As I disengaged my blade, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the man Ian was fighting go down.
The magical battle still raged, with attacks splitting the air back and forth, punctuated with automatic weapons fire, and to my surprise, the soldiers seemed to be holding their own. The restaurant had what I guessed was a storeroom jutting off the kitchen, and that hid us from the attacking Knights. We found ourselves in a place where we couldn’t see the combatants from either side—the soldiers around the corner to the left and the Knights around the corner to our right.
“What next?” I asked my companions. I stared at the face of one of the Knights I had killed. He appeared younger than me, and I doubted he had to shave every day. His blue eyes stared at the sky.
Another fireball whooshed past, and McGregor said, “Personally, I’m not enthralled with the idea of going out there.”
“Me, neither,” Oriel said, “but remember there were Knights behind us when we came out here.”
I looked back through the doorway. The cooks were still cowering under worktables or hiding in corners. None of the Knights we had seen in the dining room had yet come into the kitchen.
“We can try to go back,” I said, although I didn’t really want to.
“We can stay here and wait to see who wins,” Oriel said, “or, we can go back inside. I can cast a ward on the kitchen, and we can ask the cooks to make us another breakfast.”
My stomach rumbled, letting me know how it voted. Then the world rocked with a huge, ground-shaking explosion, followed seconds later by two more deafening blasts.
“What the bloody hell?” McGregor growled.
“The gas station,” I said. “The fuel tanks. One of those fireballs finally hit the tanks.”
We watched debris rain down and heard it hitting the roof of the diner. Then a dozen or so Knights rushed past us toward the gas station. If any of them had glanced to the side, they would have seen us, along with the bodies of their comrades, but they were focused on their destination and none of them did.
When no more Knights came, I crept to the corner of the building and peeked. I didn’t see anyone in the direction the Knights had come from, so I slipped out along the wall, keeping low and holding my sword in front of me. When I came to the back of the diner, I still didn’t see anyone, so I took off for the woods. A glance back showed that Oriel and Ian were close behind me.
As I reached the tree line, a Knight stepped out from behind a tree, aimed a pistol at me, and fired. The bullet bounced off my shield, and I cut him down as I ran past.
We ran for about an hour, heading northwest. Most of the farms and houses we passed showed no activity. I assumed people were either keeping their heads down or they had evacuated.
I finally stopped at a small clearing and sat down on a log to catch my breath. McGregor scouted the edges of the clearing, then came and sat down next to me.
“I’m hungry,” Oriel announced. “Anyone have any objections to roast squirrel?”
“I’d eat my boots if I didn’t need them,” I answered.
McGregor shook his head. “No objections here.”
Oriel nodded and disappeared into the trees. We watched him go, then McGregor stood and heaved a sigh.
“Never had raw squirrel, and I am not particularly eager to try. Guess we should gather some firewood.”
I agreed with him, and by the time Oriel returned twenty minutes later, we had a pile of wood and a fire going.
Oriel had three skinned squirrels impaled on long green sticks. He smiled when he saw the fire, and handed a squirrel to each of us.
“Hold them about two to three feet above the flames and turn them regularly. Should take half an hour or so to cook properly.” He shrugged. “Wish we had some salt and pepper, but I couldn’t catch any of that.”
“Any idea if your friends from last night are okay?” I asked.
“They made it out long before we did,” Oriel said. “They’re probably sitting in a cozy inn in Tir na Nog by now, enjoying breakfast.”
While we cooked our meal, I called Frankie and gave her an update on our situation.
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” she said when I finished. “We got word that you’d been found, then we heard that the outpost that reported you had been wiped out. The army’s mage corps are fighting a running battle with the Knights all over that part of Virginia.”
“How are things there?” I asked.
“Not so hot. The President has imposed martial law, but Congress has split. The President has issued a proclamation for the Knights to stand down, but the Universal Church and the Knights’ supporters have refused to abide by it. The Knights have taken control of the Capitol. We’re packed and ready to get the hell out of town but waiting on you.”
I relayed that to my companions.
“Tell her not to wait on us,” McGregor said. “We can take care of ourselves.”
“Frankie, we’ll catch up to you later. Where are you going?”
“We’re going to take the train to BWI and fly home,” she said. “I can leave tickets for you at the airport. Getting out is going to be problematic in any case. Airline schedules are unpredictable at the moment.”
After I hung up, I saw Ian and Oriel with their heads together.
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“We’re going to split up,” McGregor said.
“We’ll set Ian up with a car and a change of clothes,” Oriel said, “and he’ll try to make his way to an airport. We’re thinking Charleston, West Virginia, might be safer than any of the Washington airports or Richmond. Then you and I will take to the mounds.”
I responded with a witty and intelligent, “Huh?”
After breakfast, which was far better than I had feared it might be, we put out the fire and went looking for an abandoned house with a car. As had been the case all morning, we frequently saw military airplanes and helicopters overhead. Ground traffic was almost non-existent.
We found a large house with horses in the pasture around it but no one around. Oriel used magic to bypass the lock on the door, and we searched the closets to find some clothing for Ian and me that was less conspicuous than our Hunter uniforms. The men’s clothing Ian found was a bit small for him, but he said it would do. The family’s teenage daughter had clothing that fit me almost perfectly. We also found food, and I made up two bundles to take with us. At my insistence, we left a note and some money to pay for what we took.
The four-car garage contained a car and a pickup truck. McGregor chose the pickup, and Oriel siphoned gas from the car to fill up the truck’s tank. He didn’t even have to hotwire the vehicle since we found a set of keys for it in the house’s kitchen.
It was late afternoon when we watched McGregor drive away.
“So, what now?” I asked. “Are we going to take the other car?”
Oriel grinned at me. “Nope, we walk.”
“There’s a mound near here?”
“There’s a mound near everywhere. Feel the ley line?”
“Yeah, though I try not to. They’re still all screwed up.”
“Yes, but it will still take us to the underworld.”
“Are you sure I have enough Fae blood to go there?” I couldn’t decide whether I was more afraid that I could go than that I couldn’t. All the old myths about what happened to humans in the Fae’s world swirled around my mind.
Oriel took my hand, and the world around me vanished.
We were in the ley line, and I felt like I was drowning. Rather than a smoothly flowing river of magical energy, it was like being tumbled around inside a washing machine. The churning, chaotic flow was tainted and foul . The disruption in the ley lines was in its third day and not showing any signs of relief.
I panicked and tried to pull away from Oriel, but he refused to let go and pulled me closer to him.
Chapter 13
The next thing I knew, we were standing on solid ground again in a paved courtyard. Plants grew all ar
ound us, sporting a riot of colored flowers. Equally colorful birds flitted about, singing and chittering, and water splashed in a fountain surrounded with a stone bench. I looked upward and saw an arched ceiling almost impossibly high above us.
Oriel had reverted to his Unseelie form. “Welcome to Fairyland,” he said, pulling me to him and kissing me.
We walked along massive hallways from one wonderous place to another. The halls were lined with pictures—portraits, landscapes, and city scenes. Some were realistic to my eyes, some fantastic, and some surreal. The people we passed fit those descriptions as well. A few looked almost human, some I would call monstrous.
Something that looked like a swamp thing from a low-end movie wrapped a tentacle around a laughing woman who was half-covered with fur and at least seven feet tall. A group of fairies no more than a foot tall flew past on dragonfly wings. A woman—blonde, blue-eyed, and extremely busty—walked by on furred legs with cloven hooves. Her companion looked perfectly human, if you discounted the enormous nose like the beak of a bird of prey, the feathered crest, and the feathered wings folded against his back.
“I thought the mounds were closed to the outer world,” I said.
“They are, or at least closed to the ley lines.”
“So, how did we cross over?”
“I have a token my mother gave me. In concert with the Knights’ ruby I carry, it allows me to cross the ley lines and enter the mounds.”
“Oh. Something she made?”
“Maybe. I didn’t ask her.”
In places it looked as though we were outside—one enormous room reminded me of walking through New York’s Central Park—but it never felt outside, even when the ceiling was impossibly high above us, blue and with drifting clouds.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Underground.”
“Literally?”
Oriel sighed. “Yes and no. Consider it another dimension. It’s of your world, yet apart. It’s the world we created to escape when your ancestors mounted their genocide against us.”
“Didn’t the Fae enslave humans and rule over them?”
He gave me a grin and winked. “What’s your point? We never slaughtered humans.”
I chuckled.
“We didn’t attempt to exterminate you,” he continued. “As far as I know, that is a distinctly human trait. If it were up to you, you’d be the only species on earth. And before you object, ask the dodo birds, honeybees, and rhinos for their opinions. Hell, you slaughter yourselves with a weird kind of glee. See references to Nazis, Knights Magica, and Illuminati.”
I couldn’t argue with him. For one thing, he was a lot older and more educated than I was, not to mention smarter. But I had done a lot of soul searching since learning the truth about the Illuminati. Humans were incredibly cruel to each other. If aliens or angels or the Fae conquered humans and imposed order and peace on us, I wasn’t sure it would be worse than us ruling ourselves.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” he asked a little while later.
“What do you mean?”
“You keep looking around, not just at the sights, but as though you’re looking for something.”
“Oh. I guess I was hoping I might see Lizzy. I know this is a big place, so probably unlikely, huh?”
“Ah. She’s on the other side. Would you like to see her?”
“The other side?”
“The Summer Court. We’re in the Winter Court, also called the Night Court. That’s why some of the foliage looks like it wants to eat you. It does.”
I looked over his shoulder, and a plant I had been trying to make sense of came into focus. Those really were teeth and a tongue in that flower.
“Oh.”
“But if you’d like to see her, I’m sure it can be arranged. You can’t enter the Summer Court, but she can visit you here.”
I nodded, suddenly unsure of my voice. I missed her so much.
“I’ll ask my mother to arrange it,” he said.
He took me to a place with small tables overlooking a pond. Black swans swam languidly around, occasionally attacking and eating the small red ducks who also seemed to live there.
As soon as we sat down, plates of food appeared on the table, along with goblets of wine.
“That’s what I call service,” I said.
He winked at me. “And we don’t even have to tip. The brownies would actually be offended if you tried.”
We ate while we watched the savage swans decimate the ducks. Then some pixies showed up and attacked the swans.
“Is this the normal entertainment?” I asked.
“At this particular place, yes. I could have taken you somewhere with fish wars.”
“Charming.”
He chuckled. “They’ll all be back, healthy, tomorrow. It’s kind of like the movies. Everything miraculously heals overnight.”
“And is this what it’s like in the Summer Court?”
“Oh, no. Everything over there is saccharine sweet and perfectly beautiful. Except for the backstabbing. They prefer emotional and psychological torture over blood and guts. Lots of sneaky intrigue, conspiracies, and subtle jockeying for position.”
Oriel laughed at my expression. “Hey, we share a homicidal ape as a common ancestor with humans. For all our arrogant superiority, we do have some faults, and it can get boring here.”
When we finished eating, he took me down a side hall, and then into a grotto with a waterfall and steaming pool. We helped each other take off our clothes, bathed, made love, then fell asleep on a moss-covered shelf off to one side of the pool.
“I can’t believe we were the only ones there,” I said as we left the grotto the next morning. We had breakfasted on fruit growing from the trees surrounding the pool.
“If someone wanted a setting like that,” Oriel said, “they would make one. No one would intrude without an invitation. That would be rude.”
“You made that? It didn’t already exist?”
He shrugged.
We wandered down the main hall we had been following—at least I thought it was the same hall. Some time later, we encountered his mother, sitting on a stone bench near one of the side tunnels. Her appearance was similar to how she looked when I met her in my world—pale skin, long black hair—but her face was more like Roisin’s, with large, sharply slanted, slit-pupiled eyes, sharp cheekbones, a heart-shaped mouth, and a pointed chin. She was at least a foot taller than Roisin, though, even taller than me.
She smiled, showing some intimidating pointed teeth. “Hello, Erin. How nice to see you again.” Standing, she asked, “So, how do you like our world? You haven’t been foolish enough to eat or drink anything while you’ve been here, have you?”
All of the myths about humans lured into the mounds erupted in my mind, and I stared at her, momentarily paralyzed.
Her laughter echoed down the hall, and she put her arm around my shoulders. “Oh, I just couldn’t resist. I do hope my son hasn’t been starving you.”
Tiana pulled me into the side hall, which branched after a dozen steps, and then along another corridor until we came to what looked like a quaint little café, very similar to one Roisin had invited me to in Killarney Village. We entered, and around a couple of more corners, found a table with Roisin and Lizzy.
Lizzy leaped to her feet and met me before I could reach the table. We gathered each other into a hug, and it felt so good. Her smell—a mixture of honeysuckle and lavender—filled my nostrils.
“I missed you,” I whispered.
“Oh, Goddess, I missed you, too. You and Jolene, and Sam, and Jenny, and everyone. Especially, my dad. It’s lonely here,” she said.
I smiled down at her. “Don’t tell me that you’ve had to go celibate.”
She shrugged. “Oh, no, things aren’t that bad. I have a lover, and he manages not to be an ass most of the time, but it’s not the same. He’s never lived full time in the outer world, so there’s a lot he just doesn’t under
stand.”
We walked over to the table and sat down. Food and drink appeared in front of us. The brownies were definitely good at their jobs.
For the next three hours, Oriel and I filled Lizzy and Roisin in on events in the outer world and answered their questions. I could tell that news of Fae working with the Knights worried them.
“The resistance members I met in D.C. said they have encountered at least half a dozen Fae working with the Knights,” Oriel said. “And Erin and I discovered that a congressional staffer tied to a presidential candidate with a pro-Knight agenda is Fae. What have you been able to find out here?”
Roisin and Tiana traded a look, then with a sigh Roisin said, “It appears that Tiana and Reginn’s assessment is correct. There is a group within the Unseelie who are plotting to rule. The queen hasn’t taken an active role in more than five hundred years, so the court really has been chaotic for quite a long time. On the Seelie side, the king is debauched and doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on either.”
Tiana took up the narrative. “The upshot is that those who have power don’t exercise it, and those who want power seem to be taking advantage. As far as I can find out, the malcontents are mostly younger people, who don’t remember the last time we warred against humans.”
“And the Heart of the World is the key,” Roisin said. “That is why they are infiltrating the Knights. Gain access to the Heart, and they’ll have more power than any Fae has had in eight thousand years.”
“Any idea where the Knights are keeping it?” I asked.
Tiana and Roisin shook their heads. “That is what we’re trying to find out,” Roisin said. “We’re starting to deploy our own spies. If the Heart is found, then we need to make sure people with the proper motives take possession of it.”
“And what do you consider a proper motive?”
Tiana chuckled. “Someone who doesn’t want to keep it. It needs to go back into the Well. It’s obviously too dangerous to have the thing floating around where any idiot can pick it up and wield it.”
Knights Magica: An Urban Fantasy (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 5) Page 10