slicing into his forearm. Scrambling to her feet, she clasped the knife as she moved in to plunge it into Dylan’s back.
He rolled away at the last moment and Cailleach stumbled. Kennedy didn’t know whether to cheer or scream. Both emotions fought for a foothold on the tiny ledge where her remaining sanity perched.
Dylan drew his sword, the blade scraping against the scabbard with the hiss of metal against metal.
Magicks silently unfurled around them. His own softened and twisted everything it touched so he appeared to move through ever-shifting surroundings. Cailleach’s dark magick swirled around her feet, as dense as Dylan’s was fluid. The fine black mist widened even as it drifted up her legs, twining around them like some great cat.
Tendrils of the goddess’s magick bled through Kennedy’s consciousness. She struggled to dislodge the sticky, invasive tentacles that seemed determined to dismantle her, one painful, spearing jab at a time.
Cailleach laughed and began to retreat. “We’ll save this for another day. I find I enjoy sparring with you.”
Darkness threatened to swamp Kennedy, a pervasive sense of nothingness—an absolute void she was powerless against.
Cailleach faced the Assassin.
Kennedy watched as Dylan hesitated. The surety of a decision made skipped through his eyes just before he shoved his damaged hand in his pocket and pulled a syringe, flicking the cap off. He charged forward. Slamming into them, he drove them into the wall. They hit hard enough that Kennedy experienced the breathlessness of impact.
Dylan’s body pressed into hers. Their hearts thundered against each other, the stormy rhythm hammering her awareness. She experienced a brief connection with him, intimate in the silence of her mind.
His arms shoved under hers, the needle digging into the soft area between her collarbone and armpit. Dull, aching pain quickly spread as he dug the needle in all the way to the shank. He slid his short sword up between her breasts. The guard came to rest against her sternum as the tip pierced the soft underside of her jaw.
Kennedy arched her neck away from the threat and cracked her skull against his chin. A scream lodged in her throat, but she was too terrified to move as she found herself faced with two attackers—one a physical assailant, the other an emotional terrorist. The shock that he’d drawn blood, had actually acted against her without consideration that it was her—her body, her trapped inside—snipped her last thread of hope that this was all a bad dream.
“I can end this right now,” he said, panting in her ear.
“You won’t,” Cailleach purred. Every word drove that soft spot under her tongue onto his blade. “You may want to slay my mortal host, but you won’t. Not yet. You’ll seek to bind my immortal soul on Samhain, and your honor won’t settle for less.”
He kicked her feet apart, wrapping a foot around her ankle to keep her off balance. “You mean nothing to me, Crone.”
“No, but for some reason? She does.”
Kennedy’s heart stumbled, and she felt Cailleach’s smile.
“She’s the means to your end.” Dylan pressed the sword point deeper, splitting her skin wide. “You’d be an utter fool to bank your eternity on any more than that.”
And just like that, the goddess was gone, and Kennedy was falling against the sword with no idea what scared her more—the cut of the blade or the brutal emptiness of the Assassin’s words.
Dylan depressed the syringe’s plunger hard and fast. It was the woman’s voice that cried out in pain even as the goddess tried to curse him, her words misshapen by the drug’s impact. Unfazed, he dropped his blade and rode her to her knees, holding her there with his good hand as the drug worked through her system.
Smoke boiled around him and filled his lungs. He looked up. Dagda’s balls. The collision of black magicks. Ethan’s house was burning down around them.
The calculating part of his mind said to leave the woman and let her be recorded as a casualty of the fire. There would be no inquiry.
But it was the other part of him, unfamiliar and unwelcome, that demanded he discover the truth about the woman. Smoke thickened around him as he looked at her, crumpled on the floor. Violence flooded him. He despised indecision, despised being cornered and forced to choose between two impossibilities. Throwing his head back, he roared his fury to the heavens. How could he, for even a moment, believe he had a choice?
What he was going to offer her was no kinder a fate, but he couldn’t leave her to die this way.
Sweeping her up, Dylan rushed to where the front door had been, flinging magicks ahead of him to fold the wall open. Racing across the lawn, he reached the warlock’s sports car and dumped her unceremoniously in the passenger side. Her eyes tried to track, but she couldn’t make them focus. With the dose he’d given her, she’d be out for hours.
Her mouth worked slowly, and she tried to speak around a tongue that felt too large for her mouth. “Muh...” She blinked slowly. “Muh...”
“Easy. You’ve a good while before your time comes.”
“Eth...an.” She licked her lips. “Get... Eth...”
Ethan. She was trying to say the warlock’s name.
Under any other circumstance he would have left the man as a casualty, yet it was clear she wanted him saved. Pain struck his chest hard and fast. He’d not be entering a burning building on the whim of his mark. Of course, the man might have knowledge the Order could use in managing the woman until Samhain.
Not like you to lie to yourself, his subconscious whispered. You go back in there, you’ll know exactly why you’re doing it and it’s not for information. It’s for the woman’s peace of mind.
Kennedy continued to fight to say the warlock’s name, the short sound coming further and further apart as she sunk into unconsciousness.
Danu’s prophecy was driving him mad, if he’d even think of returning to the house. It was the only logical reason he could accept that explained the connection he had with this woman, his concern for her well-being. She was his mark, not his heart mate. Yet inside, before she’d collapsed, he’d felt their hearts beat together, their rhythmic parallel a shock. He’d experienced the taste of her fear and known a moment of complete confusion. The combination of events had thrown him off so much that he’d discarded his blade for fear he’d inadvertently cut her.
Never, in his hundreds of years, had he experienced such need for a woman. Danu’s prophecy had said nothing of this, had spoken only of finding his truth in her, but not that it would cost him emotionally. He couldn’t afford to feel. A lifetime spent avoiding wasted emotion left him certain that wasn’t part of his personal absolution in this matter. Still...
With a low, heartfelt curse, he sprinted back across the lawn and into the blazing house. Finding the man and hoisting his unconscious form over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, Dylan ran for the car, slid the driver’s seat forward and hoisted Ethan into the backseat.
Kennedy had nearly rolled off the front seat, and he had to resituate her before he could get out of there. He leaned the seat back and buckled her in. A few words of simple magick and the engine rumbled to life and he roared out of the driveway.
Sirens sounded in the distance. Neighbors were in their yards, no doubt initially drawn by the epic boom he and Cailleach had caused when their curses collided. One of his ears was still bleeding, and he needed to get the pilot on the phone.
He and Cailleach... He hadn’t cursed her. No, he’d claimed rights to the woman when he’d yelled, “De réir Danu, I éileamh an bhean is mo chuid féin!” By Danu, I claim the