by Cate Corvin
Called it! But we only had four of us, and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice a single one of them to shut this thing down.
“I’ll go up to Bathory and bring down a sacrifice.” Càel made it sound like he was running to the grocery store for milk. “Someone big. With lots of blood in them.”
Lula Fray cut him off with a horrific screeching noise that went through my head like a drill.
The gleaming surface of the gate was wavering.
“Excellent,” Càel said. “Saves me a trip upstairs.”
“Should we take cover?” I asked. What if Thraustila was bringing another siege engine through? We’d get our asses thoroughly kicked.
“No. I’m going to kill whoever walks through that gate.” Càel crossed his arms, watching the warp grow stronger.
I just nodded. There was no way I was coming between Càel and whoever’s head he was going to rip off, and I had to appreciate a man who was willing to crack a few skulls to make an omelet. Or shut down an infernal gate. Same difference.
It was our turn to be surprised when two forms pushed through the membrane between worlds. One was of them was familiar to me: Apolline, her hair brushed, the crusted blood and dirt washed off her face. Her eyes widened in shock when she saw the four of us standing there.
The other woman I’d never seen before. If woman was the right term. She was half-Fae, her platinum hair buzzed short, titanium piercings studding every fleshy bit of her face and vaguely pointy ears.
She held Apolline by the nape of her neck and a bird cage packed with pixies in the other hand, but dropped both slayer and her cargo when she saw our group, pulling a sword from a sheath and leveling it at us.
At me. Càel growled, low in his throat. Why would she aim for me if Càel, the true danger in the room, was standing right there? This chick had her priorities severely mixed up.
“You must be Gwendoline,” I said conversationally.
Gwendoline sneered without lowering her sword, and Apolline edged to the side.
“Nope. Sit your ass down, Apolline.” I cut her a glare, but… what if she didn’t want to be here? She’d tried to escape to Libra. She’d had no way of knowing that Thraustila would employ demonic siege weapons to bring her back.
She remained standing, lifting her chin defiantly. “Make me, Trailer Trash.”
Her voice was back. It was barely intelligible, a grating rasp layered over cracked screeches, but hey. Sometimes you had to work with what you had.
Besides that, I lost most of my sympathy the moment she opened her mouth. Some things never changed.
“We can help you. You don’t have to stay here as his chew-toy.” As I spoke, Gwendoline shifted in place, whether to run back through the Gate or lunge at me, I didn’t know. But Càel caught her eye and she stopped.
Apolline glared at me through red-rimmed eyes, her teeth drawing back. “I don’t want to go back,” she grated out. “The Helsings took me from him and imprisoned me there. None of you own me!”
So, Burns had lied. Apolline had been an unwilling prisoner the entire time, waiting for her ill-chosen lover to find her.
It would be nice if people actually started filling us in on what the hell they were doing. It’d save us a lot of time and energy.
“This is the life you want?” Will asked in disgust. “Crawling around in moldy tunnels and eating dust?”
He looked at his ex-girlfriend like she was a slug underfoot.
“You couldn’t understand,” Apolline said haughtily. “Look at what you chose over your own family.”
“What are you doing with the dust?” Suraziel asked. When he looked cold and hard, it was so far from his usual self that I felt a prickle of foreboding. It meant Really Bad Shit was about to go down. “Are my brothers and sisters beyond that gate? Have you wrung out enough of them to satisfy your greed?”
Apolline squinted at him. “Sura?”
“Duh. What’s on the other side of that gate, Apolline?”
Gwendoline moved in front of Apolline, hissing at her to shut the hell up. “The Gate is my master’s business,” she said coldly. She hadn’t lowered her weapon an inch.
“You’re so short-sighted,” Apolline cut across, completely disregarding Gwendoline’s order. “You’re a vampire now, Trash. You need to eat to live. You need to kill to eat. Thraustila’s thought all of this through. Why risk death by slayer when you can have the food come to you?”
Dust glittered in the corners of her lips.
“By turning them into mindless addicts?” I asked quietly.
“By giving them what they want. And in return, you get to gorge on all the blood you could drink. Thraustila’s doing you a favor with this, moron. You can live out your whole shitty eternal life drinking your fill, and all you have to do is make dust.”
Was she seriously trying to justify producing enough tainted dust to enslave the minds of most of New York? My own singers had proven you could live without killing. I didn’t need to feed an army of mindless dust addicts to satisfy my thirst.
Thraustila was just a greedy fucker who wanted to be able to kill indiscriminately without repercussion.
“Why hasn’t he had someone Make you yet?”
Apolline went still, her sneer sliding off her face. I’d caught her off-guard.
“You still think you’re his singer. You want to be here forever. What’s he waiting for, Apolline?”
She caught herself, hiding the lost, hurt expression behind a steel wall. “He’s not going to let just any vampire Make me. He’s promised I would have a worthy Maker.”
“And who might that be?” Càel didn’t look like he had a care in the world, watching the back-and-forth with amusement. “Is he going to drag Lilith from Her grave to Make you?”
Apolline cut him an opaque glance, taking him in from head to toe. Much as I hated her, she was obviously a red-blooded woman. I’d feel pretty damn shortchanged if I’d gotten Thraustila instead of Càel. “The Queen of the Ebon Court. You know her.”
Càel bit off a snarl. “Oh, I know her. You eat up lies from the palm of his hand, slayer. The Ebon Court would make what he does to you look like fun and games. Lucille owes him nothing and would tear your throat out for the fun of it.”
Whoever Lucille and her Ebon Court was, I made a mental note to avoid them in the future. Apolline was as gullible as a slayer came, if Thraustila was promising her a queen would be the one to make her.
How many damn queens did the Shadowed World have, anyways? I was going to need to start scrapbooking this to keep it all straight. And my page was going to get the most glitter.
“You’re not going to be Made,” I said. My daggers were heavy at my side, impatiently waiting to be drawn. “He’s lying to you. You’re one of his blood-bags, Apolline, don’t you see it? He’s keeping you as addicted as the rest of them.”
She shook her head, closed her eyes, refused to hear me.
A heavy weight slipped into my stomach. I hated Apolline, but there was nothing enjoyable about killing in cold blood. I just didn’t see any other way.
“Stay behind me,” Gwendoline whispered, but Càel sighed and rolled his shoulders.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. “Give us the slayer.”
To her credit, the half-Fae dealer didn’t flinch. Or maybe she didn’t understand who she was dealing with.
“I have orders to keep this one alive,” Gwendoline said grimly. “I’d rather take my chances with you than my Master.”
Well, those were pretty shitty choices, no two ways about it. Both sides were guaranteed death. One side was just going to be faster than the other.
“A master of nothing.” Càel’s nails lengthened into dark claws.
“Last chance, Apolline.” I gazed at her, but she refused to meet my eyes. “Die here now, or live out your life in prison.”
“What choice is that?” she asked with a bitter laugh.
“You’ve fucked over too many people to
go free now. People have died because of you. Students have died. They’ll never let you go.”
She blinked, casting her glance at Gwendoline. “No. I’d rather live free to do what I want.”
Her guardian shoved her backwards, into the Cerberian gate. It flashed bright enough to leave spots across my vision, and the mirror-like surface settled.
Gwendoline went pale as Càel snarled again, his teeth lengthening.
He was standing next to me one second, gone the next. Through the Gate with Gwendoline’s throat in his palm. Her head hit the ring of stones on the way through, leaving a splatter of blood and knocking one of the bricks askew.
My heart flew into my throat, but the gate remained whole. If it closed with Càel inside…
“Fuck.” Will darted to the Gate’s surface. “We need to get them back. Can you hold it together, Sura?”
The incubus inspected the blood-spattered brick. “For a while. It’ll start losing stability soon, so hurry the fuck up.”
Lula squealed from his horns, pointing to the cage of pixies and the Gate. “She says there’s more of her kind in there. We need to get them out, too. Chill, little lady, they’re on it.”
I glanced at Will. “We doing this?”
“We’re doing it.” He took my hand, and together we stepped through.
Like leaving the lake and kelpie magic, it felt like passing through a slimy, ice-cold membrane that slithered over my face and hands. My stomach lurched ineffectually, but I stepped foot onto solid ground.
I opened my eyes to Hell and was immediately slapped in the face with icy, ashen wind.
The land of Cerberus was a void of ice and dust. Glaciers rose around us, culminating in sharp peaks and spires. The snow wasn’t even pretty. It was bubbled and discolored with ash, the ruins of the world beneath the ice.
The Belial siege engine was canted off to the side, already covered in a drift of snow. A broad trail had been tramped in the snow around the Gate, hundreds of footsteps packing down the ice around the mess.
Cages. Piles upon piles of cages, from hamster cages to bird cages to rubber bins, had been flung in messy mountains around the place. Most of them were empty.
One, half-sunk in the ashy snow, was full of shivering pixies. Their light had dimmed until they were almost invisible.
Càel was on the snow only yards away, crouched over Gwendoline. The dealer’s eyes were rolling in her head, fingers twitching. She was a dead woman; her body just didn’t know it yet.
I felt sick when I saw a glittering patch of snow near one of the cages. It wasn’t just dust. Tiny frozen bodies were curled up in the snow. Crumpled wings had been ripped off the pixies and stomped into the snow next to them with combat boots.
Boots just like the ones Gwendoline was wearing.
Will saw where I was looking. “Some of the higher Fae like to torment their own,” he muttered. “Unseelie, Seelie, doesn’t matter. Don’t look, Tori.”
I couldn’t help but look. They were such tiny, harmless Fae. Ripping them apart and stomping on them was like kicking a kitten.
Càel was growling at Gwendoline, his words so distorted by the wolf-like fangs in his mouth it was impossible to understand him.
She gasped for breath like a fish, the blood on her head already freezing over, and started shuddering. These were death-throes. She was done.
Càel stood up, holding her by the collar, and dragged her back to the Gate. He slid a claw across her throat and hot, steaming blood burst out. The steam was carried away by the icy wind, and the blood gushing over the Gate froze on the bricks as soon as it landed.
“Apolline is out there,” he said, letting Gwendoline’s body drop. “The Gate won’t last much longer.”
“Then let’s go find us another blood sacrifice.”
Twenty
Tori
We followed the packed trail.
Apolline hadn’t made it far. Even with the dust she’d consumed, she was slow and weak, broken down by Thraustila’s repeated beatings.
“Apolline!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs, but we stood on a ridge, and the wind ripped my words away as soon as they left my mouth.
Regret filled me like a bitter well. She was once one of my own, no matter the hate between us. I didn’t enjoy killing slayers.
But she was cruel to the core. She gravitated to Thraustila because they were two of a kind; brutality was the air they breathed and the food they ate. She would never come back. There was no life for her with slayers.
She looked over her shoulder, saw the three of us standing on the ridge, and tried to run. Her foot caught on a patch of ice and she went down hard.
Apolline glared at us and reached into her jacket. For a wild moment I thought she had a gun, or a demonic weapon Thraustila might’ve given her, but all she did was pull out… a pixie.
The little Faerie writhed in her grasp, squealing like nails on a chalkboard, and before I could shriek at her not to do it, Apolline shoved the entire Faerie in her mouth, her face screwed up as she chewed and swallowed.
She got to her feet and sprinted as I slid down the ridge.
If I killed her for anyone, it would be for Lula Fray and the pixies who’d been stomped on like dirt.
Apolline was fast, but she was no match for a pissed-off vampire, even running on Faerie blood. I caught up to her as she slid down another hill, crashing into her from behind.
She grunted when she went down, and I smashed her face into the snow. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I snarled in her ear, grinding her face deeper in. When I let her up, she was red-faced and gasping.
“Fuck you, Trash,” she gritted out. “He’ll come for me. I’ll eat you next.”
My stomach twisted. They made Will’s fucked-up family look like a pleasant Christmas card.
“Not gonna happen, Polly.” She spat at me, and I wiped it off my face before it froze there. It glittered against my palm, and I tried not to think about the little pixie bits in it.
The trail culminated in a steep cliff. I clambered to my feet, dragging Apolline behind me, and forced her to the edge.
It was a long drop. A very long, steep, ridden-with-razor-sharp-spikes-of-ice drop.
She stopped breathing, her arms flailing wildly to grab any part of me they could. “Don’t, Tori!”
“Oh? I’m not Trash now? Funny how things change when you’re looking death in the face.”
I shook her by the nape of the neck and her feet slipped. Apolline shrieked, but I held her steady.
“He’s not coming for you,” I said in her ear. “You’re all alone with us. How many Fae have you killed and eaten?”
She snarled, and I inched closer to the edge.
“I don’t fucking know!” she howled. “As many as he brings me! Pixies, kelpies, a few goblins… Jesus Christ don’t drop me!”
My guts felt like stone. “You’re horrible, you know that? I’ve got a few more names to lay at your doorstep. Pheric Grant. Silas Vaughan. Darcy. And the younger ones, too. I didn’t even know them all.”
“They were made to fight and die.” Apolline wheezed when I squeezed her throat. “That’s all they were. The walking dead. Thraustila just gave it to them a little earlier than they expected.”
She didn’t have a drop of remorse in her for what they’d done. It made this so much easier than I’d expected.
“And you’ll get the same treatment.”
Apolline laughed. “Don’t you need my blood to close the Gate?”
A hard smile cut across my face. “Not all of it. Gwendoline was kind enough to provide the rest.”
I yanked the iron dagger from my belt, slashed through her arm, and shoved her.
She dropped from sight without a trace, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream.
I didn’t wait to see where she landed.
The single cage of frozen pixies was all that was left. We didn’t find a single sign of incubi, to my relief.
I handed Càel my bl
oodied dagger and yanked the pixie cage from the snow drift, cradling it close to my chest. The pixies all darted to the side closest to me for warmth as we pushed back through the Gate’s membranous doorway.
It was still cold, but I sighed with relief as we hit the marginally warmer air of the subterranean tunnels. Lula immediately left Suraziel, who was holding the blood-soaked, shaking brick into place in the Gate’s architecture.
I popped the cage door, and Lula began pulling pixies out one by one, glowing brightly to warm them and rubbing their hands. They began to light up, drifting into the air as they unfroze.
“We’ve got her blood,” I said, and Suraziel didn’t ask what happened to Apolline or Gwendoline.
“Bring it over here,” he grunted. “We want this done clean. Blood on both sides will shut it for good.”
Càel flipped the dagger in his grip and plunged it between the bricks on the opposite side of the gate.
I’d expected it to crumble and shut the door. I didn’t expect a fucking earthquake.
Stone screamed against stone as everything shifted. The air pressure dropped, and the wavering membrane became pitch-black.
“Let’s go!” Will barked, snatching up a few of the pixies, and we all dashed for the stairway.
Water flew in my face as the tunnels shifted. I slammed into the wall, the floor bucking under my feet, and strong hands gripped me around my shoulders and pulled me off the crumbling floor.
I couldn’t see a thing. Dust filled the air, Will and Suraziel’s shouts grew muffled, and a crashing roar took over the world.
My ears popped, and I knew the Cerberian Gate was closed for good.
Problem was, there was a solid wall of stone between me and the tunnel we needed to be in.
“It’s collapsed,” I said incredulously. Càel ran his hands over me, looking for injury, but I’d made it out unscathed.
I threw caution to the wind, shouting for Will and Suraziel, terrified that one of them had ended up under the avalanche of stone.
