by Leigh Kelsey
The ground seemed to have stilled. Oisìn stared up at the crack of sky visible, like a lash through the earth around us. “You’re right,” he said, but begrudgingly.
I took his chin in my fingers, made him look at me. “What is it?”
His eyes flickered; he glanced away. “Nothing.”
“Oisìn.”
He sighed, a muscle in his jaw feathering. “Fear Doirche is here. I can sense him.”
I blinked, cold suffusing through me. “You can feel him?”
He nodded. “Because he’s my sire.”
“Shit,” I breathed. I’d never considered there would be a sire bond between the two of them before. “Does he know where you are? Do you know where he is?”
Oisìn’s eyes darkened further, cutting off from me completely in a way that scared me to death.
“Oisìn,” I breathed, brushing his jaw. “Talk to me.”
“He’s trying to … to call me to him.”
“Look at me.” He did—excruciatingly slowly. “You’re not his anymore. You never belonged to him—you belong to yourself. Remember? He doesn’t own you, doesn’t control you. Not anymore. You’re free with us.” His dark green eyes didn’t lighten, didn’t fill with love or heat or even torment and guilt. They stayed dark and empty. My heart folded in on itself, I leant up and brushed a careful kiss against his bottom lip. “He doesn’t command you, Oisìn.”
He said nothing for a minute, the world going on around us—loud shouting and panic on the ground above us—until he finally said, “I know. I know that with my mind but it doesn’t change what I feel with the rest of me.”
“What about your heart?” I whispered, barely wanting to ask. “You once told me that everything else was Fear Doirche’s but this—” I laid my free palm over his chest, heaving with every breath. “Was mine.”
“It is,” he replied, still distant and dark. My last hope of bringing him out of this died. This hold Fear Doirche had on him, and whatever was going on inside his mind, there was nothing I could do to free him of it.
“We need to get out of here,” I said, turning away to look at the fissure we’d fallen through. I wanted to ask him if he’d be better or worse if we got closer to the fae god but I didn’t dare. “It’s not that high. If you help me up, I might be able to get out, and then I can pull you up like I did in the guardhouse.”
He nodded, his eyes unfocussed.
“Is he—is he speaking to you?” I whispered.
“No,” he replied. And that was all.
“Right,” I breathed. “Okay. Can you help me up?”
He bent without a word, without any sharpness coming back to his eyes, and made a cradle of his fingers for me to step into. If he was going to throw me up like a cheerleader, I’d have to be very, very careful to grab hold of the ground. If I missed… Broken bones and agony. I didn’t let myself think about it.
“One,” I counted. “Two. Three.”
He stood, hauling me through the air, and my eyesight narrowed onto the lip of the fissure where grass was visible. I grabbed for it as I neared, the grace of being reborn allowing me to reach out at the right moment, hooking my nails into grass and dirt and roots. I dangled precariously for a second before I ground my teeth and pulled myself free, my arm muscles burning. Nowhere near as terrifying as back at the guardhouse.
I scanned my surroundings quickly, panting and shaking strength back into my arms. Anouk and Rita were casting a spell, chanting, wands out and furious expressions on their faces. Finn and Allen spotted me and instantly sprinted over, the relief on Allen’s face profound.
“We couldn’t find you,” he gasped, pulling me up and into a hug.
“The ground fell open,” I replied. “Oisìn’s down there.” I lowered my voice, looking at Finn. “He’s in a bad way. Fear Doirche is in this world, and he’s calling to him. Trying to control him, I think. Oisìn’s fighting it.”
Finn’s blue eyes filled with pain before anger cleared it. He laid flat on the ground, leaning into the crack in the field to help Oisìn out. I grabbed my mate’s arm and Allen grabbed his jacket, and between us we hauled him out. It was a million times easier with the three of us than it had been by myself that time.
“Fear Doirche is here?” Finn asked.
Oisìn only nodded.
“Where?”
“St Mary’s church.”
“Of course,” I breathed. At least our plan had worked. “We need to get there. Now.” I was thinking about the friends we’d sent to fight there, about my father.
“No,” Oisìn said. “You’re not going near him.” Flat words.
I swallowed, not sure what to say but knowing he was fragile and I needed to be careful. “I might be the only one who can kill him,” I said gently. “I need to be there, Oisìn.”
“No.”
“Why not?” I coaxed. His face did not change a millimetre and my heart grew tight. “Why don’t you want me to go near him?”
“Because he is death,” he replied in that same empty voice. “And pain, and misery, and everything that is bad in this world and the next.” A muscle at his jaw fluttered. “I will not have you anywhere near him again.”
Finn took a step away, the others moving into my peripheral vision. Giving us what small bit of privacy they could allow.
“I don’t want you anywhere near him, either,” I rasped, my throat suddenly full of glass and sharpened edges. “How many times have we almost died, almost lost each other because of that monster? You think I want you in the same place as him? I don’t.” My voice broke. I clenched my jaw until the immediate emotion passed. “But he needs to die, Oisìn. And I can do it—my power can kill him. And I don’t want … I don’t want to face him alone,” I whispered. “Not again, not this time. I’ve had enough of fighting him without my family.” I lowered my voice to a mere breath on the freezing air. “Without my mate.”
Oisìn said nothing, his eyes shuttered and staring at something distant, seeing something I couldn’t or so focussed inwardly that he hadn’t even heard what I said. But he grit his teeth, bones grinding in his jaw, and reached for my hand.
“Okay,” was all he said.
I sagged in relief.
“Rita,” Allen shouted, and as if in answer to his shout, everyone else converged too. Kwame appeared from nowhere, the look on his face foreboding, and Sceolan and Bran bounded over in black dog forms. I tried to pull myself back together, my insides feeling like they’d been mashed to a pulp. “We need to go!”
“One minute,” she yelled back, not turning from where she stood before the ruins that had been more castle-shaped a few minutes ago. Now they were blown out, crumbling, bits of mortar and stone everywhere. Kwame had obviously been caught by debris because blood flowed from a wound on his bicep, but he didn’t seem affected even as I reached for him in alarm.
His wide mouth curled into a grim smile. “I’m barely hurt.”
I made myself nod, step back. We would be hurt worse than this, and at the Mistress’s castle, we already had been hurt worse than this; it was irrational for me to be so worried. Still, I scanned the rest of my family for wounds but we’d been far enough away to have been mostly unscathed.
I jumped half a mile as Finn’s phone blared an indie song. He answered instantly. “Yes?” he demanded. “We know. We’re on our way now. We’ll be five minutes, at the most. I see. Yes. Thank you, Waylon.” Finn ended the call and met our expectant stares with a hard look. “The vampires have started coming through the portal. Fear Doirche is with them.”
“What about our friends? The people who are there, fighting?”
“They’re failing.” Finn raised his voice and yelled, “Rita! We’re leaving now.” At the tone of his voice, she broke away from the other two witches and ran over.
“I’ll take you.” She produced a different crystal from her bag, this one pale blue and threaded with white. “Grab this quickly. Close your eyes.”
I did as she said, mak
ing sure Oisìn touched the stone, and in a second we were gone.
EXPOSURE
We arrived to chaos, and not the kind I’d been expecting. There were vampires everywhere, people of every appearance, height, and race, wearing clothes so ordinary that they jarred me—jeans and jackets or sleek dresses or shorts, not battle armour or chainmail. Friends were indistinguishable from enemies, fighting all along the paths, between the gravestones, down the hundred-and-ninety-nine steps, and even by the abbey we’d transported to. But what I hadn’t expected was the thump-thump of a helicopter hovering in the overcast sky, a woman leaning out of it with a professional camera, her hair whipped by the wind like my own. Other, smaller shapes flitted through the air and it took me a while to place them as drones.
“Finn,” I breathed, panic shooting through me like ice water in my veins.
“I know,” he replied, reaching for my hand and Allen’s with his other. I was still covered in a fine layer of dirt from falling into the fissure at Middleham Castle, and so was Oisìn, but fear erased all my discomfort, all other feeling.
“Pip!” A short woman with pastel silver hair and a leather jacket came racing over, looking as panicked as I felt. Over her shoulder, I thought I glimpsed Scarlett’s wave of blonde hair slicing through the air as she fought, but it could easily have been someone else. The silver-haired woman grabbed onto Pip, shaking her enough that her blonde pixie cut flopped into her face. “This is mental! There’s cameras everywhere.”
“Have you spoken to Claudette?” Rita asked urgently. “Does she know about all this?”
“Yes!” the silver-haired witch replied emphatically. I tried to focus on the conversation but I was distracted by a vampire being thrown across the car park of the abbey. My breath caught in my lungs, dizziness coursing through me. So close—that was so close. “She says there’s nothing we can do, but I think I can do something. Make all these people forget and make the pictures disappear.”
“How?” Anouk demanded, her voice like thunder. She kept her dark wand at her side, her spine rigid. “Nothing short of blood magic can do that, Estelle.”
Estelle’s eyes flickered. “Just—leave it to me. I have a plan. Is this … is all this because of what you told me? That faerie?”
Rita nodded.
“Right. You try to deal with this, and I’ll…”
Her voice trailed off, her attention on something over our shoulders, and when I turned, I knew why instantly. Fear Doirche hovered above the crowd on a wave of magic that made me shiver deep in the void of my soul. His white hair was tied at his neck, no scar to show what we’d done to him in his study in the pocket world. A whimper crashed out of me at the sight of him and seemed to jar Oisìn. He reached for me, touching me for the first time since Fear Doirche had hooked his will deep in his blood and bones, his hand gripping my bicep hard. Air flooded my lungs as my throat loosened and I gulped it down, shaking.
I wasn’t ready for this.
People fought all around us, the sounds of swords clashing and claws scraping, arrows whistling and the gurgle of throats being torn out, bodies being thrown or falling to the mud between gravestones, those stone monoliths shattering. And the smells… The metal of so much blood, iron of weaponry, the tang of dirt and foul, heavy air, grime so thick around us that I could feel it on my skin, taste it coating my mouth. Vampires marched and dove and slashed, every undead body a weapon. Every slice of blade, claw, and fang was messy and desperate, panic hanging around the church like a fog… As I stood on the border of that battlefield, I didn’t think I could do it.
But then Finn was drawing a sword and marching into the fray, Allen and Kwame at his sides, and Bran and Sceolan raced ahead, snarling—and I walked numbly after them. I had a single dagger, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to use it, but Oisìn’s hands folded around mine, pried the blade from my fingers, and—and curled them around a long, sharp stake. The wood was dark, mottled, and old. This stake had many stories to tell and as a sucking, hungry sensation pulled at my fingers, I knew this was a hunter’s stake.
“Mine,” Oisìn said in a tight voice, the muscles of his shoulders, his neck, so tight, like he was still fighting Fear Doirche physically, mentally, and emotionally. “I took it from Abriana. When she…”
When she lay in the spare room, dead and cold and staked. When Graham Harrington and Rosa sent her as a message.
I looked up at Oisìn, glimpsing him through the hardness of his eyes, hidden far behind the mask but there. Everything he’d been through with this stake, and now he was giving it to me…
“Thank you,” I whispered, the words inadequate. I meant to say more but motion blurred over his shoulder and I lunged automatically, vampire grace colliding with protective mate instincts. I buried the stake, warm and alive beneath my fingers, in the chest of the vampire who’d set Oisìn in her sights, and as she gurgled, thrashed, then fell, I found myself in the centre of the battle.
FURY
I tried to keep sight of Fear Doirche as I fought my way closer to St. Mary’s but I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me. Everything was motion and fangs and blades around us, too fast, too frantic and desperate and every second bringing me a hair’s breadth from death. Each breath scraped up my throat, my arm muscles straining, and my lungs battered and greedy for more than the slips of air my tight chest allowed. I couldn’t see anything except the next sword or claw or fang, the next enemy. At least I managed to keep Oisìn, Allen, and Sceolan in my sight but I’d lost track of the others.
Oisìn stayed close to me, keeping the bulk of vampires away from me. His stake pulsed, warm and alive in my palm as I thrust it at whatever body parts came towards me. Throats, chests, arms, stomachs—I stabbed the sharpened tip of the wood into whatever I could reach, adrenaline racing through my body and everything sharpened, my senses heightened and body on high alert. My vampire grace made each movement precise. I don’t know how many vampires I managed to actually hurt but I kept lashing out, breathing hard, on the edge of a horrified shiver.
I wasn’t sure whether it was the blood spilling over the stake, the act of killing that first vampire, or my touch, but the stake felt hungry beneath my fingers. It urged me to hurt more and more vampires. It was only when we got to the graveyard around St Mary’s and I saw the sparse number of people fighting that I allowed myself to pause. I spotted Sinclair’s silver ponytail, saw my mum—my mother—fighting with a twisted bit of metal I was sure had once been one of her sculptures. Bran was easy to find, snarling and hunting down the last of our enemies, her muzzle dripping blood and gore, and Kwame prowled with his heavy sword hefted, tracking any vampires that made a wrong move with blood pouring from shallow wounds on his upper body. I didn’t know where the witches had gone but I frantically scanned the bodies on the ground—all with gruesome wounds, some with black, gaping holes where their hearts should be, others with limbs and even heads missing—trying not to be sick as I searched for my friends.
Sceolan raced to join his brother. Allen navigated the gravestones and bodies to Kwame, demanding to know where Finn and Scarlett were. I let Oisìn protect me as I trudged through the maze of bodies strewn across graves and blood-drowned grass. Every still body I scanned made my limbs heavier, the lead weight in my chest sagging a little more with dread.
The helicopter had vanished at some point, the vicious wind it stirred up gone and the whump-whump sound silenced. I hadn’t noticed it over the noise of hissing, snarling, and metal clashing, but now it was too quiet. The media were gone, and a quick scan revealed the tourists and bystanders missing too, all cameras removed. I wondered if the silver-haired witch, Estelle, had achieved what she’d suggested and fixed all this, but I was too worked up and buzzing on fear and fury to care much.
That was a problem for later. Now, as I turned over the last body with my boot and exhaled in relief to see an unfamiliar face, I focussed on the immediate danger.
Finn and Scarlett were missing, and Fear Doirche was
nowhere to be seen.
I marched over to Sinclair and my mother, clinging to fury and refusing to be scared. I’d been terrified before but now I had this rage blazing in me and I wasn’t letting go of it until we were all safe.
“Where’s Finn?” I demanded of the head vampire.
“I don’t know, Elara,” he replied tiredly. His coat was gone, the white shirt he’d had beneath spattered with blood and his skin stained too. I let my eyes slide to my mum, not sure what to say or make of her being here. I scanned her for any injuries but beyond being shaken, it looked like Sinclair had kept her from the brunt of the fight. I knew if I allowed myself to ask why she was here, I’d end up looking as tired and numb as Sinclair. So I didn’t.
“Right. Thanks.” I turned on my heel and headed for Kwame and Allen instead.
“He told me to tell you nothing,” Kwame said before I could even ask. He held his head high, his back straight, and I knew he wouldn’t break his word to Finn. So I looked at Allen, and I looked at him hard. I was being too harsh but I couldn’t care. I couldn’t stop. I needed it done—I needed Fear Doirche dead.
The stake in my hand, lit up with Harker power, agreed. The fae must die.
“Find him,” I snarled at Allen. “You can find him with your sire bond.”
“I tried,” Allen said, shrinking into himself. “I really tried, Elara.”
“Try harder,” I snapped.
Oisìn’s hand closed around my wrist and even though I wrenched back, he was stronger. He pried the stake from my fingers and—I sagged. All the fury left me feeling weak and terrified. I spared a glance at my mate, at the stake in his hand, but I didn’t want to think about that.