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Helena stiffened, a strange expression passing over her features, steel entering her gaze. “Charming young lady, Rogan. Wherever did you find such a pleasing creature?”
“Lyddy, I’ll be having words with you.” Rogan grabbed her by the arm. “Now.”
He hustled her out, justifications trailing behind her. “She’s no right to talk to me that way. I done the best I could. Who does she think—” A door slammed below.
Madame Arana bent beside Elisabeth.
“Can you do anything?” Elisabeth asked, taking Brendan’s hand in her own.
Madame Arana placed a freckled hand upon his chest. Closed her eyes, her seamed and wrinkled face alive with c
oncentration. “If it is battle magic, there are ways. But if his sickness originates with the drug, it is best to let it run its course.”
Brendan’s eyes locked on Elisabeth’s, the gold of his irises a dull muddy bronze. “Not such a good bargain after all.” His laughter came tinged with bitterness. “Should have married your sheepdog.”
Freddie’s eyes haunted Brendan. Disbelief to shock to terror to sightless in death. He relived the sequence of expressions in an infinite loop. Freddie’s murder playing again and again in his fevered mind.
The confrontation turning ugly. The men in Brendan’s company growing first impatient, then violent. Threats. Ultimatums. And the murders one by one of Freddie’s family before his horrified eyes. His death coming when it finally did, almost a mercy. A heedless ride away from the scene, fire raging at Brendan’s back. Eyes red with smoke and weeping, hands gripping the reins slick with a cold sweat, sickness chattering his teeth, souring his stomach.
Freddie had trusted him. Father had trusted him. Elisabeth had trusted him.
Two out of three dead. His fault. All of it was his fault.
He heaved his guts up, throat raw, muscles jumping.
Calm words soothed the howling cries of the dead. Hands gentled him. He rolled onto his side, squeezing his eyes shut, praying for relief. He didn’t want to relive it. Not again. Not the imagined murder of his father. Not the real memory of Freddie’s butchering.
Why wouldn’t they leave him alone? What did he have to do to send them away? To live without them in his head?
As if to taunt him, a new face swarmed up out of his nightmares. A monster of fangs and talons. A creature born of smoke and brimstone and keen with malice. It hovered above him. Waiting. Watching. Knowing its time drew close.
Its mouth opened on a bloody maw, its tongue thick and forked and slithering with snaky words. “Ana N’thashyl gorloa agasesh gelweth. A’sk beuewik perthyana, Erelth.”
Agony drove the breath from Brendan’s lungs, seared the blood in his veins. He jerked awake. The Unseelie vanished. Freddie gone.
But as if his old friend had pulled him aside and whispered the answer in his ear, Brendan knew what he had to do to end the nightmares. To end the threat.
Máelodor must die.
And Brendan was the only one who could do it.
Elisabeth kept vigil from a chair by the door. She’d propped it open, hoping to air out the musty room, though nothing seemed to dispel the heavy, fetid atmosphere. Smoke from cook fires mixed with the stench of latrines and animal dung from the nearby alley floated in on a sour breeze. Shouts and cries and rude laughter rose from the close-winding maze of nearby streets. A beggar snored in the shade of a torn tarpaulin. A hollow-eyed woman picked through a refuse heap beside her child while chickens pecked among the dirt at their feet.
Elisabeth wrapped her shawl closer around her, turning her face away from the distressing sights beyond her door to the man sleeping beside her. An arm lay outside the blanket, the shoulder pink and shiny with recent scarring, the curve of the crescent-and-arrow tattoo, a dark ribbon against the gray pallor of his skin.
He rested peacefully this morning. Earlier he’d called out to the mysterious Freddie. At first begging him to surrender. Later, pleading for his forgiveness. A hazy memory nagged at the edge of her mind, but as his outbursts grew less frequent and then stopped altogether, her thoughts turned to more immediate concerns.
Would the Amhas-draoi still be searching for him? Would they track him here? Was their refuge fast becoming their trap? What if Máelodor’s men took this moment to attack?
Elisabeth forced her mind off problems for which she had no solutions. Instead she watched as Brendan fought a sickness Madame Arana said was cured only by time. Another facet to a man she once thought she knew.
Only now was she finally coming to realize that man had never existed. He’d been a mirage. Smoke and mirrors. A Fey-glittery delusion she’d clung to long after she should have known better.
But what about the Brendan who fought tooth and nail to make up for his crimes? Who risked his very life to undo the horror he’d unleashed as part of the Nine? Who wept for a lost family and a home he feared he’d never see again?
No fantasies shaped her knowledge of this man. She saw him for what he was. Desperate. Lonely and alone. And as real as the warm muscled flesh beneath her fingers, the wicked gleam in his eyes, the spicy foreign scent of him that clung to her hair and her clothes and her skin as he pleasured her senseless.
Daylight faded, leaving the room gray and cold and colorless. His hand flattened out upon the blankets. His breath became a sigh, his eyes fluttered open. Dazed at first before sharpening hard as diamonds.
