“Paradise is just a few short steps away,” I told them as I waved them on.
I grinned and grinned at more and more people, feeling like a robot or a revenant, a specter on a loop fated to repeat the same words and actions over and over again for eternity.
“Welcome! Welcome! Food and a bed this way!”
My skin overheated despite the smoke and mist screening me from direct sunlight. My back was scorching hot, almost on fire. And where the hell was all that screaming coming from? Voices behind me cried out in alarm and fright. Death screams. You could always tell a death scream when you heard one.
Another voice—it was crazy, but it sounded like it was in my own head—begged and demanded I listen to it.
“Tell them to go back! Tell them not to enter the barrier!”
I was so sad I wanted to step into the path of an oncoming train and didn’t know why. How much longer would I have to stand out here?
“Welcome! Welcome to the road to—”
“Lunari? Can you hear me? Bobi is the best tracker there is. We’ll find you.”
Afternoons passed. Mornings and evenings. My boss was angry with me and told me I couldn’t leave the road until we had enough people on the train. My legs shook. My back ached. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Or had anything to drink. My eyes squinted against the dust and smoke. I grew weary and started to drift off.
“Over here!” Bobi said. “I’ve got her.”
Aril, Reeps, and Geraint hurried to a door in a maze of tunnels. Locks covered its surface.
“Shit,” Reeps said. “It’s a hundred-lock door. You get one lock open, move onto the next and the first lock closes again. There’s no way through this.”
“We’re running out of time,” Aril said. “She’s worse. I can feel it.” A pause. “Lunari!”
Reeps and the others waited for Aril to tell them I’d replied, but he shook his head. I couldn’t. My abilities allowed me to watch from a distance, but that was it. My mind was fractured in too many pieces, and Gorsydd remained firmly in control of the one with the power.
“She’s either lost in whatever she’s dreaming, or she doesn’t have the strength left to talk,” Aril told the others.
“Let me get started,” Reeps said. “Bobi, give me a hand. Try to keep the locks from closing after I’ve opened them.”
Reeps reached into a pocket for a small leather case with a locking hasp. He raised the lock to his lips, whispered into it and the hasp fell open. Inside was a lock pick set, but not an ordinary one. It included a few of the standard locksmith tools, but most strayed wildly from the ordinary, a needle-thin bone with a wicked crook on the end, another pick made from a striped fish barb, a detached, hollowed out thumb turned squeeze bulb that held sparkling gray powder inside, a spool of spider webs heavy as string.
Aril paced back and forth in the tunnel while Geraint waited a short distance away, calmly keeping a lookout.
“Pardon me, signorina.” An old man with a withered arm stopped me in the middle of my welcome speech.
“Yes?”
“Will I be able to sleep in Venice? Someplace warm, I mean?”
“Of course! We have warm, safe beds for all.”
“Safe?”
“Safe,” I said and smiled to reassure him.
“Grazie,” he said.
He continued on.
My hand shot out to grab his emaciated forearm before he could pass.
“Don’t,” I blurted, the warning urgent.
“Don’t what, signorina?”
I looked at him, opened-mouthed, trying to find what I wanted to say. My thoughts fogged over.
“Thank you,” the old man said after I could come up with nothing more. “Bless you.”
He shuffled onward.
I squatted down with my ass almost touching the ground, wrapped my arms around my legs and began to rock mindlessly.
“Out of the way,” Aril ordered Reeps and Bobi. “This is taking too long. Get up.”
“Aril, you can’t,” Reeps said. “The scar.”
“Back up!”
Reeps and Bobi scrambled out of the way.
Aril faced the door. He studied the locks, each one different in shape, design, and complexity; each one requiring a different spell to unlock. He took a deep breath, shook out his hands to limber them up. Raised them to the two rows at the top of the door. A second deep breath, a moment to collect himself, and he swept his hands from left to right over the surface of the door.
Unlike his death magic, which he always worked in black, the lightning that arced from his fingertips and into the keyholes was royal purple, intense and bright. Dead bolts shot back and twisted open in a loud clatter that made the three fae with him hold their breaths in fear someone would hear.
Back and forth, from row to row, Aril’s hands shot fire into the mechanisms. In less than a minute, every single one of the hundred locks had sprung open.
Aril had also started to bleed.
People had to be feeling the tremors in the city above. The earth beneath Venice threatened to remake itself. Magic quivered through everything: the walls, floor, and ceiling of my cell, each quake the equivalent of a tuning fork struck against stone and vibrating to a specific frequency. Each wave that passed through me sang of magic darker and more ruthless than the last. When Ashia woke, she would take everything, without mercy, and leave no one alive.
I listened for Aril with the small fragment left of my mind that was my own. I prayed the powerful dream version of myself would run out of people to charm and beguile into rushing toward their own personal Armageddons. I begged my body to burn out and quit like Titus had promised it would, before I could feed the queen’s daughter any more of what she craved.
Mostly, I stared numbly into the dense haze on an imaginary dream highway, rocking and waiting for the next group of bedraggled innocents to arrive.
Geraint led the charge down the passageway that ran from the unbolted door to where Bobi assured them I was being held prisoner. Aril was close behind, his chest wound bleeding profusely. Geraint had a protective streak in him you’d never guess from looking at those eyes and refused to let Aril out front.
“Kings don’t lead the advance,” he said.
“Like hell they don’t,” Aril said. Blood dripped onto his arm down to his hand on the grip of his broadsword, making it slick in his grasp.
“Not if they don’t want to be the first one picked off by the enemy.”
“I was never a king.”
“Royalty is royalty,” Geraint said.
“Not anymore. You owe me nothing.”
“Do you two want to stop arguing and get on with it?” Reeps said. “Here they come.”
While Aril, Geraint, and Bobi all carried traditional sídhe swords, Reeps preferred his gun. His limp, the same limp I’d observed in the mouse that visited me in the cell at the Doge’s Palace, made him ill-suited to close combat.
From an outside vantage point, it would have appeared the four fae were on the wrong side of justice. Aril and the others sprinted toward an army of brights resembling angelic warriors who existed solely to bar the gates of heaven from the unworthy. Bellowing war cries spelled to make it sound as if there was an even larger army behind them in the corridor, Aril and Geraint ended up side by side with neither leading and attacked the first two defenders who rushed them. Aril’s sword clanged against another. He winced in pain as the blow jarred his chest wound. His male opponent, a fae with alabaster skin, saw his advantage. Letting go of his sword with one hand, he drew back his fist to punch Aril in the chest. Aril anticipated his move, spun around, and hacked down where the fae’s neck met his shoulders, driving his blade through collar bone, arteries, spine, and lung, splitting his upper torso diagonally in two. Geraint dodged a thrust from a female fae with Herculean shoulders and eyebrows grown from solid gold, impaling the woman through the heart.
“There’s no room to fire!” Reeps shouted. “It’s too narrow in here.”
&n
bsp; The corridor was only wide enough across for Aril and Geraint to push the fae back. Stuck behind them, neither Bobi nor Reeps could engage the enemy.
Another two fae went down, Aril and Geraint taking them out simultaneously.
“There’s too many,” Geraint said. “Kill two and two more take their place. We’ll never get through them all.”
More fae shoved their way forward even before their fellow guards hit the stone floor. In tandem, twin fae materialized fireballs in their hands, flung them at Aril’s blood-soaked chest and scored direct hits. Aril folded over and staggered back into the corridor wall.
Geraint cursed. “What did I tell him about being out front?”
“Down!” Reeps said.
Geraint dropped, and Reeps fired his automatic at Aril’s assailants. He emptied half a clip into the twin fae before slowing them down, and they crashed to their knees.
“I hope you brought plenty of ammo,” Bobi said.
“That’s the problem with bullets and fae. Takes too many to kill them.” Reeps winked at her.
“Aril!” Geraint called back over his shoulder and got no answer. The dark fae didn’t dare take his eyes off the tens of fae massing in the corridor to look back for him.
Beat back by the one fae after another, Bobi and Reeps, too, couldn’t break concentration.
“Aril!” Reeps called while shooting a fae who tried to gut Bobi.
No response from Aril.
“Is he down?”
“They’re sending their weakest in first,” Geraint said. “To tire us out before we can fight our way to the end. Their best warriors will be waiting there to finish us off.
“We need to move the battle out into the open,” Reeps said over the clash of blades and pop of gunfire.
“You want to tell us how?” Bobi asked.
“Aril!” Geraint shouted again.
Aril was hurt!
It wasn’t bad enough that he bled from his scar; he’d been injured in the fight. My ability to observe him and the others from afar cut out abruptly. Did that mean he was gone?
Sweet god, please don’t let him be dead.
They shouldn’t have come after me. I wasn’t getting out of this alive.
Less and less of me was drawn into Gorsydd’s perverted version of pre-merge Venice. Similar to a normal dream when I was about to wake, the narrative of the road and fields of food in the dream became harder to sustain. My waking mind grabbed and held onto more of the real world and stubbornly refused to fall back into the false one. Either Gorsydd knew I was surfacing and could no longer control my dream, or my usefulness to him was reaching its end, and he didn’t care.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!
No matter how much I hammered at myself, I couldn’t. Was my sleep permanent? Would I never be able to wake?
Rewrite the dream. Manipulate it. Find a way to do something with it. You’ve done it before. You can do it again.
Thunder boomed underground. A sick, spectral wind howled through the walls of my cell. It left my prison intact, but the already noxious space reeked of fetid power. Even dreaming, I felt myself gag. I couldn’t be the only one who’d experienced it. Others among the fae must have, too. You couldn’t possess the slightest bit of sensitivity to your surroundings and not feel the catastrophic psychic temblor shake the hollow.
Ashia had opened her eyes. She’d taken her first waking breath as Princess of the Dark.
I had to find Aril.
“What the fuck was that?” Bobi said, choking.
She and Geraint steadied themselves in the wake of the blast, while up and down the corridor, fae bright and dark alike retched.
Reeps, on hands and knees, hacking up half his stomach’s contents, still managed to reach for the gun he’d lost when the quake had knocked him to the floor. A shadow crossed his arm, and he looked up. Slicing down through the air, a broadsword aimed for the hand he extended toward the gun.
“Reeps!” Bobi cried.
Lightning struck the blade. Power sizzled its way up the sword straight to the hilt, where magic forced the fae warrior to reverse his grip on his weapon. Another bolt of power targeted the sword and up it flew. A head covered in blonde dreadlocks softer than silk tumbled and rolled, the swordsman having just decapitated himself.
As one, the three dark fae all looked to their rear.
Aril, feet planted firmly, hands outstretched, faced the bright fae army. Fire so strong the bones in his hands were visible through his illuminated flesh, mushroomed outward and formed sigils in the air of ever-increasing size and complexity.
Reeps, Bobi, and Geraint were trapped in the line of fire. They looked at each other, eyes wide, and cried a warning simultaneously.
“Duck!”
Aril’s power roared over their heads and down the passageway.
My dreams located the battle in a downward sloping corridor not far from my cell. Initially—recalling the dream I’d had of the two of us on Guariti Dolori—I’d thought it was Aril connecting with me, and that was why I could follow their attack on the bright fae’s underground stronghold. However, the clearer my thoughts became, the more I realized Gorsydd had unintentionally taught me how my power worked. I was the one connecting to Aril and the other three, not the other way around. I was a dreamer. Gorsydd had called my power rare. I also now understood why he’d valued it so much. My dreams could reshape reality, but those alterations weren’t restricted to my immediate surroundings. Dreaming allowed me to take my power and abilities elsewhere.
Aril’s blood loss mounted. He was rapidly using up what power, and thus life force, he had to reach me.
Bright fae bodies crumpled on the passageway’s stone floor. Some would never get up again, but distressingly, too many of the brights roused themselves, even with Aril’s black amethyst-colored lightning around their bodies. Reeps unloaded six bullets into the nearest one and then reached in his coat for a new magazine. Geraint and Bobi stormed ahead, weapons slashing and gutting as many as they could catch off-guard.
It wasn’t enough. Those at the far end of the passageway regrouped for a charge of their own. The three dark fae would be cut down almost instantly, and Aril, pushing himself down the corridor on willpower alone, would die seconds later.
I gathered up the remnants of power Aril had let loose on the brights, allowed myself to dream, and changed it.
Everywhere Aril’s energy clung to a bright fae, I twisted reality to rekindle it. Dark purple lightning transformed itself into blue fire as my dream took hold. A fae went up in a whoosh of flames. And another. And more. I sought out the tiniest leftovers of lightning and torched each fae to which Aril’s power stubbornly clung. Gorsydd’s army ignited. Retribution for thousands slaughtered and burned in Lord Acura’s fields.
Fires burned bare skin and clothing and hair, but no matter how long the conflagration lasted, nothing was consumed. The brights only felt what it was like to burn alive. They had pledged themselves to Gorsydd’s plan. They should know the horror they had inflicted on the innocent.
Bright fae beat at their tortured skin. Some tried rolling to smother the flames. Most ran screaming back down the passageway, crying for water to douse the flames. It wouldn’t help. Nothing would put them out until the magic exhausted itself. Nor would they die. These perfect bright fae would be perfect no more, forever scarred by the part they’d played in the genocide outside the barrier.
Astonished at my magic appearing out of nowhere to rescue them, Aril and the others gazed down the corridor littered with fallen brights to where the passage opened up into a cavernous space with an earthen floor.
Gorsydd stood just inside, facing the passage. His sídhe sword—braced tip down in the dirt at his feet—gleamed with white gold that matched his hair. Some of his warriors may have deserted him, but twenty more fresh reinforcements lined up behind him.
Reeps gamely fired at Gorsydd. Every bullet that left his gun, regardless of aim, was attracted to and deflected by the bla
de, while Gorsydd watched patiently, his face blank of any signs of concern or fear.
Dripping sweat and breathing heavily, Geraint and Bobi started down the passage toward what would likely be their last battle, but Aril shouldered them aside.
“He’s mine.”
My efforts to help Aril and the others had cost me. Gorsydd was right. I couldn’t store power and didn’t have the vast magical engines of the naturally born fae. I had a human body, and my stamina could not sustain the drain on it. In that at least, I had something in common with Aril. We both had limits. Both of us were perilously close to the ends of ours.
Nothing about me hurt any longer. Oddly, I wasn’t worried by that. I didn’t think my frigid prison cell had warmed any, but I no longer shivered. The need to wake became less critical by the minute, while at the same time, Gorsydd’s fake pre-merge Venice grew less and less real to me. In my depleted condition, I could almost believe none of it had ever happened.
“I’ve dreamt of this day,” Aril told Gorsydd and brought the enormous sídhe sword arcing down toward the bright fae’s head.
Metal rang against metal as Gorsydd blocked the blow a finger’s width from axing his skull in half.
“You aren’t the only one, Cai,” Gorsydd said. “It will be a great pleasure to ram my sword through the heart of the fae who killed my brother.”
Perversely, even after the holocaust he’d engineered at the barrier, Gorsydd still hadn’t turned dark. His eyes remained bright. His tall figure retained its disturbingly perfect complexion. He hadn’t personally killed anyone, after all. He’d only directed the massacre.
Strong magic imbued the weapon in his hands. He beat aside Aril’s sword, then drove for the bloody wound on Aril’s chest. Aril deflected the jab, and the two opponents’ blades locked together, dark fae and bright fighting for dominance.
“Your brother raped Eolande.” Aril spat at the fae’s leader.
Gorsydd smiled. “And weakling that she was, she chose the greater crime, to kill herself.”
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 22