“It won’t do me any good. Luck hates my guts.” I dragged my lips into a lopsided smile. “But I do appreciate the sentiment, so wish away.”
They did, every last one of them, even the Seelie soldiers I’d never met before.
Then my friends and I parted ways for what I could only hope wasn’t the final time.
Chapter Nineteen
Half an Hour Till Dusk
The teleportation spell dropped us beneath the massive storm in the sky, and the sheer pressure of the gathering Hunt nearly bowled us over. Brigid, Cara, Lorcan, and two others from the original unit I’d met in the Divide had chosen to escort me here, while the rest of the soldiers took my beleaguered team to the nearby fort to recoup.
As they all dropped to their knees alongside me, shouting in panic from the pain of the Hunt’s overwhelming negative energy bearing down on their souls, I figured they probably regretted that decision. But to their merit, none of the young sídhe bowed out. They held their ground, drew their swords, and heaved themselves into a defensive circle around me.
“You don’t seem as affected by this,” Brigid said to me through clenched teeth as she struggled to straighten up. “Does that have something to do with your altered physical appearance?”
I nodded. “The changes aren’t just physical. My soul’s undergone a pretty impactful modification. A temporary modification.”
I hope.
The pressure of the Hunt’s energy, resonating through the air for miles in every direction beneath the churning dark cloud, had run me down like a slow-moving car. But with my spiritual alignment shifted toward the negative, thanks to Nuada’s influence, the weight felt manageable after the initial shock wore off.
I slowly rose to full height, wary of the all-encompassing negative energy, which tickled my skin and set my hair on end. It felt like I was standing inside an ocean of static that, at the
worst of moments, would violently discharge across the land and electrocute everything it touched, setting the world ablaze.
But it wasn’t this land that would suffer the devastation. Behind the storm in the sky above Maige Itha, you could just make out a distortion in the fabric of the realm—a massive tear in the veil between worlds. A tear that led to Earth.
In less than thirty minutes, that roiling black mass would shoot upward through that hole in the veil, emerge in the sky above Kinsale, and wreak the kind of havoc that not even the nukes prepared the Earth to withstand.
Saoirse stood guard on the other side of that tear, along with all the other Watchdogs who’d survived the hell that Vianu had wrought. If I failed, they would all die trying to protect the civilians.
So, I’m here, I said to Nuada, who’d gone quiet a while ago, apparently having grown bored of verbally sparring with me. How do I proceed? Go up there and give the big black cloud a slap?
Essentially, he said. You should seek to reach the approximate center of the mass, as that is where the physical representation of the Hunt’s will typically resides.
The will has a physical representation? I asked.
Indeed, he answered. Just like singular hollowfiends adopt a set form of some kind, so does the collective will formed by a gathering of fiends. This “pseudo-King,” if you will, carries out the desires that the majority of the fiends possess, forcing any dissenters into a collective course of action. Though really there are few dissenters. Hollowfiends do not possess as much individualism as natural-born creatures. They are all driven by the same basic negative emotions, so what thoughts they possess tend to be quite similar. And—
I got it, I cut in. Keep your answers succinct, please. We’re down to the wire.
Nuada snorted. I don’t have to tell you anything at all.
But you should if you want to disentangle your soul from mine before we wind up fusing into one seriously fucked-up being, I said.
He didn’t have a contradictory response for that, so he reverted to the original subject. All you need to do to make the proper contact with the pseudo-King is throw yourself into the mass. A simple air spell will do the trick. Fair warning though: The closer you get, the more the negative energy will press down upon you, until it feels like your soul will shatter under the force—
and it very well might. Your soul is as scarred as your body. Its
integrity has been compromised. There is every chance the spiritual tidal forces will rip you to shreds before you ever reach the core.
I scoffed. You’re such a cheery guy, you know that?
In my day, I was known for pragmatism, he stated evenly, pretending he didn’t catch the insult, and for brutal honesty.
There wasn’t a single honest line in that sea shanty, I replied in a vain attempt to disarm my anxiety. I know damn well you didn’t have a dick that big, and if you’d had that much sex, you never would’ve gotten anything done in your entire life.
Nuada went quiet for a second, then barked out a laugh. You know, Whelan, as much as I intensely loathe you, you are not the worst traveling companion in the Otherworld.
Thanks. I rolled my eyes. I’ll make a plaque that immortalizes your compliment and hang it up on my wall.
A great peal of thunder roared through the air, rocking the ground so hard I almost lost my balance.
Nuada hummed thoughtfully. I think it is more likely to be immortalized on your headstone.
Luckily, I don’t give a shit what you think. I closed my eyes and begged my racing heart to calm. All right. Enough chitchat. Let’s do this.
I turned to Brigid. “I’m going up now.”
She offered me her hand. “I wish you well, Vincent Whelan, for the sake of yourself and the sake of your world.”
I took her hand and gave it a firm shake. “And in case we don’t meet again, I wish you the best in your strategic climb up the fae social ladder.”
Brigid smiled. The last time we’d spoken, she told me she was going to use what she’d learned about Abarta and his machinations as leverage against her superiors to improve her social standing.
Her promotion revealed that she’d succeeded in that endeavor. And the presence of her original unit at her new and better posting revealed that she possessed just as much integrity as I originally believed.
She hadn’t left anyone she cared about behind. A loyal soldier.
The complete opposite of McCullough, and therefore, someone in whom I could find a good friend.
Brigid squeezed my hand. “We will remain here until the outcome of your quest becomes apparent. If it falls in your favor, we will return to the fort and tell your comrades of the good news.
If it does not, we will try our best to recover your body and convey that to them instead, so that they may make the appropriate mortal arrangements.”
I looked her straight in the eye to put my immense respect on full display and said simply, “Thank you.”
Then I stepped back, looked up into a darkness more absolute than the emptiness of space, and with a whispered spell, launched myself high into the sky. Up, up, and away.
For every fifty feet I ascended, the pressure of the negative energy grew stronger, the sense of suffering more palpable, the taste of hatred far more bitter. The grim emotions clung to me like a thick slime, trying to hold me back using the sheer weight of pain and sorrow.
When that failed, when I pushed myself harder and faster toward the roiling storm, siphoning all the energy I could muster from that funnel to who knew where, the emotional slime switched tactics. It sank into my pores and grabbed hold of the reins of my memory.
Countless scenes of cruelty and suffering assaulted my mind.
Heartless murders, of parents in front of children, of children in front of parents, the screams of the grieving like knives in my ears. Months of torture, flesh flayed from skin, living bodies burned over and over again, only to be healed for the torment to start anew.
The full breadth of war, shoved through my eyes all at once, a thousand brutal deaths by a thousand brutal means l
ayered atop one another. So thick with blood and gore that my stomach would have turned itself inside out had I eaten anything recently.
On and on it went. Burning more than any lifetime’s worth of anguish into the back of my skull. Providing my brain with enough fuel for its nightmares to last me an eternity I could only now be happy that I would never live.
Tears streamed from my eyes despite the whipping air scraping off their moisture. Blood streamed from my lips, my tongue torn by gnashing teeth. Sweat beaded on my temples, on my neck, on my chest, only to freeze as it touched the runoff from my winter-born air spell.
I wanted to scream. In horror. In disgust. Until my vocal cords were shredded and my mind was pleasantly numb.
But I had a job to do. The most important job with which I had ever been tasked. So I could not sulk in some dank, dark corner, waiting for the end of everything, like I had during the collapse. I had to persevere.
No matter if the Hunt left my mind in tatters and turned my soul to ash. No matter if Vincent Whelan truly did cease to exist, all of what he was obliterated by a force far beyond him, his luck for surviving the ill will of gods and monsters finally running out. No matter if I did survive, by some double-edged miracle, but what came out the other side of this nightmare couldn’t even honestly be called me.
For most of my life, I had rejected some critical part of my identity. I had lied to be self-serving, to the detriment of others. I had lied to my own detriment, because I was too afraid, or too petty, to admit an inconvenient truth: that I was a child of two contradictory worlds, and neither would ever fully accept me, no matter how hard I desperately tried to fit in.
But the fact was, I didn’t need to be fully accepted. To have friends. To garner allies. To make waves. To bring change. I didn’t need acceptance. I only needed honest effort. The last year had taught me that, so many years too late, and the fragment of existence I’d claimed as my own was that much worse off for the gross mismanagement of my life.
Now I had a chance to redeem myself for those past transgressions, that lingering weakness. And I intended to carry on with that redemption even if I was rendered dust in the wind.
Vincent Whelan. Not human. Not sídhe. Just me.
It doesn’t matter where you came from, son, my father had tried to convince me once, when I was a dumb teen with a hard head and a bundle of chips on my shoulder. What matters is where you choose to go. And there’s always a good path to walk, a righteous path, a path that matters, a path that makes a difference. When you find that path, don’t hesitate to walk it. And don’t straddle two paths thinking one might make a fair backup—because in the end, all you’ll do is trip yourself up and land flat on your face.
If thirteen-year-old Vince had listened to his father, I might be in a different position, a better position. But I made my choice, a poor choice, during the purge, during the war, during the end of the world. A choice to do absolutely nothing of consequence.
Was this the penance I deserved? I didn’t know.
But this was the penance I chose.
You watched the world fall once, Whelan, I said to myself ten feet from the black cloud and closing fast, now get up off your ass and do something to make sure it doesn’t fall again.
I plunged headfirst into the amorphous black mass, and an army of spectral hands attempted to throw me out. But I was flying too quickly, the air at my feet like a rocket, and the frosty
currents whirling around my form rebuffed every tendril that struck out.
I carried on straight toward the core of the Hunt, punched through the outer cloud wall into an enormous empty space whose rounded walls were covered with undulating figures of every size and shape. As if individual hollowfiends were trying to tear themselves free of the mass.
Warriors on horseback, armed with weapons made of pure energy.
Skeletons with extra limbs the size of city buses. Monsters whose shapes were indescribable, some armed with rows of skinny legs, like centipedes, some slithering through the black mass like snakes.
Every last one of these figures was made of darkness.
Every last one was made of fury.
Every last one wanted only one thing: to destroy.
But within this storm of fear and loathing, only one figure mattered. The figure that lay at the very center. The pseudo-King.
It held a humanoid form, the King, a hundred feet tall and proportionately broad, with huge curled horns like a ram, six empty eye sockets pockmarking its face, and a mouth like a gaping chasm, its teeth two rows of black skeletons constantly trying to claw their way out.
Instinctively, I knew what I had to do—fly right into that cavernous maw and tear into the pseudo-King’s brain, a living bullet. So that was what I did.
I flew straight on, without slowing, without hesitation, without remorse, and soared past its smoking lips just before it snapped its jaws shut, sealing me inside.
Reality ceased to exist. In its place, only strife remained.
Strife that beget pain. Strife that beget death. Strife that beget grief. Strife that beget rage.
A billion little moments of strife that had occurred across the whole of Tír na nÓg since the Wild Hunt’s last ride, adding up to a singularity of suffering whose gravity could rival that of any black hole. Strife strong enough to raze the land. To level the cities. To kill all the people. Strife that would do those things if I allowed it to ride free.
It was almost too much, that strife, sitting on my soul. The shell of my soul splintered, a million cracks running through it, my life force weeping out into the endless darkness. I struggled to stay afloat, to stay intact, searching for a weakness to
exploit, even though my adversary was no real being but rather an amorphous collective of ill intent.
My soul shell began to bow inward.
Nuada, I could use some advice here. How do I take command of a collective of base emotion?
No answer. I was on my own. Left to stew in my own suffering, in my own rage, all of it focused on…
Focused.
You couldn’t fully command such primal negative emotions. But you could focus them on a subject. You could blame someone for them.
Take them out on that someone for perceived offenses, real or imagined.
On its own, the Wild Hunt took its fury out on everything within its reach. But when it had a real King, it took its fury out on whatever that King held in highest contempt.
That was how you took control, I immediately understood. You showed the Wild Hunt that you possessed within your heart a rage of a caliber that mimicked its own, and you convinced it to take the object of your rage as its own.
I intently focused on all my negative feelings. Dug up all the ways I had been hurt by one man. All the times my world and the things I cared for had burned under his influence. All the pain and all the rage this man had sculptured in my heart. All the fury for his petty vengeance I had yet to unleash upon him.
I collected all of that on a silver platter, and via Nuada’s soul, a tether of negativity tying me to the Hunt, I offered up the feelings, whole and true and awful, that I possessed for Abarta of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
Then I said to the Wild Hunt, Let’s destroy him.
And the Wild Hunt replied, Yes.
Part III
After Dusk
Chapter Twenty
At first, the siren’s call of the Ritual of Hollowfiends tried to lure the Hunt to Earth. But I put a stop to that with a firm push of my thoughts, indicating that the primary target of our rage was right here on the Hunt’s home turf, ignorant to our imminent arrival. The fervor of the Hunt spiked at the prospect of ambushing Abarta when he was on the cusp of victory.
The Hunt reveled in stoking as much pain and shame and humiliation as possible.
So the black mass of partially differentiated hollowfiends turned away from the tear in the veil, turned away from Kinsale, and set its sights on Maige Mell.
Beneath me, the remnants of
the pseudo-King, its form having unraveled into rippling strips of darkness, wove themselves into a shape that vaguely resembled a black stallion. This spectral horse carried me to the edge of the Hunt, the billowing front of the storm, and emitted a shrill whine to express its growing impatience.
To formally begin the ride of the Hunt, the King had to order the charge.
I unsheathed Fragarach and pointed it at the horizon. “To war!” I screamed, somehow in every language I knew at once, my voice booming across the sky, its echo like the beat of heavy drums.
With that proclamation, the Wild Hunt set off across Tír na nÓg.
The air currents in the lower atmosphere acted as our road, the growling wind conveying us over land at incredible speed. The Hunt spread out from its original bundle of darkness and shaped itself into a broader storm cloud, a dark hand reaching far and wide, casting shadows across the fields, the woods, the rivers, the lakes, the pristine summer wilderness of the Seelie Court, bathing the land of everlasting day in the kind of night it feared the most.
We passed over towns and villages, so small from this height that they looked like children’s toys, tiny bits of paper that a light breeze could blow away. The terrified citizens of these places looked like playthings too, as they scurried about in search of safe harbor from the wrath of the Hunt.
Had this been any other Hunt, they would have been at the mercy of a force that had none. But it was their lucky day, because I was the King of the Hunt, and my wrath was reserved for one man only.
I curtailed the dissident hollowfiends who tried to break off from the collective and mow down the towns, forced them to focus on the task at hand. And the toylike people below were left to stare in fear and wonder, both relieved at their good fortune and concerned: what would the Hunt destroy today if not them?
They would discover the answer soon enough.
Maige Mell was located on the edge of Unseelie territory. As the Hunt crossed the Divide, the plain shone like a beacon in the perpetual night. A great battled raged in the shallow valley
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