Authors: Kathy Morgan
Sacrifice.
The word rang an appalling bell in her head, a reminder of Conor’s insane ramblings on the boat.
The sting of fire…
A wooden post…. Surely, he didn’t mean to…
Comprehension came with an all-encompassing sense of horror.
Please, God, no, not that. He planned to burn her at the stake. Her only hope, slim as it was, lay in trying to reason with a madman. “So it was you all the time,” she began, trying to keep her tone light and conversational. But the drugs had dried up her saliva to the point that her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. “You were the one watching me on the shore.”
Conor stilled. “Tailed you from hospital when Caleb went in to see Mam. But the storm blew in, chased you away.” A demonic glow lit his eyes. “A slight delay.”
Arianna played along. “Yes, only a slight delay.”
“‘Twas thoughtful you were in leaving your address on Mam’s table.” He smiled, a taunting curve of lips. “Watched outside your cottage that night in the storm, so I did. I hadn’t everything prepared for you yet, so went back a few days later. But you were off somewhere, getting the leg over with my nephew it seems.”
“Conor, I know you’re still in there somewhere.” Fearing to rile him, to push him any further over the edge into the darkness of his soul, Arianna was careful to keep her tone subdued. “Please,
please
don’t do this. Think of what it would do to your mother.”
She saw it then. A flicker of lucidity at the mention of his mother, at Arianna’s personalization of the man he had been. A look of dismayed confusion settled over his features as he took in the ghoulish scene around them as if seeing it for the first time. Afraid to hope, almost afraid to breathe, to upset his delicate mental balance, she watched the bifurcation of Conor’s psyche.
It was a rabid challenge, sanity staring boldly into the face of lunacy.
A battle sanity was destined to lose.
As she watched, darkness extinguished the momentary light of reason. She saw it wink out, leaving in its stead a black, empty void. Conor’s eyes were flat, dead. Devoid of human emotion. Obsidian, a mirror that reflected no light, as black as the bottomless pit that had given birth to the monster lurking within him. Dark as the remnants of the tarnished soul that had once been Conor O’Clery.
He turned and jumped off the natural platform, moving purposefully toward a small, cave-like recess in the wall created by missing stones. From the alcove, he began to retrieve sticks and pine branches and dried-out brush, items he had to have previously stowed away.
Kindling
, Arianna told herself and realized she felt nothing. No fear, no dread. Probably because the horror of it all was too much to fathom. It had left her empty, utterly numb.
She lost count of the number of times the man tramped back and forth, arms piled with twigs and brushwood that he dumped onto the limestone ledge beside her. After a while, he disappeared through a square-shaped opening on the wall’s northern end. Five, ten minutes passed. Dared she hope that he had left? That he had been distracted from his diabolical plan? But sometime later, he reappeared, dragging a huge gunnysack overflowing with logs, peat and other tinder.
She let out a squeak as he lunged for her. He grabbed the side hem of the carpet rolled around her and gave it a hard snap. Arianna rolled out of it, coming to a halt breathtaking inches from the edge of the cliff. Sprawled in a tangle of white satin, her first thought was that her limbs were now free, so she could fight for her life. But in the next instant she discovered that her wrists and ankles remained bound by the cruel leather straps. Half-naked in the thirty-degree temperature, the sea winds cut through her like blades of ice. Not that she had to worry about being cold for long, she thought with a sick sense of irony.
Conor’s movements had become zombie-like, she realized, feeling suddenly heartened by the fact. Was it possible the dementia had him so debilitated by now that, even restrained as she was, she might be able to land a deadly blow. She watched and waited until he bent to reach for her then, bound hands raised over her head, she struck him. “Don’t touch me, you crazy bastard!”
A mercurial rage melted the glazed look off his face. She had heard that insanity could endow a person with super-human strength. The only explanation, she thought, for the way he was able to grab the strap binding her wrists together with one hand and haul her to her toes so violently that her body slammed into his.
“What-did-you-call-me?” he growled in her ear, each menacing word spaced a beat apart. He took a half-step back, and she saw it coming—saw it and couldn’t do a thing but brace herself. She cried out as he slapped her so hard in the face that her teeth rattled. Her ears rang. Her knees buckled and he let her drop like a sack of rocks onto the cold, hard limestone slab.
“Now look what you’ve made me do!” he wailed like a spoiled child. Squatting beside her, he scrubbed madly at the spot on her cheek that was burning like fire. “You’re marked, so all is in vain.” He collapsed onto his butt, knees bent, head on his arms, and wept in great shuddering sobs.
But the crocodile tears stopped as abruptly as they had begun. His eyes went dead as he crawled to his feet. Movements robotic, he tossed her over his shoulder and picked his way over the uneven slabs to the side of the wooden pole.
Arianna noted what looked like several yards of black fabric wrapped around the splintery wood.
To protect my perfect flesh
, she thought, emotions flat with acceptance of the inevitable. The battle was over. The last flimsy cord mooring the man to sanity had finally snapped. And there would be no going back.
Conor bent and slid her off his shoulder, pressing her back against the post as he forced her fettered hands up over her head. He looped the shackles over an iron hook embedded in the top of the wood. Her feet touched the ground, her toes nearly flush with the edge of the cliff. Terrorized by the dizzying drop to the sea churning below, she pushed her weight against the cushioned wood.
“Conor, please,” she whimpered in mounting horror. “For God’s sake, don’t do this.”
Deaf to her pleas, he went on methodically stacking logs and scraps of kindling around her feet. Arianna tried yanking her hands free. But the pole, wedged into a crevice far too shallow to support her body weight, lurched heart-stopping inches forward.
She bit down on her lip, again tasted blood.
Never having been one to lie to herself, she didn’t intend to start now. And the truth was that all hope was lost. There would be no last minute reprieve, no heroic rescue. No one even knew she was in trouble—except Tara and Michaela….
And please, God, let them survive this nightmare.
Her teeth were chattering, her abused body shaking violently as wisps of vapor frosted the air with each panting breath. She had never even imagined this kind of cold. Salt-scented mists rolled over the rocky ledge beneath her feet. Trickles of moonlight bled through the black tableau of sky and sea spread before her. With a strange detachment, she followed the sound of the frozen sod crunching beneath Conor’s feet as he systematically built her funeral pyre.
Spent, she relaxed her weight against her hands. Her breath caught on a startled gasp as the post jerked forward several inches more. Was she destined to be burned alive? Or suffer a bone-crushing dive into a watery grave?
Arianna frowned at the flash of movement to her left.
Conor.
Spinning round and round, he was swiping at the air as if thronged by a horde of bees. Slapping at himself, he turned to Arianna, wild-eyed. “Do you not see them?”
She stared at him blankly.
“Come to rescue you, so they have,” he shrieked, still prancing and ducking. “Winged creatures with long sharp teeth, and themselves laughing…mocking...
stinging
.”
Still nothing.
No fear, no pain, Arianna felt nothing at all as he fished a lighter out of his pocket and flicked the wick. He fumbled and dropped it to the ground. Frozen fingers, she thought idly, as he swore and snatched it up off the cold, frozen earth.
He flicked it again and a small flame danced in the dark of night….
Chapter Twenty-eight
A
shriek pierced the air. Caleb found himself standing naked beside his bed, on his feet before he was even awake. His eyes flew toward the clock.
Midnight.
He shuddered as the sound came again. A piteous keening, like that of a mother lamenting the death of her only child.
Bean sidhe.
His blood turned to ice as he recalled the only other time he’d heard the banshee’s haunting wail. It had been on the night his father died. On that fateful eve, the fairie woman’s mournful warning had been for him. It had been personal. Like now…
When it was meant for Arianna.
Caleb went to the window and peered out at the darkened sky. Low, swollen clouds threatened rain. Treacherous winds rattled the windows and made a whistling sound as they forced their way through myriad cracks and crevices in the ancient stonework of the keep. The tempest-torn sea was implacable tonight. A grieving woman spilling torrents of salty tears over the jagged headlands.
Closing his eyes, he pressed his forehead against the leaded windowpane. “Please don’t let anything happen to her,” he prayed. “Sure, I’ll be left a wretched man, lost and desolate, if my fair-haired angel fails to survive the wickedness of this night.”
The plaintive cry rolled again across the waters in a wavering echo. “She’s dying...
dying...dying
! Go to her now...
now....
”
Caleb balled his fists and cried out in frustration. “Where in the name of God is she?” Sinking into a straight-back chair, he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Think. There has to be a way to find her, to reach her in time.”
A minute crept by like an hour. When the answer finally came to him, he hissed a single word. “
Yesss
.”
His mobile rang and he snatched it off the bedside table. “Seamus.”
“What’s up with you, mate? I was just leaving the restaurant and got a wicked jolt, a warning of danger.”
Caleb’s jaws locked up, as if to hold back the words. “Arianna’s dying.”
“Twasn’t danger to the woman I was just after sensing, my friend, but to yourself.”
“She’s dying,” Caleb repeated in a monotone. “And I’ve to find her. Get to her.
Now
.”
Both men were silent for a long minute. And then Seamus inhaled sharply. “Don’t do it, man,” he ordered in a stern voice. “It’s bloody foolish. Are you hearing me?”
“What perfect irony. In order to find Arianna...to save her...I’ll be forced to raze the walls of my own mortality. Sacrifice myself to the very part of my nature that’s been responsible for keeping us apart.”
Once Caleb had given himself over to the magic, he would no longer be bound by natural laws. No longer limited by time or space. Within a moment, in a twinkling of his will, he would be instantly at her side. Wherever she was, anywhere in the world.
‘Twas a matter of choice for his people, the Túatha de Danann, whether to dwell in the mortal realm or transform into one of the
Sidhe
, the fairie folk. And while that boundary could be crossed either way, ‘twas common knowledge that once a man tasted immortality, rarely, if ever, did he choose to return to his mortal self.
“You can’t do this!” Seamus protested. “Listen to me, man. We’ll find another way.”
“No time.
Tá brón orm, a chara,”
Caleb apologized softly. As his friend began to shout at him, he disconnected the call.
Caleb could feel Seamus in his mind, trying to dissuade him from his course of action. He threw up a mental barrier to block him. His mobile began to ring, repeatedly. Caleb powered it off.
Then he sank to his knees, his head bowed humbly before his Creator.
For what might be the very last time.
“Almighty God, Maker of galaxies more numerous than the sands of all the seas, please grant me this boon,” he prayed in his native tongue. “Allow me to reach Arianna, before ‘tis too late. And in this thing I must now do…” He inhaled deeply, taking one of his final breaths as a mortal man. “I commit my soul into Your keeping and pray You’ll instill in me the desire to return from the shadow world, to don the cloak of mortality again once she’s safe.” He paused. “And
only
then, Lord. For if she fails to survive, I’ve no desire to return to this empty shell, to the interminable existence that will await me.”
Eyes still closed, Caleb rose to his feet. He lifted his hands toward the ceiling, palms curved and facing toward him. The shimmer of magic he called to himself raced up and down his body, raising the hair on his arms and legs much as an electrical current would do. In that single, stuttering heartbeat, he abdicated his humanity.
Abandoned his place in the mortal realm.
When his eyes opened again, he stared into a metaphysical world alight with enchantment. A dizzying rush enveloped him. It was like dying in a world of shades of sepia, only to be resurrected into a universe resplendent with brilliant color. An exhilarating realm snapping with untapped power, the heady glow of immortality fed by an inner fire requiring neither breath nor sustenance for fuel.
His elfin nature flexed its newly unfettered muscles, stretching pleasurably to fill the void left by his humanity. That side of himself, which had always fought him, was now the victor, content at last to be wielding absolute control.
Caleb’s sharpened senses were a marvel, sure. Stone and mortar no longer possessed the power to restrict his sight...or restrain his movements. The enhanced olfactory nerve enabled him to detect the lingering fragrance of roses long dead, those that had bloomed in the formal garden in the early fall. He cocked his head and listened to the lonely echo of the humpback whale calling to its mate…from hundreds of miles offshore. All sensations that would once have stirred his soul, however, did so no more.
With a new mental clarity not clouded by man’s weak—
pitiful
—sensibilities, Caleb knew in an instant where, in the vast expanse of the world, the woman was to be found.
Dun Aengus.
The knowledge came naturally to him, without foolish anger or pointless angst to hamper his focus. For the first time, he scoffed at how disgustingly
mortal
his own people were, for all their boastings of being half
sidhe
.
“Enough!” Sound waves resonated in a musical baritone visible in the air around him. “’Twould seem I’ve a rescue mission to perform.”
And yet, he knew through preternatural instinct that not so much as a millisecond had passed since his transformation. “Hmm…” he mused airily. “Timelessness, as well.”
Something luminous caught at the corner of his eye and he turned, discovering his new form reflected in an oval mirror. His eyes were aglitter, as if lit from within by emerald starlight. A pearlescent glow emanated from his naked flesh.
With a thought, Caleb clothed himself.
The corner of his mouth lifted in a sibylline smile, a sly slant of lips as cold and dark as his soul had become. With a cocky wink, he vanished.
* * *
From her obscene perch, three hundred feet above the North Atlantic, Arianna watched Conor struggle with the lighter to get the tinder lit. But the tiny flame was no match for the buffeting sea winds. She made her decision. Death by water, rather than fire. When the pain of her burning flesh became unbearable, she would throw herself forward against her restraints. This would topple the wooden post and catapult her into the welcoming arms of the icy sea.
Whining and muttering at the bad luck he was having, he left the periphery of her view for a moment, then returned with a rectangular can. He began to squirt a stream of fluid onto the wood, the stones...drenching her bare feet. There was a smell of petroleum.
Lighter fluid.
With surprisingly calm acceptance that her time on earth was ending, Arianna bent her head and sought her Lord in prayer. She prayed for Tara and Michaela. For Caleb. For the absolution of her mortal soul. Her final peace with God she made in a familiar prayer, which she modified: “Pray for this sinner now, at this, the hour of my death.”
The accelerant ignited with a loud swoosh, but the recent rains and the moist sea air had left the wood wet and sodden. Though the flame only flirted with the timber, Arianna could feel its seductive warmth begin to draw the chill from her body. But then a caustic black cloud began to rise from the smoldering wood, the dense, acrid smoke burning her eyes and sinuses, and making her wheeze and choke.
Arianna watched Conor shoot another stream of liquid onto the tinder, which established a path connecting the weak flames to her fluid-soaked bare feet. Jaw set, her mind rebelled against the appalling reality of what she must soon do.
“No, not soon.
Now
,” she told herself as fiery sparks, like a swarm of red ants, began to take stinging bites out of her flesh.
She squeezed her eyes shut against her worst fear, of seeing the ocean rushing toward her as she tumbled to her death from so great a height. She interlaced the fingers of her bound hands into a two-handed fist. This would add strength to the movement as she lunged forward, toppling herself into the swirling, dark abyss awaiting her hundreds of feet below.
“Oh, God, oh, God, give me strength,” she whimpered. “I’m so afraid....”
What caused her to open her eyes at that critical moment, Arianna would never know. But the impossibility of the scene that greeted her was such that her beleaguered brain attributed it instantly to a near death experience.
Over the tip of her toes, she could see a slender wraith gliding through the billowing waves. The woman’s waist-length hair shone like burnished silver in the pallid moonlight. From family photographs and the vision of her parents on the night she had first arrived at the cottage, Arianna recognized the shimmering presence, the spirit of her long-dead mother.
The woman seemed to command the sea at her feet. The giant waves unfurled and smoothed out, growing calm as if in obeisance. The wind held its breath as a mighty crash of thunder resounded through the heavens, shattering the ethereal silence. Her mother’s gaze lifted skyward, a slight smile lighting her angelic features. Her intangible form began to evanesce, to grow lighter and lighter until, within scant moments, she faded completely away.
Another thunderclap shook the foundation of the tiny island. A jagged fork of lightning split the western sky. Arianna looked upward, her gaze fixed in rapturous wonder on the sight that had made her mother smile.
“Caleb,” she breathed, his name rasping past a throat that was parched and swollen.
Love filled her heart at the heavenly apparition…
her hero.
Her mystical knight in shining armor sat astride a fiery steed. Its saddle, ablaze with gemstones, paled in comparison to the incandescence of his emerald eyes. His countenance was fierce, like that of an avenging angel, illumined from within by the infinite light of a million stars. Silvery strands of moonglow threaded through his wind-blown hair, as black as the midnight sky that surrounded him.
His glittering gaze captured hers now…
mesmerized.
And the burning blisters erupting on her legs and feet felt as if they had been submerged in cool, spring water.
A haughty flick of his wrist shifted the direction of the winds, directed the noxious fumes and flames away from her body. As if in a tunnel, she heard Conor shriek in frustration, and he began to chuck more kindling frantically onto the fire to compensate.
Calling out his name in a voice that crashed like thunder, Caleb pointed one long finger toward the raving demoniac. Conor’s eyes shot to the heavens. As if pinned in place, he stared slack-jawed, only now aware of the unearthly spectacle in the skies above them.
Caleb’s lips twitched in wicked amusement at his uncle’s unholy terror, as he slowly raised the pointed finger upward. The man levitated off the earth, screaming, arms flailing, legs bicycling in mid-air. A stirring motion with Caleb’s finger propelled Arianna’s would-be executioner toward the opposite side of the wooden stake.
She felt the post jerk against her back as Conor slammed against the other side, pinioned there by nothing more than Caleb’s inhuman gaze. The crazed man screamed in agony, tasting for only seconds the flames Caleb had diverted to the other side of the post, the fiery death Conor had planned for his victim. Then Caleb formed a fist and jerked his hand sideways, which sent Conor flying through the air, his body thudding on the ground close to the cliff.
Scrambling to his feet, the heel of Conor’s boot caught on a slippery crevice in the limestone. He twisted, throwing his arms out to catch himself, but he was too near the cliff’s edge. Plummeting to his death in a grotesque swan dive, blood-curdling screams trailed after him, growing fainter and fainter until they were extinguished by the sea’s tempestuous roar.
How she knew this she couldn’t say, but the instant Caleb had appeared in the clouds time had ceased to move forward. All that had transpired since that moment had been in a span of time less than a single breath.
Arm muscles cramped and aching from the weight of her body sagging forward from the leather restraints, Arianna watched her lover’s eyes flash green fire. And then he swooped downward, a mighty flood of rain chasing on his heels. The heavens filled and emptied; thunder roared and lightning cracked the western sky. The unleashed rage of the storm was so black…so perverse…the island quaked in fear beneath her feet.
Though the pungent fumes were blowing away from her, she had breathed in too much of the thick, poisonous smoke before her magical rescuer had arrived on the scene. Lungs swelling, she choked up black grit, slowly smothering. Wet and covered with soot, her eyes streaming, she could no longer see Caleb. With her lifeline cut off, she felt the life force draining from her body, sapping her will to survive.
Can’t breathe...tired...so very tired.... Can’t. Fight. Anymore.
She dragged in one wheezing final breath and, through cracked and swollen lips, whispered, “I love you, Caleb.”