by Reine, SM
Only one of the unseelie turned to face her. He was a beautiful man, with long hair the color of sunbaked grass, and he didn’t seem to realize who or what he was facing.
She whipped the sword in a wide, graceful arc, drawing a line of sapphire blood from the sidhe’s pelvis to his collarbone.
It was a shallow cut—not nearly enough to kill. But the sidhe screamed as though he’d been gutted.
Thick green vines exploded from the injury. His spine arched, snapping from the force of the extrusion, and the vines tangled around his corpse before he could collapse. Flowers grew from his wound, turning from buds to full blossoms within instants.
A single flower thrust from his open mouth.
Vidya didn’t stop to watch him die. She flapped again, propelling herself to the next room, meeting the sidhe head-on.
Stark looked shocked. “That shouldn’t happen when you kill a sidhe.”
“That’s what happens when you cut someone with the Ethereal Blade,” Deirdre said. “The Infernal Blade turns its victims to stone. Its twin…does that.”
Movement caught her eye. Andrew, the lion shifter, was trying to run past Vidya as she engaged with another unseelie sidhe. He held Stark’s video camera on his shoulder, filming the battle. The moron.
The sidhe hurled magic at Vidya. She dodged it easily.
Andrew didn’t.
Fluid magic gushed over his body, clinging to the wisps of his beard and the fibers of his shirt.
“Andrew!” Deirdre grabbed the lion shifter, yanking him around the corner for protection.
He slammed into the wall with a groan. The video camera slipped from his hands.
The magic melted through his clothes before Deirdre could strip them away. It chewed away his skin, exposing a layer of fat, and then devoured the muscle underneath.
“No, no, no—”
Deirdre dropped to her knees with Andrew, propping him against the wall.
His face paled as he struggled to inhale.
“Gods,” she whispered, cupping his face in her hands. “Heal, Andrew, heal.”
He coughed wetly, face screwed up with pain. “It burns.”
“The healing fever is supposed to burn,” Deirdre said. “Let it burn.”
“Not the wound. Your hands.” He pushed her off weakly. His strength seemed more kittenish than like that of a lion.
Deirdre pressed her fingers to her cheeks and chest. Andrew was right. She was hot. Her anger was manifesting in a low, rolling burn, and the adrenaline only seemed to fuel the fire deep within her heart.
Andrew shredded at his chest with his nails, trying to peel the magic off of him. His skin sloughed away under his fingertips.
He needed to shapeshift. It was his only chance to survive.
Deirdre whirled to search for Stark. The whole room was warped by seelie magic. Frost crawled across the floor from the shattered windows, consuming the video production equipment, making icicles sprout from the rafters.
Vidya crashed through the growing ice, unbothered by the cold. She slammed her foot into her opponent’s chest and sent him flying.
She leaped across the room, wings flared, to pounce on him.
He flung a lance of magical light through the air, blocking her blow with the Ethereal Blade. Where sword met magic, lightning sparked. The smell of ozone filled the air. Flowers bloomed between them, beautiful, surreal, and deadly.
Vidya swept a wing across the sidhe guard’s face. Feathery blades sliced his skin. Glittering blood gushed from the cuts, splattering on her forearm.
Deirdre didn’t see Stark anywhere.
Andrew drew in a labored breath. His eyes were losing focus.
“Heal,” Deirdre whispered, cupping his cheeks in her palms. She didn’t dare try to wipe the magical fluids off of him. She didn’t want to lose the skin on her hands.
“Shouldn’t have volunteered,” Andrew said. His eyes were fixed on her chin.
He exhaled one last time and didn’t inhale again.
Someone screamed elsewhere in the foyer.
Deirdre ripped the hard drive off the video camera and pocketed it. “Sorry, Andrew.”
Another scream.
She stepped around the corner to see Stark battling the third sidhe. He dodged magic that sizzled through the air and lunged toward the faerie, jabbing his elbows and fists at the gaps that the sidhe left in his defense.
He landed a few good hits. The sidhe looked dazed.
It wasn’t enough, though.
Hand-to-hand combat wouldn’t be able to take down a soldier from the Winter Court.
The sidhe slammed into him, pinning Stark to the floor. He shoved hands that blazed with faerie magic at Stark’s face. The Alpha caught his wrists, grunting as he struggled to push the attack away. Liquid fire dripped to the floor beside his head and chewed through the wood.
He was seconds from the same gruesome death that Andrew had suffered.
Deirdre didn’t need to do anything. She could stand back and watch as Everton Stark was melted off the face of the Earth. He would never bother her—or anyone else—ever again.
Fear gripped Deirdre.
“Stark!” she shouted over the hum of magic. “Some of the sidhe used to be werewolves!”
The spark in Stark’s eyes told her that he understood.
He fixed a hard gaze on the sidhe above him. “Kill yourself,” Stark said. He put every ounce of his willpower into those two words, fueling the compulsion with his rage.
The sidhe jerked off of him as suddenly as though a puppeteer had yanked on his strings. His pupils were dilated.
Kill yourself.
The command was so strong that it seemed to rattle inside of Deirdre’s skull.
She was immune, but the sidhe wasn’t. He sat back on his knees and stared wonderingly at his hands. The compulsion didn’t work as immediately as it did on other shifters, but it had obviously had an impact. He was battling the order internally, as though uncertain if he really wanted to kill himself or not.
That hesitation gave Stark time to get to his feet. Bones popped as his shoulder bones rearranged, muscles bulged, and fur swept down his biceps.
Silver claws erupted from the tips of Stark’s fingers.
It was a controlled partial shapeshift—something that no shifter could do. Another talent that Stark had obviously been keeping secret for a special occasion.
While the sidhe continued to stare at his own hands, Stark attacked.
His claws sank into the sidhe’s gut. He twisted, pushed, and lifted until his arm disappeared to the elbow.
And then Stark wrenched free, clutching a spasming heart in one fist. Sapphire blood coated his forearm. “Thanks,” he told Deirdre, lifting the sidhe’s heart like it was a goblet and he was giving a toast.
For someone like Stark, that was almost a romantic gesture.
Her stomach flipped with nausea. “You’re welcome.”
Vidya finished off the sidhe that she’d been fighting. At least, Deirdre thought that she must have killed the sidhe, because its body was no longer visible. There was nothing at Vidya’s feet but a pile of blossoms and grass that grew from the cracks in the floor.
Unseelie blood faded from the Ethereal Blade’s cutting edge, as though absorbed into the white bone.
She rejoined Stark and Deirdre, radiating with the satisfaction of the kill.
Stark tossed the heart aside. “Get Melchior’s gun, Tombs. Vidya and I will look for survivors and meet you in the courtyard.” But before Deirdre could take more than two steps, he stopped her. “Don’t fight the sidhe. Evade them. I want you to leave this asylum alive.”
—XVIII—
Deirdre raced up the stairs to her bedroom and flung the door open.
She’d left the TV turned on when she last left her room, and it provided the only light in the darkness, flashing patterns of blue and orange over her sparse walls. A car commercial played too quietly to drown out the thumping of gunfire elsewhere in
the asylum.
Melchior’s gun gleamed on her dresser. Deirdre grabbed it and checked the chamber. It was still loaded with six of those weird oversized bullets.
“What kind of dragon carries a gun anyway?” Deirdre muttered.
She quickly loaded her few remaining iron bullets in her ordinary handguns. Deirdre hadn’t anticipated having to fight the sidhe, so she’d only ever gotten a few rounds, mostly out of paranoia. Not even enough to fill a magazine.
Deirdre shoved her Sig Sauer into her belt.
She was halfway back to the door when the commercials ended and the news came back on.
“Alpha werewolf Rylie Gresham has released a second statement in the same week, which is a first for the normally reclusive gaean politician,” January Lazar said. “Her shocking news has rocked the preternatural world…”
Deirdre stopped, turned around, grabbed the remote. She jacked the volume up in time for Rylie’s face to appear on the screen.
She didn’t look as composed as she had in her earlier statements. The color seemed to have gone out of Rylie’s cheeks.
“Ever since Genesis transpired a decade ago, our world has continued to evolve,” Rylie said. “I’ve helped the Office of Preternatural Affairs draft laws that I believe benefit Americans of all breeds, whether they be fellow shifters or something else entirely. However, it’s recently come to my attention that I may not be as in tune with the needs of the people as I believed myself to be.”
A moment of hesitation flashed over Rylie’s features—only a moment.
“Some believe that shapeshifters are animals, and we should live in anarchy as animals do. They would have me removed as Alpha through acts of violence. No matter what these reactionaries think, we are human beings, with human souls, and we can do better than that. The American people deserve better than a bloody battle among gaeans that could cause the loss of countless innocent lives.”
“What are you saying?” Deirdre muttered at the TV.
“It may be time for new leadership,” Rylie went on. “To allow all gaeans to have a voice in how future laws are shaped, we will be holding a nationwide election. This election will determine who serves shapeshifters as Alpha and represents gaeans in conjunction with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”
Deirdre’s jaw dropped.
Rylie was offering to surrender her position as Alpha.
Knees weak, Deirdre sank to the edge of her bed. She almost missed.
“I hope you will reelect me as your Alpha,” Rylie said. “I have served our people for years and hope you agree that my vision for the future is best for all of us. However, if—”
The TV shut off.
“If what?” Deirdre asked the blank screen.
She grabbed the remote and tried to turn it back on, but the TV wasn’t responding.
The power had gone out.
Worry eased through her. She pushed the bedroom door open and peered outside.
Footsteps pattered down the hall. A flash of blond hair vanished around the corner.
Jacek.
Familiar fear settled into Deirdre’s stomach. With everything else that had been happening, she had forgotten about that snake. He was the most unimportant of all of Deirdre’s concerns, between the unseelie attack, the recovery of the Ethereal Blade, and now elections to determine a new Alpha.
Elections. Holy crap.
What was Rylie thinking?
Deirdre broke into a jog, heading down the hall with Melchior’s revolver aimed at the floor.
When she rounded the corner, there was no sign of Jacek.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Deirdre whispered.
She took the stairs down to the first floor, ears perked for the sounds of fighting. She didn’t hear anything. The battles had moved elsewhere in the asylum.
The foyer was empty of life. She had no company except for the numerous bodies scattered across the floor.
It was so quiet that she heard something swinging through the air behind her.
Deirdre flung herself to the ground.
Jacek slammed a broken stair railing into the wall. It cracked the drywall. The blow was hard enough that it would have knocked her out if it had connected.
She flipped onto her back, watching as Jacek wrenched the railing free. “You opportunistic prick,” Deirdre said. “Now? You want to do this now?”
“No better time,” he said, heaving the railing over his head like a bat.
He swung again. Deirdre rolled, and the bludgeon smashed into the floor beside her.
“Fine with me,” she said. “If I kill you now, everyone’s going to assume a member of the Winter Court got to you.”
Jacek smirked. “My thoughts exactly.”
She didn’t see the next swing coming.
He hit her in the back of the head. The room erupted around her, doubling and blurring.
Deirdre stumbled into the wall.
Jacek darted forward, gripping her face in his hands, sinking his teeth into the bridge of her nose. He bit down. And then he ripped.
The skin tore off of Deirdre’s nose. Hot blood gushed down her face.
“What the hell, Jacek?” she cried.
Her eyes blurred with reflexive tears. It obscured her vision, made it hard to tell how he was moving. When she tried to inhale, she sucked blood in through her nostrils.
He spit her skin onto the floor.
“For the stove,” he said.
She breathed shallowly through her mouth. Tried not to panic. “Gods, I hate you.”
“Feeling’s mutual,” Jacek said. “I can’t stand a woman who screws her way to the top. You don’t deserve to be Beta.”
She would have laughed at him if there had been anything funny about that. Deirdre hadn’t planned on seducing her way to Stark’s side. The fact that he seemed to have interpreted their relationship like that wasn’t her fault.
“You should have told Stark what you know and let him do the killing for you,” Deirdre said, leaping away from Jacek when he lunged again.
“Told him what?” Jacek asked.
He slammed into her. His momentum sent both of them to the floor.
Jacek fumbled to take the gun from her.
“You know what I’m talking about,” she ground out, holding the gun just out of his reach, fingers tight on the handle.
“Are you confessing something, Omega? Trying to tell me you’re a traitor?” He laughed uproariously. “And you think I’d waste my time telling Stark if I knew about it? We both know which one of us he would believe, bitch.”
If Jacek wasn’t the serpent, then who had been stalking her when she met with Brianna?
Deirdre lifted her knees between them, kicking him off.
The struggle made Melchior’s gun fly out of her hand. It clattered to the floor across the room.
She lunged for it. Jacek tackled her. For such a slender man, his weight was immense on her back, flattening her to the floorboards.
“I have a knife for you,” he hissed into her ear, breath hot and foul. He fumbled to draw the blade from his boot. “I wanted to make your death slow, but I need to get out of here before the sidhe find me. I’ll settle for making sure you know I’m the one who killed you.”
Deirdre’s fingers brushed Melchior’s gun.
She seized it and twisted underneath Jacek to fire directly into his gut.
All three barrels discharged simultaneously. The gun rocked in her hands, kicking back with more force than she’d been braced for. The smell of sulfur filled the air.
A fireball the size of Deirdre’s fist punched into Jacek. It sent him flying. He was flung into the air and hit the ceiling above her.
He broke through two rafters before bouncing down again, landing a few inches away with a wet splat.
She stared between Jacek and the gun in her hands.
Melchior’s gun had ripped the viper shifter open below the breastbone. The hole between ribs and pelvis was a scorched, bleeding c
avern. She could see his spine at the back.
Jacek tried to get on all fours and collapsed with a whine of pain.
The roof groaned. It cracked.
“Oh, hell,” Deirdre said.
She hurled herself away from Jacek, leaping out of the room an instant before everything came crashing down.
The bedrooms upstairs collapsed into the foyer, covering Niamh’s makeshift studio, the bodies of the OPA agents, and Jacek in rubble. The walls sagged inward. Pipes snapped and sprayed water over the shattered drywall and brick.
She froze on the opposite side of the doorway, wondering if she should keep running before more of the asylum collapsed.
But nothing else fell. Within moments, the building was still.
Jacek didn’t emerge from the debris.
Melchior’s gun was blazing hot, even hotter than Deirdre’s skin had become as her body struggled to heal her nose. “Whoa,” she said, easing her finger off of the trigger. She was afraid it might discharge again on its own.
She tried to suck a breath in through her nose. Blood caked her nostrils shut.
Deirdre wiped some of the blood away as her shoulders began to shake. She wasn’t sure if she was giggling or crying. Her face hurt. She was drenched in blood. But Jacek was dead. He hadn’t known she was a traitor, he couldn’t have betrayed her to Stark, and now he was dead in the most satisfying way possible.
She didn’t care if Melchior ripped the rest of the asylum down around them. Deirdre was never going to let him have his revolver back.
Stark and Vidya weren’t waiting for Deirdre in the courtyard.
But several of the unseelie sidhe were.
“Crap,” Deirdre whispered, hiding behind the park bench.
The sidhe were arguing in low voices on the far end of the courtyard, where they stood in the shadow of the building. They were debating who was going to investigate all the noise that had come from the foyer.
“He almost compelled Jonah,” one of them hissed. “If he catches our eyes and says so much as a single word, we’re boned. We’ll all be dead.”
“And he has a valkyrie,” said another.
“You people are useless! Did you leave your testicles back in Ofelia’s bedroom? One of us might be vulnerable against Stark, but two of us? Three of us? He won’t stand a chance. Now come on.”