Chapter Twelve

The warm press of Micah’s lips scalded far more than they soothed. Brigid straightened like someone had applied a hot poker to her skin, and let out a breath between her teeth. Hours now, she’d poured over her mother’s writing, finally realizing that the book was bound incorrectly. The runes didn’t make concurrent sense. Trying to find logic in the ancient language had given her a doozy of a headache.

Worse, each minute that ticked by sent the dark half of her soul into a rage. Between the fierce demand that she destroy this powerful ritual and the overwhelming awareness of Micah’s sudden presence, her ability to control her father’s blood rapidly diminished. If Micah touched her again, if he put that incredible mouth on her skin once more, she didn’t trust herself not to turn around and claw out his eyes.

“Don’t…touch…me,” she ordered in a near whisper.

He drew back in a flash. The mattress bounced as he shoved off the bed. “You know—the hot and cold I can do without. Either you want me, or you don’t, Brigid.”

Want him? Had the man lost all his marbles? He knew what she was, what curse loomed over her head. Of all people, Micah should understand that her request had nothing to do with what she wanted, or how desperately she craved his touch.

She twisted to look at him to explain. But the look of hurt on his handsome face only made her grimace. “Micah…” By the sacred ancestors, she didn’t want to cause him pain.

“What, Brigid?”

The sharp edge to his voice as he moved toward the door doubled Brigid’s anguish. She lifted her lashes and met his brittle blue eyes. Silently, she pled for him to understand. Prayed he would read the words in her expression that she didn’t know how to voice. In all her life, she’d never told a soul she loved them. Not her mother, her sire, nor her siblings. She didn’t know how to spit out a phrase so foreign and so damnably forbidden.

He held her stare, questioning her with the same silence.

She swallowed, and the noose around her throat gave a fraction. “I…don’t want you…to go.”

Confusion erased the harshness of his frown. His gaze dipped to her shaking hands, the paper she held between her fingers. When he looked at her once more, his eyes widened, and he took a protective step back.

He understood. Thank the stars, he understood. But then, Micah had been understanding her on levels she hadn’t been aware of for longer than she’d realized.

Brigid let out the breath she’d been holding. Her throat relaxed. “I need you to set the wards in this room. Please. Drandar is close. He knows I have the spell.”

Micah didn’t move, but his attention jumped to the window.

“The sabot is tonight, Micah. Please, ward my room.”

With a slight shake of his head, his focus returned, and he crossed to the window. Brigid turned her attention back to her mother’s writing, forcing both halves of her soul to ignore Micah’s dominant presence. How she ached to touch him. But touching him when her spirit churned like this—he’d be better served by warding himself against her.

His voice rumbled at her side. “What else do you need, sweetheart?”

“Herbs. Dozens.” Brigid picked up the first page and rattled off the list. “Dragonsblood, garlic, heliotrope leaves, mullein leaves, pennyroyal, peppermint, strips of birch from the tree closest to the henge.” She looked up with a tentative smile. “Most of the rest are in the garden that’s overgrown. You know what they are, right?”

****

Oh, Micah knew—he also knew what collecting that list of herbs meant to the both of them. He edged his hip onto the mattress, and despite her earlier warning, tucked her hair away from her face. “Are you really going through with this?”

It pained him just to ask. For months now he’d waited for this moment, for her to find her courage and stand against Drandar and her fears. But now that it was here…

Blocking the hollow ache that set into his heart, he held her gaze, unwilling to hear her answer, unable to pretend the sabot would come and everything would be normal between them. It wouldn’t be. Not with her curse.

Brigid dipped her chin and stared at her lap. Time stood still as he watched the emotion pass over her profile, the war that she battled within herself. Seconds became unbearable, harbingers to the fate he must now embrace. To the truth he couldn’t bring himself to confront.

She lifted her gaze, and those amber eyes poured out emotion. Love, tenderness, and longing reached in to squeeze his insides into a tight vise. The fierce urge to crush her in a hug swept over him. Only her warning not to touch him, the subtle confession that she felt the calling of her sire’s dark omen, kept him from following through on the need.

Making not touching her all that much more impossible, Brigid’s eyes misted with a fine sheen of moisture. He had to strain to hear her whisper.

“I won’t come back, Micah. You know that.”

Like someone had shoved a knife into his midsection, he bled. He hadn’t even considered that aspect of the ritual, the part where she must stand before the ancestors in hopes they would allow her to return as a mortal. But the moment her words registered, he knew the answer. No, she wouldn’t. She would give her life for this ritual and stand before her ancestors, forced to confront the darkness she had lived. There was no balance when it came to Brigid. No weighing her past against her possible future that could work to her advantage.

Swallowing down a hard lump in his throat, he brushed a stray tear from her cheek. She leaned away from his touch. But her gaze held his, swimming with tender affection.

“If I stay…you know what else will happen.”

She would kill him. Because, somehow, somewhere in this crazy mess of things, Brigid had lost her heart. She’d fallen in love with him, every bit as much as he was in love with her. And damn it all, he’d lose her tonight, without ever saying the words.

Not that they were necessary. She knew. He knew. They wouldn’t be sitting here with the spell, he memorizing her list of ingredients, she asking him to ward the room from Drandar, otherwise.

Sometimes, words just made everything more painful.

Nodding, he quietly rose to his feet. “I’ll be back in a little while.” Halfway across the room, the whisper of her voice drew him to a halt.

“Thank you, Micah.”

Sheer force of will allowed him to walk through the door. He bit heartache back with a grimace and refused to acknowledge the hot sting in the corners of his eyes. She shouldn’t be thanking him. He’d pushed. He’d forced her to confront the secrets of her soul.

Damn it, he didn’t want this on his shoulders. He didn’t want to be the cause of Brigid’s death.

If Fintan could have accepted she was different. If he hadn’t insisted Micah act as guard, if he’d chosen someone else…

Jealousy gnawed at Micah. If Fintan had chosen someone else, another man could know the beauty Brigid seldom revealed. Another man would know the sweet heaven of her body, the immortality of her kiss.

No. Someone else was entirely unacceptable. But goddamn, Micah had never expected to fall in love. Never imagined he could know such unending pain.

He made his way through the castle, lost in a haze of conflicted emotion. She couldn’t exist this way. He couldn’t ask her to die.

“Micah!” Fintan hailed from his office.

Micah kept going, down the hall, out the rear entrance to the overgrown garden. For thirty-five years, Micah had celebrated the sabots, rejoiced with each one and anxiously awaited the next. He’d thrilled in the escalating power as the days drew nearer, savored the way his own powers increased. Now, with the high hour of Litha upon them, he despised the rising energy that washed over his skin.

And to his shame, a small portion of his spirit despised the friend that had placed him in this mess. That Fintan had faced his own death, that he had suffered the same curse that now enveloped Brigid meant nothing. He had always held a chance of survival. His greater goods here in Scotland, aiding his plight with the ancestors.

Fintan didn’t even hesitate over the fact he would lose his sister eternally if she embraced Nyamah’s will.

Then again, Micah supposed Fintan wouldn’t. After all, Brigid had shown him zero empathy and had done everything in her power to keep him subjected to the curse. Bad blood flowed between them, and five hundred years of sharing the same household couldn’t forge that necessary bridge.

Micah expelled a heavy sigh as he entered the garden. His gaze swept over the overgrown plants, the weeds that rooted in amongst the powerful herbs. In his mind’s eye, he saw another time, another place. A day three years ago when he’d stopped in to pay his neighbors a visit, and Brigid was on hands and knees, up to her eyeballs in dirt out here. Tending the one thing that could never harm her, Micah now realized.

Funny how no one had realized her gentleness in all this time.

No one but him.

Clenching his teeth, he bent over a mound of peppermint that threatened to take over the garden and yanked a handful free.