Carrick shakes his head. “I’ve always doubted it. Zaid, too. At any rate, he stole Mala away and forced her to live with him. Eventually, she became pregnant and bore him a son. They named him Zaid.”
“Stole her away,” I whisper hesitantly. “I’m taking it she wasn’t a willing participant in any of that relationship?”
“No,” Carrick replies gently. “Boral raped her for hundreds of years before and after Zaid was born. I think she stayed after Zaid was born in the hopes she’d have fulfillment from her child, but Zaid grew up to be more like his father than not. When he reached maturity, he marauded and ravaged right along with his father.”
“Oh, no,” I gasp, never thinking Zaid would do something like that.
“Mala couldn’t take it, so she escaped to Faere, and, for hundreds and hundreds of more years, Zaid became just as evil as his father. They raped, murdered, and maimed their way around the world, most of the time for no reason at all. Serial killers, really. Eventually, as civilization progressed, Boral became more of an entrepreneur, utilizing his skills to make a fortune. He was like the ancient version of a mobster, but still just as likely to kill for no reason at all.”
“I just can’t believe Zaid would be that way.” In fact, it turns my stomach because, despite his nasty attitude at times, I realize I’ve come to care for the stupid daemon.
“It was several lifetimes ago,” Carrick murmurs.
My head lifts off his shoulders. “That’s right. And he clearly didn’t stay with his father. And his aura has lightened, so I have to assume something changed.”
“Indeed. The terrible thing for Zaid was while he was following his father’s nature, which was half of what he was made of, he also had his mother’s half, which is an empath. So every time he committed a brutal act, it weighed on him. Maybe not a lot at first, but, over the years, it built up until he was almost mad with guilt.”
“So what changed? How did his aura start to turn light again?”
Carrick doesn’t answer right away, his arm around me tightening a bit. “Late in the 8th century, I was living on the east coast of Ireland, just north of Dublin, helping the monarchy to repel Viking raiders.”
“You had said that was your favorite time period to live in,” I murmur, wondering what life was actually like back then. “Were you ordered by the gods to do this?”
“I was,” he replies candidly. “I lived there quite a long time, and I came to love it as a true home. At any rate, I was hunting on my lands—which were vast—one day, and I found Zaid nearly dead. He was really deep in the woods, in an area of my land I hardly traveled through that was completely devoid of any humans. I found him impaled to a tree through the stomach with a large iron spike, another through his throat. He was emaciated to the point of nothing but skin on bone, so I knew he’d been there a long time.”
Nausea rolls through me. “Like how long?”
“Almost two years.”
“Oh my God. Who would do such a thing?”
“He did it to himself,” Carrick says, and I bolt straight up, going to one arm and angling to gape down.
“He did what?” I almost screech.
“He couldn’t take the guilt anymore,” Carrick explains gently. “So, he left his father far behind, traveled to a new land, found the deepest, most uninhabited woods he could, and impaled himself on that tree.”
“He was so despondent that he tried to kill himself,” I murmur, glancing away from Carrick to the windows. The sky is gray with rain.
“No,” Carrick corrects me, and my gaze comes back to him. “He was punishing himself. Daemons, like fae, can only be killed with iron to the heart or brain. He pinned himself to that tree, determined to live his immortal life there in penance for what he’d done.”
Tears immediately well up in my eyes. “Oh, Zaid.”
Carrick pulls me back down into his arms, pressing a kiss to my head. “I took him off that tree and brought him home with me. Nursed him back to health. And he’s been by my side ever since.”
“Was he mad you took him down?” I venture a guess.
“Oh, yeah,” Carrick chuckles in response. “For several years, that asshole kept trying to find ways to hurt himself again.”
“But you convinced him he was worth saving?” I ask, my heart fluttering for this man.
Carrick bashes my romantic notions. “Let’s just say I put him to work and I made sure he did a lot of good deeds. Little by little, over centuries, his aura turned from black to gray. But don’t ever think that all those things he did don’t still press down on him to this day. I don’t think we’ll ever see his aura turn white.”