“Aye. And in part that’s true. But there’s more to it, things I’ve shielded from you. Things that are best left alone. Things you need to stay
away
from. Are you hearing me, girl? You are
not
.
Going. Back.
”
A gust of hot wind blew across the parking lot, chasing the echo of his anger. The restaurant had been packed when they’d arrived and they’d had to park in the back, by the trash. Now the lot was dark and deserted. The burned-out streetlight over their car left shadows creeping across the heated tar and whispering sounds rasping against the abruptly taut silence that followed.
She wanted to tell him to calm down. She was twenty-four years old and didn’t need his permission, but an undefined feeling of threat prickled and poked at her. She opened her mouth to demand to know what these mysterious
things
he’d been protecting her from were, but an instinct as old as time silenced her and urged her toward the car. Pushing her to get out of the open.
“Let’s—”
“Shhhh,” he said. His eyes were wide, his expression frightened as he scanned the empty parking lot.
The air grated against them, lifting the hem of her skirt and blustering beneath it. It was hot—always hot in Arizona—but now that heat had weight and a dark, malevolent substance.
A trill of fear crept down her spine, but she didn’t know what had scared her, why she suddenly had a sense of déjà vu that clenched her tight and terrified her.
“Get to the car,” Donnell said, turning her and pulling her to the Toyota.
“What’s going on?”
A sound—like a hundred nails running down a chalkboard, like a thousand knives scraping china, like millions of screams that went on unending—ripped through the oppressive quiet. The blistering cacophony surrounded them, an invisible wall that herded them into shadow and gloom.
“Dad, what is that?” she asked, gripping his hand, feeling the tremors coursing through his body. That tangible evidence of his alarm escalated her own. Her dad had weakened with illness, but remained one of the bravest men she’d ever known.
He tried to pull her toward the car, but the air felt strangely gelatinous, a membrane holding them captive in the small space they filled. Beyond the unseen barrier, the everyday world faded until there was only dusky night alive with that terrible sound. Shealy clapped her hands over her ears and so did Donnell, both of them turning in place, searching for an exit. Seeking an explanation.
Beneath her feet the asphalt began to rumble and shake. Pieces of the parking lot cracked, spidering like a shattered windshield. Was it an earthquake? A car alarm joined the melee, as if in response to her panicked thoughts. She grasped at a perverse sense of comfort the explanation brought. Earthquakes were real. Shadows that hemmed people in weren’t.
But even as she thought it the darkness to her left split down the middle, like a huge piece of velvet ripped in two. She heard the sound of it tearing, felt her breath seize in her chest as she watched the fissure grow. Felt again that unfathomable sense of déjà vu. Through the rent in the night, she saw a rock wall shooting straight up, perpendicular to the earth. At its base was a huge stone plateau and on it stood a man and a teenage boy.
Mouth dry, Shealy saw the man suddenly look up, his golden brown eyes wide with shock. For an instant they stared at one another, Shealy and this man, and she felt the touch of that glance like she did the heat, the fear.
A queer sense of recognition staggered her.
There was no way she’d met this man before and then forgotten him. No possible way. He stood well over six feet, perhaps even six five. Tall and muscular, so perfectly sculpted the Greeks might have used him as the model of Atlas, holding the world on his shoulders. A wound seeped blood into the fabric of his open shirt and splattered the burnished skin of his tight, massive chest and muscular abdomen, but he stood tall and strong. And those eyes . . . those incredible eyes . . .
Who was he?
Where
was he?
Donnell muttered something that sounded like
Tier Nawn
and squeezed her hand tightly. She jerked her gaze from the man to her dad, saw the anger and . . .
recognition
in his face.
She’d barely had time to process that not only did Donnell see the man, but he recognized him, too, when a second section of darkness shredded to her right and through the gaping hole she saw another man, standing alone in a white room that gleamed with marble. Like a photonegative of the dark and powerful warrior to her left, this one had pale skin with blue eyes that blazed with rage and . . .
triumph
.
“Feck!” her father shouted and tried to put Shealy behind him, but the world shuddered violently, nearly knocking them off their feet. As if looking through windows, the two men caught sight of one another and the reaction was instantaneous. Murderous.
The one with the golden brown eyes lunged forward, exploding from the gash in the darkness like a demon. The pale man moved only seconds slower. In a heartbeat they stood in the swirling circle of confusion with Shealy and her dad trapped in the middle between them.
The blond man made a grab for Shealy, but her father blocked it. Enraged, he struck Donnell hard in the face, making him stagger back. Shealy’s screams joined the chaos as she tried to get around her father and stop his attacker. Her dad was not as strong as he used to be—illness had withered away much of the brawn that he’d once worn so easily—but he seemed determined to keep her safe.
The pale man came at them again, but the dark one with the luminous golden eyes—the one her dad had called
Tier Nawn
—shoved the other man back, shouting something at him that Shealy couldn’t understand. It felt like the world exploded,
im
ploded, ripping free of its moorings. Everything began to spin.
The ruptures in the darkness shrank, that gummy membrane surrounding them growing tighter, pinning them. And yet, the pale man strode forward easily, intent on Shealy. She didn’t know why, didn’t know how to evade him when the very air had become an enemy imprisoning her.
What, in God’s name, did he want?
Her father tried to stop him, but he gave Donnell a hard blow that sent him sprawling on the ground. She was still screaming, but she couldn’t even hear her own voice over the roaring coming from beneath her feet, overhead, all around. His fingers reached for her throat and in his eyes she saw victory.
And then the other man slammed into them both, knocking the pale man away and falling on top of Shealy.
All the breath left her body as he crushed her beneath him. Her head hit hard against the asphalt. She saw stars, bright bursts of color, then black on black nothingness.
“Who?” she tried to ask.
Who are you?
But the viscous cocoon caved in around them and Shealy felt a great suction pulling her. She cried out for her father, heard the echo of his voice as he shouted her name. She turned her head, saw him prone beside her, managed to get her hand out and touch her fingers to his just as the pale man, relentless and determined, crawled over Donnell’s inert body to reach her. But in the same instant, a force she couldn’t comprehend hauled her toward that great tear in the darkness, to that rocky cliff she’d glimpsed earlier.
The suctioning pressure grew until it felt like it would crush her, collapse her rib cage, and compress her skull, leaving her nothing more than flattened goo on the sizzling parking lot. The man on top of her tried to ease his weight, pushing up with massive arms. He was enormous, his muscles so sculpted they looked illusory. But the weight of him added to that grinding pressure left her in no doubt that every single inch of him was real. He had dirt smudged on his face, a bloody cut on his collarbone, and eyes that burned like whiskey. He stared into her face as if he might find answers there. If she hadn’t been so scared, she might have saved him the trouble. Shealy O’Leary didn’t have any answers.
Still he probed, grimacing as the air compressed, excruciating and unyielding. She stared into his eyes, feeling his ragged breath fan her face, the tremble of his arms as he fought an unwinnable battle with the agonizing pressure.
Who
was
this man?
The force bore down on them both and she clenched her eyes tight, knowing she’d probably never find out the answer because whatever was happening to her would likely kill them both. The man fought the weight of it, but his arms finally gave and he collapsed. His body covered her from head to toe, their faces side by side, his breath now a hot burst against her ear. The shrieking sounds rose to a crescendo, and then suddenly it felt as if they’d punched through the crust of asphalt and were falling. . . .
Chapter Two
“C
HRIST’S blood!” someone shouted.
Shealy turned her head sharply, sending jolts of agony to every nerve ending in her body. She was prone, spread out on something hard and uncomfortable. The teenage boy she’d glimpsed from the parking lot—the one she’d seen with the warrior through the rip in the darkness—stood beside her, looking down with an expression of horrified shock.
She tried to take a breath, to speak, but that crushing weight still pinned her and she couldn’t draw in enough air to form words. In the same instant a handful of rapid, bewildering realizations hit her hard: the heaviness pressing down on her belonged to the dark warrior, sprawled over her body; the shadows and gloom had morphed into a bright and sunny day; the screeching noises had been replaced with what sounded like a pack of wild beasts fighting over a bloody bone; and—she craned her neck to search in every direction she could—she didn’t see her father anywhere.
“Is my brother dead?” the boy demanded in a deep voice that was a pubescent contradiction to the youthful face. “Did y’ kill him? I’ll cut yer throat if y’ve harmed him, I swear I will.”
The boy reached for a dagger when the man on top of her groaned and moved. Slowly he lifted his head from where it rested in the crook of her shoulder and neck. He looked disoriented, as confused as she was. Then those strange golden brown eyes met hers and the fog cleared, leaving them sharp and hot. He stared at her and the moment stretched out . . . unfurled . . . snapped.
Every cell in her body felt that look, felt the charge of electricity that hummed beneath the whiskey glow. Then the gaze moved from her eyes to her face, to the scars on her chin and throat, to the damaged shell of her ear. There were prying questions and hot awareness in every flick of its touch. Instinct made her want to cover her scars, turn her face away, but he’d trapped her with his unwavering perusal, pinned her with his big, heavy body.
As if suddenly realizing he was crushing her, he heaved himself up and off, rolling until he lay flat on his back beside her. Gratefully, Shealy sucked in a deep and painful breath. Somewhere nearby, the gnashing and snarling beasts she heard began to bay. It sounded like hundreds of them frothing for something. . . .
Where
was
she? Where had her dad gone? She gazed frantically in every direction but could see no sign of him.
The brilliant blue of the sky above hurt her eyes. The rocky, rough surface beneath her felt jagged in places. After a stunned moment, she surmised that she must be sprawled on the enormous flat stone she’d seen through the bizarre hole in the darkness. She remembered the feeling of being sucked in and then plunging through. . . .
She sat up suddenly, dizzy as the blood rushed from her head. “Where’s my dad? What happened to him?” she said at the same time the boy asked, “Tiarnan, where did y’ go? One minute y’ were there and then . . .”
The man held up a hand to stop the questions and then stood on unsteady legs. For a moment he swayed, and Shealy watched anxiously. His shirt was stained with blood, his face gray and his hands raw. She remembered how he’d fought the pale man. Remembered how she’d felt that baffling sense of recognition.
“Where is my dad?” she asked again, more forcefully.
He ignored her question as he asked his own. “How did y’ do it? How did y’ pull me out?”
“Pull you . . .
Me
? I didn’t do anything. You came out of. . . out of . . .” She flung her hands wide to indicate the great unknown that surrounded them. “Out of
here
. You came at me—at us. Not the other way around. I want to know where my dad went!”
Her voice rose with her panic, with her fear. The warrior watched her, silent but missing nothing.
Tier Nawn
, her father had called him, but the boy had given the pronunciation a softer lilt.
Tiarnan
.
“The old man was yer father?” he asked at last.
She nodded, hating that he’d said
was
instead of
is
. His words were shaped strangely, though, and she tried to tell herself he hadn’t meant to use past tense. She had the perplexing sense that she shouldn’t understand him at all, remembered how in the parking lot he’d shouted at the pale man and she’d been unable to decipher what he’d said.
The boy, Tiarnan’s brother, said, “It must have been him that did it, then.”
More confused by the moment, Shealy exclaimed, “That did
what?
What are you talking about? My father didn’t
do
anything. That’s what I’m telling you. You opened the darkness and then that other man—”
“Cathán,” the warrior said. “He wanted y’.”
Shealy stared at him, struck by the ring of unwanted truth in his words. She remembered how the pale man had charged her, knocked her father out of the way to get to her. If not for Tiarnan, he would have succeeded.
“I’ve never heard of Cathán. My dad and I were just walking to our car when you both attacked.”
In two strides he stood in front of her and hunkered down so that his face was very close to hers. He balanced on the balls of his feet, agile, lethal, ready to pounce if she tried to flee. He lifted a hand and she flinched. Eyes narrowing with displeasure at that telling gesture, his long fingers curled against her chin and, he tilted her face so she could not avoid his eyes.