“A man would have to be mad to slit his own mother’s throat, then drink her blood.”
“That’s purely disgusting,” Meara decided. “And still if we’re going to hear about it, I’d rather hear all at once, and when we’re all sitting down.”
“That’s the way. Fin, put on your sweater now so you can sit at the table like a civilized man.” Mary Kate handed him the sweater. “I’ll just look around the kitchen, Branna, see what you might have I can put together, as I’ll bet everyone could do with a bit of food.”
While Mary Kate put together a wealth of leftovers from the Christmas feast, Branna sat—relieved not to be doing the fixing—so she and Fin could tell the story.
“His own mother.” Shaking his head, Boyle picked up one of the pretty sandwiches Mary Kate put together.
“Just a woman, and old, so he said. He had no feelings for her. There was nothing in him for her. There was nothing in him,” Fin continued, “but the black.”
“You heard what spoke to him.”
Frowning, Fin turned to Branna. “You didn’t?”
“Only a humming, as we heard when we got there, when we went into the cave. A kind of . . . thrumming.”
“I heard it.” Absently, Fin rubbed at his shoulder, at the mark. “The promises for more power, for eternal life, for all Cabhan could want. But to gain it, he had to give more. Sacrifice what was human in him. It started with the father.”
“Do you know it or think it?” Connor asked him.
“I know it. I could see inside his head, and I could feel the demon trapped in the stone, and its needs, its avarice. Its . . . glee at knowing it would soon be free again.”
“Demon?” Meara picked up the wine she’d opted for. “Well now, that’s new—and terrifying.”
“Old,” Fin corrected. “Older than time, and it waited until it found a vessel.”
“Cabhan?”
“It’s still him,” Fin told Boyle. “It’s Cabhan right enough, but with the other a part of him, and hungry always for power and for blood.”
“The stone’s the source, as we thought,” Branna continued. “It came from the blood of the father and the mother Cabhan sacrificed for power. Conjuring it, pledging to it, he took in this . . . well, if Fin says demon, it’s a demon right enough.”
“Why Sorcha?” Iona wondered. “Why was he so obsessed with her?”
“For her beauty, and her power, and . . . the purity, you could say, of her love for her family. He wanted, craved the first two, and wanted to destroy the last.”
Fin rubbed his fingers on his temple, attempting to ease the pounding still trapped inside his head.
“She rejected him, time and again,” he continued, though the pounding refused to be abated. “Scorned him and his advances. So he . . .”
Surprised when Mary Kate stepped behind him, stroked her hands along temples, along the back of his neck where he hadn’t realized more pain lodged, he lost his thread.
And the headache drifted away.
“Thank you.”
“You’re more than welcome.”
She gave him a grandmotherly kiss on the top of the head before she sat again. It flustered him, and showed him just where Iona got her kind and open heart.
“Ah. His lust for her, woman and witch, became obsession. He would turn her, take what she had, and he believes no spell, no magicks can stop him, can touch him. Her power could cause him harm, threaten his existence, and her rejection burned his pride.”
“Then there were three,” Branna calculated. “And with the three the power, and the threat, increases. We can end him.”
“In that moment, in the cave, when he took in the demon, and the black of it, he believed nothing could or ever would. But what’s in him knows better. It lies to him, as his mother warned him. It lies.”
“We can hurt him, bloody him, burn him to ash, but . . .” Connor shrugged. “Unless we destroy the amulet as well, unless we can destroy the demon joined with him, he’ll heal, he’ll come back.”