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He leaned over the bed as spasms ripped through him. Heaved until he tasted the iron tang of blood in his mouth and on his lips. Flopping back against the pillows, he narrowed his stare upon the patient watcher. Focused every ounce of strength left in him on banishing the creature back to the void. The Unseelie merely smiled its intent, as if expecting a pleasant show as the sickness tore Aidan apart from the inside out.
“If you think I’m scared of you, think again,” he brazened.
The Unseelie’s mouth widened, displaying rows and rows of needle teeth.
“I’ve bested you once already.”
Scorn dripped off it as it worked its jaw, its tongue darting in and out. “Erelth, merweth,” it hissed.
Other. Die.
Uncurling from its place at the foot of Aidan’s bed, it hovered above him, placing its bony hands upon his chest. Its fingers dipping within his flesh as if proving to Aidan how easily he would succumb.
Aidan flinched as frozen fire singed him outward from the point of contact.
“Erelth. Skoa.”
Soon.
He moaned, coming awake with a start. Staring round him with disbelieving eyes. Same cluttered bedchamber. Same pitcher and glass on a table beside him. Same sputtering fire upon the grate. The gut-wrenching, muscle-seizing illness remained. So too did the pressing sensation of death delayed. But no Unseelie lurked. No monster threatened. He was alone.
“Aidan?” Cat’s voice, tired and anxious, came from a corner of the room beyond the reach of the candlelight. “Are you awake?”
She swung into his view, hair bundled loosely off her face, mouth pulled into a worried frown. “Do you know who I am?”
“The angel of death?” He tried smiling. Failed miserably.
She sniffed. “I suppose if you can joke, you must be on the mend.” She placed a hand upon his forehead. Tsk-ed. “Yesterday you called me Miss Osborne. I nearly sent you to the grave for that insult.”
Talk about a slip of ill-starred proportions. He winced. “Sorry.”
She shrugged, trying to show her indifference, but he saw the hurt and the desolation before she turned away. Even out
of his head, he managed to cock things up between them. “Cat, if you’ll let me—”
She drowned him out. “The day before was worse. You called me a demon temptress and it took three of us to wrestle you back to bed.”
He sought to shift himself farther up the pillows. Fell back with a gasp as muscles cramped and seized. “Cat—”
Again she refused to let him finish. “You’ve been like this for almost two weeks.”
Dear gods. An entire fortnight lost to the endless stretch of nightmare and sickness.
“We weren’t sure you’d recover. It was”—she shuddered—“closely run.”
“I’m too stupid to know when I’m beaten.”
“Or too stubborn.”
He gave a bark of cynical laughter. Rubbed at his throat.
“Daz has been fabulous,” she offered, a false jauntiness in her voice. “I don’t think he’s had an episode since that night.”
“And you?”
She looked away, her profile tipped in rose and gold from the candlelight. The sorrowful curve of her lips and that pale silver slash a reminder of words he wished with all his heart he could take back.
“Cat, what happened that night—”
