by Heather Long
Oh, if magic didn’t affect me anymore…fucking yes! I’d have to rethink my irritation at being signed up unwillingly, ’cause that was lottery worthy.
Not us?
Pfft. I had you before you finished forcing my transition. Don’t play that card with me.
True, Beautiful. You did.
I grinned and stepped through the twisted and crumpled metal and headed toward the main doors.
I lifted a fist and slammed it against the door. That one didn’t crumple. Nor did it buckle and blow inward. It did make a dreadful gonging sound.
“Knock knock,” I yelled. “Avon calling.”
Fin’s mental chuckle warmed me.
The door began to crank, the roll of chains and pulleys announcing the locks being lifted and the drop gate pulled upward, even as the doors swung wide.
Dorran stood there, a black stain of shadow and darkness surging out to lick toward me. “Fiona,” he greeted me. “My sweet pet. I told you that you’d come to me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I told him as I strode forward. The shadows writhed toward me and back, never quite touching as I made my way inside. I had to go in willingly, right? Look at me, all willing and shit. “You also said you’d be waiting.”
Wrapping his hand around my throat, Dorran loomed over me and dipped his head toward me as though he planned to kiss me. “And here I am…”
I really fucking hate this guy, Beautiful. Do not let him kiss you.
Really? That’s your concern right now?
The shadow demon’s lips barely touched mine, and a roar split through the silence of the prison, shaking the entire foundation.
Maddox.
I exhaled, jerking my head back, even as a stupid grin covered my face.
Told you. Fin sounded almost smug. Go ahead. Let the bastard try to kiss you again and see what happens.
You know. I just might.
CHAPTER 2
“I’ve learned so much from my mistakes, I’m thinking of making a few more.” - Anonymous
FIN
A really long fucking time ago…
“F uil ár gcuid fola…” the old man droned on, but Fionnbharr stopped listening on the third pass through the incantation. Gathered on the dark knoll, they waited for the last flicker of the sun’s rays to sink into the west, consigning the earth to the longest night of the year. The bitter wind cut through his cloak, but the warming spell kept it from doing more than cool his cheeks.
Not all of his companions were so lucky. The older ones might not survive the vigil, but if the goddess wanted to take them this night, then to the crone they went and a beloved journey would they be wished. For the most part, Fionnbharr just wanted the sun to set so they could light the bonfires and open the mead.
There were many fine lasses waiting in the town. Waiting to stream out to find the druids and the vates. Pleasure in the darkest night of the year promised that warmth and light would come again, and he’d like to be balls deep in a few of those lasses and get on that sowing of seed.
There’d been a particularly fetching young maid just arrived from Europe as part of the new lord’s retinue. Interesting sort, they’d hosted a feast for the surrounding villages, plied them with wine and rich meats, then offered plenty of work and protection.
Fionnbharr had attended, but had avoided consuming anything. They were the hosts. He was the guest. The law of hosting protected him, but in refusing their gifts, he kept his wits about him, even as the villagers and the other druids drank themselves into a stupor.
It was how he’d found himself in deep conversation with the lord, one he and Aelfraed had then continued each evening through the autumn. The new lord and two of his retainers would be in attendance after the bonfires were lit. Another reason Fionnbharr was eager to get on with the dirge to the sun’s death and eventual rebirth.
He enjoyed those conversations, but he enjoyed the fine cunt on a lass far more and it had been some time since he’d been in one.
“Beannaigh dúinn an oíche seo…trí fhilleadh an tsolais a dheonú.”
Finally, thank the gods. Fionnbharr flicked his fingers towards the huge pyre, with its wicker shaped effigies of the gods wreathed in dried flowers and fruited offers. The spell for fire rippled through him, and the sparks jumped from his fingertips to light the kindling. Even the stiff and steady breeze couldn’t extinguish the flames as they began to cascade upward.
A mile or two away, on another knoll just like this one, the bonfire lit. Then another. Soon, the ring of light would blaze across the whole of the isle. Even in rain, they would keep them burning until the sun was reborn with the dawn.
Until then…
“And now we drink!” Fionnbharr called, and laughter raced through the assembled. Even the greybeards gave him a wry shake of their head as they chuckled. Popping the cork on the flask he’d brought for the occasion, he took a deep drink.
The solstices were the optimal time for visions. As a vate, Fionnbharr’s gifts extended well beyond the earthly, and he needed strong spirits and stronger herbs to keep his mind grounded here.
Too many vates let their visions consume them, and he refused to be one of them. It wasn’t long before the merriment poured out of the villages and toward the hills. Torches came to life in the towns as they would everywhere this night.
Everyone would be tasked with holding back the shadows and the darkness. For these long hours, they were alone in the battle until the sun god could be born once more. The crone spread her cloak across the land, and it was into her care that they consigned themselves. But the crone had a wicked sense of humor, though Fionnbharr suspected that he’d at least earned her amusement if not her favor.
Leaving the circle of the fire, he made his way down the hill, avoiding the natural trek of the road. The first girl on his list would be waiting for him in her warm cottage, her body naked and her legs spread. She’d asked for the blessing of the crone this night, and he would do his best to see it delivered.
It was the least he could do.
Another swallow of the mead in his flask, and the world shifted.
Fionnbharr paused. He was nowhere near the hill nor the village. Instead, the woods rose up before him, and he swore.
“Not tonight, dammit!” The boon he’d asked should have been granted, but a haze draped everything. The clay flask seemed impossibly heavy in his palm, and his hands went numb. The woods elongated and stretched before his eyes, and the darkness in them rushed out.
In true dark, away from any man-made sources of light, the world wasn’t that dark at all. The sliver of the crone’s waning sickle hung low in the sky. A glimpse of what could be.
The stars themselves twinkled overhead. So many stars, the jewels of the gods scattered across the sky and draped in their finery.
Turning in a slow circle, he staggered, and the clay bottle fell from his now nerveless fingers. It broke on some rocks. His heart thundered, the rush of his blood, and the world kept swaying as the earth shifted beneath his feet.
This time, he was deep within the virgin woods, untouched by the malignancy of man. The trees were dense, but instead of being trapped among them, he stood in the center of a clearing of a grove of old trees twining together to create an impenetrable wall.
“Fionnbharr,” a voice whispered from everywhere and nowhere. He sank to his knees. Poison in his flask.
That was why he saw the shadowlands.
That was why he was here.
Irony, the longest night of the year, the night he would spread his seed to a new generation, and instead, he would die here.
Alone.
The crone always did have the wickedest sense of humor.
“Are you truly this dark and dramatic, or are you trying to impress someone?” The husky voice dragged his watering eyes upward, and he found the most beautiful woman in the world gazing at him. Her hair was the perfect color of the fire he lit, and her eyes a deeper green than the promise of spring. “I have to tell you, th
is really isn’t a sexy look on you, Fin.”
His name was Fionnbharr.
“Really? Pretty sure when I’m screaming as you drill your cock into me, Fin does just fine.”
A laugh wheezed through him, and he choked on air and blood.
“No,” she ordered, catching a hold of his face and forcing him to look at her. “You don’t get to die, Fin. You promised me.”
“Cad a gheall mé duit, Álainn?” At the moment, he would promise her anything. Give her anything. But his life faded. The shadowlands were there, and she was the bridge the goddess sent to him?
Maybe he could embrace his death.
“Drink, Fin,” she whispered. “You’ve lost too much blood.”
The strength in her arms cradled him, and he pressed his mouth to her pulse. Oh, he would die a happy man right here.
“You’re not dying,” she told him. “Do you understand me? You are not allowed to die. I did not come all this way to save you, only to have you die. You promised to put balm on my ass after Alfred and Rogue tan it, and what will Maddox do without you?”
Fionnbharr frowned and lifted his head. The vision of her splintered, and it was Maddox leaning over him. “It’s poison,” he said. “I can smell it.”
Aelfraed replaced the knight—no, Maddox was no knight. This close to death, Fionnbharr could read the flames in his aura. The beast within him flared against his eyes. Rogue knelt on his far side, and the coolness of his hand eased the fever burning in Fionnbharr’s blood.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
“Who?” Aelfraed asked.
“I don’t know,” Maddox answered. “He was alone.” Their strange accents weren’t so strange. If anything, they had become familiar. “I saw him leave the fire, and then he slipped away on his magic. I damn near lost his track the way he kept porting. If not for the poison, I think he’d be halfway around the world.”
“We can try to drain it,” Rogue said. “But his pulse is already weak and thready, and he can barely move. Whatever the poison is…”
“Nightshade and death goddess,” Fionnbharr said. “There is no saving me. It’s already trying to lock up my magic. Where is she?”
“Who?” Aelfraed asked him again.
“The goddess of flame and spring, she was here. I saw her. She talked of you, but she was here for me. I want to see her again…”
“Is he making any sense to you?”
“My lord,” Fionnbharr tried, but he could find no strength in his limbs. “She wanted me to drink.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s asking for,” Rogue argued.
“Maybe not,” Maddox said. “But he hears the spirits and the gods. If she wants him to drink, who are we to argue?”
Aelfraed said nothing, but he held Fionnbharr much as she had. His body was so cold. The fever leached away too swiftly.
“If I do this, Fionnbharr,” Aelfraed said, his tone seeming to encompass all of his being, “there is no turning back. You will be one of us. A brother.”
“I will be the best of you, but I have to drink from her.” He wanted it.
“She is not here,” Aelfraed told him. “Do you wish to live?”
Did he?
“You don’t get to die, Fin. You promised me.”
“I have to live,” he choked out, but his eyes were falling closed. “I promised her.”
The world blurred, pain filtered through his body, and it was as though the magic in him tried to pull him apart and bring him back together again. She was there, the whole time, her fingers tight in his and her eyes filled with a canny intelligence and deep, almost soul sucking sadness.
“I’ll live for you,” he promised over and over as he waged his war against death. The lord, Aelfraed, waged the battle alongside him, and it was days before he woke properly, his body drenched in sweat and everything different.
The silent room he woke in boasted a single bed, a fireplace large enough for three grown men to stand in, and a heavy thatched rug in front of it. Light filtered through a single window, but it was gray and wintry.
He was alive.
Standing, he groaned at the pain in his limbs and the protest in his muscles. A beard coated his face, and his hair had grown longer. The tattoos on his hands had changed, melted away as though they’d never been.
The creak of a door had him turning, and when the chill in the room registered against his bare flesh, he called for fire and it whooshed to life in the hearth. The explosion of light and heat was intense.
Rogue stared at him for a moment and then the flames. “Good, you have not lost that talent with your transition.”
“My transition?”
“We have a lot to talk about, Fionnbharr. Maddox is bringing food, and I will bring the wine. Then we will sit and tell you everything before you meet with Aelfraed.”
“Fin,” he said abruptly, and Rogue paused at the door.
“What?”
“My name is Fin. Our goddess of flame and spring called me Fin and said that was the name I had when she came on my cock. She spoke of all of you. So whatever it is…I’ll understand. But call me Fin.”
He would live for his goddess. Just as she demanded.
Hopefully, she would come to him again.
Not so fucking long ago…
“I’M HONORED to meet you, Fiona MacRieve, I don’t know if I said that earlier.” Even casting himself across the prison, weaving his shadow against the prison’s own magic couldn’t diminish the simple joy in him at seeing her again. Finally, after so many years.
His goddess of flame and spring.
“No,” she challenged in that delightfully husky voice. “Not really. But I’ll bite, why are you honored?”
“You’re the—”
“Fin.” Maddox’s snarl cut him off. “Later. For now, find us a route out of here preferably before Rogue arrives. This is an extraction, not a war.” The grumpy dragon had never been any fun when it came to this vision of Fin’s. No matter how many times he’d seen her or how the vision altered subtly year after year, she’d never spoken to him again as she had that first time.
When she’d saved his life.
“Eh,” Fin said. “It’s kind of both. Even you have to admit that. With the lovely Fiona here the prize at the center of the maze. We just have to get through all the mini-bosses to the big boss, and boom, we get the girl.”
Now he had her name.
“Okay,” she said, removing his shadowy hand off her thigh with two fingers. “Bored now.”
“Ha.” Maddox sounded far too self-satisfied.
“First, no one asked for rescue. Second, I’m not some helpless damsel. Third, I’m nobody’s fucking prize.”
“I can’t wait to lay my real eyes on you when we rescue you,” Fin said. “You’re delightful.”
She wasn’t ready for him to declare himself to her. Not yet. They were at two different places in this journey, but she had always been his destination. Even as he snapped himself back to his own body and readied himself to move, the single glimpse of her could sustain him for another thousand years.
But his goddess was within reach, and he would steal her from this place if it was the last thing he ever did.
More like super recently, a.k.a. now…
PAIN RAKED OVER HIS BACK, and Fin grunted. The fae doctor, Brina, with her blood-red hair and too pale skin marred by a scar that bisected her left eye, paced in front of him. “You’re distracted today, druid,” she commented, studying him. “What holds your attention so firmly?”
“Definitely not you,” Fin told her cheerfully enough. His goddess was there to save them, and that meant it was time to stop playing games inside the prison. They’d let themselves be taken in part to learn what arrangement the other originals had with the shadow demon running the place.
The demon’s continued interest in Fiona was unacceptable. As was the blood bounty being placed on her head. Their goddess was not anyone’s to touch. But she was here without Al
fred or Rogue. Her fierce, impetuous nature and damn stubbornness put her in danger, but at the same time, a fierce pride filled Fin.
Fiona was strong. She’d always been stronger than even she realized. It was time to let her embrace that strength, but with the shadow demon trying to kiss her and Maddox about to beat the stones down, it was time for the games to end.
Fin snapped the chains holding him and straightened. Brina opened her mouth to cast, but he flung a hand out and her hair wrapped against her mouth like a gag, even as she tumbled across the room. She crunched into the wall and then slid down into a heap. Rolling his head from side to side, Fin grimaced at the stinging welts.
Nothing to do about them now, and his shirt was utterly ruined.
Another roar shook the foundations.
I told you… he began when Fiona’s tart voice filled his mind with delight.
You dared me to do it again. Did you know that it actually burned him?
Oh.
Well, that was a twist.
Where are you? Her thoughts had a kind of breathless quality, like she was fighting. Oh, he wanted to see that.
I’m coming, Beautiful. Don’t kill them all without me.
Snagging a key from the unconscious Brina, Fin let himself out of her chamber of horrors and studied the layout.
East.
Every cell in his body yearned east.
He couldn’t slip through the roots inside the prison, but he could move fast. He made it to the main gates in time to see Fiona flip one guard, even as she tumbled into another. Blood spattered her clothes and her face. She had the look of a wild Celt at war.
A goddess of flame, spring, and blood…
How appropriate.
The shadow demon roared as he lunged for Fin, and Fin grinned savagely.
Yes.
It was time to dance, so he called the fire.
CHAPTER 3