I set my jaw. “My answer is still no.”
“Is it?” Her eyes go cold. Without waiting for my response, she says. “Well. This is quite useful anyway. This place, this body. Since your powers shield your thoughts from me, his abilities will help tell me everything I need to know.”
I just need to use your blood to see.
I jerk back. I know what she intends to do with him. With his body. “No.”
I summon the power again. It swirls inside my core. It heats through my bones, through my veins—
Hot. Too hot. My vision blurs. Blood bursts out of my mouth and splatters across the vine-covered floor.
I’m too weak to hold myself up, so I fall. Get up. Get up!
The thud of boots across the ivy draws my attention. The Morrigan leans over me, her expression calm. The way I’d imagine Death to look before he takes your soul. “My sister’s power is tearing you apart. Find the Book, give it to me, and I’ll use it to save you.”
“You have my answer.” My voice is faint.
The Morrigan kneels next to me. “You’re a foolish girl, Aileana Kameron. When I take that Book from you, I’m going to cage you. Just like my little bird.”
She bares her fangs and seizes my arm. Fight back. My mind is screaming at me, but my body can’t move. It can’t fight anymore.
I shut my eyes as she bites down.
This isn’t the same as with Lonnrach. The Morrigan doesn’t slip into my mind easily. She enters my mind like a tidal wave crashing against rock, fast and powerful and destructive.
She tears through memories of Kiaran and me. She watches our hunts, watches us sprinting down dark streets under the stars. She watches us battle as if we were in a dance. She watches him save me. She watches him whisper against my lips, a chant of I’m yours.
She brings up the deep, dark secrets of my heart. My desire to live forever if I could—with him. About how we hoard our minutes, our hours, because that’s all the time we have.
Because he’s all that matters. Because he’s everything.
Then the Morrigan takes her teeth from my wrist. When she looks at me, her smile is satisfied. A victor’s smile.
When she speaks, I tremble with fear. “That, Aileana Kameron, is how I’ll get my yes.” Her laugh rolls over me like a cold shadow. “You’ve never told him, have you? You’ve never said the words.”
The words. Three simple words that would change everything.
I love you.
I can’t say it when I know he and I don’t have a future together. Because even if I manage to survive all this, he’ll watch me age, watch me wither, watch me fade. That’s our fate.
I’d rather Kiaran think of me one day a hundred years from now—two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred—the same wistful way he thinks of Catríona, his Falconer, and I’ll be remembered as a rueful smile. A lover’s kiss. A what if. A could have been.
It’ll make the memory of me less painful to bear than if he had heard those three words on the lips of a dying girl.
You were his butterfly.
As if she reads my mind, the Morrigan’s expression hardens. “So many emotions. If you and he had no feelings at all, this wouldn’t be so easy.”
She almost looks like herself for a moment, I can almost see the shape of her through Lonnrach’s face, the beautiful features that look so much like the young Cailleach’s. “He’d give up everything, you know.” She taps her temple. “I see it in his head. He’d give up his immortality to become just another filthy human. For you.”
Then the Morrigan leans in. Her fingers reach up to graze my face. There’s a clear threat in her touch, a promise of death.
Her hard voice is ice in my veins. “Say yes.”
I shut my eyes. “No,” I whisper.
When I open my eyes, she’s standing ten feet away, her expression cold and recondite. “Our time is running out and I’m going to get my yes, little girl.” The Morrigan smiles her slow, victorious smile. “One word. That’s all it takes.” She disappears like smoke.
I’m left alone in the room of my nightmares. And I begin to believe I never made it out.
It’s so easy. Easy to fear and believe that I’m still under Lonnrach’s control. When I stare down at the bleeding mark the Morrigan left behind, I have to remind myself that it isn’t his. That I’m not there.
This is Kiaran’s coat, I tell myself. Remember? You ripped yours up after the Morrigan showed up as a water wraith and used it to bind your wounds. There, see? Feel your back. Those are her claw marks. Those are real. You’re real. You’re all right. You’re real and you’re alive and this is Kiaran’s coat.
I slip the coat off my shoulders and press it to my face, closing my eyes.
It smells like him. Even with all my blood, it smells like him. Like wind and rain and sea, something wild and untamed. Like salt on the air. Like running through the trees, wind through my hair.
Then I hear a sound across the room, and when I look up, he’s there.
CHAPTER 39
MY FIRST instinct is to go to him, but something stops me.
Kiaran doesn’t look the same.
The shadows linger around him a little too closely. Long tendrils of darkness rise from the ground and wrap like vines around his legs. His skin looks paler. Even with his powers bound, he seems lit from within, shining. Beautiful. Until I look at his hands.
They’re covered in blood.
My eyes meet his and my chest tightens with dread. His irises are deep pools of black—not a hint of lilac in them. They settle on me and flash with hunger.
Are you Kiaran or are you Kadamach?
He shakes his head as if he’s clearing it, and the ink in his eyes begins to recede until I step forward. “Stay back.” His voice is sharp.
I put my hands up. “Are you all right?”
“No. You’re hurt again.” I hear his soft inhale. He can smell my blood. I doubt even a bonfire could hide the scent from him now. It’s all over me.
“The Morrigan,” I say, as if it explains everything. I look at his blood-soaked hands again. “Yours?”
Kiaran’s fingers curl to form fists. “I don’t know.”
He glances around and catches sight of himself in one of the mirrors. Then he shuts his darkened eyes. He’s getting worse, fraying at the edges.
“I don’t know,” he says again. “She made me kill you. I thought I’d killed you. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
I swallow hard. The Morrigan has been torturing him, breaking his control little by little. When he looks up at me again, his eyes are as black as a starless sky.
“How do I know you’re real?” Kiaran strides toward me, boots pounding across the floor. “How do I know you’re not her?”
Oh god. The shadows wrap around him in thick trails at his feet. He has the swift gait of a predator. Fast, so fast. I don’t have anywhere to go. Nowhere to run.
I back up until I’m pressed against the mirror and he’s still coming. “MacKay.”
Kiaran stops, inches away. His ebony eyes stare at me. The white of a fang glints between his lips. He tilts his head, a slight frown on his face.
“MacKay,” I whisper again.