“The ritual is for you to sacrifice a virgin to appease the gate with her pure, virtuous blood.”
“Yes, I know the ritual, Siobhan.”
When she smiled at him and raised an eyebrow, realization dawned on her father’s ruddy face. His complexion grew red, his cheeks flushed with rage and when he spoke again, it was a bellow that rattled the room’s only window. “You foolish, useless girl. Do you have any concept of what you’ve done?”
“I protected myself. From you.”
“You’ve desecrated yourself. Laid waste to the one thing worthwhile about you.” Eion threw a punch at the wall next to her head, and the plaster split beneath his knuckles like it was made of tissue paper. In the instant it took for him to throw his posturing punch, Siobhan had pulled her bow from the purse along with a single arrow, and both were extended to their full size. It was all for show, of course—she hadn’t had time to string the bow—but the wire was wrapped around her wrist, and she was betting she might have enough time to loop it on before he threw another punch.
“Tell me again how useless I am, Papa. I have guarded this gate by myself for a decade. Tell me what a disappointment I am as a warrior.” She dropped one of the wire loops to the floor, hooking it on the end of her bow without looking, then str
ung the other end on tightly with only the slightest pressure on the bow. “Because you haven’t been here. You don’t know a damned thing.”
“You were never a warrior,” Eion huffed, unfazed by the loaded weapon in her hands. “You were only meant to be fodder, and now you can’t even do that right. I should have killed you when you were a babe.”
Siobhan skirted him with her back to the wall until she was on the opposite side of the room with the bed between them.
“I won’t be a pawn for the Claughdid anymore.”
“You were born to be our pawn.”
With an arrow aimed at his right kneecap, Siobhan struggled to keep her voice from wavering when she spoke again. “Go home. Go back to Belfast and tell the high council there won’t be any sacrifices in New York next week. I will continue to guard the gate like a true warrior of the clan, but I will not be your animal to slit open on the altar of tradition.”
“You make a grand speech,” Eion scoffed. “But you’re wrong.”
“About what?”
“If you won’t be our willing virgin, we’re just going to find ourselves an unwilling one.”
He yanked open the door, and when it slammed closed behind him, the entire room rattled.
Night had settled over the city faster than usual, like a fist closing to trap a moth, all the light blotted out in minutes and not over the course of hours. Heavy, bloated rain clouds dotted the horizon, and streetlights came on an hour sooner than they would have otherwise.
Siobhan wasn’t sure what she was doing out in the streets, but she knew something needed to be done to keep her father and his cohorts from kidnapping and murdering some poor, hapless girl. She’d wanted to save her own life. She’d never thought she’d be bartering someone else’s in the process.
She wanted to call Shane. It had been her first instinct after her father had run out, but she’d told herself it wasn’t a good idea. When she’d disentangled herself from Shane’s arms earlier in the morning, she’d told herself that was it. His purpose had been served, and she wasn’t going to see him again.
But now she was one woman in a city of seven million, and somewhere there was a virgin sacrifice who was going to die because Siobhan had been busy riding Shane like a pony the night before.
Maybe he should be the one to help her.
It wasn’t like she was getting anywhere on her own.
He’d entered his phone number into her cell earlier with an all-too-charming, leering wink suggesting if her life needed saving again, he was only a phone call away. She caught herself smiling at the memory.
Well, fuck if the lanky, lumbering bugger hadn’t gone and gotten under her skin.
She pulled out her cell and found his number, and after a moment’s hesitation hit the call button. It rang three times, and she was prepared to hang up as soon as the voicemail kicked in, but on the fourth ring he answered with a bored-sounding, “Hello?”
“Shane?”
A pause, then a rustling noise followed by the sound of him clearing his throat. “Red?”
Her heart thumped traitorously when he used a nickname for her. She’d never mattered enough to anyone before to warrant a nickname.
“Everything okay?” he asked, his tone laced with genuine concern. “You’re not… Are you okay?”
She was not—in fact—at all okay, yet she found herself nodding. She stopped bobbing her head when she remembered he couldn’t see her.