She was trembling violently—her instincts suddenly those of the wild creature she had become, only barely colored by her rational mind. She could feel her own tiny heart fluttering madly in her feathered breast.
Fly! Escape!
Harvicc lumbered over to one of the ornamental potted trees with exaggerated care and deposited the kestrel gently on a branch, holding his fingers in a loose cage around her feathered, quivering body. Her wings ruffled, and Harvicc closed up the gaps between his fingers so that she would not attempt panicked flight again.
Caged! Trapped! Escape! Fly . . .
“Wait!”
The Fennrys Wolf stepped out from beneath the dripping eaves on the far side of the terrace and stalked toward them. Putting his hands on Harvicc’s thick wrists, Fennrys slowly began to open the cage of the ogre’s fingers wider.
Escape!
“What do you think you’re doing?” Tyff grabbed at his arm.
“Wait.” Fennrys shook the Summer Fae off.
The kestrel’s wings shivered and furled. Harvicc closed his hands tighter.
Fear!
“Stop,” Fennrys said to Harvicc in a firm, quiet voice. “You’re frightening her. If she feels trapped, she’ll try to fly.”
“As opposed to what she was just doing before he caught her?” Tyff snapped. “You know—flying?”
“Trust me,” the Janus said, glancing over his shoulder.
Tyff uttered a squawk of protest. “Trust you?”
“Kelley does.”
Kelley . . . I’m Kelley. I trust . . .
Tyff’s mouth snapped shut on whatever it was she was going to say, but her eyes still blazed, fiercely protective.
“Don’t worry.” Fennrys turned back to the potted tree and the bird perched there. “I know what I’m doing.” His knuckles went white with the effort of peeling back the reluctant ogre’s meaty digits. All the while he was crooning to the terrified creature that shifted and shivered on the too-slender branch that swayed in the gathering storm winds, threatening to dislodge her. “You’re all right. Shh . . . you’re all right. I’m here. I’ve got you. . . .” Fennrys reached out to gently stroke the chest feathers of the reddish-hued bird with the back of his fingers, shushing her gently.
Trust . . .
“That’s my roommate you’re pawing, Fido,” Tyff growled.
He ignored her and, resting his other arm in front of the branch, slowly coaxed the nervous kestrel onto his wrist. “I’ve hunted with falcons since I was a boy in Gwynn’s court. I know what I’m doing.” He reached up and smoothed the feathers on top of the bird’s—on top of Kelley’s—head, continuing to croon to her under his breath.
The kestrel’s talons scrabbled for a moment, and then she steadied on the perch of his forearm, tilting her head from side to side, trying to make sense of vision that was suddenly more acute—although less binocular than she was used to. Over Fenn’s shoulder, Tyff’s face came into focus as the beautiful Faerie peered down at her.
“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, little roomie?” Tyff murmured.
The falcon shifted and made a high-pitched, mewling sound.
“Okay. Okay . . . I know you’re in there.” Tyff took a step forward, trying to cajole Kelley back to personhood. “Kelley? Think ‘people’ thoughts. Legs and arms and stuff. No more of this pretty-birdie act, all right? You’re freaking me out.”
The kestrel ruffled her feathers in agitation.
“Not nearly as much as you’re freaking her out,” Fenn growled.
The strong pulse of his blood thrummed through Fennrys’s wrist—she could feel it beneath the grip of her kestrel feet. The steady rhythm began to sooth her jangled nerves.
“Now all of you step back so I can try and get her inside the apartment. . . .”
Suddenly, lightning flashed. Thunder roared like a cannon discharged directly overhead. The kestrel shrieked in fear and rage. Her wings beat the air, clawing at an updraft. Maddox made a desperate grab for her; Tyff screamed and Harvicc lunged; and Fennrys howled in pain as razor-sharp talons sliced through the flesh of his forearm.
She felt the blood, wet and warm, as she launched herself skyward.
Up into the heart of the pummeling tempest.
Far below, the voices of her friends shouting for her to return grew small and then silent as she flew upward into the lashing rain and the storm clouds swallowed her up.
Chapter III
Sonny didn’t know how long he’d been riding the subway. Long enough for it to have made its way north, all the way up to 168th Street, to the end of the C line in Washington Heights, where it stopped and headed south again. No one seemed to notice Sonny or care that he sat there, slumped in his seat, as the train headed back down toward Midtown. People got on and off—mortals hurrying from one place to another, going about their lives. Most of them made a point of actively avoiding glancing in his direction. He must have looked either dangerous or crazy. Or both. Sonny certainly couldn’t have cared less. He had nowhere to go, and so the aimless journey suited him—just dim light, anonymous faces, and a rumble of sound to block out his thoughts.
He had no idea where he was when the train suddenly lurched, stuttering and grinding to a stop in the tunnel somewhere between two stations. The lights in the car flickered and dimmed to almost nothing, buzzing like lazy insects as they ran on emergency power. Sonny let his head fall back against the window and closed his eyes. Waiting for the subway to start moving once again. Taking him away from everything. From nothing. From Kelley.
“You look lost,” said a voice in his ear.
“What?” Sonny opened his eyes again to see a small, thin slip of a girl sitting next to him, a brown paper bag clutched tightly on her lap. Her feet were bare and she swung them back and forth without touching the floor of the train car.
“Lost,” she repeated. “Like me.” She cocked her head and getured with her chin. “Like them.”
Sonny looked around at the other occupants of the subway car. He’d been vaguely aware that it had been uncharacteristically empty for the last several stops, but he’d been grateful for the solitude. Now there were a handful of other occupants, scattered on seats up and down the length of the car. But not one of them was human. They may have worn human shapes, like Halloween costumes masking their true natures, but Sonny could see through the glamours to the creatures beneath: a trio of dryads with leafy hair huddled over a hand mirror, a nervous-looking banshee with haunted eyes drinking from a Starbucks cup, a shining Faerie girl clothed in a coat of silver chain mail, and one of the urisk—dwarfish solitary Fae noted for their shyness—disguised as a wizened old man. They were the Lost Fae. Marooned in a world away from their homes. Shipwrecked . . . like him. Lost.
The girl who had spoken to Sonny held out a slender hand to him. “This is my stop,” she said. Sonny glanced out of the window but saw only the darkened walls of the tunnel. “You can come with me, if you want.” Her fingers, he saw, were slightly webbed with diaphanous membranes. Her skin shimmered, and her long, fine hair was a shade of indigo so deep it was almost black. She was Water Folk . A naiad. She should have repelled him or made him want to fight. But her dark, luminous eyes, huge in such a tiny, delicate face, held his gaze, and all he felt was weariness.
She was right. He was lost.
With nowhere else to go, Sonny stood and looked down at the Faerie girl. The top of her silky head barely reached to his shoulder, but she smiled up at him serenely and held out her hand again. Sonny wrapped his fingers around hers and followed as she stepped toward the subway doors on the opposite side of the car from the ones that would open at the next station stop—the next human station stop. When the doors shimmered and vanished, several of the Lost Fae that had been sitting stood and stepped out into the darkness of the tunnel.
The girl leaped gracefully down, moving toward what seemed to be a service alcove recessed into the tunnel wall. Sonny followed. Behind him the doors of the car re
appeared and the whole thing shuddered, its interior lights flickering back to normal brightness. Then the train jerked, rumbling and clanking into forward motion, and was gone.
The shadowed shapes of the other Fae who’d left the car melted into the darkness that followed in the wake of the train. Sonny blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the murk. Then he saw, directly in front of him where the blank, sooty black wall of the alcove had been, a faint phosphorescent shimmering. He reached out a hand and felt nothing. Air. The wall had disappeared.
The Faerie girl at his side stepped through into another tunnel. This one wasn’t man-made, Sonny knew that instantly. But it also wasn’t natural. A Faerie construct. Sourceless light reflected off the gleaming facets of what looked like black cut glass. Sonny glanced around to see his own visage shattered and mirrored back at him in a thousand fragments. It was, he thought humorlessly, an apt metaphor for his present state of mind.
He trailed behind the naiad—both of them sure-footed, used to traveling in the dark—for what seemed like quite a while. Five minutes? Maybe ten? Sonny lost track of the time, but it wasn’t as if he had to be somewhere. Eventually, the obsidian tunnel opened onto another tunnel. This one was man-made; brick and stone arched overhead, and a trickling stream of water flowed down the middle. Faerie-wrought sconces hung at intervals on the curved wall, set with smokeless torches that cast pale, flickering illumination. The tunnel veered at a slight angle and sloped gently upward in the direction they walked. After another ten minutes or so, Sonny saw the faint glimmer of brighter light far up ahead.
He supposed he should be wary—or, at the very least, curious—but his emotional responses were detached, distant . . . as though they belonged to someone else. It seemed almost like he followed behind the naiad more out of professional habit than anything else. The Lost Fae—Faerie that managed to get past the Janus Guard once a year when the Samhain Gate, the passageway between the mortal and Faerie realms, opened—were generally very good at losing themselves in the city. Some, like Kelley’s roommate, Tyff, had managed to blend into human society with ease. Others found their way to scattered pockets of fae—like secret, underground communities—who would take them in. It looked as though Sonny was about to be introduced to one of those. And it was, quite literally, underground.
The circle of light in front of them grew as they approached the exit, and Sonny was dully astonished as he reached the tunnel mouth and looked out. In front of him stretched a vast cavern, the ceiling of which vaulted up and away into blue shadows and darkness. Shifting patterns of light danced upon rough-hewn stone walls—reflections of a series of pools, interconnected with streams and waterfalls—and Sonny heard the sounds of several voices raised in delicate, echoing song. A shiver ran down his spine. Sirens.
He stepped out into the grotto, and the singing stopped abruptly. He heard the sounds of startled splashing and then silence. Fine, he thought. Good. If they feared him, if they shrank from him, so much the better.
“Silly things.” The Faerie girl at his side giggled. “They spook so easily. You’re nothing to be scared of.”
Aren’t I? Sonny gazed down at her. I hunt your kind. I’ve killed your kind.
But the things that Sonny had come to define himself by had begun to fray and fall apart all around him. Ever since the moment, probably less than three hours earlier, when Kelley had said . . . the thing she’d said. Sonny shied from the memory, concentrating on the present moment. He backed a step away from the naiad.
What are you doing here in such a place? he chastised himself silently.
There had been no reason in the world for him to follow the Faerie girl. But then again, had there really been any reason not to? Sonny felt himself adrift without purpose. Nothing mattered anymore.
“Well, aren’t you a sorry-looking thing,” said a familiar voice from somewhere off to his left. He turned to see a slender young woman with long, dark hair and a bow and quiver strapped to her back descending down a narrow path carved into the bedrock wall. “Hard to believe that all it takes to wilt such a formidable creature as a Janus Guard is a little rain.”
“Hello, Carys.” Sonny recognized her from the time he’d taken Kelley to Herne’s Tavern on the Green. The beautiful huntress Fae was not exactly friendly to members of Sonny’s particular profession. “Lovely to see you again, too.”
“What are you doing here, slave of Auberon?”
Sonny didn’t have the will to put up a fight. Wordlessly, he turned to go.
She stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “How did you find this place?”
“I brought him,” said the girl at his side, not loosening her grip on Sonny’s hand. “He looked lost.”
Carys took in Sonny’s appearance with a scalding glance, head to toe. “He looks half-killed, is what he looks.” She sniffed in disdain.
Her gaze drifted to his face, and Sonny locked eyes with her, a distant spark of anger flaring somewhere deep inside him. Not quite enough to start a fire, but enough to make the Faerie look away first.
“Neerya has a soft spot for strays.” Carys glared at the slip of a girl. “Mongrels and hard-luck cases are her specialties.”
Neerya just tilted her head and smiled, tugging Sonny back away from the tunnel mouth. “I like him. He’s got pretty eyes. I wish they weren’t so sad, though. . . .” Neerya wriggled past the huntress and led Sonny toward what looked to be a green meadow, stretching out for some way in the underground cavern. A soft light—blue and gold—filled the air, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Come eat!” Neerya tugged him with surprising strength across the grass to a rocky outcropping where a cloth was spread upon the ground and set with silver platters heaped with a seemingly endless repast. “Food fixes everything.”
Sonny knew better. And he also knew better than to partake of a Faerie feast in the company of unfamiliar Fae.
“It’s not.” Neerya giggled, seeming to read his thoughts—or perhaps just the wariness of his expression. She plucked an apple off a tray and held it out to him. “It’s people food. For my ‘strays.’”
It had a bruise on one side and the kind of waxy sheen to its skin that meant Neerya had probably pilfered it from a grocery store. Nothing magickal about it. A closer look at the silver platter pierced whatever weak glamour had produced the illusion of Otherworldly splendor. In fact, Neerya’s “feast” was comprised mostly of produce past its prime. Scattered in among bruised apples, wrinkled tomatoes, and sparse bunches of red and green grapes, there were dented cans of soda and packages of Twinkies and potato chips. Neerya thrust the fruit out to him again, her eyes shining too brightly. It was somehow pathetic and endearing at the same time. Even though he wasn’t hungry, he took the apple from her hand and bit into it, because it made the young naiad smile.
“I haven’t been able to have any friends over for a long time now,” she said wistfully. “Carys says I have to be careful who I talk to up there.” Sonny assumed she meant up there in the city. “Hereside’s not so safe for us these days.”
“He knows that,” Carys said from where she had taken up a perch on a crumbling support pillar that jutted from the ground like a broken tooth. “He’s one of the reasons why.”
Neerya turned and blinked at Sonny, a small frown creasing her brow.
“Hereside?” Sonny asked.
Carys shrugged. “Have to call this realm something. It’s not home. It’s just the side of the Gate we’re stuck on. It’s just . . . here.”
Neerya looked like she was about to ask Sonny what Carys had meant before, but she didn’t get the chance. Something roared angrily from the darkness of one of the tunnels, and the naiad squeaked in alarm. She shrank back, trying to hide behind Sonny while gathering the pitiful pile of food in to safety, as a hideous, leather-skinned nightmare came barreling out of the shadows. Driving boulder-sized fists down into the turf, hammering wild holes into the ground, the beastly creature knocked Neerya’s
carefully collected repast into disarray. Neerya cried out and scrambled to retrieve a rolling grapefruit—barely avoiding the ogre’s massive fists. Sonny dodged beneath one of the descending blows and scooped Neerya up, tossing her toward the shelter of Carys’s perch. Then he sprinted away from the naiad, trying to draw the ogre after him. It worked.
“I smell human!” roared the creature, thundering in his wake.
“You smell more than that,” Carys called after the ogre, goading him on with grim amusement. “You smell changeling! Janus Guard changeling.”
“Janusss,” the monster snarled, swinging its head back and forth, nostrils flaring, as if it tasted the air to capture Sonny’s scent. Then it lurched with ponderous swiftness in Sonny’s direction, launching roundhouse blows wildly as it came toward him. Thankfully, the monster had the worst aim Sonny had ever encountered. Still, there was nothing for him to do but retreat—and eventually, over near the tumbling falls and pools, Sonny found himself cornered, caught between a jutting stone buttress and a sharp drop to the dark water below.
The ogre was coming closer, and Sonny wondered if he should plunge into the water and swim for it. But then he heard a thrumming sound coming from beneath the surface of the pool and knew that there was no way in any hell he would take that option. It was not singing—not quite—but, rather, an eerie wail that set his teeth on edge. The Sirens, it seemed, had returned. He could not go that way. He would not.
Sonny recoiled from the edge, remembering the moment when he had let the Siren girl Chloe into his thoughts. She’d ripped a lullaby from his mind—the only memory he’d possessed of his mortal mother—and Sonny had let her do it, let her ravage his mind, because Chloe had possessed information about Kelley. He’d wanted to help Kelley. Be her knight in shining armor . . . and look where that had gotten him.
The ogre lunged for him again, a two-fisted hammer blow landing like an avalanche where Sonny had stood only a moment before. An eyeblink later and the ogre caught Sonny a glancing blow to the shoulder with an absurdly lucky slap at the air. It spun Sonny around and knocked him near-senseless against the stone wall. By the time he’d recovered, he was hanging upside down, dangling by one ankle as the ogre held him and shook him like a puppy with a chew toy.
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