by Karen Chance
She was clutching her chest, her eyes wild and her mouth working, although no sounds were coming out. I saw her shiver all over, because possession is no joke if you’ve never done it before, and then go completely still. Before looking across at me, although I couldn’t tell if she was trying to mouth anything, because I couldn’t risk looking directly at her.
But since no stunned cowboy hit the dirt, only to get stabbed full of holes by the fey, I assumed that they must have come to some kind of understanding.
Yet it was already too late. A flash of light seared across my retinas from the direction of the portal. And when I turned my head, I saw—
“Oh, good!” Jonathan clapped his hands like an excited schoolboy. “Oh, here we go!”
No, I thought, staring in horror. At a line of brilliant yellow that had just slashed across the sky, almost the length of the valley. Out of it was pouring our army, which had looked vast in the pieces of it I’d seen over the last month, massing at HQ or training on the vampire consul’s estate. But now . . .
It looked pretty paltry now.
The ley line was spewing out vamps and mages alike, along with some heavy equipment that I recognized from all those late-night planning sessions. They were ward breakers, intended to cut through the magic that guarded Aeslinn’s fortress far better than stone walls ever could. And his wards were up, looking like a huge dome of frosted ice over the castle and surrounding town, because Aeslinn was taking no chances.
I didn’t think he needed to worry. Because the ward breakers were broken themselves inside of seconds, and the army was assaulted by a wave of defenders, often while it was still trying to exit the line. I couldn’t see how bad things were, even from this angle, because Aeslinn’s forces were so huge that they basically blocked out everything else.
But then, I didn’t think I wanted to.
We were getting slaughtered.
The only positive note was that Jonathan was whooping and pumping his fist in the air, and completely ignoring anything else. Even the fey were watching the war play out rather than paying attention to their prisoners. But that wasn’t going to help us in a minute, because Billy was having a problem.
He’d emerged from Rhea and was trying to make his way back to me, but he’d just gotten tackled—by the damned librarian. She had been freaking out this entire time, but hadn’t been doing anything about it. But seeing another ghost with a sense of purpose had galvanized her, and when he tore past, she latched on for the ride.
That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that Billy had timed his transition to match up with a stream of earth energy cutting through the fey stuff swirling out of the portal, and she’d just knocked him out of it. And she’d knocked him hard. As a result, two all-too-human bodies tumbled out of nowhere, right in front of a line of fey guards, and to make bad matters worse, one of them was screaming.
Shit!
Billy tried to salvage the situation by putting a hand over her mouth, but she bit him and he jerked it away, not that it mattered. Because the fey were already lunging for them, weapons out and glinting in the sunlight. Several spears slammed down, each of their points razor sharp and deadly enough to have ended things right there.
But they only hit dirt and rocks, although not because Billy and his screeching backpack had moved, but because the currents had shifted, taking them both back to spirit form. That may have saved their lives, but Jonathan could see them, thanks to Jo, just as well as I could. They wouldn’t stay hidden for long.
Fortunately, he was way more interested in watching the war than he was in helping the bewildered guards.
A fey approached him, but he waved him off. “Deal with it. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“But we can’t see them, hersir,” the fey said.
“You bloody well can half the time!” Jonathan said, his eyes still on the battle. “Are you that inept?”
“No, hersir.” The fey snapped his fingers, and the soldiers fanned out, some staying in place to guard the other prisoners, but most moving around so that there was basically no open space not within reach of a fey weapon.
Billy stared at me from across the courtyard, and I stared back. Get out of here, I mouthed. Go!
He couldn’t help me anymore, and would only get himself killed if he stayed. I’d have to think of something else. But Billy wasn’t leaving.
He was moving, however. He started dragging the librarian from place to place, trying to stay within the bands of Earth energy as much as possible while also zig zagging around, making it harder for the fey to predict where he’d show up next. The result from their perspective was a wildly flickering target, popping up here, there, and everywhere, with no clear path or destination.
Spears were thrown, swords slammed down, the ring of steel on rock was everywhere. One of the fey guards ended up taking a knife to the thigh when Billy flickered into existence, and then right back out again, and the knife passed through his now ghostly body and hit the fey behind him instead. Several more had near misses, causing the guards to stumble and curse, trying to get out of each other’s way.
It almost looked like Billy was trying to cause chaos, and maybe he was. I realized that I didn’t see the librarian anymore. But he didn’t need to buy her time to flee; he needed to go with her!
Because the guards were closing in.
He was ducking and dodging, but the swirls of power coming out of the portal were unpredictable, and the fey had figured out where he was. He took a glancing blow to one arm, sending a spirt of red arcing across the pale blue sky; he took another, bigger blow to the thigh, causing him to stumble. And that would have been it, if he hadn’t gone transparent again, right freaking then.
But that had been luck, and his was running out.
“They’re going to take him piece by piece,” Jonathan said, glancing at me and echoing my thoughts. “Does he know that, when they kill him, he won’t come back?”
He knew. When spirits take bodily form in Faerie, they could be killed, just like anybody else. And because the body in that case was their spirit, just in an altered state, they didn’t leave ghosts.
So what the hell was he doing?
“Billy!” I yelled, uncaring what the fucking guards did to me. “Run!”
And he did. But not the way I’d expected. I got half a second to see him pause and look my way, and there was something on his face, something that had me surging to my feet, my breath catching in my throat and my body starting to run even as the guards grabbed me, and dragged me back.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jonathan said, looking up at me as I kicked and fought. “What are you doing?”
I never had time to answer. I didn’t have time to do anything. Because Billy tore out of nothing, a hundred and seventy pounds of determined cowboy, who grabbed Jonathan on the way to his feet and—
“Knock ‘em dead, kid,” he told me.
And then they were gone.
Chapter Forty-Two
It took me a moment to realize what had happened. And when I did, it felt like the ground had fallen out from under my feet. As if someone had punched me in the gut, as if the world had suddenly grown hazy and indistinct and gray and lifeless and—
And then I was screaming, screaming my throat raw. And jerking away from my captors to run to the cliffside and throw myself down onto the ground, trying to see—something, anything. But the view from below was obscured by sheets of early morning mist, and it wouldn’t let me.
It was like Billy had just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
I vaguely heard sounds coming from behind me: cries and calls in another language; someone shrieked and abruptly stopped; and no one came to drag me back. Of course, they didn’t, I thought, the ocean crashing in my ears. Billy had just killed Jonathan, sacrificing his own life to do it. But that meant that Mircea . . .
Was now free.
And I didn’t need to turn my head to know what he was doing.
But I did it anywa
y, as if in slow motion, because my brain wasn’t working right. I felt Rhea crash into the ground beside me, and grab my arm. Felt the ghostly embrace of the librarian on my other side, heard them trying to talk to me. But it all washed away on a tide of emotion.
I didn’t need comforting.
I needed that, I thought, watching Mircea grab two ancient warriors and crash their skulls together so hard that their heads exploded.
Blood spewed out like rain, a full-on cloud of it, which he absorbed on his way to carve up three others. He’d found a sword, I noted vaguely. One of theirs, I supposed. It was sharp.
A rain of body parts followed him, as he moved through a whole line up in a deadly dance too fast to see. Even so, they might have caught him, have overwhelmed him by sheer numbers, but he had help. Pritkin was back on his feet, looking like a corpse but machine-gunning spells in all directions.
And he wasn’t bothered by the shifting magical currents. He could have cared less. He effortlessly moved from fey magic to human and back again, without missing a step.
I wondered why he hadn’t done that earlier, why he’d taken that beating instead.
I didn’t know. Didn’t care. The shock of losing Billy was eating into my soul like acid, making impossible to think about anything else. Rhea was shouting something now and shaking me. I ignored her.
But it was hard to ignore something else. Something that looked like electricity that suddenly arced between my fingers. It was pretty.
A fey came running at us, sword bared, and I reached out—
And the lightning jumped to him. He fell to the ground, spasming, and didn’t get back up again. But I did, rising to my feet, looking around, wishing I could stop the roaring in my ears, but it seemed to have swamped me.
“Lady! Lady!” Rhea gasped, as another dozen fey headed our way. Until an arc of blue white fire erupted from my fingertips, turning them to ash that fluttered away on the breeze. Easy, so easy.
How had I never noticed how easily they died?
All of them were running now, not toward the portal where I stood, but away, scattering in every direction. I started after them, but Rhea held me back. I turned on her, snarling—
And she held her ground.
There it was, I thought. There it was: the courage, determination and strength I’d always seen and loved in her. Her color was high, her hair was down and whipping around her face, and her expression said she knew what she risked. Yet, unlike the fey, she didn’t run. An enraged Pythia in her face who had just killed thirteen men, and still she didn’t.
“Lady, please! Listen to her!” she yelled, pointing.
At the librarian, who was kneeling in the dirt, sobbing.
“My fault,” she told me, staring up. She was human again for the moment, and her face was wet and her eyes bloodshot. “My fault! I’m sorry, Lady, so sorry—”
I slapped her, full in the face, and would have done it again, but Rhea stopped me. “Cassie! Cassie, listen!”
The use of my name when she never did, brought me back a little, helped me think. But it didn’t help much. “Listen to what?”
“Oh, thank God,” the librarian sobbed. “Thank—”
“Thank whomever you please later,” Rhea snapped. “Tell her!”
And she did. I didn’t get all of it. Mircea’s bloodlust was throbbing in my veins, or maybe that was mine. Grief was tearing me apart, what felt like literally. My heart was beating so loudly that I could hear it, as if it would rip itself out of my chest.
But I could hear her, too.
And what I could hear . . . explained everything.
She told me how the file on Lover’s Knot in the Circle’s library contained more than just the spell. It had the full history of its use, the one they didn’t want anyone to see. But the Pythian Court had the same history in its archives, and Rhea and the librarian had found it after I left and she recovered.
And what a story it was.
Lover’s Knot hadn’t been outlawed for the reason everyone thought. That had been a cover story to hide the truth. Because, yes, the spell allowed two magic users to share power, and yes, if one of those died, they both did. But that had rarely happened.
The Senate—the main users of the spell in their old wars—had guarded the witches they paired with their vampires carefully. A few were killed anyway, in surprise attacks, but it was damned few. They knew the risks, and they accounted for them.
So, what did happen? The truth was simpler: the spell worked a little too well. Like Mircea and I had discovered, it did more than allow people to simply share power. It started to blend it, to morph it, to grow it exponentially. In some pairings, that only resulted in the war machines the Senate had hoped for. But in others . . .
In others, they got way more than they bargained for. Because if there’s one thing vampires understand, it’s power. And some of them became inventive, adding not one witch into the spell, but two or three or more, each with different specialties. In doing so, they increased their risk, but also their reward, getting so powerful that they rivalled the consul in strength, despite being far younger.
One or the other of them would probably have replaced her, but she didn’t give them the chance. She acted swiftly and decisively, having their witches murdered in daytime while the vampires were asleep, and thus taking them out, too. And then she burned every copy of Lover’s Knot that she could find, and persuaded the Circle to do likewise, because they didn’t want hundreds of uber vampires walking around any more than she did. But they kept a carefully locked down version of the story in their library, nonetheless, just in case the vampires ever tried to use the spell to gain an advantage over them.
“But there’s more,” Rhea said, while I struggled to absorb all that. “We think that Jonathan—who rediscovered the spell first and thus had more time with it—asked himself a question. What would happen if, instead of a vampire and a witch or two, the spell combined the powers of others? Others who were even stronger?”
“Like a first level master, a demon prince, and a demi-goddess,” the librarian added breathlessly. “What would happen then?”
“What would happen then?” I asked, watching lightning arc between my fingers. And being pretty sure I already knew.
“You told me once that you and Mage Pritkin could, er, make a great deal of power between you,” Rhea said, blushing a little. “That it was how you defeated Ares.”
“Yes.”
“But you also said that you couldn’t hold onto it. That it was too much, all at once, for either of you to handle. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you were in a spell that shared power with a third party, one who himself was linked to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other powerful beings? Ones with the ability to store energy and feed it back to him when needed?”
I looked up at her, and realized that Pritkin and Mircea had joined us at some point. Pritkin was looking like a savage in nothing but a pair of bloody boxers and a tunic he must have stripped off a fey. Mircea, on the other hand, was pristine, in a dark suit without so much as a speck of blood anywhere, despite the fact that fey blood does not nourish a vampire.
But eating your enemies does.
I didn’t bother to ask if the fey were all dead. They wouldn’t be back here, otherwise. And that meant what? A hundred fey soldiers dead in a few minutes?
I looked up at the portal.
“Then why did we have no power before, when we first arrived?” I asked, staring at the battle. “I couldn’t do anything then.”
“I couldn’t, either,” Pritkin said. “I was completely drained. It all went to him, every drop of it, even my own damned power.”
He looked at Mircea, who nodded politely, as if they had conversations like this every day. They hated each other, but this this was no ordinary day, and the rules didn’t apply here. None of them did.
“I absorbed it,” Mircea agreed. “But did not realize it at the time. My mind was gone, overwrought by some power the dar
k mage possessed. I could not release anything back to you, or even use it myself.”
“How did you absorb it at all?” I asked. “You don’t have a family in this era; you told me so yourself—”
“This is not the fifteenth century, dulceață. It is the eighteenth. I know it is hard to tell,” he glanced around at the timeless landscape. “Things do not change in this part of the world as fast as in some others. But it is nonetheless true. I came back here for—but that can wait. The point is, your acolyte followed me—”
“Gertie was going to kill him,” Rhea broke in. “As she had promised she would if he time skipped again. But I persuaded her to let me come first, to see if I could talk sense to him. But I really wanted to see you. I knew you’d come looking for him, and if I took Eliza—this is Eliza, by the way—”
The librarian actually got up in order to curtsy.
I stared at her.
She blinked and slowly sank back down.
“—so that we could tell you about the spell. And the fact that Jonathan had realized that Lord Mircea was the missing component it needed. His extensive family provides a sort of . . . of battery, to store all the power that the other part of your trine creates.”
“There must be three,” I murmured. Jonathan had seen the danger, and had tried to keep me from being able to see it too. But he’d failed.
And now I knew.
Rhea nodded. “I think he thought that, together, the three of you, with the Pythian power magnified many times over and your gifts combined, well . . . I know it sounds crazy, but I think he may have believed—”
“That we could jury-rig a god.”
I stood up.
“Dulceață?” Mircea said. Because he could feel it, the emotions running through my veins, speeding my breathing, causing my heart to skip. Billy. He’d known that I had to hear this, and that Jonathan had to die to release all of that power, and he’d given up his life to make both of those things happen.
And then what had he said?
“Knock ‘em dead, kid.”