What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  Abarta lifted his foot to make the first step in a war march toward me.

  I wrapped my hand like a vise around Drake’s arm. “Yeah, now’s a great time to leave. Right now.”

  Drake didn’t waste a moment. The portal talisman activated with a turquoise flash, and it yanked us into the void between worlds just as Abarta lunged for me, his hand outstretched to grab my neck and finish the strangulation job he’d started nearly a year ago. His fingers missed by about two inches, and he tried to follow us into the portal, take hold of me in the infinite blackness and send back to Kinsale as a corpse. Drake’s portal talisman stopped him in the nick of time, sealing the opening behind us the instant the last vestiges of our forms passed the realm’s boundary.

  A hot mouth pressed against my ear, the voice distorted by the void. “Suppress your aura!”

  “Suppress…?” I started to ask, but then I remembered.

  The intercept spell.

  I snatched the life force I’d unspooled from the vital part of my soul and stuffed it back into its place, as far down as it would go, until my spiritual presence was so minimal that Drake’s far outshone it. Even so, when we were halfway through the trip, I felt the spell, felt Abarta’s magic sniff me out, a spiritual bloodhound, felt it try to take hold of me and throw me back into that dungeon.

  Drake felt it too, and he surrounded me with a blanket of his magic, burying what shades of mine remained. Blessedly, the intercept spell wasn’t smart enough to see through the abatement of my magic signature. It gave up and retreated into the void.

  A moment later, Drake, Kennedy, and I bumped into the edge of the Earth, and on the exhale of one relieved breath, we were home.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kinsale was on fire. Again.

  The portal spit us out five blocks from City Hall, on the corner of Mayhew and Faraday—which I only knew because the street sign had been knocked over and lay beside my boot—and we were immediately accosted by a wall of smoke so thick that it blotted out what little light the winter night possessed.

  Drake waved his hand in a circle to cast a filtration spell. A bubble of energy surrounded us, repelling the smoke and allowing only clean air to pass through. We spent a good minute coughing our lungs clear, and then we tried to get our bearings. But the smoke was so dense, rolling past us in undulating gray waves speckled with fiery embers, that if it weren’t for gravity, we wouldn’t have even been able to tell up from down. Visibility was less than a foot.

  Closing my eyes, I oriented myself with the base of the toppled street sign and listened. To my left, in the direction of City Hall, I caught the telltale sound of a gorging fire. To my right, I heard distant shouts of terror from a group of humans in distress, possibly under attack. Ahead of me, there was only silence, except for the moaning wind. And behind me, I thought I heard the clattering of hoofbeats, the horsemen on the march. All signs pointed to an active assault on the city, and there was only one possibility that fit the known criteria.

  “Vianu’s fledglings are launching attacks on random neighborhoods to distract the fae so they won’t realize the lord and master is up to something until it’s too late,” I said.

  Drake gave me a curt nod. “He didn’t tell me anything about that, but it falls in line with his typical tactics.”

  “Shit.” I ground my foot into the cracked concrete. “This is going to make it a lot harder to rally the troops in time to plan a coordinated attack on the second summoning circle.”

  “Especially because there are three possible staging areas.”

  I smacked his face with a hard look. “Come again?”

  “That park you and your friends went snooping through the other day? That’s only one of three sites Vianu scoped out as potential staging areas. The second is a warehouse in the old industrial park, four lots west of that paper plant you burned down a while back. And the third is the site of that big tent market you all abandoned after…well, after I had the neamh-mairbh tear it down.”

  “Oh, I see where this is going,” I grumbled. “Vianu’s going to set up each location to look like the real staging area in order to throw us off, just in case the general chaos of the vamp attacks doesn’t do the job.”

  “You got it in one.”

  “And Vianu didn’t tell you which location is the real one?”

  Drake shrugged. “Sorry, man.”

  “Do you at least know what level of resistance we can expect at the actual staging area?”

  “Um, a lot?”

  “Your specificity is astounding.” I pressed my fist to my forehead as I sorted through my myriad problems. “So, in the next hour, we need to somehow figure out which staging area is the real one and drum up enough combat support to overwhelm an unknown number of young vampires, plus an elder.”

  “That’s about the gist of it.” Drake tugged Kennedy off his shoulder and placed the man on his feet. Kennedy wobbled a bit but didn’t fall over. “Think this guy can be of any more help?”

  “If we can get him a visual of the summoning circle, he might be able to label its weak points,” I said, “but if we bring him that close to the vampires—”

  “They might use their super speed to snatch him and spirit him off to do Vianu’s bidding, or return him to Abarta.” He scratched his close-shaven head. “So, what? We hole him up somewhere safe until this all blows over?”

  “That would be prudent, considering the amount of damage his knowledge has already done.” I grabbed Kennedy by the wrist and tugged him closer to me. “I’d take him to City Hall, but I think it’s on fire. So my house is the best bet.”

  “You sure your house isn’t on fire too?”

  “Trust me, pal. There is no building in this city more fireproof than my house.”

  “If you say so.” Drake squinted, looking side to side at the encompassing cloud of smoke. “Which way is it again?”

  I jutted my thumb toward City Hall. “Easiest way to get there from here is to pass the burning remnants of the city’s social order. Follow me.”

  What should have been a quick trip to City Hall was slow and tedious, the smoke inhibiting our every step as we kept our senses on the hunt for vampires hiding in the gloom. No one ambushed us from an alleyway or a rooftop, but several corpses lying on the sidewalk or in the road nearly tripped us up. A few of them had been the victims of vampire fangs, throats torn and bodies drained of blood. But some, likely practitioners, were riddled with badly broken bones and large puncture wounds. One had even been eviscerated, his abdominal organs splashed across the pavement.

  Kinsale was fighting back, as it always did, but it was doomed to lose this battle—and the war—if I couldn't stop Vianu from completing the ritual.

  As we neared City Hall, now visible as a brightly burning husk, the orange glow of the licking flames radiating across the entire neighborhood, I tried to pick up speed. But yet again, Kennedy held me back. He bobbed along behind me at a brisk walk and refused to move any faster. His eyes were drawn to the raging fire consuming City Hall, but his face showed no particular interest in its implications.

  “Can you carry him again?” I asked Drake. “I need at least one arm to fight with, and the right one is down for the count today.”

  He eyed my right arm. “You sure about that? Your weird life force trick looks like it’s working to me.”

  “Huh? What trick?”

  I looked at my arm, something I’d been steadfastly avoiding since all the skin and half the muscle had been seared clean off the bones by Abarta’s bitch of a shield. The arm had stopped hurting altogether shortly after I sustained the damage, which meant my nerve endings had been singed. And, in the near future, I’d experience the distinctly unpleasant sensation of regrowing pain receptors. Something I knew would leave me rolling on the floor, begging for painkillers whose supply human society had bled dry years ago. Not even pain-dampening spells could totally dull nerve restoration. So I was in for a very bad night.

  Or at least
I’d thought I was.

  Upon examining my arm now, however, I found that most of the major tissue damage had already healed. The limb was still numb, but when I tried to flex my fingers, everything moved as it should.

  For a moment, I thought my healing factor had gotten its wires crossed and focused solely on fixing my arm, when it should’ve been splitting its attention between the arm and the impact damage I suffered after the shield exploded. But no, I realized as I probed all my other sore spots. Everything was healing at an equal rate, and that rate was much faster than normal for me. Almost like I’d gotten some kind of boost.

  I looked inward, to my soul. And what I found was baffling.

  You couldn’t siphon off your life force for magic use without deliberately trying, so now that I was “at rest,” my life force should’ve reverted to its usual job: making sure the tether that held my soul to my body didn’t come untied. But it hadn’t. Instead, my life force had spilled back out into the magic side of my soul and was now expediently refilling my energy reservoir.

  That should’ve been impossible. There shouldn’t have been nearly enough life force in my soul to replenish my fae magic store, not by half, not even by a third. Yet a glance at the shell of my soul revealed it was glowing its typical pale blue, not a dim spot in sight.

  The life force outflow wasn’t hurting my spiritual integrity at all. And that made no sense. Because my soul was a finite size, and the amount of life force I possessed was proportional to that size.

  It was almost like my soul was channeling extra energy from an outside source. But what source could that be?

  Hel’s voice rang through my mind once again. I suspect you will eventually discover the answer to that question on your own.

  Something had been buried underneath my soul glamour, something abnormal, and Hel had known about it. While I had known nothing—

  “Uh, Whelan,” Drake whispered. “We’ve got a problem.”

  I yanked myself back into the moment and peered through the field of smoke ahead of us.

  Seven silhouettes stood in the roundabout in front of the fiery ruins of City Hall, and all of them were emanating the distinct magic signatures of the sídhe. As we reached the edge of the sidewalk, the smoke suddenly retreated, blown away from the area by a persistent magic wind. In the clearing left behind, we found a kangaroo court blocking our path to my house.

  McCullough stood apart from the rest, his face warped into a tight scowl, the blade of his sword dripping blood. Before him, Orlagh and Boyle were being restrained by four of the other sídhe soldiers. They were both wounded, but Orlagh’s wounds were superficial, a few dark bruises the worst of her treatment. Boyle, on the other hand, was on his knees, bleeding from multiple stab wounds whose origins were easy to track by the red trail that led to McCullough.

  Kinsale was in the middle of a catastrophe, and McCullough was punishing rebels.

  Something dark and coldly righteous settled in my gut like a slithering snake.

  “You egotistical bastard!” I shouted at the man who was making a fool of the sídhe.

  McCullough’s shoulders stiffened, and he slowly turned to face me.

  Drake shot me a horrified look. “Are you nuts? That guy can crush us.”

  “Thought we already established I was insane,” I replied as I released Kennedy’s arm and stepped off the sidewalk.

  Logically, I should have been scared of McCullough’s wrath, should’ve been quaking in my bloodstained boots, should’ve been running away from the roundabout with my tail between my legs. Because without one of Tildrum’s minions here to warn the man off, I was like a newborn bunny just waiting to be snatched up in the talons of a hungry hawk. Weak. Fragile. Mortal.

  But there was something growing in my chest, in my heart, in my soul, a harder kind of confidence than any I’d ever had, hard like ice in darkest winter. It leeched into my muscles, into my blood, into my bones, as the energy of unknown origin filled my magic store to the brim.

  I let the energy overflow, spill out into all the corners of my being. Into my mind. My memory. My personality. It invigorated every fraction of my self, until I felt alive in a way I never had before. My senses on a pinhead, acute to the nth degree. My touch like fire. My sight like sharpened glass. My hearing so finely tuned the moans of the wind became a siren’s song.

  I didn’t know what was driving this metaphysical experience, and right now, I didn’t care.

  All that mattered was punishing McCullough for his failure to uphold Unseelie honor.

  And punish him I would.

  “Whelan,” McCullough said, a broad grin stretching across his face. “You’re alive.”

  “How strange. I thought for sure you’d be upset to learn that rumors of my death were exaggerated.” I strode toward him, one even step at a time, arms held loosely at my sides, shoulders slack and back unburdened, soul singing with pent-up energy vexed at the presence of this wretched failure for an Unseelie soldier.

  McCullough raised his sword, aimed the point at my face. “Oh no. I’m elated to see you still live, bréagadóir. Because now I have the opportunity to dish out the punishment you deserve. For defying my authority. For turning my own soldiers against me. For walking into a vampire trap even though I warned you off, resulting in mass casualties to your own people. And for leaving the city at large with such impaired defenses that our worst enemy felt emboldened enough to launch a large-scale attack. You deserve a far worse death than being blown to bits and shunted into the afterlife in an instant. You deserve to suffer. You deserve—”

  “Not to have to listen to your bullshit anymore,” I cut in. “I deserve to be free of you, McCullough, and so do your subjugated soldiers, and so does the city of Kinsale, and so does the Unseelie Court. Because you are a disgrace to the nature of the sídhe. So careless that you allowed vital intelligence to fall into enemy hands, yet so prideful that you refused to admit it to the detriment of everyone around you.”

  McCullough’s confident mask cracked. Ever so slightly. “What are you talking about?”

  “What am I talking about?” I increased my volume to make sure all the sídhe behind him heard me loud and clear. “I’m talking about the fact that you allowed the vampires to obtain the preliminary Watchdog organizational report. And because you were so concerned that your negligence would damage your precious reputation, you didn’t tell anyone about it. And because you didn’t tell anyone about your idiotic mistake, the Watchdogs didn’t know the entire organization was compromised from the very beginning. And because we didn’t know Vianu had us by the balls, a bunch of us died last night.”

  At this point, I was practically shouting. “All those people died because of you, McCullough. Not me. Not Saoirse. You.”

  The grin melted off his pale face. “How dare you make such gross claims of misconduct.”

  “If they aren’t true, you can just say so.”

  The soldiers holding Orlagh and Boyle tensed up, waiting for McCullough’s rebuttal. But McCullough failed to give one. Because there was nothing he could say to wriggle out from beneath the truth.

  Truth was the lifeblood of the fae, and also the bane of our existence.

  “You filthy fucking half-blood,” McCullough spit. Then he charged me, sword held high.

  I came to a casual halt, eying the man with what I passed off as disinterest but was actually an analysis of my opponent’s strategy:

  McCullough pounded across the asphalt, moving so fast he was a blur, stepping so hard he left cracks beneath his boots. He funneled energy into his arm and down the length of his sword, creating a buffer meant to repel counterattacks and shatter shields by discharging a blast of force into the first solid object with which it made contact. He intended to cut down any defense I threw up with magic and then use his superior sídhe strength to cleave me in half with his bloodstained blade.

  That strategy might have worked—if he hadn’t underestimated me.

  McCullough came within
striking distance and immediately swung his sword at my seemingly prone body.

  I caught it. Softened the bite of the blade in my palm with a thin stream of energy. Simultaneously used a much larger amount to redirect the force blast around my body just as it attempted to rip my hand to bloody bits. And while McCullough was distracted by the asphalt ten feet to my right exploding at the brutal impact of the force blast, shooting large chunks of shrapnel every direction, I yanked the blade with all my half-sídhe strength. It unbalanced McCullough just enough to bring his head within arm’s reach.

  Then I rammed my freshly healed right fist into the center of McCullough’s face.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The front of McCullough’s skull imploded with a vicious crunch. Blood showered the air, sprayed my face and neck, further soiled my uniform. Teeth like hailstones plinked across the asphalt, ripped out at the roots. Shards of facial bones ate into his eyes, temporarily blinding him. And his lower jaw was driven so far into his throat that he couldn’t produce more than a muffled whimper of pain.

  McCullough flew back at the force of the blow, his hand slipping free from the hilt of his sword, and smacked the ground headfirst, falling limp on impact.

  That ought to keep him occupied long enough, I thought as I spun his sword around and caught the hilt in my right hand. The fingers broken by the magic-assisted punch ached as they closed around the hilt’s leather grip. But unlike with McCullough’s mangled face, the damage to my right hand was minor. The deep cut on my left palm was a bit more concerning, given how much blood it was weeping onto the pavement. But I fixed that in a jiffy by using the sword to slice off a piece of my already torn pants leg and create a makeshift bandage.

  Once the blood flow was staunched, I groped around on my broken utility belt until I located my RTP talisman. It was a bit dented from my collision with the dungeon wall, but the spell construction was stable.

  I discharged the remainder of the energy supply the talisman had originally been loaded with, then pushed my own energy into it. Far more energy than it needed to function at optimum levels. So much energy that a thick layer of white frost covered its every contour and a pale-blue glow emanated from its center.