Chapter 1
“Orla!” Lorcan’s scream seemed muffled by the fog as he saw her turn around to look at him with tears streaming down her face. And then she vanished into the thick mist.
What have I done? Lorcan asked himself, not expecting an answer. He stared into the emptiness and felt the vibration of the energy Orla had left behind. A blizzard. It felt like thousands of blades of ice were slashing at his skin.
Was this the end of Orla and him?
The Irish countryside blurred in front of him. This was the riverbank where they had become childhood sweethearts. But it had now become where their relationship ended. “Orla!” he called out again but expected no response as he remembered the vision of her blending into the smoky air of the mysterious river.
Why? Lorcan struggled harder to free himself, but his legs felt like they weighed a ton. His body didn’t obey him. He did his best to turn around.
Behind him, the woman pulled the upper half of her dress up to cover her breasts. She pulled her long, flaming red hair back to reveal her perfect face and the flawless skin of her delicate neck. Her striking blue eyes pierced at Lorcan at the same time as a smug smile crossed her face.
“What did you do to me?” Lorcan asked while summoning all of his leftover power to move.
“Nothing you didn’t want.” She smiled again.
Lorcan thought he had gotten things under control. Bricius, a nasty sorcerer he had fought and killed during his last mission, had cursed his parents before he died. Although Lorcan had no idea how to break a curse, he had traveled back to Ireland alone, without Orla. They had fought so hard to be together, free from the curse her family here had bound them with, and he couldn’t take a chance she would get tangled up in that mess again.
He had landed at the riverbank after exiting the portal of the Daimon Gate. But before he even had a chance to congratulate himself for successfully sneaking back to Ireland without Orla, he saw her. He should have known. She always seemed to know where he was. She smiled at him. It was the usual Orla smile. But there was something more to it.
Lust.
It didn’t surprise him. They had run away from this place to be able to love each other freely and be together. And now, here they were, back together—and at the riverbank. Love was the only thing he had in his mind, and he was sure it was in hers as well.
She’s irresistible, he had thought and then grabbed at her. He kissed her as he always had. But this time, it was different. As soon as he touched her, the air around him seemed to turn into a vacuum of some kind, and he was ‘sucked’ into her. That was the last thing he remembered, and that had been the last moment when he’d been able to control his movement.
The eyes of the woman staring up at him now were not Orla’s. His arms were moving up and down her body, pulling up her dress. His mouth ravished hers. But it wasn’t he who controlled the actions. His body seemed glued to hers. His mind was numb. He heard himself screaming on the inside for it to stop.
He was watching himself from outside his body. Bloody hell! He was having sex with this strange woman, and he couldn’t do a thing stop it.
Then he heard a daunting sound.
“Lorcan!”
Orla’s shaky voice stabbed into his heart. She had followed him back to Ireland after all. He couldn’t turned around himself—the woman had to push him. Nothing hurt him more than the look on Orla’s face.
She walked away from him and vanished into the fog.
Chapter 2
“Who are you?” Lorcan asked the woman.
“I am the one you were in love with. She was just a convenient replacement.”
“What?”
“All the time you were looking at me at the riverbank, you think I didn’t know? You were watching me from the bush. You were there for me. Remember? It was me that you wanted. You were going to build me a castle.”
Lorcan stared at the woman for a long moment, then nodded. “It was you, my childhood fantasy. All those years, I was in love with you . . .” Lorcan whispered as he gazed at the woman.
The woman teared up. “You remember?”
“Yes, of course.” He tried to walk toward her but failed. He raised his arms to reach out to her, to embrace her. But his body didn’t cooperate. “I remember,” he said. “Let me hold you again.”
The woman smiled and waved her hand.
Lorcan felt as if a thousand tons of heavy air had been lifted from him. His body and his mind worked again, and the thought that instantly crossed his mind was rage. It gathered inside him. “Never ever call Orla names!” He grunted out the words and glared at the woman, a wave of electric current shooting from his eyes. It struck the woman, lifting her off the ground and throwing her rolling onto the wet grass. “No one can replace her.”
Lorcan charged at the woman, hauling her up. “Who are you, and what do you want from me?” But his hands gripped a pile of clothes. The woman had vanished like smoke. A wedge of icy air hit him from behind. Lorcan fell, rolling on the ground. Behind him stood a woman who looked the same as the woman he’d just attacked—he recognised her eyes—but this time, she was twenty feet tall, and her face was ancient, marked with scars and veins. She raised sharp claws and made a sweeping gesture. Lorcan’s body was swiped off the grass, spun up in the air, and smashed down in the middle of the river like a rag doll.
From beneath the icy water, he saw the woman smirk. Her arm reached out, keeping Lorcan submerged. He knew shooting an electric wave from under the water wasn’t wise. He kicked hard but couldn’t free himself. He was running out of air when the woman started laughing. Lorcan reached for his gun and found it had slipped out and sunk to the bottom of the river.
Then the woman pulled him up to the surface. “You could have lived happily forever after with your bitch Orla out there. Why bring her back and take what’s mine?”
Lorcan gasped for air. “I came back to visit my family. It has nothing to do with Orla. She doesn’t care what’s yours.”
The woman let out a demonic laugh. “You fool. You think she follows you back here for love? Do you know who she is? Do you know what she would become in two weeks?” The woman dunked him in the water and pulled him back up again.
“I know who she is . . .” He gasped for more air.
“You know nothing. In two weeks, I will get what I want. If only she hadn’t shown her face.”
“I’ll take her out of here. There’s nothing here that we want.”
“It’s too late. They’ll never let her leave this time.” She brushed her bony fingers across his face. “What a pity! I thought I could have a taste of you. See what all the fuss was about. See what it’s like to have the man she’d left everything for.”
“She didn’t leave here because of me. She left because she didn’t want to be surrounded by people like you.”
The woman laughed. “She will have to live with it now. Or should I say, die with it now!”
“If you want to kill me, do it. She wouldn’t have come back if not for me.”
“You’d die for her. How sweet! Let’s do it.”
Lorcan tried to yank her hands from around his neck, but they were clenched as tight as a vice.
“Were you really the girl at the riverbank?”
“You can’t play the same trick on me twice, Lorcan. But yes, I was.” Then she plunged his head under the water again. This time, it was for a very long time. He struggled for a while, and then he let go. He let his mind and his body flow free with the current. He hung on to nothing.
She pulled him up again. “She thinks she’s protected here. Big mistake. She’ll die painfully. And you’ll have to help me to do that . . .”
Lorcan opened his eyes and shot the electric wave at the woman as soon as she lifted him out of the water. She screamed and released him. He swam to the riverbank while the woman burned like a torch.
As soon as he hit the riverbank, he ran as fast as he could. The woman whirled around and swung her arms. A wedge of icy air rushed over her, and the fire died out. Lorcan charged ahead. A few more feet and he would reach the bush and find a place to hide. But the woman clawed at him from behind with arms that had stretched out at him like two snakes. Blood spurted from his back as he fell to the ground. The woman flipped him around. She’s going to gut me, Lorcan thought.
“I’ll skin you and show whatever’s left of you to the bitch Orla. See if she can handle this. See if she bursts into flame. No one is going to take what’s mine.”
The woman raised her talons. Lorcan used what energy he had left to shoot out the electric currents, but they died out like pitiful sparks before they reached her. Her claws came at him menacingly.
Suddenly the haunting sound of a lullaby wafted out from the other side of the bush. It was his mother’s lullaby.
The woman screamed, “No!”
The song hovered in the air, and the soothing melody kept coming. The woman yelled again, “No! Stop!” She covered her ears with her hands and spun around. But it didn’t seem to help. Her body burst into flames again. This time, the fire was stronger and harsher. She raced into the woods, her haunting moans trailing behind her as she ran.
The bush returned to its eerie quietness. Lorcan thought he heard the woods sigh. Blood poured from the wound from his back and weakened him by the second. He needed to pass out in order to heal his wounds, but it wasn’t wise to do it here. If wild animals, creatures from hell, or that mysterious woman came back while he was lying somewhere in a ditch shivering from fever, it would be the end of him.
He pulled himself up to his feet and darted in the direction of the place he had once called home. Trees and the darkness surrounded him, disorienting him. He kept running, and the pounding of his heart cause even more blood to gush from his wounds. He had run this very route with his mother once when he was six. He had killed for the very first time here to protect his mother. He couldn’t see much, but the haunting lullaby guided him. He followed the song. The music floated on the wind, seemingly coming out of nowhere.
He didn’t mean to throw a tantrum whenever his mother sang this lullaby. He actually enjoyed it, but he thought a boy shouldn’t like a lullaby. Or at least so he thought when he was six. She had stopped singing it for a long time. So many things had happened between that time and now, and he had stopped talking to his mother. The words of the lullaby came to mind, and suddenly he began to mumble the lyrics under its breath. The song of a little lost boy finding his way home.
He hadn’t been a little boy when he’d left. He hadn’t been lost. He loved his parents, and he knew he had their unconditional love. But something in him told him that he didn’t belong in the peaceful Irish countryside. And then he’d found Orla. It was like finding his other half. And he knew then where his life was meant to be.
It was Orla who stood between him and his parents. He had never told her he’d chosen her over his family because it was a wound that had never healed in his soul, and there was no point in her carrying the baggage.
But now it seemed he had lost from both ends.
Just before the last drop of energy drained out of him, he saw the gate of his family’s mansion. The door swung open before he reached it, and once inside, he fell into the arms of his parents and his sister.
He had made it home.
Chapter 3
Cold reality slapped at Orla’s face as she ran aimlessly into the woods. She had left Lorcan at the riverbank with a strange woman. The scene of him holding the woman had ripped at her heart. She knew infidelity wasn’t in Lorcan’s blood, but she had underestimated how much it would hurt her to see him with another woman.
They had been through so many life and death situations. She recalled the many times she’d held him in her arms, knowing that life was drifting away from him and having no clue how she’d ever survive if he died. But nothing compared to this!
The pain knocked the wits out of her. She ran until her legs began to cramp and her breath hissed in and out of her lungs in painful spurts. She finally collapsed onto her knees. When she looked up, the entrance of a graveyard loomed over her. She pulled herself up to her feet, using the low stone wall for support. She looked over the wall at the moss-covered gravestones, letting the misty fog and slight breeze soothe her broken heart.
The magic that her family possessed made it easy to keep private cemeteries looking scary enough so that they were left alone. She knew that the fog wasn’t the ghosts of the dead, aimlessly wandering around their burial places. She finally caught her breath enough to stand up straight and limp her way down the gravel walkway toward the back of the cemetery where her aunt’s grave was.
Aunt Siobhan had been more than just her mother’s sister. Since her parents had died when she was five, she had known Aunt Siobhan as her mother. She had been a mentor in more than just magic, and she had been the one to give Orla hope that love was still attainable.
She set her feet on the familiar path, letting them carry her to the very back of the cemetery where the wild trees and grasses of the Irish moors began to creep up over the walls. She loved that her aunt’s grave was here. Siobhan had been more of an elemental, using nature itself in her magic and spells. Now it almost seemed like nature was coming to be a part of her again, even after she was dead. As the fog rolled back, the grave marker came into view through the mist. The wild grasses and moss had started to grow up the stone, and Orla did her best to peel them off with her bare hands. She knelt down in front of it when she’d finished clearing the vegetation.
Then she thought of Lorcan again, and the fresh wound opened. She let her tears flow freely now, watering the grass at the foot of the stone.
“Don’t go watering the weeds! There’s no point in me coming here every month to do the weeding if you’re just going to encourage them to grow.”
Orla’s head jerked up, her heart racing as she turned around slowly. “Maeve! Oh boy, am I glad to see you!”
Maeve was Siobhan’s daughter, and she and Orla had grown up together. Maeve smiled at her and helped her up for a welcome hug. Orla stumbled a little, as her legs had cramped up from kneeling down on the uneven paving stones.
“You should be glad it’s me instead of someone else. There’s a bit of a storm brewing. You’ll be in trouble if they find you. You should stop by Mom’s old house. It’s empty and abandoned. You should be safe there for a while.” Orla gave Maeve a hug and an extra squeeze.
“Thank you. Your psychic read has gotten much better over the years, I can tell.”
The smile faded from Maeve’s face. “I saw clouds, Orla. You didn’t come back by yourself. A storm is following you, and this one is bad.”
The pain had crept up on Orla again, and she teared up.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Maeve asked.
Orla nodded and wiped her tears away.
“It’s poor timing, Orla. Couldn’t you have waited another two weeks to return?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s a full moon in two weeks, and Bradan will become the leader of the clan.”
“Bradan?”
“Your distant cousin, Orla!”
Orla squinted. “Oh . . . oh . . . Who would have thought!” Orla exclaimed remembering the skinny, freckle-faced, red-haired boy that all the girls, including her, had picked on all the time. She cleared her throat. “So I guess he’d grown up a strong candidate for the leadership. But what does that have to do with my timing? I broke my promise with the ancestors. If they catch me, they’ll burn me. And so what?”
“The position has always been yours until replaced by the newly chosen. So that’s Bradan, and that will be in two weeks’ time. Unless you really want to . . .”
“Hell no.”
“If you don’t want to take up that post with the clan, why come back now?”
Orla had no answer. She had left and had been gone for years. She’d sworn to never set foot in the village again. There had been many times she’d wanted to come back to visit Aunt Siobhan’s grave and Maeve, but her haunting past had put her off. She couldn’t live the emotionless life of black magic again.
And then came Lorcan. He had found her in the city after she’d run off for a few years. He’d left everything behind for her. Before she knew it, he had become a part of her life that was more important than anything else.
Then came this trip. Bricius had cursed his parents, and he’d had to come back to Ireland. He’d thought he could get away and leave Orla in Eudaiz. But she had followed him anyway. Ciaran had helped her, warning that her trip was against Lorcan’s wishes. Her thought circled back to the scene at the riverbank. Who was that woman? she wondered.
“Orla!” Maeve called out.
“Huh?”
“What’s the matter?”
The image of Maeve became blurry and flickering in front of Orla. Oh crap! Someone was using black magic on her.
Chapter 4
Orla swayed and tried to hang on to her consciousness. She should have known. What had she expected, coming back to the land of black magic, to the place where she’d grown up, where she had been trained and where she owed a debt?
She hadn’t been practicing for years. Her knees buckled. She heard Maeve calling out for her and felt her hands on her shoulders. Her best friend could help. Aunt Siobhan was a white witch, and Maeve practised white magic. She wasn’t part of the clan, and she was Orla’s only hope. They had been communicating in their psychic minds for years, and she was sure her trip to the Daimon Gate wouldn’t have broken their psychic communication channel.
“Help me!” Orla managed. She couldn’t get many words past her lips, but she remembered mind reading was one of Maeve rare gifts. “Read me!” She reached her hands out and tried her best to clear her mind to communicate with Maeve. She felt Maeve’s cool hands grabbing hers and a slight energy passing through her body. The warmth of the energy helped.
“Concentrate,” Orla told herself, willing the muddy clouds from her mind. The scene of Lorcan and the woman at the riverbank flashed back into Orla’s mind. As much as it hurt her, she forced herself to analyze the situation. Someone was using the black magic on her. Someone was trying to break up her relationship with Lorcan. Someone wanted her to resent him.
A sharp pain pierced through her brain, and Orla suddenly slumped to the ground, breathing heavily.
“Hold on, Orla, keep thinking. I’m with you,” said Maeve.
The resentment grew quickly into hatred. Orla could read her mind like an outsider and could see her conscious mind was leaving her. “I want to hate Lorcan.” The words were demonic. It came deep from her throat and from her soul.
“What are you talking about? You confuse me, Orla. Your mind is confusing. I can’t get hold of it,” Maeve cried in a panic.
Orla’s head was throbbing. She was losing it. She gasped for air as tears streamed down her face. She summoned a last thread of hope. “Someone is trying to get me to curse Lorcan from hatred. Please don’t let me . . .” She groaned in pain, breathing heavily and trying to shake the thought from her head, but the mud was getting in again. The clarity was leaving her. She thought of Lorcan again, which was probably not a good idea. She almost lost control of her mind.
“Black magic!” she whispered. Lack of practice was doing her no good at the moment.
“Don’t let go, Orla. I’ve got you.”
She heard Maeve’s voice in the distance. Everything seemed blurry.
“Tell Lorcan I love him.”
“No, you tell him yourself.”
Blood trickled from her nose. “Lorcan betrayed me. He kissed that woman.” The words coming out of her mouth weren’t hers. Tear streamed down her face, and her self-awareness slipped in and out. “He kissed that woman. I . . .”
“Don’t say that, Orla. You’ll put a curse on him, and you’re going to regret it. You’re strong. You can control it,” Maeve’s voice echoed in from a distance.
Orla cried. Her mind wandered back to the apartment she and Lorcan shared in London. She walked into the living room. She could sense him. She could hear his laughter. She saw him fumbling with the coffee machine, trying to fix it so the sharp lever wouldn’t cut her next time she used it. He smiled at her. She loved his beautiful blue eyes. She smiled back .
The bed had blankets on it, and the pictures of them on the wall were hanging askew. Some of their pictures had fallen to the floor. Glass was everywhere. “Someone broke into our apartment! That woman—she stole him from me!” Orla yelled.
“You’re hallucinating, Orla. Concentrate. Don’t let it get to you. I can’t help you if you let it take over your mind.”
Her heart lurched painfully in her chest, thinking about how happy she’d been in London with Lorcan, but now all that filled her mind was Lorcan and that other woman. Rage began to build inside her, and she was beginning to feel a dull throb behind her eyes.
“It hurt!” Orla whispered.
“I know. Come on, Orla, look at me.”
“It hurt so much,” she said out loud, and once again, the words weren’t hers. “I hate Lorcan. He’ll pay for what he did to me.”
“Stop, Orla. Stop!”
She heard Maeve yelling at her, but she couldn’t stop. She drifted back to the apartment again. Looking at a picture of the two of them together was the last straw. She reached up and yanked the picture off the wall so forcefully that the nail behind it bent. As she threw it onto the ground, breaking the glass in the frame, the pain in her head grew worse. She tore through the room, ripping everything that reminded her of Lorcan off the walls.
At the graveyard, she could see herself hitting the stone marker and ripping weeds out. She saw Maeve trying to hold on to her. But then her mind slipped off again. The world became empty, and she burned with a desire to destroy.
“He has to pay for what he did to me . . .” She began to chant a curse while tears streamed down her face. The last drop of self-awareness was slipping out of her. Images of Lorcan flashed on and off at the back of her mind. “I curse . . .” She hadn’t finished when a hard blow on the head put her out.