I cleared my throat. “Malek? How did you bring us here?”
He squeezed Beth’s hand gently until she let go of him. Safest place in Faery, he signed.
“How, not why,” I said. “We haven’t been able to come here ourselves.”
Silver’s consolidating her rule. There are factions arrayed against her. It’s chaos. She’s careful about who has the keys to the kingdom.
“You’re on her invitation list,” I said.
He nodded.
“Simone and I are not. Since when don’t we qualify?”
Since she doesn’t really remember you.
Not remember us? “Care to give us the crash course on why?”
Ask her yourself, Malek signed.
He started down the path. He stepped on twigs and small stones and the occasional fallen leaf, but he didn’t make a sound.
Beth scrambled after him, braids swinging. She made every noise her boss didn’t.
Simone and I brought up the rear. Her legs seemed a little shaky at first, but steadied as we went, even as we climbed the small slope. The trees crowded closer to the trail as it wound uphill, painting the ground with dappled shade.
Simone spoke low in my ear. “It’s better here.”
“Because of the magic?” I asked.
She nodded. “The ground under my feet—this ground—it’s feeding me now.”
“So you’re healing faster.”
“Yes,” she said.
If being here helped her, I hoped that we could stay for as long as she needed. Silver might not remember us, but she’d been a friend. Chances were, we’d find shelter here. Protection. Maybe a home base where we could work out what we needed to about who was hunting us and put a stop to it. Then we could work on healing the realm.
“You need healing, too,” Simone said, responding to my thoughts—or more likely the expression on my face.
I shook my head. “You need all the magic and healing you’re getting for yourself.”
“I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t think I could handle it, Kev.”
“I don’t think—”
“Not taking another step until you come to your senses,” she said, and stopped walking.
Malek and Beth halted and turned to look at us.
“Don’t be dumb,” Beth said. She wasn’t talking to Simone.
“You can’t fight like this, Kev,” Simone said.
I sighed and set down the packs, allowing myself to really feel the wound in my shoulder. The ache. The stiffness in the muscles. My body shook with the full realization of it. Pain aside, if I had to defend us, I’d fail. Simone was right. I didn’t want to take away from her healing, but I couldn’t argue with her point.
“Fine,” I said. “Just be careful. Don’t overdo it.”
“Off with your jacket,” she said.
I obliged.
Simone set her hand on top of my shoulder. She whispered a word I couldn’t quite hear and warmth flooded through her palm, through the bandage, and into the wound. The gentle heat melted the pain, pouring past the hurt down through my chest and belly and legs, all the way to my toes. My knees started to buckle. I widened my stance and caught my balance before I fell—barely.
Simone pulled her hand away and the warmth faded instantly. She worked the knots in the bandage with deft fingers. She pulled off the bandage and started to drop it to the ground.
“Nope,” Beth said, unclipping the clasps on her messenger bag and holding it open. “Blood goes in here. It’s the last thing we want the enemy to get her hands on.”
The enemy. Famine.
Simone dropped the bandage into Beth’s bag. “Move your arm, Kev. How does it feel?”
I flexed the muscle. The stiffness had vanished along with the wound. It felt miraculously good. “It’s perfect.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.
I met her gaze. She didn’t appear worse for wear, as I’d feared. In fact, she looked a little better than before she’d healed me. My worry had been for nothing.
“Thank you,” I said, shrugging back into my jacket.
Malek’s waving hands caught my eye. Can we go now? he signed.
We walked to the top of the rise. What appeared to be a large, hollow cairn of stones stood down below, a short, silver gate blocking its low front entrance. The stones had stood in the same place for so long that grass and moss had grown on them, almost enough to obscure the rock. Magic flowed off the cairn in waves strong enough that I felt them like real ocean waves—minus the wet, of course. The unexpected power, enough to knock a guy off his feet. The tidal pull of them, the undertow.
There would be guards in the treetops. There always were. I glanced up, looking for them, and didn’t see any. Not that they made a habit of being conspicuous. They were there in case of trouble, and it was always better to get the jump on trouble. All four of us were known quantities. No need to check IDs at the gate or ask questions. No need to call down a greeting. But it bugged me all the same even with the perfectly logical reasons.
The crows I’d heard before cawed again. I couldn’t make out what they said.
Malek led us down to the gate. The downslope was steeper than it looked, making it harder to watch anything except where I placed my feet, or face tripping over tree roots that buckled up through the earth or stones that suddenly seemed to appear. Our footfalls kicked up puffs of dust—all except Malek’s, anyway. The earth on either side of us rose up gradually to knee-height, turning the path into a ditch. By the time we reached the gate, that ditch started to feel claustrophobic. It would be hard to scramble out.
The gate itself, which had looked short from the angle at the top of the hill, up close revealed itself to be about seven feet tall. No ornament, just plain silver bars magicked together, except for the delicately wrought oak leaf at the center.
Malek studied it for a second when he should’ve stepped out of the way. Simone was the only one of us who was fae, the only one among us who could open the gate into the royal Court. But Malek stood there, staring, when we could’ve hurried up the entering. I wasn’t enjoying the sitting-duck feeling very much.
“What?” I asked. “Somebody tamper with it?”
He turned his body so I could see his hands. No. Nobody has, not even to open it. Not in a while.
Simone squeezed my arm, then let go. “Define ‘a while.’”
Months, Malek signed.
It’d been a while since Simone and I had seen Silver, and a lot had happened after that. “When did you last see Silver?”
When I inked her, Malek said. In April.
Three to four months ago. What were the odds no one had entered or left the Court in that time? “What did you ink her with?”
That’s between her and me.
“Not if something’s happened to her,” I said. “Singer, can you do the honors?”
“In a hurry,” Simone said. “We should get inside fast. Malek, move.”
He didn’t blink at her command, only stepped aside.
I realized I hadn’t seen her and Malek interact much with each other except during dire emergencies. As two magical beings living a couple of miles apart from each other, they had to have known each other before I arrived on the scene. Clearly, they didn’t follow a god-versus-everyone-else hierarchy in their dealings.
Simone slipped past him and placed her palm on the oak leaf. She sang a phrase. It took me a second to recognize the language as Irish Gaelic.
Oscail do shúile.
A shock flew through me like a streak of lightning, sparking from the base of my spine and racing through the top of my skull. My skin prickled all over. Judging from the way the others straightened up all of the sudden and the glances they gave each other, they felt it, too. The magic of Simone’s voice, of what she was, wove with the power in her extraordinary voice.
Malek looked at her with outright envy. I caught the naked expression on his face for a split second, then he shuttered it. When he was mad
e at the beginning of time, he’d been able to do what Simone did with plain words rather than song—until he’d tempted one too many humans and the being more powerful than him cursed him, taking his ability to speak.
The gate unlocked with a click and swung in.
“What’s that mean?” Beth asked Simone. “You know, the words.”
Simone glanced over her shoulder. “Open your eyes.”
“Is that like open sesame?”
“Maybe for you,” Simone said.
Beth thinned her lips. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Simone ignored her question. “Follow me, and stay close.”
I went in behind Simone, with Beth at my heels and Malek bringing up the rear. Passing through the gate was like walking into a dark house on a brilliant, sunny day. I couldn’t see a damned thing. I could hear the tap my sneakers made as the ground we walked on shifted from earth to stone. I felt the hardness of it, and the seams between the shaved slabs of rock underfoot. The temperature dropped a good ten degrees. A spot between my shoulder blades chilled and set off a shiver. I took a deep breath, getting a mouthful of cool and damp and clammy for my trouble.
The pitch black all around started to separate into shapes and colors until I could grasp the outlines of burnt-out torches in their sconces set on either side of closed double doors, the faery version of a porch light. There should’ve been two guards here, but there was nobody at all.
In front of me, Simone froze.
I opened my mouth to whisper, then snapped it shut again when she reached a hand back and signaled silence. I tensed, waiting for someone or something to charge out of the corner shadows, but no one did.
Simone let go of the breath she’d been holding. “It’s empty.”
I spoke low. “The room?”
She shook her head. “The whole royal Court.”
“Not good,” I said.
She looked over her shoulder. The corners of her mouth were turned down and quivering in spite her best attempts to stop them. Her eyes were wide. She was fucking terrified. I’d never seen her that scared, except for the time she’d almost accidentally killed me.
“We should check it out,” I said. “Make sure, right?”
She swallowed. “Yeah. Make sure.”
But there was as much hope in her voice as in mine: none.
If Silver and her Court weren’t here, where were they? There was no such thing as a second house with these people. The whole realm was governed from this spot. Which meant that most likely there was no governing going on. Faery was a free-for-all. A different kind of chaos than Malek suggested. What the hell was going on here?
“Silver wouldn’t abandon her people,” I said.
Simone mulled that for a minute. “No. She wouldn’t.”
Beth cleared her throat. “Malek agrees.”
“How can you tell?” I asked. It wasn’t as if we could see his hands move well enough to read his signing.
“I just can,” she said. “Remember that blood bond thing I mentioned before?”
“Okay,” I said. “We’re on the same page. Silver wouldn’t have left voluntarily. So what happened?”
Simone marched toward the double doors and pulled them open easily on their well-oiled hinges. The long corridor on the other side was dark and silent.
Our footsteps echoed as we made our way through the long hall. I could barely see Simone in front of me. The air was still, the sense of dampness more pronounced. If it got any more humid, water would start to condense on my skin.
I knew from my previous visits here that the hallway opened out about fifty paces from the front entrance. I stretched out my right hand, trailing my fingers along the wall, which were in fact filmed with condensation.
Simone stopped dead. I noticed in enough time to keep from running into her, but not to keep from tripping over my feet and flailing into the wall, knocking a torch from its sconce. It clattered to the floor while Simone turned and opened the first of the doors off the corridor. These rooms belonged to guards.
There were no lights in this room. No people, either, as far as I could tell. And so it was for all the rooms leading up to the end of the corridor. The echo of our steps seemed louder. I could hear everyone’s breathing. And, like I had before, Simone’s heartbeat. It stuttered between beats. No heart should do that.
I sped up my pace until I came even with her, meaning to take her hand.
She grabbed for mine first and squeezed. “Kev. Look.”
Straight ahead twenty feet, and impossible to miss—it was the only light at the end of the tunnel—a long strip of flickering light filled the space underneath the doors to the great hall.
Simone and I walked shoulder to shoulder toward them, bodies pressed tight against each other, and pushed them open together, squinting and blinking at the brightness. Torches burned in their wall sconces every few feet along the walls, casting the river-stone floor in ever-changing pools of light and shadow. The warmth of the fire washed over us. It felt like coming home after a long time away, which was not a feeling I’d ever associated with the place before.
Small, round tables flanked the sides of the football-field-sized room. They’d been draped in white tablecloths and decorated with low glass bowls filled with floating red and white roses. Red and white tapestries, also covered with what appeared to be live roses, hung from the walls. The perfume of the flowers intoxicated.
At the far end of the room near the dais, a DJ station had been set up. Not very courtly, but Silver had some ties to the Human world, and as Queen she could listen to any flavor of music her heart desired.
I broke away from Simone and the others and jogged toward the setup. The table had a couple of vinyl stations and that was about all I understood of what I saw, not being too knowledgeable about spinning records. A bucket had been tucked underneath the table. It’d been filled with ice, still in its frozen form, along with bottles of water and cans of energy drink.
The dais was decked out in red and white velvet ribbons, the seats of the wooden thrones covered with tea light candles in full flame. Shadows clung to the back corners. A pair of eyes shone in their depths. A pair of terrified eyes.
I hopped onto the dais and headed right for them and the person they belonged to. Anyone that scared might go on the offensive out of desperation. Or they’d curl up into the fetal position and wait for me to go away. Two extremes, but what happened was actually somewhere in between.
A trembling voice said my name. “Kevin Landon?”
Underneath the shaking, I recognized him the same as he knew me. I stepped into the shadows with him, the warmth of the torchlight fading from my back, and hunkered down in front of him.
“Mr. Nance,” I said.
His salt-and-pepper hair, normally slicked back and neat, stuck out in twelve directions, his skin pale. He wore a brown, pinstriped suit and tie with a tan button-down, but where it would normally be neatly pressed, it’d become a collection of wrinkles.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I went to sleep in my own bed and woke up here.”
I’d have said that was impossible, but that word didn’t have much meaning for me anymore. “When?”
“What do you mean? Last night,” he said. “At least, I think it was last night.”
I had no idea what day it was, so I couldn’t say myself. “Did you do anything to hurt your daughter? If you did, so help me, I—” I froze. I’d what? Punch him in the face? Beat him up? Kill him? An eye for an eye?
He wasn’t an innocent. He’d discovered everything he could about Simone and her new life. He knew about things most humans shouldn’t. But he just wanted her back, didn’t he? That was all he wanted.
“She’s hurt?” His eyes grew wide. “What happened?
He seemed genuinely surprised. And horrified. He didn’t have an evil bone in his body. Just human ones.
“She could’ve been kil
led,” I said.
He blanched. Like, vampire pale. “You think I did it?”
“I don’t know what to think.” Except that he knew more than he was letting on, even if he didn’t know that he knew it. “You talk to anyone before you went to bed?”
“On the phone?”
“At all,” I said.
He closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them again, he said, “A girl. She came to the door. Selling cookies.”
“In August?” Never happened in the history of the world as I know it.
“Oh, no,” Mr. Nance said.
“No kidding.”
A set of feet hit the dais behind me, accompanied by the flutter of wings. Simone. “Kev?”
“Here,” I said. “With your father.”
She was at my side in the time it took for me to draw a breath. She knelt and leaned forward until she and Mr. Nance were nose to nose. “What did you do?”
“We were just establishing that,” Nance said. He looked everywhere except at her.
Maybe that was to be expected since she’d told him that she couldn’t be his daughter anymore. The King took her humanity, and she wasn’t the girl Nance remembered anymore, and she couldn’t—wouldn’t—pretend for his sake. It broke his heart.
“Establish it right the fuck now,” she said.
Her words struck him like a slap to the face. He did look at her then. “Do you hate me?”
“No. Do you hate me?” she asked. “Someone cut me with a blessed blade.”
He blanched. “How deep did it cut? Are you all right? Are—”
She interrupted him. “So you know what a blessed blade is.”
“Just so. I interrogated Mr. Davies.”
He’d questioned Rude. Who would normally tell him squat.
“How did you get him to answer?” I asked. Rude would never divulge secrets without a damned good reason.
Mr. Nance rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger. “He came to me, not the other way around. I told him I’d help him find you. In return, he told me whatever I wanted to know.”
Faery (The Faery Chronicles Book 3) Page 7
