by Rhys Ford
Conri handed the little binoculars back to Bell, who folded them and stashed them in his pocket. “And another mortal for the slough to tap,” Conri said grimly. “It’s getting greedy.”
He felt Bell’s assessment out of the corner of his eye. “You sure you were just a servant?” he asked. “You sound way too knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Otherworld.”
Conri’s mouth twitched up at the corner. It wasn’t exactly a smile.
“The Otherworld?” he said. “No. But I know a fey lord’s hunting preserve when I see it and, well, they are what they eat. This place spent years glutted on death and fear and the hot thrill of the kill. Then it was left to starve. It’s like a thirsty drunk—water would do to wet his throat but what he wants is rotgut whiskey.”
He jabbed his finger down toward the pickup as he said that. The mire under it had thickened, the broken-edged ruins of an old dirt road shrugged up to the surface under Ned’s tires. Bell followed the gesture and grimaced as he saw the road.
“And by rotgut whiskey you mean a violent redneck with a gutful of conspiracy theories and bigotry,” Bell said. “On the trail of the kids he thinks kidnapped his sister.”
Conri grabbed his T-shirt and pulled it on. It was still damp, and he’d been right about the bog-cotton making him itch.
“A hunt is a hunt,” he said through the sweaty folds. “And now it has… two? No three… at the same time.”
Bell stared at him for a second and then turned to watch Ned, his face set in grim lines.
“My brother drank,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice. Conri, as he picked a burr of flower silk out of his hair, regretted the comparison. “Before he died, he drank a lot. I’ll tell you one thing he really hated, that was guaranteed to set him off? If you tried to take his bottle off him.”
Conri scratched his ribs and shrugged.
“It won’t want us to leave,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t want the hunt to end either. So it isn’t going to help Ned.”
Bell glanced down at the proto-road the slough had shaped for the pickup and then gave Conri a skeptical look.
“It’s the carrot,” Conri said grimly. “If the prey thinks there’s no hope, they’ll lie down and die. A good hunting preserve is designed to keep them on the move, to dangle the possibility of escape—or rescue—close enough to make them think they have a chance but far enough away to keep them running.”
Bell looked bleak. “Then it needs to throw something our way,” he said as he started back down the hill. The frustration was raw in his voice. “Because we aren’t any closer to finding Nora and the others than when we got here.”
He was right. Which…. Conri paused, his sneakers balanced on two rocks, and cocked his head to listen to the rattling growl of the pickup’s engine as it cut through the eerie silence that had fallen over the slough.
“We have him,” he said thoughtfully. “Tell me, if you were trapped here, would you run toward or away from the sound of a car?”
Bell was smart enough to think about that question instead of making an assumption.
“Toward,” he said after a second. “However she got here—however Ned got his hands on Thistle—right now all she knows is that is something she hasn’t heard for a while. Whether she wants to be rescued or left alone, she’ll want to see what’s going on. If she’s free to.”
Well, he’d made a few assumptions once he got started. It wasn’t his fault. Humans mostly saw what the fey wanted, saw the fey how the fey wanted. Conri hopped off his rocks, altered course slightly, and headed on down the hill.
“Not just Nora,” he said. “Robin might be fey, but he hasn’t been back here since he was a babe in arms. He might have thought he’s ready to come back and be a High Lord of the Otherworld, but a place like this is going to rule him, not the other way around. By now, he’s as ready to get back to indoor plumbing and fruit that doesn’t have an agenda as the mortal children. Finn would be.”
Bell let Conri get almost all the way down the hill before he asked, “Even if Finn knew that he’d broken the Treaty? That he might have caused a war? Would he want to face you then?”
Conri fumbled his next step and planted his foot in a puddle of black mud. He nearly lost his shoe, but the time it took to extract himself let him recover his composure.
“Your mistake is assuming that Finn has any shame,” Conri said. He scraped black goop off his shoe onto a knot of grass. “He’d expect me to fix it for him.”
“And how would you do that?” Bell asked. He didn’t bother to make it sound casual. The suspicion was blunt in his voice. It stung a bit, but Conri appreciated the honesty. “If he had been involved.”
Conri crouched down and plucked a thin, mangled bit of metal out of the mud he’d scraped from his shoe. It was rusted like it had been there for years—iron reacted to the Otherworld the same way the Otherworld reacted to iron—but it was still recognizably a house key attached to a dented fob in the shape of an N. At one point it had been covered with crystals, but only two or three pink studs were left, sparkle dulled under the mud.
Chance or the slough’s machinations, he wondered as he lifted it to his nose for a sniff. It was mostly rust and metal, but it had spent years being handled. The oils from Nora’s skin were rubbed deeply into the metal, and even in its current state, he caught a thread of it.
Daffodils and coal.
“I don’t know,” he said as he straightened up and tossed the fob to Bell…. “I’d probably start by not telling Iron Door my plans.”
Chapter Six
CONFESSION, MOCKERY, or both?
Bell slouched back against a twisted thorn tree and chewed on that question as he waited for Conri to get back from scouting nearby for any sign of the missing kids. He’d won the coin toss and left Bell to watch Ned as he made a half-assed camp nearby.
It was nighttime, or what passed for night in the Otherworld. Somehow, although Bell couldn’t put his finger on exactly what the difference was, they had indisputably gone from dawn to dusk.
Ned had driven stubbornly into the dim light for a while, until the press of purple, whispering shadows around the dimming headlights got to him and he stopped. Thistle stayed cuffed, this time to the handle of the pickup, while Ned hunched bitterly over the fire as if he could suck the heat from gray sticks as they burned. He fed it handfuls of plucked moss and cursed in baffled, barely stifled rage as he burned his fingers but still stayed chilled.
The Otherworld didn’t satisfy. It ran on the energy of want, of the grit in the pearl of someone’s perfect, fairy life and the itch of always wanting more.
In the back of his head, the old, sticky trauma tried to squeeze out of the box he kept it in. He pushed it back down impatiently. Everything in the Otherworld brought him back to that—to blood, dirt that smelled like popcorn under his collar, and the ringing in his ears from his dad’s fist—if he didn’t give his brain something else to chew on.
Bell closed his eyes and tried to entice his brain back to the question of Conri’s innocence… or lack of it. There was a flicker of filthy interest from his libido, but otherwise nothing took the bait. Bell didn’t know Conri, but he wanted to trust him. That was probably a bad sign. Instincts lied in the Otherworld. It showed you exactly what you wanted to see before you got pushed in the hole.
How could he trust what his instincts were telling him now about Conri, when they’d been so wrong before?
Bell grimaced to himself. There he went again, nails dug into the same old scab.
“You asleep?” Conri asked. He flopped down next to Bell and tried to steal half the tree to lean on, all damp warmth and the faint salt smell of clean sweat. Bell kept his eyes closed as he wondered exactly what Conri would do if he thought he had an Iron Door agent at a disadvantage. After a moment Conri snorted. “I can tell you aren’t, Agent Bellamy.”
Bell was good at his job. There wasn’t any other option when you were a Walker. He didn’t often feel
like an idiot. It turned out he still didn’t like it.
“How?” he asked as he opened his eyes. “Special, heightened changeling senses?”
Conri pulled his knees up and rested his elbows on them. “I used to be a thief. Not a good one, but you learned to tell when people were really asleep. It made it easier.”
It shouldn’t have been funny, but somehow it was. Bell snorted under his breath and leaned forward to rub his hands over his face. He hadn’t been asleep, but it was a temptation.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll arrest you?” he asked. “Theft is a crime.”
“It was a long time ago, remember?” Conri said dryly. “The statute of limitations ran out a few decades back. Anyhow, we have more important things to worry about. Someone has set a trap for Ned about half a mile down the road.”
Bell straightened up as a flicker of adrenaline washed his tiredness away. He’d pay for this later—he always did—but a sour hangover tomorrow was better than sleeping in the Otherworld. It wasn’t quite as bad as eating or drinking here, but if you let yourself sleep, it was comfort of a sort. That could oblige you.
“Our missing kids?”
Conri shrugged. “Probably,” he said. “A trap is usually a bit too sophisticated for a hunting preserve to come up with on its own.”
“Usually?”
Conri shrugged.
“Never be sure of anything here,” he said. “But if you want someone to drive headlong into a trap—”
“You need beaters,” Bell finished for him. He got his feet under him and scrambled gingerly to his feet, one eye on Ned to make sure they didn’t attract the man’s attention. If he wanted to get Ned in panicked motion, he thought, what would he do? The ground was dense and boggy underfoot, but the thin strings of tall grass were dry and brittle. “Fire?”
Conri tilted his head back to look up at Bell. Despite Bell’s dislike for being an idiot, he was apparently determined to be one as he imagined other situations that would angle Conri’s head like that and soften the line of his mouth thoughtfully.
“Maybe,” he said, the word drawn out over his tongue. “It’s not something Robin or the other fey kids would do. It wouldn’t be sporting. The hunt has to be fair. There are rules about how to engage with the prey.”
It was actually reassuring when Bell’s stomach sank in disappointment. This whole thing would be easier if he could find a prejudged slot in his head for Conri. Delusional advocate for the fey was right there to be filled and well away from anything that would end with Bell doing anything stupid.
Fun, until the other shoe dropped, but stupid.
“Are there really?” he asked. Even though he had been to the Otherworld enough times to know that was a lie. “Rules of engagement?”
“No,” Conri said as he scrambled up, easy and graceless at the same time. “But parents are liars, and it’s not exactly easy being fey. Even in LA. It’s easier to believe in fair play and honor than assholes and murder.”
Maybe for some people. It hadn’t been Bell’s experience.
“So, what would they do? They don’t have weapons or numbers—”
Conri didn’t get a chance to answer. The herd burst out of the thick woods at full gallop first, broken branches caught in their horns and trampled under sharp hooves that flashed silver when the light caught them. Hot breaths steamed out of flared red nostrils, and their eyes were wide and rolled enough to show the whites, bright in the dim light.
Aurochs.
That’s what people called them. Unicorn was too fairy-tale a word once they realized the fey used them like cattle—for meat, milk, and leather. Bell had seen them fat and placid in Otherworld fields when he went to check the living conditions of the farmhands hired to tend them.
Virginity, like death, was a mortal concept. At least it was as far the Otherworld and its beasts were concerned. But death had glutted the market, so virginity brought a higher price if someone was willing to hang on to it for a year’s farm work.
These things, though. Bell took a step back, as if that would get him out of the way as the herd charged toward them. They had as much kinship to the horn-docked farm animals he’d seen as boars did to pigs. They were hard, knotted muscle and mange-pocked hides, the silver manes knotted with burrs, and their tails stained with shit and urine.
Not exactly the unicorn of legends, except for the horn. It jutted out from thick, armored foreheads like a spear, white as bone and carved with what old wives claimed were the secrets of the Otherworld. Although they didn’t usually mention the blood and filth smeared into the grooves.
“Stay on your feet,” Conri yelled as he grabbed Bell’s shoulder and dragged him out of the path of the things. “Don’t touch the horn—”
They didn’t get far before the panicked aurochs rolled over them in a tide of muscle, hide, and hot, sweaty stink. One shouldered between Conri and Bell and shoved them apart. A parting kick from its back feet caught Bell in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. He grunted and struggled to stay on his feet as the pain twisted around his hip bones.
Still lucky. If not for the Kevlar, it would have opened him up like a knife and knocked his guts out.
“A stampede,” Conri yelled, his voice thin over the roar of thirty animals moving as one scared beast. “That’d do it too.”
“Again,” Bell managed to grind out through clenched teeth as the wet, matted flanks of the beasts battered him. The sheer weight of them made it feel like being beaten, his bones sore and legs aching. “So glad I brought you along.”
He slammed his hand against a hard, gray shoulder and managed to keep his feet as another sideswiped him on the way past. There was blood on their flanks, so bright and red it looked like paint. It itched when it got on his hands. A big female lashed out with a hoof the size of a dinner plate as she went past. It caught him on the hip and put him on his back in the dirt as hooves thundered past him. He squirmed like a snake to avoid any of them landing on him, with only partial success.
Bell managed to roll over and scramble onto his knees, gray with filth and bruises. He could taste blood in the back of his throat, and his face throbbed with that distinct broken sickly heat that was going to hurt soon. As he tried to get the rest of the way up, something about him caught one of the auroch’s attention, and it dropped its head. Mad, blue eyes—blue like Conri’s eye was blue, liquid as water—sighted along the spike as it charged at him.
He hesitated, but he’d never admit that to Felix, and then he pulled his gun and fired in one smooth, thoughtless motion. The gun bucked against his hand, and a coin-sized blotch of black appeared on the auroch’s chest, right in the middle. It staggered at the impact but didn’t go down right away. Blood sprayed from its nose in a fine mist as it snorted, and momentum kept it going forward even as it stumbled over its own hooves.
Head shot would have been quicker, but a unicorn’s skull was thick as Kevlar. Bell hesitated again as he considered a second shot, but the unicorn was already dead. The news just hadn’t reached it yet.
Two more heavy, juddering strides, and then the unicorn’s knees went out from under it, and the limp, sour bulk of it slammed into Bell. The tip of its horn scraped down his throat, and the weight of it bowled him over. He landed flat on his back, legs and hips pinned under the dead thing.
The herd surged over them both. They jumped over their dead herd mate, metal hooves tucked up toward their bellies, and stamped at Bell on the way past. He got his arms up over his head and hunched up to protect his stomach as best he could.
Killed by unicorns, he thought with a flash of black humor. I guess virginity really doesn’t grow back.
“Fuck,” Conri said. There was a rough edge to his voice, as if the fricative f wanted to be a snarl. “First time I’ve wished I was ugly.”
The weight on Bell’s legs shifted—not a lot, but it was enough to wriggle. Bell opened his eyes and saw Conri with his shoulder braced against the unicorn’s side. Blood matted his patc
hwork hair down into one matte-brown mess, and bruises mottled the side of his face and arms. The heavy muscles in his shoulders bulged as he threw his weight against the unicorn and it shifted enough for Bell to yank his legs free.
“Because you’d have still been a virgin?” Bell asked as he flinched away from the hammer blow of a hoof and scrambled to his knees.
He grinned hard as he grabbed Conri and dragged him over closer to the unicorn’s corpse. “Pain in the ass when someone points out the obvious, isn’t it?”
They hunched down for shelter as close as they could get against its bulk as the rest of the herd detoured around and over them. The unicorn’s hide was rough, coarse as an old dishcloth as Bell pressed against it, and the smell of bloody fruit seeped out of it.
“Because I’d have been dead,” Conri said raggedly as he panted for air and made a face at the thick-enough-to-taste stink of it. “And this would be someone else’s problem. Are you okay?”
Good question. Bell took inventory. He hurt. His legs itched and tingled as the blood seeped back in, but that was probably a good sign. Less so for his nose, which had started to throb now he had time to think about it. Okay was a stretch, but he was alive.
“It could be worse,” he said. “You?”
Conri shrugged. “Never seen a wild unicorn before.” He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth—the lush curve of his lower lip split and bloody. “Never really wanted to either, but still. I guess I can add it to the bucket list just to cross it off.”
One of the unicorns misjudged its leap over its dead companion, caught a trailing leg on the dead meat, and went down in front of them. There was a nasty distinct snap as it hit, and it didn’t get back up. Its screamed was a piercing sound like a ruined trumpet, and it kicked out violently with three sharp hooves and the spike on its head.
Bell caught a kick on the hip as he scrambled away from it, and Conri bled from a fresh cut on his forearm. It tried to get up and went back down as the other unicorns trampled over it. Bell pulled his knife from the small of his back but hesitated. He did this, and he’d have killed two unicorns, and this one wasn’t in defense of his life. They were mean animals, he knew that, but….