Stone Blood Legacy

by Jayne Faith

  Then something caught my eye. Movement under the dark surface. Unease stirred deep in my gut, and I quickened my pace.

  Again, I thought I caught a flicker of something in the water.

  “Did you see that?” I asked, my voice low.

  “Aye,” was all Jasper said.

  We both drew magic and summoned our stone armor. I felt the wash of his magic in the air—it had a distractingly refreshing sense to it, like a very fine spray of mist on my exposed skin.

  Something broke the surface of the water, just skimming it, but I didn’t get a good enough look to see what it was. I drew Mort and extended magic into the blade. Violet flame surrounded the sword, reflecting on the rippling surface of the pond.

  About ten feet away, something breached. Jasper and I froze as a huge ridged back rose from the water. The highest ridge was taller than me, which meant the creature it was connected to must have been enormous. Impossibly large for this pond, considering we weren’t even waist deep. My brain tried to make sense of it as the ridges rose and then disappeared.

  “What in the name of Maeve was that?” I asked shakily, my eyes wide and scanning the water for movement. “There must be a deep trench out there.”

  I could hear Jasper’s rapid breath next to me but didn’t dare look away from the water to read his reaction.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, his voice admirably calm.

  “Another illusion of some sort?”

  “Possibly.”

  A second later, the illusion, or whatever the hell it was, sprang out of the water. There was just enough light left in the late-twilight sky to see the creature looked like a giant koi. A koi the size of a fricking whale. It rose into the air above us. Impossible, but there it was.

  Seeing what was coming, I started to backpedal and then turned and started hauling ass back toward the shore. But my boots were too heavy and the mud too deep. It was like one of those slow-motion nightmares where the monster is behind you and suddenly your feet feel like two anvils.

  I twisted to look over my shoulder as the creature reached the apex of its impossibly high jump. Its mouth was stretching wider and wider into an O that seemed big enough to swallow the entire pond.

  I planted my feet, wrapped both hands around Mort’s hilt, and braced my shoulders like a batter at the plate. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jasper do the same a few feet away. As the creature descended upon us, the space inside of it seemed to go on forever. I wasn’t sure there would even be anything within reach for me to slash at.

  I swung anyway as the darkness of the fish’s insides came down around me. My boots lost contact with the ground, and I pitched forward, tumbling ass over tea kettle in sloshing water. The shock and jolt interrupted my magic, and Mort’s flame extinguished. I flailed in darkness so complete I lost all sense of direction. I desperately fought to keep a grip on my broadsword and prayed to Oberon that Jasper and I didn’t run each other through with our swords.

  After another few seconds of tumbling around in watery darkness, I was floating.

  No, not floating.

  I’d passed over into the cold void of the netherwhere.

  Panic began to grip me in its chilly, strong hands. I hadn’t purposely entered a doorway. How would it know where to spit me out? What if there wasn’t a way out?

  I floated in the nothing, powerless.

  Then all of a sudden, I went sprawling onto the ground. Mort flew from my hand. I lay there for a moment, dirt sticking to my lips and tasting the grit of it, just grateful to be back out into the physical world. My clothes and hair were soaked, and I could swear to Oberon that I smelled a faint fishy odor in the air.

  There was a groan from a few feet away. I raised my head and looked around, but I was back among the trees, and the moon’s light didn’t penetrate to the forest floor.

  “Jasper?”

  Another groan. I reached for Mort and then crawled toward the noise, not feeling steady enough to try to walk over unfamiliar terrain in the dark. While I was moving, the lantern bugs meandered down from above, providing enough light to see that Jasper was lying on his back, his own sword tossed nearby.

  “Is anything broken?’ I asked.

  He sat up and dropped his head into his hands for a moment. The bandage I’d fashioned around his forehead was gone. He stretched his arms out in front of him and then brushed his hands down his sleeves.

  “Nah, nothing important.”

  The swarm of lantern bugs was descending on us, and they buzzed and blinked around our heads.

  I dumped water out of each boot, and he did the same. Then I stood and offered him my arm. We linked elbows, and I heaved back to pull him up. My hip bumped his upper thigh as he righted himself on his feet, and the memory of his lips hovering inches from mine not long ago flashed through my mind.

  “Where do you think we are?” I asked.

  He pointed into the trees. “Other side of the pond.”

  I followed his gaze, and sure enough, there through the trees was the pond and the meadow, lit with pearly moonlight. As we watched, something rippled along the surface, and a creature’s ridged back breached momentarily before disappearing into the water again.

  We both turned away from the pond to where the cloud of glowing lantern bugs hung. They seemed to know they had our attention and began moving away in a thick winding ribbon to the head of a path.

  “Guess that’s our cue,” I said.

  We set off toward the trail and followed the bugs deeper into the forest. Jasper let me walk first.

  “If that was Melusine’s idea of a warm welcome, I don’t think we’re going to get along too well,” I said over my shoulder.

  He snorted a wry laugh. “It was pretty rotten. But you have to go along with their whims. You know how it is with Old Ones.”

  “Actually, no,” I said. “Having not grown up in a proper Faerie court with all the courtly pomp and nonsense, I have very little personal experience with Old Ones. Unlike you, Prince Jasper.”

  “Nah, it wasn’t like that. I’m a bastard,” he said.

  “But Periclase claimed you as his. He seems to respect you. You grew up in the Duergar court, right?”

  “I didn’t come to the palace until later. I spent most of my childhood with my mother.”

  I glanced back at him. “So that was when you became a Grand Raven Master?”

  “Aye, ‘twas,” he said, his brogue thickening momentarily.

  “Where’s your mother now?”

  “She’s in a small town in the Duergar realm, still in my childhood home.”

  “Was she a courtier?” I asked, figuring she must have spent time in the palace to have had a liaison with King Periclase.

  “Nope.”

  I thought of pressing him, but there was something up ahead—lights. I slowed, but the lantern bugs sped up, darting ahead of us.

  “There’s a cottage,” I said. I squinted into the darkness, trying to make out the contours of the structure.

  Smoke puffed lazily from the chimney, tracing a line up and away into the night. The smell of logs in a fireplace wafted past, the homey welcoming aroma at odds with the tightening in my gut.

  We crept up to the edge of the weak light cast from the windows of the quaint little house.

  “A lone cottage in the middle of the woods,” I whispered. “These stories always end happily for the ones who wander in, right?”

  Jasper muffled a chuckle against the back of his hand.

  “Well, this is what we came for.” He stepped out of the protective shadow of the trees.

  I drew a deep breath and followed him.

  Lunar moths flitted around the moon garden to the left of the cottage. The lantern bugs rose above the roof, tracing a loose spiral up through the trees. The hoots of owls and soft calls of night birds formed a pleasant audial backdrop to the scene.

  The little house itself seemed drawn straight from a fairy tale. The windows were round, and the roof steep and d
ormered, and it had a vaguely Swiss-chalet look about it. A stream meandered to the right, fed by the larger pond we’d gotten all too well acquainted with. I eyed the water warily as we approached the front door.

  Jasper and I exchanged a glance, and then he gave a little shrug, reached up, and rapped his knuckles on the door.

  I could just make out soft sounds of movement inside, and something darkened a window off to the side—there and gone too quickly for me to catch more than a pale face.

  The wooden door opened inward with a gentle creak.

  There stood Melusine, her face in shadow as she was backlit by the crackling fire in the hearth behind her.

  “You made it, I see,” she said. “I suppose I must invite you in. Enter at your own risk, little ones.”

  She swung the door wider and let out a soft, dry cackle, a fitting laugh for the witch she was.

  I swallowed hard and stepped inside.

  Chapter 10

  THE COTTAGE WAS much larger inside than it appeared. So much so, I felt vaguely dizzy as my brain tried to reconcile it. Another trick of Fae magic, no doubt, like the shallowness of the pond and the enormous size of the koi in it.

  Melusine had the same stately and ethereal look as Oberon and Titania, the only other Old Ones I’d seen in person. Her skin was like white porcelain, her hair black and glossy as the feathers of Jasper’s birds. Her eyes were haunting, the irises the rosy color a ripe peach’s skin. Her coloring would have looked gothic and overly-dramatic on a normal Fae, but on her it was mysterious. And like the other Old Ones, her beauty was so exquisite it was almost painful to look straight at her.

  “The walk didn’t do much to dry you off, did it?” she said, her mouth twisting a little in distaste as she surveyed our wet clothes.

  I suppressed a frown. It was her fault we got soaked in the first place.

  She fluttered the fingers of one hand, and the air around me seemed to compress. The pressure grew uncomfortable, but then it was gone, and with it the water was drawn from my clothes, hair, and boots. A fine, thick mist formed around me and Jasper and then began to dissipate into the room.

  “What did you think of my doorway?” she asked and cackled again, louder than before.

  I blinked. “You formed a doorway in a fish?”

  “Pretty trick, isn’t it?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. It seemed cruel to insert a Faerie portal in a live creature, but perhaps the fish was only an illusion. In any case, we needed her help, and it wasn’t going to further our cause if I criticized her method of bringing us here. For once, I managed to keep my trap shut.

  She turned and went to a carved, high-backed chair set up near the fire and sat down, propping her feet on a tiny footstool with miniature carved legs that matched the chair’s. As she settled herself, she pierced first Jasper and then me with uncomfortably long, unblinking stares.

  Something moved over the top of the chair’s back. My eyes widened as a spider larger than my hand paused on a carved flower and then began to descend toward Melusine’s shoulder. I started to raise a hand to warn her, but then she reached up and stroked the spider’s furry back as it perched just above her collarbone.

  I cringed and tried not to shudder too visibly.

  “I don’t like fish much. They eat insects,” Melusine said. Her gaze settled on Jasper. “That’s why I couldn’t allow your birds in my realm. They’d prey on my lunar butterflies and other pets.” She looked down at the creature on her shoulder with an affectionate little smile.

  I was pretty sure ravens weren’t stupid enough to try to take on a huge, hairy spider, but she was probably right about the moths.

  “You know why we’ve come, my lady?” Jasper asked.

  “Hmm, yes,” she said, still gazing at her pet. “You need Melusine to tell you who your mommies and daddies are.”

  She said it as if speaking to small children. Which, to her, we probably were in some ways. When you’d lived for many centuries, what was a twenty-seven-year-old Fae? A mere baby. But there was also a mocking note in her voice, indicating she didn’t think much of us. Or maybe just young Fae in general. Or perhaps she didn’t really like anyone. She did, after all, tend to live in places that made her impossible to find unless she wanted to be found.

  I glanced at Jasper as something she’d just said tickled at my mind. “We only need to discern the parentage of one individual,” I said. “We brought a sample of her blood.”

  “No,” she said sharply.

  My heart dropped. She was going to refuse Nicole’s blood?

  Melusine narrowed her eyes at us and again fixed on Jasper. “He wants to know, too.”

  I swung my gaze around at him. “I thought you knew who your parents were?”

  He flicked a glance at me but didn’t respond.

  Melusine cackled at me. “You thought wrong.”

  “Petra’s right in that we’ve come primarily for another.” He reached under his breastplate and drew out the little drawstring bag I’d given him before I’d left with Gretchen. When he took out the wad of gauze, I heard a faint crunch.

  I winced. Shit. The vial had broken.

  He unraveled the gauze to reveal glass shards.

  “Oh no, did your little swim wash away all the changeling’s blood?” Melusine asked in a high-pitched, mocking voice. She pulled an exaggerated sad face, her eyes wide and the corners of her mouth pulled down.

  Jasper shook his head at the broken vial and then looked up at me. “I’m so sorry, Petra. It’s gone, completely gone. There’s not even a blood stain. Our trip has been in vain.”

  Melusine began to chuckle, her lips closed and the sound coming from deep in her throat. It sent chills spilling down my spine.

  “Not in vain,” she finally said. She raised one graceful arm and extended it, pointing at me. “You’ve got a walking skin bag of blood right there.”

  He flicked a glance at her and then squinted at me.

  “Are you going to tell him, or am I?” the Fae witch asked me in an admonishing tone of a parent who’d caught her child in a lie. “This is your only chance to discover the truth. I will not be granting you audience again.”

  I fought back a scowl. She was clearly enjoying all of this, and I hated being toyed with. I couldn’t help wondering who else knew my secret, if Melusine was aware of it. In any case, she wasn’t going to allow me to get another sample of Nicole’s blood.

  “You have three seconds,” Melusine said irritably. “Or I’ll tell him.”

  It was now or never.

  I met Jasper’s gaze. “Nicole is my twin sister,” I finally said. I had to. If I didn’t, Melusine obviously would. She let out a pleased titter.

  His eyes widened momentarily. His lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but no words came.

  Melusine brought her hands up under her chin and gave a couple of delighted little claps.

  “The two of you could be half-siblings!” She crowed. She looked at Jasper. “That’s what you’re thinking, right?”

  Jasper’s brows drew low, but he smoothed his expression before it became a full-on frown. He reached down to his belt and withdrew a small folding knife, which he passed to me.

  I flipped it open, and with a quick flick, I nicked the blade across the back of my wrist. I didn’t want to damage my hands, in case I needed them later in a fight. Blood swelled from the cut, and I looked up at Melusine.

  Her eerie pale-orange eyes were fixed on the cut.

  “Come closer,” she whispered, beckoning.

  It was literally the last thing in the world I wanted to do, the way she was looking at my blood with a greedy glint in her eyes. But I did it anyway. When I reached the side of her chair, her hand darted out and her cold fingers wrapped around my arm, just above the cut, squeezing hard enough to make me want to pull back. Then she jerked my arm up and ran her tongue over the bead of blood.

  Bile rose in my throat as I realized what she’d done. The swell of revulsion wa
s quickly drowned out by a new sensation that began at the cut and seemed to worm its way through me. It was as if a horde of scuttling beetles had been poured into my bloodstream.

  I squeezed my eyes closed and gritted my teeth, trying with everything in me not to scream and writhe. When the sensation spread up my neck and into my head, seeming to beat at the backs of my eyeballs, I couldn’t hold back a low moan.

  When she finally released my arm, the invasive, crawling sensation began to recede. In its wake was a horrible exposed emptiness. The depth of it stilled my breath. It was like standing naked in front of every living person on Earth and in Faerie while everything I’d ever done or thought rolled across a screen for all to view.

  I opened my eyes and met her orange gaze, and somehow I knew she’d seen into everything that made me who I was, that nothing was private anymore or ever could be again.

  I’d wondered what the price would be, what I would owe Melusine for her information. This was it. She knew my every thought, wish, and fantasy. I couldn’t imagine what she’d do with such knowledge, but I felt as if I’d been turned inside out and spread on a table for her perusal.

  I swallowed hard, fighting the urge to vomit in her lap.

  Her lids lowered partway, and the tip of her tongue flicked out to her lips, as if she were still tasting my blood. My stomach tumbled as I waited for her to speak.

  Chapter 11

  “OLIVER MAGUIRE IS not your blood father,” Melusine said. “The Duergar King Periclase is.”

  My entire body went stiff, and I reeled a little, desperately pushing back at the tidal wave of thoughts that tried to crash through me.

  “And my mother?” I managed to grind out through clenched teeth.

  “Carmen MacPharlain, deceased.”

  The name was completely unfamiliar to me. I filed it away for later examination.

  I drew a shaky breath, and another. Then I turned and stumbled away from Melusine and nearly plowed into Jasper. He caught me by the upper arms and held me steady.