And God help me, I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep it from taking Lannie and her pretty lemon soda eyes right out of my head. I couldn’t stop it from turning her to smoke and darkness that vanished with the smallest breath of a whisper…
And a fear like none I’d never known roared up where the smoke had been and chased the whisper off. But something was gone, something dearer to me than anything else in the whole world, and I couldn’t remember oh God why couldn’t I remember?
I was—
* * *
—Impaled to my soul when I felt William’s passing. I screamed his name in voice and mind, but even as I snatched up our baby and ran from our house I knew that the all too brief flame of my beloved’s mortal soul had been extinguished before the end of the time that should have been his by nature’s right. And when Agatha gave me dire warning of the telephone call she had received, and of the blind terror in my husband’s voice as he cried out that he could not remember who had borne him a daughter, I knew that one of my own people was responsible—one of my own House. No one else would have the motive; no one else would have the power.
The choice at hand impaled my soul a second time. How could I leave my child, the treasured life William had helped me create? But how could I let this assault upon him go unanswered?
I cradled her to me one last time, kissed her infant brow, and murmured to her in the tongue of Faerie.
“I will always love you, Kendeshel.”
Then I handed her to Agatha, who would have been a wise-woman or a shaman if she had been born in a different time and place. Loyal, stalwart Agatha, who had lost a mate and child of her own and who looked at me with grim understanding—mortal eyes or no—as I adjured her to guard my daughter and to take her far away, and quickly, should I not return.
And then I yielded to the wrath igniting in the empty place where the warmth of my bond to William should have resided. For the sake of my mate and his kin, the better to hide among them, I had leashed my power. Now it surged up once more at the flare of my fury, the deadliest weapon at my command as I went howling into the night. I did not care what mortals or beasts I would terrify with my passing, and I did not care when I screamed out my death curse that the guardian of the gate of life’s beginning would claim a sacrifice of blood to work my will.
There was room for but a single thought within me: my mate was dead, and I would have my vengeance of the one who had slain him.
I was—
* * *
—Awake and sitting bolt upright in my old bed in Aunt Aggie’s house, gasping for breath. Tears streamed down my cheeks. Sweat dampened my entire body, chill against skin so flushed and hot that I wondered if I were running a fever. The prickling was back, humming throughout my flesh in a seemingly unbroken wave, as though nerves that had previously slept were coming alive all over me.
Rain pattered against the roof and the bedroom window. Yellow storm light tinged the darkness of the room, revealing Jude curled up obliviously on her side of the bed. She rolled over onto her side, burrowing her head under her pillow, and then subsided as I pushed the quilt and sheets off me and got up. A ceiling fan whirled noiselessly overhead. And though it was the middle of August, the slight cool breeze stirred up by the spinning of the fan felt like silk against my overheated skin.
Water, I thought. I needed water. For a few dazed moments, I seriously considered running outside and letting the rain splash down upon me; then I recalled that old Millie had been adamant that we were all safer inside the house than outside it. Something about wards. Or, rather, Wards. She’d uttered the word as though it had a capital. Remembering Millicent reminded me that two strangers of unknown sensibilities slept elsewhere in the house, and so with shaking hands I pulled my shorts back on along with the T-shirt I’d slept in. On bare, silent feet, I stumbled out into the hall. As I drew the door almost closed, stopping just shy of shutting it completely so it wouldn’t click, I was sure I heard Jude snore.
And I heard something else as I headed through the living room towards the kitchen, intent on fetching a glass of water. It wasn’t very loud, and with the continuous background patter of the rain on the roof of the house distracting me, I should have missed the faint distressed noise coming from the couch. But I didn’t, and I stopped cold.
The word ‘whimper’ brings to mind noises made by frightened children or dogs—or as much as it might pique me to admit it, women. Yet Christopher was doing just that in his sleep. It wrenched something in my chest, for big guys with deep, rumbling voices are in theory not supposed to whimper, and hearing this one do so now distressed me almost more than the nightmare. I didn’t have to wonder very much about the cause. His head had to be hurting like hell, and I couldn’t forget that running to my rescue had gotten him not only hurt but drafted into a lifetime position on Seattle’s secret magic police force.
Not that two was much of a force, but well hey, who was counting?
Uncertain if Christopher would subside back into sleep, I lingered partway to the kitchen and stared over toward the couch. I couldn’t see him from my vantage point until he violently flailed an arm out to one side; once he did, I crept guiltily around the corner of the couch until I reached him. My nice, stable, normal life going awry was one thing, but that same chaos overturning someone else’s was another thing entirely. The water dispenser on Aggie’s refrigerator door still called my name, but the need to help Christopher chase off his nightmares called louder. I’d gotten his life screwed up for him. I owed him the help.
The quilt had tangled around him, leaving his arms and chest free but ensnaring his waist and legs. One of his feet was stuck under the cushions in the couch’s center corner; the other kicked restlessly as I caught his flailing arm. Christopher’s eyes flew open at my touch, and though another deep, hoarse noise escaped him, this one held more confusion than pain.
“Hey, hey, easy,” I murmured, sitting down beside him on the couch’s edge, thinking I’d lay his arm down along his chest. That didn’t work out the way I intended. Once my hand found its way to his, the heat within my skin flowed almost eagerly out to enfold it. Then for a moment or two, all I could think of was the strength of his fingers grasping mine. His expression was wild, disoriented, the look of a man struggling to figure out where he is and what he’s doing there. I squeezed his hand and tried to sound soothing as I added, “It’s me. You with me?”
Understanding stole into Christopher’s eyes. “Kendis,” he muttered.
“Sounded like you were having a bad dream,” I said, offering him a small, rueful smile. “You too, huh?”
Slowly he relaxed, slumping back along the couch, but his hand kept its tight grip on my own. His gaze flickered to our intertwined fingers, and he stared at them as if they’d caught fire. To me, at least, they felt like they had. “A bit of one,” he whispered. “Seems like a night for it.”
“For us, anyway; Jude’s out cold.” Between the darkness of the living room, the pattering of the rain upon the roof, and the lateness of the hour, I kept my voice hushed. Thanks to general exhaustion, I wasn’t sure I could muster the coherence to speak up, anyway. “Do you want to talk about it, maybe?”
Christopher didn’t answer that. Instead, his attention still on our hands, he said, “Your palm’s hot.” With a cautious sort of deference, as if he were setting down a newborn kitten, he laid my hand in my lap. Then his eyes found mine. “Sorry about that. I shouldn’t touch you when I can’t focus enough to shield myself.”
Disappointment at the breaking of the contact jabbed through me, but I strove to ignore it, and my smile quirked up a little larger. “Wait a minute. You’re the one with the concussion, who was just having a nightmare in front of me, and who as near as I can tell has just had his life get almost as weird as mine. And you’re apologizing to me?”
Without warning Christopher smiled back at me, a drowsy, rueful smile that transformed his face even in the dim light. His eyes lightened, taking on a glimmer of green, and white teeth fl
ashed in the middle of his beard. “I’m from Newfoundland,” he informed me. I liked the way he said ‘Newfoundland’, with the final syllable lilting up stronger than those before. “We’re like that.”
“It’s okay, really.” I grinned, heartened by that smile and by the sense of humor emerging from beneath the brusque outer shell of Christopher MacSimidh. But then my smile faded. The mention of apologies only reminded me of the remorse beneath my own outer shell, and the impact of my own nightmare faded beneath the prodding of guilt. “Besides…” I sighed, and I fidgeted, and as Christopher’s smile dimmed down too I finished unhappily, “I’m the one that ought to be apologizing to you. You wouldn’t be hurt if it weren’t for me getting jumped by that damned troll.”
“It’s done,” Christopher softly replied. “Don’t fret on it, Kendis. I’m not.” Exhausted resignation stood out more in his expression now without that smile to temper it, but his voice was earnest. “Well, aside from the concussion, which I’ll grant is some painful. But I’ll bear it. And if it makes you feel any better, I’m thinkin’ the fault with me being an impetuous boob who can’t help runnin’ in to save a girl from a monster is mine.”
“But you got hurt because of it. And your blood got on the grass,” I argued, hugging my arms to myself to try to stay still.
At that Christopher closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he whispered. His accent drew that single syllable almost out into two. “It did.”
“And if I understood what Millicent said correctly, it means you get the same job she’s got? It makes you a Warder for Seattle?”
Again that single, drawn-out syllable. “Yeah.”
“Permanently?”
That got me only a nod. Not good. I licked my lips, fidgeted anyway despite my best efforts to the contrary, and asked, “And you don’t get a choice in the matter? You don’t get to say no?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“You don’t get to leave?”
Christopher shook his head along the cushion that pillowed it, and my heart sank.
“That’s not fair,” I blurted, reaching for his hand again but stopping short of actually taking it. “I mean, you’re a free man, right? You don’t have to—”
His eyes came open; the trace of green within them had vanished, leaving them once more dark. For a moment he paused. Then his hand lifted, and with the same cautious deference with which he’d let go of them before, he slipped his fingers back around mine. “I do have to,” he said, without quite meeting my eyes. “It’s the way the magic works. Warder blood spilled on the earth is an unbreakable promise, one we’re not to make unless we mean it with everythin’ we have. My mum once told me it was like the old tales of kings and lords sacrificin’ their own blood for the good of the land…” His mouth twisted in a little half-smile. “Except I don’t feel much like a king.”
“But you weren’t ready. It was an accident,” I protested lamely. It felt inadequate, not enough to soothe the hollow, haggard look away from Christopher’s face. “And it was my fault it happened. I’m sorry.”
He looked at me once more, his skewed smile straightening out, though it grew no larger and it didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t fret on it,” he repeated. “It was goin’ to happen to me anyway, eventually. Just a question of where and when. And if I’m to be a Warder after all, I guess I’m thankful it’s in a place that reminds me a bit of home.”
The words sounded stoic. I searched Christopher’s expression closely, trying to figure out if he truly meant what he’d said, or if he was just trying to psych himself into believing he did. Either way, he looked hangdog enough that I couldn’t help but squeeze his fingers. “Seattle’s a long way from Newfoundland,” I observed, and relief and pleasure lit a candle-flame behind my breastbone as he squeezed my fingers in return.
“That it is,” Christopher agreed with a ghost of his earlier smile. “But it’s a port town, and that helps. It could be worse. I could be stuck in South Dakota.”
“South Dakota would be worse?”
“Lass, have you ever been to South Dakota?”
I giggled, and Christopher’s smile got bigger. This did nothing to calm the strange flares through my nervous system or the odd heat of my skin; if anything, it aggravated them. But as long as Christopher smiled, I found myself wanting to see what he would look like smiling ear to ear, and to hear what that low, lilting voice of his would sound like when he laughed.
But the faint glow of the clock on the panel of Aggie’s ancient VCR proclaimed it was nearly 3:30am. Though I was loath to return to the bedroom, I had to admit that Christopher needed rest even more than I did. “You’d better sleep,” I advised. “I was getting up to get water. Can I get you anything?”
“Aspirin or somethin’ would be good if you’ve got it.”
I didn’t. Aunt Aggie’s bathroom closet had a bottle on the middle shelf, though, above the clean folded towels and below the hair dryer and old straight iron. Something niggled at my brain about the proper painkillers to avoid bleeding, though, and so I opted for the Tylenol next to the aspirin instead. As I fetched water from the kitchen to go with it, I decided that I also liked that Christopher seemed able to handle pain without being a macho idiot about it. It gave me enough bravery to say the other thing my conscience was nagging me to say when I returned.
“By the way, since I haven’t gotten around to mentioning… and since getting eaten by a troll puts a big crimp in a girl’s day, and I meant it when I said it was the bravest thing I’d ever seen… thanks.”
As I got the words out my gaze slid off Christopher’s face, and I wound up peeking sideways at him to watch his reaction. He’d gulped down two of the Tylenol capsules, and had paused in the middle of drinking down the glass of water I’d brought him when I started speaking.
His eyes went wide, and it took me a moment to identify what I saw in them: shock. Pure, genuine shock. That surprised me in turn. The man didn’t blink twice at trolls, Sidhe, magic, and who knew what else existing for real in the world. Nor had the need to defend me tripped him up, or the little conference we’d all had tonight about my own mother being… not exactly from around here. So what was with the astonishment?
Then it hit me, and I wondered what it meant that a man who handled a staff like he did, a man who could rush in without hesitation to save someone’s life, would look so stunned and humbled when thanked for having courage. I wondered what might have happened to him, in Newfoundland or Seattle or somewhere in between, to make it shock him so; I wondered whether anyone had ever called him brave before, or if I was the first.
But I didn’t ask him any of those things. He looked like I’d hit him over the head with a baseball bat, and I strongly suspected that meant I should lay off asking any more awkward questions. Instead I took the glass of water from his unresisting hand, setting it down on the coffee table with the bottle of Tylenol in case he woke up again and needed them. Then I helped him get the quilt untangled, so he could settle back down again beneath it.
And he whispered, “You’re welcome.”
His tone wasn’t abashed, but his eyes were. Gently I whispered in reply, “Go back to sleep, big guy. It’ll do you good.”
With Christopher settled, I went back to the bedroom to take my own advice. This time, when I ventured back into sleep, I found no dreams lying in wait.
Chapter Eleven
I didn’t rouse again until the morning, when the smells of frying bacon, eggs, and waffles launched a bold incursion through the bedroom and into my slumbering brain. Sleep didn’t have a chance. Outnumbered and with nothing in its arsenal to match that triple-team campaign, it surrendered, fled the field, and abandoned me to the siren call of breakfast.
In the kitchen I found Jude scrambling eggs, Christopher fetching dishes from cabinets and utensils from drawers, and Aggie at the table with a cup of freshly brewed coffee at her elbow. My aunt smilingly pointed the two younger people towards everything they needed. But every so often she gl
anced Millicent’s way, worry crinkling the corners of her eyes, and that was my first sign that something was up.
The old Warder herself was my second one, though she took no notice of my arrival. She paced back and forth through the living room, scowling and looking two seconds away from snatching up her shotgun and blasting somebody. Very possibly the recipient of the words she barked into her phone.
“Do you want me to explain it to you again in small syllables, honey? Three members of your Court loose in my city have broken the Pact, and they’re going to break it again if we don’t—what? Hellfire and damnation, you heard what I said the first time! Yes, the girl’s a changeling! And she’s half Seelie and a baby mage to boot!”
She’s talking about me, I realized, but to whom, I could not begin to think. My attention commandeered by her tirade, I watched her from the kitchen doorway, unable to tear myself away.
Millie turned and saw me, which stopped neither her pacing nor the irate tide of her words. “Yeah, you damned well better grasp the severity of the situation, girlie, and grasp it fast,” she railed into her phone, her drawl thicker now and yet razor-sharp. “Because I ain’t even started on how they also assaulted my brand new Warder Second.”
Two plates clattered out of Christopher’s hands onto the countertop, and I shot him a worried glance. Between his restive features and a certain wary stiffness to his frame, he had the air of a man in a jungle doing everything in his power to ignore a hungry tiger stalking along his path.
The domesticity of the morning, apparently, went only so far as the smell of bacon.
“Um, hi?” I piped up in greeting, hoping to defuse the tension vibrating through the room. “Can I do anything?”
With her egg-festooned spatula, Jude waved me to the table. “You can sit, because we’re about ready. And now that you’re up we need to talk about today’s game plan.” Her tone was steady, but her gaze was only slightly less nervous than Christopher’s.
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