Strangehold (Crossroads of Worlds Book 1)

by Rene Sears

  And then he sent it to me.

  The silver flared brighter, and I felt his magic in my bones, curling through me. It lingered in the sigils graved on my skin, a long touch wilder than magic from leylines, and I sent it effortlessly into the ward we'd cast, amplifying it and shaping it. The power and the unexpectedly intimate feel of it melding with my own efforts shut my mouth entirely, and when he turned to me, his eyes were wild and vivid, new-leaf green. His chest heaved as he sucked in breath; I felt as though I'd run a race myself.

  He was beautiful and the power he'd just shared with me was intoxicating, but I had never been more aware of the danger he posed. Magically speaking, he could crush me like an ant.

  "This will keep it," he told me. "No one will enter."

  *

  I got us two rooms at a Motel 6 off I-20. I spent the first few minutes alone composing a quick email to my clients letting them know I'd be gone a few days for a family emergency, and then braced myself. After I called Helen's daughter to tell her about her mother and the dog—and what a fun conversation that was—I hopped in the shower. I was too wired to skip it, even as exhausted as I was. I combed my hair in the green fluorescent bathroom light and coughed experimentally in the steamy air. My throat didn't hurt. I was just so very tired.

  But as tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. Not yet. I turned on the TV and flicked through channels until I found a news station. The anchors couldn’t maintain their composure. "Dozens dead...airports closed...the president has declared a state of emergency...officials ask that residents stay in their homes...CDC officials report that they have not yet isolated the vector..." They were calling it the Savannah flu because patient zero had been hospitalized at St. Joseph's in Savannah, Georgia, but Savannah was a port city, if I recalled. It could have come from anywhere. Something about Savannah dinged a bell in some distant recess of my mind. If only I hadn't been so tired...

  I fell asleep with images of hospital rooms flashing behind my eyelids, a meld of old memories and current events. I didn't sleep well.

  A knock on the door woke me. It was unlikely to be anyone but Falcon, but my pulse knocked against my temples. I readied a protective spell with energy from the ouroboros tattooed on my shoulder just in case, and kept it armed and ready as I opened the door. It was indeed Falcon, so I let the magic fizzle back to my tattoo.

  "It lacks only a few hours until sundown," he said. "I thought we might get something to eat before the sun sets."

  For a long stupid moment, I just stared at him, until I remembered him shifting in the cab of my truck at sunrise. When the sun went down, he'd shift back. "Oh. Of course." I longed to know the nature of his curse, but fae or not, I couldn't help but feel it would be the height of rudeness to outright ask him.

  "I will not be as much use to you in the night, but nor will I be entirely worthless." He smiled grimly.

  I hesitated. Did he know how to use a TV? "Did you see the news?" I grabbed my bag and the key to the room. This motel was so out-of-date it was an actual metal key, not a card.

  He nodded, his face shadowed. "It's bad."

  "Very, very bad." Understatement of the year. I sent a wave of energy through the tattoo over my heart to the girls. They were alive. I had to hope they were safe. His gaze sharpened.

  "Do you have a—"

  What he wanted to ask, I never found out. The mirror over the couch swirled frantically, and Gwen's face resolved in a blur of color. She was standing in what I assumed was her bedroom at the Faerie court, a baroque but elegant fantasy of silk and curved, gilded wood.

  "Morgan! I've been trying to reach you for days!"

  "Gwen!" I ran to the mirror and only barely stopped myself from touching the frame as if it were her hand. If I disrupted the spell, when she was reaching out to me... "What's happening? Why are the feygates closed?"

  "The queen closed them," she said shortly. "It seems her suspicions were right. Someone—someone human—tried to launch some kind of attack on the court. She repulsed it, but it was close enough to successful that she..." She glanced to the side, then back at the mirror. "She had a lot of questions for me. I don't know how long I'll be safe here, Morgan. And the twins..."

  "Is there anywhere you can go underhill?"

  Gwen's eyebrows lifted then drew together. "I want to bring them to you."

  I shook my head helplessly. "It's not safe for them here either." I filled her in on the Savannah flu. "And it's attacking casters, not regular people. Helen's dead, and Eliza didn't sound that great last time I talked to her. Don't bring the girls here, Gwen. If you can hold out there—if Elm can help you—I saw Helen. It's not anything you want happening to you, much less the girls."

  Her eyes flicked from side to side, but she nodded. "Remember your promise."

  "Don't talk like that. There won't be any need." She glared, and I put my hand over my heart. "I swore. I won't forget." Her shoulders sagged fractionally, and in that movement I read all the fear she wouldn’t express. The image rippled. That she had held it this long through the closed gates was impressive enough.

  "Find me. Let me know when it's safe. I don't know how long we'll have and the queen—" The mirror flickered one more time and was still, reflecting only my ashen, worried face, the bland hotel room, and Falcon, watching me.

  *

  "So the human ambassador to Faerie..." Falcon dipped a French fry in ketchup and stared at it dubiously.

  "Is my sister," I finished. I rolled a bottled beer back and forth between my hands. The cool glass felt good. I knew I needed to eat—should be ravenous, in fact, since all I'd had all day was a granola bar and some jerky—but a cold knot had settled in my stomach, and the turkey sandwich and fries didn't look all that appetizing. The TV in the corner of the bar wasn't helping. Even though the sound was muted, images flashed across the screen—bodies wrapped in shrouds, medical staff in masks, EMTs in hazmat suits. They still weren't sure of the vector of transmission. The restaurant was almost empty except for us, and the servers watched us with wary eyes.

  "Then I know your brother-in-law." Falcon's smile had an odd edge to it. Some history there. How big was the fae court? Would he know everyone? They lived a long time, collecting grudges like charms on a bracelet as near as I could tell.

  "Then you know more than I. I've only met him a few times." A few highly awkward times. Gwen wasn't supposed to fall in love at court, she was supposed to represent human interests in Faerie and help preserve the fragile peace one of her predecessors had brokered forty years before. An alliance by marriage was a traditional form among the fae and we could have made use of it, but Gwen had chosen with her heart, not her head. It was unlike her, to say the least. Her entire career had been a slow, calculated climb to her current position—whereas mine was a tangle guided by necessity more than a plan, full of detours driven by disaster. I sipped my beer, letting the dark flavor coat my tongue. None of that mattered now.

  "He's a good man." Falcon hesitated. "Perhaps not the most political." No, Gwen had not used her head. I forced myself to take a bite of my sandwich.

  "Will they be safe there?"

  He took a long swallow of his own beer. "No one's ever safe anywhere."

  Well, that was reassuring. I let it go for the moment. "We have several problems." I held up a hand and ticked them off on my fingers. "This Savannah flu, whatever it is—I need to call Dr. Ramachandran and see what she's found out. The queen has shut the gates because someone tried to attack her, or maybe Faerie itself. Someone will know who and what they did. In the meantime, Gwen and the girls are stuck underhill, and you're stuck here. If there's a way through—there's still this sickness. And Marcus is somewhere, and he needs help. Does 'Strange hold' mean anything to you?"

  "Strangehold? That's a name I've heard only in whispers." He took another swig of his beer, looking at the glass with far more approval than he had the food.

  I allowed myself cautious optimism. "Marcus said something about it when he called."r />
  Falcon nodded. "A friend of mine went there—when she came back, she would only speak of it obliquely, and only after I swore never to speak of it to any of the Shining Court. From what I understand, it's an old back way between underhill and over."

  A cautious tendril of hope stirred. Another route to Faerie? Maybe I could get to Gwen and the girls. "A back way?"

  "My friend told me there were doors to it here and there." He drew a squiggle in the condensation from his beer. It glowed faintly and branched into much narrower, finer lines. They split and rejoined, meandering across the tabletop, and I realized I was looking at a map. Falcon frowned in concentration, his eyes distant. "Here, I think, and here..." One in New York, it looked like, and one in D.C. He frowned. "But the closest would be...Ah." The lines squirmed and rearranged themselves. "Atlanta." He looked at me, pleased.

  "These seem like awfully urban areas for a back door to underhill."

  "I believe part of the point was to put them somewhere a lord or lady of the high court would be uncomfortable going." That crooked smile again.

  "Do you think you could get us there?"

  He looked at me. "Were we not going to the next feygate?"

  "We were." I bit the inside of my lip. Eliza would be pissed. Things were falling apart here and I shouldn't leave. But then again...maybe she wouldn’t. If I told her Marcus had asked... "I'll call Anil and get him to check the gate in Louisiana. If we can really find another way to Faerie—"

  "I'll get in touch with my friend and see what else she can tell me."

  "Can you do that with the gates closed? It was hard for Gwen to get through to me."

  He ran a finger through his map, and it was only water droplets again. "In this case, I'll rely on sympathetic magic. I have something that once belonged to the lady. That should be enough to let me reach her."

  My mind buzzed with speculation. The only thing he seemed to carry through his transformation was the metal disc and the chain it hung on. Was his friend the person who'd cursed him? He was frowning at the water and I didn't ask. I pulled at my beer and made myself pick the sandwich up again. "All right. We'll head there tomorrow."

  He looked up, but his eyes were still distant. "And what will we find?"

  *

  We left early and hit Atlanta before lunch hour traffic got too bad. I had steeled myself and called Eliza, but she didn't answer. I squelched worry and left a message telling her Marcus had sent me on a lead, and I'd asked Anil to check up on the Bogue Chitto gate. I said not to worry if she couldn't get in touch, because I might be out of cell range, but I was okay. I hoped I wasn't lying.

  Someone had a sense of humor; the backdoor to underhill was in Underground Atlanta. Someone had affixed three two-by-four planks of wood to the bricked walls in a rough arch with a ward that would keep most eyes from noticing it. The wood was weathered and splintering, and I couldn't find any screws or nails. When I looked with spellsight, silvery strands threaded through the wood. It was not as strong nor as obvious as a feygate, and I doubted I'd have been able to sense it from even a street away.

  "So tell me how this works." Trusting myself to a feygate was one thing; they were established and had been around for centuries, even millennia, some of them. This rickety thing was some stranger's spell, and I had no way of knowing how skilled a caster they were.

  "It doesn’t go directly to Faerie—Strangehold is between our worlds."

  I raised an eyebrow. Someone had built a way through...what? The space between worlds? The thought made my head hurt. "That seems..." Impossible? Improbable, certainly. "...unlikely."

  "According to my friend, this door leads to Strangehold, and there'll be a door to Faerie somewhere inside."

  "Who made it? A fae, or a human caster?"

  He shrugged. "Briar didn't know, or didn't tell me. All I can tell is that whoever did it was a Tolkien nerd."

  I looked at him blankly.

  He laid a hand on the wood and whispered, "Mellon."

  "What?"

  "'Speak friend, and enter.'" I looked at him blankly. "Mellon means friend in elvish. Have you never read Lord of the Rings?"

  "I haven't even seen the movies." So Falcon was a Tolkien nerd himself. I had no room to judge—my parents were Arthurian nerds, and I had picked up a lot of it by osmosis, or in self defense. But all I knew of Tolkien was what I'd picked up from people talking about the movies. I'd been too worried about what the actual fae were doing to want to see imaginary elves. The silvery threads in the wood expanded and met, twining around each other, weaving across the arch until it gleamed like a mirror, but reflected nothing. Falcon waved a gracious hand indicating I should precede him. I told myself not to be a coward, and stepped through.

  The silver clung to me as I walked through it, but it felt like the comforting hand of a friend against my skin; nothing malignant, nothing so powerful as a feygate, or as breathtakingly pervasive as Falcon's magic. Then I was through.

  Strangehold was a hold indeed; it looked like some bastard child of a fortress and a luxury tree house, set inside a vast and echoing twilight void. If it was a cavern, I could see no walls. A tree trunk wider around than a football field rose from murky, unknowable, and possibly Stygian depths, wreathed with leafy vines. I could just make out a staircase spiraling around and around the trunk as it sank into the gloom. A narrow bridge apparently made of woven vines crossed the vast chasm from where I stood, which was an all-too-small platform of wooden planks, thankfully sturdier than the arch on the other side of the door had been. I wasn't prone to vertigo or fear of heights, but the depths the little bridge spanned were breathtaking. I looked down once and decided once was one time too many. At irregular intervals around the cavern, there were other platforms floating in the air (realizing ours was also floating over nothing made my stomach lurch), other rickety walkways over the void. They all converged on the building.

  The structure on the other side of the bridge was a castle set into and around the tree trunk. Stone and wood melded and worked with each other, imposing walls broken by graceful arched windows. Vines grew over and around the walls, but they seemed to support the walls rather than pull them apart. It was fantastical.

  But no less fantastical was the amount of magic surging around me. I didn't have to summon my caster's sight to see it; indeed, I was afraid I might blind myself if I tried. It was like standing under a waterfall, when I was used to a slow moving river. It pounded against my skin and I clutched the thin wooden railing in front of me to steady myself while I acclimated to the force of it.

  The arch shimmered behind me, and Falcon stepped through. He straightened and took a deep breath. Some tension I hadn't been aware he was carrying melted away from him. "Worried we wouldn't make it?"

  He glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. "What? No, not at all. But it seems Strangehold is free from outside influence." My face must have been blank. He smiled. "I am not bound to change with the sun." Interesting—whatever curse he was carrying worked overhill, and, I presumed, in Faerie, but not here...wherever here was. Perhaps because there was no sun? I looked up. The tree went up and up, the staircase spiraling around. Vast branches split off above us. It seemed to get a little lighter, a silver light tinged with the green of the foliage, that might or might not have been some kind of sunlight.

  "What's up with the bridges? They seem...unnecessarily flimsy."

  "No one could ever bring an army here. Not easily, anyway. Shall we?"

  He held out his arm. I slid my hand into the crook of it, told myself not to look down again, and stepped forward.

  The walkway swayed alarmingly, and I hissed in apprehension. "It's all right," Falcon said. Vines snaked up from the base of the bridge, so fast that before I had the chance to be alarmed, they had formed a rail at waist height. Greenery raveled before us, the railing stretching all the way across the bridge. A chill iced the skin down my spine. The amount of magic necessary to make this place was mindboggling; maybe they'd had to b
uild it here, because otherwise even in Faerie there wouldn’t be enough to support it. Did it respond on its own to our presence? Or was there a caster here, somewhere, watching us? My hand tightened on Falcon's arm involuntarily. I didn't know whether that was a good idea. He had been nothing but helpful so far, but he was fae. It wasn't that they were inherently untrustworthy—though some people thought so—but they had their own agendas, which were not always comprehensible to humans. Our paths pointed the same way at the moment, but there was no guarantee that they would continue to do so, especially if the way to Faerie from Strangehold allowed him home.

  Crossing the swaying, bouncing bridge was no fun, even with the railing. My stomach was in knots by the time we reached the other end and my shoulders tight and creeping toward my ears. Falcon looked as calm and at ease as when we started across. If he was amused by my discomfiture, he didn't let it show.

  The bridge terminated in a landing on the vast staircase winding round the trunk of the tree. The staircase continued another quarter-rotation until it widened into a courtyard. From here I could just make out twisted cypresses flanking double doors. We started off toward it, up the staircase.

  The tree trunk we walked by was pierced with more of the windows I had seen from across the bridge. Some were set with faceted glass, some with colored panels, and some with undecorated panes, but even where the glass was clear, I couldn't see inside, only the reflection of the eerie cavern around us. My legs ached from walking up steps by the time we reached the courtyard.

  The double doors swung open at our approach. Gravel crunched beneath my feet as we crossed the courtyard. A floral smell drifted from potted flowering trees. Inside, the floor was warm, polished hardwood of different colors laid in a pattern; if it was meant to suggest anything other than pleasing symmetry, I couldn't see it. We entered, and the doors swung shut behind us with an unfortunately final sound.