“She attacked you? Athena?” He laughed. “You’re lying.”
She flushed. “You are distraught. You know she is able to walk. Her strength is greater than it appears. She was determined to go after her lover—the murderer Morgan Holt.”
A fresh swell of exclamations followed, but Niall’s wild glance imposed silence once more. He loomed over Cecily. “He has not come here?”
“Here?” Cecily shuddered. “But I thought you—” She bit her lip. “I warned you about him. You said that you would deal with him yourself!”
He seized her upper arms and shook her. “If anything has happened to my sister—”
“But nothing has, Niall,” a hoarse voice said from across the room. “Not in the way you mean.”
Chapter 23
Cecily felt her knees begin to buckle. A figure draped in oversized trousers and shirt walked down the open path the crowd had made for Niall’s entrance. Athena’s approach was not nearly so violent, but every eye turned to her and the silence became even more profound.
Athena’s face was white, her hair a rat’s nest, her breathing ragged. But she stood before her brother as if she were the taller and more powerful, capable of felling him with a single blow.
“Athena!” Caitlin exclaimed.
“Athena,” Niall stammered. “You are… Where have you been?”
His attempt to regain control of the situation failed miserably. Athena stared up at him, unblinking.
“Did you kill my mother?”
Niall’s mouth fell open. She showed him no mercy. “I know you were responsible for her disappearance just after I was born. Did you kill her?”
Cecily had never seen Niall turn white as he did now. “Athena, what are you doing?”
“I am seeking the truth.” She smiled, a look that sent a chill down Cecily’s spine. “It’s too late to worry about my reputation now, isn’t it? I am sure that Cecily has told everyone what they didn’t already know.” The smile vanished. “Tell me.”
“Athena… you don’t understand.” He looked about as if for support and found only one gaze that would meet his. Caitlin Hughes stepped up beside him. It was a measure of how far he had fallen that he seemed to take comfort in her presence.
“I did not kill her,” he said in a firmer voice. “I drove her away. I had to. She was ruining our father’s life, and she would have ruined yours. I tried to save you.”
“To save me,” she whispered, “or yourself? Are you that afraid of me?”
Niall’s face darkened in fury. “Who told you about your mother?” he demanded. He swung on Caitlin. “Was it you?”
“No.” Athena glanced at Caitlin with a remote gentleness in her eyes. “Morgan told me. You thought he was dead, didn’t you? You believed you’d killed him. But you didn’t succeed, Niall. He deceived you. And I found him.”
The expression on Niall’s face transformed from consternation to contempt in a handful of seconds. “You… you have been with him, haven’t you? Turning against your own family, your own kind… Lying with him like any whore, just like your mother—”
A blur of motion was all Cecily saw before Niall crashed onto his back on the ballroom floor. The blur resolved into another man, barefoot and wearing only a calf-length greatcoat. He stood over his fallen victim with teeth bared and eyes ablaze.
Morgan Holt. Morgan Holt had come. Those terrible eyes turned from Niall, rested briefly on Athena, and fixed unerringly upon Cecily.
With a mindless shriek, Cecily turned and fled.
Athena watched her go, feeling nothing, just as she suffered no regret or embarrassment under the horrified and titillated stares of those she had once called friends. All the emotions that had driven her for the past hours—rage, confusion, terror—had deserted her; it was as if she stood at the eye of a tornado, hearing it howl about her while she remained untouched.
It was a way of protecting herself from hurt, just as she had made a fortress of her lameness and the chair that restricted her freedom. From the chair she had watched the world go by, seeking to affect it while remaining unaffected, a serene goddess of mercy and charity who had forgotten what it was to be human.