Oh, Freya, the never-emptying quiver! Was it giving her another chance, providing one more shot at Cruach? The arrow had been replicated. But would the Banemen's awesome power follow?
How to reach it? An idea.... The skin on her wrist was now serrated all the way around. So she took a fortifying breath - then yanked her arm back with all the power she possessed. She screamed in agony as she skinned her hand, peeling it clean to her fingers like a glove.
But she'd freed that arm.
As MacRieve faced off against the Cromites, she gritted her teeth and forced her ruined fingers to close around the new dieumort. Once she'd drawn it free, the same power as from the first surged through her.
When Cruach fell to his knees before her at the altar, her arm shot out, planting the tip right into his black heart.
He stared down at his chest in disbelief. Extending out from the arrow, ash began to replace his scaly skin, spreading like a poison through his monstrous form.
Crom Cruach was dying... truly dying.
As she beheld the end of her nightmare, she sneered, "Do you feel it, husband?"
He faced her. With his last breaths, he grated, "The beast... saved him from me" - blood bubbled at his lips - "and will forever keep him... from you."
Just as MacRieve finished the last of the Cromites, Cruach collapsed, his eyes as lifeless as the corpses' all around them.
His hulking body disintegrated, becoming a layer of ash atop the blood pooled on the floor. The Broken Bloody One is no more.
With his death, MacRieve's infection would eventually burn off. He could be saved - from this. But could Cruach have been right about the beast?
"Garreth, I'm right here!" she cried, yanking on her other hand. "Scot, come back to me!"
MacRieve had told her, The beast rises too much, maddening its Lykae host forever. Now his eyes flashed from that white to the palest blue and back. And he never saw her.
Was it already too late?
"MacRieve, I'm alive! You have to come back to me!" Her voice broke on a sob as she cried, "Garreth, I need you."
He gazed back at where he thought her headless body was. As a tear tracked down his blood-splattered face, he dug his claws into his chest, ripping through his own skin.
Though she screamed for him, he ran from this place, yelling from deep within his lungs, a deafening roar of misery.
When Lachlain and Bowen finally spied Garreth in these bleak woods, he was raging, clawing himself. As they closed in on him, Lachlain stared at his brother in shock.
Blood covered him and his tattered clothes. The flesh of his chest was maimed. His eyes were an opaque white and wet. With tears?
"Grab his arms!" Lachlain told Bowen. "Garreth, stop this! What has happened?"
In a harsh beastly voice, Garreth muttered, "Begged me... to leave... said I wasn't strong enough... her head." He bellowed with pain, thrashing from their grip.
"Where is your mate?"
He roared, "Dead!"
Bowen hissed in a breath. "Oh, Christ. I know this well. We have to get him out of here."
"No, this canna be right," Lachlain said. "He's been maddened. Look at his eyes. Garreth, why do you think she's dead?"
Garreth choked out, "Slammed the blade... through her neck. Ah, gods, her head!"
"Who did this to her?" Lachlain's own beast was stirring to avenge his brother's mate.
Bowen's eyes were turning as well. "Tell us who!"
"Me! I cut off her f**king head!"
"Ah, Garreth, no!" Fear for his brother gripped Lachlain, like a hand wrapped round his throat. "You could no' hurt her."
"I killed... my Lousha." With a yell, he flung himself free from their grip, clawing at his chest again.
"Damn you, Garreth, stop this!" But he wouldn't.
The beast wanted to rip out its aching heart.
As they grappled with him, Lachlain saw the milky white of Garreth's eyes turn to the palest blue.
It's taking over. "Fight it, Garreth! You have tae fight this."
He gazed up at Lachlain. Just before Garreth turned irreversibly, before the beast claimed him for good, he rasped, "Brother... I'm lost."
50
Into the desolate woods Lucia had run with her bow, her hands still flayed and dripping blood from escaping those bonds.
She'd left behind that lair forever, running from a forsaken past into her future - with MacRieve. If I can find him... and bring him back.
For two days, she'd searched this forest, tracking him. He'd run in a frenzy, with no rhyme or reason. She might have lost his trail if it hadn't been for his claw marks on trees.
Lucia couldn't fathom the pain and loss he was feeling, the confusion. At repeated intervals, her eyes would tear up, and then she'd berate herself for being weak. He needed her, needed her to be strong.
Now, at last, a break - his footprints in the muddy ground! And beside them, the prints of two shoed men, two big men, as towering as Garreth was.
In her mind flashed the memory of Lachlain standing tall next to Garreth in that cell.
The tracks changed. The shoed men had dragged him away.
Garreth had once told her, My brother used to get me out of scrape after scrape. If the witch Mariketa had given Bowen and Lachlain the coordinates to this place, they could have found him....
Her eyes narrowed. The Lykae had taken Garreth.
They'd taken him home.
Kinevane Castle, Scotland
Lachlain and Emma gaped at the security feed of the mystically-protected front gates of Kinevane. Realization had just dawned on both of them that the rain-drenched female who'd been frantically banging on the impervious gates was -
"It's Aunt Luce!" Emma cried. "I told you she was alive! We would've felt it if she'd died."
"That is the reasonable one?" It was Garreth's mate. If nothing else, Lachlain recognized the bow slung over her shoulder.
"Let me the hell in!" - two rapid kicks - "I know he's in there!" With a boxer's jab, she punched the proud Lykae seal in the center.
Lachlain let out a stunned breath. "She lives."
Emma hit the intercom button. "Two seconds, Aunt Luce!"
"Aye, it's freezing outside, so let's get her the hell in - " Emma had already disappeared; Lachlain hated it when she traced without him.
Exactly two seconds later, Emma had returned with her sodden aunt.
Lucia wasted no time. "Where is he?" There was a wild glint in her eyes, a dangerous one, and Lachlain felt the tiniest spark of hope for his brother.
Though I know better. There was no record in their clan's thousands of years of annals of a Lykae ever coming back from this state. And Lachlain had already had Bowen bring Mariketa, the most powerful witch in existence, to Kinevane. She'd tried to help, but with her magicks bound, she could achieve nothing.