by S. M. Reine
His chest heaved. He made a horrible gasping sound.
Was he dying?
Gods, that would be a hell of a way to assassinate someone. On accident. During sex.
“I’ll find Vidya,” she said.
But when she tried to stand, he grabbed her knee.
Stark wasn’t making sounds of pain. He was laughing.
He pulled her down by the hair, kissing her harder than ever before, with fierce delight. “You,” he said, “are incredible.” He tasted a little bit like barbecued ribs.
“And you are insane,” Deirdre said, tracing her fingers over his face. The top layer was peeled and black. The skin exposed underneath glistened crimson. Half his beard was nothing but blackened curls.
“Everton is fine, if Everton is what you like,” he said, dragging her down to lie on his wounded chest. She didn’t want to rest on him. It looked like it must have hurt, with all the wounds mottling his chest. But his arm locked tightly around her, and the healing fever swept over him, so he was repairing from the damage quickly. It was too cold not to cuddle herself against him. “You can call me Taye Diggs for all I care.”
“Taye Diggs? You know who Taye Diggs is?”
“Terrorists live in caves, not under rocks,” Stark said.
A nervous laugh slid out of her, and with it went the fear, the tension. “Oh my Gods. No, I’m not calling you Everton. You can’t make me. It’s weird.”
He gripped her breast in one hand and her hip in the other. “Suit yourself, Tombs. I couldn’t care less.”
XII
Deirdre wasn’t sure how long they rested there, the two of them gazing up at the stars of the Winter Court, warmed by nothing but her leaping flames.
Now that the orgiastic reverie was gone, she couldn’t believe what she was doing, where she was, whom she was with.
It was stranger than her wildest dreams and more frightening than most of her nightmares.
Stark.
She felt no affection for the man she rested against, but the deep, comfortable sense of satisfaction was impossible to deny. They had been moving inexorably toward this for weeks, and now she had crossed that line. If she’d been a feline shifter, like Colette had been, she would have been cleaning her whiskers with pride.
Gods, she really was as bad as Stark.
“I have a house in South Africa,” Stark said. “Well below the ethereal plains, near the tip of the continent. It will be good there.”
“Huh? South Africa?” For a moment, all Deirdre could summon to mind were her fantasies of living on warm savanna, roaming the wilderness with lions and elephants. “Why do you have a house there?”
“My family,” he said. “Part of my trust. We will kill the servants, of course. I won’t allow them to report back about us.” As though murdering servants to keep their affairs private was a normal thing to do.
Deirdre lifted her head to study Stark’s profile. He was resting his head on one arm. His skin had healed from the scorching, though it was dusted with the ash of the earlier damage and his beard was still blackened at the tips. “Why would we go there?”
“To raise my daughters outside the OPA’s reach. It’ll be good there. Amphicyonidae and phoenix. Forget this Brotherhood, the unseelie, politics. Forget it all.”
She pushed herself onto her knees, hair swinging over her shoulder. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because…I can’t. We have to go back to America, Stark. We have to fix this election and depose Rhiannon. That’s the whole point of this. Did you miss the part where I told you that?”
His eyes darkened. “She’s meaningless, Tombs. You were right when you said that you’re nothing like her. We’ll leave. Move on. Start new lives somewhere else.”
“But what will everyone else do when we’re gone?” she asked. “You said that you believed in helping gaeans live their natural lives. You want shifters to be free of the system. You want us to roam the wilderness and hunt like we’ve always been meant to do.”
“I wanted to punish Rylie Gresham for Genesis and avenge my wife,” Stark said. “Now, I don’t care. We’ll be Alpha mates beyond her reach.”
He sounded less patient by the word. As though he couldn’t believe that they were still discussing this.
Deirdre clenched her teeth, stood up, grabbed her clothes. They were shredded in multiple places. It was hard to weave her limbs through the proper holes when there were so many tears in the material. “Alpha mates of what? There aren’t gaeans in South Africa. There’s nothing but angels on those longitudes, from up in Copenhagen all the way down to damn Jo’burg.”
Stark stood, too. He was an impressive specimen while naked, even bearing the scorch marks of their union. “Did you think that you’d change my mind about this? I told you that I’d have nothing to do with the Alpha election. That includes making sure it’s run fairly and that victory is taken from Rhiannon.”
“But then you took the compulsion off of me.”
“Only because I decided to keep you,” Stark said.
Deirdre barked a humorless laugh. “Keep me?”
His eyes narrowed. He watched her as she dressed in a hurry, covering all of the parts that he had only just become acquainted with, and there was judgment in his eyes.
She might have been mistaken, but she thought that there was worry there as well.
Maybe fear.
“You don’t really care about Rhiannon and the gaeans in America,” Stark said. “This wasn’t really about getting me to go back.”
“Uh, yeah,” Deirdre said. “Actually, it was completely about going back there.”
“Politics is about money, power, maneuvering. It’s not about the people.”
It was like she’d been flung into the Twilight Zone. Stark had made all those statements on camera about how he was going to help the people he now disdained, and she’d believed him. “Were you lying the whole time that you presented your platform? Was it really just about revenge?”
He didn’t respond.
Stark’s body language spoke volumes, though.
“I won’t run away with you,” Deirdre said. “I thought we shared something, but…that ‘something’ doesn’t exist without our ideals. My ideals.”
“Forget your ideals, Deirdre,” Stark said. He grabbed her by the shoulders. “All I want is you.”
She gaped at him wordlessly.
The wind shifted.
Niamh alighted on the edge of the throne room, black wings folding to her sides so that the wind wouldn’t carry her into space again.
Startled, Deirdre zipped up her trousers and tried to make it look like she wasn’t getting dressed. She didn’t think that she looked convincingly casual as she walked down the stairs. Niamh’s gaze moved from the melted throne to Deirdre’s zipping and then to Stark pulling the skins around himself, unhurried, still glaring at Deirdre’s back.
She must have known.
“We’ve found something,” Niamh said. “It looks like Rhiannon and Melchior might have lived there, but—it’s weird, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just weird.”
“Show me,” Stark said.
He strode past Deirdre, whipping the hides around his shoulders. Niamh was large enough in her harpy form that he could mount her back, and then she lifted one of her scaly legs, offering to carry Deirdre in her clawed foot. But Deirdre didn’t move toward them. She was still numb despite her fire, frozen to the shattered stairs.
Her stomach churned at the sight of Stark climbing onto Niamh so casually.
Stark wanted her to leave with him.
He wanted her to leave all of North America’s shifters.
Deirdre didn’t believe that he could be so callous. He couldn’t really feel nothing toward the gaean community he had professed such compassion towards.
Could he?
Rhiannon’s antechamber looked much like the throne room, with all its icy gears and spikes. Deirdre’s breath fo
gged in front of her as she stepped inside.
She couldn’t seem to flare her fire enough to stay warm. She was barely flickering.
Deirdre rubbed her arms to warm them as she looked around the quarters. “This doesn’t seem weird to me, except for the idea that Melchior could have lived here without melting everything.” Even the furniture was limned with frost. She couldn’t imagine living in such a miserable, hostile place. Just visiting it was awful.
“Go through the doors,” Niamh said.
Stark reached the doorway into the rest of Rhiannon’s quarters first. He threw them open.
Moist air gushed into the antechamber.
On the other side, it was all green.
Trees. Bushes. Grass. A world within a world, like a piece of spring growing out of the frost.
Deirdre was so shocked to see a lush forest within Rhiannon’s chambers that it took her a moment to realize that there were holes in that forest. There were places where the grass had been flattened and the trees had been cut down, configured like there should have been furniture there.
At the moment, there was no indication of anyone living there. Just an altar among the grass and a lone bed that had been stripped of sheets.
Stark stood in the doorway, fists clenched, face reddening under his scorched beard.
“We already missed them,” Niamh said.
“Why?” Deirdre asked, stepping in to touch the trees. They were alive. Either they were really growing in that room, or the unseelie illusion was just that good.
Vidya understood the question that she was trying to ask. “Rhiannon did this for the girls. The trees. The grass. She didn’t want them to grow up in ice.”
Deirdre went to the altar. It looked like anything an ordinary witch might use. It was basically a table—disturbingly ordinary in the forest overflowing within Niflheimr—covered in a velvet cloth, with candles and crystals arrayed around it.
“She’s still doing it,” Stark said. “She’s gotten worse.” He hovered over Deirdre’s shoulders, scowling at the table.
She struggled not to face him. She was acutely aware of his presence behind her, as though he was touching her, settling his hands against her waist. Their bodies weren’t in contact, though. “What are you talking about?”
“Look at it and tell me what you think,” he said.
Deirdre tried to see it as he did, looking for the things that Rhiannon had placed most prominently on the altar.
The bowl of flowers. Everything surrounded that bowl of flowers floating in tepid water.
“What are they supposed to do?” Deirdre asked, dipping her fingers into the water to touch the roots.
He gripped her wrist with crushing strength. “Don’t.”
Deirdre drew back. She picked up a crystal instead, revealing the open book underneath.
The book looked like one of the ones that had been in the polling booths for the election. Deirdre turned it over to see the spine, which had the Hardwick Industries mark stamped on it.
“She cast a spell to modify the election,” Deirdre said. “This is it. This is proof that she messed with it.”
Stark couldn’t seem to care less. He’d already moved on, searching behind the trees as though he expected to find his daughters waiting among them.
Deirdre paged through the book. The last pages were glowing with magic.
There was a list of factions on them—along with a sole name.
Sanctuary shifters.
Independent faction.
Unseelie.
Deirdre Tombs.
Seelie.
Each of them had a number beside it—numbers which were close to the figures that had been polled before the election. The sanctuary shifters had gotten thirty-six percent. Stark was at thirty. And Deirdre… She shouldn’t have had been on that list at all, but she was at six percent.
She ran her fingers over the names. It buzzed with energy against her skin.
“These are the election results, aren’t they?” Niamh said. “Do you know what that means?”
Yeah, Deirdre knew.
Rylie had won the vote. Stark had come in second.
And Deirdre had come in fourth place.
People had written her name on the ballot. That was…unexpected.
It wasn’t as important as the rest of the results. This was her proof right here, plastered in the Hardwick Industries logo. There was surely something she could have done with this. She could have gotten Pierce and Jaycee to testify, maybe—if she could have found them, pried them away from Rhiannon, gotten them on the stand.
Evidence didn’t matter at this point. Deirdre’s word had been enough to work gaeans into a riotous froth. Rylie already had enough evidence to know that Rhiannon had cheated, and she was still going through with the inauguration. Stark didn’t even care. None of it mattered.
“The rooms are empty,” Vidya reported, emerging from the bathroom.
Stark punched the nearest tree, hard enough that his fist sank deep into the trunk.
He didn’t kill the sidhe with his grief and rage like the unseelie king had, but he vibrated with such force that Deirdre wouldn’t have been surprised if he had.
“There’s something else here.” Vidya tugged a sheet of paper out from the edge of the altar cloth. “It’s for you.” She offered it to Stark, but Deirdre was the one who took it.
For Ever—by the ley lines connecting to New York. Come find us.
Rhiannon had signed it.
Nausea writhed within Deirdre. “It’s an invitation,” she said, showing it to him. “Rhiannon wants you to go to her, Stark.”
“By the ley lines to New York,” he read aloud.
“She makes it sound like you should know where that is,” Niamh said. “I don’t know where that is, so there’s no way you could.”
But Deirdre did.
Melchior had taken her through that ley line juncture the last time she’d been in the Winter Court, after all.
“This is a trap,” Deirdre said.
Stark gave her a calculating look. He knew she’d been with Melchior. And he could clearly tell that she knew where that juncture was. “Let’s go,” he said.
And they left to walk right into Rhiannon’s trap.
To escape Niflheimr, they had to pass over the bodies left behind by the unseelie king’s wrath.
Deirdre had plenty of opportunity to study them as they flew overhead. More time than she would have liked. Cooper’s grief was etched over them all, permanently memorialized in ice.
Hundreds of dead sidhe.
She tried not to look.
The distance was too far for them to fly the entire way without Deirdre’s flame to warm them. They took off from the shattered husk of the throne room and flew as far as they could before Vidya’s wings began to stiffen. Then they landed and walked the rest of the way.
Once they were grounded, Deirdre struggled to summon the fire again. She couldn’t do it while looking at Stark, while feeling that sickening dread and confusion, but she could do it when she saw how cold Niamh and Vidya were without her help.
For all the confusing feelings that Stark made Deirdre feel—very confusing, very hot feelings—he was good at quenching her fire.
She burned a path through the snow and they followed her.
There was no sign of the juncture that Melchior had used to drag Deirdre into the Middle Worlds now—no swirling patch of shadow in the air, or even the barely visible distortion that sometimes represented sidhe portals.
It was a clear, quiet night, and there was no sign that anyone living had ever tread the ground in recent days. There weren’t even melted snow patches where Deirdre and Melchior had walked not that long ago. Everything had been consumed by snow once more.
Deirdre turned on the hilltop, searching for any sign of a hideout—anything bright, a flash of light, some flaring magic, a signal that people might live within the shadowy chill of the Winter Court.
There.
It wasn’t a bright spot on the next hill over, but a dark circle in the shadow beneath a cluster of trees. It might have been an area that the ambient light couldn’t touch.
Or it might have been a cave.
Vidya saw where Deirdre was looking. “I’ll check it out.”
Deirdre couldn’t stand back while the valkyrie scouted. She couldn’t linger on the hilltop with Stark and Niamh and all of the questions that hung in the air between them.
As soon as Vidya flared her wings and took off into the night, she followed, leaping down the mountain.
The other two probably followed, but it didn’t really matter.
As she drew nearer to the dark patch under the trees, Deirdre realized that it was definitely a tunnel leading into the depths of the earth. She only realized how steep it was once she stood on the brink, cold wind wailing at her back and a hollow silence beyond the tips of her toes.
This was it. This was what Stark had been looking for. This was all they needed before they could return to Earth.
Deirdre’s stomach flipped.
Return to Earth, sure…but to where? To the hidden Stark home in South Africa, where he’d kill his servants so they could live off his trust fund in privacy? Or to rescue the gaeans of North America?
A shoulder bumped hers. Stark wasn’t lingering at the mouth of the cave like she did, and he wasn’t stopping to look at her, either. He rammed past her and headed down the steep slope into the unknown.
Was he angry with her? Or just determined to find his daughters?
Deirdre didn’t want to find out.
Vidya followed Stark down. It was Niamh who offered her the tentative smile, cheeks ruddied by the chill. “I’ve got your back,” Niamh said.
Deirdre couldn’t muster even the faintest hint of anger at that.
The sound of the wind chased her all the way down the tunnel. Even once the faint light had vanished, she could still hear the whining, the shriek of a blizzard whistling through the rocks. The further away she got, the more it sounded like the screaming of a child than an actual wind.
A few hundred feet down—or maybe just a few steps, it was hard to tell—she could no longer see Vidya’s razor wings swaying in front of her.