A Crack in Everything

by Ruth Frances Long

  In the moment it took her to regain control, the light flared more brightly and he could see in graphic detail what her mortal eyes could only begin to make out.

  Blood indeed. And death.

  Everywhere.

  Bodies lay strewn over the dance floor. Not many, for not many would have been here. Most of them weren’t intact, that was part of the problem. But there were glasses and bottles, all smashed, scattered like shards of ice amongst the corpses. Had they been celebrating Silver’s safe return? Honouring Holly’s presence? Every face was familiar.

  Or had been.

  And then the wrong word had been said, a piece of bad news imparted, one fatal mistake made. Or maybe Holly just took the opportunity as it presented itself. Maybe she had just been waiting for the right moment.

  Holly had been here indeed. And only those she still needed would have left with her.

  Sage slumped half on and half off the stage, his green eyes gazing endlessly at the ceiling. Most of his stomach had been torn out.

  Panic seized Jinx. He had to find Silver. He had to know.

  If she was dead … if she was dead …

  But Holly was Silver’s mother. Silver was so special she’d got her own hollow within Holly’s domain. Every Sídhe wanted that. Holly’s child. Holly’s first child.

  She wouldn’t! She couldn’t! Not even Holly!

  Silver was no threat to her. All down the years she had never made a move, never brooked any mention of independence. She could have. It was her right and she was strong enough. But she didn’t. She was so very careful.

  Tearing through the curtain to the VIP lounge, Silver’s little realm, Jinx wasn’t even sure how he crossed the death-soaked club. The light, and Izzy, bobbed along uncertainly behind him, gradually illuminating horror after horror.

  They had uprooted the tree, broken it, killed it. Silver’s tree, which was her strength and her heart, the place she had poured all her power down through endless years, the place where she stored the memory and essence of those lovers who had served her as Leanán Sídhe.

  They’d smashed it to matchsticks and firewood. The harp had been crushed underfoot.

  ‘No,’ he whispered, uselessly. Who was there to hear? Who would care but him? And Silver, if she could possibly have survived this?

  Silver had already been stripped of the power she had in her body by Brí. Could she survive this?

  Izzy’s free hand closed on his shoulder, a single point that wasn’t made of pain. Her voice shook. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Silver lost her magic to Brí, that which she carried within her, but the tree could have restored it. She’d poured her excess magic into its branches and leaves over the years, and her heart and will too, as a safeguard against such a loss. When she took the life of a lover, at the end, this was where it went. It was her touchstone, the source of her magic, of her life.’

  ‘And Holly … broke it?’ He just nodded. ‘But you said Holly is her mother?’

  ‘It’s complicated, Izzy. Our ways of dealing with kin and kith, with family and bloodlines, with loyalties and duties, aren’t the same as yours. As her mother, Holly is owed duty. She owes very little to Silver in return. But Silver owes everything. She’s always been loyal, always!’

  A new voice broke the silence. ‘Holly’s hardly the maternal type, is she, Jinx?’ Mistle ambled from the shadows beyond the tree.

  Jinx didn’t think, couldn’t waste the time. He leaped across the shattered room, seized the wretched fae and slammed him into the wall. ‘What are you doing here? Picking through the debris? Out for a buck from the dead?’

  Mistle turned his head to one side and spat onto the floor. Coolly collected, far too at ease. Prickles of alarm raced up Jinx’s spine.

  ‘Waiting for you. Knew you’d turn up sooner or later. Holly trashed the tree and took Silver off. Ordered her guards to wreck the place and kill the others.’

  ‘And where were you?’

  ‘Hiding. What do you think? I amn’t facing off against Holly, not even for Silver. Not for any of the bastards in there.’

  He grinned and nodded back to the warren of rooms beyond, strewn with the broken bodies, the corpses of Jinx’s friends. As near to friends as he had ever had, anyway.

  Jinx let him go, dropping him like something diseased. Mistle cast his filthy and broken grin at Izzy. ‘Nice to see you again, princess. You’ve turned out well, I see.’

  Izzy had already drawn the knife, brandishing it and Mistle fell back. ‘You stay the hell away from me,’ she said.

  Mistle dropped to his knees and bowed his head in perfect submission, his hands wringing together in front of his wizened body. ‘No offence meant, my lady. I mean only to serve. No offence.’

  Izzy stood there, trembling, light in one hand and death in the other. ‘Then tell us where they’ve gone.’

  ‘Jinx already knows that, don’t he? He’s kin, almost as strong as Silver is. Kin to her and kin to Holly, mistress, though they hate to say it, because of his blood. Because of what Belladonna did.’

  ‘His blood?’

  ‘Because of my father,’ Jinx growled. ‘And Belladonna … my mother was a child of Holly’s bloodline, like Silver, but younger, by hundreds of years. She helped my father, loved him, and ran away with him, or tried to anyway. She died for it. Holly doesn’t forgive.’

  Izzy stared at him as if he’d announced that he could fly. ‘That’s what Brí and the selkie meant?’ Jinx nodded. ‘Your mother betrayed Holly because she loved Jasper and Holly blames you. That’s … that’s cruel. Oh, Jinx … I’m sorry.’

  For a moment he dared to hope that she meant it. She glowed again, a fair soft glow that could have just been the fire in her hands. But it wasn’t. It was that glow again, one he hadn’t see in her for some time. He’d missed it. Gentleness filled her voice, softened the strained lines of her face, and her eyes glistened with tears.

  Tears like those he’d forced from her with cruel words earlier. Now she gave them willingly, for him.

  Jinx’s heart had never weighed so heavily before. He turned to Mistle, kicked him back from Izzy, but the old fiend still grovelled before her when he landed.

  ‘Where’s Holly taken Silver?’ he snarled.

  ‘To the Market. Where else? Plans to make an example of her.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ Izzy asked. ‘Is that where the grail is?’

  Jinx bared his teeth, wishing she’d watch her words around Mistle, but it was too late now.

  Mistle’s head jerked up from the floor. ‘Holly’s grail? What would you need that for?’

  ‘None of your business.’ Jinx replied before Izzy could give more away. ‘Just answer her.’

  ‘Yeah, Holly’s grail is at the Market. She likes to show off her prizes. You know that, Jinxy-boy. Showed you off enough while she had you marked and pierced, didn’t she?’ He’d stood there for days, on the dais in the middle of the Market right beside her touchstone, with them all gawking at him, tied to a pole so he couldn’t hide, or change, her spells swirling beneath his skin, the silver burning him. Blistering tears had coursed down his face and the fae had laughed. They’d all of them laughed. Only Silver hadn’t. Shudders ran through him at the memory.

  Jinx turned his back on Mistle to shut out the words. They still reached him, but at least he didn’t have to see the glee on the old fae’s face. ‘I know where it is, Izzy, but it’s not somewhere to enter lightly.’

  She stepped up beside him, a warrior ready for battle, her jaw firm and her eyes blazing. She didn’t touch him and for that he was grateful. He couldn’t bear to beg her to go back home and forget all this. ‘All this’ wouldn’t forget her, not now. It would be the action of a child, a soon to be dead child. But he wanted to. He wanted to make her run and hide, for once and for all.

  But there was nowhere left to hide.

  ‘Take me there,’ she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Into the Market

&nb
sp; They crossed the city centre, flitting between his world and her own. Dubh Linn for some streets, and just Dublin for others. Izzy stared at the strangely dressed fae and Jinx stoically ignored the human eyes that widened as they passed over him. Izzy stood closer to him than she should. Time shifted as they passed from one to the other. She could feel it, like an after-taste in her mind, a sense of wrongness, the temporal equivalent of sea-sickness. It was later afternoon now, if the light was anything to go by.

  Izzy itched to touch Jinx, to comfort him, even knowing that he would only hurt her again. All the excuses crowded her mind. It didn’t matter. He’d still said what he said, used her to get them to dry land. The logic of it didn’t make the facts any easier to bear.

  Smithfield opened out from narrow streets and close-crowded buildings, a patch of first-world city that had been dropped into the remains of Georgian slums and warehouses. It shone with all the new-age optimism of the millennium that somehow completely missed the mark. Luxury apartments soared up to the sky, but at their feet, on the edge of the square, boarded up windows gazed at them like the eyes of the alcoholics who slept in the doorways at night.

  Not all of them human, Izzy realised.

  The old world clung to the human edges and waved at it through the ragged end of torn posters, leering up through the gutters amid the rubbish. They picked their way beneath brushed steel lamps and past the gaudy lights of the hotel and pub, avoiding the horse shit littering the square from the fair that no one seemed able to get rid of. Smithfield was as strange a mixture of two worlds as Izzy had yet seen. Old and new Dublin, like Dublin and Dubh Linn, didn’t mix well, but somehow flowed together, each pointing out the flaws and cracks of the other.

  ‘Stay with me,’ Jinx said for the thousandth time. ‘Try to keep out of sight. Don’t accept anything offered, don’t admire anything and don’t even look at anything if you can avoid it, understand?’

  ‘Am I allowed to breathe?’

  He glared at her, his eyes like steel, his mouth a hard, unforgiving line. ‘Not if you can avoid it.’ He glanced at the ragged shadow Mistle made behind them and dropped his voice. ‘We’re here for Silver and the grail. In and out. Nothing more, get it?’

  The urge to tease – or argue – rose again, but she pushed it down. For once even the angel agreed with him, so what was the point? He wouldn’t listen anyway.

  ‘Yes, Jinx.’

  He paused, studied her a little closer. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  What did he mean, that’s it? Hadn’t she just agreed with him? God, was he never happy?’

  ‘No arguments? No opinions? No brilliant plans you haven’t thought to warn me of?’

  ‘Should I have some?’

  ‘It never stopped you before. I’m not entirely sure I like your trust, Izzy. Makes me uncomfortable.’

  ‘I didn’t say I trusted you.’ Hell, no, she’d have to be insane to do that. ‘In and out. Silver and the grail. That’s all I agreed to.’

  ‘Oh.’ To her surprise, he sounded deflated. Intrigued, she glanced up at him, but he refused to meet her gaze. Well, what did he expect? After everything that had happened. He was the most mercurial, maddening man she’d ever met.

  And of course, he wasn’t a man.

  ‘Jinx—’ she began more gently than she had thought she was still capable of. But Jinx wasn’t listening again.

  ‘Let’s go. Be prepared though, you might see anything in there. At Holly’s Market, anything goes. And usually does.’

  In the centre of the square, between two of those ridiculous lampposts that resembled half-rigged sails, the world gave an odd sort of shimmer like a heat haze or the familiar sickening dread of a migraine aura. Points of light wavered around its edge, as if made of acid eating through the fabric of reality. Her reality, or what remained of it.

  The phone chimed, Dylan again, checking up on them. It was only then she noticed about five messages, all saying roughly the same thing. Where are you?

  Smithfield, she sent back. There’s a gate to the Market. We’re going in.

  Her first thought was that the whole area was too quiet. The knife, tucked into Izzy’s belt formed a cold line against her hip even through the jeans, an unbending block which made her movements feel awkward. But having carried it for days now, she couldn’t imagine being without it. Her neck on the other hand felt curiously bare without the pendant. She missed it, in the same way she missed Dad – with a dull, hollow ache deep inside.

  Walking through the gates was like walking through a wave of electricity. It danced over her skin, each hair rising in alarm, each follicle prickling – a brief moment of pain, of excitement and, yes, of fear too.

  Izzy sucked in a shocked breath and Jinx caught her arm to steady her. Irritation rose again and she pulled free.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Of course you are. Take a moment.’

  She shivered and fought not to throw up. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just one of her jokes.’

  He could have warned her, she thought. But then again she probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

  ‘No guards? Not even someone watching the front door?’

  Mistle stepped through behind them, shaking himself off like a dog coming out of the water.

  ‘She don’t need guards, little angel. Not here. Everyone can come to the Market. Open to all, isn’t it?’

  Jinx exhaled in a long, impatient breath. ‘Let’s go.’

  The square had vanished beyond the gate. A tunnel opened up ahead of them, broad and high enough to allow a bus to drive down it, lined with polished bronze. Light bounced from wall to wall, reflecting downwards. As they walked down the steep incline, their reflections followed them, hazy and indistinct in the metal. From the corner of her eye, Izzy saw other things too. Shadows that jumped from place to place in a way no shadow should. Points of light that crawled and scurried. Sometimes the reflection of Jinx flickered to his hound form and Mistle appeared smaller, horribly hunched, his eyes gleaming red. Worst of all, however, were the glimpses she caught of herself. She stood much taller in the curved bronze, her head held high and instead of her shoulder-length red hair, wave upon wave of golden locks tumbled down her back, where it was abruptly obscured by the sweep of feathered wings. Light swelled in a nimbus around her as she descended to the underworld, the light the bronze lined walls carried underground, but something else too, fiery and golden, like the sun, like naked flames.

  She glanced over her shoulder to check once, twice, and again, to see if the feathers fell burning to the ground behind her, incinerated by the raw heat, but there was nothing. Only Mistle, leering at her. Her stomach clenched and she reached for the knife, still there at her hip, one small and cold comfort.

  The noise grew as they descended, at first a vague murmur like the waves on a shingle shore, then the whispering breeze moving leaves in a forest. Finally it swelled into a swarm of life and activity. Hawkers’ cries, accents that were pure Dub and lilting brogue and something else entirely, screaming, cajoling, and the ringing tones of many other languages, each more exotic than the last. Snatches of music drifted out through the vast cavern below ground. Laughter, anger, songs and curses, blended together in a riot of vitality. They stepped out of the tunnel’s mouth into a cross between a carnival and rush hour. The force of the noise and the stench of the place pummelled Izzy’s senses, driving her back a step or two. The sheer number of people surrounding her was momentarily overwhelming.

  No, not people. Beings. Creatures. Fae.

  Jinx locked his hand around her wrist, his touch strangely warm against her skin, impossibly strong, but by no means painful. He pulled her down the nearest aisle of stalls decked with by turns silks and velvets, fragrant oils, all manner of food and caged birds or lizards. Izzy tried not to stare as the fae tending their wares surged forwards in search of a sale. They weren’t wearing glamours here. They didn’t need to. Strange and beautiful, terrifying and
bizarre, everywhere she turned …

  A girl whose pale blue skin was etched with lines of azure in some kind of delicate Old Irish script smiled as she held out a gossamer-fine scarf which shimmered as if spun with moonlight. A bull-shouldered man with the thickest neck Izzy had ever seen carefully handled tiny finches in fingers like sausages. He whistled softly and all the birds started to sing in harmony, just for him.

  She stumbled past a stall where bottles of a thousand different hues gave out intoxicating aromas. Someone she couldn’t see thrust a small cup into her hand. The liquid was icy cold inside, the exterior of the glass damp with condensation.

  ‘Drop that,’ Jinx barked and she realised she had already lifted it halfway to her mouth.

  ‘But it’s just a sample,’ Mistle protested. ‘And Hands makes the best vintages there are.’

  Jinx pulled Izzy hard against him and snatched the glass from her fingers, deftly tossing it aside in the same movement. ‘No such thing as “just a sample” with lilac wine. Drink that and you’d crave it for the rest of your short and bitter life. Keep moving.’

  She ought to be offended, but he was protecting her. She knew that. She looked away, and more wonders were waiting.

  At the far end of the aisle, a giant of a man was juggling fire. Not torches or brands, but balls of fire that burst from his fingertips and rolled up towards the roof. Izzy followed their path, dazzled. Could she do that?

  High overhead, bronze plates shone with stolen light and licks of his flames, curved into a dome. The whole Market heaved and swarmed under the arc of that roof, and was reflected in it, in all its strange and wondrous glory. Too far away to make out details but all there. Every single one, playing out above just as below.

  And in the centre was a column. It looked like crystal, sparkling in the borrowed light. The biggest she’d ever seen, thick as the trunk of an ancient oak.

  ‘That’s where Holly sits,’ said Jinx, following her line of sight. ‘Whatever we do, we stay the hell away from that.’

  ‘And where does she keep the grail? Where is Silver?’