“Pledge your alliance to me. Tell me you will never try to kill me. Say it,” I demanded. So I could take fair measure of it. These were men of honor, in the same way I was. Corrupted as we are, there must be a solid core or we become the villains. If Ryodan spoke and it rang true, he would adhere to the letter of the law he’d chosen. As would I.

“I can’t guarantee I can make that claim sound like truth,” Ryodan warned. “There’s a part of me that obeys no one and nothing. And if you focus on that part, no words of mine will ever sound like truth to you.”

“Then we’ll be enemies. I suggest you convince me.”

Ryodan glanced at Barrons and they exchanged a long look. Then Ryodan glanced away as if consummately chafed. “We are allies,” he said.

“And we will protect each other and fight together against common foes. Say it.”

He repeated it coolly.

I waited.

He looked at me, I at him. I wasn’t asking. He knew what I wanted.

“And we will never turn on each other.” His words dripped ice. It didn’t matter. He’d said them.

I looked at Barrons, who then repeated the same. Both of their voices held the knell of a sacred pledge. Smacked of truth.

Sauntering close to the walls I’d thrown up, locking gazes with me, Ryodan said with silky menace, “And we will guard each other’s secrets as our own.”

Fucker, I thought. But I knew he’d not seal the alliance without it. And I knew we’d be at an impasse forever if I didn’t. Truth was, I preferred them as allies, not enemies. The Unseelie sure as hell didn’t have my back.

Barrons echoed it.

“Now you, Mac,” I said.

She looked at me, startled, but repeated the entire oath.

I said it with her. All the way through. Right down to guarding each other’s secrets as our own. Then I withdrew a blade and cut my wrist.

Barrons and Ryodan exchanged another of those inscrutable glances.

“Blood,” I demanded. “Yours with mine. It’s a pact ancient and binding, made to an Unseelie prince.”

“He’s one demanding fuck,” Ryodan murmured to Barrons.

Barrons said to me, “Magic doesn’t bind us.”

“I’ve heard some does,” I said. I’d caught wind of Lor getting chained up by the Unseelie princess in Ryodan’s office.

Barrons gave me a dark-edged smile that disturbed me more than a little. “Have you any bloody idea what you’re doing, Highlander?”

“I’ve no doubt sharing blood with the two of you will screw with me in ways unimaginable and uncounted. Nevertheless, we’re doing it.” I dropped my walls and released Mac. Moved forward slowly.

The four of us came together in the middle of the corridor, meeting warily.

Only when each of us had smears of all of our blood mixed together on our arms, above an open vein, Mac, too—and she was a bit of a challenge, as quickly as she kept healing—did I relax.

I could see the magic of our sworn oath shimmering on the air around us. Performed properly, by a high druid, oaths have enormous power. It wasn’t just the Unseelie blood in me they should worry about.

Barrons was at Mac’s side, shooting me a killing look that said clearly, Never threaten my woman again.

Those two. Christ.

“Come.” Ryodan turned and walked away.

—

I followed him to the north corridor, my wings canted up behind me, so not to have my feathers serve as a bloody broom and attract every bit of dust and slosh of ice on the floor.

At the wall that wasn’t a wall but had been as impenetrable as those of the Unseelie prison, Ryodan stopped and pressed his hands to the air, as if there were indeed a surface there. He murmured softly, touching various places, then traced runes in the air.

A corridor was revealed before us.

From the far end, terrible sounds echoed.

I stiffened. What the bloody hell was down there? But I held my tongue and trod in silence, boots echoing on the stone floors, barely audible above the din.

Ryodan stopped outside a cell, one with a small window and bars in the door. The baying became deafening then abruptly ceased.

I moved forward to join him, wondering what the bloody hell they were doing with my uncle’s body. Had they fed it to some creature, thinking it might assuage torture beyond imagining? In olden days, the blood and flesh of a druid was considered sacred, reputed to have enormous healing properties, especially the heart.

“Think before you react,” Ryodan warned, stepping aside so I could look in.

I looked.

I blinked and stared.

I shivered and drew thunder from the sky without even thinking. Far above me, it rolled and lightning crashed, followed by screams and something enormous falling, exploding into rubble. I knew it to be a concrete chunk of Chester’s ceiling far above, in one of the many subclubs.

“I said bloody think before you react! If you intend to be allies, get a goddamn grip on yourself,” Ryodan snarled. “And you will fix that later.”

I turned slowly from the door. Feeling carved of marble, as I once had in the icy prison. Feeling a storm brewing in me, a storm that could rip and crack and tear asunder.

But Ryodan was right. I had to think before I reacted. With my power, I always have to think first. I won’t become wanton destruction like my brothers, my dead brothers who will no doubt rise again, inside some other tortured human male. I made that choice on the cliff, dying over and over, carved it into the flesh of my Highlander-druid heart. The heart that I’d refused to let freeze and decay to blackened Unseelie flesh. A heart I’d kept beating with force of will and memory of love. In large part because of the one who lay shuddering beyond the bars of that small window.