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“She won’t be the first or the last. It’s war, isn’t it?” Cian shot back. “She’s what they call collateral damage. Good strategy this,” he mumbled, and took stock. “Slow us down and switch to a faster car. I won’t be catching them now before they reach the caves. If that’s where they’re going.”
He turned toward his brother, considered. “I may need you now after all.”
“I won’t leave an injured woman on the side of the road like a sick dog.”
Cian stepped back to his car, flipped open the center compartment and took out a mobile phone. He spoke into it briefly. “It’s a communication device,” he told Hoyt as he tossed the phone back into storage. “I’ve called for help—medical and the garda. All you’ll do now by staying is get yourself hauled in, and asked questions you can’t answer.”
He popped the hood, took out a blanket and some flares. “Put that over her,” he instructed. “I’ll set these up. He’s bait now,” Cian added as he set the flares to light. “Bait as much as a prize. She knows we’re coming. She wants us to.”
“Then we won’t disappoint her.”
With no hope of cutting off the raiding party before they reached the caves, Cian drove more cautiously. “She was smarter. More aggressive, and more willing to lose troops. So she has the advantage.”
“We’ll be outnumbered, greatly.”
“We always would have been. At this point, she may be willing to negotiate. To take a trade.”
“One of us for King.”
“You’re all the same to her. A human’s a human, so you have no particular value in this. You perhaps, because she respects and covets power. But she’d want me more.”
“You’re willing to trade your life for his?”
“She wouldn’t kill me. At least not right away. She’d want to use her considerable talents first. She’d enjoy that.”
“Torture.”
“And persuasion. If she could bring me over to her side, it would be a coup.”
“A man who trades his life for a friend doesn’t turn and betray him. Why would she think otherwise?”
“Because we’re fickle creatures. And she made me. That gives her quite a bit of pull.”
“No, not you. I’d believe you’d trade you
rself for King, but I don’t think she’d believe it. You’ll have to offer me,” Hoyt said after a moment.
“Oh, will I?”
“I’ve been nothing to you for hundreds of years. He’s more to you than me. She’d see that. A human for a sorcerer. A good exchange for her.”
“And why should she think you’d give yourself for a man you’ve known for, what a week?”
“Because you’d have a knife to my throat.”
Cian tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “It could work.”
The rain had passed into dreary moonlight by the time they reached the cliffs. They rose high above the road, jutted out to cast jagged shadows over the toiling sea.
There was only the sound of the water lashing rock, and the hum of the air that was like the breath of gods.
There was no sign of another car, of human or of creature.
Along the seaside of the road was a rail. Below it was rocks, water and the maze of caves.
“We lure her up.” Cian nodded toward the edge. “If we go down to her, we’re trapped, with the sea at our backs. We go up, make her come to us.”
They started the climb, over slippery rocks and soggy grass. At the headland stood a lighthouse, its beam lancing out into the dark.
