by Karen Chance
One of the guards had a stick in his hand, like he’d been using it to poke at the embers. His eyes were open, with reflected flames dancing in the irises. More flames were slowly eating up the stick, the bottom half of which was already black. The next second, it collapsed into nothingness, sifting away on the wind. He didn’t flinch.
Not even when a sudden gust of wind caught the back door of the house, slamming it against the old boards like a gunshot.
I jumped, and Æsubrand grabbed my arm. “Are you satisfied?”
“At what?” I demanded harshly. “What did you give them?”
“A fey drug,” Efridís said, shrugging. “You would not know of it.”
“Then how do I know you haven’t killed them?” I’d finally spotted Claire, slumped over one of the picnic tables, her bright red hair cascading over the weathered wood like a spill of firelight. I wanted to run to her, to feel that pulse beating under my fingertips. But that would mean shrugging off Æsubrand’s hold, and right now, I wasn’t sure I could do that.
And weakness wasn’t something he admired.
“If I had wanted them dead, I would not have used poison,” he sneered. “It is a coward’s weapon.”
“That’s real convincing coming from someone who makes war on children!”
Silver eyes flashed. “It was not my doing that put the child’s life in danger. He should never have been born.”
“According to you.”
“According to treaty,” Efridís said, her voice a sweet note on the air.
“Come again?” I said, trying not to look like I was scouring the surroundings for help. Marlowe should have had a crap ton of his boys around the house. So where the hell were they?
And why do you care? I asked myself bitterly. They couldn’t get through the house shields, and I couldn’t get to the charm that collapsed them. Not with two fey to watch and lives at stake. I couldn’t do anything but stand here, trying not to sway on my feet, and listen. And hope they needed something I had to offer.
Although I’d be damned if I could think of what that might be.
“There was a great war once, between the two leading martial houses of Faerie,” Efridís said. “You know of it?”
I nodded. I’d seen a flash of it once, in her brother’s mind. A fact I didn’t see the need to mention to these two. “I understand it was…pretty severe.”
“It almost annihilated us both,” she said flatly. “But a truce was finally arranged, sealed by a marriage alliance. My brother—Caedmon, as you call him—offered me to Aeslinn of the Svarestri as a bride. Aeslinn accepted, but not merely to end the war. He was hoping for a child who might one day unite all Faerie under one ruler, one throne.”
“And this didn’t worry Caedmon?”
Efridís smiled slightly. “My brother gambled on my being as infertile as he was himself. He has only ever sired the one child, and that with a human.”
“Heidar.” Claire’s fiancé.
Efridís inclined her head.
“But at his birth, my uncle began to scheme,” Æsubrand broke in angrily. “What if he used his half-breed in a liaison with another? Their human blood would render them more fertile than he had ever been himself. And if he could find one who possessed more than half fey blood, he would have a successor from his direct line. And cut me off!”
“Leaving you with only one throne. What a tragedy.”
“It may well prove a tragedy—for us all!”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Because you’re as shortsighted as the rest of them.”
“Say rather ill-informed,” Efridís said smoothly, cutting in.
“And you’re here to inform me about…?” I asked her.
“My husband,” Efridís said simply. “I discovered that he was not trying to unite all Faerie merely for dynastic reasons. He is what I believe you would call a religious…zealot?” She tipped her head charmingly. “Is that the word?”
“It’s a word. I didn’t know you had religion in Faerie.”
“We do not anymore.”
“But you did once.”
“Yes. That is why the war was fought. The old gods were banished from both Earth and Faerie thousands of your years ago, by a spell maintained by your Silver Circle of mages. My husband wishes to destroy it.”
“And thereby to bring his gods back.”
She nodded. “He was trying to invade Earth at the time of the war in order to attack your Circle, which was much more vulnerable then, but Caedmon opposed him. The two sides were almost equally matched and the battle was therefore—”
“Wait. Caedmon opposed him? Why?”
Æsubrand said that thing that might be a curse word again and glared at me. “Do you know nothing?”
“About this? Yeah. Nothing is pretty much what I know.”
Efridís sent him a let-me-handle-this glance, which surprisingly had Junior backing down. It was a little surreal, seeing the titan of the fey abruptly close his mouth when his tiny mama told him to, but that’s exactly what happened. Then she looked at me, smiled, and tried again.
“It is…complicated. Too much to go into now. All you need to understand is that a generation of fey warriors died for their faith on one side, and for the right to live free of it on the other.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
“Because the war you are currently fighting did not start recently. It started thousands of years ago, on that battlefield.”
“It started before that, in the war between the gods them—” Æsubrand broke off at another glance from mama.
“Let us keep this simple, shall we?” she asked, with a brittle smile. She looked at me. “The two sides only ceased fighting out of utter exhaustion. Afterward, the pathways between Earth and Faerie were closed, the easy commute of the old days gone forever. And a truce was established, sealed by my marriage, between the two great houses. But truce is all it was. Peace was impossible. For both sides still believed they were in the right. And now, the war is about to be reignited.”
“Why now?” I demanded. “What’s changed?”
“The number of available warriors. It is what stymied my husband’s plans all along. As I have said, the two sides were very closely matched, and try as they might, neither could gain the upper hand. And Caedmon made it clear that if my husband wished to invade Earth in the future, he would have to do it through a Blarestri army.”
“Which he’d just proven he couldn’t do.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why my father was willing to settle the matter—temporarily—in exchange for a royal Blarestri bride,” Æsubrand put in, more calmly. “He assumed that any child that resulted from the union would be able to claim both thrones one day, thus uniting the two most powerful fey armies under Svarestri control. And giving him the numbers he needed to combat your Circle.”
“Only that hasn’t been working out so well,” I pointed out.
“That remains to be seen. But Caedmon’s successful attempt to gain an heir raised the possibility of an unbroken line of opposition. And even had it not, my father was beginning to doubt the depth of my devotion to his dogma.”
“You’re not a true believer?”
That got a flash from those strange eyes. “I am a king, or will be shortly. Not a lackey to a group of beings who could be banished by a human spell!”
Okay, that I could believe. A moral objection I’d have laughed at, since I was pretty sure Æsubrand didn’t have any morals. But being king of all Faerie didn’t mean much if he still had to bow and scrape and kiss godly butts all the time.
“Okay, say I believe you. Say you’re suddenly on our side. Then what the hell were you doing at Slava’s?”
“Trying to warn you.”
“Warn me? You almost killed me!”
“You were in the way,” he said, shrugging off my almost-death. “And I did not mean to warn you specifically, but your people. When I learned that my father w
as preparing an attack, my mother and I decided to alert the other side. The difficulty was in how to be believed. Due to…certain incidents…in the past, we felt some proof might be required—”
“You think?”
Pewter eyes narrowed. “—and the vampire had it.”
“And that proof was?”
“You should know. You killed him with it.”
It took me a minute, because technically, I hadn’t killed Slava at all. But I had shot him. And I guess turning into an ice cube hadn’t improved his chances any.
“You’re talking about the gun.”
“The bullets, to be precise,” Efridís said. “They are infused with a fey battle spell, giving anyone who wields them the power of a strong fey warrior—”
“Hardly,” Æsubrand said tightly. “There is more to being a warrior than a single spell.”
“Perhaps, but it is a devastating one.” She looked at me. “My husband knew he needed three things for any hope of success: superior numbers, a way around the blockade Caedmon had enacted and allies. He has obtained them all. And he is about to turn them on the Circle’s greatest supporter. Tonight, unless you warn them, the six senates will fall. Tonight, unless you stop it, the war may be lost.”
Chapter Forty-one
“This is bullshit,” Ray said, as Louis-Cesare’s chauffeur pulled into the long line of cars waiting to get up the consul’s impressive front drive.
“What is?” I asked, trying to drag on a thigh-high in the dark without running it or kicking Ray.
I managed one of them.
“Ow!” he yelped, glaring at me through the neck hole in his T-shirt, which he was in the process of stripping off.
“Don’t be a baby. I barely touched you.” I looked around. “Where are my shoes?”
“Did you leave them? Tell me you didn’t leave them!”
“I didn’t leave them.” At least, I was pretty sure. It wasn’t like I hadn’t had about a thousand other things to keep straight.
Like getting here at all. I wouldn’t have managed it if Ray hadn’t shown up half an hour after our unwelcome guests left. I’d been holding Claire’s head in one hand, while she tossed up a couple days’ worth of food, and yelling uselessly into the phone in my other when he stumbled through the portal. And bitched me out about the shield he’d had to hack his way through.
He’d come to warn me about the fat bounty that had just been offered for my capture. So he’d been less than happy to hear that I was about to walk back into the arms of the guy who had issued it. He’d been even less happy when he found out I expected him to pay for the privilege.
But there wasn’t any other choice.
Despite what Æsubrand seemed to believe, I did not have a large amount of influence over the vampire world. Or, you know, any. What I did have were contacts, including some who might actually listen to the crazy story I had to tell despite the fact that I had exactly no proof to go with it.
Or they would have if they had been conscious.
But Mircea and Louis-Cesare were still out of it, and they’d taken their masters right along with them. A senior master in extremis will pull power from family, and Mircea’s need had been dire. Louis-Cesare’s masters were wandering around in a stupor, looking like they’d been hit by a large truck, but Mircea’s weren’t even vertical.
That left Radu as the only other person I knew who might be able to force someone to listen. Luckily, he’d been emancipated from Mircea’s mastery centuries ago, so he wasn’t in a dead faint. Unluckily, where he was, along with the rest of the vampire world, was at the fights.
Why he was at the fights, I didn’t know. Yes, this was the last night and, yes, they were choosing new senators this evening. But I’d have thought he’d have had better things to do right now. But apparently not. And that put him behind the consul’s massive wards, which rendered electronic devices as dead as their owners.
So, if I wanted to get his attention, I was going to have to go to him. And that meant walking straight through the consul’s front door. With no one to pull my ass out of the fire if she objected.
Sometimes I really thought I needed my head examined, only that hadn’t been going so well lately.
Like this shoe hunt. Where the— There.
“Ow!” Ray and I went for them at the same time and knocked heads. Hard.
“At this rate, the bad guys aren’t going to have to take us out,” I said, rubbing my newest knot.
“There are no bad guys!” Ray said, jerking on a white dress shirt. “It’s bullcrap. How is somebody gonna attack that?”
He gestured at the huge edifice above us, which was blazing with light from every window. It was glittering off an acre of expensive marble and a mass of silken banners and an army of golden breastplates on the chests of the double row of honor guards who were lining the sweeping staircase. It was a ridiculous over-the-top display that nonetheless managed to be damned impressive.
And to make my palms sweat.
Of course, they were doing that anyway. Just like my knees kept trying to buckle and my hands kept wanting to shake, and if the plan had been to fight, I’d have been in trouble. Fortunately, that wasn’t on the agenda.
At least, I really hoped not.
“Nothing’s gonna happen,” Ray said, as if he’d heard me. “You’re being paranoid.”
“Okay,” I said, getting the other stocking in place. “Then what about Æsubrand’s story?”
Ray rolled his eyes. “What story? Ancient war, blah, blah, something about some gods, blah, blah, fey army coming to kill everybody, blah, blah, blah. No. Just no.”
And yeah, I knew how it sounded. Which was why the only one of Marlowe’s boys I’d been able to reach by phone had hung up on me. But what Æsubrand said had answered a lot of questions.
“What he said answered a lot of questions,” I told Ray, who was fighting with his cuff links.
“Like what?”
“Like what the deal is with all those hybrids we keep finding. Crossbreeds like Stinky have been turning up everywhere—weird ones that don’t make sense. There were a bunch at that auction where I found him, and the Senate has a whole collection—”
“Slaves run away all the time,” Ray said dismissively. “And there’s occasionally some sicko trying to crossbreed ’em, to get stronger specimens for the fights. Like the ones Geminus used to run.”
“And maybe that’s where he got the idea,” I pointed out. “He was weapons master for the Senate. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for someone like him to wonder what would happen if you combined human and fey magic—”
“Only you can’t,” Ray interrupted crabbily. “Everybody knows that. It’s why you don’t see the mages going into Faerie without permission and an escort—half the time their spells don’t work, or they’re weak as water when they do. And the fey don’t come here much, because their spells take, like, ten times the strength that they do back home.”
“Which is my point. Æsubrand said that the experiments were about crossing human and fey magical creatures to come up with one whose magic worked both places. And then to harvest its abilities—”
“If it was that easy, why didn’t somebody do it a long time ago?”
“The fey didn’t do it because the only reason you’d try such a thing is if you were planning on fighting a war here,” I told him, striving for patience. “Something that most of them had no interest in. The Svarestri were the only ones who did, and they were the bigots of Faerie. They thought that everyone, especially everyone from Earth, was inferior and they never interbred with them, much less experimented—”
“And our side?” Ray demanded. “The Circle’s had plenty of spats with the fey, but nothing ever comes of ’em because humans can’t fight there and fey can’t fight here—”
“I didn’t say it was easy,” I interrupted, because patience isn’t really my thing. “And the Circle didn’t have a thousand-year-old necromancer working for them!”
<
br /> “I’d still have to see it to believe it.”
“Well, I did see it,” I said curtly, brushing ruthlessly at the tangles in my hair. “And the gun I lifted off that mage at Slava’s was frightening.”
Ray didn’t reply to that, but his forehead wrinkled. Like he was actually thinking about it for a change. I took the opportunity to slide on the gleaming patent leather stilettos Louis-Cesare’s tailor had provided.
They matched the low-cut, black chiffon evening gown with little fluttery bits that I was wearing. They were supposed to move when I did, creating a flowing effect “like the ocean at midnight.” Or so he’d said, after Ray and I showed up pleading for help, since neither of us had the wardrobe for something like this. He’d seemed like a nice guy, so I hadn’t informed him that dark water hadn’t been real lucky for me lately.
But at least it fit. Unlike Ray’s outfit, because even vampire tailors balk at whipping up a bespoke tuxedo with all of five minutes’ notice. And there hadn’t been anyone on staff with one the right size. In desperation, the guy had cut down one of his own, but the result was…less than perfect.
Ray scowled and jerked the jacket on, which he barely managed to button.
Good thing vamps don’t need to breathe.
“Yeah, well,” he finally said. “Say they did come up with some kind of super-weapon. Somebody’s still got to use it, don’t they? And how you gonna get an army here from Faerie with nobody noticing? Especially a Svarestri army?”
“What difference does it make what kind it is?”
He rolled his eyes. He was going to make himself dizzy at this rate. “You just said it. The Svarestri don’t like Earth; think it’s beneath ’em. So they almost never come here. So how you gonna hide a few thousand people who don’t speak the language, don’t know the laws, can’t drive a car and dress completely crazy?”
“In New York? Check them in at the Y.”
He glared at me. “We’re being serious, all right? And seriously, how do you hide something like that right underneath the Senate’s nose?”
“You don’t.”