by SM Reine
“Lincoln!” Rylie cried.
Brother Marshall leaped off of the back of a gargoyle, using his staff for balance. “Morning, Rylie,” he said, touching the brim of his cowboy hat in greeting.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“From the looks of it, it seems like I’m saving your life.” Brother Marshall parried one of the sluagh’s tentacles with the staff, beating it away before it could touch him or the politicians he now protected. Where staff and limb contacted, unseelie magic sparked.
The sluagh’s voices shrilled in pain. Deirdre clapped her hands over her ears as she ran, skirting the patio to try to reach Brother Marshall. He seemed to know what he was doing.
But the monster slammed into the wall, cutting her off from the others.
Her ankle was still cold from where it had grabbed her earlier. The numbness threw her off balance. She stumbled backward, falling onto her butt.
The gargoyles closed in. They thrust their stony fists into the mass of the sluagh, faces immobile as they seized its thrashing tentacles, yanking them away from Deirdre. Thousands of souls thrashed and screamed, painting the arms of the gargoyles in blood.
She scrambled to put distance between herself and the fight, kicking her heels against the ice-slick ground.
The sluagh was still growing. Stretching. It tried to wrap itself around the gargoyles, attempting to consume the animated stone the way that it had consumed the sidhe guards. But there was nothing to eat, no bodies to absorb into the darkness. The gargoyles pounded their fists against it and didn’t react when the unseelie magic clung to them like taffy.
Between the gargoyles and the sluagh stretched between them, Deirdre couldn’t see the others anymore. She couldn’t even see Marion with all her magic. All she could see was thrashing shadow, emotionless golems, and the screaming faces of the dead within the sluagh.
“Rylie!” Deirdre shouted.
She skidded around a patch of ice. She wasn’t able to stop herself and slammed into the low wall separating the patio from the ocean, giving her a view over the side to the beach down below.
There were more seelie guards fighting in the crashing foam of the surf. For a heartbeat, Deirdre thought that Kristian had followed the sluagh into the Summer Court too—but then she realized that the man fighting the sidhe was far more familiar.
He was also wielding a tree as a club. As in a tree ripped out of the ground.
Where he struck the sidhe, their blood splattered all over the sand, mingling with the lapping waves. They couldn’t even get at him with their magic. He knocked every spell away as a batter might hit foul balls.
Even at that distance, Deirdre recognized the horrible grace and deliberation of his movements.
Everton Stark had come for her.
She felt the same confusing mix of emotions that she had when he’d brought down Rylie’s private jet to save her: fear and gratitude and annoyance and something that felt like a grudging, growing affection.
She was actually happy to watch him ripping through the sidhe.
Secretary Friederling had backed Deirdre into a corner with a terrible decision. But Stark’s arrival meant she could choose secret option three. Instead of making a statement that would piss Stark off, or getting thrown into solitary confinement, Stark was going to rescue her. She could run away with him.
Deirdre needed a way to reach him on the beach.
She turned to search the patio for an exit. There was no sign of the king now—only his guards. Additional reinforcements had also arrived. They moved in from the outer edges of the patio, magic rippling in their clenched fists, making the room warp and distort around them.
Between the seelie and the sluagh, Deirdre’s senses were breaking down. Everything twisted around her, lensing as though she were surrounded by a spherical magnifying glass. Even the sounds were warping as the sidhe battled.
She heard screams and sizzling, cries and thumps, but she couldn’t tell where anything was coming from.
So it took her a minute to realize that the seelie guards had left fighting the sluagh to Brother Marshall and his gargoyles.
Now they were coming for Deirdre.
Rough hands seized her by the arms and ripped her away from Rylie.
They thought that Deirdre had brought the sluagh deliberately. They thought she’d been trying to assassinate the king.
Great.
Deirdre’s gun was in her hand. She had drawn it instinctively when the guards moved in on her. But she couldn’t tell where to aim. The more the sidhe touched her, the faster their tenuous illusion fell apart, exposing her vulnerable mind to the distorted reality of the Summer Court.
The chateau was in ruins. It was also under construction. And it was completed, covered in ivy, shimmering in the sunlight.
The ocean was calm and glassy even as it frothed with the fury of a storm.
So many different images, so much conflicting sensory information, a thousand smells and colors.
Her whole body jerked, and the room spun around her. She recognized the feeling of being pulled through the ley lines from when Melchior had transported her the night before.
The guards were going to remove her from the patio.
Something told Deirdre that if they took her away, she wasn’t going to be coming back.
“No!” she yelled, thrashing in their grips.
The chateau flipped upside down. She watched as the gargoyles, conducted by Brother Marshall and his staff, continued to shred the sluagh. She watched as Rylie ran in slow motion toward Marion and Friederling. She watched as the Sapling Throne shrank into itself, drawing into the floor, hiding from the assault.
And Deirdre glimpsed Stark climbing over the half-wall.
But now everything was receding, like she was watching it from the end of a tunnel. The ley lines contracted around her.
“Stark!” Deirdre cried. “Help me!”
The patio snapped back into focus instantly.
She smashed into the floor facedown, palms slapping against the floorboards. Sluagh blood stung her fingers. Gargoyle feet thudded around her head.
But the patio wasn’t warping anymore.
When she pushed herself up to look around, she saw why.
Stark stood knee-deep in seelie blood, drenched in fluids from the guards he’d killed. His shirt had ripped at the shoulders when he’d partially shapeshifted. Emerald handprints marked his bare arms. Bits of flesh clung to his beard.
He’d murdered the seelie guards trying to take her away.
And now he stood over her, barely even breathing hard, looking more relieved than angry. Whatever they had been fighting about back at the high-rise seemed inconsequential.
“Tombs,” he said.
Deirdre smiled weakly. “Stark.”
Another of the seelie guards lunged at them, dodging the wrestling gargoyles to attempt an attack.
Stark put himself between the guard and Deirdre. “Walk into the sluagh,” Stark said. The command resonated. He put so much willpower into it that even Deirdre’s skull ached.
The seelie stopped mid-step. He spun on his heel. And he leaped into the morass of souls that formed the sluagh. Dead in an instant.
Stark had killed him for Deirdre, just as he’d killed all those others.
Movement in the corner caught Deirdre’s eye.
Secretary Friederling twisted the hawk’s head on the top of his cane, yanking away the shaft to reveal that it was a sheath for a long stiletto. The blade was shining silver. Probably pure silver—the kind of metal that hadn’t been sold since Genesis.
Enough silver to kill Everton Stark.
But not enough to kill her.
“I’ll take him,” Deirdre said.
Stark responded by plowing into another of the sidhe, smashing the guard’s body into a wall.
The secretary moved forward. Deirdre snapped a high kick at Friederling, and he moved with surprising reflexes, ducking underneath her boot heel.
When she kicked again, he blocked her leg with the flat of his stiletto.
“Remember how I offered you a way to avoid going to prison for the rest of your life?” he asked with a wry twist to his mouth.
“Remember how I hate your guts?” Deirdre replied.
Secretary Friederling moved faster than she expected. The cane came swinging out of nowhere, rapping Deirdre sharply on the side of the head. She staggered.
He didn’t try to stab her with the stiletto, but he didn’t need to. Not with that much silver. It stung her scalp. She smelled burning flesh instantly.
Damn, but he was fast. It shouldn’t have been possible. He was human. Mundane. And he usually limped like an octogenarian.
She wasn’t going to be surprised by him again.
When Secretary Friederling moved into another attack, she ducked under the blow, grabbed the cane, and jerked it out of hands. It burned on contact with her palms.
Deirdre hooked the cane low and jerked his feet out from underneath him. He fell with a grunt, landing hard on his back.
She brought the stiletto down like a golf club, aiming for his skull. Secretary Friederling blocked it with his forearm.
Her foot lashed out and connected with his temple.
His eyes blanked.
At that moment, a gargoyle pounded the sluagh flat into the stone floor. In the gap between its body and that of its neighbor, Deirdre suddenly could see Rylie and Marion, who stood back in the corner of the patio.
Both of them saw what she had done to Friederling.
“Deirdre!” Rylie looked aghast, as though too surprised by the attack to know how she should retaliate.
But not that surprised.
She had already begun to shapeshift, claws emerging from her fingertips, fangs extruding from her gums.
The shapeshift distracted Rylie.
Stark had just killed the sidhe he had been fighting, and it put him in the perfect position to sneak up on the Alpha. The crack of stone from the struggling gargoyles meant he didn’t even need to be quiet about it.
He grabbed Rylie from behind and snapped her neck.
“Stark!” Brother Marshall roared. When he moved, the gargoyles moved too. They had pounded the sluagh into a murky smear—not dead, but gone from the Summer Court, leaving behind nothing but a stain on the floor.
And now Deirdre and Stark had the full attention of the gargoyles.
Stark hadn’t hesitated to take down Rylie, and he wasn’t going to hesitate to deal with Brother Marshall, either. Deirdre could barely track the shifter with her eyes as he flashed across the room. He easily leaped between the reaching hands of the gargoyles, which were far too slow to catch him.
He struck Brother Marshall and knocked him over.
Magic flashed. The staff snapped in half.
The gargoyles stopped moving.
Stark bounced Brother Marshall’s head off the floor, and the monk stopped moving too.
“Stop,” said a quiet voice.
Marion stepped from between the immobile gargoyles, hand extended. The brilliance of the magic that lashed around her arm made her skin look colorless and her hair black. She didn’t look like a teenage girl anymore. She looked every inch an angel.
Her magic snapped around Stark, freezing the man in place.
Deirdre took two steps toward Marion. The mage girl flung her other hand out, and the same spell gripped Deirdre, rooting her to the floor.
“Stop,” Marion said again, more firmly this time.
Deirdre couldn’t disobey. She could barely even breathe.
Marion held them in place as she kneeled beside Secretary Friederling and Rylie in turn, searching for their pulses at their throats.
They must have been alive. It took more than a broken spine to kill a werewolf Alpha.
Marion sighed. “Deirdre.” She turned to Stark. She actually looked a little excited to meet him. “And you. What will I do with you?”
“Let me go so I can finish what I started,” he said through clenched teeth. Even trapped by a mage’s spell, he was a terrifying thing, coated in blood and magic with his clothes shredded to expose healed skin.
She considered them both, eyes glimmering with magic.
“Okay,” Marion said.
She lifted her hands above her head in a position of surrender. The spell holding Deirdre and Stark vanished.
Marion dropped to her knees in the puddle of sluagh blood.
“Take us away,” she said. “All of us—Fritz, Rylie, Lincoln, and me. We’re now prisoners of Everton Stark.”
XII
Everton Stark was a man of many talents. He was the only shapeshifter Deirdre had ever seen who could turn into a prehistoric monster: a bear wolf, an apex predator that rivaled even the most frightening werewolves. He was also one of the only shapeshifters who could do a partial shift, deliberately taking on claws and fangs while leaving the rest of him human.
She shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he could do strange and frightening things anymore. Even so, she was pretty shocked when he managed to reassemble Brother Marshall’s unseelie staff and use it to haul them and their captives through the ley lines.
They reappeared on Earth in a plain room with steel walls marked by runes. The bodies that had been sprawled around the chateau reappeared in the same configuration as in the Summer Court: Rylie and Secretary Friederling unconscious to one side, Marion kneeling with her hands behind her head, Brother Marshall curled up against a wall.
And then Stark and Deirdre standing above them all.
“Rylie Gresham,” Stark said softly, circling her body.
She was still limp, though her eyes were open and her cheeks were pink. The healing fever would be sweeping through her, knitting together her nervous system, hemming the broken bones, repairing the injuries.
On an Alpha, that process would be a thousand times faster than on an ordinary shifter like Deirdre. It wouldn’t take long for her to be on her feet.
But Rylie didn’t have enough time to even finish her accelerated healing.
Stark dropped to his knees beside her. He lifted her head with a hand cradling her skull, and Deirdre winced at the strange way her broken neck tilted. It hadn’t healed yet. He would be slowing the repair process by shifting those bones.
“Put her down,” Marion said.
Stark ignored the girl. But in much the same way that Rylie couldn’t heal fast enough to escape another attack from Stark, Deirdre wouldn’t be able to shoot fast enough to stop Marion from casting a spell if she wanted to. She still didn’t know why Marion had surrendered, but she didn’t want to test the limits of the mage’s patience.
“Listen to her,” Deirdre said. “Put Rylie down.”
Stark gave her a hard look. “After all this time, Tombs. We’re here now. This is our moment if we want to take it.”
Deirdre should have encouraged him, she knew.
Let him take care of Rylie Gresham.
Let him incur the wrath of Marion and all the powers of an angelborn, mighty as they were.
It would be the perfect solution to most of her problems—two Alpha deaths wrapped up together.
“Do you want to martyr her?” Deirdre asked.
She could tell that Stark heard her, and he was weighing the options. There would be better ways to bring Rylie down—ways that wouldn’t practically canonize her—but nothing as easy as ripping her head from her shoulders.
“Deirdre?” Marion asked.
The girl was asking if she should do it. If Stark was really going to kill Rylie.
“Come on, boss.” Deirdre let a little pleading into the words, and at the same time, she hunched her shoulders, lowered her eyes, made herself look as submissive as she could manage while holding her gun to the skull of a teenage girl. “It’s not the right time, is it?”
Stark slowly released Rylie, who slumped bonelessly against the ground. “Get out.”
It took Deirdre a moment to realize he was speak
ing to her.
There was only one door, so she stepped through it, leaving her gun trained on Marion. The mage didn’t move, even when Deirdre backed away, but she still didn’t drop the gun until Stark locked their captives inside the room.
The hall outside the cell was like any other apartment building in New York, grungy and windowless with stained carpeting. Except that it just so happened to have an enchanted vault where they were currently keeping two of the leaders of the preternatural world.
“Is this Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise?” Deirdre asked.
“Home sweet home, such as it is.” Stark twisted the wheel on the door to lock it, then slapped one of the runes on the doorframe. All of the runes glowed to life.
He tossed Brother Marshall’s shattered staff aside. It fell to pieces once he no longer held it.
Stark led her across the hall to another room. The number on the wall beside it was 714B, with paler wallpaper to the left indicating that it may have once been 1714B. Though the door looked ordinary, the inside was more akin to a security room than an apartment, since an entire wall was covered in monitors.
Stark flipped a few switches, and the cameras in the room across the hall came to life. Marion was gently repositioning Rylie, probably to align her spine for proper healing.
“I’ll kill Vidya,” he said. “She should have been there. She should have protected you.”
“She’s busy.” Deirdre tried not to smile and failed. Surviving the attack by the sluagh had left her dizzy with relief—or maybe that was the effect of being pulled through the ley lines by a shifter who had no business messing with them. “I thought you were angry at me.”
“I am,” he said.
“But you saved me anyway.”
“I did.”
“And you brought Brother Marshall?”
“He was the only way I could travel the ley lines into the Middle Worlds,” Stark said. “He wanted to help Rylie Gresham. They’re old friends.”
Everyone was old friends with Rylie Gresham. “You could have used his staff to get into the Winter Court.”
“You would have died if I had done that.”