“Girl,” growled the fae. “What are you going to do?” It sounded almost worried.
“Doing what you should have let me do before it got this far. I have to send you home.” Siobhan cut into one of its tangled red hind legs, whetting her blade’s appetite for blood and making the blue light grow brighter.
“It’s nothing like I remember it.” The creature’s rumbling voice sounded sad, resigned.
“Nothing can stay the same for that long.”
“I have,” it said.
She began to draw a circle around the fae’s body. “I’m sorry.” Though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologizing for.
“You’ve sent back hundreds of our kind dead. Why are you not killing me?”
“They left me no choice. You’re leaving me a choice.”
“I wanted to lay your world to ruin.”
The circle was half complete. “Then I’m doing my job. But I can do it without killing you.”
She was only a few feet away from where she’d begun, muttering the Gaelic words she knew by heart.
“I used to be feared. They thought me a god.” The fae’s voice was strained, thick with pain.
Siobhan cut her finger, and as the drop of blood fell, she thrust her knife into the ground, binding the circle. Light flooded outward, but with it came a large clawed hand. In the silence of the vacuum created by her spell, she hadn’t heard the monster cry out. She’d been lulled so thoroughly by the fae’s defeated tone and the sadness in its voice she had believed the monster had given up. Before the banishing could be finished, the creature took its parting shot at Siobhan, running razor-sharp claws over her abdomen even as its body faded out of reality.
Just like the goblin had gotten Percy, she too had been undone by putting her guard down too soon, by trying not to kill something instead of doing what she’d been trained to do.
The banishing was complete and the clearing was left empty. Siobhan took one look at Shane, then down to her seeping stomach wounds.
“I…” She was able to speak but found herself without words.
The lights of the city she’d learned to love blotted out one by one. Her last thought as she crumpled to the ground was, At least I completed the circle.
Chapter Sixteen
Shane wasn’t good at giving a shit about people.
Not since his real family had shown him love was a fool’s errand. Not since Wanda died and showed him people who care about you will always leave. So his first instinct was to take Siobhan’s body to a hospital and bail.
He got to the hospital entrance and froze.
It wasn’t that he thought he loved Siobhan. It had been such a long time since he’d allowed for the possibility, he didn’t know if he could feel that way about someone again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever loved his wife, which was a big part of the reason they weren’t married now.
But Siobhan was different.
She’d asked for his help, even needed it. But she’d never been dependent on him. He wasn’t her reason for getting out of bed in the morning. She was strong, and she was independent, and God help him, he couldn’t just leave her.
He needed to be there for her, especially now that she couldn’t ask him for his help.
He wanted to be there for her.
A doctor came running out of the hospital doors, shouting instructions at a nurse while asking Shane to explain what had happened to her.
“Something in the park,” Shane muttered, as they pulled Siobhan’s limp form out of his arms. “Looked like a fucking lion.”
Hours later—when Siobhan came to—she wasn’t expecting to be alive.
First she assumed she’d moved into the Afterlands to be scolded by her ancestors for eternity about what a bad little druid she’d been. After a moment of consciousness, she figured she must be in Hell. Why else would her stomach be filled with stinging scorpions and everything be bathed in fluorescent light? Surely Hell was solely illuminated by fluorescent bulbs.