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Once beyond the alley, all he would need was a moment to bend his concentration toward a cloaking spell. The invisibility of the feth-fiada. Anything to buy him running room.
Just as he hit the corner, a blast of battle magic pummeled him from behind, flinging him forward into the gutter, his knife spinning away.
It was like being struck by lightning. Mage energy lanced through him along fried nerves, his brain shocked into whirling confusion.
He stumbled into a stack of crates. Scraped his hands as he fell to his knees. Sweat stinging his eyes. Escape screaming in his ears.
A shout. His own or someone else’s? He didn’t stop to look. To answer.
He ran.
“Wake up, ma puce. You must dress quickly.”
The voice yanked her from sleep. Dropped her to earth with a dull thud.
She tried pulling the covers over her head, but the voice persisted. “Elisabeth, it is important. It is young Douglas. You must come.”
The thread of fear running beneath the words did more than the hand on her shoulder to drag her up and out of the quilts. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, a tremor shaking her hands. The danger had finally caught them up.
“What’s happened?”
“Rogan has come with news. The Amhas-draoi found Douglas.”
Elisabeth forced a calm she did not feel. “Is he . . .” The words caught like glass in her throat.
“He is alive, but hurt. Helena tells me to let you sleep, mais vous êtes son épouse—you are his wife. It is for you to be there as well.” Madame Arana dragged her out of the quilts. “Come. We leave soon. Dress and be downstairs in ten minutes.”
And then she was gone, leaving Elisabeth shaking with cold and dread and a knowledge she wished she could wipe clear from her mind. She sat on the edge of the bed, hands braced on either side of her, staring at her toes.
She closed her eyes. The vision she’d seen in the mirror rising in her mind’s eye as the gorge rose in her throat. Madame Arana’s admonition scraping across her heart. Her own denials pounding in her head.
Had she meant what she’d said when she’d tried to convince him of his redemption? Or had she merely been hoping to convince herself?
A thought occurred to her there in the dark with the memories thick as wraiths around her. Would this attack convince Brendan that Helena’s plan was futile? Would he decide survival meant losing himself again? Living amid strangers in a foreign land? A man with no past. And no future.
Could she let him go without a fight?
Again?
With shaking fingers, she buttoned herself into her gown. With a heart pounding unsteadily in her chest, she dressed her hair. And in nine minutes fifty-nine seconds, she was downstairs, ready to go.
eighteen
He tried opening his eyes, but they seemed weighted shut, just as his arms and legs barely held the strength to move and every breath came as a struggle. Piecing together the scraps of memory, he recalled a filth-strewn alley, pain enough to fell an elephant, and a man strangely familiar to him warning him to be silent as he shoved Brendan beneath a tarpaulin.
So where the blazes was he now?
Scratchy, smelly wool beneath his cheek. A steady drip of water from somewhere nearby. The sour odors of stale alcohol and old sex.
“Shhh, rest easy.” A cool hand on his forehead. A woman’s voice, but not one he recognized.
He tried turning his head toward the voice, sending a sizzling twist of pain shooting down his neck into his spine, squeezing his ribs as if they might snap. He moaned and retched, the hand falling away with a tiny cry of surprise.
The curved edge of a glass was pressed to his lips, liquid running down his throat. Thick and sweet, though a medicinal bitterness lingered. A taste he recognized, though it had been long years.
“To help you sleep,” the voice comforted.
He struggled to open his eyes, to warn her about what she’d done, to heave up the viscous poison seeping into his system. Yet even as he tried to open his mouth, his weighted body seemed to cave in on itself, his breathing deepened, his guts twisted, and he knew nothing more.
