Haunting Warrior (44 page)

Tears filled her eyes and she brushed them back angrily. There was no place for fear here. No place for hesitation.

“Saraid.”

It was Ruairi’s spirit speaking. She kept her eyes averted, refusing to see him.

“Don’t do this, princess. I’m not the one to save your people. It’s you, Saraid. You and your brothers. You can, you
will
do it without me. Don’t listen to what it tells you. It lies. It will only hurt you.”

Nay, lass
, the Book crooned in her mind. ’
Tis only what he wants you to believe—He is like the others who would own me, seek to control me. But what do you have to fear? I am part of you. I beat with your heart. I flow with your blood. I was with you at birth. Ask me and I will give you more than you desire.

She clenched her eyes tight, not knowing who to believe, who to doubt. Terror like she’d never imagined made her movements sluggish, her limbs numb.

Ruairi’s breathing was shallow and harsh, and his flesh burned from a fire within. The ground beneath him was soaked in his blood and still it flowed from his wounds. Yet as she knelt, his hand moved ever so slightly, and she took it in her own, holding it against her breast as her tears flowed.

His eyes fluttered open, so blue against the mask of ivory that was now his face. “Don’t sweat it, princess,” he said, his voice a whisper she had to lean forward to catch. “Not your problem. Not your fault.”

But it was her fault. She had brought him here without even knowing how she’d done it. It was she who had summoned him like the witch Cathán Half-Beard accused her of being. She had not plunged the knife into his body, but she had pinned him to this time that was not his own. She had called him here where he would die if she failed him.

“And what would y’ have in return?” she asked the shivering silence. “What price must I pay?”

She waited, tense, fearful. Ruairi’s breath wheezed and waned, and she felt death trying to capture her thoughts again, knew his spirit was waiting to emerge once more. She fought it like she had never fought before.

“What would y’ have of me in return for his life?” she demanded, and this time her voice was strong. The answer came at once.

“Free to do what?”

Ruairi’s hand clenched hers again, and she leaned forward. “Get out of here, princess,” he said. “Go now.”

Did he know she was bargaining with evil in its purest, rawest form?

Could that be true? Could it be that the Book of Fennore was no more evil than the blade of a knife? Could it be used for good as easily as it was for bad? Why, then, did so many fear it? Why did she?

An image filled her head in a brilliant flash. In it Saraid stood on a harsh and jagged precipice, staring out at a fierce sea. Waves spewed and foamed, grinding away at a rocky shore. The wind gusted up the sheer wall and teased the fabric of her skirts, making them snap and billow. Her hair blew round her face in a dark cloud of glittering black and brown and fiery red. A man approached from behind. Tall and solid, as golden as the sun and as beautiful as the gods. He slipped his hands around her waist and pulled her back into the safe harbor of his arms. Her head fit perfectly under his chin, and she let herself melt into him, knowing he would protect her from anything. From everything.

His hands were big and they slipped up to cup the heavy weight of her breasts before gliding to pull her skirts tight around the bulge of a belly swollen with child.

A blink and it was gone, the precipice, the wind, the man . . . She looked down at Ruairi and felt the love that had been in his touch. It was a future she’d never dreamed of, and it was being offered to her now. She would give herself, but this vision implied that she would not lose herself in the giving.

“Is this a trick?” she whispered.

There was no answer, only that expectant thrumming, waiting for her to decide.

“Ruairi will live?” she tried again.

With that, the lock over the Book unraveled and burst open and the pages began to fan, back and forth, ruffling the air, whirring with purpose, with menace.

“What are you doing?” Ruairi asked, his eyes open now. “Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”

Before she could answer, his body arched in a terrible bow and he shouted in pain. Her vision blurred and her tears streamed down her face. She dragged in a deep breath, forced herself to calm, and carefully she put her hands on the Book, felt them sink into it like quick-sand. She wanted to scream, wanted to jerk back, but she didn’t. She held, though every instinct shrieked for her to run. She held, and did what she’d come to do. She asked for Ruairi’s life.

For a moment, nothing happened, and then suddenly she was yanked from her body, sucked into a vortex, spiraling down, moving so fast she couldn’t see or breathe. She felt herself break apart and become miniscule, insignificant. A wind, a breeze, a whisper. She was rushing toward an end she didn’t comprehend, and then suddenly she was there, hovering over a red gash
inside
Ruairi’s body. Turning, she stared at herself through the opening in his flesh, understood in a queer and unsettling way that she was both here and there.

For her entire life she’d been afraid of small, closed spaces, and now she was in a place so tiny it had no borders, no beginning or end. It was a million times worse than her most frightening nightmare. But she was here for Ruairi and she would not cower beneath her fear.

She silenced the screams echoing in her head, and some strange instinct guided her. She reached with her mind, touched the jagged flesh of Ruairi’s wound, smoothed the harsh line of it, pulled the edges together, and sealed them with the burning flash of her thoughts. Her heart seized at the complete darkness that engulfed her. Would she be able to find her way out? Had she trapped herself inside him, neither dead nor alive, neither real nor imagined? Her terror became a snake, slithering through her mind, hissing that she had sealed her own fate with the act. She forced the burgeoning hysteria down and focused on what to do next.

She saw bubbles rising all around and followed them through the dark and pulsing world until she came to two sacs that hung suspended before her.
These are his lungs
, some part of her said. She moved closer, saw the rip in one and the bubbles of air escaping. Again she reached out, touched the torn surface, and knitted it together by thought and will. And then she moved again, following the wake of destruction, putting the pieces back together, seamlessly mending each damaged part of him, ending at last with the torn and bleeding shoulder. She stitched it all with her will, leaving the smallest of openings to see out. There was her own pale and waxy face staring sightlessly back.

She focused on the darkness of her eyes and surged forward, escaping Ruairi’s body but not rejoining her own. She hovered just over his shoulder, above the raw and swollen flesh of the wound. He lay perfectly still, a statue of marble. Gently she blew a hot breath across his shoulder, imagining the touch of it against his skin, a whisper of power that mended and strengthened. And as she watched, the two sides of the wound merged together and became one.

Aware of the blank shell of her body beside him, Saraid spread herself over his prone form like a blanket of mist. She filled his nose and mouth, breathing power into his lungs, his veins, his mind. She felt him catch his breath, heard the steady beat of his heart as it took her strength and pulsed it back through his blood.

And then suddenly she felt a heaving, ripping sensation, as if a cyclone had touched down beside her. Colors blurred as it wrenched her from his body and slammed her back into her own.

She gasped, coughed, gasped again, each breath as painful as the one before it. It felt like she’d drowned and was now filled with burning water that must be ejected before she could breathe. She crawled a few feet away and retched, spewing up a fountain of dark malevolence that could not be human. It floated like oil before finally soaking into the earth and disappearing.

She sat back, looking down at herself. Every inch of her was covered in blood, soaked in it. With a cry she stumbled to the pool and plunged in, fully clothed, no longer fearful of what lurked in its depths. She dunked and rinsed until the water around her swirled a rusted brown. Shivering as much with the cold as the shock of what she’d done, she stripped and scrubbed with the gritty sand of the shore until her skin was raw, but clean. Only then did she emerge, legs shaking, arms weak, and spread her clothes next to Ruairi’s to dry.

The Book of Fennore lay just where she’d left it, silent now. Satisfied. Quickly she wrapped it back in the canvas and tied the cord. It felt unbearably heavy as she dragged it back to the ancient wall. She didn’t return it to the dark cavity where she’d found it. Instead she set it above ground and loosely covered it with stones.

Spent, she dragged herself back to Ruairi’s side and curled into his heat. His chest rose and fell with an even rhythm; his skin was flushed, but not with fever. Gone were the dark circles beneath his eyes. Gone was the rattle of his lungs and the wheeze of his breath.

Numb, depleted of her last bit of strength, she let the blank page of unconsciousness rush up to greet her.

R
ORY awoke in a strange place. Again.

His eyes opened to darkness and shadows, obscured moonlight and shifting shapes. He was on his back, stripped bare and laid out like a corpse beneath the starlight. Was he dead, then?

He didn’t feel dead, and yet he had the sense that he should be . . . that he’d fought and lost. That Saraid . . .

Saraid.
Where was she?

He turned his head quickly, and his vision swam with bright stars and violent explosions at the sudden movement, but he saw her. She lay curled into a tight ball beside him. Her hair gleamed around her shoulders like mahogany striated with scarlet. She slept deeply and without movement. The rush of emotion that filled him was at once overwhelming and strangely expected. Sometime, somewhere between those first deranged moments when he’d been neither here nor there, an invisible extension of his other half, and this moment, now, Saraid had become the sun around which he orbited. She was, quite simply, the reason he kept getting up again and again when his father’s men knocked him down.

He let out a soft breath and gazed at her. An eerily bright moon illuminated her face, throwing into relief the red abrasion on her cheek, the mottled bruise with the clear imprint of a hand on her throat. Cuts and scrapes marred her arms and chest. In fact, it looked as if every inch of skin bore some sign of abuse. A slow burn started in his gut as he fought through the fog in his head to remember what exactly had happened.

Like light spilling from the crack of an open door, the events at last began to spill out. He recalled leaving the cave with Saraid, her brothers, and the strange following of Leary’s men. They’d discovered Eamonn was missing and he’d fought with Tiarnan.

Hell, who hadn’t he fought with since coming here?

He’d been chewed up and spit out three times—four, if he counted the skirmish with Tiarnan, which had ripped all the carefully laid stitches Michael had sewn. He remembered the blood, hot and thick, pouring from the wound as they’d run through the forest, convinced they were being chased. By the time they’d made it to the creek, Rory had felt like he couldn’t take another step. And then . . . Cathán’s men had found them as they crossed the creek into the clearing. . . .

Suddenly it all came back in a rush, filled with visuals and excruciating details. Some big, ugly guy had grabbed Saraid, and her scream had filled Rory with a kind of helpless rage like he’d never known before—prayed he’d never know again. He couldn’t help her because a sword had sliced through him . . . the shock of it cutting through his vital organs . . . the panic of not being able to breathe . . . The blade had come from below, driving up, severing flesh and tendons, clipping his liver or kidney or both, until the tip of the blade had punctured his lung. He’d felt the breath collapse from his chest. He’d
known
his number was up.

But obviously he had survived and somehow he’d come to be here with Saraid. He remembered none of how that came to be, though, nothing after he’d hit the ground, thinking he’d finally met his end. That he’d failed Saraid.

And he’d cared more about failing her than dying.

He stared at her sleeping form, and a surge of relief went through him. Thank God she was here. Thank God she’d survived, despite him.

By degrees he stood, testing himself with each effort. Aches and pains from every joint in his body cried out in sudden clarity, but they were nothing to the waves of nausea that swamped him. Carefully he breathed in and out, willing his stomach to settle, fighting the urge to heave. He had to pause and bend at the waist, hands braced against his knees as his gut tightened.

Shock
, some strangely clinical part of his mind told him.
This was shock
.

It struck him odd that it would come now, for obviously some time had passed since . . . since whatever had happened. How else had he come to be here? Stripped and sleeping beside Saraid?

But apparently his body didn’t care that the danger was over. He was trembling from head to toe, weak and afraid. He braced himself, hating the last of it more than the sickening churn in his stomach. Deep breaths . . . in . . . out. Finally he stood straight, feeling better for the effort. Saraid slept on, and he waited until he could see her chest move as she breathed before taking a step away.