by Jayne Faith
“Thanks for that,” I said. I decided to go for bravado. “You won’t be sorry. I’m the best there is.”
She gave a short, lilting laugh. It was more sharpness than amusement. “Your humbleness is overwhelming.”
“What’s the payout?”
She quoted the price on her mark’s head. It was a decent bounty.
“And the Guild is really offering half?” I asked.
“Yep, if you help me apprehend the mark in Faerie. If it turns out she’s not on the Faerie side of the hedge, then the deal’s off, and I go after her alone and retain the full amount.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said. “What’s the deadline on the bounty?”
“Midnight two days from now.”
I sucked in air through my teeth. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t you?”
“It took me a while to figure out where she’d gone,” Gretchen said. “You know how that goes.”
I was pretty sure that was a reference to my last mark, a vampire named Van Zant. He’d given me quite the runaround in Faerie. And I’d mistakenly turned in a box of ashes to the Guild, believing they were his remains. Not the easiest job I’d ever had, but in the end it had been a live capture and the reward had been substantial.
“Where was she seen last?” I asked.
“Nuh-uh,” Gretchen said. “I need our agreement in writing before I tell you who or where.”
“Hey, I’m no mark swiper!” I protested. It was horrible form, but there were a few unscrupulous mercs who poached jobs. I’d never been one of them.
“Sorry, but I’ve been burned before. I’ll write up the contract and text it to you. Sign it and send it back to me, and then we’ll talk again.”
She hung up, and I grumbled at the dead line. Humans and their need for written contracts. In Faerie, we had our fair share of paperwork in the modern era, but when it came to promises, there was no need for paper or signatures. We could magically bind each other to such agreements.
I paid for the gas, started up my scooter and continued on to the Golden Gate doorway. The deepening colors of twilight were giving way to darker shades of dusk. I steered through the Presidio toward Fort Point, where the doorway was located. I’d arrived a bit early, so I steered to a spot on the curb and then went to the edge of the pier. There was some trash scattered around, and the water below didn’t smell great, but there was a sweeping view of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Great spot to watch sunsets,” came a voice behind me, one I recognized immediately as Jasper’s.
He’d startled me, but I managed to resist the urge to spin around with Mort flaming in my hand. Instead, I turned casually and then leaned my hip against the concrete partition that helped keep people from sliding down the short rocky cliff to the cold ocean below.
I crossed my arms. “We missed the sunset, so we might as well get down to business,” I said.
The last fading light in the sky seemed to intensify the gold in his eyes as he strode closer, matching my casual movement.
“Why so frosty?” he asked, the hint of a smile dancing around his eyes. “You summoned me. And you’re indebted to me. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”
“You’re right.” I gave him a wry smile. “And of course I haven’t forgotten.”
Maxen and Emmaline be damned, I had to admit to myself I was happy to see him again.
“I heard of the servitor attack on the fortress,” he said, growing grave. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I inclined my head slightly. “I’ll pass your condolences to Lady Lothlorien. It’s a tragedy, but we’re fortunate it wasn’t worse. These servitors were much stronger and deadlier than the knife-tossing ninjas you and I battled.”
Jasper and I had fought off a servitor attack while I’d been in the Duergar palace. In retrospect, I wondered if that might have been what prompted him to help me escape later. Perhaps he’d felt he owed me something for helping him defend the palace. No—that was how a human would have taken the situation. Fae were much more stingy and careful with favors. I’d spent so much of the past many years on the Earthly side of the hedge, it had clearly started to skew my thinking.
“Why did you help me escape?” I asked, suddenly realizing how much the question had been gnawing at my mind.
The twinkle in his eyes returned. “Which time?”
I cracked a very small smile. “Either one. Both.”
He came to sit on the cement partition I was leaning against, planting himself about an arm’s length away from me. The wind shifted, and I caught the faint scent of his soap. His slightly shaggy hair had comb marks in it, and it was darkened a bit, still wet from a recent shower.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” he said.
I snorted. “Are you not loyal to your liege? Your father?” I gave slight emphasis to the last word.
“My father is a king. It doesn’t mean he’s always right,” Jasper said, his faint brogue more apparent as the intensity of his tone increased. “Only a fool would blindly let another man dictate his own set of values. I judge each situation on its own merits, and I make my own decisions.”
I considered that for a couple of seconds. “Does he know you’re here?”
“No.” Jasper had been looking off to the distance, but he turned his golden gaze on me. His eyes were the brightest thing in the immediate vicinity, almost reflective like a cat’s irises. It was hard not to stare at them.
“Why not?”
“Because of what I spoke about before,” he said. “I want you to help me smooth things between the Duergar and the Stone Order. We shouldn’t be wasting our time or resources fighting with each other.”
“You could call in your favor and compel me to do it,” I said.
He gave me an imploring look, his mouth pressed into an unhappy line. “What good would that do? I need you to believe in the importance of it, Petra. Compelling you to work with me wouldn’t truly achieve what needs to be done.”
I squinted at him in the fading light of dusk. “You really believe in the larger danger that’s looming?”
“I do.”
“I told Maris—uh, Lady Lothlorien—what you told me. She wasn’t nearly as surprised as I would have expected.”
He tilted his head. “It was her idea to contact me, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I peered at him. “That disappoints you, doesn’t it?”
“Like I said, I want you to be genuinely behind my cause. You, Petra. Not the monarch ruling the Stone Order.”
It was the second time he’d said my name in the past minute or two. There was a warmth, almost an intimacy in how he pronounced it, despite the fact that I was causing him some amount of frustration. I never would have admitted it out loud, but there was some part of me that wanted to hear him say my name again.
I mentally flicked myself in the head for such an asinine passing thought. Thank Oberon, neither Emmaline nor Maxen would ever know it had passed through my brain. I blinked hard and forced my focus to the matters at hand.
“But why me?” I asked. “Why not go to Maxen, or even Lady Lothlorien herself? Or anyone in the fortress with political pull?” Or anyone who actually gave a shit about inter-realm scuffles and Faerie politics.
“You’re the champion of the Stone Order now. You’ve got plenty of influence.”
I wagged my finger at him. “Ah, but I wasn’t champion when you first tried to persuade me on this.”
He chuckled. “True enough. Still, I’m confident in my choice. I was terribly pleased Uncle Darion didn’t kill you in the arena, by the way.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said with mild sarcasm.
He pushed off the barrier and leaned against it, partially imitating my posture.
“So,” he said. “What did the lady of the Stone Order hope you would get from me?”
“She’d like to know how you came about the information you gave me. How you found out the Tuatha are coming with a Dullahan arm
y. And why they’re coming, if you happen to know that. I’d like to know, too.”
“To the second query, I have to say I don’t know, though I sorely wish I did.”
“And the first?” My stomach tightened a little in anticipation.
“I can’t say,” he said. “To do so would betray the confidence of someone very important to me.”
Someone more important than his father, I took it. Interesting.
“Can you at least tell me what proof there is?”
“The Great Ravens have seen the Dullahan riding.”
That shut me up for a good long moment. The Great Ravens weren’t capable of lying. And I knew of Jasper’s connection to the legendary birds because the last time I’d escaped from the Duergar realm, Jasper had bailed me out by revealing himself to be a Grand Raven Master by summoning one of the great birds. I’d ridden away on its back as the Duergar guards cursed me from the roof of the palace. Jasper had told me that they wouldn’t suspect him of helping me because they didn’t know he was a Grand Raven Master.
Not breaking the silence, he pushed away from the barrier and started toward the walking path that meandered near the water. I followed and fell in step beside him, and we kept a strolling pace.
I shook my head. “I still don’t understand why the Tuatha would be coming at us with the Bone Warriors. How do we even know they’re threatening us? They could be coming for some other reason. We’re the people of the land of Faerie they abandoned. What the hell did we do to piss them off so badly? Maybe they’re coming to fight some other foe we haven’t considered.”
“They’re not,” he said shortly, his face turning grim. “The Ravens know. The Tuatha De Danann are sending the Dullahan against us.”
“But why?”
I felt suddenly affronted by the idea that the Tuatha planned to attack us. Faerie had gone on for generations after they’d faded into the mist of legend. Why were they angry with us? What had we done?
“Only the gods know,” Jasper said.
I looked up at him sharply and then turned my gaze to the distance. Up until then, most Fae would have said “only Oberon knows.” But if the gods were coming back to Faerie, they’d stand above the Old Ones like Oberon. My insides twisted at the thought.
“It’s like the God of the Christian Old Testament returning,” I mumbled.
Jasper looked down at me. “That’s an apt analogy. The Old Ones who have been ruling us for many generations have left us to our own devices to a great extent. There’s plenty of brutality in their roots, but they’ve treated us as somewhat distant parents. But the Tuatha . . .” he trailed off.
“They’re old-school brutal, and they’re pissed at us,” I supplied, shivering. “What else do you know?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Not much. I’m trying to find out more.”
“The Great Ravens?”
“They’re one source of information.”
“Who else is delving into this the way you are?” I asked. “What’s the actual state of knowledge across Faerie?”
“There are others trying to understand what’s coming, but many are in denial.” He sighed heavily. “Or they’re simply distracted by more immediate issues and aren’t ready to try to deal with a threat that seems vague and far-off right now.”
“But all of the Faerie rulers know?”
“I believe they’ve all at least heard murmurs.”
“How much time do we have before the Dullahan strike?” I asked.
His boots scuffed to a halt on the walkway. “You believe me?”
I raised a palm. “Say I do. When will it happen?”
“We don’t know. But not immediately. According to the Ravens, the Tuatha are still gathering themselves. They’re growing their army. They’re gods, so to them time is different than it is to us. It could be months. It could be decades.”
A chill spilled over my scalp and down my spine at the mention of the Dullahan increasing their ranks. According to legend, there was one way to grow the Dullahan army: by taking humans or Fae living in the Earthly realm. It was one of the stories Fae mothers used to keep their children inside of Faerie: don’t stray to the other side of the hedge or the Dullahan will take you and cut off your head, and you’ll ride forever with the Bone Warriors. According to the story, Fae made the most fearsome Dullahan fighters because after they were transformed into Bone Warriors they still had Fae magic.
I shook my head, looking past Jasper to the dark water of the San Francisco Bay. “I don’t see how we can stand against the gods and an army of Bone Warriors.”
“If we’re divided, distracted, and fragmented into separate interests, we don’t stand a chance.”
I wanted to reject all of it, to brush it off as stories or mistaken information. But my mind kept snagging on the part about the Great Ravens witnessing the Tuatha and the Dullahan preparing to descend on Faerie. The legendary birds couldn’t lie.
I peered up at Jasper. Was he bending the truth? I didn’t think he was.
“If I were to agree to go along with your plan to smooth things between the New Gargs and the Duergar, what would that entail?” I asked.
“First, we’d want to eliminate the points of friction. One being the lineage of the changeling, Nicole.”
My pulse bumped. Nicole’s lineage was my lineage. The Duergar King Periclase was absolutely convinced he was Nicole’s blood father and insisted she belonged in his kingdom. No one but Nicole, our father Oliver, and my best friend Lochlyn knew that Nicole and I were twins. At Oliver’s insistence, we’d kept it secret. Our mother, who died when I was a baby, had been terrified when Nicole and I were born because of one of Marisol’s prophecies. In her vision, she formed a New Gargoyle kingdom on the bloody corpses of twin New Garg girls. Marisol’s singular goal in life was to bring the Stone Order into kingdomhood. Apparently, our mother had been so sure that Nicole and I were the ones in the prophecy, our mother had insisted on hiding one of us in the Earthly realm.
“And how would we address that?” I asked.
“By obtaining proof.”
My eyes widened. “You mean go to Melusine?”
He shrugged. “Do you know of any other way to definitively prove Fae parentage?”
He was right. Human DNA tests didn’t work on Fae. Melusine was one of the Old Ones, and the only one alive who could divine Fae parentage. Like many of the Old Ones, she could be terribly foul-tempered, violent, and difficult to locate.
“It doesn’t matter, though,” I said. “Nicole summoned stone armor, proving she’s at least part New Gargoyle. She has a right to stay with the Stone Order even if King Periclase is her father. Which he’s not, I’m positive of that. Periclase can’t insist that she return to the Duergar kingdom.”
Our father was Oliver, the full New Gargoyle man who’d raised me.
“Yes, she’s New Garg, but that doesn’t matter to Periclase,” Jasper said. “He’s convinced that Nicole is his daughter, and as long as he believes that, he’s going to try to get her back. Children are rare in Faerie—you know that. Princesses are even more precious, and they’re valuable commodities to their ruler parents.”
I thought of Maxen, Marisol’s only son. Everyone in Faerie knew that she would dictate who he married because of the strategic nature of high-level Fae unions and her goal of raising the Stone Order a proper Faerie court.
“Just seems like a hell of a lot of trouble to get him to drop that bone,” I muttered.
“Agreed. But he’s obsessed. Trust me, the rift between our two realms will not be repaired until this matter is settled.”
“Prolly didn’t help that I nearly killed his brother in the battle of champions over this,” I said, trying not to sound smug. I’d had to fight in the battle because Periclase had been so enraged that I’d taken Nicole out from under his nose.
“No, but that was a battle you won fair and square. Periclase can’t argue with that.”
I pushed my fingers into my hair and
yanked. “It just seems so damned stupid.”
He chuckled. “That may be. But Fae wars have erupted over less than this.”
“I suppose you want me to go to Melusine with you, as a witness to her findings.”
“Yes. Marisol would insist on an Order witness, you know that.”
I blew out a loud breath. I couldn’t believe I was agreeing to this. “Okay. If you can locate Melusine, then I’ll get a vial of Nicole’s blood and accompany you to verify her lineage once and for all.”
It wasn’t quite a binding agreement, but I’d keep my word. After all, I had a very personal interest in the results. I already knew Oliver was my father, but he’d always refused to tell me who my mother was. I could finally get the answer. Maybe. Melusine wasn’t likely to make it easy on us.
“Actually, I know where to find Melusine,” Jasper said.
Of course he did. I let my head fall back. I’d figured I had at least a few days, maybe much more, before Jasper found the Fae witch. It would have allowed me time to try to capture Gretchen’s mark and collect half the bounty.
He gave me a broad grin. “We can set out first thing in the morning.”
I stifled a groan, and he chuckled gleefully.
Chapter 4
I RETURNED TO the stone fortress and reported to Marisol with the information Jasper had given me. Her face gripped with tension when I told her the Great Ravens had observed the coming threat.
“Jasper Glasgow has a connection to the Ravens?” she asked.
“Uh, presumably so,” I said.
Damn. I hadn’t meant to allude to his secret but didn’t see how I could convince Marisol the info was good without the detail of the Ravens. Everyone in Faerie respected them and knew they spoke only truth.
I dug my nails into my palms as a reminder to keep my responses minimal, and I hoped she wouldn’t probe further.
“Is he a Raven Master?” she asked.
Double damn. I couldn’t lie. Fae can’t lie to each other, not outright, but we can get clever with words.