“Does it matter, Christian?” Mac said. “Your uncle isn’t at the bottom of a gorge or buried in the ground. One day you’ll be able to talk to him again. He didn’t die for you. That must be a weight off your shoulders.”
“My clan has the right to know.”
“If you tell your clan, the tribunal will hear of it and you’ll lose him,” Barrons warned.
“What is this tribunal?” I demanded.
Mac perked up beside me, suddenly all ears.
Barrons shot me a look, something ancient and feral moving in his dark eyes. “None of your bloody business. There are terms, Highlander. You may know he’s alive. You may be of help to him through what lies ahead. But no one else may know. If word of his existence gets out, you’ll only be giving him back to your clan to lose him again. Permanently.”
“Our secrets. Yours now. And yours, ours,” Ryodan reminded.
“You don’t know my secrets.”
He smiled faintly. “You might be surprised. We shared blood.” His eyes said he knew what that meant. In a druid sense. And that maybe I didn’t know what that meant in a whatever-the-fuck-he-was sense. That I was as bound to him as he was to me. And I wondered for the second time if he’d not left most of the dungeon unprotected for a reason. If he’d not perhaps arranged this very scenario, wanting me bound to them. What better way to get help with my uncle, draw another Keltar into the fold? Was he that diabolical?
I dismissed him and weighed Barrons’s words for truth. “Your tribunal would take him? It could take him from you?”
“Yes. And yes,” Barrons said levelly.
“Truth. Fuck.”
“He must always remain hidden. You uncle died in that gorge,” Ryodan said.
“Chloe.”
Barrons said, “Perhaps in time. She, like Mac, would have reason enough to protect his secret. If she passes our tests.”
“You would test my aunt.” I was incensed.
“You should hope they would,” Mac said. “No point in giving him back only for her to lose him again.”
“My entire clan can be trusted.”
Barrons and Ryodan snorted.
Mac said, “Save your demands for another day, Christian. Deal with today.”
I turned to look at Dageus, shuddering on the stone slab. Finally, I said, “What is he going through?”
Ryodan said to Barrons, “I’ll take the Highlander from here. Get her out of here.” He jerked his head at Mac.
“Oh, come on!” Mac protested. “Don’t you trust me by now?”
“Need-to-know basis, Mac. And you don’t. But he,” Ryodan jerked his head at Christian, “might just prove a grand babysitter while we figure out how to save the world.”
Babysitter, my arse.
Mac and Barrons vanished down the hall.
When Ryodan opened the door, I followed him inside, unable to shake the feeling he might just have intended the evening to end this way all along.
19
“It’s time to begin, isn’t it…”
“Have you located the other Unseelie princes?” Cruce asked.
The roach god had to finish molding his many roach parts into the stumpy-legged shape of a human dwarf before he had the mouth to reply.
“All but one have been slain,” he said, when he’d completed his tongue. He craned his neck to stare up at the tall prince, roaches scuttling to shift position with his movement. It was complicated to function in this form. It required incessant readjustments, yet it was this mimicry of those around him that had enabled him to strike his first alliance long ago. The more he donned it, the more he despised its limitations, envied those who suffered none.
“Which one remains?”
“He was once a Highlander, now mutated.” He shifted slightly, settling the remaining stragglers into place, reinforcing his knees.
“Useless. Who killed my brethren?”
“Ryodan and Barrons.” He observed his new ally closely. “I was there, beneath the desk when they placed their heads on it.”
The winged prince demonstrated no weakness of rage at the news. He absorbed and moved on. The roach god’s satisfaction with his choice of allies increased. Success did not grace the stupidly violent, but the patient, the unseen, those who lurked and bided and seized the correct moment.
“The Seelie princes?” Cruce demanded.
“Dead as well. The last of them slain by the same two.”
“The concubine? The female that was in this cavern the night they imprisoned me,” Cruce clarified. “The one with the Unseelie king. You were there that night, were you not?”
“Ryodan bade me scatter my parts through the abbey that night, while the wards were down, listen and learn. He misses no opportunity. I’ve seen no sign of that woman.”
“And the Unseelie king?” Cruce said.
He shook his head, masses of roaches swaying and churning, but not one of them slipped. In his upright form, he was cohesive enough to do a few things. Far too gelatinous to do most. He resented that deeply. He was tiny, weak, in a world of giants who crushed him beneath their heels, drenched him with sticky hair spray or canned poisons that made him sick, sick, sick, even flushed him down a toilet as if he were excrement.