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“Not bloody likely.”
Swiping the blood from his eyes, Conor pushed off the standing stone, but he’d taken only a few steps before Asher’s spell engulfed him. Bones grated together then snapped, ten-dons tore. His chest felt crushed within a giant fist. He dropped to his knees, gasping. His body’s healing ability kept the wounds non-fatal for now, but each new break, each ruptured artery weakened him. It was a slow death Asher wanted. Agonizing. Tortured. The air darkened, became like fog. Then smoke. It stung his eyes and burned his throat. Just inhaling and exhaling wearied him.
Asher’s shadow fell over him. “You’re a coward, Bligh. I told your kinsman you’d never go through with the sacrifice. That your honor would keep you from using the girl.”
Conor’s gaze flashed to Simon. His cousin stood just on the far side of the heel stone. For a split second, their eyes locked, but there was no spark of affinity. Nothing in Simon’s expressionless stare to give Conor any hope of help from that quarter. His fingers dug into the soil, slick with his own blood. Blood drippe
d from his mouth, the razored flesh of his arms. It welled within gashes intersecting his mage marks like gruesome tattoos.
“I warned her. Did she tell you?” Asher mocked. Conor’s head snapped up.
“I told her how it would all end, but she wouldn’t believe me.” His lips pulled back from his red gums, revealing jagged, yellow fangs. Bending close, he whispered in Conor’s ear. “She won’t mourn you long, Bligh. She’ll be too busy screaming.”
Conor roared his fury, flinging dirt into Asher’s eyes as he lurched to his knees.
Asher stumbled away, clawing at his face as he tried to clear his vision, but it gave Conor the opening he needed to slide under the demon’s guard, coming up behind him.
He struck with his own power, knowing he had one chance to bring this to a close before his wounds killed him. He’d run out of choices.
Ellery couldn’t take her eyes off the battle. She started forward, but Aeval’s hand on her shoulder held her back.
“You can’t stop it. Not that way.”
Ellery pointed, her breath coming in quick, shocked gasps.
“He’s killing Conor.” Her voice cracked in anguish. The squashy-lung feeling was back, but added to it was a new dizziness. The world tilted and spun, her stomach in her throat.
“It’s almost time.”
The fey from the barrows was back. In his hands, he held the reliquary. Was this the same jeweled box hidden in Molly’s wardrobe? It looked the same, but this one pulsed with a dark energy, throbbed with expectation. She’d almost call it excitement.
“We must hurry. Already the brothers sense Asher’s victory. They try and sway us with their black speech. Bring us under their influence.”
“Look.” This time it was Aeval who pointed up the hill. Ellery followed the track of her gaze. And bit back an oath.
Conor concentrated on the quoit, on the ley lines that spread away from Ilcum Bledh like spokes on a wheel before they joined the great web running beneath the earth. Reaching out, he tapped the energy there, felt the ancient power rush into him, filling him, infusing him with a strength that was his and yet more. He drew on it, honing it to a spear-point. Emotions fell away with the hopelessness and the desperation. All was light spreading in a wide, horizonless plain and a deep pounding rhythm that matched his heart beat for beat. He sensed his ties to the Mortal world loosening as the magic took over. As he became part of the web, a living conduit for another’s power. A voice sounded in his head, high, low, a fusion of Fomorii consciousness, a cacophony of words in a language long dead, but droning like the hum of bees around his skull. He let it speak, let it act through him as it sensed his change and realized the battle had now truly been joined.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“What’s happening to Conor? What’s going on?” Ellery demanded, squinting through the deepening gloom.
Aeval bit out an order, quick and sharp. “Go, Maban. Tell the rest. They must feel it already. I’ll see to the reliquary.” Her eyes snapped to Ellery. “And the girl.”
The man vanished, leaving Aeval and Ellery alone at the bottom of the hill, half-hidden from view by the crowd of trees that surrounded the ledged slopes of Ilcum Bledh like supplicants. “Come,” Aeval said. “Bligh draws the magic into himself. We must hurry before he goes too far to return.”
A crackling like air before a lightning strike sounded. Ellery staggered beneath the percussion. “What do you mean gone too far?”
Something was wrong. Something had changed on the hilltop.
She knew war. Been close enough to battle to know the smell of it, the metallic taste of steel and gunpowder, the blood that shook your veins until you thought your heart would burst. And she thought she’d known Conor, thought she’d seen enough to understand his brutal, warrior skills paired with the unimaginable Heller’s shift. But this was different. Conor’s self-command was no less, that precision of movement that spoke of a natural ability perfected by strict training. But the struggle had slowed, spun out as if the air and time around them had been pulled in all directions like taffy.
She grabbed Aeval’s shoulder, spun her around. fey or no fey, she wanted answers. “What in God’s name is happening?”
“Conor has dropped his inner walls to draw the deepest power of the fey in. His magic and ours together can destroy Asher.”
Her gaze leapt to the hill. Watching as Conor dodged between the stones of the quoit, on the attack. His blade flashed in the new-risen moon.
“So this is a good thing?” she demanded, pulling her attention back to the faery.
