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All weakness burned away. “Stay away from him, you filthy, damned dog!” she shouted as she half ran, half tumbled across the clearing.
Killer looked up, his dark eyes heavy with sadness. “You’re awake.”
“Stay away from him, do you hear?” She grabbed Killer’s knife arm, trying to wrestle the weapon from his hand. Easily accomplished. In fact, he handed it to her.
“I am not your enemy,” he said evenly.
“Aren’t you?” Blood soaked Brendan’s shirt, pooled viscous and dark beneath him. There seemed to be no part of him without injury.
“The blood on the knife is my own.” Killer held out his arm, which bled from a gash across his forearm. “Blood from us can be powerful medicine. I offered mine to Douglas as a way to hold his soul within his body.” He shook his head. “But it is not enough. Máelodor stripped much of his essence away, and what the mage did not claim was summoned by Douglas in opening the portals between worlds.”
Elisabeth gathered Brendan’s hands in her own, his fingers cold, the tips blue. Strange—he wore a silver and pearl ring that glowed softly in the strange twilight of the grove. Elisabeth had never seen it before. “Brendan? Can you hear me?”
“Dying . . . not deaf.” His smile broke her heart into a million jagged pieces.
Killer stood abruptly, his body rigid, hackles raised. “There is one chance yet. A slim one, but it’s worth a try.” To Brendan, he said, “Hold on. This may hurt.”
Bending, he lifted Brendan in his arms as easily as if he were a baby. Carried him across the grove toward the cave, where white light spilled like water and a strange shimmering glassy melody rose and fell as if the wind had been given voice.
“Why did you hit me?” she asked, mainly as a way to keep from thinking. Thinking was not a good thing right now. Thinking would lead to uncontrollable weeping, and she refused to have Brendan’s last image of her be tear-streaked and blubbery. No. Not his last image of her. That meant he was dying. That there was no hope left. That Máelodor had won.
“The mage would have sensed your conscious mind and attacked it as he did with Rogan,” Killer explained. “I let him believe I was the shooter. Magic does not work on me in quite the same way.”
Before ducking beneath the toppled broken slab that served as entrance to Arthur’s tomb, Killer sought her eyes with his. “Do you come?”
She returned his questioning look with a determined glare.
“Then take hold of Brendan’s hand and do not let go. That should keep you safe in the between of worlds.”
She’d no time to ask for an elaboration before he stepped into the wash of white light, the color blanched from his face and body, replaced by a strange blue-silver glow that crackled over his skin and clothes. Quickly she grabbed Brendan’s right hand, squeezing it as if she were stepping out onto a narrow cliff ledge above a raging sea. A roar filled her ears, her body buffeted in rip currents of air and water, leaping flames and grinding earth. And together they crossed the threshold and entered the cave.
From the outside, it was no more than a granite slab lying at a crooked slant against a shorter, stouter stone, barely large enough for a full-grown man to stand upright.
Inside, the narrow mouth opened into an immense cavern, the walls rising around her glimmering with an opalescent fire. Water ran over folds and ridges in the rock before being channeled into a marble bowl at the base of the opposite wall. In the center of the cavern stood what looked like an altar or a sarcophagus. Long. Narrow. Its side separated into intricately rendered panels depicting the lost king’s life from birth within a Cornish fortress to defeat at the hands of his traitorous son. Carved into its lid, a dragon coiled round a sword protruding from a rock. The details wrought so well one almost saw the twitch of a tail, the gleam of steel.
Arthur’s tomb. The resting place of the last great king of Other. Fantasy come to life.
She’d no time to be awestruck before shadows surfaced within the cave’s strange shimmering mother-of-pearl walls. They moved within the rock like figures seen through thick, wavy glass or beneath murky water. As she watched, they took on definition and then form as one by one they stepped from the walls to ring the chamber. Nine gray-robed women, silver diadems upon their brows, each one so beautiful she was almost painful to look upon. Elisabeth gazed on them only in quick snatches and only through downcast lashes.
Killer didn’t seem to have the same reaction to the faery women. He looked upon each one of them in turn as if searching their expressions for the slightest hint of sympathy. But none weakened or spoke or moved to assist them. They were still and white as marble, gazing as though staring into eternity.
Killer stepped forward, laying Brendan down at the foot of the tomb, Elisabeth kneeling beside him with a clamped hold of his hand, willing her life into him.
Standing tall, the shape-changer scanned each woman in turn. “You can feel its call or you would not have shown yourselves. Douglas bears a token of Ynys Avalenn. He is known to one among yours.”
It seemed as if minutes ticked away with no one moving, Brendan’s grip upon her hand weakened, his eyes growing opaque, breathing becoming shallow, so that his chest barely rose and fell. “Help him!” she shouted to the women, her patience snapping.
They looked through her, remote in their apathy.
“You’re Fey. You can save him!” Frustration and fear burned through her like lava. She’d never been so angry in her life as she was at these stone-faced women. “What’s the good of being immortal and all-powerful if you won’t use your power to save a life? You’re a bunch of cowards. Deceitful, false-hearted, conniving, hypocritical—”
“Not helping . . .” Brendan whispered while Killer muttered, “Why don’t you tell them how you really feel?”
“—treacherous scum!”
“Enough.” The smooth, vivid voice echoed through the chamber before rattling around in Elisabeth’s skull. The throbbing in her temples moved down into her neck and shoulders.
Two figures stepped out from behind the phalanx of silent attendants to approach Elisabeth and Brendan.
