Darklight Read Online Free PDF Page A

speak, but it was too late. He was already going—in another moment, there would be little left of Mabh’s monstrous creation but smoke and mist and a haunting cry that drifted away on the wind.
    Sonny averted his gaze so that he would not have to watch as yet another Wild Hunter faded to nothingness.
    “Another one for the fire,” Sonny said as he slammed his hand down on the oak table and sank wearily onto a bench. Gofannon the blacksmith—a mountain of muscle in a scorched leather apron—rumbled a greeting that sounded half composed of ash and smoke. He thrust a bar of raw iron into the heart of the forge and threw his heavy tongs down on the hearth as though they weighed no more than a pair of knitting needles.
    When Sonny withdrew his hand, a glittering black stag-head jewel lay upon the worn wooden surface. Gofannon eyed the stone as if it were a poisonous viper. He drew a dirty oilcloth rag from the pocket of his apron and picked the stone up in it. Moving swiftly for all his bulk, he stepped back over to the fire and tossed both rag and gem into the forge. Then he went and worked the bellows, pumping air until the flames burned almost white.
    “You’ll ruin the iron.” Sonny nodded his head at where the metal bar had begun to misshape in the extreme heat.
    “Plenty more where that came from,” Gofannon grunted between his exertions. When he returned to sit with Sonny, he was carrying a small wooden box that he had fetched from a cabinet hanging on the rough stone wall, along with a clean rag, a dish, and a pitcher. “Give me your hand,” he said, pouring water from the pitcher into the dish and dampening the rag.
    Sonny’s hand was wrapped in a strip of fabric torn from the hem of his riding cloak, the cloth stained through and stiff with blood. He laid his forearm on the table and waited silently while the blacksmith unwrapped the makeshift bandage.
    Sonny tried to ignore the big smith’s muttered expressions of consternation as—once he’d cleaned the dried blood away—Gofannon traced the thin white lines of close to two dozen other scars that ran across the breadth of Sonny’s palm, in addition to the fresh, angry-red seam of his latest wound.
    “How much longer is this going to go on, then?” Gofannon asked, his voice carefully neutral.
    “There are twenty-seven hunters, all told,” Sonny said, staring at his palm as if the scars could tell his future.
    “Then you must be close to the end, judging by this.”
    “Three left. I think. They all start to blur together. In my mind and on my hand. . .”
    The act of eliminating the Wild Hunt, Sonny soon discovered upon his return to the Otherworld with Auberon, was bound up in dangerous magick. His appointed task was not quite as simple as hunting their scattered numbers down, one by one. Not only were the hunters dangerous in and of themselves, but it was only blood magick that allowed Sonny to release a hunter from Queen Mabh’s curse once he’d caught up with them. His own blood.
    The smith’s brows knit fiercely as he tended to the wound on Sonny’s hand. “When you first told me of this task the king has charged you with. . . I should have counseled you against it.”
    “It wouldn’t have made any difference, Gof. It wasn’t something Auberon would have let me refuse. And besides, the waking of the Hunt was partly my fault. It’s only right that I be the one to clean up this mess.”
    “Still. Blood magick is bad business, Sonny. Dangerous.”
    “Aye,” Sonny agreed dryly. “And frequently painful, I can attest.”
    The gash on Sonny’s hand cleaned, Gofannon twisted the stopper out of a squat, opaque green jar that he produced out of the box. He slathered a thick coating of pungent ointment onto the not-yet-healed wound and unrolled a length of linen bandage, wrapping it around the Janus’s hand. “Faerie magick is a plague, Sonny. A sickness. Passion fuels it, and that is its very peril—because the more you use it, the