The Druid Next Door

by E. J. Russell

  “No. Of course not. But—”

  “Gwydion’s bloody bollocks. You and David, you’re always on about how fae take too much for granted, assume too much, when all we need is to ask. So why didn’t you, Bryce? Why not ask the fecking question?”

  Bryce threw up his hands in disgust. “Because I didn’t know what the fucking question was!”

  “So you settled for fucking, and hang the question?”

  “You think that’s what I wanted?”

  Mal shoved Bryce away. “I did, more fool me, and now we’re stuck with it.”

  “If you’re so unhappy about it, what do you think the Queen is going to feel like if she sacrifices herself on our say-so, only to find out she’s stuck with whatever the consequences are. You don’t even know what the consequences are. Nobody does. Why doesn’t anybody think about this shit?”

  “Because we’re bloody fae, you sodding druid!” Mal roared. “The elder gods did our thinking for us. Talk about consequences—we’ve been dealing with those since time began.”

  “If you don’t like it,” Bryce roared back, “then do something about it!”

  “What do you—”

  “Gentlemen.” The Queen’s voice wasn’t loud, but it bisected their argument like a scalpel. She was standing at the far side of the circle, Steve looming next to her. She didn’t say any more, but the order—and it was a command, Bryce had no illusions about that—was clear.

  Shut the fuck up.

  He compressed his lips and strode toward the Queen’s group, putting on enough speed to strain the tether—enough to inconvenience Mal but not hurt him. Bryce’s desires didn’t lead him that far into uncharted waters. In fact, he sheared away from them as if they were marked on an ancient map. Here be monsters. He didn’t want to be one of them.

  The Queen reached the tree line as Bryce cleared the ring of stones, Mal still stomping along behind him and cursing under his breath. Apparently he had no wish to close the distance either, keeping them just on the edge of discomfort.

  She turned and raised her hand. “Lord Maldwyn. Your transgressions have not yet been forgiven. You will await our judgment here.”

  All of Bryce’s nerves sparked as if he’d just stuck his pruners into a light socket. Mal echoed his own cry of pain and surprise. What the hell?

  He rubbed his chest as the Queen’s group disappeared down a path lined with flowering trees, their branches laced together to form a living tunnel. Bryce imagined that in better times, it would have been . . . well . . . magical. But now, he could see the dark threads running through the heart of each branch and twig, the curl of each blossom. Something was definitely rotten in Faerie.

  He waited until the trio had disappeared around a curve in the tunnel, and then strode forward to investigate. He’d never seen trees like this before. If he could touch them, feel them, would they speak to him the way the trees in the Unseelie sphere had? Would they cry? Would they beg him for help?

  But he never got there. The tether wrenched him to a halt five feet from the outer edge of the Stone Circle.

  He sighed. “Look, Mal. I know you hate this”—hate me—“but could you at least cooperate while we wait? Please.”

  When he got no response, he turned around. Mal was standing between a pair of menhirs in the outer ring, his feet braced wide, his shoulders tense. Bryce took a couple of steps toward him, and the set of Mal’s jaw eased.

  “Mal, I get that you want nothing to do with me. But—”

  “It’s not that. She told me to wait.”

  “I know. But maybe we can do something more interesting than stare at each other. I’d like to take a look at those trees.”

  Mal sank down with his back against one stone, stretching his legs out toward its neighbor. “Sorry, mate.”

  Bryce’s temper boiled up again. “So that’s it? You’ve decided to do nothing, so you’ll prevent me from helping too?”

  “You don’t get it. She told me to wait.”

  “So?”

  Mal extended his hand until it reached a spot in roughly the center of the short side of the megalith. Light flared, green and yellow, like a force field with the stones as its power poles. Mal flinched and so did Bryce as an echoing spark lit up his nerves. “So she made sure of it. And with you on the outside of her magical prison and me on the inside . . .” He shrugged.

  Ah, crap. “So we wait here? All night?”

  “Looks like it.” Mal patted the ground next to him. “It’s the bloody equinox, so the night won’t be the longest it could be, but it won’t be the shortest either. May as well get as comfortable as possible.”

  Mal stared up at the slice of sky visible beyond the capstone overhead. When he hadn’t been trolling for sex in the Outer World, he’d always loved the nights in Faerie, where the moon seemed close enough to touch if only he could find a tree tall enough. He’d always imagined that the One Tree stretched all the way to the moon. Now it turned out it didn’t even reach beyond the throne room.

  He ignored Bryce’s exasperated muttering as he settled against the same stone on the other side of the barrier. At first, Mal thought Bryce intended to give him the silent treatment all night. No such luck.

  “How could you not know that guy had ulterior motives?”

  “Everyone has ulterior motives.” He’d had several himself, chiefly to get his hand and his life back without giving Rodric Luchullain a damned thing. Without restoring Rodric, though, could Steve deliver on what he’d promised? Maybe that was the plan—Steve would restore Rodric, which would break Mal’s curse. But if that was the case, when and where would the alleged delivery occur? Shite, Mal should have gotten a few more details at some point along the line. “Besides, I was drunk at the time. Thanks to you.”

  “Now it’s my fault you can’t hold your liquor?”

  “I wouldn’t have downed so much if I hadn’t suddenly become shackled to a bloody druid.”

  “Which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tattled to your brother-in-law.”

  “‘Tattled’?” Mal picked up a pebble and threw it at the barrier. It passed through, of course—the Queen hadn’t told it to wait—and narrowly missed Bryce’s boots. “Gwydion’s bollocks, man, I’m not a toddler—I’ve been out of short coats for millennia.”

  “Really? You threw a beer bottle”—he nudged the lucky escaped pebble as if to say among other things—“at a coyote.”

  “That wasn’t a coyote. It was an Unseelie redcap.”

  “Really?” Bryce drew out the word until it had triple its usual number of syllables. “Are they particularly susceptible to beer bottles, then?”

  “No,” Mal growled. “But it was the only thing I had to hand.”

  “And it got you nowhere except facedown in the slough.”

  “That wasn’t until later. They’d have come after me anyway, so can we give it a fecking rest?”

  For a wonder, Bryce shut up. But after a handful of minutes, Mal broke the silence himself. “It’s not necessarily rape, you know.”

  Bryce scowled at the next stone over, as if he could break it with his gaze. “It’s a coercive sexual relationship. That’s the definition of nonconsensual, and nonconsensual equals rape.”

  “No. I mean they don’t have to have sex to meet the terms of Steve’s request.”

  “But he said—”

  “A night in the Queen’s bed. Those were the exact words, and in the elder times, they were a euphemism that everybody understood with a wink and a nudge. But nowadays, if you want to shag someone, you wouldn’t just ask for a night in their bed. Hells, from the wording, the Queen doesn’t even need to be in the bed. Only Steve.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yeah. The Queen is nobody’s fool, and she can best ninety-eight out of a hundred Sidhe in hand-to-hand combat, so she’s got resources. But I don’t think Steve would force her even so. He seemed almost . . . apologetic about it.”

  “You think he was faking?”

&nbs
p; “You tell me, Mr. Druid-Sight.”

  Bryce leaned his head against the stone, gazing up at the stars for so long that Mal thought he’d finally stepped over the line and offended him for good. “He’s definitely hiding something.”

  Mal snorted. “No news there. Can you really see it?”

  “In a way. It’s hard to explain. But there’s a place in his chest where the flow of energy stops. Like a locked room in his mind.”

  “Is it his mind or his chest? There’s a bit of a difference there. His chest doesn’t have snakes sprouting from it, for one thing.”

  “I told you it was hard to explain. That’s as close as I can get. Sorry.”

  “Your inner eye needs spectacles, mate.”

  “Maybe.” Bryce sighed and lapsed into silence. Mal thought he might have even dozed for a few minutes, but then he spoke up again. “So why’d you do it?”

  “Told you. Too many beers.”

  “I don’t mean your conspiracy with . . . Steve? God, really? I mean signing on to be my . . . my familiar. How does that work?”

  “I asked Cassie for details about that and got nowhere. Why do you bloody druids have to be so gods-be-damned cryptic all the time? At least in a sword fight, you don’t have to figure out the deep dark meaning of the blade sweeping toward your neck. Simple and uncomplicated, that’s what I like.”

  “See? That’s the problem with the fae mindset. It’s too binary. Seelie, Unseelie.” Bryce held his hands out flat, as if he were weighing his words in each palm. “Greater fae, lesser fae. Faerie, Outer World. But if you look at it more closely”—he laced his fingers together—“none of those are separate at all.”

  “Getting right philosophical, aren’t you? If you intend to go on like this all night long, I may throw myself against the Queen’s wee barrier just to end my misery.”

  “Would it really kill you?”

  Mal rolled his head so he could see Bryce’s face, the rough stone catching in his hair. He had a brief memory of Bryce restraining him, fingers threaded through his hair, and a wave of heat crested in his chest. Shite.

  This was why he’d never taken a lover, had never wanted to chain himself to that kind of anchor. He’d had his brothers as cautionary object lessons: Alun, who’d guilted himself into exile when he thought he’d been responsible for his first lover’s death; Gareth, who was so devastated after the Unseelie abducted his human lover that he’d become the first voluntary fae ex-patriot.

  The problem with anchors was that you could lose them. Be cast adrift, as Alun had been, as Gareth was. And as Mal would be when he was locked away from Bryce.

  “Death would be easier,” he murmured.

  Bryce’s eyebrows snapped together. “What?”

  Flaming abyss, he hadn’t meant to admit that aloud. “Nothing.”

  “Don’t try to bullshit me, Mal. I can tell when you’re lying. In fact, I can feel it. The way your skin prickles and the way your dick shrinks.”

  Mal covered his groin with one hand. “It does not.”

  Bryce grinned wolfishly. “It does. You know how I know? Because mine reflects it. It’s like that sympathetic magic spell I did on the paintballs. By changing the nature of the potion in the mirror cup, the paintball changed too. I think we’re like that now.”

  “You think it’s part of the familiar bond?”

  “That’s my guess, although without anybody who’s experienced it to tell us what to expect, who’s to know?”

  “Shite. Any road, I want to say—” He swallowed. No point in lying now, was there? “I’m sorry. I should have given you the whole story before. Given you a choice.”

  “Yes. You should have. And, in future, you always will, right?”

  Mal scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Bryce. We don’t have a future. Or at least I don’t.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve learned things tonight, we all have, that are game-changers. So don’t go fatalistic on me. Fight. Work with me. Because I’m not giving you up.”

  Mal’s eyes gleamed in the soft light. “Truly? Even after my little deception?”

  “Not so little. But I doubt I could have given you up even if we weren’t permanently attached at the hip.”

  “It’s just that I needed to get in here. Steve threatened Gareth. Said if I didn’t fulfill my part of the bargain, he’d force Gareth to do it instead.”

  “Based on Gareth’s little tantrum tonight, he’d probably have jumped at the chance if he thought it would piss off Alun, or screw you over, or stick it to the Queen.”

  “He’s not— You can’t judge him that way. Yeah, he might have done it, but if he had, there’d be no coming back from that. It would have been a point of no return.”

  “So why would it be a bad thing for him, but okay for you?”

  Mal chuckled, low and mirthless. “I’m already beyond the pale, mate. No great loss if I fuck my future.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s a pretty much done deal that when Alun escorts Her possibly debauched Majesty back at dawn, he’ll be escorting me away with rather less ceremony and more chains.” He leaned his head against the stone. “I just wish the whole thing hadn’t been such a bloody waste. This was supposed to lift both our curses, but so far, mine is still firmly intact. My memory of that first encounter is cloaked in a beer haze, but I seem to remember Steve saying he had to be fully restored—whatever that entails—before he could flick his magic fingers at me and make good on his end of the deal. I should have asked to see the fine print, since I don’t even know what Steve’s curse might be.” He snorted. “Maybe it’s having to be called Steve.”

  “Seriously? He looks like a blue-skinned cross between a gorgon, Lord Voldemort, and a wild boar, and you wonder what his curse is?”

  “For all we know, that’s what he looks like normally. The elder gods had some pretty rubbish ideas about bioengineering, our own situation being a case in point.”

  Bryce gazed at Mal’s perfect profile. “I don’t know about that. Other than the familiar time-bomb, they did a pretty spectacular job with you.”

  “Don’t be daft.” Mal ducked his head, red washing his cheeks.

  Bryce chuckled and leaned against the stone, facing Mal, to enjoy the view. “You had that same look—kind of a gobsmacked wonder—during paintball target practice.”

  “Don’t remind me. We got sideswiped by Rodric afterward and he nearly—” Mal clenched his eyes shut. “Goddess, if I didn’t hate the bastard’s guts already, when I thought he’d killed you?”

  Bryce shuddered at the memory. But . . . “Why would he attack us in our own backyards anyway? Did he still consider you a threat?”

  “I have a theory about that—and it’s not one that makes me happy. Remember later that night at dinner, when I started to tell you about Nuada?”

  “Yeah. I thought you were ready to spill about Steve’s visit. Imagine my disappointment.”

  Mal’s eyes widened. “So that’s why you were so pissy.”

  “You weren’t much better. Go on.”

  “Is that an order?” Mal purred.

  “You know it’s not.”

  “All right. So Nuada lost his hand in battle, much like our dear Rodric. Well, the Tuath Dé had some funky rules about the qualifications for kingship. One of them was that the king had to be ‘perfect’—that is, whole. Since an imperfect king wasn’t qualified to rule, he stepped down in favor of a half-Fomorian bloke who was a bloody nightmare. Later, two others, a physician and a craftsman, created a hand for him made of silver—and that allowed him to retake his throne as Nuada Airgetlám—Nuada Silverhand.”

  Bryce’s eyes widened. “That’s a pretty disturbing parallel.”

  “Exactly. If Rodric imagines himself as the second coming of Nuada Airgetlám, he’d see me as the avatar of Sreng, the bloke who bested him.”

  “So you think he’s got some kind of obsession about you, then?”

  “Aye. He always was an overly dramatic so
rt.” Mal snorted. “You should see his court wardrobe. But aside from that, if he’s got it into his head that he’s Nuada nouveau, and failed to grab the Seelie crown? If I were the Unseelie King, I’d be watching my back, that’s all.”

  Bryce peered beyond Mal’s shoulder at the altar stone, which was still winking with baleful red sparks. “If he’s as entitled as you say, why would he stop at one realm?”

  “Shite,” Mal muttered. “You think he’s aiming for all of Faerie.”

  “Why would he stop there?”

  Mal’s mouth dropped open. “Gwydion’s bloody bollocks.” He shook his head and turned away. “No. Not even Rodric would be insane enough to think the Tuath Dé could rule in the Outer World again. Things have changed too much.”

  Bryce remembered the blight spreading through the wetlands, its mirror in the Unseelie woods. “What if he’s trying to change them back?”

  For an instant, Mal simply stared at him, then smacked his fist into the ground. “Flaming abyss. We’ve got to tell the Queen. It may not mean anything—Rodric would need the gods’ own power to do anything close to that—but she should know.” Red washed Mal’s cheeks. And his forehead. And his . . . hair?

  “Mal, is the sky turning red? That can’t be good. Can it?”

  He cast a distracted glance at the sky. “Never mind that. Color spectrum sky. Yellow at noon, violet at night. Red means it’s almost dawn.”

  “Does that mean they’ll return soon? Is the night technically over?”

  “Could be. This is one of the shadow times between night and day, so it could go either way. Fae love this shite. It’s their favorite time for magic to go down.”

  There had been something in the grimoire about this—something about the awakening of power, if only he could remember. “It’s important, isn’t it, this time between? It’s the point where the ancients, who didn’t understand how day and night worked, would start to hope the light would come again.”

  “Deep, mate. Very deep.”

  “Shut up.” The energy surging in Bryce’s veins had changed. His chest felt tight, as if it were suddenly too small to contain whatever was about to crest in his blood. “Something’s happening.”