* * *
They all regrouped at Kendis’ house, for though nobody wanted to break the news to Aggie, even less did they want to keep it from her. The very idea made Christopher ill. Yet he couldn’t stand the thought of meeting Aggie’s eyes to try to explain what the hell had just happened, and so, when Kendis’ aunt met them at the door as they trudged in, he hung back and left the unhappy duty to Millicent. He did catch a glimpse of Aggie’s face going bleak, as if all the hope had been sucked out of her—and that, too, made him sick at heart.
Makiko’s other son Ryuji met them at the house once Millie cleared him to cross back over Seattle’s Wards. He proved to be younger than his brother, barely out of his teens, with halting English at best. Jake saw to patching up his partner. Then he saw to all three of the nogitsune, offering tea and sake and what other refreshments he and Carson could provide, as well as conversation in soft Japanese. While Christopher didn’t have a word of it—he’d barely muddled through his French classes in school, never mind any other language—the worry in their voices was plain. It was the same worry shared by them all.
Makiko, however, soon enough spoke up.
“There are others of our people in and near Seattle,” she said. “Jake Tanaka knows of this. My sons and I will warn them. And we will patrol past the edges of the city where you Warders cannot go.”
The edges of the city.
How permeable, Christopher wondered, were the boundaries of the city for him?
He didn’t dare voice the thought aloud, not when Millicent had point-blank ordered him and Kendis not to share his strange new flexibility of range with anyone else. But he didn’t miss the measuring glance his Warder First threw his way, even as she sternly handed out duties to everyone in the house. Jake and Carson, as much as the latter’s battered condition would allow, were to assist the Asakuras in scouting outside Seattle proper. Melisanda would carry word of the threat to the Seelie Court. To everyone’s surprise, Jude abruptly announced that she wanted to go with her. The young woman Christopher had known for the last two months should have outshouted everyone. But this Jude, pale-faced and hollow-eyed, clammed up as soon as she made her proclamation. Not even Millicent could get her to talk. The old Warder grudgingly let this stand, even as she sent everyone else scattering—and even as Melisanda, in quiet tones Christopher could not overhear at all, drew Jude outside to talk.
Only Aggie remained, eying the two Warders with a set to her mouth that brooked no contradictions. “I’m old, slow, and mortal, and I’m not going to be a damned bit of use to any of you running around the city,” she said bluntly. “But Kendis is my niece, and I will not be shunted aside. I need to be able to help. I need to know I’m going to see my little girl again.”
“We’ll find her. I’ll find her,” Christopher said. Ideas on how began to glimmer across his mind, and he eyed Millie. He wasn’t used to pressing for his way with her, not yet. But in this, he wouldn’t be denied. “I’m going out there. I can cover the city faster than you can.”
Because she’d asked it of him, he stopped short of adding and more of it—but he could see the thought crossing Millie’s eyes nonetheless. “We have to get the word out,” she said. “Every Warder between Portland and Vancouver needs to know what just happened and that their cities are at risk.”
“You don’t need me for that, Gran.”
Her eyebrows rose, for Christopher rarely called her that, though she was the closest thing he had to a grandmother these days. “The rest of the Warders need to know you. And you’re going to have to start learning how to work with the fey to get help when we need it. We need that help now.”
“Kendis needs my help now.”
He waited and held his ground under her canny, considering stare. No one was with them but Aggie, not to mention the restless Fortissimo, twining back and forth around all their ankles and mewling in aggravation at the tension still hanging in the air. Not even before Kendis’ aunt and cat, though, did Millicent give away what they’d kept to themselves. For that, he was grateful.
If the rules of Warding were somehow bending for him, he was loath to speak of it out loud, lest those rules snap back to the places they were supposed to be.
And if that bending was born of Kendis, that fierce, bright crackle he’d felt from her from the first moment they’d met, he didn’t dare risk it now. Not when he needed to bring her home.
For the longest of moments Millie held his gaze. “I take it you have a plan, son?” she said at last.
Only then did Christopher realize he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out on a sigh of relief. “The start of one.”
“Then go do it. And I’ll expect you to keep me posted.”
“Keep both of us posted,” said Aggie.
She hadn’t been born to power, not like the Warders, not like the Sidhe. Not, God help them all, like the child born of nogitsune and dragon blood alike, with an Unseelie’s vengeful ghost inside her. But in that instant, with the fear, worry and love in her eyes making tears she hadn’t yet let herself shed, Agatha Deveaux looked as if she had.
To pay those unshed tears their due, Christopher stepped up to the woman who’d raised his Kenna like her own daughter, and hugged her with all his strength.
“I will, Aggie. You’ll know the moment I find her.”
He hugged Millie for good measure, smiling crookedly when she hugged him back. Then he fetched his bouzouki and his staff, and took them both out into the night to look for the girl he loved.
* * *
It usually hadn’t bugged Jude much, being magic-free, human, and, well, normal over the last couple of months. Sure, she’d been blown away by all her best friend’s changes; any sane person would have been. And it had always helped that Aggie and Carson were just as human as she was, since it meant she wasn’t Token Mortal Girl in a circle of connections that tended to get weirder with every passing week.
But that’d been before Elessir had come back and brought with him the spirit… bone walker… alokhiu. The ghost. The thing that’d taken over her brain, crowding into her so thoroughly that there hadn’t been room for her in her own skull. She still felt scoured from it. Her limbs wanted to shake, and she wanted to curl up in the center of Kendis’ Warded house, just like she might have done if a tornado were about to strike.
Not that a tornado was at all likely in Seattle, but hey, elves and dragons and magic weren’t supposed to be likely either.
The point being, she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life, scared to the point of nausea, almost to the point of pain. Jude hated the feeling. So she forced herself to get Melisanda’s attention, though the full, direct stare of a woman of the Sidhe did nothing at all for her composure.
In fact, as soon as she got Melisanda out Kendis’ front door, she almost burst into tears under the Seelie’s jewel-green regard. There was no magic in it, no compulsion that could threaten her—none that she could sense, anyway.
But the thought struck her that she’d never seen eyes so beautiful in her life. Meeting their gaze as the two of them stepped outside was the hardest and most glorious thing she had ever done. Just a moment, Jude almost lost hold of the resolve she’d mustered.
“Do you have a full name?” she blurted. “We’ve all just been calling you Melisanda, but it’s kind of presumptuous of us to not even have asked what it’s proper for any of us to call you.”
Apparently, it was possible to surprise a woman of the Sidhe. “You’re the first to have thought to inquire in decades,” the warrior said, fair brows rising, speculation breaking through what Jude had thought so far to be her habitual reserve. “I serve House Kirlath but my family House is Sharran; I am Melisanda ana’Sharran. Melisanda will serve. But I don’t think this is what you brought me out here to ask me, Miss Lawrence.”
“No,” Jude admitted, blushing, but keeping her gaze up nonetheless. “I want to know why you don’t think I should go to your Court with you.”
�
�I made no such utterance.”
“You didn’t have to. I could see it in your eyes. So out with it. Is it because I’m human? You and the others came after Kendis after all.”
Melisanda’s mouth drew into a thin line, and she turned away, only to slant a look back at her. “You remember, I trust, that I’m here to make amends for that?”
“That doesn’t mean you want the likes of me coming to visit your people.”
Melisanda blew out a sigh, so softly that Jude wasn’t entirely sure she’d heard it at all. Her beautiful eyes went hard with tension and then closed, and she stood like that for a long moment before finally murmuring, “No. I don’t.”
“So what’s your problem?”
The Seelie opened her eyes again, swinging back round to face her. “While I have witnessed honor from its individuals, by and large, I do not trust your species as a whole. The Sidhe have learned how to live with you because we must. You outnumber us. So no, I do not want you in my house.” Her flush deepening, Jude opened her mouth to reply, but to her surprise Melisanda held up a hand to stop her. “But that’s a general you. You in particular… Kendis Thompson calls you friend, and that’s worth much. But do not take it the wrong way if I say that you look like walking death. You need a house of healing, not to stand in a council of war. Which is exactly what will be called when I return to Faerie with word that the Unseelie have taken House Kirlath’s Heir, and that an alokhiu in dragon form now roams free. She threatens human cities now, but if unchecked, she will eventually threaten us. The Queen of Wind and Morning will not permit this to stand.”
None of which, in all honesty, Jude could argue with. “And what happens if your Queen decides the dragon takes higher priority than rescuing my friend? Who, I might add, you yourself said is the friggin’ heir to your House? Are you going to stand at this council for Kendis?”
Melisanda stared at her in that remote, never-wavering way the Sidhe she’d seen so far all had, a gaze that not even Millicent had ever matched. “Kendis,” she pointed out, “has not yet chosen to stand for House Kirlath.”
“But she’s important enough to your Queen that she sent you here to make up for trying to kill her. Pro tip: if you’re serious about doing that, then getting your people in on helping her is the way to do it. Not only for Kendis herself, but for those of us humans who give a damn about her too.”
“Like you.”
The Seelie’s tone was speculative now, and though her stare remained cool, Jude knew a sizing up when she saw one. Lifting her chin, she answered, “Like me.”
“That, then, is why you wish to come to Faerie? To stand on her behalf before House Kirlath, and before the Queen of the Seelie Court?”
Now it came to it. Now was the part where she’d have to step up to the plate. Nervousness already made a snarling hole in her belly, and it was only getting worse. To hide the shaking of her hands, Jude shoved them into her jeans pockets. There was nothing she could do, though, for how her jaw quivered even as she tried to talk. So she blurted the words out as fast as she could, before she could change her mind or allow her panic to smother them down until she couldn’t say them at all.
“Not just that. I want you to teach me how to fight.”
Chapter Seventeen
I dreamed—at least, I thought it was a dream, and to this day part of me fears it was something more—that I was turning into a tree. My legs were fused into a slender dark trunk, my feet split into a dozen roots sunk into the earth. Branches crowned my head, spreading toward a sky strewn with stars as bright as blades. I still had hands, and I reached in supplication for that starlight while my spread fingers became twigs that opened new leaves with every slow breath I took.
Each leaf drank the starlight, and the starlight filled me with bliss.
But wasn’t I supposed to be somewhere—something—else?
Now why would you think that, my little rowan? A voice crooned in my awareness from nowhere and everywhere at once, as if the night itself were singing. You have always been here with me, and there is nothing you need that I cannot provide.
The voice rang with the truth of air and earth and stone. Most of my addled mind believed it, for each word it uttered was a life-giving draught flowing through me, the sweetest of nourishing rains… and yet. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain I was missing something. Someone important.
Is that all? The voice chuckled at me softly. You have but to think of him, and he is yours.
A figure appeared before me, a black-haired singer with eyes like the sky that beckoned my branches. If I could have moved, I would have reached for him, but I didn’t need to. He came to me instead, transfixed, his hands uplifted. I wanted him to touch me, for he was born out of the starlight I craved—
No. He wasn’t right.
That’s not a problem either, sweet little sapling. See?
Just like that the singer changed, growing a little taller, broader-shouldered and heavier-framed. The lines of his face roughened. His hair turned golden-brown, and his mutable eyes settled on green for once. That seemed fitting, for that was like my leaves. The longing in that gaze did not diminish. Neither did mine. It grew sharper, in fact, as I fought to remember his name—
Christopher.
Magic surged. My cocoon of branch, bark and leaf shattered with such force that I could feel it rend my living flesh. The stars wheeled overhead, and though it said nothing, the weight of the voice’s disapproval bore down upon me, uprooting me from the earth. I sobbed at the breaking of that connection, and from the knowledge that I’d displeased the voice. I screamed—
* * *
Then, with no transition at all, I was awake. And that same voice, lush and layered and full, was laughing.
“Impressive, Miss Thompson. You held out for a good twenty minutes. Well done.”
My heart nearly stopped as I finally identified the speaker. Luciriel, the Queen of the Unseelie Court, sat in a delicately carved, bone-white chair, not five feet away from me. I’d seen her only once before, but that had been more than enough to let her haunt the edges of my memory. With frost-pale hair and brilliant eyes that held all the colors of peacock feathers, she was every bit as beautiful as all the Sidhe I’d encountered to date. That, in turn, was utterly inconsequential compared to the power that radiated from her. I’d begun to come to terms with the magic that Millicent, Christopher and I could throw around, but we were candle flames next to the bonfires that were the Queens of the Courts of the Sidhe, or the bright, burning star that had been the demon Azganaroth.
Slowly, cautiously, I sat up, and only then did I begin to notice my surroundings. My mind flailed, not expecting ‘living room’ to apply to anywhere in Faerie, but that was the only way I could think to describe the room in which I found myself. I was on a couch—the most luxurious couch I’d ever seen, done all in pitch-black, butter-soft suede, but it was still a couch. The rest of the furniture in immediate sight, a couple more chairs like the Queen’s and a long, narrow table polished to a glass-like sheen, was arranged more or less in living room configuration. Beyond the furniture, though, was a tall hearth of smoke-darkened stone, in which burned flames of blue and green. The walls too were stone, strangely smooth and flowing, making the whole room vaguely teardrop-shaped. Bizarrely enough, that lack of mortal architectural angles was the thing that clued me in the hardest that despite the domestic arrangement of the lovely furniture, I was assuredly Somewhere Else.
Well, that and the Queen. Between Azganaroth and the Queens of the Courts, Luciriel was the one I feared the most. I stared at her, unable to keep from trembling. My own panic pissed me off, but there was nothing to be done for it, or for the simple fact that the female before me could eat my mind for breakfast if she so chose.
I had the uncomfortable feeling she’d just been toying with doing exactly that. And so I said, not trying to hide either the quaver or the crossness in my voice, “I’d appreciate it if you stayed out of my head. Please. Um,
Your Majesty.”
Luciriel chuckled again, and even smiled, as if I were a pet who’d particularly pleased her. “Ah, and you even have at least a few manners. How nice. Because you asked so politely, I’ll oblige you.” She made no visible motions, but nonetheless I felt a sense of her presence retreating, like vines sliding away from my skin. “Is that better, then?”
Part of me, the part of me that had dreamed of being rooted in earth, didn’t want those vines to go. I bit back a whimper. But now I could breathe and I could think, and I told myself fiercely that that was by definition better. “Yes, thanks,” I croaked, and wondered when I was going to stop trembling.
“You’re quite welcome. You’ll be wondering why you’re here, of course.”
“That had crossed my mind.”
“And I’m sure you’ve got a theory or two,” the Queen purred. “Why don’t you elaborate on them to me? Show me what a clever child you are.”
Coming from anyone else, ‘child’ would have pissed me off too. Coming from Luciriel, it was a word that would be in my best interests to ignore. At any rate, it wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of other reasons to be cranky. “Elessir told us you’d let him go,” I began. “That you put the alokhiu in him.”
“Oh, quite.”
“And given that she just chucked us through a portal and told me to say hi, that suggests she was supposed to get me while she was destroying him from the outside in for you.”
“Right again.”
“So I-I figure, given that the first time Elessir came after me, he was supposed to recruit me for you…” My trembling hadn’t stopped. It took everything I had to speak at all, much less with a steady voice. I blushed at the sound of my stammering, all the more since I was sure that if anyone could tell that a dark-skinned girl like me was blushing, it’d be Luciriel. “You’re trying again.”
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