And all of that was only the beginning. Because the ritual didn’t just call for bodies. It called for a sacrifice of souls.
Before the man’s soul could depart his body naturally, Abarta plunged his hand into the tortured corpse and ripped the soul right out of it. A golden spark of magic immobilized the soul, and there was nothing the poor man’s spirit could do but watch, spectral eyes wide and frantic, as Abarta hauled him away from his ruined mortal vessel and placed him in a small, empty circle within the complex summoning configuration.
The borders of the circle flared brightly upon recognizing the presence of the soul. When Abarta released his grip on the soul, a cylindrical barred cage made of golden light sprang up from the circle’s perimeter. The poor man’s soul pounded at the bars, but he couldn’t escape.
Nor could the other eleven souls Abarta had already snatched.
With a casual air, Abarta walked back to the altar, picked up the man’s corpse, and tossed it aside like a piece of trash. It landed outside the summoning circle, atop the growing pile of mutilated bodies. Abarta then clapped his blood-covered hands, spun to face the row of terrified humans, and said, “All right. Who’s next?”
I ducked underneath the empty frame of the window through which I was watching this nightmare and pressed my forehead against the roughhewn wall, teeth cutting into my tongue.
This is like the Well of Knowledge incident all over again. Except this time, I don’t have a chance in hell of saving Abarta’s victims. Even if I do somehow manage to damage the ritual process enough to thwart the summoning, Abarta will still kill any of the remaining prisoners out of spite. None of those people are leaving here alive. They were doomed the moment Vianu’s fledglings grabbed them off the streets. If only the Watchdogs had been able to…If only I’d been able to…
A sense of calm in deep winter, the stillness of air after a blizzard, enveloped me from the inside out, my mind glamour once again dialing down my humanity, allowing the Unseelie wolf to rise. The concern for those humans slated to die, the guilt for their suffering I couldn’t prevent, and the sense of futility that had draped itself over my shoulders—all of those things fell to the wayside as a set of clear and simple goals fixed itself at the forefront of my mind:
One, clear the valley of svartálfar so they couldn’t disrupt my attack on the summoning circle. Two, wreck the circle to the best of my ability in order to stall out the ritual’s completion past its deadline. And three, flee from Maige Itha before Abarta ripped me to shreds for ruining his devious plan.
It all sounded so simple in theory. The execution, however, would be anything but.
Pulling my head away from the wall, I searched the small building that had become our hideout. I located Kennedy where I left him, sitting all by himself in a damp corner.
Drake too hadn’t moved since I first peered out the window, but unlike Kennedy, who was observing nothing in particular, the dhampir was monitoring the route we’d taken to get here via the large hole in the wall we’d used as a door. He was watching for any sign of the goons who’d been pursuing us from the castle, or the ones he’d led away from the forest with the decoy aura. Either group was liable to make a reappearance soon, which would ruin the element of surprise crucial to our assault on the staging area. We have to make our move as soon as possible.
On my hands and knees, I crossed the room and retrieved Kennedy. Again, he followed my commands without resistance, allowing me to position his eyes above the window frame, just high enough to grant him a view of the entire summoning circle and the slaughterhouse Abarta had created at its heart. I gave him a moment to process the visual information, then leaned close to his ear and asked, “What is the name of that summoning ritual being prepared in the valley?”
Kennedy answered, “The Ritual of Hollowfiends.”
There was something familiar about the term “hollowfiends,” but the string was floating among the detritus of my broken childhood memories, and I couldn’t find the end of the thread quick enough to make use of it. Instead, I countered Kennedy’s response with, “Tell me the history of the Ritual of Hollowfiends.”
“Historians have thus far been unable to determine when the first iteration of the Ritual of Hollowfiends was performed,” Kennedy said as if reading from an article, “but the ritual definitively predates the rise of the Tuatha Dé Danann and is noted in at least three separate primary documents to have been used multiple times by various persons throughout the ruling period of the Fomóraig.
“After the Fomóraig fell to the Followers of Partholón, the use of the ritual was either forbidden or forgotten, until the early warring factions of the Tuatha Dé Danann revived its use in an attempt to secure supremacy over one another. After the Tuatha Dé Danann became a unified people, circa five thousand years before the arrival of the sídhe in Tír na nÓg, the ritual was banned by their first king, Nuada Airgetlám, under the reasoning that its use was overly destructive.”
Kennedy paused to take a breath, then continued. “During the formation of the faerie courts in the decades after the fall of the Tuatha Dé Danann, all documents relating to the Ritual of Hollowfiends were collected and locked away in a warded vault reserved for the storage of forbidden magic rituals, whose location is known only to eight different sídhe, the two queens among them.”
The fact that a Tuatha king had deemed the summoning ritual “overly destructive” didn’t sit well with me. Not only because it boded poorly for Earth, but also because I didn’t understand why Abarta would go through the trouble to send such a powerful force to Earth. If these hollowfiends were strong enough to unnerve even the Tuatha, then surely they could deal a major blow to the fae. And Abarta wanted nothing more than to achieve vengeance against the fae, so why wouldn’t he summon the hollowfiends to…?
Wait a second.
I said to Kennedy, “Name all the ways to wake the Tuatha Dé Danann from their dormant state in Maige Mell.”
Kennedy replied immediately, as if the information was within easy reach. “One way to awaken the Tuatha Dé Danann would be to call them collectively to arms using a revival spell combined with the ancient magic stored in the Dagda’s harp, Daur Da Bláo. A second way to awaken the Tuatha Dé Danann would be for both queens of the faerie courts to invoke the counterspell for the enchantment that keeps the Tuatha Dé Danann in a collective state of dormancy. A third way to awaken the Tuatha Dé Danann would be to use the Potion of Copper Sight to override the effects of the dormancy spell for each individual member of the Tuatha Dé Danann.”
And now I understood. This whole summoning scheme was a misdirect.
Abarta was simply resetting the stage for the same bloody coup he’d originally tried to launch with the Dagda’s harp. This time around, he was planning to send these hollowfiends to ravage the Earth in order to distract the sídhe armies. While they were preoccupied, he was going to break into Maige Mell and use that third option, the Potion of Copper Sight, to laboriously wake the Tuatha Dé Danann one at a time. Once they were all up and at ’em, they would re-form their old army and march against the cities of the fae.
There are too many different parts to this scheme for me to handle them all on my own. I need to sabotage this circle, get back to Earth, and tell everyone what Abarta is planning—starting with Tom Tildrum. I bit my tongue in annoyance. So much for Manannán’s role as the inside man. Abarta must be playing his schemes too close to the chest for any single spy to glean actionable intelligence from him. Because if Manannán was actually of any real use as Mab’s magic spy camera, then I wouldn’t be in this precarious position right now.
I snuck another look through the window. Abarta was finishing up with this thirteenth victim and preparing to grab the next in line, a young woman with tearstained cheeks.
“Another question, Kennedy,” I said. “What exactly are ‘hollowfiends’?”
Kennedy blinked a few times, like he was rifling through files in his head, before he responded. “Hollowfie
nds are naturally occurring semi-sentient phantoms that sporadically gain corporeal form and attack population centers for a period of roughly twelve hours. They are a phenomenon unique to Tír na nÓg and are believed by scholars to be environmental expressions of negative magic energy that collects within pockets of the space-time fabric that constitutes the realm. It is thought that when a concentration of this magic energy becomes too dense in a particular area, the fabric of the realm forcibly expels the energy, where it takes on a physical form and expends itself through the execution of destructive acts.”
I considered those facts for a second, somewhat confused. I didn’t see how hollowfiends could do much damage to the sídhe armies, or to Earth for that matter. It sounded like they were no more dangerous than the Sluagh.
Unless…
“How many hollowfiends are summoned by the Ritual of Hollowfiends?” I asked.
“The Ritual of Hollowfiends draws all the negative energy throughout the entirety of Tír na nÓg’s space-time fabric to a particular location, resulting in the formation of an enormous, amorphous mass of vaguely individualized hollowfiends,” he replied. “This grand collective of hollowfiends, which is capable of wreaking destruction on a scale roughly equivalent to ten thousand sídhe soldiers, has historically been referred to as the Wild Hunt.”
Part III
Before Dawn
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Wild Hunt. It was the subject of Tír na nÓg’s most chilling ghost stories, the tales of warning you told your children to keep them in line—do as you’re told, or the Wild Hunt will steal your soul. But unlike the legends of Earth, whose themes were largely centered on myth as opposed to the true paranormal, the Wild Hunt was a very real phenomenon.
Once a millennium, the Hunt formed on its own, the storm of the century, a perfect confluence of dark magic events, and rode across the whole of Tír na nÓg. It attacked every living thing in its path, cutting wide swaths of destruction throughout the land and leaving death in its wake.
The people of Tír na nÓg had accepted the Hunt as a fact of life. Every major city in the faerie courts was equipped with heavy protections specifically made to withstand the Hunt’s wrath. Whenever the weathervanes swung the wrong way, whenever the winds carried the scents of hatred and fury from one end of the realm to the other, everyone who lived in a rural area dropped their entire lives in a heartbeat and flocked to the nearest city to wait out the vicious ride of the Hunt.
The people of Earth had no such luxury.
Though the barriers around the protected cities were strong, they could be breached, as Vianu had proven six months ago. And the reason they could be breached was because Mab and her Seelie counterpart were the only two people sustaining them. Mab alone was protecting every single city in the northern hemisphere, along with holding back the deadly nuclear fallout inside the northern radiation zones.
As a consequence of those continuous monumental efforts, Mab couldn’t focus too much power on any one location without letting something else fall by the wayside. So when the Hunt unexpectedly showed up in Kinsale, she would have to make a decision: save Kinsale and risk irradiating a large swath of the northern hemisphere, or let Kinsale fall to the fury of the Hunt.
It was obvious which choice she would make. Kinsale was just one city. And while the Hunt was busy ravaging what was left of it, Mab could make arrangements to protect the other cities using the armies of the sídhe. Kinsale and everyone in it would be forfeit.
I have to stop the Hunt from riding to Earth. Or else.
Sticking Kennedy back in his corner, I joined Drake at the hole in the wall. He’d overheard my questioning of our resident encyclopedia, and the color was already draining from his face as he considered the implications of giving the Hunt free rein over a mortal realm.
Before the analysis paralysis could set in, I shook his shoulder to get his attention and explained in six short sentences what I needed him to do while I launched an ill-advised attack on the summoning in progress. Surprised at my strategy, he asked me three times if I was sure I wanted to make such a ballsy move against a god. I told him there was no other move I could make in this situation.
“If the shit hits the fan,” I added, “grab Kennedy and bail back to Kinsale.”
Drake snorted. “If?”
“When,” I corrected. “Whatever you do, just don’t let Kennedy fall back into Abarta’s hands. Or Vianu’s. Or any other asshole’s, for that matter. Anyone with bad intentions can use his knowledge to cause trouble, and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to refuse to answer questions.”
He shot a thoughtful look at Kennedy. “Not to sound callous, but…”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to kill him?” I rose to a crouch and passed through the hole in the wall, pressed my back flush against the building’s weathered stone so the impossible sunlight wouldn’t throw my shadow too far. “Yes, it would be. But then we wouldn’t be able to use him for our ends. And given what he’s already told Abarta, we need all the information we can wring out of him, or that knowledge gap is going to mean not only our downfall, but the deaths of thousands, even millions, of innocent people. Humans. Faeries. Everyone in Abarta’s way.”
“All right. I get it.” He gave me a mock salute. “I’ll deliver the package to Kinsale. Who should I address it to?”
“Saoirse. She’ll find a safe place to stow him.”
“Where will I find her?”
“Watchdog HQ, if Vianu hasn’t burned it down.”
“He hasn’t.” Drake tapped his temple. “He doesn’t know where it is. The location wasn’t mentioned in that report he stole from you, and you all kept slipping the tails who tried to follow you there. How’d you do that anyway? Another set of storm drains or something?”
I smirked. “Tunnels. Dirt tunnels. We dug them out from the basement level of our building.”
“Nice.”
“You say that, but you haven’t had to traverse them, fearing an imminent cave-in every step of the way.” I crept along the uneven wall of the ancient building until I reached the corner. Then I turned back to Drake and murmured to him the address of Watchdog HQ, imparting with a stern expression that he shouldn’t speak it aloud to anyone, even under threat of torture or death.
He waved off my concern. “I’ve kept smaller secrets under threat of worse. I’ve got Vianu for a dad, remember?”
“How could I forget?”
I poked my head around the corner of the building and familiarized myself with the lay of the land, noting every bump in the hillside, every jutting rock from the ruins, the position of every enemy lurking in the valley. With no structures taller than my waist from this point on, Abarta and his goons would see me coming from a hundred yards away. I’d have seconds to mount an effective first strike before they swarmed me, and the only advantage I possessed was the high ground. It would have to suffice.
Closing my eyes, I drowned out the world around me—the echoing screams of Abarta’s victims, the smell of copper in the air, the atmosphere of misery blanketing the land—and focused on one thing and one thing only: defeating the man who’d lit the match that burned down human society, the man who was actively trying to tear down the fae in an even more permanent way, the man who’d harmed my friends and wrecked my city, the man who, for fifteen hundred years, had lived for nothing but revenge.
I had outwitted Abarta before, and I could do it again. I might’ve paled in comparison to the might of a god, but even a god could trip and fall if you applied the right pressure in the right places.
With a deep exhale, I banished the aches racking my body, banished the tremors in my hands, banished the fear shaking my thoughts, and in their place, I inhaled the raw and merciless might of winter.
“You ready, dhampir?” I asked, opening my eyes once more to view the carnage below.
Drake answered, “Ready as I’ll ever be, half-sídhe.”
“Good.” I strode out from behind the cover of the building.
“Then let the game begin.”
Energy burst out of my body in a great wave of snow and ice and wind. It thundered down into the valley, trampling every blade of grass in its path and freezing the earth solid. All the elves guarding the stone formation spun on their light feet, weapons raised for a fight, defensive spells on the tips of their tongues.
But the storm overcame them in the blink of an eye. Their shouts of alarm were swallowed by the shrieking gales, and as the sharp shards of ice I’d threaded through the air currents began to bite their skin, the only sounds that broke through the storm were faint cries of pain and furious hisses.
Abarta had a faster reaction time than the elves. The front of the blizzard looming over him, he conjured a shield that encompassed the entire summoning circle and the remaining sacrifices. My ice pelted the shield without leaving a scratch, and the raging wind couldn’t even rock the Tuatha’s spell.
Abarta halted his vivisection of the poor woman on the altar and dragged his gaze up the hillside until it found me. He looked more bored than anything else, as if he’d expected my interference all along. After greeting me with nothing but a roll of his eyes, he returned to his morbid work, his knife cleanly slicing through the screaming woman’s flesh.
A frigid rage filled my heart and drummed like hoofbeats through my bones. Twice I’d ruined Abarta’s plans, twice I’d survived his sickening traps, and still he treated me like a fly buzzing around his head. He didn’t view me as a threat, only an annoyance, something that could make him stumble but could not make him fall.
That hubris will be the end of you, I promised him silently, as I formed in my right hand a sword of ice. Pride fells gods just as easily as it fells men.
I launched myself off the top of the hill and barreled into the valley, the whipping winds parting around my form. I’d refined this blizzard spell with a pseudo-sensory feedback element, and every time my ice shards came into contact with an enemy’s body or magic, I felt a small tug in their general direction. This provided me with a precise layout of the battlefield even in the whiteout conditions.
What Dawn Demands Page 19
