Heir of Danger (40 page)

Shielding himself against the worst of the curse, he groped his way toward the Sh’vad Tual. Reaching for it, he dodged Máelodor’s fanged and venomous bite. And never saw the deadly bull-like fist of Oss until it blindsided him, striking him in the head. Rattling his teeth. Breaking his focus. The mage energy draining out of him in one sucking whirlpool rush.

He lay upon the turf, staring up into a sky riven with cloud and fire and a sweep of circling birds. There was a fraction of a second when he saw the slit-eyed malevolence of Máelodor and the blur of his descending staff.

He rolled aside, but not before the tip of the staff scored a bloody gash along his upper arm. Immediately, his fingers numbed and his arm went dead as the poison entered his bloodstream. And time and chances wound down.

Máelodor lifted the Sh’vad Tual high above his head in both hands.
“Mebyoa Uther hath Ygraine. Studhyesk esh Merlinus. Flogsk esh na est Erelth. Pila-vyghterneask.”

The stone ignited in a wash of color. The words of the dark spell beating against Brendan’s brain. Each syllable pounding in his chest like the tolling of an enormous bell.

Fire and light poured out over Máelodor’s hands and down his body. Sparkling over his skin and clothes in drifts and eddies before burying themselves into the ground at his feet.

Brendan cried out, the visions cascading through his mind. Arthur, his face black with sweat and blood and dirt, his sword broken as he fell. Aidan’s lifeless body one of thousands beneath a crow-filled crimson sky.

“Klywea mest hath igosk agesha daresha!”

Mage energy blazed up through the trees in a tower of blue-white fire. The ground rumbled and lurched as the sky darkened to a false midnight. As a storm’s tempest
raged, wind whipped the leaves, bringing down cracked and splintered limbs. Blinding and choking him with a gritty, throat-scouring dust.

Brendan covered his head as he curved into the shelter of a fallen log. Opened his eyes on a world gone suddenly still.

Where the giant slab of mossy granite had leaned was now a doorway, the shine of silver light spilling from an exposed cavern, the chime of faery bells high and bright and floating clear upon the air.

Slowly lowering the stone, Máelodor motioned with a jerk of his head.

Oss stepped forward, even his blank features tinged with the shade of fear. Ducking inside, he disappeared for a moment before reappearing with a strange shake of his head and a spread of his palms.

“What?” Máelodor’s response cracked across the silence like a whip as he pointed to Brendan. “Bring him to me.”

Oss’s gaze fell on Brendan like the first spade of grave earth.

The man dragged him stumbling to Máelodor. “What mischief is this, Douglas?”

Brendan’s lip curled with animosity. “You’ll have to be more specific. Mischief is my middle name.”

“The tomb is empty. You had the stone. What have you done with the High King’s bones?” Máelodor demanded, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, his eyes alight with madness. I’ll have your answer or Oss will slice off a finger one at a time.”

The servant pulled a knife from his belt, grabbing Brendan’s wrist, though he felt no pain due to the advance of the poison in his bloodstream. In fact, he barely noticed anything as he pondered this new and wild hope.

The tomb was empty. No bones. No Arthur. Máelodor had failed.

“Arthur’s not dead,” he whispered, his mind beginning to haze, his limbs sluggish as the serpent’s venom crawled through him with needling agony.

“What?”

Oss’s knife cut into the flesh of Brendan’s pinky. Brendan watched his blood dripping down over his wrist with clinical apathy. “Arthur lives. Not a tomb. A portal. To
Ynys Avalenn
.”

How he knew, he couldn’t say, only that once he said it, he knew it as truth.

Blood slicked the back of his hand as Oss withdrew his blade. Brendan clutched his hand to stanch the flow. It seemed the sensible thing to do.

“A portal. A way between worlds.” Máelodor rubbed his chin in speculation.

“It’s over, Máelodor. Without Arthur to inspire them, the
Other
will never rally to your cause.”

“Are you certain?” Máelodor’s transformation seemed to progress before Brendan’s eyes. New scales covered the man’s entire head; long white fangs grew to either side of a flickering tongue. “So I will not have our last great king to lead us into battle, but there will be a reckoning. The
Duinedon
will fall. And, bones or not, this portal is the key.”

The clap of his hands came like thunder. As he began the chant that would unlock not a passage to
Ynys Avalenn
but the
Unseelie
abyss.

His gaze fastened on Brendan. “And you will help me, son of Kilronan.”

The blast of demon magic ripped into Brendan, the
burn along his muscles like acid. Shredded glass pulled through narrow veins. And then something else. A peeling away of his soul. A tearing anguish, as if his insides were being flayed to a million pieces. He screamed his agony to the boil of storm clouds as Máelodor slowly inexorably drained him of power and life.

In the end, finding their way to Brendan had been laughably easy. Or would have been had Elisabeth been in a laughing mood. After all, it hardly took magical tracking or canine smell power when the ground rumbled beneath one’s feet. The sky darkened to a sickly orange-green before being swallowed by rolling storm clouds, and the wind carried a stench of charred flesh and rotting bodies.

She crouched at the edge of the grove with a stomach-tightening swirl of terror and nausea. Magic infected the air, a sulfurous greasy stench, a black slithering coil of hate and madness penetrating her mind with a dark desperation. All of it emanating from the monstrous creature standing in the center of the clearing. Máelodor had grown unusually tall and thin, his twisted, snarled limbs gangly, his head hooded and scaled like a cobra’s. Eyes lidless and red with death. Mouth fanged and bloody. Bearing enough humanity to make the monstrosity of him all the more grotesque.

Her hair stood on end. Every impulse screamed at her to run. To flee this place of ruthless savage power. To pray for a quick end.

Killer gripped her hard until she had to bite back a cry, but it was enough to snap her free of the panic.

Brendan lay upon the ground, the fingers of one hand plowed deep into the soft earth, his other hand held close
to his chest, his face bone-white, his body seeming to thin and pale before her eyes.

His eyes met hers. The wild gold of his gaze dimmed to a sinister black.

A blast of thought beat against her brain, overpowering for a split second the pounding rhythm of demon blood. And she knew what she must do.

Lifting her pistol, she took dead-eye aim. Cocked the hammer.

“Wait!” Killer shouted as she pulled the trigger.

With a roar of fire and smoke, she shot Máelodor square in the chest.

Heard the snap of a twig. Felt the chill of a shadow across her shoulder.

An explosion burst behind her eyes.

She knew nothing more.

Máelodor’s death would have been too much to hope for. Engorged as he was on
Unseelie
magics, it would take more than a pistol shot to kill the master-mage, but it had been enough to disrupt his concentration. To sever the soul-devouring link between them.

Brendan would die here. There would be no return from this place. For some reason, the idea did not terrify him as he thought it might. Instead, it filled him with a calming sense of purpose. If this was his inescapable fate, he need not fear the struggle with his own blackened soul. The dark magics he’d loosed would serve their master one final time. And die here with him.

The
Unseelie
hovered in the prison of between. Howling, razor-clawed, fangs and jaws clacking, their greasy, fetid charnel-house stench burning his nose and throat. Not yet
anchored to this world by ties of the flesh but no longer imprisoned within the abyss, they hovered in a crimson, smoke-filled sky.

Lightning split the sulfurous air, thunder deafening. The storm broke over him, rain like knives, pinning him to the slick, churned mud. He willed his body to respond. Dragging himself to his knees, then his feet. Already his mind fragmented as Máelodor’s poison ripped him apart. But he knew what he had to do.

The spell formed unbidden in his head before lying like acid in his mouth.
“Una math esh gousk—”

A kick to his side interrupted the flow of words.

Brendan rolled away as Oss drew back to level another rib-crushing blow, but even that small movement almost caused him to pass out. Something was definitely broken. Probably a lot of somethings.

Brendan looked calmly into Oss’s chillingly blank eyes, but just as the final blow should have descended, a huge snarling blur of fur and teeth barreled into the muscle-bound servant, knocking him to the ground, ripping into his throat with bone-crunching, blood-spraying gusto.

End this, Erelth! Now!

The words formed like a shout in his head. No time to understand. No time to question. Brendan completed the spell, its power searing his vision, ringing in his ears and firing his mind.

Throwing open every chamber of his mind, he drew the power of the thin place into his body before casting it wide in a battering, unstoppable flood of mage energy. If one doorway could be forced open, so could another. And in such a way that both sides must confront one another. Must clash.

Wind froze to ice. Ice shattered. The chime of bells became the clang of shields and the cries of the dying. Smoke burned his lungs. Ash clung to his lips.

Battle was joined in a maelstrom of fury and rage and madness as
Unseelie
and
Fey
—Dark Court and Light—raged and swarmed the air of the grove like an evil tempest.

Máelodor fought to control his army, but the demon swarm once freed was deaf and blind to all but a wild killing frenzy. They turned on him, rending him limb from limb before the
Fey
swept down upon them. Brendan’s last view of him was as a headless corpse tossed back into the abyss to be imprisoned alongside his erstwhile allies.

Lifting his face to the storm, Brendan let the rain scour clean the poisonous fog.

And for one moment saw a flame-haired king lifting a sword above his head. His shout carrying a ring of command, his gaze like silver steel as he beat back the challenge.

Arthur. The last great king of
Other
.

Leading the armies of the
Fey
as they drove the
Unseelie
of the Dark Court before them.

The shine of his armor. The golden crown upon his brow. The bloody stain of a crimson sky. The storm blurred them until, like looking through rain upon glass, he saw nothing clearly. Heard only the rush of wind and the ring of bells.

And a voice sounding clear above the din. “You have done well, heir of Kilronan. Now you may rest.”

Elisabeth woke to birdsong. The drip of water upon the leaves. The cleansing wash of a gentle rain upon her face. Her head throbbed. She winced, probing the goose egg at the back of her head. Whose side was Killer on anyway?

Crawling from beneath the overhanging branches, she stumbled to her feet, her gown clinging wet and muddy to her legs, twigs and leaves scattered over her bodice and caught in her hair. No sign of Máelodor or Oss or whatever had stripped the trees bare and churned the clearing to a sea of mud and broken branches. She didn’t think she wanted to know.

The shape-changer knelt beside Brendan, his face grave, Rogan’s knife in his hand.

All weakness burned away. “Stay away from him, you filthy, damned dog!” she shouted as she half ran, half tumbled across the clearing.

Killer looked up, his dark eyes heavy with sadness. “You’re awake.”

“Stay away from him, do you hear?” She grabbed Killer’s knife arm, trying to wrestle the weapon from his hand. Easily accomplished. In fact, he handed it to her.

“I am not your enemy,” he said evenly.

“Aren’t you?” Blood soaked Brendan’s shirt, pooled viscous and dark beneath him. There seemed to be no part of him without injury.

“The blood on the knife is my own.” Killer held out his arm, which bled from a gash across his forearm. “Blood from us can be powerful medicine. I offered mine to Douglas as a way to hold his soul within his body.” He shook his head. “But it is not enough. Máelodor stripped much of his essence away, and what the mage did not claim was summoned by Douglas in opening the portals between worlds.”

Elisabeth gathered Brendan’s hands in her own, his fingers cold, the tips blue. Strange—he wore a silver and pearl ring that glowed softly in the strange twilight of the grove.
Elisabeth had never seen it before. “Brendan? Can you hear me?”

“Dying . . . not deaf.” His smile broke her heart into a million jagged pieces.

Killer stood abruptly, his body rigid, hackles raised. “There is one chance yet. A slim one, but it’s worth a try.” To Brendan, he said, “Hold on. This may hurt.”

Bending, he lifted Brendan in his arms as easily as if he were a baby. Carried him across the grove toward the cave, where white light spilled like water and a strange shimmering glassy melody rose and fell as if the wind had been given voice.