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Cat crossed to the bed, taking him by the arm. Trying by sheer force of will to propel him up and into sanity. “Stop it. Stop prattling like a damned Bedlamite and do something.”
Maude sought to intercede, but Cat was beyond listening. Beyond understanding. Beyond anything but panic and the fear that even now it was too late. Surely that was the steady approach of Lazarus she heard across the boards below. And there was his breathing as he climbed the stairs. The drip of a blood-splattered blade.
“Get up, damn you!” she shouted.
Daz started to move. With agonizing lethargy, he drew on his breeches. Wrapped a banyan about his shoulders. Too slow. Far too slow.
Hurry! she wanted to scream.
Hurry before it’s too late.
“Even without your help, I’ll find it, Kilronan. And your silence will mean less than nothing.”
If Aidan closed his eyes, the earth would devour him. The soil would close over his head. Roots would snarl in his hair, and his flesh would dissolve to naught more than food for the worms. So he kept his eyes open and locked on the fiend striding triumphant toward the house, while his mind fastened on the only answer to this unwavering onslaught of devastating mage energy.
Gulping a fiery breath, he descended. Pulled forth the words he’d read only once, yet which had sat upon his tongue like a bitter taste ever after. Words with the force to summon an Unseelie. The only being he could think of with the ability to vanquish the reanimate.
“Yn-mea esh a gwagvesh. A-dhiwask polth. Dreheveth hath omdhiskwedhea.” Just speaking took monumental effort. Placing the emphasis in the right spot. Shaping the harsh vowels and chewing the raspy consonants. Pushing them through cracked lips from a mouth sticky and numb. “Skeua hesh flamsk gwruth dea. Drot peuth a galloea esh a dewik lya. Drot peuth a pystrot esh a dewik spyrysoa.”
The words seemed to draw a shadow over the sky, as if some great beast had swallowed the moon. And he shivered despite a heat beginning in his belly. Spreading along his arteries and veins in the usual fiery race to his brain. But something else traveled in the same current as this molten flash flood. Something foreign and potent and bearing the weight of oblivion.
Aidan repeated the phrase. And again. Each time feeling death recede and a new existence beckoning with skeletal fingers. The air thickened, making it difficult to breathe. His lungs worked like a bellows, yet dizziness spun the stars overhead and spots clouded his eyesight.
A form took shape at the corner of his narrowed vision. A creature more shade than substance, yet gaining mass with every passing second. Craning its thick, wattled neck back and forth as if seeking the origin of its summoning.
Laying its gaze upon Aidan, its lips peeled back on a mouth full of razored teeth and a lolling tongue like a lizard’s.
“Hwot gelweth mest, Erelth.” It spoke in a slithering, hissing speech, its unblinking vertical-lidded eyes pale as bleached stones.
“I called you forth.” Aidan heard the words come from his mouth. But his voice had deepened. Bore the same unnatural reptilian crawl. “Join with me. Take your place within me.”
“Mest akordyesh, Erelth,” the Unseelie answered. “Hwot esh biest mest.” It punched its fist into Aidan’s flesh, his body parting bloodlessly. Again came the pain like a breath-stealing bullet’s rip. And the Unseelie’s other arm disappeared into Aidan’s body.
He shifted against a feeling as if his bones had hardened to iron, his blood turned to acid, his brain whirling and overflowing with thoughts and memories not his own.
Fury. Rage. Murder. Hate. Chaos. Destruction. Ruin. Death.
The creature’s voice filled his head with a screeching buzz like metal against metal. “Esoest hwot, Erelth. Owgsk vest. Oa hunot.”
And like stepping through a door, the creature settled beneath his skin. Controlled him. Became him.
With the Unseelie’s help, Lazarus would be a dead man. Again.
Cat stumbled to a crashing halt at the top of the stairs.
Below her, an expression of grim determination upon his upturned face, climbed Lazarus. His gaze settled upon her like a knife at her throat, his steps unfaltering.
Spinning, she fled back toward her bedchamber. Slammed the door closed behind her, sobs knotting her throat, her heart thundering. She scanned the room for a hiding place. Somewhere she could crawl into and become invisible to the searching, killer eyes of the de
athless Domnuathi.
Steps sounded on the floorboards. Slow. Sure. As if confident none could stand against him. And wasn’t that true? How did one kill something already dead? How could one hurt something for which pain was less than nothing?
She’d prodded Daz and Maude to action. Now she prayed the old man and woman huddled safely in their chamber while Lazarus searched. He didn’t want them. He wanted the Kilronan diary. She wished she could give it to him. Hand it over and be done with it. All she’d found within it had been sorrow. Sorrow and misery. The pages seemed to bleed these emotions, as if agony had been written into the mysterious language with every stroke of the pen.
“Lazarus!”
The shout erupted in the torpid silence of the house. The footsteps paused.
