Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  It was only a brief flicker in my peripheral vision, vague and indistinct. My shadow ghosted along at my heels as I slowly moved forward, but the fey cast none. Around him there was only a quivering nothing, like negative space.

  Some kind of camouflage, I guessed, and it worked pretty well. I couldn’t seem to see him at all if I looked directly at him. He only showed up in the corner of my eye in glimpses, wavering in and out of the rain shadows and the strands of gently waving wallpaper.

  The fey was joined by another and then another, the air around them practically sparkling with the ghostly light around their bodies. Until it flickered and went out, dimming down to the nothingness of the first. And whether it was a spell or that almost weightless gait they all seemed to have, my ears couldn’t pick up a thing. Not a footfall, not a single breath, nothing. Silence filled the old house like cold water, broken only by the soft sound of the rain.

  A fourth intruder joined the growing crowd. And unless the fey were as ghostly as they appeared and could walk through walls, I knew how they were getting in. He’d come from the pantry, through the door that led out into the hall. They’d entered through the portal.

  Pip had the big boy in the basement, but he’d littered other portals throughout the house for security and convenience. They didn’t go anywhere exotic; that one just let out into the backyard, by Claire’s old compost heap. We’d mostly been using it to take out the garbage.

  But it looked like the fey had found a better use for it.

  There were no wards guarding it because it didn’t exist when not in use. At least, that was the theory. Somehow, they had figured out it was there and had tinkered with the spell enough to get it to open from that end, giving them free access to the heart of the house.

  What I couldn’t figure out was why the damned internal wards weren’t working. Pip hadn’t been content with just exterior wards. He’d added a bunch of nasty interior ones as well, which I’d seen in action on one memorable occasion. And Olga and I had recently placed another layer over the top of that.

  With four fey in the hall and who knew how many coming, there should have been a hell of a fight going on. Yet the wards hadn’t so much as twinged. Damned useless things, I thought viciously. Spend all that money and time, and what did we get? Not so much as a warning siren when the bad guys showed up. If I lived long enough, I was going to tell Olga exactly what I thought of—

  I was grabbed from behind and yanked backward into the kitchen. We hadn’t even stopped moving when I slammed an elbow back into my attacker’s gut, and came down on his foot with my heel. And had to stifle my own curse. I’d forgotten I was barefoot, and that had hurt.

  But he let go and I spun, bringing the short sword up in a stabbing motion—and hit wallpaper. Whoever it was had moved like quicksilver, dodging the blade before darting back in to grab me and shove me against the refrigerator. He pinned me there with his lean, hot weight, grabbing my arms, trapping me.

  So I brought up a knee, hard, and heard another grunt, just as I recognized a familiar scent. Fey didn’t smell like butterscotch and whisky—at least, none I’d ever met. I looked up into a pair of furious blue eyes. Louis-Cesare.

  “How the hell did you get in?” I whispered.

  “Through the door,” he said quietly, his voice a little strained.

  I moved my knee. “Sorry.” And then what he’d said registered. “What do you mean, through the door? The wards are set to exclude all but family.”

  “I am family, Dorina.”

  Oh, yeah.

  I didn’t ask him why he was here instead of where he was supposed to be because right then I didn’t care. “They’re after Aiden,” I told him. “We need to get them before they go upstairs.”

  He didn’t ask me what I meant. I guess he’d gotten a look in the hall, or maybe that keen nose had scented something off, too. “I counted eight of them. And there may be more,” he told me grimly.

  “Eight?” Wonderful. Not that it made a difference. “It doesn’t matter how many there are. We’ve got to stop them.”

  I started for the hall again, or tried to, but that iron grip didn’t budge. “We will not stop eight fey warriors by brawn alone,” he told me harshly. “A little planning may be the difference between success and failure.”

  “So might delay!”

  I wrenched away, but he moved to block the door to the hall, and trying to budge him would have been like going through a brick wall. Harder, actually: I’d been through a wall, but I’d never managed to dislodge Louis-Cesare when he was in a mood. I spun on my heel and flung open the kitchen door instead, intending to circle around back and hopefully take the fey by surprise.

  And then I just stood there, staring.

  I’d been hearing a weird noise coming from outside, but hadn’t had time to focus on it. It had sounded like someone bouncing on a trampoline, which was a little odd at three a.m. But the reality wasn’t that far off.

  “What is it?” Louis-Cesare came up behind me.

  I thought it was sort of self-explanatory. He was just in time to see another group of Cheung’s boys throw themselves at the wards. A few of them must have had some serious power, because they actually managed to dent the surface a few inches, distorting their faces horribly as they pressed up against the invisible skin.

  And then the wards corrected, throwing more power at the point of contact, and they went staggering backward. Or flying, depending on how far in they’d made it. The reaction seemed to be in direct proportion to the threat.

  I could have told them that they were wasting their time. The house wards weren’t run off a talisman that could be exhausted if enough force was applied. They were powered by a ley-line sink, which had unlimited energy. Cheung’s boys could batter themselves bloody, but they’d never get through that way.

  “Idiots,” I said with feeling. “It would serve them right if they did get in. I’d like to see how they’d deal with—”

  I stopped, staring at all the power expending itself uselessly against the wards.

  When it could be in here helping us.

  I watched the mud-splattered attackers for a moment and wondered if I was going crazy. No way could the two of us handle a couple dozen senior- level masters. But then, weaker ones wouldn’t be any use againstsubrand’s thugs. And when Cheung’s boys stormed the house, there was a good chance the fey were going to assume they were coming to our aid, and vice versa. If they tore into one another, it might buy me time to find Claire and the boys.

  Of course, if they didn’t, I was screwed. But I was screwed anyway, and between the devil and the deep blue sea, the devil starts to look pretty good. At least he can be bargained with. The sea will just kill you.

  I felt a hand suddenly tighten around my bicep. I looked up, and saw the same idea dawning in Louis-Cesare’s eyes.

  “Can you do it?” he whispered.

  “Yes. But Cheung will run as soon as he sees the fey.” If he had any sense.

  “He won’t run,” Louis-Cesare said, with a slight smile.

  I followed his line of sight out into the yard, where I saw Cheung’s head jerk up. He stared at the house, a scowl spreading over his features. “What did you do?” I demanded.

  “I suggested to him that he might have his servant, if he was not too much of a coward to come in and take him.”

  “You called a first-level master a coward?”

  “Among other things.”

  “And they say I’m crazy.”

  I mentally felt around for the bright web of power flowing about the house. There should have been a corresponding interior web as well, but it was conspicuously absent. Someone had taken down the internal wards, cutting the link between them and their power source, the ley-line sink. But they’d left the external ones intact, either because they’d wanted to fool me into thinking everything was fine or—more likely—because they just hadn’t cared.

  It took only a second to wrap the filaments of the external war
ds around my mental hand and give a hard tug. Within seconds, the long skeins of energy had unraveled to nothing, leaving the old house bare and defenseless. “I hope this works,” I said with feeling. “Or we just went from bad to—”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish, because I was suddenly slung over a shoulder, carted to the pantry and shoved headfirst down the portal. It happened so fast that for a second, I didn’t understand what was going on. Until it spit me out the other side.

  Right atsubrand’s feet.

  “—tragic,” I finished blankly.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I thinksubrand was almost as surprised to see me as I was to see him, but he recovered fast. His boot came down in the middle of compost and wet leaves, right where I’d been lying. I wasn’t there anymore, because I’d flung myself backward into the now two-way portal.

  I crashed to the hard floor of the pantry and rolled into Louis-Cesare’s legs. And then the lunatic picked me up and started trying to stuff me back inside. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Attempting to get you to safety.”

  “That’s a damn strange way of doing it!” I panted, bracing my hands and feet on the shelves on either side of the gaping maw, like a cat trying to avoid a bath.

  “I will get the others out. You have my word,” he said, trying to prize me off. But every time he removed one limb, I curled the others through the metal supports of the shelves, holding on for dear life.

  I was sucking in breath to explain, when he jerked me back, ripping the whole shelving unit off the wall. It came away, concrete screws and all, but I held on like my fingers were welded to the metal. He cursed in exasperation. “Why will you not let go?”

  “Becausesubrand’s out there, you complete lunatic!” And then it wasn’t true, because he was suddenly in the house and crashing into me.

  I don’t think he’d expected to find someone physically blocking the portal, because he hadn’t come through with a drawn weapon. But that was the only good thing. The portal flung him into me, I lost my grip on the shelves and we tumbled to the ground. And then he was suddenly gone. It took me a moment to realize that Louis-Cesare had picked him up and flung him back through.

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” I said, half-appalled, half-impressed, as he turned toward the door. I pushed the shelving off me and grabbed him. “Stay here. Hold offsubrand.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get my duffel.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now! Ray’s in there! If Cheung gets him before we do, he’ll have no reason to stick around.”

  “I will go,” Louis-Cesare said as the sound of crossed swords and gunfire came from the hall.

  He left before I got the chance to tell him that I’d really prefer to face Cheung and his men than the ice-cold prince of the fey. But then the portal started to activate again. I panicked just slightly at the thought of facingsubrand with nothing but a short sword for a weapon. So I started throwing everything I could reach down the portal’s wide gullet.

  Heavy bags of beans and rice—Olga always bought in bulk—were swallowed up, along with bottles of condiments, large-sized cans of soup and vegetables, and a broken TV that someone had stuck on a shelf. I’d hoped that, if the portal was open and active on one end, someone couldn’t use it to come through on the other. It seemed to make logical sense, but I forgot—magic is rarely logical. As was demonstrated when a bloody leg poked through the portal almost in my face.

  No, not blood, I realized, ketchup. I hacked at it with my sword. Okay, now it was blood. And then the fey it belonged to emerged and grabbed me around the throat.

  It wasn’tsubrand, but he was damned strong anyway. I slashed at his arm with the sword, and he pulled back, saying something in their language that sounded fairly obscene. I took the few seconds that bought me to shove the shelf over the mouth of the portal.

  That didn’t help as much as I’d have liked. It was just ordinary metal shelving with an open back, through which he started slashing at me with his own sword. It was a lot longer than mine and glowed faintly, giving him plenty of light to murder by. Only I wasn’t going to make it easy on him.

  The open-sided shelf worked two ways, so I used that, grabbing a mop—we had a mop?—and using it to poke the fey back into the open maw of the portal. It sort of worked—his bottom half disappeared into the swirl of color on the wall—but he grabbed onto the shelf with one hand, preventing the rest of him from getting sucked inside. He made a pass with his sword with the other, and I was suddenly left holding nothing but a mop head.

  I danced back out of reach as that sword took a swipe at my chest. But that gave him the chance to bat the whole unit out of the way. And then Louis-Cesare was back with the duffel. He held off the fey with a sword he’d found somewhere—it glowed slightly, so I assumed he’d taken it off one of our other attackers—while I rooted through the bag.

  “Hey! That’s my eye!” Ray groused, and then my hand was closing over the explosive putty.

  I grabbed it and ripped off a sizable wad. “Move!” I told Louis-Cesare, who spun out into the hall as I threw the piece overhand, like a baseball. I dove for the kitchen as the explosive did what it was designed to do and collapsed the portal—with the fey still partially inside.

  That was one visual image I could do without, which was just as well, because I didn’t see it. The pantry exploded behind me in a hail of shelving and flying cans as the portal destructed, and I slid to a stop beneath the heavy old table. I tipped it over, grabbed my guns out of the duffel and slammed home extra clips—my last—as a couple of fey rushed in from the hall.

  I sprayed them with bullets from both guns. The first one got some kind of shield up in time, but not the second, who jittered back against the wall before sliding down it on a smear of red. Looked like they could bleed, after all, I thought, as the first one jumped me.

  I was out of bullets, and his weapon was longer than mine, but then it didn’t matter because a glowing sword ripped through his guts. I looked up, expecting to see Louis-Cesare, and saw the vamp I’d nicknamed Scarface instead.

  The name was less appropriate now than it had been at the Club, where his face had resembled Frankenstein’s. The livid, puckered lines were much less noticeable now, just barely darker than the rest of his complexion. But his black eyes were no less fierce.

  He’d picked up the sword of the fallen fey, I guessed, as he stared at it admiringly. “Carves through shields like butter,” he said, those eyes meeting mine. “Let’s see what it does to you.”

  “Let’s not,” I told him, right before my knife caught him in the throat.

  It would have been a sufficient discouragement to a younger vamp, but Scarface just pulled it out, ignoring the wash of blood that drenched us both. “Bad idea,” he snarled. “I was going to make it quick.”

  He wrenched the sword out of the fey as I scrambled back, underneath the knife rack on the wall. Stainless wouldn’t do much to the fey, but it worked fine on vamps. I’d grabbed the cleaver in one hand and a serrated bread knife in the other before I noticed—Scarface wasn’t pursuing me.

  He was watching the fallen fey.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he demanded.

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. The fey usually healed as fast as a vamp, but this one was floundering around like a fish out of water, yet not really getting anywhere. He tried to stand, and immediately went back to one knee. And then fell onto his stomach.

  Scarface kicked him over with his foot, and I sucked in a breath. There should have been a small puncture wound, or possibly nothing at all by now. Instead, half his chest was eaten away. It was livid red underneath, with white edges of ribs peeking out. But the boundaries of the rapidly expanding wound looked almost like paper when on fire—gold and brown and then nothing at all as the skin and flesh burned to cinders.

  Scarface held up the sword. The naked blade shone in the dim light like fox fire, wh
ite with a pale blue luminescence at the edges. “They must have enchanted it.”

  No shit, I thought blankly, as the fey started screaming and clawing at the floorboards, hard enough to leave fingernail tracks in the wood. I got to my feet slowly, keeping an eye on the sword in Scarface’s hand. But he didn’t raise it. He seemed as mesmerized as I was with what was happening to his opponent.

  Within seconds, the strange fire had burned through the fey’s ribs to the white column of his spine. He suddenly stopped moving, frozen in place like the baby vamp I’d stabbed at the club. But unlike the young vamp, I didn’t think he was going to be all right.

  His eyes stared into mine, and the hate drained away, replaced by a desperate sort of pleading. And I could do nothing. Except watch as the fire crept up his torso to the rapidly fluttering heart.

  I’d never seen a weapon that could do something like that, that could overwhelm the body’s shields and its natural healing ability so quickly and so completely. But the fey never stood a chance. His heart went up like a flame a second later, a sudden bright flare, and it was over. In less than a minute, the body had been completely consumed. All that was left was a scorched black shape on the floor, like a crime scene cutout.

  “What the hell kind of trap did you lay for us?” Scarface snarled, staring from the blistered boards to me. His voice was as belligerent as always, but he looked more than a little freaked out. The sword hung limply by his side, like he was almost afraid to touch it.

  I would have been, if I were him; vamps burned easily enough as it was.

  “No trap,” I said, my mouth a little dry. “Or did you not notice that he was trying to kill me?”

  “Why? You steal from him, too?”

  “I didn’t steal from anyone. I’m working for the family who own the rune. They want it back.”

  “Finders keepers.”