As soon as Shealy sat beside him, he pulled her legs into his lap, forcing her to brace her weight on her hands behind her. Gently he brushed the sand from her feet, grimacing at the angry, open gashes on them. She’d been forced to run with bare feet, but she hadn’t complained once or lagged behind. She’d shown more courage and resilience than many men he’d known.
It roused a fierce need to protect her, this brave and mysterious woman who might be the first hope he’d had since the night he and Ruairi had ripped the pages from the Book of Fennore, and Tiarnan had been sucked into this place of nightmares with his brother. But like Liam, he couldn’t quite trust her. Cathán wanted her—no doubt for the same reason Tiarnan did. She could help them escape, and that made her invaluable.
When he touched her, though, it wasn’t thoughts of using her to get to her father that filled his mind. Something about her woke a yearning he’d thought long dead. When he touched her, he wanted
more
. . . .
He shook his head, trying to banish the foolish hunger, but the feel of her silken skin, the light teasing scent of her flesh, soft and so blatantly female that it had made him want to bury his face in the crook between neck and shoulder and drown in it, would not be eased.
“Do you think those wolves have rabies?” she asked, watching him run his fingers over her satiny calf. Her skin felt like silk, and he thought of her legs twined with his own, hooked at his hip, holding him to her. . . .
She went on, “Some of them were foaming at the mouth. I read somewhere that that means rabies.”
“There is much to fear in this place,” he answered. “But we’ve all been bitten by the wolves at least once and none of us has yet sickened. I do not think they carry rabies.”
“Whew. Well that’s good,” she said with a tremulous smile.
“The seawater washed yer bites clean. I think they’ll heal fine.”
She caught her lip between her teeth and nodded, watching his fingers as they trailed over her ankle, gentle on the place where the wolf had almost gotten ahold of her. His heart seized as he thought of those agonizing seconds when she’d dangled over the gulf with only his grip on her arm keeping her from certain death. He let out a deep and shaking breath and then moved to her instep, where the jagged stones had cut deep into her flesh.
She winced and he gentled his touch, barely brushing the tender arch before circling to the top where he let the warmth of his hands sink into her flesh. He could feel her gaze following each movement but he kept his head averted, afraid she’d see how much he wanted to enfold her in his arms, hold her close, and make her feel safe. It was a stupid desire. On Inis Brandubh, no place was safe.
“So tell me again what this horrible place is?” she asked, shivering as a damp breeze chased across the beach. Her hand trembled when she tugged a lock of hair forward to curl around her face, hiding the shell of her ear that looked to have been burned long ago and the fine network of pearly white scars on her chin and throat. He wanted to ask about those scars, but each time she caught him looking, a mask came over her features, locking him out. It was tangible, that slamming door.
Instead of prying, Tiarnan held her small foot in his big hands, noting that her toenails were painted a sunny pink that matched the flowers on her gown. He touched one and then another, marveling at the clarity of color, wondering what kind of dye she’d stained them with.
“Answer me, Tiarnan,” she said, her voice husky.
The breathless sound of it heated his blood. He didn’t want to talk about Inis Brandubh. Had his brother not been sitting on the other side of the fire, he thought he might not be talking at all.
“I do not know how to explain this place where we live.”
“Hell, they call it,” Liam offered.
“I can see why,” she answered with a wry glance at his little brother.
“Y’ know the Book of Fennore?” Tiarnan asked, hating to even speak its name.
Her look of surprise could not mask the recognition beneath it. She’d definitely heard of the Book, but the doubt in her expression contradicted that gleam.
“The Book of Fennore is a legend,” she told him. “A myth.”
“It’s more than that,” he said.
“My father thinks so, too. He wasted half of his life trying to find it. But you know what? He never did. Because it isn’t real.”
The vehemence in her words surprised him. “Yer father sought the Book of Fennore?”
She raised her brows in answer.
“Do y’ know why he wanted it?”
“My dad has these twisted ideas. He said the Book of Fennore was some kind of legacy his family was supposed to guard, but they’d screwed up somewhere down the line and lost it. My grandfather was obsessed with finding it, too, but he couldn’t either. Imagine that. He died alone and broke for his efforts.”
Her bitter sarcasm confused him. The Book was no myth, though it was legendary.
Warily, he asked, “Is yer father a seer, then?” Seers were strange breeds that made him instinctively distrustful. The world of Fennore was so discordant that the very idea of a seer peering into the murky future unsettled him more than even this woman with her stormy eyes.
“You mean can he see the future? No. He’s just an old man with a heart problem.”
“But he did open”—
What had she called it?
—“the darkness. He opened the darkness and pulled me out, Shealy.”
She shook her head, but frowned, obviously thinking back over those moments when Cathán had attacked.
Carefully Tiarnan chose his words. “This island that we’re on now . . . is not an island at all. It’s another world—a world that is connected to the Book of Fennore. We’ve been trapped here for a long time.”
“How long?”
Flopping onto his back on the gritty beach and closing his eyes, Liam interjected, “A handful of minutes? A lifetime of years? Who knows.”
At Shealy’s look of consternation, Tiarnan tried to explain. “Time does not flow here like it does in the real world. The sun might rise and set in a blink of the eye or it might dally high in the sky for what feels like weeks on end. My brother was just a boy when we came; now he’s almost a man and yet so many years could not have passed.”
At least that’s what he hoped. He couldn’t bear to believe he’d been here that long.
“That’s crazy,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
Reluctantly, Tiarnan released her legs and reached for the shirt he’d set by the fire. It felt dry and warm. Gripping it on either side, he split it down the middle and began using the two pieces to wrap her battered feet. When they reached his shelter, he would find proper boots for her. He’d give her his own now, but he knew she’d never be able to keep them on her tiny feet and they would only trip her up and cause her to fall.
As he worked he spoke, describing the nightmare to which she’d come. “The seas surrounding Inis Brandubh are filled with creatures from the blackest nightmare. Creatures y’ cannot imagine. The tides flow at unfathomable times. The treacherous currents defy any foolish attempt to breach the vast waters.”
“There’s no escape,” Liam muttered, his voice sleepy.
No escape.
Until now.
Until this woman’s father had opened the darkness. Where was he at this moment? Stumbling around Inis Brandubh, looking for his daughter? Perhaps already dead, killed by one of the monsters that called this world home? He closed his eyes, refusing to consider it. When Tiarnan had first seen him, he’d been struck immediately by a sense of familiarity that he didn’t understand. He felt certain he’d seen the old man before, though he didn’t know how that could be possible.
“What does this place have to do with the Book of Fennore?” Shealy asked.
“The Book of Fennore is not just a book. It is a vessel. A thing of power. Unfathomable power. And this world is a part of that.”
He looked up into her widened eyes, watching with fascination as they moved like a stormy sky, layers of slate and silver, midnight blue and clouded white mixing with her confusion.
“Until I came here, I did not understand it either. Since then, I’ve come to imagine this world is inside the Book of Fennore in the same way that the heaven of Christianity is in the sky and hell is the brimstone beneath the earth’s floor.”
Her mouth formed a small
O
of comprehension, then her brows pulled in a frown. “How did
you
get here, Tiarnan?” she asked. “Is this your world? I mean, do you belong here?”
He might have laughed if her question hadn’t cut so deeply into his heart. Did he belong here? Did he deserve this? His just rewards for a life of disappointment, of failure and betrayal?
“It’s not my world,” he said forcefully, knotting his shirt in place over her foot.
With her feet wrapped, he had no reason to keep her so near. He swung her legs from his lap, missing their warmth and weight instantly.
A strange impulse urged him to stop her from moving away, to pull her body against his and shelter her in his arms. Tiarnan balked at it, stunned by the intensity of the thought. He’d spent hardly any time in her presence, and yet he seemed aware of every breath she took. He feared that more time in her company would spur other yearnings, other feelings. He might start thinking he needed to protect her. A part of him already
wanted
to protect her. And in a land where danger lurked at every bend, where each day challenged him to stay alive—to keep his brother from harm—Tiarnan refused to let his thoughts about Shealy go any further.
He’d failed many before her. He was not strong enough to bear failing again.
“The Book of Fennore has been a curse on my family for all of my life, but I did not fully understand it until it sucked me in, like it did y’. I remember, just before it happened, three men came to see us. They were named Red Amir, Mahon Snakeface—Mahon had the markings of a viper tattooed on his face—and the last man was called Leary.”
Shealy’s eyes rounded. “That’s why you keep calling me Leary, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Leary was a seer. He knew things before they happened.” He cleared his throat and glanced away. “We did not get along.”
Leary undermined all sense of control that Tiarnan had until he’d felt like a leaf tossed in the midst of a winter bluster. He’d made Tiarnan feel useless in the face of destiny.
“These men told us the story of the Book of Fennore,” Tiarnan went on, fighting to keep his voice even, watching her shift, her skirt riding high on her thighs as she curled her legs beneath her.
“This is unbelievable,” Shealy muttered, shaking her head.
Her gift of understatement struck him, and Tiarnan realized he was almost smiling. “It is worse than that, Shealy.”
She returned his surprising almost-smile with a crooked grin that made something twist deep in his gut. She was beautiful, this woman. He looked away.
Clearing his throat, he went on. “These three men, they said that in the time of our ancestors, there was a Druid named Brandubh—”
“
Brawn-doov
,” she repeated, drawing out the syllables.
“That’s right. He was very powerful and valued by his king. There came a woman who also had powers. She had a book made of the most sacred hides and jewels, lined with silver smelted by hallowed fires and christened in blood.”
“The Book of Fennore,” she murmured, guessing correctly.
“It was a thing of power before it was ever used,” Tiarnan answered, pulling from his memory the exact words Red Amir had spoken when he’d told of it. “She cursed the Druid to spend eternity in a hell of her making, in the prison of the Book of Fennore. Here.”
“Here?” she said and looked around, as if expecting Brandubh to appear. “You’ve seen him?”
“No. I do not know if he even exists anymore.”
She leaned closer, scrutinizing him, trying to work out what he hadn’t yet told her. Her dress met in a low dip over the swell of her breasts, and her position gave him a tantalizing view into that valley between them.
What would she do if he touched her? If he pulled her against him and kissed her?
What would
he
do, if she let him?
Across the fire he heard Liam give a soft snore and realized that his brother had fallen asleep. No one would know if he acted on the need that filled him, that made his skin feel painfully small and his craving for her touch too large to contain. But on the heels of that came another thought—why did this one woman have such an effect on him? Had she bewitched him? Wary, he looked away from her.
“I still don’t get why
you’re
here. Did you know this Druid? Did you piss off this Fennore woman?”
“No, lass. ’Twas long before my time.”
“And what about the guy who attacked us? How does he fit in?”
“Cathán,” Tiarnan said with a scowl. “He is here because of me. Because of what I tried to do to the Book of Fennore.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to destroy it.”
“How?”
“I tried to hack it to pieces, but it would not cut. It is not a thing that could be burned either. I could not destroy it . . . but I managed to tear some of its pages free.”
He looked at his hands and she moved closer to peer down at them, too. She took one of them in her own and stared at the scars on his palms and fingers, tracing her nail over them. He could still remember the razor bite of the pages as they’d fought the destruction, shredding Tiarnan’s skin in defense.
“I cannot describe it, touching something that evil,” he said, keeping his voice low so that Liam would not awaken, so that Shealy could not hear the tremor that ran through it. She sensed it, though, and looked up quickly, catching him by surprise. What did she see in his face? Terror? Guilt?
Shame?
“It felt like all the bones in my body shattered, and then everything went white and the world rumbled. I remember falling and when I opened my eyes, I was here.” He looked up, met her gaze, and said softly, “
In
the Book of Fennore.”