Page 17

T he pain ebbed away slowly, pulled from him on the breeze alongside the last few bits of his shredded glamour.

Rodney kept his head down, his elongated fingers dug deep into the damp earth.

His skin was raw and sensitive—he could almost pick out every individual particle of soil that had worked its way under his nails, each tiny pebble and bit of decaying plant pressing into his palms. It was overwhelming, as was the brush of cool air across his neck and the heat of the tears that still ran intermittently down his cheeks.

Without the mantle of his glamour to shield him, Rodney thought he might be able to feel acutely every last molecule that made up the whole of the realm.

For a moment, that rush of sensations distracted him from the panic.

With one final, gut-rending shudder, Rodney forced himself to his feet.

His vision sharper now, he turned in a slow circle, searching amongst the trees for anything else that might test him.

No more ashes fell from overhead, no apparitions cried out to him.

The forest clearing was quiet once more, without a single sign of that twisted illusion besides the deep grooves his desperate hands had left behind in the dirt.

Still, he had very little desire to remain unguarded there.

He scanned the forest once more then picked a direction and began walking.

He hoped the path he chose would take him to the tree line, but in that moment all Rodney truly cared about was getting away from the spot where Sítheach had stood before him, screaming and pointing her finger.

Blaming him for everything, just as he had for so, so long blamed himself.

Rodney shivered again and pulled his cracked leather jacket tighter around his shoulders.

He was, at the very least, grateful that he’d managed to keep his size as a human relatively close to his true form.

He was thinner now, though, so he had to hike up his jeans as he walked.

His feet were larger, too—not by much, but enough that the fit of his boots was just this side of uncomfortable.

He let his heightened senses take over to guide him through the forest. He was alert to every rustle of leaves and every distant chirp, but the volume of sounds and the feeling of his ears shifting subtly to pick them up was more irritating than useful.

He tried to focus, to filter out the unnecessary noises and find something familiar.

As he trudged onward, he thought he caught glimpses of movement through the trees—flickers of light and streaks of shadow, brief and indistinct.

His heart raced as each sighting ignited a spark of hope.

Maybe it was one of his friends. Maybe he wasn’t as alone as he felt.

Aisling couldn’t have gotten far—she couldn’t have.

Rodney wasn’t that fast a runner. Though he’d lost all concept of time, flimsy as it was there, while he’d been trapped in the vision.

If it had been minutes, she was likely still close by.

If it had been longer…he didn’t want to think about it.

He didn’t want to think about what she was doing, either.

What she was going through. Above anything else, he needed to find her before she found Kael.

He needed to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid.

Aisling wasn’t a reckless person—far from it, really—but she was absolutely selfless, and would do absolutely anything for those she loved.

And although she hadn’t yet said as much to him, Rodney knew she loved the Unseelie King.

Misguided as that was.

Despite knowing that about her, a small part of him was fearful of what she’d think of this version of him—so far from the human man she was used to.

The Fae were still new to her, and the way he looked now, while certainly not as frightening as some, was still a rather stark departure from the more handsome, human-like Fae like Kael or Raif.

He was just as uncomfortable as he suspected she’d be, anyway.

He felt like an impostor in this skin. Not because he’d been Rodney for too long—in fact, his time as Rodney, just shy of thirty years, had been a mere blink of an eye in comparison to some of the other lives he’d lived.

No, he felt like an impostor because he had spent so long adopting any other form besides his own.

He hadn’t cared what it was, who he was, as long as he wasn’t himself.

Now, a púca again for the first time in a very, very long time, Rodney felt utterly and unbearably trapped.

The terrain grew more and more challenging as he pressed on, with roots jutting out to trip him and low-hanging branches scratching at his face and arms. A fleeting thought sent a chill zipping down his spine: the forest was leading him.

He’d veer right, and the underbrush would become impassable.

Too far left, and an immense, downed tree blocked his path.

Without a map or a light or any tools to defeat the obstacles, Rodney had little choice but to let Elowas dictate his direction.

Something familiar brushed the back of his shoulder but he swatted it away, just as a quiet voice murmured from the darkness, “A faerie once more, I see.”

Rodney wheeled around to find Lyre hunched in the shadows beneath a tall tree, half-leaning against its trunk. He was gaunt, with hollow cheeks and a haunted look in his cat-yellow eyes. Rodney let out a sharp breath.

“Where the hell did you come from?” There was no hiding the relief in his voice. Though Lyre was the last of the three he wanted to find, Rodney was grateful nonetheless to be back in the company of someone other than his own internal voice.

Lyre gestured vaguely in the opposite direction. His robe was missing, leaving him in only plain black vestments. Without the Prelates’ signature garment, he looked much smaller and far less imposing. “Deeper,” he said. “That way, somewhere.”

“I’m looking for the tree line. Raif told us to meet him there.” Rodney began walking again, too anxious to stop for long. Lyre fell into step alongside him.

“Us?” he asked.

Rodney nodded. “Me and Aisling. After you’d already been separated.”

“And where is our dear Red Woman?” Lyre glanced around as though Aisling might have been hiding nearby.

“I lost her,” Rodney admitted reluctantly. “I thought she was right behind me.”

“That’s a shame. I had grown rather fond of her.” Rodney ignored his implication that she was lost for good. She wasn’t. They’d find her. Filling the silence Rodney let settle between them, Lyre added, “And to think, I might not have known her at all had fate not intervened.”

“Had you not owed me a favor,” Rodney corrected.

“Had I not procured that rather expensive bit of minotaur horn for you.” He’d nearly gone to hell and back to find it in a shady backwater market, and bargaining the price down had taken almost just as long.

If he hadn’t also found a purveyor of some of the finest honeysuckle cider he’d ever tasted, it may not have been worth the effort at all.

As it was, even then Rodney knew that being owed a favor by Lyre was no small thing.

Lyre chuckled darkly. “And a fine specimen it was. Remind me who you were then? I can’t seem to recall.”

Rodney thought for a moment before he said, “Olin, I think it was. A wood elf.”

“Ah, yes.” Lyre fell back behind Rodney as the trail narrowed. “The winemaker.”

Rodney frowned. Not all of his lives had been particularly memorable, but he was almost certain he’d never claimed to be a winemaker. “Wine drinker, perhaps. Certainly no winemaker.”

“My mistake,” Lyre acquiesced.

The pair pressed on in silence for a time, unable to stray far from the route Elowas had laid out for them.

When they’d first come upon it after crossing the black sand plain, the copse of trees hadn’t looked nearly as big as it seemed once they were inside.

Now, it was endless. An uneasy feeling coiled in Rodney’s gut, not unlike what had twisted there as he’d approached the crying Sítheach.

Everything about the god realm felt off—not always noticeably; just a few degrees from normal.

Lyre picked up on his discomfort before he could hide it. “You saw something too, didn’t you?”

“This realm is toying with us,” Rodney said, briefly sweeping his eyes up through the branches overhead. It was as much confirmation as he was willing to give.

“Indeed it is. And your vision—it was unpleasant?” Lyre’s footfall was nearly silent compared to Rodney’s, save for the errant twig snapping beneath his bootheel. But while Rodney trudged heavily, Lyre seemed to glide.

Rodney snorted in an attempt to mask the look of pain he felt flash across his face. “That’s one word for it.”

“Memories, I believe,” Lyre mused pensively. “Or, rather, what began as memories. Then twisted into—”

“Nightmares,” Rodney said at the same time as Lyre said, “Fantasies.”

Rodney shot the Prelate a bewildered look over his shoulder. “Fantasies?”

“Grim fantasies, perhaps, but fantasies, nonetheless. I do not believe we could have been shown anything we’d never imagined for ourselves.”

Rodney couldn’t conjure up a witty retort to hurl back this time.

The Prelate was right, as he so often was.

He was thoughtful; an analytic, reflective thinker.

And though his conclusions tended to be uncomfortable ones to confront, Rodney couldn’t deny that Lyre was just as intelligent as he let on—a fact which annoyed Rodney to no end.

He reached a hand up to scratch the back of his neck, fingers sinking into the tufts that trailed down his spine.

“And here I had just begun to grow accustomed to your human skin.” Lyre’s tone was singsong, lilting as he taunted. He could sense Rodney’s self-consciousness and pounced on that weakness straight away.

Rodney rolled his eyes and shoved his hand back into his jacket pocket. “Sorry to disappoint.”