“He is Imnada, my lady. And the shapechangers have always been stronger and more able to withstand injury than normal humans, but it will not be easy or pretty to watch. Best leave him to Badb and Lady Duncallan for now.”

Her Ladyship had soon returned to assure her of David’s comfort, but the hours dragged and Callista’s thoughts remained scattered and afraid.

“Faster. More agile. Quicker to respond to danger. Quicker to heal,” David had boasted.

She prayed he’d not been wrong.

By rights, she should have been the one lying blooded and feverish upstairs. She had tripped the wire. The bullet had been meant for her. Only David’s speed and animal instincts had saved her from the poacher’s trap. He’d saved her life. She prayed it was not at the cost of his own.

As footmen offered and removed courses, she tried to listen as Lady Duncallan chatted and tried to answer when Lord Duncallan asked her questions, but mostly she choked down food she never tasted and sipped from a wineglass that seemed never to empty. By the time the last footman cleared the last plate and closed the door behind him, leaving the three of them alone, she was exhausted, dizzy with drink, and her stomach was more full of knots than of dinner.

“We’re traveling to Skye,” she said in answer to His Lordship’s latest question. “My aunt is a priestess there.”

“Mr. St. Leger is taking you?” he asked. He watched Callista from the head of the table, spinning his cane idly between ink-stained fingers. “He agreed to accompany you to Dunsgathaic?”

“I would have promised you a trip to the bloody moon,” David had confessed. He had never meant to take her to Skye. Those had been empty words. A promise built on air. “We made a deal. He vowed he would see it through to the end.”

“If only he offered us such devotion, eh, Katie love?” Lord Duncallan smiled, his eyes softening whenever they turned to his wife.

“Poor Gray,” she answered. “He’s been certain all it would take was the right sort of nudge and David would be won over to the cause.”

“Are you the right sort of nudge, Miss Hawthorne?” Duncallan asked, turning his gold-flecked brown eyes to her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I doubt I’m the right sort of anything,” she replied, fatigue and disillusion taking her over.

Lady Duncallan sipped at her wine while His Lordship leaned back in his chair, left leg stretched awkwardly in front of him. Unlike Corey, who used his walking stick as a gentlemanly affectation, the baron seemed to truly need it. He favored his right leg, and from time to time as he walked, his face would blanch with pain. Callista had not dared to ask, but he’d seen her noticing.

“An accident a few years ago left me crippled. Lucan saved my life,” he explained.

“Mr. St. Leger must love you very much,” Lady Duncallan broke in, her smile friendly, though there was a decided twinkle in her eyes.

“What?” Callista nearly choked on her wine. “No, it isn’t like that. We have a business arrangement. That’s all. We only pretended to be lovers fleeing north to explain why we traveled together.”

“Truly?” Lady Duncallan’s smile faded, a small downturn at the corners of her mouth, a crease between her brows. “From all I know of the shapechangers, it would take more than a handshake to persuade one to walk into Scathach’s fortress, the heart of Amhas-draoi power.”

But then, David hadn’t been persuaded. And Callista had never for a moment believed he loved her.

* * *

David opened his eyes, but this time the pain did not come ripping up angrily from the same deep well where the wolf slept, waiting. It snaked along limbs thick and sluggish, as if his blood congealed within his veins and curled hard within his chest.

“Shhh, be still.” A hand touched his brow, cool against his sweat-soaked skin. “Your fever’s broken. The worst is over.”

He should have known she’d be here. She’d been here every time he’d waked. When the agony left him drenched in sweat and raving. When he swam up from the haze of his darkest dreams, shuddering and racked with tears. The Mother knew he’d tried to leave her behind. Yet circumstances worked to keep them together as if the dream fought to become truth.

“Where are we?” he asked with a tongue thick and dry.

“Addershiels. Lucan and Badb brought us.”

“Lucan?” His heart cramped, his lungs caught on a ragged breath.

“He claims you know him.”

David closed his eyes, his theory fantastic but un-shakeable. “Know of him, but . . .” He shook his head. “It can’t be real.”

“Has anything been real since you landed in that Soho alley like a hero out of a nightmare?” Shadows flickered across her drawn and careworn face.

“What of the book, Callista? Where is it?” He sought to sit up and nearly passed out as spots danced before his eyes. He flopped back on his pillows with a frustrated breath. “Shit, I left it behind. It’s still with Oakham. Mac’s going to fucking kill me.”

“Calm down. It’s safe with His Lordship.”

“His Lordship? Who the hell is . . . oh, you mean de Coursy.”

“I’ve seen him only once and very briefly. Since then he’s been closeted with Lucan and Lord and Lady Duncallan.”

“The Duncallans? They’re mixed up in this madness as well?” David ran a hand over the tight seam of the bandage stretching around his torso and up over one shoulder. His wits returned, though too slowly for his liking. “Secret meetings. Fey-bloods crawling all over the castle. A mysterious shapechanger wandering the halls in company with one of the true Fey. Damn it, I feel as tightly wound as an Egyptian mummy and about as useful. How long have I been lying here like a lump?”

“Two days.”

“Shit. No doubt raving like a lunatic.”

Sorrow glimmered in her eyes. “Only a little.”

He didn’t ask what secrets he’d revealed. He could well imagine.

“Lucan said as long as the wound doesn’t sicken, you’ll be back on your feet soon enough. Though he did warn that you’ll have quite the scar to show off.”

“I’ll add it to my collection,” he huffed. Inaction never set well. He needed to be moving, planning, running. It gave him less time to brood.

“David, you were delirious. The burn on your back—”

“For a man who shouldn’t exist, Lucan’s full of conversation,” he interrupted before she could finish. That Callista knew of his shame was bad enough; he didn’t need to add degrading humiliation to the stabbing pain already in his chest or the scars on his body. “Did he tell you where he came from? How he survived? What the hell is going on?

Her expression closed tight as a fist, but she took the hint. She knew as well as he that the hurts of the past were best left in the grave. “What do you mean Lucan ‘shouldn’t exist’?”

David closed his eyes, letting his thoughts coalesce. It didn’t make his conclusions any better, but his head didn’t pound quite so much. “This will sound like madness . . . but I think he’s the Imnada warlord who betrayed King Arthur. Lucan Kingkiller. The Traitor Lord.”

“It can’t be. The Lost Days were over a thousand years ago. Lucan was slaughtered during the battle.”

“I know the stories as well as you do. When you’re around him, do you feel anything”—he placed a hand against his bandaged chest—“here?”

She shook her head. “There’s no feeling of death surrounding him. He’s alive—or at least not dead.”

“Is there a difference?”

Her face hardened. “Very much so.”

“But how? Why does he travel in company with one of the true Fey? What’s in that book that’s so important to Gray he’d send men to their deaths over it?” He glanced at the scars crisscrossing his palm before closing his hand into a frustrated fist. “Questions but no answers and me flat on my back.”

“Better that than six feet under, sewn into a shroud.”

Callista rose in a fluster of skirts to wander the room, a hand trailing across a table, a cabinet, picking up and putting down a china figurine, a row of porcelain boxes, a Wedgwood urn. She glanced at the fire in the hearth but then turned her steps to the window to draw back the heavy drapes. The moon washed the park in silver and outlined her face and hair like a halo.

“Why did you do it, David?” she asked gently, her gaze still upon the lawn and the far horizon where the hills dipped down toward the sea. “Why did you take that bullet?”

Another question with no good answer. Or at least one he dare not speak aloud. Not if he wanted to keep the dark future he dreamed from coming to pass. Instead, he offered her a flippant—and very painful—shrug. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She glanced back over her shoulder, her hair shimmering in the ghost light, her expression giving nothing away. “You used that as an excuse before.”

“You’ll find it’s my answer to a great many questions.”

She gripped the drapes in both hands, head bowed. “You were right about the Fey-bloods and about Corey. He wants you not because of me but for your blood. He wants to sell it. I don’t know why, but he—”

Shock jerked him up against his pillows, pain wrung a gasp of air from his lungs as if he’d been punched. “There’s only one reason to want to milk me for my blood and that’s the afailth luinan. But how could Corey know? It’s a legend. A faery tale.”

Callista returned to the chair, brows furrowed. “What’s the afailth luinan?”

“Translated, it means roughly ‘blood heal.’ My gram told me the tale of the Imnada chieftain Rinaci Hammerclaw who saved the life of Edern, his Fey-blood bride. It was too full of kisses and romance for me, but if I listened without complaining, she’d tell another story with enough battles and bloodshed to keep me happy for weeks.”

“Imnada blood is a medicine?”

“It’s said to contain properties that heal any hurt, close any wound. I never believed it and most Imnada discount the ancient stories as myth, but my grandmother believed. She said all myths contain a shred of truth.”

“That truth being that your blood holds the power to close the door into death? It’s impossible.”

“Corey believes. Enough that he wants to cellar me like a fine vintage. St. Leger 1817. Good oaky notes and a light, fruity finish.”

A log fell in the fireplace, shooting sparks, throwing light across her face, and he realized that what he’d taken for tears and fear was actually anger, a fury as red and hot as his own.

“How can you joke?”

“What else can I do, Callista?”

“You can fight back. You can make him pay for treating you like dirt. You can show him you’re not going to let him hurt you or humiliate you or . . . or . . .”

“Do we talk of me . . . or of you, Fey-blood?”

“I spent years trying to please my brother,” she said softly, though still her voice shook with rage. “Trying to show him I was worth his attention and his love. It didn’t matter. He sold me to Victor Corey as if I were a dog or a horse or a stick of furniture.” She fairly quivered with unspent fury.

He knew the fire that churned her belly and coursed like lava through her veins. He understood her feelings of futility and powerlessness. Hadn’t he experienced the same for the last two years?

“If I see him again, I’ll kill him myself,” she whispered. “And should Corey’s threats come to pass, he’d better sleep with eyes wide open lest he find a knife through his heart.”

David ignored the pain and sat up, swinging his feet onto the floor. The room swam in and out of focus, but he refused to swoon. Instead, he clamped his jaw and met her dark gaze.

“You walk the paths of the dead, Fey-blood.” He levered himself up on his feet. “You do not send others down that road.” He took a few shaky steps toward her. “Take it from someone who’s sent many a man to Arawn’s realm,” He skimmed her sides before pulling her close. “Once you start killing, it becomes very hard to stop.”

* * *

She stayed with him even after he slept—peacefully this time. His breathing deep and even, his body no longer racked with chills, his skin no longer burning like an inferno. It was a sleep without the moaning whimpers and short jagged cries that turned her stomach and made her want to place her hands over her ears. Such pain he’d endured, such horrific suffering at the hands of his own people. No wonder he would not speak of it. No wonder he carried such rage within his heart. But she’d heard other things as well. Darker secrets and shadowy dreams. And these were what kept her awake even as the hours ticked by and the earth turned toward dawn.