“Calm down, Phelan,” Seamus said. “You’re not dead.”
“But you’re dead. If you’re here and talking to me alongside Ciar and Brighíd, who are also both dead, how the hell am I not dead?”
“Shit,” the woman who’d been holding him said quietly. “Neve, Seamus, what’s wrong with him?”
“We were afraid of this,” Neve said quietly. “When Ciar came back to himself after he was sundered, he wasn’t the same. I guess amnesia is what—”
“Ciar had that, too, at first,” the voice that was Brighíd’s said. “It got better, but it took time and care.”
He looked at the woman with Brighíd’s voice for the first time and took a sharp breath. “You’re not Brighíd,” Phelan whispered. “But you…you are.”
She smiled weakly and touched his blanket-shrouded leg. There was a resemblance there, between the woman he’d once known and the woman before him, but an even stronger echo of someone else.
Teague and Maireád.
“Marin,” she said softly. “My name’s Marin, Phelan.”
“Leannán,” he whispered. His chest grew tight for a moment and he twisted toward the woman sitting behind him, the one who had been cradling his head when he’d awakened. His eyes stung. Honey-colored hair hung in a messy braid, wisps flying free around her face. His heart gave a strange double-beat. He knew her—his soul knew her.
Gods and monsters, why can’t I remember her name? He sucked in a breath and tried to get to his feet. Pain seared through him and he fell back, caught and cradled by the woman that was familiar and at the same time wasn’t.
“What happened to me?” he asked again.
“There was an attack,” the woman said as she held him. His back and shoulders ached with a dull, penetrating throb. “You were hurt and then…well. Then Thesan sundered your soul.”
“Oh,” he said in the moment before darkness swallowed him whole.
