Chapter Thirteen #3
Only the cowled folds of his robe’s hood, gathered like a yoke of bunched, dark wool around his shoulders.
He lifted a hand and took a step forward, as if to gain her attention. But if he spoke, a sudden blast of howling wind stole
the words. Again and again, the gusts battered the tower, rattling the shutters and filling the room with the cold, damp scent
of rain and old wet stone.
Stone steeped in silence, its cold, lichened essence feeling almost pagan.
“Ach, dia,” Gelis cried, her own words lost in the swelling, ear-piercing din.
Now a high- pitched, keening wail, the roar of the wind blotted everything but the wild buzzing in her head and the deafening
thunder of her pulse.
The table and even her pile of strongboxes melted into the floor, quickly followed by the fine stone-carved hearth and its
little clumps of glowing peat. Then the massive stone walls began to shake and weave, falling one by one into the darkness,
their disappearance letting the deeper shadows swirl into the room.
“Gaaaaah!” She flung out an arm when one of those shadows rushed past her, the Raven’s great four-poster bed vanishing in
its wake.
She pitched forward, her bare feet and the flats of her hands hitting the floor rushes only to plunge right through them,
her spiraling fall hurtling her into even greater, colder blackness.
“Gaaaaah!” she cried again, tumbling and spinning, her flailing arms grasping only air before she slammed hard onto something
that felt distantly familiar, like the furred coverlets of her bed.
But the bed was no longer there.
Nothingness surrounded her.
A great dark void pressed in on her from all sides, cold and cloying, terrible in its emptiness.
Only he remained.
Her heart began a slow, hard thumping as she stared at him, dimly aware of the hand she’d clutched so fiercely to her breast
and of the eerie quiet that now replaced the wild screaming winds of moments before.
Looking at ease in the chaos, her raven seemed oddly taller now.
His dark eyes glinted ever brighter, and he held out his arms, silently beseeching her as the darkness around him grew blacker.
Black as a tomb.
“Ronan — I pray you, stop. Don’t do this . . .” But her voice sounded far away, as if she called to him from the bottom of a very
deep well.
You’re frightening me.
Those words, too, she held back, shamed by her fear.
Not that he could have heard her.
Already the blackness was consuming him. Dark and dense, it poured in, swirling first around his ankles and then whirling
ever higher to slide around his knees and finally spread upward, circling his hips and all of him.
As if the shadows sought to bury him.
“ No-o-o!” She clapped her hands to her cheeks, shaking her head. “Please stop.”
Silence answered her, its deadness worse than hell’s coldest wind.
She swallowed hard, her fingers digging into the swell of her bosom. She began to tremble, wanting to squeeze her eyes shut
when the darkness reached his neck, but she couldn’t look away.
Then only his eyes were visible.
Dark and piercing, they still glinted right at her, glowing as hotly as the hearth’s reddish-orange peat embers she could
no longer see.
But then she was staring at the peat embers.
The raven was gone.
And she was sprawled naked across his well-appointed bed.
Her bedchamber — nae, his — appeared as always.
No black winds tore at the wall hangings or rattled the soundly latched shutters. The table by the window and her own towering
stack of hump-backed, iron-bound coffers stood exactly where they should.
Untouched, and certainly not melted.
Even the scattered bearskin rugs on the floor were undisturbed, without even a single stray bit of dried meadowsweet or what-have-you
marring their glossy pelts.
That alone was a clear indication that no unholy wind had swept through the room.
Even so, she drew the bedcovers to her chin.
She knew fine what she’d seen.
Even if she also knew someone else could have stood beside her and not noticed a thing amiss.
She knew better.
Something was sorely amiss.
And she had enough experience with such matters to guess exactly what it was.
“Saints, Maria, and Joseph!” Her father’s favorite curse slipped from her lips and she fell back against the bedcushions,
her entire body shaking.
Staring up at the richly carved bed ceiling, she clenched her fists and fought hard against slipping into the deceptive peace
of slumber.
Two truths were bearing down on her and she could deny neither.
The first seized her each time she drew a new, lung-filling gulp of the cold, early morning air.
Ronan had spent at least a few hours in her bed.
The sheets and coverlets reeked of him, or, better said, of the rank-smelling goldenrod goo she’d spread across his ribs and
smeared onto his toes.
The second truth ripped her heart and stole her breath, its horror splitting her soul.
The blackness she’d seen consuming Ronan could only mean his death. And the icy cold, stone-drenched emptiness had to have
represented his tomb.
Gelis shuddered, hating the interpretation.
But try as she might, she couldn’t find another explanation, much as the reality struck her like an iron-hard fist in the
belly.
The Raven truly stood in mortal danger.
She’d just have to be sure she was ready when the blow came.
She’d be damned if her Raven’s foes would defeat her.
And she’d face down the devil himself before she’d let them conquer him.
Enough was enough.