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“Your bravery does you credit, Kilronan,” came the grim voice on the other side of the door.
“Abomination of Annwn. Your cannibalized half-life is over.” Aidan’s voice—yet hardly his words. No, these came clipped and enunciated with careful and formal precision. As if the speaker used a language not his own. “Yntresh esh dea hesh dea tarosvana, not bodsk diwedsk mesk nana.”
Chained rage quivered off every syllable, and Cat’s throat closed around a panicked moan. She knew this language. Had heard it once before in Aidan’s library the night he’d called the Unseelie. This wasn’t Aidan. Or at least not the Aidan she knew. This was a merging of man and monster. He must have summoned a being of the Dark Court to aid him against Lazarus. But who could be the victor between two such unspeakable creatures?
A blast of mage energy lit the space beneath the door. Sparkled the very dust hovering in the air. The wood panels buckled, the lock rattling, the nails glowing red-hot.
There came a shout and a scream, and again the mage energy crackled through the air with a sulpherous stench.
“Hold, damn you!” That was Aidan, for certain. But then his words came again with the same odd dissonance as before. “No peaceful sleep, Domnuathi, but a wakeful eternity in the deepest pits of Annwn.”
The sounds of battle rang up and down the corridor and the stairs. The crash of a gunshot. The whistle of arcing steel. The grunts and curses of men locked in a death struggle.
The fight receded in a tumble and rush of boots upon stairs. A scream and a string of furious swearing. And through it all the prickly rush of expelled mage energy bathed in the nausea-inducing miasma of the Unseelie.
A slam of bodies. And from the lawn, another blue white flash turning night to day as it expanded in wave after wave of rolling magic.
Aidan’s triumph sounded animalistic and wild like a blooded animal crowing over a fresh kill. Then came silence as thick and brimstone filled as the air of the underworld.
Cat fingered the doorknob. Flinched from a heat bursting up her arm before it dissipated.
Ignoring the unsettling sensation, she wrenched open the door. Stumbled down the stairs. Past the broken and hanging furniture, the spilled blood, the crush and splinters of destruction. Out the back to stand upon the terrace stairs.
Below, in the pallid light of a setting moon, Aidan crouched over a body upon the grass.
“Is he dead?” she called.
He straightened and turned toward her. And his eyes shone like pits of fire. “Not yet,” he hissed.
The man upon the grass moaned and stirred, reaching for a dagger just out of range. And Cat sucked her breath in over a tongue swollen with horror.
Not Lazarus. Of the dead-eyed Domnuathi, there was no sign at all.
This was Aidan.
Battered. Bleeding. And about to be murdered by—himself.
Aidan touched the dagger’s hilt, the cool steel grazing the pads of his fingers. Reality amid a battering nightmare of sensations and images flooding his bruised and exhausted mind. Weakened by his fight with Lazarus, he had no strength left to struggle against the Unseelie’s domination. The long, excruciating consumption of his existence into the body of the creature standing over him.
Thoughts came slowly. Action slower. The air around him grew heavy upon his chest. Sight came through a prism of flame and smoke and cinders.
He reached for the dagger. Closed his hand around it.
There came a muffled shout from somewhere to his right, the monster’s attention momentarily diverted.
With almost the last of his strength, Aidan lurched upward, the blade plunging deep into the monster’s chest. Interrupting the parasitic drain with a crackling infernal roar even as it opened a long, jagged wound. Black blood spurted, burning Aidan’s exposed flesh, the dagger disintegrating on a sour wind.
The Unseelie reared back in surprise and pain, its eyes wide and terrible, Aidan seeing his death mirrored in the crazed fury of the animal.
Surrender would be easy. Let the Unseelie have him. Let this struggle end now. He’d no hope of winning against such strength. Yet sheer cussedness kept him fighting.
Father thought he’d never be good enough? Well, he’d be damned if the old man would be proven right.
“Dehwelea dh’agaa bya!” The shouted words from the stair above stung Cat to life. Daz’s sturdy warmth. His musty old-book and sour-wine smell. His voice, no longer shivery and ancient, but bold. Confident. Forcing the Unseelie away from Aidan’s prone body. “Moa hath ankresyesh not nesh fellesh!”
It eyed them with a viciousness Cat felt all the way to her bones. Here was evil hiding beneath the cloak of the familiar. The same tousled auburn hair, the same aristocratic bearing, the same large, work-hardened hands ornamented with that heavy emerald chunk. Only this stranger-Aidan remained gray as ash, with a body coarse and stocky and unlike lover-Aidan’s long, lean frame.
She shuddered so hard her knees knocked, and she felt she might slump to the bricks beneath her feet if the Unseelie didn’t turn its gaze elsewhere. But then Maude appeared, her matronly bulk offering reassurance. “Come, child. Strength is needed tonight.”
