Reluctant Adept: Book Three of A Clairvoyant's Complicated Life (40 page)

"Jesus Christ! They cut out his tongue? What the hell kind of precaution is that?"

As I asked the question, Maeve shook her head at Lorcán, clipped out a heated sentence, and then turned to deliver a brutal slap across the king's left cheek that echoed throughout the room, making me cringe.

"It prevents— " Drustan began and then stiffened, his arm once again pulling me hard to his body.

The king's head lolled a few times, but he eventually straightened and opened his eyes. Even bloody and ravaged, he regarded Maeve with a look of fury that would have stopped me in my tracks if I'd been on the receiving end of it.

Before I could think to protest, Drustan slid from the saddle, yanking me and Red along for the ride as he deftly dropped to the ground. If not for his unyielding two-handed grip on my shoulders, I might have fallen to my knees. My irritation promptly evaporated, though, when I considered the four shocked gazes that locked onto our location when Drustan's veil vanished.

"My lord," he called out. "Your quarry as commanded. I await your next call when you
charge me by name
."

He turned to me, bowed deferentially, and then, just like that, the master was gone—
poof
—horse and all.

But with his final words, Drustan found a way to answer my question. To invoke the Hunt, King Faonaín had to call the master by name, which was impossible now that his tongue was missing.

Lorcán, still relaxing on the couch, looked me up and down as a condescending smirk spread over his cruel lips. "My, my. Look at what the huntsman dragged in. But where is your attack dog, I wonder? Left behind, foaming at the mouth, I don't doubt." He chuckled. "Poor Kieran. He never was particularly good at keeping up with the play. Always a day late and a dollar short, isn't that the saying?" He grinned, pleased with himself.

My lips curled into an involuntary grimace. "Jesus. How can you even stand yourself?" Shaking my head, I looked at Maeve. "And you. He's your father! No wonder you've taken up with demons. You guys are birds of a feather. While we're on the subject of human sayings, here's another one to consider:
You reap what you sow
."

Pretty sure the king was finding that one particularly insightful, right about now.

Maeve laughed and placed her hand lovingly on the king's shoulder. "How quaint—
father
. Do you see this? The adept is honestly upset for you.
You
—the one who encouraged his marischal to dabble with plagues and cause untold human misery and death. The same sidhe who methodically impregnates any and every female descended from adept blood lines, whether they're bonded or not. The king who would risk everything to possess his prophesied
Anóen
, body and soul, by any means necessary."

Folding her arms, she stared at me pitilessly. "Go home, Adept. I am rescuing you from a lifetime of torment. Save your sympathy for someone who deserves it."

Her gruff yet earnest declaration caught me flatfooted and, for a moment, I didn't know what to say. Talk about a surreal moment. I'd come face to face with one of those mind-bending philosophical questions: If you could kill Adolf Hitler, would you do it? And not merely that, how about making him suffer a little too, for good measure?

Except, in my case, the question seemed to be: Would you go out of your way to save his life and alleviate his suffering?

My head swam.

Maeve had given me a choice—walk away or risk my life for a man who probably made Josef Stalin look like a petty thug, although, perhaps that was an unfair comparison. None of my sidhe compatriots had ever taken the time to recount all of the king's supposed crimes. Maeve mentioned plagues. Could the king's ordered 'dabbling' be responsible for the pandemics that wiped out millions back in the fourteenth century or something less deadly, like the common cold?

Even if it was the former, did it make a bit of difference what he'd done or how many he'd killed? Was prolonged systematic torture
ever
an acceptable punishment?

I wasn't proud of myself. The question was more difficult to answer than I'd like to admit, especially when I considered the evils perpetuated by some of the more depraved serial killers in human history. Deep down, though, when I honestly considered it, I knew, even if King Faonaín had killed millions, even if he'd been as villainous as Ted Bundy in his efforts, if I walked away and allowed these three to continue their torture, I'd be condoning their crime. I'd be an accessory to the king's dismemberment, suffering, and eventual murder and it would make me no better than them. No better than Azazel.

There was no choice. Not for me.

And so, for better or worse, I seized the king and sidestepped him out of his chair as though he were a thread that I pulled through the fabric of the universe. Thankfully, I'd gotten a head start learning his resonance while hiding behind Drustan's veil, otherwise, taking his clothes along for the ride at a moment's notice might have been a problem. Keeping his limbs steady was more of a challenge since I had to account for standing him upright as I sidestepped him to my side. When he arrived, pain lanced his expression, but he stood with squared shoulders, taking his full weight without needing the support of my telekinesis. With the amount of blood he'd lost, he had to be running on fumes, so I kept my webbing draped around him, in case.

I tried not to grimace at the combined smell of his blood and sweat or the closeup view of his gore coated jaw and neck. As I considered him, my thoughts went to Michael's suffering down in Invisius' basement at Lorcán's hands while I dawdled in the higher realm dealing with Kieran's unwanted magic.

Indignant, righteous fury bloomed in my chest and radiated through me, a welcome heat, searing in its intensity but delicious as hell. It narrowed my vision and heated the air around us as efficiently as a radiator on a gray Seattle morning. Before I panicked about how to safely release the excess potential, King Faonaín cupped his ruined right hand to my neck and turned to regard his three torturers.

I don't know what in the Sam Hill I'd been thinking when I grabbed the king. I should have whisked us back to his royal box, or sought Tíer's resonance or, even, taken him to the higher realm, away from Maeve and Lorcán and Nathan, for a cooling off period. But no. Instead, I'd removed him from his shackles and expected him to act like an honorable, scrupulous ruler by affording his usurpers due process of law. At most, I figured this would entail throwing the three of them in jail to await the Tribunal. Why I thought this would follow, after Maeve and her cohorts had essentially riled up the bull by cutting off his horns, I can't imagine.

So I had to wonder whether a not-so-small part of me knew what would happen, even if I couldn't have foreseen precisely how things would unfold or the dangers involved.

At the king's touch, an odd tremor pulsed through me. If the sensation possessed a voice, it would have said, 'Please, come to me,' but the request hadn't been directed at me, not exactly. It was an ardent, desperate plea, a broad, sensual stroke that delved straight to my core and teased my potential. The caress of this connection felt so incredibly right, so pleasurable, that nothing short of forced separation would have prevented my wholehearted compliance. By the time Tíereachán's alarm slammed through me and I realized what was happening, it was too late.

Unchecked power, supreme in its brilliance, roared through me, completing our circuit and conveying so much of Earth's potential that I lost all sense of my physical body as it rushed through me to satisfy the king's urgent need. And even though his evocation blinded me and overloaded my nerve endings, I reveled in each glorious, scorching second until the pleasure turned to pain and self-preservation reared up to slap the hell out of me. At the cusp of overburn, I tore away from his enticing grasp, stumbled backward, and witnessed King Faonaín's wrath when fueled by a briefly besotted idiot of an adept.

With an inarticulate roar, the king unleashed his magic in a single, thunderous salvo that tore open solid rock, forming a rift that fanned outward from his feet like a zipper bursting apart at its seam. The air reverberated with a deafening peal as the accompanying shockwave shook the ground so violently that even the king would have fallen to his knees if not for my telekinesis, which I'd instinctively wrapped around us.

Lorcán, who'd been caught mid-stride as he attempted to reach safety, slipped from my view as the bottomless fissure gaped under his feet, unceremoniously swallowing him whole, right along with the sumptuously upholstered couch, matching velvet settee, carved coffee table, and several chairs, not to mention much of the room's stone floor. Half of the brightly-colored rug hung over the crevasse's lip, forming an unintentional, below-ground tapestry, its trailing edge pinned topside by the magic circle, which had protected Maeve and a shell-shocked Nathan from the king's vengeance.

Maeve, now confined to a sixteen-foot diameter pillar of rock, rushed to her circle's perimeter to peer down into the depths of the sheer abyss, screaming Lorcán's name. When she turned her aggrieved gaze to her father, her blue eyes hardened and her mouth drew down to form a malevolent line. She shrieked something indecipherable at him, which may have echoed my own immediate sentiment.

"Son of a bitch! I didn't rescue you so you could summarily execute everyone! Don't you people have laws here? A little something called the Tribunal?" I shot eye-daggers at him. "And if you touch me again, so help me, I'll freeze your balls solid and then kick them hard enough to knock your goddamned teeth out."

In spite of his dire injuries, the bastard had the nerve to raise a superior eyebrow. His eyes, which were a stunning robin's egg blue, all but twinkled, which made me wonder whether he was still riding high on the pleasure of our joining or if his delight was solely due to eliminating one of his tormentors in such a dramatic way.

I wasn't sorry Lorcán was gone. He'd ordered Glen's murder and the abduction of my friends and done horrible things to the king, but knowing that I'd been at least partly responsible for his death filled me with a snarl of intensely bleak emotions that tangled in my thoughts, weighing me down. As I fought to compartmentalize my feelings, Tíer's concern, which I realized had been pulsing through me ever since the king siphoned my power, finally caught my attention, but I didn't have the bandwidth, nor the heart, to explain, so I opened my mind to him  instead.

"Stupid human! Of course we have laws," Maeve sneered. "The king doesn't believe they apply to him. Why in the oracle's name do you think we've done all this? Centuries of planning, countless lives lost, all rendered meaningless no thanks to a brainless, insignificant human with more power than intellect!"

"Maybe if you hadn't been an immoral, scheming bitch who enjoys torture and consorts with demons, an insignificant human like me wouldn't have taken you for the greater of two evils." I speared her with a narrow-eyed glare. "But your undoing was messing with people I care about. Nobody screws with my friends. Daddy Dearest here might not be a prize, but at least he hasn't tortured my loved ones to force me into doing his bidding."

She regarded me, stunned for half a second, and then burst out with a round of musical laughter. "Oh. Oh, my." Barely recovered from her hilarity, she pressed her dainty fingertips to the base of her throat. "Yes, of course—your friends. You should ask the
worthy
sidhe you rescued about one friend who has spent quite some time in his company. You, my callow, unsuspecting adept, are in for a cruel enlightenment." She sighed. "I almost wish I could leave things as they are, just to see him break you. But, alas, it is not to be." Brandishing a knife, she deftly cut the tip of her middle finger and bent down to press it to the edge of her circle.

As she began to chant something under her breath, King Faonaín's grunt drew my attention to his pointed glare.

When he attempted to step close enough to touch me, I secured my telekinetic hold on him. "I'm not your personal battery pack." Frowning, I shook my head in some vain hope that Maeve had manipulated the truth. "The only friend of mine you had access to is Vince. Where is he? What have you done?"

He glared back, square jaw dead set, and jerked the bloody stump of his right index finger at Maeve.

Seeing that fiercely pointing finger and his indignant expression, knowing that he might have tortured Vince … something inside of me snapped. I knew it was reckless to ignore Maeve, but her words had destroyed any charity or kindness I had so naïvely felt for the king's plight. I practically felt my heels dig into the stone floor. I'd resign myself to Hell before I took orders from the likes of him.

"I don't give a crap what your shit daughter is doing!" I bellowed at him, every muscle primed for a showdown. "Look at me! Yes or no. Did you hurt Vince?"

He shook his head, his blue eyes blazing at me from beneath his fiercely set brows.

I almost breathed a sigh of relief until I considered his injuries and
who
had delivered them. I fixed him with a scrutinizing glare. "Did you order or allow someone else to hurt Vince?"

His expression drew down hard, and he stared at me with a look of such righteous fury that it took all of my willpower to refrain from kicking his sorry ass right over the lip of the yawning pit.

Maeve was right. I was an idiot. I'd saved a mass murdering, sadistic monster from his just desserts. What had I been thinking?

You are not like them, love
, Tíereachán thought at me.
You follow your heart. It isn't in you to do anything less than save, even, the lowest, most undeserving miscreant from torture. A quality for which I am eternally thankful, I might add. Now, bring the king and come to me. Brassal is here. We arrived in time. The king's chambers are sealed to us, but I'm told my mother's forces have engaged the king's enemies, cutting them off from the palace. It is a matter of time before Evgrenya and the rest of Maeve's co-conspirators are routed. Soon my wretched cousin will have few resources and no safe harbor.