Chapter 29
29
As I step through the shimmering veil between worlds, bitter cold pierces straight to my bones and the world tilts. I sway, momentarily blinded by the transition from the daylight forest to this eerie night. Kiaran steadies me.
“I told you not to walk through that portal,” Kiaran says, his voice sharp.
I blink until the darkness resolves into an endless velvet night sky, broken only by the glimmer of stars.
“Since when have I made a habit of heeding warnings?” I ask, turning in a slow circle to take in my strange surroundings.
My equilibrium returns as I regain my bearings.
We’re standing on a narrow strip of beach bounded by a vast, dark loch that resembles black glass. Its surface ripples with unearthly colours—vivid crimson, shimmering gold, aquamarine. Ancient trees with dense canopies that swallow the wan light pierce the heavens at the boundary where sand becomes earth. Everything is cloaked in wisps of mist that coil around my legs and wind up my body in smoky tendrils, chilling exposed skin.
The air feels alive here, charged with wild magic that raises the fine hairs at my nape. My instincts scream that this isn’t a place for me. Judging by the annoyance still etched into Kiaran’s features, he shares that sentiment.
His violet eyes flash silver in the dark—utterly beautiful and inhuman. He has never looked more fae.
“My warnings are meant to keep you alive, instead of dying violently,” he says.
“If I listened whenever you said something wasn’t safe, I’d never leave the house.”
He steps closer, using his considerable height advantage to glare down at me. Being near him awakens nerve endings all over my body that have no business intruding right now.
“Must you always be so stubborn?”
“I prefer ‘determined.’”
“Reckless. Foolish. Going to be the death of me.”
“I think you’ll survive my antics a while longer, given your advanced age.”
His lip twitches at the words advanced age . I love irritating him.
I slip out of his grasp and stride toward the loch, its glassy surface reflecting the strange constellations above. They swirl as though alive. In the distance, I can see the crumbling silhouette of a towering structure against the star-flecked night. Some enormous ruined palace, perhaps. A relic from a bygone era when magic ran rich here.
The scent teases my memory until I finally place it—the same wildness that thrums through Kiaran’s ancient power. It’s everywhere in this realm, infused into it.
I sense Kiaran shadowing my footsteps across the narrow beach. “What’s beyond the loch?”
“The Seelie and Unseelie kingdoms. Old palaces. Ballrooms.” His voice is flat. “Places untouched since their fall.”
Surprise lifts my brows. “This is the fae realm? Your home?”
Pain flickers across his beautiful face. “It was. Once.” He turns his gaze to the loch, expression shuttering. “The uprising changed everything. After the courts fell, the remaining few eventually crossed into your world. There was nothing left for any of them here.”
I swallow hard, thinking of the fae who escaped to exist in the human realm. For them, it must have seemed an endless banquet laid out for the taking, undefended and oblivious to the monsters moving among them. Small wonder so many crept into Edinburgh’s shadows, harvesting lives to sate an aching hunger this empty kingdom could no longer satisfy.
Kiaran endured the violent downfall of the vivid, vibrant worlds that forged him. Watched his people fade into ghosts haunting ruins.
I drag my gaze from the beckoning water. “Why don’t you and the others live here?”
Kiaran clenches his jaw. “There’s no magic left to maintain it without the courts. It crumbles more each year. And this beach is as close as I can go.”
“What would happen if you ventured in farther?”
“I’ll die.” He states it so simply.
My head jerks toward him, eyes wide. “What? It would kill you?”
The familiar icy mask settles over Kiaran’s face as he turns those luminescent eyes on me. “It was part of my sacrifice. I can never go back.” He catches my wrist, drawing me away from the hypnotic water. “We need to leave. Now.”
I glance again toward the towering ruins visible through the fog on the opposite shore. I can’t banish the questions crowding my mind. “But if Sorcha came here—”
“Time moves differently across realms.” Kiaran doesn’t let me pull out of his firm hold. “We have to go back.”
I open my mouth to argue when a familiar voice cuts through the night air.
“Leaving so soon?”
The sound scrapes down my spine. My mouth fills with the biting tang of iron and blood, as if it’s being poured straight down my throat. I double over, gagging. The taste coats my tongue no matter how hard I swallow it down.
Sorcha hovers just above the loch’s glassy onyx surface, tall and pale and flawless as living statuary. Her gauzy dress and long black hair billow around her. Cold, ancient power radiates from her small frame. Those emerald eyes are soulless right now, devoid of the empathy I saw when she covered me with a coat, having discovered what her fellow fae had done.
Colder than when she plunged the blade through me.
“What do you want, Sorcha?” Kiaran asks softly. Too softly.
One dark brow arches. “What do I want? Why don’t we start with a proper greeting, a ghaoil ?” Her tongue caresses the unfamiliar term in a way that makes my skin crawl. “You and I have unfinished business.”
Fury ripples off Kiaran with such intensity that I almost take an involuntary step back. “Don’t call me that. Not ever.” Each word is like a chip of glacier ice. A simmering fury glints in his features as he looks at Sorcha—a darkness.
Whatever bitter history festers there runs soul-deep.
Sorcha offers an indulgent little smile, either oblivious to his threat or confident in her hold over him. Perhaps both. Her next words drip contempt.
“You might wish to forget what we once meant to each other, but I have a longer memory.” She takes a graceful step toward us, power coiling. “You’re still bound by your vow, even now. Have you forgotten? Feadh gach re ? . Always and forever. Tell me, does your new pet know about us?”
Vow? He made her a vow? He knows her intimately? My hands are already straying toward the blades on my belt. Sorcha’s gaze narrows. She sweeps her vivid green eyes over me again, assessing. Searching for tender places to sink her claws.
Then her will crashes over me, seeking to crush me beneath its weight. To invade the private spaces of my mind, exposing everything vulnerable and human and flawed. I try to shore up my defences, but she’s much stronger here. This is her world, her power source. I’m outmatched.
Panic climbs my throat as tendrils of her toxic presence wind inside my memories. She rifles through them, shredding privacy and dignity until hot tears streak down my face.
Abruptly, the choking pressure vanishes.
I gasp air into my starving lungs, relief dropping me to my hands and knees. I dig my fingers into cold sand, using the sharp bite of grains against my skin to centre myself in the now. The loch, the glass-smooth surface reflecting starlight. The susurration of wind in ancient branches. Kiaran’s fury beside me.
Here and now.
“Have you told her what that pretty mark on her skin actually means?” Sorcha continues. “The one you no doubt said would keep us from finding your precious pet? How lucid was she when she accepted it?” Sorcha flashes her teeth. “Did he tell you that you’re bonded to him? I would know that mark anywhere. You reek of his claim.”
The mark on my palm burns.
The memory of his voice from that night claws up from my memories. Listen closely now. I can save you, but you have to accept my mark.
And my reply, a whisper before the darkness pulled me under. I accept .
Please let her be lying . I search Kiaran’s face for some flicker of denial, stomach threatening to revolt when he refuses to meet my gaze. Dread hardens in my gut. You told me it meant what I wanted it to mean.
Sorcha makes a scornful sound. “This sad creature is a far cry from your last pet. A pity how that one turned out in the end. Though I notice you didn’t even mark that poor girl.” Her smile is cruel when her attention falls on me again. “But Kadamach will always be fae, Falconer. And the fae love to break their toys.”
The words land like physical blows.
Kiaran doesn’t let his composure slip. Not even a crack. “Are you done?”
“This would have been much easier for her if she had simply died like her mother. She didn’t even have time to feel us coming that night.” Sorcha’s smile curves with cruelty. “Arion tore out Victoria’s throat before she could utter a sound.”
Rage whites out coherent thought. I rip the dagger from my belt and send it flying straight at Sorcha’s heart. By some miracle, the blade punches deep into her stomach before she can evade it. Blood spills down the front of her pristine gown.
Sorcha’s sharp cry cleaves the air, high and thin with agony. She hunches over the embedded dagger, her body wracked with tremors. For the first time since she appeared, stark fear shows in her features.
Now’s my chance while she’s wounded. Every ounce of pain this creature has inflicted on me and countless others across long, bloody centuries demands immediate retribution.
I surge forward. My boots slap at the sand as I sprint straight for the loch, fingers already closing around the hilt of my longest knife.
Before I can leap, shadows seize me. Kiaran’s power closes around my torso, hauling me off my feet.
I writhe and claw against the implacable shadow magic dragging me back through the air.
Kiaran catches me against his chest. I feel the tension thrumming through him. “ Enough .”
I struggle against him. Behind us, Sorcha makes choking sounds low in her throat. My window to destroy her is closing.
“Let me go!”
“No.”
I rake my nails across his shoulders as I buck against him, desperate to break free. Sorcha sways on her feet, colour high in her cheeks as she presses one hand to the bleeding wound. So close.
“You told me you would stay out of my way,” I snarl. “That you would let the last three be mine. You promised me .”
Kiaran’s features tighten. “I never sealed those words with a vow.”
You have my word on that. Do I have yours?
You have my word.
Oh, god. How foolish was I not to notice that he’d simply repeated my own words back to me? Not even a lie—a vow that meant anything.
“ Sleep, Kameron .”
The command forces itself down my throat. My vision dims around the edges, darkness creeping in. The cloying taste of honey blooms on my tongue. I try to fight it, to resist, but his power is implacable. Relentless as the tide.
Just before oblivion claims me, I feel the rasp of his cheek against mine.
And I think I hear him whisper, “I’m sorry.”