Twenty-nine – 05

[This post is from Matt’s point of view.]

Matt found himself feeling oddly bereft as he stared after her. He sat frozen on the edge of the bed, still tasting her against his lips—her kiss, her tears. For a long moment, all he could do was just stare at that open door and the shadows beyond it, shadows that seemed to have swallowed her whole only a few moments after she’d walked out that door.

The way she talked… He shook himself, swallowing hard. His throat was still strangely tight.

Shit. How much of this is me actually being worried about her based on everything I’ve just seen and heard and how much of this is him and his memories and feelings manifesting in me?

Matt knuckled his eyes and exhaled. Maybe it didn’t matter.

Hell, it probably doesn’t matter.

He reached for his boots and tugged them on, expression settling into grim lines. Understanding this—whatever had just happened, whatever was going on with her—was important, maybe even more important than escaping.

Escaping. Shit. I should—

No. No. This is more important and I can’t deny that. I don’t think I want to, either.

The more we know—maybe if we know more, we’ll be able to—

To what?

He growled and stood up. He’d figure that part out later. Right now he knew what he needed to do, even if doing it wasn’t what his friends and family would have expected him to do at the first opportunity.

He walked through the door and into the shadows after Hecate, trying to quell the nausea that rose in his gut, the bile that crept up in his throat.

“There are some things I can’t quite control.”

“Sometimes I just…do things.”

Matt closed his eyes and exhaled a shaky breath.

There was definitely something more going on than any of them had ever had the chance to see—before now, before him.

Did Cíar know?

If he had, Matt suspected he’d never said anything outright. Maybe it hadn’t been as bad back then.

Or maybe Cíar was the only reason she was still alive all these centuries later.

He might have put some kind of bug in Phelan’s ear, or in his sister’s—might have quietly done something that got them to leave her alone.

Hell. Maybe Cíar mac Dúbhshláin had convinced them to give her a pass back then. Maybe that was why Phelan—or any of his allies—had never really made a concerted effort to kill her.

I could be wrong—but I could be right, too.

“Hell,” he breathed, starting to move faster. The hall was just about as dark as it looked, but he could see a light ahead and to the left—probably a corner. He thought he could hear her beyond that corner, hoped it was her he heard beyond that corner.

There was nowhere else she could have gone, logically speaking.

Then again, I quit living in a world where only logical things happened a long time ago.

“Hec—” he stopped short of saying her name as he came to the corner and caught the barest sound of voices.

Someone else was there and talking to Hecate.

Who?

He pressed his shoulder against the corner, brows knitting as he strained to hear the conversation he wasn’t a party to but wanted to hear anyway. One voice was unmistakably Hecate’s. The other felt familiar, though he couldn’t quite place it.

“You haven’t been answering,” the voice he couldn’t place said. It was smooth, like stones polished by the sea, but there was an almost purring undertone to it, one that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck and set a growl rising in his throat. There was something very, very wrong, he knew it down to his bones.

Whoever was talking to Hecate was someone he already didn’t like one bit.

“That would be because I am not the one at your beckon call,” Hecate said, her voice razored at the edges and as cold as ice—painfully different from the way it had sounded only minutes before, when she’d been with him.

It’s like she flipped some kind of switch.

“You waste time and resources,” the first voice said. It was a woman, Matt could tell that much, but a strong one—one very used to getting her way. “Far be it for me to question your precious plans—”

“Then don’t,” Hecate said, cutting off her guest. “Regardless, your services are no longer required.”

There was a pause, then: “Really, now? Has someone else brought you the Taliesin in chains?”

“It’s none of your concern.”

“Oh, I very much think it is my concern, my lady. We had a contract.”

He heard Hecate take a slow, deliberate breath. “And that contract is now complete.”

“You promised me spoils.”

“I promised you a share if there were any.” Was it Matt’s imagination, or was her voice growing a little unsteady? “And only if you played a role in getting me what I wanted. You have done neither. Our business is complete. Now go.”

“No.”

Shit.

Matt squeezed his eyes shut.

Just go back. Just wait for her—or something.

He didn’t listen to the part of himself that was counseling that discretion was the better part of valor. Something deep inside wouldn’t let him—probably the same part of himself that could see the vulnerability in the Hecate, the part that suspected there was far more to the witch-goddess than he and the others had seen.

He stepped around the corner and blinked at the sight of the cocoa-skinned woman dressed in a fitted gown of crimson-dyed cloth, her hair bound in hundreds of slender braids decorated by red and white shells and beads that clacked and rattled as her dark gaze snapped toward him.

“No spoils,” she said softly, her eyes narrowing. “I think you’ve been holding out on me, Hecate.”

Suddenly, there was a knife in Hecate’s hand and a fire blazing in her blue eyes. Her voice came as a low, deadly whisper, the slender blade pressed against the other woman’s throat.

“Touch him and die.”

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