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The warning came by way of a flare in the gate guard’s eyes. He rushed, sword swinging, with a deep-chested cry. His lunge at Dallin was somewhat clumsy, but the man was formally trained, so Dallin didn’t underestimate him. Dallin turned himself sideways, flung his arm out and clothes-lined the man. It sent him to his back in the dirt with a breathless snarl. He didn’t stop swinging.

His blade flashed in the dribs and drabs of sunlight that filtered through the buildings. Dallin had to spin again and dance back to avoid getting his shins sliced up.

He glanced over at Wil, still holding three of them off with the aim of the rifle and a look that would have made Dallin stop and think twice. One of the men was helping the gate guard up from the ground. He stared at Dallin and dragged at the guard’s elbow.

Dallin was just wondering again where the sixth had 113

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got to, went to flick a quick glance over his shoulder, when a sharp pain, searing and incandescent with bright-white agony, sliced into his lower-back. He jerked with a throttled cry. Instinct drove his elbow back first, then he followed it with a blind, spinning right-hook. The butt of the gun against his palm lent more power to the blow. Dallin didn’t even have time to be satisfied with the painful grinding of his knuckles as they mashed into the assailant’s jaw, the gratifying
crunch
of tooth and bone vibrating up his arm.

A shot boomed, the heavy
whoof
of air exploding from a broken chest almost muffled beneath the roar. Dallin heard every mechanism in the rifle click and churn as it was pumped, cocked again. Another shot whizzed past his shoulder. He only noticed vaguely when a warm spray of blood spattered at him—he was otherwise occupied with watching the top of a man’s head split off from the bottom… otherwise occupied with trying to breathe through pain that was almost sublime in its agony.

“Good shot,” he said, only it came out fuzzy and slurred, his vision pulsing between light and dark in time to the pain radiating up from his back, engulfing the whole left side of his body. He reached back, fingers blundering into the hilt of a knife jutting from low in his back. Exquisite, blinding pain vibrated from his touch, sent hot bile to the back of his throat and sparkled at the edges of his perception. “Shit,” he muttered, swayed a little. “This is… this is bad.” Not fatal—everything important was higher and on the other side—but bad.

Two more shots rang his ears. Dallin blinked. His right arm shouldn’t feel like it weighed twenty stone, but just raising his gun, pointing it into the blurred mass of moving bodies, made his vision go dark.

“Brayden!”

He blinked again, shook his head, but couldn’t clear 114

Carole Cummings

it. A vague shape that resolved itself into Wil was coming toward him. Face fierce and determined, lit from within and as close to actual feral beauty as Dallin had ever seen. Like some kind of avenging spirit. Wil was saying something, shouting, but Dallin couldn’t hear it. He peered up, wondered why Wil was suddenly so much taller than him, and realized he’d gone down to his knees, oddly disturbed that he couldn’t remember when.

“
Hey
!” Wil shouted, fear and real concern all over his hard-set face. “C’mon, we have to go.” He reached out, took hold of Dallin’s shoulder. “We have to
go
!”

“Don’t shake me,” Dallin mumbled, or hoped he did. Shaking would be bad. Shaking would bloody
hurt
.

“Can’t go,” he told Wil, shook his head, but everything was still too bright about the edges, muddled. “Just…

give me a minute.”

He just needed to catch his breath, that was all. Catch his breath and clear the tangle of pain that was clouding every thought, turning him slow and stupid, sucking him down into that quick-mud everyone kept chastising him about.

“What’s wrong?” Wil wanted to know, hand gripping tighter now. “Are you shot? Did they get you? I don’t see anything—is it your head?”

Going a little bit shocky now, Dallin blinked up into Wil’s face. Then up into the face of the man looming behind him. Noted the beaded braids in the gold-gray hair… the rough, notched the scar.

Just how corrupt does an Old One have to be
, he wondered dazedly,
before the others slice your Marks
from off your face?

“The Watcher is watched,” Dallin wheezed
.

Vertigo closed him in a hard fist. He dragged his eyes back to Wil’s, reached out, gun dropping from his hand as it latched on to Wil’s sleeve.

Leaned in, whispered, “
Run
.”

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The Aisling Book Two Dream

Wil just barely kept himself from growling anxious impatience. They must have hit Brayden with that chunk of wood a lot harder than Wil had thought. Brayden had seemed fine just a moment ago, but now Wil was going to have a bugger of a time getting him to his feet, let alone out of the alley before the gunfire started attracting a crowd.

The men had all scattered, except for the two Wil had shot. Wil had no doubt the others would be back in minutes with reinforcements. The scraggy woman was cowering in the doorway of what Wil assumed was the hostel’s kitchen, clutching her gold to her thin chest and singing to herself, that eerie smile still pulling at her mouth. Her sudden appearance, the realization of what she was, had thrown him almost completely before. Now, he dismissed her, blocked her from his consciousness like she didn’t even exist.

He yanked his arm out Brayden’s grip, leaned in until the dark gaze fixed and focused on Wil’s face. “We have to
go
,” Wil snarled. “Get up, we don’t have time for this.”

But Brayden only grabbed hold of Wil again, this time clenching a fist to the collar of Wil’s coat, dragging him in. “Go.” A breathless grunt, urgent and fierce. “
Run
!”

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“I’m

trying
to, damn it, would you—”

Wil stopped short, eyes narrowing. He hadn’t noticed the look in Brayden’s eyes until just this moment. Hadn’t seen the stress, the pain, the urgent command. The way he dragged his oddly hazy gaze away from Wil and pointed it over Wil’s shoulder. Hadn’t noticed that Brayden had dropped both his guns to the dirt…

Brayden was
never
without his guns.

There was a prickle at the back of Wil’s neck, a bulky shadow falling over Brayden’s face and stretching out behind him. Wil turned slowly, pushed his reluctant glance up even while his stomach began a queasy descent to the ground.

He knew right away why Brayden had told him to run.

Knew right away that this was some very serious shit. Tall and wide, and blond and tanned—a Linder, but somehow so unlike Brayden it made Wil want to cringe.

“Is this how your Guardian guards you?” the man wanted to know. His voice was gruff and graveled, harsh, and the smile in his eyes made something inside Wil go loose and cold.

Brayden was trying to get up, stand between Wil and the man, and not quite making it. It took a moment for the hilt of the knife jutting from Brayden’s lower back, the growing stain of blood on his coat, to jumble itself into sense in Wil’s head.

Oh. So that’s what he’s doing down there.

“Exile,” Brayden said through his teeth.

“Watcher,” the man returned and dipped his head, mouth turning up at one corner in a smirk that sent a shiver down Wil’s spine. The hard blue eyes dismissed Brayden, turned to Wil. The man turned his hands palms-up. “You see I am not armed. I am no threat to you.”

Wil ignored him and bent to pull the dagger from where it jutted out Brayden’s back—

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The Aisling Book Two Dream

“Don’t do that,” the man said calmly. Wil hesitated and peered up. The man shrugged. “Do it and he’ll bleed out before you can get him help.”

Uncertain, Wil turned to Brayden. “Is that true?”

“Yeah,” Brayden wheezed, moved his mouth like he meant to say more, then only nodded somewhat drunkenly.

Wil set his teeth and turned back on the man. “What do you want?” he asked, relieved that his voice was steady and not as reedy as he’d feared.

“Ah, we all want so badly,” the woman sang, giggled a little and smoothed her torn, ragged skirts about her ankles. “Give them what they think they want to keep them from taking what they don’t know you have.” Her bird-like hands fluttered in the air in front of her face, and she laughed again.

A small shock went through Wil, and he frowned at the filthy woman, a grimy little oracle, leaking portents like pus from a wound. How many times had he told himself that same thing? How many times had he used it as an excuse for deeds he didn’t want to remember?

“We never give ’em anything that matters,” she murmured to her fingers, grinned her ruined grin at the man Brayden had called Exile. “Keep it so well, it hides even from our own.” She giggled.

The man ignored the woman entirely, just let his smile spread a little wider, asked, “Does he take you to the Cradle, lad?”

Wil jolted a little—he couldn’t help it.

“Ah, but you’re no lad, are you then?” the man went on. He nodded sagely, tilted his head. “Did you think they’d just let you walk right in?” His voice had dipped down, conspiratory and filled with mock-concern. “Did it never occur to you that there were others who Seek?”

He took a step forward, but Brayden let loose a 118

Carole Cummings

rumbling growl and drew his short sword from its sheath; it shook as he held it up, not much of a threat, but the man stopped, eyes narrowed. There was something wrong about him, something… off. He gave off threat like it breathed from his pores—he
knew
what they were, both of them—and yet there was circumspection in his mien, like he was looking for more. And he’d kept Wil from pulling out that knife and letting Brayden bleed to death.

The woman staggered to her feet, threw herself at the big man, took him in a bony embrace. “Exile,” she breathed, burying her face in the sleeve of his coat. “Ye’ve waited so very long to take Her Children in-hand.” She looked up at him, pleading. “Will She take my hand, then?”

The man’s smile turned shrewd. He slipped his arm about the woman, peering down at Wil, cunning. “D’you want what she has, then?” he asked smoothly. “I see the look in your eye. I see the need.”

Wil shook his head, sucked in a heavy breath. Bloody hell, was it carved into his forehead?

He wanted to shoot the woman so he didn’t have to look at her anymore. Didn’t have to wonder how close the resemblance might have been. Didn’t have to know that he still wanted it so badly he’d consider killing for it and then killing himself if he managed to get it.

“Wil,” Brayden wheezed, “if you don’t move right now, I swear, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Wil could only frown and wonder why he wasn’t doing exactly as Brayden had said. He
should
be running.

Except he wasn’t going to. Couldn’t.

“I’m going,” Wil told Brayden, low and even, “but you’re coming with me.”

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The Aisling Book Two Dream

kept a steady eye on both the man and the woman as he did it, and his finger on the trigger. It was very telling that Brayden couldn’t seem to shrug Wil off.

Instead, Brayden wrapped his arm about Wil’s neck, dragged him in. “
Wil
,” he hissed. “Don’t be an idiot—

I’ll catch up if I can, but this is not apples and potatoes, you’ve nothing to prove. Look at him, don’t you know what he is? They took his
Marks
.”

And yet had left him alive, knowing what he apparently knew, setting him loose in a world they hadn’t trusted for thousands of years to do with the knowledge what he would…

It didn’t make sense. A Clan that didn’t even tell its own people what it was about, allowing their secret to slip through their borders in the form of a disgraced Old One?

Wil looked the man over thoroughly, noted the calm, calculated challenge, the lack of malice in the measuring stare. The way he kept peering at Brayden with a badly hidden look of muted urgency. The too-obvious lack of any sort of assault on Wil himself, his mind or his person.

Wil gently disengaged himself again, stood. “No, they didn’t,” he told Brayden. “He did it himself. Or maybe had another do it for him.” He tilted his head, watched the man’s eyebrows rise. “He can’t hurt me,” Wil furthered softly. “He hasn’t got the power.”

“He’s been mucking with my head since we got here,”

Brayden snarled.

It made sense; unless something had gone very wrong with Brayden’s reflexes, no one could have ordinarily got behind him, let alone stuck a knife in him. He’d been acting odd for hours, twitchy and unlike his usual confident self. And now that he thought about it, Wil himself had managed to sneak up behind Brayden earlier, and he hadn’t even been trying. It wouldn’t do at all to 120

Carole Cummings

assume anything, or underestimate this man. There was a sinister air about him, but in the same way a hurricane was sinister, a flood—a force of nature, the sole purpose of which was to move from Point A to Point B, and if you couldn’t survive the onslaught… well, it wasn’t personal.

“He hasn’t done anything you can’t fight or do back ten times harder,” Wil said, tilted his head a little when the man’s smile curled sardonic.

“In case the obvious has escaped you yet again,”

Brayden ground out, “magic is slightly beyond my skills.”

Wil almost pitied him. Brayden probably would have lived his whole life very happily believing what he’d just said.

The far off shrill of a whistle broke in Wil’s ears, a renewed sense of urgency drumming a choppy
rat-a-tat
on his nerves. People from the hostel and whatever the building next to it was were peering down at them through dirty windows. Wil could feel their stares like buzzing insects over his nape. How much time had passed? Two minutes? Three? They needed to go—should already be gone—but a risk was one thing; blind stupidity another.

He regarded the man with narrowed eyes, laid his bandaged hand to Brayden’s shoulder. “Did you know this would happen?” he asked the man bluntly.