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.