Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  We’d rounded almost half of the tower when Oberis slowed, gesturing toward a pair of closed double doors. “In there,” he murmured.

  Eric and I stepped up to the doors, readying our weapons, as Oberis took a deep breath. With a firm nod to both of us, he blurred forward, shattering the door and crashing into the room.

  I followed him through, riding the rush of the quicksilver as I searched for any Enforcers in the room with the Wizard. It was apparently MacDonald’s bedroom, an opulent throwback to Victorian fantasies of Indian sultans. A giant four-poster bed occupied the center of the room, with heavy drapes and curtains over every wall, and piles of cushions.

  MacDonald, wrapped in chains that glittered in silver and gold and cold iron, had been tied upright to one of the posts of the heavy bed. His eyes and mouth were bound, and the nearly immortal Wizard looked old—and terrified.

  For a moment, I’m sure the three of us looked absolutely ridiculous. Eric and I were sweeping the room with the muzzles of our shotguns, and Oberis stood just out of reach from MacDonald in a low combat stance, a glowing blade of Power in his hand.

  Then the glamor blade shattered into a million pieces as a black iron sword slashed through it, breaking the power that held it together. None of us saw Winters before he attacked, and even Oberis, ridiculously fast as he was, only barely managed to block the strike that followed his initial blow.

  But he only had his bare hands to do it with, and the cold iron burnt his flesh. I could see it and smell it from across the room, as well as feel the cold iron, now that whatever had shielded Winters before he attacked was gone.

  Winters had a head of height and forty pounds on Oberis’s whip-thin build. With most mortals, it shouldn’t have mattered, as Oberis had the speed and strength of his inhuman nature. Gerard Winters had long since moved past human, and as the fae lord stumbled back, white light flaring around his hands as he tried to heal and defend himself with Power, Winters used every inch of his height and reach to attack.

  The black cold iron blade flashed across the room, dimly reflecting the sunlight trickling through the shattered doors, and embedded itself in Lord Oberis’s torso, stabbing clean through his sternum and neatly pinning the fae lord to a post of the giant bed, next to the Magus.

  “Drop the guns,” Winters ordered Eric and me. “You can’t hurt me with them.”

  I shot him. I knew he was correct about not being able to hurt him, but I was riding the quicksilver high and had just watched him impale Oberis. Obeying him was just not going to happen. Plus, I figured the same force that had bowled over the heavily armored Enforcers would work on him, too.

  I was wrong. Three times I managed to cycle the heavy automatic shotgun. Three times I hit the Enforcer with the full blast of the buckshot. Three times the shot simply bounced off of him.

  Then he broke the shotgun with a bladed hand strike—the stereotypical karate chop. From him, it sheared the rune-encrusted metal of the barrel in two, destroying the weapon.

  “It’s over, Winters,” I told him as I dropped the ruined metal and stood there, facing a man I knew could destroy me in a moment. If guns weren’t going to work, Eric wouldn’t be any help here. He was a smith, not a warrior.

  “Madrigal and her cabal are broken and being hunted down. Darius Fontaine is dead. Laurie confessed everything—your plan has failed.”

  He laughed and stepped away from me, looking at Oberis. The fae lord was desperately trying to get a grip on the sword impaling him, but the cold iron hilt kept defeating him.

  “It’s a sad love story we have here, isn’t it?” he asked the lord, ignoring me like I was useless. “The brave Lord Oberis, coming to rescue the ex-lover who wronged him so. It’s a little untraditional, but that’s how the world works these days, isn’t it.”

  Well, that helped explain why there was an access to MacDonald’s personal quarters that Oberis was the only person in the city who could use.

  “Did you really think, my lord, that the Magus’s head of security didn’t know about your tryst?” he demanded of the dying Lord. “Or that I wasn’t expecting you after Michael escaped?”

  “You know you’ve failed,” I realized aloud. “You can never seize power here now. It’s over.”

  Finally, he turned back to me, though he was still speaking to Oberis, I think.

  “It’s a shame that this love story ends in a tragedy,” he told us. “But that is the fate of those who create monsters, isn’t it? They die at the hands of their creations.” He met my eyes and, for the first time, actually spoke to me.

  “You’ve heard it said, haven’t you, changeling?” he asked softly. “That Gerard Winters is a construct now, not a man—a monster forged by the power and arrogance of the Wizard MacDonald. He took a loyal man—and he made me into nothing.

  “You think I’ve lost,” he told me, “but you assume the real plan was to seize power. This was always about MacDonald. And now I know I gain nothing by killing him later, I see no reason not to kill him now,” Winters spat.

  A heavy automatic pistol appeared in his hand, and he turned toward the Wizard. Everything we’d done would implode when he pulled the trigger, and I would both fail in the charge given me under fealty and watch an innocent man be murdered.

  With or without the chains of fealty, I could not let that happen. Knowing that angering Winters was suicide. Knowing that I could not face him. Knowing that I could not watch the Wizard die. I took a deep breath and annihilated the pistol with a bolt of green faerie flame.

  “I think,” I told him quietly, striving to put some semblance of calm in my voice, “that I have an objection to that plan.”

  There’s that sinking moment in this sort of situation where you realize that you’re David, the other guy’s Goliath, and the only available equivalent to God is trussed up and chained to his bed. The first time Winters hit me was that moment.

  I barely saw him move between my blasting the gun out of his hand and him hitting me, but the blow knocked me clean through the wall, out into the corridor around the outside of the Tower. If there was ever a warning that I was even more out of my “weight class” than usual, this was it.

  With the quicksilver in my veins, and aware that he was coming at me, I barely managed to dodge the next blow. Blocking or attacking was out of the question as the Enforcer came after me. Finally, I failed to dodge another blow.

  Glass shattered around me as I was pitched clean through the next wall and into the atrium, crashing through several decorative trees and bushes before landing in some kind of fern. Winters casually hopped through the shattered glass and came after me. He’d acquired another black cold iron sword from somewhere, and my quicksilver-heightened speed of thought allowed me to wonder just how many weapons he had on him.

  Again I found myself dodging his attacks, barely forcing misses from the deadly cold iron. I danced back out of his reach and managed to find enough of a breather to draw the Glock 18 Tamara had given me at the start of the morning.

  The Glock 18 is almost unique among light handguns in having a burst-fire setting. Tamara’s Glock 18s had been modified to fire full auto. Of course, with only the easily concealable ten-round magazine, full auto empties the weapon in slightly more than a second.

  Throwing the pistol at Winters after I emptied it at him appeared to have about equal effect. The bullets bounced, scattering away from the tattooed man’s skin as he advanced on me like a freight train, drawing the sword back.

  “You can’t hurt me, changeling,” he told me. “Surrender, and I’ll make it quick.”

  Apparently, I hadn’t been upgraded to threat—just annoyance. Which was fair, as that was about where I was classifying myself.

  He’d backed me against the window, and I suddenly realized I was trapped between two giant pots holding evergreen trees. An evil smile crossed the Enforcer’s face, and I tried to dodge forward, past him, as he stabbed toward me.

  Something clicked in my head, and the world went
cold. For a moment, I thought he’d killed me, and then I recognized the cold. I was Between. How the hell was I Between?!

  Then I stepped out of Between and was back in the room with Eric and Oberis, the gnome staring at me in shock from where he’d been desperately trying to wrap enough cloth around Winters’s sword to allow him to pull it out of Oberis.

  “You can’t walk Between in here!” he said, astonished.

  “I can’t walk Between at all,” I replied, equally astonished. Of course, I then realized that if we hadn’t said anything, I might have managed to remain undiscovered.

  “Go,” Oberis groaned. “MacDonald’s Order is...” he gasped around the sword, “…already sending help. You can’t...save us. If you can walk...Between...take Eric and GO!”

  I didn’t let Eric try and argue. Hoping that it would work, I grabbed the gnome’s arm and tried to step.

  It was like pushing into putty. Somehow, I could tell we got halfway across but then were catapulted back, and the gnome gasped for breath, shaking his head at me.

  “The quicksilver lets you cross over, but it’s not enough to take two,” he told me.

  “We have to get back to the entrance. Run,” I ordered, “I’ll keep him distracted.”

  At that moment, Winters charged back into the room, heading for the gnome and me with that black and deadly blade.

  With a deep breath, I focused on that mental click, the barrier I felt around us, and stepped. A flash of cold later, I was behind Gerard Winters and punched him in the back of the head.

  I’ve punched walls with more effect. Hitting the Enforcer hurt, and it told him I was there. He turned, flashing around in a deadly spin with the sword cutting at neck height. I stepped out of the way, dropping into Between.

  This time, I stopped in Between for a moment to capture my breath. I could breathe there. I’d always been there with someone else; I’d never been able to breathe there on my own before. The quicksilver was more impressive than I thought.

  With that thought on my mind, I stepped back into reality. Winters had Eric in his grip, lifting the gnome off the ground with the sword in his other hand. It looked more threatening than actually lethal, but I didn’t like the look of it anyway.

  I hit Winters with another blast of Faerie flame. Fueled by my fear and the quicksilver, it was a lethal blast of flame that continued around his head and hit the wall behind him. Concrete and steel exploded above us, but Winters didn’t even have singed hair as he turned back toward me, dropping Eric.

  The gnome scuttled out of the room as Winters and I glared at each other.

  “You’re starting to annoy me, changeling,” he told me. “All you’re doing is drawing things out. You will change nothing.”

  I dodged backward as he slashed at me, retreating out of the room with my face to him. For a moment, I almost hoped he wouldn’t follow—but if he hadn’t, I knew I’d have had to find a way to make him.

  Said following, however, took the form of a blurringly fast charge I barely dodged by bouncing through Between to the corner of the building. Missing me as I stepped into another reality, Winters crashed into the glass window, sending glass shards careening through the greenery.

  He turned to glare at me, and giving in to an unknown impulse, I gave him a cheery wave and stepped again. This time, I emerged amidst the bodies of the Enforcers who’d ambushed us when we arrived, and by the time Winters came charging around the corner, I’d engaged in another moment of stupidity and picked up two of the boxy bullpup assault rifles.

  The weapons were light enough and manageable enough that I could hold two. Even aim two. Firing two, as I discovered, was a different matter. With the quicksilver in my veins, I was easily strong enough and fast enough to do so and absorb the recoil.

  But strength didn’t do much for the fact that I’m almost skinny enough for a light breeze to blow me away. Without the mass to help absorb the recoil, the two guns quickly climbed for the roof and threw me.

  Like every other time I’d shot him, the small high-velocity bullets bounced off of Winters, and then he was in my face. I was too close to dodge, too distracted to step Between. The first punch broke several ribs and drove me to the ground. The second shattered my left shoulder. The follow-up kick tossed me into the room we’d entered from.

  I hit Eric and carried the gnome to the ground before bouncing further. There was no barrier there—I could feel it. I could walk Between there, save both myself and Eric from this room. Then I tried to stand, and the warmth and heat of the quicksilver faded almost instantly from my body as I realized I’d broken my leg when I landed.

  Winters walked into the room slowly, his grin a terrible thing as he saw my injury. Ignoring Eric, the gnome lying where he’d fallen, he advanced on me as I struggled to get into some kind of position to fight back. Without the quicksilver in my veins, I didn’t stand a chance at evading him. I barely managed to lurch to a kneeling position as he approached me, to die with some semblance of dignity.

  The Enforcer stepped within reach of me, and then Eric shouted at me.

  “Remember, under it all, he’s still mortal.”

  There must have been some quicksilver left in me, because time seemed to slow as Winters’s sword arm drew back to end me.

  He’s still mortal. How was that relevant? There was enough magic woven into Winters’s tattoos to protect him from any weapon, magic or attack I could come up with. It didn’t matter if beneath those protections, he was still mortal.

  He was still mortal. There are places mortals can’t go, I remembered. Places no mortal could survive—not because it attacked them, but because the place was inherently hostile to them. Places no one except the fae could walk and live.

  Knowing that if I failed, I died, I managed to half-lurch forward. I grabbed Winters’s leg and stepped.

  The sword didn’t come with us. That was the first thing I realized—cold iron can’t go Between any more than non-fae can do it without a fae with the gift.

  The lack of a sword saved my life, and I jerked away from Winters, abandoning him in the cold as he tried to strike at me with his bare hands. There, despite my broken leg, I could move and stand by thought, and I faced him squarely.

  “What is this?” he demanded, and then clutched his throat as the last of his air left.

  “This is Between,” I told him, and then something swept through me, and words that were not mine issued from my lips.

  “Gerard Winters,” I found myself saying, my voice harsh and cold on my own tongue, “for breaking oath and trust and Covenant, you are sentenced to the Cold Death.”

  Winters’s tattoos slowly turned black under the cold, and his skin blue around them. Gasping desperately for air, for any kind of breath at all, he looked at me in mute horror as he fell to his knees and mouthed a single word. I could make it out easily. Mercy.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him quietly. “There’s no air here—no warmth, no life. No mortal, however shielded, can survive here. I can no more give you mercy than I could have let you kill MacDonald.”

  I knelt, just out of reach of the dying man.

  “You chose this road,” I said. “MacDonald only gave you power; you chose what to do with it. If you are a monster, it is because you chose to be.

  “May some Power have mercy on you,” I murmured as he slipped to the “ground” of this strange place. “I cannot.”

  I stayed there with him, outside the world, until it was over. It was a bad enough death. No one deserved to face it alone.

  36

  When I returned to the world, the room was empty. Slowly, weary with conflicting emotions and using the chair from the desk as a crutch, I retraced our earlier steps to MacDonald’s bedroom. Below me, echoing up from the ground floors of the Tower, I could hear gunfire. The rest of the Court was there, fighting with the Enforcers defending an already-dead master.

  Eric had used the time well, managing to use some of the drapes from the wall to pull the cold iron sw
ord out of Oberis before it finally managed to kill him. The fae lord sat on the bed with his eyes closed, a faint light glowing around his midsection as he slowly healed himself with whatever Power was left to him.

  Eric had removed the gag and blindfold from MacDonald and was busy breaking the chains with the strange powers gnomes had over metal. The last chain fell to the ground as I entered, and MacDonald finally stepped free of his bondage. The Wizard looked around the room slowly, carefully, once, and then gestured.

  The sound of gunfire below us stopped.

  “My Enforcers are now sealed in the parking garage beneath this building,” he said quietly, passing a phone to Oberis. “If you could call off your Court, my old friend.”

  Oberis opened his eyes and nodded, taking the phone from the Wizard’s hand.

  “Talus,” he said into it after a moment. “It’s done. Get our people out before mortal authorities get there.” He waited a moment for acknowledgement and then closed the phone.

  “Thank you,” MacDonald said simply. He reached over and touched Oberis. The gesture was gentle, caressing. A surge of Power flowed through it, and Oberis’s wound healed. The Wizard turned to me.

  “Where is Gerard?” he asked sadly.

  “Between,” I said simply, and he winced. “The Cold Death was the only way I could hurt him.”

  “A Hunter’s changeling, I see,” MacDonald said quietly. “I thank you, Jason Kilkenny. I will miss him and regret what happened, but you did what needed to be done. Any Boon you ask of me, I will grant.”

  As he said this, he laid his hand on my shoulder where I was leaning on the chair. That shoulder seemed like the only unbroken piece of my body, until another surge of Power flowed from the old Wizard. For a moment, my various broken bones seemed to burn, and then they flowed together as if I’d never been injured.

  “I have no idea what I would ask for, Lord Magus,” I said quietly.