Len lay still, draped across the roots covering Albigard’s body and staring into nothing, too chilled by the death he’d channeled to even shiver.
It was the vague awareness of warmth kindling beneath his cheek and hands that finally succeeded in cutting through the heavy gray fog surrounding his thoughts. The roots began to glow again. With his face plastered against them and no strength to rise, Len was treated to an up-close and personal view as golden sparks trailed outward from the walls, traveling the same path as the oily darkness of the Hunt had when it was being absorbed, only in reverse.
The little sparks of light were pretty, he decided. Unfortunately, they also illuminated Albigard’s haggard features and blank, staring eyes again—which Len really didn’t like.
He should look away. It was hard, though. Even in death, Len wanted every last memory of the Fae he could get. And it helped that the diffuse golden glow lent a bit of color to his pallid cheeks. It softened the gaunt angles into something more lifelike... gave the illusion of a pink tinge to Albigard’s perfect lips, rather than the ugly blue-gray of death.
Len stared at those lips for a while, remembering the way they’d felt beneath his. It had been their first kiss, he realized. Also, their last kiss.
When his gaze strayed back to Albigard’s green eyes, the Fae’s eyelids were closed.
Len blinked.
That... wasn’t right. Was it?
The golden sparkles moving through the roots began to fade, but that same glow seemed to be coming from Albigard’s skin now—a lucent aura spilling out from the Fae’s body.
The roots slithered free from their death grip, like snakes wriggling away from prey they’d decided they didn’t want. Len felt them retract beneath his limp body, squirming loose until he was lying across Albigard’s torso directly, his left cheek pressed against dirty and rumpled silk brocade rather than fibrous wood. The glow dimmed gradually, until Len was once again in the dark.
He wanted to pretend that it was still last night, when he’d lain sated and tangled with Albigard on a pile of furs by the hot springs—because that fantasy was so much better than this reality. When a heartbeat thudded into existence beneath Len’s ear, he decided that, yes, this was definitely turning into a nice hallucination. Maybe he would stay in it for a while.
The strangled gasp that expanded Albigard’s lungs and nearly made Len slide right off his body seemed a bit much, to be honest. It sounded like someone surfacing from drowning, and wasn’t really in the spirit of the comforting dream he was aiming for.
“What—?” a voice rasped. “How...”
Hands closed on Len’s shoulders in the dark, manhandling him into a sitting position. His body lolled against the support, since he still had basically zero control of his own muscles. An arm closed around his back to steady him.
A new ball of light flared, making him wince at the sudden brightness. It floated upward, exactly like the balls of magical illumination Albigard used to be able to make, before he lost his magic while trying to keep Len safe. It lit the cavern, revealing the roots once more dormant in the walls and floor, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the underground cavern at all.
“This is turning into a stupid dream,” Len slurred.
A hand cupped his jaw, tilting his head up to meet the eyes of a ghost.
“The Hunt?” Albigard asked urgently.
“It killed you, and then it tried to get away, but I collapsed the tunnel entrance with blue magic and the tree ate it,” Len said, feeling like he really shouldn’t be forced to relive all this in the middle of his escapist hallucinatory fantasy.
“Can you walk?” the ghost demanded.
Len scoffed. “Does it look like I can walk?” he shot back. “Also, you’re way more demanding than any of my other ghosts have been.”
The ghost blinked at him. “I... daresay.” Strong hands lowered him to lie on the floor, supporting his head on the way down. “Rest here. I will see what can be done about the tunnel entrance.”
Panic speared Len’s chest as the ghost made to rise. “No!” he gasped, lifting a numb hand. The movement lacked any kind of coordination, but it was still the first positive response his body had offered to his brain’s commands. Fingers caught his, warm and alive and oh god, how Len wished this were real instead of his brain’s pathetic attempt to dissociate from fresh trauma.
The ghost lifted his hand to warm lips, pressing a kiss to the knuckles before lowering it to rest on Len’s chest. “You did not leave me alone,” it said. “Trust that I will not leave you either, a rúnsearc. Only give me a few moments to see how we may best leave and rejoin the cat-sidhe. Perhaps they will be able to explain what has happened here.”
Len still wanted this dream to return to their night by the hot springs, rather than... whatever the hell this was. He managed a small, reluctant nod. Fingers brushed his cheek, and Len let his eyes slip closed, since it was getting harder and harder to keep them open anyway.
After that, consciousness came in fits and starts. He was aware of being hefted over someone’s shoulder—a fireman’s carry that was super-uncomfortable and made him worry he might throw up. He was aware of the sound of crackling flames, and an abrupt feeling of disorientation that made the nausea even worse. He was aware of voices talking urgently, but not of what was said.
More crackling flames, more disorientation, and then he was being lowered onto something soft. A different kind of fire appeared in his hazy vision, tame and bounded by a ring of stones.
“I will check the food stores,” said a familiar voice. The cat-sidhe. “You should both rest. Nothing will intrude here tonight. We will talk later.”
A second voice answered, but Len was slipping again. He roused a bit when another body lay down next to him, a familiar sunlight-and-ozone scent tickling his nostrils. Len flopped toward it and clung, graceless and clumsy with exhaustion. Arms closed around him, a voice that no longer existed murmuring words in his ear that he couldn’t understand.
It didn’t matter. This was the hallucination Len had wanted all along—the one that would allow him to exist for a few more hours without his mind fracturing into a million razor-edged shards. He tightened numb fingers in silk brocade and let the darkness take him.
* * *
Len woke alone some unknown amount of time later, not surprised by that fact in the least. Of course, lack of surprise did nothing to stop the awful sinking feeling that started in his stomach and spread outward to encompass his heart. Every beat of the damned thing felt like it was laboring against a cocoon of tightly wrapped barbed wire.
He swallowed, and swallowed again, hoping it might help. It didn’t.
The campfire was still burning cheerfully inside its ring of stones. Familiar walls of stone surrounded him—the cave at the heart of the Forsaken camp. Someone had placed him on the pallet where Albigard had recovered after the loss of his magic, a mere couple of days ago. The blankets still smelled like him. The cavern was empty and echoing, its inhabitants gone. Len couldn’t immediately tell if the Hunt had been through here or not.
Movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He managed to push himself partly upright, his body once more under his nominal control. The cat-sidhe sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire, sipping tea from a clay cup. Their expression was inscrutable, but some of the tension eased from their shoulders when Len rolled into a sitting position and rubbed at his face.
“You got me out of there,” he said in a monotone, unsure exactly how he was supposed to feel about that fact.
The sidhe raised an elfin eyebrow at him.
“Not I, human,” they said, and took another slow sip of tea.
Len stared blankly for a few seconds, trying to decide if he had the mental energy to pursue the conversation any further. He was leaning toward ‘no’ when a figure entered through the mouth of the cave. For a moment, all Len could process was the fact that the vines half-obscuring the opening were wilt
ed and limp.
Then he took in the platinum hair pulled back in intricate braids, and the green silk tunic over black leather boots and breeches—clean and unmarked, as though they’d been put on fresh only recently. Len froze, blinking rapidly. The figure stayed solidly real.
“I was unable to find game or easy foraging in the immediate vicinity,” Albigard said. “The Hunt has—” He cut himself off, his gaze falling on Len. “You’re awake. Are you well?”
Len continued to stare. “But...” he said slowly. “That’s... you’re not...”
“I am not a specter, or a hallucination,” Albigard told him. “You have my word on it—though perhaps such a declaration does not hold as much weight as it once did.”
Len climbed to his feet, swaying a bit when his head protested the change in elevation. Albigard approached him cautiously, putting a hand out to steady him by an elbow.
The grip seemed real—skin on skin, warm and alive.
I felt you die, Len wanted to say. He couldn’t though, because his lungs had seized at the first touch, and now they were working triple time... great, heaving gasps that did nothing to force back the dizziness making his vision waver.
Fingers cupped his cheek, and eyes the color of spring leaves filled Len’s awareness, leaving room for nothing else.
“It would please me if you were calm,” Albigard said in a low, resonant tone. “All is not well, but I am still with you. And, in fairness, things do seem considerably better now than they were a day ago.”
Len choked on a sob of recognition, as his rampaging emotions yielded to a control not his own—the tension draining out of him and leaving him lightheaded. This was no ghost standing in front of him and manipulating his emotions... but a solid, living Albigard, flexing his magic like the entitled Fae asshole he was.
That trick had never worked very well on Len, and it took him only a moment to snap the control now. He reached a hand out to hook Albigard by the back of the neck and pull him forward until their foreheads rested together. His eyes slid closed as the most profound relief he’d ever felt in his life swept over him.
“How?” he whispered.
Albigard swallowed, his throat clicking. He made no move to pull away, speaking into their shared air.
“You would appear to have more insight into that question than I. My last memory is of asking you not to leave me... and your lips on mine.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Then I woke up in the dark to find you collapsed across me, barely conscious. The tunnel leading into the underground cavern was blocked by debris and crackling with necromantic power, but my magic was back. I was able to call up a portal leading to the surface and carry you through it. The cat-sidhe was waiting, and brought us back here via a second portal.”
“I thought I was hallucinating,” Len said hoarsely.
Albigard eased back, his brow furrowing in concern. “So I gathered.”
“Tell us everything you can remember, human,” the cat-sidhe ordered. They still held the cup of steaming tea, and had not risen during Len’s brief breakdown. But their green eyes were intent now, demanding answers.
Len sank down to sit on the pallet, feeling unaccountably relieved when Albigard joined him, perching primly on the edge of the bedding, shoulder to shoulder. He took a deep breath, trying to gather his thoughts into some kind of coherent narrative.
“When we first went into the tunnel, a lot of the roots seemed to be damaged,” he began. “But others were only dormant, I guess. Albigard touched one of them and it whipped out and caught him by the wrist...”
He recounted the way the roots had trapped the Fae and used him to lure the Wild Hunt within reach... the way the Hunt had nearly escaped, and Len had collapsed the tunnel to trap it without truly understanding how he’d done it.
He described watching as the Hunt’s darkness was pulled through the roots and siphoned into the body of the tree. Then, the reverse—something bright and golden traveling from inside the tree and into Albigard’s body. He tried to put his confused flashes of consciousness into words—Albigard’s heart bursting back into life beneath his ear, the gasp of breath as he’d regained awareness.
As Len finished speaking, something that had been circling at the edges of his thoughts for days now finally coalesced into solidity. He poked at it, trying to turn it around and see all the angles, wondering if it could really be that simple—because if so, the Fae Court had a hell of a lot to answer for.
The cat-sidhe gave Albigard a contemplative look. “Well, then, Albigard of the Unseelie. It appears that Mother Dhuinne has more use for you in the realm of the living than the dead.”
At Len’s side, Albigard appeared faintly dazed by both the retelling, and the sidhe’s declaration.
“You believe my soul—and my magic—were returned to my body by the world tree... with conscious intent?” he asked cautiously.
The cat-sidhe shrugged. “You both seem to agree that the Hunt killed you, and there is little question that Chaima absorbed the Hunt immediately afterward. I see no other explanation.”
“Albigard thought Nigellus might be able to use the Hunt as a conduit to reach Rans and Zorah’s souls,” Len reminded the sidhe, trying to follow the logic to its conclusion. “Maybe Chaima did something similar? Or Dhuinne did, I guess, because they seem to be the same thing.”
“Your reasoning is sound,” said the sidhe. “The next step will be to see what sort of effect the Hunt’s absorption has had on Dhuinne’s magical imbalance. One assumes it can only be a positive development, but it still does not address the underlying cause. That part remains a mystery.”
Len took a deep, steadying breath, and spoke. “No it doesn’t. After seeing what I saw in that cavern, I think I know exactly what’s causing the problem.”
FOURTEEN
TWO SETS OF matching green eyes fell on Len with the weight of utter disbelief. He tried not to take it personally, since apparently no one on Dhuinne had managed to figure out the answer to the mystery in more than two hundred years of trying.
“It’s the Unseelie,” he said. “The roots of Chaima are sick, and the roots are elemental magic. Unseelie magic. But you’ve been sending the Unseelie to Earth for hundreds of years—sending them as changelings, ever since you won the war against the demons.”
The cat-sidhe’s lips parted. Albigard looked blank with shock.
“Don’t you see?” Len asked. “At this point, there’s probably more Unseelie magic on Earth than there is on Dhuinne. And the Hunt is basically Unseelie magic on steroids, right? It must have been attracted to Earth for ages now—like to like. So when the Court told it to hunt Albigard, and Albigard was on Earth, of course it broke through the veil to go after him.”
His audience of two continued to stare at him with matching gobsmacked expressions. He cleared his throat, starting to feel more than a little self-conscious under the scrutiny.
“I think I first realized it properly when Chaima’s roots went for Albigard like a cat going after a mouse, but they ignored me completely,” he said. “I was too out of it at the time to really put it together, but it was as though they were ravenous for Unseelie energy. Albigard’s. The Wild Hunt’s. Maybe they couldn’t suck anything out of Albigard because his magic was already gone, but they still sensed what he was. The roots are growing too weak to support the tree—that’s why it’s tilting. If it goes on for too long, it’ll fall... and I’m guessing that would be bad with a capital B.”
The cat-sidhe was still gaping at him. When he stopped speaking, the little Fae closed their mouth very deliberately and locked eyes with Albigard. “I will never question the perspicacity or intelligence of humans again,” they said.
“I may,” Albigard replied. “But when I do, you are welcome to remind me of this moment.”
“So, I’m right?” Len pressed. “Because, to be fair I’m pulling this theory straight out of my ass. But it’s the only thing I can see that fits all the facts.”
“As yo
u say, human,” the cat-sidhe agreed. “I cannot refute the logic.”
Albigard still looked decidedly dazed. “Mab’s green garden. There are easily ten thousand Unseelie on Earth at present. Trying to recall all of them...”
It was Len’s turn to be taken aback. “Ten... thousand? Changelings? As in, your people have kidnapped ten thousand human babies from Earth?”
He shook his head. “No, not changelings. Not all of them. That practice began as a way to subvert a particular treaty provision with the demons. Hell had negotiated a tithe from the Fae in exchange for peace—one-tenth of the children on Dhuinne were to be sent to them. That, along with Ransley Thorpe’s survival, was the major concession we made in order to end the war quickly, after the rest of the vampires were killed.”
“The demons neglected to specify that the children in question be Fae,” the cat-sidhe added. “An omission I have always found interesting. Of course, the Court immediately sidestepped the provision by bringing human infants to Dhuinne, and sending them to Hell in place of our own children.”
Albigard took up the thread again. “Fae are long-lived, and there are relatively few births—fewer than ever in recent years, perhaps due to the very same imbalance of magic we’re currently discussing. Whatever the case, I would estimate that fewer than one thousand of the Unseelie on Earth are changelings. The rest are like me, sent to Earth because they were needed as additional support for the Fae power structure within the human realm.”
Len knew he was still reeling from the previous day’s events. He didn’t really have the excess brainpower to devote to details, so he focused on the bottom line. “It doesn’t matter. The Court needs to call them back to Dhuinne, or things are only going to get worse.”
Utter silence greeted the words, as the other two exchanged glances.
“What?” Len demanded.
“Let us say that there is likely to be considerable resistance to that conclusion,” the cat-sidhe replied.
Forsaken Fae: The Complete Series, Books 1-3 (Last Vampire World) Page 45