Siobhan stared at him, her face twisted and mad. “You want my power? Take it!” Leaping back, she fired a massive blast right into his eyes. He shielded, but the searing energy of it rocked and blinded him.
Helena! Liam/Lugh screamed in his mind. It’s a feint! She’s going to target Helena!
He couldn’t see a fucking thing, but he sensed the spear that appeared in Siobhan’s hand as she spun toward Helena, barbed point glowing with a spell designed to punch through any shield.
Conal, blind, threw up Darkbane and sent all the power he had blasting up its length.
In her frenzy, Siobhan didn’t even see it coming. This time it was her turn to slam through the nearest wall. And the next. And the next. And the next.
Above Conal’s head, the palace gave a menacing rumble. The floor began to shake as tons of stone began to collapse beneath its own unsupported weight. Oh hell, I’ve brought down too many walls. He leapt in a blind ten-foot bound, one hand darting out to grab a fistful of thick mane. Jerked three hundred pounds of werewolf into his arms. Helena yelped, whipped around, and almost bit him. “Conal?”
“Essus!” he bellowed. Through the link, he sensed the bird veer away from attacking the last of the courtiers to dart toward the dimensional gate he opened with a burst of will. Essus flashed through the gate a heartbeat before he did, carrying Helena like a puppy.
They emerged in the gardens as the air filled with a deafening rumble and a choking cloud of dust as the palace collapsed behind them. A wave of exhilaration surged over him, replacing the energy he’d bled off in the battle as his vision rushed back. The lives from the building collapse restored his power. Fuck, I’m a monster.
He ignored the thought and put Helena on her feet. “Are you hurt?” Her black fur looked matted in places, wet with blood, but he couldn’t tell if it was hers.
She peered at him with a wariness that stabbed him. “Nothing I can’t heal.”
Something blazed up out of the corner of one eye, and he automatically held up a forearm. Essus landed on it. “Gods and demons,” the bird said, sounded exhausted. He too, peered anxiously into Conal’s face. Tried to reach for his consciousness through their link. Conal instinctively blocked him. He didn’t want Essus’s mind touching his. Not right now, with all those deaths lighting him up like lines of cocaine hitting an addict’s brain.
“Are you all right?” the eagle demanded.
No. “Fine.”
“Damn,” Helena said, staring over his shoulder. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
He turned. The palace lay in ruins, fire leaping from among the stones. But just before the piles of rubble, among the garden’s smoldering rose bushes, lay a dented armored form. Siobhan. The bitch yet breathed, but she was so, so close to dying. He could feel the energy of her life force, ready for him. All he had to do was kill her and it would be his.
All that power. No one would be able to hurt Helena ever again. Not her. Not my sisters. Not my people. Conal took a step forward, hunger filling his mind…
“Don’t!” There was a ragged note of panic in Essus’s voice. “You’ll lose control and become a bigger threat than that stupid little psychotic ever was.”
He’s right. Lugh/Conal remembered killing. Leading his people on the battlefield against the Dark Ones, the alien predators who’d fed on the suffering and death of others. Remembered his dying people crying out for his protection. God of Justice that he’d been, Lugh had answered their prayers.
But it had taken power. So much he’d had to consume the Dark Ones’ black life force. Lugh had never done that before, not even when killing the unjust. But he’d needed that power. And so he’d killed and consumed them until one day he’d no longer been Lugh, god of Justice. He’d become Death, who commanded the demon winds, addicted to the drinking of dark lives. Even after he, Cachamwri and his Sidhe allies drove the Dark Ones from Mageverse Earth, his hunger had continued to grow. Until Maeve and Cachamwri had been forced to bind him. And knowing what he’d become, Lugh had allowed it.
Essus was right. If he killed Siobhan, it would happen again. He knew it. But…
He stood in the throne room with his infant sisters in either arm, looking into the cruel face of Siobhan. Realized the sanctuary Birk had promised had been a lie. Seen the desire on her face, the lust, and known what he’d have to do if he meant to keep the girls safe.
A little green-haired girl stood beside the throne. Iona, Siobhan’s daughter. She had the same delicate line of the jaw, the same wide peridot eyes. But the child’s expression held only pain and fear and the lonely knowledge that no one cared about her. But as she saw the way Conal cradled his sisters, longing filled her hollow eyes. The wish that he would protect her too. There were bruises on her upper arms, finger-shaped marks from hands digging into her skin. Another bruise marked the side of her face.
I’m staring at the twins’ future. But we can’t leave. If we do, Ansgar will tear us apart. He realized then he’d do anything to protect Branwyn, Aislyn and Iona. Anything at all. And he had.
Memory spun through his mind. Shame and loathing as he smiled into Siobhan’s face, watching her relish her power over him. Wanting him and loathing him for it.
The chain tightened on his throat as the troll pulled hard, choking him, stretching him, as Siobhan’s whip tore chunks from his back even as he ate her pussy…
The bitch deserved to die. Deserve it for his sisters, for Iona, for himself. The need to mete out the justice she so richly deserved burned in him, a compulsion as strong as his craving for the furious blaze of her life.
Lugh/Conal could have turned away from the power, the temptation of all that seething life force. But he couldn’t turn away from the memories, from the countless cruelties she’d inflicted, the beatings he’d taken to turn her rage from the girls. Most of all, he thought of the way Siobhan had given Helena to that fucking troll. What Olwydd would have done to the woman he loved. “You deserve death,” he told her now as the hot power built in him. “You deserve it as much as any Dark One ever did.”
* * *
Helena stared in horror as Conal’s face went as cold and expressionless as glacial ice. The humanity in him was winking out. Oh, God, Conal, what have I done to you? The acrid reek of his hunger and black, boiling rage stung her nose like a trash fire. I’ve got to snap him out of it. Not just for Conal’s sake, much as she loved him. For Liam, her smartass, slightly creepy partner. She was going to lose them both.
There was one hope. The last time she’d taken a gamble this big, she’d turned the man she loved into a fucking death god. But if she could fix that, it was worth whatever happened to her. Reaching for her power, Helena shifted. Human again, dressed in her ragged red party dress, barefoot and grimy, she started forward.
Essus slammed into her shoulder so hard she almost fell on her face. His talons punched into her human skin with no mercy whatsoever, drawing blood. “No. If you touch him now, he’ll kill you. I can still feel him in our link, just a little. There is very little of him left, and if he kills you, it will destroy whatever’s left. He’ll kill until Maeve can raise a force big enough to bring him down.”
“Es, I’ve got to do something!”