The Sidhe singer gave me a look even more guileless—and more worrisome—than Jude’s. “By all means. What may I do to demonstrate the good faith of my Court?”
I paused, my mind racing as I sought the best path to the information I wanted. Millicent had been clear about the difficulty of getting an answer out of the Unseelie. Aggie, though, had said that the Sidhe wouldn’t lie if asked something point blank—in other words, the direct approach. I knew it. So I ran with it.
“Answering a few questions would be good.” I ticked off each one by lifting a finger off my fork. “One, who were the Seelie at the Penguin? Two, do you know anything about why my boss has no clue who I am anymore?” More irritation than was wise got into my voice with those last words, but I couldn’t help it. It scared the hell out of me that I could be wiped out of someone’s memory as easily as deleting a file off of a computer, and I couldn’t stop thinking of it happening to Jude. Or Aggie. Or, though I’d known him for only two days, Christopher. But I couldn’t afford fright—not when we needed to find Millicent. I held that back for now, though, unwilling to put that question forth quite yet. “Three… I’ll get to that.”
“How amusing.” Elessir’s eyes sparked with interest and challenge; a feline smile slid along his mouth. He finished off his fajita, then took up his margarita glass once more and twirled it around within his fingers. “You decline the invitation of my Court, and yet demand information of me. That seems hardly equitable.”
I speared the last bit of my taco onto my fork, ate it without looking, and drawled, “Humor me.”
Elessir gave me another luminous smile. “If you put it that way, darlin’,” he drawled right back, “Ah’ll jes’ ask for only a couple lil’ ol’ favors in exchange for tellin’ you what you wanna know.”
“Figures,” Christopher grunted, while Jude looked back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis match. “Tell him to fuck off! You can’t bargain with the Unseelie!”
He had a grip on that rage, but the terror I’d glimpsed behind it was leaking through; Christopher’s eyes looked haunted. It triggered a strong, distracting need in me to touch him, and I didn’t care if Elessir noticed; I slipped my hand under the table and squeezed Christopher’s knee. “Tell us what you have in mind,” I ordered Elessir as I did. “But if I don’t like what I hear, I reserve the right to tell you to, as the gentleman beside me has suggested, fuck off.”
“Free will is the hallmark of all sentient beings,” the singer agreed without batting a single black eyelash or shifting the angle of his gaze. His smile grew ever so slightly larger and more catlike. “And just because I like your face, I’ll even answer the first question for free. The Seelie at the Electric Penguin were Malandor, a Seelie lord, and his lieutenants Tarrant and Melisanda. Malandor is a mage of no small repute in both Courts of the Sidhe.” His gaze bored into my own. “Furthermore, I’m given to understand that he is your mother’s brother.”
He couldn’t have staged a better reaction to that little announcement. Christopher jolted, Jude let out a squeak of shock, and I felt my blood turn to ice within me. “T-that—” I heard myself stammer, scowled, and fought to level my voice. “That bastard who put the whammy on me is my uncle?”
“That is what I said, my dear. Now, about your second question…”
Right. I forced myself back on track, though I was about to freak at the notion that the Sidhe who’d ensnared my will with his was a blood relation. “What do you want in exchange?” I said. Christopher’s hand slipped over mine, wrapping my fingers within his. That helped.
“My Court requires,” Elessir easily replied, “that I bring back either you yourself or confirmation that you possess the potential for your mother’s power. A simple test will give me the confirmation my Queen commands.”
“What kind of test?” My eyes narrowed.
“Power lies in blood, Miss Thompson. If you’ll permit me contact with just a few droplets of yours, it will suffice to tell me of the power that lies within it.” The Sidhe’s casual expression did not change; the smile still played across his lips, and his eyes still gleamed. But it seemed mask-like somehow, effectively concealing what was going on inside his beautiful head. He slipped one hand behind his back and brought out a tiny silver dagger. This he presented for my inspection. “I’ll need but a prick of one finger, nothing more.”
Christopher’s fingers tightened their grip on mine. Jude bit her lower lip, shooting an uncertain glance from Elessir to me. Me, I felt a shiver of dread trickle right down my spine. This had ‘bad idea’ written all over it. But did I have any choice but see it through?
“Can you answer my questions with something besides ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t tell you’?” I asked, suspicious of loopholes, and Elessir evidently approved of my caution.
“Yes, I can,” he assured me, placing his hand in reach of mine. “The proverbial ball is in your court, darlin’. Your serve.”
How else could this backfire on me? “Before I say yes, promise you won’t be using this to harm me or any of my friends or family,” I insisted, hoping that Aggie had been right. I couldn’t think of anything more point-blank than this.
“Consider it promised. Neither by this act nor by your blood shall I harm you or your loved ones.”
“Heard and witnessed,” Christopher said. “The word of a Sidhe is binding, Unseelie, even for you.”
That was that, then. Praying I wasn’t doing something stupid despite my claim to Christopher, I held out my hand. “Get it over with.”
Elessir inclined his head and took my hand in one of his, then agilely flipped the dagger in his other one around into position. With a swift, light prick, he poked the tip of my middle finger.
Blood welled up in a bright scarlet bead, but the Sidhe pressed his fingertip over mine before the droplet could fall onto the table. A crackle of new energy shot through my system at that small pressure. The necklace beneath my shirt thrummed; the sense of a shield all over my skin grew stronger. Elessir seemed to sense it, too. His lips parted just a bit before he shivered infinitesimally and let go of my hand.
“Well?” I barked, hoping I didn’t sound as shaken to everyone else as I did to myself.
“That…” Elessir sounded shaken himself. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the silver blade, and then slipped the weapon back down behind his back where he’d gotten it. With the handkerchief he dabbed at my finger, proffering a slightly skewed edition of his arrogant smile. “That will, ah, be adequate. My profoundest thanks.”
Still clinging to my other hand beneath the table, Christopher prodded the Sidhe, “Answer her next question, then.”
While I snatched my hand back from him, Elessir mustered a more assured smile. “Certainly, if Miss Thompson will elaborate upon what has befallen her employer.”
“He doesn’t remember me,” I said tightly, pressing my thumb against the finger Elessir’s knife had poked. “He does remember Jude. We’re assuming magical causes.”
Elessir leaned back once more against the wall, folding his handkerchief into quarters, and returned it to his pocket. “You assume correctly. Any suitably skilled mage can spirit away a memory, though it may also be done with boggles. Perhaps you’ve seen them. Small and black, with red eyes,” he said. And with a subtle upward lift of one brow he added, “They make excellent spies, and Malandor has the power to command them.”
I flashed back on the thing I’d seen under the vending machine, and then upon the red-haired Seelie lord. Malandor. My uncle. The thought made me want to throw up. “Do you know if he did it?”
“Is that your third question?” countered the singer.
For a moment, I was ready to say yes; then I remembered Millicent. I hauled in a deep breath, braced myself, and said, “This is. Do you know where we can find Millicent Merriweather?”
The Sidhe’s gorgeous eyes went wide. “The Lady Warder of this fair city?”
“That’s the one.”
&
nbsp; “She has been mislaid?”
My heart sped up within me. “I was hoping you’d tell us that,” I said, stunned that my words came out so steady. Especially since Elessir delayed answering me for several seconds, drawing out my tension as he seemed to deliberate the matter. I itched to shake him and yell at him to say something—but when he did, it was not what I wanted to hear.
“I’m afraid I will have to ask for a higher price for this answer, Miss Thompson.”
“Name it,” I whispered.
With a serenity that completely belied his words Elessir told me, “Nothing too taxing, to be sure. Since my Court desires your bloodline joined with ours, all I require is for you to lie with me.”
Chapter Fifteen
Before either Jude or I could react, before I could rip Elessir a new one for his shocking proposition, Christopher leaped to his feet and lunged, wolf-like, for the Unseelie’s throat. Electricity poured off his frame in a turbulent flood. Dishes clattered, his chair fell over, and the table jarred between us all as he seized Elessir by the front of his white shirt.
“It’s over my dead body you’ll touch her!” the Newfoundlander thundered.
Someone shrieked—maybe Jude, maybe me. Then a second, stronger surge turned the world a blinding blue-white. My sight and hearing shorted out; my sense of space and of the shape of my own body vanished, as every inch of me seemed to transform to crackling flame.
When the moment passed I found myself pitched onto the floor, spangles of light exploding and fading dizzily behind my eyes. Through them I glimpsed Jude, who had flung her sturdy, plump form across Elessir, pinning him to the bench and thrusting his shoulders against the wall. Her cheeks were livid and her eyes dark with visible fear, but as my hearing came back I heard her shouting, “—enough, pal! I don’t know what you did but you’re not doing it again!”
One look at the Sidhe showed me why Jude was scared. Christopher’s power made every hair on my neck stand on end; Millicent’s was a hammer that could knock me almost off my feet. But Elessir’s turned the air around me to ice. I forgot about coincidental human resemblances, and saw instead the knife-edged smile, the predatory gleam in his eyes, and the chill, translucent shine that blazed out from beneath his skin, changing his face to something with no connection to humanity whatsoever.
“Release me, mortal girl,” he commanded Jude in soft, deadly tones. “I will not give you another chance.”
“Not if you’re going to lay another one on Christopher!”
Christopher.
I scrabbled around to find him sprawled atop the nearest empty table, now tipped over on its side, with napkins and silverware strewn all around him on the floor. The blast of power had thrown us both from our chairs—but it had hit Christopher like howitzer fire. His face twisted into agonized lines, he struggled to rise, to breathe; when I looked his way, though, his eyes opened just enough to hurl a seething glare at the Unseelie singer. “Oh, he’s welcome to bring it on, he is,” he ground out, teeth clenched, his power roiling about him without focus or control.
Elessir grinned, a feral, hungry grin that rattled me right down to my bones. “I’d be delighted, Warder-blood.”
“Back off!” I jumped up to plant myself squarely between mortal and Sidhe, with a palm pushed out to each. As my fear and anger surged, my prickling energy—my magic—swelled up like a tidal wave from within me and crashed into Elessir and Jude. They slammed against the wall as if I’d physically smacked them, and each of them locked astonished gazes upon me. A remote corner of my brain wailed at the look on Jude’s face, and tried to cry a warning about startled voices shouting out across the restaurant, but I could spare no attention for any of it. The roar of power within me and without consumed everything I had. “Back the fuck off! You’re not doing this!”
Midnight eyes met mine; Elessir’s grin grew disturbingly larger. “Weren’t you the one advocating free will just now, Miss Thompson? I don’t believe it’s your place to get in the way of Mr. MacSimidh’s challenge,” he said, bizarrely conversational—and a wall of force whipped out from him towards me.
“It is if it’s not a fair fight!” The power roaring out of me smashed against that wall just before it struck me; I barely stayed on my feet. Directly between us, two of the glasses on the table shattered into dozens of pieces and sent water and melting ice spilling all over the table.
Behind me, with awkward effort, Christopher pushed up onto his knees. “He’s not touchin’ you!” he panted. “I’m not lettin’ him touch you!” The words had no strength, but when I risked another swift glance his way, I saw an expression that alarmed me almost as much as Elessir: an anguished, fervent determination that burned through the pain in his face. He looked like a wounded soldier on a battlefield, about to shoot his final bullet into an oncoming enemy squadron. And more importantly, he looked like he’d just gotten his ass kicked. Because of me. Again.
“You have your priorities out of order, mortal,” Elessir drawled at Christopher, with a dark, avid glee that sent dread slicing along all my nerves. “A Warder’s bond is to a city and not just one person, you know. One might wonder whether you shed your blood on Miss Thompson here, given the ardor of your defense.”
Blood. The word raced through my brain, and for an instant all I could think of was Christopher slumped in my arms on the Burke-Gilman trail, his blood soaking through my shirt, warm against my shoulder.
He had bled on me.
And he remembered it too. Our eyes met; his reflected my own unmitigated shock back at me. But we didn’t have time to figure out what it meant. Not now.
“Get out of here!” I hollered at him.
“I’m not leavin’ you!”
We didn’t have time to argue, either. Cold, numbing energy stabbed at me all the harder the longer Elessir stared my way, stoking the power boiling in me to greater and greater heat. My head began to throb in time with the pounding of my heart, and every bone in my body seemed about to tremble itself into pieces. As my vision swam with hot sparks of light, it was all I could do to screech at Jude, “Get Christopher out of here! And anybody else in the restaurant!” Eyes round as coins, she gaped at me with much the same fright she’d just shown Elessir, and my voice cracked as I repeated, “Go!”
Jude scrambled off of Elessir and over to Christopher’s side. With a desperate kind of speed she grabbed his arm and hauled him bodily upright; he didn’t have the strength to resist her, though he tried, swaying and lurching against Jude’s far shorter frame. She dragged him over to the archway that led to the next seating area over, flashed me one last stricken look, and fled towards the front of the restaurant with Christopher in tow.
The Unseelie seemed utterly uninterested in their retreat. Poised where he sat like a panther about to spring, he stared fixedly at me, his eyes burning an infinite, fathomless blue, that malicious grin curling his mouth. “So you wish to champion Mr. MacSimidh, then?” he said. Blinded by the sweat streaming down into my eyes and by the power screaming through my entire system, I heard him more clearly than I saw him. But his voice was every bit as potent as his power, a whip of quicksilver that lashed against my consciousness, seeking a way in.
“Just standing in for Christopher till he’s up to speed,” I croaked, quivering as I wrestled with the invisible storm that rolled back and forth between us. “You know what Warders are—you should know about the Pact!”
“Oh, I do, I do,” Elessir assured me, rising from his seat without the slightest tremor of disturbance to the energy he hurled forth. “I also know that since your Christopher is not yet Seattle’s Warder in truth, I’m not yet obliged to answer to him. And as you are not a Warder at all, Miss Thompson—”
His power flared, struck, and threw me backwards into the table over which Christopher had fallen.
“—I’m also not obliged to answer to you.”
My head spun; my roused magic crumbled into disordered chaos through my senses. For the briefest of moments I fought to
pull breath into my body, and that was all the time Elessir needed to crouch at my side. His fingers reached out for the hair falling in wild disarray before my eyes—and as my vision refocused, as the necklace I wore pulsed with renewed warmth, they halted scant millimeters from actual contact. Surprise widened the Unseelie’s eyes, and then he flung me a warm, melting smile of something that looked strangely like approval.
“Darlin’, this doesn’t have to be difficult,” he crooned, almost gently. His voice slithered all around that shield of warmth the pendant laid over me, and to my alarm, I began to feel faint tendrils of the same hypnotic pull wielded by his singing. “I can tell you’re feeling it now—your fey blood. Your mother’s blood. I can tell it wants out. My Court can help you make it happen, and teach you how to control that power your mother’s blood has given you. You’re going to need it, you know. For what’s coming.” I started, and the Sidhe’s smile grew warmer. “You know what I’m talking about. Dreamed of it, I’ll bet—or Saw it. We all have a touch of the Sight.”
“H-how did you know—?” I was flat on my back against the overturned table, but my power still churned through me. A row of lights along the wall exploded, raining pieces of bulbs down upon us and filling the room with the crisp stench of fried wires. “What do you know about—?”
Elessir slowly drew his fingers through the air directly in front of my face, never once touching me, but setting off shivers throughout me nonetheless. “Now, now,” he chastised, “that’s two more questions. What are you willing to pay for the answers?”
“What happened to ‘we’re not the bad guys of Faerie’?” I gasped, trying to make myself get up. I couldn’t. My body shuddered beneath the triple rush of power: mine, the pendant’s, and Elessir’s sliding like silk just beyond them both, pulling in closer and closer.
“Such lack of faith, honey—Kendis.” His voice took on the slightest touch of a drawl, just enough to soften each syllable he uttered and to add to their beguiling lure. Even his feigned accent, I realized in fright, was a weapon. “May I call you Kendis?”
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