he spun and staggered as he ripped at the shimmering form with his short blade.
“Show yourself,” he demanded, chest heaving.
The visual disturbance winked out, leaving behind record of neither its presence nor its passing. Innocuous dust motes danced on the air where the thing had been.
Like every other time he’d demanded a confrontation with whatever it was that followed him, he experienced a moment of awareness, a sense of soul-wrenching despair, before abject solitude wound its way around and through him, strangling limbs and organs and emotions without differentiation. Every bit of him was put through the wringer and left feeling crushed.
As he rubbed his sternum, Ethan’s wild gaze skipped around the hallway, floor to ceiling. “If I trip and fall and get murdered, I’m filing a grievance with management.” Irritation saturated his mutterings as he whirled away from the emptiness and resumed the trek to his rooms.
That he’d been reduced to what felt like the sacrificial starlet doomed to be the first one taken out really pissed him off. Sure, he loved a good slasher flick as much as the next guy, but he strongly preferred fiction to fact when personal threat was involved. This real-life emotional-torture-cum-horror-fest was messing him up. All he needed to round out his physical retreat was a tension-building score filled with haunting piano music accompanied by ominous strings. Maybe pipe organs...
“Organs.” He snorted. “Bad word choice.”
A huge shadow rose in his peripheral vision.
Ethan’s lungs seized as if a massive, invisible hand had gripped the pair and squeezed them like they were the leather bags on a bagpipe. A choked wheeze of alarm was the most he could manage. Whatever was stalking him had never rematerialized so fast and with such density. Intent on rending that shadow in two, Ethan swung out.
His short blade met the heavy metal of a proper sword, the shock singing up his arm until his nerves vibrated like a tuning fork. His hand spasmed and his dagger fell to the stone floor, striking with a metallic clatter.
“Shit!” He cradled his numb arm to his chest and glared into the shadowy alcove. “You scared the ever-living hell out of me.”
“The gods of light and life will be glad to hear it.” A dark looked passed over Rowan’s face. “If you intend to strike out at a larger man carrying a much bigger sword, you need to either arm yourself better or get faster. Preferably both.”
Ignoring the chastisement, Ethan let a slow, wicked grin spread over his face even as he fought to bank the fury he knew filled his eyes. “Frankly? I’m more interested in what you’re doing tucked away in a lovers’ alcove with nothing but your sword than I am in hearing you criticize my mad fighting skills.”
“It’s not a lovers’ alcove, witchling. It’s an archer’s lookout.” Rowan stared down the hall in the direction Ethan’s mysterious stalker had disappeared. “As for the other, I was doing exactly as you asked—trying to see if whatever it is that you claim is following you might be visible to me in the spirit realm.”
“Tell me you finally saw it.” Coarse and strained, Ethan’s demand sounded like it had been squeezed through a vise.
Rowan’s nostrils flared. Then he gave a single, sharp dip of the chin.
Hope warred with terror. Ethan wanted—needed—to know what was going on. With the banished and damned gods rallying as the Shadow Realm’s power shifted, the appearance of this otherworldly stalker had him unnerved. He waited on Rowan to speak.
Nada. Nothing. Niet.
The assassin just continued to stare down the hall, his eyebrows drawn together.
Ethan scooped up his dagger and, to hide his trembling hand, gestured with the blade as he spoke. “Tell me, or the next time you end up in the infirmary, I’ll set up an account and profile for you on www.hotmenofDublin.com and tie the account to your phone so it posts your location...no matter where you are.”
He fought to keep from flinching when the man’s arctic-blue gaze refocused and landed solidly on him. The vacancy in those eyes made it seem like Rowan was no more than a husk of a man. A shell. Soulless. His response did little to dispel the impression. “I’d refrain from referring to the being as an ‘it.’”
Ethan tried not to grin and failed. “You’re telling me I’ve picked up a...what? A ghost? As in, an incorporeal stalker?”
“Of a sort.”
Grin fading, Ethan couldn’t stop the sudden buzzing in his ears. “What ‘sort,’ exactly? And how do I get rid of it?”
“‘It’ is a woman,” Rowan answered softly. “And I’m not sure you want to be rid of her.”
“Why?” The buzzing grew louder as something heavy pressed against the corners of Ethan’s mind.
“Because it would seem she’s your wife.”
* * *
Isibéal Cannavan quite literally hovered around the corner and out of sight of the assassin with the terrifying eyes. The man had seen her. Could see her. But that wasn’t what had scattered her so and left her suffering with uncontrollable palsy. She’d touched the man now known as Ethan. The man she knew as Lachlan. And the terrifying man who could see her had either heard her or read her lips when she uttered that cherished yet damning word. “Husband.”
Nor was her admission what had sent her careening down the hall. All she had wanted was to touch Lachlan. Nothing more. So, after summoning every ounce of will she possessed, she had concentrated on Lachlan’s bare neck. And she’d done it, had felt him. But the very second the sensation registered, an excruciating pain had ripped through her and torn an involuntary, albeit soundless, scream from her throat. Nothing, not even the sword strike that had taken her life, had ever hurt so badly. She had been catapulted away from him as if she’d taken a far more violent blow to the midsection. Even now her hands hovered over the sight of the original deathblow. She looked down, half expecting to find blood staining her gown.
There was nothing there.
Isibéal rubbed one thumb and forefinger together, still convinced it should be blood-slicked. Her other hand she held clamped against her side. Despite the fact that she didn’t need to breathe, her chest heaved. Pain still ricocheted through her, pinging about like a maddened hornet trapped in a jar. It was of no consequence, seeing as she refused to regret her actions. She wished with fierce intensity that she’d been able to retain the sensation of Lachlan’s warmth. A fitting reward that would have been worth the lingering pain. Such was not to be. Touching her husband had taken every ounce of available concentration and more than that in bravery to master her form and create the brief connection. To retain it would have taken the very thing she did not possess.
A mortal body.
That she would never again realize the intimate feel of Lachlan’s form sliding beneath her hands, stroke the stubble along his jaw, experience his lips against hers or his arms cradling her... The realization, both compounded and comprehensive, had been enough to do what the pain had not done, driving her from the keep.
She raced to the cliffs, teetering to a stop inches from the edge.
Wind whipped through her.
Her
