Chapter Seventy-Nine
Dylan
DYLAN’S SENSES AWAKENED IN PIECES.
His mouth tasted of ash and ruin. The tendons in his neck throbbed, electric with pain. His skull vibrated like a tuning fork, worsening the ringing in his ears.
He stirred slowly to find himself in a damp, dark cell. Fragments came back to him: his body ripping into something else, the gush of strange blood into his mouth, his sister’s scream.
His first transformation.
He wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, had been too deep in the healing sleep after a first transformation. He could barely open his eyes. But they focused on the four other Empyreals in the room.
‘Where’s my family?’ Dylan managed, struggling to rise, discovering his arms had been tied behind him and shackled to the wall, and someone had dressed him in unfamiliar dark gear.
‘You’re not leaving till you’re oathed,’ they said.
Then he heard a scream.
He knew the sound of it intimately, had heard it in the middle of the night when Bells had her nightmares. Except this wasn’t a scream of fear, but pain.
Dylan threw himself forward and the pop of his shoulder dislocating echoed in the back of his mind, followed by the quick agony. ‘Let me go!’ he roared.
They only offered him a knife.
He looked between them all. There was no taking on four Empyreals, not in a weakened state like this. He barely felt capable of standing, let alone fighting. But maybe he could buy himself time.
‘I – I’ll need my hands free, and my arm.’
One of the Empyreals came around to unshackle his chain from the wall and put one palm to his chest as the other grabbed his dislocated arm.
‘Wait, I—’
He didn’t have a chance to grit his teeth before the arm was forced back into the socket. He screamed behind his teeth, barely able to relish the escape from the discomfort. The cell zoomed in and out of focus as he grappled to stay conscious.
He felt them fix his chains to bring his arms around the front and push the knife into his hand. It was a signifier of how unthreatening he was and how confident they were that they gave him a weapon.
‘Let me see my family and I’ll do it.’
‘You’re not going anywhere.’
He could barely make out their features. How could he fight his way out of here like this? He couldn’t wait, Bells needed him. His father. Nicole.
Desperation; devastation clawed up his throat. ‘Please—’
‘Swear your oath and we’ll untie you,’ one said, his face swimming.
‘Repeat after me,’ the other Empyreal said. ‘I pledge myself—’
Dylan cursed the world as he tipped the knife to his arm and went to carve through the skin. He gritted his teeth against the blood that welled up, dark and fast.
‘I pledge—’
Liquid fire razed his blood, turning his words into a strangled cry.
Wrong, his Empyreal told him, as if it was tearing through the haze of its healing process, but was too weak. Instead, it blared warnings and spotted his vision with light.
‘—myself,’ Dylan panted through his teeth.
‘In eternal service to the Wake, as their loyal hunter,’ the Empyreal continued.
He’d managed a crescent moon now, blood sliding hot down his forearm and spattering to the cell’s stone floor. He didn’t know if he’d make the circle reach, if it would form the shape in the right way.
It made him understand, truly understand, Nicole’s fascination with paintings. With symbols.
This one wasn’t just the symbol of an open eye, of the ‘awakening’ of an Empyreal through their first transformation.
It was an eternal prison.
And he was about to be well and truly damned.
I’m sorry, he thought. To his mother. To himself, and the new, shuddering power within.
But I have to protect them.
Dylan steeled himself to say the next words. ‘In—’
‘Dylan!’
The familiar masculine voice rang with fury, authority. Dylan barely registered the leap of his heart before a blast of power followed, one so strong he was thrown backwards, the knife flying from his hand.
Darkness instantly followed.
‘Wake up,’ came the voice. Softer than usual. Warm fingers lifted his chin. ‘Dylan, you open those gorgeous fucking eyes for me, right now.’
Callum.
Dylan tried, but it was like they’d been soldered shut.
His eyes flickered and he was rewarded with a hazy vision of the Empyreal he’d told himself he’d never trust. The momentary glimpse made Callum seem like he glowed with inhuman power, gave him the sense of being suddenly bigger, stronger, more.
But the gut-deep relief at Callum’s voice didn’t last. ‘My sisters, Dad—’
‘Upstairs.’ Callum said as he untied him. ‘We’re going there now. Can you move?’
‘I – I don’t know.’ Dylan forced his body into compliance. His limbs tingled and cramped but they shifted, weighted with extreme fatigue. He knew he shouldn’t be moving, but there was no time for that. ‘We need to get to them now, I heard Bells scream.’
Callum hauled him up and they came out into the hallway. It was white and clinical but for the spray of blood and the bodies. Dylan staggered over them after Callum, who stalked down the hallway as if he expected more.
‘You won’t be able to stop them, you’re just as bound as Kyan is,’ Dylan said.
Callum didn’t stop. ‘Wrong.’
‘You found a way to stop the oath?’
He turned. ‘There’s something you should know.’
Dylan leaned against the wall to catch his breath. ‘I’m all fucking ears.’
Callum’s lips quirked. ‘You’ve been right about me from day one.’
Suspicion sharpened Dylan’s gaze. ‘About?’
But he could feel the knowledge simmering as he looked at Callum, standing there with barely any blood on him despite the carnage they’d just walked through.
The one Callum had involved himself in to save Dylan.
‘You’re not an Empyreal, are you? I’ve never actually seen you transform.’
‘So you have been paying unusual attention to me. And here I thought you were just playing hard to get. You know, you’re the only person to ever notice.’ He’d come closer. ‘I wonder why.’
‘Tell me,’ Dylan said.
‘Guess.’
‘Guess?’ Dylan growled. ‘This isn’t a game. We don’t have time for this.’
Callum’s eyes darkened, and suddenly he was more serious than Dylan had ever seen him.
‘Yes. Yes it is a game. And once you start playing it like one, you have a chance at survival. I’ve been playing for millennia, Dylan.
So, use those instincts and tell me. You’ve been convinced from the start I’m not who and what I claim to be.
’ Something that looked close to pride glittered in Callum’s eyes.
He walked closer and closer still, till they were a few breaths apart. ‘So you tell me.’
Dylan almost couldn’t speak over the pounding in his ears, over the sudden clutch in his stomach.
The answer whispered to him. Deep in the back of his mind, he knew.
Callum’s gaze lingered on Dylan’s lips. As if there was something in Callum that wanted him to say the words. Dylan’s throat was suddenly dry. But when he said the words, they settled over him with a cool rightness.
‘You’re a god.’
At Callum’s slow grin, Dylan knew he was right.
Something rippled in Callum’s form, allowing a glimmer of insight into the truth that lay beneath his carefully crafted image.
‘I knew you’d figure it out.’
‘I just can’t figure out the most important question,’ Dylan said, realising that this answer was the one he feared. Because it would change everything. ‘Are you on their side, or ours?’
Callum’s eyes held a glint of affection and satisfaction, and that unconscious knot in Dylan’s gut loosened.
‘You know that as well, don’t you?’
He did.
Part of him had wondered, seeing the snarl on Callum’s face when he’d pinned Dylan’s father to the wall with such bone-deep hatred. Who, what, would do that?
‘What’s your real name?’ Dylan asked.
Callum’s teeth flashed in a relieved laugh, as if he had been waiting for someone to ask that his whole life. Or, perhaps they had, but this was the first moment he might consider telling someone the truth.
Callum sketched a bow. ‘Ogma. God of the Túatha Dé.
‘Now.’ He grinned. ‘Let’s go get your sisters, shall we?’