Alpha: An Urban Fantasy Novel (War of the Alphas Book 3)

by SM Reine

  Deirdre didn’t think Stark would shoot her. If he wanted her dead so quickly, there were a thousand other times he could have tried to kill her, even commanding her heart to simply stop.

  But this was the man who had ordered a dragon to kidnap his own children. What did Deirdre truly know about Stark?

  Only that her reflexes weren’t quite as good as his.

  She leaped away the instant that she realized that he was aiming the dragon revolver at her, and that was a full instant after he had already squeezed the trigger.

  A fireball erupted from the gun. It seemed to move slowly through the winter-bitten air, but Deirdre was slower. Her boots couldn’t seem to propel her across the ice. Her heart seemed to be frozen between beats.

  The fireball blazed over her left shoulder. She smelled burning hair.

  It impacted the monolith.

  The rock cracked from ground to its tip with the sound of a femur snapped in half. And then it fractured completely.

  The force of the explosion sent Deirdre flying.

  Her body hurtled past Melchior. She smashed into a silver tree behind his thrashing tail, hard enough to shake ice out of its branches. She hit the ground in a ball, throwing her arms over her head for protection as shattered rock pelted her and ice pinged to the ground.

  A tentacle thrashed over her head. The sluagh seized upon the tree she had struck, ripping it from the ice.

  Fluid spattered around her. Deirdre rolled away.

  Melchior stomped toward her, melting ice under his massive heels, concrete cracking under his weight.

  The stench of sulfur bore down upon her. His tongue thrashed between his fangs.

  Deirdre was trapped between a sluagh and dragon.

  She couldn’t think, couldn’t escape, couldn’t even shout to Stark one last time.

  “Stop.”

  The voice was calm and echoing, even more powerful than Stark’s voice. Deirdre heard it through her whole body. It bored right through her skull and pounded into her brain.

  Stop.

  All of Original Sin grew still.

  Deirdre peered from under her arm. Through Melchior’s legs, she glimpsed a woman standing among the rubble of the monolith, which had been destroyed by the dragon revolver. She was brown-skinned, a little lighter in tone than Deirdre, with her dark hair woven into thick braids that fell around her shoulders. She was naked. Her skin was like jewels. Caramel diamonds.

  Stark hadn’t been aiming for Deirdre. He had identified the weak point in the spell containing the unseelie queen and taken action to destroy it. Deirdre had merely been standing in the way.

  And he’d freed Ofelia Hawke.

  Her head fell back, arms spread wide, and it seemed like she embraced the club. Like she folded the entire building and all of its millions of layers of magic into her arms, despite the fact it was impossibly huge and she was no bigger than the average woman.

  The silver trees, sky, and ice vanished.

  Deirdre was inside of a darkened club. Everything was concrete. There was a bar against the wall, along with a few couches and tables. Ordinary furnishings. An incredibly ordinary building.

  A building too small for the bulk of a dragon’s body and a sluagh engorged with vampire souls.

  Something hard pressed against Deirdre’s shin. She was suddenly lying beside Geoff, who was blue with cold even though Original Sin was suddenly a very pleasant seventy degrees.

  Vidya and Ember were on the upper catwalk, frozen in mid-fight, fists lifted and wings flared.

  Stark stood against the wall.

  And the Ethereal Blade was only inches from Deirdre’s fingers.

  The unseelie queen drew all of the magic into herself piece by piece until she radiated with the power of it. She looked so impossibly huge. She never should have fit within the country, much less a single club.

  Melchior growled. Deirdre could make out actual consonant sounds in the rumbling of his dragon voice. He was saying, “Ofelia.”

  “Come to me,” she said.

  The sluagh drew into itself, dwindling down to the size of a human being. It squealed as it shrank. It twisted with agony.

  The queen repeated herself. “Come to me.”

  Deirdre jerked her knees to her chest, getting her legs out of the way. The sluagh shot past her. It stained the concrete floor with its acidic blood as it raced to Ofelia’s open arms.

  “No!” Deirdre cried.

  Melchior had said that the sluagh could kill its masters. That was why Rhiannon didn’t let it into the Winter Court anymore.

  It would murder Ofelia.

  But there was nothing that Deirdre could do to stop it. Ofelia had summoned the unseelie creature to her, and now it collided with its queen.

  Deirdre didn’t see what happened after that. Melchior was rounding on her, and if she thought that he’d been frightening before, it was nothing compared to how he looked now. Flames glowed on his scales. His heat built, filling Original Sin until it felt like an oven.

  He rounded on her, serpentine neck lowering his head, mouth opening wide.

  His jaw snapped.

  Deirdre rolled out of the way just in time. A fang grazed the toe of her boot, leaving a deep furrow.

  She scrambled across the floor. Grabbed the Ethereal Blade.

  Melchior dropped on her, and Deirdre drove the Ethereal Blade upward, aiming it between two of the hand-sized scales on Melchior’s breast.

  It plunged deep into his leathery skin. The sword heated instantly.

  He flung his head back, mouth opening in what should have been a roar. But instead of a scream escaping him, there only came flowers. Whole fistfuls of blossoms dribbled over his jaws.

  But he didn’t die.

  He thrashed, he bled blossoms, but he didn’t die.

  Melchior’s movements wrenched the Ethereal Blade out of Deirdre’s hands. He launched into the air, wings pumping, struggling to gain altitude as blood and vines poured from his belly and mouth, frothing with flame.

  The sword that could kill anything wasn’t taking the dragon down.

  He smashed into the catwalk. Metal shrieked and snapped. Vidya dragged Ember to safety as the dragon exploded through the roof of Original Sin, ripping a hole open that let in fresh night air and rain. He dripped flowers and fire in his wake.

  Melchior vanished with the Ethereal Blade, and the club was silent.

  XVIII

  Nothing moved in Original Sin.

  For a moment, Deirdre and Stark could only stare at each other from across the dance floor. The triple-barreled revolver smoked in his grip. His clothes were torn by multiple changes into his animal form and back again. There was a huge gash on his chest from right shoulder to left hip, so deep that it exposed a glistening inch of rib. It wasn’t healing.

  He was breathing hard, fists clenched, radiating fury.

  Melchior was lost to him again.

  The shattered remnants of the monolith smoldered between them. Most of the runes had exploded, vanishing from the floor. Half of the roof had fallen on the crystal’s fragments. The dust was settling like snow, tinting the rubble in colorless gray.

  “What the hell?” Deirdre asked. Her voice was hoarse. She must have been screaming at some point during the fight without realizing it.

  “I could ask the same of you.” He emptied the bullets from the revolver. “I saw what you did.”

  She didn’t have the energy to defend her kiss with Melchior. She didn’t even care. “Shove it into your tailpipe, Stark.” Deirdre turned Geoff over, checking for a pulse. His heart was still beating. “Vidya?”

  “We’re fine.” The valkyrie had landed on the rubble from the roof with Ember.

  “Take Geoff and get out,” Stark said in a low, dangerous voice. Deirdre moved to pick him up. “Not you, Tombs.”

  She stepped back to allow Vidya access to Geoff’s unconscious form. The valkyrie was strong enough to carry him in her arms and still support Ember as she led them o
ut of the club.

  Deirdre had never felt quite so afraid of being alone with Stark as she did in that moment. Not even when she had first joined his pack, before he had feelings for her.

  There was murder in that man’s eyes.

  She twitched when he stepped up to the monolith’s fragments. He wasn’t attacking her, though. He began hauling pieces of roof away.

  “Help me,” he said.

  Deirdre was exhausted and cold, but she did. She tossed as much of the debris aside as she could. Inch by inch, they exposed the remaining runes that had contained the true queen of the unseelie, which were stained with the blood of the sluagh.

  And then they found her, crushed underneath part of the roof.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, no, no…”

  Ofelia Hawke was a beautiful woman, even in death. Her long fingernails were painted with tiny, delicate vines, and her pinky nail had been pierced. A gold charm in the shape of a heart dangled from the tip. Her sculpted eyebrows were narrow, high, and arched. Her lips were dark red without any sign of lipstick.

  But she was dead. Her heart didn’t beat and she didn’t glimmer with unseelie magic.

  Deirdre pushed the debris away with new strength, then rolled the queen halfway over to look at her back, expecting to find blood. There was none. “How? There’s no wound. She looks fine.”

  Stark peeled back one of her eyelids. The pupil was white. “The sluagh got her.”

  “Gods, no.” Deirdre sat back, cradling her head in her hands. “This is bad. This is so bad.” Gods only knew where Melchior had limped off to die with the Ethereal Blade. The true queen was dead. The seelie would take that as an act of war. Rylie would blame Deirdre, and there would be no election.

  The only thing that hadn’t gone wrong that night was that Deirdre had survived, but she wasn’t sure how long she would stay that way when Stark was looking at her like that.

  “What is this?” Stark asked, shifting a piece of the crystal that had entombed Ofelia aside. He revealed a puddle of sluagh blood. There were fresh runes scrawled in the acidic fluids, along with two English words. Seven horrible letters scrawled with messy urgency: Kill her.

  Ofelia had painted them with her fingertips before dying, her soul sucked into the mass of the sluagh.

  “Did she try to cast a spell before the sluagh took her?” Deirdre asked. She reached out to touch the runes.

  Her hand vanished in midair.

  Deirdre jerked back with a gasp. Her hand reappeared, fingertips blue with cold. She stuck them in her mouth to warm them.

  “A portal.” Stark gathered a handful of dust and tossed it into the air over Ofelia’s runes. Some of it floated to the ground. Much more of it vanished, etching out a large oval in the zero space. “She created a portal to the Winter Court so that we could go through it and kill Rhiannon.” The fevered murder in his eyes had gone distant as he imagined his wife’s death.

  Deirdre caught his arm. “You can’t go in there.”

  “You can’t stop me,” Stark said, his voice silken and deadly.

  “There is so much we have to fix here. I’m going to be arrested. There’s going to be war.” She gripped him tightly, digging her fingernails into his bicep. “And I have so many questions for you.”

  “You’ll handle everything here fine,” Stark said.

  He tried to enter the portal. Deirdre held him back.

  “Melchior told me what you did to your daughters. What you did to him.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Is that a question?”

  “How could you?”

  “You don’t know me at all. I don’t need to explain myself.” Stark rested his hand on hers, squeezing her back. “Listen to me. I’m in love with you, Tombs. You make me weak in a thousand deadly ways. But even that will not stop me from getting the vengeance I deserve. Nothing on this Earth will stop me.”

  Deirdre’s jaw dropped. “You’re what?”

  She was so shocked that she forgot to hold on to him.

  He lifted the triple-barreled revolver, as if to say goodbye. And then he leaped into the portal that the unseelie queen had created in the blood of the sluagh.

  Everton Stark vanished.

  An orange-tinted sun rose on the smoldering buildings of Chelsea. Deirdre watched it from a rooftop opposite the building that used to be Original Sin, accompanied by Vidya, Geoff, and Ember, who sat in haunted silence.

  None of them felt right in Stark’s absence. He was akin to the star that had guided the Magi to the firstborn son of God—a vision in the desert, the path to destiny.

  Now he was gone.

  Deirdre had risked her life to save that election. She had risked everything, and she had failed. The riots would continue. The seelie would go to war. And Stark hadn’t even cared enough to stick around. She wasn’t surprised, not exactly, but she was…exhausted. That was probably the best word for it.

  His last words lingered with her. You make me weak in a thousand deadly ways.

  “I’m sick of it,” she said. The sound of her voice startled her. She hadn’t meant to speak. It had slipped out.

  Vidya was sitting beside her, the length of her body warm against Deirdre’s. “What?”

  “I can’t do one damn thing right,” Deirdre said. “Every time I try to fix something, it goes wrong. I wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives. But there’s nothing but death wherever I go, and this election isn’t going to happen.”

  “It’ll happen,” Geoff said. “We couldn’t stop it if we tried.”

  “But it’s meaningless without Stark.”

  Ember rubbed his chin, shaded by thick brown stubble. “Is it? Do we even need him?”

  “He’s the one with the compulsion,” Deirdre said.

  “I wasn’t compelled to leave the safe house the other night. He freed me, but I joined with the pack because I believe in what he stands for, and we don’t need him to keep chasing that dream.” The way that Ember was looking at Deirdre made her uncomfortable—like she was in charge, like she was a leader.

  Like she didn’t ruin everything she touched.

  “I’ll help,” Vidya said.

  “Help with what?” Deirdre asked.

  “Anything you need.”

  Such an offer from a valkyrie was powerful. Deirdre would have been crazy to refuse.

  Too bad she had no idea what she needed.

  She wrapped her arms around her knees, gazing at the shimmering orange sun as it lifted between the buildings across the way, bathing the rubble in sickly light.

  “You can’t give me what I need,” Deirdre said softly.

  She needed control of her animal. Safety from her enemies. And most importantly, an honest, legitimate election.

  There wasn’t much that Deirdre could do about the election. Even if Stark had remained on Earth rather than chasing his wife into the Middle Worlds, he had told her that he’d prefer that Deirdre die rather than participate. She couldn’t betray him without revealing that she wasn’t vulnerable to his compulsion. It was the only weapon she still had against him.

  But what did it matter now if he didn’t want to participate in the election?

  Stark was gone. He wouldn’t know if she survived defying his order until he returned—if he ever returned.

  And with Stark in the Middle Worlds, there would be others who could follow Deirdre into battle. She was Stark’s Beta. As far as the vampires and allied packs knew, her command was as good as Stark’s.

  Her mind whirled with half-formed ideas. Attacks on government installations, protests, support for the Gaean Citizens for Democracy. Ridiculous things that wouldn’t work, no matter how many people she had on her side.

  Deirdre didn’t need all of those people to help her.

  There was still one thing she could do that might save the election.

  “Nobody knows that he’s gone,” she said softly.

  “What’s that?” Geoff asked.

  Instead of responding, Deirdre sto
od. “Go back to the high-rise. Tell everyone to get ready for me.”

  “Where are you going?” Ember asked.

  She turned into the sun. She might not have had wings, but bathed in its light, she felt like she was on fire. “I’m going to make a statement.”

  Deirdre didn’t have to break into the United Nations to get Rylie’s attention again.

  All she had to do was go public.

  There were new cameras at the safe house three blocks down, on the north end of Chelsea. The entry booth was unstaffed, but someone would be watching those cameras day and night.

  Deirdre walked up to the fence outside of the safe house. She waved her arms over her head.

  Minutes later, black SUVs with OPA license plates arrived to pick her up.

  It was strange entering the United Nations building with an official escort, especially when the light of recognition filled guards’ eyes. It hadn’t been long since she had entered the building illegally, scaling its side to enter the dock at the top. Many of the people present that morning had been there on the day that she attacked, too.

  They took her up a glass elevator. The sky outside was steely gray with smoke that billowed past the windows. New York City continued to burn into the morning. The OPA had yet to gain control of the riots.

  Secretary Friederling was on the forty-second floor, surrounded by assistants and stylists who were helping him prepare for a televised speech. “Leave us,” he said the instant he noticed Deirdre, and the man doing his makeup walked away.

  “Getting ready to explain away your seelie sex party?” Deirdre asked, drumming her fingers on her folded arms.

  “I don’t need to. What happened at Original Sin? Did you save her?”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. “She’s dead. The Ethereal Blade is gone. I failed.”

  The secretary sighed and pulled out his phone. “Gods damn it all. We need to get the seelie guards off Rylie immediately. Donne and Leah will know soon, and we need to revoke their security clearance before they try to retaliate.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Deirdre asked. “What statement are you making?”

  “Apparently, I’m announcing that the deal surrounding the oath has failed. There won’t be an election.” He surveyed her coolly. “I’m surprised you’ve surrendered yourself to arrest so readily. I didn’t expect you to be cooperative. Looking forward to a very long vacation in solitary confinement?”