His raised eyebrow and broad grin were deliberately goading.
Sorcha favored him with a long look and then sighed. “You do enjoy testing my patience, Captain Rossin. Now, let us go.” She clambered down into the cool tunnel.
He joined her below, and the Brother dropped the hatch above them with a loud clang. Now it was just the two of them, standing in a rough hewn stone chamber lit only by the flickering light. It was cold and slightly damp.
Sorcha handed the lantern to him. “If I am here to protect you, then you’d better carry this.”
And the woman accused him of trying to irritate her. Raed snorted, but took their illumination into his care.
“How long do you think this tunnel is?” he asked, suddenly aware that he’d spent a long time avoiding dry land. Now here he was, surrounded by it.
“Not frightened of enclosed spaces, are you?” Sorcha asked, pulling her dark blue cloak tighter about her against the cold. “If you become hysterical, I may have to slap you.” It was hard to tell if she was serious or not.
“I think you would like that,” he whispered to himself as she peered down the tunnel once more, her clouded eyes indicating the use of her Center.
Sorcha did not laugh. “Considering your . . . problem, I shall go first.” Her voice bounced commandingly off the walls.
Aachon was the only person whom Raed was used to having keep an eye on him, and even that rankled. Still, it was impossible to argue with logic. With a mocking bow, he swept his arm before him. “By all means, my lady.”
She brushed past him in the narrow confines, the faintest scent of jasmine tickling his senses. Did Deacons wear perfume, or was it his own tormented imagination? He’d been a long time at sea, after all.
The tunnel was very tight, and at certain points it ran with water. Raed and Sorcha had to bend low in several portions, and gained a few bruises at tight bends. “Whoever this was built for, was obviously not a tall man,” the Pretender commented with a wince after knocking his head on the ceiling.
“Don’t worry. I can give you a kick if you get stuck,” Sorcha quipped, glancing over her shoulder. In the glow of the lantern he could tell she was definitely smiling.
He’d not expected a Deacon to be so witty, so prickly, or so pretty, and he was very glad Sorcha Faris was not much of a Sensitive. He would not have liked her to know that he was watching the fiery glint in her hair, or the sway of her hips ahead.
She’d mentioned to one of the crew and gossip had brought it to his ears: she had a husband. Thinking disreputable thoughts of a happily wed Deacon . . . That was a complication he did not need. One curse was more than enough for him.
Raed was so busy contemplating that he almost stepped on Sorcha. The Deacon had stopped suddenly, and his heart began to race; luckily, it had nothing to do with the closeness of the lovely woman. They had come to a slightly wider portion of the tunnel. They were actually standing side by side and perfectly straight. Raed’s back appreciated that last bit.
“Do you think there are rats in this tunnel?” she asked, taking the lantern from him and swinging it around. As Sorcha turned her head back the way they came, her eyes were as milky as cataracts. This, combined with the weird tilt to her head, poured ice down his spine.
“Why?” he asked, his mouth dry as drought.
She raised a finger to her lips. “I hear scampering,” she whispered after a moment.
“And do . . .” He cleared his throat. “Do the unliving scamper?”
The film on her eyes cleared, until they were that clear blue that he’d first been struck by. Her little laugh eased the clenching feeling in his stomach. “Generally, no. They tend not to have any feet. I do believe, however, that we are about to have some company.”
Raed stood stock-still, and now he could hear them tumbling nearer; a wave of chattering rodents pouring down from the direction of the Priory. He saw Sorcha slam her eyes and mouth shut before bracing herself against the wall, so he did the same. The bodies streamed about them, squeezing past and over the motionless humans. Certainly the sensation was shudder-inducing, and the flow of bodies was horrifying, but it was over quickly. The feeling of furry bodies sliding over him would give his nightmares plenty of ammunition, yet none had even paused to bite him.
Finally, when they had passed, Raed shook himself. “Well, that was unpleasant.”
“Not just unpleasant,” Sorcha whispered. “Confusing. Why would—”
They both felt it, an unsettling breath of cold air pouring down on them from the same direction as the rats. The Deacon’s eyes were once again covered and white. “Not unliving . . .” she assured him. “Just water. They must be flushing something up there—explains the rats.”
She might have just thought it was sewage, but Raed knew otherwise; not because he could See as she could, but because he could feel it in his bones. The water was from deep in the earth, ice-cold and shocking when it smashed into them. If that had been all it was, Raed would have been delighted. But something lived in that water, something geist that stirred what lived in him.
The Curse was uncoiling itself from his core, wrapping its dark tentacles through bone, blood and flesh. Light flared in the back of his brain, blinding him for an instant. His worst fears were being realized and yet he managed a gasp from his tormented throat. “Run Sorcha—run now.”
Then his body was drowning under the Curse. It sucked away logic and control, and yet Raed clawed desperately at it, trying to at least slow the Change so that the Deacon could escape. Trapped in the tunnel with the Rossin, she would have no chance. Swinging his head around felt like a monumental task, and he was horrified to realize that she was still there. She’d put the lantern into a niche and was shoving on her Gauntlets. The Order had tried once to tame the Rossin, and those deaths were still deeply etched into his conscience. However, his human voice was gone, so his attempt at a shout came out as a primal howl. He managed to get his Changing body to turn and run a little. In his heart he knew he wouldn’t get far, and sure enough, after a few staggering steps he collapsed. The Change was now wrapped all around him.
That was the worst of it: he was well aware and conscious, trapped in the body of the growing animal. Primitive function took over, and he could only watch in disgust as he was wracked by the demands of the shift.
It should have been painful; muscle and sinew dancing into new forms, skin rippling as fur punctured it from within. However, the Change felt very, very good; shamefully good. The ripple of his own Changing flesh was as sensual as any feeling he’d had in bed with a woman. The howl from the Rossin’s mouth was not one of pain.
The clothes on his back ripped and the lacings on his boots snapped and broke apart as Raed’s form doubled in size. His body gained the bulk of the Beast while hands became paws and his head twisted into a jaguarlike snarl. The Rossin’s earth form, the great cat with patterned fur and long mane; he’d seen it as a young boy, painted on the ceiling of his bedroom. It was a beautiful thing. It was also a thing that the artist had never seen, only read of.
The Rossin was indeed a great patterned cat, but what a painter could never capture, what no one understood, was the hunger. The flame of it burned so deep in Raed that it consumed all. The Rossin had to feed, had to live on the blood and fear of others.
In this tight corridor, there was only one person that the hungering Beast could feed on. With a snarl, the Rossin turned and crept toward where Sorcha still stood. The closeness of the corridor meant that its shoulders were constricted slightly, but in the wider portion of the passage it could still pounce upon her.
Through the golden eyes of the beast, the Deacon burned like warm embers just stirring to flame. While it would take many normal humans to sate the urges of the Rossin, a Deacon would drown them for a while. Raed, buried deep within, tried to halt the great cat’s advances on her, but it was like trying to claw his way out of a sand trap. The Rossin had him, and now it would have her too. He could only watch. In these close confines and against the Beast, her sword would be nigh on useless. Even gunshot had no effect on the creature. She had to know that.
The Rossin liked fear—that too fed it—but there was little of that coming from the woman. As a Deacon, she must have seen many horrors, so the great cat stalking toward her couldn’t have been the most dreadful. However, unlike a geist, the cursed Rossin was more than capable of ripping her body apart to feast on the fire
