What Man Defies

by Clara Coulson

  They were surrounded by svartálfar.

  Exactly what I’d been worried about. I’d reviewed my memory about Nuada’s metal arm over and over again while I was at the hospital. Taken in conjunction with the banshee’s comment that I was “notorious,” I’d concluded that the most likely mastermind behind the kidnappings was Abarta. He would’ve known where Nuada stashed his old prosthetic, because he knew Nuada. He could also know where any number of other relics of the golden age of the Tuatha were buried. He could, at this moment, be building an army of formidable underlings, like the banshee, by enticing them to join his cause with weapons of great power. A mercenary army. An army that had no qualms killing anyone Abarta set his sights on.

  I had slowed him down by destroying Daur da Bláo, but I hadn’t stopped him. Not even close.

  The man had fifteen hundred years to plot his revenge against the fae. He probably had dozens of plans in motion, all working to related ends. The abductions, after all, had started before Abarta tried to cast the spell with the harp. So whatever he was doing with these people, it wasn’t meant to lead directly to the awakening of the Tuatha. No, he was after something else. But I didn’t doubt his goals here were any less dangerous than the war he was already plotting.

  But where is here? I wondered. I need to know where these people are if I want to rescue them.

  There were countless realms in the Otherworld, and I needed to have, if not a frequently used name of the realm, then a firm image of the location wedged in my mind’s eye. But the terrain I was observing in Weatherby’s memory wasn’t unique enough. It was just patches of dead, black forest, and bare plains of ash-strewn earth, and jagged obsidian chunks rising from the ground in random places. There wasn’t anything I could anchor myself to. No clear and unmistakable landmarks. If I tried to make a portal with only general imagery in my head, and no idea of which realm these features existed in, I could land in the wrong place.

  Weatherby had to have seen something I could use. I nudged the trace a little harder, increasing its speed. Weatherby being dragged to the starting line by two dark elves. Weatherby sitting on his knees in the lineup of prisoners—with Christie next to him, resolve burning in her eyes despite the mottled shiner that had partially swollen one of them shut. (I made a note to beat the ever-loving shit out of the person who hit her.) The entire lineup of prisoners, tied together with lengths of rope, as they were led toward the starting line on a winding path that cut through a stretch of petrified woodland.

  When they emerged from the beginning of this path, I found myself looking at something I couldn’t quite parse. There were eerie stone statues placed at random intervals on a wide circular field that was broken down into segments painted either light gray or dark. As the chain gang of prisoners wound back across this field, Weatherby happened to look up. Hanging from the mouth of the nearest statue, which was carved into some kind of birdlike chimera creature, was Orson Barnum. The statue had the man’s neck pinched between its beak. It had crushed his windpipe. He’d suffocated.

  What the fuck is this? Horror spread through me, a cold, creeping poison. This field almost looks like a…

  Weatherby glanced to the right. Lying sprawled on a light gray section of the field twenty feet away was Amy Newsome. She’d been impaled through the neck by a stone spear. The spear belonged to a statue that looked vaguely like an armored centaur. The centaur’s hand was still holding the spear. As if it had come to life and killed Newsome before returning to its inanimate form.

  A field arranged in sections of alternating colors. Statues with blocky bases that fit into those sections. And in the center of it all, sitting atop a stone dais—a pair of obsidian dice.

  It was a game board. A giant magic game board. For some kind of strategy game whose rules included actual death. The prisoners had been compelled to play this game by the svartálfar, no doubt under the threat of a bloody and painful execution if they attempted to refuse.

  I felt nauseous. It was one thing to be kidnapped and straight-up murdered by a criminal. It was an entirely different kind of nightmare to be forced to play a game for your life, knowing that if you rolled the dice the wrong way, even once, a goddamn statue would come to life and brutally kill you. No wonder the ghosts of these people were showing up restless and disturbed in Kinsale. They were being forced to navigate literal death traps and getting slaughtered in severely traumatizing ways.

  But to what end? That was what I didn’t yet grasp.

  What was the goal? What was at the finish line of this “obstacle course”?

  If it was this well defended, it had to be something of awesome power, something that would give Abarta a major edge in his crusade against the sídhe. Which meant I could not let him acquire it, under any circumstances. Problem was, if I told the local fae leadership about what Abarta was doing, and they told the queens, and the queens sent a battalion of sídhe warriors to storm this place and stop the elves, and the banshee, and whoever else Abarta had on his payroll for this venture, the odds that any of the prisoners would make it out of the fray alive were slim to none.

  It was just like the harp incident. The sídhe didn’t do things halfway when it came to legitimate threats. And they didn’t give a shit about collateral damage, as long as the damage wasn’t done to their cities or the surrounding territory in Tír na nÓg. A few dozen human lives were meaningless to them. If a dark elf tried to use a human shield, a sídhe soldier would shoot an arrow right through the human, as long as it’d hit the elf too.

  No, calling in the fae cavalry will have to be a backup option. I have to try to save all these people first…

  An extraction job. That was the plan. I’d gather a team, enter this realm, and rescue the victims. If, in the process, I got to take out a few more dark elves? Good deal. If, in the process, I got to take out the banshee with the metal arm? Great deal. If, in the process, I dealt Abarta another major blow? The best deal. But the main goal would be to rescue the prisoners and make sure that Abarta’s forces couldn’t snatch any more.

  One remaining issue though: I couldn’t launch a rescue operation if I didn’t know where this place was. It was imperative I figure it out, and fast, because the dark elves were sacrificing people at an alarming rate.

  I pushed the trace again, the spell straining, the twine around my finger growing hot as it began to overload. But the memories backtracked faster, taking me along the path the chain gang had used to get to the game board and all the way to a sheer cliff face that went up and up and—

  There. Weatherby peered up at the sky above him. Except it wasn’t a sky at all. It was the ceiling of a colossal cavern. There was a split in the wall of the cavern, narrow at the base and wide at the top. The split branched off the top of the wall and stretched about eighty feet across the ceiling, allowing light inside. The chain gang had entered the cavern through the broken wall, and in the memory, the astonishing view through the ceiling had attracted Weatherby’s attention. Because that view showcased two entirely different skies. On the left, there was a night sky, pale moonlight cast down, stars twinkling. On the right, there was a noon sky, bright sunlight and puffy white clouds. The skies met directly in the center of the hole in the ceiling of the cavern.

  The Unseelie Court and the Seelie Court. The two halves of Tír na nÓg.

  This cavern was in the Divide, the strip of barren land that separated the courts.

  Of course. What better place to hide something than a wasteland where no one lived? Nobody would ever stumble across this cavern by accident. You’d have to know exactly what the entry point looked like because the Divide was one big expanse of charred and rocky ground. You would be hard-pressed to differentiate between the black shadow of the entrance and the rest of the grayscale terrain, even from the air. Whoever had built this labyrinth of death traps to protect their power object had picked a damn good spot.

  But now that I knew what the entrance looked like and that the cavern was located in the Divide
, I could—

  Someone grabbed my shoulder. I lost my concentration on the trace spell, and it collapsed in an instant. The real world blinked back into existence. Before I could react, the hand wrenched me sideways and spun me around, and the next thing I knew, I was staring down the barrel of a gun. Above me, finger on the trigger, stood Joe Shark, in all his unshaven and greasy-haired glory, dark eyes narrowed and lips twitching in vehemence.

  “What the fuck,” he spat at me, “do you think you’re doing in my bar?”

  “Well,” I said breathlessly, staring at the gun aimed at my face, “that’s a funny story.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Police!” Saoirse yelled. “Drop the gun.”

  Joe Shark went rigid, then slowly looked over his shoulder. Saoirse and the detectives had crawled out from under the booth and flanked Shark and the two hulking lackeys he’d brought downstairs with him. Saoirse’s gun was pointed at Shark’s back, her finger drifting toward the trigger a millimeter more for each second that Shark didn’t respond to her command. You could tell from the fire in her eyes and the frown on her lips that she wouldn’t hesitate to gun Shark down if he tried to hurt me.

  A rapid sequence of thoughts flashed across Shark’s face, his expression twisting and turning. But he didn’t drop the gun, didn’t even lower it. Instead, he said, “You have a lot of guts, lady, coming in here.” He hummed a low note. “This isn’t like the bars on your side of town. We’re not so cop friendly in Bedlam Heights. No donuts. No coffee. No rules against retaliation if the police piss us off. So you might want to think really hard about threatening me, in my domain, with thirty-plus people on my payroll watching.”

  Saoirse didn’t flinch. “I’ve taken down teenagers with sharper teeth than you.”

  “Sounds like you want to place a bet. You against the house.” He flashed his teeth. Three of them had gold fillings. “Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but those aren’t good odds.”

  Saoirse didn’t give Shark an inch. She kept her eyes trained on him, kept him craning his neck…so he wasn’t looking at me.

  As subtly as I could, I released a wisp of energy from my fingertip and directed it toward Shark’s gun. It squeezed in behind the trigger and solidified into ice.

  I cleared my throat.

  Shark’s head snapped toward me. “What?”

  “One thing you’re forgetting, pal.”

  “What’s that?” He cocked an eyebrow. “I can kill you in a second.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t kill a ghost.”

  My arm shot out to the side and grabbed the twine that made up the boundary of the circle. Shark pulled the trigger of his gun, only to hit the ice gumming up the mechanism. In the time it took him to realize I’d messed with his gun and shove his fingers behind the trigger to clear the ice, I yanked the twine up, knocking over two of the candles and breaking the binding spell that was keeping Tristan Weatherby’s ghost contained. The ash shackles dissipated immediately. Weatherby, just about frothing at the mouth, enraged further by the invasion of my trace spell, soared up into the air again and regained control of his still-floating table shrapnel.

  “Oh, fuck,” Shark said.

  Then Weatherby started throwing broken tables.

  I dove to the side and huddled against a booth. The first projectile, almost a foot wide, slammed into Shark’s chest and flung him across the room. Saoirse dropped to her knees, and Shark sailed over her head and slammed into the back wall. He bounced off and landed in a wheezing heap, ribs shattered. The second chunk whacked lackey number one in the face, and he did a little ballet twirl before collapsing. And the third and fourth pieces hit the other goon, one to the gut, one to the groin, and he went down shrieking like a dying fox.

  Weatherby didn’t care who he was hurting. He was picking the closest targets. So as soon as Shark and his men were beaten, he geared up for round two with Saoirse and the detectives. He slung back his arm, lining up more table shrapnel for his next volley. But I tore his attention off Saoirse and the others by rising to my feet and loudly clapping my hands. “Hey, Weatherby,” I said. “How’d you like to go for a ride through time and space?”

  Weatherby yelled incoherently and went to change the trajectory of his pieces so he could pummel me. I grabbed a spherical Christmas ornament from my pocket and threw it at him, uttering a short invocation. The ornament shattered as it passed through his transient form, and my magic energy ballooned outward, enveloping the ghost in the same cylindrical prison spell I’d used before. This time, however, instead of the crude basic circle that led to the void, a more complex circle appeared in the air beneath Weatherby’s feet, made of swirling snow. The cylinder dropped into the circle, taking Weatherby with it, the ghost letting out one last pitiful moan before he crossed the veil for the last time.

  This banishment spell was a direct outlet to Weatherby’s afterlife. It would read the history of his soul and spit him out in the right realm, minus the cylinder prison. That way, he wouldn’t have to drift until he found his way, or spend time in the Endless Sea, waiting for Manannán to ferry him to his eternal home. Farewell, pal. Hope the afterlife treats you better than this world did.

  With Weatherby taken care of, I examined the room. A bunch of people hiding under tables, several of them armed and dangerous, but none of them aching for a fight. Three injured mobsters I wasn’t generous enough to carry to the hospital. And Saoirse, Mallory, and Granger, in one piece, though Granger had a couple splinters in his face from where one of the table pieces had fractured when it hit the second goon’s head. Nothing a pair of tweezers couldn’t take care of.

  All in all, this catch-and-release scheme hadn’t been a total disaster. Which was a win in my book, considering we lived in the post-apocalypse.

  Saoirse stood up, brushing debris off her clothes. “So,” she said, drawing out the sound, “now what?”

  “Now we put together a hunting party,” I replied and nodded toward the exit. “Come on. We need to talk.”

  Outside, and twenty blocks away from Anderson and Company, I told the three detectives and Odette, who’d slunk out of the bar after us, what I’d learned about the missing and the murder victims. Mallory handled the horror by internalizing everything, face like a rock, whereas Granger had to hobble off to a nearby alley and toss his cookies. Odette looked as if she’d smelled something disgusting, but wasn’t otherwise rattled. I figured that as a witch who’d lived through the purge, she’d seen her fair share of nasty business.

  Saoirse paced back and forth across the icy sidewalk, huffing out white breaths. “So you think the only way we’re going to get the rest of those people out alive is with a strike team?”

  “I’m sure of it.” I kicked a loose piece of ice into the street. “The fae will launch an all-out attack. Crushing anything—and anyone—who happens to be in their path. Including hostages. We let them take the wheel, we’ll just be bringing back body bags.”

  “So, what?” Odette snapped. “You want to sneak into this death cave and take on a bunch of svartálfar? A half-fae, a human witch, and three mundanes?” She glanced at Saoirse, wary. “No offense, but you aren’t exactly a big hitter when it comes to the paranormal sphere.”

  “I agree with you,” Saoirse said. “But we can’t spend a week on recruiting efforts. These people are dying now.”

  “We don’t even know what they’re looking for though,” Mallory added, hesitant. “What’s at the end of this line of…traps? Locks? What are we calling the setup in this cavern?”

  “I think ‘locks’ is a good description.” I tucked my hands into my pockets. “It’s like a vault with the most sophisticated security system ever conceived. In order to get to the prize inside, you have to beat a series of dangerous magical tests.”

  “It’s like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” said Granger, in between spitting the last bits of his bile on the ground as he walked back over. When the three of us stared at him, bewildered, he sighed. “You kn
ow, when Harry, Hermione, and Ron had to beat all the obstacles to retrieve the Sorcerer’s Stone before Voldemort?”

  We continued staring.

  Then Odette said, “Okay, back to the real magic. Here’s what I don’t understand: Why are they kidnapping mundanes and using them as cannon fodder? The dark elves could probably beat these ‘locks’ way more easily than any human, even a practitioner like me. So what’s the deal?”

  “Some kind of requirement?” Saoirse said, directed at me.

  I thought about it. “If I was already going through the trouble to store an ancient object of great power in a vault protected by complex magic locks, then why wouldn’t I take the extra step of making sure the keys to the locks were also difficult to obtain?”

  “Difficult?” Mallory said. “But they’re snatching people so easily.”

  “No, they aren’t,” I replied. “They’re using rip portals to perform risky snatch-and-grab jobs in public, and I bet you anything several bystanders have seen them doing it. Those bystanders just didn’t understand what they were seeing.”

  “Rip portals?” Saoirse tilted her head. “I remember ‘directed portal’ and ‘slip portal,’ but not ‘rip portal.’ What’s that?”

  “The jackhammer of portal spells,” Odette said. “You literally rip a big, ragged hole in the fabric of reality and step through it like a torn sheet. It harms the veil, leaves scars that take years to heal. And if you use too many rip portals in one area, the veil can actually become unstable.” She pursed her lips. “Trash magic is what it is. That banshee lady is threatening more than just lives.”

  “What’ll happen if she keeps up with the kidnappings?” Mallory asked, rubbing her arms. It was cold and getting colder. “Keeps opening these rip portals? What happens if the veil does become unstable?”

  Odette and I exchanged glances. Neither of us wanted to say.

  “It’s not going to,” I eventually said. “Because we’re going to stop the banshee.”