Though the magic-enhanced dynamite I’d created packed an impressive punch, the explosion didn’t linger. The wall of fire collapsed after a few seconds, the orange flare behind my eyelids fading to black. I cracked my eyes to confirm the danger had passed, and when I wasn’t struck blind, I dropped my shield and whirled around to get a load of what remained of Emhain Abhlach.
The answer, it turned out, was absolutely nothing.
A smoldering crater lay where the castle used to be, filled with roiling smoke and a few flickering flames from small debris still burning to ash. All the apple trees scattered across the hills had been bowled over by the shockwave then scorched black. The tall grass had burned like fine hair, nothing but particles in the air now. The fire had been so hot that what sand hadn’t been blown sky high by the shockwave had melted into uneven panes of glass, and the shale rocks, including the one on which I stood, had been badly cracked or completely shattered.
A pinch of guilt tightened my chest—I had destroyed a beautiful place—but I didn’t allow it to fester. Nature would heal the wounds I’d dealt to the land and eventually restore the island’s beauty on its own. What was important was that Manannán wouldn’t be able to call Emhain Abhlach home for the foreseeable future, and the pain of losing such a staple of his immortal life would haunt him for decades, even centuries, to come. Almost as much as that memory of Saoirse lying helpless on the floor inside Abarta’s mountain fortress, her life hanging on by a fraying thread, haunted me every time I tried to sleep. Almost.
But “almost” would have to be good enough today.
I heaved Fragarach onto my shoulder and broke into a hard sprint. Across the remains of the beach. Up the blackened hill. Through the gnarled remnants of the apple tree grove. Around the edge of the crater, where the gate to Manannán’s castle had once been. And back down the now barely visible trail I’d taken earlier.
As I hurried around the curve of the hill, the dock came into view. It was intact only because it too was surrounded by a powerful magic shield. A shield that flashed out of existence as soon as the witch on the dock spotted me coming.
Odette stood before an enormous pile of loot—it looked to me as if everything had been successfully pillaged from the vault in the time I’d allotted—and behind the pile stood Detective Camilla Mallory. I’d tapped her for this mission because she was my only ally with a working knowledge of demolition. Her father had owned a construction company, and she’d been groomed to inherit the business, which included being taught the ins and outs of using explosives similar to the ones I’d designed to bring down Manannán’s castle. She’d been able to position the dynamite in the castle’s most vulnerable places, ensuring a catastrophic effect when Odette set off all the explosives simultaneously.
I gave the women a thumbs-up as I raced down the hill. Tildrum’s talisman had an automatic recall feature that allowed you to portal back to your starting point by using a single activation word, so all the three of us had to do was stand within the chalk circle Mallory had drawn around the loot pile while Odette spoke the word, and then we’d be off in a jiffy, hurtling back through the void, plundered treasures in tow.
Out of all the steps of this frankly outlandish revenge plot, this escape sequence should’ve been the easiest.
But of course, Manannán had to complicate matters.
Despite the fact the shockwave had thrown him well over a mile from the island, his magic caught up to me when I was thirty feet from the dock. A powerful force bowled me over, and I tumbled face-first onto the scorched earth, nearly cutting my own leg off with Fragarach as I flailed to regain my footing. Before the wave of magic reached the dock, where Odette had already erected the shield again to protect her and Mallory, the force spell attached to the energy disengaged. And a second, latent spell that had been attached to the same energy burst activated with a low roar that rumbled through land and air alike.
The new spell hit the sea—and pushed it back.
A towering wall of water rose up, climbed higher and higher until it was taller than the island’s peak, curved to form a complete circle that blotted out the bulk of the light from the Seelie sun and cast darkness across the smoking remains of Emhain Abhlach. Then, the water wall began to spin, streams splitting off in different directions to form a churning vortex strong enough to tear bodies limb from limb and leave nothing behind but sheared bits of flesh doomed to be eaten by the fish in the sea. And finally, the top of the vortex turned inward until it was poised to come crashing down on top of the three hapless mortals standing in its shadow.
Shit.
With a push of my own magic, I launched myself at the dock, and barely evaded the shield as Odette brought it down for a clipped second to allow me through. I stumbled to a stop in front of the loot pile just as the water vortex plunged toward us, and said to Odette, “Activate the talisman. Activate it now!”
“The water can follow us through,” she shouted back over the roar of the falling ocean.
“Do it!”
As she ripped the talisman from her pocket, I braced my feet against the worn boards of the dock, raised my hands toward the sky, and discharged every ounce of magic energy I could yank from my soul without ripping it to shreds. My magic collided with Manannán’s spell, producing a sound not unlike that of a tectonic plate slipping out of place and cleaving the land in two.
Instantly, every drop of water in the vortex turned to snow. And as the snow crashed down on top of us, I redirected the bulk of it away from the dock to relieve the weight on the shield.
But Manannán was quick on the draw. He grabbed hold of my snow with his magic and transformed it back into water in a flash, then once more funneled all that water into the base of the ocean wall, rebuilding his vortex. The churning water bore down on us again, three times faster than before, three times harder, three times deadlier.
With my two remaining glamour charms burning hot against my chest, struggling to remain intact, with my knees about to buckle from the overwhelming strain of that gargantuan counterspell, there was nothing I could do, nothing at all, but watch the water fall—and pray.
When the water was twenty feet above us, the portal opened beneath our feet.
Tildrum’s spell grabbed hold of us like lassos around the neck and dragged us into the void between worlds, the view of Emhain Abhlach dissolving into darkness. We fell for what seemed an eternity and yet no time at all, until a dim glow indicated our imminent arrival in my basement. The portal spit us out with what felt like a great deal of force, though somehow we emerged on Earth standing still.
Just as the portal talisman deactivated, a thin jet of water shot out of my basement floor and smacked me in the chin so hard I almost got whiplash. I staggered into the wall with a yelp and brought my hand to my chin. My glove came away wet with blood where the top layers of my skin had been sheared clean off. But the muscle and bone were intact. The damage was superficial.
I was fine. Everyone was fine. Everything was fine.
“We…won,” I murmured in amazement. “We legitimately won.”
Mallory, who was shaking like a leaf, sank to her knees and let out a haggard breath. “That was a very close call though.”
“Too close.” Odette tossed the portal talisman onto the floor, and it rolled off into a corner. “Christ, Whelan. You need better contingency plans than just ‘throw magic at the bad guy and hope it stalls him long enough.’”
“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” I rummaged around in my pockets until I found a folded tissue and pressed it against my chin to staunch the bleeding. “Also, I feel the need to point out that every stage of the heist and bombing went exactly as I planned, down to me successfully conning Manannán out of Fragarach.” I shook the sword for emphasis. “The water vortex spell was a variable I failed to anticipate, I admit, but the bomb blast did succeed in throwing Manannán far enough to prevent him from catching up to us before we portaled away. Which was the important part. Because, as I demo
nstrated, I am just strong enough to counter his magic at a distance, for a short period of time. But if he’d cast at us in close proximity…”
“We’d all have been killed,” Mallory finished in a whisper.
Odette stared at the floor, uneasy. “You’re sure he can’t follow us back here, right?”
“A hundred percent.” I peeled the tissue off my chin. It was soaked. “Because Manannán is ‘officially’ aligned with Abarta, per the Unseelie Court’s most recent decree, he’s become persona non grata to all fae-controlled territories. That includes the protected cities on Earth. The barrier that surrounds the city will no longer allow him to portal in, and if he tries to breach it, the horsemen and the Unseelie sídhe contingent now stationed in Kinsale will be obligated to repel him.”
“Can they beat him?” Mallory asked. “He is a god, right? On par with the Tuatha?”
“He’s strong, yes, but not strong enough to plow through ten sídhe soldiers. Especially when one’s a colonel. You don’t reach that rank without being a powerhouse.”
Mallory said, “The colonel’s the guy with the gray hair and the scar on his face, right?”
I nodded. “McCullough, I think is his name.”
“He’s one scary son of a bitch.” Odette worked out the kinks in her muscles she’d gained while hauling all the treasures out of the vault. “Looks tough enough to challenge Manannán, at least.”
“And his looks do not deceive you.” I came to stand in front of the disorganized pile of loot, bracing Fragarach against the floor to hide how badly that monstrous blizzard spell had drained me. It would’ve been far easier to cast had I not been wearing my mind glamour, but I didn’t trust myself enough to strip it while I was around humans. Not after the shitty choices I’d made during the zombie attack. I needed to get cracking on my adaptive glamour idea, and soon.
Problem was I had about seven hundred other ideas to get cracking on too.
They were all part of my plan to defeat Vianu and his new fledgling vampire army, and in so doing, deal Abarta another blow.
I scoured the loot pile until I located a small wooden box that matched the description Tildrum had provided of the item he wanted in trade for the portal talisman. Carefully wriggling the box out from between a round metal shield and what appeared to be a statuette of a lion-elephant-snake chimera, I held it in my palm and probed it gently with a tendril of magic. It had no active magic signature that I could discern, but the box could somehow be shielding whatever was inside from prying eyes. I wasn’t brave enough to open the box—Tom Tildrum wanted it, which meant it was almost certainly dangerous—so I dialed back my curiosity, slipped the box into a plastic baggie I’d brought along, and stowed the bag in my pocket.
That was the last loose end regarding the heist and bomb plot.
Mission complete.
Odette circled the loot pile and whistled as she used her own magic sense to examine the myriad items. Dozens of obvious weapons, like swords and knives and bows and battle-axes. More than fifty dusty tomes and twice as many parchment scrolls tied shut with twine, all of them so old it was incredible they hadn’t turned to dust centuries ago. Odds and ends of every size and shape, including a set of what looked like silverware, an actual crystal ball as large as its bowling equivalent, a thick wool blanket that smelled like nutmeg, a goblet covered in jewels that had a tiny black cloud hovering inside it, complete with miniature lightning bolts, and some items so odd I wasn’t sure how to describe them using human words.
I was absolutely sure everything in the pile could kill me, though I had no clue how any of it worked.
Mallory finally climbed to her feet, still trembling slightly. “So, now that we have all this powerful magic stuff in our possession, what exactly are we going to do with it?”
“I started wondering the same thing while I was carrying the stuff to the dock.” Odette reached out with her prosthetic hand and tentatively poked the head of a stone spear. “Most of these objects are probably just as complicated to operate as my new arm, if not more so. We can’t just hand them out like candy to our allies. We’ll end up with more dead bodies on our side of the field than the enemy will.”
“We’re not going to give them to anybody,” I said. “They’re a starting point.”
“For what?” Odette scrutinized the spear. “Some kind of weapons research?”
“Exactly. We’re going to recruit every practitioner interested in protecting the city from the vampires, which will be most of them, I imagine, and have them work their asses off to study these items and reverse engineer every single useful effect or ability they can glean. And from the knowledge we acquire during the course of this intensive research, we’re going to build a magic arsenal of great and awful power. And then we are going to use that arsenal to wage a vicious war against Abarta and his burgeoning army of dark creatures with malicious intentions.”
I tossed the bloody tissue onto the floor and slipped my hand inside my coat, pulling from my interior pocket an object that Saoirse had trekked all the way to my house to deliver to me three days ago. Even though she was still so weak from Rian’s life force drain that she could hardly walk a quarter-mile without gasping for breath.
My new police badge glinted under the glare of the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. I clutched it tightly in my hand and finished, “But first, we have to build an army of our own.”
Part II
Is Darkest
Six Months Later
Chapter Eight
When you lived in a broken city on the edge of an apocalyptic wasteland, sometimes you needed to check out of the world for a few minutes, think of nothing but white noise, just to make sure the weight of reality didn’t drive you crazy. When that city you lived in was also on the verge of being overrun by bloodthirsty vampires, the leader of which had a personal grudge against you, sometimes you needed to augment that check-out session by occupying yourself with a mindless, repetitive task.
In my case, I would lie on the floor of a room whose every wall was covered in three inches of ice, and toss at the ceiling an apple I’d frozen solid shortly beforehand, as part of my magic experiments to create a foolproof vampire-killing spell.
Today, I’d had a whole three hours to myself, the longest break in a single day I’d had in six months. But instead of spending my time napping or snacking or reading, as I’d have preferred, I spent it all working on this spell. Vampires were exceedingly hard to kill, even for powerhouses like the sídhe, primarily because they were so fast they could kill you before you had a chance to throw a spell that would obliterate any other enemy.
So my approach to defending myself against an elder vampire like Vianu, who had spent the last six months leaving increasingly chilling threats nailed to my front door, was to craft a spell that could suck all the heat out of a vampire’s body and freeze it solid faster than the vampire could rip out my throat.
Everyone I’d consulted about the spell concept, including full-blooded sídhe, had concluded it was a decent enough idea (though more than one person had failed to hide the “for a little half-sídhe” implication in their praise). Problem was, acing the execution was a nightmare. Because I had to fight the laws of thermodynamics to accomplish that kind of rapid freeze, and because in the field, I would likely have to throw multiple spells at once to counteract my opponent’s defensive magic.
Vianu had scuffled with the sídhe soldiers two months back and demonstrated he was a capable wizard. If I wanted to beat him at this game, I needed to max out not only my fae wiliness but also the share of the legendary sídhe magic I’d inherited from my mother.
Considering I’d spent the bulk of my life disavowing my heritage, neither of those was an easy task. So I’d had to train, and train, and train some more. Work to hone my magic strength and precision every spare second of every day. Invite sparring partners to take potshots at me until I could multitask like a Wall Street banker during an economic downturn. Push myself to the bri
nk of breaking the one true glamour I still wore, my soul glamour, the last vestige of the purely human essence I’d submerged myself within since I was a young boy.
Breaking that last glamour would be one of those “break glass in case of emergency” situations. If all else failed, I would do it because protecting Kinsale was more important than my ongoing identity and insecurity issues, and the power boost I would gain from stripping it might just push me over the edge to victory. But if the vampire scourge slowly spreading its poison throughout my city could be defeated by a lesser act of selflessness, I would prefer to stick with that.
You could call me a stubborn ass if you wanted, but I liked being Vincent Whelan, mortal cop. Vincent Whelan the totally unglamoured half-sídhe was an unknown quantity, and I wasn’t sure I could trust him. After all, last time I’d broken a base glamour during a fight, I’d turned into such a massive asshole that even Odette had commented on it. Odette.
I didn’t want to have to deal with uncertainty regarding my behavior. Not when Kinsale was teetering on the edge of a cliff, waiting for the lightest puff of wind to blow it over. This city needed a pillar of stability at such a crucial time, and for some unfathomable reason, fate had slotted me into that position.
Personally, I thought fate needed some goddamn glasses. That or a better sense of humor. Either way, me being—
A loud bang jerked me out of my thoughts, and I suddenly realized I’d spent the past twenty minutes dwelling on the weight of life’s problems instead of winding down from my training session. During that time, I’d started throwing the frozen apple so hard at the ceiling that the fruit had cracked like an egg.
What Dawn Demands Page 5
