“You sure you haven’t been drugged with Sapphire?” he asked with awink.
“I don’t need Sapphire to wantyou.”
“Does this mean you’ve changed your mind?” He arched hisbrows.
“About the prophecy?” I nodded. “I’m not going to let some random words from a druid control myfuture.”
“It’s about damn time,” he said in a low growl, reaching out to pull me back to his chest again. Wow. He was ready for round two, and round one had only just ended. Fine withme!
Lugh suddenly gasped. His eyes went wide. Arms falling limp to his sides, he stumbled out of the bed. Shock flickered across his face, his eyes lined inhorror.
“Lugh.” I rushed toward him, catching him just as he slumped against the wall. Eyes rolling back in his head, he fell, muscular body ripping out of my grip. I dropped to his side, catching his head so that it didn’t bounce against the hardwoodfloor.
I swallowed down my panic and screamed out the open window at the courtyard. “Help!”
I turned back to Lugh, cradling his head on my lap. My heart pounded so hard that I could barely think around the force of it. “Talk to me, Lugh. Come on, you’re stronger thanthis.”
Footsteps padded on the floor, and a twin pair of green toes edged into the corner of my vision. Uisnech let out a little gasp, and then moaned. “No, no,no.”
Tears filled my eyes at the sorrow I heard in the hobgoblin’s voice. “Uisnech, tell me what to do. No, wait. Call Axel, the sorcerer. And get all the healing nurses in here.Now.”
A soft hand landed on my shoulder. “It is too late, my noble warrior. Lugh isgone.”
“What?” I whipped my head toward Uisnech, my entire head full of swarming bees. “He’s breathing. He’s alive. We just need someone to get hereand—”
“His soul is gone,” the goblin whispered, his ears flicking. “You need to step away from him, my noble friend. The Lugh you know is no longerthere.”
Swallowing hard, I shook my head, staring down at my mate. His face was slack, but those sharp, cutting features of his still remained. Lugh wasn’t gone. He couldn’tbe.
“I know you care for him, Moira, but he will not be himself when he comes to….” He skittered back on his oversized feet. “And you do not want to be quite so close to him when he opens hiseyes.”
At that very point, those twin, dark, soulful eyes suddenly stared right up at me. But instead of the fire, the warmth, the intensity I knew so well, there was nothing. His gaze was empty and unseeing, as if I weren’t there atall.
Then, his grip tightened on my hands, so hard I swore my bones nearly cracked. And then he threw me across the room, my back slamming into the wall. Everything wentblack.
13
My head connectedwith the table. Again and again. It was the ultimate head-desk, and I never wanted to stop. If I did, the anguish lurking in the corners of my mind might rush in and drown me. Lugh was gone. Both literally and figuratively. Uisnech had filled me in when I’d woken, still sprawled on Lugh’sfloor.
After the King had come to, he’d thrown me away from him and then leapt out of the window, falling like Spiderman himself onto the cobblestones outside the palace. Then, he’d disappeared into the night. Luckily, he hadn’t attacked any of the fae inside of Castle Wraith, but that had come with aprice.
He would be lurking in the streets of Edinburgh now—stalking thehumans.
“What do we do?” I pulled myself upright and blearily glanced across the table where Saoirse was sitting, purple eyes wide and unblinking. All the colour had trained from her face, creating a stark contrast between her skin and her waist-length dark hair. Boudica, Warin, and Nero had joined us, along with Uisnech. We hadn’t filled the rest of the castle in on what had happened—yet. We needed a planfirst.
Not that a plan could make much of a differencenow.
We werefucked.
“We need to recover the spear,” Saoirse said in a low voice, eyes stillunblinking.
I perked up a little at that. “Have you seen avision?”
“Not in such basic terms, no,” she said slowly, and then frowned. “Lugh’s future as a nightmare wraith is as muddled as the future I tried to see between you and him.” Her eyes suddenly went sharp. “It’s because they’relinked.”
My heart thumped. Of course they were linked. That didn’t make me feel particularly better though. I couldn’t get Lugh’s request out of my head. He wanted me to kill him when he turned into a nightmare wraith. He wanted me to fulfil Caer’sprophecy.
“Before anyone suggests it, I’m not going to killhim.”
