by Rhys Ford
I stepped aside to let Ryder bring the Mustang inside and rolled the door down. Playing the penlight over the car, I winced at the damage. Peeled steel and punctured fenders were a small price to pay for Shannon’s safety, but it still hurt, especially the spider nicks in the back window. I could machine the steel, but the glass would be a bitch to replace.
Ryder stepped out of the car, leaving the door open. I could still hear Shannon’s hissing breaths, but they were shorter now, more relaxed. “We’ll need some light.”
“Know any more useful spells? Like instant candle, just add air?” I asked, then took the keys and popped the trunk open. Switching the engine over was problematic if we were going to need speed, but the motor’s battery could only power the lights for so long without running down. It was a case of damned once or twice.
“No, sorry.” He peered into the trunk. “Tell me you have supplies back here besides water and jerky.”
“Yeah, hold on. Let me lock down the fuel lines so I don’t set us on fire. I’ll turn on the electric so we can power up some lanterns.” I’d mounted the flat engine up against the backseat after welding a piece of plexi-metal in to support it. The blue fuel cells hummed to life, brightening the headlights. With the reactants online, the engine could run for years without being maintained, especially since we weren’t currently dodging unsidhe hounds.
Over the years, I’d learned what was useful for a run, stashing things away in the Mustang’s trunk in case of emergencies. Slender vacuum-pack water bottles took up the space near the lock, but I stored other things in removable box crates. I popped a crate open, then grabbed an expanding lantern, its side folded down flat. I snapped it open, its slender, flexible LEC panels accordioning to lock into place along the wire frame. I plugged in the leader line connections, powering up one of the lanterns, then handed the rest to Ryder.
“Here. There’s six more. If you can do the rest.” I dragged out more lines and handed the ends to Ryder. “Watch your feet, though. They’ll disconnect if you trip over the line. I’ll grab the first aid kit. She might need something from it.”
“You okay?” He nudged my side. “You look pale, maybe even a little sick.”
“Yeah.” Nodding, I dug around in the crates, wondering where I’d put the antibiotic packs I’d gotten from Dalia. “Woman things. I’m not very good with them.”
“Well, if you’ve got anything hard to drink in that tesseract you call a trunk, bring it with you. I think she’d appreciate it afterwards.”
“I might,” I scoffed. “And screw her, I’ll need it more.”
Ryder’s eyebrow jumped. “Your compassion warms my heart.”
“Yeah, whatever. There’s some rock salt stored back there.” I jerked my chin toward the back. “If it’s not packed solid from its own weight, we can use it to make a circle around the car. It’ll at least keep the dogs out of here if they catch up to us while… well, you know.”
“Now that I can help you with.” He grinned at me and winked.
By the time I’d unearthed the antibiotics, Ryder had the lanterns up and two of the bags cut open. Lifting one, he tilted the bag, steadily pouring a stream of salt into a thick line. It took five bags to complete an uneven circle around the Mustang, and when we were done, I dusted off the fine, salty white powder clinging to me.
“I feel like a pretzel.” I spit out a chunk of salt caught on my lip. “Taste like one too. All I need is some mustard.”
“I think you taste more like a strong brewed chai.” Ryder grinned at me, wiping a wet cloth over his face. “Can you activate it, or do you want me to?”
“Yeah, activating it? I don’t know how.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. “No one I know can fire up a salt circle. We just lay it down and pray it slows the bastards down.”
“Do you have a knife in the car?” Ryder asked. “I can show you how to do it.”
“Yeah? There’s a couple of Ka-Bars and a Sheffield Bowie under the seat. Which one do you want?”
“I just need something sharp.” He eyed the black blade I unsheathed and handed to him. “Thanks.”
“What?”
“You should have taken one of these with you into Elfhaine. Grandmother would have been less inclined to mess with you.”
“Alexa said no weapons. And I didn’t think I was going to be asked in for tea and get my ass bitten,” I said. “Even where I’m from, that’s bad manners.”
“It’s bad manners where I’m from too,” Ryder grunted as he laid the blade on his palm. “Damn, that’s sharp. I didn’t even feel the cut until it was through the skin.”
“Yeah, I sometimes skin black dogs with those. I like them sharp.”
“Thank you. I’m glad I rate the same knife as an ainmhí dubh.” Holding his hand flat, Ryder let his blood pool in his palm.
“Everyone rates the same knife. I like them.” I watched intently as he dribbled blood on four equidistant points on the salt, then crossed over to the diagonal spots, spacing out the pours.
“Stay inside the salt circle,” he warned me. “Remember how you reacted to a spell when you were touching metal? I don’t want the same thing to happen to you again.”
I nodded, moving closer to the center. “So you think you can teach me this?”
“You can have dinner with me in exchange,” Ryder suggested, looking up at me suddenly. “A date kind of dinner.”
“I don’t… date,” I said, shaking my head. “Dating… complicates things.”
“Maybe I just want to talk to you about joining my Court?”
“Yeah, sure,” I grunted, crossing my arms over my chest. “If that’s all you want to talk about, dinner’s great. And I can tell you ahead of time that the answer’s no, but hell, I’ll get a free dinner and a way to keep black dogs out of an area.”
“Do you like seafood?” He handed me the knife, sucking on the wound. The edges were already folding in, healing faster than I could. “I found a great crab place near Southside.”
“Yeah, crab works. Steak too. Answer’s still no to the court thing.” I slid the knife back into its sheath, hooking it around a belt loop on my jeans. “Do you need anything else besides blood and salt?”
“No, the spell is simple, only a few sidhe words of protection,” he said. “You might need help with pronunciation, but I can work on it with you.”
“Funny thing, that,” I said, leaning against the car’s side. “Last person to teach me a language insisted her tongue needed to be in my mouth to make sure I was saying things right.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. Good idea.” Ryder was bold and persistent. “I definitely could see the advantage in that.”
I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious. I went with serious. “You are not chasing words into my mouth with your tongue.”
He stood over one of the bloody spots, placing a foot on either side of the salt. “It was worth a try.”
“Shit.” I drew the word out with a hiss, peeking in on Shannon. She gave me a smile and sipped at a water bottle. “You doing okay in there?”
“Yes,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. The strain on her body pinked her face, her cheekbones nearly as red as a coxcomb. “It’s resting right now. I’m sure as soon as I fall asleep, it’ll wake me up again.”
“You don’t even know what it is?” Most humans knew what they were going to have months before the kid actually made an appearance.
“No, it’s better this way. It’s good to wait,” Shannon replied. “Besides, it’s a sidhe tradition not to know. Ciarla wanted it that way.”
“Huh.” I kept my thoughts to myself, but I was certain Ryder caught the sound. Human or elfin, it was impossible for the three races to interbreed with one another, and Shannon looked too human to be like the kids at the Diamond Kitty, so it didn’t make sense for her to follow a sidhe tradition.
“She and my sister are close friends, remember? Shannon follows a lot of sidhe paths.”
Ryder
lied worse than one of Jonas’s toddlers. His eyes shifted back and forth, and the edges of his mouth tightened. I snorted, and he shot me a hard look.
Pointing down at the salt line, he asked, “Do you want to learn this?”
“Yeah. I’ll record it on my link and see if I can memorize it.”
“I can check your pronunciation later if you’d like, without the tongue of course.”
“During that dinner, I suppose.”
He grinned. “At least you’re not threatening to shoot me anymore.”
“Night’s not over yet,” I reminded him. “And I’ve got full loads of ammo.”
“You’re feral, but at least you come prepared.” Ryder crouched over the blooded salt, placing his left hand flat on the line. “Ready?”
“Yeah.” I clicked on my wrist link and moved behind him, adjusting the wide leather band until I had the piece angled toward Ryder. “Go ahead.”
He opened his mouth, and my world fell away into black, the darkness choking my throat with strong, vicious fingers.
His voice hit me, slapping hard across my mind. My stomach clutched tight at the husky sidhe rasp he growled into the salt. I doubled over. My nerves cut free and dropped me to the ground. Each syllable drove me down, beating me with sharp hooks into my spine and guts. A searing ache spread across my shoulder blades, the skin slowly tearing as Ryder continued his mutterings.
I tried to push myself up, rocking on my knuckles, but the spell slithered around me, wrapping me tighter, and I could feel my skin throbbing with every heartbeat. Slow trickles of blood ran down my arms, parting at my elbows and flowing around my wrists. It pooled under my palms, and my shirt gave up trying to soak in the wetness coming from the split skin on my back. A pulse built, slow at first, then hardening to a steady throb along the keloids stretching over my shoulders, and my skin gave, parting down my spine. Sobs choked me, tears watering the red down to a liquid pink.
Shuddering, I rolled, fighting to take a breath. Razors filled my lungs, the air turning to ice as I sucked in deep. A few more words and I was done in, letting the darkness take me.
And still, I wasn’t safe.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
STEWING IN the black, I cowered from long feline faces howling and laughing at my pain. Their voices echoed, becoming snatches of conversation filled with ugly words followed by even uglier fists. There wasn’t an inch of my body left untouched—unbruised. I shivered, unable to move more than a few centimeters. My arms were useless, bound by something I couldn’t see, but it didn’t matter. The shackles were mostly for show. I wasn’t going anywhere. There was nowhere to go.
Hands were on me, then inside me, lifting up the skin along my thighs, ass, and back. My voice was shot. There wasn’t anything left in me to scream, and as for begging, I’d given that up a long time ago. I tried to blink, but the light poured into my eyes, burning away all my tears.
“Kai!”
The word sounded different, incomplete. I listened to it ripple out along my mind and found the sound empty and edgeless. Hearing it should cut, gutting me and letting my insides spill onto the floor. I listened for it again, fascinated by the change. It echoed again, reverberating in my ears.
Singlish.
I knew Singlish—pure, ugly, and simple. Its rough fatness suddenly left me weak with relief. The stop and start of sounds were crude compared to sidhe, but to my ears, it was a balm on swelling blisters. The world grew fuzzy, dotted with tiny uneven stabs of light that I guessed were the lanterns. Sparkling, the dots moved, attached to the flick of my lashes. More noises, words fading in and out, then I surfaced, understanding the language and hearing the panic around me.
“Goddess, Kai. Listen to me. Can you try to drink some water?” There was more, but I lost it in the echo. What I heard were different words, softer and inconsistent with the bleeding of me. I almost didn’t want to answer, wondering where the tones would go, but the light tugged me back.
“Do we leave him? What about the babies?” A woman’s voice joined in, a sharper keen pouring over me, velvet soft but with a firm push. She whispered, “How are we going to get out of here if he’s sick? Can you drive the car?”
“Shannon, go back to the car,” he insisted. “Let me take care of this. You need to rest while you can.”
Ryder, my brain whispered. Iesu, Buddha, and Gilgamesh, he was a pain in the ass, or trying to be. He teased and mocked, lecturing me about dragons and sidhe. I knew Ryder. Shannon was easier to remember. Her body was going to explode, gurgitations of babies, blood, and water. My arm still needed washing where her belly button had touched me.
I risked opening my eyes wider, falling out of the familiar knifing darkness, and the light shifted, turning into dancing balls. The spheres were pretty, like cooked fish eyeballs bobbing around in a soup. I tried reaching for one, but my shoulder didn’t want to work my arm, locking and clicking as I struggled.
“Don’t move.” The golden slither of Ryder’s voice clung to me, holding me up from the shadows. “I’m going to cut your shirt off.”
I mumbled something, but the cool metal sang so close to my flesh that I kept my mouth shut. Speaking would make jagged edges to his cutting, and it would be harder for Ryder to steal my skin from me. For some reason, this made me sad inside, and I stilled, wanting Ryder to have a whole skin when he pulled it free from my flesh. Some part of me mourned the silly thoughts I’d had about dinners and teasing. It was all the same. Everyone was all the same, and I numbed my brain, waiting for the anguished rush to hit me when Ryder made his first cut.
That was another time, my brain reminded me. Now is different. Ryder is not doing those things to you. He is not one of those faces in the dark.
“You’re cold.” He rubbed at my immovable arms. The touch stung, my nerves too ripe with sensation to stand his skin on mine. I felt a dribble of water on my mouth, and I gulped, trying to catch each drop. “Kai, swallow.”
“Is he breathing?” She sounded distant. “It doesn’t look like he’s breathing.”
“Bruugggh.” There wasn’t any hope that I’d sound coherent, but any noise coming out of me would at least assure Shannon that I was pulling in air. “Daaaaamn.”
“See, he’s breathing. You can tell. He’s complaining,” I heard Ryder say as he pulled my shirt apart. It stuck, then gave way, the drying blood stubbornly holding the fabric to my skin. His gasp sucked in so much air I wondered dimly how he held it all. “Morrígan help us. What have they done to you?”
What have they done to me? For a sidhe Lord establishing his own Court, that would be a good question to ask. For me, it was more of a why? Why seemed much more important than what. What was the easiest thing to figure out. It only took one look at my back to see the answer to what.
The scars across my shoulder blades shocked them. They shocked most people, and I heard both Ryder and Shannon gasp. Awash in blood, my back would be horrific, carved out and lifted keloids shaping the skin into sweeping wings. It was the only thing my father ever gave me. His symbol. His black dragon wings carved out and scarred into my back.
“God, I’m going to be sick,” Shannon murmured. “Why would he put bat wings on his back?”
“Not bat wings,” Ryder whispered. Even with my ears ringing, I could hear the horror in his voice. “Those are black pearl dragon wings.”
The wings were spread open, undulations along the scars more from the jagged rips of tearing skin than delicate knife work. Ridged rebar was used to form the metacarpus, the iron corroding and burning through. The curved rebar created phalanges, sweeping out from the main line. When I outgrew one length, the end of the scar was cut open and the bar removed. Then a longer, thicker bar was worked into the rusty scar sleeve to continue the process.
To form the flat of my wings, thin metal lifted and cut under my skin, spreading the hypertrophic slender scars. The wings’ membranes were partially tattered and worn, edges curling in places, and other raised areas were formed by a burni
ng stick passed back and forth over the wingspan. Varying ridges from the rebar loosely resembled the diamond pattern of a reptilian skin, but it’d been close enough to bring murmurs of pleasure. I’d lived for those purring dark signs of approval. Even in the deepest pain, the sound soothed me, a crumb tossed to my starving soul.
That was the what Ryder saw. He was wrong about the what, and the why was still a mystery to me.
“That’s why you don’t know anything about the Dawn Court. You’re unsidhe. You’re even wearing a Dusk Court’s symbol on your back,” Ryder murmured. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I hated the sound of betrayal in Ryder’s voice. It should have soothed me, an assurance he wouldn’t chase after my tail anymore, but something inside me broke. Ryder’s assumption was natural. Why would I be wearing pearl dragon wings if I weren’t unsidhe? Because, I wanted to scream at him, the unsidhe mark everything, especially the things they own.
“Doesn’t matter.” Mumbling, I tried to push him away, but Ryder was immovable.
“It does matter,” he replied, wiping my face with a wet cloth. “I would have told Grandmother no. She must have known. That’s why she insisted on meeting you. Kai, you’re a fool for not telling me!”
“What does it change?” I felt stronger, but my insides were churning. “Other than I shouldn’t have been inside that damned circle.”
“I wouldn’t have done the spell if you’d told me,” Ryder growled. “I could have killed you.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried. Get back. Going to be sick now.” I heaved, folding in half. A gush of water tasting like rotten algae spilled out, but thankfully nothing else. Through the muddled recesses of my mind, I counted back to when I’d eaten last, only remembering some jerky before being dragged into Elfhaine. “Pele, I hate this.”
