by SM Reine
“Oh my,” one of the seelie women giggled, tugging the shirt off of his shoulders. The other woman opened the fly of Friederling’s slacks.
Deirdre felt her cheeks getting hot. “Um.”
Rylie put her hand over Marion’s eyes. “Are you really going to do this out here?”
He gave a low chuckle and lifted a foot so a sidhe woman could peel his shoes off. “There’s no back room in the Summer Court.”
Friederling was far from the only man exposing himself in pursuit of something sexual. Many of the seelie were now getting intimate and making love under the canopy of ivy, for all appearances unbothered by their huge audience.
It wasn’t a court. It was an orgy.
Marion tried to duck away from Rylie, but the werewolf wouldn’t let her. “I’m almost fifteen now,” Marion protested, bouncing up on her toes to see over the shorter woman’s hand. Rylie just lifted her arm higher.
“Almost.”
“Mère said it’s okay for me to deal with the seelie on their terms,” Marion said, ducking under Rylie’s hand.
The Alpha moved her fingers to keep Marion’s gaze blocked again. “I say it’s not okay, and your mother told me to take care of you, so my authority wins this one.” She spun Marion around and swatted her on the butt. “Get inside the castle.”
“Rylie!”
“You heard me.”
Marion rolled her eyes. “What am I supposed to do? The party is here.”
“Why don’t you take a walk to the stables while we negotiate?” Rylie said.
“Gods, you’re such a heavy!” But she trudged inside obediently, peeking over her shoulder a couple of times as Friederling was drawn away by the women. They were dribbling wine from a golden chalice into his mouth.
“Negotiate? Is that what you’re calling it these days?” Deirdre muttered to Rylie. The seelie woman sank to her knees between Secretary Friederling’s legs. “She’s not going to…?” Deirdre’s eyes widened and she turned around, giving her back to the secretary. “Okay. She is. Wow.”
The politician whose face was on her dartboard back in school was currently getting blown by a faerie. That wasn’t a life experience she’d ever planned on coping with.
Rylie’s whole face was red, but she was laughing, too. “This is what they do. It’s okay.”
“Isn’t there a Mrs. Secretary Friederling?”
“What goes on at his house, and what his wife thinks of politics, isn’t for me to judge.” She put her hand in front of Deirdre’s eyes like she had with Marion. “Is that better?”
Deirdre swatted her hand away. “This isn’t funny.”
“It depends on your sense of humor, I think. It’s a little bit funny.”
It wasn’t funny. Not at all.
This was perverse—a sex party on the beach masquerading as politics. No wonder the sidhe typically had nothing to do with issues on Earth. Deirdre knew that they had always taken care of their own, but if they had the resources for this kind of thing, why weren’t they helping more people? Why limit it to the seelie?
Didn’t anyone feel a sense of responsibility?
“I think it’s my pleasure to take care of you,” Storm said, offering his hand to Rylie.
Rylie took his hand. “Thank you. We appreciate it.”
He led the Alpha to one of the couches, one that was thankfully distant from Secretary Friederling, and Deirdre was momentarily frozen, slack-jawed.
She’d already dealt with seeing the secretary getting oral. She didn’t know what she’d do with herself if Rylie, maternal figure that she was, started getting her freak on with one of the seelie, too.
Another male seelie approached.
“My name is Malik,” he said.
“Don’t even think about it.” Deirdre lifted her hands in a karate position. She was only halfway joking about the implied threat. She would go all kinds of ninja phoenix on his ass if he tried to sex her up.
“It’s polite,” Rylie said as Storm helped her sit on the couch.
What had Stark told Deirdre? Don’t let them touch you, don’t let them kiss you. That had seemed like a legitimate warning, not merely his strange possessiveness toward Deirdre coming out.
“Then I’m gonna have to be rude,” she said.
“What a tight ass,” Storm said, his slender fingers light on Rylie’s ankles as he unlaced her sandals, exposing delicate feet. He stroked a line from her knee to ankle. “You’re lucky to even be allowed to visit, shifter girl. We don’t let just anyone in here.”
They didn’t.
That was the problem.
Storm started rubbing the pads of Rylie’s feet. The Alpha melted against the couch with a sigh, eyes drooping closed.
“Relax, Deirdre. We’re not going to have sex. My mate wouldn’t like it if I got physical with the seelie,” she said.
“So you’re getting a massage?”
“That’s all,” Rylie said.
Malik was still waiting, hands extended, offering whatever physical pleasure Deirdre requested. Beyond him, Friederling was reclining alongside three different women, who were doing a lot more than massaging him.
“If you touch me,” Deirdre said, “I will shoot you.”
“What’s your problem?” Malik asked.
What was her problem? What was her problem?
She turned to take in the sight of everyone on the patio. The Sapling Throne was shifting slightly, as though stirred by the wind. The ivy crawled across the wall and wrapped around the ankles of a sidhe beside the wine fountain. People laughed, they moaned, they enjoyed all kinds of carnal pleasures. Food and drink and other bodies.
Deirdre felt like she was about to explode. Like she might catch fire and burn the whole place down.
“This is screwed up on every level,” Deirdre said. “You people are in here playing politics and sex games when people out there—people on Earth—are starving. Vampires resort to horse blood because they can’t get human blood. I had to subsist on a werewolf diet for years. Children are abused in the foster system. You’re threatening to throw me in a detention center for the rest of my life. And look at you people!”
Rylie sat up. “Deirdre—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
But the Alpha wasn’t looking at her. Rylie was looking beyond her, and the look in her eyes verged on fear.
Donne’s return was heralded by thunderclouds—literally, black clouds brewing in his wake, as though he were dragging the fury of a thunderstorm behind him.
She took that to mean he hadn’t been able to reach Ofelia through the looking glass.
“The queen?” Rylie asked, standing slowly.
“She’s missing,” Donne said curtly.
Rylie paled. She obviously hadn’t believed Deirdre until that moment—not really. But now the reality of it sank in. The implications.
“You can’t let Melchior take the oath,” the king said. “If you recognize him as the authority of the unseelie, then he will have too much leverage in the Winter Court.”
“The unseelie have to join the election or we risk war when it ends,” Friederling said. “War and riots and all kinds of things that I frankly don’t have the budget to deal with. Or the patience, for that matter.”
“If you recognize Rhiannon and Melchior as the leaders of the unseelie, then you may as well be signing the death certificates for the true king and queen,” Donne said.
“Who cares?” Deirdre asked. “You’re enemies with the Winter Court.”
“You don’t understand. You could never understand.”
“As the secretary said, everyone needs to take the oath, Your Highness,” Rylie said. Storm helped her stand. She smoothed her skirt over her thighs. “The only way this election works is if everyone participates.”
Donne’s eyes sparked with anger. “I won’t take the oath if Ofelia’s consort doesn’t. The seelie won’t participate!” His volume increased as he spoke until he was almost shouting the last word.
The words fell flat over the patio. They had stopped playing music, and all of the sidhe were now listening to the conversation. Some of them had even stopped mid-coitus to watch.
Donne turned his focus on Deirdre. “Did you do this to Ofelia? Was it you and Stark?”
She planted her hands on her hips. “Excuse me? I want this election as much as anyone else. More than anyone else.”
“I’m not doing it,” Donne said.
“Don’t be selfish.” Marion had returned. She stood at the edge of the pergola, arms folded.
Donne rounded on her and the throne room warped around his movements. Flowers seemed to bloom in his footsteps, but only when Deirdre looked at him out of the corner of her eye. When she tried to look at him directly, she only saw a man in motorcycle boots stalking across ordinary wooden floors.
“Did you call me selfish?” Donne said.
“It’s in everyone’s best interests if this election goes through,” Marion said. “That includes yours.”
Deirdre had thought that the chateau had gotten quiet before, but now it was utterly silent. She would have been able to hear a flower growing, it was so quiet.
The guards were circling around Rylie and Marion, all those shimmering seelie with their auras of magic.
“You bring this thing into my court, this insolent mage, and expect me to believe that you’re not involved in the fall of the Winter Court?” Donne asked. “You brought a Kavanagh?”
Rylie sucked in a breath, as though the seelie king had struck her.
The last name was, apparently, not something that he was supposed to know.
“I normally use the name Garin,” Marion said cheerfully, unperturbed by the revelation of Donne’s knowledge.
“But you are a Kavanagh,” he said.
“That patronymic doesn’t apply to me.”
“When you said you would bring a witch to perform an oath binding, you didn’t say it would be this one,” Donne said to Rylie. “You expect me to take this as anything but an act of war?”
“I kept Marion’s identity secret for her protection, not because it’s an act of aggression,” Rylie said. As she spoke, Friederling untangled himself from the sidhe, pulling his slacks on, picking up his shirt.
“The most dangerous witch on Earth,” Donne said.
Deirdre completely believed that. Marion gave her the willies. If she was the most dangerous witch on Earth—or in the Middle Worlds, as the case was at the moment—then it explained why Marion looked thoroughly unimpressed by the seelie king advancing on her. She wasn’t even sweating. It took a lot more than that to impress a girl with angel blood.
“Does someone want to tell me why it matters what Marion’s last name is?” Deirdre asked.
Nobody responded to her.
“You shouldn’t take my presence as a threat,” Marion said. “You should take it as assurance that this election is going to happen. It’s a guarantee that if you win, your role as Alpha will be upheld, regardless of whatever tumult might rock the Winter Court.”
“Get out,” Donne said.
“No.” Marion smiled. It was a very cute smile, and once she was a few years older, it would probably be strikingly beautiful. For now, the lingering hints of baby fat on her cheeks just made her adorable—and disarming. “Not until you’ve taken the oath.”
With that, she lifted her hands, and power swarmed her.
Deirdre had seen Marion cast magic before. She had summoned a blue rose out of nowhere. That had been impressive enough on its own.
Watching her cast a binding spell upon the seelie king went beyond impressive straight to terrifying.
Electric blue light cocooned them, seeming to flow from her eyes like tears. It radiated from her as a halo. She was cloaked in it, tangled all up in the fibers of the universe. Where seelie magic seem to be a piece of the earth, Marion was a different thing entirely, something lofty and ethereal, beyond human comprehension.
Donne reared back. “Stop her!”
The seelie moved forward, but there was nothing that they could do.
Where Marion’s magic touched him, the king’s true form was exposed. He was a muscular human man with a mohawk at the same time that he was a beast of fur and fang, an animal that had decided to walk upright and take over the court.
He was a hybrid of forest and animal, man and magic, almost too beautiful to look at.
But Marion was so much more than that. Light spilled from her every pore, diminishing the sidhe until they looked dull in comparison to her. There might have been more of them, but she was immense—as though her body contained an energy without limit.
“Marion, don’t,” Rylie said. She was touched by the magic too. Where she stood, Deirdre could see the shining golden wolf that she became once shapeshifted. She wasn’t all that different from Donne in many ways. “Everybody needs to calm down right now before we—”
“Sluagh!” Donne roared.
He wasn’t looking at Marion now. He was looking at Deirdre.
Marion’s light was bright enough to engulf her as well, and where it touched Deirdre, her skin was revealed to be patterned with feathers. She wasn’t surprised to see that. It looked normal, a piece of her, in much the same way that Melchior’s scales were part of him.
But there was also a darkness in her belly, twisting in the air an inch in front of where her navel should have been. It was an open pit that reminded her of the immense darkness that she’d glimpsed in the Winter Court.
It wasn’t part of Deirdre’s phoenix form.
“What the…?”
Deirdre’s tried to move away from the spinning ball of darkness. But it clung to her. It was attached.
“What is that?” Friederling asked. He was disheveled, hair sticking up and slacks hanging open in the front. But he clutched his cane in one hand like he was about to whip Deirdre with it.
She tried to pluck the ball of energy off of her, but there was nothing there to touch. That portal yawned wider and deeper, like a tunnel that should have bored through Deirdre.
Kristian must have attached it to her when he attacked the dirigible. That was why he hadn’t bothered trying to fight Deirdre. He had affixed something far worse to her—something that now had the seelie sidhe screaming and fleeing, abandoning their fountains of wine. The sluagh, whatever that was.
Melchior had warned her that she would die if she left the Winter Court.
The thing clawing its way through Deirdre’s aura to reach the Summer Court had a thousand limbs, a thousand faces, and a thousand screaming voices.
“Don’t let the sluagh in the castle!” Donne said. “Kill her!”
The sluagh erupted through Deirdre’s body.
She didn’t feel it coming through. It was just suddenly there, taking up space in front of her, stirring the air in the room, gusting her hair back from her face.
In many ways, the sluagh reminded her of Marion’s magic, at least in the sheer vastness of its form. But where she was filled with an awe-inspiring light, the sluagh was shadow, a black hole absorbing everything around it, inhaling magic and life and devouring it in endless gnashing mouths. There must have been thousands of them—millions—but it was perpetually shifting, from mouths to hands to spines to eyes. She couldn’t focus on it.
Worst of all was the screaming.
Gods, the screams.
The sluagh launched itself toward the Sapling Throne. Donne leaped out of the way.
It smashed into the throne and fluids gushed over the dais, freezing in cruel fractal patterns that looked sharp enough to impale.
Tentacles whipped wide, shattering the pergola’s pillars and showering wood over Deirdre.
The few remaining seelie fled. One male sidhe didn’t run quickly enough, and one of the sluagh’s skeletal hands lashed out, seizing his ankle. It jerked him off of his feet. It hauled him into its belly.
His scream joined the thousands of others.
And its body swelled.
>
Sidhe guards hurled magic into its wintery black core. But the sluagh devoured everything that they threw at it, and it only seemed to grow with the power.
It reached out to grab other seelie who thought they had fled far enough to escape, swallowing them with a sickening wet sound.
Deirdre’s back hit the castle’s wall. There was nowhere else to go. Nowhere to run.
Secretary Friederling dragged Rylie away from one of the lashing tentacles. He moved pretty fast when he wanted to. There was no sign of a limp when he was dodging death. “Don’t attack it with magic! You’re only making it stronger!”
His advice came too late. The sluagh snapped a nearby guard into its maw, consuming him instantly. He didn’t even have time to scream.
The sluagh kept growing.
One of the tentacles lashed over Deirdre’s head. She rolled under it, dodging the blow. But it was faster than she was. The second strike caught her ankle, shooting ice all the way up her hip. It jerked her across the floor.
“No!” she shouted.
Deirdre fired her Sig. The iron bullet snapped its tentacle in half.
The sluagh screamed in its multitude of voices, drawing the offending limb within itself.
Deirdre was now close enough to see all the skeletons inside of it. The bones were crumbling and luminous, like an entire cemetery’s worth of bodies churning within the graveyard of its maw.
She had its attention now, though. The sluagh’s hands reached for her.
It was going to rip her apart, and she’d get to find out if there was a limit to how many times a phoenix could regenerate.
Then the pergola shattered.
Massive stone bodies punched through the patio cover. They landed one at a time, pounding into the stone floors hard enough to dent them.
They had broad wings, twisted faces, and gray skin that seemed hewn from solid rock.
Gargoyles.
And not just any gargoyles. Deirdre recognized the patterning of runes over their animated flesh. She had been chased by those exact creatures when she’d been trying to steal a sword from Holy Nights Cathedral.