Haunting Embrace (33 page)

Again, he remained silent, wary. Meaghan let out a pent breath and said, “It did something to you, Áedán—when it spoke to us. It made your eyes change and you . . . you seemed mindless. Like your response had been hardwired into you to answer that commanding voice. You didn’t have a choice about it. There was no
you
in your eyes anymore. They looked like black pits. I feared I’d lost you.”

He caught his lip with his teeth, avoiding her gaze. His emotions rose like a tempestuous wind, pulling at the debris on every surface until she could no longer discern what comprised its fury. Anger, she knew by its bite. The bitter burn of deceit joined with despair. Resignation. Fear. But she felt hope mingling through it all. Though besieged, it fought for survival.

What did a Druid hope for? What did he fear?

As if hearing the question, he frowned, and now those eyes looked guarded. He felt cornered, she could see it, sense it in the air. Meaghan knew instinctively that if she kept pressing him, he would close up completely.

Softly she said, “I know what it feels like to be so exposed.”

He blinked and narrowed his eyes distrustfully. She caught the blast of his disbelief.

Meaghan supposed it was justified. He’d revealed so much of himself, of who and what he’d been. But she’d shared very little with him. She didn’t like talking about herself—not surprising. When people found out about her gift, they generally had two reactions. Either they treated her like a novelty and made her feel like a freak, or they became reserved, doubtful, reticent. She’d become so sensitive that even curiosity, like Kyle had shown, made her self-conscious.

She’d learned over the years to hide her empathic gift—especially from men who couldn’t fecking stand the idea that she knew their feelings. But with Áedán, she needed to swallow her fears and show him something of who she was or he’d never trust her.

“Remember when you asked about . . . when Colleen called me odd,” she began haltingly.

He nodded, watching her closely.

“Well, it’s true. I got so defensive when you brought it up, because I’m not quite . . . normal, I guess you’d say.”

“Normal?” he asked, brows lifting.

“I’m empathic, Áedán. I sense the emotions of others. Whether I want to or not.” She gave a small laugh, feeling more exposed than she’d ever been in her life. “I wish I could control it, but I can’t. For the most part, I consider myself lucky that I can at least discern which feelings are mine and which come from someone else. There are empaths who can’t. They feel every emotion like it’s their own.”

“You’ve had this gift your entire life?”

She shook her head, surprised that he asked this first. She’d been braced for the usual question—
what do you feel from me?
Without fail, anyone she’d told had always asked that before anything else.

“No. It didn’t develop until puberty.”

“You don’t consider it a gift,” he said.

She shrugged. “People lie all the time. They are uncertain, angry, often rude. They look in your face and smile while they wish you’d go jump off a cliff or something. It’s hard to feel their honesty and never be shielded from it.”

“This is why you’ve never mated?”

She felt her face flame with embarrassment. She knew what he meant, but the word
mated
brought the memory of doing just that with Áedán too close to the surface.

“I suppose,” she said. “I have trust issues.”

He smiled then, a full, surprising smile that chased back the chill that had swept through her during her confession. He said, “Perhaps this is why we get on so well.”

Did they? Get on well? She usually felt so confused around him she wouldn’t have described it that way. But now that he’d spoken the words, she realized the truth in them.

She found herself grinning back. “Perhaps. Does knowing this about me make you . . . ?”
Like me less? Want to run away? Wish you’d never met me?

“No,” he said, as if he was the empath and he’d read her uncertain emotions. He gave a shake of his head and a short laugh that held irony.

“I am somewhat . . . reassured by this,” he said softly.

Surprised, Meaghan asked, “How so?”

“You tell me you can sense what is at the heart of me, what I feel.”

She nodded.

“And yet you insist that you don’t believe me to be evil.”

“That’s right. I know you’re not.”

“I have done things—hurt innocent people without conscience. For all the eternity that I have acted like a monster myself, I never thought I’d have another chance to be human again. To be less and to be more. I’ve never thought I wanted that chance. I’ve never thought I deserved it.”

Until you.

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. Meaghan felt a weight, which had bowed her shoulders since the first time she’d revealed her empathic ability only to be shunned for it, ease and then lift.

It was crazy to feel so right when everything around them felt so wrong. But as she stared into Áedán’s eyes, she realized that she did.

“Was it really
you
doing all those things, Áedán? I don’t believe you acted alone. From everything I’ve learned, from what I saw today, you had no will of your own. That voice spoke and you answered without conscious decision.”

He seemed to consider this and she waited for his response. “I would like to believe that is true, but I cannot shirk responsibility. I cannot pretend I am blameless.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

He hesitated before speaking again. “Cathán knows you have the key,” he murmured.

Meaghan frowned, scrambling to shift gears and follow. “The pendant?”

He nodded.

“Does he know what it does? Do
you
know?”

He frowned, pensive, and then said, “Like the Book, the pendant has taken on a life of its own. I cannot say what powers it holds now.”

“I know you didn’t intend for the Book to become the monster it is, but I just can’t figure out how—if you had all this
Druidness
going on—you couldn’t have seen where it was headed. Why didn’t you know what it was becoming?”

Áedán said, “Last night, you saw Mickey.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“For Elan, visions like that came daily. People she knew and cared about. Strangers she’d never have the chance to meet. Their spirits bombarded her. Tormented her day and night. Elan wanted nothing more than to escape them, but her heart . . .” He swallowed thickly. “Her heart was too open to turn them away. They spoke to her and she listened.”

And in his words, in the way those beautiful lips formed them, she glimpsed just how much he’d cared for Elan. How much he’d loved her.

“I wanted to protect her. Shelter her,
shield
her from them. I would have done anything to make them stop. And so, we created the Book. We didn’t mean for it to become evil, but we knew at the start that it couldn’t be a simple thing. It had to be more than a scroll. It had to be bound and spelled because it would hold great secrets. It had to be powerful.”

“Why? Why powerful?” she asked.

“Because we hoped it would do what Elan could not.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Book of Fennore was meant to save the people she saw. What it offered her in the end, we’d created it to do. But the Book became sentient the moment of its birth, and it had other, darker goals. Even if I’d suspected what was in store, I was already too late to stop it. The ball was already in motion. But it was my arrogance that shaped the being inside the Book.
My pride
warped it, made it think it deserved to be more than a tool. My flaws became its strengths. You’re right, Meaghan. I should have known. But I was too busy
playing God.
Too blinded by my own sense of greatness.”

Warily, she moved closer, feeling the rage and hatred of his emotions, knowing they were directed inward.

“The pendant—the key—was for Elan to lock her secrets away once she’d shared them with this powerful Book we’d created. Only Elan could open the Book. Only Elan could lock it. But the Book did not want to be locked away. It began to incite that which we’d created it to prevent.”

“What does that mean?”

“It brought death.”

In her head, she heard Kyle speak.
They suspected that she called death to them.. . .

“And they blamed her,” Meaghan said. “You made it to protect her, but it became the reason your people wanted her sacrificed?”

“Yes. When we realized just how dangerous the Book had become, we tried to destroy it, but we could not. In vengeance, it sent out its powerful signal, and it drove the people of the village mad. Blood spilled between friends and family. Husbands turned on wives. Mothers murdered their children.”

“And Elan saw it all.”

No wonder she’d been desperate enough to grasp it when the Book offered its deal. She’d sacrificed Áedán to save who knew how many others. What she’d done was unforgivable, and yet . . .

“You think she made the right choice,” Áedán said.

Did she? If Meaghan saw everyone she knew the way she’d seen Mickey last night, would she be desperate enough to do anything to stop it?

“No,” she said, surprised at the certainty she felt. “I would have sacrificed myself before I made that choice.”

“Perhaps,” he said softly. “And perhaps you’d choose exactly as she did.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Á
EDÁN cursed himself silently. He should never have left the door open to Meaghan’s curiosity, shouldn’t have given in to his desire to exonerate himself in her eyes. With a plunging feeling, he looked down at the markings creeping up his forearms. They’d almost reached the crook of his elbow. He pictured them inside, shadowing his veins, tainting his blood, marking him as the monster he knew himself to be.

“I suppose it’s human nature to doubt,” she said. “But I am not Elan. I know my heart. I’ll be true to it.”

She believed it but he could not.

“It may be human nature, but I am not human.”

Meaghan’s lips quirked in a grin that mocked his blatant lie. For it seemed each moment on this island made him more human than the last. Each second in her presence transformed him into a man. Just a man, with wants and needs that ruled him.

“Let me know how that works out for you,” she said wryly. “I guess I can count on you never making another mistake again.”

“You can’t count on me at all. Why can’t you grasp that simple fact?”

“Because actions speak louder than words, Áedán. And your actions are screaming at me. They tell me you are a good person. They tell me you have a heart. They tell me you can be hurt. They tell me you care.”

He gave a bitter laugh and shook his head. “And you believe them, beauty? Do you not see that we are trapped, you and I, in a repeat of a history we have no hope of escaping? Your blood is the only way out of this nightmare.”

“My blood?” she repeated, paling.

“Yes.”

She cocked her head, considering. But he saw no revulsion on her face when she should have been looking at him with fear and disgust.

“How much blood?” she asked after a moment.

Flummoxed, he said, “How much . . . Does it matter?”

“It might. A pint or two I could live without if it meant saving our fecking arses.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending. He’d expected anger, outrage, hurt that he’d even voiced the horrible reality. Instead she wanted to calculate quantities. He could not bring himself to tell her that the amount of blood he’d need could not be spared.

“Cathán is a mindless beast of power, rage, and endless hunger,” he said. “Combine that with the entity I gave breath to, and you have something that is malevolent beyond belief.”

“I’ve heard the legends say the same thing about you.”

He blanched but nodded. For centuries he’d preyed on the greedy, on the needy. He’d offered them exactly what they wanted but gave them nothing of what they needed. It didn’t matter that the Book of Fennore and its wants played the leading role in his actions. He’d taken everything and repaid nothing. And he’d felt justified in it. He’d felt vindicated. He hadn’t cared if they were innocent or not. He had been innocent once. He had known a love so strong it drove him to his destruction. Why should he worry about the mortals who heard his call and craved his touch?

But now he was mortal once more, and with each sweet breath he took in, the desire to stay that way consumed him and repelled him.

“I will not go back to what I was,” he said.

“I don’t want you to.”

He turned on her, taking her shoulders between his hands. “You don’t understand. For the ritual to work, someone must die. Unless you know a volunteer, that someone must be me. Or you.”

She heard him. She even understood him. But he could see that she would not accept his words as truth.

“I won’t believe those are my only choices. Áedán, you were once the most powerful Druid ever known. You still have power and not just because of the Book. I believe in you. I think you’ll figure it out.”

“Figure it out?”
he said, and he’d meant it to sound derisive. But instead a note of longing crept in.
She believed.. . .

As if hearing his thoughts, she repeated it. “I believe in
you
, Áedán. If you need to spill my blood to end it all, then so be it. I’ll trust you to take care of me.”

“Why?” he said as inside something burst in his heart.

She placed a hand over his chest, as if to capture the wounded organ in her hand. “I feel what’s here. I can feel it now. Hope, fear, longing. But I don’t feel deceit. You will do the right thing, Áedán. I know it. I have faith in you.”

Humbled, astonished,
grateful
, he could only gaze at her. But he knew how futile her faith was.

“Your faith is misplaced, beauty,” he said harshly, each word a razor that left him bloody and in pieces.

Chapter Twenty-three

M
EAGHAN heard his words, but what she saw, what she felt spoke stronger. She stared into the swirling hope of green and the flickering strength of gold, tasted the emotions coating the space between them, thick and honeyed.