was to stare through the rain-splattered windshield into the unforgiving darkness. He coveted warmth the way an addict craved their next fix. It wasn’t lost on him that, as the keeper of the element of fire, the flame he’d called should have come to him as it always had. Before his death, heat had always been to him something as familiar as a lover’s caress, words whispered across the darkness, promises made, opportunities taken. Now it was a stranger to him, and he felt its absence more acutely than a sailor unable to find the North Star on a clear night.
A powerful gust of wind slammed into the car’s ultralow profile, striking metal and fiberglass hard enough to have the wide-bodied machine rock on its shocks. Shifting his attention to the dash’s muted glow, Gareth rested his least abused fingertips on the wheel. Whether he thought to steady the car or himself, he didn’t know. Both needed something he didn’t feel qualified to give. Not anymore. But to give up was to accept death with open arms, and that—the ultimate end man simply labeled death because he didn’t know the truth of its horrors—would be here for him soon enough.
Sitting there protected from the ragged downpour but still blinded by sheet after sheet of rain, the truth became the only thing he could see with any clarity at all.
The goddess queen would come for him and would find him simply by waiting for his soul’s collection, not unlike an egg in a hen’s nest.
“I’ve nothing left.” He closed his eyes. “No fight. Not anymore.”
A leaden blanket of shame settled around his shoulders.
The oppressive darkness grew heavier by the second. His breath was just warm enough to fog the car’s windows and block his view. He panicked. Failing to truly call his element had wrecked him. It had barely flickered to life, damaging his hands for the first time, his skin too cold to handle the tail of the flame.
Memories rushed him, memories he hadn’t been able to shake since he’d returned to life in October.
She came at him on the cliff side, blade raised, a goddess bent on the possession of a fine woman—a woman his brother by choice would call his own. To fight back would be to kill her. It would cost his brother everything he’d never thought to find let alone to possess, namely love.
So there would be—could be—no fight.
He braced and took the blade. With force and fury greater than any torment he’d suffered, the goddess-wielded blade ran him through, piercing and shredding and ripping. Darkness webbed across his vision. Sight fractured.
A coppery tang coated his mouth, his throat, and he choked.
He tried to scream. Pain like he’d never known, could never have imagined, rendered him mute.
Not within his head, though. Gods, not within his head. His scream ripped through his skull as his heart rate slowed, his blood cooling. He knew it was the end, heard the waves crashing against the cliffs, felt their fading reverberation through limbs grown lethargic.
Startling in its suddenness, sunlight winked out and darkness pulled at him with such force his bones shattered like fine crystal hurled against a stone wall.
Pain burned along every nerve.
His scream echoed....and echoed...and echoed. All in his mind.
But there was no one to hear him. This was a solo trip. The magnitude of his isolation, his desolation, raked at his soul.
Shards of cold shredded his skin until it hung in tatters.
He didn’t bleed.
Dead men don’t.
He knew it was the end.
Pressure gave way to a temporary vacuum, his legs, his arms, his spine—all broken. Entirely useless.
Fear choked him, stealing the last of his will. He continued to fall, his body indefensible, his sense of self splintering.
His heart stopped, and the vast depth of the silence inside him created a terror unlike anything he’d ever known.
The darkness began to gain weight, to possess a malicious awareness of him. In the heart of his growing horror, a presence began to form.
His body slammed into the ground. Cold seeped through him and his skin cracked, reformed and cracked again. And again. And again. The cycle sped even as the fissures deepened, skin to muscle to bone.
He opened his mouth and cried out, the horror of his reality skating across his mind on the finest of blades.
A face, both hideous and desirable, parted the mist above him as it moved into view. Macha, the Goddess of Phantoms and War, loomed over him. She didn’t bother to hide her vicious delight. “Welcome to the Well of Souls, Gareth Brennan.”
She swept low, gripped his hair and canted his head back at an entirely unnatural angle. Cold lips pressed against his, peeling skin away when the contact was broken. Then she produced a metal discus with the Ogham Idad on it. She blew across the face of the piece, smiled down at him and then slammed it into the pad of muscle over his heart.
Skin froze, burned, blackened and flaked off, the metal welding to bone.
Gareth roared with a combination of pain and fury.
She’d...branded him?
Bones healed with supernatural speed only to afford the cold the opportunity to break them over and over, as thoroughly as that same cold ravaged his skin, his muscle, his organs.
The goddess gripped him by the throat then and lifted him, holding him at arm’s length. “You are forever mine, but your service only begins here. Where my sister failed to release her brethren, I won’t. You’ll be my tool, my sword arm for eternity. With you as the head of my immortal army, I will release my brothers and sisters and retake every realm.”
It turned out the Druidic belief that Tir na nÓg awaited all warriors was a lie.
In the heart of eternity was eternal pain and terror.
Nothing more.
A clap of thunder sounded, the sharp sound shocking him out of the memory-induced numbness. He caught the sight of his eyes, wide and panicked, in the rearview mirror. In the ambient dash light, his lips were blue.
Digging through the glove box, he retrieved a pair of driving gloves and sheathed his hands. Then he stumbled from the car and turned toward the pub, the only thought he could grasp was that the woman, the bartender, the woman he’d dubbed “Ash,” had generated a warmth that permeated his bones. It suddenly didn’t matter what she was, what her intent was. He needed that warmth, needed that affirmation of life in the absence of his own and the damage done to his hands by his element.
He’d never been weak, never been afraid, never been one to avoid a fight. As Regent, he was more likely to seek trouble out, to get to the heart of the matter and eradicate whatever conflict existed by any means necessary. The Druidic race counted on his efficient brutality just as much as his brothers in service counted on him to retain the dregs of who he’d been as a younger man—the fun-loving lad with the sharp wit and quick smile. It had been a balance all these years, one he’d managed. No longer. His control was gone, stolen by the queen’s hand.
Dissatisfaction raced through his veins. Every second brought Beltane closer, and what did he do? Sit here waiting. He thumped his head against the headrest. There was more to life than this, more to living than waiting to die.
“Not for me,” he whispered, letting his eyes drift shut. “Never again for me.”
* * *
The music swelled, rallying the patrons. Ashley took orders and slung drinks as fast as she could. Tables were moved aside and an impromptu dance floor was created. Drunken customers spun wildly about the floor in traditional Irish dances, some in pairs and others stepping out alone.
There shouldn’t have been time to consider the strange interaction with the unknown man who, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be the leader of the group of young men