Pas

by S. M. Reine

  He would have been able to swallow her in a single bite.

  But when he lunged toward her, she pulled her arm back and slapped him in the muzzle. It was hard enough to stagger him.

  But not so hard that he shouldn’t have gotten up again.

  He collapsed in the snow, flank heaving, frothy saliva gathered on the tip of his nose. His eyes were unfocused. He hadn’t really been trying to attack Deirdre—he’d just been trying to kill anything that moved.

  Sidhe magic had burned his back open, deep enough to expose spine. His paws were frozen. The skin was black without blood flow.

  And he was no longer healing.

  It had taken the loss of hundreds of sidhe lives, but Everton Stark had finally been knocked down.

  Deirdre almost didn’t check for a pulse. She almost walked away. But she thought of Lucifer taking the murder of vampires into the shadows, and Rhiannon at the United Nations, and she went to his side. Deirdre buried her hands in the fur around his neck and held her breath.

  Stark’s heart beat slowly but surely.

  Defeated, but not dead.

  And Deirdre hated herself for feeling such dizzying relief.

  Deirdre built a fire at the end of the valley using clothes stripped from the sidhe bodies for kindling, and Vidya spread her massive wings to help contain the heat. It trapped enough warmth that Deirdre could begin to thaw Stark’s frosty fur.

  He was limp as Deirdre tried to massage blood flow into appendages blackened by frostbite. He must have been frozen to near-death and healed a thousand times before becoming too depleted of energy to go on.

  But he still had Alpha healing. All he needed was warmth, a break from the fighting, and a little rest.

  His body began to knit.

  Niamh curled into a ball on the opposite side of the fire, hugging her knees to her chest. It was strange to see the confident harpy so diminished. It wasn’t the cold making her so pale. She wasn’t an Alpha, and she was going to need a lot more time to heal from what she’d suffered at the hands of the vampires.

  “You awake?” Deirdre asked. The harpy startled at being addressed. She nodded silently. “How do we get to Niflheimr from here?”

  “I don’t know where ‘here’ is,” Niamh said. “I could fly. I could take a look around.”

  “Great. Do that.”

  Niamh stood, tugging the harpy skin out from under her shirt. She must have stitched it back together in secret while held by the vampires; it was ratty, barely more than a few shreds. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Wait.” Deirdre set down one of Stark’s legs, rubbing her flaming hands on her pants to extinguish them. The fire didn’t burn her clothes. “What are you doing?”

  “You told me to look around.”

  “That’s not what I mean. All this stuff you’re doing—this sudden contrition. Why? I’ve let the vampires drain you for days. You’ve gotta be mad at me. I know you, or at least, I thought I did. You should be pissed.”

  Niamh flipped the skin over her shoulders. The magic rippled around her. “I’m pissed.”

  “Then what’s with all the obedience and self-sacrifice and all that crap?”

  Stark groaned, shifting on the ground.

  Niamh’s harpy form took over. With a few hurried flaps of her wings, she escaped the circle of firelight and climbed out of Vidya’s protective aura.

  Stark’s eyes opened.

  Deirdre tried not to feel too relieved.

  After all, they weren’t friends. They weren’t lovers. And as soon as he realized that Deirdre was immune to his compulsion, they were going to have serious problems.

  But dammit, it was so good to see him and his stupid rugged jaw and even the spark of brutal intensity in his golden eyes.

  He was a leader. A man who took charge, for better or for worse.

  Having Stark back meant that Deirdre wasn’t solely responsible for everything.

  He didn’t allow her to help him sit up. He did that on his own, biceps flexing as he pushed himself upright.

  Deirdre had saved a few shreds of loose robes from some of the seelie sidhe, who had been dressed warmly to help tolerate the depths of winter. She handed these to him. Stark draped them over his broad shoulders and furred chest.

  “Impressive,” he said.

  He wasn’t talking about the clothes. He was looking at Deirdre’s glowing flesh.

  Deirdre steeled herself against the warmth she felt at his praise. Not friends. Not lovers. Not mates. I just need him, that’s all.

  “How do you feel? Will you be able to walk soon?” she asked.

  He considered himself. “If I eat.”

  “We’ve got kibble,” Vidya said.

  She fished a small packet of jerky out of her pocket. It was barely enough to fill Stark’s mouth, but he took his time chewing it, rolling the meat around in his mouth. It must have been the first meal he’d had since entering the Winter Court.

  Niamh landed, rejoining them. “I know where we are,” she said. “I can get us to Niflheimr.”

  Stark’s reaction to her arrival was almost as chilly as the wind itself. “What are you doing here, Tombs? And with her.”

  “You’re hunting in the wrong place,” Deirdre said. “Rhiannon’s been on Earth.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Her flames flickered. “You do?”

  “She moves freely between the worlds. But she will need to come back here. This is where I will find her, and this is where I’ll be able to kill her without intervention from the OPA.”

  “You were almost dead yourself,” Deirdre said. “Maybe you should be picking your battlegrounds in places where you can actually survive.”

  “They’re here, Tombs,” Stark said. “It’s not just about Rhiannon.”

  She stared at him blankly. “They?”

  “The girls.”

  His daughters.

  Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat. “They are? How do you know?”

  “I know.” He tapped his nose. “I knew the instant that I entered the Middle Worlds.”

  “It could be a trap,” Deirdre said. “Illusion cast by Rhiannon.”

  “It’s not. I know them. They’re here.” He leaned toward Deirdre, fixing her with a serious look. “I did it for them.” The gentleness in his voice shocked her. She had to struggle to even understand him.

  “You did what?”

  “You wanted to know why I compelled Melchior to hide the girls,” Stark said. “I did it to protect them. The compulsion meant that Melchior wouldn’t be able to reveal their location under any amount of torture. He agreed to it because he believed in protecting them, too.”

  Deirdre looked to Vidya and Niamh, but they were acting like they weren’t even there. “Protecting them from what?” she finally asked.

  “Their mother,” Stark said.

  “Melchior kidnapped Rhiannon and your daughters.”

  “Not exactly. Rhiannon knew I’d sent him away with them, and she chased him down to try to get the girls back.” His jaw clenched, tendon flexing in front of his ear. “I assumed that Melchior had somehow found a way around my compulsion and turned on Rhiannon, but now I think her compulsion was merely stronger than mine.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to. I only want you to know that I have never intended to harm my daughters.” Stark drew the scraps of animal hide around him. He looked regal like that, almost like he could have been a sidhe king himself. “Rhiannon’s won the election.”

  That was subject matter that Deirdre did understand. “Yeah, by cheating.”

  “I don’t care about that,” he said. “What else did she do?”

  “She tried to have us executed publicly. All of us.” She gestured to the other women.

  “I don’t care about that either.”

  Of course he didn’t. “But you’ve gotta care that I can direct you to her, right? We can get into the inauguration together and kill her.”

&n
bsp; “It wouldn’t be that simple. Aside from the fact that Rhiannon will be expecting us, they have that mage girl orchestrating everything. The inauguration will be protected against attacks like ours on multiple levels. It would be the worst possible place to go after Rhiannon.”

  “We’ll find a way to do it,” Deirdre said. “At least we’ll know where she is. Right? And it’s not a million degrees below zero on Earth.”

  “I won’t leave without my daughters,” Stark said.

  “Won’t it be easier to save them once Rhiannon’s dead anyway?”

  “If she hasn’t placed some kind of trap to kill them in case of her death. I don’t know. We’ll need to find them. I suspect she’s holding them at Niflheimr.”

  “Then you were going the wrong way when you were killing all those sidhe,” Niamh said. She pointed toward the hills. “There’s an ice bridge leading to the castle in that direction. It’s a long walk, though.”

  He eyed Deirdre’s flaming skin again. “Not too long a flight.”

  “I can’t,” she said automatically. “We need to get back to Earth.”

  “My daughters are children. Alona is twelve. Calla is not yet eleven. They’re trapped in the Winter Court, and I will find them.”

  Just the sound of it made Deirdre’s heart ache. He’d pursued them relentlessly for so long, tracking them around schools they’d attended, benefits offices that had fed them. And now he was so close.

  Deirdre had disdained Rylie for prioritizing her kids over the country, but now she was thinking of helping Stark do the same thing.

  “The solution is obvious,” Vidya said. “We retrieve the girls as quickly as possible and return to Earth. If we work together, we’ll get through this faster. Simple.”

  Simple, but not easy.

  Damn if Vidya wasn’t right, though.

  “Okay,” Deirdre said. “Let’s go find your kids.”

  X

  Find Stark’s kids.

  Get back to Earth.

  Simple.

  All they had to do was cross the icy landscape, find the bridge leading to the castle of ice, and enter the palace where Rhiannon had most likely hidden them.

  The first two parts didn’t take long. Maybe an hour. Stark had killed all of the sidhe forces in the forest before succumbing to the cold. Deirdre melted the snow and Niamh navigated. Simple.

  But then they reached a hill overlooking the ocean to find the bridge to Niflheimr, and nothing from there seemed simple.

  Deirdre had seen that bridge while flying with Melchior, and given it little thought at the time. She’d been too wrapped up in her first flight to care about the towering crystalline pillars isolated in the vast frozen ocean.

  It also hadn’t been surrounded by an army at the time.

  Seelie and unseelie alike teemed on the surface of the ocean, visible only as sparks of magic at that distance. Their cries drifted on the wind. Deirdre couldn’t begin to count how many there were, but the numbers must have been in the hundreds—a civil war surrounding the death of Ofelia, Rhiannon’s betrayal, and seelie complicity with the OPA.

  They weren’t just on the ocean. They were on the lone bridge leading to the gates of Niflheimr too, and the snow-covered beach resting in front of that.

  Stark actually looked a little uncertain at the sheer numbers of them. It was a rare sight in him.

  “What do we do, boss?” Deirdre asked.

  He scrubbed a hand through his beard. “Kill them, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Vidya said.

  Deirdre snorted. “You’re a great tactical mind, Everton Stark.”

  “I killed that many and more since entering the Winter Court,” he said. “I fought for days without rest.”

  “Yeah, you did,” Deirdre said. “And you’re still healing from that. You’re not exactly fresh.”

  “But I have you.” He was looking far too intently at Deirdre’s flaming skin. She decided to pretend that he was talking about their party as a whole, not Deirdre specifically. She hated it when he got all intense like that.

  “Four against four hundred still isn’t great odds,” she said.

  “Not with that attitude it’s not,” Niamh said with a nervous smile.

  “If Stark stays in his human form, he can compel some of them,” Deirdre said, trying to wrap her mind around the situation the way she’d been strategizing back on Earth. She didn’t need Stark to act like Stark to enjoy his leadership skills. She’d gotten great at mimicking him. “Plus the bridge is pretty narrow—they’d only be able to come at us five, maybe seven at a time.”

  “We have the advantage of aerial assault opportunities as well,” Vidya said.

  “Why assault at all?” Niamh asked. “Why don’t we just skip over them? We can come down from the cliff over there…” She pointed. “We can skim down with minimal energy, go over their heads, and hit the gates. I know how to open them.”

  “It might work,” Vidya said. “My ability to fight will be limited if I’m carrying people, though.”

  Niamh unfolded her tattered harpy skin from within her jacket. It expanded in her hands, dripping with feathers. “I can take one of you.”

  “Very well,” Stark said. “Vidya will take Tombs.”

  “No, I’ll go with Niamh.” Deirdre’s protective instinct said that only badness could come out of leaving Stark and Niamh alone. They’d kill each other, and like it or not, she needed both to survive for the time being.

  Niamh’s hands shook as she pulled the harpy skin around herself. “You’ll have to turn off your fire so you don’t incinerate me, Dee. I’m flammable.”

  ”All of us are going to have to move fast if we plan to get through the gates before we freeze,” Vidya said.

  “Or we could fly for the nearest portal back to Earth,” Deirdre muttered.

  Stark shot a look at her as he wrapped an arm securely around Vidya’s waist. He wouldn’t let himself be carried in her arms the way that Deirdre did.

  “Don’t die,” he told Deirdre.

  Irritation rippled down her shoulders. When she felt like that, it took no effort to dim her flames until her skin went completely dark. The anger seemed to suck all of the fuel out of her. “Don’t act like you care, Stark. Remember who left whom.” Deirdre vaulted onto Niamh’s back, much broader now that she was in her harpy form. “Go!”

  Niamh took off, diving off the edge of the cliff.

  The original enchantment had been created by Rhiannon, which meant it had been designed to fly well in the Winter Court. She sliced right through the hard, blasting winds.

  Simple.

  They pulled up a few feet above the heads of the warring sidhe. Niamh flew with stunning agility, dodging the sizzling splash of magic that the faeries cast at one another.

  The battle was an ugly thing to witness up close. Niamh moved quickly, but not so quickly that Deirdre didn’t see the sidhe gutting each other. They were filled with magic on the inside, more magic than blood and organs.

  And they died in the most spectacularly messy of ways.

  Like balloons filled to bursting, they erupted at the slightest wounds. The seelie were the worst of it. They couldn’t seem to hold themselves together in the brutal cold of the Winter Court. And as soon as they popped, they froze into hideous statues of blood and ice.

  The surviving seelie seemed to be making a push for the gates of Niflheimr, but the unseelie were holding them off.

  A bloody stalemate.

  Niamh flapped hard, sliding over the currents of the wind. The gate drew near.

  It was a towering thing, that gate. It must have been almost as tall as the UN building—and that was the tallest structure on Earth these days. Yet it barely covered a fifth of the tower it led into. The castle was so much bigger than Deirdre had realized. She felt tiny in comparison, tiny and helpless, and she wished desperately that she could flame up and fly away.

  Instead, Niamh flew faster to reach it, struggling to beat her wings throug
h the paralyzing cold. Even Rhiannon’s harpy skin didn’t protect her from that.

  They were falling.

  “Faster!” Deirdre shouted, her voice carried away into the frozen night, drowned out by the death-screams of battle.

  Niamh tried. She really did.

  But then something changed.

  Tension rippled through the Winter Court, and the fighting on the crystalline bridge below slowed.

  The wind stopped. The gates opened.

  And a man stepped onto the bridge.

  Deirdre realized who he must have been too late to stop Niamh’s flight. The icy hair, the shimmering sapphire diadem, the heavy velvet robes—it was the gods-damned king of the unseelie, the real king, and he was looking right at Deirdre as she descended.

  Too late.

  She jammed her heels into Niamh’s flanks, pulling out fistfuls of feathers in an effort to slow her.

  “Turn around! Turn around!”

  To Niamh’s credit, she tried. She tipped to the left. She tried to wheel away.

  But the king lifted his hand.

  “Stop,” he said.

  Niamh’s wings buckled.

  An instant later, they both smashed into the icy bridge, flopping over one another in a tangle of limbs.

  Stark and Vidya hit shortly thereafter.

  They shored up at the king’s feet.

  Deirdre fought to untangle herself from Niamh, reaching deep within herself for the anger and fear to make a fire burn. But the flames didn’t return. She was so very cold, and there was nothing she could do against the king of the unseelie.

  Stark came off the ground swinging his fists.

  The king flashed forward, effortlessly dodging the blows that should have been too fast for anyone to dodge. His hand closed on Stark’s face. Ice spread over his beard, gripping his eyes, encrusting his ears. “You’re the Alpha,” the king said. “Who’s your Beta?”

  Stark didn’t say anything. He barely even glanced at Deirdre.

  It was enough.

  With a flick of magic, Deirdre was jerked off of the ground, smashed into Stark, and hauled through the gates.

  “Bring the others to my dungeon,” the king called over his shoulder.

  Unseelie guards swarmed Vidya and Niamh.