Get up, Mac, I can almost hear him growl. Get the fuck up.
The man orders me around even when he’s not present. I hang my head and try willing my rigid muscles to relax. It doesn’t work. I’m growing dizzy from lack of oxygen. Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe! I’m starting to panic.
Sometimes if you get too focused on a goal, Ms. Lane, you make an unwanted element of it sticky.
Not getting it, I’d said.
Fear of the power you believe someone or something has over you is nothing but a jail cell you choose to walk into. By obsessing over freeing yourself from the Book, you become more certainly its prisoner.
I force myself to do the counterintuitive, the opposite of what I want: exhale instead of inhale.
Air screeches back into my lungs so fast I choke. I crouch in the gutter, sputtering, panting.
After a few moments I push myself shakily to my feet.
How did this happen? How did the Book gain control of me without me even realizing it?
I look around slowly. Commit my crimes to memory.
Bits of Unseelie and human flesh are scattered everywhere.
There is no piece larger than a tea saucer.
I sort through them and, after a time, gather the hand of the man I murdered, cradle it to my chest, and weep.
4
“Pain without love, pain can’t get enough”
It’s summer in the Highlands, white and purple heather has taken over the countryside, carpeting the meadows and bens. Lavender thistles explode from fat prickly pods and pale pink wild roses tumble over rocky outcroppings.
The devil is in the details.
So, sometimes, is salvation.
I focus on the soft crush of grass beneath my bare feet, the wind in my hair as I run.
We race down the hill, my sister Colleen and I, to swim in the icy early-summer slate water of the loch. It’s one of those perfect days, the sky a cloudless blue above a scooped-out grassy bowl that sprawls for miles between the majestic mountains of our home.
Nothing compares to my Highlands, nothing ever will. The land brings me peace and joy.
Although I hear truth in lies, although I’m sometimes feared and the villagers cede me a certain aloof respect, this is where I fit. The Keltar name is known and it’s a proud one. We’re integral to our village, our people, feeding the economy when it wanes with work on our land and castles. We understand that when those in our care prosper, we’re ten times stronger than we are alone. It’s the meaning of the word “clan”—so much more than family.
Scotland is the passion in my blood. She is where I was born and will die, my bones planted in the cemetery behind the ruined tower ivy claimed, past the slab etched with Pict runes, but not quite to the tomb of the Green Lady, where the roots from the tree at the head of her grave twisted themselves to form a lovely nude moss-covered body with a fine-featured face.
Family is everything. I’ll wed and raise my bairn behind the strong walls of Castle Keltar near the circle of standing stones known as Ban Drochaid, or White Bridge, whose purpose is known only to us and where magic beats like a living heart in the soil. I’ll teach my sons to be druids like their da and granda before him, and my daughters to be like the Valkyries of old. I feel a keen sense of belonging. I know exactly who I am: Christian MacKeltar, descended from thousands of years of an ancient, revered bloodline.
The first of my clan walked the Hill of Tara before Tara was named. Before names were, we tilled the soil of Skara Brae, gathering stones to build enclaves for our women and children. Before even that we stood on the shores of Ireland in the churning surf as the clouds exploded with light and watched the fiery descent of the Old Ones from the stars. Bidden by these new gods, we removed to the Highlands to uphold the Compact between our races.
My ancestors’ ghosts walk the castle corridors on the blessed evenings of the feast days of Beltane and Samhain when time is thin and reality liminal — my ancestors who embody duty, loyalty, and honor.
We are the Keltar.
We fight for what’s right.
We protect and honor.
We do not fall.
When the Crimson Hag rips out my guts again and pain burns through me until I am nothing but torment, my flesh on fire with agony, every nerve screaming as my entrails are torn again from my ragged abdomen, I struggle to remain alive though this body of mine keeps trying to die because every time I die and consciousness slips away — I lose my Highlands.
Staked to the side of a rocky cliff a thousand feet above a hellish grotto, I breathe deep to smell the heather of my homeland, I run faster to feel the dense spring of grass and moss beneath my feet. I gather roses as I pass between bushes, and bloody hell — there was a thistle in that bunch!
I plunge into the icy waters of the loch, break surface and shake water from my hair. I throw back my head and laugh as Colleen dives in beside me, missing me by inches, drenching me all over again.
Below me, inside me, there’s a pit that’s dark and comforting and quite completely insane. If I sink into it, I can be free of all torture.
But I am Keltar.
I will not fall.
5
“We’re building it up to tear it all down”
“You told them what?” Incredulous, I pace the rug in front of the gas fireplace in the rear sitting area of Barrons Books & Baubles, which is really Mac’s B&B, but my name on the hand-painted shingle doesn’t carry the same cachet. I turn and pace the other way. After what happened this afternoon, my nerves are raw. I can’t deal with this. Not now.
He gives me a look. I feel it stabbing between my shoulder blades; the stress of that man’s regard is palpable, even with my back to him.
“Your heels are damaging my rug. It’s an eighty-thousand-dollar rug.”
I say, “You like me in heels. Money doesn’t signify anymore. And at least I’m not burning holes in it.”
Does he smell the blood on my hands? Barrons’s sense of smell is atavistically acute. I showered for an hour after I got home. I cleaned beneath my nails with a scrub brush until they bled. Yet I feel dirty, stained.
Still, I see the Guardian’s hand, the silver wedding band on his third finger, etched with Celtic infinity knots; a pledge of forever.
I found his wallet. I know his name.
I’ll scream it in nightmares, whisper it in prayers. Mick O’Leary had a wife, a young daughter, and a newborn son.
“A wiser woman wouldn’t remind me of that time. I’m still pissed about it.”
The night Fiona tried to kill me by letting Shades into the bookstore and turning off all the lights seems so long ago. I was reduced to lighting and dropping matches all over one of his sixteenth-century Persian rugs in my desperate bid to survive. The way I feel right now he’s lucky I’m not burning holes in the entire bookstore. The news he just gave me is unacceptable, and I’ve got fifteen minutes to vacate the premises before the event begins. He pretty much just said, I’ve decided to put you under a microscope in front of all the people who might be able to figure out what’s wrong with you, plus two of the Unseelie princes that turned you Pri-ya. So buck up, little buckaroo. “Well, I’m not staying here for it,” I say. “You’re on your own with this one, bud.”
Bud. He looks at me and I remember calling him that the night he showed up at the Clarin House, dwarfing my tiny room with its tiny bed, communal, impossible-to-get-your-turn-in bathroom down the hall, and four crooked hangers in the closet. My suitcase, so carefully packed with pretty outfits and accessories, had found a home in neither closet nor city. I wonder where all those clothes went. I haven’t seen them for a while.