What remained of Dageus’s body was positioned on the wood slab.
They would chant and spread the necessary elements, then burn the corpse, freeing his soul to be reborn. When the ceremony was done, his ashes would drop into the grave below, mingle with the soil and find new life.
He moved forward to join the others, shifting his shoulders so the tips of his wings didn’t drag the ground. He was getting bloody tired of having to clean them. Although he threw a constant glamour to conceal them from the sight of others, unless making a show of power, he still had to look at them himself, and he preferred not to walk around with pine needles and bits of gorse stuck to his fucking feathers.
Feathers. Bloody hell, he hadn’t seen that one coming when he’d considered his future. Like a goddamn chicken.
The clan surrounded the pyre somberly. He hadn’t expected to attend tonight, much less be involved, but Drustan had insisted. You’re Keltar, lad, first and foremost. You belong here. He seemed to have forgotten Christian was a walking lie detector who knew the truth was that Drustan didn’t want to be anywhere near him. But then, he didn’t want to be near anyone, not even his wife, Gwen. He wanted to disappear into the mountains and grieve for his brother alone.
Once, Christian would have argued. Now he said little, only when necessary. It was easier that way.
As the chanting began and the sacred oil, water, metal, and wood were distributed east, west, north, and south, the wind whipped up violently, howling through rocky canyons and crevices. Thunder rolled and the sky rushed with ominous clouds. Grass rippled as if trod by an unseen army.
Look, listen, feel, the storm-lashed grass seemed to be whispering to him.
In the distance, the rain across the valley turned to a deluge and began moving rapidly toward them in an enormous gray sheet. Lightning exploded directly above the pyre and everyone jerked as it cracked and spread across the night sky in a web of crimson. The pungent odor of brimstone laced the air.
Something was off.
Something wasn’t right.
The powerful words of the high druid burial ceremony seemed to be inflaming the elements. They should have been softening the environment, preparing the earth to welcome a high druid’s body, not chafing it.
Could it be the Highlands rejected an Unseelie prince’s presence at a druid ceremony? Didn’t his Keltar blood still define him as one of Scotia’s own?
As Christian continued chanting, restraining his voice so he wouldn’t drown out the others, the sky grew more violent, the night darker. He studied his gathered clan. Man, woman, and child, they all had the right to be here. The elements had been chosen with precision and care. They were what had been used for generations untold. The pyre was properly constructed, the runes etched, the wood old, dried rowan and oak. The timing was correct.
There was only one other variable to consider.
He narrowed his eyes, studying Dageus’s remains. He was still pondering them a few minutes later when at last the chanting was done.
“You must set him free, Chloe-lass,” Drustan said, “before the storm prevents it.”
He always believed he was the rotten egg of the two of us, Christian had overheard Drustan saying to Chloe earlier that evening. When the truth of it is he gave his life to save others not once but twice. He was the best of men, lass. The best of all of us.
Chloe jerked forward, carrying a torch of mistletoe-draped rowan that flickered wildly in the wind.
“Wait,” Christian growled.
“What is it, lad?” Drustan said.
Chloe stopped, torch trembling in her hands, not bothering to glance at either of them. All life seemed to have been stripped out of her, leaving a shell of a body that had no desire to continue breathing. She looked as if she might join her husband in the flames. Christ, didn’t anyone else see that? Why were they letting her anywhere near fire? He could taste Death on the air, feel it beckoning Chloe with a lover’s kiss, wearing the mask of her dead husband.
He pushed between his aunt and the pyre to touch the wood upon which the bits of his uncle were spread. Wood that once had lived but now was dead, and in death spoke to him as nothing alive ever would again. This was his new native tongue, the utterances of the dead and dying. Closing his eyes, he went inward to that alien, unwanted landscape inside him. He knew what he was. He’d known it for a long time. He had a special bond to the events occurring tonight.
The Unseelie princes were four, and each had their specialty: War, Pestilence, Famine, Death. He was Death. And Fae. Which meant more attuned, more deeply connected to the elements than a druid could ever be. His moods affected the environment if he wasn’t careful to keep tight rein on them. But he wasn’t the cause of the night’s distress. Something else was.
There was only one other thing present whose provenance might be questioned.
None but a Keltar directly descended from the first could be given a high druid burial in hallowed ground. The cemetery was heavily protected, from the wood of sacred, carefully mutated trees that grew there to ancient artifacts, blood, and wards buried in the soil. The ground would expel an intruder. Perhaps Nature herself would resist the interment.
Was it possible what remained of the Draghar within Dageus marked him as something foreign?
Christian had heard the truth in his uncle’s lie at a young age. At first, Dageus told Chloe and the rest of the clan that the Seelie queen had removed the souls of the Draghar and erased their memories from his mind. Sometime later, to aid Adam Black, Dageus had come clean with the truth…at least part of it, admitting he still retained their memories and could use their spells, though he maintained he was no longer inhabited by the living consciousness of thirteen ancient sorcerers.
Christian had never been able to get a solid feel for just how much of those power-hungry druids still lived within him. His uncle was a proud, intensely private man. Sometimes he’d believed Dageus. Other times—watching him while he thought himself unobserved—he’d been certain Dageus had never stopped being haunted by them. The few times he’d tried to question him, Dageus walked away without a word, giving him no opportunity to read him. Typical of his clan. Those aware of Christian’s unique “gift” were closed-mouthed around him, even his own parents. It had made for a solitary childhood, a boyhood of secrets no one wanted to hear, a lad unable to reconcile the bizarreness of other’s actions with the truths staring him in the face.
He eyed Dageus’s remains, casting a net for possibilities, considering all, discarding nothing.
It was possible, he mused, that they had the wrong body. He couldn’t fathom why Ryodan might give them the savaged pieces of someone else’s corpse. Still, it was Ryodan, which meant anything was possible.
Hands resting lightly on the pile of rain-spattered timber, he turned inward, wondering if he might use his lie-detecting ability to discern the truth of the remains, or if his new talents might aid him.
An immense wind gusted within him, around him, ruffling his wings, dark and serene and enormous. Death. Ah yes, death, he’d tasted it countless times recently, come to know it intimately. It wasn’t horrific. Death was a lover’s kiss. It was merely the process of getting there that could be so extreme.
He harnessed the dark wind and blew a question into the bits of flesh and bone.
Dageus?
There was no reply.
He gathered his power—Unseelie, not druid—and shoved it into the mutilated body, let it soak into the remains and arrange itself there…
“Bloody hell,” he whispered. He had his answer.
Thirty-eight years of human life lay on the slab, terminated abruptly. Pain, sorrow, grief! But not by the lance of the Crimson Hag. Make it stop! A poison in the blood, an overdose of something human, chemical, sweet and cloying. He stretched his newfound senses and sucked in a harsh breath when he felt the dying, the moment of it, rushing like a glorious wave over (him!) the man. It had been sought, embraced. Relief, ah, blessed relief. Thank you,
was the man’s final thought, yes, yes, make it all stop, let me sleep, but let me sleep! He actually heard the words in a soft Irish burr, as if frozen in time, rustling dryly from the remains.
He opened his eyes and looked at Drustan, who fixed his deep silver gaze on a spot slightly above and between his brows.
“It’s not Dageus,” Christian said, “but an Irishman with two children who were killed the night the walls fell. His wife perished from starvation not long after as they hid from Unseelie in the streets. He tried to go on without them until the day he no longer cared to. He met his death by choice.”
No one questioned how he knew it. No one questioned anything about him anymore.
Chloe staggered and melted bonelessly to the ground, her torch tumbling forgotten to the wet grass. “N-N-Not D-Dageus?” she whispered. “What do you mean? Is he alive, then?” Her voice rose. “Tell me, is he still alive?” she shrieked, eyes flashing.
Christian closed his eyes again, feeling, stretching, reaching. But life was no longer his specialty. “I don’t know.”
“But can you feel his death?” Colleen said sharply, and he opened his eyes, meeting her gaze. To his surprise, she didn’t look away.
Ah, so she knew. Or suspected. She’d stayed with the sidhe-seers, searching their old lore. She’d come across the old tales. How had she decided which one he was?
Again, he slipped deep, staring sightlessly. It was peaceful. Quiet. No judgment. No lies. Death was beautifully without deceit. He appreciated the purity of it.
In the distance, Colleen tried unsuccessfully to turn a gasp into a cough. He was fairly certain she wasn’t looking at his eyes now.
That eerie Fae wind gusted and blew open the confines of his skull, leveled barriers of space and time. He felt a soaring sensation, as if he’d taken flight through a door to some other way of breathing and being: quiet and black, rich and velvety and vast. Dageus, he murmured silently, Dageus, Dageus. People had a certain individual feel, an essence, an imprint. Their life made a ripple in a loch of the universe.
There was no Dageus ripple.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Chloe,” he said quietly. Sorry he couldn’t say yes. Sorry he’d dragged them into his problems. Sorry he’d gone bugfuck crazy for a time, for so damned many things. But sorry was worthless. It changed nothing. Merely coerced the victim to offer forgiveness for what you shouldn’t have done to begin with. “He’s dead.”
On the ground near the pyre, Chloe wrapped her arms around her knees and began to keen, rocking back and forth.
“You’re absolutely certain it’s no’ him, lad?” Drustan said.
“Unequivocally.” The owner of Chester’s had packed them off with another man’s remains, intending for them to bury it and never know that somewhere out there a Keltar body rotted and a high druid soul was lost, denied proper burial, never to be reborn.
Knowing Ryodan, he’d simply considered it a waste of his precious time to make the hard hike down into the gorge and search the darkness for remains when there were so many more easily available in any city he’d driven through on the way back to Dublin. Coming by Keltar plaid wouldn’t have been difficult. The entire clan had been living for a time at the fuck’s nightclub.
“You can’t bury that man here,” Christian said. “He must be returned to Ireland. He wants to go home.” He had no idea how he knew that the corpse didn’t want to stay here. It wanted to be in a place not far from Dublin, a short distance to the south where a small cottage overlooked a pond smattered with lily pads, tall reeds grew, and in the summer the rich baritone of frogs filled the night. He could see it clearly in his mind. He resented seeing it. He wanted nothing to do with the last wishes of the dead. He was not their keeper. Nor their bloody damned wish granter.
Drustan cursed. “If this isn’t him, then where the blethering hell is my brother’s body?”
“Where, indeed,” Christian said.
3
“These iron bars can’t hold my soul in, all I need is you…”
The cavernous chamber was well-sealed against human and Fae with magic not even he understood.
Fortuitously, he didn’t need to.
He was neither human nor Fae but one of the old ones from the dawn of time. Even now, his true name forgotten, the world still regarded him as powerful, indestructible.
Nothing will survive nuclear holocausts save the cockroaches.
They were right. He’d survived it before. The acute burst had been an irritant, little more. The lingering radiation had mutated him into more than he’d ever been.
He partitioned himself, separated and deposited a tiny segment of his being on the floor near the door. He despised being the insect beneath man’s feet. He coveted the life of the bastards that reviled and crushed him at every opportunity. He’d believed for a long time the one he served would eventually grant him what he sought. Make him what he’d observed with crippling envy, a tall, unkillable, unsegmented beast. The glory of it—to walk as man, indestructible as a cockroach!
He’d lived with the threat of the one weapon that could destroy him for too long. If he could not be one of them, at the very least he wanted that weapon back, buried, lost, forgotten.
But stealing from the one who’d stolen it from its ancient hiding place had proved impossible. He’d been trying for a small eternity. The beast that would be king made no mistakes.
Now there was one he believed just might be more powerful than the one he served.
As he slithered flat as paper and pushed his shiny brown body into a crack too small for humans to see, he knew something had changed before he even passed beneath the door and crossed the threshold.
He despised the way his mind instantly went into information-gathering mode, trained—he, once a god himself—trained to spy on fools and heathens.
They were the bugs. Not he.
This was his mission. No one else’s. Yet he’d been conditioned to collect bits of knowledge for so long, he now did so by instinct. Engulfed in sudden rage, he forgot about his body for a moment and inadvertently wedged his hindquarters beneath a too-narrow rough-hewn edge. Seething, he forced himself forward, sacrificing his legs at the femur, and half scuttled, half dragged himself into the room silently, unseen.
The one they called “Papa Roach” in their papers sat, rubbing his antennae together, thinking. Preparing for his new venture.
He’d been duplicitous in the past, playing both sides against the middle, but this was his greatest deceit—informing Ryodan the chamber beneath the abbey was impenetrable.
He wanted it—and its occupant—off Ryodan’s radar.
This potential ally, this opportunity was his alone.
He hissed softly, rustled forward on his front legs, dragging his cerci uncomfortably, until he stopped at the edge of the cage.
It was empty, two bars missing.
“Behind you,” a deep voice echoed from the shadows.
He startled and turned awkwardly, hissing, pivoting on his thorax. Few saw him. Fewer still ever saw him as more than a nuisance.
“You have been here before.” The dark prince was sprawled on the floor, leaning back against a wall, wings spread wide. “And I have seen you in Chester’s, in Ryodan’s company more than once. Don’t look so surprised, small one,” he said with a soft laugh. “There’s a decided dearth of events in here. A bit of stone dust crumbles. Occasionally a spider passes through. Of course I notice. You are not Fae. Yet you are sentient. Make that sound again if I am correct.”
The cockroach hissed.
“Do you serve Ryodan?”
He hissed again, this time with eons of hatred and anger, his entire small body trembling with the passion of it. Antennae vibrating, he spat a chirp of fury so hard he lost his balance and floundered wildly on his belly.
The winged prince laughed. “Yes, yes, I share the sentiment.”
The cockroach pushed up on his front legs and shook himself, then tapped the floor with one of his remaining
appendages, rhythmically, in summons.
Roaches poured beneath the door, rushing to join him, piling on top of one another until at last they formed the stumpy-legged shape of a human.
The Unseelie prince watched in silence, waiting until he’d carefully positioned the many small bodies to form ears and a mouth.
“He dispatches you to check on me,” Cruce murmured.
“He believes I can no longer enter this chamber,” the glistening pile of cockroaches grated.
“Ah.” The prince pondered his words. “You seek an alliance.”
“I offer it. For a price.”
“I’m listening.”
“The one who controls me has a blade. I want it.”
“Free me and it is yours,” Cruce said swiftly.
“Not even I can open the doors that hold you.”
“There was a time I believed nothing could weaken the bars of my prison save the bastard king. Then one came, removed my cuff and disturbed the spell. All is temporary.” Cruce was silent a moment, then, “Continue taking information to Ryodan. But bring it to me as well. All of it. Omit nothing. I want to know every detail that transpires beyond those doors. When the chamber was sealed, I lost my ability to project. I can no longer see or affect matter above. I escaped my cage yet am blinder than I was in it. I must know what is happening in the world if I am to escape. You will be my eyes and ears. My mouthpiece when I wish. See me freed and in turn I will free you.”
“If I agree to help you, I do so of my own accord. You neither own nor order me. But respect me,” the heap of cockroaches ground out. “I am as ancient and venerable as you.”