He found quite a group: Falcon and Flint, two others familiar only from pain-ridden flashes of memory, and the two Guardians. No Grayson. When they spun to face him, Julian slowed to a walk and spread his hands, nonthreatening. “I felt you pass through, and came to investigate.”
Falcon said dryly, “You are rather slow.”
But Flint stepped forward, suddenly alert. “When did you feel us?”
“A few minutes ago.”
In one swift rush, everyone re-aligned, facing outward and scanning the trees. The male Guardian said to Julian, “They’ve been here more than half an hour.”
“But we, on the other hand, have been here mere minutes.”
The smooth voice brought Julian around and into a ready stance. Six Unseelie approached through the trees. Of course they would come through here; they sought a place where it was easy to connect the worlds, and the presence of the Seelie would facilitate that nicely. Julian wondered if the two Courts had stumbled across one another before this. From the posture of both sides, they might have. The threat of violence hung in the air, and Julian backed away one careful step at a time, tensing for trouble.
“They will not fight,” a new voice, female, murmured silkily in his ear. “They only bare their teeth and snarl.”
In the clearing filled with sidhe, where the effect of their Otherworldly nature was overwhelming, the woman at his shoulder stood out like a beacon of familiarity. She was human. Not sidhe.
A wilder.
Relief turned to ice an instant later. Wilders had long noted that although they possessed almost every strange eye color possible in the human genetic spectrum, their eyes were never truly green, or gold.
But her eyes were as gold as the Unseelie.
He pulled one swift step away. That unnatural gaze showed mocking amusement, as if she could hear the thoughts screaming through his head. Shard said they had a way. But how? We can’t be forced to their side!
But perhaps they could go of free will. And though Julian had hoped—prayed—that the geis would keep all wilders on the right side of the fight, in the end they weren’t perfect. Everyone had their price.
It seemed the Unseelie had found one they could buy.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, but the two Guardians were occupied with the staring contest between the Seelie and the Unseelie. It hadn’t broken into outright battle, but it might at any second, whatever this wilder thought. Had she come as part of the contingent sent to Grayson? Or had the connection expanded through blood to other parts of the world, where the Unseelie could enjoy richer pickings?
When he turned back, she was smiling. “I know what you’re thinking. You assume they’re your enemy, that they have nothing to offer you but pain and enslavement. You’re wrong.”
Every nerve was alive, burning with contradictory fires that made it hard to think. She spoke in an intimate tone, as if she knew it was the easiest way to unsettle him, and the damnable thing was that it worked. Julian clenched his jaw, then asked the question she was waiting for. “What else, then?”
“Freedom.”
He forced a laugh. “Freedom through enslavement to their cause?”
Her impossible golden gaze bored into him, as if she could see straight through every facade, to his soul. “Freedom from the shield.”
Laughter went away. So did thought. The clearing might have been deserted except for the two of them; inter-world war could have broken out behind him and he wouldn’t have cared. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.” She came a step forward, drawing close—too close, but he couldn’t move, and he knew she was slipping through his unsteady shields to call a response from his body, making him aware of hers, but he couldn’t muster a defense. “The Seelie would never do it. The deep shield helps keep you in line, and that’s as useful to them as it is to your masters. But the Unseelie would free you.”
His breath was coming too fast. Years of study under Grayson; more years before that, examining it every time they gutted him, all toward this end. To break the deep shield.
“And then,” she whispered, almost in his ear, “you would never have to trust someone else with the key to your soul.”
His breath stopped. Julian turned his head the bare inch necessary to look in her eyes—golden eyes, alien and unfamiliar, and the face around them so subtly changed as to be nearly unrecognizable, because change like that should be as impossible as her eyes. But he recognized it.
“Kim.”
She laughed, in a voice that didn’t sound like her, any more than her features looked like her. Kim, and yet not. Black horror threatened to overwhelm his vision. Kim. A wilder. How?
Kim. Unseelie.
Smiling at him like some kind of entertaining toy.
Hands clamped down on his shoulders and dragged him back, and Julian couldn’t even pull together a defense out of the shattered fragments of his mind. It was the other Guardian, the woman, and people were shouting, sidhe and humans alike; he couldn’t focus enough to pick out words, but the Guardians were retreating, the Seelie and Unseelie going in opposite directions, and Kim was going with the Unseelie. Watching him the whole way. Still smiling.
Her whisper slipped into his mind just before she vanished from sight. Think it over.
~
“They lied.”
Grayson had her head in her hands, fingers laced into brown cage across her white hair, either to defend or to hold something in. She didn’t move at Julian’s flat declaration, but she answered him. “Now we know they’re capable of it.”
Every muscle in his body ached with tension. He hadn’t slept; how could he? Instead he told Robert and Liesel, hearing his own voice like a stranger’s, and now all three of them waited with those two Guardians in Grayson’s office, watching the pale sun rise, counting down the minutes until the Seelie could step through again.
He couldn’t murder them. He needed them to answer questions.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Kim’s face. Not the face she wore last night, but the one he’d known for years. Human eyes, blue and filled with kindness and determination. A smile that had never once mocked him. Everything he had come to know, to trust—and, in time, to love.
The Unseelie had taken all of that.
Everything was too silent. Grayson’s office was the only occupied one; the building had been cleared, and the area around it. The evacuation of campus had begun. Those with a connection to the sidhe, however, were staying until the solstice, whether they wanted to or not.
No sound in the hall, but none was needed. They all felt the sidhe approach. Julian and the others stood as Falcon, Shard, and three other sidhe came into the room.
He held onto his focus, not letting any emotion interfere. Falcon’s bored disdain didn’t bother him. Neither did Shard’s refusal to meet his gaze. He asked, in a perfectly level voice, “What did they do to her?”
“There is a powder we use,” Falcon said, “to strengthen our own abilities, on the rare occasions when it is needed. We believe they used it on her, and its effect was to make her a changeling. And in that moment of change, they bound her.”
She hadn’t chosen it. Julian hadn’t believed it, not once he realized who she was; maybe everyone had a price, but the notion that the Unseelie could grant anything Kim wanted that badly was too impossible.
But it meant Kim truly was a wilder. Her changed appearance was real.
“Why did you lie?”
Falcon’s mouth settled in what might be the sidhe equivalent of an eye-roll. “Because you would act foolishly otherwise—as you almost did last night. You are the one that matters, changeling. Neither they nor we particularly care about her.”
Julian was only barely conscious of the explosion as the room’s windows shattered. As if the glass had been his cage, all the fury he’d been holding in roared free of his control, and with it came everything else: his love for Kim, his fear and grief, his sense of betrayal, that the sidhe consi
dered her to be disposable in this fight. Falcon actually flinched, and Julian almost took him by the throat and slammed him into a wall. “You goddamned bastard. You have no idea how much she matters!”
“She is lost,” Falcon spat at him, hunching like a cornered animal. “As you were warned. Do not blame me for that.”
Julian fought the rage under control before he could do something unforgivable. Everyone else was standing well clear, sidhe and humans alike. He pulled his anger in, forged it into a harder shape. “So I’ll get her back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She is Unseelie.”
“She’s human,” he snapped. “More human than sidhe, and we have free will. We aren’t born to one side or the other, and can’t be bound that way.”
“But the part of her that is sidhe can be bound. She can’t be helped now, changeling; accept it!”
“One moment, if you please.”
Robert’s incongruously polite interruption startled both Julian and Falcon out of their focus. Robert had retreated with Liesel to a corner, but now he stepped forward, diffidently, as if hoping one of the Guardians would save him should someone decide to tear his head off. As if he wasn’t sure which one it would be, his roommate or the sidhe. Behind him, Liesel had her hands pressed to her mouth, and tears ran along her fingers.
“I still have difficulty with your telepathic technique,” Robert said with a forced laugh. “So I’m not certain whether I have interpreted your words correctly. She can’t be helped now, you say. By that, do you mean the time to help her has passed—or that it has not yet come?”
A tiny spark of hope flared within Julian.
But Falcon shook his head. “The time will never come. By the time the conditions are right, she will be dead, or too long under their control.”
“What conditions?” Julian whispered.
The sidhe clamped his lips into a thin line, refusing to answer. But Shard spoke, from behind Julian. “The two worlds. To touch her human nature, the Unseelie worked in this world, and caught her spirit as it moved. But now she is split too much between the two, and you cannot reach her completely. In our world, you will miss that part of her which is human, and here you will miss that which is sidhe.”
Caught her spirit as it moved. When Falcon spoke of the powder, Julian hadn’t thought about its implications. They’d precipitated the same crisis in Kim that made a wilder—or killed someone with the psi-sickness. There were many more of the latter than the former. How close had she come to dying?
It was done with. The future mattered more. “So at the solstice—”
Shard shook her head. “That will only open the doors. The worlds will meld in time, but not soon. Years, perhaps. I have not looked ahead to see.”
He didn’t think she was lying. It sounded right; in fact, he was willing to bet the meld would spread as the connection had before it, following sympathetic and contagious links.
But power and sidhe blood weren’t the only things that had thinned the veil here. “Then we’ll force it,” Julian said. “Like I did before, with the summoning circles.”
He’d never seen a sidhe come that close to open-mouthed shock. “You think to move whole worlds?” Falcon said. “I have heard of human arrogance, but this is beyond belief.”
“Not whole worlds,” Julian said, the idea taking shape in his mind. “Just a tiny portion of them.”
He looked instinctively to his roommate and saw Robert considering it, as if this were a theoretical assignment Grayson had set. The professor herself stood silently, and the other Guardians watched her, waiting for a cue. “Blood calls to its home,” Robert said. “The best would be to put sidhe here, and humans in the Otherworld; then they anchor themselves where they stand, and summon their homes to them.”
“The Circle,” Liesel whispered. Her face was still wet with tears, but she’d lowered her hands, revealing a surprising degree of resolve. “They’re still here. And they’re connected. They would do it, to get Kim back.”
Grayson said, “We can defend you while you work.” She was too professional to say more, but Julian thought he saw pride in her eyes, for all three of them—even Liesel, who had never been her student.
Then she turned to the sidhe—addressing Shard, not Falcon, who still looked mutinous. “Will it work?”
“I do not know,” Shard said. “Not everything can be seen. But it is a possibility.”
“Then we’ll do it.” Julian only needed a slim chance. The rest, they would do for themselves.
~
They didn’t race out of Grayson’s office to perform the ritual on the spot. Something like this couldn’t be done off the cuff; it had to be planned, and checked, and checked again, with wiser heads offering advice. They chose their battleground: the wasteland on the riverbank, where Julian had first been attacked. They chose their people: seven humans, seven sidhe, with Guardians to protect them. They chose their configuration: Robert and Liesel with Falcon and Shard on the inner circle, and the remaining ten on the outer.
In the end, however, it would come down to Julian and Kim.
He spent the hour beforehand cross-legged on the floor of his room, deep in meditation. For this, he could not afford any missteps. He had to banish every last distraction from his mind, every emotion that might weaken his focus. All the discipline of his childhood might have been intended for this one moment, when any error would bring a fate much worse than gutting.
A clumsy nudge to his mind brought him out of trance. Robert stood before him, worry written plainly on his face. Not just for what they would do tonight, but for Julian himself. There were certain kinds of details Robert noticed, and he would not have missed the ones before him now: the black clothes, the grim expression, and the long box on the floor in front of Julian.
His roommate nodded warily at the box as Julian rose to his feet. “How exactly do you intend to use that?”
“Any way I have to,” Julian said, shrugging into his coat.
It didn’t reassure Robert, but it wasn’t meant to. There wasn’t any reassurance to be had, tonight. Julian stooped to pick up the box, and when he straightened, he found Robert staring at him with both fear and pity. “One way or another,” Julian said, “I will free her.”
~
The others were waiting for them at the riverbank. The Palladian Circle stood in a wide-eyed clump, nervous of the Guardians’ presence. Julian wondered if they’d seen the sidhe yet. He wasn’t about to ask. He was grateful enough for their aid, without doing anything to remind them of what it was for.
They flinched back from him, too. For once, though, he didn’t think it was because he was a wilder. Julian couldn’t spare the effort right now for any pretense. The coldness inside was plain for all to see.
Michele came forward, though, and shook his hand. The gesture meant a great deal, even though their gloves protected her from skin contact. Hers were thick ski gloves; his were the same black leather he’d worn on Samhain. She fixed her gaze just below his eyes and said, “Lord and Lady bless you, Julian.”
“Thank you.” He nodded at the rest of them, and then Liesel came forward and hugged him hard.
“Bring her back to us,” she whispered.
The air thrummed with rising power, and the sidhe stepped through.
It almost seemed as if part of the riverbank’s lost vegetation had reappeared, amidst the flat and featureless snow. Even in the dark night, the colors glowed vivid and strange. The portal wasn’t a door, though; it didn’t exist only in two dimensions. The effect was more like a summoning circle, with a patch of the Otherworld appearing on the ground, and the sidhe stepping out of it.
Julian sensed Liesel extending her support to the rest of the Circle, and them accepting it. Led by their empath’s resolve, and escorted by Grayson and the female Guardian, they went through, and then the portal vanished behind them.
Leaving him alone with the other Guardian and seven of the Seelie.
“Are you prepared?”
Shard asked.
Julian answered by shrugging out of his coat and tossing it outside the snowy circle they had once blasted clean. He scarcely felt the cold as he carried the box to the center of that space; his mind had already sunk inward, preparing. Falcon and Shard took up positions on either side of him, Shard in the east, Falcon in the west. The other Seelie positioned themselves in a larger ring around the three of them, spacing themselves equally.
Then they grounded themselves in the earth and began to pull.
The sidhe chanted nothing, made no ritual gestures. They didn’t have to. For them, magic was a matter of will alone. Even for them, however, this was an epic undertaking, and although their serenity never wavered, he felt the effort.
Then he felt something more: the motion of the worlds. They shifted slowly, grudgingly, stretching in unaccustomed ways in order to draw closer to each other. The sidhe part of his own nature hummed in response. Closer. And closer.
They slid together with a stomach-turning wrench.
Robert and Liesel materialized, seemingly from nowhere, standing in the south and the north on either side of Julian, and beyond them the rest of the Circle appeared in the gaps between the sidhe.
But Julian knew, before he even saw them, that the two worlds had merged. He sensed it, bone-deep, and for the first time in his life knew that he was home. A tension he hadn’t felt until it was gone melted away. The human world rejected the part of him that was sidhe, and the Otherworld did the same to the human … but in this place he truly belonged.
He wanted to luxuriate in the feeling, but he sensed the strain in Liesel’s shoulders, felt in his own jaw the force of Robert’s clenched teeth, and knew he couldn’t spare the time. He had to hurry.
Julian reached out with his mind to find Kim.
It wasn’t like seeking someone between worlds, or even like searching within the mortal world. It was easier than either—far easier. Standing in this place gave him strength he’d never had before.
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