Haunting Warrior (16 page)

“This can’t be happening,” he said.

Saraid faltered, and he thought once more that she’d heard him.

“Did you?” he said, kneeling beside her. “Can you hear me?”

But again she wasn’t listening to him. She was staring at his twin as his skin turned ashen and the once-invincible body withered with weakness.

Rory’s twin lifted a bloody hand and brushed back a stray wisp of Saraid’s hair. All around him, the rage that had sustained the battle with Stephen still hovered and sparked in the air, diluted now by the excruciating pain that lingered in Rory’s memory though not in his now-invisible body. But there was something else in that look, and Saraid seemed to realize it. He saw some shift in her thinking, some acknowledgment he didn’t understand.

“He’s betrayed us both, hasn’t he?” she whispered.

Rory’s twin closed his eyes and nodded once.

“Who’s betrayed us?” Rory asked.
His father?
He didn’t want to believe it, but he’d be a fool if he chose to be blind to the facts. The man in the banquet hall looked like his father, went by his father’s name, but he wasn’t the same man Rory remembered. Could he, like Rory, be existing in a twin? The idea was so abstract that even after experiencing the phenomenon himself, Rory could not wrap his mind around it.

“Y’ must go,” the twin said, his voice no more than a breath in the stillness.

“Go? Where can I go that Cathán will not find me?”

The confirmation that whether true or false, these two believed Rory’s father had planned the attack filled Rory with pained bewilderment.
Why?
How had his father become the kind of man who would plot the murder of his own son? And why today, his wedding day?

In this world his father wasn’t the nicest guy, but he wanted this marriage. He wanted Saraid pregnant for reasons Rory still didn’t know. He didn’t want her dead. He didn’t want his own son dead . . . did he?

Rory moved to the curtain and peered through the gap where it met the wall. On the other side, musicians played a loud and jaunty tune. Tables had been pushed back, and dancers circled in the clearing. Against the far side of the room by the door, Saraid’s brothers stood alert and watchful, troubled eyes moving from gathering to curtain. Cathán’s men were three deep everywhere he looked. Their mass and power on grim display around Saraid’s brothers.

“He means to use y’, Saraid. Do not let him,” Rory’s twin was saying, his breath coming in a wet rattle of agonized breath. “Go, now.”

It was sound advice, but Rory knew without being told that she wouldn’t leave her brothers out there, surrounded by the enemy. With one last glance at the three of them, Rory came back to her side and knelt down.

“You should listen to him, princess,” Rory said. “It’s going to get ugly.” He looked at the bloodied version of himself on the floor. “Uglier.”

But she didn’t hear him. Of course she didn’t.

“He wants the Book from y’,” his twin was saying. “Do not give it to him. It is all that keeps y’ alive.”

Rory snapped his gaze to Saraid’s face, shocked by the words his dying twin had spoken. “You’ve got the Book of Fennore?” he demanded, thinking back to the dreams he’d had of Saraid and the Book. Suddenly it made sense. Nana had sent him here for the Book, using this woman, Saraid, as bait. All he had to do was get her to give it to him and then he could go home. “Where is it, Saraid? Where is the Book of Fennore?”

His twin’s eyes had shut, and Rory waited, fearing the next rattling breath would be his last, trying to ignore the insistent question in his head—what happened to Rory when the twin died?

Then suddenly his twin’s eyes snapped open and he slowly turned his head. For an instant Rory thought he might be seeing angels coming to take him—or the devil more likely, coming to bring him home to the fire and brimstone that had spewed him into the world. But then his eyes seemed to focus, and Rory realized with a chilling certainty that his twin was looking at him.

His twin’s expression changed from horror and fear to utter surprise and then . . . relief. Frowning, the woman followed his seeking gaze with her own, her face paling, her breath coming in soft, frightened gasps. Every hair on Rory’s body stood on end.

“You see me. . . .”

Rory held his breath as it seemed she stared right at him. He looked down, the feeling of being invisible—though he couldn’t even say just
what
that feeling was—had waned. There were his hands, resting on his knees as he knelt beside his dying twin. Solid. He was naked, stripped down to flesh and bone. Only the pendant hanging on his chest.

He lifted his hands and saw there was blood on them. Whose blood, he didn’t know.

Into the silence came a new sound, a humming deep and insidious emanating from all around them. He recognized it, the feel of it worming its way under his skin, pulsing at his ears, thrumming through his heart. The Book of Fennore. Only the Book of Fennore made that kind of rumble, that earthquaking tremble of heart and soul. Where was it?

He’d barely thought the question when he saw his twin holding the Book in his bloody hands.
How? Where had it come from?
The question was mirrored on his twin’s face and on the woman’s. The three of them stared at it in shock, while that drone became a sickening disease that tainted the air. The black-covered Book gleamed in the flickering light, beveled leather writhing with concentric spirals and crusted jewels. The gold and hammered silver glowed with an eerie light at the edges and corners, all leading to the three strands of silver woven into a lock that held prisoner the rough- edged parchment inside the covers.

Rory reached out as if to touch the Book, but his twin pushed his hand away. “It lies,” he rasped. “It lies.”

What that meant, Rory didn’t know. His twin now pointed to the pendant hanging from Rory’s neck, swinging back and forth above the leather Book, its intricate pattern a perfect match for the mystifying lock. “Keep it always, wear it always. Do not let him have it. Ever.”

Then the Book fell to silence and vanished as quickly and ominously as it had appeared. The three remained motionless, staring at the place it had been, doubting that they’d seen it. In the next instant the air seemed to shift and become gritty, like sandpaper, and now his twin began to fade—there was no other word for it. In the same way Rory had become substance, his twin began to crumble, layers blowing away and taking with them years until a boy stood where his twin had slumped.

Stunned, Rory stared at the child while his mind whirled through possible explanations and found none that made sense. The boy stared at him and Rory couldn’t help the feelings washing over him. Once again, he looked into his own eyes. This was Rory. Rory as he’d been twenty-five years ago, that night in the castle ruins when his father had disappeared.

Saraid was making a small hiccupping sound as she stared, and he knew without a doubt she saw the boy, too. Knew she’d seen the unbelievable transformation of his twin to this child, but could not begin to understand what she’d witnessed. From the gritty air there came a voice, calling out Rory’s name. As he had at the airport terminal just the day before, Rory recognized who spoke. It was his sister, Danni, calling him home. The boy turned away and in a blur of color and motion, he was gone.

“Fuck me,” Rory breathed.

On the wall behind Saraid a candle guttered and smoked. The slight hissing sound it made seemed unnaturally loud in the sudden silence. Slowly she lifted her eyes and stared into his.

“You
can
see me now, can’t you?” he asked and then said it again in her language.

She stared at him, her eyes wide and shocked, her gaze traveling slowly over his features, erasing any doubt that he was still invisible. She saw him. That was good. But there was terror in her expression, panic that seemed to swallow her whole. That was not good.

“Hey,” he said, gently touching her hand. “Breathe, princess, breathe.”

She did as he told her and took a great, gasping breath.

“That’s it,” he said, watching the color return to her face. She was shaking from head to toe. Not surprising—so was he.

She gulped another breath and said, as if reciting some memorized script, “A man will come. A man in the guise of another.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, but she seemed to expect a response. Mutely he shook his head. Her dark gaze raked his features.

“It is y’ she foretold. It was always y’.”

The baffling statement came with a tone of accusation and another expectant stare that made him feel stupid and hopelessly inadequate.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “
Who
are you talking about?”

“Colleen. Colleen of the Ballagh.”

The name pushed him back and he sat hard, the stone floor jarring his bones, the straw scratching against his bare skin. He stared at the woman, remembering Nana’s words as she’d sat in his Camaro. She’d said Rory wasn’t the only one she had to visit that night. Had she come here as well? To the woman from his dreams?

“Colleen Ballagh told you I was coming?” he repeated slowly.

Saraid nodded. Then she lifted her hand as she’d done so many times in his dream and reached out, touched him. Her fingers were icy against his chest. It made his heart stutter, that frozen contact.

“Colleen of the Ballagh told me y’ would come to save us.”

S
ARAID stared at her splayed fingers, feeling that the freezing hand must surely belong to someone else. Not her. Not Saraid. Yet she could feel the coldness of it pressed against the burning heat of the Bloodletter’s chest. Feel the fierce pounding of his heart beneath her palm. She was numb and raw at the same time. Her mind felt dull, and yet every pore of her skin was sensitive to the slightest shift in the air. The draft coming from beyond the curtain chilled like a blustering wind. The voices in that other room boomed loud and jarring. How could they still be laughing? Playing music and dancing? How could they not know what Saraid had witnessed? The impossibility of it felt as enormous as the sky, the sea, the very earth beneath her.

It is you she foretold. It was always you
.

Saraid had spoken the words before she’d even realized their truth.

But somehow her eyes and her mouth had accepted what her mind still rejected. This man staring at her from behind the Bloodletter’s blue gaze had changed—pulled himself in two and . . . and . . .

She moved her icy fingers, trailing them over the heated muscle to the rippled pucker of a scar just over his heart. Slowly she traced the outline while he remained perfectly still, barely breathing. Watching her with the same shock she felt inside.

The scar was as big as her hand, spread wide over it. It was shaped in three continuous spirals that had no beginning, no ending. She knew them, recognized the symbol from the ancient stones at Tara, from the countless mounds and dolmens scattered throughout Éire. It was the triple spiral that represented life, death, and rebirth. The same symbol that she’d just seen locking what could only be the Book of Fennore. The spirals had been burned into this man’s flesh so long ago that the skin was now white and silky. But the scar hadn’t been there before, when he’d stripped his clothes. When he’d taken her on the bed.

She might have overlooked it—doubtful as it was—but even if that was the case, she knew that such a symbol would have been noticed before. Stories would have circulated about the warrior marked by the mystical Book of Fennore. Legends would have been told. Songs written and sung for the tribal kings and their people. It would have been known by all. And yet not once had she heard even a whispered word about it. Not once.

Slowly, she raised her gaze to his face, watched emotion play over his features, tried to understand what went on behind those bottomless blue eyes. What was he thinking?

They were her own words, but could they possibly be true? Was Ruairi the man Colleen had prophesized? Saraid had seen him dying on the rushes, she’d seen him fade into a boy and answer the voice of the goddess who called him home. Yet here he was, kneeling next to her. Strong and whole. Had he been thrown back from the Otherworld? Rejected by the gods and goddesses? Or could it be that what she’d just beheld—Ruairi, pulling himself in two—was what Colleen had meant when she’d said he would come in the guise of another?

He’d recognized the dead woman’s name, Colleen of the Ballagh. There was no mistaking that. But beneath his reaction, she saw misgiving and distrust. No longer did she have the sense of another within him, but no longer was she sure who this man was at all.

He made a sound that might have been anger or might have been fear. Could he be as frightened as she by what had just happened? Or was that simply some wishful part of herself trying to make him more human than the Bloodletter could ever be?

The question crystallized like a sharp icicle in her mind. It pierced the fog surrounding her thoughts and sent her scurrying backward, finally breaking the contact of her hand on his chest. She gulped a huge breath and let it out with a shudder.

As if her withdrawal had released him from his own inertia, he stood suddenly and paced a few steps away. “Nan—Colleen,” he corrected himself. “She was here? She told you I was coming? Here?” He said it as if of everything else that had happened, this event was the strangest.

Saraid scrambled to her feet and nodded.

“Well where the hell
is
here? Where am I?”

The question shot a flame of alarm through her body. How could he not know where he was? And what had made him so suddenly angry? He reached for the fur cape she’d used to staunch his twin’s blood and laid it over Stephen’s dead body before facing her again. His brows rose as he waited for her to answer his question.