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"Cad ata ar siul?"
I turned toward the voice. A woman stood beside me. Or it looked like a woman--I struggled to focus on her, as if she were behind old glass, her form and features shifting and blurring. She was my height, with dark hair and sky-blue eyes. Those eyes were fixed on the men.
"Cad ata ar siul?"
What's happening? That's what she was asking. I knew it, though I couldn't place the language.
They're sowing iron filings, I wanted to say. But what came out was, "Nil fhios agam."
I don't know.
The men finished the circle, a huge one that wrapped around us and the land that would one day hold Villa Tuscana. Then the torches went out. I stood there, with the woman, unable to speak or move, as voices whispered all around me. What's happening? What's going on? What should we do?
We don't understand.
The torches leapt to life again, but the flames . . . the flames were blue, and I caught a whiff of something both unfamiliar and terrifying, something that chilled my very core. That's when the screams began.
"Run!" I shouted, wheeling to the woman beside me. "Run!"
I heard my voice, my English words, and saw her stare in fear and incomprehension, and I struggled for the right words, any that would help, but I knew none would. Nothing could help.
The men threw the torches, and the blue fire ripped through the dry field, devouring it at an impossible speed. The woman ran. Others ran, too, shadows and forms in the night, all racing for safety . . . and stopping when they reached the perimeter the men had drawn. The ground sown with iron.
They cannot cross. They're trapped.
The fire caught a shimmering figure in the field, a blond man. It caught him . . . and it rolled over him, consuming him, leaving screams long after he'd vanished. Terrible, unearthly, impossible screams, as if the very ground continued to shriek after he'd disappeared.
I could see the iron filings on the ground. I raced over and reached down. They burned my fingers. I lifted a handful to throw aside, to clear an opening for the others, those whose blood ran true, who could not cross. But the filings fell through my fingers. I frantically tried to scoop them, then to kick them aside, to no avail. The field was aflame and all I could hear were the screams of the dying, trapped within the circle.
Then I saw another figure. One of flesh and bone, no shimmering phantasm, no blurred and shadowed being. Gabriel, standing where I'd left him, the blue flames swirling around him.
I raced back, shouting his name, but the screams drowned me out. He just stood there, impassive, his shades still on as he stared out into the blazing field. When I drew close, he turned to me.
"I smell fire," he said. "And I hear . . ." He trailed off, brows knit in confusion.
The flames licked at his feet, and I grabbed for him, but I stumbled and it was like falling face-first through a portal. I was in darkness, and then I wasn't, and I was still stumbling, still falling. Gabriel caught my arm and pulled me upright.
"Did I startle you?" he said. "I was only saying that I--"
"--smelled fire and heard something."
"Yes." He looked out at the ruins. "It's gone now."
"It was . . ." I gulped for breath, and it felt like inhaling that terrible fire, as it scorched my lungs. Gabriel took my arm again, keeping me upright.
"Before the construction, they trapped the fae in a circle of iron and lit the field with some kind of blue fire. I don't know what it was, but it was . . ." I shivered. "Awful. The smell and the sound and the screaming. They died. They all died, horribly."
Still gripping my arm, Gabriel turned. I glanced back to see the girl there. He yanked off his shades with his free hand, staring in her direction.
"Is this really necessary?" he said. Then he shook his head sharply. "No, let me rephrase that. This is not necessary. There is no possible reason she needs to see a hundred-year-old massacre."
I expected her to smile and answer with some riddle. Or perhaps to solemnly say that it was necessary. Instead, she walked to him and reached out to touch the hand hovering there, holding his sunglasses. The moment her fingers made contact, he yanked his hand back and then covered the reaction with a scowl.
"What have they done to you, Gwynn ap Nudd?" she said.
"Leave Gabriel out of this," I said.
She smiled at me, wistful. "You protect him as he protects you. And the other, too. The three of you, in a circle of support, as it should be, as it was once, before the circle was torn asunder and the darkness came."
