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The passage was empty, but for the tangle of overlapping shadows. Silent but for a steady drip of water.
Not Sabrina.
She’d fled him hours earlier. The anguish in her eyes cutting into the icy fist of his heart. He’d let her go despite his questions. And his need. But he refused to ignore either for long. Not when she traversed the mysterious junction of past and present. His key to understanding both.
The same instinct that pulled him alert and out of bed had him padding silently down the passage and into the main ward of the hospital. Sister Clea remained asleep. Nothing and no one out of place.
Outside, rain pricked his exposed skin like claws. Peering into the night, he scanned the courtyard. The locked gate. Shuttered barns and storehouses. Dark windows of the buildings opposite.
Somewhere a door slammed in the wind. A gutter rattled. Animals shifted upon their bedding. All normal night sounds. Nothing that should have touched off his wary soldier sense.
A sister unable to sleep. A servant rising to stoke a fire. No more than that, surely.
Still he kept watch. Waited for the telltale slipup that would reveal the intruder.
There. A latch falling. A furtive step. A light glinting then dying in a doorway. He hadn’t imagined it. Across the way in the main building.
The plaguing sense of an unseen force pushing against his brain sank through him. He accepted its seeking, slithering presence. Let it glide between the walls of his mind. Easier than struggling and less painful. It also allowed him to hold onto the shreds of a fast diminishing illusion of control.
Hunching his shoulders, he stepped out of the shelter of the cloister. Picked his way through the concealing gloom. The order’s rectory stood imposing and grim. Narrow, arched, staring windows. A shallow set of steps to a double door.
He bypassed the main entrance. The sounds he’d heard had come from the side. A less conspicuous entrance.
As he slid inside, he felt the stir of air from an upper corridor. A muffled breath. Whoever he followed held a knowledge of stealth. Yet it gained him little. Daigh was better. Quiet and inescapable as a tomb.
At the top of the steps, he followed the weak light of a shielded taper down a wide corridor.
Ard-siúr’s office lay in this direction.
Anger writhed and curled with needle-sharpness along his nerves. Burned black and wicked with his blood. Buried itself so deep within him, he could no longer be sure where he ended and the presence began. The strength of one augmenting the other until they became one.
Stalking the last few yards to the door to Ard-siúr’s office, he slid into the antechamber, alive to any waiting danger. Bookshelves. A glass-fronted highboy. A desk holding an open ledger. A stack of books. A set of chairs lined like sentinels against the far wall. An inner door, standing cracked. A sliver of pale light pointing like a dagger at his feet.
Tapping the inner door wider, he stepped into the narrow breach. Barely dodged the downward plunge of a heavy vessel aimed at his head. Took the makeshift weapon on his shoulder, numbing pins and needles shooting down his arm. He swung into the room, escaping a second attempt to brain him.
The figure remained impossible to distinguish from the thick cluster of shadows. A twisting slick of ghostly movement that had Daigh sucking wind from a punch to the gut. Brought him to his knees with a chop to the neck.
He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Let the vicious lick of flame torching his body ignite the predator in him. His vision contracted onto a man. Dark. Lean. Dressed in unrelieved black, but for the silver flash of a knife. It swept at Daigh’s throat. Sliced a deep wound across the palm of the hand he threw up to deflect the blow.
Unfolding from the floor with slow deliberation, he speared the attacker with a furious glare. The dagger arced a second time. Stung Daigh across the ribs. And again—this time aimed at his stomach.
He threw himself to the side but not in time.
The dagger pierced his flesh with a hot agony. Tore through muscles. Tendons. Ended buried hilt-deep and quivering against a rib. Daigh opened his mouth on a scream. Choked it back until his cry became only a muffled, anguished moan.
This was his hunt. The intruder his quarry. He’d not alert the bandraoi. Not until he understood the danger.
The man smiled, his eyes wide with triumph. Turning from Daigh’s still crumpled body, he relit his candle stub. Worked in a methodical inch-by-inch search, starting at the shelves to the right of the door.
Ignoring Daigh.
Bad idea.
Wounds would slow but not stop the relentless hammer of his battle prowess. Death would be turned aside.
He wrapped a hand around the blood-slicked dagger. Yanked it free, almost passing out from the pain. His whole body tremored until he grit his teeth against the spasms ripping through him. Squeezing his eyes shut, he counted to one hundred slowly. Opened them to another freshly healed scar crisscrossing his torso. A road map through hell and back.
He traced the puckered ridge of skin with the tip of one finger. Experienced a tingly icy numbness, but beyond that no lasting effects from a wound that should have killed him.
