They screamed together. In the spirit’s memories, the army of immortals and mortals tied it down with ropes and vines. Adam felt every knife, every nick and slice, as they carved it up and burned its pieces. Its memory of the moment weakened it and gave Adam strength. He pushed it back, willed himself to remain who he was. It would not have him.
In the past, in the memory, the battle raged. Reduced, it became a horned skeleton whose tail could sweep villages from the map. Still the powers, the mortals and immortals, cut it from both sides of the veil. They whittled it to parts, flesh and spirit, until only the last part, its massive heart, remained.
The thing had tried to kill Adam. It had possessed Annie, shot Vic, and killed Carl—yet what Adam felt through their forced connection was too familiar. Tears welled in his eyes at the aching loneliness, at being the only of its kind, opened inside him.
The elves must have seen it too. When the time came for the final blow, they hesitated. Ever the preservationists, they could not let it fully die.
They buried its heart, bound it in obsidian, deep in the earth. Sleep crept in, and the memories, its awareness of the outer world, faded.
Adam watched the elves withdraw to their side of the veil, ceding the world of flesh to humans and other races, other things. It was not a simple departure. Bonds had been formed, children of mingled mortal and immortal blood birthed. The elves decided that any children would stay with their human parents.
A blood vessel burst in Adam’s eye, ripping him back to himself, back to the present. He screamed. The spirit hadn’t possessed him. He’d staved that off, but the tendril had him. It wormed into him. Everything burned, like his blood was lit afire.
And yet he didn’t burn. He was stronger than he’d thought, than he’d realized. Adam pushed the spirit back, though he did not know how long he could keep it out of his mind. His strength wouldn’t last much longer.
Heat filled him. Then the tendril binding Adam splintered. He felt the spirit recoil as their connection broke. With his hands free, Adam ripped the vein from his nose. It came free in a bloom of blood and agony.
Silver landed on the ground beside Adam, the shard of obsidian in his hand. The prince crouched, a hand pressed to the ground, a reedy jay ready to take flight.
“Run!” Adam shouted.
Another tendril dove toward the prince. Adam had none of the elf’s avian grace, but leaping, he pushed Silver aside. They went down in a tumble of limbs as the tendril hit the ground. Others came as Silver grabbed Adam around the waist and ran with supernatural strength and speed.
They’d never reach the car.
“We can’t outrun it,” Adam gasped, the breath short in his chest.
“My thoughts exactly,” Silver said. “Close your eyes.”
“What?” Adam asked.
“Now is the time to trust me,” Silver said. “I must reveal myself to save us.”
Adam obeyed, but the light still burned through his closed lids.
The next thing Adam knew, he was underwater.
27
Adam
Adam’s spirit flattened and stretched. All the air was knocked out of him. He’d felt it before. The memory rose from somewhere dark, newly clear, swarming with feeling, as if fresh.
They’d gone down to the lake, to the little homemade dock they’d fish from. Adam had been too little really, so he’d watch the dragonflies, blue and shining, dart over the water. He’d eaten an orange, left the peel in pieces in the brown mud by the water. The zest of the first bite lingered on his tongue.
Dad had made a similar pile of beer cans. Such piles littered the lake’s edge.
“Adam,” Dad said. “Do you want to learn how to swim?”
He’d nodded. He did, and he’d asked before, but Bobby had always warned of snakes, said they weren’t supposed to. Adam’s eyes darted to the end of the dock, scanning for beady eyes.
“It’s okay, no water moccasins today,” Dad had said. “Come here.”
Adam had obeyed. He wasn’t wearing shorts, just jeans and long sleeves. Dad, too, was fully dressed. He scooped Adam up, like he often did when he was playful, but this time he waded into the lake.
“Hold my arm.”
No other warning. No other instruction. Dad pushed Adam down into the lake, to the bottom. Adam tasted foul water and mud. He saw bubbles, colors, and sparks.
He remembered lying on the little dock, coughing. He heard his parents arguing, feeling his mother’s concern more than understanding her words as the water ran out of his lungs.
“He wanted to learn,” his dad said. “He said so.”
The memory faded, and Adam was drowning again.
There were planes beyond the Spirit and the mortal. Elves could move between them, but Adam hadn’t known they could do it at will. Maybe it was a royal ability, unique to the most powerful. Maybe it was unique to Silver and Argent. Maybe they all could do it.
He imagined the planes like a sandwich. If the mortal was the meat, lying thick above the lower crust of the hell dimensions, the spirit was the condiment, the glue holding them together. Elves hailed from somewhere higher, the lettuce. Yeah, that made sense. They were hippies, all green and vegan.
Adam and Silver hadn’t dropped into the water. They’d appeared in it, soaked and floating. Silver’s arm gripped Adam’s middle like an iron band as he began to shake. Mortals weren’t meant to transcend. It felt like what he imagined divers who rose too fast went through. He wondered how much of it came from the stretching of the distance between his consciousness and his body. He couldn’t feel it, his flesh. And he couldn’t feel Vic at all. If the connection between them snapped, then Vic might die. He might not yet be healed enough to live on his own. His heart knocked in his chest at that. He cast about, eyes seeking light but finding none.
Be okay. Please be okay.
Distant music called him, faint and slightly metallic, like a symphony of flutes and harps. Adam couldn’t name the song.
The warm water ran up the channel burrowed through his nose by the spirit. Pain seared through his skull.
On some planes everything broke apart into fire, or so the colorful drawings in Argent’s texts implied. In the other direction lay ice. He hoped Silver hadn’t just placed them in endless water.
No, there was light above them, but he could not tell how much ocean filtered it. Taking some comfort in Silver’s grip, that he wasn’t alone, Adam kicked toward the surface. His lungs burned. His sight flushed red and black, his throat about to burst.
Adam broke into the light, gulped air, in and out.
The air tasted clean, salted, but so clean. Silver breathed hard, his chest rising and falling against Adam’s back. He focused on the sun, warm, but not burning. It did not hurt his eyes to stare at it. The light had a liquid quality, like the spring days he’d walk with Bobby down to Lake Liberty, the leaves bright green on the scrub oak.
“Light doesn’t have flavor,” Adam muttered.
“You are in shock,” Silver whispered in his ear.
“Probably.”
“You will be all right, Adam,” Silver said, his lips brushing Adam’s ear. He dragged Adam toward the beach, one arm around him, the other clutching the obsidian shard.
They collapsed onto a ribbon of perfect white sand. Silver rolled to a crouch. His open vest showed a soaked, transparent shirt that left nothing to Adam’s imagination. He had the body of a track star. He’d lost his hat, revealing a haircut with short sides but longer on top and in the bangs. His chest, pale, only finely haired, rose and fell. Adam shook himself to focus. The pounding in his heart eased.
“Where?” he sputtered, looking away from Silver and up the beach at a pristine forest of pearl-barked trees with leaves too green for even the word emerald to do them justice.
“Specifically? In English, this place is Starlig
ht’s End,” Silver said. “In general? This is Alfheimr. Elf home.”
“It’s beautiful,” Adam said, meaning it.
“We come to the sea for retreats,” Silver said. “Holiday and contemplation.”
Adam nodded. He tried to imagine the elves on a beach vacation and could not. He’d never seen the ocean—movies had not prepared him for the brightness, the liquid sapphire of the ever-shifting water.
Adam tried to dismiss the image of Silver in swim trunks.
“Did I get it all out?” Adam asked, lifting a bloody nostril for the elf’s inspection.
Silver chuckled. “Yes. It dissolved soon after I cut it.”
“How did you do that?” Adam asked. “It killed the other elves.”
“Concerned for me?” the prince asked, his tone mocking.
“Yes,” Adam admitted, surprised to find it true. He had a lot of questions. The elves were beings of immense power, and yet they’d risked themselves for Adam. Silver had risked himself for Adam.
“I used this,” Silver said, holding up the shard. The broken end had a fine edge.
“What is it?” Adam asked.
“I don’t entirely know,” Silver said. “But I guessed from its reaction that the spirit would not enjoy being cut with it.”
“It’s Elven,” Adam said. “Isn’t it?”
“The script is old,” Silver said. His head whipped around. “Oh. Adam—I’m not supposed to be here, especially not with you.”
“What do you mean?” Adam asked.
“Keep this safe,” Silver said, putting the shard into the inner pocket of Adam’s jacket, his eyes never leaving the cliffs. They rose high above the glittering sand, green with growth, where marble towers spiraled into the sky. Stairs, with nothing to moor them but magic, drifted in the air. Adam tried to see whatever approached from that direction. Though he found nothing but the slowly orbiting towers, a deep shudder began somewhere in his spine.
Silver cocked his head to the side, listening to something Adam could not hear. He gave a little nod and said, “Come here, quickly.”
Silver pulled the silk tie from around his neck. “You must not see what is to come.”
“What is it?” Adam asked. The shudder had reached every part of him. He felt it in the tips of his hair, a faint vibration that moved downward until the tiny hairs across his body were standing on end. It felt like the moment he’d seen in videos back home, the guys in mullets taking funny pictures right before the lightning struck them dead.
“I will do my best to shield you, but—” the prince trailed off.
Adam saw doubt behind Silver’s eyes, but he nodded and obeyed. If another of Silver’s people came upon them unveiled, the magic would burn Adam to ash. Silver bound the tie around Adam’s eyes. There was no way to know if the other elves would think to raise a glamour for Adam’s protection.
He felt something else, liminal, soft—Silver’s light, his power, weaving a bubble around his spirit. The feeling wasn’t uncomfortable, just dimming, like ear plugs at a loud concert.
“Why?” Adam asked. “Why are you protecting me? And why are you hiding the shard?”
“I would not see you harmed,” Silver said gently. “And I am not yet certain what the shard means.”
Though soaked in seawater, the tie smelled of lavender and rosemary. Blind, Adam reached out a hand, felt it land on Silver’s heart, his wet shirt a thin barrier between them. Awkward, he shifted it to the elf’s shoulder.
Then magic cascaded over him. Adam was certain that if he could see, he’d find every hair on his arms raised. He’d never felt anything like it, never been near to a source so vast.
“What is that?” he asked, the question almost a gasp.
“My father is nearly here.”
“Your father?” Adam asked. “The King of Swords?”
“Yes,” Silver said as he finished weaving his ward.
The bubble fell into place with a subtle chime. It was a graceful magic, slightly cold and so very elven. So very Silver.
Tensing, the prince stepped away, just when Adam could have used him most. Adam drew up his armor, all of it, just in case, and felt his defenses sync with Silver’s, chain mail and plate layered together.
The force of the King’s arrival slammed against Silver’s wards. Enough leaked through to buffet Adam’s defenses, a tornado wind diverted by a wall of trees. Adam shook against the strength of it, but he kept to his feet. The feeling leeching through was white-hot rage, anger worthy of a tidal storm, worthy of an elven king.
Silver and Argent were one thing. They were used to shielding mortals from their nature, but the King of Swords was unused to curbing his power for humans. More of that anger broke through and Adam fell to his knees. Any more and he would start to burn.
Several clomping sounds, hoofbeats Adam guessed, announced the arrival of riders. He desperately wanted to see if they looked like something out of Tolkien. Maybe the elves rode unicorns. Maybe they were centaurs in their natural state. That led to a perverted thought and a mad laugh almost escaped him.
Still in shock then.
A voice boomed in a language Adam didn’t know.
He wished Silver had blocked his ears as well as his eyes. Silver answered in kind, his voice like reedy music in his native tongue.
Though Adam could not understand their words, the King barked at his son, his sentences short and jabbing. Adam squeezed his eyes shut to hear Silver’s contrite responses. The anger did not abate, and Adam felt it was meant for him especially.
The king said something, short and decisive.
Silver protested, loud enough that Adam cringed.
A viselike hand seized his shoulder. He hadn’t heard the elves approach.
“Hey!” he shouted.
“Do not fight them,” Silver said in English. “Let them take you and do not look at them!”
“Where?” Adam asked.
“To a dungeon,” Silver said over the shuffle of bodies as they gripped him.
*****
Adam stumbled once, twice—then one of the elves simply lifted him and threw him over a muscled shoulder. He didn’t fight, and worried that the shard would slip free as they jarred up and over what had to be hundreds of stairs, probably the ones leading up the cliffs. He could feel the spray on his bare skin. His damp clothes cooled around him. Everything smelled of salt.
They set him down with more gentleness than he’d expected. The shard’s weight still rested in his pocket.
A door closed. A bolt clicked.
The cell didn’t feel dark or dank, none of the things he’d have expected from a dungeon. It smelled like lilies. He couldn’t sense another presence. The temptation to peek nearly overwhelmed Adam but he waited.
He didn’t need to pee. He didn’t feel hungry or thirsty. That would come though, and with it, he’d be tempted. There were many old stories about eating food from other planes. Everyone, starting with Sue and Perak, had warned him to never eat or drink anything offered to him in spirit. To consume a bit of that other world would make him part of it, bind him to it, and trap him there.
And he had to get home. If the king ordered him imprisoned forever, if Silver could not take him back—Adam fought a fit of breathlessness.
“Screw this,” he said, reaching for the necktie.
Thin, firm hands seized his. Adam yelped. He’d thought himself alone. He hadn’t heard anyone else in the cell.
“Let me,” a voice, familiar and almost forgotten, said. Adam hadn’t heard it in so long.
His heart dropped and soared at the same. It couldn’t be. How could it be?
“Perak?” he whispered.
“I’m so sorry,” the elf said. “I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
Hands pulled the tie away.
Adam blin
ked as much from the light as to focus on the face of his first love, the elf boy who’d left a lonely teenager alone with nowhere to turn. Slimmer than Adam was now, with hair in shades of purple and blue that shifted even when he wasn’t moving, Perak was a like a dream. His skin was pale, but spotless, almost unreal. He hadn’t changed by even a day. His eyes were exactly the same—pale, almost colorless, they were like water with just a drop of gray in them. They picked up the shades of his hair, so at the moment they were almost lavender.
Adam had found the burned-out church, their usual meeting place, empty. He’d run through the spirit realm, searching. He’d even asked the trees, and they hadn’t answered. Adam balled up his fist and punched Perak in the gut.
The elf folded with an oof. He threw up his hands in surrender.
“It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “My father found out. He was furious. He forbade me from seeing you, kept me away.”
“Your father?” Adam asked.
“He would not have his son consorting with a mortal. He sent me to teach you, and I did—but I tarried too long, gave myself, us, away.” Perak ducked his head, giving Adam a better look at the purple-blue hair that had captivated him. It shifted colors like a thing alive. “Then he knew how I felt about you.”
Adam wanted to punch Perak again, and kiss him, and punch him again. It flipped back and forth in his chest until he took a deep breath and forced himself to stop spinning, to remember Vic, to remember the contact between them.
He seized on which of Perak’s words hurt the least and asked, “Why did he want you to teach me?”
“We had been looking for mortal practitioners for a while. The thing out there, the spirit—we knew we could not combat it. We knew it would take witches to fight it.”
“The Denver practitioners,” Adam said. “You sent them against it.”
“We did,” Perak confessed. He bowed his head. “It killed them.”
Adam forced himself to focus on the topic, to keep his brain working on what it could handle, not on seeing Perak again. “It’s been free for a while then. For years.”
White Trash Warlock Page 17