by Nina Bangs
She almost made it. The door was shutting when Tirron slipped into the elevator with her. The door closed completely and started down. Without pausing, he held his hand in front of the control panel and the elevator stopped its descent.
“There. Doors locked. No warning lights and bells signaling trouble. We can have our private little talk without irritating interruptions. It won’t be a long talk, though. I don’t do well in metal boxes.”
Ivy didn’t wait for him to do whatever he intended doing. She attacked—clawing, shrieking. Suddenly, whatever had happened during Klepoth’s illusion kicked in again. Her power surge was an explosion of white light and a muffled boom. The force flung her back against the wall of the car. When her vision cleared, she saw Tirron scrambling to his feet on the other side of the elevator. His shocked expression would’ve been funny if the rage that immediately followed it didn’t terrify her.
He didn’t give her a chance to gather her strength before he was on her. No attempt at faery magic, just a straightforward need to hurt. He punched her in the face, knocking her head into the wall behind her. She fell. Pain washed over her and dizziness made her want to throw up. Don’t pass out.
She tried to stand, but her body had decided that the prone position was more comfy. Ivy fought her body’s weakness—concentrating, demanding that it move. But she hurt too much. Damn. Why couldn’t she call up her faery power again?
Tirron leaned over her. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stared at her. Then he spoke. “You will obey me.”
He was kidding, right? “Go to hell.”
His anger seemed to have eased, replaced by a thoughtful expression. “Humans usually don’t require threats. I merely compel. But I just tried to order your obedience. It didn’t work. That coupled with your little demonstration of power shows an interesting level of strength for a mongrel.”
What was he talking about? Murmur didn’t have any trouble compelling her. Did that mean Tirron was less powerful than Murmur? The thought vanished as quickly as it came. Not important in the grand scheme of things. The faery in the elevator with her was her top priority.
He frowned. “I’m not going to allow you to ruin this for me, little bitch.” His face hovered mere inches from hers. “You’ll stay in the castle, and you’ll do what you’re told to do.” He’d regained his cold calm. “Do we have an agreement?”
Had she ever thought he was beautiful? She wanted to cringe, curl up on herself, protect her body from his fists. No, she wouldn’t be that person. She tried to ignore the trail of what must be blood trickling down the side of her face. She refused to speak. She glared up at him. Both hims. Ivy blinked. Still dizzy.
The common-sense part of her suggested it was easy to be defiant when he hadn’t gotten to his threats yet.
“If you don’t follow directions like a good little girl, here’s what will happen: I’ll kill your brother. Running won’t help. I’m a hunter. That’s why Bain chose me to track the faery host. I’m very good at what I do. I will find you.” His smile promised that he’d enjoy watching her run, seeing her try to hide, feeling her terror. “You’ll tell no one what we’re planning—not Sparkle, not Ganymede, not your brother. Do you understand?”
Ivy didn’t move. She was afraid to speak, afraid she’d scream at him and he’d kill her brother right now. Ivy would’ve defied him if he’d only threatened her, but she wouldn’t take a chance with Kellen’s life. So she choked back her words and nodded. Once she was out of the elevator, she’d think of some way to free them.
“Good.” His smile was as icy as his words. “Now, we’ll have to get you cleaned up before anyone sees you. I’ll—”
Ivy had no idea what he would’ve said next because suddenly the car jerked as a heavy weight landed on the roof. She barely had time to register that fact before something peeled back the elevator’s ceiling with a grinding and shrieking of ripping metal.
She looked up just as Murmur leaped through the opening.
This was a Murmur she didn’t know. His eyes glowed red. His fingers ended in long, sharp claws. His lips curled back to expose pointed teeth. And he scared the hell out of her. But everyone was doing that right now. He may as well join the fun.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion now, or maybe that was just her general wooziness after getting Tirron’s fist in her face.
Murmur landed in a crouch.
Tirron backed up, his eyes wary. “What’s wrong with you, demon? She heard what we said about her. I had to stop her.”
Murmur stared, his expression savage, as a sound seemed to take form and substance around him. It gave her an eerie, sick feeling. She shuddered. She couldn’t hear it clearly, but it made her feel as though she were watching something terrifying drag itself from the primordial ooze—hideous and deadly.
“You hurt her. Your part in Bain’s plan is finished. You’re finished.”
Tirron looked startled for a moment. He met Murmur’s gaze. Suddenly he widened his eyes. “Well, well. Who would have thought. You’ve—”
The faery didn’t get a chance to finish. Murmur leaped at him.
Ivy curled into the corner of the car and covered her head with her arms. Their kind of fighting might not kill them, but she had doubts about her survival.
Then… nothing. There was no music, no sounds of fists meeting flesh, no grunts and cries of pain, no magic whipping around the car. Only the sound of one person breathing. Not her. She was holding her breath.
She dared to look up.
Murmur stood in the middle of the car, his fists still clenched. But now his hands were just hands. No claws. He turned to look at her. Green eyes. He didn’t smile, so she couldn’t check out his teeth.
Wisely, he didn’t try to touch her.
“Where’d he go?” She sat up, leaning her back against the wall.
“He dematerialized. He must be old if he managed it surrounded by all this metal. I sent my music after him. He’ll keep running until he’s back in Faery. That’s the only place where he can escape it.” He started to bend toward her.
She held up her hand. “Don’t. Touch. Me.” She took a deep breath. “Why didn’t I hear your music?” Ivy needed a few minutes to gather herself together. Right now, bits of her were scattered all over the landscape, from I-hate-you to Please-hold-me.
“I blocked it. I sent my death music after him. Even though it wasn’t aimed at you, hearing it wouldn’t be something you’d forget.”
“Nightmares?”
“Many.” He took a step toward her. “Look, I know what you heard us say sounded bad…”
“You think?” Her face throbbed and her head hurt. She needed some industrial strength painkillers. “I won’t believe anything you say, so don’t bother trying to explain. But, hey, this is an easy fix for you. You can compel me to silence or make me forget. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” She was channeling her inner bitch, and she didn’t care. She was aching inside and out.
She thought he’d continue to argue. He didn’t. Without consulting her, he bent down and scooped her into his arms. Ivy thought about demanding that he put her down, but she was just too weary. Who knew that betrayal and disillusionment made you yearn for a nap?
A sound above them drew her attention. Bain balanced on what was left of the elevator’s roof.
“What the hell is going on? Where’s Tirron?”
Bain looked horrified when he saw her face. She must look like crap. Too bad. He needed to choose his evil cohorts more carefully.
“Ivy heard our discussion about her. She ran. Tirron caught her. He probably tried a compulsion on her, and it didn’t work. So he beat her.” He speared the other demon with a hard stare. “He won’t be coming back.” Murmur raised her toward Bain. “Take her to my room. I’ll call Cinn to help her.”
Bain leaned down and lifted her. Ivy wanted to complain that no one was asking what she wanted to do. She wanted to get Kellen and leave here. Leave her beautiful demon and his b
eautiful music and his ugly, ugly lies. She would go… Ivy couldn’t remember where. She felt so tired, and everything hurt, and she couldn’t seem to think. She closed her eyes.
Her first thought when she woke was that she never passed out. She remembered exactly what had happened up until Murmur handed her to Bain. Then, nothing. She kept her eyes closed, trying to get her bearings.
“She’ll be fine, Murmur. A slight concussion. Just watch her for the rest of the night. I’ve left something for her pain. The eye won’t look too bad by tomorrow. The cut bled a lot—head wounds do—but it wasn’t bad.”
“Thanks, Cinn.”
Murmur sounded relieved, but of course he would. If anything happened to her, who would he trade to the Sluagh Sidhe for Bain’s precious Elizabeth? But even as she thought her cynical thoughts, a small hopeful part of her wanted his worry to have nothing to do with his crazy plot.
“I have to get back in time for Holgarth’s next fantasy. I’m playing the beautiful, clueless virgin for some old guy. Major eww. I really don’t get it. I wouldn’t fantasize about a gorgeous, stupid young stud.” Long pause. “Okay, maybe I would if I were old and withered. If you need anything, just yell.”
Ivy heard Cinn cross the room and then the opening and closing of the door. She was gone.
“She’s awake, Murmur.”
Sparkle? What was she doing here? In fact, where was here? Ivy opened her eyes. Ugh. She closed them again. Everything hurt.
“Where are the painkillers Cinn said she left?” Ivy didn’t believe in stoic suffering when there were excellent drugs available to take it away. She managed to prop herself up against—she scanned the area—Murmur’s pillow, with minimum wincing and only one “damn.”
“Here.” Sparkle handed her a glass that looked suspiciously cloudy.
Ivy hesitated. “What’s in it?”
Sparkle laughed. “No poison. Cinn is a demigoddess. She’s inherited some of Airmid’s powers. Airmid is the goddess of healing plants. Cinn’s drink will do more for you than any pill. Drink.”
She did. For all of Sparkle’s strangeness, Ivy realized she trusted her. Amazingly, even before she finished the drink, she could feel her pain fading.
Sparkle handed her a thick pad. “Put this over your eye. Cinn whipped up some plant thing that’ll get rid of your shiner.”
Ivy obediently pressed it to her eye. She was now coherent enough to notice Murmur. His long hair, which usually fell in a shining curtain down his back, was a mass of tangles around his face. His eyes were shadowed. He didn’t approach the bed. He sat on a chair in the sitting area and watched her. His expression gave nothing away.
When he met her gaze, he nodded. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Stay here tonight. I’ve already told Kellen you’ll be with me. He doesn’t need to see you like this.” He stood.
“You told him I’d be with you? He’ll think—”
“He’ll think we’re doing exactly what we did do earlier today.” He didn’t smile. “He’s a teenager. He understands the concept of sex between consenting adults.”
She wouldn’t think about what they’d done. “Fine. At least you’re right about me not wanting him to see me like this.” Besides, she had more important things to worry about. Tirron was gone, but would her brother be safe? Will he ever be safe again? “I should be near Kellen, though, in case—”
Murmur held up his hand to stop her. “I asked Ganymede to stay with him. I’ll be in Bain’s room if you need anything. He’ll be busy with the fantasies for most of the night.” Then he left.
“He didn’t want to try to explain?” Lame question.
“He said you wouldn’t want to hear it.” Sparkle eyed her critically. “You look like shit.”
“Gee, that makes me feel better.” He could’ve at least tried to talk to her.
“He told me what happened.” Sparkle looked as though she wanted to whip out her makeup and hair products and go to work. “This is tough for me.” She bit her bottom lip.
“I guess it would be hard listening to the kind of evil they were plotting.” It was nice to have some sympathy.
“Evil plotting?” Sparkle sounded puzzled. “Oh no, I didn’t mean that. I meant it’s tough to sit here without making you look better. But if I touched your head, it would hurt.”
“Right. Looks are important.” She laced her words with all the sarcasm she could muster.
Sparkle smiled. “See, you understand. Not that you’ll be joining the Sluagh Sidhe, but if you were, they’d value you a lot more if you looked gorgeous.”
Ivy would have ground her teeth, but she didn’t want to take a chance of bringing the pain back. “Tell me what the demon said.” Yes, it was childish to refuse to say his name. But the old Murmur had been someone she cared about. Someone who she thought cared about her. This incarnation? Not so much.
“Bain planned all along to trade someone for Elizabeth. Without someone to offer in exchange, he’d have to battle the faeries. If it came to a fight, he wouldn’t have a chance alone. That’s why he chose to stay here. And he chose you because you were available and someone the faery host would accept.”
“Bastard.”
“Yes, well, we all do what works for us.”
Ivy frowned. That didn’t sound like a resounding condemnation of Bain. She didn’t say anything, though, because she wanted Sparkle to get to Murmur’s part.
“Murmur said he didn’t want to trade you.”
A little warmth crept into Ivy’s cold heart.
“He said if they traded my shiny new assistant and I found out, I’d drag Mede into it. They didn’t want to deal with Mede.”
Warming trend over.
“So Murmur convinced Bain to trade someone else.” Sparkle didn’t seem able to help herself. She reached down and came up with her purse. She rooted around in it until she found her makeup bag.
“That’s awful. You can’t allow some other innocent to take my place. You have to—” She didn’t get to voice her full outrage, because Sparkle had pulled her compact from her makeup bag and was poofing powder over Ivy’s face.
“He didn’t choose an innocent.”
Sparkle carefully replaced the compact and then went to work with the blush. When she finally made eye contact with Ivy, malicious glee shone there.
Ivy opened her mouth to spout more outrage, but stopped to think. Who would put that expression in Sparkle’s eyes?
“Ohmigod, he chose Asima.” Ivy might not like the cat, but she didn’t think she deserved to be kidnapped by faeries.
Sparkle handed her a lipstick and talked while Ivy put it on. “Asima is perfect. They won’t keep her. She’ll make their lives hell. And they can’t kill her without making an enemy of the goddess Bast. So they’ll end up dumping her, probably back in our laps.” She frowned at the thought. “Anyway, she’ll keep them happy until the trade is done. When they finally find out what they have, it’ll be too late.”
“That’s mean.”
Ivy’s comment startled Sparkle into laying down the mascara wand. “This is making the best of a bad situation. Bain should never have come up with his crazy idea to free Elizabeth in the first place.”
Ivy felt conflicted. “I think he should try to free her, but not this way.”
Sparkle shrugged. “Well, it’s done, so now we have to deal with it. If we don’t offer something or someone in trade, Elizabeth will stay with the faeries.”
Ivy was tired. She was glad that Murmur wouldn’t have traded her, no matter what his reason. But she didn’t like the idea of Asima taking her place. That was wrong. But she had no way to fix it that wouldn’t end up in either a war with the faeries or Elizabeth remaining a prisoner.
“I think I need some sleep.” A question nagged at the back of her mind.
“Sure.” Sparkle dumped Ivy’s makeup back into her purse. “At least now, if the fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, you’ll look awesome standing in the street in your night
gown. Oh, and before you panic, I’m the one who put it on you.”
“Comforting thought.” She must really be out of it. She hadn’t even noticed the nightgown. Ivy watched Sparkle head toward the door.
“Someone will look in on you throughout the night.”
“Not the de…” Oh, what the hell. “Not Murmur.” Did she sound too wistful?
“Not Murmur.”
Sparkle opened the door.
And Ivy remembered what had been nagging at her. “Murmur said that Tirron was old. How old is old for a faery?”
Sparkle paused. “Thousands of years.”
She was almost afraid to ask the next question. “Do you think Kellen has enough faery blood to live that long?”
“He has Mab’s face. I’d say there’s a good chance.” Sparkle stepped into the hallway and closed the door quietly behind her.
Ivy turned off the bedside lamp and lay in the dark. She wouldn’t live long enough to protect Kellen. That meant she had to find someone to teach him how to protect himself, someone who knew what it meant to live for centuries. And no matter how betrayed she felt, there was only one person she’d trust with that job. Too bad she was never going to speak to him again. Never. She drifted off to the satisfying sound of that word in her mind.
She woke hours later—at least it felt that way—to the sureness that someone was in the room with her. Ivy lay still and cracked open one eye. Darkness. Her pounding heart eased a little as she remembered Sparkle saying someone would keep an eye on her during the night.
But there was a familiarity about the presence, a knowing. Murmur? She wanted to turn on the light and scream at him, make him tell her why he’d kept Bain’s secret from her. But then they’d fight and he’d leave. And as stupid as it made her feel, his presence comforted her. So she closed her eyes and relaxed into the warmth of having him there.
Murmur sat in his room, in the dark, staring through the narrow castle window at the shimmering reflection of the moon on the Gulf of Mexico. That was him. A shaky reflection of the real thing.
During his long existence, Ivy was the closest he’d come to feeling this—the “this” as yet to be named and definitely not admitted. He’d fucked everything up, though. He would drink himself into oblivion, but a smashed demon woke up in the morning wondering what city he’d turned to ashes the night before.