Soul Fire Read online

  “There you are, Ro,” Maggie set off again. “I was beginning to wonder. How’s everything coming for the Peter Clarke show? All right to come along the morning after to have a look? The whole group really enjoys it.”

  Rowan took two of the leaflets which proclaimed that the Weathermere Art Group would be exhibiting their work in the Town Hall—all welcome—tea and coffee available—in a variety of elaborate scripts.

  “I’ll pop them up in the window, Mags, but—” She sighed and a concerning weariness spread across her face. “You might as well start spreading the news. Peter Clarke pulled out of the show.”

  Maggie’s jaw dropped. “But how could he do that to you? What a git, Rowan! Do you have to…to ring everyone you invited?”

  “I don’t seem to be able to get three-quarters of them, just secretaries, PAs and voicemail. Don’t worry about it, Maggie. Hey, at least I’ll be free to visit your show.”

  Giving Daire another long look of interest, Maggie said her goodbyes and left.

  Rowan’s shoulders drooped. The papers trembled in her hands, rustling like leaves in the wind.

  “Your problems are serious,” said Daire. “More so than you let her think.”

  “Yes, but wholly mundane.”

  “Could you solve them if I was not here?”

  She shook her head, forcing a brave smile. “Considering the conversations I’ve just had, nothing short of a miracle is going to save this gallery right now. But that isn’t going to matter, not if Aynia—”

  He lifted a finger to her lips, silencing her.

  “It will not happen. I vow that I will not let Aynia harm you. Nor any of her people. You are under my protection.”

  Anger flared briefly in her eyes, a flash of rebellion, but it was swiftly replaced by resignation. A twinge of self-mockery played on her lips.

  “I suppose that in light of being chased by half the Unseelie Court, telling you that women don’t need a big strong man to protect them nowadays would be pointless, wouldn’t it?”

  “Then what do you need ‘a big strong man’ for?”

  He meant it in jest, but she blushed again, that captivating combination of embarrassment and desire that so became her. So beguiling a woman, so close. He reached out to touch her face, to feel her heat, her passion, but stopped himself in time. His hand hovered an inch from her face. She was only a mortal and he was Sidhe. Temptation rippled through the air between them. She drew him to her, and yet he knew there was nothing to be gained from a liaison between them, only loss and regret. She was just a human. Less than Sidhe, less than him… The fact that he had to continually remind himself of that should have acted as warning enough. But he ached to touch her, to hold her, as if she was working an enchantment, winding her will around his own.

  Heaving in a breath, he turned away from her.

  Her voice reached him, flustered and breathless. “We…we should head back. I’ll just… I need to put these up…”

  As she worked, taping a notice to the large windows on either side of the door, she slipped back into her business persona, so by the time she let her eyes fall on him again, her body and her emotions had become diamond hard. Impenetrable.

  “Shall we go back? The day’s wearing on and if you want to look for the key, you’ll need light.”

  Light. She was right. The year was almost done and the dark days of winter’s heart drew near. The sun had moved well past its peak and soon a long twilight would stretch across this land, opening the veil. With it, Aynia’s powers would reach their height. With it, he felt sure, Aynia’s guards would arrive, armed and ready to carry them both off if they could.

  Daire nodded slowly. To go home. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? He had never felt torn before, not like this. Even when Aynia betrayed him, betrayed all of them, he had known what to do. His duty was everything. He had no business being here, every business going back to fight the Unseelie. This was not the place for that war.

  But it seemed that war and his own past had followed him here. And that had brought it to Rowan. He could not—would not leave her undefended.

  They drove in silence while Daire watched the path of the sun across the sky. The wind was rising again, but he could not be sure if that was natural or Aynia’s doing. Not from here inside this cage of iron. He had never before resented the approach of twilight. Drinking in as much sunlight as he could, he allowed it to strengthen him. He sensed the growth of a nagging fear. He was going to need all the strength he could gather to survive until nightfall.

  As the wind intensified, Rowan slowed the car. Leaves, caught in the growing storm, hurled themselves at the windscreen. She muttered a curse under her breath. On either side of the road, the trees swayed in sickening lurches. Out of the fine autumn day the windstorm thundered against the car, shaking the contraption as it hurtled forwards.

  Daire made himself ignore the fact he was in a box of metal propelled by small explosions and centred himself. He could do nothing about the world outside, but when the turmoil inside him struggled against his will he battered it down, filling himself with strength and resolve. Drawing on the reservoir of power so recently depleted, he began to construct a shield. First he surrounded only himself. Then he extended it to include Rowan. A bubble of tranquillity, it closed around her and she visibly relaxed, her concentration sharpening on the task in hand. Good. More of a chance of getting there intact when the pilot of the vessel was calm. He was about to extend it again to encircle the whole car when a black-and-white ball of feathers and blood smacked into the windscreen, leaving a circular crack, like a spider’s web.

  Rowan screamed and the car veered from side to side, lurching sickeningly. She clung to the wheel, wrestling with the vehicle for control. A second bird followed and then a third. The windscreen shattered, an explosion of glass, wind and night raining down on them both.

  The car pitched to the left and plunged off the road, rattling down a bank. It jarred to a stomach-wrenching halt. The impact hurled Daire forwards, only the flimsy restraint of the seatbelt holding him in the car. Rowan struck her head off the steering wheel and lay still. The engine spluttered to silence and outside the howling wind vanished like a dream on waking.

  Rowan’s chest moved and Daire paused to check her pulse. It was strong and sure. A thin trail of blood tracked down her face, but it was only a scratch. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on him. Her lips struggled to smile.

  “Stay still,” Daire told her. “I’ll be back.” He extracted himself and climbed through the broken windscreen.

  Clambering up the bank, he scanned the road. The bodies of three magpies had been smeared across the surface. Magpies. Aynia’s birds.

  “Oh my God,” Rowan groaned. True to herself and in spite of his instruction, she had crawled out and was surveying the wreckage with an expression of horror. “My car!”

  “We’ll have to leave it here.”

  “I’ll call the rescue service and the cops. What…what happened?”

  “An attack designed to slow us, to leave us here in the open come twilight when she can bring her men through the veil.”

  Rowan clambered across the bonnet and slid down into the muddy ditch. Standing very still, she tried to take in what had happened by glaring at the car. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  Daire turned his attention to the sky. “It isn’t the dark we need to worry about, but twilight. That will be fast upon us. How far is your home?”

  Rowan scrambled up onto the road and pulled out her cell phone. “Let me just call…” Her voice trailed off. “No signal. These things aren’t worth their weight in anything sometimes. Okay, it’s about three-quarters of an hour walk, I guess. Maybe an hour.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I never walked it! I have a car!” she snapped.

  “Then we should hurry,” Daire said, unwilling to rise to her anger. He closed his emotions off to her and strode on ahead. “Be wary. If Aynia has left us an hour to get ther
e, she will have other surprises in wait for us.”

  With one last helpless glance at her car, Rowan trotted after him. When she reached his side, she fell into step with him, matching him stride for stride.

  “If you begin to tire—” he began, trying to make reluctant allowances for her mortal constitution. He could tell by the way she gritted her teeth, by the way her jaw line hardened, that it might be a miscalculation.

  “Just keep walking,” she replied.

  Chivalry insisted that he try to accommodate her, despite her stubbornness. “But if you should need—”

  “I need to get this over and done with. I loved that car. Now it looks like a write-off, and as for the insurance hike I’m looking at…” She heaved in a sigh of frustration. “Just keep walking, Daire. I don’t need to talk.”

  Chapter Eight

  Halfway home, Rowan found a working spot in the patchy phone coverage and was able to make calls to the roadside rescue service, her insurance company and finally Matthew. She concentrated on the mundane realities of arranging for pick up, a temporary replacement car and reporting the accident, blocking out Daire’s presence as she did so.

  She found Matthew, who had been in more than his own fair share of trouble in his time, less than sympathetic.

  “Was Daire with you?” he asked.

  “Yes. Still is. Why?”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing!” She glanced at the Sidhe walking just ahead of her, his attention fully focused on the woods flanking the road, waiting for the attack they both expected. Up ahead, the sun slid lower in the sky, staining it the same red gold as Daire’s hair.

  “Are you honestly telling me it wasn’t his fault?” Matthew went on. “Because you’ve never had so much as a fender-bender before you met him, Rowan. You’re the safest driver I’ve ever met and within twenty-four hours of enjoying his company, you total your car?”

  “Matt, this is simply not fair!”

  Abruptly, she heard the sounds on the other end of the line muffle, as if Matthew had covered the mouthpiece. His voice adopted that purely professional tone, though she couldn’t make out the words.

  “Rowan, I have to go,” he said, more calmly than before. “A client has arrived.”

  “This late in the day?”

  “Unexpected. I’ll ring later and I will check out your houseguest. Tell him that and watch his reaction carefully. Then decide if he’s trouble. Okay?”

  Rowan muttered several curses she didn’t think her younger brother knew were in her vocabulary.

  “And it’s lovely to talk to you too,” came Matthew’s cool reply. The line went dead.

  Daire paused up ahead, watching her, waiting for her to catch up.

  “Matthew says he’s going to have your background checked.”

  A curious smile tweaked the corners of his mouth. “And won’t he be suspicious when he finds nothing?”

  “Probably.” She fell into step beside him in silence, mulling over events, his words, the things she had seen. “Aynia sent those birds, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Magpies have ever danced to her whim. Even before she…” His voice trailed off.

  “Before she what?”

  “Aynia wasn’t always as you see her. She was…well, she still is beautiful, but there was a purity to her, a sweetness which is long departed. All the birds would come to her call. She turned to the cause of the Unseelie, and after that, only the magpies answered her. Vicious, vindictive, those birds, just like her.”

  “Why does she hate you so? What did she say to you in the car?”

  “Her usual promises and lies.” His eyes fixed straight ahead of them, but she recognised the tension in his face.

  Rowan waited, allowing her patience—small as it was—to do the work for her, to draw out the story.

  “I told you she offered me passage away from here, if I joined her. She offered me…a lot of things. And she made me remember a time long past. We walked arm in arm on the shores of Tir na nÓg, amid the orchards where the sweetest fruit is always ripe. We lay in the shadow of the Tor Gloinne—the Tower of Glass—watching the setting sun refract through its myriad surfaces and dance like rainbows overhead. I led a life with her by my side and I looked forwards to eternity.”

  Rowan’s heart beat a hollow refrain in her chest. She felt empty, drained of any capacity for joy by the wonder and fulfilment in his voice. And the loss. She didn’t need to ask if he had loved Aynia.

  “How long ago was it?” The words forced their own way to her mouth.

  “In your terms?” He frowned, working it out. “Three or four hundred years ago. We age differently to you and your kind. We…” His eyes caught hers and he gazed at her for what seemed like a lifetime. “We are very different, you and I.”

  Rowan hung her head and picked up her pace. “The sun’s setting,” she said by way of an excuse. But that wasn’t the reason for her sudden turn of speed. Not really. She couldn’t believe she had even brought up the subject of Aynia, couldn’t recall there ever being a time when talking to a man about a previous lover could be considered a good idea. Even without mention of Aynia, the longing in his voice when he spoke of his home told her how important it was to him to get back.

  She was being a fool, she told herself, but for a moment she had thought that if he left her now she would die. Not just mope around with a year’s supply of paper tissues and ice cream. But flat-out pine away and die.

  And he would leave her. Even his coming here had been an accident. Fate had trapped him and thrown the two of them together. She was nothing to him, a lowly mortal, far beneath him or any prince of the Sidhe. He was hundreds of years old. She must be no more than a child to him, an infant.

  The violence of her emotions left her stunned. She couldn’t look at him for fear that somehow he would see her pain and understand its source. It wasn’t possible to feel like this so quickly after meeting someone. Not even if that someone was Daire. But he swept through her every defence, all the walls she had built up around her emotions over the years. They fell before him like straw. And it frightened her. Perhaps, she was loathe to admit, even more than facing Aynia.

  The sun slid behind the hills and the air cooled around them. The western sky was still bright, but in the east night crept up on them. The narrow road curved up ahead, just as it entered a tunnel of trees. Birds flew overhead, seven of them, their black-and-white plumage unmistakable. Rowan followed their course with her eyes, directly towards her home. The cottage lay no more than ten minutes beyond the bend, but what waited for them in the path? She came to a halt and Daire stopped at her side. His warm hand closed on her shoulder.

  “You sense it.” It wasn’t a question.

  She certainly sensed something. From deep inside her the warning quivered in her flesh, something ancient, ingrained, a sense for danger, a sense of survival. “They’re waiting for us.”

  “Yes.” Daire lifted his face, smelling the air, his eyes half-closed like some great golden cat. “And no. They are coming for us.”

  Rowan’s breath jammed in her throat. “If we run back…” she managed, thinking of the village, or the car which the rescue truck might already be pulling out of the ditch. They were too far, weren’t they? And it was open ground. Exposed. Probably why Aynia had picked the spot. “If we run back, they’ll overtake us before we ever find help.”

  He nodded, a curt gesture, but one which told her that he both agreed with and approved of her assessment.

  Rowan felt a moment of pride before the grimness of the situation quashed it. “Then what? The trees?”

  “The trees. Do you know them well, Rowan? Can you find an oak? Or even a hawthorn?”

  She bit her lip as she stared at the edge of the woods. “An oak, I think. I’d…I’d recognise it, anyway. Why?”

  “They are protectors. Come on.” He took her hand and led her off the side of the road, into almost total darkness.

  The last place Rowan wanted
to be was scrambling through the woods for the second night in a row, even with Daire for company. She followed him closely, a shadow, letting go of his hand with regret as he pulled away and crouched down, his body a coiled spring.

  She watched him reach over his shoulder and the air around his hand shimmered for a moment, like a heat haze, before he pulled the bronze sword out of nowhere. He had hidden it, she realised, in the same way he had changed his clothes. Magic.

  The same clothes altered now, the illusion of normality fading. He no longer needed it and it wasted his energy. A line of miniscule lights spread out, and the T-shirt and jeans vanished where it passed, to be replaced with red, orange and yellow leaves. His autumn clothes blended in with the world in which they now hid.

  An oak tree, she ordered herself, find an oak tree. With Daire watching for attack, it was up to her, though why he couldn’t sense an oak or a hawthorn, she didn’t know. But all she had to do was find an oak in a forest. How hard was that? Panic rose in her, crushing her breath in her chest. She had studied trees in art school, inspired by this forest. She knew how to draw an oak leaf with her eyes completely closed. So where was the bloody tree? In the half-light, with thoughts scattered by fear and desperation, how on earth was she supposed to find one unless she ran right into it?

  She stopped at a broad trunk, wreathed with attendant mistletoe, and looked up into the spreading branches. The oak reached through the canopy, the life-giver of the forest, guardian and protector.

  “Daire,” she said. “It’s here.” He appeared right beside her, so close she felt his body heat before she saw him.

  “They’re coming,” he whispered. “Take cover.”

  The oak tree was huge and very old. Rowan managed to swing herself up onto a lower branch almost as broad as her torso. From there, she clambered onto another and lay along its length, watching Daire on the ground below. He glanced up at her, his finely structured face half in shadow. His eyes glittered. He nodded once, and looked ahead again. Rowan watched him shifting his position, like a cat waiting to pounce. He circled back around the tree trunk, each movement slow and precise, totally silent despite the leaves and the undergrowth.