isn’t happening. None of this is happening.
The discordant voice chuckled, low and rough. “Oops. Seems she heard me.”
Dylan watched her with dispassionate eyes that gave away nothing. When he finally spoke, his voice made the hair on the back of her neck rise. “What she is or isn’t aware of means little so long as the assignment is carried out. Say what you will. All you’re doing is tormenting her before the inevitable end.”
In the stillness, Kennedy’s emotions began to fray. I’m just another kill. My blood on his hands means nothing to him.
True, answered Cailleach. The goddess seemed to take over her body and move it accordingly. She now mimicked Dylan’s position, leaning Kennedy’s body against the hallway wall.
Dylan’s phone buzzed in his pocket once then quit.
“Shouldn’t you answer that?” She smiled and traced fingers over Kennedy’s nipples, back and forth until they stood erect beneath her camisole. It was a ghostly sensation, wrong on every level. “No? Fine. I have an arrangement to propose. I’ll need a consort, Assassin. This body could be yours for the taking.” She held out her hand to him.
She’s pimping me out?
His lip curled. Leaning against the wall, he gave no indication of his intent. “I could do better with a Dublin streetwalker.”
“Bastun,” she spat out. “You desire her. I know you do.”
Dylan shoved off the wall and shouted, “De réir Danu, I éileamh an bhean is mo chuid féin!”
At the same time, Cailleach screamed, “Do chroí damanta go luaith!”
Power ripped through Kennedy with the force of a thousand joules. She screamed, strategically cleaved apart only to be slammed back together once the magick left Cailleach’s hands.
Hurled magicks collided midair, creating a burst of blue-black flames that wound together intimately, climbing to the ceiling and spreading out. A shockwave rocked the room and percussed their ears. The glass doors and windows held.
Dylan dove forward, knocking her to the ground.
Cailleach snarled. A brutal swipe to his wrist left it bleeding and his hand limp. Claws curled, she shredded his shirt and ripped a dagger from its sheath, the tip slicing into his forearm. Scrambling to her feet, she clasped the knife as she moved in to plunge it into Dylan’s back.
He rolled away at the last moment and Cailleach stumbled. Kennedy didn’t know whether to cheer or scream. Both emotions fought for a foothold on the tiny ledge where her remaining sanity perched.
Dylan drew his sword, the blade scraping against the scabbard with the hiss of metal against metal.
Magicks silently unfurled around them. His own softened and twisted everything it touched so he appeared to move through ever-shifting surroundings. Cailleach’s dark magick swirled around her feet, as dense as Dylan’s was fluid. The fine black mist widened even as it drifted up her legs, twining around them like some great cat.
Tendrils of the goddess’s magick bled through Kennedy’s consciousness. She struggled to dislodge the sticky, invasive tentacles that seemed determined to dismantle her, one painful, spearing jab at a time.
Cailleach laughed and began to retreat. “We’ll save this for another day. I find I enjoy sparring with you.”
Darkness threatened to swamp Kennedy, a pervasive sense of nothingness—an absolute void she was powerless against.
Cailleach faced the Assassin.
Kennedy watched as Dylan hesitated. The surety of a decision made skipped through his eyes just before he shoved his damaged hand in his pocket and pulled a syringe, flicking the cap off. He charged forward. Slamming into them, he drove them into the wall. They hit hard enough that Kennedy experienced the breathlessness of impact.
Dylan’s body pressed into hers. Their hearts thundered against each other, the stormy rhythm hammering her awareness. She experienced a brief connection with him, intimate in the silence of her mind.
His arms shoved under hers, the needle digging into the soft area between her collarbone and armpit. Dull, aching pain quickly spread as he dug the needle in all the way to the shank. He slid his short sword up between her breasts. The guard came to rest against her sternum as the tip pierced the soft underside of her jaw.
Kennedy arched her neck away from the threat and cracked her skull against his chin. A scream lodged in her throat, but she was too terrified to move as she found herself faced with two attackers—one a physical assailant, the other an emotional terrorist. The shock that he’d drawn blood, had actually acted against her without consideration that it was her—her body, her trapped inside—snipped her last thread of hope that this was all a bad dream.
“I can end this right now,” he said, panting in her ear.
“You won’t,” Cailleach purred. Every word drove that soft spot under her tongue onto his blade. “You may want to slay my mortal host, but you won’t. Not yet. You’ll seek to bind my immortal soul on Samhain, and your honor won’t settle for less.”
He kicked her feet apart, wrapping a foot around her ankle to keep her off balance. “You mean nothing to me, Crone.”
“No, but for some reason? She does.”
Kennedy’s heart stumbled, and she felt Cailleach’s smile.
“She’s the means to your end.” Dylan pressed the sword point deeper, splitting her skin wide. “You’d be an utter fool to bank your eternity on any more than that.”
And just like that, the goddess was gone, and Kennedy was falling against the sword with no idea what scared her more—the cut of the blade or the brutal emptiness of the Assassin’s words.
Dylan depressed the syringe’s plunger hard and fast. It was the woman’s voice that cried out in pain even as the goddess tried to curse him, her words misshapen by the drug’s impact. Unfazed, he dropped his blade and rode her to her knees, holding her there with his good hand as the drug worked through her system.
Smoke boiled around him and filled his lungs. He looked up. Dagda’s balls. The collision of black magicks. Ethan’s house was burning down around them.
The calculating part of his mind said to leave the woman and let her be recorded as a casualty of the fire. There would be no inquiry.
But it was the other part of him, unfamiliar and unwelcome, that demanded he discover the truth about the woman. Smoke thickened around him as he looked at her, crumpled on the floor. Violence flooded him. He despised indecision, despised being cornered and forced to choose between two impossibilities. Throwing his head back, he roared his fury to the heavens. How could he, for even a moment, believe he had a choice?
What he was going to offer her was no kinder a fate, but he couldn’t leave her to die this way.
Sweeping
