I thought about humming along, or smiling, and then realized I couldn’t remember how to do either. But that didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered more than watching the One raise his power and call the one who would make me float forever.
I watched.
And I floated.
Chapter Twenty
“Azganaroth the Foremother, ancient progenitor, guardian of the gate of life’s beginning through which all souls to be reborn must pass, hear now the plea of your humble supplicant. Accept the blood of these lives in sacrifice, to reopen the gate for those wrongly denied incarnation.”
I was a living bell, and those words were the hammers that struck my brain, bone, and blood. With each syllable, my entire being tolled in summons; I fancied myself held aloft by the current that bore my thoughts, my feet swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as I rang. White-hot light exploded from the gesturing hands above me, shooting out and down to wreathe me in a new and visible layer of cocoon to go with the unseen one spun around my mind.
“Great Azganaroth, accept the blood of this Unseelie, this child of night, wind, and frost, this son of the Court of Chaos.”
The shining circle around me briefly parted, making space for hands to throw a limp form with disordered black hair across my legs. As he fell I glimpsed his closed eyes, pain-twisted face, and a small blade of silver thrust into his flesh, high upon his back. But I didn’t feel the impact of his body against me, and I didn’t turn my attention to him. My sight belonged to the One who stood before me and called—
What was his name?
I couldn’t remember, but I didn’t need to.
“Accept the blood of this Warder, mighty Azganaroth, this son of chieftains and protectors, through whom you may feast on the energy of life.”
Warder? What was a Warder?
When I tried to remember that, something infiltrated my cocoon of light and heat and silver. I felt it between my shoulder blades, a green-golden coolness that whispered of a refuge from the rain beneath a willow tree’s branches. I heard it somewhere in the back of my mind, a run of barely audible notes, a measure or two of a song composed in a dream. It jangled against the call pealing through me, making me whimper and try to block it out. I didn’t like the dissonance. It distracted me from the summoning. I did not want to be distracted; I wanted to float, and be a bell.
But I couldn’t remember how to move, and so I tried to shoo the distraction off another way: I flailed at it with a silver-wrapped tendril of thought, to try to push it back out of the cocoon where it belonged. But as I did, the green-golden coolness latched onto that tendril and pulled.
“Accept the blood of this changeling, eternal Azganaroth, this daughter of mortal and immortal, child of the one whose will shut the gate against the souls unborn. Let that gate now reopen. Let this changeling’s blood be the key.”
Most of my consciousness, floating within the radiance that surrounded me, resounded with the power woven into that invocation. But that coolness was back there, pulling, prodding, like the end of a poker seeking out the last few embers in an almost-dead hearth. And it found one. A tiny white spark separated itself from the silver that bound my thoughts, growing a little brighter and a little more distinct with each insistent nudge.
All at once I realized that spark was me.
But who was I?
Kendis Marie Thompson, the One’s silver voice whispered, compelling me to float forever, mindless…
Kendie baby, crooned someone else. Older, with wise, kind eyes…
My dear Miss Thompson from someone… wait. The person who’d fallen before me, in fact. The one with black hair and pointed ears. He had called me that, hadn’t he?
Babe and chica and Ken all in rapid succession from someone with a lively, round-cheeked face. Kiddo from someone big and brawny that I loved like a brother…
A voice I knew only from a dream murmured tenderly over me, Kendeshel…
And someone else looking down at me with warm green-golden eyes, smiling as he called me Kenna-lass in a rich, rough voice brightened by the lilt of an eastward island.
Names and nicknames winked on and off like fireflies within my mind, slowly but steadily gaining strength from the pull of that cool, clean touch of green and gold. They broke loose from the current, uniting into a greater and truer sense of me than any single name could contain, as a full symphony is a greater music than any single instrument’s contribution. The One who stood before me made a final gesture that tore open a hole in the blinding light; as he did, the joining of names caught fire and lit up my brain in a flash of jagged, unsteady comprehension.
I was Kendis. And Christopher was trying to wake me up.
Much of me rebelled, still lured by the thrall lain over me, struggling to return to its embrace. The rent in the air spread wider and wider until it claimed almost all of the space within the circle of light; through it, a massive, dark figure took shape. My struggle grew harder. That back corner of my brain where I’d regained my name was a determined little hook trying to pull me free from the silver current, but that current was strong. It flowed inexorably towards that dark figure, carrying most of my awareness with it on the promise of endless floating bliss.
Six and a half—no, seven feet high, the shadow stepped out onto the rain-sodden earth. She—for the two pairs of breasts each as big as my entire head and the curves of a gigantic form the color of rich, fertile soil proclaimed the entity unmistakably female—towered over me, over Christopher at my back, and over the Sidhe who surrounded us as well as the one who lay sprawled over my knees. She smelled of soil as well, of new green growing things poking up out of the earth, of blood shed by creatures giving birth, and of the sulfur of a newly risen volcano. With two pairs of eyes like a line of miniature suns across her face, she surveyed us. Then her attention locked onto Malandor.
And she roared, a blast of thunder that simultaneously hurled two sounds across my ears: the deep rumble of boulders crashing against one another far below the surface of the earth, and the high scream of metal piercing metal. Within them came a voice, so many octaves below the normal pitch of speech that I should not have been able to hear it, but which reverberated with deafening force across my mind.
YOUR SUMMONS DOES NOT AMUSE ME, LITTLE SIDHE.
The thrall burned away from me and left my brain wide open for a flood of bone-deep horror—and returning coherence.
Sidhe. My uncle. Malandor—
He’s going to feed us to that thing—
Oh God oh God oh shit—
Christopher!
The moment I seized upon his name I heard him muttering behind me in a voice that rasped like a sword whipping free of its sheath. Gaelic syllables and then English ones shot across my hearing, and in a rush of shock and relief, I recognized them. They were the words he’d uttered beneath the willow in my backyard, in his private oath to the city that called to his blood.
“I am Christopher MacSimidh and I will Ward this city with my breath, bone, and blood!”
When he called, Seattle answered him.
Magic erupted from deep within the sodden ground, with Christopher as its conduit and heart—and I, with my body pressed so close against his by the silver chains and my blood so keenly attuned to his, took the blast of it right along with him. Every one of my senses reacted at once. Images, scents, and sounds deluged me, and for an instant, I was no longer just in Sand Point Magnuson Park; I was everywhere in Seattle. I tasted a salt-laden breeze blowing off Puget Sound, heard the clang of the Hammering Man in front of the Art Museum downtown, and saw the boats bobbing in their moorings all along the shores of Lake Union. I was in Jude’s apartment, in Christopher’s cramped little rented room, in Millicent’s house and Aggie’s and mine, and hundreds upon thousands of others. My chest reverberated with the rhythm of hundreds upon thousands of heartbeats. My blood sang a thundering chord. Even in the midst of my terror, with that harmony roaring through me, I felt mira
culously, gloriously alive.
The power that Christopher summoned flared out from us both, straining against the chains and the starlight circle that kept us bound. I felt strong and vital enough to snap the chains with my bare hands, and for a lone wild instant I thought that it might work, that we might set ourselves free—
But Malandor’s own magic still rushed forth from his glowing hands, like flames along an oil slick, pressing us down hard beneath its intangible weight and choking off speech within our throats. “Great Azganaroth,” he cried to the hulking being before him, his face ablaze with dreadful purpose, “I implore you to accept these lives, this blood, which I have brought you! Look with favor upon your supplicant, Ancient Mother, and reopen the gate of life’s beginning to the unborn souls of my House!”
The demon roared once more, flinging arms each as broad around as Christopher’s entire body out in challenge. Six clawed fingers on each of her hands splayed wide, and her thick serpentine tail lashed back and forth.
THE CAUSE THAT CLOSED THE GATE WAS JUST. THE MATE OF SHE WHO MADE THE PLEA WAS SLAIN; FURTHER LIVES FROM HER WOMB WERE DENIED HER.
I froze even as Christopher’s power built to a crescendo behind, beneath, and within me, urging my own magic up and out of my blood to join it—the magic I’d inherited from my mother. Was that thing talking about my mother?
What had Elanna done?
Malandor’s face contorted, his expression cracking like a broken mask and showing a glimpse beneath it of a soul-corroding grief. “Where is the justice, great Azganaroth?” he howled. “There is no justice in the death of my mate and of the child within her womb!”
YOUR MATE FOR YOUR SISTER’S MATE, the entity thundered. IT IS JUST.
“My child was innocent, a life already conceived, and there was no justice in her death!” my uncle screamed, his head held high, proud, and terrible. “You speak of justice—I call for it now! Her child for mine!”
That was a cue to do something if I’d ever heard one. Within physical and magical chains I writhed, striving to wrestle past the panic and terror that threatened to overwhelm me as thoroughly as Malandor’s thrall. All around me the wave of energy out of Christopher gathered till it felt as though I sat in an ocean of summer, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the energy roiling up from within me in reply latch onto it as we’d done to raise the Wards on my house. Not without my hands being free, and my hands were chained up tight.
Then Elessir stirred and opened his eyes. His dark head jerked in several directions, first upward and then back and forth as he tried to get a bead on what was happening. As fury, pain, and surprise all flared across his face, I nudged him hard with one knee to get his attention. With no time to spare, I took the chance that if Malandor had betrayed him, the singer would defect to the home team. I mouthed ‘help’ at him when his dazed eyes met mine.
Later, I’d worry about kicking his ass.
Just as my uncle screeched out his challenge to Azganaroth Elessir flung himself at my side, almost between Christopher and me. He craned his head in close to both of us, whispering hoarsely, “I trust you will both take this as the most platonic of gestures.”
Then he threw an arm around each one of us, grabbing my bound hands in his left one, Christopher’s in his right. When his hands connected with ours, it was as though we were the batteries of a pair of cars and the Unseelie the jumper cable. Power surged. Mine welled up out of me in a flickering wave of white as I fought to marshal my senses. Elessir’s came in cool and blue, moonlight across a midnight sky, and it locked onto mine to wing it headlong into the green-golden fire that roared forth from Christopher.
I felt the chains around me heat to an unbearable degree; then, before they had time to do more than singe my arms and shirt, they exploded. Twisted shards of silver went flying. So did Elessir, who was flung back hard into one side of the circle that surrounded us all, and he cried out as his collision with that barrier of power drove Tarrant’s dagger further into his back. The circle pulsed in reaction to our rising power and rippled with the impact of the Unseelie’s body, but it held fast. Elessir did not. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell over sideways into a heap.
Melisanda instinctively dodged, though none of the fragments of chain escaped the circle and only enough power to stagger her a little leaked out. Tarrant shouted out her name, though, and my uncle screamed back at him, “Hold your place! Keep our gate open!”
“Kendis!” Christopher made my name a prayer of desperation while he whirled around, grabbed me, pulled me against him, and leaped to his feet all in one fluid sequence of motion.
But he had no time to do anything else. Even as we scrambled up off the ground the demon spun around to face us, with enough speed that her tail or the stiff, straight mane that ran from her skull down to the small of her back would have bisected anything closer to her. She was no less daunting from a standing perspective than she was from the ground; I looked up and up into her inhuman, fiery eyes. And I grabbed Christopher just as tightly as he’d grabbed me, completely and unabashedly terrified.
Because you know what? The troll on Burke-Gilman had been frightening, but the demon right in front of me, looking poised to take my uncle up on his revolutionary new demon diet plan, was immeasurably worse. I tried to smack at her with my infant magic as I’d smacked at the Sidhe, Christopher’s power lending me extra strength, but she didn’t budge an inch.
From somewhere far off to the right, two shafts of light fell across Azganaroth’s enormous form, beams that might have been searchlights or headlights—but I didn’t look to see if someone or something else was coming as the demon commanded every iota of my attention. Christopher and I clung to one another, our merged magic shining in a shield before us, but I didn’t think we’d hold the entity back for more than a second. Maybe two.
But she didn’t spring for the attack.
Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Malandor’s two followers double-taking; Melisanda then pivoted round to shriek a warning to my uncle. But I couldn’t hear it. Nor could I hear any engines of vehicles as Azganaroth roared a fourth time, with a volume that almost drove Christopher and me to our knees.
THE SACRIFICES ARE UNWILLING.
“Damn straight we’re unwilling!” I shouted. At least I thought I did. My ears—hell, my whole head rang so much in the wake of that roar that I could barely hear myself think, much less shout. But I felt my lungs and throat work, hurling out air and words towards the being looming before us.
And I felt Christopher’s magic, blazing like a hearth fire, filling my senses with echoes of Seattle: brilliantly sunny spring and summer mornings, the crisp, blue-gray peaks of the Olympics and the Cascades and Mount Rainier rising majestically to the southeast, the autumn and winter rains that rinsed everything clean and wrapped the city in clouds and mist. As he looked down at me with despairing eyes, all I could think was that his arms felt like home, and I was about to lose them.
“We can’t fight her, Kenna-lass,” he breathed. Those words I heard, and even if I hadn’t, their meaning was etched all too plainly in his face. “She’s beyond us. But I swear to you, she comes for us, I’ll make her hurt as she takes us down!”
Azganaroth took a step towards us, her six-toed, taloned foot slamming like a falling boulder into the earth.
With that, a noise that registered only as a sharp crack in my ringing ears split the air. Something struck the circle that confined the demon, Christopher, Elessir, and me, making two brief, bright showers of sparks four feet up off the ground. A second later Melisanda violently jerked and collapsed, her sword clattering from her hand and her left leg a torn and bleeding mess. A new wave of energy surged, and though the circle kept it from reaching Christopher and me, the echo of it through my blood was enough for me to identify its source.
Millicent.
Those beams of light were the headlights of Jude’s truck, and the old Warder woman sat perched in the open passenger window, her fedora jammed
back on her head and the smoking barrels of her shotgun pointed in the demon’s direction.
I started to think Oh thank God—
But that thought went down in flames as Azganaroth seized me in one huge hand and Christopher in the other, lifting us bodily off our feet and out of each other’s arms. Christopher grabbed hold of the limb that had seized him. I felt him lashing out with his power, trying to draw on the very air around him, the air of Seattle, as he’d done with Seattle’s earth. But you can’t sink roots into nothing. His magic scrabbled at the already power-laden air like hands seeking purchase on slick, wet rock. Without avail, and with no effect on the demon other than to make her shake him, almost chidingly, like a mother lion might shake her cub by the scruff of its neck in her mouth.
“CHRISTOPHER!” I screamed for him with all my strength.
Behind Azganaroth, Malandor rounded on the intruding truck and let loose a torrent of power that tinged the night an unearthly red as it flew. I caught a glimpse of Jude, wisely diving down out of the line of fire even as she kept a death grip on her steering wheel, while Millicent scowled at the incoming volley—and as near as I could tell in one fleeting look, stopped it before it hit with a shield of her own.
The demon hauled Christopher in close to her face, close enough to bite right through his neck if she so chose. But she just stared at him with the combined searing blaze of all four of her burning eyes.
Feebly, Melisanda stirred. She shot a stare of agonized loathing towards my uncle; then she shouted something weak and breathless in the tongue of the Sidhe. With amazing speed for someone with a thigh ripped to bloody shreds by a shotgun blast, she crawled for the glowing doorway where Tarrant stood urgently beckoning her closer.
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