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A cloud settled over her features, her shoulders hunched as if suffering under a blow.
He’d struck close to the mark. Perhaps the creature of the Dark Court had succeeded where Lazarus had not. Perhaps Kilronan was no more, and the diary unguarded and exposed.
Pain succumbed to exhaustion, and he closed his eyes. Let his body renew itself bit by unnatural bit.
When he opened them again, she was gone.
“You’ll carry it always,” Daz intoned in a grave and sorrowful manner.
Aidan examined the angry, puckered three-inch scar upon his chest. The very spot he’d stabbed the Unseelie.
He touched it with tentative fingers. Ran his finger up and down the length of it. Pressed the healed flesh. It didn’t hurt. In fact, it tingled with an icy chill.
He looked up to meet Daz’s solemn gaze reflected in the long mirror.
“You will always bear a piece of the creature within you,” Daz explained. “A splinter of the demon Fey to plague you ever more. A reminder of how close you came to being devoured by your own idiotic summoning.”
His stern master mage expression quirked into the rolled eyes and shaking head of scolding teacher, and he clout Aidan upon the shoulder with enough force to drop him to the edge of the bed. “What were you thinking, boy?” he scolded. “You know better than to play about with magic of that sort. It’s evil. An outrage to call on the Dark Court.”
Aidan slid a shirt over his head. Inhaled slowly until the dizziness passed. “I was hardly playing about. It was that or allow Lazarus to steal the diary for Brendan.”
There, he’d said it. What he’d been thinking ever since Daz had revealed the depths of his family’s treachery and his brother’s cold-blooded ambition. It hurt still. A pain he knew he would carry as surely as he carried the scar of the Unseelie.
How had they held so much back from him? It was like discovering the two people he loved most were complete strangers.
“You mentioned Brendan once before.” Daz stared at him as if he’d grown three heads. After the attack, not completely out of the range of possibility. “Why would your brother be after the diary?”
“Brendan must need it to find the tapestry. To bring Arthur back.”
“Why on earth would Brendan want to do that?”
Daz’s recovered sanity must be slipping.
“You said it yourself. The Nine sought to resurrect Arthur. To start the wars that would lead to a new order, this time with Other dominant over Duinedon. And we know it’s possible. The creature Lazarus is proof of that.”
The old man scratched at his unwashed hair. “It couldn’t be Brendan.”
His protests merely fanned the dull press of betrayal. “Don’t try to protect him. I know you loved him. I loved him too. And in the end, he was rotten to the damned core.”
Daz scowled, his ruddy complexion reddening to a deeper shade of purple. “You’re talking madness.”
“The Amhas-draoi were right,” he shot back. “They tried to warn me. Even Jack sought to put me on my guard. But I was blinded by a love as faulty as my memories of him.”
“It wasn’t Brendan.”
“Stop trying to keep the truth from me.”
Voices rose in volume.
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly. Brendan was a bloody criminal. A madman.”
By now they each shouted to be heard.
Daz grabbed Aidan by the shoulders. Wheeled him about so they faced each other squarely. “Listen to me, Aidan. It was Brendan who betrayed them to the Amhas-draoi. All of them. Even your father.” Purple faded to ghastly gray. “Brendan betrayed them and was, in his turn, betrayed.”
