The Titans got Ronan this morning; they are taking him to Lucan. He's already been to prison twice and escaped twice, so I'm positive Lucan is going to kill him. You have to do something! Avalon pleaded desperately and I was out of bed before he could finish his sentence.
Are they taking him straight to Lucan or to prison first? I demanded, knocking over the bed side table and sending it crashing to the stone floor. Clumsy and confused, I fumbled through the dark room, trying to knot my hair into a messy bun on the top of my head. My tattoo glowed in the soft darkness, catching my eye with the brilliant blue that spilled across my collarbone.
I heard Kiran stir from one of the leather chairs, but I didn't have time to explain to him my mission or give him the opportunity to stop me. I grabbed a sweatshirt from the edge of the bed and threw it over my tank top on my way out the door.
The Titans stood to attention from lazed, almost-slumber, on the other side, but there was no way in hell they were going to stop me. Jedrec stood across the hall, and I knew he remained my only hope.
“I can either take all of your magic and answer for the consequences later or you can let me go. I'm just taking a walk, I'm not going to leave and I’m not going to get you into trouble ,” I growled a serious threat and an obvious lie, hoping to sound level-headed and convincing.
“I'm going with you, then,” Jedrec reasoned. He eyed me with something like a mixture of trust and terror but I was in too much of a hurry to dissect his expression now.
The other Titans stood to attention, unwilling to let Jedrec dismiss me so casually, but Kiran stood in the doorway behind me and commanded them, “Let her go, she's with me.”
He lied, and they knew it when he was the one left to follow after me as I ran down the winding staircase and then sprinted toward the throne room. If I had been more awake I might have tried the courtroom first, assuming Ronan would face some kind of trial before he faced execution. But instinct urged me to Lucan's royal seat and I fled there with Jedrec and Kiran flanking me.
The Titans standing guard on the outside of the double doors moved out of the way, not for me, but for Kiran and his determined gait next to mine. I burst through the brass doors and fell into a wall of Titan Guards that surrounded Ronan Hannigan, the Irish Immortal who had been sentenced to death first when he was part of Avalon’s team that attacked Kiran on our camping trip last October and second after he was rounded up with the group of Immortals taken from the farm. The Titans surrounding him had forced him to his knees in front of the king, his hands bound behind his back, raw and bleeding, and his chin tipped defiantly toward the sky.
“What is the meaning of this?” Lucan demanded of his son.
“What are you doing?” I gasped, not allowing Kiran to answer. I pushed through the Titans and stood beside Ronan, willing to join the condemned if Lucan wouldn’t listen to me.
“How dare you interrupt me!” Lucan shouted. His cold blue eyes turned to me, hard slits of pure anger and hatred. “He is an enemy of the crown and his punishment has been decided.”
“And what is that? What are you going to do to him?” I crossed my arms, refusing to bend to evil incarnated.
“This is none of your concern, you are a prisoner here and nothing else,” Lucan growled and he motioned for his Guards to restrain me.
“Don't touch me!” I shouted and lashed out with my magic, knocking the two approaching Guards off their feet. “What is his crime that you have sentenced him to death? Tell me what he has done!”
“Eden, if I have to warn you again what your insolence will cause, I will demonstrate with more than just this animal,” Lucan snarled with a viciousness I had surprisingly not heard before.
I held up my hands conceding this one point and let the Guards hold onto me, knowing full well if I needed to break free there wouldn't be any real struggle.
“Then tell me what he has done!” I pleaded, still keeping my chin tilted in stubborn defiance.
“I don't have to answer to you, child. You do understand that, don't you?” Lucan asked facetiously, but then seemed to calm down. He rose from his throne and walked down the small set of stairs to pace the floor in front of us. “First and foremost he is a Shape-shifter and trespassed on my land, property his people have been exiled from. If that is not enough to condemn him, he has escaped from my prisons twice, with your help no doubt, and he was caught tonight in those same dungeons with what we can only assume an attempt to free other criminals.”
“And that deserves death? He is an Immortal! He is part of your kingdom, a kingdom that is on the way to extinction if you continue to kill everyone who disagrees with you! You would punish him with death?” I demanded and felt the eyes of everyone in the room fall to me in disbelief.
“I will punish him with death because that is what he deserves!” Lucan shouted at me full of rage and righteous vindication. “I am not the fool you would have others believe, child. His death is not only deserved it is a message to the rest of his little rebellion that I will not be defied!” He grabbed the sword from the nearby Titan that stood poised to strike Ronan down at any moment.
“No!” I screamed back and sent the Titans flying back from me with a forceful burst of magic. I moved in front of him with lightening quick speed and shielded Ronan with my body.
“Eden, don't!” Kiran yelled from somewhere behind me, but I ignored him. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him move into place beside me and then wait to protect me from his father. I ignored him, knowing this was my fight and nothing he could do would keep me from protecting Ronan.
“Do not tempt me!” Lucan hollered so forcefully I felt the spit fly from his mouth and land on my face.
“Throw him in prison, lock him up, keep him there for as long as you want, but he does not deserve death!” I pleaded, maintaining my stance of defiance.
“Throw him in prison? So that he can escape for a third time and leave me to look like an incompetent fool of a king?” Lucan demanded of me.
“Please don't do this,” I begged, ignoring his question. “Please.”
“Eden, move out of my way before I pull every other prisoner I have detained downstairs and make you watch while I bury this sword into every one of their hearts, slowly and painfully,” Lucan threatened and I flinched under weight of his words.
“You're bluffing,” I winced.
“I guess we'll find out!” his voice grew to a shout and he turned on his guard, “Bring them all up, every last one of them! We will start with the child and she can learn her lesson the hard way!”
“Eden,” Ronan's calm voice reasoned from behind me with his soft, Irish accent marking every syllable. “Let him do it, let him kill me. He has gained nothing by my death and you would never be able to live with yourself. Please, I'm ready to die. I'm not afraid.” His voice broke at the end, but not from fear, from something much more like determination. He was right, he was not afraid to die. He had faced tonight's mission with the firm belief that his actions were worth giving his life for and I could not argue with him.
I turned around to face him and forced my eyes to his. I desperately wanted to fall to my knees and weep, to throw my arms around his neck and beg for his forgiveness. But I knew that he needed strength more than anything. He needed confidence. So instead, I stood tall and nodded my approval, only allowing one tear to unforgivably escape down my cheek. I fell silent and held back my tears with fierce resolve. Ronan was ready, it was his determined acceptance while facing death that made me back down. Nothing that Lucan could have said or done would have calmed my behavior.
I let the Guards remove me from Lucan's reach and carefully restrain me. Kiran came to my side, and one of the Guards backed away so that he could stand next to me, supporting me with an arm around my waist.
We watched together as Lucan retracted his sword and plunged it forcibly through Ronan's heart without so much as acknowledging his non-resistance to the punishment. The sword made a sickening slicing sound as it plunged through Ronan's chest cavity and he instantly fell forward onto it, his fiery red hair spilling across his ghost white face.
The tragedy of the moment was too much for me and I lost the ability to think rationally, I lost complete reign of my senses. With a horrified scream and a stream of words I didn't even understand I released the blue smoke in a thick cloud in one last attempt to save Ronan's waning life. The smoke flew through the air with purpose, fighting through clustered Titans and toward the boy who lay in the last moments of his life on earth.
Lucan, who had his back to Ronan wiping his hands off on a towel, turned around at the sound of the wind and commotion behind him. His face contorted into unadulterated rage and in one swift movement of his hand he sent his magic to meet my blue smoke in the air. His black magic became a wall of fury, stopping the blue smoke from getting anywhere near Ronan and sending it back against me so that everyone around me was knocked back from the force of it.
“This is your last lesson, child!” Lucan shouted at me, the satisfied calm that settled over him after Ronan’s death gone. “Cross me again and you will beg for my mercy whilst you watch every last one of your beloved rebels die at my hands. I will not continue to let you defy me. Break to my will or I will break you myself!” He let his words settle in the air over me before he turned to his son, “Kiran, if you ever let her disrespect me like that again, I will spare nothing in my attempt to teach her the lessons she refuses to learn. You can watch by as your beloved bends under my thumb. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, father,” he answered, humbled by his father's wrath. He pulled me closer to him protectively and I let him.
Lucan left the room in a flurry of robes and wrath. Several Guards followed after him and those that didn't picked Ronan's empty body off the ground and carried him from the room silently.
I turned into Kiran, and collapsed into his arms. The tears came again, angry, frustrated tears that would not let up or let me forget the peace in Ronan's eyes as he looked toward the heavens and watched his wispy magic float heavenward as if his soul were soon to follow.
Kiran caught me, holding me tightly against him. He rubbed my back, soothing the pain that would not lessen, that would not disappear. That would eventually turn into fuel for a fire that burned against Lucan, a fire that would eventually burn him to the ground. I let the pain consume me, the horror of what I had witnessed, the unfairness of watching an innocent Immortal suffer at Lucan's evil hands. And I turned it into vengeful strength. The strength that I needed to one day take a life of my own.
Lucan's life.
Chapter Twenty-One
I sat at the window, staring unseeingly into the pounding rain that dampened the late summer's day. Three weeks had gone by since I watched Ronan murdered. Three weeks of tragic mourning that frightened Kiran, angered Lucan and even worried Avalon.
I pulled my knees to my chest and rested my cheek against them. I would have closed my eyes under normal circumstances and allowed the utter exhaustion to sweep me away, but his death reenacted for the hundredth time waited for me behind closed lids and frankly the thought of facing him again terrified me. I reached out to the window, pressing my hand against the cool glass and wondered if I would ever shake this devastation.