"Then make me understand, but do it fast because time is running out."
"It will not end well, my king."
"Just so long as it doesn't end quickly," the dying king joked. His laughter was painfully weak.
"I can take the sickness out of you, I think. Banish it."
"Then what are you waiting for? Do it."
"It will take on a life of its own."
"But it will be outside of me. I must live. It is as simple as that. My daughter needs me. Do what you have to, Jax."
And in the mirror Ashley saw Redhart Jax move closer to the dying man's bed. He placed his hands on the king's temples and closed his eyes. He began to whisper words of power. She couldn't understand them, but even through the glass and all of those years in between then and now, she could feel them.
Slowly, like a snake charmer or horse whisperer, Redhart Jax drew the sickness out of Elbegast, the King Beneath the Moon. It rose like wisps of black smoke through his lips and nose, coiling and gathering substance in the air above him, until Ashley could see the black stuff had gathered enough shadow-solidity to begin to mirror the face of the man on the bed beneath it.
Her father.
Her real father.
"I don't understand," she said. She turned on Jax. "You saved him? I saw it… you saved him… but how could he turn out like that?"
"I told him there would be a price," Jax said.
"You told him? That wasn't enough!" Ashley yelled at him.
"I begged him not to do it. You saw it. He wouldn't be denied. I should have lied. I should have told him there was no hope."
"There wasn't," Ashley said. "You might as well have killed him yourself. Instead you made a monster and clothed him like my father. You did this. All of it. This is your fault." It was a harsh thing to say, but she was angry. "What happened to my real father—because that's not him, is it? That's not the King Under the Moon. That is the sickness you drew out of him, isn't it Jax." The Occulator didn't deny it. "It killed him, didn't it," She said, remembering what the King had said to her in the Bones. It liked the way her blood tasted. "Is there anything left of him? His body?"
The Occulator shook his head. "The sickness took his place."
"Like a cuckoo," Ashley said.
"Just say the word, my Queen," Blackwater Blaze said, "And I will end his miserable existence."
She saw Targyn Fae, one of the heavy velvet drapes from the mirrors still in her hands. She saw her mother caught in indecision two feet from scooping her up in a fierce embrace. She saw Redpelts on the ground, injured, fragments of the shattered moons from the Orrery scattered all around them. She saw Ratko the little hunchback towering over them. She saw broken mirrors and the black wraith of Elbegast's sickness gathering shape in them. She saw the horror and fear etched deep in every face looking down from the gallery.
The flames before them had unanimously turned blue.
There was one person she couldn't see, no matter where she looked. And she looked.
And then she saw him.
The King Under the Moon was trapped beneath the fallen Orrery.
THIRTY-THREE
Escape
Escape was as easy as slipping through the cracks.
The moment the meddling Wolfen great arms around Redhart Jax's neck he knew he was in trouble—what he didn't know was how much trouble. He could wait for it to play out, hope to contain the situation, or he could act first. Ordering the Redpelts to kill the woman had been a mistake. It had tipped his hand too early. But he couldn't have known she would have something of her damned mother's, or that it would reveal the truth to the entire Council.
There were places to fight and times when it was best to disappear. More often than not normal people couldn't tell which was which, not until it was too late to run. So instead they ran too soon. Fight or flight. It was the most basic, most human of responses. Only he wasn't human. He wasn't even Fae any more, though he was born of Fae flesh and blood. He was the sickness that lurked inside every body just waiting to be awoken. And once awake he was voracious, his appetite insatiable.
He was hungry.
So very, very hungry.
But as long as no one was aware of his true nature, then disappearing wouldn't be all that difficult given the chaos of the Council of the Moon.
As the curtains came down and that girl's film played out across them, the choice was made for him. He hadn't finished with this body, but that didn't matter anymore. It was time to move on.
The girl had given them a memory so horrible they wouldn't be able to look away from it. He needed to go then, while they weren't looking.
The clue, of course, was in the mirror they were all staring so intently at. In it, he was smoke. Elbegast breathed him out. He was the sickness deep inside him, the contagion, and out in the air he was free to pass from host to host, feeding off them as long as they offered him sustenance.
There were over three hundred possible hosts he could have stolen into in this one room alone, but as the dust settled he leaked out through the dead man's lips, mingling with the dust from the Orrery's collapse.
Free of his host, he could taste their horror with every ounce of his sick being. He dearly wished he could have stayed there to savour it a moment longer, slipping in and out of each and every one of them, but he knew the memory captivating them. He only had a minute or so to get as far away as possible from this place, and then keep on going.
So he drifted up, and up, curling like wisps of black smoke, disappearing before their very eyes, and out through the hole in the ceiling.
Beneath him, the King Under the Moon's body slowly began to melt. It was like black oil spreading out across the floor. It couldn't be helped. Without him inside it, the simulacrum was coming apart.
He could have taken any one of them. There were thousands of people in the marketplace that had grown up around the Shard, thousands more out there beyond the walls who had come to see Ashkellion returned. But there was one soul out there, so incredibly powerful, he could taste it from miles and miles away, and it was impossible to resist.
He let the wind blow through him, carrying him out over the walls, towards the Night River, and then on, towards Howls Circle and two bodies lying forgotten in the dirt beside the Great Moongate.
The wind was ferocious, buffeting and bullying him over the treetops and the rocky crags. His flight took him through a flock of Coribrae, and as their black wings brushed through his contagious smoke he felt them sicken momentarily and start to fall. Had he possessed a face he would have smiled. The birds were no concern of his. He had a bigger prize waiting for him.
And on the wind took him, swirling and churning and roiling and writhing until the ring of stones came into sight, and then he drifted and swirled down and down towards the bodies lying on the grass below.
The Nightgaunt lay side by side with the skin-changer.
He drifted over the flat face of the Nightgaunt, looking for a way inside. As he brushed across the tears in the creature's flat face that passed for nostrils, he felt the slightest breath tease through his smoky being, and with it the most incredibly hopeless chill. Unlike the skin changer beside it, the Nightgaunt wasn't dead. Not yet. Not quite. He was tempted to slip inside the Nightgaunt, it had talents that would have made him unbeatable, but the creature beside it was going to be of more use in the short term. They would never suspect it had taken refuge in one of their own.
He drifted away from the Nightgaunt, coiling almost lazily over the bear's powerful body, slipping between his lips and down inside to the secret parts of anatomy; into his lungs, into his blood, and swelling out from there to fill him up, into each and every capillary and blood vessel, into each fibre of his being, into him body and soul.
He had one thought: live!
Guerin gasped, the thrill of life pulsing through his stolen body.
He opened his eyes.
He breathed again, and again.
Something dug into hi
s side—it was a sharp pain from something in the pack on his back. He sat up and opening the back saw the gold leaf lettering and the name Jacob Grimm on the spine and realised that he had found the Concord. He thought of all the monsters tamed by it, their true essences trapped within its binding, and what nightmares he could unleash on the world if he set them free, and smiled.
He turned to the creature beside him and said "Wake up. I am not done with you."
Beside him, the Nightgaunt stirred.
THIRTY-FOUR
Last Rites
"Just say the word, my Queen," Blackwater Blaze said, "And I will end his miserable existence."
"No." Ashley said, shaking her head.
Time had snapped back into place all at once, all of those individual moments coming back to converge on the here and now. She held the mobile phone in her hand. It was still playing that film of her and the King who wasn't her father on a loop, but the audio was so quiet now because of all of the other noise in the room no one could hear it. It had happened the moment she saw the body trapped beneath the Orrery.
Ashley picked her way through the broken glass and bits of planetary orbs and the twisted frames of the Redhart Jax's mirrors. She looked around the wreckage of the room, surveying the damage. It was a mess. But it wasn't just about broken glass and twisted wood and metal. Something else had changed inside the room as the flames had turned blue.
The trials were over; the Council of the Moon had accepted her as the rightful heir. They'd witnessed the sacrifice Elbegast had made to stay alive, and even if they didn't' understand it, they realised for themselves that he simply hadn't been strong enough to resist the sickness once it was drawn out and made real.
Ratko strode through the detritus. In his hand he had a sword. The blade was as black as midnight. "I believe this is yours," the little man said, handing it to Ashley. She took it even though she didn't know what to do with it.
Ratko looked at Jax. "It really would be safer to just let the Alpha do what he wants, you know?"
"I don't think so," Ashley said.
She knelt beside Elbegast's broken body.
She didn't look at Jax.
"It is one thing for him to die in the heat of battle, but look around you, the fighting's done. Giving the order to kill him now…" she shook her head again. "I don't want to start this with blood on my hands."
Meghan slipped an arm around her shoulder. "For what it's worth, I think you are right. The quality of mercy should never be forgotten."
"Neither should what this wretched creature tried to do," Blaze said, tightening his grip uncomfortably tight around Jax's throat. The Occulator didn't struggle or plead for his life. He was resigned to paying the price for his treachery and ambition.
Ashley slipped out of her mum's embrace and knelt beside Elbegast's body. He looked more like the man in the mirror than the monster who had cornered her in the Bones, but she didn't trust looks anymore. She knew they didn't offer the truth.
Only one thing did when she couldn't rely upon her own eyes: the alethioptics.
She pulled the goggles up over her chin and into place.
Ashley looked down at the King Under the Moon's corpse. She blinked, frightened of what the goggles might show her—or more truthfully what they might not. She bit down on her top lip. There were no greasy black tentacles. There was no sucking pit instead of a mouth. The dead man looked up at her with the face of her real father and stole her breath away. But the black oil dripping out of his ear betrayed the truth: it wasn't him. It might look like him, but even as she watched she could see that part of the side of his head was beginning to melt away. There was black oily goop on the floor puddling around his head.
"That is not my father. It is all that remains of the sickness Jax drew out of him. It's not his body, it looks like him, but it isn't him. The King Under the Moon is gone and has been for a long time."
"Sickness is cowardly," Paget said, as though that explained everything. When it didn't, she added, "It is like a phoenix, its body dies, but it doesn't. It is born again from the ashes. When Jax expelled it from your father's body it fled, taking on a life of its own. For all his sins, he could not have known it had returned… not at first… it would have looked and acted just like your father. It was him, after all. But it was a darker, twisted version of him."
The side of the simulacrum's face had already begun to cave in. There was nothing inside it.
"Then we burn this thing," Ashley said, pushing herself back to her feet. "A funeral pyre in honour of the man he was, before this thing came back to take his place… We can't bury my father, but we can make sure this monstrosity never rises again. Even a phoenix has to die some time."
"It shall be done," Paget promised. "And we tell no one of this. As far as they know, the King Under the Moon died here today."
"If I can't kill Jax," Blaze interrupted, "what do you want me to do with him?"
Ashley knew exactly what she wanted to do with him.
"Take him down to the Bones. He was part of this. He worked with that thing." She said. She shook her head, remembering what the Occulator had said when he'd had her taken down there: No one has ever escaped the Bones. Indeed, I am sure there are prisoners who have been down there so long they've been forgotten about. That wasn't true anymore. One person had escaped from the Bones. She had. The odds of it happening twice though were miniscule. "Even if he didn't kill my father knowingly, he set his death in motion and sided with the thing that did."
Jax seemed to shrink in on himself, slumping forward despite Blaze's iron grip. He reached out to steady himself, using one pawed hand to stop from pitching forward. The soft pads of his palm pressed down on the shards of broken mirror with all of his weight. Several embedded there. He didn't so much as wince as the blood trickled over his claws.
He didn't look her in the eye as he was led away.
He was almost pitiful, like a broken beast, but she had no pity for the creature that had plotted so long and so hard to see her dead.
"I won't forget you," she promised.
"And I won't forget you either," Jax said, nursing his bleeding paw.
The centaur was the first to move. He picked a careful path through the detritus to where Ashley stood with Meghan, Paget and Ephram, and lowered his immense bulk slowly to one knee. He bowed low. "My Queen," his voice boomed out, deep and resonant and full of power. "You have my team, all you need do is sound the call and we will ride together for the glory of the Fae."
"Thank you—" Ashley broke off. "I don't even know your name. I'm sorry."
"I am Chiron, my Queen. The Spearhead of my Team."
"Thank you, Chiron, but I am not anyone's Queen."
"Your heritage says otherwise. Blood cannot be denied. That is why we were gathered here when Grimtooth brought word of your return to us."
Chiron rose gracefully, and Ashley saw the line that had formed behind him, with the Elemental Regents of fire, earth, air and water first—and by far the most hauntingly beautiful and spectacular in their ephemeral forms—in line.
Ashley held up her hands, shaking her head, "Please, there's no need, I don't want you to do this," she said, but before she could object any more strenuously, Ephram leaned across and whispered in her ear, "Let them, Ash. They need to do this. Believe me. The ritual is important."
And so they came one at a time to bend on one knee before her, Sabras, the King of the Wolfen Packs sniffed the ground at he feet, the Arachne spinning a fine silver web in offering, the two-faced Kishi lmperion pledging the oath with both mouths at once, the dwarves and gnomes and goblins, the satyrs and salamanders, imps and korrigan, nixies and sylph, black dogs and the one-eyed men, each bending their knee in turn and making variations of the same pledge one after the other.
Ashley just stood there, shaking her head until the last of them approached her. It was Blackwater Blaze. He knelt, but unlike the others he didn't go down to one knee. He knelt on both knees, and prostrated hims
elf before Ashley, pressing his face all the way down to the floor. He didn't look up even when he spoke. "I didn't know. When I crossed over into your world I believed I was serving the will of my King. I failed you. I should join my pack Beneath the Mountain."
"Your pack are dead, Blaze."
"And I should have died with them," he said. "There is no honour in serving a traitor." He looked up finally, and with shocking ferocity tore the medal from his wrist and tossed it away across the chamber floor. The tiny clatter of the metal as it clattered to rest was the only sound in the place. "I am Lone Wolf," Blaze decreed. "I have no place here. I will leave. I will go out into the wild."
"You will do no such thing," Ashley said, suddenly sounding very much like a Queen. It would have made her smile if she'd realised just how much she sounded like her mother at that moment. Beside her, Meghan did smile. Just a little. Proud. "Not until I have spoken with your King, because he bears some responsibility for what has happened." She scanned the room looking for the grizzled muzzle of the Wolfen King. Sabras stalked forward, slinking through the onlookers to stand before her.
"What can I do for you, my Queen?" he asked. His voice was low and throaty, like cement churning in a mixer. He might have been an old wolf, but his eyes were still ferociously bright.
"I would like you to explain something to me before Blaze exiles himself. Redhart Jax was your wizard?"
"Redhart Jax is my Occulator," the Wolfen King shuffled uncomfortably from paw to paw.
"So your Occulator opens a Moongate, breaking the ancient veil that has protected our worlds from one and other, sends a pack of his elite warriors through that Moongate with orders to kill me, and when one of that pack begins to doubt his orders dispatches a creature capable of sucking the life out of me one sense at a time to get the job done. I owe my life to your Alpha, King Sabras, but I could be forgiven for thinking a lot of this leads back to your door."
"My loyalty is not in question, my Queen. I would die for you. You need only say the word."
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