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“It would never have gone that far,” he said quietly. A sharp knot wedged in his throat. He’d blame the toast, but he knew for a fact it was something more. The same thing that had kept him awake most of the night. Memories of Father had battered him hour after hour. The daring sportsman who’d taught him to climb the sheer, rocky cliffs around Belfoyle. The caring parent who’d read to his children from a great book of stories, transforming the night nursery into a fabulous wonderland spun with words. The professorial academic who’d tried to instill a love of learning and a pride in being Other in his offspring. He’d been stern at times. Demanding when it counted. But never before had Aidan questioned his motives or his morality.
The diary had opened a window on a different man. A complete stranger. A ruthless Other.
Cat blurted, “Your father toyed with dangerous magic.”
Aidan’s face went stiff; the knot in his throat grew. Threatened to choke him. “Father was a dedicated mage and scholar with a desire to learn. To stretch boundaries. To push his mind and his magic as far as they could reach.” He could barely get the words out.
“Summoning Unseelie? Sacrificing his own child? That’s not pushing boundaries. That’s sailing right off the edge of the map.”
“You don’t know anything about it.” His chest ached as the knot expanded. Sank into every part of him until the lancing pain of tonight returned a hundredfold. “You weren’t there. You didn’t know him . . . before . . .”
He sounded like a child standing up to the schoolyard bully. Shaking. Scared.
“Neither did you apparently. But the Amhas-draoi must have. They executed him. They must have known he was abusing his powers. Look. Just read this.” She pushed the book across the table at him.
“What is it?”
“It’s a treatise on the nature of Unseelie.”
He flipped through the book, though his eye barely registered the flicker of passing words.
“It documents everything,” Cat explained. “Or as much as the author knew or could surmise from the limited contact between the Unseelie void and the mortal world. Though it would seem by some of the footnotes that the contact was more than anyone had dared before. The author had opened the door. Not once or twice. But dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. He talks about the summoning. The fatal possession. Unseelie can’t survive on this plane. Not without a host.” She paused, letting the import of those words sink in. “It’s a temporary bond. Death is certain. The fragile human shell can’t handle that kind of parasitic power. And live.”
He looked up. “Are you going to tell me my father wrote this book? He wasn’t like—”
“No, Aidan. Not your father. A man by the name of Máelodor.”
Bloody hell! The elusive M.
Unable to read any more, Aidan closed the book, queasiness souring his stomach. If half the pages he’d read were true, the author had been a master mage of incredible power and charisma as well as immense brutality. Along with being a nutter of the first order. His writings hovered somewhere between brilliance and madness. His hypotheses reached so far into the realm of impossibility, Aidan would have discounted them if he hadn’t seen the Unseelie take shape before his own eyes. Sensed the elusive vastness of eternity hovering just out of reach as the creature attempted to merge with him. Akin to a death experience or a birth experience. A total and irreversible passing from one form into another.
“Well?” Cat prodded.
“What do we know about Máelodor? Did you find anything else?”
She shrugged. “A book of essays recounting obscure Other history. Another of natural philosophy that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. But nothing that revealed more about Máelodor than his contempt for the Duinedon world and an overweening desire to return to—in his words—‘the last Golden Age of Other.’ ”
Aidan didn’t get as far as answering. Instead, mage energy cruised his skin like ice. A moment later the ice plunged like a frozen knife into his gut. Doubled him over with the force of a sucker punch. Congealed the blood in his narrowed veins until his limbs went numb.
“Aidan!”
Cat’s frightened scream bounced through his skull. But he’d passed beyond words of reassurance. Whoever just breached his house wards had the power of lethal sorcery behind him. A power Aidan could never match.
He speared Cat with a grim stare. Choked out one hissed word. “Run.” And clutching the table for support against the menacing weight of panic and mage energy, straightened to meet the attack.
The door burst in on a wet draft of air, rain puddling on the threshold, the familiar city smells of coal fires and damp stone overlaid with a brimstone burn rising off the man towering before him.
A colossus in black. Black hair. Black eyes. A face black of purpose. And a blade glittering with wicked, obsidian light.
He stepped through the door, slamming it closed behind him. The world of Other and Fey crashing into Aidan’s carefully constructed Duinedon persona with deathly violence.
His gaze searched the room, head up as if scenting a trail. “It’s here. I feel it.”
“Who the hell are you?” Aidan choked through a throat gone tight and dry.
The man offered a nod of mock solemnity. A chivalrous gesture in an otherwise cold-blooded killer. “The Great One names me Lazarus. I am death undone.” The man raised his sword, the tip grazing Aidan’s jugular. “The diary. Now.”
The prick of the blade acted like a goad to Aidan’s numbed senses. His own powers flooded him with a thawing heat. Sparked along his nerves. “Not in a million years.”
