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“I…I have no coin in these pants.”
“Typical. I’ll buy.” She hooked an arm through his to make sure she didn’t lose him again, then began to wind through the crowd.
“Did my brother hurt you?”
“What?”
He had to shout. How could anyone have a conversation in such noise? There were too many people in this place. Was it some sort of festival?
There were women writhing in what must have been some sort of ritual dance, and wearing even less than the witch. Others sat at silver tables and watched or ignored, drank from clear tankards and cups.
The music, he thought, came from everywhere at once.
“I asked if my brother hurt you.”
“Brother? That fits. Bruised my pride for the most part.”
She chose the stairs, moving up where the noise wasn’t quite so horrific. Still clinging to his arm, she looked right, left, then moved toward a low seat with a candle flickering on the table. Five people were jammed around it, and all seemed to be talking at once.
She smiled at them, and he felt her power hum. “Hi. You really need to get home now, don’t you?”
They got up, still chattering, and left the table littered with those clear drinking vessels, some nearly full.
“Sorry to cut their evening short, but I think this takes precedence. Sit down, will you?” She dropped down, stretched out long, bare legs. “God, what a night.” She waved a hand in the air, fingered her pendant with the other as she studied his face. “You look better than you did. Are you healed?”
“Well enough. What place are you from?”
“Right to business.” She glanced over at the waitress who came to their table to clear it. “I’ll have a Grey Goose martini, straight up, two olives. Dry as dust.” She cocked a brow at Hoyt. When he said nothing, she held up two fingers.
She tucked her hair behind one ear as she leaned toward him. There were silver coils dangling from her ear in a Celtic knot pattern.
“I dreamed of you before that night. Twice before I think,” she began. “I try to pay attention to my dreams, but I could never hold on to these, until the last one. I think in the first, you were in a graveyard, and you were grieving. My heart broke for you, I remember feeling that. Odd, I remember more clearly now. The next time I dreamed of you, I saw you on a cliff, over the sea. I saw a woman with you who wasn’t a woman. Even in the dream I was afraid of her. So were you.”
She sat back, shuddering once. “Oh yes, I remember that now. I remember I was terrified, and there was a storm. And you…you struck out at her. I pushed—I remember I pushed what I had toward you, to try to help. I knew she was…she was wrong. Horribly wrong. There was lightning and screams—” She wished actively for her drink. “I woke up, and for an instant, the fear woke with me. Then it all faded.”
When he still said nothing, she drew in a breath. “Okay, we’ll stick with me for a while. I used my scrying mirror, I used my crystal, but I couldn’t see clearly. Only in sleep. You brought me to that place in the woods, in the circle. Or something did. Why?”
“It was not my work.”
“It wasn’t mine.” She tapped nails painted red as her lips on the table. “You have a name, handsome?”
“I’m Hoyt Mac Cionaoith.”
Her smile turned her face into something that all but stopped his heart. “Not from around here, are you?”
“No.”
“Ireland, I can hear that. And in the dream we spoke Gaelic, which I don’t—not really. But I think it’s more than where. It’s when, too, isn’t it? Don’t worry about shocking me. I’m immune tonight.”
He waged an internal debate. She’d been shown to him, and she had come within the circle. Nothing that meant harm to him should have been able to come within his protective ring. While he had been told to seek a witch, she was nothing, nothing that he’d expected.
Yet she’d worked to heal him, and had stayed with him while the wolves had stalked his ring. She’d come to him now for answers, and perhaps for help.
“I came through the Dance of the Gods, nearly a thousand years in time.”
“Okay.” She whistled out a breath. “Maybe not completely immune. That’s a lot to take on faith, but with everything that’s been going on, I’m willing to take the leap.” She lifted the glass the waitress set down, drank immediately. “Especially with this to cushion the fall. Run a tab, will you?” Glenna asked and took a credit card out of her purse.
“Something’s coming,” she said when they were alone again. “Something bad. Big, fat evil.”
