Cruel Enchantment

by Bast, Anya

  “All praise.” Maddoc turned and walked away.

  Gideon let his expression transform to pure hatred as he stared at his superior’s back. He couldn’t wait until it was time for Maddoc to suffer all he deserved. He was soft. He’d forgotten the old ways, had grown compassionate and feeble in his dealings with the fae. Labrai would punish him eventually and Gideon would be more than happy to be His tool.

  Abruptly Maddoc stopped and turned. Gideon quickly pasted a bland smile on his face. “Brother Cederick has taken ill and has been admitted to the hospital.” Maddoc pressed his lips together. “We fear the worst.”

  “Oh, no.” He filled his voice with the sympathy that would be expected of him. “This is the first I’ve heard of it, though I have noticed he hasn’t been in his office lately.” His very nice corner office with a view of the gates. The office Gideon would soon be occupying. “What illness has he contracted?”

  “A mysterious one that our physicians are at a loss to explain. Tests are being conducted.” Maddoc pressed his lips together in that gesture that made Gideon want to smack him. “You’re quickly moving up to occupy your former seat, it seems. Our brothers have had very bad luck this past year.” Light suspicion threaded his voice, but there was nothing Maddoc could do and he knew it.

  Gideon bowed his head, hiding his smile. “I am Labrai’s hand, directed where He wills me.” When he looked up, Maddoc was gone.

  FOUR

  HER head humming with a dull ache, Emmaline lifted her head and cracked her eyes open, seeing a warm red glow penetrating the black. She pushed up as best she could with her wrists bound and saw Aeric at his forge.

  His hands and forearms were covered in thick leather gloves, but that was almost all he wore. In one hand he held a red-hot length of iron into a fire that burned white hot in the middle of a huge metal table. Shirtless from the waist up, his powerful back and shoulders flexed as he removed the iron from the flames, picked up a hammer, and began to work the piece with strong, ringing clangs.

  Molding. Shaping. Bending the ordinarily inflexible metal to his will. That was Aeric Killian Riordan O’Malley. Strong. Fiery. Passionate. He always had been, always would be.

  She hated that her body reacted to him. Right now she should fear him, detest him, loathe the very sight of him, but the feelings she had for Aeric were just as strong now as they’d been hundreds of years ago. There was something very, very wrong with her. If she ever got back out of Piefferburg, she was seeking a psychiatrist pronto.

  Could she blame him for hating her? He thought she’d ruthlessly killed his soul mate in a fit of jealousy. If she were in his place she would feel the same way. Maybe she would have waited years and years to take her revenge, too. Perhaps she would have dreamed of ways to make the murderer pay for what he’d done.

  She wasn’t happy to be here, and she would fight tooth and nail to survive this, but she understood his motives.

  At least, she understood his motives from his current perspective—from the lie he believed. If he knew what had truly happened the night she’d killed Aileen, she might not be sitting in his forge as a prisoner, wondering if she would live or die.

  Here was her dilemma—if she told him the truth, it would alter his view of his soul mate forever and destroy his memory of Aileen. Stupid her, she’d sacrificed a lot to keep that memory pristine.

  It might also redeem Emmaline in his eyes.

  Ultimately, it was a moot point. He wouldn’t believe anything she said. Therefore, she didn’t have to grapple with any moral issues about destroying Aeric’s memory of the woman he loved so much.

  Her, an ex-assassin, grappling with moral issues. That was humorous.

  She hadn’t been an assassin now for hundreds of years, but the taint of that time of her life had never quite washed clean. And now, confronted with Aeric and having her nose rubbed in all her past sins, her history seemed fresher than ever.

  The heavy weight of emotion—regret and shame—settled in her chest. Nothing changed the core truth. She was guilty of killing Aileen. Aileen and so many others. Maybe she deserved to be punished by Aeric’s hand. Maybe she deserved all of this. Maybe it was karma, like Aeric had said.

  Spying a tray by her right foot, she saw that he’d brought her food. A bowl of soup, a sandwich, and a glass of milk. Her stomach rumbled. At least he wasn’t going to starve her to death.

  Scooting over, she tried to spoon some of the lukewarm chicken noodle soup into her mouth but succeeded only in dripping it onto the floor.

  Aeric spotted her and walked over. In a moment, she was free of the cuffs. Immediately her impulse was to cloak herself in glamour again, but she tamped it down. What was the point? He knew every one of her dirty secrets—and even believed a few that weren’t true. There was no sense in hiding from this man.

  “Eat,” he commanded roughly, throwing the cuffs to the floor with a metallic jangle. He turned back toward his worktable. “But don’t expect those cuffs to stay off.”

  She gathered the bowl in her hands and rested against the wall behind her, spooning up the soup and trying not to eat like a starving animal. When the bowl of soup was gone, she started on the sandwich and only then did the dull ache of hunger in her belly begin to ease.

  “Why did you come to Piefferburg?” Aeric asked, his voice low and raspy with anger. He picked up his hammer and walked over to the fire to remove a long piece of metal.

  She set the rest of the sandwich back on the plate. “I came to find you.”

  Clang. Clang. “I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Believe it or don’t believe it, it’s the truth.”

  Making a sound of disgust, he threw the hammer down onto the worktable. “You don’t know what the truth is, woman. You couldn’t find the truth if it stepped out in front of you, big as a barn.”

  “You don’t know anything about the truth, either,” she muttered.

  He turned toward her with what looked literally like a hot poker in his hand and she stilled. She needed to be careful with this man and that meant she had to watch her mouth better. Ordinarily, her mouth was famous for getting her into trouble. She’d meant what she’d said about believing Aeric was a good man who wouldn’t hurt her, but it was still smart to give good yet angry men with hot pokers some respect.

  “My best guess is that you’re here to get back into good graces with the Summer Queen. I think you want your old job back.” He studied her. “Or are you here to kill someone?”

  “I don’t do that anymore.” She ducked her head, feeling shame that she’d ever done it in the first place. “I work on behalf of the HFF now. I’m here on a mission for them, a mission—by the way, that would benefit you greatly. You need to let me go and you need to help me.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need, assassin. I know what I need and it’s nothing that would benefit you. You’re not going anywhere. Your ass is mine now.”

  “And what do you intend to do to me?” Her voice only shook a little. She was proud of herself.

  He set the piece of red-hot iron onto the table and took up the hammer. “I’m weighing my options,” he said right before he brought the hammer down on it. “I’ve been thinking about ways to make you pay for so long that it’s hard to settle on just one.”

  She shivered and pushed the tray away with her foot. “I probably deserve everything you have to dish out.”

  “No doubt.” His hammer clanged down again.

  “Although in the last three hundred or so years I may have redeemed myself somewhat. At least, I doubt the sluagh will claim my soul when you kill me.”

  The sluagh, an army of unforgiven dead, took the souls of all the murdering fae. If Aeric really did kill her, chances were high they’d take him, too.

  The hammer stopped in midair and he turned to look at her. “You, redeemed? And just how would that be possible, woman?” His voice was a harsh bark and his brows were drawn together in one severe slash over his beautiful chocolate brown eyes.r />
  Shame on her that she thought his eyes were beautiful. Clearly she was a deeply disturbed person. She needed medication.

  “I told you,” she barked back. “I’ve been working for the HFF since it was first created. My ultimate goal is your freedom, freedom for the fae. I don’t kill for the Summer Queen anymore. I haven’t since—” She snapped her mouth closed. Not since she’d killed his fiancée by accident. “Not for hundreds of years. All my time and energy is devoted to breaking the barriers that hold the fae in Piefferburg. I think that when I die Danu and the Morrigan will take mercy on me.”

  He snorted. “All your killings were ordered by the Summer Queen, so you get a free pass from the Powers That Be.” He paused. “All but one murder, right?”

  Guided by the hounds that came from the Netherworld, the Wild Hunt normally instantly collected the souls of those who murdered in cold blood. It was a swift and accurate punishment that drastically controlled fae-on-fae killings. Though there were exceptions. Those deaths ordered by either royal, Unseelie or Seelie, were exempt, as were deaths dealt during wartime. Sometimes there were random passovers that no one understood. But generally, those fae who murdered other fae were swept up by the Wild Hunt almost right away and taken by the sluagh.

  She couldn’t explain why she hadn’t been swept up after she’d killed Aileen. Perhaps because it had been unintentional. Aileen had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somewhere she shouldn’t have been, doing something she shouldn’t have been doing.

  “I don’t deny I’ve done many things in my life I’m not proud of, but I’ve spent a lifetime—many human lifetimes—trying to make amends for those years.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not.”

  “I don’t really care how you’ve spent your life since you killed Aileen. That’s all irrelevant to me. The fact that you murdered her is all that matters.”

  She pushed a shaky hand through her hair. Dying wasn’t really on her agenda. She had a mission to accomplish. The question remained: how could she get herself out of this mess?

  She drew a careful breath and licked her lips. “What if I told you that the HFF knows where a piece of the bosca fadbh is and you hold the key—literally—to obtaining it. You know that the fae have already managed to get one piece of the bosca fadbh and the Book of Bindings. If you have one more piece, you’re that much closer to getting out of here.”

  “Do you remember the part where I think you’re a lying murderer who would sell her own mother for a chance at retaining her miserable life?”

  Yeah, that was pretty much what she’d thought he’d say.

  “Fine, kill me, then, but you’re wasting the best chance you have for freedom.”

  “But killing you will make my life so much sweeter.”

  “And then the Wild Hunt will come for you, Aeric, and you will belong to the sluagh.”

  “It would be worth it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Really? It would be worth it? You’d never get to see Aileen in the Netherworld if you let yourself be taken by the sluagh.”

  “Aileen is lost to me and always will be. I accepted that a long time ago.”

  “And have obviously been swimming in bitterness ever since.”

  He smiled a bright, charming, open smile. The kind of smile that, had he bestowed it on her long ago, would have made her heart do a backflip. “Oh, yes, woman, and I’ve been saving it all for you.”

  CÁEL O’Malley had once been strong and vigorous, but age and Watt syndrome had taken their toll. When Aeric entered his father’s apartment the formerly mighty man seemed a little more fragile than usual. Aeric dreaded the day the Wild Hunt would come for him. That was the dark side to serving on it—they had to reap their loved ones.

  His dad, bent and gray, sat near his living room window. He held a book in his gnarled hands and had a blanket draped across his knees. The sickness made him look about ninety. If he hadn’t become ill, he would only appear to be in his early fifties by human standards. Cáel had been one of the lucky ones, though. Not many had survived the sickness.

  His father let the book drop into his lap and sat up with a smile of pleasure on his face, but his expression quickly fell. “Jaysus, what’s wrong?”

  Aeric closed the door behind him and crossed the living room to sit near his dad. The Shadow King had given Cáel a nice apartment in thanks for so many dedicated years of service. Cáel was due every square inch and every stick of wood in the furniture for all the work he’d done. “What makes you think there’s something wrong, da?”

  Cáel’s still sharp eyes narrowed. “You’ve got that look on your face.” He spoke with a thick Irish accent that hadn’t seemed to erode even after so many hundreds of years in Piefferburg.

  “What look on my face?”

  “The one that you always get when you meet a woman you like”—he smacked his lips together—“and you don’t know what to do about it.”

  There were so many things wrong with his father’s reply that Aeric didn’t even know where to start. “Uh, I met a woman. You got that part right. The rest, not so much.”

  Cáel cackled and mostly ignored him. “I knew it. And as usual you don’t know your arse from your asshole when it comes to wooing her.”

  Aeric’s lips twisted. “What does that even mean, da? And for your information, I know enough not to use the words arse or asshole when wooing a woman. Do you?”

  “My wooing days are over. I can use any kind of language I want.” He paused and smacked his lips again. “Anyway, your mother never complained.”

  “Well, Mom was a saint. She had to be a saint to put up with you.”

  Another cackle. “That’s for sure. She was a good woman.” A good woman who’d succumbed to Watt syndrome. “Them were good days when she was at my side. Now all I got to look forward to during the day is messing my cacks.” Lip smack. “So tell me about her. The woman, not your ma. I can remember every detail about her.”

  “You got it wrong, da. I don’t like this woman and I know exactly what to do with her.” Okay, maybe not. Once he had. Now he wasn’t so sure. Before his dad could say anything more, he got up and brought back the chess set. They always played a few games together.

  He set the board up while Cáel studied him. “If you say so.”

  Aeric looked up at him, a chess piece in one hand, and held his gaze steadily. “I say so. And I want very much to stop talking about this now.”

  “Huh. But—”

  “Da.” Aeric’s hand closed around the black queen he held hard enough to hurt. “The reason I have a troubled look on my face does have to do with a woman—the woman who killed Aileen. Do you understand now?”

  Cáel’s face went a shade paler. “The Summer Queen’s assassin is here in Piefferburg?”

  Aeric nodded. “You can’t say a word to anyone, da. Not a word.”

  “The Unseelie would tear her apart if they knew.”

  “That’s why you can’t say anything.”

  His father’s body went rigid. “Are you protecting her?”

  “No.” Aeric carefully placed the piece on the board, weighing his words before he made a full reply. “Yeah, sort of. I’m protecting her from the rest of the court so I can take my revenge on her at my ease, without interference.”

  Cáel shook his white head. “Revenge is a bad business. I recommend you get out of it before you do something you regret, something that abrades the fine man you are.”

  Aeric looked up at his father. “She killed Aileen.”

  “A very long time ago. You don’t know her full story. You don’t why she did it, or even if she really did it at all. It’s not your place to be her judge, jury, and executioner.”

  Aeric fought to keep his voice down. “And why not? She certainly played judge, jury, and executioner.”

  “By the Summer Queen’s order, she did. Killed men who deserved it. Like Diarmad
Ailbhe Eòin Aimhrea, remember him? And Driscoll Manus O’Shaughnessy.”

  “Why are you defending her? And O’Shaughnessy was Seelie, by the way.”

  “I remember.” Cáel rubbed his lips with his twisted hand, lost in a memory. “Never knew a man who needed killing more than him. The Summer Queen’s assassin never took anyone whose death didn’t improve the world. You have to admit that. She cleaned up the trash.”

  Aeric studied the chessboard fiercely, controlling his temper. “She wasn’t a godsdamn superhero, da.”

  “No, she was a teenage girl, Aeric. Just a young thing. I remember.”

  “You’re thinking of her age in contemporary terms. She—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “She was a teenager by any measure back when she was killing for the queen. I met her once.”

  Pique momentarily forgotten, he raised his head. “You did?”

  He nodded. “Walking the path through the woods one day. She knew who I was, of course, being your father. She was very polite.”

  “So because she was polite you defend her even though she killed Aileen? Aileen was polite, too. Remember her?”

  “I do remember her. She was a good woman. If she had lived, maybe she’d be the mother of my grandchildren. I want to see those soon, by the way. I won’t be around forever, you know.”

  “That issue is in the hands of the Powers That Be, da.”

  Cáel nodded. “All issues are. That’s why you need to be giving up this idea of revenge against this woman, boyo, before you do something that will change you forever.” He paused. “Change you for the worse.”

  Aeric shook his head and gritted his teeth, but he didn’t argue any further because he knew with heaviness in his heart that, indeed, Cáel wouldn’t be around forever.

  DAVID Sullivan sat in an Internet café in Haifa, Israel, and tapped his fingers on the tabletop while staring at the screen of his laptop. If he stared hard enough maybe an e-mail from the HFF would pop up to ease the niggling fear he had that something horrible had happened to Emmaline.