by Rhys Ford
“Cari, slowly edge over to where Kai is,” Ryder coaxed her. “We’re blocking the ainmhi dubh. We’ll want them to have a clear egress once Kai lets go.”
The fear in her eyes when she looked at me was possibly the worst moment of my life—beyond anything my father had done to my body and mind—because I saw the break in the trust she had in me, and I couldn’t hold my head up when she shuffled by.
I never knew my heart could break into so many little pieces.
“Listen to me, Kai.”
Ryder’s hand on my back kept me from falling apart. His breath on my cheek held me up, and his soft murmurs sanded down some of the sharp edges cutting me open from the inside.
“It will be fine.”
His whispers were ice on the heat of my thoughts, skittering across the molten surface of my panic. The dogs felt like they were stitched into me, tugging at the razor-sharp threads running through my brain. A sharp pain flared up behind my eye when the dog shook his head. His muzzle peeled back, and his long black-spotted teeth mocked me with a vicious smile. I felt him trying to shake loose of me, the serrated binding running through us sawing away at my brain—physically catching angry hooks into the squishy gray meat trapped inside of my skull. The flares were rapid-fire and searing, making me long for an ice pick to dig out the teeth chewing me up inside. I looked away from the ainmhi dubh and caught my reflection in the glassy black rock.
If Cari’s fearful glance broke me, then my father staring back at me in the bowels of Oighear Bhais was my undoing. Startled and angry, I jerked in shock, and then the shale chips under my feet gave way, sending me tumbling back into Ryder’s side.
My mind tore apart when the ainmhi dubh wrenched free, and I grabbed blindly at the sidhe lord, unable to do anything other than scream helplessly from the pain running through me. The smaller dogs howled, challenging me or the male, but I couldn’t tell which. Hell, I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and my pain began.
The male wrenched away, rolling his shoulders and twisting about. The line tugged again, sawing away another chunk of my brain, and the pain exploding behind my eyes was too bright, too strong to bear. Something wet dribbled out of my left nostril, and when I wiped at it, I drew my hand back to find it covered in blood.
Another tug and the inside of my skull sloshed.
“Can’t… hold them, Ryder.” Sucking in air, I tried to fight the ainmhi dubh for control. The two smaller dogs whined, trapped in the power struggle between me and the male. Something… slipped, and my spine rippled with agony as the male tore free.
They slid away from me, as black and viscous as the unsidhe I’d somehow found in the recesses of my brain. The dogs burbled, flowing over my bones, biting into my brittle joints as they surged out of my control. The bond between us unraveled, snapping back into me with a lashing wail, and I tasted blood, a river of it pouring down my gullet to sit in my bile-swollen belly. The world spun, dimming with each heave of my chest until all I could see in front of me were the black dogs’ vivid scarlet eyes. I fell… and kept falling… unable to find the ground but caught in a red-lit amber.
“Cari! Now!” Ryder seemed to be screaming inside of my head, his angle-chopped Singlish sliding around in the clotted sludge left in my skull.
Gunfire filled the chamber, echoing reports and gunpowder stings slamming into my too-tight skin and broken mind. Malone shouted something indistinct, and Cari’s shotgun carried on its booming replies to the fleeing ainmhi dubh snarls. The dogs were running, running hard and free. I wanted to go with them, be with them, but I was trapped as neatly as I’d been when stretched out over Tanic’s worktable for him to peel apart. It seemed like a forever before the crevice was thick with silence again, and I sagged in on myself, hung up over Ryder’s left elbow.
“Malone, grab that pack. I need to see to Kai.” Ryder shifted, holding me fast, his arms wrapped tight around my chest and his knee shoved up against the small of my back. I blinked, still unable to get the crimson out of my vision or the hurt out of my heart. “Cari, he’ll need some water—”
“No, she….” I couldn’t talk around my tongue. It felt swollen and stuck to the roof of my mouth. “Scared of me, Ryder. She’s scared of me.”
“I’m not scared of you, guey,” Cari whispered softly, a shaky warmth in the cold filling my bones. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not fricking terrified.”
Nineteen
“WELL, THERE wasn’t much left of him, was there?”
To say Malone was stating the obvious would have been… stating the obvious. Of course there was nothing left of the Hunt Master. He’d been a smear on the rocks from the moment he lost control of his pack—a pack he’d been given by the bastard who’d made me. I’d always thought of Tanic as my father, but after the invasion of my mind by his foul lurchers, I was beginning to have my doubts about what exactly he’d used to impregnate my mother. I had more in common with Tanic’s Wild Hunt than I did the unsidhe remains oozing out from under Cari’s soles.
I was as weak as a wet kitten and about as grumpy, but I’d won the argument to keep pressing forward since we’d only twenty minutes of hard walking in the maze of fallen tunnels and sheltered crevices to get to Marshall’s proposed dig. Our advantages were we had a map, and Oscar Bennett was down one Hunt Master and the pack was in the wind. I didn’t know what else he had up his sleeve, but I wanted to get what we’d come for and get the hell out before he ambushed us again.
As for the dogs, we were far enough from any settlements for me not to worry about the damned things taking down a human, and with the nightmare herds stalking the southern road, the black dogs would probably die out before they became any kind of threat.
If not, then I’d come back for them.
And with any luck, I might even be able to kill them.
Ryder and I were holding up the rear while Malone and Cari tromped on ahead. It wasn’t the best of situations. In fact, I hated it, but common sense told me I’d need at least half an hour to catch my breath, and the ache in my brain apparently alarmed the sidhe lord to the point where he was willing to abandon his search. I, on the other hand, had no intention of being tucked into bed and spoon-fed chicken broth until I felt well enough to head back to San Diego.
I didn’t drive through all of that crap only to turn tail just because my maybe-father’s long, bony fingers reached into my brain and dug around looking for the apricot pit he’d left there.
“You can talk to me about it,” Ryder whispered behind me. “Nothing you say will go anywhere beyond us.”
I glanced back at him, my shoulder blades pulling tight from the tape and gauze he’d slapped on my weeping scars. He smiled, a gleam of benevolent understanding in the murky stillness, and I shook my head at his poking. The smile dimmed a bit, but a brush of his fingers on my side more than made up for the loss of warmth. My skin was taut and oversensitive, and Ryder sure as hell wasn’t helping, leaving fire trails wherever he touched.
“I’m….” I’d planned on lying. Fully intended to flash my teeth at the blond haunting my every step and lie my ass off about the discomfort knotting my intestines, but my brain had other ideas. “I… didn’t expect the dogs to… fuck. They executed him, Ryder. Just like they did that guy out in the ruins. Just to stall us. Who does that? Who kills their own people?”
“And you wonder why I think you would be a good lord for my Court.”
Ryder hooked his fingers into a belt loop on my torn jeans, slowing my step. Coming up against me, he was a brush of heat away, branding me with a long, simmering line down the left side of my body.
“For all your coarseness and threats to do me harm, I know you would never shoot me. Not like that. To defend us, yes, but not… you weren’t responsible for his death.”
“I was just going to clip him,” I explained softly. “I figured if we could break his concentration, the ainmhi dubh would sever their pack bond with him and run. Eating him? That wasn’t… I couldn’t stop them, Ryd
er.”
I didn’t know how to tell him I’d felt the black dogs creeping around in my mind, their hunger digging through my memories until I was sick from the images slamming into my thoughts. Apparently I didn’t have to, because he sighed heavily, then said, “You fought with the unsidhe for control of the pack, didn’t you?”
I debated denying it, but the truth was too raw to scrape over, so I nodded, grateful for the smoky gray light coming through the fissures above us because there were enough shadows to hide in. “I… I was so damned scared they were going to eat you and Cari. Ain’t going to lie. Scared down to my toenails and then they were just in me…. Pele’s breath, I just wanted them to stop. Nothing else.”
“Your eyes turned… red, like an ainmhi dubh,” Ryder confessed. “It was a… tell, of sorts.”
I snorted. “Great, now I’m becoming one of them.”
“Not necessarily,” he replied, stepping around a fall of rocks. “I’ve seen the same thing happen to my grandmother when she casts an intricate spell.”
“That’s about the same thing.” I made a face. “Sebac. Ainmhi dubh. Kind of hard to tell the difference if you’re comparing soulless predator to mindless eating machine.”
Ryder said something, but his words were lost beneath Malone’s excited shout. The passageway turned in, angling down into the dark. Cari swore, either at Malone or something ahead, and I limped forward, using the butt of my shotgun to steady myself on a boulder jutting into the passage.
The turn was sharp, a hard left hook heading us back toward the ruined city outside, and the ground grew uneven, veined with cracks wide enough to catch on my boot heel. We were out of the crevices scalloping the front of the mountain, and I turned on my link light to see where I was going. Ryder kept tight on me, his fingers still hooked into my belt loop as I carefully picked my way to Malone and Cari.
“He’s got to shut up,” I grumbled while Malone continued to make odd noises ahead of us. “Boy might as well send up a flare gun and tell Oscar where we’re—”
Another turn in the path and we worked around a house-sized boulder lodged against an unyielding brick and mortar wall. Sliding through the gap between the rock and another wall, we emerged into a massive chamber and the darkness fell away, a curtain of black pulled back with a quick shift in angles and light.
And by the gods too numerous to name, there was so much light.
The natural amphitheater once was open to the sky, but the unsidhe and possibly the Merge shut it away from exposure. Like the mountain, the walls were stygian and reflective, but instead of an unyielding staunch of black, the enormous space was dotted with flecks of glowing blue light, turning the domed cavern into a tiny captured sea of stars buried deep in the mountain’s belly.
A thin stream ran through the middle of the amphitheater, its floor thick with the remains of buildings and enormous chunks of rock broken off of the cavern’s walls and ceiling. Flicks of luminescent white creatures danced through the slow-moving water, but I couldn’t tell if I was looking at some kind of crustacean or fish. The blue spots flickered and dimmed, at times entire spans flaring up to a painful brilliance only to ease back into a soft cobalt glow.
“It’s night-finder moss,” Ryder rumbled in my ear, awestruck and humbled. “It takes years to grow even a foot of it. This would have taken… centuries to cover.”
“Marshall’s notes said there was light in the chamber, but this?” I turned around slowly, thankful for Ryder’s steadying hand at my back. The air was crisp and cold, sharp in my lungs after the dust-mote-heavy stillness of the corridors. “This is insane. Is it safe to touch? This moss stuff?”
Ryder nodded, and I lightly pressed my fingers into the bristly covering. It was wet, damper than I’d expected, and my hand glittered when I pulled it back. The white-blue glow bathed us, and the sparkling moss’s light deepened the green in Ryder’s enormous almond-shaped eyes. A few feet away, Malone crouched next to the stream, his knees dangerously close to the edge. Cari stood behind him, an evil glint in her eye, and as he craned his neck to look at something, she nudged his ass with her toe. His wild-eyed panic was hilarious, and Cari laughed when he ended up elbow deep in the water with his knees spread wide over the bank to stop himself from falling in.
“They’re cute together.” Ryder pressed at my back, a not-so-subtle urge to continue down the path.
“What? Cari and Malone?” I scoffed at the idea. “Cari would eat him alive.”
“Stranger things have happened, ainle,” he replied. “Would you have said a few months ago you and I would be standing at the edge of an unsidhe compound, hoping to find an answer to the declining elfin population?”
“You hope to find an answer,” I pointed out, skating the edge of a mossy bank. “Don’t forget, I’m here for the cash and the glory.”
“Oh yes. That.” His eye roll was so strong I could hear it in his voice. “How could I ever forget?”
THE RUINS were the stuff of nightmares.
And I had more than my fill of nightmares.
But mostly, it was the overwhelming unsidhe-ness of the place that sent shuddering whispers of spoiled blood and shattered limbs through my brain.
If I’d wanted to turn around and backpedal when I’d first seen the black mountain, I’d since graduated to turning tail and running until Oighear Bhais was nothing more than a speck of a bad dream in my rearview mirror.
Marshall’s notes were extensive but written in a curlicue logic even Malone had a hard time understanding. Armed with a glowing notepad, he walked through the space we’d found, measuring off spans with a few strides only to be turned around at a dead end. I left him to his wanderings and took a moment to stare at the slice of city trapped behind an avalanche of glossy rock.
Elfhaime—the sidhe city—was a riot of graceful lines, delicate expanses, and impossibly floating towers. The white mountain and the city built around it shone under the SoCal sky with a diamond-sharp brilliance so bright it hurt, while Oighear Bhais’s ruins murmured dusty regrets of its once magnificent past.
The dead city now only reminisced of its faded, delicate elegance, but only in a passing whisper between brutal, harsh walls and tiered walkways. The city’s architects delivered a blunt, unyielding sprawl, each shaken building uglier than the next, and I wondered how the hell some of the structures were even useful. Some were tall, connected with walkways and the remains of abstract sculptures, but there were too many cell-wide buildings barely large enough to take a breath in much less hold a person.
Much of the walls were a dull moray-eel brown, spackled with dark spots and the occasional window, but there were traces of beauty as well. I imagined the city had been a delicate balance between art and function, despite the heavy-handed glut of squat, closed-in buildings. Traces of colorful murals of strange creatures covered more than a few walls, slivers of red and purple caught up in the mossy blue light, but in the jumble, it was hard to make sense of the buildings, the fallen structures forming a maze of toppled walls and caved-in ceilings.
It was hard to imagine anyone once lived in the rubble. Even harder to believe we’d find anything to help the elfin continue to live, but Ryder seemed determined as he picked his way through the seemingly endless trail of chambers.
There were signs of past inhabitants, mainly in wooden fragments and broken pottery, but I stepped into yet another long, empty, roofless room and kicked a piece of stone with my foot. It rolled over, fragile and golden, then came to a rest on a patch of sparkling moss.
The stone had eyes.
Two almond hollows stared back up at me, a delicate canine tooth shaking from its perch on the skull’s upper ridge. Bone tentacles erupted from one of the skull’s unfused parietals, a curious aberration along the otherwise smooth surface. I was about to bend down to pick it up when Malone’s shout cut through the still, cold air.
“Lord Ryder! I found something!” Malone’s excitement pitched his voice to a squeak, and its echo bounced arou
nd the chamber. I couldn’t see where he’d gone, but Ryder apparently did because I got a head jerk from the blond sidhe, and then he disappeared through a darkened archway.
“They’re going to get eaten by a giant tarantula.” Cari stomped past me. “Swear to God, I’m going to turn a corner and find a seven-foot spider picking their bones out of its teeth.”
“I thought most spiders injected a toxin into their prey so everything liquefies under the skin so it can all be sucked out like a juice sack.”
I ducked to one side to avoid the rock Cari threw at my head. It sailed past my ear with a soft whistle, and she followed up with a gesture so offensive I knew her mother would make her wash her hands with acid to get rid of its stench.
“Nice. So very nice. You used to be such a sweet little girl.”
“I was never a sweet little girl, you asshole,” she shot back. “Now hurry it up before something has them for lunch.”
We found Malone and Ryder at the amphitheater in a long stretch of a chamber still sporting some of its roof. Unlike the rest of the rooms we’d been in, the floor here was clean of debris and rocks and the walls were more or less intact. More of the same scrawled animals covered the interior, glints of metallic paint flashing with blue speckles from the rippling moss clinging to the cracked plaster walls.
Oddly enough, a stone counter sat perched on triangular wooden supports along the chamber’s long wall, its gleaming, veined slab a slash of chalky white cutting through the muted rainbow murals. Ryder and Malone stood in front of the flat stone, shooting images of its surface with some of the equipment Malone’d dragged with him.
“Cover the door outside,” I ordered Cari. “Oscar’s still out there somewhere, and if they’re excited to find this, we’ve got to guess this is what that asshole is looking for.”
“You got enough ammo?” She cocked her hip, balancing her shotgun on her leg. “You went through a hell of a lot back there with the dogs.”