Lord of Shadows (9 page)

Her heart thrashed against her ribs, her mouth dry and sticky. Should-have-beens were useless. What she needed were steady nerves and a plan. Any plan. But all her whirling, panicked mind did was curl into a ball and pretend to be dead. Hardly helpful.

“Hand over the bag. And aught else of value,” Bone-Thin Man demanded.

From behind, a dirty hand slid around her waist. Drew her close, a hiss of sour breath against her cheek. A barrel’s dig against her ribs. “Do as you’re told. Isn’t that what them women teach ya? Obedience?”

She dragged her bag from her shoulder to the ground. She might be brave, but she wasn’t foolish. They could have it, though they’d find little of use among the medicines it contained. “That’s all we have.”

Jane whimpered, her freckles standing out in splotches against her white face.

A second man closed in. Tipped her quivering chin to
the light, a leering gleam in his eye. With a wrench, he tore the kerchief from her head, hair spilling in a copper wave down her back. “I say we take more than a few measly coins and a trinket or two. Probably starved for a man, they is. Like a good ride? Eh, pet?”

Jane’s eyes darted wildly, her body visibly shuddering.

The sight of her friend’s panicked terror ignited a spark of defiance in Sabrina. A spark that caught. Flared and sizzled in her like a sputtering candle. She glared. If only the flames heating her blood could shoot straight from her eyes. “Take your hands off her.”

The man’s slimy attention swung her direction. “Jealous, are ya, pet?” His crude braying laughter touched off the others, who snorted and stamped their approval of his wit. “You’ll have yer turn soon enough. There’s plenty of us to go round.”

“Take care. You address a lady.”

The familiar, menacing growl punctured Sabrina’s swelling terror. Sent her peering into the dimming gray light for signs of her savior.

It couldn’t be. She’d last seen him under the watchful eye of Sister Liotha, raking down straw for the cows. She must be mistaken. But oh, how she hoped she wasn’t.

A shadow glided among the trees. Huge. Dark. Silent as a wraith. Never emerging from the overgrowth, but always there. Watching. Waiting.

“Show yourself, friend,” Bone-Thin Man shouted, his knife steady, his eyes narrow and searching.

“Let the women go. Take yourselves off.” Clipped, battle-edged tones. A quiet confidence, so different from the nervy bravado of the men.

The bandit scoffed. Spat in the dirt. “I’ll not be takin’
orders from a coward what hides in the bushes like vermin. And if you won’t reveal yourself, I’ll have my men flush you out. Then we’ll see what’s what. And who’s givin’ the orders.”

He motioned at his comrades, who fanned out into the shrubbery. Two dropping back. One beating aside the undergrowth with the barrel of a rusty blunderbuss. Jane’s tormentor twitched his reluctance, but released her to crash into the bracken alongside his compatriots.

Slimy kept a firm warning hold on Sabrina, though his attention was all for the woods.

Dusk deepened, the heavy gray fading into night. Trees black and clawing against the sky. Cold rain spattering through the branches. Calls from man to man all that broke the unnatural stillness of the scene.

Suddenly, a flock of chattering starlings rose in a whirr of wings as a scream ripped the silence. Ended just as abruptly.

“Abe?” Bone-Thin Man jerked one way then another, hunting the wood. His knife whipping the air. “Kelly!”

A crash of branches. A grunt and whoof of spent breath. No answer.

The remaining men crowded closer together like a herd sensing danger.

Slimy wrenched Sabrina close. His pistol’s barrel chilling her neck. “Come out or the sister gets hers! Call him, Sister. Tell him I’m meaning business.”

She opened her mouth. Squeaked. Swallowed and tried again. “Come . . . come out. Please, Daigh.”

“Yes, come out, Daigh,” he mocked in a sneer that turned her stomach. “Please.”

“As you will.” An enormous, looming shadow detached
itself from the darkness like some creature from the deepest
Unseelie
abyss. Eyes, hellish pits in a grim face. A body rippling with raw magic. This wasn’t Daigh. This was some horrible, distorted version of him. He bestrode the roadway not like a bewildered shipwreck victim, but like a warrior who knew his business. Knew it and enjoyed it.

“Let them go.” His quiet command holding more violence than any shouting threat could. And even unarmed, danger simmered in the air around him. “Or join your friends.”

The men’s focus was all on Daigh for the moment. She’d not get a better chance. “Run, Jane,” Sabrina hissed. “Run for help.”

Jane moaned her terror but did as instructed. Darting beneath the cursing reach of Slimy. Swerving past Daigh as if he were the devil himself. None stopped her. All eyes riveted to the monstrous, grim-featured goliath blocking the path.

The remaining ruffians closed ranks to meet this intruder, only Slimy staying back. Holding Sabrina in front of him like a shield.

Daigh’s gaze swung over the group. Settled on her, the flicker of some lost emotion surfacing in the empty hollows of his eyes.

The world wavered and spun, the path dropping from under her, the trees bleeding into a haze of spring white and green. As she watched, the flick of a fur-lined cloak and a sword’s silver edge overlapped Daigh’s coarse linen and leather. She blinked, the vision vanishing as Daigh’s rage slammed at the base of her skull. Hot. Terrible.

She grimaced at the headache now clamping her brain. And though he seemed in complete control of the
situation, she got the sense Daigh held to sanity by the thinnest of threads. And that—unlikely as it sounded—he looked to her for rescue.

The alien, probing presence pounded against his brain. Some undefined evil slithered along his nerves. His vision filled with a crackling, pulsing light. A wash of frozen fire behind which everything hovered in shades of nightmare.

Through the haze of his own madness, he felt the men shift, a grumble like distant thunder as they took his measure. Adjusted their attack. He allowed them their fill. It would avail them nothing, though how he knew this was lost to him like so much else.

At some invisible signal, a man struck from the trees. A knife thrust at his side. Scoring his ribs.

Cursing, he caught his attacker’s wrist. Bones grinding under his fingers. The man’s scream ripping through the last barrier between conscious thought and animal instinct.

A turbulent, endless void warped him like a sword upon the smithy’s anvil. Heart beating with the hammer’s clang. Reshaping him into something unnatural. Unstoppable. Unheeding of pain or fear or loss. Knowing only killing. Only hate. Only death.

The man’s groaning agony seemed to break the stand-off. The rest flung themselves forward like a pack of snarling, snapping dogs scenting rabid prey.

He reacted without thought. Without reason. Muscles stretched and rippled beneath his skin. Blood ran like acid through narrowed veins. Hazed his vision in scarlet hellfire.

The assault faltered as the dead and dying sprawled in tumbled broken heaps. At one point, he found himself clutching a rusty, pitted dagger, hot and dripping with his
own blood. He flipped it in his hand. Gripped the handle. Embedded it in the stomach of a man charging him in a screaming bull-rush.

Shouts filtered through the roar in his ears, but he ignored them. They shouted a name that meant nothing to him. His true identity ground to dust among the scattered fragments of his injured mind.

He wasn’t Daigh. He wasn’t a man.

He was death undone.

Sabrina watched in growing horror. Held her breath for the moment when Daigh hesitated. Faltered. Weakened. And the remaining men would close in for the kill.

But it never came. Every moment seemed to strengthen his killer cunning, the unearthly sixth sense that kept him alert and alive beneath the onslaught. Until those remaining fled the chaos. Faded into the shielding twilight. Were replaced by the whispering shush of skirts upon the ground. The murmur of worried fearful voices as the sisters approached.

Slimy gripped her in an ever-increasing stranglehold, his elbow clamped around her throat. Cutting her air until pinpricks spotted her vision and her lungs cramped with effort. He jerked at each loss, his curses loud and increasingly panicked. Clutching Sabrina as the last buffer between Daigh and imminent death.

“I’ll kill her.”

Harsh words pierced the fog of his madness. A blood-freezing sight met Daigh’s hazy vision.

Sabrina caught around the neck, a pistol jammed beneath her breast.

He paused, blood-soaked. Chest heaving as his lungs fought for air. Met the man’s stare, each seeing murder in the other’s eyes.

Actions slowed to infinity. A weapon leveled at his chest. The explosion of sound and flame. Followed immediately by a punch to the chest. Blood hot and streaming from the wound. The sudden weight of drugged limbs.

Lurching to his knees, he concentrated his aim. Let his dagger fly. Watched with ruthless satisfaction as it found its intended target.

The brigand dragged at Sabrina’s skirts as he fell. Dead as he hit the ground.

She screamed.

And oblivion swallowed him.

“What was he doing out here?”

“Lambing time. Sent him to check on the ewes.”

“Have you ever seen the like?”

“Mad. He’s mad. Dangerous. Summon the authorities.”

“Saved Jane. Sabrina. A hero.”

The clucking worried babble of the
bandraoi
. The hum of nervous confusion. The shush of heavy skirts and cloaks as they moved among the carnage.

Sabrina knelt beside Daigh, rifling among her bag as if the potions and cures she carried could stanch the blood or halt the ebbing life beneath her hand. Pain bit deep lines into the gray pallor of his face. Blue tinted his lips. No human medicines would avail him now. But if she delved within the magic of her race, she might buy him time if not survival.

She tore the remnants of his shirt open. Laid bare the shredded and bloody flesh. Swallowed the bile clawing its
way up her throat. Focused instead on the mage energy rising like a tide within her. The texture and quality and weight of the power. Using what she’d learned from Sister Ainnir to shape its flow. Hone it. Sharpen it to scalpel brilliance.

“Sabrina?”

She met his pain-clouded gaze with a smile of false reassurance.

“It’s not needed,” he explained through clenched teeth.

“Don’t talk,” she comforted. “You’ll be all right. I can . . .”

A shadow loomed over her. The rustle of skirts. Breathing heavy and frantic.

Daigh’s gaze moved beyond her. “Tell her. You understand.”

Sabrina threw a confused look over her shoulder. Ard-siúr. Sister Ainnir. Both frowning. Both frightened.

“He’s right, Sabrina,” Ard-siúr intoned. “Your gifts are not necessary.”

“But . . .” She clamped down on her fear. Focused instead on the blood. The gore. Sticky. Black. A stench of murder and vicious death rising in fetid waves.

Daigh shuddered, his muscles leaping in spasms. His breath quick and sharp and painful. Pupils dilated and unseeing.

But no wounds.

Nothing but puckered pink flesh marring the hard-packed ridges of his stomach. The broad expanse of his chest.

“He’s . . .” Her hands curled to claws, the nails digging into her palms. Unable to shake the image of a man reveling in the battle. Drunk on mayhem. Lost to everything
but killing. “It makes no sense. He was shot. I saw it.” She searched the faces of the
bandraoi
. “Why? How?”

“That would be a question for Mr. MacLir.” Ard-siúr’s attention never left the man lying upon the ground in his own spilled blood.

He shook his head. Spoke through chattering teeth. As horrified as any of them. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Rapid healing from lesser injuries, I’ve seen. But never from a killing wound. Never to such an extent and so quickly.” Sister Ainnir shook her head as she paced the room with slow, arthritic steps, hands clasped behind her back. “I’d say it was impossible did I not see it with my own eyes.”

“It’s unfortunate you were not the only one among us to witness it. Already the order’s abuzz with lurid stories of our mysterious guest.” Ard-siúr followed Sister Ainnir’s painful perambulations from her desk, face a study of thoughtful worry as she stroked the fat, purring tabby.

Sabrina huddled in her corner seat, mind swirling with questions and possibilities. None of them sensible. All of them the stuff of wild, outrageous fantasies.

Was Daigh true
Fey
? That would explain his apparent invincibility. The crushing, impenetrability of his stare. The strength contained within a titan’s frame. But a tiny voice persisted in denying that explanation. Pushed her to look elsewhere for answers. It was the same irritating voice
whispering to her in the bleak hours of night, warning her Daigh’s arrival was not coincidence. He’d been brought here for a purpose. And if she could only puzzle out the bizarre bond they shared, all the other answers would follow like tumbling dominoes.

“So do we follow Sister Brigh’s stern counsel and send him on his way?”