Passion Untamed (Feral Warriors #3)(36)

She lay on her back in a pool of blood, her arms still caught behind her, her back bowed in agony. Deep cuts marred her lovely face, neck, and hands. Scores of them.

Fury roared through his blood as he grabbed for the keys to her cell with shaking hands. As Lyon and the others raced in behind him, he whirled on his chief, his lip pulling back in a snarl. "I'll kill the man who did this."

Lyon came to stand beside him as Paenther unlocked the door of the cell. "Look at her legs, B.P."

Through a haze of rage, Paenther stared, uncomprehending. Cuts erupted along the lengths of her legs as if a ghost wielded an invisible blade. The bloodstains on her dress grew, encompassing her abdomen and hips, arms and thighs, though no cuts appeared in the fabric. They were coming from within her.

"What's doing this?" he demanded, pulling the door open and rushing inside. As he knelt beside her, blood-caked lashes rose slowly, painfully. "What's happening, little witch?"

She tried to speak, but her voice broke on a word, forcing Paenther to lean closer. "Birik." Her face and body contorted, but her mouth fought to form the words. "The moon...ritual."

"The slaughter?"

"Yes," she gasped. "My punishment...for not..." Her mouth went still as a wicked cut slashed across it.

Paenther stared at her, at the slashes wreaking havoc on her flesh with quicker and quicker frequency. Her meaning slowly penetrated the furious fog encasing his brain.

Birik was punishing her for not performing the ritual. As if she had any choice when she'd been stolen away.

That bastard.

The slashes were coming so fast that it was as if five men attacked her at once. The pool of her blood spread.

Her suffering tore at him. It shouldn't matter to him. She shouldn't matter to him. But she did.

"How do we stop it, Skye?"

"Can't. It will...stop." Her words told him clearly she'd been through this before. How many times?

Her eyes rolled back, her body bowing against the agony. Yet she made no sound, suffering in silence until finally she collapsed into unconsciousness.

In his mind's eye, he saw her again as she'd lain in a heap on the floor of the cavern, bloodied and broken from Birik's attack. He'd kill him. If it was the last thing he did, he'd kill that son of a bitch. Fury roared through his body, a fury born from the depths of his abhorrence for the abuse of innocents.

He stared down at her, at the beauty nearly obscured beneath the bloody cuts that crisscrossed her face. And he finally accepted what his gut had been telling him from the beginning. This witch was different. She was innocent of the cruelty and treachery he'd suffered from Ancreta.

Innocent.

"We may finally know the purpose of that cantric of hers," the Shaman said behind him.

Paenther glanced at him over his shoulder, taking in the small audience that had followed him down. "What do you mean?"

"I've been wondering why anyone would embed a cantric in a heart, and I've come up with one reason. So the one in whom it was embedded cannot ever be free of it."

"What are you saying?"

"I think it's there to control her. Punishment, she called it. That Mage loaded spells into her cantric to punish her for doing the forbidden, or for failing to do the things he wanted her to do."

Like perform the moon ritual.

"Then he put the cantric where she could never remove it."

"Seems like a drastic measure," Tighe said.

"I agree." The Shaman shook out the lace cuffs of his sleeves. "It makes you wonder just how hard she fought him for him to resort to such a measure."

"Was she a slave, then?" Tighe asked. "To her own people?"

Paenther's hands fisted at his sides. "To one person, I think." Birik. Goddess, he didn't know what she was. He didn't know anything anymore. She'd shown all the signs of a woman abused. But then during that nightmare of a ritual, she'd seemed completely involved in the slaughter and the sex, taking him inside her against his will, and he'd believed what Vhyper had told him, that it was all a ploy to gain his cooperation. But when he thought back on that night, he remembered how tight she'd been even after Birik had attempted to ready her. He'd assumed that proved her interest in him had been faked. Now he was beginning to realize their mating had been as against her will as it had been his own.

Paenther looked down at the ravaged, delicate beauty as if seeing her clearly for the very first time. Eight years old. She'd fought Birik like a panther cub. Why?

But he knew. She'd fought him over the animals.

He looked up at Lyon. "She's an enchantress."

"What's an enchantress?" Kara asked.

The Shaman answered. "The enchantress is one of the truest of the nature spirits the Mage evolved from. There are few left. I've seen them attract birds or butterflies. Occasionally bees. For this one to affect your animals is extraordinary."

"What function did she perform for the Mage, B.P.?" Lyon asked.

"I'm not sure. She called animals from the forest, five or six at a time. Birik sacrificed them, drenching her in their blood while she...performed...a ritual. It was through the power of that ritual that Birik was able to free three wraith Daemons from the blade."

The Shaman frowned. "Sacrifices are used to call forth dark power. Killings like that would go against the very nature of a true enchantress."