And then someone is going to be very, very sorry they ever crossed me.
Odette reared up and kicked a skull halfway across the room.
“I’ve been sorting through bones for ten goddamn minutes, and I’ve found nothing but a mound of dead beetles and dried stains from bodily fluids I don’t even want to know the names of.
There’s nothing here, Whelan. There’s nothing here at all.”
“Unless the mourners are beetles.” Indira plucked one off the floor and gave it a critical look. “I hope the answer isn’t some sort of potion we have to mix from crushed beetles.”
Odette snatched the beetle and crushed it, then opened her palm to reveal the dark fragments. “They’re not white on the inside, or gold, so no, they’re not the answer.”
“Maybe they turn white from a chemical reaction?” Drake offered.
“It can’t be that complicated.” I squinted to reread the riddle through the wavering candlelight. “We’re missing something obvious. Let’s look at it from another angle. ‘Mourners’ are usually people, but we’ve already determined that the people in the chairs don’t qualify.”
Odette sighed. “But the only other people in the room are…”
The revelation descended.
“Us,” Indira said. “ We’re the mourners. We’re mourning all the people we recently lost.”
“But the riddle says the cure is hidden somewhere behind us,”
Drake said, “and when we first entered the room, the people at the table were behind us. We weren’t behind ourselves.”
“Maybe ‘behind you’ is the part that we aren’t supposed to take literally,” I said. “‘Behind’ could also be interpreted as
‘before.’ The cure could be something we obtained in the past.”
“That interpretation sounds logical to me.” Odette shot a worried look at Orlagh, who had gone unnaturally still. “But what the heck could we have obtained that can act as an antidote to Ellén Trechend venom? Only things I’ve got on me from this romp through the woods are the dirt on my shoes and the bits of leaves and flowers—”
“Flower!” I shouted, startling everyone. I frantically patted all my pockets until I found what I was looking for: a small black bag secured in a pocket over my heart. “The flower is white and gold.”
“What flower?” Drake asked.
I opened the bag and carefully shook it over my hand. The flower, now a little bent and a little torn and a little flat, slid out onto my palm. “This flower. It intentionally flew toward me and landed in my hand earlier, after I completed the first test.”
Everyone drew closer and stared at it.
“It does fit the riddle,” Indira said. “Vince is in mourning. He got the flower in the past. And the flower has a white ‘robe,’
aka petals, and a gold interior.”
“But what do we do with it?” Odette asked. “Feed it to her?”
“Spirits,” I muttered, pinching the very tip of one petal between my fingers. I pressed hard, until the moisture in the petal transferred to my glove. Then, in an admittedly foolish move, I stuck the tip of my gloved index finger into my mouth.
“Uh, Whelan…” Odette started.
“Spirits,” I repeated, tugging the finger from my mouth. “It tastes vaguely like alcohol, as if the flower is going through a fermentation process. That could feasibly produce some kind of chemical that counteracts the venom. I think we need to crush the flower up, maybe mix it with water, and then have Orlagh drink it.”
Odette slapped her palms against her thighs. “Well, if nobody’s got any other bright ideas, I say we go for that.”
Everyone pondered the idea for a hot minute, then murmured in agreement.
With a sense of urgency, we gathered a cup, a bowl, a pitcher of water, and a sturdy spoon from the table of suffering. I used the bottom of the spoon like a pestle, mashing the flower up in the bowl, with Odette’s steady metal hand pouring in tiny amounts of water every now and again. Once we had a thoroughly liquid mixture that smelled of alcohol, I carefully transferred the bowl’s contents to the cup.
Handing the cup off to Boyle, I watched in hushed suspense as the man tipped Orlagh’s head back and helped her swallow the liquid, one tiny sip at a time. She was so weak now that she almost couldn’t swallow at all.
It took nearly five minutes for Orlagh to get the whole cup down.
But by the time she swallowed the last sip, some of the color had already returned to her face. She was still groggy, her breathing a touch ragged, but the slurry of words that first emerged from her mouth were recognizable enough: “Thank you.”
Awkwardly, I patted her shoulder. “Anytime, Major Maguire. I always help my friends.”
Orlagh drew her lips into something that wouldn’t have been called a smile on any other day. “Are we friends, Whelan?”
“You’re a lot closer to a friend than Tom Tildrum, that’s for sure.”
Orlagh let out a wheeze that I thought was supposed to be a laugh. “You’re not going to let me live down that mistaken assumption, are you?”
“Well, I’ve got to have something to hold over your head.” I returned her smile. “Else you’ll go around telling everybody I’m
‘eccentric.’”
Her expression softened into amusement. “I speak only the truth on that matter. You are by far the most eccentric half-blood I have ever met.”
“Yeah, but I can do without an Unseelie officer of substantial influence telling every sídhe who’ll listen that I’m a major weirdo.”
“And here I thought you did not care what the sídhe think of you.”
“It’s not that I care on a personal level.” I waved my hand in the air, illustrating nothing of value. “It’s the principle of the thing. See, if you tell the sídhe that I’m—”
“Um, guys?” Drake cut in, his voice a fearful whisper.
“Something’s happening.”
Everybody spun around to face the table of suffering, save for Orlagh. She used Boyle’s arm to hoist herself to her feet, her back pressed against the wall as a cheap replacement for the balance she hadn’t yet regained.
Peering over my shoulder, Orlagh said in disgust, “What in Mab’s name is happening to those people?”
I’d gotten so used to the whimpers of the diners that the near constant sounds had merged into white noise. Consequently, I hadn’t noticed when the tone of the sounds shifted from pain and fear to sheer and utter panic.
All the people had stopped eating, and every one of them clutched their bulbous throats. Their fingernails uselessly clawed at the skin beneath which the invading creatures now writhed like startled snakes.
“Is there anything we can do?” asked Indira.
“Besides put them out of their misery?” Odette eyed each suffering person in turn. “I don’t think so. We’re not surgeons, or healers. We can’t remove those things, especially if they’re physically attached in some way.”
Drake slapped a hand over his eyes, unable to look any longer at the bloating throats, most of them smeared with blood from where those fingernails had torn off long strips of skin. “We have to do something. We can’t sit here and watch this forever.”
“I do not think it will be forever,” Boyle said quietly. “Their throats only have so much give, and it looks like…”
“Like the creatures are trying to emerge,” Orlagh finished for him, gray eyes wide with undiluted horror, the venom’s mental fog dispersed by the awful sight before us.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly parched. “We may want to, uh, turn away before—”
I really wished I had the chance to finish that suggestion. But four words shy of the end of that sentence, a parade of death came marching through the room.
Simultaneously, each person’s throat exploded into a rain of gore, spraying everything in the room, including us, with thick, hot blood. All the poor souls then slumped in their chairs, most of them dead before they hit the backs, the rest of
them gurgling for a couple seconds before the massive blood loss drained their brains of oxygen and they blessedly lost consciousness.
That blessing, however, did not last long. Because as each soul detached from its respective body, an invisible force, an unnatural force, took hold of it, and dragged it down, down, down, through the floor and far beyond.
The Morrígan would not let her victims find peace, even in death.
“What the fuck are those things?” Odette whined.
My attention snapped back to the tabletop just as a fat, slimy, orange creature the size of my foot clambered out of each ruined throat and fell onto the tabletop with a series of obscene wet squelches. The creatures took a moment to orient themselves, shaking off the blood of their victims. Then they resumed eating the endless food at the table, fresh gore and all, as if absolutely nothing of consequence had happened.
Not that I could really blame them. They weren’t sentient creatures.
“Alp-luachra,” Orlagh murmured.
“Parasitic newts,” I clarified for those who didn’t know the term. “They’re native to the marshlands of the Seelie Court. They situate themselves in a creature’s throat and eat the vast majority of the food the host consumes, until, after some months or years, the creature finally dies from chronic malnutrition.”
Odette grimaced. “Lovely.”
“Usually, their hosts are animals,” Boyle pointed out. “Most sentient creatures can easily overcome any parasitizing attempt.
The newts are not especially strong, and they possess no significant magic.”
“Pretty sure it wasn’t the newts that were keeping the victims compliant.” I pointed to a nearby chair, whose occupant had fallen to the right, revealing a ward written into the seat cushion. Its outlying structure indicated that it was linked to several other wards, like a chain. “If any one of those people had tried to escape, the movement would’ve triggered all the wards, and every single person would’ve gone up in flames.
Literally.”
“So they were given a choice. A cruel choice,” Indira said.
“Suffer through the slow death of the newts, or burn themselves to death and spend eternity feeling guilty about killing all these other people too.”
“Fuck this Morrígan bitch.” Odette stomped her boot on the floor so hard it rattled all the silverware on the table. “Seriously.
Is this a trial of worthiness, or is this just some sadistic game? Because I am hella tired of being jerked around by someone who’s apparently got the moral compass of Hannibal Lecter. And—”
Indira jabbed her elbow into Odette’s side. “I think you should shut up now.”
“Why?”
Drake pointed at the table. “That’s why.”
At some point during Odette’s rant, all the alp-luachra had stopped eating and turned their blood-spattered heads toward the angry witch, as if they could comprehend her words.
Odette sputtered, “Uh, how smart are these things again?”
“They’re not.” Orlagh stared hard at the newts. “However, a lack of high-level intelligence usually makes a creature more vulnerable to mind magic, and therefore, easy to control.”
“Like puppets,” Boyle added, “on strings.”
The newt nearest to the end of the table suddenly hissed, and we all recoiled toward the sealed doors as it opened its mouth and spit. The yellow globule splattered to the floor in front of my boots, and every inch of stone it touched hissed and bubbled and steamed.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” Odette slapped her face with her metal hand. “They spit acid ?”
“Normally, no,” I answered. “But it looks like the Morrígan has been engaging in some selective breeding.”
“The doors are still locked,” Drake helpfully pointed out. “What do we do?”
“Kill them?” said Boyle. “Acid or not, they’re only newts. They should go down easy.”
Indira gulped. “And if they don’t?”
Dredging up my magic, frost ghosting over my cheeks, I said,
“Doesn’t matter how they go down. They will go down, and that’s that.”
I took one step forward, gingerly avoiding the steaming spot on the floor, and pointed two fingers at the newt who’d started this fight. “We’re not going to die here, not when we’ve traveled so far into a place as dangerous as the old forests, not when we’ve overcome so many of the Morrígan’s devious traps, not when we’ve won—”
I would never know whether the Morrígan was impressed or pissed off by my motivational speech. But whichever it was, she had heard enough from me. I knew this because, as I was about to say,
“so many different battles against so many different enemies,”
the floor beneath my feet abruptly ceased to exist in a perfect circle just large enough to fit my body.
An invisible force, likely the same force that had dragged all those poor souls to some form of eternal damnation, grabbed hold
of my entire body and dragged me down into what looked like a bottomless pit.
My friends shouted in alarm, and Odette made a valiant dive to save me. But she was a tad too slow. The hole in the floor closed up as quickly as it had formed, plunging me into darkness. A darkness so absolute that it seemed as if reality dissolved, as if Vincent Whelan the half-sídhe ceased to be altogether.
Given all that happened after this disorienting trip through the void of existential terror, I was kind of bummed I didn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Three and a Half Hours Till Dusk
The tunnel through oblivion spit me out several hundred feet beneath the surface of Tír na nÓg, and the telekinesis spell that had taken hold of my body brought me to a halt a few inches from the floor. When it released me, I landed with a dull thud that echoed across the corridor in which I’d been placed. The number of times that echo repeated sent a chill down my spine.
This wholly dark corridor was a vast space, in which any number of potentially lethal assailants could be hiding. My half-fae eyes could penetrate some of the gloom, but the corridor stretched so far in both directions that there were bound to be dangerous things lurking beyond my sight.
Before I took a step in any direction, I studied everything that I could see.
The roughhewn stone floor, pockmarked by the marching of countless boots. The marble walls shot through with veins of gold and silver that glowed faintly even in the low ambient light. The columns along both walls that held back the immense weight of the earth above. The empty circles high up on the walls that showcased only dirt, circles that had, in the distant past, been windows to a better world.
This place, whatever it was, had been sunk at some point. Like Maige Itha.
I tried to figure out which direction to go. There were no helpful signs posted on the walls, no painted arrows on the floor, no active magic signatures coaxing me to approach a waiting god. Which meant I would have to pick a random direction and hope the corridor didn’t circle the entirety of the realm.
With a grunt of frustration, I started to recite “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” flicking my finger side to side in time with each word. Just as I reached the last “moe,” however, a loud squawk resonated through the corridor, startling me so badly I nearly tripped over my own two feet.
Spinning around, one hand on Fragarach’s hilt, the other primed with magic energy, I tracked the noise back to an unlit metal sconce attached to one of the columns. Atop the sconce perched a crow. A crow that had definitely not been there a second ago.
When the crow was sure it had my attention, it took off and headed in the opposite direction from the one my “moe” had been about to choose. Not one to assume good intentions from those who’d yet to prove they had any, I set off after the crow at a cautious pace.
The crow seemed mildly annoyed by my hesitance, shooting me looks over its wing and squawking three times more. But I only sped up to a power walk. I wasn’t keen on running into any more traps today.
Until at last, the walls turned outward and curved around to form an enormous rotunda with a domed ceiling. Three tiers of steps led down to the floor, mimicking the layout of a theater.
Numerous figures sat on these steps in small groupings, chatting quietly among themselves. Few of the figures resembled one another—they were different sizes and shapes, had different hair and skin colors, wore clothing from many different eras—but all of them had one thing in common: they were transparent.
They weren’t living people. They were ghosts.
At the center of the room, on a raised dais, sat a lone old woman on a wooden stool, vigorously washing several articles of clothing using an old-fashioned washboard and a tin tub of sudsy water. The woman was hunched in the back, like she’d been washing clothes for decades on end. But the poor posture didn’t hide the devastation that marred her skin.
A broad scar arced across the left side of her face, cutting through the empty space where an eye had once been, and clipping the edge of the lips in such a way that it tugged the woman’s mouth into a permanent sneer. Her hair, nothing but thin wisps of gray, did nothing to obscure the damage. And the bald patches dotting her scalp revealed even more scars, a chaotic array of tiny crosshatched lines.
The crow swooped down and landed on the woman’s shoulder, and the woman’s single dark eye glanced at me through the limp strands of hair. Either she didn’t find me interesting, or she was expecting me to make the next move, as she did nothing but continue to wash the clothes. As if all that mattered in her life was cleaning the bloodstains from some standard jeans, a plain shirt, and a coat riddled with tears…
Hold up. I looked down at myself. Those are my clothes.
Suspicion riding high, I stepped farther into the room, pausing at the top of the stairs. None of the ghosts took notice of me, and no dangerous wards sprang to life in my vicinity. So I took another step, and another, and another, carefully creeping down each tier. Until I reached the floor and stood before the dais, the position of a person who’d come to beseech a great power for help.
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