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As if only waiting on Ard-siúr’s official word, Sister Ainnir immediately shifted focus. “Perhaps a consult of the texts that deal with this type of magic,” she agreed eagerly. “Sister Ursula would know where best to search.”
“A good thought. And I have my own sources who may be able to guide us in our understanding.”
Absorbed with their own planning, they turned their attention from Sabrina.
Each passing moment spiraled her deeper into an unknown, unnamed fear shredding her insides. Tugging her to her feet. This was wrong. All wrong. Daigh needed her. He looked to her for help. Not them. Her. She sensed the call more strongly each moment. As if the gods guided her thoughts.
She scrambled out of her chair, an immediate need to escape pressing against her heart. Fresh air. Rain upon her face. A scrubbing of his blood off her skin. If only she could cleanse the endless well of his horrified gaze from her mind. His pounding dread from her soul.
“Sabrina.” Ard-siúr’s sharp voice, catching Sabrina short.
“Ma’am?”
“Remember. A wounded animal can be unpredictable. Trapped, he can become deadly.” Her stare drew inward on some scene invisible to Sabrina, her face falling into careworn lines. “Daigh MacLir is both.”
He collapsed on his pallet, head in hands. Body braced against a flash of pain that struck him like the slam of an axe between the eyes.
A man’s face. Rage burning like hellfire in his gold-brown eyes. His mouth open on a scream of hate.
The image filled every corner of Daigh’s mind until his brain threatened to spill out his ears and sickness churned his gut. Twisted him into so many knots it left him retching his supper into the slops jar.
Instantly the coiling nightmare awareness he’d experienced in the woods slid up out of the darkest parts of his consciousness. He sensed it waiting upon the far side of that vast empty chasm of memory. Seeking entry. Enjoying his anguish.
Anger touched him like spark from a flint. Burned up through him in a funeral pyre conflagration. Muscles constricted on a destructive emotional whirlpool, his vision clouding as the man’s enraged features receded to a crimson fog blanketing and thick as the rain clouds outside.
A hand upon his shoulder threw Daigh to his feet in an instinctual defensive move that swung him around, one arm dragging the intruder close. Another locking around their neck, windpipe crushed in the crook of his elbow.
A gurgling plea chased the red from his eyes. Pulled him back from the brink. The enemy beneath his hold dissolved into a gray-gowned woman, kerchief dangling, hair falling in a cascade of lost pins over thin, trembling shoulders.
He released her with a broken oath. Stumbled back to fall heavy on his pallet. “Gods, forgive me.”
Sabrina stood shaking in the far corner of the still-room, her face white as the kerchief she threaded through unsteady fingers. “I startled you. I . . . you didn’t mean to hurt me.”
He flexed his hands. The scars incised into his palms, a sickening reminder that what he didn’t know about himself might kill. “Are you sure of that?”
He looked up to see her straighten, certainty asserting itself. Bright steel entering a gaze that until now had always remained petal soft. “You didn’t mean to harm me,” she said again.
Whom did she seek to convince?
Exhaustion rushed in to replace the earlier maelstrom as if he carried the weight of centuries upon his back. “You were in the woods. You saw what happened, Sabrina. By rights I should be dead.”
The men on the beach. The knife. The tearing, clutching hands. It became clearer.
“This isn’t the first time it’s happened.”
“There’s an explanation. You’ll see.” She knelt to gather up pieces of broken crockery; less fortunate victims of his attack, giving him a perfect view of the sleek spill of gilded brown hair, the arch of her neck where the fragile bones moved beneath skin flushed pink.
Heat that had nothing of anger about it sparked down leaden limbs. Flashed across a gulf between past and present. Between a dim vision of this woman laughing up at him amid a wrinkled heap of blankets and another more tactile impression of a body sweet and taut molded to his chest. Breathing quick and fast. Her fragrance clean and fresh and holding none of the grave about it; important to him though he’d no idea why.
She sucked in a sharp breath, her hand closing on a broken shard, a stinging between her fingers. Her body swayed as if she might faint.
“Sabrina?” he spoke roughly through a throat scratchy and hoarse with his own hesitation. Took her under the arm to steady her.
She flinched before allowing him to assist her. But even then, she seemed off-balance and confused.
“Your hand,” he said, turning her palm up to examine the narrow cut in the flesh between thumb and finger.
“It’s nothing.” She sucked away the thin line of blood before shoving her hand into her apron pocket.
