by S. M. Reine
Whatever Deirdre and Stark had going on between them, it wasn’t love.
But her heart had a different opinion than her rational mind.
“How can you be so kind to me?” Deirdre asked. “I keep screwing with you. I came here to kill. You should hate me.”
“I’m annoyed,” Rylie said. “I’m frustrated. But I could never hate you. You know why that is?”
“Because you’re the magical offspring of Santa Claus and a box of cuddly munchkin kittens?”
“Hatred hurts us far more than the people we hate,” Rylie said. “Forgiveness has only brought good things into my life. Compassion heals. You’re not a bad person, Deirdre—you’re not like Stark. I would never hate you.”
She didn’t know how much she needed to hear that until it came from Rylie.
Deirdre wasn’t like Stark.
“I’m sorry,” Deirdre said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I came here to kill Marion. I just…I don’t know what else to do. I have to stop Rhiannon. I can’t let her spread winter over the world. And the sluagh—gods only know what she’s going to do with the sluagh, but whatever it is will definitely involve a lot of people dying. She must be stopped.”
“I agree,” Rylie said.
“But you aren’t doing anything. You’re just handing her the reins like it’s nothing.”
“You’re a woman of vision, Deirdre Tombs, but you’re so short-sighted. You should know by now that I have a plan. Don’t you?”
“Then I’d love to hear it,” Deirdre said.
The door opened. Abel stepped back inside, and Rylie gave him a hopeful look. “Everyone’s fine,” he said. “Nobody has died, no thanks to our…guests.” That last word came out as a growl.
Rylie sagged with relief. Deirdre would have been lying if she had said she wasn’t relieved, too.
“My plan is in its early stages,” Rylie confessed. “I know that we have to move forward with the inauguration, just as I know we can’t unleash Rhiannon on the country. Brother Marshall and Secretary Friederling are prepared to help as soon as we decide what to do. I hope you’ll provide support too.” She took a folder off the side table and handed it to Rylie. “This is all the intelligence I have on Rhiannon. It’s not impressive, but I’m still hoping that there’s something in here that will help me provoke her to attack me.”
Deirdre’s eyes widened. “Attack you?”
“I can’t attack Rhiannon. If I do, I’ll break the oath, and I’ll be without all the protections that entails. She will kill everyone I care about and then she will kill me.” When Deirdre opened her mouth to speak, Rylie lifted a finger to silence her. “We have to be cautious. We have to make her do the attacking, and we have to do it before the inauguration. That way, she’ll be out of the oath’s protections, and we can have her arrested.”
Or killed.
Rylie didn’t say it, but the words passed between them silently.
“She cheated with the election,” Deirdre said. “It should be enough to stop her.”
“Even if it were, that doesn’t sway public opinion. We’ve created a multi-pronged problem. It’s not enough to fulfill the terms of Marion’s oath. We have to make the whole country understand what’s happening, too. We have to get them to support us. You had the right idea with your rally, and all that stuff you were doing with January.” Rylie set the folder next to Deirdre’s knee. “Read the intelligence. I hope you’ll have an idea. I hope you’ll help us.”
“I can’t believe you want my help. After everything I’ve done.”
“You’re telling me,” Abel muttered.
“Deirdre isn’t like Stark,” Rylie said firmly. “We want the same thing—to save lives. We just don’t agree how it’s best to do that. I think that we can find common ground, though.”
“Not if it involves more boarding schools and a benefits system that keeps gaeans a permanent lower class,” Deirdre said.
“The only way we can lift everyone is by helping the lowest of the low,” Rylie said. “I’m helping them as best I can.”
“Your best sucks.”
“Then I need someone to tell me how to do better.”
Rylie was smiling. She was so pretty when she smiled.
Deirdre didn’t remember her mother. The woman had died when she was too young to remember it. But there was something in Rylie’s smile, the way that she touched Deirdre’s hand, that brought back warm, comfortable feelings she associated with the safety of childhood.
Rylie was right. They both wanted to save people.
Even if Deirdre was disgusted with her methods, maybe their urge to help others was a good starting point. Lord only knew it was a better starting point than whatever had happened with Stark.
“Your phoenix is impressive, by the way,” Rylie said.
Deirdre warmed despite herself. “Melchior changed me.” A lump formed in her throat. “I killed him with the Ethereal Blade.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“But he was the only one who could make me change. Now I’m stuck again.” She covered her eyes with a hand so that she wouldn’t have to see the room. “An Omega.”
“Melchior was an Alpha,” Rylie said. “If you guys are the same class of shifter, then he’d have been capable of telling you to change, just like I can tell my shapeshifters to change. We just need another Alpha like him. You’re not without hope.”
“If you keep being this optimistic, I’m going to barf on you,” Deirdre said.
“I like to think of it as realism, not optimism.”
Then the “real” world Rylie lived in was a heck of a lot kinder than Deirdre’s.
“You know, Melchior told me I’d be able to change if I just learned to harness my anger,” Deirdre said. “But every time I get all angry, I lose it. I can’t even make myself flame up when I’m angry. I don’t understand why. It makes me feel so helpless, and that doesn’t help either. He must have been messing with my head.”
“I understand why Melchior would have told you that,” Rylie said. “Anger used to make me spontaneously transform between moons, long before I was Alpha.”
“What makes you change now?”
“Willpower. I am an Alpha, after all.” She tipped her head to the side, studying Deirdre thoughtfully. “I don’t think that you can learn anything from me and my wolves—you’re just not very much like us. You aren’t cursed, you know?”
“You’re not cursed either,” Deirdre said.
“That’s an argument for another time. The thing is, you’re meant to be a phoenix. You were born this way. And as destructive as you are, it’s also an incredibly beautiful thing.” Rylie stood up, smoothing her dress over her hips. “Everything you’ve done with Stark has come from a place of love—love for him, love for the people. Maybe that’s where your phoenix comes from, too.”
Deirdre stared up at her, unable to speak.
Rylie bent to kiss her forehead.
“Sorry I hurt you,” she said, her lips tickling Deirdre’s skin. “Let’s start over.”
Deirdre swallowed hard as she pulled back. “I’ll think about it.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
Rylie and Abel stepped out of the room, leaving Deirdre alone.
But she wasn’t alone. Not really.
XV
Deirdre flipped through the folder that Rylie left on her bedside, one eye on the papers and the other eye on the shadows outside the windows.
There wasn’t a lot of information that she hadn’t already known. Rhiannon was an orphan with unknown origins adopted by the Arigotti family, a coven with criminal roots. In the times before Genesis, they had enslaved multiple succubi, harnessing the energy they generated in the sex trade to fuel their black spells.
That was how Rhiannon had learned to use the power of other creatures for her own magic. That was how she had learned to abuse her naiad daughters in such a way.
The fact that she’d married Stark in Bahrain—that w
as old news, too. And so was the fact that she’d had two children shortly after their marriage.
There was nothing that told Deirdre how they could provoke Rhiannon into attacking.
Rylie knew little more than she did.
“Damn,” she muttered, setting the folder aside.
Deirdre rested her elbow on the windowsill and gazed thoughtfully outside.
The sanctuary was lit by huge floodlights, which illuminated all buildings Deirdre had burned. Apparently it wasn’t easy to extinguish phoenix fire. And her destruction had accomplished little other than absorbing the pack’s resources when they most needed them to fight Rhiannon.
She was chilled by the sting of humiliation.
How could she have been so selfish?
Deirdre hadn’t been thinking. Not at all.
She was about to pull the curtains closed when she noticed Rylie crossing the street to talk to Abel. Her mate was so much taller than she was that he almost made her look like a child. But no adult would willingly hand a sword over to a child, and that was what he was doing.
Abel was giving Rylie the Ethereal Blade.
They kissed briefly—a tender gesture shared between two people trying to connect before moving on to their separate jobs. The way that Abel looked at Rylie made Deirdre feel something uglier than jealousy in her stomach.
He went in one direction empty-handed. Rylie walked in the opposite direction with the sword.
Deirdre set the folder on her side table.
Where was Rylie going with the Ethereal Blade?
It seemed likely that she would return it to the mausoleum on top of the waterfall, but Deirdre had told Stark that was where the blade used to be stashed. If Rylie put it back there, it would be too vulnerable. She was smarter than that. She wouldn’t leave a deadly weapon somewhere that Stark could find it.
Curiosity got the better of her. Deirdre slipped out of bed, wincing at the pain of her skin flexing under the bandages.
Damn, but Rylie had messed her up big time.
She hadn’t been injured so severely since her last death—and probably not ever. There was no damage quite like an Alpha’s damage.
When she limped over to the closet, she felt very much like Secretary Friederling with his cane, an old mundane man hobbling along with limited mobility. It made the wounds on her chest ache to push the door open.
But there it was, exactly where she hoped it would be: a door to the crawlspace in the attic of the cottage.
Deirdre hadn’t seen the trap doors before, but she had seen such crawlspaces in foster homes, and she’d used them frequently to slip out when she wasn’t supposed to. There were a few boxes of spare men’s clothing in the closet, too. She piled them under the trap door, climbed on top of the stack, and opened the crawlspace.
It made a faint scraping noise when she pushed on the panel. Deirdre froze, waiting to see if a werewolf guard would enter the bedroom to see her attempt at escape.
Nobody came.
She was careful to be silent as she clambered into the crawlspace, deploying every ounce of agility to lift her legs without bumping them against anything. The crawlspace was tight and filled with fiberglass insulation. Deirdre bit the inside of her mouth as she navigated through it. The healing fever flared everywhere that the slivers embedded.
Faint light drew her to the back of the crawlspace, where slats in the walls permitted outside air to circulate through the cottage. She opened it.
Some of the nearest cottages were still smoking, though OPA agents with fire hoses were spraying them down. They weren’t watching the place where she was resting. They might not have even known she was there yet. Deirdre wouldn’t have put it past Rylie to attempt to protect her with anonymity.
But there were still werewolves circling the cottage. She waited until the closest of them turned the corner before leaping out.
Deirdre pushed hard enough to propel herself past the fence, landing in the yard of a neighboring cottage.
Hitting the ground hurt.
The pain radiated throughout her body, from the scrapes on her abdomen all the way to her legs. It felt like she was a rag doll coming apart by the seams, tossed by an angry child just to watch the stuffing erupt through her stitches.
Keep moving.
Gritting her teeth, Deirdre vaulted over the fence into the next yard, and the next.
Only two cottages down, she found more places that she had burned. She didn’t remember passing over them. The fire must have spread there on its own, consuming the homes of people who had committed no crime except being privileged enough to live at the sanctuary.
The sight of the sanctuary’s inhabitants attempting to repair the damage of the attack was surreal. Now that she was two-legged, Deirdre struggled to connect herself to the damage.
It wasn’t Deirdre who had done all that. It was the bird, the phoenix, the creature of fire and rage that Melchior had created.
The people who hosed down scorched walls and dragged smoke-blackened furniture out of cottages—they weren’t reacting to things Deirdre had done. They weren’t rallying as a community stunned by pain she caused. It was random devastation.
If only.
Through the gap in the fence, Deirdre glimpsed blonde hair.
Rylie was passing, escorted by OPA guards, no longer accompanied by members of the seelie court.
She still carried the Ethereal Blade.
Deirdre mirrored her throughout the yards, keeping herself hidden behind the trees, behind bushes, around walls and corners. Even wounded, she moved quickly enough to keep pace with the Alpha in her human form.
Near the northern edge of the sanctuary, Rylie turned to speak to her guards. Her voice was too quiet for Deirdre to make out the details. It was easy to guess what they were talking about, though.
When Rylie proceeded into the forest, the guards stayed behind, watching the road.
Deirdre ghosted into the trees.
The wilderness was Rylie’s natural habitat, in much the same way that cloud-tipped skyscrapers were Deirdre’s. She had to keep a fair amount of distance between herself and the Alpha to keep from being detected. She clambered into the tree branches so that Rylie, with the Ethereal Blade swaddled in cloths and tucked under her arm, wouldn’t see that she was being followed when she glanced over her shoulder.
She didn’t go far into the mountains. A young woman waited for Rylie in a clearing that overlooked the lake.
Deirdre sat in a high branch of a sturdy tree, one arm wrapped around the trunk. She was masked by the thick branches. Her body would be invisible in the gloom, but she could see the women through the gaps from above. She saw them the way that a hawk would see deer passing through the forest under its perch.
“Do you have it?” asked the stranger that Rylie had met. Deirdre didn’t recognize her shape in the dark, but she knew Marion’s voice.
“I’ve got it,” Rylie said, voice echoing through the forest.
Marion had been sitting on a rock at the end of the clearing, but now she stood to meet Rylie halfway. The grass was long after all the rain that had been drenching the east coast. It brushed their elbows, their hips.
Rylie held the sword out.
And Marion took it.
“Did you talk to her?” Rylie asked.
“I always talk to her.”
“You know what I mean. Does she know that I lost it for a while?” The Alpha sounded more anxious than Deirdre ever heard before. “Is she pissed?”
“I told her, but I don’t think she cares, honestly. She always had a soft spot for you. She only ever says nice things about you, even when she’s complaining about all the other people on Earth.” Marion slipped the cloth off of the Ethereal Blade, exposing glistening white. She sighed. “I haven’t seen this one since…when was that? Fifth grade?”
“Your first year at the academy, I think. Be careful with that. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“I can handle a sword.”
&nbs
p; “Accidents can even happen to the Voice,” Rylie said.
Deirdre frowned, leaning further out of the tree. Had she heard that right? Why would Rylie have called Marion the Voice? What was that?
Marion swung the sword through the air. Rylie grimaced.
“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.” Marion took a few things out of her pocket and set them on a nearby rock—a handful of change, some stones the size of her fingernails, a few gems. She also set her treasured cell phone on the rock.
“Any credit cards?” Rylie asked.
Marion rolled her eyes, and in that moment, she looked so much like a typical teenage girl. Not a powerful witch of angel descent. “Mère won’t let me have one.”
“Good. I don’t want you to fry anything when you cross over.”
“I’ve done this a few times,” Marion said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Once she patted down her pockets to find everything was gone, she held the hilt of the Ethereal Blade in both hands, tipped her head toward the sky, and closed her eyes.
Rylie backed away.
“I have it,” the mage girl said. “I’m ready.”
And then she was gone.
Just like that—one moment, she stood in the clearing, and the next, she didn’t.
Both Marion and the sword had vanished.
Rylie bit her bottom lip, gazing at the empty patch of ground where she had been standing moments earlier. She glanced up at the sky. Sighed.
She turned and walked away, leaving Marion’s possessions on the rock.
Deirdre didn’t understand what she had just seen.
It wasn’t weird that Marion could disappear like that. The girl had designed magic powerful enough to bind a bunch of Alphas together for the election. Being able to vanish was some petty David Blaine stuff.
The fact that she’d taken the sword—that was weirder.
Rylie vanished down the path, but Deirdre didn’t follow this time. She was a lot more interested in the cell phone sitting on the rock with all the other contents of the girl’s pockets.
Deirdre dropped out of the tree silently. It hurt less to land than when she had jumped out of the cottage. The healer’s magic was working underneath her bandages, mending her wounds, taking away the pain.