What Fate Portends

by Clara Coulson

  “Oh, sure they did,” he said, enunciation sliding nearer to the hissing of a snake. “They sent the cleanup crew around to poke a few extra holes in the dead, just in case.” He clapped his hands together, startling Saoirse and me, making us jump, making us look like scared little mice. “And when one came around to poke holes in me, I poked a few extra in him instead. And then I took his armor. And his face. And the rest of his skin too.” You didn’t even have to see the manic gleam in his eye to know he meant those statements literally. “And I walked right off the battlefield and hid among the fae. For years and years and years. Totally undetected.”

  “While the rest of your comrades went to sleep. Until you could secure their release, by finding Daur Dá Bláo and using it to break the spell.” I bit my tongue until I tasted copper. “But that…” I took a shaky breath. “That sounds like the sort of plan you’d come up with in advance, as a contingency, not some half-assed scheme you’d make up after the fact, after the battle was lost.”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? Some among us were simply not willing to lose to the aes sídhe, even if we had to play a long game to win. They invaded our home. Took our lands.” His voice grew into an ear-breaking rumble. “Tír na nÓg belonged to us!”

  Abarta stepped forward again, and despite my best efforts, my shaking legs made me step backward again. But I was drawing close to the wall behind me. Soon, there’d be nowhere to go.

  Eyes alight with satisfaction, he dropped his voice to a normal volume. “And it will belong to us once more.” He made a sweeping gesture to the magic circle, to the harp sitting within. “The new war begins tonight, when the chords of Daur Dá Bláo once again call the Tuatha Dé Danann to war.”

  “Why are you doing this now?” I said. “You’ve had fifteen hundred years to recover the harp.”

  “Can you really not think of a reason?” He pointed to the ceiling, but the ceiling wasn’t the implication. It was the emptiness of the house above. The lack of people left living in what had once been a home. The grievous results of humanity’s last war.

  It came to me then. “The forces of the fae are split between Earth and Tír na nÓg. If you awaken the Tuatha Dé Danann, they can overrun the courts in one realm before the greater forces in this world, spread far and wide across the globe, can muster an organized response to the threat.” I gritted my teeth, fists clenched so hard my gloves were threatening to tear. “Most of the faeries still living in Tír na nÓg are lesser fae civilians.”

  “Yes, I am aware,” Abarta replied with no emotion whatsoever. “But the land on which they live is not theirs to live on, the resources not theirs to use. So they can flee and leave my realm and crawl back into the hole they came from, or they can stay and fight and die. Their choice.”

  “I won’t defend the imperialist history of the fae.” I met his gaze straight on this time, even though my very soul quivered beneath its weight. Stand firm, Whelan. Stand firm. “But that does not justify the mass slaughter of civilians, any more than the humans were justified in committing genocide against the paranormals when they discovered we had ‘infiltrated’ their society.”

  “Ha!” Abarta shook his head and gave me a pitying look. “Justification is irrelevant when hatred fuels the fire of war. The humans were always destined to slaughter the nonhumans the second they found out you were their neighbors, their relatives. They fear everything they don’t understand, hate everything they fear, and destroy everything they hate—because it’s their nature. Same as you have a faerie nature, hiding behind that pathetic glamour. Same as I have the nature of my kind.”

  “You generalize too much.” Anger spiking, I racked my brain for some semblance of a plan before I did something stupid and got myself killed. There’s got to be a way out of this. Some way to stall or distract him long enough to escape. “Even among the fae, spiritual natures are individualized. Not all humans are cruel to those they don’t understand.”

  “Like her, you mean?” Abarta motioned to Saoirse, and for one terrible moment, I thought he was going to kill her where she stood. But the sensation of impending doom slid past, and Abarta continued, “I don’t disagree with you, Whelan. But individual will only matters insomuch as there are enough dissenting views to change the course of a species’ natural tendencies. And unfortunately for your poor little world, there were not. So the ‘paranormals’ were burned at the stake, and the humans were burned in the bomb blasts.”

  Pride wriggled across his face, settling deep inside his smile. “Exactly as planned.”

  I had the sudden and unmistakable sensation of being disemboweled, all my organs spilling out and sloshing on the floor, so overwhelming that I glanced down to see if it had actually happened. But it hadn’t. The feeling was simply my entire worldview crumbling to dust, leaving nothing its in wake but an absolute and awful emptiness. “What do you mean?”

  Abarta took yet another step toward me, and I was so unsettled, I stumbled two steps back. The strength of the pity in his voice grew stronger with each word he spoke. “Tell me, Whelan, what sparked the purge that haunts you all so much? What alerted the humans to the presence of nonhumans living among them and drove them into a bloody frenzy?”

  I tried to answer, but nothing came out of my throat.

  Saoirse answered for me. “A collection of videos. Someone posted it on the internet. Contained tons of footage of legitimate paranormal activity. Werewolves. Witches and wizards. Vampires. Faeries.” She gripped the fabric of her pants, face drawn tight in anguish. “The people in the videos were doxxed, names and addresses provided in the captions. Because the bizarre and violent nature of many of the videos spurred the FBI to investigate, it quickly became apparent that the content was…real.” She let out a ragged breath. “Mass panic ensued.”

  Abarta nodded. “And who made that video, Lieutenant? Who caused all this suffering?”

  Saoirse drew her lips into a thin line, bitterness pooling in her eyes. “Before today, I would’ve said we never found out, but I’m going to make an educated guess, based on your own words just now, that the answer is you.”

  Abarta smiled like he’d won a fucking chess game. “Correct.”

  My entire body shook with rage the likes of which I’d never experienced before. All this time, I’d thought the exposure footage had been the work of some underground human group who’d fallen down the rabbit hole and bitten off more than they could chew. And all this time, it hadn’t even been the humans’ fault. Of course, the purge was their fault. The war was their fault. The collapse was their fault. Regardless. But the inciting event, what started us all down this path of destruction that had led to a broken world pockmarked by radiation and shrouded in a long and miserable winter—that wasn’t their fault.

  It was his.

  Abarta had intentionally set this world on a path to ruin so he could get back at the fae for a war that had ended when human civilization was a waddling toddler. And now that civilization was on life support, one faulty breath from a coffin. Over a conflict that didn’t even involve Earth or the creatures who lived on it.

  No matter how much I resented the fae and their callous rule of law and their cruel manipulations, I could never hate them as much as I reviled the Tuatha Dé Danann in this moment. Because human life meant something to the fae, however little. That was why they’d saved it. But human life meant nothing to Abarta.

  That primal force within my magic rose up from the depths of my soul in response to the rage whipping around inside me. It hissed in my mind, Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. Kill him!

  “You’re the reason the harp ended up in Adelaide too, aren’t you?” I finally managed to say.

  “Ah, yes,” Abarta replied, “the harp was a nice little detail. I managed to smuggle it out of the Unseelie vaults a couple centuries back. I put it into circulation here on Earth to disguise its identity until such time as I needed it.” He chuckled. “That was the reason I came to Kinsale, actually. The harp was out in Adelaide, so
I decided to set up shop here to perform the counterspell while it was retrieved by my lovely assistant, Agatha Bismarck.”

  Like silk sheared in two, the air parted behind me, and I realized I’d been baited into a trap. I dodged to the right, but I was too close to the wall, too close to where Bismarck had been lying in wait beneath one of Abarta’s flawless veils. The antique iron hatpin that had been meant for my heart pierced the top of my shoulder and emerged from my chest two inches lower.

  Pain exploded through my entire body, knocking me off my feet. I hit the ground screaming, the iron burning through muscle and bone, a hundred million fire ants gnawing away at my flesh, eating me from the inside out. My vision went white. My hearing faded. I tasted blood and smelled death, the stench of my own scorched skin. I faintly heard Saoirse yell my name, but it was washed out by my own voice, so loud I nearly ripped my vocal chords in half.

  Thoughts in tatters, I couldn’t prevent the patch on my fourth glamour from evaporating, and the hole left behind destabilized the rest of it. It unraveled and fell away, revealing for the first time in so many years what I really looked like, what I really was, the truth of my heritage on display like a brand declaring me the worst kind of criminal. I wanted to press my face against the floor and hide the marks, hide my eyes, but all I could do was lie there, vainly clutching at the hatpin that had run me through. I couldn’t reach around my shoulder and pull it out. I was in too much pain, and every twitch of my muscles made it flare like a belching fire.

  I clamped down on the agony as much as I could and attempted to focus my eyes on the room. Everything was off kilter, double vision, but I saw Saoirse on her knees, a sword at her throat, one of her arms twisted behind her back. She was glaring in fury at the dark elf who’d emerged from the hallway and disarmed her, her gun now lying on the floor at the edge of the circle. The elf merely stared down at her in distaste, teeth bared, threatening to slit her throat if she dared to moved.

  Abarta, hands in his pockets, appeared bored as he shuffled into the circle and dropped into the chair someone had placed next to the harp. As he ran a finger down the worn wood of the instrument, he said to the air behind me, “I must say, Ms. Bismarck, that was a much bolder move than I was expecting from you. I thought for sure you’d use a charm, or hell, one of those handy guns.” He jutted his chin toward Saoirse’s weapon. “But an iron blade? That’s quite audacious.”

  There was an unspoken foolish underpinning his words, and Bismarck caught it. She appeared from within a cloud of gold smoke—the veil must’ve been a charm, embedded in an object on her person—a deep frown set into her face. “What do you mean? There’s no better weapon than iron to use on the fae.”

  “Of course not.” Abarta leaned back in the chair. “I mean ‘bold’ in terms of risking the ire of the sídhe. They’re not known for being particularly lenient on those who use iron against one of their own.”

  Bismarck skirted around my convulsing form, dropped to one knee in front of me, and grabbed me by the chin, wrenching my face toward the light. At the sight of the marks on my face, of the unmistakable ring of frosty silver around my pupils, she blanched. Unceremoniously dropping my head back onto the stone floor, she stood and spun around with the grace of a cracking whip, growling to Abarta, “You bastard. You knew he was half sídhe this whole time and didn’t tell me? I sent people to off him. What if he’d actually died?” She glanced over her shoulder at me, at the pin sticking out of my flesh, the one she’d put there. “What if he dies now?”

  Abarta shrugged. “I didn’t tell you to stab him with iron.”

  “You didn’t tell me not to.” She wrung her hands behind her back, her loose, gauzy sleeves riding up to reveal a knife strapped to each wrist. There was also a small gun on her belt, the tip of the barrel sticking out from under the hem of her shirt. “This is a punishment, isn’t it? For letting someone catch a whiff of the harp’s whereabouts.”

  “No,” Abarta said in a chiding tone, “this is a punishment for almost ruining hundreds of years of planning. I promised you a payout the size of which your petty human dealings could never produce, in exchange for nothing but moving a musical instrument from one location to another. And you repaid my generosity by setting a nosy half-sídhe on my trail, and an Unseelie one at that. You’ve stuck me between a rock and a hard place. If I kill Whelan, or make him otherwise disappear, the Unseelie will find out, and quickly, because the higher fae keep tabs on all their half-bloods. But if I don’t get rid of him, he’ll go blabbing to the sídhe about my scheme to overrun the courts in Tír na nÓg.”

  He stamped one foot against a symbol on the circle, and the glow of the entire construction grew brighter. “Either way, your missteps, Ms. Bismarck, have accelerated my timetable beyond my comfort zone. I’ll have to organize the rest of the Tuatha Dé Danann in a matter of hours, instead of days, like I wanted, to ensure none of the fae battalions stationed in this realm can make it back to the Otherworld in time to prevent the sacking of the capital cities.” He stomped his other foot, and the circle’s light grew stronger still. “And that is why I allowed you to share some of the risk that comes along with grievously injuring a sídhe scion.”

  Bismarck’s red lips curled into a vicious scowl. “They’ll kill me if they find out I injured him with iron.”

  “Not if my people win, they won’t.” He smiled, placid and infuriating. “So you better hope it all pans out despite your mistakes.”

  Bismarck was visibly shaking now, not in fear but in fury. Her fingers brushed the butt of the gun hidden by her shirt, but she didn’t take hold of it. She wasn’t naïve enough to think she could do harm to Abarta, much less end him. Despite all her bluster, all her conceit, she was only human, and she had no magic to her name. Abarta could render her dust just as easily as he could Saoirse.

  The only thing stopping him from doing so, as a real punishment for her errors, was, I assumed, that Bismarck’s assets and connections in this realm held some further use for the man. Perhaps he intended to use Bismarck’s network for intelligence on fae movements here on Earth, or something similar.

  Either way, Bismarck knew she was beaten. She had to take Abarta’s rebuke like a tablespoon of bitter medicine. But the subtle narrowing of her eyes, that razor-sharp glare, told me Abarta had made an enemy of someone who could’ve been a long-term ally. Bismarck would turn on him the first chance she got.

  Of course, Abarta would do the same to her the moment her usefulness ran dry. Which way the double-edged sword of their relationship ultimately swung would come down to whoever first uncovered a reason to swing it.

  Abarta checked a watch on his wrist. “All right. Enough dawdling.” He gestured to me, bleeding atop some of the outlying symbols and shapes of the circle. “Get him out of the boundary. He can interfere with the casting if he’s inside, even in his current state.”

  Bismarck’s mood soured more at being ordered around like a lackey, but she didn’t openly defy Abarta. She backtracked, grabbed me by the legs, and dragged me outside the circle, the jerky motion jostling the hatpin still slowly eating through my flesh. I cried out again, weaker this time, more like a dying whimper than a scream. Even my magic, writhing inside me, repelled by the touch of the metal, couldn’t fight the fading of my consciousness. The iron was too close to my heart. It was leaching my energy away at a startling speed.

  If the hatpin wasn’t removed in the next ten minutes, I was going to die.

  Worse yet, I had even less time to stop Abarta from casting the spell.

  When it rains, it pours, little fae, said an echo of a mocking voice slinking around behind my searing pain. Pours until you wash away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You know what the biggest irony is?” Abarta said to me as he wrote with his finger on the wood of the harp a list of softly glowing words, the names of all those he sought the harp’s song to reach. “If the faerie queens, and the ancient forebears of the other nonhuman societies, hadn’t instituted
the universal gag rule that forbade all creatures from revealing themselves to humans, then this whole ‘collapse’ business would’ve never come to pass. Humanity would’ve already had a war with the nonhumans, way back when their most powerful weapons were bows and spears. And such a war the nonhumans would’ve resoundingly won. You all shot yourselves in the foot by holding your tongues until the humans had nuclear weapons at their disposal.”

  I struggled to gather enough breath to speak, and rasped, “What would your plan have been then, if there were no more secrets and lies between humans and paranormals? If the paranormals had had a greater hold on global society? What other atrocity would you have sparked? And would it have had fewer casualties, or more?”

  Abarta finished scrawling his list. “To which casualties are you referring, human or other?”

  “Both.”

  “You know, for someone who was victimized by humans, you seem strangely concerned about their well-being.” His gaze flicked to Saoirse again, who shot him a glare like smoldering cinders, a promise of pain to come. He only smirked at the fleeting threat as he returned his attention to me. “You’re even still friends with some of them, while most nonhumans now move in their own circles. Either you’re an extremely forgiving person, Whelan, or you are quite the sentimental fool, trying to rebuild bridges best left burned to ash. Do you really think humans are worth saving, after all they’ve done?”

  “Far more than I think the Tuatha Dé Danann are worth resurrecting from their shallow graves,” I replied.

  Abarta frowned. “Don’t you dare compare us to them.”

  “All creatures are comparable.” I had to take a wheezing pause. “Especially so with humans. Because all species with half a mind have their own special brand of pettiness, just like human beings do. It’s a consequence of sentience, the potential to make stupid choices, and more so, the potential to knowingly and intentionally commit unforgivable acts. The Tuatha Dé Danann are no exception to that rule.” I had half a mind to spit at him, but I didn’t want to risk spitting blood, so I added, “You’re a fine example of that.”