“We should be clear for now,” I murmured to Saoirse, “but be prepared for resistance when we get to the other house. So close to the witching hour, they’re probably on high alert. I expect security will be tight, particularly around the room where the spell is being prepared.”
“Understood.” She peered into the gaping void of the tunnel. “How are you planning to respond if they spot us?”
“I’m planning to make a grab for the harp and then run as fast as I can.”
“Your brilliant tactics never cease to inspire, Vince.”
“Oh, shut up. Like you have anything better.”
“If we were up against humans, I would have about ten better plans.”
“But we aren’t, so you don’t.” I wagged my finger at her. “Which makes me the expert in this situation.”
She faked a shudder. “What a terrifying thought.”
“Fuck you too.”
She smiled. “That reminds me, you owe me a date at a fancy restaurant.”
“Excuse me?” I sputtered.
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.” She stepped into the tunnel. “Two weeks before the exposure of the paranormals, I had a date with a really sexy firefighter named Ian. He took me to Armando’s, that high-end Italian place that used to be on Plantain. Right after we got our appetizers, you burst in. You were covered in mud from a wrestling match you’d had at a construction site with that mob hitman, Vintano, after he tried to assassinate Deputy Mayor Murdock, whose protective detail you were on at the time. You ran up to our table, leaving muddy footprints all over the expensive carpet, grabbed my arm, yanked me out of my chair, and said, ‘We have a conspiracy on our hands. The mayor’s in danger! Let’s go.’ And I had to leave poor Ian all alone, and skip my dinner.”
I racked my brain for a second, and came up with a memory that somewhat resembled her story. “Did I apologize?”
“Not really. You said you’d make it up to me later by taking me out to a fancy restaurant yourself.” Her smile shifted into a grin. “I asked you if the only reason you came to me, instead of grabbing someone who was actually on duty, is because you were jealous of Ian, and you turned that delightful shade of pink you always do when embarrassed.” She paused. “Yep. That’s the one.”
I slapped my hands over my flushing cheeks. “Shut up. I wasn’t jealous. I thought you’d be the best person to lead the team to hunt down Vintano’s associates.”
“Sure you did.” She winked at me. “Anyway, you never made good on your promise. So you still owe me a date.”
Clearing my throat, and willing my blush to fade, I replied, “Hate to break it to you, partner, but there’s only one fancy restaurant left in this town, and Bismarck owns it.”
“She might not after tonight. If it gets out that she’s been defying the queens, her little business empire’s going to crumble.”
“That’s true, but…”
“But nothing. You’re going to take me out for dinner, one way or another. A debt is a debt. You’re half faerie. You know that.”
Saoirse had me there, so I just pouted at her.
“Oh, stop moping.” She gestured into the tunnel with her gun. “Come on. Let’s take down the mob lady and her mysterious associate.”
“Fine,” I said like a moody teenager, brushing past her. “But let me lead in case somebody throws a spell at us. You keep watch on our rear.”
Together, we proceeded through the musty tunnel, which gradually narrowed as we neared the middle, to the point where we both had to bend our knees so our heads didn’t drag along the damp earthen ceiling. The tunnel began to widen again as we neared the other end, where we found a door just like the one in the first basement. Except, for some reason, this door had a massive dent in the middle, bowed out toward us, like someone or something very strong had kicked it in a rage. That didn’t bode well, but whatever had done it couldn’t be more menacing than a barghest. Right?
At the door, Saoirse and I took up positions on either side of the dent and pressed our ears against the metal. My unglamoured hearing was more acute than hers, but I was pretty sure she could hear roughly as much activity as I could. The murmurs of fifteen to twenty people, some near, some far. The heavy, regular footsteps of soldiers marching up and down a tiled hallway. The clanging of metal on metal, high pitched and repetitive, like someone was using a hammer to bang on a sword…A blacksmith?
It sounded like the people on the other side of the door were preparing for war.
Saoirse and I pulled away from the door and exchanged nervous glances.
As quietly as I could, I turned the handle of the door and opened it the slightest crack, just enough for me to glimpse one direction down the hall. I expected enemies to charge me immediately, but whatever the people in the basement were preparing for, it had distracted them from assiduously guarding their secret entrance. So I was able to draw a solid mental image of the basement—or rather, the underground compound—and shut the door again before anyone noticed me peeping.
I then leaned close to Saoirse’s ear and whispered, “The basement has been expanded into a kind of small military outpost. Barracks. Armory. Svartálfar crawling everywhere.”
“You put one of those veil things over us earlier, right?” She made a gesture like she was throwing a sheet over her head. “Will that hide us from them?”
“No. Elves, both dark and common, can see through veils. It’s a spiritual quirk. In fact…” I dispelled our veil. “There’s no point in wasting the energy.”
“So, what? We wait for an opening?” She bit her thumbnail. “Or cause a distraction?”
“Since we don’t have much time before the spellcasting will get underway—and we can’t predict if someone will come through this door in the meantime—I say we go with a distraction.” I closed my eyes and reexamined my mental picture of the western half of the hall, searching for weaknesses in the construction. “There’s some exposed water pipes bolted to the ceiling. They turn at the end of this hall and continue on to another section of the compound.”
“You want to flood the place?” Saoirse scrunched her nose. “I’m not looking forward to more waterlogged shoes.”
“Now it’s your turn to suck it up.” I wrung my hands, carefully siphoning a tiny amount of magic energy from my soul. I didn’t want a big explosion of power that would alert every enemy to my presence in their midst. I wanted just enough to wreak the right amount of havoc. “This shouldn’t take but a second. Watch.”
Once the energy had gathered in my fingertips, I cracked the door open again and checked to see if the coast was clear. There were a couple dark elves loitering nearby, but they were speaking in harsh tones to each other and facing away from the door, preoccupied by whatever had the base in a tizzy. So I pointed two fingers at the nearest pipe. With a mental whisper that took a tad more effort than speaking an invocation aloud, I released the magic from beneath my skin as a nearly transparent white wisp and directed it into the pipe.
The moment it touched the water, folding into a compact seed of energy, it shot down the length of the pipe so fast the two elves standing beneath said pipe didn’t sense a thing. The spell then took that sharp turn and kept going, and kept going, and kept going, until it hit yet another curve—which I knew because that was the condition under which I’d ordered it to explode.
A screech of tearing metal rebounded off the walls, followed by the unmistakable sound of water splashing across a tile floor. The two elves in sight of the door started, and took off to investigate. I shut the door as soon as they were gone and waited, hearing several more elves blow past, followed by a multitude of swears in a language I didn’t speak. As soon as our stretch of the hall quieted, I opened the door a third time, wide enough to stick my head through, and quickly looked both ways. Clear.
I yanked the door halfway open, ushered Saoirse through, followed her, and then softly closed the door behind us. At her questioning eyebrow, I pointed to the opposite end of the
hall from where I’d sent the spell. We hurriedly shuffled along, listening at every door, checking every nook for hostiles lying in wait, until we reached an intersection that branched off in two directions.
Saoirse mouthed, Which way?
It wasn’t a question I had to think hard about. One end of the new hall was dead as a doormat. No lights. No people. No magic. Just two small doors across from each other I thought might’ve been supply closets. The other half of the hall was equally dark and seemingly deserted, no ceiling fixtures ever installed during the reno that added this new wing onto the basement complex. But magically, it was alive. Intense power practically bled from underneath a wooden door at the very end of the hall, coming in pounding waves that rattled my soul the way shockwaves rattled bones.
I jutted my thumb toward the door and mouthed back, That way.
Shuffling down the length of the hall, I signaled for Saoirse to prepare for a fight. The magic behind that door was considerably more powerful than anything we’d come across up to this point. Far beyond any dark elf. Far beyond most human practitioners. I could taste its vast complexity like blood on a razor’s edge, a remnant of the first delicate incision of what would become a gaping wound carved through Earth’s plane of existence. It was the sort of spell construction that was used to bridge here and there in a way that was both more stable and more devastating than any portal to the Otherworld.
If the spell behind that door was cast, it would leave in the veil between worlds a massive tear that would take centuries to heal, and would only ever scar. A hole that all manner of dark and deadly things could use to access Earth.
We reached the door. It wasn’t warded, which I thought was either a gross oversight by an arrogant man or the telltale sign of a trap. But trap or not, Saoirse and I had to get into that room and recover the harp, or perhaps damage the spell construction—which would be a large and complicated circle—to the point that it couldn’t be fixed before the witching hour. Since this particular spell was meant to be cast on the night of the full moon at three AM, sabotaging the circle meant the caster would have to wait an additional month. So even if we failed to recover the harp tonight, we could still win the day.
I would prefer to get the harp though. I wanted to win the war.
Ear against the door, I didn’t hear anyone pacing the room, or even a slightly rapid heartbeat. If there was anyone in there, they were standing or sitting, perfectly calm and composed. I sent Saoirse a gun gesture, telling her to be ready to fire the second I whipped the door open. She nodded, stepped back to clear the door, and raised her weapon, finger hovering over the trigger.
Taking a deep breath, I put my magic on standby so I could raise a shield or shoot off an attack spell at a moment’s notice. Then I gripped the doorknob. Exhaled. Turned the knob. Inhaled. Yanked the door open. Exhaled. Flooded my limbs with power. Inhaled—in a gasp.
The room beyond the door was bathed in a harsh golden glow from the single most intricate magic circle I’d ever seen. It was nearly thirty feet in diameter, strewn with symbols and shapes and lines whose arrangement exceeded every grasp of magic knowledge I possessed. At the center of the circle sat the harp, a proud instrument of weathered wood and silver strings, and it too was glowing, a soft white, revealing its true nature as an object of power.
But even if it hadn’t been glowing, I would’ve recognized the harp for what it was. Because the second my gaze landed on it, a memory from my childhood flittered to the surface of my mind. I had seen that harp before, in a drawing in a book about the history of Tír na nÓg. A book borrowed from the Great Library of the Unseelie Court.
Daur Dá Bláo. Oak of Two Blossoms.
The harp of the Dagda, leader of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
Chapter Eighteen
Fifteen hundred years ago, the last great war between the aes sídhe and Tuatha Dé Danann had ended in a resounding defeat for the latter after a brutal battle that raged for nearly four months straight and shook the very foundations of the Otherworld. The old rulers of Tír na nÓg, ancient and venerable, were then shunted aside for a new regime. But in a rare display of mercy, the faerie queens offered their long-time rivals an alternative to death: an endless sleep in Maige Mell, the Plain of Delight, a region deep in the heart of Tír na nÓg where no one was allowed to tread without explicit permission from a queen. And so off they’d gone to be laid to rest for eternity, and to fade in the collective memory, reduced to nothing but myths and legends.
Now someone was trying to wake them up.
Daur Dá Bláo. The instrument played by Uaithne, the Dagda’s harper. It had been used as a call to arms during the many wars of the Tuatha Dé Danann and, according to the stories, had been played during that final battle, right up until the moment where Uaithne was slain by a powerful sídhe warrior from the Seelie Court. After that, the harp had fallen out of the old stories, slipped into obscurity, as so many things—and people—did once the reins of rule had been wrenched from their hands.
How it had also slipped through to Earth, I didn’t know. And how someone had managed to locate it here after the collapse baffled me even more. But despite those lingering mysteries, the truth of the matter was clear. Someone intended to use the harp to break the spell that kept the Tuatha Dé Danann dormant in Maige Mell, which would once again pit the fae against their oldest enemies. And seeing as the bulk of the fae leadership was now based on Earth…it could mean a war on mortal soil.
Oh, god.
“Judging by the look on your face, Vincent Whelan,” said a voice that came from everywhere at once, “I’m going to assume you’ve figured out my play.”
In the corner of the room, a veil so perfect that I couldn’t have pulled it off with a century of practice dissolved into a lingering golden mist. Its dissolution revealed a man of average height and build, but whose red hair was streaked with gold and whose irises were green yet speckled with the same metallic aspect. He appeared no older than me, not a wrinkle on his face, but the way he stared into my eyes spoke of a lifetime so long and winding and storied, spoke of a power so far beyond my half-mortal comprehension, that my knees almost buckled in the spare second it took me to break eye contact.
Saoirse, affected worse than me, stumbled into the doorframe. But she kept her brave face. “Who the hell are you?”
The man spared her a look, and smiled. “Lieutenant Daly. We met earlier, though I’m afraid I was wearing quite the glamour then, as a matter of practicality.” Said glamour instantly coalesced around him, casting him as an ordinary man with brown hair and eyes. He wiped the glamour from existence a second later, as soon as Saoirse’s sharp intake of breath met his ears. “See? You remember.”
“From the auction.” She frowned. “You said your name was something odd. Abar…Abarta?”
“Abarta?” I spat at the man, hands curling into fists, heart now pumping hard. “You’re one of the Tuatha Dé Danann?” That was bad. Very, very bad. “You’re supposed to be asleep in Maige Mell.”
Quicker than I could blink, his cordial smile morphed into a sneer. “That’s a nice way of saying the faerie queens tried to toss me into a catacomb to rot with the rest of my comrades.”
“You agreed to that fate as part of your concessions for losing the final war.”
Abarta barked out a laugh. “Agreed? You show your age, boy. Your ignorance.” He rose, and the chair he’d been sitting in vanished into another puff of golden smoke. “We were still on the muddy, bloody battlefield when that ‘agreement’ was struck. The only reason our heads weren’t lobbed off by the ice queen’s blade is because her warmer counterpart convinced her that we might one day be of use to them, if some future issue in Tír na nÓg could be rectified by our continued existence. It was only the slightest compromise on the queens’ end, the slightest risk, since they still held all the power and were unlikely to wane or be challenged in the ensuing centuries. But for us…for us, it was either an ignoble end, or a long-term gambit, depending on which o
f us you asked.”
“So you’re saying”—I struggled to grasp at the fraying ends of my thoughts, to stall Abarta until I could think of something, anything, to do to get Saoirse and myself out of this unwinnable conflict with a man who’d once been a god—“some of the Tuatha Dé Danann wanted to die for honor’s sake, while others were still plotting a way to win the war, even when they were on their knees in the shadow of Mab’s sword?”
Abarta didn’t miss the fact I used her name out loud. He shot me a dark look, darker than the void between worlds, daring me to say it again. At which point I was sure he’d blow me away with a single spell. I’d be lucky if there were ashes left of me, this man’s power was so much greater than my own.
“Keep going,” he said in a false friendly tone that sent a shudder crawling down my spine, “you’ve figured out the gist of it, haven’t you?”
“You, uh…” I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. Saoirse was visibly quaking. I realized that Abarta’s magic was now rolling off him in waves of steam, cinders of his golden aura glittering in the air. Even mundane humans could feel the pressure of such magic in their souls. What a fucking idiot I was, dragging Saoirse into a hornet’s nest.
Abarta took a step toward me, and I instinctively took a step back.
Amusement twinkled in his gold-flecked eyes. “Keep going, I said.”
“After the agreement was struck, you somehow slipped free—”
“Not quite,” he interrupted. “I wasn’t in the lineup. I was already ‘dead.’”
“You were playing dead, you mean,” I said. “You were a trickster god, through and through, so you hid yourself among the fallen. But surely they checked to make sure—”
What Fate Portends Page 16
