Read Brighid's Mark for Free Online Page B

he said, with grim satisfaction.
    “Yshotha?” Callie stretched over the table and lifted the open book, leaning on her forearms and balancing on the balls of her feet. Liam wasn’t sure how the physics worked, but he was as appreciative was he was fascinated. As annoyed as he was with Chase’s impeccable timing—he’d been within an inch of kissing Callie, magnetized by those whiskey eyes. Disappointment thundered in his chest.
    “Based on Liam’s description and Maeve’s reference to unrequited love, this is the bugger we’re after.” Donal’s eyes sparked with satisfaction.
    Callie pushed the book in Liam’s direction and swiveled to her elbows, long limbs on riveting display. “What do you think?”
    Liam smoothed the crackling page. He was slowly growing accustomed to having people in his space, their things underfoot and littered across every flat surface. It made his fingers itch, but he managed to restrain the urge to follow everyone with a laundry hamper and a dust cloth. Only that morning Chase had left a wet towel on one of his antique leather upholstered chairs, and Liam was almost positive the demon hunter had done it on purpose.
    Speaking of demons, there it was—the horns, the fiery eyes, the lava-run crags in inky woodcut detail. He would have said medieval demonologists possessed too much imagination and too many lonely nights for their own good if he hadn’t seen the damned thing for himself.
    “That’s it.” He raised his eyebrows at Donal. “And you want to summon this thing?”
    Chase smirked. “That’s how we hunt. If we can’t track it and bring it bay, we trap it. Provided we have the right bait.”
    Callie returned his smile. “Meaning me.”
    “What?” Donal blurted out.
    “What?” Liam echoed, half a beat behind.
    “Are you certain you want to put yourself up for this?” Donal scowled. “Eva was bait, and it got her.”
    “It won’t get me.”
    “How do you know?” Liam demanded. Of course it would get her. She would be utterly destroyed. How could she not be?
    Then he remembered her eyes when she faced down Maeve, and doubted his own judgment.
    “Because we have a connection to the Loa. We’re meant to take it down.” She leveraged up onto both feet and returned the book to Donal. “What’s it going to take for a summoning?”
    Donal’s fingers trailed across the page as he read. “These demonologists didn’t half make things complicated, did they? We’ll need a field enclosed in iron—a big one. Also, there’s a reference to where ‘fire has taken lives, created ghosts of hearts and souls.’”
    Liam scrubbed his face with both hands. “You just described most of the city. The older parts, anyway. Do you have any idea how many Great Fires we’ve had?”
    Donal did the math and conceded the point. “I imagine it’s referring to some symbolism as to unrequited love.”
    “What else?” Callie asked.
    Donal returned his attention to the book. “A lot of live obsidian, and the blood of the unrequited. Heart’s blood.”
    Callie raised her eyebrows. “Which unrequited? The object of unrequited love, or the unrequited themselves?”
    “Doesn’t say.” Donal snapped the book shut with a dusty, papery poof .
    Chase grunted. “I don’t think it matters. Unrequited is unrequited. Let’s get this show on the road already.”
    Callie gave a fatalistic shrug. “At least I won’t have to lay open my sword hand.”
    Liam marveled at her, not for the first time. “You really think a sword is going to take this thing down?”
    She grinned. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”
    Liam turned to Donal. “What does the book say?”
    “The usual drill—abandon all hope, all ye who enter here, et cetera.”
    “A grand thing it is,” Callie drawled in an exaggerated brogue, “the ability to read Latin. I knew I should’ve stuck with it in school.”
    “It’s what you pay me for,” Donal returned. “However measly it is. Regardless, there’s no