by Stark, Jenn
Horror iced me to my bones. No.
Then another one hit. And another, opening up my skin with each swipe, while I struggled to keep my brain from exploding. Because these wraiths weren’t the only trespassers here; they were arguably not even the worst.
I scrabbled away, barely avoiding a face plant into the turf, but my precarious windmilling brought me face to snout with another clutch of creatures, fat, hideous monkey-like imps, with long arms and longer claws, each swipe of their paws sending an electric jolt through me.
Suddenly, the sound of pounding boots rattled across my senses, and a fire-headed phoenix in flowing green robes and clinking chakra jewelry, wielding the staff of Gandalf in one hand and Harry Potter’s wand in the other, exploded in front of me.
“Back off!” Nikki shouted, and the screaming imps fled back.
Fury suddenly clicked in, and I roared, bringing my hands around and exploding the imps back beyond the veil for good—or at least back into the In Between, where the bastards belonged.
I swung around, searching for Conal. He stood with his arms outstretched, his face bathed in a brilliant smile as he surveyed the carnage around him, never mind that his own people were getting trampled by what looked like a swarm of angry bees in one quadrant of the green, their clothes catching on fire in another as writhing, coiling serpents belched fire, some even having long, sinuous feet. I immediately thought of the illuminated manuscript pages in the Book of Kells and shuddered at the other horrors that might await us if I didn’t get those doors closed.
Lurching forward, I realized that something had latched on to my ankle, and I looked down to see a tiny beast that looked like it was all mouth and wings hanging on to me for dear life, its teeth sinking into the tender flesh of my calf. This was another creature of magic, and I had to fight a wave of nausea as I desperately tried to kick it off. It wouldn’t drop, and when the next monkey raced up to me, I whirled with a tight sweeping kick, knocking the imp away while dislodging the biting ball of feathers.
By then, I’d almost reached Conal, and I allowed my momentum to keep driving me forward, tackling him to the ground. To my shock, he didn’t fight my physical onslaught with the burst of magic I’d expected and braced for. He struck me with his fists, rolling over on top of me, and driving punishing blows against my face and chest as if he could pound my heart right into the ground.
I recovered quickly, pain having that effect on me, and thrust him off my body with a surge of blue fire. He screamed and fell back, but once again, he didn’t send out a return surge of angry energy, though his entire body crackled with a web of sparking circuitry. I fixed my gaze on him, glaring with fury—and blinked. He was surrounded by a net, I realized. A web. A shroud of ultimate and extreme power, but one that served as nothing more than a cloak of protection, one not even driven by Conal’s own energy…but by another’s.
“Get away from him!”
A bolt of power with the force of an angry bull gored through my side and sent me flying, and as I twisted around, I saw Niall crouching over Conal, the latter’s power flaring brighter, stronger—but suddenly dwarfed by Niall’s white hot corona of flame.
Oh…no.
Suddenly, all the details converged at once. The fight between brothers that had no resolution other than driving a powerful, tradition-bound parent away. Niall’s aw-shucks aversion to being involved in his brother’s ministry, yet he was always there, standing just out of reach of the camera and the crowds, watching with careful eyes. Even the gift of Ireland’s own precious soil to me—the act of a true believer whose faith was all the more formidable because he understood true power. Because he wasn’t the Green Knight, he was the Hallowed Knight.
Niall McCarthy, the Hallowed Knight of the ages, sent by the gods to lead them back to Earth.
So strong, he’d managed to hide his true powers from his father, his brother, his people…even from me.
The Connected ability that smoked and crackled in Niall outshone, for the moment, even my own, temporarily drained as I was by the attack. He positively glowed with energy and excitement, rage and fear, a potent combination made all the worse by the fact that Conal was now back on his feet, eager to continue the fight. Given Conal's manic smile, I wondered if he even knew the truth.
I didn’t understand the dynamic between these two, but I couldn’t stop Niall by myself. Not and deal with the raging creatures from the In Between—
A shot rang out across the clearing, and I whirled. In my distraction, I’d allowed the force field surrounding the green to falter. Four Garda officers, their Connected abilities making them shine like beacons among the crowd, had forced their way through. And they’d brought their guns. Unfortunately, their gunfire was simply absorbed by the enormous, bearlike creature that loomed in front of them, the added force of their ammunition making wings burst from the back of the creature and turning it into a monster straight out of high fantasy nightmares—a Balrog on steroids. It suddenly occurred to me how many of these creatures looked like snatches and bits of creatures of myth and story, cobbled together into real and frightening life. How many authors had stumbled unwittingly into the In Between and, quite literally, lived to tell the tale?
I lurched toward the officers, then realized that Kreios was there, standing in front of the humans and facing off against the Balrog, who roared in fury at being denied its meal. Suddenly, instead of one Devil, there were six, then twelve, and I turned to other problems.
Conal was shouting again.
“Behold the glory of a world returned to its most ancient and primal form, where the survival of the fittest depends not on who holds the guns, but who holds the magic within their hands.” He raised his own hands, and now fire did glow at the end of his fingertips, but I wasn’t fooled. Niall was the power behind the throne. Niall was the Connected the Council should have feared all along.
I raced toward him, and I wasn’t alone. The Magician fell into step with me, only the moment he did, a surge of panic so blindingly real nearly drove me to my knees. “No!” I tried to gasp, only it was too late. A wall of green fire erupted all around us, and a new round of creatures sprang up from portals in the very ground to wrap us in their fury.
I burst through the line of them first, which I’d both known and feared I would as Armaeus distracted them in battle, and found myself in front of Conal and Niall. The former still preened with delight at the chaos he assumed he’d wrought, but the latter stared at me with a flat, intractable fury that took my breath away.
“Why?” I demanded. I felt if I could understand that, I could understand all this.
“Because you and your Council have ruined this world,” Niall said, his voice vibrating at a level I couldn’t understand. “How many centuries, how many millennia were you given to set the course of humanity along a more sustainable path? By allowing humans the right of self-dominion—all humans, not merely those who were tied to the very core of Earth’s power, but those who had long since turned their back on such grace—you condemned her to a slow and steady death. A death that has become all the closer for the rash acts of humanity that you have allowed to continue unabated.”
“It is a world of humans,” I protested. “It’s not anyone’s place to stop them from their own destruction or their own recreation, should they find it.”
“And I say you are wrong. If they would rule this earth, they must earn it—and only the Connecteds of true strength will have the right to try.” Niall didn’t raise his arms high the way his brother did, and in that moment, I wondered how these two could even be brothers, as different as their energy was. But they both shouted their next command with gusto.
“Come forth, come forth!”
The doors of the In Between blasted open again, and through them now trooped the long, sinuous forms of the Fomorians, ancient rulers of Ireland, condemned to their forms as creatures of the dark and deep when they lost their battle to keep dominion over the other ancient powers vying for contr
ol. The moment they stepped foot upon the green, the humans staggered, dropping like flies—but not all of them. Only the ones who had no spark within them, or such a faint spark that it would have to be nurtured into full flower with long and careful tending.
“The era of allowing non-Connected humans to rule this earth is at an end,” Niall proclaimed. “We will take, but there are too many in our way, too many who would destroy. Who do not know how to live off the land but continually rape and defile it for their own purposes. And so the ancient terror will flow over the mountains and the seas, destroying all who live like parasites upon this earth, to be defeated only by those with the power within them to set the world to rights again.”
“Are you insane?” I demanded, even as the full contingent of the Council flickered into place around the green. The inference was clear. They would as soon destroy everything within this net than allow the Fomorians to escape. There would be no balance of magic if two-thirds of the planet had been wiped out by it, and those who were left were then flattened by an international war against creatures from the primeval past. “You can’t let these things out!” I lashed out with magic along with the Devil and the Magician, restraining the Fomorians.
“They’re already out,” Niall sneered. “And your puny Council can’t hold this newest wave of ancient gods for long. The rage of Earth against its human invaders can already be seen. The soil and rock of this planet is capable of healing and it is capable of destroying, each in equal measure. Some of the blows are with a blunt instrument, some are with a razor’s edge, but they are happening all the same. They are simply not happening fast enough.”
“Behold!” Conal’s sudden exultation drew our attention. Both brothers practically radiated excitement, their eyes on the doors to the In Between, and I flinched back as a sudden new burst of ice-white light beamed out from that space, piercing the green to converge on a central figure…a central figure who collapsed to the ground.
I froze in horror. “Armaeus!”
Niall and Conal dropped to one knee, their faces suffused with awe as they stared at the doorways to the In Between.
“Gods of our fathers, rule us,” Conal said with abject reverence. “Destroy your ancient enemies and protect the children of this earth.”
I turned to the doors, my mouth going slack.
Radiant beings stepped out of the light and onto St. Stephen’s Green, each new figure bringing with it melodies of the same song, swelling to an unbearable chorus of beauty. The Tuatha dé Danann. They were too bright for me to fully see, bathed in a corona of the same white light that was pinning Armaeus to the ground, and they moved toward him like an inexorable tide.
Their power and his power could not coexist in this world, I knew in an instant. Their power and his power could never coexist.
Their power and his power would break the world in two.
And Armaeus had already been weakened—fatally weakened—protecting me.
“Sara.” The Magician’s soft call ripped through me, and I battled forward, the white light now turning on me, lashing at my shields like a hurricane crashing against a crumbling shore. I staggered, nearly falling, then pushed on again, desperate to reach Armaeus.
The Magician spoke again, but his words were thready, barely whispered in my mind, garbled and indistinct. “Know this—remember!”
“Armaeus!” I screamed. I didn’t want to remember anything he told me. I wanted him. Only him.
But his words came anyway, frighteningly brittle and wan. “Remember…that I—I will love you, ever…more.”
The Fomorians I had trapped, turned and writhed, caught in my bands of power, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold them for long. Soon they would break free, the battle would start anew, my shields would falter, and the world would be ripped apart. I knew it as surely as I knew I was losing Armaeus, the Armaeus I had finally claimed and loved with every fiber of my being, who had stayed in the center of the green not only to fight the creatures who’d beset us, but because the center of the green was where the ultimate power of the ancients would be directed…because he was protecting me.
Once again.
Exactly as he said he would.
Horror speared through me, enormous wings of fire burst open from my back, arcing over me with furious heat. I whirled, bringing my hands together to release an entirely new magic, born of my grief, fury, and terror. Blending the red and blue of my separate infernal infernos, a geyser of purple fire erupted from my palms. I would not break the barrier holding the ancient terrors of the Celts within it. I would not allow any of these creatures—these infernal gods—to escape, I would not—
“You won’t,” murmured Death’s harshly beautiful voice in my head. An entire network of galvanizing pain laced around my arms, turning and churning, as the ink Death had inscribed on me tightened its hold. “You were made for this. Call me to the battle, Sara Wilde. Bring us both, to do what must be done.”
I shuddered, but I had seen, I knew. All the beginnings, all the ends and everything—
In Between.
My wings suffused in roiling flame, I blew the purple fire out of my hands and onto the ground in front of me, where it shot out in four directions, then rounded on itself, two bars constrained and supported by the circle of the sun. A Celtic Cross.
The figure of Death crystalized in its center, her eyes wild and fierce, her body wrapped in a long dark cloak, flapping in the gales of wind and power that swept across St. Stephen’s Green, her cropped white hair swept up defiantly atop her head.
And in her arms, she held a silver harp.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A strangled voice at the far end of the green cried out, “No!”
Moving more quickly than I would ever have given him credit for, Conal leapt up, pushing his brother out of the way and racing ahead. But instead of running for Death, who calmly settled the harp against her body, the purple flame coalescing into solid form to provide her with both a stand for the instrument and a perch to sit upon, he raced toward Armaeus’s still form. The power emanating from the Magician rocked the green in waves, his body writhing, and I sensed more than saw Conal’s desperate lunge as he yanked an athame out of his cloak and lurched toward Armaeus.
I didn’t even blink. In one moment, I was struggling toward Armaeus, in the next I was standing over his body, wings of fire outstretched, flame licking off my skin as I reformed and brought my hands together sharply. A sound like a thunderclap rocked the green, and Conal stopped midflight and crumpled to the ground with a shattering of bones, his scream rising above the chaos.
And then, the cool, clear note of a single plucked string filled the whole world.
The Fomorians stopped, frozen as they reached and stretched and strained. The non-Connected humans who had crumpled to the ground jolted where they lay, lost to the moment but not to the world, their hearts once more pumping blood, their lungs once more billowing to pull in the thick, lush air of life. The Connected souls reacted even more forcefully, their faces turned up to the sky as tears rushed down their faces.
Not only in the green either. The flickering images still projected against the tree line of the green showed a world gone still with wonder. Death might be placing her hand upon her instrument here in the heart of Dublin, but the shining, plaintive tone she drew from it was heard around the world.
At my feet, Armaeus shifted, and I nearly collapsed with relief. He was alive! He sighed out a rush of syllables, then sang a low and resonant, mournful tone, ancient in its timbre, which started as little more than a whisper. It quickly swelled to meet the second tone of Death’s harp, then the third.
And then, in concert with Armaeus’s murmured invocation, Death played her fingers along the shining strings and bent into her song.
The music that filled the green this time had an even more striking effect. The members of the Council turned, their faces caught up in various shades of wonder and shock. Tears stood in the eyes of even the mo
st cynical—Tesla, the Emperor, and, with a sudden rush of wings, I realized the archangel stood beside me now as well, his face rapt as he listened to Death’s ethereal harmony. While Michael had always appeared pale to the point of translucent, drained of all color, as I watched, a rush of pigmentation swept through him, darkening his skin and filling out his slender form into a magnificent being of strength, setting every feather of his enormous wings into glorious, radiant color. I gaped, emitting the tiniest gasp, and he turned and looked at me—truly looked at me in a way I wasn’t certain I’d ever seen him do before. I stepped back from the weight, the terror, and the desperate loneliness of that gaze, the staggering burden of a secret that must never be spoken.
And then the moment was past, and it was only the cool, pale form of the Archangel regarding me, his lips twitching with private amusement.
He nodded to the green beyond me. “Behold an age of ancients come to life, Justice Wilde.”
I turned and followed his gaze, and realized that it was not merely the Fomorians who were caught in the thrall of Death’s harp. Their glamour fallen away enough for me to see the other gods’ forms more clearly. Nearly thirty figures stood at attention, their hands outstretched, fingers splayed wide, as if they could grasp the meter and measure of Death’s mournful song and twist it in their hands, a living thing. And in truth, with every new chord she played, a pressure built throughout the green, pressing in on my mind and my heart, compressing my very bones. While I rocked beneath this pressure, the Fomorians crumpled to the ground, wailing with despairing, impotent fury, their bodies becoming slowly—so slowly—less distinct, more fluid. As if all the tears of earth were being shed to wash them full away.
And still the other figures watched, their own blinding light evening out around them, their faces becoming more distinct as the Fomorians lost detail. Smooth, fair skin, pale eyes and paler hair, tall, elegant bodies dressed in pristine robes of all the richest colors of the earth and sky. Many wore gleaming crowns of interworked gold and silver in their hair, and their feet were shod in leather slippers that also glinted of gold. They looked as if they would speak, they looked as if they wanted to speak, but no words fell from their lips, not even so much as a sigh escaping, as their lips parted on the hope of a whisper that never came to life.