by SM Reine
She could tell that her feet were lifted from the sidewalk, though.
The assassin was trying to carry her away.
“Luke!” she cried, flinging her hands in his direction. She didn’t know if he heard. Marion’s voice fell flat within the rippling magic.
She thought that she could hear a distant orchestra, like cellos playing sour notes.
And under that, more gunshots.
The shining gold fog evaporated.
Luke caught Marion by the hem of the shirt and yanked her toward him. He fired his gun into the fog as it darted down the street. The further the light got from them, the more it returned to human shape. But even as it dwindled, its magical reach extended over Port Angeles, blanketing the town in shimmering distortions like a heat mirage.
Marion had no idea what she had just experienced. She could only cling to Luke’s shirt and gape in the direction of her attacker. “What…?”
“Move,” Luke said tightly, shoving her into the alley.
Even with the sidhe magic lifted from her mind and body, she felt brain-blind, like her every nerve had shut down. Marion was running on sheer instinct.
She skidded around the end of the alley and Luke pushed her again, nudging her downhill. Marion let momentum carry her past an antique store, a restaurant, a fence.
They leaped onto a rocky beach. Luke pulled her under a pier and looked over the top, gun uplifted, ready to fire. “Damn,” he muttered before dropping back beside her.
“Do you see it?” Marion asked.
He nodded. “Up the hill.”
Marion’s sense of direction was scattered, but she knew that “up the hill” was meant to indicate their hotel—and worse, Luke’s truck. Their only potential mode of escape.
Her eyes tracked across the rocky beach, wetted by crashing waves that were black in the dimming light. Marion couldn’t make out much detail beyond twenty feet. Without glasses, her vision was too blurry. She could tell that there was a boat tethered a few hundred feet away, though.
Perhaps the truck wasn’t their only mode of escape after all.
“We’re not waiting for the morning ferry,” she said decisively.
Marion didn’t even get a chance to stand up before Luke yanked her back again. “Are you crazy? We can’t steal a boat!”
“Better stealing than dying!”
“No way,” he said. “It would attract too much attention.”
“I’ve already caught the attention of the assassins. I’m not afraid of being seen.” She threw her shoulders back and lifted her chin in defiance. “Better still, if it brings law enforcement upon us, then they can protect me!”
“I can’t believe we’re discussing this. Hasn’t anyone in your entire life told you no before?”
She almost argued with him, wanting to remind him that she had no clue—but then she stopped. “You have. Several times.”
He faltered. “I have.” Marion grinned. She imagined that a smile on her striking features must have been very disarming, particularly when she bit her bottom lip as she did at that moment. He sighed. “All right.” Luke straightened enough to look up the street. “The glow from the assassin’s light has faded.”
“That’s good?”
“Not exactly. Means I can’t see where he is.”
And Marion assumed that meant that the assassin could look like anyone, too. That degree of magic must have been able to cloak virtually anything. “We’ll be safest on the island, far from here,” Marion said.
“It’s not that far,” Luke grumbled. But he followed her down the beach anyway.
Marion’s feet were light on the rocks, though her shoes had no traction. She slipped repeatedly. It made her slow. Luke was more agile, but patient; he waited with her even as he kept his eyes on the city above.
The roiling waters stank of seaweed. Waves crashed over the rocks, leaving thick ropes of kelp and froth in their wake. The kelp was filthy, murky, slimy—nothing Marion could bear to touch.
They clambered onto another pier, closer to the harbor. White boats bobbed in the night. Big boats, little boats.
“I wonder if I know how to drive one of those.” Marion squinted at the nearest boat and cast her mind for memories, fishing around for anything aquatic, preferably sailing-related. She came up with nothing. Not even a hint of familiarity, like she’d felt upon finding a shop selling designer clothes.
They didn’t have any alternatives. Marion might not have been able to see the light from her would-be assassin anymore, but she sensed a certain weight in the air that suggested nearby magic. Strong magic.
They climbed over a fence to get into the harbor. Luke selected a small boat with the word “Sparrowhawk” on the hull and helped her climb inside. “Do you hear anything?”
She strained her ears. Marion didn’t think he meant the crashing waves. “What do you hear?”
“Singing,” he said. “That means you’re driving the boat.” He released the ropes tethering the boat to the harbor, and they bobbed a few inches to the left.
“I don’t know how,” Marion said.
“Neither do I.” Luke checked the magazine on his gun, then positioned himself near the motor. “It’ll be safer if you’re behind the wheel. Trust me.”
Marion shrugged. Why not? She was a smart girl. An angel. Surely she could drive a boat. “The only problem is that it looks like it needs keys,” she said. He held up a key ring. “Oh. Where’d you find that?”
“Around,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
She didn’t worry about it. At that point, she would have trusted Luke if he’d told her to launch herself over the side of the boat into the murky waters.
Marion turned the engine on, throttled forward.
They bumped the boat in front of them.
Okay, less of a bump and more of a strike. Not a gentle one. Her chest slammed into the controls and she winced. “Sorry, Doctor!”
Luke didn’t respond. He was glaring at the ocean like he heard something strange.
She steered more carefully, pushing out onto the water. Once she got away from the pier, she increased the speed to put distance between themselves and the shore—and, more importantly, the sidhe assassin.
Marion found the controls simple. She soon got into the rhythm of steering through the waves, weaving between the other boats toward the mouth of the small harbor.
“Not that way,” Luke said suddenly.
“It’s the only way we can go,” Marion said, accelerating. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t get an opportunity to answer before they broke into open water.
A plume of salty water gushed in front of their boat, as tall as the hotel they hadn’t slept in and as wide as a car. It arced in midair, twisted, and smashed toward Marion like a fist.
She didn’t even get a chance to cry out.
Water clogged her nose, ears, mouth. She was cold. Soaked. Suffocating. Her lungs spasmed within her chest, but found no oxygen.
It splashed to the bottom of the boat with such force that they tipped sideways.
Marion clung to the wheel. Her feet slid from underneath her.
Then the boat righted itself, coming down from the crest of the wave to bob in calm ocean once more.
Where there had been a pillar of water, there was now a woman with opalescent flesh. The starlight behind her twisted into spirals. She was suspended in midair by broad wings of ocean film, green and dripping, her gaunt face hardened into cold resolve. She held blades of coral.
It wasn’t the glittering sidhe who’d attacked them on the shore, but Marion wasn’t sure if she should take that as a good thing or bad thing. Either way, they hadn’t escaped danger.
“Get down!” Luke shouted. Marion threw herself under the wheel.
He rose up, shot his gun twice. Even though he was drenched from the spray of ocean, the gun still fired. But it didn’t seem to matter that the gun functioned. The bullets passed harmlessly through the sidhe, carvin
g tunnels into her chest that sealed instantly.
She landed on the front hull of the boat with a thud, bare feet denting the metal.
The assassin leaped over the windshield and landed on the deck between the doctor and Marion.
“Luke!” Marion shouted.
The sidhe’s coral blades came down on the wheel. Coral should have been fragile enough to shatter on impact against the manmade material, but they sliced right through it.
Marion dodged the attack so narrowly that she felt coral scratch her arm.
Luke plowed into the sidhe and threw her over the side of the boat. He took the wheel, throttling forward again at maximum speed. They tore into the bay as the water surged behind them.
The sidhe assassin was following with a tidal wave.
“Take control again,” Luke said as the engine sputtered dangerously.
Marion’s hands slipped on the broken wheel. “What do we do if we can’t shoot that thing?”
“Drive,” he said. “Keep driving.”
They were still so far from Vancouver Island that it appeared as little more than a line of inkier black against the black sky on the horizon. At least an hour away, Marion would have wagered.
The water moved much faster behind them.
In fact, the rear of her stolen boat was already lifting from the force of the wave. It was driving them forward faster, faster. They were hurtling out of control.
It was like the assassin was trying to push them toward something.
Pale figures appeared in the water ahead. Marion glimpsed slender faces with predatory features, sharp eyes, thin lips. The women were comfortable within the water even though there was no craft nearby. Doubtlessly they weren’t human.
Their mouths were open and moving. It looked like they were speaking—or singing, as Luke had mentioned earlier.
Marion couldn’t hear anything.
“Sirens,” Luke said.
The word helped no memories surface, but Marion assembled the definition rapidly. Sirens must have been one of the preternatural creatures that had emerged after Genesis. They dwelled in the water and sang enchanting music that Marion couldn’t hear, but Luke could.
He covered his ears, shut his eyes. A groan tore through his chest, and a line of blood dripped from his nostril.
The music Marion couldn’t hear was hurting him.
Trapped between naiad and sirens, with a gun Marion wasn’t sure could hurt anything, she only knew one thing: this time, she needed to save her own life.
“Give me your hand!” she shouted to Luke, loud enough that she hoped that he’d hear her over the sirens. He didn’t react. Blood poured down his upper lip.
The female bodies were slicing through the water, pale forms among the dark waves.
Marion lunged toward him, seized his hand.
Doors opened. Magic unfolded.
The world went white.
* * *
Marion remembered a garden. She had been as tiny as the trees had been large. They towered over her with trunks as wide as small cities—trunks so huge that they couldn’t have been natural to Earth.
She’d liked how the dense trees stretched for seeming eternity, the dim blue light that radiated from everywhere and nowhere, and the hint of green in the leaves miles above her head. Marion had even liked how she never saw the sky, not once, because the canopy was too dense.
More than anything else, she’d liked the company she kept there.
“It’s really easy to go wherever you want,” the boy had told her. He’d been older than Marion, tall and skinny, on the brink of adolescence. “I can show you how to do it.”
He’d walked up to a tree then and knocked on its trunk. A door had appeared. It had been a terribly ordinary door, white and four-paneled, like any door that Marion had seen in her homes on Earth. Except that this one was set into the tree.
“How did you do that?” Marion had asked.
“Try it yourself,” he suggested.
So she had. Marion had been pleased, but not surprised, when knocking on another tree produced a door just as readily.
“Wonderful,” she’d said. She had been speaking in French. That was the only language she’d spoken as a little girl. Her older playmate, the tall boy, had spoken only English. They’d had no trouble communicating anyway. The things they said transcended words.
“You can do that any time you want, anywhere you want. They’re always listening.”
Marion had asked, “How do you know?”
And he’d said, “Because I’m one of them.”
She hadn’t understood what he meant at the time. But later—later, it had all made sense. Marion didn’t remember any of it now. She was grasping at distant truths, flailing for scraps of memories and almost reaching them…but not quite.
Marion remembered the garden. The doors. The boy with the curly hair.
Everything else remained just out of reach.
* * *
Luke’s mind cleared and his eyes opened on a starry sky. Everything hurt. That was a novel sensation. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had been in so much pain, and for a moment, the humanity of it all excited him.
Pain. Pain.
Then he remembered that pain meant something must have hurt him.
“Marion?” Luke was immersed in a good three inches of chilling water flooding the Sparrowhawk. It sloshed when he stood.
“I’m here.” Marion picked herself up from underneath the console. Her normally voluminous hair clung to her cheeks, giving her the shrunken, angry look of a cat tossed into a bathtub.
She was alive, though. And so was he.
Luke looked around for the sirens and the naiad. They were nowhere in sight. In fact, he saw nothing at all: no other boats, no land, no lights. They were floating in the midst of a quiet ocean.
“What happened?” The last thing he remembered was Marion pulling his hand away from his ear, and then such immense pain that he’d instantly passed out.
“I cast magic.” Marion showed her fingers to him. They sparked with white electricity, which fizzled out within seconds. “I think…” She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “I think I might have killed them all. I remembered something while I cast magic, too. A garden.”
“Like, with vegetables?”
“With doors,” she said softly.
“I’m not following you.”
“I don’t get it, either.” Marion wrapped her arms around herself, hugging her body against the cold. Her chin trembled. “I’m sure I killed them.”
“They were trying to kill you,” he said.
“I know. I know.” Two tears painted parallel tracks down her cheeks.
“Marion,” he sighed. He enfolded her in his arms. Marion was very tall for a woman, so she easily rested her chin on his shoulder. Her hands clutched the back of his shirt, and he gripped her in return. She smelled like a bonfire—fine furniture shattered into pieces and burned on a beach.
Marion was a mage powerful enough to rip sirens and naiads apart when she was angry, but she was trembling.
“You’re okay,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but an order. “You’re okay, Marion.”
“What kind of person must I be to have so many people out to kill me? Nobody invests so much into killing the nice people.”
“They do when the nice people are dangerous,” Luke said.
“I don’t want to be dangerous.”
“You’ll get your memories back soon, and I bet we’ll find that you haven’t done anything to deserve this.” Luke wasn’t certain if he believed those words himself, but they made her trembling subside, so it was worth saying. Anything to make her stop shaking like that.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting her head from his shoulder. She lifted a finger to brush it over his bottom lip, but didn’t quite touch. “Where’d you get that?”
She meant his scar. He had several, but the one on his face was most obvious. “A fight.”
&nb
sp; “What could have possibly hurt someone like Dr. Lucas Flynn thoroughly enough to leave an imprint?”
“Long story. Doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” she said.
He touched her sleeved elbow and used it to guide her hand away. He still didn’t release her once the offending fingers were safely at her side. From only inches away, he could see into the depths of Marion’s white eyes, glowing in the night. Alien as those angel eyes looked, there was more humanity in them than he’d seen on most mundanes.
Even without any skin-to-skin contact between the two of them, Lucas gazed at Marion and felt…things. Things that he didn’t trust.
Light arced through the sky in an eye-scorching shade of gold. Luke had barely an instant to register it before that light slammed into the deck of the boat. Water sprayed where it connected.
The light resolved into a human form.
Luke pushed Marion behind him, shielding her with his body. “Stay behind me!” He drew his gun.
“Wait!” the new man shouted. “Don’t shoot me again! I’m not trying to hurt either of you, damn it!”
It was the sidhe who looked like a member of a boy band. He wasn’t carrying that massive sword anymore. Lucas didn’t fire.
All three of them froze, watching, waiting to see who would twitch first.
“Who are you?” Marion finally asked, clutching the back of Luke’s jacket.
The assassin laughed disbelievingly. “Marion, it’s me.”
“She asked you a question,” Luke said with a hard edge to his voice. His gun didn’t waver. “You need to answer.”
“My name is Konig—ErlKonig,” he said. “Marion…I’m your boyfriend.”
9
Luke didn’t fire, but he also didn’t lower the gun. Marion curled her fingers over his shoulder. She studied Konig from safety, half-hidden behind Luke.
ErlKonig. A powerful sidhe who could appear and disappear like fog rolling in off the ocean, who had tracked them across Port Angeles and into the bay.
Her boyfriend.
If this man was her boyfriend, then he must have been someone she knew well. Very well. But his features didn’t trigger any memories, and she found it hard to believe she could have forgotten a face like Konig’s. He had a long nose, big violet eyes, and black hair that glistened blue when light hit it. He looked like a male model who had been sprayed with glitter.