She was so warm, so hot, that it was like being swept away in a tide of molten chocolate. She bit at my ear, her teeth nicking me and spilling a little blood. I tried to scream, but she swallowed it with her mouth.
“You taste like power,” she cooed in that maple syrup and honey voice. “Do you want me to let my power sweep over you? I could make you enjoy this. I could make you beg me to eat your flesh, to taste your blood. Would you like that, Dioscuri?”
“No…” My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. Everything in me was begging me to give in, to let her give me just one more taste, but I forced myself to try and ignore her. It wasn’t going well.
She leaned closer, putting her ear nearly to my mouth. “What was that? I can’t hear you.” Her breath was like spattering oil on my skin, and I bit my lip to keep from screaming. My hand fell to my side, my fingertips brushing against the pommel of Isis. A tiny spark leapt across the back of my brain like shattering ice, like crystalline spider webs crackling along the surface of a frozen pond.
My fingers wrapped around the hilt of Isis, and her soft dual voice of an old, aging crone and a defiant, young princess cooed in the back on my mind. “There is more to life than lust and heat and glistening, suntanned bodies. There is the dark, the gloom, and the tragedy. There is pain and terror. There is knee-shaking, gut-wrenching agony.”
I felt Isis reach out to me, running her cool, protecting hands over my too warm flesh, tightening my grip on my katana. Her voice was like the soft coo of fall in my ear. “No matter what happens, there is always Shikuhakku.”
“Shikuhakku…” I mumbled the word, and the temperature dropped ten degrees. A small breeze swept through the room, bringing with it the smell of pine trees and coming rain.
“What are you doing?” the Queen of the Bright and Hot screamed, stepping back as if bitten by a snake, holding her hands out like she was trying to ward off something evil. “You can’t do that here. You’ll unbalance Fairy!”
I looked up at the Queen, knowing my eyes had turned solid crimson. Sanguine fog coalesced above us, casting the sunlight that fell on us in a bloody hue as I pulled out the twin blades of Shirajirashii. The pure white blades glinted as I held them in front of me.
With a word, I could call on the fog to condense into clouds. It would begin to rain. Big, fat red drops would fall from the sky like a great wound had been torn across the horizon. When that happened, our darkest memories and thoughts would come to life.
I only used the power once before, when I was very young and vowed never to use it again. I did not want to see the darkness that lurked within men’s hearts. I didn’t want to see it when I closed my eyes, forever unable to unsee it.
Even Dirge, who had a far greater understanding of Shirajirashii than I did, only used the power a few times, and with each usage it broke her a little more. I was thankful I could not remember the details of what she experienced.
I didn’t know what it would do to the Queen of the Hot and Bright. I especially didn’t want to see the chain reaction of her worst fears and most terrible memories springing to life in front of me. I did not want to feel her agony and her despair.
But I did want to live, and she was scared. Wind whipped around us, carrying with it the scent of fallen leaves. I just had to say one word.
“Stop, Lillim!” the Queen screamed. Her voice was a cacophony of worry, but it was just a voice now. Behind her, Kishi started to stir. Had Shirajirashii banished her power entirely or had she become too frightened to overwhelm us?
“You know my name?” I asked a little surprised. This wasn’t the first time a mythical creature knew my name, but it was always a little disconcerting when one did. I mean come on, I was just a Dioscuri, and she was the Sidhe Queen of Summer. There were orders of magnitudes of difference between us.
“Yes,” she hissed. “I know of you and of Shirajirashii. I know of the Red Rain. You cannot use it here in the heart of Summer, or we will become unbalanced. It is a dark power, Winter’s power. Using it here—”
The Queen of the Hot and Bright’s face exploded in a cloud of red mist as the cry of Kishi’s shotgun shattered the calmness of the room. The Queen fell to her knees, her upper torso burst open like a ripe melon.
The room shook as I stumbled backward, trying to wipe away the blood that covered my face. The ceiling above us split. The sound of screeching metal rang in my ears as I fell onto my butt. The power I’d gathered dissipated. The crimson fog evaporated as shadow fell across the room. The sun above us winked out as though being hidden by a solar eclipse, leaving us in total darkness.
Whatever had just happened was definitely not good, and I had a simple rule of thumb. When places start to collapse on top of me, I made myself scarce.
“Kishi!” I called above the din, barely able to make out Kishi stumbling toward me. “What’d you do?”
“Stopping you from making me have to kill you,” Kishi’s voice called but it sounded so far away. “I’d rather not turn into a sobbing pile of angst while you sit back and watch it happen.”
I swallowed. “Yeah, well… it was either that or let The Queen suck the marrow from our bones,” I said, getting to my feet and sheathing my swords. I wasn’t going to call the red rain if I didn’t have to, especially with the place collapsing around us.
“Which is why I shot her in the face. Fairy Queen down!” She sounded closer now, and I glanced in the direction of her voice.
Fire exploded from the Queen’s body, erupting like a volcano in the center of the room. I shielded my eyes with my arm and turned away. Spots danced across my eyes as an inhuman shriek shook the room. The walls blew outward, like someone stuffing too much air inside a tin can, and I was thrown from my feet, tumbling backward and crashing into one of the gilded walls.
The Queen of the Bright and Hot stood, her body a living bouquet of flame. Her eyes burned like stars from within the piercing magma. She took a step toward Kishi, one arm outstretched. A gout of flame leapt from her fingertips. Kishi threw up her arms, and the fire bounced harmlessly off her armored form. The Queen screamed, and it was like a raging inferno. The temperature exploded, climbing upward so fast my sweat instantly evaporated.
Cloying heat filled my throat as I licked my dry, cracking lips. Kishi stumbled backward, hands reaching to her throat as the Queen smiled, her fiery lips stretched back to reveal a mouth full of flame.
I reached out with my power and muttered a word. “Come.” My Beretta flew through the air and hit my outstretched hand with a thud. I pointed the weapon at the Queen of the Hot and Bright and fired three quick shots. The first two hit her in the center of the back, pitching her forward. The third caught her in the back of the neck and blew out her throat in a flash of blood and ash. She fell to her hands and knees, fire exploding outward around her like a wall.
Kishi’s shotgun roared, and the Sidhe Queen was thrown backward out of the ring of flame. She rolled, coming to her feet in an instant and leaping into the air, giant dragonfly wings whirling like helicopter blades.
“Find cover!” I screamed, dropping the pistol and pulling the twin blades of Shirajirashii from their sheathes. “Shikuhakku Shirajirashii! Shikuhakku!”
Kishi dove underneath the wreckage of the dragon statue as sanguine clouds burst into being above us, manifesting so suddenly that the Queen was caught within them. She screamed, an earsplitting howl that made gooseflesh rise on my skin and the hair on the back of my neck to stand at attention.
The first bloody teardrops fell from the clouds, splashing downward in great splatters of crimson. The Queen turned toward me, eyes wide in horror as she plummeted from the sky like a rock. The flame around her winked out as she slammed into the marble floor. I cringed away from her, awaiting the inevitable torrent of horror and emotion that was going to rip through both of us, giving me a front seat view on her own personal rollercoaster of horror.
Light came back in a rush as a pale, silver moon glinted in the sky where the sun had been.
A woman descended from above. Her pale, nearly translucent form seemed more like an apparition than a flesh and blood being. Her hair was like spun moonlight, and her eyes were the pale blue of glacial ice. Her delicate, blue-white wings flapped leisurely, resembling those of a great winged bird rather than an insect.
As she drew closer, cool, damp air rushed through the room, bringing with it the smells of swampy earth. With a wave of her hand, she banished my spell. Shirajirashii went lifeless in my hands. The crimson clouds winked out of existence, the red rain vanishing mid-fall.
I don’t know how the Queen of the Hot and Bright managed it, but she turned and shrieked at the descending woman. She stood, her flesh knitting itself together beneath her sheath of flame and raised her hands in the air.
The room around us shrieked and tore itself asunder as hunks of superheated metal flew upward at the descending woman. She smiled, her pale blue lips revealing a mouthful of starlight as she held one hand out. A whirling dervish of snow and ice exploded outward around her, catching the melted gobs and flinging them away to shatter against the marble floor.
“No!” the Queen of the Hot and Bright screamed. “You cannot be here. This is the realm of Summer, the land of burning flame and glistening flesh. You have no claim here.”
“On the contrary,” the woman spoke, and it was like being tucked in at night by your grandma. “These two have established my claim here.”
“Fools! You have unbalanced Fairy!” the Queen of the Hot and Bright yelled, turning to look at us. “You have allowed the Winter Queen into the very Court of Summer.” She gestured upward at the pale, silver moon. “Turned the heart of Summer, the heart of the glowing eternal sun to the moon.”
“It was always inevitable, sister,” the Queen of the Cold and Dark said as she touched down onto the floor beside Kishi, her wings folding up behind her back in a flurry of white feathers. “Say what you will about the destructiveness of fire, but I’ve never seen someone put out a blizzard. Even the stars above burn only until they are swallowed by the unyielding dark.” She grinned and held out her hand to the other Queen. “Come with me, sister, let us plunge these lands into unyielding, unending winter. Let us fill their plains with snow and cover their rivers in ice.”
“That seems bad,” Kishi murmured and took a step away from the Queen of the Cold and Dark. I agreed instantly with her sentiment. Fighting off a super-powered fairy hadn’t exactly been fun before, and now there were two of them. Something told me that even if the two Queens didn’t kill us directly, we had a very good chance of becoming collateral damage. Call me old-fashioned, but I did not want to become collateral damage.
“You think?” the Summer Queen snarled, rushing forward, her hands glowing with sunlight. The Winter Queen cocked her head to the side as if contemplating a particularly interesting insect and snapped her fingers. The temperature seemed to drop a billion degrees in the space of a heartbeat. The Queen of the Hot and Bright fell sideways and slid across the floor, encased in a solid block of ice.
“How foolish you are, sister. I am here in your seat of power, beneath a wonderfully pale moon, and most of all, you forget one tiny trifle.” The Queen looked from Kishi to me and covered her mouth with her hand conspiratorially. “It’s November.”
9
We were locked in the Queen of the Cold and Dark’s prison, and even though we weren’t chained up, I wasn’t exactly pleased with the situation. The Queen had been nice enough to offer us the choice of going peacefully or in pieces, and hoping I could figure out a way out of this mess, I’d convinced Kishi to come along quietly.
So far, my plans had ranged between nothing and nil, but I was hoping I’d come up with something soon. Especially since the Queen of the Hot and Bright stood motionless in her block of ice only a few feet away. Mist wafted off of it, covering the floor in ankle-deep fog. Her accusing eyes stared outward, burning holes into me, despite being frozen within the ice. I fidgeted and shifted to the side, and her gaze seemed to follow me. That was impossible right? She was encased in three feet of ice after all.
“So now that we’re locked up, what’s the plan?” I asked Kishi as she continued to pace back and forth in the small, ten by ten foot cell. To be honest, it was starting to annoy me.
“Break out, kill the Winter Queen, and rebalance Fairy,” she said for perhaps the fifteenth time.
“Repeating yourself isn’t as helpful as you’d think,” I said, waving my hands at the room.
“The rest is just details,” Kishi growled, never breaking stride.
I leaned back against the cool, white-marble walls and sighed. “Details are important, Kishi. Like the small detail that we’re in a prison in the middle of the Winter Court with no way out. That’s not a minor detail!” My words came out in white wisps of fog as I spoke.
“Well, maybe if you didn’t unleash the eight sorrows on the Summer Queen, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Kishi turned and glared at me. “You should have known using a dark power like that in Summer’s seat of power would be a bad idea.”
“If you keep talking to me like that, I’m going to stop being your friend,” I replied, crossing my arms over my chest and turning my head away from her. If I didn’t I was going to get seriously mad at her, and this definitely wasn’t the place for that.
“Friend? So we’re friends now?” Kishi scoffed, putting her hands on her hips. “Friends don’t let friends get captured by evil fairies. Friends don’t send friends into creepy lakes alone. Friends don’t—”
“Quiet. I don’t have a lot of time.” Caleb’s voice cut through the room like a gunshot, silencing Kishi in mid-sentence. His short, blond hair was spiked up in that just fell out of bed way that I’ve long since known wasn’t as natural as he liked people to think. His maroon t-shirt was stretched nearly to the breaking point by his broad chest and his hands were shoved casually in his khaki shorts. The immense form of Incinerator, his broad sword, was slung over his back.
I wasn’t quite sure why he still carried it since he could control time and space. Maybe it was his comfort object? Maybe that giant, overcompensating broadsword was his version of a teddy bear. Then again, Caleb had never really been one to rely on magic when a more physical approach would do. Or maybe he just liked stabbing things.
Kishi glanced over at him, and her cheeks turned bright red. She tried to smile at him, but only wound up looking away sheepishly.
“Caleb!” I squealed and leapt on him, wrapping my arms around him and burying my face in his chest. He caught me, pulling me onto my tiptoes and leaning down to kiss me. I blushed as his lips touched mine, my knees going a little weak.
“Erm…” Kishi half-grunted, and I turned to look at her. I’m not sure what look was on my face, but Kishi, almost immediately, turned away.
“Anyway, I don’t have a lot of time. I have to get you two out of here before the distinction between the two realms of Fairy disintegrates entirely,” Caleb said, disengaging himself from me and taking a step toward the Queen of the Hot and Bright. “And I need to put her back in the fight.”
“Wait, what?” I asked.
“Whatever you two did has fundamentally unbalanced Fairy. Even now the Summer and Winter Courts are starting to merge. You need to leave before that happens. Trust me.” Caleb waved his hand at the block of ice. Flame leapt from his fingertips in a flash of heat that took my breath away and made me cringe. It was like standing too close to a campfire when someone decided to douse it with lighter fluid.
Crack!
The frozen block holding the Summer Queen erupted in a shower of ice and sleet. She took a step forward, stumbled, and fell into a heap on the ground. Caleb bent down and pulled her shivering form to her feet.
“You shouldn’t be here, Blue Prince.” The Queen’s voice was barely a whisper. Her once glowing and luminous body now seemed dull and drab, like a painting that had been bleached by the sun.
“I know,” Caleb said with a grin, his mouth stretching in that
stupid way that made butterflies dance in my stomach.
“It is fall. My power ebbs every day and Winter’s power grows. If it were spring…” She stumbled, falling against Caleb, and he reached out to catch her, bracing her body against his. My eyes narrowed as he held her nearly-naked body in his arms. I knew it was ridiculous because he was just catching her, but still... that ribbon she was wearing barely qualified as clothing.
“If you’re through falling all over my boyfriend, we’ll be leaving now,” I snarled, and my tone surprised even me. Caleb’s eyes widened as he looked down at the Fairy Queen, his eyes running over her flesh. Pink spread across his cheeks as he took a step backward, holding her at arm’s length.
“You can’t leave,” the Queen of the Hot and Bright said. She coughed and wiped her mouth with the back of her arm leaving a crimson smear on her flesh. “You must help me subdue Winter. If you do not, it will be as the Prince said. Fairy will merge. You do not want that, and I cannot stop it alone. Not now. Not after you have killed my Breaker.”
That, unfortunately, seemed like a pretty valid point. Thankfully, I was pretty sure I could ignore it, mostly because I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Fairy since I was pretty sure there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in summer I was ever getting my apartment repaired now. I’d definitely have to talk to the gremlins, and I really disliked gremlins.
“Why should we help you?” Kishi asked and, to be honest, I’d almost forgotten she was there, which was stupid.
“Because, if we merge, the earth will no longer have seasons. It will be the same always. Your crops will turn fallow, your rivers run dry—”
“I’m from Southern California. We don’t have seasons anyway,” I said, putting my hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
The Lillim Callina Chronicles: Volumes 1-3 Page 46