“They?” asked Murdock.
I looked at him. “They’re the Dead, Leo. I thought the surge was following the Dead, but it is the Dead. I didn’t realize until tonight that Dead essence fades faster than living essence. I was gauging the time frame for the faded essence wrong.”
“So you’re saying the Dead are kidnapping people,” he said.
“Looks that way,” I said.
He smirked. “Remind me again about that resolved cultural conflict thing you were talking about.”
I got back on the bike. “They’re not doing the killing. The leanansidhe is. Remember, the surge showed up down in the Tangle after the darkness did. Let’s circle around the block and see what’s on the other side.”
Murdock did a slow cruise down the sidewalk. At the corner, the engine jumped in pitch as we turned. We were on the edge of the Tangle, with its engine-killing spells.
Darkness shadowed the block as Murdock coasted to a stop. I hopped off again and found another shield barrier. My finger sank beneath it as I touched it. Suspicious, I pulled away. It didn’t make sense for one shield to be softer than the other. Ready for a trap, I placed both hands against the wall, I pushed again. My left hand slipped beneath the surface, but not the right one. I stepped back and looked at my hands.
“What’s the matter?” Murdock asked.
“I think my tattoo is letting me through the shield.” The tattoo on my left arm was created from the filigree that had once decorated a silver branch. The fey used silver branches to cross the barriers between worlds. I lifted my left hand to the wall and pushed. As my arm went through, it dawned on me that silver branches would work with shield barriers, too. I held my breath and pressed forward, leading with the arm. I passed through the barrier, its essence itching across my skin until I stood on the other side. From my side, the wall was transparent. I could see Murdock frowning, but the look said he couldn’t see me. Behind me, the faint residue of Dead essence trailed across a long, empty alley. I went back through the wall to the sidewalk.
“That was freaky,” Murdock said.
“It’s gone. They either looped back around or left through another barrier,” I said.
Murdock scanned the street. “Keep looking?”
“Oh, yeah. We almost had it that time,” I said.
The surge teased us as we rode through the neighborhood, a flash in the distance that vanished again and again. We followed but didn’t get close. Murdock turned down a narrow lane, and the engine guttered. We had moved deeper into the Tangle, but as far as I knew, remained outside the central area. Murdock goosed the engine. Warehouses loomed to either side, wet and dark, their rooflines curling overhead. Fire escapes tangled into each other, forming a tunnel of metal.
As we continued, the lane lengthened and appeared to run for a mile—impossible for the area it covered. Murdock had to rev the engine more often to keep it going. Illusion twisted our perceptions. What looked like a long, straight lane was more likely a circle. I searched for a break in the walls, some other exit than the false promise ahead. The motorcycle whined and shuddered. With a loud pop from the exhaust, the engine died.
“We’ve drifted farther into the Tangle than it looks,” I said. While Murdock held the bike steady, I got off. The lane stretched in either direction as far as I could see.
He leaned back in his seat to get a look at the engine. “The bike’s okay, though, right?”
“Yeah. Once we get it out of here, it should start right up,” I said.
Murdock wheeled the motorcycle around toward the direction we had come. “Are we even going to get out of here?”
“We should be okay. Backtracking usually works. It’s going forward that’s a bitch,” I said.
A screech of metal tore through the air, followed by a crash. Ahead, a pall of smoke curled across the street.
“What’s the hell is that?” Murdock asked.
“Sounded like someone’s car spell-crashed and hit something,” I said.
More sounds echoed toward us, tortured metal and rumbling falls. Smoke rose higher, blocking the view. Blue light flickered in the haze. As the light intensified, a churning cloud of essence filled the lane from one side to the other. Behind us, the street stretched even farther than before, with no visible turns or exits.
“Whatever that is, it’s coming right at us,” Murdock said.
The blue light became more prominent and flared. Deep within it, something moved, a great silhouette of darker blue. The fire escapes rattled and shuddered as the cloud rolled forward. Networks of stairs and landings twisted and pulled from the walls, crashing into tangled, jagged heaps. The blue surge flared and rushed toward us.
“A plan would be a good thing if you have one,” Murdock said.
“Park the bike,” I said. We pushed it against the wall. I pulled Murdock several feet into the shallow depression of a bricked-over door.
He resisted, pulling his arm away. “I can’t leave it there.”
I pushed him back against a wall and flattened myself next to him. “We have to. We don’t want the bike’s metal interfering. This is far enough. Harden your body shield, Leo, and brace yourself. That stuff’s going to hit us hard.”
Crimson essence blossomed around us as Murdock activated the shield. “I thought we wanted to catch it?”
The ground vibrated as the surge approached with a growing roar. “Catch it, not get run over by it. Whatever you do, don’t drop that shield,” I shouted.
Murdock closed his eyes in concentration. His body shield shifted, darkening from a rich crimson to a deep maroon, pressing around us in fractured planes. Indigo and white essence billowed toward us. The fierce cloud consumed the entire lane, yanking down fire escapes and tossing dumpsters aside as it passed.
Murdock staggered when it hit, his shield shuddering and bending under a rain of yellow sparks. He steadied himself against the wall, forcing the shield back against the passing wave. With a scream of stressed metal, the fire escape above toppled into the street, narrowly missing us. The surge slammed us against the wall. Murdock’s shield heaved and shifted. My body ached under the pressure, black spots flashing across my vision as the dark mass in my head danced in confusion.
A thick plume of indigo essence smudged the horizon, swirling and flickering as it moved toward us. A sound weaved itself into the background noise of the city, subtle but distinct, an uneven hum broken by sharp notes. My ears pricked to them, and my heart raced, responding to some deep memory, a sound of danger like a wild yelp in the night. By the time the sound resolved into the barking that my instinct had already recognized, the low hum rose higher and became the clear call of horns, deep bass soundings that signaled one unmistakable thing: the approach of a hunting party.
Caution forced me back against a wall while curiosity tempted me to lean out. The light grew, its color bleeding from indigo to violet. Figures appeared in the rolling fog, animal and wild human shapes leaping and lunging past.
The cresting wave of essence threw me down. Despite Murdock’s shield, I bounced in a hazy blue torrent like a pebble in a flood, my body hitting the wall again and again as the riders and runner swept past. The world turned into a confusion of light and tangled bodies twisting and falling among winged solitaries and running beasts.
The shield buckled, and the blue essence swirled around us. Murdock lifted off the ground and grabbed at a tangle of fire escape as he rose into the air. I grappled with his kicking legs as the surge coalesced around him like a cocoon. Blue haze obscured my sight. A blast of crimson essence burst through, shredding the blue light. The surge retreated up the street, eddies of faint gray mist trailing after it.
A dark figure broke away and wheeled toward us on a massive black horse with yellow-lit eyes. Thick fog rolled along the ground as the enormous beast reared with a thunderous neigh. Its hooves sparked with yellow lightning as the horse came back down.
Behind its enormous head, a cloaked figure pulled the reins in hard,
turning a skull-masked face toward me, eyes burning like embers beneath an antlered helm. The rider stared, as the agitated horse pawed in the fog. With a flick of the reins, the rider wheeled the horse and cantered away. The rider lifted a sword, a long blade of red flame, and let out a scream that pierced my chest with its vibration. The rider disappeared back into the haze, fading away as the mob raced off into the night.
Dazed, Murdock climbed down from the fire escape where he had landed and slid to the ground. “I feel like I got hit by a truck.”
I crouched in front of him. Taking him by the chin, I shifted his head left and right. Murdock opened his eyes. His skin was abraded, but he didn’t appear seriously injured. I didn’t hurt as much as he did. He had taken the brunt of the hits. Chalk up another debt to him for saving my ass. “I would have said a train. You should get checked for a concussion.”
I moved into the lane, trying to get a good look through the tangled heap of fire escapes. A faint shimmer of blue essence remained, fading as it splashed up the building walls to either side. Light glittered in the distance, but it was a streetlamp. The stretching illusion had vanished, too.
“Damn. There’s going to be hell to pay,” Murdock said.
I glanced back, thinking he was making a boast, then realized where he was looking. The motorcycle lay under a jagged cage of shattered fire escape. The weight of all that heavy metal had bent the handlebars and metal rods, piercing the engine case. I groaned. “Please don’t tell Bar I was on the bike.”
At least Leo laughed. “Please tell me you saw someone riding a horse, ’cause I saw someone riding a horse.”
I helped him to his feet. “It was a dream mare. You saw them in TirNaNog. It must have escaped before the veil dropped and gotten trapped here on Samhain.”
“Who was riding it?” he asked.
“I think it was the King of the Dead.”
He grimaced as he rubbed his neck. “Of course it was.”
“We just bought a big problem, Leo. If that was the King of the Dead, then that blue surge can be only one thing. The Wild Hunt is in Boston, and as far as I know, nothing can stop it.”
21
Briallen wasn’t home when I let myself into her town house the next morning. I was one of the few people she allowed open access to her home. I scared the hell out of the brownie caregiver she had hired to watch over Meryl. Once the poor woman’s claws and teeth retracted, she was quite nice—even apologetic, though the fault was mine. I should have knocked at least.
Meryl rested by the blue fire in the upstairs parlor. By a trick of positioning, she appeared to be staring into the flames when I entered, meditating like a druidess with something on her mind. Her lack of response killed that notion. I kissed her on the top of the head and sat in the armchair opposite, trying not to let melancholy overwhelm me.
“I miss you,” I said.
Our relationship was complicated, one part friends, one part lovers, and one part what-the-hell-is-going-on. I had thought a lot about it since she went into the trance. Meryl provoked and challenged me at every turn, daring me to call her my girlfriend so that she could dismiss the idea. She understood me on a level that only good friends did, but would have slapped me upside the head if I compared her to Joe or Briallen. She knew she was more than that. She had her own life, her own ideas, and her own way of doing things that mattered more than anything I said sometimes. While that frustrated me on occasion, I respected the hell out of her and wouldn’t have it any other way. When push came to shove, though, she dropped all pretense of indifference and became the strongest ally I had ever had. Maybe I didn’t know how to define what we had together because it wasn’t supposed to be defined. Or maybe what we had was a real relationship, and I had never had one before.
I read aloud to her while I waited for Briallen, an old tale about dreams and war. I thought Meryl would appreciate it. She was a Dreamer, and her dreams often had glimpses of the future. In recent months, I had had prescient dreams, too, and she had helped me understand how to interpret them. I wasn’t good at it, or at least didn’t like my dreams’ implications. Too often, my symbols and metaphors pointed to death and destruction around me. Reading about someone else’s dreams made me realize I hadn’t experienced my own in a while. Like so much else in my life, I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one.
Briallen swept into the room an hour later, a high flush on her cheeks. “It’s a beautiful day. I walked back from the Guildhouse. Did you two go out at all?”
“We’ve been reading. I didn’t want to miss you,” I said.
Briallen put down some books she carried and ran her hand along Meryl’s arm, causing their body signatures to interact. She brushed back hair from my forehead and placed a gentle hand on my temple. Briallen had raised me and had earned a mother’s privilege of not asking permission to touch me. She checked my health whenever she had the opportunity. I closed my eyes as warmth spread from her hand into my head. The dark mass quivered from the touch of her essence. It never reacted to her probing, as if it understood that her touch meant concern.
“It’s shaped like a ball of spikes,” she said.
“It feels like one. All the essence in here makes it curious,” I said.
She glanced at Meryl. “Let’s go downstairs. I’ll make some coffee.”
I touched Meryl on the shoulder as I left. She didn’t react.
Down in the kitchen, Briallen pulled out an old percolator pot and rinsed it at the sink. “I’m glad you’re here. It saves me a phone call.”
I slid onto a stool. “Sounds serious. You never use the phone.”
Amused, she pouted her lips as she put the pot on to boil. “I’ve been talking with Nigel. He has an interesting idea about Meryl. Do you want to argue about it now or wait until the coffee is ready?”
I stared at her, uncertain what to say. She knew my opinion of Nigel. “I hope you have cream and sugar.”
“He wants to simulate her trance state on himself and guide her back. I’ve gone over the spells he’s talking about. I think he has a good idea,” she said.
“So why hasn’t Gillen Yor tried it?” I asked.
“He tried something similar. He can’t resonate the essence correctly,” she said.
I folded my arms, suspicious. “And Nigel can? Why?”
She sighed. “Connor, you are going to ask all the questions I did, and that’s fine. But we have to do something. She can’t stay like this.”
Frustrated, I rubbed my hands over my face. “I don’t understand his interest. It worries me.”
“They’re friends. Isn’t that enough?” she asked.
“Not with Nigel. I was friends with him once.”
She lowered the flame on the stove and set the pot to perk. “You have to remove your personal feelings from this. I’ve gone over the process and the spells. They make sense. I’ll be with them the entire time. We can do it in my sanctum.”
“I don’t trust him,” I said.
She leaned across the kitchen island and held my hand. “Don’t think I don’t know Nigel Martin, Connor. He has a reason for doing this that has nothing to do with friendship. Whatever that is, it’s a side issue for the moment. If his idea works, Meryl is more than capable of dealing with him. She’s told me so herself whenever I’ve expressed my own doubts about their friendship.”
Meryl never mentioned that to me. “You have?”
She poured out the coffee. “Of course. I’ve known Nigel a lot longer than you—either of you, I think. I don’t believe he’s malicious, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t capricious, and it doesn’t mean I’m not cautious around him. He serves the Wheel of the World in a different way than I do. I’m not so foolish to think mine is the only way.”
I smirked. “ ‘And you shouldn’t either,’ she pretended not to say.”
She play-slapped my hand. “Exactly.”
“When does he want to do this?”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“I want to be here.”
She settled herself onto a stool. “Of course. I’m sure Meryl will be happy to see you.”
I sipped the coffee, its rich flavor hinting at one of Briallen’s secret additives. Everything Briallen made had a little something extra. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I ran into something last night. It looked a hell of a lot like the Wild Hunt.”
Briallen groaned and slumped against her hand. “Can we have one month when no one starts a new pissing contest? It’s bad enough Donor Elfenkonig’s in town.”
“You knew about that?” I asked.
“You did?” she asked.
We contemplated the countertop. “So . . . anyway . . .” I said.
Chuckling, she sipped at her coffee. Briallen knew more than anyone about what went on among the fey in Boston. She had connections everywhere. While Nigel saw the Teutonic fey as straight-up enemies, Briallen considered them the friendly opposition. “Yes, anyway, why do you think the Wild Hunt is here?”
I described what happened to Murdock and me in the Tangle. She played particular attention to the description of the rider. “That doesn’t sound like Arawn.”
In Celtic tradition, Arawn ruled over the Land of the Dead. “He’s for real?”
She nodded. “I’ve met him. I’m sure I would have heard if he was in Boston.”
“You’ve met Arawn, as in ‘King of the Dead’ Arawn,” I said.
“Why does that surprise you? I may not remember everything pre-Convergence, but Arawn is hard to forget. One of the most courteous kings I’ve ever met,” she said.
“Did you just out yourself to me as an Old One?” I asked.
She smirked and lifted her coffee. “I don’t know, did I? I don’t remember saying when I met him.”
“How did you meet him?” I asked.
“That’s a story for another time. If the rider you met were Arawn, he would have spoken to you, taken you with him, or killed you.”
“So it was an imposter?” I asked.
Uncertain Allies Page 16
