What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

“Of course not. Why did I even bother to ask? I knew…”

  Two workmen in dirty overalls strolled around the corner a block down from me. One of them carried a shovel, the other a metal toolbox that jangled with each step he took. They chatted casually with each other—until they spotted me sitting against the streetlamp, at which point their words died out like a fading breeze.

  Their gazes latched onto my face, at the silvery marks beneath my eyes that followed the curves of my cheekbones. Only the sídhe and their half-blood scions bore such marks, and during the fae coup that had ended the war and halted the collapse of human society nearly eight years ago, those marks had become a warning beacon to human beings: Danger. Stay far, far away.

  Not for the first time, I had a powerful urge to restore my fourth glamour. I crushed it. The stripping of my fifth glamour, my mind glamour, during the struggle in Hel had led me to reveal my true identity as a half-sídhe to hundreds of humans in Kinsale when I returned to deal with the zombie invasion. Because many people already knew me, or knew of me, as Vincent Whelan the stretch scavenger, the revelation of my heritage had spread even faster than the fires that burned half the city to the ground. Even if I hid my fae features, I would still be tailed by hushed whispers and fearful glances wherever I went.

  There was no point in denying reality, and attempting to do so despite the futility would unnecessarily limit my power during a time when I really, really needed every scrap of power within my reach.

  I gave the frozen workmen a friendly wave.

  One of them hesitantly returned the wave, and the other gave me a nervous smile, but they both crossed the street and hurried past on the sidewalk opposite me so they didn’t come close enough to warrant any sort of conversation. That hurt, seeing the people of my city treat me like a bomb that could go off at the slightest touch, and a deep sense of longing for the “good old days,” where I was an unassuming finder of lost things, nearly made me choke.

  But then I reminded myself that despite my sídhe heritage, I still had human friends. Good friends, like Saoirse and Christie. New friends, like Mallory and Granger. Even friends who’d kick my ass at the drop of a hat, like the one and only Odette Chao.

  I also reminded myself that whenever I fell into a rut of self-pity, I could simply amble down to Flannigan’s and mope to O’Shea over a couple good beers. O’Shea, after all, was perfectly willing to verbally smack me until I stopped feeling sorry for myself and refocused on the big picture, protecting the people of Kinsale and saving the—

  A paw nudged my leg.

  I pulled myself out of my reverie and looked down at the orange cat, which had finally finished off the tuna. “Are you ready now?”

  The cat blinked at me slowly, then spun around and trotted off down the sidewalk. I slid up the streetlamp and pushed off into a light jog, following a few paces behind the tabby.

  It led me through a twisting series of narrow streets still clogged with debris from the attack. Shattered glass from a hundred broken windows glittered in the overcast light. Stubborn bloodstains browned on the pavement, refusing to allow the intermittent rains to wash them away. Piles of ash choked the gutters, black wisps curling into the air as a brisk wind blew through the neighborhood. Empty homes with broken doors, marred by fire damage, gaped at me on either side.

  The dark atmosphere would’ve unnerved me if I hadn’t lived through the purge.

  The tabby took a shortcut through a hazy alley that smelled like a smoker’s haven and crossed a service street behind a gutted office building to reach the open rolling door of a mostly intact storage facility. Just inside the shadow of the door lay a dozen more cats of various sizes and colors, all of them positioned in the exact same way, all of their sharp eyes trained on me as I neared the doorway. None of them hissed at me or took a swipe with a claw, but two of them looked particularly annoyed as they were forced to get up and toddle off to allow me and the tabby to enter the building. As soon as I passed them, they returned to their spots and flopped back down onto the floor. Lazy sentries.

  Though the cramped facility held five rows of storage units, any one of which would make a great hiding place, the tabby bypassed them all and instead squeezed through a door propped open by, of all things, a ceramic garden gnome. I pushed the door open to reveal that the storage facility backed onto a scrapyard, and a sizable hole had been cut into the chain-link fence that separated the two businesses.

  More cats were splayed out across the gravel parking lot behind the storage facility. They all watched with mild interest while I hurried to catch up to the tabby as it hopped through the fence and headed into the maze of rusting metal mounds.

  The trip across the scrapyard was short but perilous. Sharp pieces of metal jutted out of the scrap piles at all heights, threatening to snag my clothes and pierce my skin. Several times, I sensed iron lurking inside the heaps, and the idea of stumbling into a piece face-first made my stomach churn. I quickened my pace to keep up with the tabby as it expertly navigated the piles and occasionally squeezed through a hole too small for me to fit, forcing me to take a detour.

  As I came around a particularly large heap that was leaning too far to one side for comfort, the path before me abruptly cleared. In the middle of this clearing sat an antique sports car propped up on cinderblocks, and on the hood of this priceless antique sat Tom Tildrum, King of the Cats.

  Three dozen of his furry henchmen surrounded him, some of them dozing, some of them snacking on the bodies of vermin, some of them batting around pieces of metal like toys. Tildrum himself was reading a hardcover book someone had pilfered from a library, the identification sticker still taped to the spine.

  At the sound of my oncoming footsteps, Tildrum’s ears twitched, and his acid-green eyes peeked over the top of the book to observe me. “Vincent Whelan,” he said with a voice like a knife drawn across steel, “to what do I owe the inconvenience of your decision to incessantly seek me out? You do realize I am not at your beck and call, do you not?”

  “You labeled yourself as my handler last time we spoke.” I stepped over a fat black cat and drew close to the front of the car. “Handlers are supposed to handle their assets. That includes in-person meetings when appropriate.”

  “‘When appropriate’ being the operative words.” He snapped the book shut and set it on the hood beside him. It was a copy of War and Peace. “Why did you feel the sudden need to meet with me? I would’ve thought you’d be apprehensive to find yourself in my presence so soon after your failure to recover Fragarach from the Tuatha rogue.”

  “If you wanted me to recover Fragarach that badly,” I said with a hint of anger, “you should’ve told me where Abarta was actually keeping it instead of allowing Manannán to lead me into a trap.”

  Tildrum’s lips curled into a grin too wide for his face. “I would have, had it been Queen Mab’s imperative.”

  “Why wasn’t it her imperative?”

  He tilted his head sharply to the side. “What is your educated guess on the matter?”

  I’d been dwelling on that question for the better part of a week, and there was only one answer that made sense. “Because if you’d foiled Manannán’s attempt to deceive me, Abarta would’ve had doubts about Manannán’s veracity as an ally. And Mab needs Abarta to believe Manannán’s assistance is genuine because she’s relying on Manannán to pass the Unseelie vital information about Abarta’s plans. He’s a double agent. Willingly or unwillingly, I haven’t yet figured out.”

  “Unwillingly,” Tildrum stated matter-of-factly, “due to a long-standing favor owed to Queen Mab he has been unsuccessfully attempting to nullify for several centuries.”

  I nodded along with his explanation. “So Mab was willing to sacrifice me in order to put her shiny new pawn into place.”

  Tildrum gestured in my general direction. “From where I’m sitting, you appear to be alive and well. You cannot claim status as a sacrifice if you were not actually killed.”

  “You know wh
at I mean.”

  “I do know what you mean, and I know too that you are wrong.” He held up a finger to preempt my retort. “One day, you will learn why you are wrong, but I will not hand the answer to you on a silver platter. Some things in life you must work for, Vincent Whelan, and when you hold the blood of the sídhe in your veins, information is one of those things.” He pointed that same finger at me, and I caught a glimpse of a sharp claw as his glamour flickered. I distinctly remembered one of those claws raking the skin of my throat the last time I had the misfortune to converse with Tildrum.

  I suppressed a shudder. “Fine. Whatever you say.”

  Tildrum rolled his eyes at my indignation. “Just to warn you, I strongly dislike asking questions more than once. So I implore you to answer as I ask yet again: why have you sought me out on this dreary day in this sad little city you call home?”

  I rolled my shoulders back, a pitiful attempt at displaying confidence. “Because I can’t follow your orders regarding Abarta anymore.”

  Tildrum’s pupils narrowed to paper-thin slits. “What, exactly, do you mean?”

  “I mean, I can no longer ‘continue to act as I have’ regarding Abarta’s plots. I can’t keep sitting on my hands and waiting for Abarta to put his schemes into motion before I muster a response. I can’t keep pulling together ragtag teams of poorly prepared people and jaunting off to the Otherworld on short notice with barely more than a general idea of what I’m facing on the other side. I can’t keep leaving Kinsale vulnerable to Abarta’s machinations, or those of his allies, while I battle his infinite minions in other realms. I can’t be this subtle saboteur you want me to be, waiting in the wings and doing nothing of value until Abarta makes the first move. I need to be an active opponent. I need to be a true rival. I need to be a legitimate threat.”

  Tildrum regarded me curiously, like he hadn’t expected that response. “And what if I say you cannot? What if I say that is out of the bounds of Queen Mab’s role for you?”

  “Then I say go ahead and kill me right now.” I forced the words to pass my lips without so much as a stutter. “Because whether you approve of my decision or not, I won’t act as your janitor anymore, cleaning up messes that could have and should have been prevented in the first place. I won’t be a passive participant in a war”—I gestured to the city at large, a scarred and broken thing filled with haunted people—“and this is very much a war.”

  “You were passive in the last war fought on human soil,” Tildrum pointed out.

  I bit back a stream of venom. “That was my mistake. I won’t make it again.”

  “So it seems.” He leaned toward me, as if hunting for a sign of deceit on my face, as if my exposed sídhe marks were somehow obscuring a more human element. Finding no lies in my statements, he reapplied his eerie smile and said, “Very well. I do in fact possess permission from Queen Mab to modify the terms of your assignment. So long as those changes do not risk alerting the courts’ newfound foe to the significance of Abarta as an enemy of the fae. What is it that you have in mind for thwarting Abarta and his circle from here on out?”

  Trying very hard not to smile at the bloom of pride in my chest—I’d stood up to the King of the Cats and actually kept my head on my shoulders—I replied, “To begin with, I need to know more about Manannán’s role in the overarching plan…”

  Chapter Three

  Three Weeks after the Zombie Invasion

  On the castle’s ground floor, Manannán broke the illusion, the energy fizzling out in my senses. He stormed toward the stairwell, following the traces of magic I’d left behind. Using another blast of air, I shot myself all the way down the hall and slid to a stop in the middle of the vault. Rising with the amount of trepidation a vault full of ancient power objects deserved, I rapidly surveyed every item in the room until I located what I was searching for. It sat alone on a stand in the back corner.

  Just as Manannán stomped into view at the end of the hall, I lunged across the vault and picked up Fragarach. As I whirled back to face the furious sea god, I vigorously shook my left arm, and a round medallion slipped out of my coat and plinked onto the floor behind the sword stand. Manannán didn’t notice the sleight of hand. Largely because, at the same moment I pulled the maneuver, I also shouted, “I invoke the right of contractual negotiation!”

  Manannán halted halfway to the vault door. For a moment, a look of astonishment crept across his face. But it was quickly quashed by another surge of anger, this time riding a wave of humiliation. A deep blush reddened everything from his collarbones to the tops of his ears, and he ground his teeth as he glanced between my face and the ancient magic sword clutched in my trembling right hand. Fear roiled in my stomach at the utter fury gouged into his dark eyes, fear that Manannán would strike me down to remedy his embarrassment regardless of the high cost of breaking the terms of a formal magic deal.

  Gods never liked it when you beat them at their own games.

  When Manannán paid his impromptu visit to my house to send me on the wild goose chase to Hel, he coaxed me into formalizing a basic exchange of favors to recover Fragarach. This obligated me to do all in my power to retrieve the sword and return it to the owner, designated by the deal as the god from whose home it had been “taken.”

  That the sword wasn’t actually stolen in the first place—Abarta used a favor owed by Manannán to legitimately borrow Fragarach for a limited time—and that Abarta didn’t take the sword to Hel at any point after he acquired it never factored into the simple terms of the contract established between Manannán and me. Manannán was free to lie to me about everything regarding the sword and its whereabouts, free to deceive me to his heart’s content, free to throw me right into a death trap.

  So why bother to even establish a deal in the first place?

  Insurance.

  In case I miraculously survived my trip to the mountain fortress meant to be my tomb, Manannán wanted something to hold over my head so I couldn’t retaliate against him. My failure to recover Fragarach and fulfill my end of the bargain meant that Manannán had the right, by the contract’s terms, to redefine the nature of his request at any time. Manannán was planning to use that leverage to prevent me from taking revenge against him for deliberately putting me and my friends in harm’s way.

  Since I thought it a very bad idea to remain beholden to Manannán, now technically an agent of Abarta, I decided to remedy the issue: by recovering Fragarach and fulfilling the original terms of the contract before Manannán moved to revise them.

  And that was what I had just done.

  I stepped out of the vault and approached Manannán, who was practically fuming from the ears. The moment I fulfilled my favor for him, I immediately had the right to begin negotiations to determine his favor for me. And once I invoked that right, he couldn’t deal me any physical harm without violating the contract’s “good faith” terms and suffering a catastrophic backfire from his own magic. So all Manannán could do to me as I ambled down the hall, without potentially blowing himself up, was stand there with his fists clenched and his stormy eyes fixed on my face. Like he hoped if he stared hard enough, his gaze would burn a hole through my skull.

  No such luck. I walked up to him unimpeded and offered him the sword. “Fragarach recovered, as requested.”

  Manannán snatched the sword from my hand. “How did you know I’d gotten it back?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “I bet you do.” He hefted the sword and set it on his shoulder. “All right. Spit it out. What do you want from me? Information on Abarta?”

  I held up a finger. “Before we talk favors, how about we relocate to a more scenic location? It’s a little dreary in this damp, dark basement, and I’ve had enough of dreary scenes over the past few weeks. Since, you know, half my city was set on fire and hundreds of people were murdered by zombies.”

  His eyebrow twitched, and he said through gritted teeth, “Where would you like to go?”

  “You h
ave a pretty beach. Let’s go there.”

  Before Manannán could protest, I skirted past him and sauntered back to the stairwell. With a resigned sigh, he followed me, and we ascended the steep stone steps back to the ground floor of the castle. I allowed Manannán to take the lead once we reached the main corridor, since he knew the layout of his island better than me. He guided me back into the front courtyard and through the raised gate, which I swore shuddered as I passed beneath it, as if Manannán was fighting the temptation to let it fall and impale me.

  Ignoring the marked path down to the dock, Manannán cut a hard diagonal through one of the apple tree clusters. We emerged from the grove to the gorgeous view of a tiny cove characterized by gnarled branches of driftwood so old they’d petrified when the Earth was young, and large, jagged shale rocks buffeted by the rising tide.

  Manannán strode through a line of trampled grass that happened to be his exact width, onto the soft sand without missing a beat, and halfway down the beach. There, he hopped onto the largest shelf of shale and walked to its edge, which hung over the sparkling water. A favorite thinking spot, perhaps.

  I clambered up onto the shale rock behind him and took a moment to enjoy the view of the gentle ocean before I spoke. “Okay, this is good enough.”

  “Better be,” Manannán grumbled without turning to face me. “So, what do you want?”

  “That’s a loaded question. I want a lot of things. Not the least of which is for you to suffer as much as Saoirse did after Rian drained the majority of her life force.” I scuffed my boot against the smooth surface of the shale. “But I don’t guess that kind of retribution is on the table today.”

  He ran a hand through his thick, curly hair, appearing genuinely stressed. “You know I didn’t set you up out of malice, don’t you? I owe Abarta substantial favors I cannot cast aside. Any attempt to do so will be as disastrous to my well-being as attacking you during this negotiation. And whatever vague sense of allegiance to the faerie courts I possess is far from strong enough to override my sense of self-preservation. The queens’ wrath I can evade indefinitely, if I’m smart. The penalties for breaking a magic contract I cannot evade at all.”