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Sister Ainnir sighed. “It’s done already. You’re free until your duties this afternoon.”
She spoke this like a reward when it only meant Sabrina would have hours to roll events in her head. Tumble them into new shapes. Sort through every shared look and exchanged word that passed between her and Daigh for clues to his duplicity. End brooding over her complete and utter gullibility.
Perhaps if she wrote it all down in her journal. Seeing it on the page in black and white might help her to place Daigh and her naive infatuation in its proper place. Make her see it all for what it really was. A momentary diversion when she most needed one. Not the life-altering passion her overactive imagination had turned it into.
Suddenly she was glad of the escape. The hours to herself.
She hurried back up the aisle. Ignored Sister Clea’s pathetic call. “Where’s Paul? Where’s my brother? He said he’d come back. He promised.”
And what was a promise worth?
Sabrina had found over and over to her cost—absolutely nothing.
The hunt came so easy. Too easy for Daigh to ignore the obvious. He’d stalked his quarry before. Many times. And turned a skilled and deadly hand to it.
He traced Black Jacket to the village. And from there toward Clonekilty. On to Bandon, where a frightened publican at the King’s Arms assured Daigh a man matching the thief’s description had stopped to rest and water his horse and snatch a bite to eat in the tavern’s tap before taking the road for Cork. No, he’d not spoken of his business in the city, but he’d a foreign look to him and an impatient air, so a betting man would say he’d been making for the harbor.
Daigh would take that bet. He tracked like a hound upon a blood trail.
Or like one of the Domnuathi stalking its next victim.
The truth fired his soul with torchlike intensity. Singed away hope. He’d been fooling himself since waking among the bandraoi. Let the calm of days measured in prayer and work lull him into believing he might be normal. A simple man suffering a simple tragedy that time and patience would heal.
Nothing simple or normal about him. And he needed neither time nor patience to heal. It was death that was denied him. Or should he say—dying again. He’d been sent to the grave once already.
But if he now understood what he was, he still didn’t know who he was. What dark power had summoned him back from the grave. How he’d ended half drowned upon a stretch of rocky shoreline. What strange presence infected his mind l
ike a violent disease. Those questions remained along with the scattered bursts of so many others pummeling the insides of his skull.
Black Jacket knew the answers. Daigh just needed to run him to ground. Force him to give them up—at the point of a blade, if needs must.
Last night’s rain had become today’s drizzly mist, leaving him damp and miserable. The road slippery and treacherous. Twice his horse had stumbled. And once he’d had to find a path around a wash where the road had completely vanished under a sea of mud and debris.
Urging the bay into a canter to the top of the rise, he searched the road below as it dipped into a shallow valley. A few carriages. A wagon and team. A farmer in a heavy coat and hat hiking the verge. The rest lost in a gray afternoon twilight.
Turning in the saddle, he looked back the way he’d come. To Glenlorgan. To Sabrina.
I’m back for you. His promise to her. The words coming from some lost place within. A place where he saw her laughing. Loving. The two of them sharing a life. But she didn’t belong to him. It had been a mirage. A dream built upon his bones. A desire torn from a life that had ceased to exist centuries ago.
His hands clenched the slick reins.
Nothing solid but for the ache of their separation. That held a pain as real and recent as yesterday.
Sabrina lifted her head after long hours bent over her diary. Squinted against the fast fading light. Rolled her shoulders as she worked out the kinks. And read back the pages and pages filled with impressions, recollections, and conversations, hoping against hope her time with Daigh would make more sense than it had as she’d written it.
No such luck.
In fact her frantically scrawled notes sounded quite a lot like the ramblings of a particularly creative-minded bedlamite.
Memories of a past that didn’t belong to her. Daigh’s face swimming up through her mind as if it had always been there. And a knowledge of things that shouldn’t be hers to know.
Dear heavens, if the bandraoi got hold of this they’d shackle her to her bed and hide all sharp objects.
She shoved the book under her pillow. Changed her mind. Stowed it under her mattress.
None too soon.
Jane wandered in, listless and pale-featured. Smudges hovered beneath her eyes, her body stooped as if she sought to protect herself from some invisible hurt.
