Shadow's Curse (40 page)

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.

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
feel
dead?”

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.

With a quick steadying breath, he rolled up onto his knees, the world tipping and spinning like the deck of a ship. In between the bursting fireworks shattering his vision, he made out Badb’s feathered shape, a kneeling figure that might or might not be
Lord Duncallan, the table, the spilled bells. “Where’s Callista?”

The Fey knelt by his side, her cap of black curls tousled in the wind, her cloak billowing loose to reveal her pearly skin. “You succeeded, child of the wolf. You sealed the door.”

“Damn it, what’s happened to her?”

Badb’s gaze flickered, her lips pursing slightly.

“My niece chose death. She is a true daughter of Arawn now.” The head of the
bandraoi
stepped aside, her skirts revealing Callista’s still form laid upon a blanket. Her dark hair glimmered in the afternoon sun, but her face was white as chalk, white as the snows of Annwn.

No mark of his knife marred her throat. No blood stained the white of her muslin gown. She could be asleep, her hands placed upon her breast as if already prepared for her coffin. A death of earth and dust. No journey beyond the stars and through the Gateway.

“I killed her.” David scrambled to her side, touching her, brushing her hair from her face. Waiting for the moment she opened her eyes, stuck out her tongue, and told him it was all a prank. All a dream.

But the dream had been real. His dream had unfolded as he’d seen it a million times. He’d failed.

“You were merely the weapon Callista turned upon herself. It was her choice,” Badb said.

“Damn it, there was no choice about it. You forced her to close the door. You forced me to be her killer.” He rubbed his sticky hands over his face, blood tasting of iron and salt on his lips. It mingled with the tears burning against his cheeks. He fisted his good hand
against the rage. Opened it slowly, his gaze locked upon the silver scars interlacing his palm, the blood slicking his wrist. An idea formed in his weary head. A chance. A hope. All he had left.

He grabbed up a fallen knife, clumsy with only four fingers, but still adept enough to slide it over his opposite wrist. His blood oozed from the narrow gash. He placed his wrist against Callista’s blue lips, letting his heart push the blood a drop at a time into her mouth. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .

“Come on, Callista. Open your damn eyes. Take a breath. Something.”

“What are you doing?” The Ard-siur rushed to pull him away, her words snapping against his brain, her fingers wrenching his shoulder, but Lord Duncallan stopped her with a gentle word and a stern grip. “He offers her the
afailth luinan
. His blood for her life.”

“Death cannot be undone,” the old woman argued. “Arawn will not be cheated.”

Lord Duncallan pulled her away, his words calm but allowing no resistance.“The Imnada owe no allegiance to the lord of the dead, and the ways of the shapechangers are not our ways. I’ve seen it work and felt its power. Let him be.”

Ten . . . eleven . . . twelve . . .

David seemed to float above his body, his vision fading in and out as his injuries made themselves felt in every muscle.

Twenty . . . twenty-one . . .

Did her chest rise? Did her cheeks pink? He bent to lay his head upon her chest, and felt the curve of an arm come round to hold him close. A breath warm against his cheek. “David?” she murmured.

He gathered her up against him, her hair spilling over his arms, his kisses brushing her temple, her forehead, her cheek, her neck. “Callista. Edern, my beautiful Fey princess.
Orneai aimara
.”

*  *  *

“. . . reconsidered my initial and perhaps hasty assessment. I will allow you to stay on, but you can expect no special treatment due to our . . . familial connection. You will be taken in as the lowest novice and worked harder than you’ve ever worked before, but perhaps, if you have a tenth of your mother’s promise . . . there might just be . . . hope for you as a necromancer.”

It must have been like chewing worms to speak those words. Callista wanted to laugh at the pained expression chasing its way over her aunt’s dour face. She wanted to, but her throat hurt and her chest felt prickly, as if bees had taken up residence under her ribs. Instead she closed her hands around the book she’d been reading and smiled her thanks.

“You can’t know how much it means to me to hear you say that. But why? After all you said, why go into death after us? You could have simply let the door remain shut. It would have been simple.”

Her aunt pulled the packet of letters from her pocket, the frayed blue ribbon replaced with a purple satin bow. She put them on the bed beside Callista. “No matter your unfortunate paternity, you and I share blood and birthright. I couldn’t make up for the years I lost with my sister. I needed to try to make amends with her daughter.”

How many momentous decisions in life hinge on a single moment in a single day?

Had her aunt spoken those words just one day earlier, all would have ended differently. Now Callista swallowed around a knot in her throat, dreading what she had to say. Her heart’s desire lay spread before her, but despite her aunt’s softening, Callista knew this was no longer the right path for her. “I appreciate your offer, Aunt Deirdre. But”—her aunt frowned—“I can’t accept. You were right. I don’t belong here. In my mind, I turned Dunsgathaic into the home I never had and you into the mother I lost. I thought I could make a place for myself here, but I can’t. The home and family I truly want is still out there waiting for me.” She glanced to the window, where sunset painted the sky red and gold, pink and orange, while the sea rippled dark as ink.

“If you speak of St. Leger, he’s gone.” Aunt Deirdre’s hand clamped round the bedpost, her large knobby fingers white.