Institute of the Shadow Fae Box Set

by C. N. Crawford

  “And you’re fine?” I slurred.

  She nodded. “We think it came from Arubian’s palace. At least, that’s what I think. Ruadan and Aengus aren’t doing much thinking at all.”

  I glanced at Aengus again. For just a moment, a vicious look in his eyes sent ice through my blood, and his face seemed to transform, dark veins streaking his skin. Then, his jaw went slack again, eyes unfocused. My blood surged.

  Was I hallucinating?

  Focus. “Where is everyone?”

  “All the other knights are still out searching for Baleros. Searching for something to do with Nan and Hal. Quite frankly, we don’t really know what we’re doing right now.”

  “Don’t trust,” said Aengus. “Don’t trust Arianna. Parry … honor….”

  My lip curled, fingers tightening into fists. I come from the Horseman of Death, and I will end you. Aengus was making me angry, using what seemed to be the last of his dwindling brain power to cast doubt on me. I wanted to shut him up.

  Aengus managed to point at me. “Who … are your parents?”

  The death instinct swooped through my skull, threatening to erupt. Phantom wings tingled on my shoulder blades. It’s time to let you know the truth about myself. I lunged for Aengus, then slammed my fist hard into his jaw.

  I reared back my hand to hit him again, but a piercing scream stopped me.

  I whirled to find Melusine staring at us, gripping the book. “Stop! Both of you!” she shouted. “Look, I see two people under the effects of the poison getting angry, I think maybe the poison is at fault. That’s just me.”

  I unclenched my fist, still staring at Aengus. Guilt flooded me. The guy was near death, and I’d just bashed him in the skull.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m not thinking. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” I couldn’t stop saying the word.

  “Shhhh,” said Melusine. “Just stay away from him. You two both need to keep a distance.”

  Melusine was talking sense, as usual.

  “Right,” I conceded. “Where is Ruadan? Out searching with the other knights?”

  She flipped a page in the book, and the gesture looked angry. I’d annoyed her. “No, Ruadan and Aengus never made it out, because of the poison. Ruadan is doing better than Aengus, on account of Ruadan being a demigod and Aengus being just your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill fae.” She cocked her head. “Doesn’t explain why you’re doing better than Aengus. I guess we’ll get to that later. Right now, we have to stop Aengus from dying, because the poison is eating his brain at an alarming rate. Ruadan and his mum went outside to try to kill humans.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I drawled. “And the booms?”

  Melusine cleared her throat. “Humans have made makeshift nail bombs. Full of scraps of iron that can kill fae. They’re lobbing them through the hole in the moat.”

  My skin grew cold, and my mind cleared for a moment. “Ruadan is out there, delirious, in the middle of nail bombs?”

  Melusine shrugged. “Queen Macha is with him, feeding off their deaths.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. I needed to caution them about something—there was an added danger there, if I could just put my finger on it. Thoughts wafted through my mind like dandelion seeds in the wind, and I reached out to snatch one.

  “Wait. Wait. Arubian was right. If the humans see Ruadan killing them, they’ll turn on us. We can’t fight them all. This is bad PR. Very bad.”

  Even in my fog of confusion, I was beginning to understand that we were screwed. We had only a few hours left till the Plague hit. Humans were attacking us. Oh, and we’d been poisoned.

  Baleros was about to win again—because, of course, he always did.

  Aengus’s skin was shot through with dark veins once more, and his head lolled. Just moments ago, I had been ready to batter him to death. Now, panic gripped me at the sight of him withering before my eyes. The only one still functioning here was Melusine.

  “What have you found in your books?” I demanded.

  She scratched her cheek. “I found in the literature references to a legendary unicorn named Nan. That’s about it.”

  I winced. “I don’t suppose the unicorn is a promising lead?”

  “No.” She pulled out another book. “And I haven’t been able to spend long on that. I’m trying to figure out the poisons first. One thing at a time, you know what I mean?” She cracked the book open.

  Whispers sounded around my head, breath on my neck. I leaned against a column to steady myself, and dread tightened my chest. “We’re running out of time.” I had a bad feeling that as time dwindled, Ruadan would simply give himself over to Baleros. He’d stand in front of the gate in iron cuffs.

  I bit my lip hard. I shouldn’t have killed Arubian so fast.

  From the floor, Aengus was trying to say the word “unicorn.”

  I crossed my arms, gripping my own biceps hard to try to clear my thoughts.

  Nan … Nan … Nan….

  Queen Nan....

  The pain of my own grip helped me clear my head a little to think. There was something familiar about the name Nan, if I could only grasp onto it.

  Nan … Queen Nan’s lace….

  “I know the name Nan.” I started pacing, closing my eyes. “You should have woken me up earlier. I could have figured this out.”

  I was mentally ticking over the name Nan. It was such a plain, solid, unsexy name, that it had stuck in my brain….

  “Nan,” I said at last. “Nan Bullen.”

  Melusine looked up from her book. “Who?”

  “The demoness queen I saved from one of the hell worlds. Her name is Nan Bullen. Queen. She lives in one of the empty rooms here. Didn’t know what else to do with her after I saved her.” Melusine and Aengus just stared at me as I swayed on my feet. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

  Chapter 90

  Dressed in her green gown, Queen Nan Bullen swanned into the throne room, a golden crown gleaming on her dark hair. In her six-fingered hand, she held a long, thin cigarette.

  She took a puff, the smoke curling around her. “You called for a queen?”

  Might as well get right to the point. “Do the names Nan and Burly Hal mean anything to you?”

  She strode up to the empty throne like she owned it, then draped herself in the chair, letting her legs dangle over the edge. She chuckled darkly. “Nan and Burly Hal. How could you not know? Forgotten so quickly, time fleeth before us like a hind through the wood.”

  Oh, please get to the point. I wasn’t sure I could keep myself standing much longer.

  It was at that point that Ruadan strode into the room, his dark clothing glistening with blood. He looked a lot steadier than I felt, but his eyes were pure black.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “This is Queen Nan,” I slurred. “Did you fix the problem outside?”

  “No.”

  The queen cocked her head at Ruadan, smiling coquettishly. “Have you come to praise my beauty? I’ll accept a poem.”

  Dark magic whirled around her, and in it, I saw wolves and stags forming. She tapped her cigarette holder, and ash dropped onto the floor in a neat little pile before the throne.

  Ruadan’s magic iced the room. “Do you know who Burly Hal is?”

  Queen Nan’s sigh was a delicate thing. “Do you know I didn’t even feel it when they cut off my head? He brought in a French swordsman. That, at least, was a nice gesture. If I’d made a spectacle of myself like the Countess of Salisbury, running around with chunks out of my flesh as the axeman chased me, I’d have never lived it down in my hell world. Not that they gave me much respect, anyway.” She pointed at a tall, peaked window. “My death spot was just over there. My blood stained the stones, dripping through the wooden scaffold. Noble blood, not that it spared my life.”

  At last, even with the fog in my mind, I started to piece it together.

  And apparently, Ruadan had, too, because he said, “Queen Anne Boleyn.”

/>   She lifted her hand. “Didn’t have six fingers when I was alive. The gods gave me an extra one in the hell world. Bastards.”

  She looked at me, her dark eyes enchanting.

  “You want Burly Hal? He was my husband, Henry VIII. You killed his demon form in the hell world. Thank you for that. He was a deeply unpleasant person.”

  “What was the home built for you?” Ruadan was rubbing a knot in his forehead. “We need to know, now.”

  Another delicate sigh. “He had the whole place engraved with our initials, intertwined. True love, it was. Until he moved on—”

  “The home,” Ruadan barked. “A palace?”

  Those dandelion seeds of thoughts wafted through my mind…. A Tudor palace … pearls and silk.

  I scowled at Ruadan. “Weren’t you alive when it was built? You should know this.”

  “I hardly paid attention to human affairs,” he shot back. “Humans are alive one instant and dead the next. There’s not much point in learning their names.”

  “Quite true in my case,” said Nan, her smile electrifying. She seemed to be enjoying the attention so much, I had a feeling she wouldn’t let it escape her grasp so quickly. She’d cling to it like a drowning woman clung to a branch. “I’ll accept a love poem as payment.”

  I glanced at Melusine, who was still flipping furiously through a book about poison.

  Ruadan stared at Nan, his whole body tensed, a lion about to strike. I had the impression he was fighting his natural impulse to simply attack and terrify her until she gave him what he wanted, but some gentlemanly part of him reined it in. He stood there, shadows cutting the air around him.

  “He’d be really bad at poetry even on the best of days. No good,” I said. “He barely speaks, and when he does, it’s usually about death. But he has the nicest muscles.” I giggled.

  Shit. Had I said that out loud?

  Nan blinked her long eyelashes. “A song, then, from the muscled gentleman! Compose me a song, dedicated to my beauty.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” I shouted, losing patience. “If you want romance, Aengus can sort of paw at you. He’s lonely and he has soft hands since he never worked a real day in his life.”

  She flashed me a look of pure, hot rage. Right. So it wasn’t lust she was after, but actual courtly love or whatever. Something I honestly didn’t understand.

  I turned to Ruadan, grabbing his arm. “Can you make her one of your floral wreaths?”

  Ruadan cut me a sharp look, and I knew he was still considering violence. He’d be producing neither a crown, nor a poem, nor a song. See, men never had to be flexible in that way. He could just stand there, rigid as a rock, and say this is who I am, and I’ll be fucked if I’m changing. Women—like me and Queen Nan here—we were used to being mutable. I could be flirtatious when the situation called for it, or aggressive when I needed someone to fear me. I could be funny or flattering, or I could take charge. I didn’t necessarily do it all well, but I was used to adapting.

  Perhaps I had to field this one.

  I stepped forward, struggling to keep my balance.

  “Beautiful queen.” I stumbled over my words. “Your beauty is like a moon, and also like jewels, and like … dew on the grass. And your eyes are like—” I let out a long breath. “A lovely pair of beetles. No. Those dark volcanic stones, and like the black heart at the center of Queen Nan’s lace. Cheeks like … pink flowery petals made of skin.” I winced. “Breasts like two fleshy flotation devices.”

  Well, I’d done my best.

  She nodded, satisfied. “Fair enough. Hampton Court—”

  “Hampton Court Palace!” Melusine shouted, hand raised. “I just remembered.”

  “Thanks Melusine,” I said. “Very helpful.”

  Queen Nan leaned back in the throne. “It’s not fortified like this place is. No tower walls to keep it in. Has your enemy got a powerful army, by any chance, to defend him?”

  “Yes,” I sighed. Somehow, Queen Nan had become part of our strategic planning process, since she was one of the few here who could think straight. “And we haven’t got an army.”

  “I’ll go into the palace on my own,” said Ruadan. “I’m leaving now.”

  “How?” I asked. “Night hasn’t fully fallen yet. You won’t be able to shadow-leap around.”

  “I can create night.” He looked dazed. “We can’t waste any more time.”

  “Wait.” My jaw dropped. “You can create night?”

  A flicker of night darkness swirled around his powerful body. “It’s a temporary, artificial night. The sun seems to disappear, the stars come out.” Ruadan scrubbed his hand over his jaw, eyes on the floor as he thought. “But the only problem is … the only problem is….”

  Ruadan was struggling to finish his thought. I, too, understood there was something wrong with this plan, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Melusine raised her hand. “It would instantly alert Baleros that you were there.”

  BOOM. The walls shook. Apparently, the humans weren’t done hurling their grenades at us. I held onto a column to stabilize myself, woozy as hell.

  “Not to mention,” Melusine added, “you’ve all been poisoned. Am I right? You wouldn’t be able to create night that easily.”

  Ruadan paced the room, not answering. “Night will fall in two and a half hours,” he eventually said. “That leaves us only a half hour after darkness falls….” His dark gaze went unfocused again.

  Three hours left. When I closed my eyes, my mind filled with images of rotting bodies in the street. I gasped, opening my eyes again.

  I bit my lip hard to clear my thoughts, then began pacing furiously across the floor. “You can’t attack him like this. Even if we find the palace, you’ll be dead within moments unless you’re completely sharp. He’ll be ready for you,” I muttered.

  “We have to be prepared for the fact that Adonis might be there,” said Ruadan.

  I closed my eyes, and my father’s image flashed in my mind like a lightning bolt. Blue eyes, golden skin, black hair. Once we achieved our objectives—once Ruadan killed Baleros, my father was next on his list. Then me. Would this happen tonight?

  At every moment, I was moving closer to the execution block—my father and me, moving up together. My blood would drip through the scaffold onto the stones below.

  Not if I got the mist army first. Whoever killed Baleros got his army. Ruadan had said he needed the immortal army to kill Adonis. Maybe he needed it to kill me, too.

  I bit my lip so hard I pierced the skin. Blood pooled in my mouth, and I forced those thoughts out of my mind.

  I had to go with him. I had to kill Baleros before he did.

  “I’ll go with you,” I blurted. “Once darkness falls completely, you can distill your Wraith magic. That thing that makes it so hard to see you. Give me that, too.” I held up a hand, wiggling my fingers. “Look. You can put it in a ring, and I’ll slip in with you. I can wear the lumen crystal. I’ll zoom around the palace, all silent, until I find him. Until I find Adonis.” I shook my head. Not Adonis. “Baleros. Until I find Baleros.”

  Ruadan was rubbing his forehead again. “I need to be the one to kill Baleros. I need to restrain him and take him through the portal. Only I can do that. I just can’t think….”

  BOOM.

  I gritted my teeth at the explosion. The humans were really starting to piss me off at this point.

  “I’ll send ravens out,” said Ruadan. “They’ll swoop over Hampton Court Palace now, and they’ll report back if anything seems unusual. Fortifications, guards, weapons, anything. In the meantime, I’m calling back all the knights from the search for Baleros. We need them on top of every gate, patrolling every outer wall.”

  “Except we can’t just kill them,” I said. What would Baleros do? “We need the humans on our side. Create a tyrant.”

  Ruadan’s lip twitched. “One who oppresses the masses.”

  “Execute him publicly,” I added.

&
nbsp; “I’m afraid I’m a bit lost here,” said Melusine. “Anyone care to fill me in?”

  “Turning the tables on Baleros,” said Ruadan. “Framing him for the killing we’re about to do.”

  “Fighting back against the humans while making it clear Baleros is behind all this,” I said. “Let them think he’s in power here.”

  Melusine frowned. “And how are we supposed to convince Londoners that Baleros has taken over the Institute within the next few hours?”

  “We fly his flag over the tower,” said Ruadan. “Create the impression that he’s invaded.”

  Aengus groaned from the floor. “My head. My head. Headddd.”

  Oh, right. Aengus was about to die from poison. “Have you found anything useful yet, Melusine?” I snapped. “We’re about to lose one of our knights here.”

  “Give me a minute,” shouted Melusine, flipping another page. “It’s not as simple as— Oh, hang on. This is it! The poison. It’s from Arubian’s hounds. All you need is a skilled fae mage to reverse it, one who knows potions from the Old Gods. If you don’t, it says here in the literature that immediate death follows a period of delirium and decreasing mental acuity. The brain literally turns to liquid. So that’s unpleasant.”

  Shit.

  “Good,” said Ruadan, absentmindedly. “But we have no mages skilled in the magic of the Old Gods. Not since Esther got into a fight with the gorta and starved to death in the grass moat.”

  “Kill me,” said Aengus weakly.

  Mum. My mother had known the magic of the Old Gods. She’d know what to do.

  If only I’d paid attention to her lessons before she died….

  Chapter 91

  I swallowed hard, tiredness creeping up on me, stirring up my thoughts. My mother had known about the Old Gods—she’d known all about them. She’d be able to cure us all. A dark laugh escaped me, echoing off the stone.

  My father had killed the person who could save us now.

  My confusion had sharp edges, a dark delirium. I’d died once. Iron sword right through my heart. I’d drifted into the afterworld, and my father had caught me. I clamped my eyes shut, the possibilities swarming in my mind.