Kiaran jerks Sorcha to him. “That’s enough.” There’s something wild in his expression, something mad. Something dark. “Speak to my sister like that again, and the next torture I come up with will leave you begging me to end us both.” His knife is in his hand before I can blink. “Perhaps I should start now? How about one of these lovely green eyes?” He taps her cheek with the edge of the blade.
I back away. His voice is unrecognizable. Unfamiliar. That voice is how I imagine death to sound: a low, dangerous voice that freezes me to my bones.
Sorcha’s expression doesn’t change, but a small tremor goes through her body. “Come now, Kadamach. You made a vow—”
“And it doesn’t come into effect until we find the Book. Now move.” Then he roughly shoves her away.
Sorcha just looks at Aithinne, lifts her chin, and keeps searching. She might be an expert at hiding how she feels, but I’m not fooled. Kiaran just scared the hell out of her.
He scared the hell out of me, too.
As we continue through the hall, Aithinne doesn’t speak. Every so often, her fingers clench and unclench around the hilt of her sword; what Sorcha said is getting to her. I lean over and whisper in Aithinne’s ear that being vulnerable doesn’t mean she’s broken. Aithinne’s hand grips mine, squeezes in understanding. Lonnrach tried to shatter us both.
After a while, Sorcha stops again, fingertips skimming along the wall. I feel her power in the air, only for a moment, before she pulls away again with a soft, frustrated curse.
“If you found the door before this castle existed, why are we searching through it now?” I ask.
“When Lonnrach found the Morrigan’s prison for me the first time,” Sorcha says, “it was through the Sìth-bhrùth. And since the Sìth-bhrùth has withered away to practically nothing, we need to find it here. I’m using the crystal to direct my powers, but the damn door moves.”
“It moves?” I ask skeptically.
“Why do you think I had to ask for my brother’s help the first time?” She sounds annoyed now. “Since it required our blood, it was easier with two of us.”
“Or finding it required someone with a skill beyond subterfuge and betrayal,” Aithinne mutters, sounding more like her old self.
Sorcha flicks out her hand and I feel her power build. A moment before it strikes, Aithinne shoots out her hand and disintegrates Sorcha’s power as easily as if she were tearing a piece of paper.
“Don’t embarrass yourself,” Aithinne says with a sweet smile. “I may be broken, but if I wanted to, I could make your heart explode in your chest.”
With a scowl, Sorcha turns down another long hallway. She puts her hands out, fingertips brushing the stone walls, and I can feel her power in the air again. It tastes like iron and has an abrasive texture, rough as pumice.
She presses her palms to the wall, her face a mask of concentration. “The door exists between our worlds,” she murmurs. “In the right space, I can conjure it forth, the same way we’d travel between this realm and the Sìth-bhrùth.”
“Why didn’t you find the Book?” I ask. “If you wanted it so badly, what made you walk away?”
Why give up on ending his curse and saving him? If you loved him so much?
When Sorcha looks at me, her eyes are glazed over, her power still searching. “That’s where you have it wrong, Falconer. I didn’t walk away; I got on my knees and crawled. With my life.”
Her brow creases into a frown and she takes a few steps from us. Then she comes to a hard stop, her head jerking to the left. She’s staring at the wall, as if she sees something the rest of us don’t.
I reach out with my powers and sense a shadow of . . . something there. But it’s so slight that I can’t make it out. Power, but a mere glimpse of it—as faint as a waft of heather on the air.
“Kadamach,” Sorcha says in a low voice. “Give me your blade. Quickly.”
Before I can protest Sorcha being in charge of something pointy, Kiaran slips a knife from the sheath at his wrist and passes it to her, hilt first. Without any explanation or hesitation, Sorcha slices the weapon down across both palms in two quick swipes. Then she passes back the blade and smears her blood across the obsidian wall.
She slams her palms against the stones. I watch as the blood gathers along the smooth rock, glistening like molasses. Only it doesn’t drip down as it should. Instead, it curves across the stone to form a pattern. Like something from one of Kiaran’s marks, a swirling design that loops and loops around itself, becoming smaller and more intricate.
“There you are,” Sorcha whispers. “Fosgail.”
A startling crack resounds through the hallway, so loud that my hand immediately goes for the hilt of my sword. Before us, a fissure forms in the wall, stretching from floor to ceiling. The stones disintegrate, tearing away to reveal a pitch-dark hollow that I can’t see beyond—an opening just large enough for a single person to fit through.
Sorcha blinks and steps back from the fissure. “There you have it. One portal to hell.”
I stare at the dark opening with an impending sense of alarm. What could the Morrigan have done to make Sorcha decide Kiaran wasn’t worth it?
“You never said what made you give up,” I say to her.
I’m surprised by the small hint of humanity in the depths of her usually cold green eyes. I’ve seen moments of her emotions before, when she looks at Kiaran with longing. But this is something more, a sense of loss I recognize from having keenly felt it for so long.
“The Morrigan will do whatever it takes to break out of there,” she murmurs. “The moment we go in, she’s going to decide which of us are the pawns, and which one of us is the key to her escape.”
I swallow hard. “Which were you?”
Sorcha’s smile is both bitter and brutal. “Neither. I was her entertainment.”
With that, she steps back and gives me a look as if to say, How about it, Falconer? Is he worth it?
Kiaran’s eyes catch mine. His expression is unfamiliar, unsettling. A glimpse of something dark and hungry just beneath the surface, barely contained. His curse. The curse I have one chance to undo.
Save me, Kam? You’ll wish you’d killed me.
I look away sharply, and step through the portal.
The hallway on the other side is similar to the one we’ve left—a wide, shadowed passage. Only there are no doors—at least, none that I can see through the swaths of dead ivy that snake across the stones from floor to ceiling. Not a single green leaf remains on the foliage, just withered brown vines that extend down to the dark end of the corridor.
I shiver in the chill from the old damp stones, my breath exhaling in white mist. The cold is a bone-deep kind that comes not from the temperature but the atmosphere. The walls feel too close and too far away at the same time. As I stand there, the hallway grows darker, colder, longer.
Somewhere in the ivy—in this dead, empty space—someone is watching me.
I turn in dread. Kiaran, Sorcha, and Aithinne step out of the portal—and it disappears, closing up like a quickly healing wound. Then it seals shut as if it had never been there at all.