I look around, smiling, filled with plans. I will one day be laird, as my da before me. I’ll live in a mighty old rambling wonderful stone castle filled with history and tradition, take a bonny lass to wife—

Dani is unprotected and that bastard Ryodan is—

Pain rips through my entrails and I scream.

I know why I’m obsessed with her. She’s the innocence I’ve lost. As I was going dark, she was getting nothing but brighter. She’s the ready smile of a fourteen-year-old that believes the world is one long, incredible adventure. Her dreams are still intact. She’s everything I’m not anymore. She tackles life with abandon, lives in the moment, never gives up.

She reminds me of Tara, dead three years now, of a rare bone disease. I wept at the funeral for the girl who smiled all the way through her brief but brutal decline, to the twilight that came too soon.

I see the ghosts in Dani’s eyes. You’d have to be blind not to.

I want to chase them, as nothing can chase mine.

I want to keep her from ever changing into something so terrible as I’ve become.

I want to shelter her from the hard truth that life takes from you, whittles away at your hope and scrapes the flesh from your bone and leaves you so changed you can’t even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.

I want her to always be Dani, as she is now, but the thing I was becoming got so fucked up about it. I hope the last action I chose to make as a free man cancels some of it out.

I thought turning Unseelie Prince was the most difficult battle I would ever face.

I was wrong. I thought I was in Hell. Then I found out what Hell really was. It’s enough to wrench a laugh from my cracked lips at the sheer absurdity of it.

Pain stabs through my abdomen, sears and rips and gnaws with tiny razor teeth right down into my groin as I’m flayed alive. I scream again, flee back to the Highlands, and see the …

Bonfires.

The crisp air smells of roast pig and gently charring peppers and potatoes. We’re about to walk the livestock between the twin fires, twins like Colleen and me, like my uncles Dageus and Drustan, before driving them out to the summer pastures. We’ll relight the doused fires in our castles from the sacred, protective flames of Beltane. We’ll feast and my family and friends will dance and life will seem like one perfect, long dream from which I plan to never awaken.

I have no idea how long I’ve been staked to the side of a cliff. I’ve recounted every day that I can recall, relived it in extraordinary detail.

It has kept me from falling.

It has kept me from going mad.

Unexpectedly, it has also silenced the monster I was becoming.

I no longer loathe and fear what was happening to me, because so much worse has happened to me. Perspective is a funny thing. You think your back is to the wall, then something worse corners you, and the first threat looks puny in comparison.

There is only me now, a Keltar who’s been mutated with immense power and perhaps will always be, but each time I’ve died on this cliff and held my own, maintained my sanity, reminded myself of my heritage, who I was born to be, the madness of the Unseelie Prince faded a little more. Strengthened by my ordeal, staked to the side of this bloody godforsaken cliff, the prince overtaking me was overtaken.

I am not a man that was once a Highlander, who got swallowed alive by the depravity and homicidal mania of a death-by-sex Fae.

I am a Keltar druid who now happens to possess Unseelie power and a bloody enormous sex drive. Not sure that last part’s much of a change.

My head sags forward, blood gushes from my cracked lips. She’s at it again, needling away, yanking out my entrails and knitting feverishly on a gown that will never be complete.

The cruelty of it is intolerable. My entire body is on fire with pain.

Fires.

The Highlands.

Beltane.

I recall this particular night of my fourteenth year for three reasons.

It was the first night I was recognized as a Keltar druid. Heady stuff for a young lad.

It was also the night Uncle Dageus warned me, made me suspect my happy dream would end before I was ready.

Like Tara.

Like I won’t let it for Dani.

When Da and the others place the sacred chalice and staff on the slab, Uncle Dageus moves close and puts a hand on my shoulder, pulls me aside and gazes down. Golden eyes so like my own stare into mine.

Fire purifies and distills, he says. Fire transforms. You must remember that when the time comes it seems only to ravage and destroy.

So, too, does pain.

One day you will walk through flames, lad.

Of the Beltane fires? I ask curiously. This was not a tradition with which I was familiar, but many of our more complex druid rituals were cloaked in secrecy until certain ages.