“Oh.” Some of the ice weighing down my stomach began to melt. “I’m impressive, huh?”
“We can discuss the finer details of your badassery later, Vince. You know, if we’re not dead.”
“We can discuss them even if we are dead, you know? Just in a less physical state.”
She frowned. “Can we focus on the death squad and how to escape them? Please?”
“Actually, that’s what I’m doing.” And I was. Currently cycling through every possible escape strategy in the known universe. But I was coming up dry. I was starting to think I might need to look at escape routes in other universes. “Adding a dash of humor to situations where I’m on the verge of death makes it a tad easier for me to think over the terrified internal screaming.”
“I see,” she said, tightening her grip on the gun as the elves in front of us began to move. “Should I start telling jokes?”
“You got booed off a stand-up stage once, so I’m going to say no.” I glanced behind us. The rearguard was closing in as well, one slow, even step at a time. They were all moving in to form a tight circle we couldn’t breach, at which point they would attack simultaneously with a host of sharp swords and pointy daggers and nasty spells. The barghest, on the other hand, was staying put. If Saoirse and I somehow managed to evade the elves, the creature would intervene and rip us to shreds. Considering it was intelligent, I doubted it would allow me to pull the flood tunnel trick a second time.
We were well and truly screwed if we stayed here a minute longer.
“Fucking hell,” I said. “We really have no choice. I’m going to have to call in my marker.”
“Marker?” Saoirse paused with her gun halfway up. “With who?”
“Hard to explain. Better see for yourself.” I flexed my hand a couple of times, vacillating over whether to reach out and grab her. We hadn’t breached each other’s personal space even once since our initial encounter at Mo’s shop this morning, a seven-year wedge of bad blood and haunting memories stuck in between us.
But I knew it was foolish to dwell on the past, especially during a situation whose outcome would decide the future. Saoirse wasn’t to blame for what happened to me, and I had no reason to keep my distance from her other than to keep my distance from her workplace and her coworkers. An issue that was not hard to manage, and never had been. I’d just spent the time I should’ve been repairing the bridge between us wrapped in a bitter blanket and cursing my circumstances.
If my dad had been alive, he would’ve verbally beaten me for wallowing in self-pity.
Get your act together, Whelan. It’s time to act like a mature adult.
I took a deep breath, and let it out.
Then I grabbed Saoirse’s wrist and yanked her toward me, wrapping my other arm around her waist to pull her flush against my chest. Her cheek brushed mine, the one with the patchwork glamour, and her warmth bled through the faulty spell, tingling against my wintery skin. She let out a hushed gasp at the contact, and made to ask me what the heck I was doing, but I cut her off and said, “Hold on to me, tightly, and do not, under any circumstances, let go until I tell you to. Understand?”
She went rigid, hesitating, for only a second. Before she hugged me in a way that spoke of more than necessity (though I didn’t have time to dwell on that right now). “Whatever you’re about to do better be damn impressive. Because we have one shot at getting out of this trap before we end up shish kebabs.”
The elves were moving in quicker now, alerted by our movements.
“It’s not what I’m about to do you have to worry about. It’s what happens afterward.”
“What do you—?”
I stomped one foot, channeling all the energy I could muster into the ground beneath me. Frost shot out in all directions, curling and crackling across the asphalt, forming lines and shapes, symbols and words, until all the components joined together, closing to create the most fundamental method of magic casting in existence. A circle. Whose purpose any novice could read with a few language references, and which the elves immediately recognized. The barghest figured it out too, and at the same moment, all of our adversaries bounded forward, desperate to reach us before I spoke the invocation.
Funny thing was, I didn’t need to use an invocation.
All I had to do was think: Take me home.
A wall of wind and snow shot up from the edge of the circle, blocking every sword and knife as the elves attempted to skewer us. The ground began to shift beneath our feet, until it became like quicksand, slowly drawing us down, down, down. Saoirse stiffened in fear, her heart pounding against her ribs. I embraced her securely, reassuring, as the ground ceased to exist altogether, as our heads slipped beneath the pavement, out of the meager light of a Kinsale night and into the total darkness of the space between worlds.
We fell through infinite blackness for what seemed an eternity. Until, out of nowhere, we bumped into something hard. Something that rebuffed us the way a hammer hits a nail, driving us back so fast we sprang off into the deepness as if shot from a cannon. We hurtled through the void, clinging to each other, spinning head over feet, feet over head, until finally our soles came into contact with a barrier whose touch was not unlike the soft caress of silk. It stopped our movement, instantly, yet without inertia crushing us to pieces, no laws of physics binding us, reality but a dream. And for a moment in a place beyond time and space, we stood untethered from the universe.
Then the silken floor upon which we stood…spun. The void fled from existence, and a new reality bled in.
I blinked the vestiges of darkness away and found myself standing on an ocean.
Chapter Thirteen
The world was bright, but the sky wasn’t blue. Instead, we stood beneath a black dome of space populated by the scattered realms of the Otherworld. Some realms were distant lights, like stars, while others were close, the colorful features of places strange and foreign to Earth cast across the horizon. There were realms that looked to be planets, with vast rings of glass and stone arced around them. There were realms that looked to be flat planes, oceans cascading off their edges and billowing out into cosmic clouds. There were realms that looked to be things I couldn’t even describe, because the words to describe such things didn’t exist in any language I knew.
Saoirse disentangled herself from me and staggered back, thrown off kilter by the strange sights around her. She stared first at her bare, scraped feet, standing atop a gently rocking ocean, unable to penetrate its surface. Confused, she lifted one foot, a drop of blood rolling off a cut on her toe and splattering onto the water. The drop undulated with the movement of the waves, but it didn’t sink into the water and disperse. It was like the ocean was a tilting floor beneath our feet. And really, that wasn’t far off from the truth.
Saoirse’s wide brown eyes drifted up to the sky then, and her mouth dropped open in awe. She spun around, seeking anything recognizable, but north and south and east and west, there was nothing but water as far as any eye could see. Down there was nothing but ocean, crystal clear near its surface and black near its base, if there was a base. Up there was nothing but space and the realms that occupied it, too far away for us to touch.
Eventually, Saoirse found her wits and said, “Vince, where are we?”
“It’s got a lot of names. The Endless Sea. The Sea Between Worlds. The Sea of Lost Souls.” I swiped my foot along the surface of the water. If I pushed hard enough, I could make it ripple, but I couldn’t punch through it. “You can call it whatever you want.”
“But what is it? And why are we standing on it instead of swimming in it?”
“It’s a body of water that exists between all the realms of the Otherworld.” I pointed at the heavily populated sky above. “See those? The ocean exists between all those realms.”
“Huh?” She squinted as she catalogued all the celestial bodies floating above us. “But those are planets of some kind, in space. How can the ocean exist between them? I don’t understand.”<
br />
“No one understands.” I chuckled. “It just is.”
She clenched her eyes shut and smacked her cheeks a couple times, something she always did whenever she was stressed and needed to focus. Eyes fluttering open again, she said, “I’m guessing everything in the Otherworld makes as much sense as that explanation?”
“Par for the course.” I gestured to the water beneath us. “And as for why we’re standing on the water, it’s because we’re not ‘compatible’ with it. The Endless Sea is not a place inhabited by the living. The spirits of the ocean live here, along with the souls of the dead who’ve lost their way on their journey into the afterlife.”
Saoirse squinted as she scoured the depths of the water. She pointed her finger at something. “Is that an ocean spirit or a dead person?”
I followed her finger to a bioluminescent blue streak flittering through the water well over a hundred feet below the surface. “Ah, that’s a fuath. They’re the guardians of the sea—and angry little bastards.”
Saoirse pursed her lips. “Will they hurt us?”
“Nah. Sometimes, they venture into other bodies of water, in the Otherworld and on Earth, at which point they’re liable to attack people. But since living people can’t enter the Endless Sea, and the shades of the dead are intangible to the fuathan, they don’t usually get aggressive here.”
“Well, at least there’s some kind of paranormal not after our heads.” She immediately grimaced. “Sorry. I know you’re a paranormal too. I just…” She let out a deep sigh. “Apparently, I’ve gotten really bad at talking to you.”
“Seven years will do that.” I took a better look at my injured arm. The wound wasn’t deep, but it was extremely tender, and every twitch of my muscles sent another wave of fiery pain up my neck. It wasn’t unmanageable though. I could grin and bear it for a while. And I had a salve at home crafted specifically for iron wounds. It wouldn’t accelerate the healing—nothing could, since iron burned faeries all the way down to the soul—but it would take most of the pain away so I wouldn’t have to dwell on it for the weeks it took to mend.
Saoirse shuffled closer to me, her footing unsteady, and eyed the wound, frowning. “That won’t scar, will it?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Hate to break it to you, but all iron wounds scar.”
“All?” She blinked owlishly at me, like she didn’t fully understand, before the implication smacked her in the face. “You mean, the injuries from the chain that they…”
I nodded.
She slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, Vince. I’m so…” Her gaze fell to my chest, boring through my shirt fabric, seeking out any hint of the pale, patterned marks permanently branded on my skin. “I’m so sorry,” she finished weakly.
“You didn’t do it. You have nothing to be sorry about.”
She hung her head. “You’re wrong. I was there. I could’ve stopped them.”
I opened my mouth to contradict her, but struggled to push out the words. I’d let my anger and bitterness and depression over the attack simmer for so many years that it’d painted anyone and everyone who’d even been in the vicinity of the precinct during the time in a negative light. I’d justified my loathing of all those people, Saoirse included, by telling myself exactly what she had just said: that they could’ve done something to help me. Even though I’d known all along that excuse for such aching hatred was bunk. Even though I knew there was no one to blame but the bigots who’d actually done the deed.
The breakdown of all my relationships at the precinct—relationships with good people, like Saoirse—was not the fault of the seven men who’d wrapped me in an iron chain and beaten me to a pulp the day I slipped up and revealed my paranormal heritage to one of them by accident. The breakdown was my fault. I’d let the trauma get the better of me. I’d used it as a free ride to spit nasty things at my own partner, call her so many derogatory names that ought to have earned me a one-way ticket to hell. I’d used it to smear all my best memories of my time as a cop with an ugly, oily poison. And then I’d used those soiled memories as fuel for my coldly burning fury.
It was so hypocritical of me, to act like all humans—in particular, all cops—were as bad as those men. Considering how many humans had treated paranormals the same way, as if we were all evil creatures aligned with the devil. Yet I’d ridden that hypocrisy for so long, seven goddamn years, because at the end of the day, I was a coward who didn’t want to confront the pain of the past and sort out the jagged pieces of myself to build a better future. Because I was too afraid of getting cut all over again.
Saoirse had endlessly suffered in her own emotional prison as a result of my actions, blaming herself for my misfortune this whole time. And she didn’t deserve it. Not one bit.
It’s far past time you rectify this, you absolute bastard. You owed her an apology years ago.
Fingers shaking, I stripped off my right glove, reached out, and took Saoirse’s hand. “No. You couldn’t have stopped them. You couldn’t have done anything. If you’d tried, they’d have hurt you too, for being a sympathizer.”
She squeezed my hand, her own quaking badly. “I had a gun. I could’ve done something.”
“Not without destroying your entire life. You’d have been marked. You’d have lost your job. You’d have lost your home. You’d have been forced to run. You would’ve had to go underground with me, and the underground was not a good place for a human during the purge. You’d have been miserable and constantly in danger.” I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles. “I wouldn’t have wanted that for you, living such a perilous existence for months on end. It’s better that you didn’t intervene until the attack was over. That decision kept you safe.”
I smiled, weary. “Plus, it saved my life.”
Saoirse’s hand tightened around mine, and she said, breathless, “What do you mean?”
“After they were done kicking the shit out of me, they left me in that alley with the chain wrapped around my torso. Iron eats through faerie skin like acid, Saoirse. If you hadn’t come along afterward and removed the chain, then the iron would’ve killed me.”
“Oh my god.”
“So, you see, if you’d gotten hurt or locked up trying to stop those men, I wouldn’t even be here talking to you right now. I’d be in a shallow grave somewhere. Or ash in the air, like most of the purge victims.”
Saoirse’s eyes filled with tears, but they didn’t fall. She surged forward and embraced me, burying her face in my shoulder, her breaths shuddering as she said, “I spent so long thinking you hated me.”
“I pretended to,” I said, guilt grating across my voice, “but in reality, I was just too spineless to approach humans the way I had before, and I channeled that fear into anger.” I wrapped my arms around her, gently. “That crap I said to you after you unwrapped the chain and helped me out of the alley, when I threw your kindness back in your face…you should’ve hated me for that. Not the other way around. I’m sorry, Saoirse. I’m the one who threw our friendship away.”
Saoirse brought her face directly in line with mine, then slowly tipped forward until our foreheads touched. “I’m starting to think pretty much everyone acted like a fool during this purge-war-collapse mess. And I’m inclined to forgive most people for running around like chickens with their heads cut off. So how about we agree to stop being a couple of needlessly guilty morons, and pick up where we left off? And if we can’t pick it up, if that bridge is simply too damaged to repair, then how about we start over and build a new one?”
The tension that had been clutching my heart since Saoirse first walked into view at Mo’s finally began to loosen. “I’ll do whatever you think is best. You’re the tactician after all. I’m the nimrod who jumps fences into yards with large guard dogs and nearly gets eaten alive.”
Saoirse smiled, a real smile. “I told you to go another half block over.”
“I thought I knew better back then.” I smiled too. “I’ve learned from that mistake. And othe
rs.”
We released each other, and she stepped back. “Good to hear. Why don’t you show me what you’ve learned?” She gestured to the expanse of churning water that stretched on to every horizon. “What’s the game plan? I assume you didn’t bring us here for no reason.”
“You think right. I did it to throw off the svartálfar and the barghest. You remember when we were traveling, that part where it felt like we bumped into something and bounced off?”
She thought for a moment, lips skewed to the side. “Vaguely.”
“That was us getting repelled by the protective shield around the Unseelie Court’s capital city. I intentionally directed my Otherworld portal to a location in the city so that the shield would rebuff us. Because when your portal fails to open at your designated exit point, you automatically get sent to a random location in the Endless Sea. And random means…”
“Your enemies can’t follow you?” she finished.
“Exactly. They’ve lost us. And have no way to find us as long as we’re here. Tracking spells don’t work in the Endless Sea due to its wonky geography.”
“Sweet.” She arched an eyebrow. “But we do have to leave at some point.”
“I am aware, thank you.”
She snorted. “What’s our next move then?”
“I call in a favor with someone who can drop us off in the right place for a slip portal.”
“A what now?”
“A slip portal.” I waved my hand in the air in a way that did not clarify anything. “There are multiple types of portals for crossing the veil between Earth and an Otherworld realm. Two of them are fairly standard: a directed portal and a slip portal. Directed portals require more power, but they let you come out anywhere—unshielded—that you want. A slip portal requires less power, but only lets you move between areas in the two realms that correspond to each other geographically. The upside of a slip portal, besides that it requires less magic expenditure, is that it’s also practically unnoticeable. Direct portals are ‘loud,’ magically speaking.”
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