Even with my unglamoured speed, I couldn’t move in time.
So I buffered my palms with absorbent blocks of energy and caught the sword. The force of the blow nearly sent me sprawling. But I braced myself against the asphalt, then jerked to the right, under the vibrating black strings still hanging in the air, and heaved myself into a standing position, dragging the blade of the sword along with me. The instant the blade made contact with the strings, I let it go—the elf woman wasn’t so lucky. She realized what was happening a fraction of a second too late. Just as a violent bolt of electricity leaped from the strings, down the length of the sword blade, and into her hands.
Thunder roared. The sword exploded in a blinding flash, and the woman shot across the street and slammed into the stoop I’d been sitting on earlier. The concrete cracked underneath her back, and her head smacked the railing with a clang loud enough to wake the dead. Pieces of her shattered sword, edges blackened from the sheer power of the electricity spell, clattered onto the asphalt and sidewalk, smoking.
Ha! Not bad for an unpracticed—
A second sword swung into view. I flung myself to the side, but the tip of the blade sliced through my left ear, nearly splitting it in half. Pain lanced across my head, but it wasn’t iron pain—their weapons were made of an Otherworld metal. I was able to clamp the pain down by refocusing my heightened senses elsewhere. Then I recovered my stance by pushing off the asphalt with one hand, and hopped back into the fray with my bloodthirsty magic prepped for round two. Just as the lead elf followed through on his swing, did a total three-sixty, and came around for another blow.
I drove my fist at his chest in an attempt to pull the same ice spike move I’d used on the half-troll, while I held up my other arm, forming a small but dense shield with a single whispered word to block the oncoming sword. But when my knuckles were two inches from his soiled shirt, a flying dagger snuck in between my hand and his chest. The instant the fabric of my glove touched it, a wall of pure force crashed into my body and flung me fifteen feet down the street.
I landed in a painful roll but forced myself back up as the lead elf and one of the others—who’d smashed all the ice blades I sent spinning his way—ran at me full speed, each wielding a weapon and a waiting spell.
The new entrant into this fight pulled the same teleportation trick as his female colleague, appearing in the space behind me, a few feet off the ground. I was ready for him. Spitting out a guttural string of words, I summoned a powerful vortex of air, dragging him out of his trajectory and around my body in a wide arc.
The man was thrown in front of me at the same moment the lead elf lunged forward so he could perform a quick, devastating hit with his sword while simultaneously shooting another round of those creepy black strings from his free hand. The leader couldn’t abort the maneuver in time. So the sword ran the other elf through, and the black strings struck the man’s face, impaling his brain and electrocuting him to death.
The lead elf then lost his footing in shock and barreled into his dead colleague. I jumped high enough to avoid the resulting tangle of body parts, landed in a crouch, and…nearly fainted. Not from exhaustion, but from the sheer overwhelming force of my own magic’s visceral ferocity slamming into the barrier that was my fourth glamour. My vision faded to pinpoints. My hearing was muted. My skin lost its sensitivity, and I couldn’t even feel the weight of my clothes. My taste and smell went haywire, nothing but the clean scent of a deep winter tingling in my throat.
I’d pushed myself too hard. I’d used too many combat spells, hurt or killed too many people, and now my magic was aching to find its real home, its real form, to reach its true potential. It could feel its own unbounded self lurking somewhere behind my deeper glamours, a faint, unyielding flicker of frosty light in the distance that could grow into a blizzard of epic proportions, wreak untold destruction, destroy my enemies with a single breath, bring the entire city to heel beneath its might. If only I would set it free, unleash its awful strength unto this petty, weak human world full of fragile, disgusting little things—
A gunshot yanked me from the brink.
The world shifted back into focus.
I spun around to see the other elf who’d been busy smashing my spinning ice blades collapse in a pool of his own blood and brain matter. He’d been about two steps from cutting me clean in half with his sword. At the end of the alley down the street, Saoirse lowered her gun and mouthed, Are you all right?
Was I? I didn’t know. I’d almost let my damn faerie magic drive me to the point of stripping the rest of my glamours. The last time I’d let that urge get the better of me, I’d been twelve.
I couldn’t be this reckless. I couldn’t risk waking that beast. Not to beat these dark elves. Not to beat the barghest. I’d legitimately forgotten until this very moment just how brutal and merciless and callous the nature of my true self really was. I’d spent so many years with my base glamours perfectly intact, not a scratch, my magic use minimal and safe, that I’d lost sight of the monstrous creature that lurked beneath my skin.
That was close. Way too close.
I forced myself to nod at Saoirse, then turned around to confront the lead elf, who was busy extricating himself from the corpse of his fallen colleague. Instead of using any more of my magic, I grabbed the hilt of his sword and tugged it from the dead elf with a wet squelch. I held the bloodstained tip an inch from the leader’s bloody nose, threatening to chop off the rest of it with a swift flick of my wrist. He stopped trying to rise and remained on his knees, his head tipped up toward me, pointy teeth on show in a wide sneer. “You’re a trifling bastard, half-blood.”
“Nice to know I haven’t lost my touch.” I jerked the blade a hairsbreadth closer to his skin. He flinched. I smiled. “So, you want to give up the ghost and tell me who the hell you’re working for? Because I’m getting kind of hungry, and I turn into a real sourpuss when I miss dinner.”
The elf’s bloody sneer slowly morphed into a smirk. “We operate on contracts much the same as the fae,” he said, lapping a streak of blood off his lip. “A fact of which I’m sure you are aware. I cannot speak the name of my employer out loud, or write it down, by an explicit clause in the contract under which I’m currently operating. Very unfortunate for you, to have expended so much energy, only to gain no real intelligence in the end.”
“I’ve gained plenty of ‘intelligence’ about your so-called employer,” I retorted. “Namely, that he—”
“Vince!” Saoirse cried out.
About one-quarter of a second before an iron poker sideswiped my left arm.
Chapter Twelve
The point of the poker tore through the fabric of my coat and shirt, exposing my skin to the length of the rod as it rocketed past, launched in a powerful javelin toss by the female elf who’d been thrown through the townhouse window a few minutes prior. The sharp point didn’t pierce me, but it didn’t have to. The mere brush of the metal against my arm dissolved layers of skin, as if I’d been splattered with a strong acid. Pain like white-hot fire exploded through my entire arm, left shoulder, neck, and head.
I dropped the sword, collapsed to my knees, and screamed as I uselessly grasped at the sizzling wound spreading across my arm, blood weeping out, blisters and red sores disfiguring flesh the poker hadn’t even touched. At the rim of the field of inflamed skin, hives started to break out in all directions, crawling up my neck and across my back and down the length of my arm, itching worse than any human allergic reaction ever could, urging me to flay myself raw. It was as if I’d been stung by the most potently venomous creature on the planet.
And my magic couldn’t stand it. Iron was anathema to the very nature of the fae.
The power inside me went wild, devolving into a beast from the dawn of creation, raving and spitting and screeching, clawing through my brain and beating at my skull so hard I swore my head would explode. I desperately tried to maintain control, but the pain of the iron burn was so overwhelming, I could
n’t think straight, and my magic was so riled up, between the injury and the combat spells I’d been overusing, that I started to lose my grip on it. The magic writhed and wrestled with me, demanding I set it free, pounding the gates of my glamours. And as the lead elf bent down and grabbed his sword, preparing to take off my head with a swift blow, my infuriated magic finally got the better of me.
For half a second, I lost control.
That was enough.
My fourth glamour cracked like an egg, and half the mask that concealed my face, my real face, fell away. I whipped my head up and snarled at the lead elf, driven into a rage by my frenzied magic as a tsunami of power rose from within me and threatened to crash out into the world beyond my body, drowning and destroying everything in its path. A hundred million possible spells at my fingertips, ready and aching to annihilate my enemies, the ancient power of the fae rearing its head from a place I’d been desperately hoping to keep it bottled up forever. Power that could…Power that wanted…Power…
The lead elf was staring at me in abject horror. His sword, raised at a sharp angle, didn’t budge from its position. The smug satisfaction that had been budding inside him at the sight of me on my knees, vulnerable, had crumbled to dust and left a deep-seated fear in its wake. Now, all he could do was focus on the jagged hole left by my partially broken glamour. On the face beneath the cracked mask. On my real eye. On the marks around that eye. On the lethal implications of those two simple features.
“You…” he stammered. “You’re no lesser fae. You’re a—”
His sentence was choked off by the blade I rammed through his chest. While his attention had been so helpfully glued to my exposed face, I’d reached back with my right hand and snatched the sword held in the limp fingers of the elf Saoirse shot dead a moment ago. Then I simply slid the sword up through his abdomen, under his ribs, and into his heart.
Yet despite the mortal wound draining the life from his body, the dark elf still kept ogling my face, lips moving soundlessly in what was either an expression of useless apology or a hopeless prayer to an Otherworld god. Right up until the second his consciousness flickered out for good and he collapsed backward onto the corpse of the colleague he’d accidentally skewered.
More gunshots sounded off behind me, and I turned—to the right—and caught sight of Saoirse firing at the last elf standing, the woman who’d thrown the poker. The woman’s shield was holding, bullets pinging off, but she was badly injured from being slung into the townhouse by my earlier spell. She didn’t have enough strength to counter the bullets and attack me at the same time. So I grabbed the sword from the hand of her dead leader, took aim, and threw it at her the same way she’d thrown the poker at me.
It pierced her back and emerged from her chest, cleaving her heart in two. She fell.
Silence veiled the street.
Saoirse searched for any more hostiles in the area before she came running over. I slapped my left hand over the exposed side of my face, ignoring the sharp pain in my upper arm, so Saoirse wouldn’t see what the lead elf had. She slid to a stop beside me and dropped to one knee, gaze roving over my body, on the hunt for serious injuries. “Are you okay?” she said. “I thought you were going to die like six times. Jesus. Don’t scare me like that.”
“Scare you?” I let out a weak laugh. “You’re the one who came running into the neighborhood with a horde of dark elves on your ass.”
“Is that what they are?” She looked at the dead elves scattered around the block. “I had no clue. They showed up out of nowhere about two blocks from the auction house and gave chase.” She leaned closer to my arm to examine the aggravated wound. “That looks nasty. Is it a poison?”
“Iron.”
Her lips parted in a quiet gasp. “What did she throw?”
“A poker. I assume from someone’s fireplace.” I nodded toward the townhouse with the broken living room window. “It’s not a big deal. It just grazed my arm. It’ll heal.”
“It looks so painful though.”
“It is painful, and extremely itchy. Not unlike an allergic reaction. Iron and faeries don’t mix—in the worst of ways.”
She sighed. “I’m so sorry I let them get the drop on me. Now you’re hurt in my place.”
“Bullshit.” I braced myself against the asphalt with my good hand and pushed myself to my feet on wobbly legs, Saoirse’s helping hands hovering nearby in case I stumbled. “I’m the one who dragged you into this ridiculous game. I only have myself to blame for letting ‘Tom’ trick me into searching for the harp.”
“But if you hadn’t gone after the harp, then the buyer would’ve been able to cast this awful spell unimpeded, right?” She cocked an eyebrow. “So it’s a damn good thing Tom did lure you into this mess, at least for the well-being of Kinsale.” She gestured to my torn, disheveled clothing and myriad injuries. “Obviously, not for your well-being.”
“What about you? You hurt?”
“Nothing serious. A few cuts and bruises. I’ll live.” Her hands drifted toward my face. “I see your ear is hanging on by a thread, but did you take a blow to your eye too? I can check and see how bad it—”
“It’s fine.” I pushed magic into the charm on my necklace that housed my fourth glamour and mentally shouted the words to patch the crack around my face. When I was finished, the resulting mask wasn’t flawless—most paranormals could see through it if they concentrated—but it was enough to fool a human with no magic-powered sight. So I dropped my hand, showing my fake face to Saoirse. “See? Just took a glancing blow with a hilt. Got a little rattled.”
She pursed her lips, unconvinced, but she let the matter drop for now. Patting her messenger bag, she said, “I got the ledger. I was planning to just find the entry for the harp buyer and copy the name and address, but one of the guards walked in while I was perusing. So I had to cut and run. Though I don’t really guess subtlety matters much at this point, since Bismarck already knows you’re on the case.”
I shook my head. “We’re past the point of being sneaky.” I gestured to the bloody battle scene around us. “These elves are the buyer’s mooks, not Bismarck’s. He knows we’re onto him, and he knows we’re coming. Might as well plow ahead.”
“So, where to now?” She wrapped her bare arms around her torso, suppressing a shiver. The night was cold and getting colder, and Saoirse was wearing nothing but a cocktail dress.
“You got a change of clothes?”
“In the bag. But I’d prefer not changing in the middle of a street. Or in a flood tunnel.”
“Good point.” I looked both ways down the street. “A lot of the buildings around here are empty. Could just jimmy the lock on one and change inside real quick.”
“Ah, breaking and entering,” she mused, “such exemplary behavior for a cop.”
“If it makes you feel any better, most of the people who owned these buildings are dead.”
She gave me a flat stare. “Thanks, Vince, for yet another dose of cynical—”
A loud growl rumbled down the street, echoed into the alleys, shook the ground beneath my feet. I spun on my heels, nearly stumbling from the combined strain of my injuries and the mental exhaustion of fighting a tug-o-war with my own nonhuman magic. Standing a block away, having somehow snuck up on us while we were talking, was the barghest. I was baffled as to how it had managed to enter the neighborhood without setting off any of my sensory alarms. I should’ve heard it, seen it, felt it, since it was following my scent and was thus tangible to me. Unless someone else had veiled…
In the space around the barghest, half a dozen dark elves stripped off veils like they were tugging off cloaks. The skin on the back of my neck prickled, and I peered over my shoulder, to find another six elves half a block behind Saoirse and me.
I’ve been played, I realized. Yet again.
They’d surrounded us while we were busy taking out the last few members of the vanguard. More than that, the whole point of the first ten chasing Saoirse was so I
’d reveal myself, intervene to help her, and then get delayed in a fight with a numbers disadvantage that would wear me out. Tired and injured, I would be easy pickings for a dozen more elves plus a barghest. And Saoirse would be too, because she was only human and didn’t have infinite bullets.
Together, the twelve dark elves and the big black dog were to be our execution squad.
“Well, shit,” Saoirse muttered. “Now what?”
A good question. One I didn’t have a simple answer for.
“Tell me, do you see the barghest?” I whispered.
“I assume that’s the giant black dog-looking thing?”
I made a disapproving click of my tongue. “If you can see it, it has your scent too, and that means it plans to kill you.”
“Lovely.” She inched closer to me. “So, is this going to be a ‘go out with guns blazing’ situation, or are you going to pull a sweet magic trick out of your ass and save us?”
“Out of my ass? What do you take me for, an amateur?”
“Actually, I did take you for an amateur”—she pulled a new magazine out of her bag and swapped it for the empty one in her gun—“until I watched you take down those elves just now. I had no idea you could use magic that powerful. And I’m substantially more afraid than I was before.”
My stomach tightened. “Afraid of me?”
Her eyes met mine, wide with surprise. “What? No. I’m impressed with you. It’s our enemies I’m afraid of. When you said you had to go all out to beat the bar…the dog thing, I honestly had no frame of reference for how much power you were talking about. Assuming that what you just displayed fighting these elves wasn’t ‘all out’—which I take to be true since you don’t look any more fae than you did before—then that means the dog monster is far, far stronger than I was imagining. Which, as a magicless human armed with only a weak charmed weapon, is a terrifying idea.”
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