She's No Faerie Princess

by Christine Warren

  "Which makes it a particular relief that you passed on the opportunity to head the Council," Rafael said. He and Tess sat on the sofa in Graham's office at Vircolac. They had rushed over in response to Walker's succinct and urgent cell-phone call and arrived at the club hot on Walker's and Fiona's heels. "The last thing they need to hear at the moment is your panicked rantings."

  "No," snarled the alpha, "the last thing they need to hear is that Others around the city are slaughtering defenseless humans. That should make our negotiations really pleasant."

  "They won't hear any such thing, because no one is going to tell them."

  Graham shoved a hand through his hair and looked about half a step away from yanking it all out by the roots. Just to keep his mind off his pain. "Right, because a series of gruesome and suspicious deaths will be so easy to keep out of the human public's eye. Damn it, the occasional death we can handle. We have our bad seeds the same as the humans, and the fact that we choose to deal with them ourselves rather than turning them over to the human authorities doesn't mean we're any more tolerant of murder. But a series of deaths isn't occasional, and it couldn't come at a worse time. If the human delegation hears about this, the talks are over."

  Tess snorted. "Why would they get suspicious? This is New York City. People die in gruesome and unexplained ways at least five times every day."

  "Not at the hands of Others, they don't."

  "And they didn't this time, either," Rafe pointed out calmly and decidedly. "Thanks to Fiona, we already know that these humans died at the hands of a demon. Others aren't to blame, and we can say that with certainty to anyone who might become concerned. You're right that alerting the human delegation would lead to nothing more than broken negotiations and a frenzied witch hunt. But that fails to solve our problem. We need to find the demon."

  "Demons. Plural." Fiona stepped out from behind Walker's shoulders. He hadn't realized that he'd put himself between her and Graham when the other Lupine had begun shouting. It was a reflex to protect his mate. "I'm pretty certain we're looking for more than one demon. The drastically different manners of death make a single demon unlikely. They're too much creatures of instinct for one to show such a lack of restraint with one victim and such a great deal of it with the other."

  Graham swore again, earning a stern glare from his wife and a resigned sigh from the head of the Council.

  "If that is true, then the situation is doubly urgent," Rafe said. "What have you been able to find out so far?"

  Walker watched a blush stain Fiona's cheeks. They hadn't exactly spent a lot of time working the last day or so, but Fiona had done what she could. Bemoaning her lack of Faerie's rich store of materials on demonology, she had wrestled her way out of his bed every so often to try different spells to help her decipher the sigils she'd recorded or to analyze the demon's energy. She hadn't had much luck, but she'd persisted. Which led to Walker feeling obliged to help her recharge the energy she used in her continued attempts.

  "I haven't found much," she admitted, and her voice dragged him out of his fond memories with a jolt. "Whoever designed the sigils didn't want to be traced. He did a good job covering his tracks. I might have better luck if I had my aunt's library to refer to, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. I'm going to have to start asking around summoners here in the city, and I was trying to avoid that. If I ask the wrong person, word might get back to the one we're looking for. And then he could either bolt and do a disappearing act, or escalate the attacks."

  Rafe looked at his mate. "The only one of us who has dealt directly with a demon and come out smiling is my lovely wife."

  Tess shook her head. "I don't think I'm going to be much help on this one. The stuff I know about demons is just adhesive-bandage witchery. Self-defense stuff and pretty useless against all but the minor characters. The fact that the one in Connecticut responded to the binding I cast had more to do with luck than anything else." She offered her astonished mate a sweet, disarming grin. "Sorry I forgot to mention that to you, baby."

  Rafe growled something in return and Walker saw his future of confronting a reckless and charming mate flash before his eyes. The disturbing thing was that he didn't find the concept unappealing.

  "Yeah, well, you can yell at me about that later." Tess dropped her endearing expression and turned back to Fiona. "The good news is that while I can't help you trace the demon with magic, I think there might be a way to get the information you need from Faerie."

  Fiona's eyes widened. "The gate has reopened?"

  "Not quite. I said get something from Faerie, not get you to Faerie."

  "What do you mean? If the gate is sealed, I won't be able to send so much as a split pea through it."

  "No, but we do have other contact with your people than just the gates."

  Rafe broke in with a glare for his better half. "What my incredibly foolhardy and about-to-learn-the-meaning-of-chastised wife means is that we occasionally need to reach someone at the Faerie courts without traveling all the way there. Since your aunt also likes to have the option of tossing accusations our way without having to leave her own borders, she gave us a gift."

  "It's a…" Tess paused and pursed her lips. "Well, actually, I'm not quite sure of the appropriate descriptor…"

  Rafe winced. "Let's go with… 'stained-glass,' er, 'piece'… shall we, love?"

  "Why the hell didn't you mention this earlier?" Graham demanded. "We might have been able to find the demon by now, and that male human might still be alive."

  Tess stiffened. "I didn't mention it because I'm fairly certain the queen is not going to be happy with any number of the things we're proposing to tell her, Graham, so I was trying to spare us all the pain caused by opening up a third front in this little war we're fighting."

  The excitement faded from Fiona's face, and Walker suppressed the urge to cuddle her.

  "She's right," Graham said. He still got headaches from the last fit the Faerie queen had thrown at the mortal Others. "I'm not sure which would be more disastrous—letting the demon ruin the negotiations, thereby causing the humans to make war and destroy all living Other kind, or telling Mab about the princess's trip and Dionnu's presence at the summit. Either one pretty much spells doom from where I see it. Knowing Mab, she might let the demons and humans destroy us anyway, just to teach us a lesson."

  Again, Walker found himself trying to shield his new mate from his alpha. Walker didn't like the tone Graham had put into calling her "the princess." If anyone was going to call Fiona by a nickname she hated, it sure as hell wasn't going to be anyone but Walker.

  Shit. He was losing his mind.

  "I don't see that we have much choice." Fiona ignored his strange restlessness and spoke with determination. "If we want to find this summoner and stop the demons he controls from killing any more humans, we need to move quickly. And we need all the help we can get."

  Rafe nodded. "I agree, but it will not do us any good if we make up time but end up in a pitched battle against Faerie."

  "Can you think of a better solution?" No one said anything, but everyone looked at least somewhat uncomfortable. Fiona nodded. "Right. Then I think you'd better show me this gift of Mab's."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  Fiona laughed when she saw it.

  The gift had probably been meant to hang in front of a large window where light could shine through the myriad panes of colored glass and cast bright, vibrant pools of color around the room. Thank the stars the Others had been too smart for that. Instead, the two-by-three-foot piece hung inside a wooden cabinet in a small study on the second floor of Vircolac like some kind of guilty secret. The gilt frame around the monstrosity could easily have dated back to the days of the human king Louis XIV, but Fiona would have dated its origins to the Early Bad Taste period.

  The edges of the glass disappeared into a rectangular wooden frame so ornately decorated, she almost expected it to tear the huge armoire down with its weight. Trailing vi
nes twisted and clung, sprouting berries here and there like a hideous example of plant food gone wrong. Winged cherubs beamed maniacally down from each of the four corners, pudgy arms pulling back on intricately decorated bows. Their arrows pointed straight at anyone foolish enough to stand in front of the blinding gilded abomination. But worse than any of the sins of the frame was the image it surrounded.

  Some evil artistic antigenius had used the same medium as the glorious rose window at Chartres to depict the stomach-churning image of Shakespearean fairies in midfrolic. Little winged creatures with faces like trolls and limbs like toothpicks gamboled around the edges of what looked like it was supposed to be a sylvan glade. A deformed and violently blue stream flowed across the foreground, and at the center of the scene a hideously blond fairy in a crown and a toga stood surrounded by the glowing nimbus usually reserved for human saints.

  "Damn. One of you must have really pissed her off."

  "Yeah, we figured that out." Tess guided Fiona until she stood right in the path of those little golden arrows about three feet from the surface of the blindingly bad artwork. "Actually, it reminds me that I wanted to ask you when Mab's birthday is. I have this lovely macramé toilet paper cover I think she'd just adore."

  "There is a little charm she told us to use to make the glass active," Rafe said. He and the others stood against the inner wall of the study, well out of sight—or maybe firing range—of the magical device. "I didn't think you'd need it. You've probably done this sort of thing before, right?"

  "I think I can figure it out."

  Fiona took a deep breath, focused her attention on the glass, and gritted her teeth. Not because of any nerves about her ability to communicate through her aunt's gift to the Others, but because when Mab answered her call, she'd probably end up wishing she'd stopped along the way and picked up a full-body suit of Kevlar. Or maybe asbestos.

  There had to be a museum in this city with a nice little set of steel-plate armor, right?

  She twitched a little when Walker appeared just behind her and laid his large, warm hands on her shoulders.

  "Need a little energy boost?" His breath tickled her ear and the solid, steady presence of him relaxed her enough that she could feel her muscles softening. That was good. It would help her absorb the impact of the coming blows. "The peanut gallery over there would get an eyeful, but it's all for a good cause, right?"

  Like she needed him to kiss her. Just the sound of his low, rumbling voice was enough to have sparks dancing along her skin. It made her remember how he sounded when he was naked beside her. Above her. Inside her.

  She shivered.

  "Is that a yes?"

  "Thanks, mo fáell," she said. He wasn't really "her wolf," but nerves made her grateful for his support. "But I think I can take it from here."

  He brushed her hair away from her neck and leaned down to press a kiss against the skin that still bore the mark left by his bite. She could almost imagine it heating at his touch. "Whatever you say, Princess. But if you need me, you just holler."

  He stepped back, and Fiona told herself to stop stalling. Delaying things wouldn't make her aunt's temper any easier to deal with.

  Vicodin, on the other hand…

  "Oh, bugger it." Gritting her teeth and steeling her nerves, she looked directly into the chaotic jumble of colored glass and breathed the simple charm she'd known since childhood. "Rís e dhumh."

  Tell me.

  For the space of a heartbeat, nothing happened, but Fiona felt the magic whisper out with her breath and curl and dance toward the glass. The magic seemed to make the individual panes ripple like the water in a pond giving way to a stone. The image in the frame began to pulse almost like a heartbeat, colors shifting and rearranging so the static image of the stained glass became almost like a movie with the characters performing the actions depicted.

  She waited patiently for the magic to creep through the veil between the human world and Faerie. Time meant nothing to power. You couldn't make it move faster, but in this case, Fiona felt it was moving fast enough. She braced herself for the image to focus and the face of her aunt to develop in the small magical window.

  Mab never appeared.

  Instead, Fiona watched as the shifting colors began to slow and settle into a new image, one that looked almost like the bright, glittering halls of her aunt's palace. Fiona couldn't make out anything specific, but she caught glimpses of archways and staircases and graceful, darting movements. She sensed rather than heard clear musical voices, light ringing laughter, and the hum of constant activity. Against her skin, she could almost feel the warmth of magical fires burning at a perfect, constant temperature in the huge open hearths and the breeze of wings stirring the air.

  Drawing in a breath, she prepared to speak her aunt's name, but the sound never made it out.

  All at once, the colors of glass flared bright with a sickly putrid green light. The image writhed violently and darkened. A veil was drawn over it, dark and thick like sooty, smothering black coal smoke. Startled, Fiona took a step forward to get a better look and heard a sound like a gunshot in the quiet of the small study.

  The glass cracked.

  Really it shattered, splintering into thousands of tiny razor-sharp pieces and blasting outward from the wardrobe like shrapnel from a bomb. Another sound shook her, this one a low, ferocious roar as something large and angry tackled her from the side, knocking her off her feet and carrying her to the floor. Arms wrapped around her, Walker rolled her across the antique rug with astonishing speed, carrying her out of the path of the dangerous debris.

  All around them, the room erupted into chaos. People shouted and swore and ducked out of the way of the tiny glass bullets. Graham shoved Missy down behind the sofa with Tess, who had been diving for cover almost before Fiona realized what was happening. With a roar, Rafe dodged to the side and threw himself forward, coming in low and to the side of the wardrobe and slamming the door shut against the volley of glass.

  Fiona lay there, breathless and dizzy under Walker's considerable bulk, and listened to the sound of glass thudding like buckshot into the wooden panels of the cabinet doors for several more seconds before everything went quiet.

  Of course, it didn't stay that way for long.

  "What the high holy fuck was that all about?" Graham shouted, dragging Missy from the hiding place he'd put her in and wrapping her up in his arms. His glare should have had the armoire bursting into flames. "Someone could have been killed!"

  "I think that was the point." Tess stood up and leaned over to shake the sharp, sparkling dust out of her hair. She gave her mate a quick, hard hug when he covered the space between them with a single leap, his hands and eyes moving over her looking for injuries. "I'm fine, baby, but someone inside that picture seems to be feeling a little bit cranky."

  Fiona shifted and Walker finally eased off of her, at least far enough to sit on the floor and pull her into his lap.

  "Are you okay?" he demanded.

  His voice sounded even rougher and lower than usual and Fiona forced her lips into a smile. For the first time in a long, long time, she felt shaken, but her self-appointed bodyguard didn't need to know how badly.

  "I'm fine."

  "No. You're not." He swore and lifted his finger to brush the curve of her cheekbone. When he drew it away, she could see a drop of crimson blood glistening on the tip.

  She reached up and touched the same spot. Now she could feel a slight sting, but until she'd seen the blood, she hadn't even realized she'd been nicked by a piece of glass. "It's nothing. Just a scratch."

  Walker growled something under his breath, but his eyes were warm and bright as he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the tiny wound. She felt the tip of his tongue sneak out to soothe the minor hurt and tried to ignore when something inside her melted.

  "I'm fine," she repeated, trying to sound brisk and cool, but she couldn't stop herself from reaching up and pushing a stray piece of his rumpled hair back away fro
m his face.

  The room was silent around them.

  Missy broke the tension with a quiet and distinctly satisfied hum. "Well, that gave us a bit of excitement. I'm going to have to get one of the cleaning crew in here with thick-soled shoes and a vacuum cleaner."

  "I think we can worry about that later," Graham said, frowning down at her. "First, I'd like someone to tell me what the hell just happened."

  "The same thing that happened when I tried to get back home through the gate in the park." Fiona shifted in Walker's lap and he set her aside, rising easily to his feet. She took his hand and let him pull her to hers. "The glass, like the gate, was cursed. Booby-trapped. Someone is going to a load of trouble to cut off the communication between us and Faerie."

  "No way." Graham shook his head and scowled. "There's no way anyone could have gotten inside this club and performed a curse without me or someone on my staff knowing about it. It's impossible."

  "Maybe it wasn't the glass that was cursed," Fiona offered, only half-joking. "Maybe it was me."

  "Not to burst your bubble there," Tess said, "but it could just be a coincidence that you were the one who activated it. The curse could have been placed before the mirror came to us and set to go off whenever it was used, or if it was ever used by someone with Fae blood. Or it could have been cursed remotely. You don't need to see something or someone to put a curse on it. That's why they call it magic."

  "But why do it in the first place?" Missy asked.

  "I don't know." Fiona shrugged.

  Rafe raised an eyebrow. "Would you care to speculate?"

  She hesitated, then shook her head. "Not really. Touching the gate knocked me unconscious for a good couple of hours, and the glass could have slit my throat, if Walker hadn't shoved me out of the way. This could start to give a girl a complex."

  No one laughed at her quip. Walker especially didn't laugh. He bristled, hackles raised like the overprotective wolf he was. "Someone is trying to hurt you, and when I find out who it is, I'm going to very much enjoy ripping out his throat."