Lord of Shadows (12 page)

Daigh speared her with a grim stare. “Oh, they’re real, Sabrina. I remember.”

She swallowed back a whimper of panic. Because she knew he told the truth. Because she remembered too.

Daigh opened his eyes on a whisper of breeze through his room. A shift in air pressure. A sound that should be silence. Rising, he dragged a shirt over his head. Pulled his boots on. Lifted the latch on his door, cracking it slowly.

The passage was empty, but for the tangle of overlapping shadows. Silent but for a steady drip of water.

Not Sabrina.

She’d fled him hours earlier. The anguish in her eyes cutting into the icy fist of his heart. He’d let her go despite his questions. And his need. But he refused to ignore either for long. Not when she traversed the mysterious junction of past and present. His key to understanding both.

The same instinct that pulled him alert and out of bed had him padding silently down the passage and into the main ward of the hospital. Sister Clea remained asleep. Nothing and no one out of place.

Outside, rain pricked his exposed skin like claws. Peering into the night, he scanned the courtyard. The locked gate. Shuttered barns and storehouses. Dark windows of the buildings opposite.

Somewhere a door slammed in the wind. A gutter rattled. Animals shifted upon their bedding. All normal night sounds. Nothing that should have touched off his wary soldier sense.

A sister unable to sleep. A servant rising to stoke a fire. No more than that, surely.

Still he kept watch. Waited for the telltale slipup that would reveal the intruder.

There. A latch falling. A furtive step. A light glinting then dying in a doorway. He hadn’t imagined it. Across the way in the main building.

The plaguing sense of an unseen force pushing against his brain sank through him. He accepted its seeking, slithering presence. Let it glide between the walls of his mind. Easier than struggling and less painful. It also allowed him to hold onto the shreds of a fast diminishing illusion of control.

Hunching his shoulders, he stepped out of the shelter of the cloister. Picked his way through the concealing gloom. The order’s rectory stood imposing and grim. Narrow, arched, staring windows. A shallow set of steps to a double door.

He bypassed the main entrance. The sounds he’d heard had come from the side. A less conspicuous entrance.

As he slid inside, he felt the stir of air from an upper corridor. A muffled breath. Whoever he followed held a knowledge of stealth. Yet it gained him little. Daigh was better. Quiet and inescapable as a tomb.

At the top of the steps, he followed the weak light of a shielded taper down a wide corridor.

Ard-siúr’s office lay in this direction.

Anger writhed and curled with needle-sharpness along his nerves. Burned black and wicked with his blood. Buried itself so deep within him, he could no longer be sure where he ended and the presence began. The strength of one augmenting the other until they became one.

Stalking the last few yards to the door to Ard-siúr’s office, he slid into the antechamber, alive to any waiting danger. Bookshelves. A glass-fronted highboy. A desk holding an open ledger. A stack of books. A set of chairs lined like sentinels against the far wall. An inner door, standing cracked. A sliver of pale light pointing like a dagger at his feet.

Tapping the inner door wider, he stepped into the narrow breach. Barely dodged the downward plunge of a heavy vessel aimed at his head. Took the makeshift weapon on his shoulder, numbing pins and needles shooting down his arm. He swung into the room, escaping a second attempt to brain him.

The figure remained impossible to distinguish from the thick cluster of shadows. A twisting slick of ghostly movement that had Daigh sucking wind from a punch to the gut. Brought him to his knees with a chop to the neck.

He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Let the vicious lick of flame torching his body ignite the predator in him. His vision contracted onto a man. Dark. Lean. Dressed in unrelieved black, but for the silver flash of a knife. It swept at Daigh’s throat. Sliced a deep wound across the palm of the hand he threw up to deflect the blow.

Unfolding from the floor with slow deliberation, he speared the attacker with a furious glare. The dagger arced a second time. Stung Daigh across the ribs. And again—this time aimed at his stomach.

He threw himself to the side but not in time.

The dagger pierced his flesh with a hot agony. Tore through muscles. Tendons. Ended buried hilt-deep and quivering against a rib. Daigh opened his mouth on a
scream. Choked it back until his cry became only a muffled, anguished moan.

This was his hunt. The intruder his quarry. He’d not alert the
bandraoi
. Not until he understood the danger.

The man smiled, his eyes wide with triumph. Turning from Daigh’s still crumpled body, he relit his candle stub. Worked in a methodical inch-by-inch search, starting at the shelves to the right of the door.

Ignoring Daigh.

Bad idea.

Wounds would slow but not stop the relentless hammer of his battle prowess. Death would be turned aside.

He wrapped a hand around the blood-slicked dagger. Yanked it free, almost passing out from the pain. His whole body tremored until he grit his teeth against the spasms ripping through him. Squeezing his eyes shut, he counted to one hundred slowly. Opened them to another freshly healed scar crisscrossing his torso. A road map through hell and back.

He traced the puckered ridge of skin with the tip of one finger. Experienced a tingly icy numbness, but beyond that no lasting effects from a wound that should have killed him.

The man paused at the tapestry hanging behind Ard-siúr’s desk—figures bearing a litter toward an open tomb. Fingered the heavy cloth for a moment before wrenching it from the wall with a shrug and a grunt of success. Shoved it into a waiting satchel.

This was Daigh’s cue. He rose like the walking dead, the blood-sticky dagger gripped in one trembling fist. His body stretched taut as a bowstring, every nerve screaming. “You should make certain of your kills.”

The man froze in a pose of astonishment mixed with terror. “How?” he breathed. “I saw”—his eyes flicked to the dagger—“no one should have survived such a thrust. No man alive could . . .” He straightened, comprehension dawning in a grim smirk. “But you’re not a man, are you?” he mocked in a cruel jest. “Nor alive in the strictest sense.”

The presence strained to be released. The beast uncoiling with serpent strength. Sinking its fangs into his bloodstream.

Daigh contained it through sheer will. Twitched against the jags trembling his hands. Shallowing his breathing to an animal pant. This black-jacketed villain knew him. Who he was. What he was.

Daigh couldn’t kill him until the thief spilled what he knew. Then he would do as he wished.

Buckling the satchel, the man slung it over his shoulder. “My apologies. Máelodor gave you up for dead.”

Daigh’s lips curled in an empty smile. “As you see, harder than it looks.”

“Poor phrasing on my part. Not dead then, but absent from your meeting in Cork. Máelodor’s anxious to recover the tapestry. He sent me in your stead.”

“Did he?”

Máelodor? The tapestry? None of it stirred any answering memory within. He focused on his first and loudest thought.

“You say I’m not a man. What would you term me?”

Black Jacket stiffened with wary apprehension. Eyed Daigh like a disease as he drew the satchel up onto his shoulder. “I meant no offense.”

“Then what did you mean?” Daigh asked through gritted teeth, patience waning.

“It’s obvious isn’t it? Look at you. Looming up out of the dark like a demon from a nightmare. I’d not really believed Máelodor’s claims of resurrecting a
Domnuathi
. Too far-fetched, like something out of a faery story.” He shifted slightly, his gaze flicking to the open office door. “The name suits you though. Lazarus rising from the dead, eh?”

Daigh flinched, his vision hazing as the final door was flung open.

Not Lazarus. Never Lazarus.

He had another name. Another life.

The creature exploded through his skull. Daigh heard it laughing as it crushed him in its coils.

He flung himself at the man, reason lost amid the howl of killing ecstasy. Heard the bark of a pistol through the pounding in his ears. Stumbled to his knees at the slash of sizzling heat gouging a path through his chest.

The man never paused. Instead he leapt for the door, footsteps slapping across the flagstones. Any pretense at secrecy over.

Daigh could do nothing but watch as the man vanished, satchel in hand.

Máelodor. A tapestry.
Domnuathi
.

Not a man. Not alive.

Lazarus rising from the dead.

He clutched his bloody chest, but it was the whirlwind in his skull that held him immobile.

Oh gods, what nightmare had he stumbled into? And how could he hope to battle his way back out?

How had she slept through it all? Had she really been so tired she’d been unaware of a commotion that turned the convent into a seething mass of raised voices, hostile interrogations, and in one or two cases, womanly vapors bordering on hysteria?

Apparently she could.

And did.

Now, standing in the stillroom doorway, she breathed deeply through her nose. Pulled her pathetic self together as she scanned the empty room. Every trace of its recent occupant had been erased. Even the scent of Daigh destroyed beneath a new layer of soapy clean. All as if he’d never been. As if he’d only been a very involved and lifelike hallucination.

She tried swallowing past the lump in her throat. Breathing around the tightness in her chest. Rubbing her arms in an attempt to ward off the gooseflesh pebbling her skin. No hallucination—no matter how
convincing—would leave her flushed with passion’s afterglow. His embrace had been real. His kiss had been very real.

It was only the snatched glimpses of herself as part of Daigh’s past that held the stuff of delirium. And those, in the reassuring light of day, she chalked up to the overflow of his tumultuous emotions seeping into her mind.
Other
empathy gone awry. Nothing more.

Trailing back up the passage, she pictured an empty ribbon of long days stretching before her. A lifetime of dawns and dusks where every day was like every other day. Safe. Quiet. Serene.

Devoid of meaning.

Sister Ainnir bent over Sister Moira, listening to her chest.

“How could you simply let him go?” Sabrina demanded.

The elderly priestess faced her with a wrinkled lowering of her brows. Straightened, ushering Sabrina before her back down the row of beds to her tiny office. Closing the door firmly behind her.

“We didn’t let him go. He absconded in the middle of the night,” she answered curtly once they were alone. “After ransacking Ard-siúr’s office. Making off with sacred valuables, and stealing a horse.”

Ard-siúr’s office? Sabrina’s chest collapsed on a swift exhalation. The night she found him there—had he lied to her? Had this been his purpose all along? “I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to believe it. The evidence is indisputable. The man was a common thief who played us all for fools. No doubt his intention all along was to gain freedom
enough to move about unwatched. Once our guard was down, he opened the gates to his accomplices in crime.”

“He must not have known what he was doing. Or they forced him. Threatened him somehow.”

Sister Ainnir heaved a derisive snort. “And pigs can fly. No one could force that man to do anything he didn’t want to.”

“I heard there was blood in Ard-siúr’s office. Lots of it. How do you explain that?”

Sister Ainnir’s lips pursed, unmoved by Sabrina’s fervent defense. “A quarrel among thieves. We’ve seen already MacLir’s inexplicable ability to heal from wounds that would kill a normal human—even the most powerful of
Other
. That alone should have given us more pause than it did.”

“We couldn’t have misjudged him so horribly. Ard-siúr would have seen his intentions. Known him for what he was.”

Sabrina should have.

His tenderness with Sister Clea. The stolen kiss in the night. It couldn’t have been merely a con man’s sly conniving. The polished art of the deceiver. What of his grief? His pain? She’d sensed them both. But if she were being completely honest, she’d also felt an underlying rage that frightened her with its feral intensity.

Had those stolen glimpses hinted at something darker? A corrupt purpose he’d hidden even from the skilled scrying of the
bandraoi
? Had her childish fantasies blinded her to the warning signs?

“Argue as you will, Sabrina. Even if it’s as you say and Daigh MacLir is wholly innocent, his departure was past due. As sisters of High
Danu,
we walk a careful line. No hint of our order’s true nature must escape these walls. No
suspicions must taint the careful construct we’ve made of our lives. Mr. MacLir threatened that. You know it as well as I. He was a danger, and he brought danger with him. It’s good he left. Now perhaps we can return to normal.” Her pointed stare included Sabrina’s return to normal in that statement.