by Neill, Chloe
I paused and wondered, just for a moment, what it would be like to snap my fingers and become someone else. Bizarro Merit, the evil or twisted version of myself. Bizarro Merit would have her own agenda. Bizarro Merit wouldn’t encourage Ethan to run for the GP, or tell him that Lakshmi had suggested the idea. She’d snap her fingers, send the GP into a parallel universe, and warp space-time so she could spend immortality with Ethan and a book on the deck of a boat on Lake Michigan.
While I stood there, engaged in my fantasy, the hairs on the back of my neck lifted, piqued by something . . . magical?
I ignored the quick punch of fear. Without moving my head, I scanned the area around me. I was facing down the length of the shopping center, but other than the usual traffic in and out of the parking lot, nothing looked unusual.
Looks, I knew, could be deceiving, so I closed my eyes, let the breath flow out of me, and allowed the sensations of the world to drip back into my consciousness.
Sound became a roar—moving cars, the squeak of carnival rides, the slide of the automatic door at the grocery store, the faraway whispers of humans . . . and the nearby shush of fabric. And now that I was paying attention, I sensed the faint, tart smell of magic. Fresh, green, vegetal.
Someone was here. And I needed a look.
I closed the barriers again and pulled out my phone, feigning sudden interest in it, but sliding my gaze to the store window beside me.
She was behind me, probably fifteen feet, mostly hidden behind a concrete pillar.
I didn’t recognize her, or even what she was. She looked physically similar to the mercenary fairies who’d once guarded the gate at Cadogan House. Tall and slender, with a lean face and hollows beneath her sharp cheekbones. But her chin was more sharply pointed, her eyes larger and rounder, dominated by huge, dark irises. Her hair was dark, closely cropped, forming curled wisps around her face.
She wore a simple dark tunic with a keyhole collar and match- ing pants, the fabric nubby and homespun. She didn’t look like a threat . . . until I turned to face her.
Wheeee.
Whistling like a bottle rocket, a three-foot-long arrow flew into the empty planter on the ledge beside me.
My mouth went as dry as dirt.
The shaft of the arrow, pale and slender, with stripes of gold and teal, ivory feathers slitted into the end, vibrated from the movement.
Slowly, I glanced back over my shoulder.
Now a man stood behind me, also in a dark tunic and with short hair, a four-foot-long recursive bow in hand, an arrow tipped with a shiny silver point already strung and taut. The fingers that held the bow were long and thin, ending in long and equally sharp nails.
Had the circumstances been different, I might have admired the weapon. It was carved of pale wood and beautifully curvy. Unless the shafts were made of aspen, being shot by an arrow wouldn’t kill me. But that didn’t mean I was looking forward to it.
I glanced back, looking for egress, but they’d been joined by another woman and man. It was four to one, and my allies were still tucked in a restaurant down the road.
The odds were not in my favor, but I put on my fighting face—a haughty expression punctuated by a hell of a lot of feigned bravado.
“I think you’ll want to lower your weapon, friends. And explain why you’re following me.”
The man watched me silently without blinking. I could read nothing in his eyes. They were too dark, too glassy, too shielded. “You have made war against us.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have attacked the People. You have breached our trust and our pact. We claim the right of retribution.”
Completely flummoxed, I evaluated my chances while trying to ferret out what the hell was going on.
“We haven’t attacked anyone. We were attacked last night. A squadron of harpies struck from the air.” Keeping my eyes on them, I flipped the thumb guard on my katana.
“Nonsense,” came the prim voice of the woman who’d followed me. “Harpies are imaginary creatures.”
“They were made of magic. And we lost four in the battle. I’m not sure what happened to you, but it wasn’t because of us.”
The man’s gaze narrowed. He pulled the bow tauter, raising his arms so the arrow pointed directly at my heart. Apparently, he meant to skewer me here and now, in front of—I glanced at the store beside us—Pilchuk Mufflers, which, according to the carefully painted storefront, had four convenient metro locations to serve all your muffler needs.
It would be ignominious to die, I thought, sprawled on the sidewalk in front of Pilchuk Mufflers. So I decided not to.
“Harpies!” I yelled out, shifting their attention just long enough to move. I dropped and punched the bowman in the kneecap, drawing a groan and enough distraction that he let the arrow fly over my head.
I pulled my sword, raked the biting edge against his shins. Blood, thin and shockingly green, spilled through the new slit in his leggings and dripped to the ground. He roared in pain, eyes wide in fury that I’d had the temerity to fight back—and that I’d managed to nick him.
He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Before I could move, he kicked, his boot connecting with my abdomen and sending a wave of pain and nausea. I nearly retched on the sidewalk but managed to roll enough so his second shot just grazed me.
Then I was violently hauled to my feet, dropping my katana in the process. I found myself staring back into the eyes of the man.
His orbed black eyes were wild with fury. I brought up a knee, trying to catch him in the groin, but my aim was off and he blocked the blow with a shift of his knee.
He slapped me. The world wavered, and my mouth filled with blood.
Someone behind me pulled my ponytail, wrenching back my head with a hot flush of pain that spilled down my neck like boiling water. My head upside down, I saw the first woman behind me, a feline smile on her face.
She wrapped her arm around my neck and squeezed. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find air at all. Panic struck, my vision dimming on the edges as my legs kicked backward, as I tried to free myself from her vicious grip and find air again.
This is the way the world ends, I thought, and the world went black.
• • •
I woke in darkness, gasping for air. It took moments to realize that I was alive, my head still attached, but my neck sore and probably bruised. My throat ached, and my head felt unusually heavy. I couldn’t see anything around me. If I could, I imagined it would be spinning.
But I wasn’t dead. Which was completely unexpected.
I also didn’t think I was in front of Pilchuk Mufflers. Shapes and faint colors began to emerge in the darkness. I lay on a braided rug on the dirt floor of a small round room. The walls were made of pale birch saplings strapped together, and a conical roof was built above it, rising to a point in the middle of the ceiling. The remains of a fire sat in a depression in the middle of the room, and the entire space vibrated with low and malignant magic.
“Merit?”
It was Jeff’s voice, and I nearly wept with relief.
“Yeah,” I whispered, but my voice was scratchy, hoarse. I rubbed my throat, swallowed past parched lips, and tried again. “It’s me.”
Slowly, I pushed myself up on an elbow, looking through the darkness. My hands and feet were bound by large silver manacles and chains tethered to a large metal hook in the dirt floor.
Jeff and Damien sat a few feet beside each other, bound in the same silver chains. Their faces were bruised. Jeff’s right eye was cut and swollen, and the air carried the peppery scent of blood. They were hurt, but they were alive.
“You’re okay?” I asked. My words were scratchy but clear enough.
“Okay,” Damien agreed. But his eyes looked a little woozy and unfocused, which couldn’t have been good. “Silver chains. An
d silver-tipped arrows.” He nodded toward a dark spot of blood near the crux of his left shoulder.
Not all myths about supernaturals were accurate, but it appeared the shape-shifter weakness to silver was right on.
I glanced at Jeff, who nodded. “Glad you’re awake,” he said with a sheepish grin, which belied the worry in his eyes.
“Where are we?”
“We aren’t sure,” Damien said. “We were out when they brought us here. Farther from the carnival—I can’t smell it.”
He was right. The air smelled woody, smoky. “In the forest,” I guessed. But there was a lot of forest near Loring Park, so that didn’t narrow it down much.
“They got you at the restaurant?”
Damien nodded. “Outside it. We were looking for you. When you didn’t come back, we got worried. Where’d they get you?”
“Walking back to the restaurant.” I considered Lakshmi’s visit to be RG business, which made it none of the Pack’s. “They were following me. And when I confronted them, they pounced. How long was I unconscious?”
“It’s one in the morning,” Damien said.
We’d been gone for a few hours. Ethan would be in a panic. I called his name, tried to activate the link between us, but couldn’t reach him. He was too far away.
“What the hell are they?”
“Elves,” Jeff said. “At least, that’s what they looked like. They’re relatives of the fairies—mutated relatives. They look even less human, so they had an even harder time assimilating. They call themselves the People. Believe they are the highest order of sentient beings. Everyone else is Other.”
“Early Europeans found them, hunted them down,” Damien continued, looking around, wincing when the move strained his shoulder. “They were believed extinct. Looks like that’s fundamentally wrong.”
“They must have migrated,” Damien said. “But how did we not know they were here?”
I glanced at the carefully constructed room, the gaps between the saplings neatly filled with mud or daub. This place hadn’t been built yesterday; the elves had been here for some time. Which made me also wonder how the shifters had missed them.
“Magic?” I suggested, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Damien, who shook his head.
“Do you know what they want?” Jeff asked me.
“They said they were attacked.”
“By the harpies?”
I shook my head. “The ones that jumped me said harpies were imaginary. They thought I was lying.”
Sounds rose outside—shrieks and pounding feet. Instinctively, I pulled at my chains, seeking freedom.
Sentinel?
My head darted up, searching for the sound of his voice in my head. Ethan? Are you here? We’re chained.
Working on it, he told me. I’ve brought your army.
“Something’s up,” Damien said, glancing at the noise that was beginning to shake the walls of our prison.
“Ethan’s here. He said he’s brought an army.”
Before I could answer, a door on the other side of the room was shoved open. Three elves, the man from before and two new men, walked in. Without speaking or acknowledging our existence, they unlinked the chains that bound us to the floor. But they didn’t unchain our bound hands and feet.
They yanked us to our feet and pushed us outside.
It was dark, the bits of sky visible through the canopy of limbs still indigo. But that was the only thing that made sense. We were in a wood, the trees stripped bare by winter.
We were also in a village.
Structures, cylindrical like the one we’d just stepped out of, filled every clearing in the woods around us, white smoke puffing from the openings in the conical roofs. Footholds had been cut into the tree trunks, and smaller structures hung from the trees. The structures looked old. Comfortable and lived in, with rough-hewn tools hanging along the exteriors and green linens strung across lines that extended between the trees. This wasn’t a camp; it was a neighborhood.
The elves were everywhere. Hundreds of men and women, all approximately middle-aged, trim and fit in the same tunics, either running toward the sounds of battle with slicked bows in hand, or battening down their simple homesteads. Untying lines of laundry, carrying steaming cooking pots into their homes.
There was an entire city of elves tucked into the woods outside Chicago and no one had seen it? No one had discovered them? How was that possible?
“And I didn’t even have time to welcome them to the neighborhood with muffins,” Jeff murmured beside me.
“I didn’t get muffins, either,” I pointed out, trying to keep some levity.
“I didn’t know you then. We get out of this, I’ll get you a muffin.” He tried for a smile, so I tried back.
“Deal,” I said.
“This way,” said the man from the shopping center, pulling my katana from the scabbard he’d belted around his waist.
I generally preferred not to be poked with my own sword, and certainly not by the very person who’d taken it from me. He yanked my arm, pulling me forward. Since we were moving toward the sounds, I didn’t fight back. They were taking me precisely where I wanted to go.
With Damien and Jeff stumbling behind us, we walked the narrow path through the trees and up a low rise, which gave way to a snowy field, still dotted with the remains of last year’s cornstalks . . . and marked by the columns of the invading army.
They’d found us.
Chapter Nine
THE SPOILS OF WAR
There were hundreds of shifters, some in NAC jackets, some in animal form. All behind the front line—which consisted of the Keenes, Nick, Ethan, Catcher, and Mallory—and waiting for orders.
Ethan searched the marching bulk, body stilling when he finally saw me, as he took in the chains on my ankles and whatever concoction of blood and dirt had stiffened on my face. His body went rigid, his eyes hot with fury, and I feared he’d begin the charge himself, ripping through elves in order to punish them for my injuries.
I’m fine, I assured him, hoping to delay First Blood, and glad he couldn’t hear the hoarseness in my voice.
Sentinel, he crisply said. You’ve managed to get yourself into trouble again.
They nabbed me as I was walking down the sidewalk, I assured him. And I think the Canon needs updating.
Evidently, he responded, and there was a gravelly edge to his voice.
How did you find us?
Damien sent an alert before he was taken. The shifters scented out the rest of it.
The elf’s fingers still wrapped tightly around my arm, we marched forward, creating another line of troops. Behind us echoed the muted and rhythmic thud of boots on soil. The elves had their own army, and quarters had been called.
They stretched out beside us, shifting their short rows to form three long lines with Rockette-level precision. They raised their bows and tucked arrows into the strings, the silver arrowheads glinting in the moonlight, the air thick with tension and magic.
Our escort pushed us to our knees, where we knelt on hard, frozen ground in front of our colleagues and loved ones, enemies at our backs, weapons in their hands.
Ethan looked calmly at the elves, his body stiff and hiding the fear and anger that I knew ripped at him. But fear was a nasty motivator, and we didn’t need another supernatural war brewing outside Chicago. Not when events there were tense enough.
They were attacked, I told Ethan. And they think we—the Pack and vampires—were the culprits. They followed us, took us in. They must have been waiting for an opportunity to get us alone.
Ethan murmured to Gabriel beside him, probably offering the intel.
“You have breached our peace,” said the elf. “You shed First Blood.”
“We have shed no blood,” Gabriel said. “We were attacked last night without provocation. S
everal members of our Pack were injured. Four are dead.”
That didn’t seem to register with the elf. “One of ours is gone. We seek retribution in equal kind.”
As if those words were enough to justify murder, he lifted the sword ominously.
I braced to move, to fight back, but Ethan beat me to it. He unsheathed his katana, catching the moonlight like Excalibur might have. And he was Arthur, blond and strong and proud, willing to destroy a kingdom for his Guinevere.
“You make one move with that sword,” Ethan said, stepping forward, eyes furiously green, “and you’ll have every vampire in the world hunting you down. Beginning with me.”
The elf’s eyes narrowed with keen pleasure, as if the thought of taking on a vampire—or a world of them—was a prize, not a threat.
But Gabriel wasn’t keen on the destruction of his kingdom, his Pack, or his allies. He put a calming hand on Ethan’s arm.
“If you commit violence,” Gabriel said to the elf, “you will breach the contract between us.”
Ethan’s eyes narrowed, and while he didn’t speak to me, it was easy to guess the line of his thought. The Pack had a contract with a species that wasn’t supposed to exist—which had apparently created a village just outside Chicago—and no one had bothered to tell us about it.
“You breached the pact first,” the elf said again, his voice growing irritable and sounding not unlike an ornery child. “We claim the right of retribution.”
Gabriel watched him for a moment, considered. “Support your claim.” And when Ethan began to protest, Gabriel held up a hand. “I would hear precisely how the elves believe we wronged them.”
“It was glamour,” the elf said, damning me with a look. Glamour was the particular magic of vampires—the mythical ability to seduce and control others. But the ability to glamour varied significantly from vampire to vampire. Ironically, I couldn’t glamour worth a damn.
“We were together for our midday meal,” the elf continued. “We’d just taken our mead when the fog began to thicken.”