Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows)

by Aileen Harkwood

  No one answered him as the mounds of water rose higher.

  Except they weren’t mounds anymore. All had taken on the same irregular shape, sharply pointed at the front end, fanning outward at the back. I couldn’t decide what they were. It was just too dark, and my thoughts remained disordered. My brain couldn’t make connections or reach the simplest of conclusions. I could only watch the foaming onyx water push itself taller than the red and white striped gondola mooring posts along the quay, and higher still until the trio of shapes came level with the gallows.

  Everyone around me on the platform tensed. Fear thrummed through the guard’s claw-like grasp on my arms.

  The shape in the center opened its eyes.

  We hadn’t been watching a sewer pipe leak. We’d just witness a snouted black head lift itself out of the Grand Canal, to stare at us with eyes the red-orange of molten lava and pupils bigger than a man’s head.

  A second set of eyes opened to the right of the first, and then a third pair on the left. Three heads on long reptilian necks rose higher than the columns flanking the gallows, higher than the Palazzo Ducale’s top floor, revealing them to belong to be a single beast, those necks joined at the shoulders.

  Both guards let go of me simultaneously.

  Without their support, I staggered and fell forward, prevented from collapsing completely to the wooden platform by the rope. Instead of snapping my neck, the angle of the noose strangled me. Blood rushed in my ears and my hands pried ineffectually at the loop choking off my air.

  Flames spewed behind me, spraying the plaza. Fire thrown by one of the serpent heads melted the designer hat with the miniature gallows to the scalp of the woman wearing it, as well as torching a dozen nearby costumes to a crisp. The second head spat a glob of hot, liquefied rock at Tomas Gagliardi’s upper body. His face burned away on impact. His body and what was left of his head plunged backward off the platform onto gawkers below. A third stream of fire incinerated the scaffold arm and rope hanging me. I dropped to my knees and then crumpled on my side. I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe.

  Yet I marveled at the horrifying splendor of the beast, its three heads shrieking in unison and body ramming the quay. Like Aril, it was beautiful even dispensing death, obsidian scales glistening, necks twining around each other, webbed fins fanning and dripping with scalding hot sea water. It reared up out of the canal, displacing water, and sent a tidal wave rushing toward the plaza. I didn’t see it, but I imagined the hysteria below as those who had come to party at my execution stampeded to escape theirs, joined by as many guards who could jump from the scaffold before the wave reached it.

  “Stop! Hold your ground. Watch your prisoner,” Donato Nazario shouted at any of his council guards who hadn’t yet abandoned him. “No. Forget the hanging. Kill her now!”

  They looked at him, unsure.

  “Shoot her,” Nazario barked at the female guard who’d demanded my clothes.

  She hesitated and then turned her face skyward.

  “Sir?”

  “I said kill her. Do it!”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t have the balls?” the doge said. “Fine. You! Gagliardi,” he shouted at the male guard nearest me. “You do it.”

  He didn’t obey. Frozen in place, none of the council’s soldiers could look away from the colossal head that swooped down toward the gallows. Black-toothed jaws snapped closed on the doge’s upper body, snatched him off the platform, whipped Nazario back and forth and then spat him at his own palace. His body struck one of the columns on the Loggia floor, bounced off and disappeared into the tidal surge where gondolas and other boats capsized and were chewed up by the wave sweeping inland.

  The guards had forgotten me. Now was my moment.

  Get up. Move your ass, Lunari. Get up.

  I couldn’t even get the rope off my neck, much less crawl or stand. I sucked in wheezing gasps that didn’t deliver enough oxygen to my brain. My fingers stopped working, and my arms fell to my sides.

  I heard booted feet charging the gallows stairs.

  Dark fae clashed with the guards who remained on the platform. I counted just three. Two males and a female. They carried no weapons, no knives, or guns. One even limped. However, the moment a guard would attack a fae, black vines sprang from that fae’s fingertips and ensnared the attacker in a shroud of magic similar to the one Aril had used on the murderer back at Guariti Dolori. One after the other, Gagliardis fell to the fae as they worked their way toward me.

  I was tired of watching people die. I was tired, period. My eyes closed. After a while, the sounds of water coursing around the gallows lessened. I no longer heard the sea monster shrieking or sensed its immense heads and necks blotting out the rays of the moon.

  “Lunari!” a male voice I didn’t recognize called my name.

  Hands shook me by the shoulders.

  “Lunari, can you hear me!” This time a female voice shouted.

  “I told you she was drugged to the gills,” the first one said.

  Gunshots. A body fell across mine, female and fiercely muscled. She knocked what little air I could draw in completely out of my lungs. A cloud of scent I could only describe as angry jasmine washed over me—fae blood.

  “Bobi!” cried the male with her. “Dammit.” He rolled the body off me. My breathing didn’t improve. “Aril!” he shouted.

  Aril’s here?

  I opened my eyes. A female fae lay beside me, motionless. A second fae with silver hair and a long, thin face squatted by her and me.

  “Aril!” he called again.

  I looked toward the stairs. Aril’s head appeared as he dragged himself up the steps. His face was gray. Red soaked his shirt in the same spot I’d seen him bleed before, over the scar on his chest. Osmosis and gravity had sent blood spreading into and down the shirt to pool at his belt.

  The male fae at my side glanced anxiously in Aril’s direction.

  “Aril, hurry, Bobi’s been—”

  He froze. A Gagliardi armed with a gun stood between Aril and us, the weapon pointed at the fae crouched beside me.

  Aril saw but paid little attention to the guard. Instead, he zeroed in on me. He also ignored his own critical wound, as he went from barely able to move to rushing up the last two steps. Ordinarily, he made no noise when he walked. That he did now showed how badly he was injured.

  The guard spun around toward the stairs, aiming as he did. Never breaking eye contact with me, Aril strode in my direction while reaching out toward the man almost as an afterthought. Aril’s death spell cocooned him before he could pull the trigger. The life force released when the guard dropped rippled outward in a shockwave. Instead of a bullet, the man’s energy hit Aril square in the solar plexus. Aril kept going.

  My sight dimmed in and out.

  Next thing I knew, fingers worked at my noose, and Aril’s distinctive blood scent mixed with the jasmine from the other fae.

  “Lunari.” His voice was softer, less harsh than I’d ever heard it.

  He drew the rope up over my face and slid it out from under my head.

  “Aril…”

  I was like Whisper, unable to get out a sound.

  “Shh. Not now. Don’t try to talk.”

  His fingers traveled gently over the rope abrasions around my neck, finding depressions in my flesh where the noose had partially crushed my trachea. Warmth flowed into me from his fingers. Painful strictures in my throat eased.

  Cartilage popped. I coughed, one violent uninterrupted bout of old man type hacking, but I could breathe!

  “Aril, stop,” the fae squatting across from him said. “Let me heal her. You don’t have enough to spare.”

  Grey that had begun to recede from Aril’s complexion after the infusion of life energy from the guard started to return.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Says the fae bleeding from a Scar of Judgment,” the silver-haired fae said.

  “Give me your coat, Reeps,” Aril ordered. “Mine has
blood on it.”

  “Exactly,” said the fae. “Yours has your blood on it.” With quick, jerking motions, he shrugged out of his coat and handed it over to Aril, then went back to administering to the comatose Bobi, searching the female fae’s body for bullet wounds.

  Aril sat me up and wrapped the coat around me. More warmth infused my hypothermic flesh. Coming from Aril, no doubt.

  Reeps wasn’t done grousing at Aril. “I told you doing this…” His gesture included all of St. Marks Square. “…would be too much. We could have found another way to save her. You didn’t need to go and raise a damned draigemor.” His nod over his shoulder indicated the canal behind him. “Now we’re going to have to carry you out as well as her. And Bobi.”

  Aril lifted me in his arms and rose to his feet.

  “Touch either me or Lunari, and it’s the last thing you’ll ever do,” Aril said.

  Reeps frowned. “I preferred you when you were merely insufferable. Cranky while gallant doesn’t suit you.” He held his hand over one of Bobi’s bullet wounds and muttered a spell under his breath in the same language Aril sometimes used. A bullet flew from the hole and slapped his palm as if magnetized. He threw the offending projectile away. The hole closed, flesh and skin rapidly knitting together. “Where the hell is Geraint?”

  Footfalls pounding across the wooden platform were followed by, “Here. I’m here.” The last of the three dark fae who had charged the gallows ran toward us. “God! Bobi.”

  “She’s lost a lot of blood,” Reeps said. “Help me get her up.”

  Geraint bent down, grabbed the female fae’s limp arms, hoisted her up, and threw her over his shoulder.

  “The guards?” Aril asked.

  “All dead,” Geraint said. “At least the ones who didn’t run.”

  “They’ll be on their way back soon,” Aril said. “We need to leave.”

  Aril held me tighter, undeniably possessive, and pivoted toward the stairs. As we crossed the platform, I was astonished to see the tidal wave had already receded and left behind very few bodies. I’d expected hundreds to have drowned, but the only dead were the wet, bedraggled corpse of Donato Nazario washed up against a column and Tomas Gagliardi, laying faceless-side up at the base of the structure, as well as the guards taken out when the fae had rushed the stairs. Not even the woman with the gallows head piece was among the dead.

  Aril saw my astonishment.

  “I don’t kill unless I have to.”

  21

  Mist enveloped Aril’s boat in wet and briny air as we cut through Guidecca along the Rio del Ponte Lungo and finally reached open lagoon. Fog condensed on my cheeks. I licked salt off my lips, which helped kill the chemical aftertaste of the drugs working their way out of my system.

  Geraint had the helm. Reeps was below decks trying to save Bobi, who had yet to revive despite the removal of all three bullets from her body and Reeps’ healing powers closing the wounds. Once Aril settled me on the short bench seat across from the helm— which he apparently thought of as mine since I’d spent most of my first boat trip sitting there—he disappeared below decks with a promise to return in a few minutes. He invited me to use the shower when I felt ready.

  On the horizon, prismatic lights from the two fae districts shone through and lit up the mist. Somewhere at the base of all that swirling color lay Oasi. No chance of Geraint getting lost while piloting us there.

  I hugged Reeps’ long coat closer around me and folded myself up on the bench. Four fae on the boat and every one of them had seen me hauled naked and helpless in front of thousands of people.

  Shame weighed me down with each memory that came filtering back to me. It was like being nine again and trapped in Sulla’s bedroom, only a hundred times worse. I’d promised myself I would never allow myself to be put in a situation where someone could take advantage of me again, yet I’d sat in a cell in the Doge’s palace doing nothing. Let them strip me and lead me docile and stumbling to the gallows for the crowd’s entertainment.

  Like a sad little lamb that meekly follows the person who will slaughter it.

  Why hadn’t I fought back? Tranquilizers or no tranquilizers, I should have at least tried. For someone they believed would somehow raise the dark and “destroy us all,” as Donato Nazario had implied to his lieutenant, I hadn’t raised anything, let alone an ounce of hell.

  I waited for Aril to return topside. I was reluctant to go below decks to find him. At the moment he’d rescued me, I’d never been so relieved and happy to see anyone in my life, but now, with the mental haze clearing, I couldn’t stand the thought of him looking at me and remembering me as the shambling, humiliated nothing of a person who’d been herded to the scaffold. I’d have to face Reeps, too, when I returned his coat. Embarrassment piled on embarrassment.

  Geraint chose that exact moment to turn and flash me a reassuring smile. His eyes were a darker blue than any of the others, even Aril’s. He hadn’t said a word since leaving La Piazzetta.

  Nor did he speak up now. He simply smiled and then focused on the waters ahead, hands confident on the wheel.

  My pack with my clothes was here on board. I should shower and get dressed.

  You don’t have any shoes.

  Fabulous.

  I headed downstairs.

  Bobi lay like the dead weight she was on the sofa in the boat’s sparse forecabin. Like so many of the fae, her hair was a color not naturally found in humans, in this case, blonde with black highlights instead of dark with light ones. It spread out on the cushion around her head like a golden puddle in which shadows lurked. I’d was tempted to believe the deep hollows under her cheek bones and in the rounded “V” under her chin looked that way from being so close to death, but her skin molded around the bones so smoothly, I knew that had to be the way she always looked, a bit cadaverous, but still beautiful like every other fae.

  Reeps sat observing Bobi’s every breath while occupying the only stool in the galley, a cup of coffee in his hand. I wasn’t convinced Bobi would survive long enough to reach Oasi, but I wasn’t going to admit that. He, too, intrigued me. I’d never seen a fae with wrinkles. His weren’t that noticeable, but they were there, bracketing his mouth and creasing his forehead.

  “He was impossible to control, you know.” Reeps looked at me. “I’ve never seen him like that.”

  “Aril?”

  “He almost spent himself back there in Piazza San Marco.”

  I didn’t understand him, not completely. What did he mean by spend?

  “He couldn’t forgive himself for losing you to Nazario and that Gagliardi crew. Still won’t, if you want my opinion, even though he got you back. It’s his job to watch you.”

  I thought about what Titus had told me, that Aril had been put on me “since the beginning,” had been with me for “years,” by people who ran him “like a komodo dragon on a chain.” Watching me? Or waiting to be given permission to do his thing? He was a hunter. Killing was his profession. Titus had implied I was designed to die, but maybe not at the hands of the human council. Maybe it wasn’t time yet. Aril, as kind as he’d been so far, could still have my number and it just wasn’t up yet. Not all killers had to be crude about it.

  “I thought his job was to kill people and steal their energy,” I said. “Life force, whatever you want to call it.”

  Reeps tensed, straightened up off the stool, and placed his coffee on the counter.

  “That’s what indigos do, isn’t it,” I said, using the slur. “Kill? You, me, Aril, Geraint up there.” I pointed at the deck above us. “He has the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen in anything alive. We’re killers.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about Geraint, or me, Bobi over there, and least of all about Aril, what he’s been through and where he comes from.”

  “I saw him off a murderer on the beach at Guariti Dolori,” I said. “He told me he was doing his job.”

  “Aril’s situation is special and regrettable. Going dark doesn’t autom
atically mean you’re evil. Have I killed? Yes. Have all of us on this boat killed? Yes. But that isn’t the only thing that defines us. Each of us has a reason we lost the bright in ourselves. It’s painfully apparent to me you know nothing about what it means to be fae, dark or otherwise.”

  “How would I? I’m—”

  “Human?” he said.

  I voiced a single ha, shrugged, and looked away.

  “Really, I’ve always been less than,” I said.

  “Have you, now?” Reeps said.

  “Are you wanted?” I asked.

  “How do you mean, wanted?”

  “Have you ever felt wanted? By anyone?”

  “You’re saying you haven’t,” Reeps said. Not a question, but a statement.

  “I’m saying I don’t know what that is. Or the point of that, or anything else.” I shrugged again. “I mean, why bother? Why care? No one I know ever has. My only friend in life was a cat, and she’s dead now. If it’s a dark fae’s job to kill, then it’s their job to kill. It goes along with everything else in life.”

  “You’re young,” Reeps said. “So I’m going to forgive you that poor-little-me speech you just delivered.”

  “Poor-little-me speech!”

  “Self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, pick the human adjective of your choice.”

  “You say I don’t know anything about your lives. Well, you don’t know mine either.”

  “Maybe not the specifics, but I have a pretty good idea,” Reeps said. “You’re what, nineteen? Twenty?”

  “Twenty-one,” I told him.

  “Right,” he said. He exaggerated his words, went for the sarcasm. “You’ve lived for twenty-one…long…years, enough to have the slums of Santa Croce written all over you, but not much else. Let me guess, you spent a fair amount of that time living on the streets.”

  “Since I was six.”

  “Impressive you didn’t die during the first two years.”

  “I don’t die easily.”

  But you will. Soon.

  “My point,” Reeps said, “and it gets back your question about the point of it all, is that twenty-one years isn’t long enough to notice change.”