Darroc snorted. “You live like a beast in a cage, and you no longer even see the bars. I was only trying to free you, free us all.”
“And enslave the human race.”
“They were born to be enslaved. By their very nature. Weak, puny things.”
And there it was, Adam realized with a faint smile, precisely the sentence the arrogant Elder should bear. “Make him human, my Queen. Condemn him to die in the human realm.”
The queen laughed softly. “Well spoken, Adam; we are pleased. Both fitting and fair.”
“You can’t do this to me,” raged Darroc. “I will not live as one of them! Bloody kill me now!”
Adam’s smile deepened.
Aoibheal moved forward, speaking in the ancient tongue, circling around the Elder, faster and faster, until but a radiant swirl of light spun on the floor of the chamber.
As Adam watched, the light grew blindingly intense, then suddenly Darroc and the queen reappeared.
Adam eyed his ancient nemesis curiously. There was something . . . different about him. His human appearance was somehow unlike Adam’s human appearance had been. But what? Rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, he scrutinized the ex-Elder.
Tall, powerful, beautiful as all the Fae. Long gold-shot copper hair spilling to his waist. Chiseled, aristocratic face etched with disdain. Copper eyes glittering with rage—ah, his eyes! They were human eyes, with no unnatural iridescence or fiery golden sparks flickering within them.
And, although Darroc still presented an exotic, stunningly masculine beauty only rarely glimpsed in the human realm (and then usually immortalized on stage or screen), he no longer had that brush of otherworldliness that Adam had never lost. Despite an ineffable sense of ancientness, Darroc would pass as human in nearly any quarter.
“I don’t get it,” Adam murmured. “He looks different than I did.”
“Of course he does,” said Aoibheal. “He’s now human.”
“Yes, but so was I.”
The queen laughed, a silvery sound. “No you weren’t.”
Adam blinked. “Yes, I was; you made me human yourself.”
“You were never human, Adam. You were always Tuatha Dé. I merely played with your form a bit, made you as close to human as I could get you without actually transforming you into one of them. I heightened your senses, made you believe you were mortal. You yourself had diminished your essence by healing the Highlander. But you were never human. It’s the one form I cannot shapeshift our people between. Once I give a Tuatha Dé a human form, it is irreversible. What I just did to Darroc can never be undone. No one and nothing in all the realms can prevent him now from dying, human and soulless. A year, fifty years, who knows? He will die.”
“But I felt human feelings,” Adam protested.
“Impossible,” Aoibheal said flatly.
Adam frowned, confounded. But he’d felt them. He’d felt pain in his chest where he’d thought he’d had a heart. He’d gotten a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever Gabrielle had been in danger. He’d suffered human feelings. How was that possible if he’d never been in human form?
He shook his head abruptly, scattering the questions from his head, to puzzle over later. There were far more important matters to which he needed to attend. And quickly, before Aoibheal decided to constrain him in some new fashion for some ridiculous reason.
While the queen was occupied with summoning her guard to escort Darroc to the human realm and bring in her consort Mael, whom Darroc had betrayed as his accomplice, Adam quietly tensed to sift out.
Suddenly the queen’s head swiveled in his direction and she snapped furiously, “You will stop that this instant, Amadan D—”
But she’d spoken too late to compel him—he was already gone.
Adam went first to the Queen’s Royal Bower.
Once before he’d stolen the elixir of life from her private chambers.
Now he did so again.
A tiny glass vial containing a tiny amount of shimmering silvery liquid.
And as he sifted about, displacing his residue before heading for Cincinnati, he reflected on those last moments he’d spent with Gabrielle.
You’re not falling for me, are you, Irish? he’d asked. And she’d blown up at him.
Launched into a furious, rambling diatribe that hadn’t made much sense to him, possibly because he’d tuned most of it out upon realizing after the first few sentences that there’d been no “yes” in there anywhere and she hadn’t sounded remotely as if she’d been leading up to one.