by A. E. Lowan
He stepped away from her, and the frustration had returned. “But you’d rather die than let me help you,” he growled out.
Winter replied with silence.
Erik turned to Etienne. He looked the faerie knight up and down again. “You hurt her, boy, there’s no hole in the realms deep enough to hide you.”
Etienne merely nodded.
Erik considered the faerie knight’s response. “But Godspeed if she actually lets you help her.” He turned away to head out, his hand moving possessively to Michael’s shoulder.
“Erik,” Winter called after him on impulse. “I’ll speak to my father about it tonight.”
The Vampire King turned back and gave her a small nod, but it was his turn to respond with helpless silence.
They both knew what Colin would have to say.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Sure, ask him for an intro. Just do it in front of me. I want to see his head split open.” Katherine grinned in amusement.
Winter placed a fresh jar of translucent green healing ointment into her storage cabinet and stretched yet again. Her joints would not stop complaining about rising at three a.m. to brew more and there was a small persistent buzzing noise in her left ear from drinking that third energy potion. She turned her full attention back to Katherine. “Surely it wouldn’t be that bad. He invited her here, after all.”
The vampire queen rubbed Little Mike’s back in circles as she breastfed him and grimaced. The music of steel kissing steel filled the early morning silence as the two sidhe lords practiced their blade work in the small grassy area outside.
“Oh, now what?” Winter put her hands on her hips and tried to not look too irritated at her friend.
Katherine shook her head. “I told him to tell you,” she muttered, and then said full voice, “Himiko invited herself and Erik couldn’t tell her no.”
Winter waited for Katherine to elaborate. When she did not, she tilted her head to the side. “I don’t see what’s so dire about that. If I had an aunt who wanted to move to my city, she would be more than welcome.” What would she give to have an aunt living?
Little Mike fussed some and Katherine caught his cheek to keep him from worrying at her breast. She tucked her finger into the corner of his mouth to get him to unlatch and when he let go she shifted him to her shoulder. The four small puncture wounds surrounding her nipple closed within seconds, just before she got herself deftly tucked away. “If that was all there was to it, you would have met her months ago.” Katherine turned her son around to stand on her knees facing Winter. He smiled and shook his fists at her, then began his campaign for freedom. Both women ignored his entreaties. “But she’s… well…” Katherine stopped, groping for words.
Winter smiled. “I know Himiko’s reputation as a loose cannon. I know she’s one of the Eldest, and that she’s eccentric, and I appreciate you not wanting to alarm me. But she has two babies of her own and Erik said she wanted to come raise them here because we’re considered fairly neutral territory – granted that’s by people who don’t actually live here.” Her eyes flickered to the map. “How terrible can someone like that be?”
“She’s a sorcerer.”
Winter’s smile vanished. Technically, wizards did not judge sorcerers and in fact some wizard families had become sorcerers themselves, regardless of what must be great risks and sacrifices. Wizards prized power as the greatest virtue. But the Mulcahys prided themselves on being defenders of the innocent and traditionally did not move in the same circles as those who dealt with greater demons – and demons consumed mortal souls. She herself knew very little about sorcery. It was one subject the Mulcahy Library did not cover in depth. “Is she bringing demons into the city?” Winter would have liked to think she would be somehow aware of such a thing, but the truth was she was just one small wizard and Seahaven was a big place.
Katherine bounced the baby on her knee. “Not from what I’ve heard. But, historically Himiko keeps to herself until she’s ready not to, so who the hell knows?”
Little Mike arched his back to look at Winter upside down and she tickled his neck. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“She refuses to associate with the other queens, for one.” There were many, many female vampires in the world, but of them all only a tiny percentage “rose upon making” as powerful breeding queens. In all the world there were only thirty-two. Winter did not know if that number included Himiko or not. What she did know, growing up under Katherine’s watchful eye, was that the queens had formed a tight-knit unit for mutual friendship and protection. Their motto for the last eight centuries glittered on the bracelet on Katherine’s wrist: Universae Stamus. We Stand Together.
At a little over three-thousand-years-old, Himiko predated the sentiment by a considerable margin.
“Why? Is it just that she’s so old?”
Little Mike began kicking his legs and squealing in earnest to be let down, and Katherine gave in, holding on to the back of his shirt to keep him somewhat corralled. “Partially. She’s always done her own thing. And, honestly, at this point who’s going to tell her she can’t? But the new thing that’s got her nose out of joint is her twins. She wants the queens to acknowledge them as princes and we won’t.”
“You won’t?” That seemed strange. If this Himiko was a queen, and she would have to be if she’d born children, then of course her children should be princes, just like Little Mike. Just like the sons of all vampire queens.
Katherine gave a small shrug. “It’s really weird – I mean, of course it’s weird, it’s Himiko. She’s the only vampire to have ever held Kingship over a city and just walked away. And she’s done it more than once. But in all these centuries she’s never born a prince, never allowed a male near her during her heat. And all of a sudden, wham! Last year she shows up here, estate already purchased, and gives birth to dhampyr twins, fathered by a sidhe.”
That brought Winter up short. Her sidhe consort was who she wanted to talk to about Etienne’s scars, but she had not heard that he was the father of Himiko’s children. Male vampires could father the rare dhampyr on a human woman, but they were widely considered to be frail, tragic creatures too weak to forge their own way in the courts, who had their fathers’ need for blood but their mothers’ human lifespans.
Winter had never heard of a queen accepting any but the most powerful of male vampires to attend her heat. And she had never heard of a vampire mixing with anything but a human. What would these children turn out like? Both parents were immortal, powerful… it was amazing. “How is that possible?”
Katherine shook her head in wonder. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure-”
Winter’s world slid sideways. Memory forced her back to the rift in the ravine, only this time she did not stand a chance of holding back the tsunami. This time there was no build up – the wave crested, the floor seeming to rise and buckle beneath her legs, and she was under. She felt the reverberation of impacts resonate through her bones, over and over again as rift after rift blew wide open against the pressure of power behind the tattered fabric of the veil. What was happening?
Somewhere Katherine was calling her name, Little Mike wailing, but she could not see, could barely hear, and could not draw breath to reply. The buzzing in her ear was overwhelmed by ringing. She was drowning in wild magic. It swirled around, battering against her shields as colors danced behind her blind eyes. She had to get out, somehow, before she passed out.
Panic tried to claw its frantic way up her throat and she brutally forced it back into the pit of her belly. It would kill her even more surely than magical suffocation. She released what little breath she had left with a broken promise of more, stilled her mind, and drew on her surgeon’s focus that let her face down shredded flesh and shattered bone and still hold body bound to soul. Power flowed all around her, but with her newfound calm she could sense it abating. The natural balance realigning on its own. She tried to follow it, to track it to its source, but the current
s ran in too many different directions as it trickled away, running in rivulets through the hundreds of minuscule rifts that perforated the veil around Seahaven. She found her way to what passed for a surface as the flood subsided.
Winter’s first inhalation tore through her chest and left her racked with coughing as sight returned. She found herself on her knees and would have collapsed forward but for the vise-like grip on her biceps cutting off the circulation to her hands. Katherine knelt before her, the other woman’s lips white with fear. Winter tried to speak but her greedy lungs were only interested in more air. Little Mike sat on the floor beside her, howling inconsolably as he clung to his mother’s hip.
The back door swung open and a grim-faced Etienne pulled Cian bodily through, both silvery gold swords gripped in his other hand. The boy was pale and shivering with fear. “Are you ladies alright?” he asked, raising his voice over the baby’s cries.
Winter nodded. “Fine,” she managed to croak. She shrugged her shoulders to encourage Katherine to release her panicked grip on her arms and tried not to hiss as blood rushed back into her hands. The vampire queen gathered up her frightened son and Winter stroked his back, unable to resist taking a moment to help soothe him. Though not magicians themselves and thus not as vulnerable to the chaos the flood of wild magic had caused, Katherine and Little Mike were still preternaturals and that made them more sensitive than an average human. She bent and kissed the baby’s soft dark hair, breathing in his warm, milky scent as he fussed. She tried to ignore the quaking fright in her own belly. She felt Katherine’s hand brush her shoulder in the first motion of an embrace and forced herself to stand, fixing what she hoped was a confident smile on her face and moved to the map on her wall. She had work to do.
In the distance a siren sounded. Winter paused to listen. Fire truck. If the humans were involved her life became more complicated.
Complications in her life were hardly new. A city full of open rifts, though…
“What was that all about?”
She jumped a little at his voice close to her shoulder. Etienne was warm beside her, smelling good of herbal shampoo and exertion and male, and she moved away from him, just a shifting of weight. The fading adrenaline was making her jittery and she wanted coffee. “I don’t know. There was a smaller one a few days ago that seemed to only have affected one rift. This one covered a much larger area, though. I felt several rifts tear wide and I need to find and seal them.”
Etienne looked over the map with her. “So, what now?”
“First things first, I have a Gate to check.”
He did a double take. “A Gate? Where?”
A real smile tugged at her lips. “Across the street.”
Etienne looked impressed.
When her sidhe ancestress Ethne and her sister Aideen came through to the Mortal Realm, they arrived via a Gate, a stable crossing between the realms. Most of the Gates that Winter had ever heard of connected the Mortal Realm to Faerie, but theoretically she supposed they could connect anywhere. It was just that these two realms in particular were very closely bound and had even once overlapped in many places. Aideen had eventually fallen in love with one of the human settlers who had come with Erik, Thomas MacDowell, and it was decided that to help conceal and control the Gate that they would build their dry-goods store right on top of it. Over the generations the MacDowells forgot their true heritage and the building changed uses until it ironically became Other World Books, and there the Gate sat snug in the building’s large basement, secure behind a gate of scrolled Cold Iron. With the hammering the veil around Seahaven had just taken, the Gate suddenly became Winter’s first priority.
She closed her eyes and relaxed, reaching her senses out the short distance toward the Gate. There was Brian, moving about the apartment above the bookstore where his family lived. He glowed against her magical sight like a candle’s flame. She could not see his mother and brother, or any other human for that matter – they simply did not have the spark of the preternatural. She looked down below the bookstore to where the Gate sat. It looked to her mind’s eye not like a jagged tear ringed in orange flames, as a rift would appear to be, but as a smooth-sided aperture in the veil, opening into darkness and bounded by layers of wards.
“How does it look?” Etienne asked. Little Mike had stopped crying.
“It’s fine, for the most part,” she replied. “The tsunami, or whatever that was, did have an effect and appears to have…” She paused, thinking of a way to describe what she was seeing. “It looks like the Gate is rather stretched a bit. I can see more space between the misdirection wards than I could before. It’s very odd.”
“‘Stretched?’ Is that bad?”
“It’s not good,” she said quietly, “but it’s also not an immediate danger. The Gate is fine. They’re natural phenomena and as such are quite sturdy.” But sturdy did not mean indestructible and the power release from a Gate collapse had the potential to level the Historical District. Maybe even The Waterfront and Signal Hill with it. The first instability she could have chalked up to Seahaven strangeness. This second one indicated a dangerous pattern forming. Fleetingly her thoughts shifted to Mount Sarah. Now there was a nightmare scenario, but it would take much, much more power to tip a dormant volcano into an eruption than to blow the Gate, so she let the thought go. She opened her eyes, releasing her magical sight. She had to figure out what was causing the tsunamis – fast.
But, again, first things first – her life was eternal triage. She had rifts to seal. Her plate was overflowing and it was not yet nine a.m.
She pulled a pen and pad of paper close and focused on the city map, using it for its intended purpose – scrying rifts. She poised the pen in her hand and released a cleansing breath to concentrate.
“What are you doing, now?”
Katherine answered for her. “With the crap we just went through, rifts would have blown like tires across the city. She’s scrying for them using the map so she can go out and seal them before anything comes through.”
Winter brushed her fingers over the map, connecting to the glyphs drawn in patterns all over the back. Images swam in her mind, overlapping dizzily as they fought for her attention. So many! She was used to only one at a time, two at the most. How…? She felt a large, rough-skinned hand close over her own and her eyes flew open, startled. Etienne was pulling the pen from her fingers.
“Here, let me help.”
Her lips parted and, “I’m fine,” nearly escaped, but she stopped. It was such a small thing, and it really would help if she could just say the addresses out loud instead of breaking trance to write them down. She had never seen so many before, and time mattered. So she nodded, let him take the paper as well, and closed her eyes again.
This time she placed both hands on the map and the images leapt to her mind with startling clarity. With each image the magic of the scrying brought letters and numbers that formed themselves into locations she could understand. She spoke them to Etienne, her voice toning in her ears as if spoken from far away. She knew where each one was, even without the addresses. This was her city, brick by brick. She opened her eyes, drawing herself out of the trance with a slow molasses feeling.
Her need for coffee was growing desperate.
She turned to grab her purple canvas bag off the desk. “Katherine, this is going to take me several hours at least. Could you call Corinne and ask her to please open her clinic to the public for the day? I’ll offer her a favor.” The large and wealthy preternatural groups often had their own medical care and the lions were among the largest and the wealthiest. They only called on Winter in the direst of circumstances. She opened a drawer and grabbed a handful of banishing potions, spilling them into the depths of her bag.
“I could, but she’s going to want to talk to you about it, anyway, to be official.”
“Blast!” Winter thinned her lips and tossed a couple of lumps of spell chalk into her bag with more force than was needed. “When is someone going
to make making my life a little easier official?” she muttered.
“Winter…”
She sighed. “I’m sorry, you’re helping too much as it is. I’ll call her on my way. Could you just catch Jessie when she gets here and have her direct patients to Xanadu?” The lion pride’s home and primary source of income was the destination hotel and resort sprawled over the big islands in the Bay. Coincidentally, this was also the source of their conflict with the sharks, who had wanted use of the islands themselves. Corinne had won the development bid and the rest was faction war history. “Corinne won’t say no. She just wants to go through the motions.”
Katherine nodded. “Yeah, no worries.” She came and looked over Etienne’s shoulder at the list of addresses, Little Mike resting on her hip. She let out a low whistle. “Wait up a minute and I’ll get Giovanni to go with you.”
Winter came and tore the list from the pad. “I’m fine. Erik’s still angry with me for dragging you two into my problems, and I’m not looking for another reason for a shouting match.”
“Erik would shout at the tide. Winter, you can’t go alone.”
She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and kept her face neutral. “You know the factional politics just as well as I do. I have to.” She brushed her fingers through the baby’s black hair and went out the back door, pulling her phone from her bag’s exterior pocket as she walked.
The call picked up on the third ring, just as she reached her yellow VW Bug. “Buenos días, Winter.”
She frowned a little as his warm Spanish accent filled her ear and then she pulled her car door open. “Good morning, Santiago. Is Corinne alright?” Corinne’s Lion King did not often answer her personal cell phone. Winter did not have the private numbers of all the preternatural leaders, but Erik had been right; Corinne was her good friend and tended to treat her more like a younger sister than the city’s wizard. Corinne was eight weeks away from the end of her five-and-a-half-month pregnancy and Winter would be her midwife. The pride doctor was a gifted trauma specialist, as a therian physician had to be, and had taught Winter quite a bit over the years, but Winter had much more experience with obstetrics.
