by S. M. Reine
Vidya was right. There was nothing Deirdre could do for the rioting crowd.
She wrapped her arms tightly around the valkyrie’s neck, and they flew, abandoning vampires and OPA agents to the sluagh’s nonexistent mercy.
VII
They couldn’t return to the high-rise. When Vidya flew overhead, they found it crawling with OPA personnel—people who worked for Rhiannon, whether they knew it or not.
Vidya wasn’t daunted by their supposed safe house and its bounty of lethe being swarmed by enemies. She spiraled back around to head in the opposite direction without missing a single beat of her wings.
They alighted in a courtyard at the center of an abandoned complex.
“The asylum,” Deirdre said softly, releasing her grip on the valkyrie’s shoulders. Her boots splashed into a muddy slurry that was overgrown with weeds. “We’re back at the asylum.” She hadn’t been there since she’d been reborn from the ashes in the incinerator—the same incinerator where Gage’s body had burned.
Little had changed in the ensuing weeks. Nobody had attempted to repair the shattered walls and windows, nor had anyone tended the garden. There were still scorch marks from sidhe magic and blood splatters.
It was quiet. So quiet.
It was also probably the safest place for Deirdre in New York City at the moment. Who would expect her to return to a known hideout?
“When Lucifer and I discussed contingency plans, we agreed that Rhiannon would be unlikely to look for us here,” Vidya said
Deirdre wandered between two trees. She brushed her fingers over the trunk. There were so many memories in that miserable place. Memories that she had been happy to leave behind.
She swallowed down saliva that tasted like blood, tonguing the gaps in her teeth where Rhiannon had performed amateur dentistry. New teeth were already growing back. Soon that pain would be nothing but miserable memories, too.
“Have you and Lucifer been talking about plans without me very much?”
“Only a little. These kinds of logistics didn’t seem worthy of your time and attention. You’ve been distracted.” Vidya’s tone was bland.
“Good idea,” she said.
Deirdre stepped over the rubble to enter the asylum—or at least, what used to be the asylum. She had blown the roof apart using Melchior’s triple-barreled revolver. More of the roof had collapsed since then. What had once been home to Stark’s terrorist organization was now little more than four half-walls and a lot of bricks.
Footsteps shuffled among the debris.
Vidya was beside Deirdre in an instant, wings flaring, fists lifted.
But the man who stepped out of the dust wasn’t Jacek—an insane idea that had only fleetingly crossed Deirdre’s mind. It was Lucifer, his arm slung over Niamh’s shoulder. The harpy didn’t look happy to be carrying him.
“You,” he snarled, pushing Niamh away. She stumbled among the bricks.
Deirdre pulled a cloak of confidence around her as Lucifer approached. “Good to see you here. We need to regroup and—”
“Shut your mouth, bitch,” Lucifer said. “I don’t want to hear another word from you until I talk to Stark. I made my deal with him. Not you. Where is he?” She opened her mouth, but he continued before she could say anything. “If you tell me he has better things to do after we were nearly subject to a public execution, I will rip out your throat.”
“I’d like to see you try,” she said.
He slammed his fist into her gut. She didn’t see it coming and failed to dodge. The breath blasted from her lungs.
She was so dizzy from the instant lack of oxygen that she didn’t retaliate against his vampire-speed uppercut, either.
Vidya kicked Lucifer in the face. It drove him back, but he didn’t seem to care. His point had already been made: He might not be able to tear Deirdre’s throat out, but it wouldn’t exactly be an easy fight, either. Especially now that other vampires were emerging from the rubble, crimson eyes glimmering in the night.
Their glowing eyes were the only way that Deirdre could tell they were approaching. They were so quiet, like rats clawing through sewer tunnels. The night was their domain.
Deirdre made a quick count. A dozen, two-dozen, three.
Lucifer, vampire lord and mercenary, had been followed by all of his people. But Stark’s people—the remaining shifters, like Gianna and Geoff—weren’t there to back Deirdre up.
She could probably beat Lucifer, but could she beat his entire murder with nobody at her back but Vidya?
“Calm down, guys,” Niamh said softly. She hadn’t bothered getting off the ground. She looked so pale and weak. “We’re friends here.”
“I’ll decide if that’s still the case,” Lucifer said. “Where is Everton?”
When Deirdre swallowed, it felt like she was trying to get one of Vidya’s razor feathers down her throat. “He’s hunting in the Winter Court.”
“Have you been communicating with him?”
“We’ve spoken.”
“Recently?”
Deirdre balled her hands into fists. “Look, he made me his Beta. I’m in charge when he’s gone, and—”
The vampire seized her throat. It felt like being in the grip of a frozen spider. His strength was even more shocking than his speed, too.
He closed her airway. Squeezed hard.
“Everton left us,” he said. “I knew it. He left us.”
“Yeah, all of us,” Deirdre said. “But I’m still here.”
“Stark’s fallen through on his end of this deal,” Lucifer said. “And I don’t have any deal with you. We’re gone.”
Deirdre wrenched him away from her throat. “You can’t leave now, not when we’re so close to—”
“To what?” he interrupted. “We’ve lost the election. Rhiannon and Melchior are going to put North America under eternal winter. Where do you think vampires will fall under her new hierarchy?”
“It’s not too late if we work together,” Deirdre said.
Lucifer wrapped his fingers around hers. They were tangled together, all hands squeezing, testing the strength of the phoenix shifter against the strength of the dead. A man with no nerves, no sense of pain, nothing to hold him back.
She only needed a single flame to make an example of him. Just a little fire, and poof—he’d be permanently dead. It would show the vampires who was boss. It might even be enough to bring the rest of them to heel.
It was what Stark would have done.
Yet Deirdre, cold and wet in the ruins of the asylum, couldn’t summon so much as a flicker.
The vampires slipped into the shadows. Their glowing crimson eyes disappeared one pair at a time, like ghosts vanishing into the ether.
She was losing them.
“We have to fight back!” Deirdre said. “Rhiannon is a fraud and we can’t let her take control! There are still things we can do!”
Stoker sneered over Lucifer’s shoulder. “We’re going to greener pastures.”
“There won’t be any such thing if we don’t stop her!”
He’d already faded into shadow.
Of all his people, only Lucifer remained.
“I almost admire you for trying to hold everything together after Stark abandoned us.” He hooked a finger in Niamh’s collar and pulled her upright. “But you’ve wasted my time when we could have been running.” He tugged on Niamh. “I’m taking this with me. I’m keeping her. And we’ll call it even.”
“Wait,” Deirdre said. She wasn’t certain if she was telling him not to take Niamh or if she was just asking him to stay.
He stepped backward. Shadow slithered up his jeans, making his feet disappear, his hips, his stomach. Niamh’s round, helpless eyes kept gazing at Deirdre as she was drawn inexorably into darkness with him.
“If you were smart, you’d run too,” Lucifer said.
And the vampires were gone.
Deirdre had lost Stark’s allies.
If he didn’t kill her for defying him,
then he would certainly kill her for that.
She tried not to panic. Panic was a sanity killer, something that would do her no favors now when the crap was hitting the fan. She needed to be clear headed if she wanted to figure out some way to defeat Rhiannon.
But she was standing in the shattered ruins of the asylum with the sky dumping rain upon her, and all she could wonder was how long it would take the sluagh to find her now that it was out of its cage again.
Rhiannon had said it wouldn’t stop until she was dead.
“We need Stark,” Vidya said, giving voice to the words that Deirdre hadn’t been willing to contemplate.
She was right.
They couldn’t do anything about Rhiannon without support. Unfortunately, Lucifer’s loyalties, pathetic as they were, rested with Everton Stark himself. The only way to get the vampires and shifters back together was to have Stark make an appearance.
Which meant that the only way that they were going to be able to defeat Rhiannon and keep her away from the inauguration was with Stark’s intercession.
If Deirdre could get him out of the Winter Court.
“He’ll kill me if he comes back to Earth,” Deirdre said. “With everything I’ve done since he left, he’s not going to see any alternative.”
“Stark’s sentimental,” Vidya said. “He might show mercy.”
“Sentimental? Mercy? Are we talking about the same Stark here?” Deirdre rubbed her jaw. Her teeth still hadn’t grown back in completely since Stark’s wife ripped them out. Would a merciful man fall in love with a woman like that?
“He can be very merciful. I’ve known him a long time,” Vidya said.
“Not long enough.”
“He’s not like you. Everything he does comes from the heart, not from the mind. There isn’t an objective molecule in his body.”
“Are you saying I’m objective?”
“You’re uniquely focused. And Stark is focused on you. We need him to achieve your goals, so let’s get him.”
Vidya spoke with near-robotic calmness, which was strangely soothing. The valkyrie didn’t care that they had almost been publicly executed, devoured by the sluagh. She didn’t care that the OPA had opened fire on the masses, or that they had lost Stark’s allies.
She was focused on the battles to come.
Deirdre needed that kind of pragmatism desperately.
She slipped a hand into her pocket, feeling the hard disc that Brother Marshall had given her at their last meeting. It looked unremarkable, its magic passive, so the agents hadn’t taken it from her when she’d gone into OPA custody.
Deirdre squeezed it. “Brother Marshall?”
The rainy courtyard beyond the collapsed windows vanished, replaced by a towering gray brick face that was covered in runes.
Holy Nights Cathedral didn’t fit into the dimension right. There was no way a cathedral that size could have occupied the same space as the asylum. Yet its four walls were snugly sitting within the courtyard, as though it had been built there all along. As long as Deirdre didn’t try to look at it too hard, trying to understand its dimensions, it looked normal.
Vidya stepped up to the stained-glass window. The candlelight from within reflected on her razor feathers, casting her damp flesh in shades of orange and red. “Unseelie magic. Cool.”
Deirdre edged into the courtyard. The overhang of the cathedral’s roof sheltered her from the rain. She could hear it tapping against the stone bodies of the gargoyles high above.
She managed to reach the door, fitting just barely between the cathedral’s wall and the asylum’s wall.
The door swung inward, and there he was: Brother Marshall backed by one of his biggest gargoyles, which tracked her movements up the aisle as she approached.
“I need your help,” she began.
But then another person stepped out from behind the gargoyle.
It was a short, thin man—more of a boy, really—with dusky skin and black eyes. He wore ill-fitting jeans and a t-shirt with holes in it.
He looked so unassuming that Deirdre immediately mistrusted him.
She stopped a few rows back, and Vidya flanked her, as ready to fight as she always was. “Who’s that?” Deirdre asked sharply. “I expected you to be alone, Brother.”
“Oh, gosh.” The boy’s voice was surprisingly high and feminine. “I forgot.” He touched his face, as though checking the arch of his nose, the dimple in his chin, the shape of his cheekbones. “It’s me. I’m in disguise to make it harder for Rhiannon to follow me. Marion made this. Looks pretty good, huh?”
Deirdre still didn’t understand. Not until the boy slid his thumbs underneath the skin on his jaw and lifted it like a hood.
Rylie Gresham’s face appeared underneath.
The Alpha herself.
Anger blazed within Deirdre. “You. This is your fault! You almost got me killed!”
“You almost got yourself killed,” Rylie said. “You can’t challenge Rhiannon publicly. An execution was the inevitable outcome.” She let the magical mask fall back over her features again, concealing her golden eyes and pink lips.
“It might have been the inevitable outcome for me, but not for you,” Deirdre said. “You knew there’d been election fraud. Brother Marshall told you. And you did nothing!”
“I told Brother Marshall not to tell you,” Rylie said.
She shot a look at the monk, who only shrugged. The gesture wasn’t embarrassed or even apologetic. “Yup,” he said.
“What Brother Marshall did is not the problem here,” Deirdre said. “The problem is your cowardice.”
“The oath might render me immune to Rhiannon for the time being, but it doesn’t spare all of my loved ones. Not everyone I care about is part of my pack. My son, Benjamin—he’s mundane. The oath wouldn’t have protected him. I couldn’t risk Rhiannon retaliating against him.”
“So you decided you’d give Rhiannon the whole country to save one boy?”
“I decided that direct confrontation would be a bad idea, yes,” Rylie said.
“Cowardice.”
“Practicality. I know you think that you can change the world by crossing your fingers and wishing hard enough, but there are real lives on the line, real people who matter, and people who need me to protect them.”
“Gaeans need you to protect them! Thousands of other peoples’ vulnerable sons and daughters,” Deirdre said. “If you couldn’t subvert her safely, then you should have gone big. Gone public. She’s the one whose head should have been on the chopping block for cheating.”
“She won,” Rylie said tightly. “Fairly or not, she won. Brother Marshall’s evidence isn’t enough. This is complicated, Deirdre, so much more complicated than you understand. We have to handle it delicately.”
“It didn’t seem real delicate when Rhiannon had me and Vidya hauled on stage to be publicly devoured by the sluagh.”
“Who do you think rallied the vampires to rescue you?” Rylie asked.
“They rallied themselves to save Lucifer.”
Brother Marshall gave a dry laugh. “Vampires couldn’t rally themselves to play a game of dodge ball.” He jerked a thumb at Rylie. “She got them together to save you. And she did it in secret. Delicately, you might say.”
Deirdre supposed that she should have thanked Rylie for it, but her well of gratitude seemed to have run dry.
The Alpha wasn’t going to do anything about Rhiannon. She was too busy playing politics, pulling strings like some damn puppet master hidden backstage while everyone risked their lives in her stead.
She was just as bad as Stark in her own way.
Deirdre was starting to think that they were all as bad as Stark.
“Forget it,” Deirdre said. “I need a way into the Winter Court. I summoned you so that you could take us there, Brother Marshall. And don’t give me any crap about it. I put myself in a lot of danger to present your evidence to the public, and you owe me for it.”
His eyes flicked betw
een Deirdre and Vidya. “I can’t get into the Winter Court. When the sluagh was unleashed, I shut down my access to the ley lines leading between Middle Worlds.”
“So open it again,” Deirdre said.
“Sure, I could do that. But I’ll have to get to the Winter Court to reopen my access points, which means someone over there will have to let me in first.”
“You’ve gotta have unseelie allies over there. Ask them to drag us over.”
“You know that the Summer and Winter Courts are at war, right?” Brother Marshall asked. “All my unseelie contacts are in hiding. I can’t reach anyone.”
Rylie stepped forward, still cloaked in her disguise. “I have a plan. I’m not going to let Rhiannon hurt people. You have to step back and let me handle things before you make it so much worse.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t trust you,” Deirdre said. “You’ve made your priorities clear, and that’s your own damn skin, not the people.” She thumped her fist on her chest. “I’m the only one who cares about them. I’m the only one who’s gonna fix this. And nothing you say can stop me.”
“Or me,” Vidya said.
That was a slightly more intimidating threat, what with the razor feathers.
Rylie sighed, massaging her temples. “There might be another way into the Winter Court. The unseelie wanted to have Stark assassinated while he was still on Earth, and they got in touch with anyone they thought might give him safe haven. They gave them ways to open portals to the Middle Worlds.”
“Like Chadwick Reynolds,” Deirdre said. He’d had a gift from the unseelie when they had killed him.
Rylie frowned. “Who?”
“Never mind. So you mean we have to figure out who among Stark’s former allies would have also sold him out to the unseelie, track them down, and take their portal-opening-device-thing?”
“Actually, I already found one person,” Rylie said. “You can go there directly. It’s near Cumberland.”
“Give me an address,” Vidya said.
Rylie did. The valkyrie’s eyes went blank as she absorbed the information, taking it in with the same chilling calm that came over her when she was acquiring new targets.