by Rhys Ford
It had been Felix he’d run to, though, not his own family.
“Sort of,” Bell said, the words dry on the back of his throat.
“For Robin and the other fey, this is home,” Conri touched the tree with his fingertips and looked wistful. “And it wants them back. But we’re not so lucky. If we want to cross over, we have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
He started toward the car, loose-limbed and confident. Bell stepped in front of him, fingers steepled against Conri’s chest to stop him in place. The T-shirt was thin, and Bell could feel the warm skin and heavy muscle under it.
“How did you find it?”
Conri raised his eyebrows and then shrugged the insult off. “It’s downhill,” he said. “When people panic, they run downhill, because it feels like the smartest decision, even if it isn’t. And unless there’s water to distract them, they run toward the moon. It feels safer if you can see. So they came in this direction, and I hoped my theory was right. You can feel the ford now, can’t you? If you’d known what to look for, you could have found it too, right?”
Maybe. Now that Bell had touched the ford, he could sort of sense it on the edge of his mind, the unfriendly “no” of something that you weren’t expected to open. It felt like the connecting door in a hotel room. The one you rattled tentatively anyhow, just to see.
“Could you open the ford again? he asked.
Conri thought about it. “After this long? I doubt it,” he said. “Even if you found all the nails and pulled them out, the iron has leached into the wood. The ford would have to be hacked back open to clear it.”
“Let’s see,” Bell said.
He pulled his hand away from Conri’s chest and loped around to the back of the car. He opened the trunk and used his thumb to unlock the heavy black box that took up most of the space. The inside was laid out with obsessive order—guns clipped to the back and ammunition directly below them, knives sheathed in custom-made nanoplastic sheathes to protect the edges, and fairy ointment sealed in lead to keep it potent. Bell lifted the knives and reached under to grab the heavy iron chains. They were meant as restraints, but they’d do.
The links rattled as he hauled them out of the trunk and against the back of the SUV. A few chips dinged the glossy black paintwork.
When Conri saw the iron looped around Bell’s wrist, he took a quick, long step back. His easy, loose-boned body language tightened, and he shifted his weight onto his toes.
“What—”
“It’s not for you,” Bell said. “I never asked to be a Walker, but I am. No one gets to close the door on me.”
He draped the weight of the chain over his shoulder and crossed the scrubby grass back to the iron-studded tree. Conri lingered out of reach, obviously not entirely convinced. The trunk wasn’t that thick compared to those around it. Nails and stagnant magic weren’t good for growing things, apparently. Who knew? He looped the chains around the base of the tree twice and then dragged the heavy length that was left back to the car. It rattled and jingled as it untangled.
“That’s… if you cut it open, it won’t be like a normal ford,” Conri warned. He slunk closer, skittish on his feet as the chains rattled near them. “The slough has probably congealed around it. This will be like lancing a boil and then jumping in.”
Bell paused with the chains only half clipped to the tow bar and gave Conri a wry look. “Thanks for the imagery. Get in the car.”
Conri didn’t do as he was told….
“You can’t help with this. It’s pure, once-worked iron,” Bell said. “So get in, and when I tell you to hit the gas, you hit the gas.”
Conri looked like he was going to argue but instead did as he was told and scrambled into the cab. He left the door cracked open as he started the engine and Bell locked the chains in place. His fingers were bruised and his knuckles were bleeding from being pinched between the links by the time he finished.
“Now,” he yelled over the engine.
There was a long pause, although he was pretty sure Conri’s pointy ears had caught the order, and then a muttered fuck before the engine revved and the SUV lurched forward. The chains yanked tight, tore the bark off the tree in strips and splinters, and jolted the SUV to a tire-spinning stop. Dirt and grass spewed out the back as the rear fishtailed and white, acrid smoke spewed out around them.
For a second it looked like the tree was going to win, and then Conri slammed the gas down to the floor. The engine made a raw metal groan as it inched forward, and then the tree tore out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stones and thick, tangled roots. It whiplashed through the air like a mace as the SUV shot forward.
Bell swore and threw himself backward. He hit the ground with a thump, and the branches scraped his hands and face as it was dragged over him. It felt like being beaten, but quickly. Then it was gone.
He rolled over, wiped blood out of his eyes, and shoved himself to his feet. His ribs ached, and a raw scrape ran from the middle of his forearm down to his knuckles. By Iron Door standards, he was whole enough.
Conri spun the wheel and hit the brakes before he drove off the other side of the road. The tree bounced twice and then smashed into the side of the car with a crack that tore metal and scattered chunks of broken glass over the tarmac.
“Fuck,” Bell muttered. All that soul-searching about whether it was appropriate to work with Conri—a changeling whose kid might still be involved somehow and who was too hot for Bell’s own good—and he got the man killed. He picked a splinter out of the back of his hand and loped over to the mangled SUV.
The tree was stuck to the side of the car like a burr, branches jammed through the metal and shoved through the smashed windows. Conri slouched in the driver’s seat, his skin paler than usual and his eyes closed. He had, Bell noticed, ridiculously pretty lashes.
“Conri?” He grabbed at the branches and wrenched them back until they broke, and he could scrape them out of the window. Something hot scraped his fingers, and he flinched back. It was one of the nails, hot enough to singe Bell’s fingertips from the energy that had torn through it. It had left a long mark on Conri’s face, half blister and half cut. Bell grabbed it, ignored the sting in his thumb and forefinger, and wrenched it loose. “Are you okay? Con?”
One eye opened cautiously, bright blue squinted through the thick lashes. After a second, the other followed suit.
“Fuck,” he said with feeling. “That was close.
Bell would have very much liked to kiss him. The urge caught him by surprise with the sudden intensity of it. He could actually feel it—the firm pressure of Conri’s lips and the taste of him on Bell’s tongue. It stung like sour candy as he swallowed the ache and made himself focus.
“It worked,” he said. He could feel the ford again, the slightly uncomfortable welcome of a wide-open door and no one else around. “We can follow them.”
Chapter Five
WHOEVER HAD nailed shut the doors to faery had done it a long time ago. Cut off from the mortal world and mortal visitors, the slough had, like a freshly dumped lover, let itself go. The shadows of the mortal world, the cursed highways and eerie ghost towns built from stolen time, hadn’t fallen into disrepair, they’d been cannibalized by the slough to sustain itself.
It had fallen back into wet, sucking bogland, lush green hillocks broken up with black mud puddles, and overgrown forest. The landscape was tied together by thickets of dense, knotted briars that stretched for miles. The black, thorny runners were decorated with great white roses the size of a hand that smelled like candied, rotted flesh.
Conri swallowed. His throat felt sticky and his tongue dry. He’d never been here before. Probably. Places changed. Memories failed. He didn’t think he’d ever been sent here. It didn’t matter. He still knew what it was.
“I guess we wouldn’t have been taking the car anyhow,” he said dryly.
Bell snorted as he pulled on a Kevlar vest and tightened the straps. He’d shifted his gun down onto his hip, an
d, while it was hidden under his T-shirt, Conri had seen him slip a fair-sized, silver-alloy blade into a sheath along the small of his back. In another situation it would be overkill. Here it was lightly armed.
“You didn’t know that when you wrecked it.” He reached out and touched a gloved finger to one of the hook-thorned briars. It made the flowers tremble, the delicate petals almost flesh-toned under the soft pink glow of dawn light. “The roses hadn’t bloomed last time I was here. Time’s running fast.”
Conri nodded. He could taste it on the air, spun out thin and sharp as cotton candy. It had volume but no substance. Heady. “It hasn’t had any time to play with for a long time, so now that it has, it’s gorged itself. It’s better than the alternative—at least we have a chance to find her before it’s too late.”
“But less chance that we take back a Nora that anyone recognizes,” Bell said grimly. “Or that she’ll want to go back.”
Silence hung heavily between them as they both—Conri assumed—thought about their own demons. Not that anyone had come looking for Conri, but if they had, they would have struggled to recognize him after only a few days. Would he have gone back then if he’d had to step back into his old life at the minute he left it?
Probably. His mortal life had been shabby and hand-to-mouth, but life in the Otherworld hadn’t exactly changed that. If he had a glamour in his pocket to pass as human—he’d never had any desire to pay for his sins, especially ones imposed on him—he’d have stolen back home and pretended he never left. If his imaginary rescuer got there soon enough, Conri might have even been able to convince himself of it too.
But there were plenty of changelings who would have stayed.
“Are we going to ask what she wants?” he asked.
Bell pushed his sleeves up toward his elbows. The slough had decided to be hot, the air muggy and full of the drone of bugs. Bell’s arms were wiry, pale skin pulled tight over whipcord muscles and dusted with freckles and fine, dark hair. A few old scars, faded to white ribbons of skin, dented both arms to different degrees. Conri appreciated the view out of the corner of his eye.
“Probably. If circumstances allow,” Bell said. “Ask me if I can care what the answer is.”
Conri thought of his life in LA—the narrow box of a house that was full of color and mess, the stack of leftovers in his fridge that ranged from Thai drunken noodles to gyros, and Finn’s clothes tossed carelessly around as if “Servants will deal with that” were genetic. He thought of Finn, who wasn’t his blood even though Conri had been the first and only one to hold him, and…. Okay, the kid was a pain in the ass, but Conri still loved him.
It wasn’t the life he’d planned—Conri was pretty sure he’d never heard of Thailand until the Return—but in a lot of ways, it was better. And it was his.
“That’s okay,” he said as he headed out along the marshy rise of sandbar that ran through the bog. The mud plucked at his boots, and in the back of his head—where it might have passed as his own if he hadn’t been wary—the grass muttered about how warm it was and how nice it would be to lie down and sleep. “I already know the answer.”
“Let’s just find them,” Bell said as he caught up with Conri and slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Worry about it too much now and lying down for a nap will sound like a good idea. And if we don’t find them, it won’t matter.”
Conri gave Bell a hard, sidelong grin. “We’ll find them,” he said. “This is what I do, and I’m really good at it.”
THREE HOURS later—by the not entirely reliable clockwork of Bell’s watch—the slough seemed to have put its shoulder to proving Conri wrong. A brittle trail of bent grasses, smears of mud, and the occasional muddy blond hair—garishly mundane in the florid overgrowth that framed it—had led them to a hill white with bog cotton back near where they’d started.
“It doesn’t want to give them up,” Conri said as he sat down on a rock. His throat was tight with the need to pant, but he resisted. He wanted Bell to see him as a man, not a dog. “You can smell how stagnant it has gotten here down in the hollers, like molasses, and it doesn’t want to go back.”
“You talk about it like it’s alive.” Bell dropped into a crouch next to him and took a long drink of water from a bottle. “The fey don’t.”
“The fey don’t like to think about things like that,” Conri said. “It’s why you don’t find many changelings who’ve seen Mag Mell or Annwn. They don’t get to visit. They like to play lords of their own creations, and the last thing they want is to tempt the Otherworld with too much mortality, a hit of time, and wake up with their beautiful cities remade into skyscrapers and tenements. That’s why they make places like this, the sloughs and estates and crannogs, near the borders so they can enjoy trysts with mortality without getting it all over the floor at home.”
Bell offered him the water, but Conri waved it back. He was thirsty, but he could grab a drink from a stream or pool on the way past. Faerie food had bound him once. It wouldn’t bother again. Bell didn’t have that option.
But he was sweaty. It stuck his T-shirt to his back and under his arms, sour and sticky. He peeled the band shirt off over his head and draped it over the cotton to air out. It would make him itch later, but he could cope with that. He raked his fingers through his hair and scratched at the nape of his neck. The salt from his sweat stung his palm as it got into the blisters, and he swore and pulled his hand down to scratch at it instead.
“You were here a long time,” Bell said. He crouched on the dry dirt, flask dangling between his knees, and watched Conri with dark, hooded eyes. His interest wasn’t entirely professional—Conri could tell that as Bell licked his lips—but it wasn’t completely unprofessional either. “The hair is always the first thing to change. But eyes and ears are more unusual.”
“Not that unusual.”
“Uncommon,” Bell compromised. “But here long enough that you can’t bear iron? That’s rare. The only ones I know of are the diplomats… who do make it to Mag Mell.”
Conri picked a shred of skin off his palm. “I never did,” he said. “If I had, I wouldn’t have seen the Court of Roses or the Hall of Thorns. I would have been relegated to the Stables of Shit, probably. I was only ever a servant, but I was… useful and resilient. Not much in the Otherworld is both. I made a good dog. Still do.”
“You’re not a dog,” Bell said. Because people did, even the ones who didn’t mean it.
Conri leaned back so pale skin pulled tight over lean, heavy muscle. He wasn’t built for show or speed, but for endurance. His legs sprawled out carelessly in front of him, jeans pulled low and loose around his lean hips.
“If you really mean that?” he said, the words harsh with challenge as he waited for Bell’s eyes to move back to his face. “Come over here and prove it.”
It was too late to curb his tongue by the time his brain realized that this mattered. There was no reason it should. Bell was nothing to him but the temptation of a good lay and a lot of trouble, but Conri could feel his chest tighten with anticipation as he waited for Bell’s reaction.
Apparently, though, he was destined for blue balls—mental and physical—since rather than answer, Bell scrambled to his feet. He shaded his eyes with his hands.
“What’s that?” He pointed back toward the ford—marked by an X scarred into the greenery with Iron Door–branded graphite paint—as a long slice of the world went thin. It looked like tissue paper for a second, a painted image laid over something else, and then Ned Kessel’s battered yellow pickup with a spray of shotgun pellet holes on the side tore through. The world snapped back into place behind it.
The oversized tires dug ruts into the soft, gray-green banks and splashed black, sticky glaur in thick, clotted patches up the doors and over the windshield. A brief try to clear it off with the wipers smeared the mud more and glued the blades up after three swipes.
“Shit,” Conri hissed between his teeth. “He must have followed us.”
“Well,�
�� Bell drawled sardonically as he absently put one hand on his gun. “Thank God I brought you along for your expertise.”
Conri swallowed the growl that stuck in the back of his throat. “How the hell did he get across? We ripped the ford open, but it’s still a ford. He wasn’t a Walker.”
Sometimes people pinged as Walkers when they weren’t, but Conri had never been wrong about who wasn’t. Ned Kessel ran too hot—too quick-tempered, too resentful, too everything—to play stepping-stones with reality. Walkers could be dumb as rocks—Conri hadn’t gotten to where he was by making good decisions—but they weren’t rash. If a Walker did something balls-achingly, breathtakingly unexpected and insane, like ripping the Otherworld open like a picked-at scab, it wasn’t because they hadn’t thought of the consequences. They’d decided the gain was worth the risk.
Bell fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a pair of binoculars not much bigger than a roll of dollars. He unfolded them and lifted them up to squint through the eyepieces as he followed the truck’s uneven, breakneck progress over the terrain.
He muttered, “Fuck,” and passed the glasses to Conri.
They were so light they barely weighed anything. Conri remembered when he’d first come to the Otherworld and been amazed by their weightless armor and self-taught swords. Now anyone taken would want to know if it was connected to the cloud or not.
He adjusted the lenses and scanned along the raw tracks cut into the bog until he found the yellow truck. It was Ned Kessel behind the wheel, sunburned skin greasy with sweat and hands locked on the wheel. Next to him….
“Son of a bitch,” Conri muttered.
Thistle, raw goblin bones still too close to the top of his skin, hunched in the passenger seat. One arm—too long, too skinny, and with the joint subtly in the wrong place—was stretched up over his head. Blood dripped down from the raw welts the cuffs had scalded into his skin and stained his shirt as he was thrown about.
“That answers your questions about how Ned got here,” Bell said. “Another fey child in distress at the Otherworld’s door.”
