by S A Archer
Tomorrow, in the new realm, she would be his again.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The shadows surrounded him as he waited. This time, Deacon waited for someone else. Leaning back, with his feet propped up on the windowsill, he watched the activity outside. His fingertips brushed back the curtain as he watched Peyton and London guiding the Sidhe boy into the back of the van. The kid wasn’t fighting any more. Deacon smirked. Just like Lugh. Just like Rhiannon. All of the Sidhe were dancing to Manannan’s tune.
That was the power of true dark magic. That was the power Crom could have wielded over all of the fey, had he just been a little bit more ambitious.
When it came to ambition, though, none could compete with the Seelie. Especially the Seelie king.
If Crom only knew what Manannan was doing with his magic. Deacon couldn’t suppress his grin at that imagining. The grin still played upon his features when Manannan and Rhiannon entered the Seelie king’s personal chambers.
Deacon remained where he was. The bloodhound king’s eyes could see him, even in the shadows.
“Have you completed your job?”
Deacon uncrossed his ankles and rose. From his jacket he tossed down a handful of photographs.
Manannan flicked his fingertips across the stack, scattering them. Images of the Unseelie girl, her darkness coiled around her. The sluagh in flight. The dark elves riding the ribbons of shadows.
Deacon’s grin spread unnaturally wide across his face, lending a cruel twist to his features. “The island is yours. The girl will answer to you now, and with all of the Wild Hunt at her call.” He backed away from the table, going instead to the side board where the carafe of dark enchantment sat among the wine glasses. He poured two glasses, half watching the two Sidhe from the corner of his eye.
Deep in the throes of the enchantment, Rhiannon looked vacantly over Manannan’s shoulder. The darkness so consumed her that the moon madness had completely suppressed her sanity. Deacon had seen her this way before, when Crom pushed her to her limits. But what made her pliant to Manannan’s will, also made her unpredictable. And unreliable. She could have taken control of the Wild Hunt and commanded the sluagh. Or she might just laugh in Manannan’s face when he suggested it. Almost like a Changeling, Rhiannon could kill without conscience in this state. How many men had she lured to their deaths over the centuries? Singing to them with the voice of a siren and watching them drown. Or Touching them and luring them into the wilderness to find her once more, only to laugh as they died in their endless searching. All, very amusing.
As Deacon crossed the room, his form altered. When he handed one of the glasses to Rhiannon, it was Crom’s face she smiled into. Deacon resisted the urge to grin, settling for a smirk that wouldn’t ruin the illusion. They clinked glasses before they each drank down the clear liquid of the dark enchantment.
Delicious black magic swirled within Deacon, exciting his wicked heart. When Rhiannon finished her drink, tossing it back like an alcoholic who doesn’t feel the burn any more, Deacon leaned down and kissed her. He licked the traces of the enchantment from her lips, then delved deeper to taste her magic as her dark Touch flowed into his mouth.
“We will begin before dawn,” Manannan said, still studying the pictures given to him and caring not what Deacon did to entertain himself.
“Just enough time.” The deep voice from the Changeling was a perfect impression of Crom’s elven accent.
“Crom,” Rhiannon grinned salaciously at Deacon, seeing not the Changeling for himself, but her dark, and since the Collapse, missing, lover.
What would Crom do to Deacon if he knew how many times the Changeling had impersonated him to sleep with Rhiannon? The dark Sidhe’s Touch and sex was worth all the risk. Besides, Crom likely would forgive him when he learned that Deacon hadn’t been entirely honest when he’d told Manannan about the power in Crom’s well water. Or that the ease with which he could conquer the Isle of Fey was more than a shade exaggerated.
Deacon hoisted Rhiannon up and over his shoulder, startling a laugh from her. “I’ll have her back in plenty of time.” He swatted her bum as he carried her off. “Then the real fun can begin.”
A battle between the Courts. A war among the Sidhe. Once begun, nothing could stop the slaughter.
Havoc. Carnage. Glorious, bloody deaths.
How very delicious.
Tomorrow promised to be fun, indeed.
###
Chapter Forty-Eight
We’ve got a problem.
Tiernan read the text, thumbed off his cell phone, and dropped it into his hip pocket. The ambient black light of the portal glowed over his shoulder, casting his shadow before him and glinting with highlights off his leather jacket and dark hair. With the snap of his fingers, Joe and Riley fell into step behind him. The lesser fey parted before them as they strode down to the fey town on the low ground at the foot of the Isle’s lone mountain. His boots pounded as he crossed the porch into the tavern.
Inside, Tiernan gestured four fingers at the dwarf behind the bar, then pointed his men towards the booth in the corner where the red-headed Unseelie waited for them. Tiernan swung past the bar and grabbed two bottles by the necks with each hand. He slid the Guinness bottles onto the table in the booth and dropped down next to Riley. Tossing back a swig, he eyed the young man sitting catty-corner from him.
Bryce leaned forward on his arms. The tension brought up his shoulders as he cut a glance around to see if anyone was listening. “Changelings. We’ve had attacks here on the Isle.”
Without even having to glance at Joe, Tiernan saw the human go into action. He drew out his cell phone and began accessing the equipment he’d installed on the Isle the day after Donovan raised it from the sea.
With his man already on it, Tiernan kept his focus on Bryce. Just this past week, Bryce became the head of the Guardians of the Realm. Quite a responsibility for someone who’d just turned eighteen. But Donovan had trained him and no one could question his loyalty to the Creator and to the realm. He’d proven himself in battle with werewolves, and gained the respect of the fairy warriors, like Thorn. But one Changeling could disembowel a pack of werewolves without breaking a claw.
“Just one?” Tiernan tilted the bottle in his hand, shifting the contents as he considered the implications.
“One so far. That we know of, anyway.” Bryce ignored the drink before him, dragging his fingers through his hair with aggravation. “We wounded him, but haven’t found him yet.”
“What about the dark elves? They can track Changelings.” Tiernan narrowed his eyes as Bryce’s gaze slipped away. “What?”
“Something’s going on with them.” His features hardened. “And with Trip.”
Tiernan left his drink on the table, pushing himself to standing. “Show me.”
Joe slid out of Bryce’s way. His attention flicked from his phone to the others as he kept up. Bryce led them up the stairs, bypassing the second floor, and then crossing the third floor disco to the platform off the back of the building. Bryce reached over and tapped the fairylight beside the door, and the entire string of lights running around the railing flickered off. He turned his face upward, searching the dark sky.
With a soft nudge, Joe handed his phone to Tiernan. The footage from one of his security cameras caught the flight of sluagh tearing through the sky, followed by streaming arms of shadow like tentacles of smoke. Figures dressed in black, brown, and scarlet rode the shadows like mustangs.
“There.” Bryce pointed into the sky. The first fingers of darkness swarmed from the far side of the mountain. “The Wild Hunt.”
“Wicked.” Riley whispered, leaning against the railing to get a better view.
Tiernan flexed his fingers, gathering his magic to him. “I’ll look into it.” The metal laced through his clothing and
his boots vibrated with his magnetic power. He lifted into the air, clearing the buildings before propelling himself like a shot.
As the Wild Hunt raced through the sky, he twisted up and over them. Dark elves whooped into the wind, careening in and out as they flew. Tiernan let them soar past him, scanning for the one Sidhe among them.
Trip clung to one of the tendrils of power. Her legs gripped to its sides like she rode horseback. Her fingers tangled into the magic as if it were a mane. The black whips of her hair snapped out behind her in the wind. Her outcries echoed into the howls of the elves.
Tiernan dropped from above, snatching her by the waist, and tearing her from the shadows she rode. “Have you lost your mind?” He snarled against her ear.
Fingers of shadow snatched at them, but Tiernan twisted out of reach, carrying Trip with him in a fast downward plunge. Pulling the metal that he wore with practiced precision he brought them down fast onto the cave ledge high on the mountain where Trip and her sluagh resided. She jerked free of his grasp, landing in a roll and coming up with a black fury.
Tiernan landed easily, barely even bending his knees as his magic arrested his fall. “Answer me!”
Her head snapped up. Trip crouched before him, gripped the rock as if she meant to pounce. She flipped her long black hair behind her as she turned her face upward. Her eyes, solid black even where it should have been white, glared at him. “I don’t answer to you!”
“Yes!” He snapped at her. “You do!” Whipping out a hand back towards the town, he yelled, “You pledged to defend the fey, not terrorize them like banshees!”
Cormac, the dark elf entrusted by Donovan to help Trip with the sluagh, leapt down from the air beside them. The flight of sluagh, like a horde of devil fey, flapped around them like great bats waiting for the signal to attack the Sidhe who yelled at their mistress. Trip didn’t give the command, only glared at him.
Too furious to care about the dangers, Tiernan raged onward. “And what about the Changeling? Think you’ll find him flying around up here? Or down in the groves slicing the throats of innocent fey while you’re joyriding?”
The fury twisting Trip’s features suddenly slackened. Her eyes widened as she gazed not at Tiernan, but just past him. The effect chilled him to the core.
He twisted about. Flicking open his hand, his throwing blades dropped into his palm, and then they flared out around him like an aura of deadly metal.
From the fragmenting mist of Glamour a tall Sidhe woman in a midnight blue slip of a gown and waist length blue-black hair emerged. Another man, standing a pace back and to the side like her second, grinned at him with the wickedness of a Changeling.
“Rhiannon,” Cormac breathed with reverence.
The Changeling bolted forward, teleporting as he lunged. He reappeared right before Tiernan. His gloved hand, studded with silver, clamped over Tiernan’s throat with crushing strength.
The knives dropped from the air as Tiernan’s magic silenced. He clawed at the hand crushing his throat, unable to tear it free. Desperate, Tiernan kicked out, but the Changeling side stepped the strikes. “Let me kill him,” the Changeling snarled through evil needle-sharp teeth.
Cormac rushed forward, but halted as if frozen in place when Rhiannon raised a hand towards him. Moving with liquid grace, she slipped up to Tiernan. The delicate curve of her palm cupped his face as her Touch flooded into him. The blue-black depths of her eyes snared him as her lips parted into a long, rising note so beautiful that it tore through his mind.
The Changeling dropped Tiernan and he crumbled to his knees. His hands covered his ears, but the song already dissolved the hold upon his sanity. His thoughts tumbled away from him like spilling beads, to hit the ground and bounce and scatter away from him in every direction. The unraveling magic of Rhiannon’s Touch spread through his flesh with torment until Tiernan clawed at himself, fighting to dig out the poison of madness. The rising scream echoing in his mind tore from his own horrified throat.
Leathery flapping beat against him as the sluagh took up his howl and echoed it back at him like screaming knives of agony.
Tiernan swung his arms at the demonic beasts, missing them and propelling himself forward. His face turned up toward the blackened moon and he reached for it. The moon madness saturated his soul until nothing else remained. Reaching up to the moon in an outcry for mercy he stumbled up to his uncertain feet.
When the Changeling kicked him in the back, Tiernan tumbled from the ledge out into the black night. Falling the distance of a scream before he hit the jagged rocks. Bouncing and tumbling, he dropped further and further into the insanity that swallowed him whole.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The tip of Lugh’s finger pressed to the flat of the silver blade. He’d pulled his dagger from the sheath at his waist only enough to press his skin to it and silence his magic. The touch of silver was the only disguise to the eyes of a perceiver. The eyes of the king.
Light streamed in a shaft past Lugh from the open French doors leading from the darkened balcony into Manannan’s throne room. Leaning back against the marble wall in the shadows, Lugh gazed up at the veiled outline of the new moon. Exactly like Rhiannon, shackled in her darkest incarnation. Missing her now, so close physically and yet bound from each other magically, the ages of their playful love affair tumbled in a collage that mingled in the ache of his heart and the torment of his mind.
Once he’d feared her dead. The Collapse of the Mounds stole so many lives.
But Rhiannon, his bright and beautiful moon goddess, survived.
Bound into her insanity at the merciless command of the Seelie king.
Witnessing the faintest halo of light around the moon struck an arrow of sadness through him so bitter his eyes closed against it.
The coming sun would rise upon the fey like the dawning of fate. Before it set once more, the lands of the fey would forever be altered. His part in the coming battle, for good or ill, would shape that future. If he strayed but a little, if his grace failed him, all might be lost.
And his Rhiannon with it.
One purpose ruled him now; seeing Manannan into the heart of the new realm.
If he failed in this mission, the devastation would rival the Collapse of the Mounds. Likely, no fey would survive the cascading aftermath.
And yet, he’d no choice but to see it done. No other than he could ensure it.
Every life lost and every drop of blood spilled would forever stain his mantle as Champion. The weight of it forever upon his soul.
With every effort he would strive to avoid bloodshed, but he couldn’t hazard failure. The loss of lives. His own. His Rhia’s. His beloved Sidhe. None carried the import of this single mission.
Lugh would have done anything to save the Mounds.
Now, he would do anything to save the new realm.
Bringing Manannan to it was the only way.
The only way.
But not as Manannan had envisioned it.
Lugh glanced over his shoulder as the voices within the throne room carried out into the night. His acute fey hearing plucked the softest murmurings from the stillness of the air.
King Manannan hadn’t taken much rest, and so neither had Lugh. “The Changelings will sweep through from the eastern shore,” Manannan’s deep voice murmured his secrets to the wizard by his side. “They have already deployed.”
Closing his eyes, Lugh leaned back his head to bump against the marble. The Changelings, with their brutal claws and vicious wickedness would spare no mercy for the fey. And their assault was already underway; hours earlier than Manannan had told Lugh.
“Your servants have gathered and await your command,” the wizard assured the king.
When Lugh first arrived, entangled in the darkest of enchantments, he’d given no
mind to the wizards at his king’s beck and call. Even less so when Manannan leashed Lugh to his will, as he’d once done to Danu, the All-Mother.
Now, released of those holds and bound to the new realm, his tolerance for the wizards dissolved beneath the acid of history. He’d fought in the Sidhe-wizard war hundreds of years ago and they were no less foul for the passage of time in banishment from Ireland. Their purpose in King Manannan’s machinations, Lugh couldn’t begin to excuse. To allow a wizard to live was to condemn the fey they would encounter to mutilation and death. All Sidhe, apart from Manannan, embraced this truism.
“Send your wizards to the western shore,” Manannan instructed. “Take the fey town and subdue any resistance. Keep them from rising to defend the portal.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
Lugh remained where he was, disguised by the shadows and the silver. The wizard failed to notice him as he strode out onto the balcony past him. The wizard’s focus fixed on the glowing surface of his palm sized scrying device.
Pinching the silver blade, Lugh drew out the dagger. With two long, silent strides he pressed against the back of the wizard as his free hand clamped down over his mouth. Leaning him forward before the wizard could even recover from the shock, Lugh sliced across the flesh of his throat all the way down to the bone.
The wizard dropped forward, bending at the waist over the railing high above the rocks and the surf below.
Releasing the wizard’s mouth, Lugh gripped the back of his loose shirt instead. Using the fabric, he wiped clean his blade. Then with a knee to the dead man’s bum, he flipped him over the railing. The sound of him splashing into the sea was hidden beneath the rough surf.