Page 68 of A Celtic Vow
“It does,” he granted, meeting her smile when he looked at them as well. “Though ‘tis my dream you’re in.” His brows bunched. “Or should I say my dream of watching you dream, seeing how I’ve been standing here all the while.” He shook his head. “You couldn’t see or hear me, though.”
“Ah, one must love dreaming, aye?” Adlin’s eyes grew merry again. “Ye never quite know what ye’ll find.” Yet the happiness in his eyes faded as quickly as it had come. “’Tis good ye found her when ye did, though, brother. Verra good indeed, for ye’ll need each other.”
“Why, what’s....” Constance’s voice trailed off when Siobhán appeared in the woods nearby. When she saw the terrible cruelty in her eyes. Just how evil she had become. Seen clearly by what she did next.
Something neither could have ever imagined.
Something truly horrendous.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“NAY,” CONSTANCE’S FORMERself cried when Siobhán chanted, and she was torn away from Aodh. Torn from his arms by immense power. Pure evil. Or so it felt as Siobhán kept Constance back and kept chanting.
Kept weaving some sort of terrible spell.
“What is she doing to you?” Constance gasped, still standing beside him in the dream.
Adlin MacLomain had vanished moments before.
“I don’t know.” Aodh rolled his shoulders, trying to shrug off the terrible pain ripping through his former self. “Something very bad.”
“The herbs in my stew that were supposed to knock her out didn't work,” Constance realized. “Siobhán played me the whole time. Knew I was going to try to run off with you.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why, though? Why do it like this? Let it get so far? And why confront us on her own?”
“Because she has a plan.” He fell to his knees and ground his teeth against searing pain when his former incarnate did the same. “And ‘tis impossible to....” He leaned over and clenched his midriff when it felt like he was being gutted. “She’s...”
In so much pain he couldn’t form words, he watched as his former incarnate’s features twisted in anguish before even more twisted.
His bones.
Form.
Everything.
“Might ye be the monster ye were always supposed to be,” Siobhán seethed. “So that she will never—”
“Nay,” Constance wailed when Aodh was turned into something non-human and grotesque. An awful thing out of anyone’s worst nightmare. Something that keened in pain, looked at her incarnation with misery, and limped off into the woods.
