His smile was on the move. “And so mass murder was a justifiable punishment?”
“Murder? Your brother wiped out the vakaru because they became too powerful. He would have wiped out the humans too. You let him back into Halow, so you don’t get to lecture me on murder.”
“Yes, my brother committed genocide,” he calmly replied. “Not me.”
So, Eledan was good now? “As Oberon’s general, you killed thousands of humans in the first war.”
“Yes, I did. That was war. I also spent much of my time teaching humans how to better their tek, and in some cases, like Hapters, I taught them how to combine tek with the magic sleeping on their planet, considerably enriching their lives.”
How could he stand there and justify himself to me? “Oh, please. You did that for yourself. Everything you do is for yourself. You admitted as much, so don’t try to convince me you’re something you’re not.”
He smirked like he’d won an argument I didn’t know we were having. “You still don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“We are so alike.”
Now I laughed. “We are nothing alike.”
He faced Faerie again. Humor glittered in his eyes and in the twitch of his lips. “We both do what we must to survive.”
“You’re fae. All you have to do to survive is show up.”
The ache in my chest thumped in time with my heart, growing hotter and heavier. I rubbed it again. “Why do you want to go to Calicto now? Is it the well below Arcon?”
“I have made mistakes—”
My laugh cut him off. Eledan admitting he’d made mistakes? What was next, Faerie freezing over? He arched an eyebrow at my outburst of hilarity. He truly was a piece of work.
Heat throbbed across my chest and cinched around my lungs. Laughter forgotten, I gasped, or tried to, but my lungs locked and my throat closed. My knees hit the floor. Pain jolted up my thighs. My thoughts raced to catch up and think around what was happening, but everything was too slow. A wall of blinding white hit, stealing my sight and feeling. The only thing left to cling on to was Eledan calling my name.
Chapter 28
Kellee
Restlessness itched in my veins. Talen had sent Captain Pierce off to ready the ship for travel, as Sirius had suggested, though we didn’t know our destination. Now I rattled around the obs room, waiting for Kesh to show up. Talen and Sota watched the screens observing the silent Excalibur decks and external docking points on the ship. Sirius waited by the door like guardian-shaped furniture, and I paced, because if I didn’t move, I’d need to kill someone.
Sirius had implied Kesh had a plan, and we were sorely in need of one.
The door hissed open. Eledan carried Kesh, convulsing in his arms.
Talen and Sota moved in. Eledan barked an order, Talen replied, but I heard nothing. The unexpected shock rewired old instincts.
Eledan set Kesh down on the table and held her there, fighting her jolting arms. Talen pressed a hand to her forehead, instantly stilling her.
“What did you do!” Talen demanded of Eledan.
He might have replied, but in the next breath, I had him against the wall, my right-hand claws lodged firmly in his middle while I clamped his neck in my left hand. Nothing had felt so damn right as feeling his poisonous blood running down the back of my hand. His throat was next. I’d tear it out like I had Oberon’s.
Sota fired. The blast hit my hip and scorched, shooting pain deep into the killing thoughts and shattering them enough for reality to soak back in.
I wasn’t meant to be killing Eledan.
By cyn, outside of Oberon, I’d never wanted someone to die so badly.
Eledan smiled. “Release me or the drone will fire again, and it will be to kill.”
Sota’s presence buzzed against my senses. I couldn’t see him while locked on Eledan, but I felt him close. “Sota?”
“Do as he says.”
Hate paled everything else. I leaned so close to Eledan that his magic flared, sickly sweet. Warm fae blood soaked my clothes and dripped onto my boot with a steady tap-tap. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing—”
“Kellee, leave him.” Talen’s voice was cutting.
If I killed Eledan, wouldn’t it end? What if the Hunt was tied to his life as its creator? Wouldn’t killing him stop it? It seemed like a reasonable risk to take, and by cyn, I wanted him gone. Heat beat through my jaw, teeth extending. I’d killed Oberon, still had him in my veins. Killing Eledan felt more right than anything had since we’d arrived on Faerie.
A cool hand touched my shoulder.
“Kellee…” Talen’s voice pulled my thoughts away. His violet eyes demanded I look, and see, and hear.
“Let. Him. Go,” Talen said, and every word thudded at the door to my soul, demanding I let Talen in.
My grip on Eledan’s neck loosened. My heart slowed. The lust for the kill fell away, and a strange peace soaked into my body.
He’s controlling me.
“Kellee…” His tone had changed, turned querying to match the new concern in his eyes, and so it should.
I yanked my claws from Eledan’s middle, ignoring his gasp, and bared my teeth at Talen. His hand sat innocently on my shoulder. His reach inside my mind was a thousand cold veins of silver, prodding the parts that made me who I was and turning them to his control. Hundreds of years we’d been together, and the one time he tried to control me was to save Eledan?
I brushed his hand off, and the sickening eel-like sensation of his invasive touch snapped and fell away. “Don’t ever get inside my head again.”
Talen’s eyes flashed silver. If he came at me, I’d do more than sink my claws into him.
“She’s stable but unconscious,” Sota said. He’d moved to Kesh’s side at the table. Kesh’s eyes moved behind her closed eyelids. She dreamed, but not with Eledan, it seemed.
Eledan stumbled against the table, clutching at the bloody patch growing on his shirt “We were talking and she collapsed. There’s nowhere safe left on Faerie to take her. You have to turn this ship toward Calicto.”
“Why Calicto?” Sirius asked. He’d stayed by the table, by Kesh, where I should have been.
I backed away from them. The wound in my side pounded, and flesh itched as it tried to heal around shredded fragments of clothing. Sota had shot me to save Eledan. Talen had entered my mind to save Eledan. Eledan leaned over Kesh, the anguish on his face almost as real as Talen’s.
“The well below Arcon,” Eledan told them, wincing and breathing like it pained him. “I can heal her there. Perhaps buy her more time before the polestar… before it’s over for us.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Sota asked.
Eledan glanced at Talen, as though expecting him to answer, then to Sirius.
The guardian answered, “She’s mortal.”
“We’ll take her to Calicto now,” Talen said.
This was what Eledan wanted.
He’d maneuvered them into a corner, and none of them could see it.
“Do you have something to say, vakaru?” Eledan asked, sensing my glare riding his back.
Talen rested his hand on Kesh’s forehead. Sota watched Kesh’s sleeping face. Only Sirius watched Eledan and saw the smile the Mad Prince cast my way.
“Nothing to you.”
Kesh was stable but unconscious in the Excalibur’s med-bay and under Sirius’s constant guard. From the chair beside her bed, he acknowledged my arrival with a shift of an eyebrow and discreetly slipped his tek-hand from hers. Whether he didn’t want to be seen showing her affection or didn’t want the drama, I couldn’t be sure. From the pieces of information I’d picked up, Sirius had loved Kesh—or Mylana, as he knew her—for a long time, but he had been trapped behind Oberon’s rule, just like the rest of us.
“You did well not to kill him,” he said, leaning back in the chair to give me the full weight of his ancient gaze. It wasn’t often I looked into the eyes of another and felt the weight of
eons look back at me.
I rippled my fingers, clean of blood and claws retracted.
“The vakaru were always difficult to control,” he added. “Your volatility made you unbeatable in battle, but unstable outside it. A trait Oberon never did breed out of you.”
Was he complimenting or insulting me? His face was as blank as always.
“I mean no offense.” He sighed, his gaze finding its way back to Kesh. “Oberon often spoke of his vakaru and human experiments. He was proud of you. Without the vakaru, the fae would not have won the first war.”
“Do you mourn him?” I hadn’t thought to ask, hadn’t thought about much since sinking my teeth into the king’s neck.
“In the same way I mourn all fae killed too soon, yes.”
I stopped at the foot of Kesh’s bed. Her chest rose and fell, and her lashes fluttered, but like before, there was no sign of her waking. A slim med-pad on a stand beside the bed blipped her vitals. It sounded like seconds ticking down.
The polestar was eating her up inside. Without Eledan’s promise to heal her on Calicto, she might never wake again. “Do you think he’ll heal her?”
He took a moment to think on the answer. “I do.”
“But he just needs what’s inside her. So why wake her at all?”
“It’s more than that.” He tucked her hand in his shining tek-fingers. Her hand seemed small resting in his. The vakaru in me wanted to knock him aside and claim her as mine, but I had a hold on those instincts, for now.
“There is a magic to her that is not part of the polestar,” he said. “She is more unique than a thousand Faerie stars, and Eledan knows it.” His gaze fell to the star on my shirt. “You wear that as a symbol of hope?”
“Among other reasons.”
“We will need it. Eledan has all four pieces of the polestar within his reach. He returns to his stronghold of a thousand years. That is no accident.”
“Do you have any idea what he’s planning?” If anyone would know, it’d be an ancient Faerie guardian.
“No.”
Then we would need all the hope we could find. Cradling my fist in my other hand, I rubbed the itch away. “I should have killed him.”
“That would have been unwise. He is all that tethers the Hunt. Without him, there may be no way to stop it.”
I knew that, which was why the bastard was still breathing, but he clearly couldn’t control it. “What of the book?”
“It cannot be read. The pages are empty.”
Typical. We needed something as powerful as Eledan to stop him and his Hunt. Shinj had barely tripped the Hunt up. We needed something bigger. Something equally unstoppable. Something nobody had tamed in a long, long time. Something unseelie…
“The vakaru wraiths on Valand…” I thought aloud. “Is there any way to resurrect them?”
“Bring them back to life? No. But they are not gone and won’t be until their spirits are returned to Faerie. We could utilize them in other ways…” His russet eyebrows pinched together.
“How?”
“By the Nightshade.”
“Talen tried that on Hapters and failed.”
“Talen alone was not the Nightshade.”
He caught my gaze, and he knew, just as I’d suspected since the Hunt had tried to kill me: we were the Nightshade.We were all connected. Sota, me, Sirius, and Talen, with Kesh at our center. All our pieces had been scattered, until now, until Kesh had brought us together.
Moving to Kesh’s bedside, I watched her sleep. This impossible woman had somehow found us. I’d lived a long time on the fringes of nowhere, looking for something I didn’t know I was looking for, looking for her. “Do you believe in fate, guardian?”
“I believe in Faerie. And Faerie believes in Mylana.”
I held his gaze. No fae could speak lightly of such things. He was as much part of Faerie as Kesh was part of the polestar. He believed in her, like we all did. “How do we rally the dark fae to us? How do we stop the Hunt, for good?”
“We will find those answers on Calicto.”
Chapter 29
Talen
Calicto looked nothing like the tek-riddled planet Kellee and I had rescued Kesh from over a Sol year ago. From orbit, its surface churned green and blue like Faerie’s. As Pierce maneuvered the Excalibur over Arcon, some fifty miles below us, Faerie’s touch became apparent. Calicto hadn’t started out alive like Faerie, but it was now.
Hulia set the shuttle down in the open plain in front of Arcon’s pyramid-shaped building and lowered the ramp. Pollen and magic puffed into the small cabin on the exchange of air. Kellee sneezed and swore, then helped maneuver Kesh’s hovering stretcher down the ramp behind me. Kesh remained unconscious.
As soon as my boots settled into the mossy ground, a new, invisible touch wound around my legs, exploring, tasting. New Calicto was an extension of Faerie now, and as alive and aware as we were.
“Holy shitballs.” Sota scanned our surroundings, made up of strange, little trees with weeping branches and sparkling brooks burbling across what had once been an all-tek plaza. Arcon loomed like a mountain of greenery.
“Life signs are too abundant to track,” Sota announced. “I don’t recognize any of the species here.”
To prove his point, a six-legged critter scurried out of the bushes and scuttled to the nearest pool. Tek tickled my senses, and as I watched the creature lower its antennae-bristling head to drink, the tek-scales along its back flared to absorb the heat.
The creature was tek and magic. I scanned the nearby bushes, listening for pixie chirps, and found them among the branches. Their little bodies were the same as any pixie on Faerie, but these had an extra set of wings made from metal and mesh.
Tek fused with magic, just like the trinkets on Hapters.
Just like Kesh had made Sota.
And just like the heart that kept Eledan alive.
It shouldn’t have been possible.
“I thought magic hated tek?” Sota asked, echoing my thoughts.
Eledan descended the ramp. “It’s evolved,” he said, like the answer was obvious. He stopped at the edge of a stream and lifted his head, admiring Arcon towering out of the undergrowth. His Arcon. His teasing smile suggested he’d known this would happen. “Faerie always finds a way.”
He touched Kesh’s med-stretcher and had it drift behind him.
Kellee started after him. I blocked him and Sota, earning frowns from both. “You need to stay here.”
Gold rimmed Kellee’s dark pupils. “To hell with that. I’m not letting him take Kesh in there to do whatever the cyn he wants with her like last time—”
“I’m going,” I interrupted.
Sota had fallen into the stillness that happened whenever he forgot about pretending to be human. His instincts demanded he protect Kesh, but whatever Eledan was about to do would trigger those instincts.
“Kellee, you know you’re not in the best frame of mind, and Sota, what happens in there may trigger your protocols to protect. Kesh needs you both out here, waiting for her when she wakes.”
“You promise he won’t hurt her?” Sota asked.
I couldn’t answer that, as well he knew. “I will do everything in my power to keep her safe.”
“If anything happens to her…” Kellee trailed off, his eye color bleeding red.
He knew me well enough to know I’d never put Kesh’s life at risk, but my controlling his emotions to prevent him from killing Eledan had driven a wedge between us, which might never be dislodged. I’d known the risk then as I knew them now. This had to be done.
“Guard the shuttle. There’s no knowing what monsters Faerie has created here.”
Sota backed off, his eyes cast downward, but Kellee’s stayed the entire way across the plain. Eledan had stopped at the foot of Arcon’s vine-blanketed steps. He rested a boot on the bottom step and looked up at his old home. Glittering motes drifted in the air, catching Calicto’s light, filtered through its new atmosphere. Fae
rie had always terraformed worlds, but I’d never seen the process firsthand before. New Calicto was beautiful, even with its hybrid tek-and-magic base.
Eledan arched an eyebrow and raised his gaze to me. “Afraid the vakaru might lose control?”
“Yes.”
He chuckled. “He’s tried to kill me several times, and here I am.”
“Because he wasn’t really trying.”
His smile died. “This is as far as the stretcher will go. We’ll have to carry Kesh deeper into Arcon.”
There was no we. Easing my hands under Kesh’s light body, I cradled her in my arms and climbed the steps. Vines and fauna slithered out of the way, revealing a dark cavernous mouth. It took a great deal to unnerve me, but passing into Arcon and feeling a thousand eyes observing me from behind hidden walls sent a shiver down my spine. I’d stepped into the mouth of something alive, and I wasn’t sure what that meant.
Walls moved, and the floor opened, leading us spiraling downward. Dallying wisps lit the way. The well had turned Arcon into a knoll, but this knoll was like none on Faerie. Creatures made of tek parts scuttled around my boots and up walls.
“Is this your doing?” I asked Eledan, who strolled ahead. I expected my words to echo, but the trailing greenery devoured the sound, adding to the claustrophobia. One wrong step and the knoll could seal us inside. Knolls were well-known for their temperamental nature. Was this knoll friend or foe?
“It’s merely what happens when a well is left to claim a world without intervention.”
“But tek and magic fused together?”
“My brother feared such a union. He considered it blasphemy.”
“Do you consider this blasphemy?”
“I would have, before Faerie neglected me. Now, having lived among humans, I consider this inevitable. I assume you’ve seen my heart, and you’ve certainly seen what Kesh did with Mab’s gift in Sota. This is, after all, Queen Mab’s life magic at work.”
“Your magic.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgment.
The same magic that had run through Shinj, and Oberon’s warcruisers, could create life from nothing, and here it was, as Calicto’s beating heart. It felt significant. “Where are we taking Kesh?”
Her Dark Legion Page 17