Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1)

by Mel Sterling

  I am not like them.

  Thomas squared his shoulders, stretched out some of the sore places Hunter had left with his stony magic, and hiked along the ridge to find a troll and an entry into the mound. He might have earth and stone magic himself, but it wasn't sufficient to create an entrance into the hollow hill the way Hunter had. It would behoove him to remember Hunter wasn't simply a bad-tempered killer. He was an ageless thing of guile and power and motivation, likely second only to the Queen in ability and skill.

  The troll, when Thomas found it, was unresponsive and immovable. Daylight turned them to massive stones, an admirable deterrent to any curious human who might suspect the large, moss-free boulders hid an opening into the hill. Thomas used what little magic he had to dig his way past the troll, who was wedged among the massive roots of an old-growth oak tree. He charmed a little earth back into the gap he had made, but left the soil loose in case he returned this way before nightfall.

  Just beyond the troll, he found himself in a tunnel sloping steeply downward. The walls were lit with the usual meandering clusters of glowworms and the faint fae magic keeping the tunnel open and dry. Stones pressed into the clay soil walls sparkled occasionally. It was an entrance he had not used before, and he took the way slowly, pausing often to listen. The whole place vibrated with the excitement and magic of Allantide. The closer he got to the series of enormous caverns composing the fae's festival halls, the more he felt the eagerness that had always meant ferocious, unrelenting pleasure was in store.

  Soon the tunnel was more crowded and more complicated, with side tunnels stretching away into the depths of the hill where the Unseelie kept their dwellings. Pixies flitted past with fierce, joyous cries, colliding with Thomas and the other fae, occasionally snatching glowworms from the walls and devouring them on the wing. This was their season, brightly garbed in the leafy forms of their home trees. The pixies were little more than self-aware pets for many of the fae, who tolerated them for their frolics and utility in carrying gossip in the mound.

  At last the tunnel opened into one of the halls, where clusters of the Unseelie swirled and laughed. They waited excitedly for night, for the moon to reach its zenith. At that moment the trees above the mound would pull their earth-clogged roots aside, creating shafts for the cold light to blaze down into the interior. Thomas pressed himself against the wall behind a spindly, cobweb-laced column and waited to hear news of the Queen. The whispers bouncing through the cavern were confusing and scattered, deflected a thousand times by the jagged, glittering crystals that formed the ceiling and walls. At last he heard one that mentioned the Queen—not by name, for even here, speaking the Queen's truename could bring her awareness or wrath down upon the unwary—and her night's attire. A shallow topic that passed for importance in the minds of the mound fae. It was just one more reason Thomas chose to live outside the mound, where he could find more of interest and substance and humanity.

  Yet part of Thomas longed to see the Queen garbed in her fae glory, a gown made of webby silk and desire, flame both burning and quenched, a gown that concealed even as it revealed. He wanted to dance in the drugging spirals the fae would weave through their mound and sate himself without consequence wherever his fancy suited—drink, food, sex. But the rest of him wanted nothing more complicated than to walk into Tess's quiet house and dine on milk and new bread with her seated across from him at her little kitchen table.

  I want to be human again. How the urge had grown so strong, he didn't know. Tess was part of it. Perhaps even most of it.

  He listened again and heard that the Queen rested in her divan. The full moon on Allantide meant power beyond imagining, but also a great cost when she harnessed that power. If he wanted to learn her secret plan, he would need all the guile at his command. He closed his eyes and forced away the trow-form, making himself appear as the human who had drawn the Queen's eyes so many decades ago. Perhaps there was still human charm in him despite how long he had spent among the Unseelie, taking on their manners and morals. Perhaps she would find him innocently pleasing and relax her guard.

  He removed the bulky oilskin and carried it over his arm, walking through the halls until he reached the doors of her chamber. There, two kelpies smirked and dripped, baring their horsey teeth at him in what passed for a leering grin.

  "Is she within?" Thomas queried, staying well back.

  "Aye." The left-hand kelpie was the one whose finger he had severed on his last visit here; no hope of help from that one.

  "Please announce me."

  "She's not alone." The kelpie's leer grew broad. "She's with her new one. Younger than you. Younger than you were, even."

  Thomas felt a shaft of white-hot fury blast through his body, but it was a momentary jealousy, a jealousy of old habit, a pale thing compared to the emotion that had once led him to slaughter a rival. It was quickly followed by a sense of relief that someone else was servicing the Queen, satisfying her appetites. Someone else she was draining of strength to increase her own.

  "Announce me or stand aside."

  "I will do neither."

  Thomas looked at the kelpie on the right, the one laughing at his predicament. "Do you want to lose a finger, as well?" He gestured to the kelpie on the left. "You can see I mean what I say."

  The right hand kelpie looked to its companion, then lowered its eyes. "She'll kill me. You know she will."

  "Why should I have mercy on such as you, when your kind does damage to mine?"

  "Trow? We do no damage to trow kin. You all taste like mud and cross-eyed badgers."

  Thomas slipped his little iron-edged knife into his hand and flashed it carelessly. "I am no trow, and well you know it. I am what she made me. But I was—am—human, beneath."

  The right-hand kelpie flashed him a wicked glint and pushed the latch. The door opened slowly. Through the gap Thomas saw the violet glimmer that was the Queen's magic, blurred and soft as the light at sunset.

  The sort of light that shone when she was well-pleased with—or by—her lover.

  Thomas gritted his teeth and flashed the blade again. "Announce me."

  "No."

  "You've already opened the door. If she meant to kill you, she'd have done it by now. Look at that light; she's quiet for the moment."

  "She has been well fucked." The left-hand kelpie slid close and looked Thomas up and down, gaze lingering at his crotch. "We never saw that sort of light when you were the one doing the service to the Queen. Did you never please her? Pity. It might have been you in there still, instead of the new one."

  "Be it on your own foul heads then," Thomas said. He pushed open the door.

  On the thistledown couch, screened by gauzy draperies, the Queen sat up as Thomas entered the room. Beside her lay a young man, apparently sleeping, in a coil of the Queen's snaky form. With a start, Thomas recognized the boy Tess had followed into Underbridge the night Thomas first met her.

  He could see the Queen's slow smile even through the draperies and resisted the urge to swallow. He remembered that smile; remembered the violent pleasures it betokened. Unknowable hours spent in sensual excess, driven to take the Queen, and be taken in his turn, until he was nothing but a husk of flesh and bone and exhaustion. By then the Queen would be achingly desirable, plump and beautiful with everything she had drained from him. The strange sleep afterward, broken by even stranger awakenings. Being fed like a babe on hot milk from the breasts of banshees and troll women until he recovered enough to do it all again, age upon age. He had given everything to the Queen simply because she asked it and he could not resist.

  "Thomas. How lovely. Come, my knight, join us here." The Queen made a moue of her lips. The draperies blew aside, shredded into mist and fog, and the sweetness of her breath reached him from the distant bed, honey and almonds and bread...

  ...and fungus and grubs and rot, he reminded himself firmly. He remembered how appalled he had been, so many years ago, to discover himself greedily devouring a plate of slow-writh
ing pupae, their bug fat on his chin like melted butter. And yet he could not have stopped himself, so ravenous was he after his beautiful paramour had ridden him nigh unto oblivion.

  Even now he could feel his body responding, the same irresistible scorching mixture of reluctant arousal and loathing he had always felt. He grew hard inside his trousers, and she saw it. She beckoned with a smile.

  "Come and meet Aaron," she whispered, rising, the snaky coil vanishing as she became the beauty he preferred to remember. "He sleeps, but when I wake him, oh, Thomas, what pleasures we three will share."

  Thomas cleared his throat and looked at his feet. It was easier, better, not to look at the bed, not to remember what it was like to bury himself in her, not to dwell on what unimaginably erotic atrocities she could orchestrate with three instead of two. "I have news, my Lady."

  It was the right tack to take. The languor instantly left her limbs. She became the ruler who had brought her people from Britain to the New World, built a haven for them, and protected them from detection by the humans in an ever-growing metropolis. "Have you the thief at last? Have you killed him?"

  "Very nearly." It was the truth, after all. Because of him, Tess had nearly died at the hands of the market mob in Underbridge and afterward with Hunter. "If it had not been for the interference of another, the thief would be dead." True, also. Dissimulation: the fae art of lying with the bald truth. He was not as skilled as he should be, to manage the Queen in this manner, but it was the only weapon remaining in his arsenal.

  "Give me the name of the Other." She came forward from the bed. On it, Aaron lay like a dead thing, and the Queen's purple glow took on spiky black fringes of ire.

  "I do not have his truename," Thomas confessed. "But I know him as Hunter."

  Instead of the violent hissing rage he expected, the Queen gave him a heavy-lashed smile, sweet and cloying. "Ah." She walked to a cabinet and took down two goblets, filling each with what smelled like clover wine, sharp and reviving. Thomas's bruised body cried out for it, but he was cautious when she put the goblet into his hand herself.

  "My Lady, why did you set another to the task you gave me?"

  "Jealous, my Thomas?" She drank deep, the diamond wine glittering in the cleft of her lower lip. "Think. You are no longer wholly mine. You have not been for many years. Lately, I hear new things of you, how you stop the kelpies from hunting for their meat."

  His heart thumped painfully. She could only be talking about Tess, but did she know the extent of his feelings for a human woman? He searched her shifting expressions for a trace of cupidity, of deception. "Confused, but not jealous. If I am to protect the market and do your bidding, why shouldn't I stop the kelpies from shitting in our nest? Why do you need another for my task? Have I not served you well enough?"

  "Hunter also serves me."

  "You did not believe I could do the job." He feigned deep distress.

  "The time is limited. My two best soldiers at the task? I knew it would be accomplished."

  "What is the timeframe, then? Why not tell me when you gave me the task? Why set obstacles in my path?" He strode to a spindly table made of stilt-bird legs and a slab of rock-hard bracket fungus studded with crystal. He set down the goblet. The wine called to him, but he needed clarity more than he wanted its sweet oblivion.

  The Queen shook her head, smiling at his naiveté. "The time is upon us. The time is now. Can you have lived among us for so long and still have no true understanding of what Hallows Eve means? An Allantide with the moon at her fullest?" She cocked her head, eyes slitting. "No. You know exactly. What do you hope to gain here?"

  Thomas gestured to the bed, hoping to throw her off. "Is that why you've taken new lovers of late? Gathering strength for this night?" He put on a hurt pouty look, a trick that had fooled her—or at least swayed her—in the past. "Was I not enough, my Lady? Not enough in your bed, and now not enough in your market, though I wear your band in dedicated service—"

  Her laughter was like bells, sweet, chiming, with an undertone of goaty chuckle. "How you men like to believe you and your maleness are all any female should ever need. Thomas, my beautiful Thomas, come to bed now. Take me. Fill me. Give me your strength, for if I am strong enough, it will not matter if the thief is taken in time or not. The market will be safe at last, completely ours, at last."

  And there it was, laid out for him as bluntly as she would ever reveal. She meant to own Underbridge, not merely allow the fae to squat there as long as no humans interfered. The trinkets must have been some sort of markers, like the anchor points of leys, for what was to come. She was not working through the channels she had used to obtain Forest Park, bewitching the humans. No, she meant to displace them altogether, force them out, and take the place for the fae.

  Now Tess had the things, foiling all or part of the Queen's plan.

  Thomas shuddered to think what the Queen would do to Tess if he could not protect her. His Queen was dangerously close to finding her.

  Thomas gestured to the young man in the bed. "Send that one back to the humans." It was the least he could do for Tess, help her in her cause. "Send him away and I will..." It took an enormous effort to push the image of Tess to the back of his mind. "I will do as you ask. But until then, my Lady...I must decline."

  The Queen shook her head in mock sadness. "That one I must have, Thomas, for a little while longer, if not longer than that! Ask something else, and perhaps I will grant it because of the progress you have made, and because you have shown more cleverness and determination than I credited you with."

  "Remove this band. Release me from your service."

  Now she laughed outright. "One strand. No—two. Little enough."

  He heard the thin plinks as two strands on the woven band broke. Crumbs of bone brushed his skin inside his sleeve as they fell. His heart leapt. "I would ask another boon of you." Now was the time to bargain to keep Hunter away.

  Her eyes slitted once more. Thomas saw the catlike shift of them. He was pushing his luck.

  "And in return? Ask more of me if you wish, but know the payment for the debt." Her eyes turned toward the bed before they returned to rest upon him. "Join me in celebrating Allantide, now in my bed, and later in the mound while we weave the Unseelie magic and grow our land. Return to me, my Thomas. Give up your chilly iron trow-hold in the bridge."

  So easy. Bed the Queen, and give up his life once more.

  So easy, and so tempting. After all, he'd done it before. He knew what he was getting into.

  But he thought about Tess at home, all unknowing, with a clutch of fae eggs on her shelves. He thought about how she treated him, even after she understood his true nature. Tess was the hard choice, but Tess was the right choice. She was the way back to humanity.

  He looked away from the Queen. "You set me a task. I'll complete it." Just not in the way you meant. "I thank you for the two strands."

  She came close, goblet still in hand. "Drink with me before you go." Her nostrils flared delicately. "Where have you been? You smell...delicious and strangely familiar. Not of my Thomas...but of my...of my..." She pursed her lips, pondering.

  Though Thomas had bathed at Tess's house, he was still wearing the clothes he'd slept in. He had been so close to Tess for hours as they slept, the Queen would be certain to smell her on him.

  The Queen leaned forward and licked the front of his shirt, just above his heart, a long, deliberating stroke. Her tongue pulled back into her mouth, tasting, savoring.

  Knowing something. Remembering. Thomas could tell from her expression. Tasting Tess.

  "Ah," was all she said, but her smile told him everything he needed to know.

  Thomas obeyed her command to drink, lifting his goblet from the table and taking a mouthful. The wine was hot in his mouth, scorching his tongue. He set down the goblet, swung his oilskin around him like a cloak, and walked toward the door without another word, without a kiss goodbye, without looking at the Queen. Behind him he could hear her laug
hing softly as she moved to draw aside the misty curtains around the bed.

  "Wake, my strong one," she said to Aaron. "Your lover hungers for you yet again."

  The kelpies sniggered nastily as Thomas shoved the door closed. "Threw you out, did she? She has tastier meat than yours in there."

  Thomas spat the mouthful of clover wine at the mocking kelpie and was not surprised to see it burning where it touched. The kelpie cringed and shrieked like the bully it was, whimpering and pawing at the wine running down its river-wet flesh.

  Thomas rushed to where an underground stream trickled down the stony walls of the cavern and pooled smooth as a mirror on the floor. He threw himself on the floor next to the pool, pushing his face into the water and sucking it into his mouth like a fish. He spat the water on the floor and rinsed his mouth again, and again, and again.

  She meant to poison me. I discovered her plan, and she meant to kill me for it. I know her plan now, but she knows about Tess.

  The knowledge both terrified and freed him. He no longer owed the Queen anything, not love, not adoration, not his body or his honor, nor protection.

  Nothing, except the debt she commanded with the band on his arm.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A HALF-MILE FROM HER duplex, a wave of paranoia washed over Tess.

  What if she hadn't lost them—what if the SUV had fought free of the Chinatown fu dogs? What if one of the other black vehicles had made it across the river and was now tracking her through the maze of northwest Portland? They could be behind her even now, glamoured to look like something they weren't. Her heart, which had slowed its panicked thumping, now took on a heavier, slower rhythm of dread. She felt stupidly glad she hadn't gone to her office where she might have endangered everyone inside.

  "Thomas lives in that bridge for a reason," she told herself out loud, as if voicing an affirmation would make it true. "I'm safe."