Page 42 of Bane of the Wild Hunt

I could feel it now that I had stepped right into its lair. It breathed slow and deep, seeping out of the cracks between the stones and gathering into a sentient mass that I could feel hovering before me. An ancient magic which had not been practiced in Uile Breithà in millennia.

Child of fire and light.A voiceless caress in my mind made me shudder against my best efforts to be calm.

“I am not afraid of the dark,” I assured it, unflinching before the facelessness. “You have no power over me.”

A hiss, the whisper of night moving so densely that it was given physical form.

You may believe you can embrace the dark. Hide in it. But you are still a child of the light, and you too will be smothered. Flames dimmed and shadows all swallowed. Consumed by that which awaits the end of all things.

And then it was gone, slithering back into the cracks of the stones around me, leaving me with a chill. I still could not breathe deeply; the air was heavy as if the coils of the darkness were slowly tightening around me.

“Nuala?” I called, unable to help from speaking softly for fear of offending the dark again. I realized I’d need to use my other senses to find her and crouched, closing my eyes to listen until I heard her shallow, wheezing breath.

Bracing one hand on the cold, stone floor and raising the other in front of my face, I began to follow her sound and the scent of blood.

“Nuala, I’m here to take you away,” I said, repeating it over and over as I neared her in case she was asleep and woke suddenly to find a male with her in the dark.

The scent of her was an assault upon all of my senses, but none made my blood boil more than the smell of so many males on her. The mere thought of the female from my dream, feeble but indomitable, becoming the source of such sick and cruelentertainment made me reconsider incinerating the mountain above us. I would awaken the volcano and allow it to purge the monsters away.

I finally found her frail body. She whimpered and tried to move away from me.

“Shh, it’s okay, I am here. I have come for you as you asked me to,” I tried to reassure her, but I was not sure she could hear or comprehend. I reached up to stroke her hair but found it was wet, and the fresh scent of blood and semen perfumed the air again.

Fire rumbled within me, a dangerous rage that I had to repress quickly before it boiled over into devastation.

I picked her up as gently as I could, horrified by how light and fragile she felt in my arms, and carried her back toward the light. She protested, pushing against my chest and trying to twist away in weak objection.

“It is alright, little witch. I am here,” I tried again to console her, but she was unable to comprehend.

I saw Carrick waiting outside the bars of her cell with his head tilted in the direction of the hallway. I was sure to put my foot through the bars first to be sure there was no magic that would attempt to restrain me.

“Someone is coming,” he warned, but then his eyes fell upon the creature in my arms, and his face drained of all its colour. “Blessed Tithriall,” he breathed in horror.

I did not reply. I did not feel as though I could without unleashing the fury gathering in me.

The scrap of cotton I thought might once have been white was now grey and wretchedly stained. She was all gangly limbs and knobby joints with sunken eyes and matted dark hair. I saw again the hands of someone who had been methodically tortured resting on her concave stomach. The bruises I’d noted in my dream had been yellowed with age, but there were new ones ontop of them that were so fresh they were still forming. Her nose was split anew as was her lower lip that was dry and cracked from dehydration. One eye was swollen closed.

The female from my dream was neglected and abused, but she was still full of fire. This one was… broken.

“She was not hurt this badly in my dream, and I came for her immediately,” I said in confusion.

“Time moves faster here, Rian. Moments for you may have been hours to her which is why we must get back to Ahnnaòin quickly,” Carrick advised me.

I was about to walk after him, but I heard a wheezing inhale and felt the frail body in my arms tremble.

“You…” Nuala whispered in her strange inflection of Sìth Gaeilge that I could just barely understand.

I stopped and looked down to find her amber eye was cracked open, and she was looking up at me.

“You are safe,” I asserted, trying and failing to keep a tremble of anger out of my voice.

Tears formed at the corners of her eyes but did not fall as her jaw clenched hard enough to make her teeth creak. There was the fire and rage I remembered.

“Burn. Them. Make ithurt,” she snarled through her clenched teeth, her voice hoarse from screaming, her frail body shaking in her fury.

“I will give you retribution, little witch, but you are going to be the one to make them hurt.”

As much as I wanted the satisfaction of delivering her justice, to appease her righteous craving for fire and blood and to inflict pain upon the beasts that could do this to another living creature…

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