Lucan walked to the bed and lowered himself on it. “Nay. No one returned. Months went by with no news from our men. It wasn’t until years later that we learned they had been killed by Deirdre’s wyrran.”
Cara cocked her head to the side. “Who is this Deirdre?”
“An evil woman who I hope you never meet. She is the start of all of this, the Druid priestess who found the template to unbind the gods.”
“By the saints,” Cara murmured, and crossed herself.
Lucan snorted. “If we had known the day we received her missive what would happen to us, we would never have gone.”
Cara’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You went to see Deirdre?”
“We had no idea who she was. She told us she had information on the massacre of our clan. Even Fallon refused to stay behind for that. We made the trek deep into the mountains to see her. Once we were there, she told us of her plan to rule Britain and how she needed our help.
“Too late we realized she had been the one to murder our clan, but she shackled us before we could escape. Her magic is strong, but then most black magic is.”
“The talk of magic is hard for me to believe.”
“After everything you saw tonight, you think I’m lying?”
She shook her head and looked at her hands. “I never said that. I simply said it’s difficult to believe.”
Lucan wished he had that problem. “We saw firsthand what Deirdre’s magic had brought forth. The pale, small beings were the first she called to her, fashioned from black magic, anger, and power. Next, she set about finding the clans who had the gods inside them.”
“What did she do to you?”
“She unbound the god.”
Cara shrugged. “I don’t understand.”
“When the Druids bound the gods, they passed from generation to generation, always possessing the strongest warriors. Sometimes the god would only pass into one warrior, with others like me and my brothers, the god would separate. Alone, Quinn is a force to be reckoned with, but when the three of us fight together, we are nigh unstoppable.”
“What happened next?” Cara asked when he paused.
Lucan scratched his chin, wondering if he should continue. Then he realized he might as well. “Once our god was released, it gave us the power to break out of her shackles, magic or not. We left the mountain, but we raged at what she had done. The angrier we became, the stronger the god grew. We dinna know how to control the powers we suddenly had. Decades passed as we hid in the mountains learning what we had become. We fought each other constantly, each blaming the others for what had happened.”
“None of you were to blame,” Cara said.
“Maybe. Fallon tried again and again to bind our god, to no avail. He learned first that if he drowned himself in wine, it dulled the god. Once he discovered that, there was always a bottle in his hand. For Quinn, it was much worse. He lost his wife and his son in the slaughter. He held himself responsible for their deaths, since it was his job to protect them. In his eyes he failed, since he lived and they did not.”
“And you?”
“With Quinn unable, and unwilling, to control his rage, and Fallon drunk, someone had to take care of them.”
“So it fell to you.”
He shrugged. “That duty led me to learn how to control the god inside me, to learn how to use the powers to my advantage without letting the god free.”
“So you turn into the thing that attacked me tonight?”
“Not exactly,” Lucan answered. “As I said, each clan had a different god. Each god had certain powers, or abilities.”
She reached out and touched his hand, her fingers moving over his nails. “And the god inside you?”
“Apodatoo, the god of revenge. I have enhanced hearing and quick speed added to my strength. I can also control darkness and shadows.”
“Control them?”
“Aye. I can move the shadows to my will, and the darkness I can use to my advantage.”
“At any time?”
“Nay. Only when I release the god do I have full control of that power. The rest I have all the time.”
She bit her lip. “The man that tried to take me was ash colored.”
“I fought one that was royal blue. When the god is released and in control, the man transforms and becomes what the god was.”
She glanced at his hands again.
Lucan curled his hands into fists. “Aye, Cara. I also turn. You saw Quinn partially turn, though I don’t think you realize it.”
“His eyes turned black.”
“Aye. Our skin, our eyes, and our claws turn black. Each god has a color that gets transformed to us when we release him.”
Lucan stilled as she moved closer and touched his face. “Do you forget who you are when the god takes over?”
“Nay, though I can hear him. I always hear him whether he is unleashed or not. But I don’t forget who I am, or who I am protecting.”
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would find your story impossible to believe. You were the one who caught me when I fell, weren’t you?”
“Aye.” Lucan licked his lips. It was time to ask her. “Do you have magic?”
Her brow furrowed and her eyes became distant for a moment. “I . . . I don’t think so.”
“Do you know why the Warriors were after you?”
“Nay,” she said with a shake of her head.
He’d expected that. “Do you know what a Demon’s Kiss is?”
After a moment’s hesitation, she pulled something free from her gown and held out the necklace with a vial at the end of it. “I think this is what they want.”
Lucan looked at the small elongated silver vial with Celtic knot work surrounding it. It was held about her neck by a thin strip of leather. Could something so small be what Deirdre was after? “What is it?”
“My mother’s blood.”
CHAPTER SIX
Cara waited while Lucan stared at the vial. He leaned close, but he never touched it. She wasn’t sure if what the ash-colored Warrior had called the Demon’s Kiss was the vial around her neck, but a nagging memory she couldn’t bring into focus told her it was.
She swallowed and tried to think past his question of whether she had magic. She didn’t know what magic was, so how could she know if she had it?
There was the possibility the vial was magic. She had been so young when her parents were murdered, but she never heard her parents speak of magic. She would have remembered that.
Yet . . . there was something about Lucan’s question that made her remember the tingling in her fingers and the sprouts in the cell that hadn’t been there before she’d placed her hands on the dirt.
It was enough to give her pause.
“What is so important about your mother’s blood?” Lucan asked.
She shrugged, jerking her attention back to Lucan. “I wish I knew.”
