Staked to the side of a rocky cliff a thousand feet above a hellish grotto, I breathe deep to smell the heather of my homeland, I run faster to feel the dense spring of grass and moss beneath my feet. I gather roses as I pass between bushes, and bloody hell—there was a thistle in that bunch!
I plunge into the icy waters of the loch, break surface and shake water from my hair. I throw back my head and laugh as Colleen dives in beside me, missing me by inches, drenching me all over again.
Below me, inside me, there’s a pit that’s dark and comforting and quite completely insane. If I sink into it, I can be free of all torture.
But I am Keltar.
I will not fall.
5
“We’re building it up to tear it all down”
MAC
“You told them what?” Incredulous, I pace the rug in front of the gas fireplace in the rear sitting area of Barrons Books & Baubles, which is really Mac’s B&B, but my name on the hand-painted shingle doesn’t carry the same cachet. I turn and pace the other way. After what happened this afternoon, my nerves are raw. I can’t deal with this. Not now.
He gives me a look. I feel it stabbing between my shoulder blades; the stress of that man’s regard is palpable, even with my back to him.
“Your heels are damaging my rug. It’s an eighty-thousand-dollar rug.”
I say, “You like me in heels. Money doesn’t signify anymore. And at least I’m not burning holes in it.”
Does he smell the blood on my hands? Barrons’s sense of smell is atavistically acute. I showered for an hour after I got home. I cleaned beneath my nails with a scrub brush until they bled. Yet I feel dirty, stained.
Still, I see the Guardian’s hand, the silver wedding band on his third finger, etched with Celtic infinity knots; a pledge of forever.
I found his wallet. I know his name.
I’ll scream it in nightmares, whisper it in prayers. Mick O’Leary had a wife, a young daughter, and a newborn son.
“A wiser woman wouldn’t remind me of that time. I’m still pissed about it.”
The night Fiona tried to kill me by letting Shades into the bookstore and turning off all the lights seems so long ago. I was reduced to lighting and dropping matches all over one of his sixteenth-century Persian rugs in my desperate bid to survive. The way I feel right now he’s lucky I’m not burning holes in the entire bookstore. The news he just gave me is unacceptable, and I’ve got fifteen minutes to vacate the premises before the event begins. He pretty much just said, I’ve decided to put you under a microscope in front of all the people who might be able to figure out what’s wrong with you, plus two of the Unseelie princes that turned you Pri-ya. So buck up, little buckaroo. “Well, I’m not staying here for it,” I say. “You’re on your own with this one, bud.”
Bud. He looks at me and I remember calling him that the night he showed up at the Clarin House, dwarfing my tiny room with its tiny bed, communal, impossible-to-get-your-turn-in bathroom down the hall, and four crooked hangers in the closet. My suitcase, so carefully packed with pretty outfits and accessories, had found a home in neither closet nor city. I wonder where all those clothes went. I haven’t seen them for a while.
He’d reacted much the same then to my scornful appellation. Few call Barrons anything but “master” and live to tell of it.
Mockery gleams in his dark eyes. Tread lightly, Ms. Lane. The floor upon which you walk is only as solid as the respect you cede it.
The floor. I get a sudden strange vision that has nothing to do with the Sinsar Dubh: me falling forward onto the hardwood planks of my room that night, catching myself with my hands, rolling over and striking the back of my head, hard, and not caring. I was doing something … something that was utterly consuming. I frown. What? Looking at a picture of Alina? Reading a book about Irish history? Folding my clothes? It’s not like I had a lot of fascinating choices in that tiny, cramped room.
How did I fall? Why? And why do I keep thinking about that day?
I have a fragment of a feeling, emotions sprung from an occasion for which I can locate no originating event. Exhilaration. Freedom. Excitement. Shame. Regret.
Normally that would bother me so much I’d go rooting around in my memory, but at the moment I have more pressing issues to deal with.
I shake it off and drop down on the chesterfield, glowering across the room at him. “You seem to have forgotten the small problem I have, Barrons. I’m hiding from all the people you invited here. I have been for months.” The princes I can’t even address. That he’s permitting them in my bookstore offends me beyond expressing. “Why do you want this blasted meeting anyway? And why here?”
He cuts me a hard look. See Mac cower. See Mac die.
“Are you trying to piss me off?” I growl.
He gives me the ocular equivalent of a yawn. Only Barrons can pull off such a thing and still look menacing. It’s not as if there are any repercussions to consider. You wouldn’t kill a scorpion if it was stinging your ass.
I study my nails. There’s a speck of blood beneath one. I don’t know if it’s Mick O’Leary’s or mine from scrubbing so hard. He’s wrong about that. I look up at him. “You have no idea what I’m dealing with.”
Ah, such as a beast within? he mocks.
“Your beast is different.” I continue talking aloud, refusing to accept the intimacy of a wordless conversation. We’ve had this argument. We’ll continue having it until the day the king frees me. Neither of us will capitulate. I’m not sure either of us can even spell that word.