“The caveat being that if an agent of the Enemy from Beyond reveals itself in a manner too public for the Council too suppress, or if such an agent becomes an immediate threat to the general public of Tír na nÓg, the members of the War Council are allowed to inform all relevant personnel of the critical details relating to the enemy.”
“And all of us here are…relevant personnel?” O’Sullivan asked, clearly skeptical that four people from Earth could warrant the designation.
But Maguire nodded in confirmation. “Vincent Whelan and his close associates were deemed important agents of the court some months ago, when it became apparent that their interference in Abarta’s plans was effective enough to substantially slow his progress toward his goal of awakening the other Tuatha.
“While they may not continue to serve in that capacity once the shadow war is brought to light and Abarta formally acknowledged for what he is, it is unlikely that they will be summarily cast aside. Particularly since Earth is still at risk from Abarta’s far-reaching machinations. Sídhe or not, they possess enough power and skill in certain areas to be of use to the court in specific affairs.
“Furthermore, as Whelan himself has already been peripherally informed of the enemy’s existence by the King of the Cats, and
has now been singled out as a target by the Interloper, it would be negligent of me not to give him an idea of what he may be facing if the enemy continues to classify him as a person of interest.”
There was a question buried in that last sentence, one she wanted me to answer.
I shook my head. “I have no idea why that thing singled me out.”
“Yet it wasted the element of surprise,” she said, “to lure you into a trap that would inevitably end in its public exposure.
When instead it could have used McCullough’s body to infiltrate the High Command, or even the palace.”
“Honestly, I don’t know what it sought to gain by attacking me.”
I shimmied out of the quilt and draped it over the back of my chair. The abnormal chill still lingered in my bones, but it was no longer overwhelming. “What concerns me more than its reason for strangling me half to death is the fact that McCullough wasn’t possessed by this thing before I sent him portaling off to Maige Itha. And since he couldn’t have made any pit stops along the way, being that I bashed his face in beforehand, then that means the creature must have taken him after he arrived.”
Maguire rested her chin atop her hands. “So the Interloper was already in Maige Itha, hidden within one of Abarta’s cohorts.”
“If it’s been observing Abarta for any period of time,” Orlagh said, “then it, and presumably its master, this Enemy from Beyond, must already be well aware of Abarta’s capabilities.”
“Maybe that’s why it set out to attack Whelan.” Boyle rubbed his injured eye. “Maybe the enemy has already forged an alliance with Abarta, and as a measure of good faith, the enemy offered to attempt to eliminate one of Abarta’s adversaries. Whelan has partially foiled his plans and escaped his wrath several times now, so it would make sense to use him as a ‘test run’ of this new alliance.”
“That is just speculation,” O’Sullivan pointed out.
“But it is not a poor theory,” General Maguire said. “And with the Interloper liable to corrupt anyone in Tír na nÓg, we must assume the worst has come to pass—that the Enemy from Beyond has made a powerful ally in the war against the sídhe—until the assumption definitively proves untrue.”
Odette sniffed loudly. “So, can we skip to the part where you explain exactly what the Interloper is?”
“And what the ‘enemy’ is for that matter?” Indira added quietly.
Maguire gave Odette a bland look, likely recalling the rude gesture she’d flashed during the inquest. “I am afraid I cannot
give you a clear description of either one, as we do not truly understand the nature of the Enemy from Beyond and its various agents. What I can tell you is that the Interloper is a sentient entity with no defined form.
“It cannot be harmed by traditional magic means, or by regular weapons. It is not dissuaded by wards, much less doors and walls; it goes wherever it pleases and kills whoever it chooses. Despite numerous encounters with the Interloper in more than a dozen realms, our intelligence operatives have yet to determine a way to harm it, much less destroy it.”
“But you hurt it, didn’t you?” Orlagh asked. “In the inquest room.”
“I did not. All I did was ruin the functionality of its latest host.” Maguire pressed her thumbs into the underside of her chin, chagrined about the fact she couldn’t do more to stop the Interloper. “It has likely already found a new one, and unless it makes the same mistake it did in the inquest room, we will not know who has been corrupted until they make a damaging move.”
“You say ‘corrupted.’” I idly rubbed my abdomen. The infirmary head had patched it up with fresh gauze, and some magic-strengthened stitches for good measure, but it still hurt. “I’m guessing this thing doesn’t possess people in the usual way?”
“You guess correctly.” She sat up straight and dropped her interlocked hands onto the desktop. “The Interloper invades the soul like a parasite and feasts on everything. Magic energy. Life force. Memories. It eats and eats until there is nothing left but an empty shell, the person within destroyed completely.”
Orlagh said hesitantly, “So McCullough is not only dead? He’s also…gone?”
“Yes. He exists no more.”
That was the most horrifying thing I had ever heard. I’d seen plenty of souls get destroyed recently, robbing innocents of their deserved afterlives. But the destruction in those cases had been swift.
The concept of having your soul slowly eaten and digested by some heinous creature while you could do nothing but look on and suffer in silence because it was also in total control of your body…God, I wasn’t even sure McCullough deserved an end that awful.
I brought a hand to my neck, ghosting my fingers over the tender skin. “Was that what it was trying to do to me?”
Maguire let out a thoughtful hum. “I believe so. Strange that it did not work, but we have gleaned very little about the
Interloper’s nature. We do know that the agents of the enemy, the Interloper included, cannot cross the veil to Earth. So it is possible that the Interloper’s lack of experience in possessing those with human blood is what protected you.”
“Great,” Odette drawled. “So us piddly humans give the soul-eating monster indigestion. That’s a better defense than we have against most of the big bads from the Otherworld.”
Indira pursed her lips. “Is the Interloper from the Otherworld though? It works for something called the ‘Enemy from Beyond.’”
“To be quite frank,” Maguire said, “we have no clue where the enemy and its agents came from, only that they don’t seem to have emerged from any known realm in the Otherworld.”
“But what is the enemy?” Orlagh asked. “What form does it take?
Is it like the Interloper?”
Maguire half raised her hands. “Your guess is as good as mine. We have never come into contact with the enemy itself, only its agents, of which the Interloper is the most dangerous. The only reason we even know that the enemy exists is because, some years ago, a high-level team of intelligence operatives captured one of its agents. During the ensuing interrogation, the agent confessed to servitude of a greater power and admitted this power was responsible for a disturbing cosmic phenomenon that the courts had first noticed decades prior.”
Unease rolled through my gut. “The disappearing realms.”
Maguire’s focus snapped back to me. “Tildrum told you of this?”
“No, Hel did. During my visit to Niflheim several months ago.”
“Hold on,” said O’Sullivan. “What realms have disappeared?”
“Realms whose names you do not know,” Maguire answered, “for they lay far beyond the influence of Tír na nÓg.”
�
�And the enemy is making them…disappear?” asked Boyle, nervous fingers dancing against the edge of the bookshelf behind him.
Maguire dipped her head. “We believe so. Though the method by which the enemy does this is still unknown to us. A century ago, when news of the phenomenon first reached the courts, we sent numerous operatives on the very long trip to that corner of the Otherworld in search of answers. But only a handful returned, and those who did brought back more questions.
“What I can tell you is this: The disappearing process always works the same way. One day, seemingly out of the blue, a realm becomes spatially locked. You are no longer able to portal in, and no one is able to portal out.
“Then, over the course of the next week or so, the realm vanishes the way an eclipse falls over a land, a great black shadow stretching across and across, until there is nothing left of the realm but the empty space where it used to be. No one who lives in this realm is ever heard from again, and their fate remains a complete unknown.”
Palpable terror welled up in the room like a fog on a stormy summer day.
O’Sullivan cleared her throat. “So, if we have never confronted the enemy directly, then what sort of war have we been fighting all this time?”
“A war of tricks and traps,” Maguire said, “the kind of war that comes most natural to the fae. Up until now, we have had only two goals: to capture, interrogate, and destroy as many of the enemy’s agents as possible, and to prevent the enemy from launching an incursion into any realms among the core of the Otherworld, particularly those with which Tír na nÓg is allied.
Regrettably, we have largely failed to achieve the first, as most of the enemy’s agents are nearly as difficult to capture as the Interloper.
“As for the second, well, we have only been successful because the enemy has not yet made a play for the core realms. If and when it does, it is possible that all the extra defenses we have spent decades constructing will crumble just as quickly as the defenses of those realms that have fallen before. Simply put, our continued failure to acquire critical information regarding the enemy’s nature has crippled our ability to prepare for its potential future assault on the core.”
Orlagh bit the inside of her cheek. “If the threat this enemy poses is so great, why keep the war in the shadows for so long?
Why not put the whole realm on high alert and divert greater resources to the cause?”
“Because we have countless foes,” Maguire said immediately. “And so do the powers of the other realms with which we have formed a loose coalition to combat the enemy. Abarta is one strong adversary among many, and we have ample proof that the enemy’s agents will promise anyone anything in order to sow as much discord as possible among the realms that would offer the strongest resistance to a direct attack by the enemy.”
“Which is why it must be our imperative,” said a new voice, “to cripple any and all adversaries of the sídhe.”
Everyone looked to the deep sill of the stone-framed window at the back of the room. Which, until a second ago, had been occupied by several stacks of brown paper folders and a few gold paperweights. All the folders and paperweights had somehow been
moved to the floor without making a sound, and in their place lounged Tom Tildrum, reading a copy of Crime and Punishment .
General Maguire crossed her arms. “I could’ve sworn this room was warded against teleportation.”
“It is,” Tildrum replied. “Your point?”
She stared him down with an expression just short of a glower.
“The point of those wards is to dissuade the entry of uninvited guests.”
“Oh?” His lips quirked up at one end. “They’re not doing a very good job then.”
“Obviously.” Maguire turned her chair so she could see all of us and Tildrum at the same time. “I assume your visit has a purpose, cat sídhe?”
“Indeed it does, General.” Tildrum raised two fingers, and a folded piece of paper appeared between them. He tossed the paper toward the general’s desk, and it landed in the exact center, face down, showcasing a blue wax seal with an imprint of Mab’s personal sigil stamped into it.
Maguire snatched up the paper, broke the seal with a practiced thumb, and scanned the message, her gray eyebrows arching as she absorbed what must have been a direct order from Mab. “Is this why you came to Tír na nÓg?” she directed at us. ‘To seek out the Morrígan?”
I was completely unsurprised that Tildrum knew about our plan to find the Morrígan. He probably had cats living in the walls of my house.
“Yes,” I said. “We have reason to believe the Morrígan has the ability to assume command of the Wild Hunt.”
“Ah, I see.” She dug another piece of paper out of the stack on the desk. “This relates to the notice I received earlier, about the Hunt riding on Earth, pursuant to some sort of ritual being conducted by Abarta and his vampire ally?”
“Yes, General,” Orlagh said. “We unfortunately failed to prevent the vampire lord from completing the second stage of the ritual, so the Hunt will ride on Earth in roughly seven hours if we do not find a way to control it.”
Maguire set both papers down, contemplative. “And Earth’s cities do not currently possess the defensive capabilities necessary to withstand the Hunt’s power. So it is likely more than one will fall before the barriers can be effectively augmented. Because doing so will require an influx of high-ranking sídhe soldiers to work a great deal of complex magic atop Queen Mab’s original barrier spells.”
“We do not believe such a devastating blow to the already fragile human civilization is an acceptable outcome,” Orlagh said firmly.
“So we’re seeking an alternative.”
Maguire tapped a gloved finger on the new message. “Seeking out the Morrígan may not be a viable alternative though. She is a volatile being at the best of times, and her bloodlust is unparalleled by even the most vicious of Unseelie warriors.
Instead of offering you help, even in the form of a binding deal, she may take delight in watching the Hunt raze the cities of Earth.”
“Not if we offer her a front-row seat to a better war,” said Tildrum in a sing-song voice.
Maguire shot him a hard look. “You refer to the war with the Enemy from Beyond.”
“I do.” He licked his fingertip and used it to turn the page of his book, never taking his eyes off the printed words as he spoke. “Queen Mab believes that the appearance of the Interloper in Tír na nÓg is the first harbinger of a great escalation in the conflict with the unknown enemy. As such, both queens in concert have just agreed not only to finally shine a light on the shadow war but also to immediately and aggressively alter the tactics we’ve been using to fight it.
“From this point on, it will be the goal of both courts to recruit the many venerable powers of Tír na nÓg to the cause of defending the realm from the machinations of the unknown enemy.
And among the first the court will seek to recruit is the walking essence of war known as the Morrígan.”
I spit out a dry laugh. “You’re really planning to use the lure of a greater conflict to convince the Morrígan to help us redirect the Hunt away from Earth?”
“No,” Tildrum said. “I’m planning to have you and your motley crew attempt to convince the Morrígan to help you redirect the Hunt away from Earth by using the lure of a greater conflict.”
He raised his fingers again, and a second paper appeared. “Herein lie the terms upon which the queens are willing to bargain in order to obtain the Morrígan’s assistance in the war with the enemy. By order of Queen Mab, it is your task, Vincent Whelan, to convey this offer to the Morrígan before the Hunt rides at the minute of dusk in Kinsale, North Carolina.”
He threw the paper at my face like it was a knife, and I grabbed it just before the corner poked my eye out.
“So Mab’s dropping all the subterfuge and just giving me direct orders now, huh?” I grumbled.
“Does there lurk within her commands somet
hing objectionable to your bizarre human morals?” he asked with a barely masked sneer, a sharp tooth peeking out from beneath his curled lips.
“Well, no. But it’s the principle—”
He lifted a single finger, and his glamour wavered, revealing a very sharp claw that had once nicked my throat during a conversation much more threatening than this one. “Unless you have some logical objection, Vincent Whelan, then stop complaining and get to work. You have hours to save the world you choose to call home, and we have little time more to re-devise all the strategies we have been utilizing for decades to defend this realm against the enemy and its agents. Therefore, every cog in this grand war machine must perform its assigned task with minimal squeaking, lest the whole operation grind to a halt.”
With that, the King of the Cats unraveled into a set of rippling ribbons that somehow phased right through the thick, warded window and flew off across the expanse of the Unseelie Court.
No one spoke for a short while after that perturbing display.
Then Odette said, “God, that guy really is a creepy fuck.”
Chapter Seven
Seven Hours Till Dusk
After Tildrum’s dramatic exit, General Maguire rubber-stamped our mission to locate the Morrígan, as the missive she’d received from Camhaoir contained direct orders relating to the matter.
Orders she couldn’t defy no matter how hopeless she considered the prospect of convincing an ancient war goddess to come out of hiding and join forces with the courts after fifteen hundred years in isolation.
Despite her inability to circumvent Mab’s commands in favor of her personal beliefs, however, she could append details to those commands as long as they were not contradictory in any way. So she offered us the aid of three additional soldiers, which would give us a five-person unit. What the army considered the minimum safe number of personnel to send on missions of consequence.
Under a light snow in the castle’s bailey, we met these three soldiers, each of them already mounted and ready to set off for the old forests.
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