Lucan laughed, and the sound sent a shock wave through the crystal hanging over them. “I am neither a boy nor your attendant.”
A dark-haired woman he had never before seen appeared in the mirror closest to him.
“You were my son.” Grave dirt fell from her lips as she spoke, and ghosts danced in her gray eyes. “But I sent you away, and died alone and frightened.”
At least this apparition had it wrong. “You are not my mother.”
“The lady Blanche did give birth to you, my son.” The priest held the woman’s hand as she stepped out of the mirror. “For your safety and her own, she convinced her cousin Gwynyth to hide you at court while she used your existence to blackmail several lovers. Unfortunately she went too far by demanding marriage from a duke.” The priest paused to brush some of the cobwebs from her shoulders. “He buried her alive in one of his family tombs.”
One of the few things impossible to do in the nightlands was lie, and this impossible truth outraged Lucan. “Do you know what Gwynyth did to me? The hell she made of my boyhood?”
“Gwynyth saved your life by naming you her son,” the priest told him. “Had she not, the duke would have seen to it that you joined your mother permanently.”
Lucan watched the dark woman fade away. “I did well enough without a mother.”
“So you did. You with your killing touch and your cold heart.” The priest made the sign of the cross over him. “You who were to become Death. Darkness has no need, my son.”
“I am a man,” Lucan said, “not darkness or death, or your son.”
“I would have been your father, but for your mother, who told me that you were Tremayne’s get.” His mirror image swelled and reshaped its form into a broader, older version of himself with glowing green eyes. “When he brought damnation to me, he denied being your sire, and told me you had been changed. On that night I lost the last remnant of my faith.”
Lucan knew the nightlands made the priest’s words the truth . . . or he believed what he said to be true.
“If by this tedious babbling you are attempting some manner of apology, you are seven centuries too late.” Lucan ignored a sharp crack that shifted the glass floor beneath him. “I have no need for a father.”
“Darkness has no need.” The priest moved his gloved hand over the face of one of the standing mirrors, which darkened to show Samantha shackled inside a small cage. “Your woman has been taken prisoner by your nameless enemy.” He reversed his hand, and Christian appeared, hurled to the deck before Samantha, who assumed a protective position over the girl. “So, too, the child she loves as a sister. Do you know what he does to women, your enemy?”
“Release me.” When the priest said nothing, Lucan seized him by the throat, and a shower of crystal death rained down around them. “Goddamn you, let me out of here.”
Dark metal oozed out of the older man’s pores, covering his skin and robe until he became a copper statue of himself. Lucan held on, snarling as more crystal fell and sliced through his flesh, and the hand he had wrapped around the priest’s throat became engulfed in flame and blackened.
“You are spellbound here by the one who means to take your kingdom from you,” the priest said, his voice grinding over the words like rusted metal. “It is not within my power to free you.”
“So you are as useless to me here as you were in life. How astonishing.” Lucan flung the priest from him as his rage boiled over, pulverizing the crystal blades embedded in his flesh. His images on wall after wall exploded, filling the air with clouds of sparkling shards and stripping the copper facade from the priest.
Lucan destroyed the world around them, until the gray void descended, obliterating everything but him and the priest, their wounds erased, their garments restored.
“You believe I am useless, and perhaps I am,” the priest said. “But this I can tell you, my son: I, too, have terrible powers, and for the love of a woman used them to destroy myself. You will come to a moment when you know these things, and only then will you understand me.”
The priest vanished.
“If that preposterous idiot is punishment for my sins, then I salute your genius at torture.” He was talking out loud to a God he no longer worshipped; surely madness had already begun to set in. Bespelled or not, he had to fight his way back to consciousness, find the women, and attend to his enemy.
Endless as the void seemed, Lucan knew it to be but a veil between worlds. He tempered his anger, gathering himself and focusing his thoughts on one objective: to awaken.