Page 12

That night, I dream of Kiaran.

We’re in a room where the walls weep shadows. The only light spills from the ornate chandelier overhead, its teardrops of dark opal cradling flickering flames that cast everything in muted shades of garnet and onyx.

This is a place of secrets and sin. Of pleasure and pain.

I study the delicate fractal etchings climbing the walls, tracing their whorls and spirals with a fingertip while Kiaran sleeps beside me. We’re pressed together beneath silken sheets that smell of ash and heather, clean and bright. The scent wraps around me, familiar as a half-remembered dream.

Home. Here, in this massive four-poster bed carved from the bones of a burned forest, this is home.

At least for tonight.

My questing fingertips find the tattoos on Kiaran’s back, the vines and thorns etched across his flesh. One thorn for every life he took. Every soul kept close as penance. He once told me each scar had its own story. Its own unique shape. Its own secret name.

I once spent hours learning their violent topography, mapping the twists and turns of his long, bloody history across smooth skin.

Now I whisper into the hollow dark, “Are you still you?”

No answer but the hush of his breath gusting warm and steady against my throat.

I trace the sharp line of his shoulder, marvelling at the play of muscle and sinew as I ask again, “Or are you already someone else?”

Kiaran stirs, his arm snaking around my waist to pull me closer still. Into him.

“Sometimes,” he says against my hair, his lips imprinting warmth along my scalp, my temple. “It depends.”

A pretty half-truth wrapped in smoke and shadow. I won’t have it.

“On?”

I feel his smile curve against my temple. Sharp as any blade. “On whether or not I can pretend you’ll still walk into the room.”

A pang spears through me. Here. Gone. Even in dreams, our stolen time together always runs short.

I force a teasing lilt into my voice, determined to cling to this fragile illusion of normalcy a little longer. “You sound like you.”

Let me believe the illusion a little longer.

Kiaran exhales, a reluctant concession. “I suppose I do.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, each word falls soft as new snow. “But only until I remember you won’t ever walk through that door again.”

I lie very still, listening to the slow cadence of our heartbeats sync and settle. Clinging to this stolen moment suspended precarious and perfect between truth and lie.

“And what if I did?” I ask him. “What then?”

His grip tightens almost imperceptibly. “I don’t think you’d like what you find.”

I gather my courage and pull back just enough to search his face. “You won’t forget me, you know,” I say, very gently. I smooth back a dark lock from his forehead, fingertips grazing one sharply pointed ear. “No matter how hard you try.”

“No?” His tone holds a note of genuine curiosity now. “Are you so certain?”

I grasp his chin in my hand, holding that gaze with my own. Even in this hopeless half-light, his eyes are ever-changing, filled with impossible shards of light and shadows. They pierce straight through to the heart of me, intent. Seeing everything.

“Yes,” I tell him with the calm certainty of one who knows she holds a person’s soul in her hands. “I won’t let you forget. Because when you do, I know what you’ll become.”

Kiaran searches my face as if committing it to memory one last time, his expression etched with such longing it steals my breath.

When he finds his voice again, it comes rough, raw. “Say my name.”

“Which one?” I counter, trailing my fingers lazily along his abdomen, enjoying the way muscles jump and quiver beneath my questing touch. “Kadamach.” I press a kiss below his navel. “The Unseelie King.” Another kiss to his hip.

I shape each title and name with my lips and breath, like unspooling a secret. His hidden depths. Ones only I know. Ones we share because we have both been ripped apart and stitched back together by each other.

I slide back up his body until we’re pressed together once more, relishing the heat kindled between us. “Kiaran MacKay.” I kiss along his jaw, nipping lightly. “They’re all mine. Every iteration of you.”

Hunger flickers through his eyes, fracturing the illusion once more. He draws me in with a bruising kiss, greedy to take whatever pieces of me remain. In answer, I breathe his name again between each rough press of his lips. A fervent chant, a benediction.

Again.

And again.

Until we are lost, tangled together in this chamber of smoke and flame.

Until nothing exists but the slide of his fingers over fevered skin, the insistent press of his body chasing mine across silken sheets.

Here, suspended together in this fragile dreamscape, we can pretend the world is only this. Only us.

It’s a seductive lie.

I know these stolen seconds bleed away too fast. But I clutch at one last gilded thread still binding me to him before this fever dream frays to ash between us.

I press my lips to the tender place just below his ear, safeguarding the words that follow. “I’m going to save you.” Kiaran goes very still above me. “Save me, Kameron?” He shakes his head once, slow, as if casting off the very notion.

“If you were alive, you’d wish you’d killed me.”

Then he opens his mouth against my throat in a lover’s kiss. I feel the sharp graze of fangs just before they breach my skin—

*

I jolt awake, a phantom pain blooming across my collarbone. The dream lingers, memories of Kiaran’s teeth biting into my skin far too vivid.

But I’m not in that massive bed from my dream, tangled in smoke and shadows with Kiaran. I’m by the cold ashes of last night’s fire, shivering as air kisses my exposed skin. The bonfire has long since burned down to embers.

Across from me, Gavin and Daniel are asleep. Derrick is curled on my discarded coat, hands clutching the fabric even in sleep.

Catherine and Aithinne are nowhere to be seen.

Unease skitters down my spine. I shove the animal pelts aside and climb to my feet. Some nameless compulsion pulls me down the path leading toward the grim infirmary cottage Aithinne showed me yesterday. The one housing Kiaran’s victims.

As I walk farther from camp and the reassuring glow of the campfire, the scent of woodsmoke and pine needles still clings to the air.

Inhaling it, I can’t help but recall that massive bed carved of dark wood.

The heat of Kiaran’s body pressed to mine.

My hands relearning the topography of his tattoos.

The soft curve of his smile meant only for me.

I quicken my pace. As if I could somehow outrun the memory of those soft words whispered against my ear in the dark. But I still feel the ghost of his teeth at my neck, the hot trickle of blood down my collarbone. Our breaths mingling, bodies moving together—

You’ll never forget what you’ve seen in there. So why seek it out again?

I don’t have a logical answer, just the restless energy thrumming through my veins.

My feet carry me along the path lined with gnarled oaks, barren limbs outstretched overhead as if in warning.

Or supplication. The soaring trunks are wreathed in snowy shrouds, the first flakes drifting down to freckle my cheeks and coat my eyelashes.

When I reach the cottage, I wrench open the door.

Catherine is inside, seated on one of the beds. She glances up, surprise flickering across her features.

“Hello,” she says softly.

I watch her wring out a cloth and press it to the dying woman’s forehead with care. The same woman from yesterday, still trapped in a twisted rapture. Her eerie smile remains fixed in place.

I brace one hand against the rough exterior wall, fighting back a wave of nausea. Even from here, I can see the mapwork of veins beneath the woman’s translucent skin. Skin that somehow stretches tighter over sharp cheekbones with each laboured breath. She’s more skeleton than a living being now.

They all are.

I can’t bear to look at them lined up in their narrow beds like corpses. Can’t bear to breathe in the thick stench of sweat and sickness permeating the cottage.

“What are you doing in here?” I ask in a whisper. I can’t tear my eyes away from the woman’s skeletal frame under the threadbare blanket. “You should be asleep.”

Catherine smooths back a stray lock of hair, tucking it behind one ear. “I don’t sleep much anymore. Not since the pixie kingdom was destroyed.”

I swallow hard past the lump in my throat. The sight of her bent over that gaunt, dying woman makes my breaths come short. Makes guilt swell and crash over me, threatening to pull me under.

I think about everything Catherine has endured since war tore our world apart. She watched the fae slaughter countless people she loved.

But she never lost her empathy. Never turned bitter or cruel.

“Stop it. I can see the guilt written all over your face.” Catherine looks down at the woman again, her grip gentle around those brittle bones.

“If it were me wasting away in that bed, I’d want someone to look at me like I still mattered.

To treat me with dignity before the end. Not pity. Not guilt.”

I flinch. I don’t even know how to care for the vulnerable anymore. For the helpless. That part of me withered away somewhere in Lonnrach’s mirrored prison cell. And the bloodshed and battles since have only cauterised what little remained.

I sit gingerly on the edge of the nearest bed, occupied by a young man close to my age. As I watch, a single tear leaks from the corner of his eye, tracing a slow path down to his pillow.

“Tell me what to do,” I whisper. Needing something. Anything to make me feel like I’m not useless here.

Catherine’s hand finds mine. “You don’t have to do anything,” she tells me gently. “Just being here for them . . . with me. That’s enough.”

I nod, and Catherine guides my hand into the water basin and presses a clean cloth into my upturned palm.

“Help me bathe them to bring down the fevers a little,” she instructs. “We can at least make sure they’re clean and comfortable.”

Together, we move through the room, Catherine murmuring a soothing litany of nonsense as we wipe each burning brow. I let the mundane motions still my chaotic thoughts. Offering these victims some small comfort as the end draws nearer.

I don’t know how much time passes. An hour, maybe more. I lose myself in the ritual, taking solace in having a simple task occupying my hands and mind. A distraction.

Then Aithinne bursts into the cottage.

The humans seem to sense her there—perhaps it’s her power rippling through the air that disturbs them. Their frail chests rise and fall more rapidly. Even lost deep in delirium, they recognise that a predator has entered their midst.

The woman I tended shudders against her sweat-soaked sheets. She arches off the mattress, spine bowing. Her clouded eyes fix on Aithinne with sudden, awful lucidity.

“Beautiful,” she murmurs. A single word imbued with such naked longing it makes my skin crawl.

But Aithinne doesn’t even glance their way, ignoring the disturbing sounds of rustling sheets and rasping breaths. Her luminous gaze is fixed on me.

“Come with me. Now. The bodies are gone, and I have news about the Book.”