by S. M. Reine
“No!” Deirdre pushed against the harpy. “They have to know the truth!”
“You’re going to be arrested!”
She elbowed her former friend away. “They won’t arrest me. They can’t touch me!”
Shifters were climbing the nearby buildings, dragging their bodies up the vertical faces like Deirdre had when she was doing parkour. But this wasn’t a tribute to Deirdre. They were using their preternatural strength to help haul witches a few stories higher, giving them superior vantage points from which they could hurl magic at the OPA helicopters.
The nearest chopper lifted, getting out of the way.
The BearCats inched slowly but surely toward the stage. They parted the crowd as Moses once parted the Red Sea. People had no choice but to move or get run over—and Deirdre was certain she saw a few of them falling under the wheels.
That didn’t seem right. They should have stopped. Rylie wouldn’t have let the OPA hurt anyone.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
Nobody heard her. The sound system had been unplugged and January Lazar had vanished. People in black combat gear kicked over the towering speakers.
Deirdre searched for Vidya and spotted metal wings flashing as she lifted the reporter to safety.
At least someone would escape to get the word out.
“We really have to go,” Niamh said.
One of the BearCats stopped at the edge of the stage. Rioters leaped onto its roof as OPA agents emerged, magic frothing around their fists.
Times Square seethed with violence and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
So much anger. So much pain.
Everyone looked like Gage.
Agents climbed onto the stage. Niamh moved to confront them, screaming a battle cry that sounded feeble in comparison to Vidya’s.
They kicked her down as easily as they’d kicked the speakers over. The frail, anemic redhead offered no real resistance.
“Stop this!” Deirdre shouted, lifting her hands over her head. “Stop hurting people! You can have me!”
“This isn’t a negotiation,” the nearest OPA agent said. She approached with a black bag and a pair of silver handcuffs. “The Alpha wants to see you.”
“Then take me to her,” Deirdre said.
The bag was jerked over her head.
Deirdre didn’t know what happened after that.
All the sounds seemed to indicate violence. The thunder of magic, the popping gunfire, the screams—people had seen Deirdre’s arrest, and they were furious. But then she was inside the BearCat, pushed into a leather chair, her ankles and wrists cuffed.
A door slammed shut. The vehicle’s armor muffled every sound.
Even in the darkness of the hood, she saw Gage and Stark everywhere.
Everything was bleeding.
This wasn’t how she’d hoped the rally would go. Deirdre had just wanted people to know. She wanted change.
The BearCat drove slowly at first, and then faster. They must have cleared the chaos at Times Square.
“Did you get the others?” one agent muttered to another.
“We got the vampire guy and the valkyrie,” someone else replied. “That’s everyone the Alpha wanted.”
“Great. She’ll be happy to hear it.”
Deirdre wasn’t happy to hear it. The OPA had arrested Lucifer and Vidya—two people who had no relationship with Rylie, and therefore no protection.
The OPA agents kept the bag over Deirdre’s head while transporting her, allowing her to experience only confusing, jumbled sensory information without the benefit of eyesight to help her interpret it. She heard bodies moving around her. Felt hands on her arms, the top of her head, her waist. They grabbed her like she was meat being taken to a butcher shop.
After some indeterminate length of time, the bag was whipped off of Deirdre’s head. She sucked in air that wasn’t poisoned by her own carbon monoxide. Her vision spun, allowing the OPA offices at the United Nations to come into vivid focus.
And she found a pair of legs right in front of her.
Deirdre’s eyes tracked from strappy ballet flats up the curve of calves to a cobweb skirt draped over broad hips. A leather corset was cinched tightly to form an hourglass shape where there would have ordinarily been a much boxier figure. Small breasts were emphasized by leather and lace, cleavage framed by a choker dangling with leather straps, chains, and a glittering sapphire.
Then the face.
That wasn’t Rylie’s face.
“What the hell?” Deirdre asked.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Rhiannon Stark said. “You wanted my attention with your stupid rally, didn’t you? Well, congratulations. You have it.”
V
“Where’s Rylie?” Deirdre asked.
Mirth lingered around the corners of Rhiannon’s lips. “The former Alpha?”
Former.
It was all too much.
The failed rally.
Being arrested by Rhiannon.
Seeing Rhiannon taking over the OPA offices at the United Nations building.
And now calling Rylie the “former” Alpha?
“Not until the inauguration,” Deirdre snarled. “You’re not Alpha until the unseelie leader takes over and declares you his mate!”
“Yes, but transition is a long process. I’m getting everything set up for my mate, the king of the unseelie, to take over for Rylie Gresham.” She said the name in a coldly dismissive way, as though naming a centuries-dead President of the United States. Someone old and irrelevant.
“The king of the unseelie. You mean the dragon I skewered like an olive in a martini? That king of the unseelie?”
“The king,” Rhiannon said calmly. “The unseelie faction won. People didn’t vote for a specific Alpha. They voted for a faction.”
“You’re not eligible to be Alpha. You’re not even sidhe.”
Rhiannon didn’t rise to take the bait. She made no confessions or denials. She just stood there, as calm as could be, and spread frost throughout Secretary Friederling’s office.
“You wouldn’t be confessing to murder, would you?” Rhiannon asked.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you come closer and we’ll chat about it?” Deirdre twisted in her bonds. “I want to talk with you without having to shout.”
“You’re not in a position to make demands.” Rhiannon actually took a step backward, not from fear, but because she was taunting her. “You’re not in a position to do anything except make peace with whatever gods you might believe in. Your death is scheduled for an hour from now. You might want to get started on praying.”
Deirdre’s spine stiffened. “My death?”
“Your public execution. I’d like to have set it up further in advance to that so we could get a bigger audience, but you’ve made powerful friends. I can’t give people an opportunity to organize a rescue.”
She took a few deep breaths, trying to slow her pounding heart. The threat was enough to shock cold reality through her buzz. There probably wasn’t enough lethe in the universe to keep Deirdre from feeling afraid at that threat, especially from someone who so obviously meant it.
Rhiannon couldn’t execute Deirdre. She was a phoenix. She’d just come right back.
A public execution—no. It wasn’t happening.
“Where are my people?” Deirdre asked.
“If you’re referring to the creatures who joined you at the rally…” Rhiannon turned a tablet on Secretary Friederling’s desk so she could read it. “The vampire lord, a mercenary code-named Lucifer, and the valkyrie named Vidya—they’ll be executed with you. Publicly. In an hour.”
“You can’t kill me,” Deirdre said. The words quavered. She swallowed hard, but it was too late to take back the show of weakness. For all the time that she’d spent pretending to be a bad guy at the asylum, and for the many days she’d spent running Stark’s pack in his absence, she still wasn’t such a good actress that she could pretend she wasn’t
afraid of dying.
“I probably can’t,” Rhiannon agreed. “But I don’t need to do it myself.”
She flicked her fingers.
A shadowy form loomed by the windows, a ghost of a monster with a thousand tentacles, a million skeletal hands, bleeding silvery fluid across the floor.
The sluagh.
A deadly unseelie assassin that crawled the ley lines and devoured souls.
Deirdre jerked, but she couldn’t go anywhere—not with her arms and legs bound.
She didn’t need to escape. The sluagh vanished within moments.
It wasn’t real. It was just illusion.
“Ofelia destroyed it,” Deirdre said. “The real unseelie queen wiped that thing off the face of the Earth the same night that I killed your so-called mate.”
“Ofelia could destroy the sluagh about as easily as she could destroy Death himself,” Rhiannon said. “You can remove it from this world, send it back to its nest, and force it to regrow. But you can’t destroy it.” How could she say that without a quiver of fear in her voice? Didn’t it scare her to know that something that could kill either of them was invulnerable? “It’s waiting for the execution, Deirdre Tombs. It’s waiting for you. I’ve had it taken down to the courtyard in its cage.”
“Cage? You’ve caged the sluagh?” That monster was so deadly that Rhiannon had banished it from the Winter Court in order to keep it from devouring her—and it had recently slaughtered the true unseelie queen. The idea of caging such an elemental force was ridiculous. And horrifying.
“I am the Queen of the Winter Court,” she said regally. “It’s my beast. I can cage it if I want.”
“If you think you’re in control of the sluagh—you’re stupid. You’re just plain stupid. Crazy to boot.”
“I’ve sent it after you, Beta. Its only purpose is to hunt you. The instant it’s released from that cage, it will not stop until you’re dead.” Rhiannon seized Deirdre by the wrists, forcing her to her feet. She couldn’t move her legs enough to walk. She all but hopped with Rhiannon to the window. “If you don’t believe me, you can see for yourself.”
Deirdre gazed down the length of the glimmering white United Nations building to the courtyard far below, which was usually roped off to prevent tourists from drawing too close.
That rope was gone now, and there was a crowd packing the courtyard for the execution to come.
A huge circle of power had been painted on the ground there, marked with a million runes too small for Deirdre to distinguish at that distance. It looked a lot like the magic that had protectively encircled Ofelia’s cocoon at Original Sin, but a thousand times more complex. The magic it took to contain a creature as powerful as the sluagh must have been incredible.
And that definitely was the sluagh down there. Its seething mass, skeletal hands, and tentacles were impossible to mistake.
The illusion that Rhiannon had briefly summoned of the sluagh was nothing in comparison to the reality of the thing.
It was waiting to kill her.
Deirdre pulled back from the window, afraid it would see her and break free of the circle. Rhiannon held her tightly. “You’re insane. If you attack any rivaling faction before the inauguration, you’ll lose all protection from the oath.”
“Not if you attack me first.” Rhiannon tossed Deirdre to the floor again.
“You can’t make me.”
“I don’t need to. Stark didn’t take the oath. It doesn’t apply to you. But nobody knows that, do they? The public believes we’re all under that oath, and the public, as you’ve demonstrated, is susceptible to suggestion.” Rhiannon turned Friederling’s desktop monitor around. There was a video playing on silent loop.
She had filmed Deirdre stabbing Melchior with a sword in Original Sin.
Deirdre should have known there would be footage. They had filmed her in the Summer Court, too.
And it sure made it look like she’d broken the oath.
“You’re going to let everyone know that Melchior’s dead? But he’s your Alpha! Without him, the unseelie can’t take over!”
“Nobody will recognize the Ethereal Blade. They won’t know what it is or what it does. All they will know is that Deirdre Tombs, Beta of the independent faction, won’t be protected by the oath anymore. They’ll understand why you have to die.” She turned the monitor back around.
Deirdre’s knees wobbled. She sat down hard on the tile. “I’m popular. There will be more rioting. They’ll never accept your control if you hurt me.”
“If you think that a few galvanized sects of the community mean that people care about who’s in charge of the gaeans, then you’re stupid. They don’t care. They just want to keep collecting benefits checks and don’t care who is at the top of the food chain.” She sauntered to the window, gazing down upon the sluagh. “People will forget that they were angry once you’re gone. They will go back to being complacent sheep. There will be no resistance.”
“People aren’t complacent. They care. I’ve seen it.”
Rhiannon just laughed.
The sound made Deirdre angrier. Lethe and fire burned through her veins. “You won’t be able to hold out against them without sidhe magic. You’re nothing. You’re just a damn witch!”
“No sidhe magic?” Rhiannon’s nose wrinkled. “I’m not just anything.”
She flung her hands out.
Ice erupted from her fingertips. It sparkled with strange green power—not the glimmering blue that Deirdre had seen in the Winter Court with Melchior, but something else. Deirdre had never seen the likes of it.
But it was definitely sidhe magic.
It encased Secretary Friederling’s desk, expanding to crawl up the walls, dripping with flakes of snow.
“Do you know what’s most pathetic about America’s gaeans?” Rhiannon asked. She punched her fist in the air again. Spikes of ice bloomed on the ground in front of Deirdre, who threw herself away from them with a cry. “When I begin to freeze the country, they won’t do anything about it. They won’t fight me. They’ll complain, they’ll share angry status updates on their social networks, they’ll put on a few extra layers of sweaters. But they won’t do anything.”
She gestured again. Ice whipped around Deirdre, encircling her as the sluagh was encircled in magic.
It was so cold.
“How?” Deirdre asked. She had seen the red blood. Rhiannon shouldn’t have been able to use sidhe magic at all.
Rhiannon sank to her knees, skirt billowing around her. Her fingernails dug into Deirdre’s jaw as she gripped her chin. Rhiannon’s eyes were so cruel. Worse, they were filled with frigid intelligence.
“You must be exceptional if my husband likes you,” Rhiannon said. “He only fixates on exceptional women.” She tilted Deirdre’s head roughly to either side, as though searching for some physical indication of what made her special.
“Jealous?” Deirdre asked, squeezing the word out between her lips.
Rhiannon backhanded her.
The room erupted into stars. Deirdre slammed into the floor, unable to catch herself with her arms still tied behind her back. She tasted blood.
Rhiannon panted from exertion, shaking out her hand. She couldn’t deliver casual blows with preternatural strength the way that her husband could. But she made up for it with her viciousness.
Deirdre tried to squirm away from Rhiannon’s next strike. The woman slammed the spiked heel of her shoe into Deirdre’s cheek.
Bone snapped.
“Jealous?” she asked. “Jealous? I’m the one who left Ever. He’s wasted his whole life looking for me. Why do you think I’d be jealous?”
Blood dribbled from the corner of Deirdre’s mouth. She couldn’t see out of her left eye. But the healing fever swept over her, quickly mending the damage inflicted by Rhiannon. “It must take an insecure bitch to pretend to be some crappy unseelie sidhe. Why don’t you try shooting higher? You could have at least pretended to be a shifter.”
Rhiannon s
trode to her ice-encrusted desk, heels clicking. “I was wrong. You’re not exceptional at all. Ever’s just gone crazy. Or else he likes your tits.” She picked something up. Metal scraped against wood.
Deirdre didn’t see what it was until Rhiannon brought it closer to her face.
Pliers.
She had seen Stark rip the teeth out of enough of his followers to know what Rhiannon might want to do with that. It seemed that he had learned all of his cruelest tricks from her.
Deirdre squeezed her lips shut, but Rhiannon pried her jaw open, shoving fingers that were encrusted with silver rings into Deirdre’s mouth so that she couldn’t bite down.
Metal clamped on an upper incisor.
Snap.
The pain lanced all the way through her sinuses, behind her eye, into her brain. Fresh blood flooded her mouth.
“I only brought you here so I could see what had Ever so interested,” Rhiannon said, frighteningly calm even as she dropped Deirdre’s tooth to the floor. “I wasn’t planning on punishing you before killing you. After all, you’re hardly significant in the grand scheme of things. But I’ve decided that I don’t like you. So here we are, and here you are.”
Deirdre refused to make a sound. She refused to shut her eyes. Healing fever swept through her, but she didn’t give one damn reaction.
The pliers clamped down on another of Deirdre’s teeth.
She had lost every single one of her teeth when she’d shapeshifted into her phoenix at Melchior’s command—every single one—but it hadn’t been painful like this. It hadn’t left her gums painful and throbbing.
It hadn’t made her scream.
Two teeth gone.
A door whispered open. Shiny black loafers entered Deirdre’s vision. The shoes could have belonged to anyone, but she recognized that limp.
“Friederling.” Blood sprayed over Deirdre’s bottom lip when she lisped his name.
Rhiannon turned to greet him. “Secretary, what a pleasure. How can I help you?” She still gripped one of Deirdre’s bloody teeth in the pliers.
“You know that the OPA has rooms without cameras where you can torture people, don’t you?” Friederling asked.
