It didn’t come.
Confused, Danice shook her head to clear away the ringing that had resulted from so many decibels of screaming and shouting and magical thundering going on right next to her. It almost sounded as if not all the shouting had stopped. In fact, one particular voice seemed even louder than before, as if someone was screaming directly into her ear.
After a minute, she realized someone was. Or rather, Rosemary was, and she didn’t sound happy. In fact, she sounded as if she was yelling at Danice to get off her and to stop being such a bitch and trying to ruin her clothes out of spite and jealousy.
Danice shook her head again and used her arms to lever herself off the other woman and onto her knees. From there, she managed to make it to her feet, but the assault on her ears only continued. Rosemary lay on the ground yelling and wailing like a toddler in the midst of a tantrum, but that wasn’t the only source of sound. Turning, Danice saw Mac and Quigley struggling to subdue Tyra. Quigley had wrapped himself around the sidhe’s legs to hold her in place, while Mac struggled to pin her arms to her sides.
Dionnu had surveyed the scene and probably decided it bored him, because he turned his attention away from the wrestling figures and fixed his gaze on Rosemary. Striding across the clearing, he reached out his hand.
“Come,” he said, ignoring Danice and speaking only to the hysterical young woman. “I promise that no harm will befall you. I will protect you from all evil. If you wish, I will have Tyra ni Oengus hunted down like a doe and fed to my dogs. You will see I can be very generous to someone who pleases me.”
To Danice’s surprise, Rosemary made what was likely the only intelligent decision of her life and shrank away from the king’s pale hand.
“N-no,” she stuttered, shaking her head emphatically. “I don’t want to go with you. I don’t like you anymore at all. You’re not the man I remember from that night. He was gorgeous and kind and charming. He made me feel like a queen. Yo-you’re nothing like him.”
Dionnu frowned at her, his impatience written on his face. “Don’t be ridiculous. I told you I remember you, and I assure you, I remember very few of the humans I fuck. If you have conceived a child, it is mine, and it will be raised as my heir. Now, come. Take my hand.”
“No. I told you, I just want to go home.” Rosemary reached out and grabbed Danice’s ankle. “Mac said he’d take me home. You can’t let him take me. I want to go home! Now!”
Danice looked from Rosemary to Dionnu and back and burst out laughing. She knew it was inappropriate—and probably a sign of temporary insanity, given the situation—but she couldn’t help herself. Danice stood five-foot-four in her stocking feet and weighed 142 pounds of average human; Dionnu, king of the Winter Court of Faerie was at least a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, and he was the frickin’ King. Of. Faerie. He could probably strike her dead with a lightning bolt just by snapping his fingers. Even if Danice wanted to physically stop him from doing something, how the hell did Rosemary think she was going to manage it?
“Rosemary,” Dionnu snapped, beginning to grow impatient. “You will come with me now. The human has no business interfering, even if I were inclined to allow it. I will not have anyone coming between me and my heir.”
That made Danice laugh even harder, but at least it gave her an idea of how to kill Dionnu’s interest in carrying Rosemary off into the sunset.
She quickly got ahold of herself and cleared her throat.
“Uh, I hate to break this to you, Dionnu,” she said, fighting back a smile, “but your heir is a figment of your imagination. It doesn’t exist. Rosemary was never pregnant. If you’d overheard even another five seconds of the conversation we were having before you walked into the grove, you would have heard her telling Mac and I exactly that. There is no baby.”
Dionnu turned his empty, black eyes on Danice, which easily chased away the remnants of her laughter. Looking into those eyes killed any desire she had to laugh.
“What did you say, human?”
Danice shifted warily, feeling her skin start to crawl. She thought that might be a really bad sign.
“I said that Rosemary is not having your baby. She is not pregnant. It was just a story she told a few people in New York when she was trying to get your attention and piss off her family.”
Beside her, Rosemary made a protesting noise and dug her fingernails into Danice’s jeans. Danice kicked her leg free and reached down to drag the girl to her feet. For God’s sake, what the hell was she glaring at Danice for? Had she really expected that Danice would lie for her? Make up some story to keep the king from knowing what an immature little brat she had been? The last time Danice had read through them, neither her current job description nor the one for a senior partner had made any mention of being quite that big a patsy.
Even if one of them had, Danice wasn’t in the mood. Her job could go hang.
Dionnu’s icy gaze traveled from one woman to the other while his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “Are you telling me that this human child thought she could trap me into a relationship with her by presenting me with a false claim of pregnancy? That she let it be known I had fathered a child on her in order to draw my attention?”
“Pretty much,” Danice said.
Rosemary glared at her, but remained silent.
“And what did she think would happen when I discovered the truth? Did she think I would not care that I had been deceived? Did she think there would be no consequences for her lie? For making a mockery of me before her people and mine?”
“If you’re asking me, I’d have to say that I’m not certain she thought at all. I kind of hope that she didn’t. Mostly because I don’t like to think of any woman being that stupid. It contributes to the misogyny of the backward and ill-informed.”
For a moment, Danice held her breath. She knew she could have phrased things with significantly more diplomacy, but exhaustion and exasperation had hijacked her tongue. If the Unseelie king felt inclined to smite anyone tonight, she had just provided him with the perfect excuse. Again, she wondered what had happened to the thoughtful, calm, and well-spoken attorney she had worked so hard for the last ten years to become.
“What the hell?”
Danice heard Mac curse and recognized the urgency in his voice. That wasn’t his surprised-and-dismayed tone; it was his duck-fast-because-the-shit-is-hitting-the-fan tone. She whirled around to where Mac, Quigley, and Tyra had struggled seconds before. Now only Mac and Quigley stood there, Quigley looking grumpy and confused, Mac looking furious and worried.
Her heart dropped into her stomach.
“Danice!”
She heard the warning and jumped instinctively to the right, knocking Rosemary down for a second time and just missing the cause of her own funeral. The blade Tyra had aimed at her heart glanced off her upper arm instead. It still hurt like a mother. Danice felt the lethally sharp silver slice through skin and muscle, but it took several minutes for the pain to hit. It wasn’t until she stumbled to her knees and clamped her hand over the bloody wound that she felt the searing ache.
Later—much, much later—she realized that she owed her life to the Unseelie king. In the moment, all she could do was stare up at the maddened Fae woman while her shock-addled mind tried to reconcile the memory that Tyra could perform magic and must have teleported herself out of Mac and Quigley’s grip to the space directly behind Danice. And then the sidhe had tried to kill her.
Why would Tyra try to kill her? Of all the people in the grove at that moment, Danice would have thought she was the only one the crazy bitch had no good reason to want to see dead. Dionnu was the one who had cheated on her, and Rosemary was the one he had slept with, the one who had lied about having his baby. Mac was the son she had abandoned, the one who’d come back to stir up all this trouble. Even Quigley, her supposed loyal spy—or so Danice assumed from the woman’s earlier rant—had attacked her to keep her from killing Rosemary. So why the hell had she decided to stab Danice, of
all people?
Maybe it had been a fleeting whim, because now that Danice had fallen to the ground and knocked Rosemary out of the way, Tyra turned her attention on Dionnu.
“It gladdens my heart to know that you won’t have the comfort of a child to carry on your name,” the Fae hissed, baring her teeth and throwing her knife to the ground. “Now you will have nothing to take with you when I burn the black heart from your chest!”
She launched herself at Dionnu, and Danice supposed it could have been the shock and pain distorting her vision, but she could have sworn the woman went for the king’s throat like a lioness. It looked almost like she wanted to tear his jugular vein open with her teeth.
Just the thought made Danice shiver.
“Get away from me, you pitiful nothing!” Dionnu grunted and caught his attacker by the neck, holding her away from him while she shrieked and clawed like an animal. The nails of one hand caught him across the cheek, opening up two long, angry furrows in his skin. Blood welled to the surface. Tyra cackled with maniacal glee.
“Oh, my God, that lady is crazy,” Rosemary muttered, sounding more awed and excited than afraid. She pushed herself into a sitting position and stared at the struggling figures as if she were watching a stage production.
In other circumstances, Danice might have pointed out the tackiness of the behavior, but at the moment she was just glad the fight kept the girl distracted enough not to whine again about being knocked down. Danice was also busy worrying that Mac would try to barge through the two combatants to get to her, since their struggles had positioned them directly between them. Judging by the look on his face, she really was afraid he might try it.
“You deserve to die in agony,” Tyra gurgled, her voice distorted from the pressure on her throat. “I tell you now, you will.”
For the first time since they had come to Faerie—for the first time ever, unless Danice missed her guess—fear flickered across the king’s beautiful features.
“Shut up, you bitch,” he growled, tightening his grip.
A smile of perfect madness curved the woman’s lips, even as her face began to turn blue and violet.
“A geis on you, Dionnu mac Lir. I curse you.” The words sounded faint and broken as she struggled to speak through the lethal pressure on her vocal cords. “You will meet your death at the hands of a woman. One of your blood, but not of your spirit. In the end, a far greater power than your own will destroy you.”
“Enough!”
The very forest seemed to tremble at the king’s furious roar. Leaves rustled, branches snapped, and in the darkness a fox screamed, its cry like a woman in distress.
“Enough of you, Tyra ni Oengus.” Dionnu freed the hand he had been using to keep the woman’s from further clawing his face and laid it on her forehead. “The life within you was lent by the land of Faerie, and to the land I return it. Codlata go deo.”
The sidhe collapsed. Her body went limp in Dionnu’s hands, the magic and madness and animation leaving her until she hung there like a doll, lifeless and empty. Danice watched with surprise as, instead of simply dropping her, the king strode the few steps to the stone altar and laid her across it. A beam of moonlight filtered through the trees and turned the now-smooth features into a porcelain mask of peace.
While facing the altar, Dionnu’s back was to Danice, so she couldn’t read his expression, or even guess at it, but when he turned back to the others, his habitual mask of arrogance had returned.
He fixed his gaze on Mac. “Well, Mac ni Tyra, will you now vow to avenge your mother’s killing? If I am to wipe out an entire family, I would like to see the job done quickly.”
Mac shook his head, but he watched the king warily. “She was never my mother. She gave birth to me, but she was a stranger to me my whole life. My family is in the mortal world. And from what I saw here tonight, there was little else you could have done. What she attempted wasn’t sane. Tyra was sick, and as far as I’m concerned, her illness killed her, not you.” His gaze flicked to Danice. “Of course, if you have any intention of harming either of these women, I won’t hesitate to try to kill you myself.”
“You wouldn’t succeed.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
A small smile curved the king’s lips. “Then it appears I am indebted to you, and that is a situation I cannot tolerate. You might not wish to call Tyra your mother, but she gave you life, and I took her from this existence before her natural end, so I must repay that act. Name something I can give you to balance the scales.”
Danice shook her head. “Do you think there’s any price that equals a life?” she asked, incredulous. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, the bitch needed to die, but you can’t put a price on her life. Twisted and effed up as it may have been.”
Mac shushed her. “I already told you, you don’t owe me for that. But we have gone to a great deal of trouble that you, however indirectly, caused us.” He glanced meaningfully from Dionnu to Rosemary and back again. “So for that, I would accept a favor.”
“Name it.”
“The three of us want to go back to New York immediately,” Mac said. The sound of a throat being cleared somewhere in the vicinity of his kneecap had him looking down at Quigley’s frowning face.
“Four of us,” the imp corrected.
Mac rolled his eyes. “Fine, the four of us. We would like safe passage back to New York through the nearest gate. Right away.”
Dionnu looked mildly surprised at the request, but he waved his hand. “You could have had much more, half-breed, but you shall have what you ask. Consider it done.”
And before Danice had the chance to blink, it was.
Twenty-six
Large hands reached down and pulled Danice to her feet. A hard, masculine body pressed itself against her for a moment, then those same familiar hands gripped her by the elbows, carefully avoiding her injury, and shook her like a rag doll. The dark, oscillating cityscape she glimpsed out of the corner of her eye reassured her that Dionnu hadn’t been messing around. They were right back on the corner of C and 6th, almost as if they’d never left. It didn’t even look like an hour had passed.
“What the hell were you thinking, you little idiot?” Mac shouted, pressing her against him again, then repeating the shaking. “Don’t you ever, ever pull a stunt like that again, do you hear me? You could have been killed! Twice! Goddess, I wanted to strangle you myself.”
“For what?” Danice asked weakly, the back and forth of the shaking and hugging making her a little dizzy. “For purposely knocking Rosemary out of the way of Tyra’s blast o’ magic, or for accidentally knocking her out of the way when Tyra tried to stab me in the back?”
“Yes! For both of it. For all of it. For ever putting yourself in danger. You can’t do that kind of thing to me,” he growled, smoothing the hair back from her face and cupping her cheeks in his hands. “You can’t scare me like that, Danice. I can’t take it. The thought of losing you makes me crazy. When I saw that knife, I think my damned heart stopped.”
“Isn’t the important thing that mine didn’t?” she asked, wrapping her fingers around his wrists and smiling up at him. “And that’s because you warned me. I heard you yell, Mac. You’re the reason I got out of the way and ended up with a slice on the arm instead of a knife in my heart.”
Mac frowned and peered at her sleeve. He didn’t look all that reassured. “How is your arm? Do we need to get you to the hospital? It looked like you’d probably need some stitches, but I never got a chance for a close look.”
With a start, Danice realized she could no longer feel the wound. In Faerie, the thing had burned and ached as if her entire arm were on fire, but now she couldn’t feel a thing.
“I don’t know,” she muttered, pulling away and shrugging out of her leather jacket.
She smoothed her hand over her shirtsleeve but couldn’t find the tear in the fabric. Impatient now, she pushed up her sleeve and stared at the caramel skin of her upper arm. She saw not a drop
of blood. The only thing that marred the smooth muscle was a thin, pale line, so faint it was nearly undetectable until the moonlight hit it. Then it shone with a faint silvery sheen.
Amazed, she lifted her gaze to Mac’s.
He shrugged, but he was smiling. “I guess Dionnu really didn’t think the favor I asked for was enough.”
“Well, I think you should have asked him for a whole lot more,” Rosemary whined, reminding Danice for the first time that she and Mac were not alone on the quiet street corner. “After all the shit he put me through, I would have asked for some big, fat magic ring, or something.”
Danice shot the girl a quelling look. “Oh, really? Maybe you’d like to go back and ask for your own favor?”
Rosemary went pale, but quickly recovered, schooling her expression into one of disdain. “As if! I never want to see that jerk’s face again as long as I live. I can’t believe I even slept with him. I mean, if he and that crazy lady had a thing, and she’s Mac’s mother, he must be at least fifty. Gross!”
“Yeah, gross.”
Mac and Danice exchanged grins. From what Mac had told her about the Fae, Danice was guessing that Rosemary would have to multiply that figure by about a hundred to get closer to the truth. After all, the Fae were immortal.
“Anyway, I’m just glad to be home,” the girl continued. “I want to put this whole mess behind me and forget I ever followed the creep into the country. It is so good to be back in Manhattan. Will you guys walk me up to First so I can get a cab?”
Danice was already nodding before Rosemary’s words actually sank in. She gaped at the girl.
“Into the country?” she repeated, her voice sounding almost as strangled as Tyra’s had near the end. “Rosemary, where exactly do you think you’ve been for the past couple of days?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m guessing it was somewhere out in Westchester. Where else would there have been a forest that big so close to the city? I mean, the trip back didn’t even take an hour, did it?”
Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here Page 22