What Man Defies

by Clara Coulson

  “Nice to see the Seelie Court isn’t any less cutthroat than the Unseelie. People on Earth always try to categorize them as polar opposites.”

  Brigid smirked. “Humans are even more foolish than Cara and Aodhan, in my limited experience.” Her gaze slid off the path ahead and landed on me again, scrutinizing. “Half-bloods, on the other hand, are more of a mixed bag, I’ve found.”

  A long silence fell between us.

  But the end of the forest of death was approaching, so she had to drive us into the uncomfortable question neither of us wanted to touch. She took a breath and asked, “This man who tried to steal from the Well of Knowledge. He is the real Abarta, yes? The one who’s supposed to be dormant with the rest of the sleeping gods?”

  I nodded. “He is. He’s on a mission to revive the other Tuatha and begin a new era of war with the fae. He previously tried to use the harp of the Dagda, which he stole from the Unseelie Court, to break the spell keeping them asleep in Maige Mell. I managed to thwart that plot by the skin of my teeth.”

  “And what was his plan for the well, do you know?” An uneasy frown settled on her face.

  “He was already preparing to break into the vault before he attempted the harp spell,” I replied. “And I doubt he has any singular plan for the knowledge you can obtain from drinking the water.” I quickly explained what that knowledge entailed. “So he can use it for practically every scheme he has in motion, and use it to plan countless others.”

  Now she looked immensely disturbed.

  “I don’t understand. If the remnant god is a primary threat to the courts, why would the queens send a unit so poorly informed about the circumstances to thwart him?”

  I didn’t answer. I let her think on it, wanting to see just how smart she was.

  She figured it out after about forty-five seconds, and answered her own question.

  “The whole point of sending us here was that we were not well informed enough to fully grasp the situation,” she said, rolling the words off her tongue like they tasted bitter. “The queens needed to send a team to clear the vault of any humans remaining after Abarta’s forces pulled out. But at the same time, they didn’t want to call too much attention to the break-in. Dispatching the royal guard, or a unit of high-level army officers, would’ve put public scrutiny on the situation, and the queens don’t want anyone focusing too hard on Abarta’s actions. They want to downplay everything he’s doing, despite his status as a threat to the realm.” She bit her lip with an overly sharp incisor. “But why?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.” I stepped out from underneath the branches of the last evil tree, excited for once to see another stretch of path cut into the petrified forest laid out before us. “I have it on good authority there are ‘factors’ at play that are driving the queens to act this way, but I can’t begin to guess what they are.”

  “Who told you of these ‘factors’?” she asked, guiding her horse back toward the rest of the group.

  “Tom Tildrum,” I said with more than an ounce of venom.

  She started. “The King of the Cats? You’ve met him?”

  “Unfortunately for my sanity.” My foot landed wrong on a loose rock, pulling on my fresh stitches in a way that made me feel like I was going to tear in half. Wincing, I added, “He’s a creepy fuck, to put it nicely.”

  “I’ve only heard stories about him. I had no idea he was active in court politics.”

  “As far as I can tell, he’s smack dab in the middle of whatever the queens are dealing with.”

  “That is…not a comforting thought.”

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  She let a thoughtful silence fill the gap as we meandered back toward the others, who had stopped at the edge of the path to wait for us.

  Shortly before we caught up, she murmured, “What I still don’t understand is where you fall into this, Vincent Whelan. I considered the possibility that you are some sort of covert agent of the Unseelie, working toward your queen’s goals from the other side of the veil. But your status as a half-blood means you are far too weak to take on a being like Abarta in direct combat.” She paused. “No offense meant, of course. I myself am far too weak for such a thing, given my age and relative inexperience.”

  “Not offended. Please continue.”

  “What I mean to say is, you suffered grievous wounds just fighting Abarta’s underlings, and it was inevitable that you would when your only available allies were a mortal mage and a small number of mundane humans.” She took a sharp, frustrated breath. “And yet, despite those critical weaknesses in yourself, and your teammates, you appear to have been the queens’ choice for the first, and only, line of defense against Abarta’s scheme to obtain the knowledge from the well. Surely the queens have many full-blooded operatives they could’ve tasked with such a perilous undertaking. Why choose a sídhe scion with no true allegiance to either court, who is not guaranteed to do as they wish or need? Why you?”

  I let out a clipped, dry laugh. “If you figure it out, let me know, because I’m as baffled as you.”

  She loudly clicked her tongue in exasperation. “I dislike being so far out of the loop.”

  “You and me both.” I stepped in line behind the tail end of the group as Brigid pointed her horse toward the front to retake her position as the lead. “Out of curiosity,” I said before her horse could trot off, “what are you planning to do with all the information I just gave you?”

  Brigid gave me a sideways glance. Those molten eyes had a gleam in them now. “I will do as all fae do when they obtain delicate information. Use it to stack the deck in my favor.”

  “Hope that works out for you.”

  “And I hope the queens’ gambit does not eat you alive.”

  Chapter Twenty

  They hoisted us from the cavern with a magic elevator.

  Instead of climbing through the narrow entrance lined with live grenades, they’d bypassed the danger by jumping straight down from the opening in the top of the cavern. The drop was nothing for a sídhe, and the ascent wasn’t much harder. While us humans loitered in an awestruck gaggle, they bent their knees ever so slightly and then bounded upward in a blur, flipping over the lip of the opening and landing gracefully on the edge. Only two of them, probably the youngest, needed to use magic to assist their jumps. The rest just had that much strength in their nonhuman legs.

  Kids these soldiers may have been, but any one of them could’ve crushed me.

  Once they were all up, they surrounded the opening, and Brigid ordered us to stand in the direct center, beside the horses they’d left behind. I led the group to the designated spot and waited, wondering what kind of trick they were going to pull. A mass levitation spell? A teleportation variant? Or something I’d never seen before?

  The answer turned out to be number three. But it was more mundane than I’d assumed.

  Chanting in unison, they created a multicolored platform of energy beneath us and the horses. After a somewhat jerky start, the platform rose from the ground like a swift elevator taking us up the floors of a high-rise. I instructed everyone to sit down and grab a buddy in case there were any jarring motions, because I didn’t want to have to dive off the edge and rescue someone from a fatal fall. I was so physically drained that I couldn’t drum up any significant magic energy, and what little I could I had used to rebuild my fourth glamour on the walk back to the entrance.

  Plus, I’d had enough of playing hero for one day. I needed a break.

  Thankfully, the fae kept the platform under control, and we reached the top without incident. Cara and Aodhan ushered everyone off the platform, back onto the rocky soil of the Divide. With everyone safely on solid ground, they led their horses off and dismissed the spell. And like that, all the survivors were freed from the cavern of nightmares. At least in the physical sense. What they’d experienced within would no doubt haunt them for years to come.

  But these were people who’d lived through the collapse. They’
d witnessed mass death and destruction before. If they’d conquered the trauma once, they could do it again.

  “So, what now?” Saoirse asked. She was sitting on the ground behind me, her bad leg, which had been splinted with sticks and gauze, stretched out before her. “How do we make sure Abarta doesn’t try to bring down the well ward again and pour himself a glass of knowledge water? All the other vault locks appear to be permanently disabled, so all he would need to take another crack at the well is enough people to throw into the ward circles until he gets the right combination. How do we prevent him from doing that? Is there a reset switch somewhere? Can we restore the vault to its original state?”

  “Even if we can,” I answered, “it’ll only delay him. He had thirty-odd people abducted once. He can do it again. And we won’t necessarily notice next time it happens. He had them snatched from Kinsale this time around because that was where he was based when he was working on the harp spell last month. But he’s not in Kinsale anymore because you and I exposed his operations to the local fae leadership, and now the dullahan are on alert. He may not even be on Earth. In which case, he can pick a city at random and send his banshee replacement to prey on that populace instead.”

  “Then we need to secure the cavern.” Saoirse raked her fingers through the dirt, staining her skin, as she dwelled on the problem. “Could we cave it in, do you think? Bury the entire vault?”

  “That’s a good idea, but I can’t pull off magic on that scale. Especially in my current state.” I gave the soldiers a curious side-eye. “They might be able to, if such a bold move doesn’t contradict their orders.”

  Brigid pursed her lips. “Our orders were nonspecific about most aspects of this mission. However, given the size of the cavern, and the strength of the magic housed within, I am not enthusiastic about our chances of collapsing the entire structure.”

  “You think the vault might have a failsafe to prevent its destruction?” I asked.

  “If I was going to build a vault like this,” she said, “I would want to include measures to ensure its long-term viability. In case I wanted to access the item it was protecting at some point in the future.”

  “That’s true.” I scratched at my cheek with the hand that didn’t have a large hole in the middle. “We bury the vault, we bury the well. That would challenge the intentions of whoever built the vault, so they could have included a safeguard to make sure no one, or at least no one of lesser power, would be able to destroy all their hard work.”

  “What else can we do then?” Saoirse wiped her hands on her pants, leaving black streaks. It didn’t matter. Her clothing was already ruined. “Some kind of ward around the entrance?”

  Brigid hummed a low note. “There’s nothing the ten of us can produce that a remnant god cannot break with ease.”

  “Well, we have to do something, even if it’s a stopgap measure,” Saoirse pointed out. “If we don’t, then the moment we leave, Abarta might turn around and make a second run.”

  “I know.” Brigid rapped her fingers on the hilt of her sheathed sword. “But I cannot think of a viable…” She paused for a couple seconds, then said to her cohorts, “Do you hear that?”

  The other soldiers looked this way and that, as if hunting for the origin of a sound.

  I didn’t hear anything. In fact, I hadn’t heard much background noise at all since my fight with the…Oh, hell. I was still wearing my anti-banshee earplugs, wasn’t I?

  No wonder everything sounded so faint.

  I plucked the earplugs out. Or rather, I tried to pluck them out. They were glued to my ear canals with dried blood, so I had to pry them out instead. Once they tore free, my range of hearing greatly increased, and I immediately picked up on what the fae had noticed, even though my eardrums were still healing from that last banshee shriek.

  It was a rumbling noise. And it was getting louder by the second.

  The ground began to shake. A faint vibration beneath my heels. Concern washed through the group, and everyone searched for the source of the disturbance, wondering if another enemy was approaching. But no one spotted anything amiss. Not the dust from approaching horses. Not the telltale pressure of magic. Not the wriggling form of another monster like the lindworm. It was almost as if the quake was a legitimate natural phenomenon.

  I knew better than that though. Which is why, the moment the vibration abruptly stopped and a tense silence fell over the Divide, I shouted, “Take cover!”

  Not a second later, as everyone was diving for the ground to shield themselves, it happened.

  Like two tectonic plates had violently shifted beneath us, the ground lurched to the left almost thirty feet. People who hadn’t quite flattened themselves to the earth were tossed like ragdolls. People who had managed to curl into protective balls were badly shaken, as if stuck in a tumbler. Noses broke. Teeth cracked. Bones snapped. The rocky soil tore into sensitive flesh, leaving bloody streaks. One man landed on his head so hard it knocked him out cold. The soldiers’ horses were thrown to the ground, screaming, and the fae themselves struggled to stay on their feet and ride out the quake.

  I’d managed to fling myself over Saoirse in the nick of time, and I used what wisps of magic my beleaguered body could collect to anchor us in place. A piece of rock stirred up by the movement went through the hole in my left hand and bounced off my face. Countless more pelted me, and though I tried my hardest to shield Saoirse, a few of them snuck under my chest and nicked her. She hissed at the pain but didn’t cry out. And no wonder. Her broken leg must’ve hurt far worse, being rattled by the quake. The cuts were just the icing on the cake.

  The aftershocks of the Great Lurch seemed to go on for an hour, rocking everyone back and forth, a rumble like a rickety train pounding at our ears. But I knew it couldn’t have been more than five minutes before the earth finally gave up the ghost. The tremors weakened, the rocks stopped flying, and the black dust whipped into the air began to settle around us. When the last rumble faded beyond my hearing, I climbed off Saoirse and sat up on my knees to survey the area.

  The entrance to the cavern was gone. The whole thing. No gaping hole in the ceiling. No narrow tunnel broken into the stone. The rock formation that had housed the latter had collapsed into a pile of rubble, and the former appeared to have simply been sealed up. There wasn’t even a scar in the dirt to suggest such an opening had existed in the first place. It was like the hand of god had descended from the heavens and sewn up a wound in the earth.

  Now, I had no trouble believing one of the queens could’ve pulled off such a feat. Mab’s finger snap of doom that destroyed DC had proven their powers had few bounds. My problem, however, with this easy theory, that Mab or her counterpart sealed the cavern, was that I hadn’t sensed any magic around the entrance before it closed. The only magic energy I could sense now were the residual pockets left over from the soldiers creating their makeshift magic elevator.

  I knew exactly zero ways someone could seal that cavern without using magic.

  Judging by the looks on the soldiers’ faces, I wasn’t alone in my astonishment.

  “Well, that was freaky as fuck,” said someone to my right. Odette. Whose bandaged shoulder had started to bleed again from all the jostling. Her one remaining arm was slung over her eyes, and she was breathing heavily. The numbing charm on her wound must’ve been wearing off. Even so, she spoke with a strong voice, only a few words running together here and there. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve seen enough disturbing shit for one day. Can we please go home now?”

  The survivors, more beaten and bruised than before, murmured in general agreement. Saoirse pushed herself back into a sitting position, wincing as her leg twitched, and said to me, “I agree. Time to pack it in, Vince. Any other loose ends will just have to wait. We’ve reached the limit of human endurance.” She motioned to my bloody abdomen and the ragged hole in my hand. “And you aren’t far behind us. Let’s get a portal set up and leave this godforsaken wasteland.” />
  I couldn’t disagree with the sentiment. Everyone except the soldiers was totally beat.

  Forcing myself to my feet with the one ounce of strength I had left, I turned to Brigid and said, “Can we get an assist on a directed portal? I can give you the coordinates for the match point on Earth.”

  Brigid, who’d been tending to her spooked horse, nodded solemnly. “Certainly. I was, after all, instructed to make sure all the trespassers left the Divide and were returned to their appropriate realms.”

  “Hm.” I drew out the sound. “I’ve never known fae officers to be that considerate to humans. Almost sounds like an order that came from elsewhere. Perhaps from someone with privileged information who knew the actual circumstances surrounding the vault break-in. Someone who knew we might need help to leave Tír na nÓg due to the events that were bound to take place inside said vault.”

  “Yes,” Brigid said dryly, “it does rather sound like that, doesn’t it?”

  “Makes you think, huh?”

  “It does,” she agreed, “though I’m now under the impression it was not supposed to.”

  “Another juicy tidbit to tuck under your belt until the time is right?”

  She moved her lips in a way that resembled a smile. “You know how the sídhe operate, Vincent Whelan. Everything we learn is a weapon meant to be drawn when the time is right. This is no exception.”

  “Better make sure it’s a weapon you know how to wield.”

  “No need to worry about me. I’m a quick learner.”

  Cara and Aodhan drew out the circle under Brigid’s watchful eye, a variation on the one I’d used back in the warehouse that didn’t require all the occupants to be in contact. When they were finished, I escorted each person who could walk inside the circle and arranged them in a tight grouping, while the soldiers carried the unconscious over and lined them up in the middle. Christie waved off my attempt to aid her and limped her way into the thick of the group, still hunched over, an arm wrapped around her side. I was worried she had badly broken ribs or damaged organs, but she wouldn’t let me examine her. Sighing, I backtracked and helped up Saoirse, and together, we headed to the last available spot inside the circle.