But as they emerged from the tunnel of dark-leaved rhododendron, Rhys’s voice brushed her mind like the wings of a moth in the dark. He is the Queen’s servant. He is not to be trusted…
Puck rubbed his hands together. “Here we go.”
Cait felt like a bug, trapped between the lowering bowl of the sky and the mountains stretching in every direction. She shivered in the wind from the western peaks. A storm was building, piling the clouds with a massive hand along the horizon. High, high above, the sky broke through, the moon a flat, pale disk against the deepening blue. But the clouds were gray, and as they rolled forward, darkness covered the hills.
“And here is your ride,” Puck said, as if he were announcing her date for the prom.
Stones clattered, and a black, shaggy pony trotted out from among the black, rounded rocks. Its fat sides were as solid as the hills and its mane was long and tangled.
Cait regarded it with misgiving.
The pony rolled its yellow eyes back at her, exposing long, yellow teeth in a grin like Puck’s.
“Is it…safe?” she asked.
Puck shrugged. “It is the Pooka. It is not safe, but it is fast. The Hunt will ride along the ridge lines and harry the woods until they find the wolf. You must be with the leaders at the end, or they will tear him to pieces before you can stop them.”
“Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?”
Puck hesitated. “The sidhe do not take sides. It is not our nature. But I called your father my friend once. And the child Rhys…I had the minding of him often enough. He was a solemn baby.” His smile flashed, and this time Cait did not recoil. “Mayhap you will make him happier.”
The wind blew. The clouds boiled up. The Pooka stamped its hooves, striking sparks from the rocks. Above the mountains, heat lightning played. The rumble chased it across the sky.
“It will be soon now,” Puck said. “Mount.”
Cait scrambled awkwardly on the Pooka’s broad back as a man strode out from the trees, a horn at his side and hounds at his feet.
She blinked and almost lost her balance. Not a man. Seven feet tall, he was antlered like a stag and all gold: gold skin, gold hair, gold horns, gold…eyes.
Rhys’s eyes, in the gold man’s face.
Her breath left her.
“Who is that?” she whispered, trying to keep her teeth from chattering, desperate not to attract the horned man’s attention.
Puck looked surprised by her ignorance. “The Hunter King.”
Okay. If there was a queen, it made sense there would be a king. But what freak of fairy jealousy or politics would drive him to hunt the Queen’s half-human, bastard son?
The hounds milled around the horned king’s legs, lifting their heads to the wind. They weren’t truly dogs any more than their master was really a man. Their long legs were oddly jointed, and their lolling tongues were the color of flame.
Cait shivered and averted her gaze to the hunter, solitary under the darkening sky. “He looks…familiar.”
“Ay, he would. He is Rhys’s sire.”
Her heart, which had been pounding in her chest, lurched into her throat. “But…Rhys’s father was human.”
“He was once. No longer.”
The Pooka snickered, tossing its head in the rising wind. Cait gripped a handful of raggedy mane.
The storm was almost upon them, roaring and tearing through the trees. Lightning forked over the hills. The Hunter King raised his horn to his lips and blew one long note that rolled like thunder.
“Be ready for it!” Puck shouted.
Ready for what? Cait thought, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, the clouds stooped, and the Wild Hunt descended like a flock of geese invading a pond, the powerful rush of their passing like the beat of a thousand wings, blinding, deafening. Their clamor filled the sky.
She stared in disbelief as the king strode into the heart of the storm, his hounds surging forward. The wind swept them up and hurtled them into the sky.
The Pooka bunched its great round hindquarters like a cat pouncing on a mouse and bounded into the wind. Cait yelped and tightened her clutch. She had no saddle, stirrups, bridle, or reins. Twisting her fingers in the Pooka’s black mane, she clamped her thighs to its barrel sides and hung on for dear life.
The wind howled. Cait was blinded, buffeted by the rain and the hair—hers, the Pooka’s—whipping into her eyes. But through the streaking rain and mane, she glimpsed other things riding the storm beside them. Lightning flickered off helms and skulls, glittered in eyes and spear points. She gasped and turned her face into the Pooka’s warm neck.
Between earth and sky they swooped and lurched, following the path of the peaks, touching down on the mountain balds where no trees grow. She knew them from her maps: Wayah Bald to Copper Ridge, Rocky Bald to Grassy Gap. Some crests were overgrown with shrubs, some cleared, but it made no difference to the riders. In and out of the sky, they coursed, sizzling down on grassy flats or churning over the tops of the bushes, scorching the earth with lightning.
If she fell, she would die.
She leaned flat over the Pooka’s bunched neck, her fingers tangled in the coarse mane by its ears. Her arms and legs burned. Her hands were numb and throbbing, as if she were back in gym class, twisting above the basketball court, trying desperately not to slide down the climbing rope.
Lightning cracked. The Hunter King, glowing gold, strode like a giant among the peaks. He sounded another long note on his horn, and the hunt brayed and whooped and roared and cackled in response.
She could not see their quarry. She could barely see the ground. But she felt the hunt’s fierce satisfaction swirl and swell, like foxhunters in England who claimed to love the joy of the chase, not the thrill of the kill.
Which was fine, Cait thought, from the perspective of the hunters, but it didn’t change the fate of the poor fox. Panting. Exhausted. Torn to pieces.
You must be with the leaders at the end, or they will tear him to pieces before you can stop them, Puck had said.
You’re nearly too late.
Please, she thought, and No, and Rhys!
Squeezing her legs on the Pooka’s sides, she hunched over its neck, scanning the ground.
There, a darting movement at the edge of the trees…
There, a lean shadow against the darker shadow of the rocks…
Flattening itself under trees and scrub, zigzagging through weeds and across open spaces, driven from whatever refuge it had sought by the marauding hunt, ran the wolf who had been Rhys.
Cait’s heart stopped.
Cornered against a cliff face, ringed by fallen rock, there, at last, the wolf turned at bay as the Hunt tumbled out of the sky.
CHAPTER 8
Too late, too late, too late…
Cait braced as the Pooka hit the ground in the midst of the swarming hunt, its flat black hooves sliding and scattering rocks. The shock of their landing jarred Cait’s bones and loosened her grip and snapped her teeth together. She fell off, over its shoulder, under its hooves.
The Pooka stepped delicately around her and away with a whicker of horsy laughter. Bastard.
Cait lay on the hard ground, struggling to breathe, too stunned to move. And maybe her precipitous arrival had stunned the hunt, too, because they didn’t seem to be moving, either.
The wolf howled, a rising minor note that hung on the damp night air and shook her heart.
Rain streaked down. It plastered her hair to her head and her clothes to her body and ran into her eyes. But the cold water in her face revived her.
She pushed to her elbows and then to her knees. She lurched to her feet, using the rocks for support.
The wolf had slipped around her, facing the hunt. Its head lowered. Its hackles raised. The hair stood up all along its back. The white hounds circled just beyond reach, snarling and darting in short, snapping forays. Dwarfed and surrounded, the wolf lowered its head, growling deep in its chest.
&n
bsp; Cait clenched her hands, her nails biting into her palms. Why didn’t it seek the protection of the cliffs at its back?
And then she realized.
It—he—Rhys was defending her.
Protecting her.
Still.
The rain abated. Beyond the eager, snarling hounds, the Wild Hunt pressed in silently. The fuzzy moonlight reflected in the gleam of harness, the glitter of eyes. The hunter raised his horn to rally his hounds to attack.
And Cait stepped forward and stood beside the wolf.
The Wild Hunt groaned and swayed like trees in the wind.
She reached down blindly, seeking comfort from the thick fur beneath her fingers. The wolf’s lean body vibrated with rage and fear. Or maybe that was her trembling. Her knees felt like rubber bands.
The hunter turned his antlered head to regard her with his golden gaze, and she trembled even more. There were no whites to his eyes, and his pupils were long and narrow like a goat’s.
“Step aside, girl.” His voice was deep and rusty with disuse. “This is none of yours.”
She was stubborn. She had always been stubborn. And maybe stubborn was as good as brave. Cait stuck out her chin. “Yeah? Well, he’s not yours, either.”
A creaky, hollow sound escaped the hunter’s mouth, like the opening of an empty chest in an abandoned house. With a shock, Cait recognized he was laughing.
“His dam claimed otherwise,” he said.
The breeze died. The Hunt stirred and fell still. Cait glanced beyond their glinting spear points and ghostly banners and saw the Queen, stiff in her red dress, shining with her own faint silver light, watching them.
Shit.
“He doesn’t belong to either of you.” Cait shoved her clenched hands in her pockets, feeling the brush of warm metal across her knuckles, feeling the wolf beside her, tense as a coiled spring. “Not anymore. He’s mine.”
The hounds whined eagerly as the hunter considered them both with his awful, golden eyes. “He does not bear your mark,” he said at last.
Clumsy with hope, Cait fumbled the necklace from her pocket. The links blazed briefly in the moonlight. She knelt and fastened the chain around the wolf’s hairy throat, ignoring the leap of her pulse at the hot breath on her cheek, the white fangs so close to her face.
Panting a little with fear and triumph, she dropped her arms from around the wolf and turned to confront the Hunter King. “He does now.”
The Wild Hunt sighed. The Queen cried out, in shock or protest.
And warm, hard arms came around Cait from behind and pulled her back against a lean, muscled chest.
“Dear heart,” Rhys’s shaken voice said in her ear. “What have you done?”
Joy rose in a wave, flooding her heart, choking her throat. “I, um, bound you.” She turned in the circle of his embrace, gazing up anxiously into his eyes. “It’s a binding chain, right? So they can’t have you. You’re mine.”
“Much good may he do you when he is dead,” said the Hunter King.
But Cait wasn’t giving up. Not with Rhys transformed and back in her arms. “If you want him, you’ll have to go through me,” she said fiercely.
Rhys touched her cheek, turning her face to his. “You are not much of a barrier, dear heart,” he said, still somewhat unsteadily, but with that undernote of laughter she had heard and loved at their first meeting.
“You make a poor challenge.” The Queen’s cold, silver voice fell like moonlight in the rocky clearing. “And a worse bargain. Use your head, girl. Why should both of you die?”
Cait stiffened. All her life she had been the good girl who made smart choices, who listened to her head instead of following her heart. Until now. Until Rhys.
Do as your heart bids, Puck had urged.
Well, she’d tried. Hadn’t she tried? She’d faced down the Queen and the King and the hounds, she’d ridden the damn Pooka through the storm. She had figured out the riddle of the necklace and turned Rhys back into a man.
And it was all for nothing.
They were going to die anyway.
What could she do against the spears and swords, the tearing claws and trampling hooves of the Wild Hunt? Throw rocks?
She looked at Rhys, despair rising in the back of her throat, and swallowed hard.
The smile in her lover’s eyes faded like the last promise of daylight. “She is right,” he whispered. He stroked her hair and cupped her face in his hands. “Don’t let my sacrifice be for nothing. Save yourself. Go home. Grow old. Remember me.”
He kissed her then, so tenderly her heart quivered and her eyes filled with tears.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
She blinked fiercely. “Screw this. He can’t have you.”
“You can’t stop him,” Rhys said, so reasonably she wanted to punch something. “And if you anger him, you’ll lose your own chance to go free.” He released her. “Go now, dear heart. Go quickly.”
“You.” Cait turned on the Hunter King, her heart burning in her chest. “You gave up everything for love once. For the Queen.”
“Caitlin…” Rhys warned.
She shook her elbow free of his grasp. “I’m not finished.”
The Hunter King’s handsome, inhuman face was devoid of mercy or understanding. But he hadn’t killed her yet, so she kept talking, praying for him to listen, willing him to hear.
“You let yourself be sacrificed because she didn’t love you. Well, Rhys let himself be sacrificed, too. He knew when she turned him into a wolf that he could be killed, that he could die. So, okay, he’s not immortal anymore. He’s got to die eventually. But he doesn’t have to die tonight. He doesn’t have to die at your hand. He could still have a long life.” Cait caught her breath. “With me.”
“Better for him if he died,” the Queen said.
She swept forward in her red dress, and the Wild Hunt wavered and drew back from her like shadows from a flame. The King’s hounds whined. “Would you condemn our son to long years on this shadow earth, to crawl in pain and sickness to slow death? Better to end it now.”
Rhys’s face was white in the moonlight.
She was losing him, Cait thought in desperation. She was losing.
“Please,” she said to the Hunter King. “You were alive once. You were in love once. Please. Let him go.”
The hunter turned his proud, antlered head toward his son. “Is that your will? To live with this mortal woman and then to die?”
“Yes,” Rhys said. “If she’ll have me.”
“So be it.”
“No!” The Queen’s voice rang like a trumpet. “I will have what is mine.”
The horned king’s eyes blazed. “He is yours no longer. You gave him to me when you summoned the Hunt. And I release him.”
Cait turned and grabbed Rhys. “Are you sure?”
He smiled crookedly. “That I love you? Yes. That you’ll have me? Not at all.”
She flung her arms around him. “Of course I’ll have you.”
He held her close, pressing his lips to her hair. Her pulse sang in her ears, but she could still hear the strong beat of his heart. A fresh wind blew through the clearing; and when she opened her eyes, the night was clear and bright, and the clouds were streaking away toward the horizon like horse-[ ]men chasing the dawn.
“But I nearly betrayed you,” Rhys said.
“When the Queen wanted you to bind me,” Cait guessed.
“Even before then.” His mouth set in a straight line. “Ursus would not have attacked you except to drive you to me.”
“Oh. Well.” Cait exhaled. “That was bad. But it wasn’t like you knew me then.”
His eyebrows raised. “Are you always this forgiving?”
“No,” she admitted cheerfully. “But it’s only fair to tell you if you plan to seduce me again, I intend to forgive you.”
He smiled at her in the moonlight, his eyes hot and the curve of his mouth tender. “I am happy to hear it.”
They
kissed, and her love for him shook her heart and warmed her down to her toes. The kiss deepened, with tongues and teeth, before Cait remembered their audience and broke away with a gasp. But when she glanced around the clearing, all trace of the fair folk had drifted away with the breeze. They were alone.
In the mountains.
In the dark.
She sighed as the real world impinged on her fairy tale. “I don’t suppose you can summon a little sidhe magic to get us to a shelter for the night.”
“I can do better than that,” Rhys said.
“Really,” she said skeptically.
He nodded. “Look around. Do you recognize this place?”
She surveyed the circle of trees and rocks, the tall cliff face and the overhang behind them. “Not really.”
“It looks different without the snow.”
She gaped as the meaning of his words sank in. The cliff? Okay. And the overhang. The firepit and a narrow fissure in the rock and…Was that his abandoned camping gear, concealed in the shelter of the rock? “But that was miles from here!”
“There are—you might call them shortcuts—in the sidhe world,” he said. “You traveled farther than you know that night.”
“Wow.” She watched as he stooped under the shelf in the rock and dragged his sleeping bag into the moonlight. “So are we going to be able to get home the same way?”
“No, I am fully mortal now.”
She had to know. “Do you regret it?”
He looked up from building a fire. “Regret that I can live with you and make a life with you? That I can have children and a family? No. I love you, Caitlin.”
She moistened her lips. “Would you say that if you weren’t wearing that necklace?”
He grinned and straightened from his position by the fire. Reaching behind his neck, he unfastened the chain.
“I love you, Caitlin,” he said, holding her gaze. “And as for this…” He spilled the golden links in her hand. “You can make it into rings or save it for our children. I don’t care.”
He kissed her then and drew her down on the sleeping bag spread by the fire. While the moon climbed in the sky and the forest sang around them, he held her and stroked her and loved her. He took her, took everything she had to give and gave everything of himself in return.
Over the Moon Page 15