Larger than a horse, she had shrunk to fit into the clearing or I would have been bird food by now. Head spinning, I hated admitting she still wasn’t trying to kill me. She couldn’t yet. She needed my blood. Putting myself this close to the final tether was not the best decision I had ever made. She would peck at me until I collapsed or—even worse—she would regroup and drag Shaw into this. As much as it pained me, I knew what I had to do. I had to sever the final tether before she bullied her way through it. Mac was still responsible for setting the threshold into Faerie. Surely he could thin a section or set a new tether to get Shaw and me home? If not, he was about to make my room a permanent addition.
Not expecting my change of direction, the Morrigan rustled her feathers and cocked her head to see what I’d do next. So long, safety. I turned and bolted into the forest. More familiar with Faerie than I ever had been, it was simple to tune out the ever-present white noise and focus on the hum of the final tether.
I hit the tree line before the Morrigan blurred into action, shrinking yet again to match my speed. Jerking my head forward, I stopped watching her transformation and started looking where I was heading. Smashing into a tree—again—was not the way to save the mortal realm, Shaw or me.
My calves burned and lungs blazed as I pushed harder, faster. Weaving through tree trunks with low-hanging limbs slowed her down. It slowed me down, too, but I recovered faster.
The size of a real crow now, she pumped her wings in my periphery, her body shrinking to give her more speed. Cutting toward me, she flew right over my head and sank her talons in my hair, scraping my scalp and making my eyes water. I swung my arms over my head, not caring if my fists never made contact. It kept her off me, and that was enough. Just a little farther...
At last the final tether came into view. A perfect circle set into the ground, it was paved with stones in concentric rows to create a miniature amphitheater with three levels of seating, each ring dipping lower into the earth than the first.
Pulling up my magical sight hurt with my head throbbing, but I did it. I got all the information required to sever the tether then tucked my arms to my sides and ran. Agony stole my breath when I murmured the Word to reopen my wound. Immediately, warm liquid trickled through my fingers. I clenched my fist tighter and pushed harder. My nostrils were raw from sucking down the chilly Autumn air, and it felt like someone had taken an icepick and jabbed it into my side.
The Morrigan’s cries grew frantic. She caught up, talons ripping hair and beak tearing skin. One frustrated grab left me clutching the small crow in hand. I flung her hard against a passing tree and watched her tumble to the ground, wings spread across the leaves and orange legs twitching.
Out of time, I slid into the amphitheater and began smearing blood across the threshold.
“No.”
The sound of her graveled human voice startled me, and I forced my shaking hands to smooth faster. Her voice worked just fine when magically projected from her crow form. That she had opted to shift before confronting me told me the running was over.
One of us wasn’t leaving here alive.
“I can’t let you cross realms.” Sitting back on my calves, I wet my lips and spoke the Word, the coordinates for this tether. Behind me, a fierce scream rose. I sat still until the snap of disconnection told me the tether was truly severed.
“There must be another way,” she snarled. “You wouldn’t have trapped yourself here.”
“I thought you wanted me to sever the tethers,” I taunted. “Well, you got your wish.”
Her fingers speared through her hair. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand you killed my father.” I stood and dusted off my knees. “You left me no choice.”
“He will rise.” At my glare, she amended, “Don’t play coy. You knew this.”
Her petulant tone left me cold. Had she killed Mac only as a matter of convenience? Did it matter? In the mortal realm, death was permanent. Humanity was fragile. Mortals didn’t get second chances.
“What about Rook?” I challenged.
“My son is my concern.” Her lips flattened. “He has survived worse and come out stronger.”
Okay, so maybe she hadn’t snuffed either out of existence, but murder was murder, and it was damn inconvenient. You couldn’t go around killing people because you figured they would recover later.
Swaying from blood loss and exertion, I planted my feet to keep me standing. “Daibhidh?”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “He shouldn’t have discounted the ogre.”
A flicker of pissedoffedness ignited in me at what the consul had done. Liar. Murderer. He bought his death when he sided with the Morrigan. Now he had paid for his loyalties. His slate was wiped clean.
“You have ruined everything.” Calm stole over her. “Centuries of planning... Gone. Poof.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I don’t get it. I figured you wanted the threshold erased.”
“Erased? No. Try reinforced.” She threw back her head and barked with laughter. “You thought I would share my Utopia with the dregs of Faerie? The mortal realm is flush with prey and ripe with potential. I would never have given away such riches so cheaply. It has been my hunting ground—mine alone—for more centuries than the length of most fae memories.” She smoothed the hairs away from her face. “I grew tired of my leash. I wanted a clean break. I wanted to cut my ties to this realm.”
Understanding made me grateful I had chosen severing the tether over saving myself.
“You orchestrated all of this.” I should have suspected her sooner. “King Moran’s death—everything.”
Her lips curved into the sly kind of smile house cats wore after canaries went missing. She let the accusation stand, let me read what I wanted into her expression. Her silence answered loudly for me.
“Mac witnessed it.” He confided that much to me himself. “That’s when he went into hiding. To cover your tracks, you and Daibhidh blamed his absence on him tracking down the killer, which is exactly what everyone would expect him to do.” It felt right, so I kept going. “Except you needed his blood. So when Mac vanished, you enlisted Rook. You sent him to fetch me, figuring it was win/win. Mac would either come out of hiding and turn himself in to save me once word got around I was here, or I would counteract his magic and you wouldn’t need him anymore. You could bleed me dry instead.”
“You’re being dramatic again.” She rolled her eyes with a snort. “You bled all over Faerie under Macsen’s supervision and seem perfectly healthy to me. What difference does it make who pulls your strings?”
Rather than answer her, I fed her another line of thought.
“I bet you were surprised when Rook married me to steal the throne out from under you.”
“I was,” she admitted. “It required a level of cunning I never suspected he possessed.”
“And you rewarded that cunning by attempting to murder him as soon as I left Faerie.”
“If I wanted him dead, he would be dead. True dead. He proved himself a valuable asset.” She shrugged. “I was willing to let him live, as long as he kept his distance. I could have used an emissary in Faerie.”
“What about Daibhidh?” He was the logical choice. “What did he want from you?”
“The same as he no doubt asked of you.” She smirked. “He wanted to graze in fresh pastures.”
Uncertain what type of fae that made him, and equally sure I didn’t want to know, I didn’t ask.
“You plunged Faerie into chaos—into the war they’d been craving—so no one would notice the tethers had been cut until it was too late. By the time the houses finished fighting, the fae would have been sealed in this realm.” I rubbed my forehead. “You planned on bringing Macsen along so he could renew the threshold on the other side, trapping the old fae here and limiting your competition.”
“If he hadn’t gone to ground,” she assured me, “I never would have brought you into this.”
I scoffed,
knowing better. “Yes, you would have. One way or the other. You can’t control Mac.”
Unruffled, the Morrigan inclined her head. “Perhaps you’re right. It would have been so simple. I had no idea until you became a marshal that he even had a daughter. Oh, I wondered what his ties were to the mortal realm, but I didn’t know. No one did. Then the king died, and I knew Macsen would run to you.”
I battled against the grief I had caused him. Mac had known the Morrigan would target me when he vanished. He had been in Wink, masquerading as Diode, watching over me and waiting, since King Moran died.
“Moran didn’t die,” I reminded her. He had help. “You killed him.”
“His death was a small price.” She waved her hand. “Think of it. Me. Living where and how I choose. No more being yanked back across realms after completing a summons. No more waiting for the dinner bell to ring. I could have fed without compunction. I would have been...free.”
“Free? Why should I care about your dreams of freedom?” My voice lowered to a growl. “What about all the death-touched fae you kept imprisoned in the caves? What about me? Daire and Odhran delivered me to Balamohan on your orders.”
“That was the one right thing they did,” she sneered.
Her vehemence surprised me. “What do you mean?”
“They took the charmed portals I gifted them and vanished. They haven’t returned to Faerie.”
I laughed in her face. “Betrayers through and through then.”
“I see nothing amusing in the matter, and when they are discovered, their insolence will be punished.”
“You don’t get it, do you? Is it really so amazing that your followers aren’t loyal? That they would ditch your special brand of crazy the first chance they got? It’s more shocking to me that any stick around at all.” I marveled at her gall. “Balamohan feasted on your daughter, and you allowed it to happen. If you would do that to your own child, then what wouldn’t you do to anyone else?”
“Branwen made her decision.” The Morrigan’s face blanked. “She chose her selkie over me.”
I sucked on my teeth. “With a mother like you, I can’t imagine why.”
Maybe the rift between mother and daughter had nothing to do with Branwen choosing her lover over her family and everything to do with her ability to leave Faerie for the mortal realm without repercussions. She could have lived a good life with Dónal if her mother hadn’t sent Balamohan to acquire her for his death fae menagerie.
Now the jailed fae made more sense. The Morrigan had tasked fae like Balamohan and others to gather her a food source large enough she could survive in the mortal realm without being noticed. The mass murder of humans would paint a mark between her shoulders. Fae weren’t anxious to come out of the closet to humanity, and they wouldn’t thank her for exposing them. Unless she turned on her own kind first...
A spate of fresh kills would expose her location to the conclave before she cemented her base of power, but the methodical abduction of fae over centuries? Well, that was harder to trace. She had cultivated the means to sustain herself for as long as the savory bits of death shaved off her victims satisfied the twisted cravings she harbored.
Memories raised gooseflesh down my arms and made my stomach clench.
Balamohan had fed on me, used his sticky-slimy tongue with serrated teeth on the end to cut out a plug of my skin and drink deeply of me. Death clung to fae like me. I was a portent, after all. What he did went beyond collecting the debris of my nature. He delved into the part of me marked by age, by past sickness and injury, by the natural passing of time, and he devoured the dark spots that I had earned from living these nineteen years. Balamohan could have kept me alive—and undying—forever.
“You are a single lash in the eye of eternity.” The Morrigan’s bleak gaze unfocused. “You can’t understand what it’s like to feed on death while living in a realm of immortals. You can’t know how the gnawing hunger of forever feels in your gut while you wait for the next summons, the next meal. Strife and war are just as filling as death, and I have been denied those too, by your father’s policies. His dream of peace became my unending famine. I am a goddess.” Rage simmered in her tone. “The realms should tremble before me. The fae should fear me and my teeth the way they once did. Half-bloods and cowards secure behind their conclave badges should not have the power to control me. Not me.” Her body shook with barely leashed fury. “I am tired of starving. I am ready to feast.”
“I’m sorry.” I understood the burden of hunger. More than she would ever know. “I can’t let you enslave others to save yourself. People shouldn’t have to suffer for you to live. This ends here, now.”
“You want to end me?” A vicious snarl curled her lips. “I can’t die. I am death.”
She slid a serrated blade the length of my forearm from an air pocket, and my stomach knotted.
My voice trembled. “Killing me solves nothing.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Her knuckles whitened on the handle. “But it will make me feel better.”
She lunged, slicing the air inches from my throat before instinct kicked in and I dodged her aim. Power flooded my runes, lighting me up, igniting the hunger low in my gut that resonated with hers.
“Your magic can’t hurt me.” She danced out of range. “Did Rook teach you nothing?”
The light show wasn’t a threat. It was the magical equivalent of my stomach rumbling.
I reached for the knife strapped to my thigh and came up empty. Are you kidding me? I had used it for practice when Mac taught me how to make my own air pocket and forgotten to remove it. Who does that? Me apparently. I wasn’t nearly as proficient as the Morrigan at snagging items out of thin air. In the time it took me to focus and reopen the blasted pocket, she could poke me three new holes.
“Is that it?” She cocked her head. “You have no defense?”
The best answer I could manage was gaping at her like a suffocating carp. Classy.
“This will be easier than I thought.” Faster than she finished her sentence, she sprang at me.
Hands sifting through the air in front of me, I latched on to my pocket and spread my fingers. The Morrigan’s aim was true, but her form was sloppy, and I whirled to one side, using the flat of my forearm to deflect the blow while fumbling with my pocket. She continued the motion, spinning left, her shoulders brushing against mine as she whirled behind me. Instinct brought my head around as a whisper of air parting sang in my ear. Her blade shot forward, nicking my throat. My eyes closed on a prayer and popped open when she braced a hand on my shoulder and began jerking her arm backward.
“Release me,” she hissed near my ear.
“You’re the one wrapped around— Oh.” I dared turn my head. “That was unexpected.”
Her blade had rung the hole made by my hands, and just as my hand had entered Mac’s pocket that night in his kitchen, mine was nursing her fingers. Fear clenched my grip around her wrist, and I tightened the mouth of the bubble, trapping her hand and her blade inside the pocket.
I yelped when her teeth sank into my ear, and slung my arm hard into her gut. She bent forward, and I threw all my weight behind slamming my elbow into her spine. She dropped facedown with a grunt, but I hit the dirt with her. My tailbone screamed in agony, but I still gripped her wrist through my pocket. Delayed reaction to the sheer depth of the crap I was in dumped buckets of icy adrenaline over me. The shock to my system left me jittery...and inspired.
I firmed my grasp on the mouth of the pocket and leaned backward, drawing my hands up past her elbow, and the fragile-seeming bubble expanded, coating her in a wash of invisibility. I lost my grip when her battle cry startled me. Her other fist hit my spine, and I grunted, arching my back. Holding the pocket with one hand, I sank my elbow into the base of her neck once, twice, until she slumped to the ground. Sheer panic sent me into hyperdrive. I pushed to my knees and straddled her hips, bringing her arm with me. I had to flop across her back to reach her other arm, but I managed
to thread it through the widening mouth of the pocket too. I had her locked inside the bubble up to the elbow when she flung her head back and hit me in the jaw with the crown of her skull.
Fireworks exploded in my mouth.
Blinded for a moment by pain, I struggled to hold on to her, knowing this was my one shot. She wriggled under me, managing to flip her body over by the time my vision returned. Hatred boiled in her black eyes as she stared up at me, and her narrow chest heaved. She bucked her hips, but I held her wrists.
“You think that pathetic bit of child’s magic can hold me?” The Morrigan thrashed her head and wedged her heels into the damp ground. “No common spell can contain a goddess. It is impossible.”
Death-touched fae were impervious to other death magics. Other benign spells? Not so much.
Too bad I only knew a handful by heart. At the moment, the air pocket was the best I had.
“It doesn’t have to last.” I shot forward when her knees hit my throbbing tailbone. Ouch. “It just has to keep you out of my hair long enough to handle business. Then I couldn’t care less what you do.”
A knowing smile crept over her face. “You mean fetching your incubus.”
I hesitated, and that was all the opening she needed.
“I gave him to Bháin.” She was all smiles. “I thought a plaything might soften him toward me.”
My brow furrowed. “Shaw can’t...”
My thoughts spun toward the complex glamours Bháin was capable of fabricating. If he wanted Shaw to believe he was me, then Shaw stood an ice cube’s chance in hell of resisting him. Oh God. I would kill Bháin if he used Shaw that way.
Old Dog, New Tricks Page 17