Magnus staggered. He gasped. He did not fall.
His sigils did.
A rope of magic flew from Titania’s hand and coiled around Hrokr. He screeched, and one of her gags followed.
Another rope coiled by my side.
I didn’t think. I reacted. I sunk both of my hands into the snake of fae magic reaching for Ellie. I grasped. I shook. I needed to get it to turn away.
It didn’t. It bit.
The dusting mate magic around my hands sucked away into Titania’s magic. It pulled off me, away from my skin, and off my soul. Only a hole remained where connection should have been.
She still held tight to my waist. She still breathed against my arm. I heard her cries and smelled the salt of her tears, but my soul thought it nothing more than memories.
Like the dryads, Ellie was lost in an illusion of distance I could not understand.
“Mother!” she yelled. “Let him go!”
Titania looked at her hand as if she, too, saw her dreadful snake and the mate magic it consumed. Her lips rounded. “Huh,” she said.
“You dare hunt on my lands?” Arne reached over his shoulder to draw Sal.
Titania pointed at him. “Do you want a war, Odinsson? If an Odin aspect uses that axe against a fae you know damned well all fae will descend on your little fiefdom.”
Arne held Sal’s handle but did not lift her off his back. “Leave, Titania. Alone.”
“And what?” she asked. “Be strategic? Make plans? Operate under the rules of the game?” She thrust out her chin. “Rules do not apply to my husband.” She looked back at us. “I can’t leave you with them,” she said. “I can’t have his wrath fall on you.”
Arne’s eyes widened in surprise as if he realized once again that Ellie had to be here—which meant he probably realized once more that I was here, also.
Hrokr struggled against his rope, but it did no good. “No no no…” he whimpered through the gag.
“Mom!” Ellie shrieked. “Don’t!”
Titania raised her hands to the sky as if to call down the clouds themselves, and… the magic shifted. The fae magic. The elven magic. All the residual kami and spirit magic around the sheep. It all took on the same red and green, feral energy of the cottage. The same sense of living under understanding I’d been given in the lucid dream I’d had last night. The one where the other magic wanted me to learn.
To be aware.
But I had no way of doing so. No way to hook into any magic no matter its origins, because I was not myself magical.
I was reconstituted and mundane. I was more science than art. And Ellie was about to be yanked from me forever.
She gulped and held tighter to my waist. “If you do this, I will never forgive you, Mom. Never.”
“I’ll go with her!” I yelled. Maybe Titania would listen. Maybe she’d send me, too.
I knew what the hole was. Each individual part of me had been inside it before my father’s brew of chemistry and power had jolted my stitched-together body to life. I’d walked inside it in The Land of the Dead. I’d stared it down when I lost Rose.
If Titania stole Ellie from me, maybe I’d remember. Or maybe the enchantments would reestablish and I’d forget. But the hole, the loss, the black depth draining away my soul would never leave.
It would roil underneath, unfettered and feral.
Titania cocked her head until her antlers touched her shoulder. “My husband will smell the elves on you, young man.”
She threw her arms wide.
The sigil’s around Arne’s hands brightened. “You can fix this, son,” he said.
His words were meant for Hrokr. I was sure they were meant for Hrokr, because Hrokr was his son with the magic. Yet Arne looked at me.
I didn’t have time for my screaming raccoon, nor did I have time for Hrokr’s menagerie of biting and hissing internal ferals, but they were all here with us anyway. The Loki elf and I were the princesses at the center of our own very special circle of dancing forest creatures, and ours weren’t going to clean anyone’s house.
I looked to Hrokr. “You protect the vulnerable,” I said. He’d done it before. He could do it again, even coiled in Titania’s magic rope.
And Ellie Jones, my half-fae mate, backpack on her back and Maura’s silly bright yellow knit hat with the huge white pompom on her head, clung to my side as if this really was the end of the world.
Ellie’s cottage—the magic of the cottage—had tried to teach me that we were all part of the same universe, the same magical ecosystem. We were all interlaced. Some parts were more local than others, but no part held more importance, even the old, old parts that cared nothing for humanity or its magicals.
The land answered the two dryads’ calls. The trees mapped space and time. They sheltered their skittering things, and they held firm to this world.
So the trees did what they should not have been able to do. Maybe they responded to the presence of the fae. Or the angry elves. Or perhaps they noticed the layers of overlapping concealment enchantments. Or maybe, just maybe, the old parts under all magic responded.
The King and Queen of the Fae weren’t the only non-elven magicals to take notice.
And no one wanted this to end in the ash and hell of yet another Ragnarok.
Hrokr’s hands flickered. He added something to his father’s sigils.
I wrapped myself around Ellie. Please help, I whispered into the ether, to the other magic. To the other pantheons who had taken notice while I was in St. Martin’s bubble with Axlam and Dagrun. To Raven, too, if she cared to listen.
Please don’t open this wound. Please.
Branches reached. Portals snared. My Yggdrasil tattoo felt as if it uprooted from my skin. And we moved, all us emotional racoons, menageries, and angry All-Fathers.
We moved someplace just across a border from Alfheim, Minnesota.
Chapter 14
I enlisted in the Fifth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment on the third day of April, 1862. We fought many battles, mostly in Mississippi and Louisiana. I wasn’t part of the First, the men who took the Twenty-eighth Virginia’s battle flag at Gettysburg, so I don’t have that glory. I was at the Battle of Nashville, though.
I remember the stench of decay in the hot soupy air. The dysentery and the malaria. The screams and the moans and the horror of weaponized death.
And I remember how a fae responded.
Self-sustaining magicals—elves, fae, kami, any of the other groups—they’re all basically the same species. Of all the subspecies out there, the elves are the most homogeneous—and the most human. They’re Norse gifted power by their gods.
But the fae, they vary. Some are like Ellie and her mother—more homo sapiens than homo mageía. Some are closer to the wolf part of the World Wolf, or the stag part of the World Stag. Some are as much manifestation as they are conscious creatures.
The American Civil War mortally wounded not only men, but also the land. The magic where battles were fought was now bloated and bruised. To this day, many places still suffer a form of gangrene.
And that one fae, that one Tennessee night, manifested out of the fog. He stood on his stag legs under the bitter moon and he swung razor-sharp antlers. He cut out the infection as best he could.
My best guess was that he’d come to America with the Scots-Irish who inhabited Appalachia. Or perhaps the French. Or perhaps he was as old as the forest itself—all forests everywhere—and had come through from a fae realm to do the regiments damage. I did not know. I know only that he wasn’t a Native spirit. He was one-hundred-percent-antigen fae.
Four-toed undulate feet scraped through the rich soil. Deep stag calls rolled through the fog. The night went cold and men died in ways mundanes could not fathom. Ways that would the next day be attributed to cannons and bayonets. To war and pestilence.
So I understood what fae were capable of. What a kami or a loa or a spirit could render. What elves could inflict, if they chose to do so. How a barrie
r could be ripped asunder as a warning. How things that should not come through, can.
Or things that should not be allowed in, are.
As magic snatched not only me, but also Sal, Ellie, Titania, and the elves, I felt the barrier’s agony. Not the suffering of what crosses, but the white-hot screaming of the magic itself.
The agony of Ellie’s cottage when it moves. The sweltering sting caused when a pocketland is cut off from the world and made a realm. The strained fibers, both the real and the magical, that hold the universe together.
What came of this? Rage burning outward from a gushing wound. The need to ride, and to break, and to inflict as a way to spend that pain.
Crossing into The Great Hall never hurt like this. Neither did crossing into The Land of the Dead. This magic, this elemental truth of the fae, set every living part of my body on fire.
Then it all froze.
I still stood in the snow, in the pasture, under the knoll and away from Magnus’s barns, but this place was different.
I was in the world, but not the real world. I was pretty sure that whatever Hrokr had done, whatever extra call he’d pushed out with his additions to his father’s magic, had shunted me at least—all of us, maybe—into a reflection.
Nothing made sense, though everything did. Left was right, and right was left, except I was not flipped, and my dominant hand still wanted to do the throwing and the hitting. Nothing looked mirrored, but I knew my senses were not operating correctly.
Time was not working correctly.
Titania’s ropes of magic coiled around Ellie and Hrokr. They also coiled up her arms and over her shoulders, where they coiled around her neck, face, and up under her antlered helmet. The ropes pulsed and rippled like water, or gel, but Titania, Hrokr, and Ellie stood frozen as if between film frames.
“Ellie?” My voice echoed as if someone had added reverb, or as if I called from a long way off and my words bounced off Magnus’s barns.
That reverb hit the hole left behind after Titania’s magic sucked away my mate magic.
Resonance isn’t a term usually associated with the chaos of anger. The thing is, anger and rage aren’t as chaotic as humans would like to believe. Chaos gives cover. “I was so angry I couldn’t foresee the outcomes of my actions” type of cover.
But that’s a lie. Anger and rage aren’t chaos. They’re a rupture. They represent a living thing’s cataclysmic response to what it sees as overwhelming opposition. It’s a raccoon backed against a shed, or me roaring promised vengeance at my father.
The outcome of such episodes is always, always predictable.
And here I was, fully aware that this place was not right, that time here was not right, that I was in an illusion and facing the loss of the first woman in my more-than-two-hundred-year life who loved me unconditionally.
I could wait for all the conditions that might possibly cause her to walk away, but they weren’t there. They never would be.
Unless the rage took me again.
The rage.
It’s not chaos. It’s not. It’s resonance inside a hole, and whatever this place was rang that stupid, still-there, always-there, bell.
And I had to fight back. I had to rupture what attacked so I could escape through the rip. I had no choice.
I had to swing my razor-sharp antlers and cut out the infection.
The sigils between the elves and Titania pulsed and wiggled as much as the ropes of fae magic. Arne and Magnus, also frozen, gleamed so brightly behind their glamours they looked to be in the first nanosecond of an explosion.
But not Sal. She was here with me in this bubble of time, and she, too, felt the resonance.
Battle roared from her in a breathtaking wave as resonant as my own echoes.
I dodged the ropes. I swung around the sigils. And I lifted my axe from King Odinsson’s back.
Mine roared out after battle. I had returned for her. I belonged to her.
Every rune on her blade glowed like the sun itself. The violet-colored magic that allowed me to wield her buzzed as if it was about to transcend into ultraviolet. My axe knew her purpose and she would avenge those in need of vengeance. She was the blazing blade of Salvation, brought forth with her sister sword from Nidavellir and forged in the fires of Mount Eldgjá. She cut a path through those who claimed righteousness but who brought only death and destruction.
I twirled her around my wrist and she sang her glory to the universe.
We would stand between our own and any Ragnarok, great or small, vampire or wolf. Fae or mundane. We were rage harnessed.
I dodged around Arne’s frozen sigil, arm up, and ready to slice through limbs and magic. Fae limbs. Arms and legs and neck of a royal who threatened my family. My mate.
Sal and I would sever these tentacles that threatened our elves and we would slaughter any who—
Slaughter.
One of the ewes baaed. She lifted her head high and she called into the magic that was this place. She touched the truth. She called out all that roamed inside this mirror place.
And she would not allow me to forget who I was.
I do not kill. I have never murdered. I would not kill. Even at my weakest, I understood not to cause irreparable harm. I would not cause someone else to become how I had been.
“No!” I dropped Sal. Again. I dropped her to the snow and I stepped back. “We can’t.” There’d be a cataclysm. A war.
Ragnarok. And I’d lose everything and everyone yet again.
I glanced at frozen Hrokr. It was supposed to be a thorn that precipitated the end times, not a lone Loki elf trying to help.
No one moved but the sheep. We were in the shadow lands, the place of twilight where Midgard bumped up against all the other realms. Ivan and Dracula had formed Vampland from the raw material here. All realms budded off the real world through this material, like little universes pushing though into their own regions of space and time.
We weren’t in a bubble. We were on a bubble. We were inside the veil itself. We were in a magical event horizon.
Hrokr had stopped us from moving into Titania’s realm, or any fae realm, and had accidentally allowed the mirror of this place to magnify my rage into flashing life inside my personal resonance chamber.
I had to get out of here. I had to, or the rage would take over again. I rubbed my temple and looked around. How was I supposed to get Ellie out of her mother’s magical grip?
“We do one killing,” Sal said. “We kill the spell.”
I looked down at her glowing runes and her ultraviolet handle. She spoke in a real, actual voice, or at least a voice that was real as this place allowed. She somehow modulated the air to make words that could be heard.
That voice had carried Dagrun-level authority.
“No killing, Salvation,” I said.
My father had framed me for several murders. I had my reasons for hating him. Legitimate reasons. He left stories and documents out in the world that, to this day, describe me as an eight-foot monster full of self-centered and self-absorbed pain and rage. He was the killer, not me.
If I killed, there’d be consequences. There were always consequences. Because the darkness might be a hole but it was never alone. It came with prison walls.
“Disrupt, then,” Sal said. “You can get the helpful fae magic away before the Queen comes fully through.”
“You’re helping now?” I asked.
Her runes pulsed. “Our King believes the fae magic to be of value.”
So Salvation helped for Arne’s sake, not mine.
I’d take what I could get. “We’re inside the veil itself.”
“We’re in the switching station,” Sal said. “We’re standing in the map. Once they’re here, they will realize their spells need rerouting. In here, that’s easy.”
My axe had the voice of an opera singer, or a goddess. One a person did not disobey.
If I got Ellie to the cottage before Titania realized what we were doing, the cottage would co
ntrol where Ellie moved to, not her mother. I’d have a higher chance of remembering her after the fact—and figuring out where it took her.
Which meant I could find her.
“Are you going to do another deep dive into jealousy if we do this?” Because I’d find another way if I had even the slightest inkling that my axe might hurt Ellie.
Sal seemed surprised that I still cared so much, since my mate magic had disappeared.
A blip of rage blanked out my senses. There was no seeing Titania, or the elves, or Sal. No smelling the crystal-clear air here. No thought of consequences.
I almost snapped Sal’s handle in half.
She yipped and I caught myself. This place removed any and all moderation. It distilled, and when one of its modulated waves crashed into me, it crashed.
I dropped Sal yet again.
There was no chaos here, only rage looking for chaotic cover. I had to remember that. Breathe it. Feel it in place of my lost mate magic.
Sal’s warrior needs were not helping.
I shook my head and took a step toward Magnus. “Maybe the elves are carrying something that will work.”
“Wait!” Sal said. “Love isn’t only mate magic.” Her voice resonated.
“I don’t think you should be talking, Sal,” I said.
Swing me wide and I will disrupt the tentacle, she pushed into my head. I must warn you: It will hurt. “I will be unconscious for some time afterward,” she said.
If it would knock her unconscious, it meant snapping the tentacle would release a lot of energy. What about Arne and Magnus? “Will this hurt the elves?”
She paused. Our King and his Second can take care of themselves, she thought-said. She paused again. They will process this place in a way not unlike how you were—are—responding.
Raging elves and a raging Queen of the Fae. Not a good mix.
Suddenly, as if a motor had engaged, the sigils ground into the snow and dirt like two massive saw blades, doing at least three full spins in a blink of an eye before freezing again.
I jumped back.
“They’ve almost settled onto the surface of this bubble,” Sal said.
Fae Touched Page 10