Chapter Seven Irian #2
Briskly—as veins of silver-gold stood out briefly along Fia’s forearms before her skin was obscured by gray fur—Irian finished undressing, tugging his rumpled, stinking, salt-and-dirt-crusted shirt over his matted hair.
Unhooked the belt carrying the Sky-Sword’s scabbard, dropped it to the ground.
As Fia bared teeth that were lengthening toward vicious fangs, he lifted her from the bed and carried her toward the bathing chamber.
He forcefully kicked the door shut behind them.
Fia growled, low and threatening, and began to change in his arms.
The wolf was huge and night black. It lunged at him with paws the size of dinner plates and a mouth like damnation.
Fangs snapped inches from Irian’s nose as he caught the beast around its neck and hauled it sideways, using its own momentum to shove it into the wall beside the tub.
The impact jarred them both; Irian’s head snapped painfully backward even as the wolf whimpered and convulsed.
Irian took advantage of its momentary weakness to wrestle the beast to the tiles, clasping his arms around its furred ruff and pinning it beneath his body.
It growled with displeasure, thrashing as it fought to get its limbs beneath it.
“I am sorry, mo chroí,” Irian murmured into the beast’s tough pointed ears. “But I am not going to let you destroy the bed. I intend to use it. Eventually.”
As Irian’s transformed wife pivoted beneath him, raking a set of razored claws from his throat down to his navel, he knew: He might let Balor carry her, might let Sinéad ride with her, might let Laoise watch over her.
But he’d be damned if he ever left her alone when she needed him.
Her cries were his to hear; her pain his to witness; her torment his to feel.
In the depths of Cnoc Féigleann, Irian had no window to the outside.
Time seemed like a story he had heard as a child, then forgotten.
Hours passed like minutes; minutes stretched like years.
As mineral stars wheeled close overhead in the nighttime of the caverns, his mind flew, and he could almost imagine the past year had not happened.
That he was trapped in a crumbling fort with nothing but shadows and wild magic for company.
That he was the one who transformed beyond his control—from man to twisted, feathered thing, then back to man. Once, it had been so.
His skin brutally pierced by sharp black feathers, his bones viciously ruptured by grievous changes, his truest self tattered by magic he could not control.
When Fia at last stilled in his arms, Irian felt almost as if he were in a dream.
The dim bathing chamber was gauzy with heat. Irian’s sweat-slick skin molded sumptuously against Fia’s sleek frame. She clutched at him, her touch finding the ridges of muscles exposed beneath claw-torn clothing. She tangled her slender fingers in his hair as she drew him down over her.
“I don’t know where else to go,” she breathed against his mouth.
The words startled him back to here.
Now.
Fia’s lips were pressed to his—her tongue sliding between his teeth, her barely covered breasts tight against his chest, her thighs latched around his hips.
In his exhaustion, Irian’s body had already begun to respond to her advances—his hands dragging her closer, his desire rising. How he longed for her, how he wanted—
Beneath her dark eyelashes, her metal eyes slashed his heart.
Irian mastered himself with a viciousness he knew he deserved. He pushed Fia—or whoever possessed her—to arm’s length with all the strength he had once used to hold her close.
She gnashed her teeth as she writhed in his grip, even more feral in borrowed lust than she had been in borrowed form. And when he met her gaze, he glimpsed not the faintest vestige of his wife.
This, more than anything else, tattered the last of Irian’s strength. The promise he had made Fia on the Longest Night echoed in his mind, the litany he had clung to now layering discordant in his skull, like a song he had heard too many times and could not shake.
Not in a thousand lifetimes will I ever let you go.
What did it truly mean, to never let a person go?
If Fia never returned to him—if she had already been consumed by Talah’s heinous magic—was he honor-bound to grapple with this thing wearing her face for the rest of his life?
Or was it enough to have loved her so deeply that the sound of her name was etched like a poem upon the parchment of his heart?
By what terrible troth had he—yet again—bound himself?
All his life, Irian had been defined by geasa. His father’s curse upon his mother, his enforced link with the Sky-Sword. His invisible bonds to the swan maidens, his marriage covenant with Fia. And now this.
Without his oaths, Irian did not know who he was. He had never bothered to ask. But now he began to wonder: Would the weight of this last pledge be the thing to break him?
Or was he broken without it?
Grimly, Irian set his jaw and waited for daybreak.