by Rhys Ford
“Everyone knows Robin’s real dad is royalty,” Shanko protested while Annie nodded in agreement. “Look at him.”
“Maybe,” Conri said with a shrug. “He’s definitely wellborn, but he’s not a Mag Mell lordling. They have a look.”
Color stained Robin’s face, a glow of pink under the ivory skin, and he glared at him. “How would the likes of you know anything about the lords of the fey?”
“Right now, it doesn’t matter,” Bell interrupted. He didn’t know why it mattered to Conri to burst Robin’s bubble, but it wasn’t the time. “All that matters is he’s too wellborn to crawl out of here.”
Conri looked Robin up and down and then cast his eye over the other two. “He is,” he said. “Her kin don’t come from the courts, but they’re not servants either. The changeling… I doubt it. He doesn’t have the attitude for service.”
“Hey,” Shanko protested but stopped as he tried to decide if he’d been insulted or not. Everyone ignored him.
“Neither do you,” Bell pointed out to Conri.
“I learned. He hasn’t.”
The blunt statement of fact didn’t require sympathy. Bell still felt a dull ache in his chest, at least part of it anger, at what lay behind those two words. He didn’t imagine it had been easy to teach Conri “his place” in the fey scheme of things.
Like everything else Bell wanted to do right now, that could wait till later.
“That means we stick together,” he said. “If we can’t use the servants’ tunnels, we only have one option.”
“What’s that?” Annie asked after a glance at her friends, who sullenly stayed quiet. “Do you… do you have, like, a SWAT team on standby or something?”
It would have been unkind to laugh. Bell swallowed the chuckle that tried to escape his throat and tried not to think how reassuring it would be to have enough Walkers available for a SWAT team at short notice.
At any notice.
“I’m a Walker,” he said. “We don’t need backup, and if we can’t take the back door, then we’ll let ourselves out the front.”
THE KNEE bent the wrong way—sideways and back—as the sap hit it. It popped audibly, and the Other went down. Bell’s training wanted to follow through, to knock the opponent out of the fight, but instead he vaulted over the body as it writhed. The clamor of bells filled the house, a discordant peal that one of the Others had raised when Bell hadn’t hit him hard enough.
He spun and cracked the weighted end of the sap against a tattooed skull, snapped his elbow back into a fastidiously, surgically redone nose, and side-kicked one of the Others in the stomach—whatever alternate-reality fantasy Keith had conjured him from close enough to normal that nothing stood out to hang a nickname on at first. Bell’s heel caught the Other under the rib cage, dug into his diaphragm, and rattled his lungs. The almost-Keith’s eyes bulged, bloodshot and red-rimmed as it tried to suck in air around how much it hurt.
Bell dropped it with a quick smack of the sap against its temple and kept moving. He jumped over the sprawled bodies, stamped on hands that attempted to grab at him, and ran through the maze of twisted corridors and oddly angled rooms that blended old-world elegance with whatever frat-boy idea of luxury Keith had come with.
He’d taken point to clear the way. Conri brought up the rear to make sure whatever Bell put down stayed down. Between them, the fey kids, armed with knives and spikes they’d gingerly selected from the slaughterhouse, clung to one another and tried to keep up.
He stepped on an empty bottle of wine. It rolled under his foot and then, as he caught his balance, shattered under his weight. Bell staggered and lost his stride. One of the Others grabbed him by his jacket and swung him around to slam him against the wall. Bell grunted as his head cracked against a thickly carved doorframe and the breath was knocked out of him.
“You won’t get him,” the Other parroted his lines as he grabbed Bell by the throat and squeezed. The thick fingers cut off Bell’s attempts to refill his lungs, and he could feel the tendons in his throat creak and strain. “We’ll never let you have him.”
Bell squinted as dark spots swam across his vision and slammed the heel of his hand up into the Other’s chin. The Other’s jaw snapped shut on the tip of his tongue, a spray of blood spit over Bell as the sliver of flesh was severed and either bone or tooth cracked.
The Other tried to hang on to Bell using borrowed jock bulk to pin him against the wall. Then Conri grabbed the Other by the collar and slammed him down onto the ground hard enough to stun. To keep it down, Bell kicked it behind the ear, the impact of steel-reinforced toe against bone way too familiar at this point.
“… sorry,” Robin stuttered. The young fey stood frozen, a butcher’s blade clutched in one white-knuckled hand and a spray of blood stark red against his cheek. “I was going to… I should have but… they look like real people.”
“Not your job,” Bell said. He shook the static out of his ears and pushed himself off the wall. Things hurt, some sharp and new and others dull under the faded effects of the trow ointment. In a couple of days, he’d pay for them all. “Move. Let’s get you out of here.”
Conri chivvied the shaken teens forward, first one step and then another and then a shove to get them to shamble into a run. The Others scrambled out of doors and downstairs to lunge at them with knives or grab at their arms and clothes on the way past. Annie yelped as one of the Others got a handful of her hair and yanked her back off her feet. The knife she’d taken dropped from her fingers, and she grabbed desperately at Shanko and Robin as she was dragged backward. Conri stooped down, grabbed the knife smoothly off the ground, and carved the Other’s arm open down to the bone as he came up. Severed tendons loosened the Other’s fingers around her knotted curls, and Annie lunged away. She left strands of hair tangled in his fingers as she threw herself into Shanko’s arms.
The Other didn’t have a chance to do anything before Conri flipped the knife in his hand and drove the blade into his exposed throat. As the Other’s eyes widened in shock, it looked real. Then they clouded over as he reeled back, a gout of blood spilling down his throat as the knife slid out.
It was Bell’s job to keep people safe. To either bring home the mortals trapped in the Otherworld or make sure the ones who decided to stay did so of their own free will. Some of them had fought him, a few he’d had to hogtie and drag home, but he’d never had to kill a human before. It would feel like a failure, no matter how often Conri claimed they were already as good as dead.
There wasn’t time to dwell on it.
“Come on,” Bell said as he pushed the fey trio forward. “Keep moving.”
Conri kept Annie’s knife. He held it like he had a good idea how to use it.
They dashed down corridors, sweaty and—at least in Bell’s case—sickly aware they’d lost any sense of direction five turns back. Or maybe not. They skidded around one last corner and nearly crashed into the three Others set to guard the door.
“You won’t get him back,” one of them, scars raked down one side of his face, said as he stepped forward. A hammer hung from his hand and he bounced it against his thigh as he talked. “We’ll die first. All of us. Here. Together.”
“We’ll die first,” the other two said, one slightly slower than the other. “… die first.”
Bell didn’t break stride. He ducked his shoulder and slammed into the Other’s stomach at full speed. It lifted the man off his feet with a grunt of surprise, and he grappled briefly at Bell’s back before he remembered the hammer. It was too late for that. Out of the corner of his eye, Bell saw the hammer start to life, the head of it scarred bronze, and he grabbed the Other’s arm by the elbow and tossed him. The joint popped with that distinctive snap of fucked tendons—like rubber bands stretched too tight—and the Other crashed awkwardly into the ground.
He writhed there, arm twisted around until his hand was nearly backward, until Conri leaned down to grab a chunk of his hair. He dug his fingers into the matted curl
s and smacked the Other’s head off the flagstones once and then again. The second time, the Other made a sick, wretched noise in his throat and went limp.
Bell spun on the ball of his foot and smashed his sap down against the Other’s heavily tattooed forearm as he thrust a spear at Conri’s side. The metal caught on the joint of the Other’s wrist and snapped it brutally back until the thumb kissed the inked phoenix on his skin and the spear clattered to the ground.
The Other screamed in rage, ignored the pain, and lunged at Bell to grapple with him. He managed to trip them both to the ground, and they scuffled in the filth and blood as they punched and kneed each other. Bell had better technique—after years on the job, he fucking should—but technique didn’t count for much in a scrum.
He twisted his head to the side. “Get the door,” he yelled at Robin, who’d shoved the other two behind him and then frozen. “Get outside.”
The order jarred Robin out of his shock. He scrambled over to the door and fumbled with the heavy, rust-thick bar that sealed it. Shanko hesitated but then went to help while Annie dithered behind them.
Bell grunted as the Other rammed a knee up into his stomach and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. He hammered two hard, knuckly punches into the Other’s kidney that made the man groan. The Other tried to pin Bell down with his weight—muscle and a bit of flab—but Bell twisted around and sank his teeth into the side of the man’s face. His incisors jarred on the hard ridge of a cheekbone and the chunk of flesh in his mouth tasted like sour wine and sweat.
But dirty tricks were good whatever sort of fight you were in.
The Other howled and reeled back, up onto his knees. Blood dripped down his face from the raw, distinctly bite-shaped wound, raw meat visible where the skin had torn. Bell pulled his knees up until they hit the Other’s ass. Then he grabbed his arm and flipped him over. The Other grunted as the landing jarred his grotesquely broken wrist. While the Other writhed around the pain, Bell scooped up his sap, weighted his fist with the handle, and punched it down against the Other’s temple. The Other’s eyes rolled back at the impact and he went limp, mouth slack and bloody.
Bell braced his fist against the man’s chest and pushed himself painfully up onto his feet. He wiped his arm over his mouth and glanced around. The kids were still fighting with the bolts on the door while Conri kept the last Other busy.
Bell took a guilty, indulgent second to watch Conri move.
The changeling fought like a… fencer—Bell refused to give the Otherworld the satisfaction of the other comparison—as he bobbed on the balls of his feet and snaked in with the knife to harry the last Other. From the dirt-locked knots of hair and the razor, he was Keith’s version of himself as a homeless serial, and he jerked away from each sharp jab of the knife while Conri twisted bonelessly away from the increasingly desperate slashes of the straight razor.
Conri wasn’t exactly graceful. He jinked and twisted at odd angles, but his absolute confidence in his body and what it could do made Bell’s mouth dry with lust… even though this wasn’t the time.
Conri had the Other under control, so Bell shoved himself to his feet and limped over to help drag the heavy bars out of their dented housings. Sweat itched between his fingers as he wrestled with the lock, the insistent pulse of blood the timekeeper in his ears.
“Watch out!” Annie yelped.
Bell turned and the head of the short axe sliced through the air in front of his nose. If he hadn’t moved, it would have been buried in the back of his skull. Chips of wood flew as the tip of the blade buried in the door. The Other grunted as he wrenched it back and swung again in a short, efficient arc that made it clear he knew what he was doing. Bell barely managed to twist out of the way, but Shanko wasn’t as lucky. He grabbed at the man and lost part of his hand as the Other easily reversed the arc of the weapon.
What looked like most of a finger dropped to the ground. Shanko was too shocked to even scream. The Other flicked the blood off the blade and swung at Bell again.
Shit.
Bell backpedaled along the wall as he tried to divide his attention between the axe and the rest of the room.
The Other spun the axe in his hand with casual competence. Fairy tales always had beautiful fey weapons—jeweled swords that could talk and spears made of ivory and horn. The reality was sweat-stained, unadorned wood handles and dented, uneven bronze axe-heads crusted with dirt and scabs of dried flesh. Bell adjusted his grip on the sap and wished, again, for the familiar off-kilter weight of his old one. He knew where the weak points were on that.
“The whore gets nothing,” the Other said. “She was told.”
Conri had dispatched his opponent. The Other, slumped against the wall and stained with blood, looked as if he was still breathing but he wouldn’t get up anytime soon. While Conri yanked the last bolts back and shoved the kids out into the pink-tinged dawn, Bell caught the axe on his sap. The blade scraped along it as it slid dangerously close to his fingers. A heartbeat before he lost a knuckle to the edge, Bell let his arms drop, the sap slid from underneath the axe, and he snapped it back around to tag the meat of the Other’s thigh.
The Other staggered, and Conri snaked an arm around his neck from behind. Lean muscle stood out against tanned skin as he choked the Other until blue eyes rolled back, and the axe dropped out of a limp hand.
The heavy weapon landed point-first on the wooden floor and buried itself, trembling slightly from the impact. Its owner was dumped unceremoniously next to it.
“You should have stayed with the kids,” Bell snapped as he stepped over the Other. His chest was tight with a strange, heady delight that Conri had come to his aid, even if it wasn’t needed. This was work, though. “We’re here to rescue them, and I—for the last time—can take care of myself. You should have gone. I would have caught up.”
He gave Conri’s shoulder a shove to shift him out of the way, and Conri fell back a step.
“Yeah,” he said, placid as dark water and just as ominous. “Thing is, they wanna talk to you.”
Fuck.
Bell wiped his forehead on his sleeve and limped outside to see what had gone wrong this time.
Chapter Eleven
APPARENTLY THERE were faces you didn’t get tired of punching.
Conri rubbed his bruised and bloody knuckles as he watched Keith preen and parade in front of the scarred yellow truck. The paint had come in cracked blisters where unicorn blood had splattered it, and the metal was gouged and ripped like it had been through a war. Something had gone through the windscreen, and they’d had to kick it out.
“… saw through her stupid trap,” Keith boasted in a tight, cracking voice. “As soon as I caught up with Ned, we headed straight back here. Did you forget we had a fucking truck now, Nora?”
He swung around on his heel to scream the last words into Nora’s face, and she grimaced and flinched back as far as she could, pinned between two of the Others. Ironically, since every Other was made in Keith’s image, the ones he trusted the most were apparently the ones least like him. One was thickly built and cabbage-eared, scars cut through his eyebrows, and the other thin as a whip, with Glasgow Smile scars on both cheeks. He was the one with a knife pressed against Nora’s tanned throat.
Her hounds were muzzled with thorns and tied up with rough lengths of rope cobbled together around skinny ankles, under the watchful eye of the rest of the Others. The big pack leader—Betty—snarled and fought her bindings, blood bright on white fur, and was wrenched back by the Other who held her lead. Robin tried to jump in as well, but it was Shanko who dragged him back by the collar.
“I hoped you were so stupid you’d get lost,” she snapped back at Keith. “Or you’d go back and leave us alone!”
Keith glowered, but it wasn’t him who answered.
“Why would we do that, Nora?” Ned Kessell rasped. “We’re only here to save you. Once you’re home, you’ll see that.”
No more ignoring the elephant in the room
, then. Or—Conri glanced at what the Otherworld had left of Nora’s brother—the pig.
Not a placid pig domestic porker, though. This was one of the half-wild pigs that Conri remembered from his childhood—mean, scarred slabs of hard meat, fat on acorns and maybe two generations away from wild boars. His shoulders had torn through the sleeves of his T-shirt, the heavy hunch of muscle fuzzed with coarse white bristles, and his eyes were red-rimmed and beady under the heavy overhang of his brow. His jaw thrust forward, and his chin had thickened as it disappeared into the thick folds of his neck. Yellow tusks poked from under his lower lip, and his nose was flattened and wet with snot.
Conri had seen worse. The fey liked extremes. The grotesque stirred their senses just as the beautiful did. It was the mundane they shunned. It wasn’t Ned’s appearance that made Conri’s skin crawl. It was seeing his worst, wet-snouted nightmare made into pink, sweaty flesh and boar-bristled jowls.
In the mortal world, probably ten minutes had passed on the clock, and even by the slough’s timekeeping, it had been a few days. Conri had never seen someone so completely, confidently remade by the Otherworld in such a short space of time.
It was what Conri didn’t want. The possibility that left him sweaty in the dark, his throat full of his own heartbeat, until Bell came to look at him like he wasn’t a monster. And the other thing. The one he tried really hard not to think about.
What if flesh wasn’t the only thing the Otherworld could shape to order? What had it left him?
“Let her go,” Bell said. He stepped forward, lean and deadly in bruises and bloodstained black clothes. “And we can all go home, Mr. Kessell. That’s what we all want, isn’t it?”
Keith jumped forward and jabbed a grubby finger at Bell. He was skinny, tanned skin stretched over wiry muscle and bone.
“Fuck you too,” he said. “We all want to go home and what? What then, Mr. Iron Door Agent traitor? You’ll bury this? Brush it under the carpet so the filthy sidhe and pixies and trow can keep on fucking us over and fucking us up? Not this time. Not with this.”
