“Laoise couldn’t have given her a wider berth?” he growled at Wayland. “At this rate, my wife will be bald.”
“Scold Laoise later.” Wayland’s glance was barbed with agitation. “Much as it pains me, we must now heedyouradvice.Run.”
The other man set a brisk pace, following the path of Laoise’s incendiary carnage. Half-burnt bones caught at Irian’s boots; red embers flared up to die on his clothes. Black smoke scrawled over the darkening sky and seared his eyes. It was slow going. And beyond the blackened path, the dead shambled, drawing ever closer.
Irian set his jaw, nestled Fia closer, and drove forward.
At last Wayland burst through the wall of smoke, Irian a half step behind. Beyond, figures writhed. He tensed. But they coalesced into a handful of wheeling aughiskies, Abyss among them—limping but alive. A tall, lithe girl wielding twin daggers. A vast Fomorian blotting out the burn of new stars against the charcoal of dusk.
Irian strode toward Abyss, but Linn moved brusquely in front of him, sliding her slender head beneath Fia’s mass of scorched hair and snapping her shark’s teeth at him. The picture she burned into his mind was unmistakable: Abyss faltering once more beneathIrian and Fia’s joined weight, before being parceled up and dined upon by the ravening dead.
“But I swore—” The promise Irian had made Fia felt as ancient as this battlefield in his mind, as scorched and desiccated as the corpses marching mindlessly toward their point of dwindling escape. He had relinquished her before. Why did it never get any easier?
Linn shoved her muzzle into his solar plexus.
He took the hint. Lifted Fia in front of Sinéad, who anchored the other woman’s frame with her cloak. Grasped Linn’s black-oil mane, levered himself onto her back. A conflagration of red flame exploded behind the group, startling them all into a gallop.
They rode for the hills.
Night swallowed them in its toothless mouth. Eventually, Laoise’s anam cló swooped in a glittering arc to collapse upon the dirt. She staggered upward in her Gentry form, her limbs trembling and her face gaunt, as if she had aged a century in the span of hours.
Irian had spent a great deal of time in his anam cló, both warped by wild magic and not. Even the simplest shapeshifting took its toll. He could not fathom what it must have cost Laoise to fight off the undead horde, to summon those incredible swaths of fire from her deepest self.
He dismounted. Supported Laoise by her scalding forearms. Interrupted her before she could protest.
“I will walk,” he said. “You will rest.”
Not even Linn protested the arrangement. Laoise mounted with difficulty, then laid herself over the water horse’s withers, twined fingers in her mane, and promptly fell unconscious.
They struggled upward over uneven shale and jagged foothills. At last, the moon rose, bright enough to ease their path.
As it laddered above them, Fia began to change.
She transformed without warning into a wildcat. Pale skin sprouted dense layers of striped fur; vicious claws sharpened on batting paws; her face exploded into a hissing whiskered maw studded with sharp white teeth. Sinéad cried out—Irian thought she must have begun to doze. She struggled to hold on as claws caught her across the temple, raising livid lines of red upon her skin.
Irian lunged for the women. Balor beat him to it, neatly scooping the yowling, scratching creature Fia had become into his massive fist.
“I can take her,” Irian growled, relief and worry pounding through him. “Please. Let me have my wife.”
“She is perfectly well, lord,” rumbled the giant cheerfully as the wildcat continued to strain and shriek in his implacable grasp. “Besides, I love cats.”
They trundled onward. When the moon passed its zenith, Irian sent a flurry of zephyrs scouting back the way they had come. They teased over rocky outcroppings, slivered between troughs of still-smoldering flame, brushed over the desiccated notches of scorched spines and blackened bones. Nothing moved—not for three leagues in any direction.
For the first time in nearly a month, the blistering thrum of Eala’s magic felt faded. Far away.
“We have not been followed,” Irian announced. “Balor—my wife, if you will. It is time we made camp.”
He wished he had said it out of concern for them. He had not.
The secret Irian had kept for the better part of the last month blustered through him, suffusing him with dread.
It had happened not on the first night after the Longest Night, nor even on the second, but on the third night, when they camped cold beneath snow-draped trees that cracked and fell beneath the weight of ice. In the hour before dawn, after transforming without respite from hawk to hound to serpent, Fia went deathly still in Irian’s arms. Irian’s gaze rode the horizon, where faint pinkstreaked a leaden sky. Worry tangled with relief in the exhausted arsenal of his muscles; briefly, he relaxed.
Fingers too hot for the frigid night trailed up his chest to tangle in his hair. A mouth that moments ago had been fanged glided along the column of his throat to breathe sultry against the shell of his ear. Legs smooth as silk slung around his waist.
Hope pummeled him. Gods alive, but he hadknownnot even a Bright One was a match for Fia’s strength. “Mo chroí?”
She arched above him, her hips surging over his. His response was reflexive—his body hardening as his hands braced at the divot of her waist, barely sparing a thought for their compatriots slumbering nearby. Reflected moonlight glazed her curves and sharpened her features as Fia leaned down to kiss him. Her fingernails dragged at the ties of his shirt as her mouth met his, lips eagerly parting.
