Illuminated by this light show was the Tuatha rogue himself, who stood directly before me on the other side of the shield. Abarta’s arms were slathered in blood all the way up to the elbows, and his otherwise tailored clothing was irreparably stained red. His serrated knife had been left at the altar, planted in the chest of his latest victim. Presumably so the haughty god could tuck his thumbs into his pockets to complete his carefree look, all quirked lips and slouched shoulders, the picture of amusement.
That faux nonchalance might have been convincing, if it weren’t for the eye patch and the scar.
The last time Abarta and I had shared the same space, when I destroyed Daur Da Bláo with a charm that just happened to be in my pocket—the greatest stroke of luck I’d experienced in my entire life—I had the pleasure of watching one of the harp’s strings snap and strike Abarta in the face. Until now, I’d assumed Abarta fully healed from that injury. But it appeared the magic stored inside the harp was so powerful that it had overridden the trickster god’s healing factor.
A thin, pale scar stretched down the left side of Abarta’s face, from his forehead all the way to his chin. Part of it was hidden by a black eye patch with a golden sigil painted on it, and that sigil, a charm energized with a complex sensory spell, told me all I needed to know about the eye beneath the patch. Namely, that it was no longer there. Abarta’s eye had been split in half by the harp string, and he hadn’t been able to salvage it.
Somehow, some way, the better part of a year ago, when I was a fool with a chip on his shoulder who wouldn’t drop his glamours if his life depended on it, when I was so out of practice I could barely fight svartálfar without taking heavy damage, after I’d been stabbed with iron by a foolish mob boss, half strangled to death by an angry god, and then saved in the nick of time by one of Tom Tildrum’s cats…I had managed to permanently maim Abarta of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
I came to a stop six inches from the glimmering shield and said, “Nice eye patch.”
Abarta’s remaining eye twitched, but he didn’t drop his smug expression. “Goodness, Whelan. I hope your grand plan to foil my ‘diabolical scheme’ doesn’t rely on goading me with petty insults until I impulsively step outside my shield to smack you around in punishment for your insolence, thus giving you the opportunity you need to damage my summoning circle or free my sacrifices.”
“What? You don’t think I can piss you off enough to tempt you into doing exactly that?”
“The fact that you are still alive pisses me off enough to tempt me into burning down all of Tír na nÓg.” He clicked his tongue. “But I am not self-absorbed enough to feel pleasure at your pain only if I strangle you with my own two hands. I will be perfectly content when my colleague kills you for me, just as I would’ve been content to have you die in the dungeon or at the fangs of the vampires, or even ironically under the foot of that incompetent colonel the Unseelie brass put in charge of your precious city.”
He drew a line across the length of shield between us, leaving behind a bright streak of blood. The shield’s energy quickly burned it black. “As long as you fall while vainly trying to protect what you love, as long as you are haunted in death by your failures in life, as long as guilt hangs your ghost like a noose and strangles your soul for eternity, I will be overjoyed. I don’t care how you die, Whelan, only that you do.”
His grin stretched into a wide sneer that warped his scar into a hideous shape. “Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t set you up to die at the hands of a dear friend of mine who’s been desperate to take a crack at you for, oh, the last six months.”
My blizzard stopped. All the snowflakes paused in midair. All the ice shards froze in place. All the whipping wind currents died in an instant.
The battle between the elves and the zombies, made visible in the halted blizzard, raged on, with the undead edging out their rivals as their numbers continually grew. Drake’s control over the corpses was seemingly unaffected by the cloying energy that was now rolling through the valley like a wave on a stormy sea. Unlike my own magic, which fled back into the depths of my soul as an immense pressure enveloped my body and bore down on my aching muscles. It felt as if gravity increased tenfold in two seconds.
I dropped to my knees, hands braced against the ground, gasping as I struggled to breathe.
This isn’t a spell. There’s no structure to it, I realized, panic rising, as the ground around me began to sink under the weight of the continuous push. This is the sheer strength of someone’s raw magic concentrated around me. The strength of someone looking my way…and willing me to die.
It took a monumental amount of effort to raise my head high enough to scan the surrounding hillsides. But just before my neck gave out and my head drooped once more, I spotted him. A lone figure walking down a hill off to my left, his steps even and easy, his back straight and proud, exhibiting no sign or symptom of strain from the insane amount of power he was currently exerting on the valley, and on me.
Behind him, at the top of the hill, sat another old stone structure, where he must’ve been lying in wait for someone, for me, to arrive and hassle Abarta. The svartálfar guards had been nothing but a charade designed to lure an attacker out of hiding, to stoke a mistaken sense of self-confidence. He was the real danger here.
Manannán mac Lir. A god with a score to settle.
Abarta squatted beside me and said, “You’ve stepped on one too many toes, Whelan. It was only a matter of time before one of their owners decided to step on you. And while I would’ve loved for that person to be me, after all the grief you’ve dealt me over the past year, I honestly think I will relish more the opportunity to watch Manannán beat you into an unrecognizable pulp while you vainly try to stop me from butchering these hapless humans and dooming your pathetic excuse for a city. It’s one thing to physically torture someone. Another to do so psychologically. And quite an impressive feat to manage both at the same time.”
He gave me a little wave and stood up, turning around to face the mere six people who remained at the edge of the circle. Most of them were doubled over, sobbing, praying for salvation that wouldn’t come. Abarta picked one at random, a woman who bore such a startling resemblance to Christie that I was tempted to think he’d had Vianu snatch her for that reason.
Abarta grabbed her by her hair and dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the altar. Plucking his knife from the corpse of his last victim, he set the blade aside, grabbed the body, and tossed it atop of the heaping pile of sacrifice victims. Finally, he hauled the struggling woman onto the altar, and with no warning or fanfare whatsoever, began flaying her alive.
Her screams would haunt me for years. But I didn’t even have the chance to give her suffering the attention it deserved.
Manannán reached the base of the hill, still moving at an overly casual pace, his gaze zeroed in on me and nothing else. As if I was all that mattered on this godforsaken plain of long-forgotten ghosts. When he began to march across the valley, the halted remnants of my blizzard melted in his wake and merged behind him to form a sphere of water. Its surface undulated with each added drop, like ripples in a pond, distorting the various reflections of the morbid events unfolding in the valley:
The elves losing their battle to the merciless neamh-mairbh, only four from more than twenty left alive. Abarta carving up an innocent woman with a disaffected sort of ruthlessness that would make anyone call him a psychopath. Me, streaked with dirt and gore, gathering what shreds of energy remained in my body and pumping them into my battered muscles until they were just strong enough to haul me to my feet.
The charm for my sixth glamour burned hot against my chest as I stood weak and weary before the approaching hurricane that was Manannán mac Lir. I dragged a trembling hand to my collar and tugged the necklace out, revealing the little star-shaped charm that had served me so well for so many years. The metal was glowing bright white, and the heat was distorting the shape. The next time I threw a spell, any spell, it would break
, and what little remained of my human façade would be lost in the winds of winter.
A year ago, that prospect would’ve horrified me. But bit by bit, Abarta and his cruel machinations had stripped away all my pathetic justifications for hiding the reality of my existence beneath six full glamours. I couldn’t suppress my physical fae characteristics in a world where all my enemies were stronger and faster than human beings. I couldn’t bury my own magic in a war where the opposing side had power beyond belief. And I couldn’t withhold the cold and calculating logic of my faerie mind, not when my adversaries had centuries more knowledge with which to outplay me every step of the way.
The only humans in this game of gods were pawns meant to be sacrificed, and the longer I allowed my insecurities to tip me in favor of my human blood, the more I allowed the powers of the Otherworld to paint me like one of those pawns. And if the man who’d sworn on his half-sídhe blood to protect the city he called home was nothing but another body meant to be burned at the altar of the ageless war between the Tuatha and the sídhe, then Kinsale was nothing more than the kindling that would be used to start the fire.
To be human is to be human, not to be better or worse than any other creature, I thought soberly. Sometimes, humanity is required for me to reach my goals, and sometimes it’s a detriment to my very survival. Today, it’s the latter…and so today, it needs to go.
I slowly closed my hand around the little silver charm.
And then I crushed it, spell and all.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Maige Itha vanished in the blink of an eye, and a world of white snow and sharp ice surrounded me. The transition between there and here was so sudden I stumbled back in shock, slipped on a patch of ice, and fell hard to my knees. Gasping out a swear as dull pain spread through my legs, I tried to regain my bearings, looked left and right, up and down, and every angle in between. But nothing I saw made sense.
Gone were the rolling green hills and the crumbling ruins that spoke of bloodstained histories. Gone was the altar upon which innocent people were being slaughtered like lambs by a bitter and vengeful Tuatha rogue. Gone was the sea god intent on crushing me beneath an ocean’s weight in water in retaliation for the destruction of his beloved home. Gone were the svartálfar for whom fate was sounding the death knell, brought down by the corrupted corpses of their own comrades.
In place of those harrowing scenes was a frozen lake bordered by a towering forest of evergreens, the land and all its wintery features bathed in the shadow of moonless night. A fresh coat of snow had painted the pine needles white, and long, jagged icicles clung to the branches. The ice of the lake was so startlingly clear that, even in the darkness, you could see all the way to the bottom, hundreds of feet below, where creatures as old as time had lain frozen for millennia. Some of these creatures looked like harmless fish. Some of them looked like the monsters that haunted the corners of my nightmares.
I sat in the exact center of the lake, as if some divine hand had plucked me from Maige Itha and planted me here for a purpose. Mab was the first deity to come to mind. This place resembled the Unseelie Court, and winter was Mab’s bastion, ice in her blood, snow in her heart, cold in her soul.
But the black sky was missing the ever-present moon that mirrored the Seelie Court’s constant sun. In fact, it was missing cosmic features in general. The sky looked less like a sky and more like a featureless dome. Is this another cavern of some kind? If so, how did I get here? How—?
A growl reverberated through the night. The wind didn’t carry it, for there was no wind, yet the sound shook the trees, rattled my bones, and made the ice beneath me tremble. It filled all the slits between pine needles, the holes between branches, the gaps between tree trunks. It bled through the cracks in the ice, spilled into the pores in my skin, replaced the air in my lungs with a sense of primal fear. It was as if the growl had a physical presence far greater than simple vibrations in the air, as if its reality was beyond real, its existence beyond the bounds of anything that could exist.
Somehow, I knew the source of the growl was behind me. So I looked over my shoulder.
And then I understood.
I hadn’t been transported anywhere at all. I wasn’t somewhere else. I was inside myself.
This was the faerie side of my soul.
At the edge of the lake stood a wolf made of snow, with eyes and sharp teeth carved from glittering ice crystals. Beneath its paws was an indentation in the snow-covered ground, where the wolf had slumbered for many years, waiting for an obstinate half-sídhe to call upon his Unseelie birthright and use its power to defeat his enemies.
Almost seven months ago, that half-sídhe had woken the wolf by breaking his mind glamour, but he had not set the beast completely free. Now, for the first time in over two decades, the half-sídhe had finally unlocked the heavy gate of this winter-born prison and asked the wolf to come out to play.
But the wolf wanted more than a game, more than a fight, more than a battle. It wanted what it had been denied for far too long. It wanted what the souls of all Unseelie wanted: to display the true might of darkness and deep winter.
The wolf and I made eye contact, and it charged me. With each loping step across the ice, it grew in size, until it was so tall that the top of its head was even with the canopy of the trees and its bulk became in and of itself a wicked blizzard, the ebbing and flowing shriek of the wind like a pulse through its phantom veins.
Any other time, any other place, I would’ve been petrified to be a sitting duck in this creature’s path, a tiny mortal man in the shadow of a great primordial beast. But in this one instance, I had nothing to be afraid of. Except myself. Because the wolf in winter was the truth of me and nothing else.
I rose to my feet and turned to face the wolf with open arms.
The wolf’s massive maw plunged down and caught me between its jaws.
For an eternity between heartbeats, I ceased to exist. I was nothing but ice in the wind.
And then the wolf in winter remade me…into something new.
I opened my eyes, and Maige Itha greeted me once more—with the image of Manannán mac Lir dangerously close to my position. In whatever spare second my conscious mind had dwelled in the depths of my soul, Manannán had drawn from the ground a massive wave that he now rode across the valley floor. He was so focused on me that he didn’t pay any mind to the remaining svartálfar on the battlefield. His wave swallowed them up and spit them out the other side, where the disoriented elves were immediately buried in a pile of vicious neamh-mairbh, from which they didn’t emerge.
As Manannán closed the distance between us, he raised his hands, and the enormous sphere of water he’d collected from my blizzard spell, which hung behind him like a liquid star, rose up. He swept his arms forward, and I could see the weight of the sphere in the way his muscles bulged, the way his limbs dragged, literal tons of water resisting the command to move at the speed of a cannon ball.
But it did move. It shot toward me like a meteor hurtling toward a planet. Because Manannán mac Lir was a small but literal god, and he had the sheer magic strength to compel small worlds to shudder beneath his feet.
Even with all six glamours gone, I couldn’t beat him.
Which was fine. Because I didn’t need to.
I pointed two fingers at the oncoming sphere and shot a bolt of energy at its core. The bolt broke the surface of the water and sliced cleanly through to the object’s center, disrupting the magic energy currents that were holding the sphere together. The currents became more concentrated in some areas and less in others, which rendered the entire sphere unstable. So when I commanded my energy bolt to explode into a simple force blast, the currents unraveled entirely, and the sphere lost integrity. Five feet from my face, its perfectly round figure devolved into an undulating, misshapen lump.
A weakened spell. Easy to break.
I made a chopping motion with my hand, firing a thin blade of force at the former sphere. It split in two
with hardly any effort on my part, and both halves flew harmlessly past me and crashed into a pair of low hills off to either side. My force blade continued straight at the man who was riding the wave behind the sphere. But Manannán flicked the blade aside with a dip of his chin, and it spun off into Abarta’s shield, where it fizzled out in a golden flash.
Manannán gestured with his fingers, and the height and width of his wave increased threefold, the edges circling around me, until it resembled the imposing vortex of water he’d used to try and crush me and my friends that day we blew up his castle. Unlike that day, however, I wasn’t scared of the sea god’s water tricks this time. Because with my own ability to lie stripped away and the truth of my faerie nature laid bare beneath my flesh, I found that I could more easily sense when others were being duplicitous.
Manannán mac Lir wasn’t lying per se—his strength was real and awesome—but he was putting on a show. A show meant to intimidate his enemies until they were too unbalanced to critically analyze the reality of the situation. And the reality was that, after spending thousands of years trawling the Endless Sea for lost souls, and doing very little combat in all that time, Manannán had lost all the magical finesse of a combat practitioner.
His water spells were menacing and ostentatious, and his well of energy was too deep to run dry against anyone less than a fellow god. But his general construction was piss poor. All his spells had fundamental flaws.
Those flaws made his spellwork fragile, even though he himself was not.
I struck out at the towering wave. One force blast to the base beneath Manannán’s feet. A second to the bottom right, where the water wall arced sharply toward me. And a third at a seemingly random position midway up the left side.
They hit in rapid succession. The first knocked the water out from under Manannán. The second prevented him from reflexively pulling in more water from his dominant side. And the third caused the top half of the left-hand third of the wave to fold over on itself and engulf the sea god in his own water vortex.
What Dawn Demands Page 21
