Author Games: Empty Night

Finals: The Cachail

            He slumped across his bathroom counter, the sleeves of his dress jacket bunched around his elbows and the face of his watch scratched by the counter's edge. Unwashed hair fell over his forehead, and bruise-colored rings underlined his lower eyelids, giving him the appearance of someone who had not slept in two days. If his coworkers were to enter his loft and survey the entire scene—possessions scattered haphazardly across tabletops, costly rugs creased and overturned—they would believe that their colleague had come undone.

But the owner of the ruined loft had not received guests in over two hundred years. Therefore, any appraisal of his situation was left to the three people remaining in the loft: the man who stood before his bronze-framed bathroom mirror, and the two men who stared back at him.

The Cachail's was the most obvious face of the two reflected in the smudged glass. No degree of disarray could hide the expensive haircut and the years' worth of careful grooming that the Cachail had maintained, along with the designer clothing that still adorned his body. His lifestyle oozed from every inch of the loft, and his influence could not be erased through one day of mental collapse, no matter how keenly the other men might wish for it to fade. But even while the Cachail blinked and stared from the mirror's surface, his haunted gaze and bitten lip could not belong to anyone to Cian. The outward trappings were the Cachail's, but the emotional turmoil reflected the man who had come before him.

And the third man beheld these two gentlemen, and he covered his face with his hands and wept.

By Nuada's crown, the fury had already left him. He did not know what to do without it; he did not know how to stand or walk or claim what belonged to him without the maelstrom of centuries lost to prop up his bones. In the harsh fluorescent light of a small bathroom, all that remained was the grief, and two men whose control had been wrested from them now begged for him to decide which of them would remain, even though the grief twisted his mind and made any choosing impossible.

Perhaps he ought to have made decisions while the anger had still invigorated him. For the twenty-four hours that had preceded the grief, his anger had allowed him to act purposefully, if not rationally; he'd singlehandedly dismantled the Unseelie investigation by dismissing Dorian H'Langraash's killer without permission, and his instructions to Veya had ensured that her arrest, if it came at all, would not be at the hands of the Unseelie Court.

Of course, these had all been the actions of a furious Cian, not those of a man saddled with two identities and certainly not those of the Cachail himself. Cian's sense of loss had overwhelmed all allegiances that the Cachail had sworn, and the rage of a father denied his children and a Tuath denied his homeland had driven him to defy the Court at any cost. In the dingy apartment to which Willow had pointed him, he'd peered into the heart of Dorian H'Langraash's killer, and he'd found the anguish of powerlessness, the despair of the weak; he'd understood the sentiments she'd fostered, though her methods had repulsed him, and he'd allowed her to flee if only so that her victory would spite the Court.

But his fury had passed, and the grief now ached in his bones. Cian mourned the loss of a land to which he could never return; meanwhile, the Cachail demanded that a decision be made before any more time was wasted, and the amalgamation of these two men found himself unable to indulge either one.

When he left this loft next, he would be only one man. His body was too weak to house two men's burdens, and his mind could not balance their disparate priorities. But choosing which man to save was an impossible task—both identities had become as real and tangible as the body that they now shared, and their separate histories had lasted for nearly the same amount of time. The single criterion for his decision would need to be this: which man's life was more worth living? Which man was capable of true fulfillment?