Who could possibly have done this to him?
What horrid luck had befallen him?
A pounding headache hammered his temples, and sizzles of electricity zapped over his scalp.
Treachery.
Betrayal.
Trickery.
The image of a black-feathered creature with a woman’s face—beautiful in her darkness, alluring in her ways of death, seductive as a sycophantic siren—flashed like black fire, and he knew.
This was the doing of his enemy—the Morrigan, taking the form of a nosy romance writer, Clare Hart.
Blasted inferno. Bloody hell.
The pages of the Green Notebook crinkledin his mind’s eye. There was a reason he’d shown Clare the precious diamond. He was supposed to have kidnapped her and brought her here alive. His Brigid needed a living, human body—but one that could contain a Fae. She needed her lifeforce.
The Morrigan was a changeling, and he’d forgotten the most critical ingredient to this entire scheme. He was supposed to sacrifice her, and only thenwould Brigid receive the heart and return to life.
Laughter from the hollow cheeks of the cadaverous man grated like rusty chains dragged over a gravel pit. The man who’d accused him of being the Morrigan’s spawn had known he would fail. Had warned him, even as he’d helped him retrieve the Heart of Brigid. Why? Because he’d gotten entangled with a Morrigan—a raven-harbinger of doom.
The dead man had passed the baton to Griffin, and Griffin had failed right off the bat. He’d let the impish witch abscond with his diamond and replace it with a piece of worthless coal.
Griffin rallied his spirits. All wasn’t lost yet. The Heart of Brigid was in Ireland where it belonged. That was progress, wasn’t it?
If Clare Hart had the Heart of Brigid, it wouldn’t be hardto find her. She was a foolish woman who wanted to make a movie. He could entice her easily—if he could only remember what else the Green Notebook said to do.
Griffin hated the holes in his memory, but while he remembered, he’d better write as much of it down as he could. He wrestled the lump of coal from its yarn net and scribbled madly on the white slate floor.
A field of energyseized every muscle and nerve, quaking and rattling his entire skeleton. The coal slashed across the clean surface, marring it with slanted letters, unreadable as he lost fine motor control. His vision blurred, and the writing faded.
A roaring scream came from deep beneath the dungeon, and he tasted metal as if his tongue were forged of red-hot iron. His fingers and toes crackled. Electricityand lightning zapped through his entire body. Beastly fangs tore at his flesh, slicing and ripping skin from bones, muscles from tendons, stretching and shrinking his head, boiling the very brains that were the seat of his soul.
He flew out of his body, headlong through a long, dark tunnel edged with knives. He tumbled like a runaway balloon surrounded by sharp needles, poking and poppingevery nerve in his body. His fingers twitched, his hands jittered, and his skin stretched, as bones shifted and cracked, pulling out of joint and twisting into grotesque shapes.
His mind was blanking fast, losing coherent thought.
He was dying.
Again.
When he woke, he would not know who he was.
He would be a beast.
A groveling, slobbering, dirt-eatingbeast.
Alone in the dungeon.
