Undertow by Rory Ni Coileain

Author:Rory Ni Coileain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books

* * *

“You could have just called me.” Josh descended the narrow winding staircase, directly behind Conall, being very careful about where he put his feet. The Stone looked like ice, even if it wasn’t slippery like ice, and it made him nervous.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You forgot your phone again.” Not a question.

“There’s method in my madness.” Not an answer. “Admit it, it was much more fun my way.”

“You have a point.”

The Stone absorbed the sound of Josh’s footsteps, giving back nothing. Kind of like Josh’s SoulShare. Conall still hadn’t told him what was wrong, but Josh was willing to wait to find out. There had been other things to think about, when Conall had arrived at the door to Raging Art-On, barefoot and pale and shaken. Josh had been between customers, and taking his partner back into his work space for a few minutes of calming, scair-anam-style, had made perfect sense. And now he was following along, out to the pit, leaving a bemused Terry to deal with the late-night walk-in crowd, thankfully not much on a Sunday. Poor Terry. He’d been through a lot over the years, had risen above it all, and had made his way to D.C. only to find himself surrounded by a hell of a lot of inexplicable behavior.

Conall stepped out of an arched doorway into the pit. Or what had been the pit. Josh followed him out, and stood gaping at the transformation around him. The nexus chamber had been cramped and ugly, concrete and drywall and a low claustrophobic ceiling—the only beautiful thing in it had been the barely leashed power of the nexus.

Now… the concrete was still there, still cracked and crumbled, frozen memories of those last horrible seconds of the old Purgatory’s existence—Tiernan straining to keep the weight of an entire building off the Fae and humans who had assembled to help Brodulein go home and Fiachra get his body back, while they sprinted up stairs that weren’t there any more. A viciously battered Lucien had been at the top of those stairs, and a narrow escape, and Josh couldn’t have imagined revisiting those memories with anything but a cringe.

Yet the new chamber was breathtaking. Like Tiernan’s crystal hand in place of the severed one, the gleam of the magickal Stone turned reminders of brutality into grace and beauty.

Conall was looking back over his shoulder. Speaking of breathtaking grace and beauty. There were days when the hardest thing about being SoulShared was accepting that he actually shared an essence with someone so exquisite. “What do you think, dar’cion?” Beautifully-colored, a pet name going back—according to Conall—to Conall’s first moments in the human world, when he’d wondered if all humans were as gloriously inked as the one he’d fallen at the feet of.

“It’s gorgeous.” Josh rested a hand on Conall’s shoulder, figuring his scair-anam probably needed the contact now at least as much as he had when he’d appeared up in Raging Art-On. “And so much bigger than the old chamber.”

“Thanks so much it was nothing, really.

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