Bedeviled

by Maureen Child

  This was what she’d been hoping for by luring Mab to Sanctuary. Her only chance at winning was in a physical match. Mab had been using nothing but magic and Fae powers for centuries. She’d probably forgotten how to fight. To really get into it one-on-one and try to hurt somebody before they hurt her.

  Then Mab’s fist connected solidly with Maggie’s jaw and she saw stars. Okay, maybe the queen hadn’t forgotten as much as Maggie had hoped.

  “Foolish human.” Mab tossed her hair back and sneered. “Do you think I’m less without my powers? I’m still Mab. I’ve fought more battles than you can imagine. I’ve reigned as queen for two millennia. I am the one the legends speak of. I am the one humans fear when they step across a Faerie circle in the dead of the night. I am—”

  “Mab. Right. I got it. You gonna talk me to death?”

  Mab screamed her rage and raced at Maggie, eyes wild, fingers curled into talons set to swipe at her eyes. But Maggie was ready, and when the queen got close enough Maggie grabbed her filmy, pale green blouse, planted one booted foot in Mab’s belly and let herself roll over onto her back. She flipped Mab as easily as she had Culhane not too long ago, and hearing the crazy-ass queen’s fragile little body slam into a wall was just wonderful.

  Maggie was back on her feet an instant later, and though already her body hurt and places she hadn’t even known existed were now singing with pain, she felt . . . charged. A part of her still heard Culhane’s shouts of encouragement, the rattle of the silver bars on his cage as he fought and strained to escape.

  Another part of her knew that Finn was close but staying out of range. But mostly Maggie focused on the enemy, coming to her feet and wobbling just a little.

  Mab gave her a reluctant nod. “Strong for a human. And sneaky with it. I approve.”

  “Well, don’t I feel loved.”

  “You and I don’t have to be at odds, girl,” Mab said, walking toward her with slow, mincing steps. “We could work together. This doesn’t have to end badly for you.”

  “Have you checked your scorecard lately?” Maggie asked, grinning. “ ’Cause I think you’ll find that my team’s winning.”

  Mab chuckled. “So it would seem to a child.”

  Maggie wasn’t going to let herself be distracted, and that was all this was. Mab would talk and talk, get Maggie off guard, then come in fast to get the upper hand. Well, Bezel might not have taught her how to fight, but that talkative, annoying little pixie had really shown Maggie how to avoid hearing irritating conversations.

  “If you change your allegiance to me, we two could do great things,” Mab was saying, her voice practically a coo now, tempting, alluring.

  Even with a broken nose, a bruise already blossoming around one eye and her hair a tangled mess, Mab, queen of the Fae, was regal.

  And not to be trusted, Maggie reminded herself.

  “Your power grows,” Mab said. “Even now I sense it welling within you. There is much for you to learn.”

  “I’m doing fine, but thanks for caring,” Maggie said, stepping back carefully for every step forward Mab took. Thank God the library was empty but for a few chairs and that long table on the other side of the room. Nothing to trip on. Nothing to fall over.

  “I could teach you more than Culhane or Finn would ever be able to.”

  “Right,” Maggie snapped. “What would we call those classes, I wonder? How to Fuck Up a Kingdom 101? How to Turn on Your Warriors and Let Otherworld Go to Hell for Beginners? Thanks, Professor, but no, thanks.”

  Mab moved unbelievably quickly and slapped Maggie’s face with her open palm. The smack was hard enough to make Maggie see stars, and the pain sizzled like fire on her skin.

  “Who are you to say these things to me?”

  Mab pushed, shoved, then delivered a solid punch to Maggie’s jaw that had her stumbling backward with the force of the blow. Okay, seriously underrated Mab, she thought. Even without her power the queen was managing to more than hold her own.

  Culhane had been right, she thought as she straightened up and looked into the cold green eyes of a mad queen. Luck on a battlefield was sometimes more important than strength.

  She just hoped she had some good luck waiting for her.

  “Don’t you realize what I offer you, you stupid human? I offer you eternity at my side.”

  “Uh-huh,” Maggie said, tossing a quick glance behind her before fixing her gaze on Mab again. “Or until you get tired of me. Then what? A cage beside Culhane? Do you have one all set up for me? No, thanks, Queen of the Damned.”

  Another hiss of outrage from Mab. Then she shouted, her voice echoing over and over again, sounding like a chorus of pissed-off Mab: “Culhane forged his own fate! Two hundred years he was my consort! And still he turned on me. You think he would be different with you?” She shook her head and gave Maggie a pitying stare. “You’re more foolish than even I thought. You are nothing more than a tool to him. He will use you, then discard you. I offer you a way out of such a fate.”

  Despite Maggie’s best efforts, Mab’s words got through, and she wondered frantically if the queen was right. Was Culhane only using her? Was what they felt when they were together nothing more than Faery magic? Was he seducing her into trusting him so he could do whatever he wanted and she’d sit by like a good little Stepford wife and nod her head?

  No.

  Mab was only trying to distract her, and damn it, it was working.

  “Forget about it, Mara,” she said, deliberately using the nightmare name for Mab that Eileen had discovered on the Internet.

  The queen’s head whipped back, and her eyes went wide in surprise at the little jab.

  “Yeah,” Maggie said, nodding. “I know about you. How you like to spend your off-hours dropping nightmares into humans’ minds. Ooh. Scary. But you’re not going to tempt me to the dark side, Darth Faery. I’m here to kick your ass, and that’s just what I’m going to do.”

  “Idiot.” All pretense at gosh-let’s-be-best-friends instantly dissolved. The queen was once again haughty, unapproachable and terrifying. Her cold green eyes glittered in the sunlight washing over the room, and her mouth, when she smiled, looked just as hard as the marble they stood on. “So we end this here. Now. While your warrior lover is watching.” She spared a quick, amused glance at the captive Culhane and listened to his shouts of rage as if they were music.

  “Fine by me.” Hey, Maggie could do bravado as well as the next really crazy person.

  “Before I finish you, let me tell you your future,” Mab said, walking again slowly, deliberately closer to Maggie. “You will die. Painfully.”

  “I figured.” She didn’t sound scared, did she? Good for her.

  “Then I will kill your sister.”

  Maggie’s eyes narrowed on an indrawn hiss of breath.

  “Did you think I didn’t know about the whore my warrior Quinn is hiding in Otherworld?” She laughed again, and this time it sounded deadly. “I haven’t bothered with her yet, but that time is gone. When you’re gone, she’s next. Then her whelp.”

  “Eileen,” Maggie whispered, and ice coated her insides.

  “She’s a child now,” Mab said, her voice soft, somehow gentle despite the venom in her words. “But the moment she comes of age she dies. Your line ends today,” Mab swore, running one hand under her broken nose and wincing at the resulting pain. “Then I will allow Culhane to watch me throw open the gates of Otherworld. The Fae will stream into your dimension. Your world will worship me. And after yours”—she paused for effect—“all the worlds.”

  “That is trollshit,” Maggie said, and slammed her fist into the bitch queen’s pretty face. Mab jerked, surprised, and Maggie took advantage.

  Slamming blow after blow into the queen, Maggie zoned out, hardly feeling the pain in her hands, her arms. The burn of fatigue pulling at her. She fought because she had no choice. Because she had to win. To lose meant losing everything, and that she wouldn’t risk. Mab had to be defeated.

 
But the queen didn’t give up easily. Her punches and kicks were sloppy, but there was strength behind them. So she wasn’t used to fighting with her hands, but her eagerness for battle made up for that.

  When Mab took her down to the floor, Maggie felt her teeth rattle as she landed hard on the unforgiving marble. Mab’s fragile hands linked around her throat with surprising strength, and Maggie frantically went for the only move she had left. Grabbing a hunk of Mab’s glorious hair, she yanked it viciously until the queen shrieked and pulled away.

  Chick-fight moves. Humiliating but effective.

  The fight was taking a toll on both of them as they wobbled and weaved on unsteady feet, still circling each other. Each of them bloodied, looking for a weakness to exploit. Each of them wanting this ended and over.

  Maggie knew she couldn’t last much longer. Then a soft breeze blew through an open window at her back, and an idea flew into her mind that she could only hope would work. Maybe, she thought wildly, when you needed luck the most, you had to make your own.

  Mab gathered her strength and ran at her. Maggie did the whole fall-back-and-flip-her move again, her heavy boots punching into Mab’s belly. Maggie smiled grimly at the sound of the high-and-mighty queen slamming into the floor, but she didn’t pause to enjoy it. Instead Maggie was up and running before Mab had recovered. Grabbing the queen, she dragged her up, then bent her back over one of the open windows.

  The wind lifted Mab’s hair like a blond flag, whipping it wildly behind her head. Wide emerald eyes got even wider as she fought to get a grip on Maggie, to hold on to the window jamb, anything that would help her regain her balance.

  But there was nothing she could do but whisper something that brought a smile to her eyes even as Maggie gave her one last shove.

  With a scream that seemed to last for centuries, Mab fell through the window of Sanctuary. Maggie planted both hands on the windowsill to help hold herself up, then leaned out to look, while her lungs heaved in gulps of air. The wind blew at her face, and she was forced to squint to see the Faery queen falling through what seemed like eternity. Satisfaction rolled through Maggie in a thick wave.

  “Ding-dong, the bitch is dead,” she whispered, trying to push Mab’s last words out of her mind. Trying to hold on to the fact that she had survived. She had won.

  Nora, Eileen, her world, were safe.

  “Oh, man,” she muttered, sliding to the floor in a bruised and exhausted heap. “I’m so whipped.”

  She leaned her head back against the wall and could only watch as Culhane stepped out of his cell and into the window Finn had drawn what seemed like a lifetime ago. He raced to her side, dropped to one knee and cupped her bruised cheek in his palm.

  “Ow!” Everything on her hurt.

  He smiled, glanced over his shoulder at Finn and said, “Nectar, if you will.”

  “Right away.”

  “What’s nectar?” She stared up into Culhane’s pale green eyes and felt all of her tension drain away. The fight was over, he was here and it looked like she wasn’t going to die anytime soon after all.

  “A kind of wine,” he said, smoothing her hair back with the gentlest of touches.

  “Oh. Good for me.”

  “You were magnificent,” Culhane told her, bending now to place gentle kisses on her forehead, her cheek, her lips. “I feared for you. Watching you fight, being unable to help, nearly killed me.”

  “I know,” she said, and a warmth like nothing she’d ever known before slid through her as she basked in what was shining in Culhane’s eyes.

  He grinned. “It was a brilliant stroke, bringing Mab here.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled, and winced when her split lip sent a zip of pain to her brain. “I’m feeling real clever at the moment.”

  “You won, Maggie.” He kissed her carefully, and the zing of that was worth the little bit of pain. “You fulfilled the prophecy more gloriously than even I expected. You defeated Mab.”

  “I didn’t kill her, though,” she told herself, then thought about it. “Or did I?”

  Finn walked back into the room, carrying a crystal glass filled with a pale gold liquid. Maggie realized he probably could have just used magic to get the wine, but he’d purposely left her and Culhane alone for moment. Smart wizard.

  He handed her the glass, and as she took a sip and sighed, Finn said, “No, you didn’t kill her. Sanctuary is out of time and place, remember? She fell, but she can’t land. There’s nowhere and nothing for her to fall to.”

  There was probably some kind of weird magic logic in there somewhere, but Maggie was just too beat to try to understand it. “So Claire was right,” she muttered, more to herself than to the two Fae bending over her. “She said she saw Mab defeated, but not dead. Huh.” Then she focused and looked up at Culhane. “You mean she just keeps falling? Forever?”

  Finn shot Culhane a look over her head, and the warrior answered her question for her. “She’ll find a way out. Eventually.”

  “So it’s not over.” Maggie thumped the back of her head against the wall. “It’s like those crappy-ending movies on the Sci Fi Channel. You think the bad creature’s dead, and then in the last scene you see an egg breaking open and you know it’s all gonna start up again.”

  “What?” Finn frowned at her.

  “Never mind.” She was just too tired. She’d worry about Mab getting out of free fall some other day. For now she wanted to finish her wine, go home, take a shower and fall face-first on her bed for a day or two.

  Lifting her gaze to Culhane’s, she looked into those pale green eyes that had come to mean so much to her, and asked, “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but how’d you get out of your cell?”

  “When Mab was defeated her power to hold me ended.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes.” Finn stood up, glanced at Culhane, and then the two of them each took one of Maggie’s arms and pulled her to her feet. She swayed a bit, gripped her wine and locked her knees. She wasn’t going to end this fight by fainting.

  She had some pride after all.

  “As I told you, power is stripped from your body when you enter Sanctuary.”

  “Yeah, but Mab left.” So to speak. “So didn’t she get her power back?”

  “No.” Finn led the way as Culhane helped Maggie into the entry of Sanctuary.

  There, high on the shelf behind the barrier, rested three spinning vortices of Fae power. One was Maggie’s, one was Culhane’s and the other, largest one . . . “Mab’s?”

  Finn bowed. “To regain your power you must leave the way you came. Mab didn’t.”

  “No shit.” Maggie chugged the last of her wine and handed the empty glass to Finn, who made it disappear. “So what happens to her power now?”

  “It’s yours.” Finn smiled. “To the victor . . .”

  Culhane turned her to face him. “It’s as I told you, Maggie. Mab is defeated and you are queen.”

  A staggering thought. So, she not only wasn’t going to lose her own burgeoning power, but she was getting even more of it. Was that a good thing? Probably. If she could figure out how to use all of this new power, maybe she could be ready by the time Mab finally showed up again.

  Because she would. Maggie knew it deep down to her bones. There was just no way Mab was going to stay away. She’d come back, and when she did, this little fight was going to feel like a cocktail party in comparison.

  But those were worries for another day. Right now she just wanted to celebrate being alive.

  “Well, all in all,” Maggie said, wincing as fresh pains began to make themselves known, “I guess it’s good to be queen.”

  Epilogue

  Being the newly crowned Fae queen didn’t get her windows painted.

  Maggie still had forty scenes to slap on glass in the next two weeks. Then she’d have to deal with Thanksgiving-dinner prep, since Nora was too caught up in her Faery warrior to be trusted around a stove.

  Holding her cup of coffee, Maggie stood at
the back door and looked out into her yard. Everything was normal. Sort of. Nora was home, and Quinn Terhune was bopping in and out, dividing his time between Nora and his duties in Otherworld. Nora and Eileen were happier than Maggie had ever seen them, so she supposed having a Faery warrior for an almost-brother-in-law wasn’t so bad.

  Although, now that Nora was becoming Fae—or, as she so delicately put it, I’m Fae by injection—Maggie had to keep an eye out for her sister floating at inconvenient moments. Not to mention the fact that Eileen seemed to think that her aunt the queen should be able to make her Fae, as well.

  “Probably trouble coming from that quarter real soon,” Maggie muttered to herself, watching Eileen sit beneath the tree, stroking Sheba’s fur.