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“Long ago,” Adam started, “I was a Knight of the Templars. After returning from my pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I was sent to explore Ireland under the express orders to gather heathen relics and bring them back to the church.” Adam gave a wry smile. “The idea being that they would destroy them, though I knew full well they merely wanted to possess these items because they feared the power within them.”
Adam waved a hand. “I thought it ridiculous superstition but did my duty. I’d plundered half of Ireland when I came upon a low hill. The locals called it sídhe, a fairy mound.”
Thorne snorted. “Let me guess, you did not believe in wee fairies either?”
“No,” Adam said with equal humor. “I’d soon learn otherwise, for I’d attracted the attention and the ire of their Queen Mab.”
Even all these centuries later, Adam could perfectly recall the visceral shock as the beautiful, red-headed woman with strange purple eyes simply appeared from out of a thick, green fog. “Mab, you must know, loves men. She loves to bed them, but particularly the reluctant ones.” Adam kept his gaze away from his audience. “I was most reluctant. She was beautiful, yes, but I’d taken a vow, and there was an inherent evil about her that made my innards recoil.”
“So then you offended Mab’s pride,” Miss Evernight murmured, her tone knowing.
“That,” Adam acknowledged, “and I’d stolen from her. Those were her objects, after all. Admittedly I was an arrogant arse, not caring one whit about what I’d taken from the unnatural woman.”
Eliza’s muffled snort had him sliding her a sidelong look. She met it with a pointed raising of her brows, as if to say Am I wrong? No, she was not wrong to laugh. He still had his arrogance and was not likely to be losing it anytime soon.
He thought of his old self. He’d carried many titles back then, Aodh, Son of Niall of Moray, Knight of the Templars, and upon roaming Ireland, Cù-Sìth the harbinger of death. Yet there was one title he’d coveted was never to be his: husband. Aye, he’d killed countless men in the name of God, he’d lived the austere life of a monk, traveled from the verdant mists of Scotland to the acrid deserts surrounding Byzantium, and yet all he’d ever wanted was a wife. A family. A home.
“She held me for seven days,” he said in a low voice, recalling when Mab had taken everything from him. “Always trying to get me to submit, to want her. And on the seventh day, her patience ran out.”
He’d been chained to a massive stone in a glen, his arms stretched wide, his chest bared to the cold air. Aodh had thought his life was at an end when the fae bitch lifted a stone dagger to his throat. But she merely grinned, her little black fangs glinting in the morning light.
“You are mine, Aodh. I claim your soul, and you shall belong to me.” The tip of the dagger punctured the skin at the base of his throat, and hot blood welled up. Mab’s cloying scent choked him as she leaned forward and licked. Aodh strained against the bonds, cursing her to hell and back, but she merely laughed and pressed her hand over his heart.
Green light poured from her palm and into him, making Aodh scream in rage and pain.
“Never to die,” she chanted, “never to age. Young and mine forevermore.”
He felt his soul slipping into her grasp, as if she were siphoning it from his flesh. And yet he fought it with all that he was. He would not go like this. He would not lose his dream, his hope.
But his vision began to fade, only to be brought back when a flash of white light flooded the glen.
Mab turned, a snarl of impatience tearing from her lips. And there, standing calm and straight, was a man made not of flesh but of crystal. Or so it seemed to Aodh. Wings of translucent silver, and wide as tree limbs, arched from the man’s back. An angel.
The man glanced at him. Yes, human. Though you may call me Augustus. The words rang clear in Aodh’s head. Augustus turned back to a seething Mab.
“Aodh’s soul is not yours to take, Mabella of the Fae.”
“Odd, as I was doing so with great ease.” As if to stake her claim, she dug her claws into Aodh’s chest.
“And yet he does not bend to your will. Thus you have resorted to theft. Nay, Mab, he is one of the divided. One half of a soul torn in two.”
Mab’s claws sank deeper into Aodh’s chest. “You jest. Be gone, foul angel. This affair is not yours to attend.”
The angel merely gazed back. “Can you not sense the emptiness that consumes him? Nor see that dark spot from which his other half was rent?”
Mab glanced at Aodh and then away, her nose wrinkling as though smelling something foul. “If this be so, pray, where is his other half?”
“I know not. Nor does it matter. That she exists is enough.”
Aodh did not believe in soul mates, nor love. Not the sort that bound one to another for eternity. Granted, until this morn, he’d not truly believed in the fae or angels, yet here they were before him, fighting over his very soul.
“This human stole from me and my kin,” Mab snapped. “Restitution is mine to claim.”
“Very well,” the angel said placidly. “Claim it.”
Aodh wanted to protest, to spit in Mab’s face, to call her every foul word he knew. Yet he held his tongue. Instinct told him that he could very well lose it, and he wasn’t about to earn more of her wrath. Not when she was grinning like a she-devil and dread crawled over his body.
“Aodh MacNiall, henceforth you are living-death, unable to age, grow ill, or suffer mortal wounding. No longer will you feel the joy of the living. Your male beauty, which you so vainly wield, shall draw both women and men like flies to honey, and yet you will never know the heated flush of desire. The dead shall be your sole companions.”
