by Jenna Black
Being a practical sort, I stayed focused on buying the basics—sweaters, long-sleeved shirts, and heavier pants, in various blends of cotton and wool. But Kimber was constantly egging me on to buy more extravagant stuff—dresses, skirts, frilly blouses. Like I said, she had a great eye, but though I tried everything on, I just couldn’t see spending money on things I’d never get to wear. My “boring” selections annoyed her to no end.
“You have to buy something fun,” she pouted at me when we left yet another shop without any silk, velvet, or lace in my bag. Finn was already carrying so many bags for me he looked like a very hot porter, but I still had more than two hundred euros left. And I had to admit, the idea of splurging on something completely impractical did have some appeal.
Kimber must have sensed my weakness. “I know!” she said, her eyes lighting up with excitement. “My birthday’s next month, and I’ll be having a great party. We should start hunting for the perfect dress for you.”
I gaped at her. “You expect me to wear a dress for a birthday party?”
Kimber stuck her nose in the air, reminding me briefly of her ice-princess act. “It’s my party, my rules. And I happen to like dresses.”
I remembered the froufrou feathered monstrosity in her closet, and hoped that wasn’t the kind of dress she had in mind. I protested feebly as she dragged me into yet another boutique.
If it had been just me, I’d have taken one look at the price tags and turned right back around. But Kimber on a mission was a force to be reckoned with, and I soon found myself in the dressing room with an armful of beautiful, expensive, impractical dresses.
With Kimber’s help, I narrowed it down to two choices, but I still wasn’t sure I was willing to fork over that kind of money for a party dress.
“I like the blue one best,” Kimber said. “It really brings out the color of your eyes.”
I made a noncommittal sound. The blue was, of course, the more expensive of the two choices. Obviously, Kimber hadn’t had to pinch a penny in her life.
She made an exasperated little huffing sound. “I’m going to go find something for myself while you think about it. But don’t think you’re leaving here empty-handed.” She shook her finger at me, and I rolled my eyes.
She’d been gone for maybe a minute when I heard a thud from the inside of the shop. I wasn’t overly alarmed. Not until the cameo warmed, and I felt the weird, prickly feeling. There was no way that was good news.
I quickly pulled on my street clothes—if I was going to face baddies, I’d rather not do it wearing nothing but panties—and had just shoved my arms through the sleeves of my hoodie when the dressing room door crashed open.
I let out a startled shriek and jumped back as Finn came flying through the door, crashing into the full-length mirror against the wall. The glass shattered on impact, and Finn let out a grunt of pain.
Two men followed Finn in, strolling as if there were nothing unusual going on. One of them stopped to close the dressing room door behind him, while the other advanced on Finn.
They were both tall and muscular, built very much like Finn. They also had the MIB look going, down to the dark glasses they didn’t even need outside on this gloomy day. I made a wild guess that they were Knights. And that I was in big, big trouble.
I tried a scream, because, hey, that seemed like the appropriate thing to do at the time, but it didn’t seem to bother the Knights. Probably the only people who could hear me were Kimber and the shopkeeper, but the Knights would have had to go through them before getting back to the dressing room. I hoped they were okay.
Finn was bleeding from a nasty cut across his forehead, and broken mirror shards had to be stabbing him everywhere. The Knights were between me and the exit, but I made a dash for it anyway, hoping their bulk would make them slow. Unfortunately, it didn’t. One of them grabbed me and hauled me against his chest, my feet dangling. He held me to him with one arm around my chest, just below my breasts, one arm pressed hard against my throat. I tried my best to kick him, but it’s hard to get a whole lot of force kicking backward, so it didn’t seem to bother him much.
“Fight, and the girl dies,” the other Knight said to Finn, who had managed to get to his knees.
Finn’s gaze darted to me, and the Knight who held me squeezed tighter so I couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said quietly. “I won’t fight.”
The pressure on my throat eased, and I sucked in a big gasp of air. The second Knight advanced on Finn, then pulled back his leg and delivered a brutal kick to Finn’s stomach.
“No!” I screamed. Finn had been a pain in the rear, but I had no desire to see him get hurt.
The Knight holding me laughed as his partner hit Finn again. I made another attempt to wrest myself out of his grip, but I was about as likely to move him as I was to move a semi. I couldn’t even look away from what was happening to Finn, not with the Knight’s arm pressed so firmly against my throat. I could have closed my eyes, but that wouldn’t have made things any better. I’d still have heard the impact of fists and feet on Finn’s defenseless body, would have heard the grunts of pain he couldn’t help making.
The Knight hit Finn again and again, sometimes so hard I heard bones breaking. I sobbed and struggled and begged Finn to protect himself, but he wouldn’t do it. Eventually, he couldn’t.
Finn lay face down on the floor, and if it weren’t for the painful sound of him gasping for air, I’d have thought he was dead. The Knight who’d beat him smiled and pulled a long, thin knife from a sheath hidden in his boot.
“No!” I wailed, although I knew it would do no good. “Why are you doing this?”
The Knight knelt at Finn’s side, and even behind the dark glasses, I could feel his eyes locked on mine. His smile was cold and cruel, and I saw nothing even remotely human in his face.
“Leave Avalon,” he said to me. “Leave, and never come back. Else, it will be you next time.”
I screamed as he raised his hand, then plunged the knife into Finn’s back. Finn cried out and tried to move. I realized with horror that the knife had pinned him to the floor.
The Knight who was holding me finally let go, shoving me to the floor. Their feet crunched on broken glass as they left the dressing room.
Horrified, I made my way to Finn’s side, heedless of the glass. The knife hilt protruded from just above his right shoulder blade, and blood poured from the wound. He was still breathing, though, the air sawing in and out of his chest. I put my shaking hand on him, not sure what to do for him. I’d nursed my mom through a couple of drunken accidents before, but nothing remotely like this. Should I pull the knife out, or would that make things worse?
With a groan of pain, Finn turned his head toward me.
“Oh, God!” I cried. “Don’t move!”
His face was … ruined. That’s the only way I could describe it. I don’t know how many bones were broken, but it was a lot. But Knights are apparently made of some really strong stuff.
“I’ll live,” he managed to gasp at me. “Get help.”
I didn’t know if I believed his claim, but his words were enough to get me moving. Now covered in blood and mirror shards myself, I stumbled out into the shop.
The shopkeeper was lying on the floor behind the cash register. Kimber, sporting what was soon to be a massive bruise on the side of her face, was helping the other woman sit up. I’d have been relieved to see they were all right if my fear for Finn had let me think of anything else.
“The phone!” I screamed at the shopkeeper, hysteria threatening to take over. “Where’s the phone? I need to call an ambulance.”
She pointed at the phone, which was practically right in front of my face. I picked it up with shaking hands, but my palms were full of glass, so I dropped it. The shopkeeper had recovered enough to stand, and she reached out her hand.
“Let me,” she said. And since I didn’t know what number to dial, and couldn’t give an address, and probably could
n’t dial correctly anyway with my injured hands, I did.
Chapter Nineteen
The ambulance and paramedics arrived at the same time as the police. I was still shaking, but I had enough brain function to know I was better off staying by Finn’s side—even though he could do nothing to help me—than letting the police take me down to the station for a statement or questioning or whatever. The police had arrested my father on a trumped-up charge, and I had no idea whose pocket they might be in. I didn’t want to take the chance of losing what freedom I had, so I pretended to be a little more hysterical and hurt than I was. There was enough blood on me to make the act more than convincing.
Kimber and the shopkeeper received a cursory examination by the paramedics and were quickly dismissed as non-emergencies. Finn, however, was a different story. He was unconscious, and had clearly lost a lot of blood.
I rode in the ambulance with Finn to Avalon’s only hospital. The paramedics—one Fae and one human—didn’t seem anywhere near as worried about Finn’s condition as I was.
“He’ll be fine,” the Fae paramedic said. “If they’d been trying to kill him, they’d have used an iron knife instead of silver.”
“And they wouldn’t have put it through his shoulder,” the human muttered.
The Fae are vulnerable to cold iron, which is what they call pure iron. It doesn’t exist in Faerie, where silver is a much more common metal.
I’d gotten a better look at the knife than I’d wanted as I sat by Finn’s side waiting for the ambulance. The hilt was some kind of wood, maybe ebony, because it was very dark. But that wasn’t what had caught my attention. No, my eyes had been drawn to the ivory rose inlaid in that dark wood. I couldn’t help seeing that knife—left behind at the scene of the crime—as a claim of responsibility. Either the Seelie Fae were behind the attack … Or someone wanted us to think they were.
There was nothing I could do to prevent being separated from Finn once we reached the hospital. He was whisked off to the Severe Trauma Ward, and I was left with a cranky Fae healer who seemed to think I’d wanted to have shards of glass piercing my knees and palms.
I was gritting my teeth, trying to be a brave little trooper as the healer hunted for glass with his evil forceps, when my dad arrived. I was more relieved than I could say when I laid eyes on him.
I think Dad was planning to hug me—or at least give me a comforting pat on the shoulder—but the healer gave him a stay-out-of-the-way glare, and he stepped back.
“What happened?” Dad asked.
I opened my mouth to blurt it all out, then thought better of it. I glanced pointedly at the healer, who seemed to be finished picking glass out of me and was now using magic to heal the wounds. Dad nodded that he understood.
“Is Finn going to be all right?” I asked, even though multiple people had already told me he would. But those Knights had hurt him so terribly, and, because of me, he hadn’t even tried to defend himself.
“He’ll be fine,” Dad reassured me. “We Fae are a hardy lot, and our Knights more so than most.”
“What exactly is a Knight?” I finally remembered to ask.
“They are a warrior caste, the protectors of Faerie. They’re also sometimes known as the Daoine Sidhe. Most of them reside in Faerie and don’t set foot in Avalon. But those who live here are the best bodyguards in the world.”
“All done,” the healer said with a satisfied nod. “You can go home whenever you’re ready.”
I blinked, startled. No insurance forms to fill out? No bill to pay? And, most puzzling, no police to talk to?
I sent Dad a quizzical look, but he just smiled at me. “Let’s get you home and into some clean clothes, shall we?”
I wasn’t at all unhappy with the proposition, so I went with him despite my misgivings. On the way out of the exam room, he snatched a hospital gown off the top of a pile on a shelf in the entryway.
“I’ll give it back,” he assured me when I looked surprised.
I didn’t know why he wanted it in the first place—thank God he didn’t make me wear it—until we got to the parking lot that adjoined the hospital. Then I remembered the hot little sports car, and realized Dad didn’t want me to mess up the seats. It didn’t exactly give me a warm, fuzzy feeling, but Dad didn’t seem to notice anything amiss as he draped the gown over the seat and held the door open for me.
Okay, I know, if I had a car like that, with tan leather seats, I wouldn’t have wanted to get blood all over it either. But I felt sure that if Fae magic could seal all my wounds and save Finn’s life, it could probably clean a car seat, too.
Dad didn’t question me about the attack again until after we got home and I’d showered and changed. I then sat down on the couch beside him, the ever-present cup of tea cooling on the coffee table, and told him everything I could remember. When I got to the part about the knife with the white rose on the hilt, Dad visibly stiffened.
His lips pressed tightly together; then he let out an angry sigh. “Damn it!” he said. He leapt to his feet and began to pace, and it looked like he was thinking furiously.
“What’s going on?” I asked, a bit plaintively, I must admit.
He sat back down, but his posture didn’t relax any. “Ethan said that the Spriggans were trying to kill you. But that didn’t make sense, not when you were, at least at the time, in the hands of the Unseelie Fae.”
I remembered Ethan had said much the same thing.
“And now you’ve been attacked by the Seelie Fae while you’re living with me.”
“It was Finn they attacked, not me.”
He waved that off. “It was Finn they injured. It was you they attacked. And hurt.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Finn is a warrior, and while he might not enjoy being injured in combat, it’s part of his job. You have no reason to feel guilty about it.”
But I did anyway. I couldn’t help remembering how Finn had looked at me and then chosen not to defend himself in order to protect me. How could I not feel guilty about that?
“So what does this all mean to you?” I asked my dad. “If neither attack makes sense, then why do you think they’re after me?”
He gave me a long, measuring look, one that warned me I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear. “The Fae of Avalon, both the Seelie and Unseelie, want you here, alive and under their influence. But I’m beginning to wonder if the Queens of Faerie have other ideas.”
“What?” I cried. Bad enough I had a horde of manipulative politicians hoping to capture me and mold me to their ideals! Now Dad was telling me the Faerie Queens were after me, too? “Why?”
Dad leaned back in the cushions of the sofa, still wearing his thinking face. “The last Faeriewalker before you allied himself with the Unseelie Court. One day, he went into Faerie and never came back. His body was eventually found, beheaded.”
I swallowed hard, unable to resist the urge to put my hand to my throat.
“There are those who speculated that the Consul had ambitions in Faerie and might have used the Faeriewalker in an assassination attempt against Mab, the Unseelie Queen. If it’s true, the Queens might view Faeriewalkers more as threats than as potential allies or pawns.”
I groaned and lowered my head into my hands. This was all just too much to take. My life since I’d set foot in Avalon had been one disaster after another. I wished I had a pair of ruby slippers I could click together to magically transport myself home. Like Dorothy, I hadn’t realized how good I’d had it until it all was gone.
“I have to get out of Avalon,” I muttered from behind my hands. I didn’t like the idea of being bullied into leaving, but if I stayed, I was likely to end up dead. And bring everyone around me down with me.
“No, Dana,” my dad said, and he started rubbing his hand up and down my back. It was probably supposed to be a comforting gesture, but I was way beyond being comforted.
I sat up straight again and stared at him. “You can’t seriously want me to stay her
e now! Not if you supposedly care about me. Or are you hoping to use me to try to take over Faerie just like that other guy you told me about?”
My father’s glare was furious enough to stop the words in my throat, and for a moment, I thought he was going to hit me he was so mad. His cheeks flushed red while his lips pressed together so tightly they turned almost white.
“I have no ambitions in Faerie,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ve made Avalon my home, and I have every intention of staying here.”
I believed him, even though he was obviously very ambitious in Avalon. “Then why do you want me to stay when my life is in danger?”
“Because you can be protected here in ways that are not possible in the mortal world. If you leave Avalon, that might be enough to satisfy the Seelie Queen—you are, after all, technically a member of her Court. But I doubt Mab would let you go even then. After all, it’s always possible you’d come back someday. She will send agents into the mortal world after you, and they will pursue you for the rest of your life. Don’t think that just because these agents would have to be human means that they cannot kill you. Or your mother. Or anyone else who becomes dear to you.”
I wished I could argue his logic. But even if I only believed half of what he said, it left me up the proverbial creek. Unfortunately, I still wasn’t convinced I’d be any safer in Avalon.
“I think it is time for me to have a meeting with both Alistair and Grace,” Dad said.
I’d had too many nasty surprises today to react much to the announcement. “I thought they were the enemy.”
He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “In that they want to manipulate you for their own causes, yes. But they are both extremely powerful. I don’t believe either one is cold enough to want you to be killed, but even if they were, they wouldn’t want it to happen while they still had a chance of winning your loyalty.”
And wasn’t that a rousing endorsement.
“Do you think either one of them would want to challenge the Queens?” I asked.