Strangehold (Crossroads of Worlds Book 1)

by Rene Sears

  The door was locked, but a small twist of energy from the tattoo at my shoulder opened it. We slipped in and started ascending. We walked up and up, until my legs ached and my panting breath echoed in the small spiral stairway. Landings and windows broke up the climb, welcome both for a moment of flat walking, and for the cooling breeze.

  Power concentrated around us as we walked, and I felt we were getting closer to some spell, even if it were not Matthew's. Finally, we reached the top. Rowan looked at me, and we walked in, me first and him right behind me.

  I hadn't expected it to be so bright, but the whole top of the lighthouse was glass. There was a metal walkway around the outside of the building. I had a momentary impression of miles and miles of sea, but then I saw Matthew, and my focus narrowed entirely to him.

  He was slumped against one glass wall, smiling sardonically. He was thinner than I remembered, and of course older. A web of silver energy wove in front of him, hiding him from non-magical eyes. Behind him a thick strand of silvery light went through the tower walls to the leyline below. He had tied himself into the spell. I had wondered how the spell continued to renew itself, sending knot after knot into the leyline—now I knew. He was draining his life to do it. He had always been so clever, and this was how he chose to waste that gift? Bile rose in my throat.

  "Matthew, what have you done?"

  I had barely breathed it, but he looked up and his eyes widened.

  "Morgan? I thought they would send Eliza." He laughed, a horrible creaking sound.

  "Eliza's dead. Your little trick killed her, along with a lot of other people."

  He shoved himself up against the wall. "What are you talking about?"

  Had he driven himself mad, tied to this spell? "The knots you're sending down the leyline. Congratulations. You've revenged yourself on everyone for exiling you. Hundreds of people are dead."

  "No...you're lying." His face twisted into a terrible rictus.

  "Why the hell would I lie to you about this? People are dying."

  He laughed again, a choked, bitter sound. "Impossible. The spell was set for the feygate. It could never have gotten past it to the main artery of the leyline. It's been destroying our enemies."

  "It's been destroying us. It never made it to the feygate."

  Rowan stepped out from behind me into the room. Matthew's face contorted again and he exhaled a hissing breath.

  "You're wrong." Rowan's voice was calm and even. "The queen closed the feygates, and your work bypassed Faerie and turned against your own people."

  Matthew's eyes closed. "No. That's impossible."

  Matthew had killed hundreds. Maybe he'd been aiming for genocide, or just to take out as many as he could before the fae stopped the spell. But he must have known he couldn't kill every single fae, and those who'd been left would have retaliated. "What did you hope to accomplish?"

  "They prey on us," Matthew said. "They never keep their promises. This flimsy peace won't last and when it breaks, we'll be nothing more than an amusement to them as we die. As it has been, so will it be. How many have we lost to them, over the centuries?"

  "Is it more or less than we’ve lost to you in the last week?" I snapped.

  "You keep saying it, but I don't believe you." He sighed. It sounded painful, and I couldn't be sorry. "I can't believe you're here with one of them."

  "You're the problem here, Matthew, not me." I tried to think of what I could say to him to convince him. I jammed my hands in my pockets, and then realized I didn't need to say anything. I hooked a finger around the chain of Helen's bracelet and slid it out of my pocket. I held it up and he started at it blankly. Of course it meant nothing to him. He hadn't known Helen.

  "What's this?"

  I took his hand and closed his fingers around the spent charms. "Scry it," I said. "You'll see the death of its owner. You'll see where I took the energy from the charms while Eliza's deputy and I tried to counter your spell. I was able to recognize the knots of your work—surely you'll be able to." My voice didn't waver. I was proud of that.

  It was a long second before he turned his gaze from my eyes to the bracelet, but he did. His eyes unfocused as he sent a tendril of power into the bracelet and read its recent history. His eyes shone—with horror, I thought. "Oh, God," he muttered. His focus returned, and he shook his head, refusing to look at me. "I never meant to—Morgan. You have to tell them. I didn't mean to do this. I would never—"

  "But you did."

  "I can't make this right," he said.

  "But you can end it," I said softly.

  Rowan looked at him, and then turned to me. "There's an obvious solution." he said. "This man's life is holding the spell together. Eliminate one, and the other will dissipate."

  Matthew flinched, and turned his head toward the leyline. "I can't stop the spell," he said. "It’s got too much of me in it, too much momentum. He's right. The only way it ends is when I die." His gaze turned back toward me. "Please. My family—they're on Loblolly Island."

  "I'll find them," I promised. I hadn't even known he had a family. If they had helped him in this, the council would judge them. And if they hadn't, we would help them.

  He smiled, and for a moment, he looked like the man I had known twenty years before. He closed his eyes, and a faint spark of magic brought a swirl of silver over his heart. I could already see it wouldn't be enough.

  "I can't." He looked directly at me, his eyes wet. "I can't pull enough magic from the spell."

  "Then I will do it for you." Rowan drew a dagger from his belt. It glinted dangerously in the sunlight.

  "No!" Matthew scrabbled backward reflexively, though with his back against the wall he didn't get far. "No. I want a human death." He looked at me.

  God damn it, Matthew. I'd been in fights before over the course of my career as a caster, but I'd never killed anyone, or ever thought I would have to. I wasn't especially eager to begin my career as a murderer.

  "Morgan," Rowan murmured. "There is no need. My hands are long since stained red. Let me bear this burden."

  Matthew's eyes widened. His power surged forward and he barely caught it. "No. I swear it, I will send my dying energy into this spell. Don't let him touch me!"

  Every second we spent dithering here was another second he might be killing innocents. "Calm yourself, Matthew. I'll do it."

  Rowan's mouth went flat and thin-lipped, but I ignored him. Blood rushed in my ears, and my pulse sped until I felt lightheaded. I couldn't bear the thought of killing him with magic—letting my energy twist with his and then killing him with it. It would be horribly intimate. I didn't want to share that much with him. I called to the silver bracelet on my wrist and let the sidheblade fall into existence as a dagger with a razor-sharp edge.

  Power crackled as it manifested, bending the flow of the silver lines that spellsight showed throughout the room. Rowan and Matthew both flinched away.

  "Is that—" Matthew gasped.

  "No," I said. "The queen took that one. I found this one later." Rowan glanced at the dagger and frowned.

  The weight of the blade steadied my shaking hands. Everything seemed unreal, like a scene from a movie. I couldn’t possibly be considering killing a man, this man, who had once been my friend, and yet...because of him, Helen and Eliza and countless others were dead. If Gwen was dead or tortured, I could lay that at his feet too: the queen of Faerie would have left Gwen and Elm alone but for his actions.

  I rolled my shoulders and fell into a ready stance, and tried to make myself step toward him. One step. Two. The sidheblade didn't share my reservations; I could feel its hunger, and I let it draw me forward.

  Matthew bowed his head. I raised the sidheblade to strike.

  Rowan darted forward, quick as a falcon diving, and slid a wide dagger across Matthew's throat. The slice was fast and deep, and the edge so keen it took a second for the blood to spurt out. Matthew tried to take a breath, frowned, and then pitched forward to the floor. I lowered the sidheblad
e, sickened, as blood began to pool beneath him. The energy he had poured his life into dissipated, floating away in drifting silver filaments.

  I let the sidheblade retreat to its bracelet, and drew in a hitching breath. I was shaking and I couldn't seem to stop. A puddle of blood on the floor looks different than a river of blood, it turns out. For one thing, there's the body it's coming from. Matthew's eyes were open, staring. He already looked like a bad copy of himself.

  Rowan dropped to one knee next to the body and bent his head. Red-brown hair had come free from where he'd tied it back, and it fell forward into his face as he murmured something. He finished, stood, and wiped the blade on Matthew's shirt. Then he frowned, and the leyline's power bent toward him.

  Matthew went up in blinding white flames that burned with no smoke. I heard sickening pops and cracks, and then the flame incandesced, and he was gone without so much as a scent of char to mark his passing. The flame followed the puddle of blood as if it were gasoline, and then that too was gone. It was if the last fifteen minutes had never happened, as if we had never seen Matthew, never killed him. As if he had never been here at all.

  "How did you...?" The floor wasn't marked with so much as a smudge. I couldn’t quit staring at it.

  "Salamander," he said succinctly. They lived in the leylines near volcanoes and hot springs, but there were none that I knew of on the east coast. Another mystery, but at the moment I couldn't bring myself to care how he'd done it.

  I made myself look at him. He was the same as ever, maybe a little more disheveled than usual. I had known he had been the Queen's Blade, but I hadn’t known it, not in the bones of understanding. Well, I did now. I couldn't unsee that perfect, precise slash, delivered with deadly grace born of unimaginable practice. I didn't know how I felt. I was relieved I hadn't had to kill Matthew after all, angry that Rowan had taken the risk Matthew would end his life contaminating the leylines further, weirdly indignant—as much as I didn't want to have taken a life, I also was pissed that he might have thought me too cowardly or weak or whatever to have done it—and uncomfortable with my new awareness of Rowan's deadliness. Which one would surface as strongest was up for debate, but for now, I had to acknowledge the relief.

  I caught his eye and forced myself to hold his gaze. His eyes were that vivid, unnatural green again. "Thank you," I said awkwardly. "I really didn't want to kill him."

  "You are welcome. I...didn't want you to have to..." He looked away first. "We should not linger here."

  We walked down the interminable stairs—away, I couldn't help thinking, from the scene of the crime—until we reached the bottom: the chained-in walkways, the white sand beach. One more layer of dissonance between what we had done and reality.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and hit Eliza's number on speed dial. Jake answered.

  "It's done," I said, before he could say anything. "Please tell me it worked."

  "I have watchers along the leylines to the southeast," Jake said. "It'll probably take a few days to know for sure." I blew out air in a wordless and inarticulate sound of frustration. "It's all right," he went on. "Your friend Jane came to help."

  "Jane?" I had no idea who he meant.

  "Jane Hawthorn. We've been making sure people are okay. Saranya's fine," he added. "She's taking care of Atlanta."

  My knees buckled—which was something I'd heard of but never experienced, and it was an unpleasant sensation—and Rowan put a hand out to steady me. I sagged against him before I could stop myself, or decide if I wanted to.

  "We'll be there as soon as we can."

  "Get some rest," Jake said. "You won't be able to help anyone if you fall on your face, or wreck on the way back."

  We said our goodbyes—I couldn't bear to ask after anyone specifically in case I was asking about someone dead—and I stood for a moment, letting the sun soak into me. I wanted to do as Jake said. I was so tired, and I wanted some time to think, to react to what I'd seen and done, and almost done. We had prevented more deaths, but we'd had to kill someone to do it. That it was what the Association would have done if he'd been tried was no comfort to me. Hell, we could have put him in the truck and driven him onto the mainland if only we could have moved him from the spell—he'd have been just as dead, and no one would have had to kill him. Part of me was mad at Matthew for not having the magic to kill himself. It wasn't as big a part as the one wondering how he'd gotten to the point of attempted genocide in the first place. I rubbed my face with both hands. My eyes ached.

  Rowan let his hand fall away and I gave myself a moment to regret the loss. "Back to Strangehold?"

  "Not quite yet. We have one more thing to do."

  *

  Loblolly Island was hard to find, unless you were a caster. Very specific, very local maps used to show it to the east of Fripp Island, but since Matthew had been exiled to it, no one without magic could find so much as a trace of it, either on a map or in person. As it was now, a person without magic would boat right by it, and a caster would feel the council's alarms buzzing against their skin.

  The motor of our boat sputtered behind us, propelling us though weed-choked lanes. We had driven a little over an hour to Fripp and then rented a boat from a resident; Fripp was supposed to be the easternmost island. Nothing more than a thin slice of sea separated Loblolly Island from Fripp Island, but unless there was another caster on Fripp, no one but us could see it.

  Loblolly was less than two square miles, so it didn’t take us long to find the pier that jutted into the water between the two islands. "They'll probably be afraid of you," I told Rowan on the drive, "because Matthew won't have been shy about his views. Let me do the talking." He laughed—an honest sound I wanted to drink in, because the drive had been mostly awkward silence—and pulled up his human glamour.

  I went first up the dirt track from the rickety pier to the house. It had been not much more than a shack when the council first brought Matthew here. In the intervening decades, the shack had become a house and a few outbuildings—enough to make me wonder just how big his family was. Chickens wandered around the yard, pecking desultorily in the grass. A lone goat came close and watched us hopefully, maaaaaing intently when we didn't pay it enough attention.

  My shoulders rose around my ears as we drew closer. It took me a second to realize why—the buzzing of flies crescendoed as we drew away from the pier. That might have just been bugs along the mud, but it got louder as we got closer to the house. I made a fist, nails digging into my palms, and looked at Rowan. His eyes narrowed, and his hand rested easily on the dagger he had wielded so efficiently earlier.

  I braced myself and pushed on the front door. It didn't have a lock—why would they need one?

  The smell wafted out, along with a wave of flies. I gagged and stumbled backward. Rowan offered a handkerchief, which I pressed to my nose. It smelled faintly of rosemary and lime, and it didn't help much, but it was better than nothing.

  There were two people inside, a woman and a man. They looked to be of Hispanic descent. Matthew had called them his family. I wondered if one of them was his spouse or lover, and who the other was. How could the Savannah flu have possibly killed them? The leylines flowed inland. Then my brain processed what I was seeing: each corpse bore a small spot of blood staining their shirts in the middle of the chest.

  Rowan bent forward and examined them, holding another over his own nose. It mostly hid his expression, but when he straightened, his eyebrows were drawn together in a troubled vee.

  "A precise strike," he said. "Straight to the heart. They died within seconds."

  "At least they didn't suffer." I tried to keep my voice steady, but it was difficult. Matthew had not done this. These were his family, and he had thought them alive in his last moments of life. Who had known they were here? Who had known that he was involved? It would be stretching coincidence to the breaking point to assume that these deaths were unrelated to Matthew's actions. "Should we bury them? Or..." I swallowed. "The council wil
l probably want to see them, to find who did this. I suppose we shouldn't disturb the evidence."

  "There is no need." Rowan's voice was nearly a growl. "I know who the perpetrator was, or what he was, anyway." His hand fell from his face. He had dropped the human glamour. I couldn't read his expression; nor did I really want to. "When her majesty wished to destroy the associates of someone she wanted to punish, I was often ordered to kill with a single strike to the heart—if they were guilty of nothing more than association. It was a kind of mercy, that they not suffer. The queen has named a new Blade."

  *

  I had just begun to summon the energy to cast a preservation spell when Rowan called the salamander back and set the house and the pitiful corpses within ablaze. I yelled at him about destroying the evidence, he yelled back about potential nasties the new Blade might have left on the body, and as a result, the boat ride back to the mainland was somewhat frostier than the ride out had been. I kept trying to call Jake but it was a while before I had reception.

  "What now?" Rowan asked, his voice still somewhat guarded, after I slipped my phone into my pocket after the latest attempt. I rubbed my eyes.

  "Back to Strangehold and the girls. Saranya and Jake might need my help undoing Matthew's work, but he's right—I won't be much good to them without some rest, and a chance to—" Let myself give into shock? Mourn a monster who'd caused the death of who knew how many people, while at the same time mourning those people? "—process everything. And try to get in touch with Gwen or Elm."

  His expression softened. "Perhaps I will be able to help with the latter."

  "Thank you." I couldn't bring myself to apologize for yelling at him when I still thought I was right, but at least we were talking to each other politely.

  So the drive to Atlanta wasn't as dire as it could have been, besides being long and tedious. We hit Macon right before sunset and got something to eat just in time. We walked behind a gas station and watched the sun inching below the horizon. "I hate this," he said conversationally.