“Then why would she have allowed it to be bound to you in the first place?” Mabh countered.
“And I saw the leprechaun in the garage under her club.”
“Which is a gathering place for many Fae in this realm,” Mabh said. “His presence there means nothing. The fact of it is that you don’t know who is behind this. Neither do I, and it is useless to go around pointing fingers. Believe me. I’m usually the one they get pointed at in such circumstances.”
“But . . .” Kelley sighed in weary frustration.
Mabh was right. The threat was there—Kelley was sure of it—but it could be coming from anyone, from any Court. Until she knew who she was dealing with, she had to keep Sonny’s secret safe.
“B— I mean . . . is the boucca still with you?” Kelley asked.
“He is. He has not left Auberon’s side. He has questions.”
And that, right there, was a big problem. “He knows everything,” Kelley murmured to herself.
“He knows a great many things.” Mabh cocked her head to one side. “But you know more than your fair share of ‘things,’ too, Daughter. Unless I miss my guess, you know his name.”
“So what?”
“I told you that I would take care of him. And I will. But if you give me the secret of the boucca’s name . . . it will make it that much easier.” The queen’s eyes glittered darkly. “Mostly for him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You want to keep the young Janus’s secret safe. I don’t see how that is possible with the boucca walking around free, possessed of that knowledge. Even if he would not willingly give it up, the knowledge is still there in his head for some . . . unscrupulous party . . . to dig for and take.” Mabh examined her long, sharp fingernails. “In order to prevent that happening, I can confine the boucca, I can kill him . . . or I can control him. Which would you rather?”
“I’d rather you left him in peace,” Kelley said. She felt a cold knot of anxiety growing in the pit of her stomach. Giving up Bob’s name would give Mabh absolute power over him. It could conceivably make him her slave.
Mabh smiled coldly. “That is a dangerous road and one I’m fairly certain you do not want to travel down. Not while you wish to keep Sonny Flannery’s secret safe.”
Kelley thought for a fleeting moment that perhaps she should cross over into the Otherworld and deal with the matter herself, but as she raised a hand to the charm at her throat—half forming the image of a rift in her mind—Mabh shook her head.
“I wouldn’t if I were you.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Cross over and deal with matters yourself.”
Kelley glared fiercely at the queen.
“Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss. I’m not inside your head. I don’t have to be. I only know that’s what you were thinking because that’s exactly what I would’ve been thinking. We are not so very different, you and I.” Mabh laughed bitterly at the look on Kelley’s face. “I know it pains you grievously to hear that, but it’s true.”
“So why can’t I cross over and take care of things my own way then?”
“Because the space between the realms has become a very dangerous place of late.”
Kelley eyed her mother skeptically.
“Oh, by all means—don’t take my word for it!” Mabh snapped. “Go ahead! I think you’d look just as appealing to your Janus lover with deep scars and an absent limb or two.”
Kelley reached out with her senses—carefully—and realized that her mother was telling the truth. She could feel a malevolent, crackling energy—like the magickal equivalent of razor-wire fences and booby traps—and she could sense the beings responsible for it. Shadowy shapes with teeth and claws. She put a tentative hand on the mirror glass and felt a sharp shock like a jolt of electricity. “Ow!” she yelped.
Mabh glared back at her with an “I told you so” expression.
“What on earth is causing that?”
“It’s nothing the least bit earthly, I can assure you.”
“That’s just an expression.” Kelley rubbed at the palm of her hand, where the skin was blistered an angry red. “Don’t be a pain.”
“They are wraiths—rogue spirits and unquiet dead caught between realms—and it seems that they have decided to wreak a little havoc. All those desperate to get either in or out of Faerie are easy pickings now, what with the rifts becoming so unstable. Still, there are those who would take their chances. Unwisely, I should say.”
Kelley knew that there were Fair Folk who shared the Seelie queen Titania’s near obsession with the mortal world—Fae who’d longed desperately to cross over ever since the days when Auberon had shut the Gates. She also knew that there were those who’d been trapped in this realm who longed just as desperately to go back to the Otherworld.
Now with all of the cracks that had appeared in the Samhain Gate . . . for the wraiths that lurked waiting to ambush unwary travelers, it must have been akin to bears standing in a river during a salmon run.
Mabh gazed unblinking at Kelley. “Decide then,” she said. “If you want my help, you’ll have to give me what I need to ensure the boucca’s silence.”
Kelley hesitated.
“You needn’t worry so.” Mabh smiled sweetly. “I will be kind.”
“Kind of what?” Kelley muttered.
Mabh’s smile dissolved and she crossed her arms, staring flatly at her daughter.
“All right, all right.” Kelley acquiesced. She didn’t have much choice. She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling. What she was about to do . . . it felt like the lowest kind of disloyalty, even if she was doing it to keep Sonny safe. She knew that, left to his own devices, Bob would never willingly betray either her or Sonny. But she also knew how unlikely it was that he would be left to his own devices. She’d already seen the boucca tortured mercilessly and enspelled because he had tried to come to her aid. Surely, this was the better way. All she had to do was give Mabh his true name. Then all Mabh had to do was compel Bob to forget.
“Bob.” Kelley scowled into the mirror, pinning her mother with her fiercest gaze so that she would understand what it meant for Kelley to give her this thing. And what it would mean for Mabh to abuse it in any way. “His name is Bob.”
“Bob?”
“Bob.”
“You’re joking.”
“Of course I am,” Kelley huffed sarcastically. “Because given the opportunity to mislead you about something like this, Bob was obviously the best I could come up with.”
“All right.” Mabh put up a hand. “All right. I believe you. Now you must believe me, Daughter. This is for the best.”
“I doubt it. But I don’t see much in the way of choices here—”
Mabh turned her head sharply to one side, as if listening to something.
“What?” Kelley asked. “What is it?”
A faint frown crossed her mother’s face. “Nothing. Nothing . . . I should attend your father.” The Faerie queen turned back to the mirror and raised one hand in farewell. “Be safe, Daughter. Be strong. Be wise.”
Kelley would have settled for even one out of those three.
Chapter VII
The blood sang in Sonny’s veins as he pounded down the outside margin of the pitch, running as if his life depended on it. In truth, it very well might. The Fair Folk took their game play extremely seriously. Fortunately, that was something Sonny had learned as a child.
Carys shouted encouragement to her team as Sonny swung his wide-bladed oak stave in a windmill arc, catching the silver ball a solid blow as it hurtled toward his head, and sending it back toward his Faerie teammates at the far end of the field. One of Carys’s defenders was a second late getting into position, and the ball sailed past her cheek toward the goal—where it was snatched neatly out of the air by an enormous fist and sent back down in the other direction.
Sonny shook his head in wry frustration. Dunnbolt made a formidable goalkeeper, in spite of his bli
ndness. He played the game with Neerya perched on his massive shoulders; she crouched there like a bug on a mountainside, tugging his ears and slapping the sides of his head, calling out player positions and the movement of the ball. And then, at her command, the hulking beast would react with swift, sure blocking moves, wielding his hurling stave like a weapon.
A shout went up from the watching Fae, and Sonny realized that Carys’s forward was racing back up the pitch toward his goal, dekeing past Sonny’s defenseman, who was too far downfield. Sonny cursed and spun on the balls of his feet, forcing his concentration back onto the game, and followed in the player’s wake to see if he couldn’t head off a scoring opportunity.
“Best three out of five?” Carys panted, leaning over, her hands on her knees. Her skin glistened, flushed with exertion, and her dark hair tumbled haphazardly around her face.
“Do you always play this hard?” Sonny collapsed onto the grass beside her. His team had barely held on to a one-goal lead to win, evening the score at two games each. He stripped off his shirt and mopped his brow with it. Tossing it aside, he rolled over onto his back, letting the stray eddies of breeze cool the sweat from his skin.
“Only when we’ve a worthy mortal in the ranks—and that hasn’t been for a very long time!” She turned and called out to one of the nearby dryads for refreshments.
A tall, gaunt Fae with large eyes and a braided goatee—and bat-wing webbing between his abnormally long fingers and toes—paused as he passed by and handed Carys a small leather pouch. “Might need this,” he said. Sonny noticed that the Faerie was one of the Ghillie Dhu, solitary Fae noted for their gentle nature and deep knowledge of healing. “You play well,” he said to Sonny. “For a human.”
“And you.” Sonny nodded graciously and couldn’t resist adding, “For a Fae.”
Sonny rolled his shoulder, easing the deep muscle ache there—it had been a long time since he had driven his body this hard. The game play had been savage, the competition fierce. And it had served its purpose: it kept him from thinking. It kept him from feeling. His mind was blissfully numb; the steady thrum of blood and breath in his body were the only sensations registering.
He had no idea how long they’d been playing. It could have been hours or days. Sonny suspected, from the way he felt, that they might have been at it for close to a full day—maybe even two. It didn’t matter. Having grown up in the Otherworld, he was used to the idea of time having no real, quantifiable meaning. He knew, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, that this—all of this: the games, the feasting, the Faerie companionship—was a dangerous indulgence. Sonny knew that he was allowing himself to tread perilously close to the edge of losing himself forever, of becoming little better than a thrall.
Thralls were all that remained of mortals when they allowed themselves to surrender completely to the lure of Faerie pleasures. In losing their individuality, their independence, their free will, they became little more than mindless slaves. Minions. It must be awful, Sonny had always thought. But, then again, thralls didn’t think. They didn’t feel, either.
And in the state Sonny was in, that was a fierce temptation.
One of the things that set changelings like Sonny and the rest of the Janus Guard apart from any other stolen mortals in the Otherworld was that they had all managed to maintain their independence—as much as they could, which was more than most. That strength of will was why the Winter King had chosen them in the first place. Auberon admired strength—especially if it could be used to his ends.
Lounging idly, Sonny followed his train of thought back to his friend, the blacksmith Gofannon. Like Sonny, Gofannon was a mortal in the Otherworld. Unlike Sonny, Gof hadn’t had the same kind of resolve to resist temptation. Gof had been an artist in the mortal realm, a metalsmith with a love of his craft so profound that he had bargained his freedom away for the chance to spend eternity making beautiful things out of gold and silver and iron. It had been a hard lesson for him to learn, centuries later, that being a slave to one’s passions was a lot more satisfying than simply being a slave. The price of an eternity spent in thrall to Auberon as the Winter King’s blacksmith had not been worth the reward. If only Gofannon’d had the strength to walk away. But some temptations, it seemed, were harder to resist than others.
Still, abhorrent as the idea of becoming a thrall was to Sonny, from the moment Kelley had denied any feelings of love for him, all he had wanted to do was to lose himself utterly. Being a thrall might not be so bad, he thought, if it meant an end to the pain that crashed down on him every time he thought of her name. Or her face. The way her green eyes had sparkled when they’d danced in Herne’s Tavern, or the way her hair shone in the light of her Faerie wings . . . the way she had kissed him on the shores of the Lake of Avalon. How could she have kissed him like that if she didn’t love him? He shook his head sharply to dispel the memory and dragged his attention back to the present.
The willowy fae who’d flitted off reappeared carrying a tray that bore none of the dents and scratches of Neerya’s serving ware. On it were two blown-glass goblets and a dark-blue bottle that seemed to glow as if lit from within.
“Will you drink with me?” asked Carys as she tugged at the bottle’s silver stopper.
Sonny eyed the bottle warily. Faerie wine.
Carys rolled her wide golden eyes. “I offer it freely for you to accept freely. No compulsion. No strings attached. On my honor.”
Sonny relaxed a bit and nodded, holding out his hand. “Then I accept it freely and with thanks.”
She poured a measure of the precious liquid into his cup. Sonny took a sip and felt it sear a pleasant trail of sparkling fire down his throat all the way to his stomach. It reminded him of home. At least—it reminded him of the place he’d grown up in. Perhaps he should return there, he thought. It wasn’t as if there was any welcome for him here in the mortal realm anymore. And yet, even as he thought that, his mind shied away from the possibility of leaving forever the world where Kelley Winslow walked and breathed and flew on wings of dark fire. . . .
He took another mouthful of wine. Carys was staring at him from under her delicately arched brows.
“What is this place, Carys?” Sonny asked, looking around at the strange landscape of the cavern. In some places, it seemed a natural phenomenon. In others, he could clearly see the remains of human architecture—stone archways and brick support pillars and walls, all overgrown with strange, night-blooming flowers and pale moss. Carys had called it a sanctuary. Like the Tavern on the Green. “Does Herne know it’s here?”
“Know about it? Who do you think was responsible for its construction?” Carys waved a hand. “If you’d gone right instead of left when you hit the brick tunnel coming in, it would have led you south and up through a passageway to the Tavern.”
Sonny looked at the brick buttressing while he dug his fingers into his sore shoulder muscles. “Is that human-built?”
“That part, yes. All this used to be under water. When the city dwellers built an aqueduct to carry fresh water to this island from a place north of here called Croton, they originally built their reservoir here. It was a lovely haven for the Water Folk. Later, it was decommissioned and they covered it over. We appropriated the cavern for our own uses. Where you are sitting right now is directly under the Great Lawn in Central Park.”
Sonny saw Dunnbolt cooling off from the match, dunking his massive head in one of the pools and ignoring the outraged squeals of the resident merfolk. Neerya threw him a ratty bath towel and he caught it without turning his head, using it to squeegee the water out of the insides of his tiny ears. Watching as Neerya playfully tugged on the great brute’s ear—and seeing how gentle he was to the naiad in return—Sonny felt a pang of guilt for what had been done to the creature by one of his own fellow Janus Guards.
Sonny turned to see the Faerie huntress watching him patiently.
“You have been away,” she said. “Things have changed since you’ve been gone. Since
Samhain.”
Sonny had suspected as much. He remembered—it was one of the only things he did remember about being in the fight at Kelley’s theater—that Fennrys had alluded to the distinct possibility of all hell breaking loose in Central Park, the last remaining Gate in or out of the Faerie Realm.
“You and your princess may have averted catastrophe at Samhain, but there is fresh trouble brewing up there,” she went on. “Cracks showing up all over the Gate. Dangerous rifts. Instability. Attacks on mortals—they call them ‘muggings’ and ‘coyote attacks’ and go about their business—but even they sense the change. Far fewer of them make their way to the park these days.”
“Do you and your folk have any”—Sonny changed the wording of his question so as not to offend—“any knowledge of what’s causing this?”
“Are you asking if we have anything to do with it?” Carys blandly retorted. “We do not. But that has not stopped your fellows from pointing fingers in our direction. And weapons.”
“Do you mean what happened to Dunnbolt?” he asked.
“Aye. And he is not the only one. I’m getting a bit tired of my folk coming back from forays to the surface with missing limbs and arrow wounds. Or not at all.”
“At the hands of the Janus.”
Carys nodded.
Sonny chewed his lip, frustrated at his ignorance of the situation. He should know what was going on with the other Guards. He didn’t. All he knew was that something felt wrong. Terribly wrong. “This is not—this should not be happening,” he murmured.
“I agree with you,” Carys said. “The peace between the Lost and the Janus has always been an uneasy one, I grant you. But it has always been there. This change is recent. And it has gone hard for my kind.”
Sonny frowned deeply. He hoped she was exaggerating. Or wrong. Surely she was mistaken about the Janus Guard. “Why would they do this?”
“It feels to me like rebellion. Like warriors left defending an outpost too long, who take to trophy hunting to relieve the boredom. But it is the kind of thing that usually only happens when someone is there to stir things up.”
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