by SM Reine
Deirdre’s back bumped against the silver tree. She brushed against it with her knuckles—just the barest brush.
Ice turned to heat. Her knuckles burned.
She jerked away with a gasp.
The trees didn’t just look silver in color.
They were silver.
Deirdre and her companions had come armed with iron, and the sidhe had prepared for a shifter assault in their own way. They had created a forest of metal that was fatal to shapeshifters.
“Oh my gods,” Deirdre breathed.
She turned to search for Geoff, who was driving across the icy dance floor in pursuit of another sidhe. He’d already forgotten Stark’s instructions to stay close.
And he was going right for one of those trees.
“Don’t touch the forest!” Deirdre shouted. “Everything is silver!”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He was roaring, attacking, fighting with the sidhe. The unseelie magic tangled him in spider webs of light, clinging to his flesh.
Stark was still struggling with his icy collar, and the others didn’t seem to have noticed that Geoff had run off.
Only Deirdre could save him.
Shivering and sluggish, Deirdre leaped over the railing and landed on the icy dance floor.
Her boots got traction well enough. But once she stepped away from the relative shelter of the silver trees, she felt the wind. It was the same cruel, biting storm that seemed to perpetually blast through the Winter Court, sucking away her breath and freezing her to the marrow.
The sidhe Geoff was fighting tossed him into a tree. He wasn’t wearing a jacket. His arms hit the branches, and he screamed at silver burn.
His shouts were drowned out by Deirdre’s gunfire.
She hit the sidhe twice. Once above the left eye, and once just below the nose, shattering teeth. The plumes of blood froze into spikes, plugging the wounds even as the sidhe collapsed.
The corpse shattered on impact.
Deirdre rushed to Geoff, but her balance failed. She struck the dance floor on hands and knees and scrabbled toward the werewolf.
“The trees are silver!” Geoff groaned. Contacting pure silver had carved inch-deep furrows into his flesh.
“I tried to warn you.” Deirdre holstered her gun, yanked her jacket off, and packed it around his wounds.
Geoff’s hand clamped down on her wrist. “The sword. I saw it.”
“Yeah, your sword. I’ll hang on to it.” He had dropped the iron weapon a few inches away, so Deirdre picked it up. Who knew? Maybe she could make use of it.
“No,” he hissed. “The sword.”
“What?”
But he was incoherent from pain, no longer focusing on her.
Deirdre muttered a few choice swear words under her breath, turning to look for the others.
There was nothing behind her but silver trees.
The icy, open dance floor resembling a lake was gone, along with the body of the sidhe that Deirdre had shot. The forest had closed around her. Silver branches speared the sky, tipped with ice leaves that reflected Deirdre in mocking glitter.
It was unseelie illusion magic. That was all. The dance floor was still somewhere nearby.
And so was Stark.
Yet she’d never be able to find him if she couldn’t see reality.
She returned her attention to Geoff. He was still breathing, but it was shallow. The sweat was freezing on his skin. His face was screwed up in pain. “Okay,” Deirdre said, rubbing her upper arms to try to warm them. “This is bad.”
It didn’t change the goal. She needed to find the queen. If she located Ofelia Hawke, then the queen would be able to unravel all this magic and save Geoff, too.
Deirdre tucked her jacket around him as tightly as she could manage. “I’ll be back.”
“I wouldn’t count on that.”
She turned at the sound of a man’s voice.
The bar on the far end of the club had appeared out of the unseelie illusion. Deirdre could see a bare concrete wall and a hallway that led to the bathrooms.
Niamh’s artist boyfriend stepped out of that hallway.
“Took you long enough to get here,” Kristian said. “The riot started hours ago. It feels like I’ve been waiting forever.”
A bone-white blade glistened in his hand, and Deirdre suddenly understood what Geoff had been trying to tell her. He had seen the sword.
The OPA hadn’t detected the energy levels for the unseelie queen in Original Sin.
They had detected the Ethereal Blade.
Niamh had terrible taste in men. She and Deirdre had fought over a lot of the same guys when they were teens, largely because Deirdre had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for men who didn’t care she was an Omega, and Niamh had always preferred to lick the bottom of the barrel.
But a snake shifter with the unseelie court—a snake shifter who now sauntered toward Deirdre holding the Ethereal Blade—was a stunningly bad choice, even for Niamh.
The heeled boots and hooded jacket emphasized his lean figure, but his sunglasses were silly in the darkness of Original Sin. He probably would have made Deirdre’s deprived loins go lusting a few years earlier. Now he left her cold. Literally.
Kristian circled a silver tree. “I know Niamh escaped to beg forgiveness from you. Did you give it? Or did you kill her?”
Deirdre wasn’t actually sure what happened to Niamh. It was hard to worry about the swanmay-slash-harpy after everything she’d done. “I didn’t hurt Niamh, but the vampires might have.”
That knocked a little of the confidence out of him. “Vampires?”
Kristian took a step toward her and Deirdre took a step back. She wasn’t going to take any chances getting within the range of the Ethereal Blade. It was terrifying to see him holding it so casually, as though he wasn’t wielding a weapon of indescribable power and death.
“Is the real queen even here?” Deirdre asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Kristian said. “You’re not going to leave this forest.”
She took another step back. She glanced behind her to make sure she wasn’t going to step on Geoff’s prone body—but he wasn’t there anymore. He had vanished, like everything else in Original Sin.
Kristian took a quick step toward her, and Deirdre jerked, clumsy. Her feet slipped on the ice. She twisted to avoid catching herself on one of the silver trees, and instead flattened out on the ground.
So cold. She wasn’t certain that the cold was any better than the silver.
“I can’t believe you have that thing,” Deirdre said, pushing her heels into the ground to scoot away from him.
“Rhiannon loaned it to me after I successfully marked you on the airship. I proved I’m good with a sword, and now I get the deadliest sword on Earth,” he said. “I have an artist’s hands. I’m as good with a sword as I am with the stylus on my Wacom. I’ll paint pictures with your blood, Deirdre.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Her hand fell on Geoff’s iron blade. It hadn’t vanished. The iron must have rendered it immune to the illusory magic. “Skip the villain monologue and get to the killing.”
He faltered at her confidence. “I have the Ethereal Blade,” he said, as if uncertain that she’d seen it. He lifted it between them.
“Yeah, I know,” Deirdre said. She tugged the iron sword to her side and stood, wavering on unsteady legs, hair stiff with frost. “I’m not worried.”
“You saw what it can do. You saw the valkyrie with it.”
“You’re not a valkyrie.”
“But Rhiannon entrusted me with it,” Kristian said. “That says something.”
“Sure. It says that Rhiannon doesn’t have a valkyrie and you’re expendable. Otherwise why wouldn’t she wield it herself?”
Self-doubt flickered through his eyes, quickly replaced by blind bravado. “She’s a gods-damned queen. She has better things to do.”
“Yeah, like not being suicidal,” Deirdre said. “Does this mean you’ve already killed
Ofelia Hawke with that?”
“Yes,” Kristian said.
She barked a laugh. “You are so full of crap. You’re lying. I can tell you’re lying.”
“You don’t have acute werewolf senses,” he said with a sneer.
“No, but my bullcrap meter is attuned to douchebags like you,” Deirdre said. “You haven’t managed to kill her yet. She’s still alive somewhere. Right? Then I want to finish this so I can find her.” She spread her arms wide, leaving the iron blade dangling from her forefinger and thumb, inviting him to attack. They were in a silver forest after all—and Kristian was a shifter, not truly sidhe. “I won’t shoot or stab you, Mr. Artist’s Hands. You’re going to die without wasting a single bullet.”
“Nuh-uh,” Kristian said. He’d run out of villain taunts. He had no better retorts to fling at her.
She laughed again.
His insecurity turned to rage.
When he lunged for her, his movements reminded her so much of the way that Jacek had attacked her back at the asylum. They were both snakes, after all. And Deirdre thought that Jacek had been bad enough.
But Kristian wasn’t kidding when he said he had an artist’s hands.
He sliced through the air with confidence, moving the point of the blade so quickly that Deirdre could see nothing but a blur.
She threw herself under the swing. It whipped over her head.
For a dizzying moment of horror, Deirdre imagined that she wouldn’t duck quite low enough. The Ethereal Blade would skim her scalp. Her brain would explode into flowers and she would die in a conflagration of perfumed vines, slowly and painfully among the ice.
It didn’t strike. She rolled again, getting behind Kristian, and he tracked her quickly.
He brought the Ethereal Blade down. Deirdre lifted Geoff’s weapon to meet it.
The blessed sword cut cleanly through iron.
“Oh man,” she said.
She tossed the hilt into Kristian’s face. He knocked it away, too.
Deirdre had no choice but to dodge repeatedly on instinct, trusting her senses to keep her out of the way of his blade. He was so fast. He came from unexpected angles, swiping the cutting edge so near Deirdre that she felt the wind of its passing.
She leaped behind a tree. The Ethereal Blade cut right through its silver trunk.
It toppled, branches falling toward Deirdre.
She jumped out of the way, and the frosted tips of the tree crashed into the ground, cracking the sheet of ice. Sapphire water gushed from the holes. It looked like unseelie blood.
Kristian cackled as he cut through another tree just as effortlessly.
Deirdre didn’t dodge fast enough that time. She shrank into a ball and protected her head.
Its branches fell around her like a cage of silver. A fragile twig scraped down her shoulder, unprotected now that she had given her jacket to Geoff. Pain erupted down her arm.
“Damn!” she cried.
Deirdre kicked both her feet out, snapping branches with her boot heels, and then scrambling out from under the tree in time for Kristian to chop it into pieces behind her.
She couldn’t fight him while he had the Ethereal Blade. It was too deadly. Deirdre needed time to draw her gun. Needed to put distance between them.
But even if she was fast under ordinary circumstances, there was nothing ordinary about Original Sin’s frosty silver forest. She was sluggish. Kristian was immune to the cold, probably protected by the same unseelie magic that cloaked everything in illusion, and he was fast for a serpent.
Deirdre felt like she was running away from him through a dream, moving only inches no matter how much energy she put into it.
She drew her Sig Sauer. She turned to shoot.
Kristian was right behind her.
The Ethereal Blade cut upwards and moved through the barrel of her handgun as easily as it had the iron sword. It fell to pieces in her hands.
Deirdre couldn’t dodge away from him fast enough to avoid the next cut.
So she didn’t dodge away.
She threw herself into Kristian, grabbing his arms, shoving his back into a silver tree. Frost showered around them from the impact. He cried out from the burn of silver, and only when she saw the blisters on his hand did Deirdre jump away.
Kristian lifted his wounded hand to look at it, and he laughed. “You think that a little silver is going to kill me? Pathetic!” He shook his hand out. It was already healing. “The closer a shifter is to sidhe, the less silver hurts them.”
“That’s great to know,” Deirdre said. “Probably explains a lot about me. But no, it’s not the silver killing you.”
Her wording made him falter.
He looked down.
There was a tiny nick in his jacket. The smallest slice where the fabric had parted. A blade fractionally duller wouldn’t have managed to cut it—but the Ethereal Blade was beyond sharp, imbued with the power of angels, and it had cut through several layers of cloth to nick Kristian’s flesh. Deirdre had moved his arms just enough to turn the weapon on its wielder.
And now a blossom grew from the hole in his jacket.
“Oh gods,” Kristian said.
Enraged, he flew at her, swinging the sword without any of the careful artistry that he’d shown before. It was a graceless, panicked gesture. Death throes.
Deirdre leaped backward, staying out of his range. But he was so much harder to predict now. Looming death made him a better fighter, because he had nothing left to fear.
She twisted around a tree, dropped to the ice, rolled under another of Kristian’s swings.
The single blossom had turned to a vine of blossoms covered in white blooms. Apple blossoms, it looked like.
They poured from his jacket. Spilled over the ice.
His foot landed on the blossoms and skidded. The Ethereal Blade fell from his hand, spinning across the ground. Its blade bit into the trunk of a tree with a metallic clang.
Kristian smashed a hand against the wound, shaking his head emphatically. “Not like this, not now—”
The rest of that thought was cut off with a hard cough.
Long grass thrust over his tongue, spilled down his lip, scattered across the floor.
His eyes squeezed toward the top of his head as green vines thrust out of his tear ducts. They curved in horns down his cheeks. Twisted over his ears. Wrapped around his throat.
And then he stopped moving.
Deirdre remained still on the ice for a breathless heartbeat, watching him for signs of life. He was a shifter—shifters could heal a lot. Maybe if he changed into his serpent form, he could escape the Ethereal Blade’s bite.
But he was far beyond that.
The sword could kill anything, and Kristian wasn’t much of a challenge.
Her eyes tracked along the vines across the ice to the sword’s resting place at the base of the tree. It gleamed dully in the darkness of Original Sin. Now that it wasn’t in motion, it almost looked innocuous, especially against the glimmering deadliness of ice.
Rylie was going to want that back.
Deirdre didn’t want to touch it.
On the other hand, she was still lost in a forest of silver without any clue where the rest of her party was, or even if the true unseelie queen was nearby.
Deirdre’s hand closed around the hilt of the Ethereal Blade.
She was surprised by how warm it was, and how easily it dislodged from the tree.
It didn’t feel like holding a sword. Not like Geoff’s iron sword, anyway. It felt like it was living, breathing, subtly expanding and contracting within her grip. When Deirdre had retrieved it from the werewolf sanctuary, it hadn’t felt like it was going to jump out of her hand at any moment. It had just been a sword. Now it was like lifting a sentient creature.
The Ethereal Blade was responding to all the times it had been used to fight. It was waking up.
“That’s not creepy at all,” Deirdre muttered. She held it out at her side carefully as she sto
od. Too bad she’d lost the scabbard—she would have loved to put that sharp edge away.
Holding it filled her with fear, now that she’d seen what it could do to someone wielding it who wasn’t careful enough. Now that she knew what power it held.
One slip, one tiny cut, and she’d be exploding into blossoms. The kind of injury that even a shifter couldn’t heal, and the kind of injury that she wasn’t confident that a phoenix could return from.
The forest shifted around Deirdre, silver trees rustling with a sigh. Ice showered from their branches.
She stood on the edge of the icy dance floor again.
Taking the Ethereal Blade seemed to clear her mind. When she looked up, instead of stars, she saw the catwalks overlooking the club. She also saw the stairs to the manager’s office.
That was where Stark had gone to negotiate with Jaycee Hardwick when they had first met at Original Sin.
Deirdre turned to look for the rest of her party. They were still gone, as far as she could tell. She was alone with the ice and the silver trees and the Ethereal Blade. And the stairs to the manager’s office were waiting for her, empty and expectant, as though inviting her to investigate.
“Here goes nothing,” Deirdre said.
And she went upstairs.
XVII
The manager’s office was empty of life. It also wasn’t really much of a manager’s office. It looked more like a booth to handle sound and lights, although Deirdre had no idea what the multitude of switches, levers, and sliders on the huge control panel were meant to do.
She stepped inside, shut the door, and went to the control panel. Few things were marked, but custom labels with runes had been added in several places. As in magical runes, drawn in marker. A label bolted to the upper right corner of the control panel caught her eye: “Hardwick Industries.”
Deirdre slipped into the chair in front of the panel, setting the Ethereal Blade carefully on an empty table beside it.
Through the window, she had a great perspective on Original Sin. When it was hopping, she should have been able to see the stage where a DJ might sit, as well as the dancers below. She would have been able to control the lighted floor and the sound system, too.