Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  “You know what?” I said as the door slammed open and a pair of guards appeared. “We’ll manage. Die!” I shouted at them in my brother’s voice, and the two tried to beat a retreat. Unfortunately for them, the door was only large enough to let one through at a time, and I fried them both when they struggled to fit through simultaneously.

  Joey followed me out, stepping gingerly over the smoking corpses sprawled on the floor. “Not bad. You’ve almost got his intonation down.”

  “Working on it.”

  “Arm doesn’t hurt so much now.”

  “Enchantment numbs the pain,” I replied, throwing a line of fireballs at the unlucky guard who appeared from around the corner.

  “And you couldn’t have done that before you set it?”

  I gave him a long-suffering look over my shoulder, an expression Coileán favored whenever Joey or I said something stupid. “It’s part of the enchantment I’ve been using. Creating a new one just to numb the pain would have taken longer.”

  “Ahead,” he said, then rested his left wrist on my shoulder and fired twice, sending the next guard to the floor.

  “Shit, be careful with that!” I yelped, pulling away from the gun as the side of my head tingled in warning. I dispatched the guard, then pointed to the lowered gun. “Do you have any idea how unpleasant that feels?”

  “Yeah,” he said, giving me a one-shouldered shrug, “but I shoot straighter when I can steady my wrist.”

  Another guard ran past, and I incinerated him before he could round the next corner. “How about warning me the next time you use me as a tripod, okay?”

  “If I’ve got time.” He nodded to the empty hallway and pressed onward, holding his gun like a steel extension of his hand.

  When we reached another parlor, I nudged Joey inside and closed the door. “Watch for me,” I said, then closed my eyes and tried to feel the realm in my mind. “Any chance of a status update?” I asked Faerie.

  What would you know?

  “Oberon’s location would be a good start.”

  She chuckled. That I will not tell you. But here, she offered, and the guards’ model appeared in my head, rotating at my direction. The yellow dots are Oberon’s people. The orange ones are your allies. See what you can learn.

  I studied the model for a moment, then flipped it around and glanced at the dungeon. “Cells are empty.”

  Your allies have been busy.

  “Mm. And the hole in the wall?”

  A distraction while they opened the cells. The true fighting is here, she explained, illuminating the long hallway that connected to the spiral staircase leading to the dungeon. I could see pockets of pure yellow and orange, but most of the dots were mixed together and jostling each other.

  As my gaze drifted around the model, however, I noticed a room in the east wing of the palace—a large bedroom, from the looks of it—holding six dots. Five were yellow, but one inside shone orange. “That’s not Coileán’s room,” I muttered.

  It is not.

  “Can you show me the fastest way up?”

  A red ribbon wound from our position up and around to the protected suite, and I dismissed the vision and opened my eyes. “Found him,” I told Joey. “Ready?”

  Joey snorted. “As ready as I’m going to be without my good arm. Lead on.”

  Oberon’s personal bodyguards were good, the best of his fighters, old and seasoned and wise to the ways of combat. I was young and largely untested, and Joey was wounded. In a fair fight, we would have been toast.

  But ours wasn’t a fair fight. I shot at the two who held the suite’s door with everything the realm had given me, and when that weakened them, I tried to simply reach across the space between us and stop their hearts. To my surprise, the guards dropped dead at my feet, as did their pair of fellows, who ran out to replace them when the screaming stopped. Joey had switched from chest shots to face shots by then, and he killed one guard before I realized he’d begun firing. When all four were dead on the rug, we stepped over the mess we’d made and marched into Oberon’s room, and I stopped cold.

  To be kind, the old king looked like shit.

  The Oberon I remembered was a redheaded beach bum with board shorts and a constant tan, a cocky bastard with the face of a recent college dropout and the eyes of an ancient. He was muscular in the way of a surfer, a couple of inches shorter than Coileán but larger through the chest and biceps. He always smelled a little like sea salt and beer, and his laughter, while frequent, was seldom kind.

  The man I found crouching in the corner of the bedroom looked enough like Oberon to assure me that I’d located my target, but there was little of the Floridian bartender left in him. He’d lost weight to the point of emaciation, and his clothes—a floor-length blue robe over a matching tunic and pants, not his familiar swimwear—hung off his shoulders when he stood. His face was gaunt, his green eyes sunken and seemingly bruised from exhaustion, and his hair bore striking streaks of white. The brocaded coverlet on the large four-poster bed that dominated the room was barely rumpled, and I could tell that if Oberon had stretched out to rest that night, he hadn’t been sleeping.

  For once, Oberon wasn’t laughing. He looked at Joey with alarm, but when he saw me, his pointing finger began to tremble. “You…you can’t be here,” he rasped, “the bind—”

  I didn’t give him time to finish before flinging a string of fireballs at his face. Oberon shielded reflexively, and the fires died on the stone floor.

  “The bind is still intact!” he yelled across the room, watching me from behind the haze of his shield. “You’re not…you can’t have…how…”

  By then, Joey had dropped to one knee and was shooting. Most of the nails bounced off, but two penetrated the shield and embedded themselves in Oberon’s thigh, and he screamed in shock and pain. Furious, he took his attention off me for a second and turned to my friend.

  That bolt wouldn’t have merely killed Joey. Had it hit him, it would have reduced him to a wet, pink haze and a gory puddle. But the shield that materialized around Joey an instant before the impact was strong and thick, and definitely not of my making. I looked across the bedroom and spotted Val standing by the window, one arm outstretched and shaking with the effort of holding the shield together. The bolt dissipated, but Joey, who continued to shoot through both Val’s shield and Oberon’s, seemed either unaware of how close he had come to death or unfazed by the brush.

  At that moment, realization crossed Oberon’s haggard face, and he aimed a blast at Val—a blast that Val had anticipated and easily deflected. “What’s the matter, old boy?” I taunted, seeing Oberon’s expression shift back and forth between anger and fear. “Feeling a little weak today?”

  His shield strengthened against Joey’s continued barrage and Val’s onslaught of lightning. “The bind is still intact,” he repeated, yanking a nail out of his smoking leg. “And Coileán is bound. I feel him. So who”—he shrieked as he pulled another nail free—“the hell are you?”

  I smiled as he limped toward me, then let the glamour fall away. Oberon’s watering eyes went wide. “The mongrel?” he muttered, momentarily frozen in his tracks. “That’s impossible, you—”

  “Maybe no one ever told you,” I interrupted, calling up a basketball-sized sphere of green flame, “but mongrels have teeth.”

  My shot broke against his shield, but the impact was enough to distract Oberon from the attack on his flank, and one of Val’s bolts slipped through. He screamed and fell to his knees, then growled with rage and turned on Val. Before he could shoot, however, another of Joey’s nails hit him in the back, and Oberon again switched his focus.

  I saw his shield strengthen anew, first matching mine, then surpassing it, until the air around him was nearly opaque with activated magic, an iridescent shell that blocked Val’s shots. A handful of Joey’s were still getting through, however, and the more that Val and I forced Oberon to block, the better the chance that a nail would strike.

  For ten long
minutes, the four of us danced around the bedroom, jumping over and ducking behind furniture to avoid each other’s fire. As sweat ran into my eyes, I realized that we probably weren’t going to get a kill shot in—I was strong, Val was doing his best to make up for my inexperience, and Joey had entered a sort of Zen state of focus in which he could shoot left-handed and still dodge the worst of Oberon’s attacks, but Oberon had thrown his weight into his shield, and very little that we tossed at him was getting past the barrier. I was beginning to wonder how much more he could pour into the shield before his attacks started to weaken when I tripped over the corner of the thick rug. Catching my balance, I let down my guard for a split-second.

  Oberon seized his chance, and my world exploded in pain.

  I flew backward and slammed into the stone wall. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs, and I saw stars as my head cracked against rock and rang from the blow. Before I could gather my wits, I felt something clamp around my neck and tighten, and I saw Oberon squeezing his hand into a fist.

  Looking down at him as the world began to swim, all I could think was, Huh. He’s a Sith.

  And then, as my brain registered that I was rapidly losing oxygen, I started to struggle against the vise around my throat. Oberon clenched his teeth and redoubled his efforts, and he and I fought for control, the one crouched behind a shield, the other pinned to the wall and beginning to suffocate. As the black specks of impending unconsciousness crept into the corners of my field of vision, I noticed distantly that Oberon’s shield wasn’t solid all the way around—sure, he was blocking Joey and Val, but he extended little of the shield between the two of us, and almost none in the direction of the open door. It was an idle observation, seeing as I was pouring everything I had into getting the invisible hand off my windpipe, but I hoped one of the others would notice and take advantage of the opening.

  They didn’t. But as it so happened, they didn’t need to.

  I was seconds away from losing my fight when Coileán dragged himself through the door. Before Oberon had time to register that the newcomer was the real deal, my brother had flung a fast volley of fireballs at the gap in his shield, and Oberon rushed to block them before they burned him alive. With his attention elsewhere, his grip on me weakened, and I fell to the floor, coughing and gasping.

  There were no words exchanged between the two kings, no taunts, no pleas for mercy. They simply threw together the best shields they could and began slinging fire at each other.

  Of the two, Coileán looked to be in better physical shape, but he was slower than usual, his attacks weaker, his shield thinner. Breaking through the bind had obviously taken its toll on him, on top of which he’d been continually fighting Oberon for nearly two months. But he was enraged, and that gave him the strength to go on.

  Val and I helped where we could, but Oberon managed to hold his own, desperately shielding and striking with every bit of his power. As he and Coileán began to flicker into and out of existence, chasing each other around the room, I looked to the door and saw that the mass fight had made its way toward us—the smoke and screams were a dead giveaway. “Val!” I yelled, pointing to the fray, and he moved to the doorway to guard against incursions.

  Just as he got into position, Oberon and Coileán reappeared across the room, barely visible through the shields around them. Coileán’s back was to the wall, but Oberon, focused on the opponent at hand, had left himself vulnerable from behind.

  I didn’t give myself time to think. “Down,” I said to Joey, who dropped to one knee without hesitation. Praying that the leather around his sword’s hilt was thick and intact, I yanked it free from the scabbard on his back, told my hands to stop complaining, and wound the sword back like a baseball bat as I ran toward Oberon.

  He never saw me coming. I didn’t completely behead him, but the cut was deep enough to do the trick.

  When Oberon fell and didn’t rise, Coileán dropped his shield, and we stared at each other over the body for a few silent seconds while the fight continued to rage in the corridor. Finally, he mumbled, “Aiden?”

  “Hey,” I panted, then remembered what I was still holding and tossed Joey’s sword away. My left hand, which had partly covered the naked pommel, felt like it was on fire, and when I opened my fingers, I saw that a good portion of the skin on my palm had gone with the sword. “Shit,” I hissed, wrapping the edge of my T-shirt around the weeping wound as the pain began to register. “Oh, damn it, that hurts…”

  “You…”

  “Realm fixed me up,” I muttered, gritting my teeth to keep from crying out, then stripped off my shirt and started winding it around the wound. “If you could cover for me for just a few minutes, I need to fix this—”

  “Won’t heal. Not…for a while. Iron burns…difficult.” He staggered backward until his shoulders hit the wall, and he sank to the ground. “Aiden…need rest.”

  “I can’t. Joey’s already down an arm, and Val—”

  “I need rest,” he clarified, and I saw the exhaustion in his eyes when I looked up from my injury. “You…”

  “I’ll hold them back,” I promised, checking to be sure that Val was still secure at the door. “Take it easy, you’ve done enough.”

  But Coileán shook his head, then collapsed and sprawled on the stone beside Oberon with his eyes closed. “You…regent.”

  I crouched beside him and shook his shoulder, trying to keep him conscious. “Come on, stay with me,” I said, jostling him until he flopped onto his back. “Come on, Coileán, you’ve got to stay awake!”

  Despite my efforts, his breathing was already slowing. “Need rest,” he whispered. “Aiden…”

  He struggled to raise his hand, and I clasped it with my uninjured one. “I’m here,” I murmured, leaning close to hear him over the noise.

  Hold the fort, he mouthed, and his hand went limp in mine.

  My brother wasn’t dead, I realized after an initial moment of panic, but nothing I could do roused him from the deep sleep into which he had tumbled before my eyes. When I was sure that the cause was hopeless, I let his hand go, then rose and found Val and Joey watching me. “So, it looks like I’m in charge until he wakes,” I muttered. “What the hell am I going to do?”

  Val pointed to the open door. “Just a thought, my lord, but why don’t you start by ending this mess?”

  I looked down at my sleeping brother and the dead king.

  Hold the fort.

  Like it or not, this was my show now, and I had to act the part. With a last look at Coileán, I started the healing enchantment over my burned hand, tried to push the pain away, and nodded to Val. “Yeah, let’s go break up the fight. I think I owe Astrid that much,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  We didn’t have to go far to find the fighting. The front lines had reached Oberon’s room by the time I poked my head into the hallway, and from what I could see, fortune was with our side. Oberon really should have killed the ones who wouldn’t kneel, I mused, watching a bolt of lightning incinerate one of his guards. A pissed-off faerie is a dangerous faerie, and many of the ones who’d been locked in the dungeon were full-blooded and angry.

  Even working with Val and Joey, it took me nearly half an hour to end the free-for-all and explain what had happened. The newly released members of Coileán’s court—my court, for the moment—were only too willing to escort the surviving members of Oberon’s down to their vacated cells. I told myself that Coileán could deal with them, or if he was asleep for more than a day or two, that I could make the call, but I had bigger issues to consider at the moment than the defeated invaders.

  Among the captives were eleven of Oberon’s children, ranging in age from one hundred or so to six hundred and change. None of them was the successor, however—the realm made that clear to me—which meant that someone out there, probably in the mortal realm, had just inherited a ton of power. I expected that he or she would come forth in
the next few days, but my more immediate concern was the Arcanum and Moyna’s siege. Having had no word from the other side for weeks, I wanted reassurance that Hel was okay—and I wanted to nab Moyna for Coileán.

  But there were certain formalities that needed to be addressed first, and at Val’s insistence, I donned a replacement shirt, gathered the available members of the court in my brother’s throne room, and perched uneasily on his seat. “Coileán is alive,” I said once the room had quieted. “And freed from Oberon’s bind. But he’s recuperating for now, and he’s, uh…he’s left me in charge. The realm doesn’t seem opposed to this.” I waited while a wave of muttering swept around the room, then raised my unburned hand. “I’m serving as regent at his request. If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with him when he wakes.”

  One of the lower ladies stepped out from the pack. “My lord,” she began, a sneer in her voice, “do correct me if I’m mistaken, but surely a mongrel cannot—”

  Her mouth snapped shut as I called a fireball into existence in my palm. “As I said,” I murmured, “the realm is on board with this arrangement. This hand,” I continued, lifting my wrapped left, “is a wreck right now because I took Oberon’s head two-thirds of the way off with Joey’s sword”—he raised the blade as an exhibit—“and I ran out of covered hilt. Now, if you want a demonstration…”

  She held up her empty hands in surrender, shook her head, and melted into the crowd.

  “All right, then.” I sighed, slumping back onto Coileán’s throne. “Moyna is still at large, and I understand that she has an army of some size. If you have concrete knowledge for me, stick around. Everyone else, stay close—as soon as I find her, I’m going after her.” I looked down at the room from the dais and smiled tightly. “Am I correct in assuming that a few of you would like a word with her?”

  The court, particularly the ones who’d just come from the dungeon, clapped and cheered until I stood and raised my hand to restore order. “Good to know. Captain?” Val stepped out of the throng, and I pointed him out to the others. “You’re in charge of attack preparations. Astrid, please take Coileán to his room and make him secure. As for Oberon…” I cut my eyes back to Val. “I don’t know how many of your team are left, but get someone you trust to take a blood sample from him, at least a few pints. We might need it. When he’s finished with that, he can burn the body.”