What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  I slammed the book shut. Dust rose from the yellowed pages and tickled my nose.

  Suppressing a sneeze, I tossed the book to the other side of the nook. “Stupid history.”

  “History,” said a voice from nowhere, “is among the most important disciplines of the fae.”

  “Go away, cat.” I wrapped my arms around my legs and pressed my nose to my knees. “I don’t want to do riddles today.”

  “No? But I thought you liked playing games with me.” Tom emerged from a dark corner as if he’d always been there. He hadn’t.

  “They’re fun sometimes. But not right now.”

  “Not in the mood, are you?” He slinked across the floor and languidly leaned against the corner of the nook, peering down at me. “What’s wrong, little one?”

  “You know what’s wrong. You don’t need to ask.”

  “True, but I’ve learned that sometimes it helps to speak your problems aloud.”

  I peeked over the tops of my knees, at his bright green eyes with the narrow pupils. Most of the time, those eyes made it seem like he was laughing at you on the inside, but today, they carried a bit of real concern.

  I chewed on my lip for a moment before I finally said, in a whisper, “Momma still isn’t back. Before she left, she told me she’d only be gone for a month. And since then, she hasn’t sent any messages about needing to stay away longer. She hasn’t sent any messages at all. So where is she? Is she…hurt or something? Is she lost somewhere?”

  Tom ran a hand through his colorful hair. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d tell you in a beat of my cat-quick heart. Unfortunately, I know as little as you on the matter of her status.”

  He slid around the wall of the nook and sank onto the cushion beside me. “I do know this, however. Among the trickiest of the fae, your mother is a standout above all others, and I’ve never known her to start a puzzle she could not solve. So wherever she is, I assume it’s a place she can leave of her own volition. And whatever she’s doing, I assume it’s a task she believes she can complete. It may simply be that the place and the task are not those she originally intended to find, and so the journey home requires she take a longer path than planned.”

  “You think she might come home soon?”

  “As soon as she can.” He picked up the discarded book and opened it to the exact page where I’d stopped. “And I know it would make her ever so happy and ever so relieved if she came home to find that her extended absence has not stunted your development in any way, the depths of your studies included.”

  I scrunched my nose. “You’re going to make me keep reading that, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but we will strike a bargain on it.” Tom split a section of the book apart from the rest and pinched the pages between his fingers. “If you can finish this chapter on the early history of the Tuatha Dé Danann in the next hour and recite to me ten important facts you learn, I will have someone take you outside for an hour to play in the snow.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  I snatched the book back from him. “Okay. But it better be a whole hour.”

  “I am a cat sídhe, child. I do not lie.”

  “You don’t have to lie to say something that isn’t true.” I stuck out my tongue. “You told me that, remember?”

  Tom smiled. “So I did.”

  “Whelan!” shouted Eamon Boyle.

  I pointed to the sentence in the book that had stumped me so much I couldn’t stand reading any more. “Can I maybe use a dictionary to help me figure out what this means? I don’t know a lot of these words.”

  “Whelan, get up! Get up now!” yelled Orlagh Maguire.

  Tom tilted the book down so he could glimpse the words. “I believe the only complete dictionary for this dialect is stored in the Grand Rowan Library, and the librarian is not keen to let it leave the premises.”

  “Then how am I supposed to read all this?”

  “Did your tutor not provide you with vocabulary?”

  “Whelan, don’t you dare die at that damn vampire’s hand!” screamed Indira Sanyal.

  “Not enough. I learned all the words she gave me, but the books she assigned me to read all have hundreds more. She didn’t give me anything easy to practice with.”

  Tom frowned. “I will speak to her about her lesson plans. For now, just read what you can. Even an incomplete understanding is better than none at all, because—”

  “Whelan, get your lazy fucking ass off the ground!” commanded the one and only Odette Chao.

  The world around me scattered into a field of twinkling white lights, and for a moment, I hung suspended in empty space. Then patches of color materialized from the darkness, slowly but surely resolving into distinct shapes. After the colors and shapes came the sounds, booms and pops and crackles, shouts and screams and groans. And after the sounds came the rest of my senses, all in a rush, the last of them touch. And with the touch came searing pain that wrenched me out of the cocoon of partial awareness and slammed me against the wall that was the awful waking world.

  I lay on a field of charred grass, beneath a sky of smoke and shadow.

  Vianu stood before me with an iron stake in his hand.

  “Ah, there you are, Whelan,” jeered the vampire lord. “I was starting to worry I’d have to kill you while you were unconscious. There is nothing I loathe more than taking a life when the person can’t feel me taking it. The lack of terror and anguish greatly diminishes my ability to savor the moment. And after all the shit I’ve had to wade through in my handling of you, all the compromises I’ve had to make, bending my knee to some petty god for a few perks and a whole heap of responsibilities I’d otherwise have cast aside…Personally, I think I deserve to drink in your exquisite suffering.”

  I stared silently at the prattling man, trying to regain my bearings. My abdomen hurt so much it was hard to think, though I couldn’t remember why it felt like I’d been punched with a jackhammer. I dragged my oddly heavy hand across my torso until my fingers met blood, and I traced a vaguely round and ragged hole a few inches in diameter.

  Blood was freely dribbling from the wound, nothing lodged inside it, and my fingers sank deeply into my abdominal cavity with the weakest push, indicating whatever had injured me had bored straight through my body. What the hell hit…?

  It came back to me: a bullet. I’d been right on the verge of upending Vianu’s ritual, when someone shot me in the back. The high-caliber rifle bullet had at least been partially iron, which was why the wound hurt so damn much. All the flesh the iron had touched had been burned by the metal, and all the corresponding parts of my soul as well.

  Luckily, a great deal of a bullet’s damage was inflicted by its kinetic energy as opposed to the hunk of metal itself. So most of the shredded muscle and organ tissue would heal without scarring. But since my body was sitting on the verge of shock, there was a good chance I wouldn’t have the opportunity to heal.

  If I didn’t get back on my feet, and get the hell away from Vianu, he was going to—

  Wait. What happened with the summoning?

  My gaze drifted over Vianu’s head, where a towering column of red light was gradually fading away. Above the column, a sliver of sky appeared to have been torn in two, and between the tattered edges of the tear, a storm of pitch-black lightning brewed. The tear in the sky was a hole in the veil, so grievous it would take centuries to heal. During that time, any number of nasty things could worm their way to Earth and drop from the sky like termites falling from an infested ceiling.

  The first thing to wriggle out of that hole, of course, would be the Wild Hunt.

  While I’d been off in la-la land, visiting a long-forgotten memory, Vianu had successfully completed the ritual and doomed my city to a terrible end.

  There was a brief second where I cursed everyone else on the battlefield, disparaging them for being unable to take my place after I fell to the iron bullet. But a single sweep of the park told me my criticism h
ad no place. Every single one of my allies was bogged down by bloody injuries and ongoing vampire brawls, and they were doing all in their power just to keep breathing.

  Indira had nearly lost her right arm at some point, the limb hanging bloody and limp at her side as she continued launching fire spells at a half-dozen skittering vamps. Odette had exhausted all the energy she’d stored in her conduit arm and was rapidly guzzling what energy remained in her soul to pummel a large group of vampires who’d pinned down four other Watchdog practitioners.

  Orlagh had wiped out scores of vampires all by herself, but with the battlefield populated by chaotically scattered fighters, she was forced to use short-range magic only. And that allowed the vamps to come too close. Chunks of her skin had been bitten out by sharp fangs, and she was rapidly losing blood.

  No one else was faring better. The vamps were too numerous, too strong, too fast.

  So when I had fallen, that was it. The last chance to save Kinsale fell with me.

  I was so close, so fucking close, and some asshole with a gun took me down…

  “Are you listening, Whelan?” Vianu snapped, and I realized he’d been jabbering out his haughty nonsense the entire time I’d been analyzing this heinous situation. “I realize you might be eager to finish your miserable life and run off to some afterworld where you can sulk over your shame in peace, but I’m not letting you leave until you acknowledge—”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Vianu balked. “Excuse me?”

  I dug my fingers into the blood-drenched soil and hauled myself into a sitting position, biting down a wail of pain as my entire abdomen burned white hot. When the worst of it passed, I gathered what saliva was left in my cotton-dry mouth and spit it on one of Vianu’s fancy leather dress shoes. “I said, shut the hell up, you infuriating, pompous piece of shit.”

  Incredulous, Vianu chuckled. “Whelan, you do realize you’ve lost, yes?”

  “Lost my city to the Wild Hunt? Yeah, that I know.” I ran my tongue across my bottom lip, tasting copper. “But have I lost this personal fight with you? No. That hasn’t happened, and it’s not going to. No matter how much pus you spew out of your filthy fanged mouth. No matter how much you twirl around that iron stake like a sparkly baton. No matter how much you flare your stereotypical evil aura, like some cheesy comic book villain. You are still going to fall.”

  Vianu stopped spinning the stake and pointed its tip down at my face. “And how, pray tell, do you intend to defeat me? When you’re so weak, you can’t even stand. So tired, you can’t even hold up your head. So weighed down by the sad sight of your friends dying left and right, that you can’t even muster a spark of resolve in those freaky faerie eyes.” His chuckling morphed into full-on laughter, pitiless and ear piercing, nails on a chalkboard. “What can you possibly do to stop me from killing you, much less put you in a position to kill me?”

  “That’s the thing,” I replied airily. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

  I plunged my will deep into my soul, past the pocket that held my magic, through the hole I’d ripped between that pocket and the dripping bucket of my life force. I sank my will to the bottom of that bucket and dug through the crumbs of energy that had gathered at its base like dust on a solid surface.

  Until I found it, tucked away in a tiny fold, an abnormality in my otherwise smooth soul—a funnel the size of a needle that led somewhere else. Someplace whose location I couldn’t guess that housed some source of power that could very well destroy me if I used it too fast, too much, too wrong.

  But I didn’t care if it destroyed me. I was past the point of self-preservation. I was willing to obliterate my very existence if doing so would bring Vianu down with me. I would fling myself into a tried-and-true hell if I could chain Vianu to my battered soul and drag him, kicking and screaming, the long way down to the worst of fates. And when we hit rock bottom, I wouldn’t care one bit if I burned and burned and burned forever, as long as I got to watch him burn beside me.

  That was what Vianu didn’t understand about the sídhe he had so thoughtlessly provoked.

  No matter how badly the sídhe lost a fight, they never, ever conceded.

  The sídhe did not give up. They got even.

  So I lifted my mental fist and threw the punch I’d meant for Vianu’s circle at the funnel in my soul instead. I rammed my will into that funnel, over and over and over and over, until, bit my microscopic bit, the funnel began to widen.

  Vianu, encouraged by my silence, thinking it a sign he’d called my bluff, launched into yet another speech, of which I only caught fragments like: “I will usher in a great epoch of vampire prominence,” “no longer relegated to the shadows,” “to break the chains of mortal tyranny,” and my personal favorite, “the birth of a new dawn demands great sacrifice.”

  With each word he spoke, I slammed my will into the funnel that much harder. His dripping arrogance fueled my effort. And his utter disdain for mortal life set that fuel on fire. The funneled widened, and widened, and widened, until the steady trickle of power grew into a stream, and a stream into a creek, and a creek into a river.

  Vianu’s monologue trailed off as he finally pulled his head far enough out of his ass to notice something was amiss. “What are you doing? Where is that energy coming from?” He tightened his grip on the iron stake. “I don’t know what foolish game you’re playing now, you vain little half-breed, but you do not have the strength to overpower me, not physically, not magically, not mentally. So why don’t you just…?”

  I fixed Vianu with a stare that held the force of an avalanche, demanding his silence. I pushed myself to one knee, ignoring the pain of my iron wound through sheer force of will. I sent out a pulse of magic, side to side, up and down, all around, until I tagged every fanged abomination within five blocks of the park they’d turned into a slaughterhouse.

  I used those magic tags to pinpoint the exact position of every target. To map their movements. Predict their paths. Approximate where they would be three seconds in the future. Then I asked the energy building inside me like a tsunami, ever so politely, to show all those goddamn vampires the true meaning of Unseelie.

  “All right,” growled Vianu, lifting his arm to drive the stake straight through my skull, “I’ve had enough of you. Enough of your faux bravado. Enough of your faerie nonsense. Enough of your wretched mortal valor. So die your pathetic death, Whelan, and get your soul out of my sight.”

  I smiled at him, at Lord Vianu the great and terrible, who thought himself unstoppable, and spoke one word:

  “Freeze.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Snow. It spiraled down in fat white flakes, shrouded the scorched earth, the roads strewn with debris, the broken homes. It doused the spitting fires, and it carried off the smoke, leaving behind the sound of silence and a darkness more than night. The darkness of heart and soul that accompanied the solemn hours after widespread death, when survivors walked the streets, unable to speak, looking to and fro in horror at the ruin of their lives.

  Earth as a whole had suffered such periods of darkness many times in the past few centuries, and its people had recovered from them all. Because mortals were as resilient as they were frail. But as I lay on the frozen ground, staring up at a sky rent in two, I had a sinking feeling that this new darkness would flood the world for many years before its waters fully receded. And during those years, far too many of those resilient mortals would finally run out of the strength to go on, and drown.

  The Wild Hunt was coming, and it would scar this world like nothing ever had. Even the nukes would pale in comparison to the havoc the hollowfiends would wreak.

  “Whelan! Are you all right?” Orlagh called to me. She was hobbling my way, her speed impaired by a shattered kneecap, her right hand propped on her sword like a crutch. The vampires had dealt her dozens of awful blows, and blood covered her from head to toe. But the sídhe healing factor was so high that her wounds
were stitching closed before my eyes. A deep laceration that had nearly split her face in two completely sealed in the time it took her to cross the distance between the last leg of her fight and the place where I’d fallen in front of Vianu.

  I would’ve answered her question, but I couldn’t open my mouth. As fast as I’d cast my quick freeze spell—roughly ten milliseconds—Vianu had still managed to strike me with the iron stake. The very tip had nicked my left cheek, leaving an inch-long cut that would one day be a small, pale scar I’d greet every morning in the bathroom mirror.

  But for now, as a fresh iron wound, it was angry and screaming, the entire left half of my head swollen as if I’d been stung by a venomous creature. My left eye was streaming tears, my lips were so stiff they would hardly open, and even my tongue was fat and useless.

  The best I could to was grunt to indicate I wasn’t dead.

  Orlagh shambled to a stop beside me and gave me a once-over, relaxing as she confirmed my injuries weren’t fatal.

  As she hovered over me, I examined her in return, and found she’d suffered an iron wound herself. A shallow puncture to her left shoulder. A minor injury.

  I assumed that, like the rest of her military peers, she would wear the resulting scar as a badge of honor.

  Since my life wasn’t hanging in the balance, Orlagh surveyed the rest of the battlefield, hunting for our comrades. Boyle was resting against the trunk of an uprooted tree, nursing a head wound with a dirty cloth. The other four soldiers were clustered together, working to wrench dislocated limbs back into place and push broken bones back beneath skin. Odette was loitering next to Indira, gulping in air, a thick layer of sweat cooling on her skin, while Indira sat hunched on her knees and retched, the ill effects of a strong punch to the stomach.