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Mage energy blazed up through the trees in a tower of blue-white fire. The ground rumbled and lurched as the sky darkened to a false midnight. As a storm’s tempest raged, wind whipped the leaves, bringing down cracked and splintered limbs. Blinding and choking him with a gritty, throat-scouring dust.
Brendan covered his head as he curved into the shelter of a fallen log. Opened his eyes on a world gone suddenly still.
Where the giant slab of mossy granite had leaned was now a doorway, the shine of silver light spilling from an exposed cavern, the chime of faery bells high and bright and floating clear upon the air.
Slowly lowering the stone, Máelodor motioned with a jerk of his head.
Oss stepped forward, even his blank features tinged with the shade of fear. Ducking inside, he disappeared for a moment before reappearing with a strange shake of his head and a spread of his palms.
“What?” Máelodor’s response cracked across the silence like a whip as he pointed to Brendan. “Bring him to me.”
Oss’s gaze fell on Brendan like the first spade of grave earth.
The man dragged him stumbling to Máelodor. “What mischief is this, Douglas?”
Brendan’s lip curled with animosity. “You’ll have to be more specific. Mischief is my middle name.”
“The tomb is empty. You had the stone. What have you done with the High King’s bones?” Máelodor demanded, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, his eyes alight with madness. I’ll have your answer or Oss will slice off a finger one at a time.”
The servant pulled a knife from his belt, grabbing Brendan’s wrist, though he felt no pain due to the advance of the poison in his bloodstream. In fact, he barely noticed anything as he pondered this new and wild hope.
The tomb was empty. No bones. No Arthur. Máelodor had failed.
“Arthur’s not dead,” he whispered, his mind beginning to haze, his limbs sluggish as the serpent’s venom crawled through him with needling agony.
“What?”
Oss’s knife cut into the flesh of Brendan’s pinky. Brendan watched his blood dripping down over his wrist with clinical apathy. “Arthur lives. Not a tomb. A portal. To Ynys Avalenn.”
How he knew, he couldn’t say, only that once he said it, he knew it as truth.
Blood slicked the back of his hand as Oss withdrew his blade. Brendan clutched his hand to stanch the flow. It seemed the sensible thing to do.
“A portal. A way between worlds.” Máelodor rubbed his chin in speculation.
“It’s over, Máelodor. Without Arthur to inspire them, the Other will never rally to your cause.”
“Are you certain?” Máelodor’s transformation seemed to progress before Brendan’s eyes. New scales covered the man’s entire head; long white fangs grew to either side of a flickering tongue. “So I will not have our last great king to lead us into battle, but there will be a reckoning. The Duinedon will fall. And, bones or not, this portal is the key.”
The clap of his hands came like thunder. As he began the chant that would unlock not a passage to Ynys Avalenn but the Unseelie abyss.
His gaze fastened on Brendan. “And you will help me, son of Kilronan.”
The blast of demon magic ripped into Brendan, the burn along his muscles like acid. Shredded glass pulled through narrow veins. And then something else. A peeling away of his soul. A tearing anguish, as if his insides were being flayed to a million pieces. He screamed his agony to the boil of storm clouds as Máelodor slowly inexorably drained him of power and life.
In the end, finding their way to Brendan had been laughably easy. Or would have been had Elisabeth been in a laughing mood. After all, it hardly took magical tracking or canine smell power when the ground rumbled beneath one’s feet. The sky darkened to a sickly orange-green before being swallowed by rolling storm clouds, and the wind carried a stench of charred flesh and rotting bodies.
She crouched at the edge of the grove with a stomach-tightening swirl of terror and nausea. Magic infected the air, a sulfurous greasy stench, a black slithering coil of hate and madness penetrating her mind with a dark desperation. All of it emanating from the monstrous creature standing in the center of the clearing. Máelodor had grown unusually tall and thin, his twisted, snarled limbs gangly, his head hooded and scaled like a cobra’s. Eyes lidless and red with death. Mouth fanged and bloody. Bearing enough humanity to make the monstrosity of him all the more grotesque.
Her hair stood on end. Every impulse screamed at her to run. To flee this place of ruthless savage power. To pray for a quick end.
Killer gripped her hard until she had to bite back a cry, but it was enough to snap her free of the panic.
Brendan lay upon the ground, the fingers of one hand plowed deep into the soft earth, his other hand held close to his chest, his face bone-white, his body seeming to thin and pale before her eyes.
His eyes met hers. The wild gold of his gaze dimmed to a sinister black.
A blast of thought beat against her brain, overpowering for a split second the pounding rhythm of demon blood. And she knew what she must do.
