* * * *
“She’s a little girl.”
Gabriel simply looked at me.
I knew his silence shouldn’t irritate me. He was still in wolf form; technically he didn’t even have the vocal chords necessary to form human words. But he could at least bow his head in doggy shame or something. Play dead maybe.
It might have appeased me.
“We can’t hand her over to Liam and Marcus.”
Lifting his hind leg, he scratched behind his left ear and I turned away to pace, fingers running through my hair. This wasn’t happening. There was no way in hell I was going to trade that kid’s life for our safety. Gabriel must have known how I’d react, so why had he chosen Asrai as our intended victim? He’d spoken as if there were dozens of people on the run from the Sidhe. He could have picked any one of them.
But he hadn’t.
Turning on my heel, I stalked back over to where I’d left him and glared down into his upturned face.
“Why?” It was a simple enough question, but it seemed as if he’d been waiting for me to ask it. He rose to all fours with a stretch and then trotted behind me. Placing his snout into the middle of my back, he started to nudge me forward. Confused at first, it took a few more head butts for me to understand that he wanted me to go to her.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
He responded to my doubt with an annoyed snap of his jaws, so I hurried off. He didn’t follow me, but instead sat just inside the tree line and watched as I made my way towards the child.
She was still swinging when I came upon her, and I saw that her eyes were closed, head tipped back so that she faced the sky. I remember doing the same when I was a kid. It had felt like flying. It made me reluctant to interrupt, but a glance down at the blinking light of my ankle bracelet reminded me that speed was of the essence.
“Asrai?” I called, voice drifting soft and hesitant on the wind. She didn’t stop swinging, though I felt her focus sharpen as she became aware of my presence.
“It’s been a long time since anyone knew me by that name.”
Her legs swept out and she began to climb just a little bit higher. I circled around so that I could see her face more clearly. Standing right in front of her so that each time she sailed forward her feet came within a hairsbreadth of my face.
On her backwards glide, she opened her eyes and looked at me. For an instant her gaze was brown in the weak light, but even as I watched, her eyes lightened. Changed, until I was looking into a blue as bright as my own.
But the change didn’t stop there. Her brown hair darkened, lengthened a little, until the strands were jet black. I stared, as right before my eyes the child changed. All of a sudden I was looking at a miniature version of myself.
“She could be my daughter,” I thought, amazed by the change.
My biological clock perked up, sensing weakness, and ruthlessly I squashed the thought before I started to wonder what a child of Gabriel’s would look like.
“How did you do that?” I asked, for lack of anything better to say.
She shrugged and closed her eyes once more. “It’s just a glamour. You learn a few things living within the Sithin.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again, and blew out a breath. How to begin?
“Asrai, do you remember the Hunt?”
If she was a fugitive, she must have been on the run at some point. She must have come across the Wild Hunt long enough to understand that this world was her only refuge.
“I remember.” Her voice was without inflection, but some of her glamour faded as her concentration slipped. She was half Mini-Phaedra and half stranger.
“Why were they after you?”
I didn’t have time to move out of the way when she let go of the swing’s arms and launched herself at me. A part of me actually braced myself automatically, ready and willing to catch her. When her weight hit me, the force of her momentum knocked me off my feet. I slammed into the ground, the sound of the still rocking swing reaching my ears.
Before I could so much as ask her if she was all right, her hands had come to rest on either side of my head and my vision shattered like broken glass.
Beneath her touch, beneath her magic, I was no longer Phaedra Conners.
Instead I was Asrai the Lightbringer. A Sidhe of mixed blood, all at once Unseelie and Seelie, and heir to the throne of both courts.
I was sitting at the hearth in an old cottage and outside the wooden shutters the wind howled like something sick and dying. It was the first sign that the Hunt had been set loose. When they rode in full force they brought storms, leveled forests, and could reorder the very fabric of time itself.
Only the mad, only the broken, lead the Hounds and their Riders.
I watched the scene unfold in Asrai’s memories.
The Wild Hunt was a threat and her father was sending her out of the Sithin. It wouldn’t help, though. The Hounds could track you anywhere. Some ran for years without ever managing to break free of the Hunt.
“What will I do if they find me?”
Her father paused, the clothes he’d been packing away wrinkling in his clenching hands. His shoulders looked tight, and Asrai had to concentrate to calm her racing pulse.
“You will run.”
“Forever?”
He continued stuffing clothes in the already bulging rucksack and shook his head. “Only until I can come for you.”
“When will you come?” she whimpered, trying to be grown up, but afraid that she was failing miserably. He came to her, kneeling before her place at the hearth and holding her face between his hands. He was warm, his hands so big that practically engulfed her face. His touch, and the knowledge that it was probably the last time she’d see him, brought the tears she’d been fighting to overflow.
She rubbed her cheek against his work-roughened palm, eyes squinting beneath the tears and her own hands rising to clutch at his wrists.
“You’re my brave girl aren’t you?” he said, kissing her childishly plump cheeks and smiling when she nodded in earnest. “The Hounds won’t come for you. Gabriel will make sure of that. But in the meantime, I need you to be strong. Can you do that?”
“I-I guess,” she sobbed. Surging forward, she buried her face against his shirt, unobtrusively wiping tears and snot against the expensive material. “But why do I have to g-go?”
“Because the Hounds are leaving, love, and I need you to go with them. When the Riders learn about you, when they realize that you’re the only one who can disband the Hunt, they’re going to come for you and they’re going to kill you.”
“Why can’t someone else do it? Make the Riders go away?”
He sighed and pulled her into his lap. Already six, she was almost getting too big for such treatment and he groaned theatrically beneath her weight.
“They’re too strong,” he explained slowly. “Too strong for either Court to control anymore.”
“I’m not strong. I can’t stop them either,” she explained sadly, as if the news would come as a shock to him.
“Oh but you are, and you can,” he assured her. “I’m strong, your mother’s strong, and you’re the best of us both.”
Abruptly, the vision ended and I came to with a gasp. Asrai was crouched beside me now, body arched like a cat and fingers digging into the foliage at her feet. Gabriel stood a few feet away. Human once again, the light from the full moon shone off golden flesh and shadowed his face so that his eyes seemed brown in the weak light. He held up his hands, moving low and careful, eyes downcast in a show of submission and the child calmed.
“Gabriel,” she said, and his lips quirked, eyes still trained on the ground.
“You recognize me?”
She sniffed the air, lips parting as she pulled in his scent.
“Your magic tastes the same.” Straightening, she crossed her arms over her chest and shuffled her feet. “And your eyes haven’t changed.”
Aching and tired, I rose to my feet, brus
hing wet leaves from the back of my pants.
“How long have you two known each other?”
Gabriel came up beside me and picked a twig from my hair.
“We were never formally introduced,” he hedged.
I jumped as Asrai slipped her hand into mine, her eyes narrowing as she looked up at Gabriel standing so close.
“It’s been a long time, Hound.”
His smile was tender, and he reached out to brush a stray bit of hair from her face. When she flinched away from his touch he drew back as if she’d struck him, his face collapsing in hurt.
“Centuries,” he agreed finally. “It’s been centuries, little Queen.”
“Centuries huh?” I repeated doubtfully, looking down at the little girl for confirmation. She smiled up at me, fingers tightening around my own.
“I age a little differently than the children you’re used to.”
Not the strangest thing I’d ever heard.
“Gotcha.”
“We have to go,” Gabriel said softly, grabbing my hand to lead me back to the woods. Since Asrai didn’t seem inclined to let me go, she was pulled along too.
“Gabriel? We talked about this already. I’m not—”
“We’re not taking her back. We’re leaving.”
My mind went blank for a minute. Then it hit me.
“As in Briarcliff?”
“As in the whole damn state.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope.”
“I can’t just up and leave.”
He stopped walking and turned on me, eyes glittering dangerously and the heat of him scorching my skin.
“What’s keeping you here? Friends? Family? No? Then it must be job security you’re worried about. I’m sorry if saving your life is interfering with an illustrious career writing obituaries.”
I looked away, the world turning blurry and indistinct through the tears that had filled my eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Despite the apology, he still sounded angry and my lower lip wobbled dangerously.
“That was mean,” Asrai scolded, patting the back of my hand and giving Gabriel the evil eye.
“I’m sorry,” he tried again, only this time he sounded sincere. “I’m just…” he growled low, and scrubbed a hand over his blond curls until they spouted in all directions. He looked like a daffodil.
I snorted, and Asrai pressed her face into my side and giggled.
“Briarcliff isn’t safe for any of us anymore,” he said, struggling to explain his loss of temper. I nodded in understanding, but refused to budge when he went to pull me along again.
“It isn’t safe for you.”
“I know that.”
“We need to leave, Phaedra. I have to get you, Asrai, and the rest of the Pack out of town before the Hunt arrives.”
“You say that you and the other Hounds turned on your Riders? That you’re no longer leading the Sidhe.”
He nodded.
“Then…that sort of means that there is no Wild Hunt anymore. It’s just a bunch of crazy Fae trying to get their dogs back.” I let that sink in. “You and the other Hounds, the other Alphas, are the real threat.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” But he seemed doubtful.
“Doesn’t it?” I asked gently. “The Riders have no power over you anymore, but you’re still running scared. Tail tucked between your legs.”
“The Masters of the hunt—”
“Former,” I corrected, finally growing angry. “They’re not the masters of anyone or anything. Not now and never again.”
“Asrai. The Pack.” He wasn’t arguing. Just talking out loud. Listing the casualties that could arise from a stand against the Mad Sidhe.
I straightened. “We’ll keep them safe,” I said, feeling confident that we could but not sure why. “This is your city. This is my home. I won’t leave it.”
Defeated, he bowed his head. “And I won’t leave you.” He rubbed his jaw and I noticed the stubble darkening his cheeks and chin. The bags beneath his eyes. My heart ached for him.
“The Riders.” Asrai spoke up, a tremble in her voice. “You’ve never seen them before. I have. They’re…there’s nothing else like them. They are nightmares made real. Bogeymen sent to frighten children. Even other monsters are afraid of them.”
“I’ve seen scary.” My words were for her, but my gaze was trained on Gabriel. For a heartbeat I looked at him, but it was the shadow beast I saw. The thing made of darkness and death that lived within him, hungry and waiting. “I’ve seen scary,” I said again, “And I think my nightmares will give yours a run for their money.”
A charged silence and then Gabriel sent me a lopsided grin. I smiled in return, and Asrai shook her head at us both.
“I’m supposed to kill the Riders of the Hunt. It’s all anyone ever talked about. The savior who would defeat the Mad Sidhe. But I can’t kill anyone. I can’t even pass the third grade. How can I be a savior if I never make it out of elementary school?”
—Asrai the Lightbringer
Chapter Sixteen
Kissed By Moonlight Page 29
