That, and the hollow whistling of the cold night wind; the touches and voices that weren’t there, reaching and whispering from the shadows.
“Ronan . . .” The name hung in the darkness, filling her soul even if her cry echoed back to her, hollow and unanswered.
Her heart pounding, she damned her dreams — for they only made her want him more — and rolled onto her side. A chill spread through her then, a coldness coming from deep in her soul. She reached for the cast-off covers, just closing her fingers on them when she saw him.
He stood across the darkened bedchamber, his tall form cloaked in shadow. Behind him, a few peat embers still glimmered on the hearthstone. The faint, orangey glow of the peat edged the wide set of his shoulders and the satiny spill of his sleek, raven hair.
No longer naked, he appeared swathed from head to toe in his great voluminous travel cloak, though she was sure the mantle would have needed laundering after shielding Buckie and his onion creel from the rain on the long journey back from Creag na Gaoith.
Shifting on the bed, she knuckled her eyes and then scrunched them to see him better. He stood unnaturally still, and although his face was cast in shadow, his eyes glinted darkly, and something about the way he was staring at her lifted the fine hairs on the back of her neck.
His neck, she saw with a start, was unadorned.
The fine golden torque he favored, nowhere to be seen.
Only the cowled folds of his robe’s hood, gathered like a yoke of bunched, dark wool around his shoulders.
He lifted a hand and took a step forward, as if to gain her attention. But if he spoke, a sudden blast of howling wind stole the words. Again and again, the gusts battered the tower, rattling the shutters and filling the room with the cold, damp scent of rain and old wet stone.
Stone steeped in silence, its cold, lichened essence feeling almost pagan.
“Ach,dia,” Gelis cried, her own words lost in the swelling, ear-piercing din.
Now a high- pitched, keening wail, the roar of the wind blotted everything but the wild buzzing in her head and the deafening thunder of her pulse.
The table and even her pile of strongboxes melted into the floor, quickly followed by the fine stone-carved hearth and its little clumps of glowing peat. Then the massive stone walls began to shake and weave, falling one by one into the darkness, their disappearance letting the deeper shadows swirl into the room.
“Gaaaaah!” She flung out an arm when one of those shadows rushed past her, the Raven’s great four-poster bed vanishing in its wake.
She pitched forward, her bare feet and the flats of her hands hitting the floor rushes only to plunge right through them, her spiraling fall hurtling her into even greater, colder blackness.
“Gaaaaah!” she cried again, tumbling and spinning, her flailing arms grasping only air before she slammed hard onto something that felt distantly familiar, like the furred coverlets of her bed.
But the bed was no longer there.
Nothingness surrounded her.
A great dark void pressed in on her from all sides, cold and cloying, terrible in its emptiness.
Onlyheremained.
Her heart began a slow, hard thumping as she stared at him, dimly aware of the hand she’d clutched so fiercely to her breast and of the eerie quiet that now replaced the wild screaming winds of moments before.
Looking at ease in the chaos, her raven seemed oddly taller now.
His dark eyes glinted ever brighter, and he held out his arms, silently beseeching her as the darkness around him grew blacker.
Black as a tomb.
“Ronan— I pray you, stop. Don’t do this . . .” But her voice sounded far away, as if she called to him from the bottom of a very deep well.
You’re frightening me.
Those words, too, she held back, shamed by her fear.
Not that he could have heard her.
Already the blackness was consuming him. Dark and dense, it poured in, swirling first around his ankles and then whirling ever higher to slide around his knees and finally spread upward, circling his hips and all of him.
