ankle. Cold breath at the back of her neck. Claws curling around her shoulder. Glowing red and yellow eyes. She froze, but soul feeder and grel, dead flesh and the wraithlike phantasm, none did more than offer her a token stare or a grimace of sharp teeth.
The snow piled to her ankles and her knees. “I . . . I can’t . . .”
David shimmered silver as his eyes, his body hard as rock, cold as ice. He gripped her under her arm. “You must. Badb sent me here, but only you can bring me out.”
The trees marched on like a twisted jungle. No way to pick the right path beneath their weighted limbs. No landmarks to bring her back to the house and the wide avenue lined with statues. And the door.
She sank to the ground. “You can do what the creatures will not. You can close the door.”
David’s jaw clenched in a face like stone. His hands curled to fists at his sides. “I won’t.”
She glanced at the blade he carried at his waist before meeting his stare. “You have no choice.”
“There’s always a choice. Isn’t that what you told me? That we could fight our fate. We could change the future we saw.”
“I was wrong!” she cried. “Look at me. I ran with my tail between my legs from London to Skye and still I ended wed to Victor Corey. I fought to get Aunt Deirdre to lift your curse, and she refused. I even tried to thwart the death the spirits showed me, and yet here you are. Fates are fixed. And this is the only way. I’ve seen the monsters that live down here in the dark corners. They can’t be allowed to escape.”
“I . . .”
“Please, David.”
“If I kill you, the door closes?”
“It can only be opened from the outside. We’ll not stop those that have already escaped, but no more will pass through into life.”
A grim smile quirked his mouth. “I always said the dead were the only ones who might make a difference.” He cupped her cheek with his mangled hand. His lips found hers in a kiss as warm as summer. “I would not have traded these few precious weeks for a lifetime without you in it,” he murmured, his breath soft against her temple.
She cried, her tears freezing on her cheeks. “I’ve destroyed you just as you said I would.”
“No, sweet Callista, you found me after I’d been lost for a long time. I love you. In life . . . and death.” His smile curved those perfect lips as he bent to take her once more in his arms.
“Now, before it’s too late.” She knelt in the snow beneath a gray sky, her hair falling soft around her shoulders. “Before I lose my nerve.”
She closed her eyes. He knelt to whisper in her ear, his words a murmur of Imnada and English. All of it a promise of love. She smiled even when he drew the blade across her throat, the first quick sting becoming a burn like fire and ice at once. Fog shrouded her vision, the snow falling faster until the world was a torrent with no up or down.
Her breastbone hummed and prickled as death yawned wide. Arms folded her close. She looked into eyes as silver and empty as the world around her.
The door closed.
David held Callista’s body in his arms, her gown awash in crimson, his hands sticky with her blood. The snow had vanished and with it the silence of a dark forest blanketed in white. The paths now stretched away across a seething, smoking ridgeline. Some dipped down into sunken lanes where men struggled with swords and bayonets. Other tracks rode up and over the hills toward the far orchards and a village, a church spire pointing above the trees.
The sound of artillery rattled his ribs and pounded in his chest like a second heart. Above, the air burned hot and smoky, flames writhing up from a house into the cinder-lit sky. Twisted corpses littered the track, their faces masks of agony. Crows pecked at their wounds and ripped free their staring eyes. The wounded cried out for help, for water, for their mothers. A few merely wept or screamed or moaned. The stench made David gag, his stomach rolling, his nerves raw.
Waterloo. The last battle. All around him, men fought, muskets rattling, bayonets and swords ringing. A boy fell to David’s left, his chest blown out. A scarred cuirassier with a bloody sleeve screamed as a bayonet skewered him to the ground. Beyond, three cavalry rode down an English soldier, crushing his body into the mud and offal near the courtyard. Out of the smoke, a wild-eyed Frenchman rose up with a cavalryman’s saber, his face a rictus of battle madness. David threw himself across Callista’s body, hoping to shield it from the descending sword, but no blade bit deep. The man passed through him as if he were a ghost or a dream, no more substantial than the pall of black, choking smoke billowing across the wood.
Then he understood. This was his death and his path forever to walk. He would not even have the solace of finding Callista within Annwn. He might cradle her body, but her spirit moved along other dark tracks within the tangled web that was Arawn’s realm. With that realization, the cold overwhelmed him; a biting freeze slashed at his lungs with every breath. The aches in his body and the agony of his mutilated hand disappeared as the glow and glimmer of cinders became the pale light of a million spirits sliding in and out of the trees, over the writhing bodies, curling up from the ripped and bloody dead.
One turned and rolled and spun until it hung in the air above him. It grew in brightness until the sight burned David’s eyes and he had to look away.
“I’ve sent you back once. She will send you back again. A third time and you will stay forever.”
A voice in his head and in his ears. David lifted his face to the ghostly figure of a man. Handsome. Tall. A bit stocky, with broad, beefy shoulders and a stomach just the trim side of paunch. An icy fist clutched at his heart and stole his frozen breath. “Adam?”
The man smiled. “I am the spirit who is. Adam who was.”
“I’ve come to join you,” David said.
“No. This is not your time and this is not your death.”
“Could have fooled me,” he answered, trying for cocky and failing miserably. Exhaustion weighted his limbs and even the sounds of battle seemed faded and ragged, the colors and sounds and life drifting away like smoke. He tried focusing on Adam. He’d not seen him for over a year—not living, at any rate. And their last conversation had haunted David ever since. But even Adam grew indistinct and shimmery like the shine off a river at sunrise or the dew caught within a spider’s web. “With death comes life, David. Live it well.”
“Wait. I’m sorry, Adam. I never meant those things I said. The curse wasn’t your fault. Nor any of the tragedy that came after. We needed one another, Adam . . . I needed the three of you . . .”
His breath felt trapped within his chest, throat burning as he struggled to draw in air, bones vibrating until he clamped his jaw against the sensation. Pressure built deep in his center as if he might fly apart at the merest touch.
Spots danced before his eyes as his vision narrowed to a pinprick.
“The blood, David,” Adam called out. “It’s in the blood.”
David screamed out a final desperate sending into the abyss.
21
He woke to the hard scowl and white lips of Ard-siur bending over him, her gray gown billowing like the wings of a giant bird. Above, the sky shone hard and blue. Beneath, the stones of the parapet dug into his back and shoulders. The pain in his hand blazed a path all the way to his brain, and he bit back a groan. “Where . . .” His breath came in spasms, every swallow felt as if he’d inhaled glass, and he shuddered with a bone-deep chill. “Am I dead?”
“Do you
His head throbbed until he thought his brain might leak from his ears and even blinking hurt. “I feel like shit.”
She winced, her eyes gleaming gold before shrugging away from him.
