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The man paused at the tapestry hanging behind Ard-siúr’s desk—figures bearing a litter toward an open tomb. Fingered the heavy cloth for a moment before wrenching it from the wall with a shrug and a grunt of success. Shoved it into a waiting satchel.
This was Daigh’s cue. He rose like the walking dead, the blood-sticky dagger gripped in one trembling fist. His body stretched taut as a bowstring, every nerve screaming. “You should make certain of your kills.”
The man froze in a pose of astonishment mixed with terror. “How?” he breathed. “I saw”—his eyes flicked to the dagger—“no one should have survived such a thrust. No man alive could . . .” He straightened, comprehension dawning in a grim smirk. “But you’re not a man, are you?” he mocked in a cruel jest. “Nor alive in the strictest sense.”
The presence strained to be released. The beast uncoiling with serpent strength. Sinking its fangs into his bloodstream.
Daigh contained it through sheer will. Twitched against the jags trembling his hands. Shallowing his breathing to an animal pant. This black-jacketed villain knew him. Who he was. What he was.
Daigh couldn’t kill him until the thief spilled what he knew. Then he would do as he wished.
Buckling the satchel, the man slung it over his shoulder. “My apologies. Máelodor gave you up for dead.”
Daigh’s lips curled in an empty smile. “As you see, harder than it looks.”
“Poor phrasing on my part. Not dead then, but absent from your meeting in Cork. Máelodor’s anxious to recover the tapestry. He sent me in your stead.”
“Did he?”
Máelodor? The tapestry? None of it stirred any answering memory within. He focused on his first and loudest thought.
“You say I’m not a man. What would you term me?”
Black Jacket stiffened with wary apprehension. Eyed Daigh like a disease as he drew the satchel up onto his shoulder. “I meant no offense.”
“Then what did you mean?” Daigh asked through gritted teeth, patience waning.
“It’s obvious isn’t it? Look at you. Looming up out of the dark like a demon from a nightmare. I’d not really believed Máelodor’s claims of resurrecting a Domnuathi. Too far-fetched, like something out of a faery story.” He shifted slightly, his gaze flicking to the open office door. “The name suits you though. Lazarus rising from the dead, eh?”
Daigh flinched, his vision hazing as the final door was flung open.
Not Lazarus. Never Lazarus.
He had another name. Another life.
The creature exploded through his skull. Daigh heard it laughing as it crushed him in its coils.
He flung himself at the man, reason lost amid the howl of killing ecstasy. Heard the bark of a pistol through the pounding in his ears. Stumbled to his knees at the slash of sizzling heat gouging a path through his chest.
The man never paused. Instead he leapt for the door, footsteps slapping across the flagstones. Any pretense at secrecy over.
Daigh could do nothing but watch as the man vanished, satchel in hand.
Máelodor. A tapestry. Domnuathi.
Not a man. Not alive.
Lazarus rising from the dead.
He clutched his bloody chest, but it was the whirlwind in his skull that held him immobile.
Oh gods, what nightmare had he stumbled into? And how could he hope to battle his way back out?
How had she slept through it all? Had she really been so tired she’d been unaware of a commotion that turned the convent into a seething mass of raised voices, hostile interrogations, and in one or two cases, womanly vapors bordering on hysteria?
&nbs
p; Apparently she could.
