Then she noticed the pile, the collection of crumpled, tattered pictures of her, all smeared, scratched, and scribbled to pieces. Some were merely blotches of black, while others were mutations—little girls baring teeth and wicked claws, slobbering foam and blood into the peaceful creeks and ponds beneath them. She reeled; these nightmarish representations painted her far more redcap than Sidhe.
“No!” she cried, pushing away from Ewan, shaking her head. “That’s not me! That’s not what I am, that’s not what we are.” She walked over, picking up a particularly brutal scrawl of the little girl gripping a decapitated head, her once virginal smile carved into a raging snarl. “This isn’t me.” She looked Ewan dead in the eye and repeated herself. “This isn’t me.”
He stared back coldly, unconvinced. “There’s one thing left to ask,” he said.
“Anything,” said Mallaidh.
“Did you know?” he asked. “That they were coming?”
She shook her head. “No!”
“I looked for you, but you were with them.”
“They lured me out. I had no idea what I was walking into.”
“Then who is he?”
“Who? Knocks?”
“Yeah, him.”
“He’s your changeling.”
“I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.”
“You don’t remember?”
“It’s all fuzzy. And I don’t know if I ever knew who he was.”
“He’s Nixie Knocks, the one they left in your place when they took you away.”
“And why does he want to kill me?”
“Because he thinks you killed his mother.”
“His mother?” Ewan thought deeply for a second, summoning from the depths a single, powerful memory that washed over him like a tsunami. “He’s the boy,” he said, his jaw slack. “The night with the goats the size of horses. He’s the little boy.”
Mallaidh nodded.
“And you were there,” he said, pointing at her, memories piecing together like droplets pooling into a puddle.
“You saved my life,” she said through a sniffle and a tear-stained smile. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand once more.
“I did?”
“Yeah. And I fell in love with you right then and there.”
Ewan gave Mallaidh a confused look. “Why?”
“It was the way you held me,” she said. “The way you’ve held me ever since.” She took Ewan by the hand. “I love you. And I’ll do anything for you. Anything. Just say the word.”
The two stared longingly, passionate confusion brewing between them. “So what now?” he asked.
She stepped forward and stroked his cheek, running her finger back to push his hair over his ear. “Now you kiss me as hard as you can,” she said, “and we pretend, for as long as we can, that none of this ever happened—that none of this matters. That none of it ever mattered. You kiss me and it all goes away.”
“What if it doesn’t?” he asked.
“Then you kiss me again. And again. And again, until it does.”
Ewan looked at Mallaidh with great sadness, shaking his head. “They’re never going to stop coming for me, you know that.”
“I don’t want to believe that.”
“But you know that, don’t you?” he asked. Once again, the tears welled up in her eyes. She nodded, crying, tears streaking down her cheeks, unable to say it aloud. “Then what do you imagine we should do?”
“Run away,” she sobbed.
“That’s what I did last time. All I did was forget. I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want to forget. Not now, not you.” He looked at the floor, his eyes wandering to the pike beside him. “This time I need to stay and fight.”
“No! No, no, no,” she protested. “They’ll kill you.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“I am. These are creatures that live only to kill—to kill and cause suffering. That’s not who you are. That’s not who you were meant to be.”
“I might be more capable than you give me credit for,” he said, mildly offended.
“It’s not about how capable you are; it’s about how far you are willing to go. These creatures will chase you to the ends of the earth to get what they want. They will kill anyone who gets between you and them. They will hunt you till they draw their last breath. Are you willing to hate that much? Can you chase them for that long?”
“You never know,” he answered.
“I do. I’ve seen what’s in your heart.”
“So you want me to run?” asked Ewan.
“Not just to run, to run away with me,” she said. “To L.A. Like we planned.”
“But they’ll come after us.”
“I’ll talk to the council. If I tell them we’ll leave, never to return, they’ll have to grant us passage out. They don’t want trouble any more than we do.”
“So they’re afraid of me?”
Mallaidh shook her head. “Colby. Everyone’s afraid of Colby. No one knows what he’s going to do. And nobody wants to find out.”
“Colby . . . ,” he sighed.
“He’s our best hope. As long as they’re afraid of him, you and I can get out of here.”
“What about him?”
“Colby? Ewan, Colby’s been taking care of himself since he was eight. He’s the last person in this world we need to worry about.”
“When do you want to leave?”
Her eyes grew wide and, for the first time since arriving, she smiled. This conversation was really happening; she wasn’t dreaming it. “Tonight.”
“Then go. Do what you need to do. Buy us some time. If you’re not back by dawn . . .”
“If I’m not back by dawn, what?” The ominous sound of that broke apart her smile, crumbling it before him.
He paused. “Just be back by dawn.”
She grabbed him tight, kissing him, cradling his head with her hands while ruffling his hair with her fingers. “I love you, Ewan.”
“I love you,” he whispered back.
She turned and left without saying another word, breezing out the door—which Ewan immediately locked behind her—and disappearing into the night.
Ewan slumped onto the ground, propping his back against the door. She was gone, and with her the soothing presence that had held the beast at bay. His heart was pounding, his head was throbbing, every molecule in his body was thundering to the same, painful rhythm. Everything beat in unison. Thumthum thumthum thumthum thumthum. Then came the whispers—soft at first, steadily growing, a white-noise static against the background of his thoughts. He reached up to grab a fistful of his own hair and realized he wasn’t wearing his cap. He needed his cap; he was suffocating without it. What at first he had confused with the weakness of his broken heart, in truth was the drying blood of his cap across the room.
There it was, draped over a chair, drying in the midnight air. He wobbled to his feet, his knees buckling, just strong enough to stand him up and stumble him across the room. His fingers swept the chair, snatched the cap off with the sharpened end of a fingernail. Ewan breathed a sigh of relief as he slipped it on, but it proved to be little comfort. Something was wrong. His cap was almost dry, only the tiniest bit of dampness remaining.
He’d only splattered it with blood; he’d never soaked it. His cap was drying out. And that meant he was losing his strength, strength he’d need if Mallaidh didn’t return on time. He needed blood. But that meant he needed to kill and Ewan didn’t want to kill anybody, not anyone human, at least.
His chest tightened, he swallowed hard, choking on cotton. This had gotten very bad, very quickly. He wouldn’t make it to morning. The pike whispered to him from the floor. Ewan gazed at it, his mouth watering like a starving man smelling his first cheeseburger. Meat. The smell of sizzling meat
and dripping juices wafting in from outside. He could smell the blood and beating hearts all around him, warm, fresh, waiting to be spilled from their sagging bags of skin.
Now he paced his apartment, clawing at the walls, knocking over furniture, pounding his fists against his skull. The whispers had become braying voices, shouting angrily what he needed to do. It was only minutes since she had left, but it weighed upon the clock as if had been hours.
There was little choice left. He grabbed a blanket from his bedroom, wrapped it around the pike and slunk out the door into the harsh, dry darkness, chasing the smell into the city. But he couldn’t bring himself to kill—not a human being. So he followed memories, scraps and fragments of stories, things said in passing; he followed unfamiliar scents across streets, through backyards, cut across alleys, until he found himself miles from home, standing on the banks of Ladybird Lake, staring out into the dark water.
He stood there, listening to the cicadas chirp along the shore, smelling hints of female flesh swimming out in the lake.
He stripped off his shirt and waited. There came the gentle sound of a BLUMP from the water, like a fish jumping out of it for a fly. Ewan knew it was no fish. Then two more. BLUMP. BLUMP. Few would have noticed the sounds, but in his sanguine state, his senses were extraordinarily oversensitive. He could hear insects mating, smell Korean food cooking at a restaurant five blocks away, knew with absolute certainty that the sounds he was hearing from the lake were those of women rising from its depths.
The first swam sluggishly toward him, lagging so her sisters could catch up. He caught sight of her taut, naked body, dog-paddling silently on the surface, her hair slicked back with lake water, tangled with sea grass, her large eyes batting at him. She was gorgeous, seraphic, looking as if she posed no threat to him at all. It was, of course, a trap, and he knew it.
Never agree to swim with a beautiful woman, that’s what Dithers had always told him. Dithers. That’s where the name came from. He missed him, and for a moment, he almost forgot his purpose. Then the two others approached, their forms hovering in the dancing reflection of a thousand stars.
“Hey, handsome,” one of them called. “You here to get wet?”
“Yes,” Ewan answered. “Yes I am.”
“Would you like some company?” asked another.
Ewan smiled. “I think I would.”
He dropped the blanket, his hand firm around the shaft of the pike. With a speed he had no idea he possessed, he tore forward. The nixies had little time to react, enough only to exchange startled looks. Ewan smiled as he sailed through the air, time standing still, their slowed expressions awash in confusion and horror.
He could taste them already. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
Tell us a story, storyteller,” hissed the redcap through gnarly, jagged teeth. His breath smelled like a burning Dumpster, fire and soot passed over swelling rot and rancid produce. Before Yashar could answer, the redcap clenched his fat, clawed fingers into a fist, and splintered his cheekbone with a single blow.
Were he not strapped to a chair held in place by two giddy redcaps, the force of the hit would have toppled him over. Spitting through blood and broken teeth, Yashar looked up, drenched in stoic bravado. “I don’t think I have any stories left worth telling,” he said. He smiled a bit, attempting a laugh, but once more a plump fist connected with his chin, spun him around as far as the straps would allow. Slowly he turned his head back and, in his best Bruce Willis, said, “I can do this all night.”
“We know you can,” said the voice in the corner, “so cut the dimestore crap, Bottle Jockey, and tell us what we want to know.”
“And just what do you want to know?” asked Yashar.
“Everything,” said the voice.
“Everything?”
“Every last little relevant detail. Where they came from, where they might be going, and everyone they might turn to when this gets as bad as it is about to get.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Yashar glimpsed the chalk outline on the floor. It was perfect—a meticulously drawn pentagram sized just right to keep him in, straps or no. They’d even sealed it with matte-finish spray so they wouldn’t accidentally scuff it with a misplaced boot. He wasn’t going anywhere; he’d have to continue taking hits until the redcaps had each bruised their knuckles to the point of crippling fatigue. That was how he would best them—he had to wait them out. There wasn’t a person on this earth who could kill him—at least not one who would—and he couldn’t think of a single thing that these cretinous little goblins could do to him to deliver anything beyond the passing shadow of pain.
“Dietrich, get the salt,” said the voice.
Except that.
The redcap smiled, his malformed jaw dancing sickly in the breeze of his own breath. Redcaps were loathsome creatures, this one particularly hideous, his large eyes not quite set properly, casting an eerie, lazy-eyed leer over a thrice-broken-and-reset nose. He reached down to a small wooden table beside him, pulled from it an empty, rusted tin cup. Then, pushing aside an animal-skin tablecloth, he pulled from beneath it a wooden bucket of raw, unrefined sea salt. Dipping the cup into the bucket, Dietrich hesitated, giving Yashar one last chance to respond.
“Hmmm?” The redcap shook his head, already knowing the answer. “No.”
He needn’t empty the entire cup at once, but the little bastard did it anyway. Dietrich didn’t just carry a grudge, he bore it on his back with pride and schlepped it like a trophy. Now, at long last, was his chance to unburden himself.
The sea salt sizzled, popping against Yashar’s skin, his exposed chest bubbling like smoky bacon. Blisters swelled, erupting, raining fatty pus down into his lap. Yashar let out a cry so loud that it shook the walls, its bass deep enough to rumble a mile away, its treble shrill enough to pierce eardrums.
Knocks sat in the corner, smiling, drinking deep the agony of the man howling desperately before him. He rose from the shadows, delighted in the work of his minion.
“Wait, wait,” Yashar begged, but Knocks was already buzzing off the anguish, soaking in the heroin bliss of a junkie high, shouting over the pleas.
“Hit him again!” he cried out in ecstasy. “Hit him again!”
Dietrich plunged the cup back into the bucket. The salt sailed through Yashar, carrying chunks of him with it. The floor was a thick morass of salt and sticky gobs of flesh. Yashar’s screams were unbearable now to all but Knocks, redcaps recoiling from the raw power of Yashar’s agony. When he howled, he howled an outrage that could level a field of trees, shaking rocks from their moorings—that the walls of the dilapidated warehouse still held at all was a miracle to the redcaps who glanced around to ensure their integrity.
Yashar writhed. He’d never felt such excruciating pain; never seen fluids leak so readily from his chest; never seen meat cleaned off the bones of his own rib cage—but there it was as his own soft tissue melted before him, down onto his stomach, off the side of his leg, onto the floor. This wouldn’t kill him; he knew that. But for the first time in his long life he began to think that maybe, just maybe, there were actually things worse than death. Clenching his teeth he looked up, one eye squinting shut, his face boiling off. A gooey drip of his forehead streamed down over his brow. He looked Dietrich dead in the eye. “When I get out of this,” he promised, “and I will get out of this, I will tear your arms off and feed them to you one at a time.”
Dietrich glanced back at Knocks. Knocks nodded, and Dietrich smiled so wide he revealed hidden teeth even he never knew he had. “Hit him again,” crowed Knocks. The cup plunged into the bucket once more. “Then put him back in his bottle and bury him at the bottom of a salt mine. I don’t want any of his friends getting any bright ideas.”
“Wait!” shouted Yashar. Exhausted, burnt beyond recognition, he shook his
head. “I give.”
“That’s all you got?” Dietrich spat out.
Panting, Yashar nodded, his head wobbling at the end of his neck. “That’s all. That’s all I got.”
Knocks smiled contently. “So you’ll tell us a story?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you a fucking story.” Yashar once again spat on the floor, losing two teeth with it. “It’s not like I was ever going to be remembered as one of the good guys anyway. What do you want to hear?”
“Why don’t you begin by telling us where we can find Ewan?”
Yashar sighed deeply.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
COLBY AND THE FIVE STONE COUNCIL
Most noble council,” began Colby, his tone humble, his heart heavy, his head bowed, his hands folded in front of him. “I come to you on behalf of my dearest friend.”
Before him stood the Five Stone Council, the night air cool and crisp, the forest humming with crickets. Meinrad loomed large and foreboding next to his stone, his cold expression offering no comfort. Coyote leaned lazily against his—one foot propped up against it—grinning proudly, wholly aware that this mess was his doing. King Ruadhri stood rigid and stiff before his stone, glowering at Colby, disgusted. Rhiamon the Gwyllion, however, smiled wryly, tickled by the knowledge of the havoc playing out at the hands of her redcap thralls.
Finally, at the fifth stone stood the newest member of the council, Ilsa the salgfraulein. In the absence of genuine leadership after the death of Schafer, the redcaps had no worthy representative to take their place on the council. Thus a largely ignored block of seelie had put forth Ilsa to take his place. The most charming and delightful of her kind, even outgracing the noble King Ruadhri, Ilsa was a woman of few burdens and fewer enemies. There was something very genuine about her, as if she were incapable of telling a lie; she was, quite literally, enchanting. The eldest of five sisters, she spoke not only for her kin, but for the woodwives and pixies as well. The Limestone Kingdom was not a place particularly crawling with those of the seelie court, so the few there were put their faith and voice behind Ilsa. And her presence alone offered Colby some comfort.
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