Wild Hunt

by Bilinda Sheehan

  “Let her through,” the voice said.

  The Garda’s eyebrows very nearly disappeared up into his salt and pepper hairline but he didn’t say anything as he stepped aside and lifted the tape so I could move beneath it.

  The trees had been much closer together in my dream, scratching and tearing at my hair and clothes as I’d ran. Climbing the hill, I came to a halt near the top and surveyed the scene laid out before me.

  The ground sloped away in to what could only be described as a gaping pit, and the remains were scattered through the bottom. It reminded me of the first scene we’d stumbled across back in King City, but this one was on a much larger scale.

  “Took you long enough,” Victoria said, appearing at my elbow and making me jump.

  “Jesus, where did you come out of?” I said, sucking in a deep breath in an attempt to slow my heart rate.

  “Graham sent me ahead with Darcey,” Victoria said, rolling her eyes and jerking a thumb in the banshee’s direction.

  “But how did you get here so fast? I mean, I only heard about this,” I said, gesturing to what lay in front of us, “this morning, and I got here as fast as I could.”

  “Short cut through home territory,” Victoria said cryptically, and I knew without needing to ask that she meant Faerie. “So how are we going to end this?” she asked, giving me a thorough once over. “By the looks of it, if we don’t end it soon, he’ll end you, or half the country….”

  “I can’t face him on his own territory. He’s too strong,” I said, ice sliding down my spine as I remembered the feel of his voice inside my head, telling me to submit. What frightened me more was that I had wanted to submit, I had wanted to give in to him, give him everything he asked for. The ghost of his daughter had been the only thing standing between my utter and complete surrender and keeping my will intact.

  “But you’ve got the demon mark,” she said.

  “In Faerie, the demon realm is too far away,” Darcey said, stepping closer and joining the conversation. “Could you resist him at all?” she asked.

  I shook my head and took a long sip of the bitter black coffee in the travel mug. “Nope. I was as good as useless…. I tried, I really did, but….” I trailed off, remembering the way I’d cried and neither he nor I had been able to control it. “I could cry though, he ordered me to stop and I couldn’t…. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t do it.”

  Darcey nodded thoughtfully and stared back over the scene, her grey eyes impassive. “Your will was still stronger than him, but you’re too much of a liability. When we go in and if you come with us, he’ll just use your power against us. I’m sorry, but we can’t take that risk.”

  It hurt to hear it. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to be the one to end him, but I understood her position. I was a liability; there was no denying it and no point in pretending I wasn’t. I’d been there after all; I’d felt how willing I’d been to simply give into the things he wanted.

  “When are you going?” I asked.

  “As soon as we’re done here. I tracked the path you took out of Faerie this morning and I’ve got a pretty good idea of where he’s hiding out.”

  I nodded and bit my lip. “He has allies…” I said, remembering the glittering ballroom and the gathered Fae.

  “I know,” Darcey said, and the way she said it made me jerk my head up to look into her face. She spoke like someone who couldn’t wait to get in on the hunt, that everything she’d portrayed herself as so far had been nothing but a facade to keep us off the trail of the real her.

  “Just so long as she doesn’t pull any of that banshee shit,” Victoria muttered, and I glanced up at her.

  She’d once told me that changelings didn’t exactly play nice with Death, that banshees weren’t good for their health, and yet here she was palling around with Darcey. Either she had lied, which I knew being a changeling allowed her to, or she was keeping quiet on the damage it was doing to her.

  “I’ll do what needs to be done,” Darcey said grimly.

  Grabbing Victoria’s hand, I towed her away from the edge of the gravesite and Darcey before releasing her.

  “What is this going to cost you?” I asked, watching her face carefully. She wasn’t exactly my favourite person on Earth and she wasn’t always completely reliable. Her moral compass tended to be far more flexible than mine, for instance, but she was still part of the team and I’d grown accustomed to having her around.

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me, Victoria, you know it does. What will this cost you?”

  “Nothing, if she keeps her screaming to a minimum…” she said.

  “And if she doesn’t? If she has to use her power?”

  “Then we better hope I have a few more lives left in me,” she said with a false brightness that left a bitter taste on my tongue.

  “Victoria, maybe you should stay….”

  She shook her head hard enough that if I had done it, I would have whiplash. “No way. I’m due a good fight, and what better way to go down? I’d much rather go out with a bang than a whimper.” Victoria smiled. Guilt washed through me and her expression darkened. “Don’t you dare pity me. This is my life; I chose to live it how I want,” she said.

  “This isn’t pity. I’m just tired of not being able to help those I care about when I need to,” I said. “I’ve got all this power, but in the end, I’m as good as useless when it comes to the crunch.”

  “That’s the price of being human. It’s just something you’ll have to learn to live with and accept.”

  “Are you ready to go?” Darcey shouted from the bottom of the hill.

  I hadn’t even noticed her leaving, but I had a feeling that it had more to do with her Fae abilities than my lack of attention.

  Victoria turned and started down the hill at a pace that would have had me tumbling ass over head as soon as I started. My heart sank as I watched them leave and I turned my gaze back to the scene.

  He’d done this because of me. Killed because I’d pissed him off. How many people hadn’t gone home last night because of me? It was a sobering thought.

  “Your colleagues gone?” one of the Garda asked me as he paused next to me.

  “Yeah, they’re going to look into something. It might prove useful,” I said, wrapping the lie with the truth.

  “What kind of a monster could do something like this?” he said idly.

  “The kind that enjoys killing,” I answered, remembering the enjoyment Fionn had gotten out of hurting me.

  He hadn’t wanted to kill me, but there had been no denying his excitement over hearing me scream. He’d practically fed on it. There was something else bothering me; his daughter had said that he’d believed she had lied and so he’d set the hunt on her. But she had claimed she hadn’t been the one to lie … so why would he think she had? What, or better yet, who, could have set him off on the killing spree?

  To think that there could be someone behind all of this, all of the pain and suffering, aside from the obvious insanity Fionn seemed to be suffering from, left me cold. It had been bad enough before that thought had popped into my head.

  Turning away from the scene, I made my way back down the hill toward the road. There was nothing I could do here anyway; Victoria and Darcey had told the cops everything they needed to know and it wasn’t as though they could do anything themselves to stop Fionn.

  Just like me, their hands were tied; all I could do was hope and pray Victoria and Darcey weren’t as limited.

  Chapter 30

  The house looked completely deserted by the time the taxi dropped me back outside it. I hadn’t seen Nic before I’d left, but my mother had definitely been around.

  Making my way to the front door, I paused and sucked in a deep breath. The air was crisp and calm, nothing like the air of King City. I’d missed Ireland, more than I’d ever admitted to myself. But what exactly I’d missed about the country, well, that was a little more difficult to put my finger on.


  Perhaps it was just the simplicity of it all. The clean air, the lure of the wide open fields.

  “Excuse me?” A woman’s voice broke through my thoughts and I spun on my heel to stare at her. It was way too early for just casual visitors and as I stared at her, something tugged in the back of my mind. Why did I know her?

  “Can I help you?” I offered, glancing down forlornly at the empty travel mug of coffee. One cup was really not going to cut it, not today, and the distinct lack of caffeine flowing in my veins was making me cranky.

  “I think perhaps I know you?” she said, stepping closer.

  There was something about the way she said the words, “know me,” that set my teeth on edge. I’d left Ireland a long time ago, and I’d changed a hell of a lot since then. Her ability to simply know me didn’t seem particularly plausible.

  And yet, I’d had the same thoughts about her….

  “I used to work with your mother, I think…. Christine?”

  “That’s not how I remember it, Tracey,” my mother said. Her sudden appearance made me jump; I hadn’t even heard her open the door behind me.

  The woman she’d just addressed as Tracey sneered, her pleasant expression disappearing as soon as her eyes came to rest on my mother standing next to me.

  “Yes, well, you were never truly one with the coven, now were you?”

  Realisation dawned on me and I couldn’t help but feel like an utter fool. The woman standing in front of me was one of the witches from my mother’s old coven, the same coven that had tossed her out on her ass and demanded I be turned over to the proper authorities.

  Rolling back my shoulders, I pulled myself up to my full height and met the older woman’s hard stare with one of my own. She had a nerve turning up here unannounced and uninvited. But then, I’d always known her kind to be brash and downright rude; witches’ superiority complexes made them almost impossible to deal with.

  “You said she wouldn’t ever come back,” Tracey said with a small smile. “You said we were safe from her kind, that we didn’t need to worry….”

  “She’s not here because of you,” my mother said, and I could feel her tension beginning to rise.

  “Then what is she here for?”

  “You do both realise that the ‘she’ you’re both discussing is standing right here?”

  Tracey turned her attention to me, her eyes narrowing as she raked them over me, her gaze so hostile that I found myself taking an involuntary step back from her. She hated me; I could see it in her eyes. Why exactly she had such strong feelings toward me when she barely even knew me … well, that was something else entirely.

  “All I can see is an abomination, something that needs to be put down at all costs before it destroys us all,” she said, taking a step toward me.

  I felt the stirring of magic on the air before she’d even taken a step to cross through the garden gate. My mother might not have had her power anymore, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t cast one hell of a mean-ass warding spell.

  The second Tracey’s foot touched the soil of my mother’s garden, she started to scream, the wards flaring to life with a blast of brilliant light that very nearly blinded me and left me with pinpricks of colour dancing in my vision.

  “You bitch—you would defy me? The grand witch? Your life was spared once before, Christine, but not anymore, not after this.”

  Tracey began to mutter to herself, the language I barely recognised as Gaeilge, but this was old. So old, many of the words were no longer decipherable as even being words.

  She drew her arms up over her head and I felt the earth itself heave a sigh, the power she drew from its core causing me to shudder.

  “Get inside, Amber. She can’t cross the wards no matter what else she does….”

  Tracey released her magic, slamming them into the wards with enough force to send my mother crumpling to her knees.

  “What have you done?” I asked, crouching down next to her as she dug her fingers into the ground.

  “They cut my magic off, I had no choice….” She trailed off and refused to look at me.

  “Your killing her, stop!” I said, shouting to Tracey, who continued to drive her magic directly into the wards.

  “You tied them to you, didn’t you?” I asked, anguish causing my chest to ache.

  “I didn’t set them up until I knew you were coming. I just wanted to keep you safe, and I knew if they ever found out…” she trailed off with a spluttering cough, blood appearing on her hands and dotting her lips.

  “I can take care of myself now,” I said, but I wasn’t entirely convinced even by my own words. “Tell me what I can do to help?”

  My mother shook her head, a pained shudder rolling down her spine as her hands spasmed and clutched at the ground. “I will not let you get caught up in this…” she said, her voice nothing more than a hoarse whisper.

  “Too late,” I said, pushing up onto my feet and facing Tracey. “Leave her be,” I said, my voice quiet, dangerous.

  Tracey smiled in response and I felt her power ratchet up my mother’s cry of pain enough to draw my own magic forth in response.

  It curled up through my body and I imagined the wards, imagined them growing stronger. I imagined them fighting back….

  Shoving my power out into the air, there was a moment of silence before the world once more heaved a sigh. Tracey’s magic faltered. The power she was pouring into defeating the wards shifted subtly and her expression grew panicked.

  She was no match for me, that I was certain. Watching her panic satisfied me in a way that was utterly terrifying. I shouldn’t have been so happy about it, and yet here I was, enjoying every second of it.

  Tracey made a last-ditch attempt at destroying the wards, pouring everything she had into them in one terrible blow that drew a scream from my mother’s lips.

  “Mom!” I said, spinning around to face her as something shoved out past me, very nearly knocking me off my feet with the speed it moved at. Rushing to my mother’s side, I dropped down next to her and stared into her face. She was hurt—just how badly I couldn’t tell, but from the sweat beaded on her forehead, I was in no doubt that it was bad.

  Tracey let out a long, blood-curdling scream and the magic on the air intensified, making it difficult to breathe past it. Glancing over my shoulder, I shuddered. It had been Nic darting out past me in a blur of speed. A triumphant shout ripped from his lips and Tracey dropped limply to the ground, her face a mask of slack-jawed bewilderment.

  “Nic, what did you do to her?” I asked, fighting to keep the fear from my voice as he advanced forward slowly and deliberately.

  His eyes had taken on the white-eyed stare of the Saga Venatione and my heart stuttered in my chest.

  “Nic, my mom, she’s really hurt….” I trailed off as he moved closer and I felt his power wash over me. The demon mark wasted no time in flaring to life, fire burning through me, quieting my magic everywhere it touched.

  “Nic?” I asked again, and this time he blinked at me in confusion.

  “Amber, I….” He trailed off, shame burning in his face.

  “I don’t care what you were going to do…. Help me,” I said, gesturing to my mom. Her face had grown paler, her breathing growing more laboured. “This isn’t right,” I said, cupping her face, “it shouldn’t be hurting her as much as it is.”

  “The witch knew what she was coming to face and she came prepared to kill.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not possible; she doesn’t have that kind of power. She never did.”

  “Things change, Amber; you know this as well as I do,” he said, his voice still a little shaky.

  “How do I help her?”

  “There isn’t a way; it’s a hex. You and I both know the only way one of those breaks is with the death of the hexed.”

  He was right; I did know it, but that didn’t mean I had to accept it. I had all this power; if I couldn’t figure out a way to break something like a hex then what use was
there in being a Shadow Sorceress?

  “I don’t accept that. We can save her. I just need to think of something and then….”

  My mother’s breathing grew harsher and I could hear the fluid filling her lungs. Tracey had planned to kill her, bringing down the wards so she could get to me…. Had she been hoping to catch my mother here alone in order to have the element of surprise?

  Carefully sliding my mother over onto Nic’s lap, I hopped to my feet.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get an answer,” I said, crossing over to where Tracey still sat, her eyes wide and staring at things only she could see.

  Grabbing her shoulder, I crouched next to her and shook her vigorously. “How do I break it?”

  “Amber, I….” Nic trailed off as I shot him a harsh glance.

  I shook Tracey again, but the only sound she made was a high pitched keening noise that pained my ears.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I said, more to myself than anything else.

  “I didn’t mean to. I just don’t have the control I need and….” Nic trailed off again as Mom started to splutter a pink-tinged white foam that flecked her lips.

  “Shit, Tracey, tell me how to stop this!” I said, the desperation in my voice making my voice crack.

  Tracey cried out again and curled into a ball. She wasn’t going to be any help, that I knew. Whatever Nic had done to her, she wasn’t going to be much use to anyone for a while.

  “Amber, I think you need to get back over here.” The tone of Nic’s voice had me scrambling to my feet and racing over to where he sat. Mom’s lips had gone an unhealthy shade of blue that was rapidly turning black as the seconds ticked by.

  I had once brought Mia back from the dead. I wasn’t sure how I’d done it, but it had worked. If I could do that, then this couldn’t be as hard, especially as I knew my mother was still clinging to life with everything she had in her.

  Reaching down, I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to her chest. Lily had brought Graham back after he’d been attacked. It meant it was more than possible and I wasn’t going to give up until I had what I wanted.