again, that she might know his touch even once more or hear him call her name, blew through her like a caustic wind. The emotion scoured her throat. Tipping her head back, she opened her mouth and loosed the most raw, animalistic sound ever to cross a woman’s lips.
The cry went on and on until she was jerked upright and set on her feet with more force than finesse.
“By the gods, woman. Enough already.” Clothing rustled. “You weren’t this difficult the day your soul was bound.”
Chest heaving on the tail end of the scream, Isibéal dropped her chin and opened her eyes. Blinked in the small room’s low light. She turned in a slow circle, fighting the fiery opposition in her ribs.
So the damage had been real.
Her gaze landed on a man whose appearance was hidden in the room’s shadows. Propped as he was in the corner, she was only able to make out the quick flash of his smile.
“Welcome to the Shadow Realm, Isibéal Cannavan.”
He leaned against the wall behind him, his face hidden deeper in shadows.
She’d heard his voice, though, and it was enough. Unless judgment had been severe, he would still be far more than fair of face. His beauty would be so undiluted that he would be hard to look upon, a god among mortal men. She didn’t need bright light to confirm that he possessed hair that mimicked the complex colors of a fox’s pelt and eyes so green that their very existence would challenge the spring grasses to grow brighter or forever look dull in comparison.
His body would be that of a warrior’s—honed and hardened. Wide hands. Smooth knuckles. Broad, heavily muscled chest. Gods, he had been lovely to look at, his full lips curling with seductive intent he used to aid powers of persuasion. He’d also been cunning—would still be cunning if centuries in the Shadow Realm hadn’t tipped him over the edge from lacking any identifiable conscience to malicious insanity.
She’d learned all this the first time she faced the red-haired, bright-eyed Lugh. That meeting had cemented her preference for blond-haired, blue-eyed men. Rather, one such man in particular. Lachlan. Beautiful this cast-off god might be, but he would never be more attractive than her husband, nor would Lugh ever overrule Isibéal’s all-consuming love for the man she’d pledged her life to. This god, discarded by the heavens for one violent act and cast to hell for subsequent carnage delivered, hadn’t understood her sacrifice centuries ago. And she knew time wouldn’t have changed his ability to understand or even accept that she would willingly die a thousand painful deaths, suffer century upon century of maddening incarceration, if it meant her husband would live on and find his joy. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to secure that payoff.
Lugh startled her when he chose that moment to break the silence. “It is admittedly good to gaze upon your fair face after all this time, witch.”
She opened her mouth to speak but had to close it as she cleared her throat and fought to keep her wits about her. Histories, both written and oral, had warned those dealing with Lugh to tread lightly. She had once boldly tromped into the bog of negotiations with gods and mortal men, believing herself capable of managing their trickery. She’d promptly sunk to her neck.
The god shifted enough in the shadow’s depth that he regained her attention. “I have a proposition I’d present for your consideration.”
“I have no desire for anything but a severance of the ties that bind us,” she said evenly. “Let me go.”
“Not yet.” He rose to his full, impressive height, his head approaching what had to have been a nine-foot-tall ceiling. “I would that you hear me out.”
“You would dare to ask me for, what? A favor?”
“I intend to see myself out of this prison and settle the score that landed me here, but the act of breaking free will require the assistance of one already tied to the mortal plane.” The cast-out god dipped his chin. “I would ask for your help, though not as a favor. I’m fully prepared to compensate you for your efforts.”
“‘Compensate’ as if I’m some two-bit floozy whose ‘services’ you can buy on a whim?” Hands curling into fists, Isibéal shook with unfettered rage. “Should you ask, I would vehemently decline...right before I cursed you to hell.”
The smile that had been convivial darkened, Irish-green eyes turning blacker than an ironmonger’s tongs. With precise movements, Lugh stepped toward her, the shadows hovering around him like vapor to a hot spring. “Would you like to know what being damned truly looks like, Isibéal? Are you strong enough to see what it is to be cursed to an eternity in the Shadow Realm? Would you like to know what it is to crave the heat of a single taper as one burns with a cold impossible to replicate in any other realm? Would you be able to stomach the truth of damnation, fair lady, and will it upon me again? Aye, again. For I am already there.” The subtle threat in his words provided the only warning she received before he dropped the little glamour he’d held as a shield to his vanity.
Hardly an outline of the man she remembered remained. Still tall, he was more cadaverous than brawny, more specter than solid form, and far more nightmare than dream. Semitransparent from head to toe, his skeletal form flickered beneath translucent skin that had taken on a hideous gray color, a color seen in those for whom death was imminent...or had already called. Most of his scalp was revealed, and what hair remained hung in thin, brittle clumps. But the vacancy of his eye sockets, the fathomless pits of misery that were exposed when his skeletal form flickered over the ghastly remains of his human countenance? She dared believe she could close her eyes ever again and see aught but that terror.
Lugh grabbed her wrist before she could move. “Tell me, witch, that you could, in good conscience, damn me to this existence for a crime I did not commit.”
“I—” A cry of sheer agony escaped her when he tightened his grip. Cold burned through her where their skin touched, the experience excruciating in its severity.
“I live with this every day, Isibéal. Every. Day!” he roared. Looming over her, those vacant eye sockets arrested her attention once again. “Every day,” he repeated, this time in little more than a whisper. “For a crime I again assert I did not commit.”
He released her, and she stumbled back, clutching her wrist to her breast. “You killed me.”
“I did not strike the blow that ended your life.”
Isibéal’s gaze snapped up and she searched his face, disturbed to find no sign of prevarication. “If not you, then who? For no one else stood at my back.”
“And that, my dear woman, is the point of contention, is it not? For how would you have known, how would you have seen, if anyone else approached you from behind?”
Ethan pressed the heels of his hands against his temples in an effort to silence the brutal noise in his head. It was like a band of drug-addled musicians had been released to tear through his gray matter with the goal being total annihilation. Whichever maniac was hammering out the drum fill was doing a hell of a job. The thrash-metal rhythm filled his head until the sound pulsed behind his eyes. He would give anything for silence. Anything.
Blinking rapidly as he fought to bring the room into focus, Ethan glanced at the group who hovered around him. “Fifty euro to the man who shuts down the noise,” he slurred.
“What
