Her Dark Legion

by Pippa Dacosta

  The dark fae had pulled back, urged away from our hull by Kesh’s subtle touch—a touch I’d struggled to ignore. She might never forgive my decision, but knowing what I knew now, it had been the right one.

  The Hunt swelled. Purple lightning split its tumbling clouds. The Excalibur charged his guns with my consent, but throwing everything we had at the Hunt too soon would reveal too much, and if it didn’t work, we’d have no alternative to fall back on.

  “Talen, get me down on the surface.”

  Kellee. Again. I would get him down there, but other paths were playing out.

  Sirius, for one. Part of my mind observed him in the lower decks, collecting Eledan’s book. Another branch observed Kesh below—her blinding light and hungry darkness like a beacon shining at the heart of Safira. The Hunt knew she was there, but I’d kept the Excalibur between them. The dark fae helped with that, and now the wraiths were close. Another force also bristled the edges of my reach. A human force. The Sol fleet. I’d hoped the niggling itch of alien tek was a glitch—some error in my bonding with the ship—but their presence had swelled outside Safira. Knowing humans as I did, they would follow the dark fae and wraiths inside the hole we’d made. Whatever plan Kesh had, she had better see it to fruition soon. I could not fight a war on two fronts.

  “Talen, I have to get down there…”

  Kellee’s presence glowed hot red in my mind’s eye. I didn’t need to see with organic eyes to know where he was. The same as I knew where all the fae in Safira were and all those that were incoming, I also knew Eledan was not among them or anywhere. I nodded, struggling to concentrate on words when they were fast becoming superfluous.

  “Sota…” His tek-presence glowed an electric blue. He approached, getting brighter with every step. He was more powerful here than he could imagine. “Go with Kellee to my home. Kesh is there.” I didn’t need to tell them to protect her. They’d die for her. “Sirius has the book. I’m sending him down now. I’ll hold the Hunt back for as long as I can.”

  Kellee’s hand fell to my shoulder, and although I didn’t feel the touch on my body, I felt its comforting intent in my mind’s eye.

  “Don’t do something stupid, fae,” the marshal grumbled, his words an electronic crackle in my mind.

  “Likewise, Marshal.”

  I sent all three down to Safira but kept Hulia on board, as my voice, should I need her, and turned my attention to the Hunt. The nightmare beast opened its enormous mouth and reached out to embrace the Excalibur. Funneling all weapons’ targets down its throat, I smiled and sent the command. “Fire.”

  Chapter 43

  Kesh

  Bruised light flashed across Safira’s rolling dwellings and streets, and up the hill, into Talen’s home, from where I observed through the huge window. Talen fired into the Hunt, but instead of recoiling, the thing swelled to an impossible size and swallowed much of the blast. Then it lashed the Excalibur’s hull, tearing it open.

  I gripped the polestar fragments, one in each hand. “No, you don’t. You’re never taking someone from me ever again, you son of a sluagh.”

  Where was Sirius with the damn book?

  The Excalibur groaned and pitched sideways. Talen would have felt that blow as if the ship’s flesh were his own. His pain threshold was high, but he couldn’t hold out forever.

  The ship fired a different weapon. It struck the Hunt and washed over it, sending thousands of tiny lightning strikes through its mass, like hundreds upon hundreds of falling stars.

  Sirius fizzled into sight on the path leading up to the house, with Sota and Kellee beside him. Relief loosened the fear clutching my heart. Sirius had the book. He dropped it on the terrace and opened it to a random page. Eledan wasn’t here to ask how this worked, but there was something of him left in me, and that something told me to draw the Hunt in close. I could only do that with the polestar’s light.

  Kellee saw me at the doorway and started forward. I shook my head. Whatever happened next, it could harm as well as heal.

  “Where’s Eledan?” he called up.

  I tapped two fingers over my heart and watched his face fall. The time for explanations would come later.

  “Stay back.” I lifted both fists, the thimble and acorn growing too hot for me to hold much longer. “I don’t know what will—”

  Power.

  It struck without warning and tore through my skin, surging inside and flooding into every vein, every cell, every microscopic piece that made me saru. I would not have survived had I been mortal. I wasn’t sure I’d survive it now, but if there was anything I exceled at, it was defying death. By Faerie, this would not be the end of me.

  Chapter 44

  Kellee

  Kesh became a thing of light and power, a creature that made the vakaru in me want to drop to my knees and hope she either didn’t see me or beg that she did. The man in me feared I was watching her die, and there was nothing I could do. The light was too thick to penetrate and too powerful to claw through, and at several dozen yards away, it burned everything exposed to it.

  “She’s all right…” Sota said. He stood beside me, guns armed. “She’s alive inside the light.”

  Brighter, hotter. I couldn’t stare into it any longer and turned away, shielding my face with my arm. She was a star, a beacon. I’d known it for months and known exactly what that meant.

  “She’s beautiful…” Sota’s voice cracked, either from the magical interference or from his own emotion. He watched, his eyes able to filter out the brightness, but all I could see of him was a washed-out blur of whiteness. Heat beat against my back in long, painful waves. I wasn’t leaving.

  “The Hunt!” Sirius’s shout penetrated the thunder above.

  Darkness filled the sky. If Talen and the Excalibur were still up there, I couldn’t see them. Even the winged dark fae had fled, although my wraiths crowded nearby, shadows upon shadows hiding from the light. Sensing I would need everything in my power to stop that thing from getting to Kesh, I let the vakaru fill me up, shedding all semblance of being anything other than unseelie.

  The book lay open down the pathway, as useless and as empty as its author had been.

  The Hunt blanketed us, as though the sky were black and swelling. Inside it, the faces of the dead howled and gaped, their hollow eyes turning inside out. They clawed and climbed to escape the nightmare. We could not allow this thing to escape Faerie. I loved Kesh, I loved her like I’d never loved anyone before, but staring into the heart of this thing, I understood her role and why she would give everything to stop it. She was the queen none of us had known we’d needed.

  I glanced at Sota. His guns were locked and ready. His stance fierce. His eyes on his target. The wardrone would stop at nothing to protect Kesh. He lifted his guns, ready as the suffocating ocean of blackness descended over us, dragging its shadow across the land, forcing back Kesh’s light. Dark and light ebbed and flowed and the earth groaned and shifted, coming to life where the two forces met.

  Fear fluttered through my aged heart, a deep-seated fear I hadn’t felt in centuries.

  The Hunt’s liquid laughter bubbled out of its depths, echoing its creator’s, but this thing had gone far beyond Eledan’s design. It seemed impossible that a book alone could hold it.

  “Your reign is over.” Kesh said the words, but they did not sound like hers. I squinted into her glow and made out the pattern of dark wings backlit by a brightness too hot to observe. “Oberon took two weapons from Faerie, and we will return them.”

  The Hunt’s laughter rolled on and on. “The Nightshade has grown into her wings.”

  “Return to the book and survive among its pages or perish forever.”

  A column of oily blackness descended and deposited a figure, neither male nor female but with the body of a fae—no face, no expression or detail, just the outline. It stopped at the book and looked down. “Time, our prison. Dark, our sentence. Light, our freedom. The time has come for me to be free.”


  My wraiths crept closer, their shadows inking the ground. I caught Sota’s careful side-eye glance and gently nodded. We would not get a better opportunity than this, and with Kesh behind us and Talen behind it, we had to act now.

  “You have your creator’s arrogance,” Kesh said, “but even he saw his errors in the end. Go now and remain part of Faerie, as is Her wish. She loves all her children, even you.”

  The Hunt’s dark chuckle tried to slide beneath my skin.

  “Power is meant to be wielded. That is the way of Faerie. And I am more…” It trailed off, and for a moment, its outline froze, cracked, and dissolved.

  “Now!” I mentally sent the wraiths forward.

  Sota fired his electric guns, blasting out great darts of light.

  Shadows became real and fluid, each one similar to the Hunt’s chosen appearance, but each one had a soul, a purpose, and had once had a life. These were my vakaru, and they’d had enough of Faerie’s fuckups. They launched themselves at the Hunt, claws out and screaming. Sota fired his electromag guns, strafing the Hunt with tek-bullets. Light blasted from Kesh in a great, snapping column that tore through the dark figure, burning it away. Together, dark and light united, we were beating it.

  Then two great red eyes opened in the blackness above, and the Hunt roared across the Safira rooftops and through its pathways, turning into a river of soul-eating smoke.

  We’d pissed it off.

  The blackness washed up the path to Talen’s home, consuming the wraiths that tried to stop it, and then blasted over Sirius, quenching his blast of flame as easily as someone might snuff out a candle between their finger and thumb. In the next breath, he was gone, consumed along with the book.

  Kesh’s light doubled down. The column snapped and twisted, pushing back, but it wasn’t enough. If the polestar wasn’t enough, nothing was.

  I flung out my claws and charged.

  Chapter 45

  Kesh

  It’s not enough.

  Every trial won, every challenge overcome to bring me to this moment, hadn’t been enough.

  Faerie, damn you, if this is not your wish, help us!

  The Hunt swallowed Sirius, and then Kellee was gone, devoured in the Hunt’s monstrous avalanche of darkness. Only Sota remained, somehow holding the Hunt back as he fired stream after stream of his tek-arsenal into it. My drone, once so small, held back a world-ending nightmare on his own.

  I pulled on everything I had, reached for everything unseelie, and drew down, demanding they answer. And they did. The monsters rushed closer.

  It’s not enough.

  The Hunt had grown too strong.

  Mentally, I reached far and wide into Safira, farther into Faerie, calling for help, for strength, for light, and heard Faerie’s creatures answer. Countless bright souls, each one a piece of Faerie, answered my call. Wisps by the millions, so tiny on their own, but as they breached Safira’s swollen sky, they shone with a light second only to mine. And more arrived. The saru who had been forced to fight and kill their own. Gladiators with their saru names hidden inside their souls. My family, my people. Sonya and those who had escaped their love of the fae, and others only recently freed. They answered and sent me their strength.

  It’s not enough.

  Time was something I couldn’t control, and we had already run out.

  The Hunt’s grasp reached around Sota. His guns smoked, his firepower immense. He screamed at the thing, and then the screams died in a static as the darkness consumed him too.

  Grief added the fuel I needed to keep the light burning. If we died here, let it be for something. Let it be to save the innocent and stop the Hunt from spilling chaos across Faerie’s sister worlds.

  I emerged onto the terrace, aglow like a star forced into a body, wings like those that belonged to the unseelie, and a living tek-whip alive in my hand. “I am the Messenger and all of Faerie stands against you.”

  The Hunt’s laughter rolled on, as deep and far-reaching as never-ending thunder. I poured more power into the light, drawing reserves from the souls that had tried to come closer. It could not end this way.

  Then the Hunt was an inch in front of me, choking off my light, and its blackness stretched into forever, like Eledan’s mirror had. All of the worlds would come to this. To nothing.

  “This is not Faerie’s wish,” I whispered, not needing to raise my voice. The darkness was the only thing left to hear me.

  A distant boom sounded. Then another. The noise was muffled, but I heard enough to know those were not Faerie noises. Another boom sounded, shuddering through the air, and the Hunt reared away, dragging its smothering weight with it.

  Ships.

  Not Faerie made. Sol made. The Sol Alliance emblem, which depicted their central star, blazed on their hulls. They appeared in the dark, peppering the Hunt’s blackness with their tek-light. And they fired. Again. And again. And again. Great holes gaped in the Hunt’s central mass, sizzling with lightning. The wounds didn’t heal.

  The Hunt pulled itself from Safira’s paths, revealing Sirius, Sota, and Kellee sprawled on the ground. And the book, its pages open.

  Kellee’s clawed hand twitched.

  My heart leaped. He’s not dead.

  Sirius’s flame spluttered back to life.

  They live!

  Sota pushed up on his trembling, burned arms.

  They were okay.

  “Kellee…” I dropped to my knees beside him and turned him over. He winced, baring sharp teeth, then cracked a vivid green eye open. My stubborn vakaru lived! “I thought you gone.”

  “Now you know how I feel…” he groused.

  “Holy shit… the humans found us!” Sota stumbled to his feet.

  “At least they are on our side this time… for now.” Sirius looked down at the book. “Kesh?”

  I hauled Kellee to his feet and helped him hobble to the book.

  Sirius knelt beside it. “Now that you are the polestar, touch its pages, summon the Hunt here, and end this.”

  “Is randomly touching fae artifacts a good idea?” Kellee asked. “Will it eat her?”

  “Perhaps,” Sirius replied.

  Before they could argue over the best way to test Sirius’s theory, I knelt in the dirt and spread my hands over the pages, like Eledan had forced me to do before. My skin crawled with an unpleasant itch, as though it were trying to unpeel itself and slither free. As I watched, the marks I’d carried for most of my life fell from my arms, from the backs of my hands, down my fingers, and into the book. Once on the pages, the marks morphed and twisted, transforming into fae words. Without Eledan, we could only hope those marks would be enough.

  “What is that?” Sota asked, watching the words twist.

  “It’s the end…” Sirius let the words settle, and I lifted my hands.

  Another boom sounded above, so loud I felt it in my bones. The Hunt screamed, and as it writhed away from the bank of Sol ships, the Excalibur emerged at the fleet’s center, bigger, brighter, and aglow with fae colors.

  A wind whipped up, carrying magic throughout Safira.

  The fleet fired its tek-weapons again and again, each one landing like an iron nail through the Hunt’s center. The Hunt’s enormous weight lessened, and its darkness thinned, until the nightmare was little more than a normal storm being pounded into submission.

  Sirius cradled the book in his arms and turned toward the sky and the battle overhead. He lifted the book and read the ancient fae words—Eledan’s words, from long ago, when he’d been a young and naïve prince desperate for Faerie to notice him.

  The Hunt twitched and snapped, shrinking with every blast, until finally it bucked away from the fleet and rushed toward us.

  I caught Kellee’s hand in mine and Sota’s in the other. I knew Talen watched from above as the swirling, howling mass of nightmare turned into a thick column and plunged into the book. It howled its way deep inside.

  After the last of it had vanished, Sirius slammed the book closed
to a strange, calm quiet, broken only by the rumble of Sol ship engines.

  It was over.

  No… not over. There was one more thing to do.

  Power cannot be taken. It must be gifted.

  I closed my eyes, still gripping Sota’s and Kellee’s hands, and mentally called to the mother I’d never had.

  “Faerie, I’m returning your gift. The polestar belongs in your sky, where it shall forever remain.”

  I expected more heat and light, but I simply felt Her gently run Her hand through my body. She was not malevolent, as I’d imagined, but a simple force made of balance and harmony, of time, dark, and light. Giving her back the polestar was the right thing to do, even if it meant leaving us vulnerable to Sol and their forces. Maybe now that Sol knew we were all Faerie’s children, we could get along? At least for a little while. Either way, the polestar and the Hunt were weapons that should never be wielded again.

  Power lifted from my soul. I let it slide off, like I was rising out of warm water. Above, Safira’s strange sky peeled open like flower petals, presenting Faerie’s night sky, and there, among a million stars, the brightest one winked at us, back where it belonged.

  I would miss the polestar, but I was not sorry to see it go. I sighed, feeling more grounded and like Kesh Lasota by the minute.

  “You did the right thing.” Kellee’s voice was soft, and the words landed gently in the strange, new quiet.

  I squeezed his hand and pulled him closer, then did the same with Sota, tucking him against my side. I had done the right thing. We all had. Together, we’d ended the nightmare.