City of Shadows

by Pippa Dacosta

  I fumbled at my side for my daggers, but the world blurred and my head throbbed. “Infinite fae power trapped in a weak human shell. You took too long, Alina. You and your human whining. I can’t wait. I’m ready. The London fae are ready. It’s our time.” He laughed a cruel curl of laughter that echoed about the construction site. “I’ll take Arachne’s draíocht right out of you.” He yanked me close and licked his tongue up my cheek. I screamed at him, but the sound never made it to my lips. I raged, kicked, but my body wouldn’t respond. His smooth, warm tongue slid easily across my skin, and behind its path draíocht crackled—my draíocht. Strength and warmth draining away, and a hollow cold soaked deep inside.

  When he pulled back, blood glistened a stark red on his lips. “Love isn’t the worst we can do.”

  He held me out at arm’s length. I sensed rather than saw the hungry, yawning space below me. With one hand I clawed at his grip, while the other fumbled to get a grip on my dagger.

  “Welcome to the new fae world.” He grinned, and in the brilliant floodlights green fragments of draíocht shone in his eyes. “Shame you won’t be around to witness it.”

  He let go.

  The floodlights rushed away. Wind whistled by me. Through the blurred madness, I saw Samuel standing over the pit, his lips twisted in a wicked smile. Hot rage broke over me, but it was too late. Everything was too late.

  The shadows rushed in.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Breathing. Breathing was important. In and out. The pain receded and rushed in, back and forth, over and under, it gathered me up and crushed me down. Breathe—in and out. It wasn’t over. I wasn’t letting go. So many things left undone, a life not yet lived. Samuel wasn’t taking that from me. Nobody would ever take my life from me. In and out.

  “I’m about to heal you. To do so, I need to touch you. Your instincts will demand more. Control it. I’d prefer not to add to your pain.”

  I heard Kael’s whispered words as though they were meant for someone else, someone in another room perhaps. But his eyes, they were fixed on me. Darkness swirled in their silver shimmer.

  His cool hands touched against my cheeks, and pain ransacked my body. I bucked and tried to push him off. He’s killing me! He pressed a hand over my mouth and pushed into me, holding me pinned under his weight.

  “Be silent,” he hissed. “We’re not alone.”

  It hurt. It hurt so much I fled inside myself, shrinking away from the burn, but I glared back at Kael with all I had left. If he was going to kill me, let him look me in the eyes and do it.

  He turned his head away, jaw set with tension. “We can’t stay here.”

  An intense prickling sensation shot down my leg and up the side of my face. My skin crawled and tugged, as though someone was stitching it together. Kael closed his eyes and bowed his head. He’d gritted his teeth and was clearly fighting his own battle. The needlelike prickles ran across my back, and a dull ache throbbed where the pain had seconds ago burned.

  “Take only what you need,” he hissed.

  The strain on his face was my doing, I realized. I was drawing his draíocht into me, or he was giving it freely. Either way, Kael was helping—not hurting. His eyes widened a fraction and immediately the pain subsided, replaced by a tingling numbness. Where was Samuel … ? Did Kael know? Had he seen what happened? Were they working together? Plots, betrayal, and deceit. Where the pain had gone, now confusion sank its claws in.

  “Enough?” he whispered—so close his breath cooled my cheek. He lifted his hand away from my mouth.

  I nodded, not quite ready to reply. Kael could have let me die.

  He let go completely, breaking the touch, but didn’t pull back. A shiver swept over me, and finally I could take in my surroundings. Darkness. Dampness. I smelled wet earth and metal and decay. The tunnels. We were in the subway tunnels, but this one was new. No tracks. Not finished.

  Samuel. Sickness rolled through me. I slumped to the side and pressed a cool hand to my mouth, trying to keep my insides from rolling up my throat. Samuel tried to kill me.

  “Listen well,” Kael whispered, bringing me back to the now, the tunnels, the darkness, and him. “I have no intention of hurting you. If you plan to attack me, I suggest you save it for after we’ve escaped the tunnels. We’re not far from the station. I had to drag you here, away from the lytch.” He hesitated and studied my face while his own tightened with concern. “Samuel opened Under’s catacombs. All of them. Every beast that came through with us during the Purge roams free.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed and pushed the acidic burn of hate aside. Later; I could rage later, but not yet. “He took my draíocht—” My voice fractured. He’d almost killed me.

  Kael closed his eyes and bowed his head. I heard the sound of his teeth grinding where he clamped them together. Samuel’s betrayal hadn’t been reserved just for me.

  “He fooled us both,” Kael said. “Played on our dislike for one another to prevent me from looking too closely at him.”

  I shifted against the wall, trying to reacquaint myself with a broken body that didn’t feel quite like mine. Numb in places, sensitive in others. And inside, I was still in pieces. Samuel had been grooming me from the moment I’d joined the FA. He’d seduced me with lies, and he’d almost won.

  Something shuffled in the dark. Kael jerked his head up, waited, and then whispered. “Unless you can tackle the worst of Faerie in your current condition, we need to keep ourselves hidden long enough to find a way out and alert the FA to Samuel’s betrayal. My phone won’t get a signal in these tunnels.” He checked both ways, up and down the tunnel, but couldn’t possibly see much farther than a few feet. The darkness was so thick it seemed to swirl like smoke. “This city is about to be overrun by nightmares.”

  “Did you know?” I asked in a broken growl.

  Always so proud, so strong, it was an act, just like all the other fae. The Kael who faced me now, he wasn’t a general, just someone who’d made a terrible mistake. He didn’t reply, but the truth was written plain as day all over his face.

  “He’s trying to weave a path back to Faerie. If he’s strong enough to hold the path open, we’re going to need you to help stop whatever comes through.” His firm fingers locked around my arm. Instincts wanted me to pull away, but I’d yet to fill up those empty parts of me. The smothering darkness churned as he pulled me to my feet. I clutched tightly as his arm, and his grip responded in kind. “You have questions,” he said with a softness I’d have thought him incapable of had I not heard it myself. “So do I. We’ll get our answers.”

  I leaned against Kael as we quietly moved farther into the darkness. A faint breeze drifted through the tunnels, cooling my face, and bringing with it dust and distant rumbles. Trains, I hoped.

  “How are you here?” I asked quietly. The tunnel walls shuddered. I heard rattles and sighs, scurrying things, and my own thudding heart.

  Kael’s grip on my arm relaxed enough for me to wobble on my own two feet. He nodded, satisfied I was able to stand on my own, and continued forward. “Samuel believed I’d appreciate his secret.” Kael ground his teeth. He glared ahead, avoiding my eyes. “He wanted me to share in his revolution and brought me here to show me exactly what he’s capable of. As soon as I felt the nearby flood of draíocht, I expected the worst. We fought.” Kael’s throat moved as he swallowed and looked away. “I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him. I should have—I …”

  “You’re not part of this?”

  “No.”

  With that one word, the tightness in my chest eased a little. Perhaps we weren’t enemies, at least, not right now.

  “There were signs,” Kael went on. “I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to keep the peace. I trusted him, but … there were bespellments. His appetite for draíocht, his mistakes … Signs I should have seen.” I thought of Reign’s words, how he’d dug up the dirt on Samuel’s mistakes and waved them in my face.

  “I barred him from the briefing, bec
ause I suspected something, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t see the truth.” Kael saw the questions in my eyes and replied with a sigh, “Samuel is an elder’s son.”

  The elders. The ones who had purged Faerie. “He told me the elders killed his family.”

  “That’s true, as far as I know.” Kael stopped and lifted a hand, bringing me to an abrupt halt beside him. The dark sighed around us. Tunnel air threaded through my hair and breathed against my face. Loose earth rattled about our feet as a train passed somewhere close behind the walls. Then all was still once more.

  “Elders are forbidden to breed—Faerie has enough problems without more elders disrupting the balance of power.” Kael moved forward, his strides more confident than mine. “It would seem one of them defied their law and bore Samuel in secret. They must have placed him with a foster family, hidden him away, either for his own safety, or as a weapon they might use later.” Kael paused, but only to gather his thoughts.

  “In a land built on secrets and lies, neither can be hidden forever. The elders must have discovered the lie and sent the Hunt to execute the boy.” Kael shook his head with regret and smiled despite the gravitas of his words. “Nothing escapes the Hunt. I should have realized then, as soon as he told me that, but he was just a boy.” Kael’s pale face tightened with pain, but not the physical kind. “You think me heartless, but I had a son. He fell in the war, as our finest often did. I let my past dictate my decisions. Samuel was … He helped me capture some of the family I’d lost.”

  I swallowed, tasting the metallic air at the back of my throat. My strength was returning with every step, and with it my thoughts were clearing. There was no doubt; Samuel had used Kael’s past to his advantage.

  “With no family to guide him,” Kael said, “it’s likely he didn’t know what he was until much later.”

  I remember Samuel’s words from the FAHQ rooftop. They want to prove to the elders we aren’t dead … We could control this city, this land, and its people. He told me everything, and I was so willing to believe Kael was behind this, that I didn’t see the truth behind his words. “He knows now. And he’s tired of hiding in the dark. He wants to be recognized.” Faerie’s elders killed Samuel’s family. This was about more than a revolution, he wanted to prove his worth. He wanted revenge on everything and everyone who’d ever thought him less than what he was born to be.

  The rumbles grew louder. We followed a curve in the tunnel until the walls opened up to reveal a silent platform. Kael helped me over the platform’s edge. I gritted my teeth against the pain pounding in my head, but the worst of it was passing.

  “You still have your daggers?” he asked.

  “You’d have to pry them out of my dead hands,” I replied, risking a smile. Kael could easily have done just that. The general had shared his draíocht and patched me up when he could have finished what Samuel had started. I owed my life to a man who’d once killed me. I’d spent so long hating him, that when I looked at him on that platform, draped in shadow and saw the man who’d been betrayed by someone he thought of as a son, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. I knew that betrayal; it twisted in my gut like a thing alive. We shared that. He knew it too, might even have been thinking the same as he looked back at me.

  A crawl of power slid across my skin. A warming sensation wrapped around me, like sinking into a hot bath. It was delicious, but Kael’s cool glare warned against letting it have me.

  “Draíocht,” he said. “More than seems possible. He’s spent a great deal of time here. In the absence of any obvious draíocht source, he must be drawing the life of London into him. You’re feeling the residue of that process. The overspill.”

  Unseen draíocht licked against my skin. If he could waste this much energy, exactly how much could he contain? I searched for any signs of anything unusual but saw only an empty, half-finished platform.

  “Faerie’s beasts feel it too. They’ll be close.” Kael moved by me. “Come.”

  My feet felt heavy and my mind slow. I didn’t want to leave. I could soak the draíocht into myself, drink it down and absorb its strength. I needed it, to make myself powerful. “Infinite power trapped in a weak human shell.”

  Not anymore, Samuel. I know what I have to do now. “Wait, let me—”

  The shadows rippled. A blast of warm air pushed from behind, followed by a rhythmic snarl that no earth beast could muster. Kael spun, freeing his daggers with a flick of his wrists. His silver eyes shone in the dark, and then the words began. Foreign fae words, smooth and intoxicating all on their own. His voice traveled into the dark and poured into my ear, trickling through whatever defenses I had left and seeking out the ancient part of me. Power. Surrounded by draíocht, I smelled the rich and sweet scent of Faerie, of home. A tiny spark inside me, the one I’d kept hidden, started to burn. I turned my head.

  The lytch—made of shadow and night—pulled the dark around itself and reared up in front of us. I saw it then, the truth of it. Eyes like embers, teeth like the daggers I had in my hands. So vast, its bulk pushed against the curved ceiling. Had I seen it before, really seen it, I’d have been afraid. Its eyes laughed. It knew me. Saw the truth of me as I saw it. And as Kael’s words whirled around us, we stood united, the lytch and I. Old draíocht.

  “You seek to control me when you cannot control yourself, Arachne’s host,” it said, speaking into my mind as the queen had once done.

  Control? No. “You can’t control the dark,” I responded.

  A smile darted across my lips. Kael’s ancient words rolled on, warming me through in the same way the draíocht had.

  I limped forward, toward the rippling dark.

  The lytch tucked its beast-like chin in and brought its head low. Its elongated snout was easily the length of my leg. Its teeth, the size of my fingers. As it settled its chin on the platform, oily shadows flowed around it. I reached out a hand. It snuffled. A forked tongue flicked out and swept over the back of my hand, barely there at all but real enough for me to feel the spritz of draíocht.

  “I do not know this place. It is hard and empty. But I know you,” the lytch said.

  Kael’s words were distant now, far away and half forgotten.

  “Would you like to go home?” I could take it into me, as I had its companion. I smelled like Faerie, and the general’s words settled around it, reminding it where it came from. This monster wasn’t bad; it was lost. In that, we were alike.

  “There are people here, little fae construct. People the elder’s son used. Many have perished. They too, are lost, like us.”

  People? Becky?! Fear and hope fired through my weariness, jolting adrenalin into my veins. “Show me,” I said aloud. Please let it be her. Hope fluttered in my chest like a thing alive.

  The lytch turned so fast that a wave of shadow washed over me, snatching a gasp from my lips and drenching me in draíocht. I staggered but pushed forward. The lytch rippled along the length of the platform into the tunnel. I ran into the dark, Kael’s calls chasing me.

  The tunnel rumbled, and ahead, our disused tunnel joined another. A subway train burst into the opening, sparks dancing around its wheels as it clattered and thundered through the junction. In seconds, it was gone again. I watched its red lights fade in the dark and then turned my gaze back toward the similarly red eyes of the lytch.

  It sailed into the active tunnel, pulling the dark with it so that it absorbed every one of the maintenance lights it rode over. I jogged along the tracks after it until it surged through a closed maintenance door and out of sight.

  I tried the door. It didn’t budge. The ground rumbled, the walls too. Another train, or something worse?

  “What in the name of Magh Meall are you thinking?” Kael growled, pacing up to me, his eyes just as deadly as those belonging to the lytch. “We need to leave now, while the lytch is elsewhere. We must return to Holland Pa—”

  “Becky. She’s here!” I kicked at the door, but all it did was rattle the hinges. “Help me.”
/>   He reached for my arm. “The lytch will kill us—”

  I shook him off and kicked the door again. “I’m not running from it, Kael.” More rumbling shuddered through the tunnel walls. “It’s helping me. It’s lost, that’s all. It’s not trying to hurt anyone. It’s just confused, like the rest of the damn fae.” This time when I slammed my shoulder against the door something creaked, but it still hadn’t budged. Kael was looking at me, his gaze harsh and hooded with shadows. Whatever was going on inside his head, I didn’t have time for it. Becky didn’t have time for it. “Are you going to help me or wait for the next train to pulverize us?”

  “What are you expecting to find in there?”

  I threw my hands up. “Becky, and others!” He was still looking at me like I was nuts. “He’s not been feeding on the ‘life of London.’ Wake up, Kael, he’s been taking people, bringing them down here and taking their draíocht, like he did with me. He took Andrews’s sister! They’re inside. The lytch told me. Help me open this door.”

  His gray eyes widened with shock. He nodded once and stood beside me, eyeing the stubborn door. “On three. One, two, three—”

  The door flung open, sending us both stumbling into the dark. The stench of rancid meat hit hard, watering my eyes and coating my throat. I gagged and briefly turned away.

  “Death,” I heard the lytch say from above. “All around there is death where once there was life. No life here. The elder stole it all.”

  A small hue of orange spilled from the tunnel’s maintenance lights into the chamber, illuminating enough for me to see Kael standing among the bodies. So many bodies I couldn’t see the floor for pale hands and hollow-eyed faces.

  “Kael.”

  “Hundreds,” he whispered.

  The chamber traveled deep into the dark and the dead covered every inch.

  “The elder’s son has their power now, little fae construct.”

  I looked up and saw the thick ripple of dark above, like the night sky without its stars. “Do you know where he is?”