Tension sang through my arms. “A Magi.”
Had he really come to help with the Shadowborn? It had bothered me ever since that day that he hadn’t cared even a shred about me, or any of us. His grief over his father had been fairly new when we’d ultimately fought about my heritage, and I understood his hatred of the Unseelie after how they’d tortured his father. I could almost forgive the things Nix said to me that day. Almost.
“The instant I touched her, all the pain in me, all the grief, the heartbreak over losing you to him … she took it all away. Alseides was her name, I think. It was a big lie. I knew it was, but I wanted it, even though a little voice in my head screeched at me to run. Everything goes a little fuzzy after that, but I have flashes of memory from when she led me to their realm.”
I wanted to believe him, and hope launched me to my feet. “So, what now? How do we get out of here, so you can lead us to Liam and the others?”
Even with his face aglow as it was, I still caught the well-duh expression clear enough. “If I knew how to get out, do you really think I’d still be down here?”
17
I frowned at Nix, needing to know, and afraid to know at the same time. “If you could have warned us the Magi intended to take all of the men, would you really have done it?”
His white hair shifted like mist around his shoulders. “Despite what you might think of me, I’m not an evil bastard.”
It was a non-answer, but in such close proximity, as in literally inside his mind, I didn’t want to think about what could happen if I pushed him. “I never thought you were an evil bastard. Even after how you treated me when you found out about Donovan.” Laerni’s teachings rattled around my head, encouraging me to speak from my heart. Yeah, yeah, shut up already. I sighed and squared my shoulders to face him head on, arms relaxed at my sides to make my body language match the sincerity of what I was about to say. “You’re still a fae, and even though I don’t trust you, I still, for whatever reason, care about what happens to you.”
His nod and sad smile surprised me. “I don’t blame you for distrusting me. I would in your place. And I can’t tell you how much it means that you still care for me at all.”
He’s agreeing with me? What happened to him to change his mind so drastically? Had the Magi done something worse to him than what he’d told me?
“Congratulations, by the way.” His ghostly gaze fell to my stomach. “Looks like you’re well on your way to becoming a mother. Bonded life looks good on you.”
“Don’t.” My doubt warred with that small place in my heart he’d once occupied, maybe still did if I was being honest with myself. I paced the confines of his mind looking for a way out, somewhere to get away from Nix so he wouldn’t try to crawl under my skin any deeper. “Don’t pretend to be happy about my choices. And I’m quite sure you think this child is an abomination no matter what comes out of your mouth, so just don’t.”
I thought I heard a faint, “I’m sorry,” as I strode as far away from him as I could get, darting glances at him over my shoulder to make sure he remained where I’d left him. He did. Thankfully. I should have been asking him more about the Magi, but I couldn’t bring myself to engage him anymore.
Liam. I needed Liam like I needed air, to allow my lungs their full expansion. They hadn’t worked properly since the moment he’d disappeared. I needed his arms, his lips. His scent. Those blue eyes with pinwheels of yellow that could hypnotize me into a blissful oblivion with the slightest graze of his stare, one filled with amusement and naughty promises. The smile that made me a boneless fool, hopelessly, arse-over-teakettle in love with him. Mine. He was mine, and I was his. Always, until the end of all things. We hadn’t had our last moment together—I wouldn’t allow it—and I wouldn’t allow Nix to confuse me ever again.
I spent what seemed like hours searching for the way back to my body. Tension crept along my shoulders and down my back at the forced closeness to my former captain. I tried willing myself to go back to my body and succeeded in giving myself a headache. A thunderous one that pounded merrily on the underside of my skullcap. Why couldn’t I sense my body? I had a brief thought that Brígh might be doing all sorts of nasty things to it in her rage, before returning to the problem. Was I supposed to have left a trail of metaphysical breadcrumbs to follow back to myself? Descending had been so easy, all I had to do was fall, but there was nothing with which to climb out on, and I couldn’t remember the path back out. What I wouldn’t have given for a ladder or a rope. Or a map. Or Gallagher. Please be okay, you old fart.
Too much time had gone by. If I didn’t get out, what would happen to everyone? What would happen to Liam? To Garret, stuck out there in my body. Oh, Goddess, Garret! I thought I’d left him in the safest place in the world, that I was only endangering myself. Idiot!
I raced back and forth, muttering to myself and rubbing my imagined belly while Nix sat hugging his knees a few yards away. There had to be a way out. If Gallagher could do it, then I could. Arrogant or not, I had to believe I had it in me or I’d collapse and bawl my eyes out. I just had to figure out how, think outside of my normal physical parameters and consider that I was just essence, energy. Could I fly inside of his mind? Eyes closed, I imagined myself floating, but I never left the ground.
“Is there some sort of magic still here?” I asked. “Like what I feel every time I’m close to the Magi? Sticky and heavy, like a wet blanket. I feel something now, but it’s different.”
“Yeah. If there wasn’t, I could have woken up by now.”
Just effing peachy. My frustration came out as a mental scream to Liam, falling on a link that went nowhere.
“What’s that?” Nix stood and faced toward my left.
I turned to find something waddling through the white, a ball of Light glowing brighter than the surroundings.
When it approached, I took an instinctive step back before realizing who it would be since the blob had sprigs of hair shooting out either side of her head. “Arianne?”
“Silly Lila got lost,” she said, her voice more like a twinkling of Christmas morning church bells than something that could come out of vocal chords.
I didn’t know whether to cry out of sheer joy or strangle Brígh for endangering the kid. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, little one. Can you get us back out?”
She reached pulsing Light fingers for me. I scooped her into my arms, marvelling that she weighed nothing before realizing that her body was only a mental projection of her energy form and not really her. Duh.
“Arianne? Is that you?” Nix moved closer, causing me to take a step back. “Wow, you’ve gotten so big.”
Arianne buried her face into my chest and clung to my hair. “Leave now, Lila. Leave now.”
“Yes, we need to go.” After a moment’s hesitation, I extended my hand toward Nix. “I think we need to be touching when she does her thing, whatever it is. A lot of telepathic stuff is like that, so better safe than sorry.” I’d rather have grabbed onto a grizzly with a hangover than him, and my expression must have shown my revulsion.
Even with his face wavering in and out, I could still make out the downward turn of his mouth and half-lidded eyes. “There was once a time when you liked my touch. What happened to us, Li?”
“What happened is that you decided some blood was better than others and that you valued power over love … not that I loved you, not really.” I had, sort of, but it never fully bloomed. Partly because I wouldn’t let it, and partly because it just wasn’t meant to be.
His shoulders dropped, and he hesitated only a moment before he came to us and linked his fingers with mine.
The white floor fell away, leaving me in darkness again and without any sense of touch. I was no longer certain the others were still with me, but I didn’t dare move in case I inadvertently dropped somebody into the void,
or me for that matter. Weightless, timeless, I hung there in muted suspension within Nix’s mind, forbidding my idle thoughts to venture to Liam, to what they might be doing to him. To whether or not he was still alive. He was. He had to be.
Shivering, I clamped down on my mental wandering and focused. Did I have to do something to get the rest of the way out? Had I fallen so far it would take us hours to get back up? Just as panic began to set in, tingling filled my limbs. A pinch sent a jab of hurt through my left arm. Another to my right. Stinging pain slammed into the side of my face.
Voices, muted at first, grew into frantic shouts. Someone cried nearby. Another, smaller voice, called my name. “Awake. Lila awake.”
All at once, sensation hit me like a concussion wave. Sound came from everywhere. Light filled my eyes. Cool air danced on my skin. My limbs wouldn’t move to bring my hands to my throat to find out why I couldn’t breathe.
“She’s not breathing!” Neve screeched. Weight—hers I assumed—pressed down on my chest. Once, twice, three times. She covered my mouth with hers and filled my oxygen-starved lungs before starting compressions again.
My body seemed disconnected from my brain, floating near, but not quite connected. I knew I needed to breathe, but no command I sent to my lungs made them draw in air. I screamed inside my head, finding no way to make it come out of my mouth, where Neve continued to breathe into.
After a few moments, whatever mental block that had prevented me from breathing cleared, and I gasped. Coughing, I clutched my throat as someone rolled me onto my side on a blood stained bed. When I finally managed to open my eyes again, I found Neve, Brígh, Nix, and Maeve holding Arianne, all staring moon-eyed from the half circle they made around the end of the bed.
Garret shifted in my belly, and a surge of glee lit up my mind that I hadn’t hurt him because I’d gone off half cocked. Never. Again. Sorry, baby. You’re safe now, shhh. I rubbed my sore face and sat up. “Who the hell was slapping me? That hurt, dammit.”
Brígh pounded me on the shoulder. “I did, you idiot!” Another two blows came to my chest in rapid succession. Her hair swirled in a current of power, and her powder blue eyes, iced over with fear a moment before, made a swift change to blazing fury. “How dare you plunge into him and scare us like that! You don’t just go diving into someone’s soul even if you know what you’re doing! I’m so mad I could strangle the bajeepers out of you!”
“I can see that.” At her next assault, I held my hands up. “Ow, stop. It worked, didn’t it?”
Lips cracking a smile, Neve pulled her glowering sister away, as a few more of the remaining guards came in. I wondered if any of them had a skill that could go against Nix’s cumhacht so he didn’t blow a hole in the wall and escape if he was so inclined. To be sure, I raised my Will and said, “You will not leave this city without my permission, and you will not harm anyone here for any reason. And do whatever Neve tells you to.”
Instead of protesting, he gave a solemn nod.
“Are you all right?” Neve asked me.
A wiggle of everything confirmed my body worked as it should. “Bit of a headache, and bruised from this one,”—I jammed my thumb toward a sulking Brígh—“who is in big trouble for bringing Arianne here, but other than that I seem to be in one piece. How long was I in there, anyway? It seemed like for-freakin’-ever.”
“About an hour, or so.” Brígh crossed her arms and made an obvious effort to not look at me.
“What? No, that can’t be right.” At all of their nods, I dropped the subject rather than argue about something I didn’t understand. Time moved at a different speed in Nix’s mind, just like in the Black City, apparently. Not that I ever, ever, ever wanted to go there again.
“So, what do we do about him?” Neve jutted her chin toward Nix, who remained neutral, passive, arms at his sides and gaze lowered, where he stood against the wall in his ratty, dirty jeans and blood-crusted T-shirt.
I pulled Neve out into the hall and regurgitated what he’d told me about being magically booby-trapped. “So, now we need to rally the troops and figure out who needs to be doing what, and we need to decide who’s going when Nix leads me to those”—a glance at Arianne’s grinning face had me censoring my language—“itchy Bs who took our boys”.
Foreign thoughts passed over Neve’s face, raising and lowering her eyebrows, making her eye twitch. “I know you used to … sort of … care for him, so sorry if I’m going against you here, but you can’t let Nix sit in on this.”
I travelled through denial, fury, hurt, and hope. His disappearance and rapid shift in opinion about us half breeds held me back from trusting him. He seemed sincere in his regret, but it could have been just another of the Magi’s ruses and his ultimate revenge against Liam and me. Too much rested on my ability to find the Magi on my own terms, but he was my compass.
“Andrew would agree with me if he was here.” Neve held her hands on her hips, her voice rising. “I’m in charge of security here, dammit, and I say it’s too risky.”
I grinned at her defiant stance and the edge to her stare that said she’d do whatever she needed in order for me to listen to her.
“Yes, you are my captain, after all, so that makes you in charge of security. I agree.”
Lifting her finger, she opened her mouth and shut it again. “Wait. You agree that this decision is mine, or that Nix shouldn’t come to Court?”
“Both.” I patted her shoulder and smiled wider, happy to see Neve coming into her role even more with the latest crisis. “Do whatever you need to in order to secure him somewhere. We can’t take the chance that the Magi have somehow made him immune to my Will. If there’s nobody left who can create wards, then ask one of the shifters. I’m sure they’d be able to come up with something.”
Neve continued to gape at me for a moment before she straightened and smiled. “Um … okay? Yeah … so … who do you want in the Court, then?”
“I don’t know, yet. Is there anyone left who can transport?”
“I don’t think so.” Neve’s lips fell into a grim curve.
That was a talent which usually fell to residents of the Black City, and without Gallagher, I didn’t have a connection to any of the other telepaths with the humans and elves to warn them. “Do you suppose the other cities were hit, too? There isn’t enough fae energy left in them to power the wards, so the Magi wouldn’t have needed a magic bomb like Nix to steal their muscle.”
“Do you think that’s why they did this?” Brígh came into the hall, where Neve and I stood, with Maeve and Arianne. “For muscle? To leave us weaker?”
I understood the hope in her voice. If the dryads wanted a small army—though, how they’d gain the boys’ cooperation, I didn’t know—then it would mean the Magi meant to keep them alive. “I don’t know, but I don’t have a better explanation at the moment, so let’s just leave it as a possibility, okay?”
She gave a partial smile, her pink hair settling down around her shoulders again with the evaporation of her hissy fit. “Tell us what to do.”
I re-entered the room to find Nix where we’d left him in the corner, on the business end of a few golden swords, which meant the women holding them didn’t have offensive cumhachts. “Neve, have as many guards as you think you need take care of Nix. Use whatever force necessary to keep his ass here, and don’t trust my hold over him for a second. He seems to be cooperative. It might be genuine, and it might be an act, so don’t let him fool you. Brígh and Neve and Laerni, if she’s up for it, will check on the other cities, if they’ll even let us in again.” At the very least, I hoped to find a way to bring the other races together for an update.
“Arianne could help,” Maeve said.
I held up my hand. “She’s been amazing, and I’ll ask her only if it’s a last resort. She’s a baby and shouldn’t be involved in this mess. And besides, she can�
�t bring anyone here anyway, so I really need someone who can bend space or whatever it is the transporters do.”
“Wait … is that how the Magi took everyone?” Neve asked. “There was a burst of light …”
The horror in her stare spread to me, but I shook my head, refusing to accept what that would have meant. “I won’t believe any of the former Unseelie are working with them again. They might be pissed at Liam, but they wouldn’t try to hurt us this way.”
“She’s right, Li,” Nix said quietly. “I saw them while I was there. That, I remember clear as a bell.” His lip curled up for the briefest of seconds before his expression fell flat again.
I bristled at his continued use of the nickname he’d once used as an endearment, bothered more by his suggestion that fae had played a part in the abductions than his use of it, but that seemed like a good thing to take my frustration out on. My head snapped toward him. “Stop calling me that, and what are you blathering on about?”
“Their little woodland city is crawling with Unseelie, or whatever they’re called now. They’ve been preparing for the Magi’s little snatch and grab for weeks.” He shrugged and dug for his pockets again. “I really wish I hadn’t been right about the Unseelie … I mean, the ones that are helping them, at least.”
“You’re so full of shit!” Brígh tugged off her ballet-style shoe, hopping on one foot to do so, and whipped it at his head. He ducked to the side, and it smacked into the wall.
“Enough!” I pointed to the door. “This is on us, now, and we’re standing around like a bunch of morons. Go! Get it done!”
Without waiting for responses from anyone, I strode out the door with determined steps, and headed out of the castle. It would take a few minutes for Neve and Brígh to secure Nix and round up the guards, so I went to the Court garden to wait. I needed to talk to someone before I exploded, and only my family would do.
Rise of the Magi Page 15
