by S. M. Reine
“Okay, let’s go,” Deirdre said, grabbing Vidya’s arm. She didn’t want to spend another moment in that cathedral with those people.
“I might as well go with you and see what I can do about my access points to the Winter Court.” Brother Marshall followed them down the aisle. The gargoyle lurched into motion, leaning on its knuckles as it loped behind him, showering granite dust on the runner between the pews.
“Can’t you just teleport the whole cathedral to Cumberland?” Deirdre asked.
“I could, but then we’d be taking Rylie and my brothers there as well.”
And Brother Marshall didn’t want to risk the people he was protecting.
All these people were prioritizing those they cared about above everyone else. Their judgment was fogged with emotion, making them weak and vulnerable.
Didn’t they know that the people they cared about could turn on them at any moment? It wasn’t that long ago that Deirdre would have protected people like Gage and Niamh, but Gage had forced her to kill him, and Niamh had turned around to kill her. Even Stark, strange and twisted as their relationship was, had left her for his ex-wife at the first opportunity.
Rylie would learn soon enough. Life had a way of teaching its ugliest lessons with brutal surety.
Love meant nothing. Trust meant nothing.
Yeah, they’d learn soon.
Brother Marshall tucked his staff under one arm, then reached up to grab the gargoyle’s bicep. It lifted him onto its back, where he sat comfortably between the wings.
Vidya scooped Deirdre into her arms as though she weighed nothing.
“Hey, Deirdre,” Rylie said, lingering by the altar. It seemed like the people painted on the mural had fixed their cool gazes upon the Alpha, though they hadn’t actually moved an inch. “I know you don’t trust me. I don’t blame you. But I want you to know that I am going to fix this. I won’t let her win by cheating.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Deirdre said as Vidya carried her through the doorway.
The last thing she saw from Rylie was the disguised Alpha turning to the mural, as if praying to the couple behind the altar.
VIII
Vidya was as good as a preternatural GPS. She had once confessed to Deirdre that a valkyrie could track a butterfly across tundra if she had reason to kill that butterfly. She zeroed in on the location near Cumberland with ease.
Not for the first time, Deirdre felt grateful that Vidya had decided they should be friends rather than enemies.
Vidya must have been able to read the signs from the air. She never looked away from the street, not for a moment. They cut through the wet sky, carving a path toward the address that Rylie had given them—a path to Stark.
Over the valkyrie’s shoulder, Deirdre watched Brother Marshall following on his gargoyle mount. The magic rippling from the staff cloaked them in shreds of night. She could only occasionally see the sweep of broad stone wings through the clouds.
Vidya pitched, arms tightening on Deirdre.
They spiraled toward the earth.
Their destination was well north of New York, but the rain seemed to have followed them there. The grass they landed on was spongy. Damp haloes ringed the lights of the manor beyond the gate where Vidya had alighted.
It was an impressive house, like the kind of thing that Deirdre had seen in movies about rich people. She didn’t even know the words for the fancy windows and pillars. Gables? Something like that.
Instead of a yard, the house had pastures. There was also a barn. Some stables. Lots of places for animals to hide, since it was currently too wet for them to be outside.
Brother Marshall and his gargoyle landed. “We should try to be all discreet-like. There’s not a lot of magic around here. I think this place is full of humans.”
“Discreet,” Vidya echoed, looking down at her bare chest. She pulled her wings in tight against her back, but there was no concealing her nudity—normal for shifters, but shocking for mundanes.
“I’m gonna hide Dale Junior in the trees,” Brother Marshall said. “Come with me. I’ll give you my robes.”
“Dale Junior?” Deirdre asked.
Brother Marshall patted the gargoyle’s shoulder.
He didn’t look like a Dale Junior.
They moved into the trees, giving Deirdre time to study the gate, searching for a way to open it up. This was something she knew well. She might not have been able to fly around of her own volition, but she’d broken into a lot of places before.
It looked like there was a security box on the inside. She could climb the wall and let the others through.
Deirdre dried her hands on the hips of her jeans, prepared to scale the bars. But then she noticed the sign.
The house was so fancy, it had a damn name.
Deirdre had to step right up to read the sign for the manor in the gloom. She slid her fingers over the engraved letters.
Stark Estates.
“What…?”
“Excuse me! We’re not open yet!”
She turned to see a man jogging across the pastures. He was lean, wearing a polo shirt and khaki slacks.
The last time that she’d seen him, he was wearing a ball cap, which had effectively distracted from his strong features and cutting gaze.
Only now did she realize how much he resembled Everton Stark.
“You’re related,” she said, unable to conceal her surprise.
He stopped a few feet away. “Excuse me? Who are you?”
It was the man that Stark had given Chadwick Reynolds’s surviving horses to. Deirdre had seen Stark giving the sickly victims of the blood factory to this man, along with a rather large wad of cash to take care of them.
This guy ran a charity where he took care of animals rescued from inhumane farming conditions, and judging by his age and eyes, he shared close genetics with Everton Stark.
“I’m Deirdre Tombs,” she said, thrusting her hand at him through the bars of the fence. “I’m Beta to your...cousin?”
“My brother. Ever is my brother.” He hesitated, and then shook her hand. His grip was weak. His muscle wasn’t preternatural, but the kind of strength that came from a mundane man toiling at an animal preserve. “You’re his…his Beta? Is he here?”
“No, he’s not,” she said.
He relaxed visibly. “Oh. Okay. How can I help you?”
“I’d like to talk.” Deirdre shook the fence’s bars lightly.
His eyebrows pinched. “Okay.” The man pressed something on the other side and the gate swung open. “I’m Sascha Stark. Pleasure to meet you.” That seemed to be a formality rather than a genuine expression of emotion. Sascha was not happy to meet someone closely aligned with Stark—not happy at all.
The brothers might have sold horses to each other, but they weren’t friends.
“I’m not here to visit your charity,” Deirdre said. “I was sent here because…” She trailed off, remembering what Rylie had said.
Sascha must have sold Stark to the unseelie if he had a device that could create a portal to the Winter Court.
She swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat. “I was hoping you could give me more information about Stark. He’s missing.”
Vidya and Brother Marshall emerged from the trees, the gargoyle nowhere in sight. The valkyrie had donned the monk’s robes, leaving him wearing nothing but jeans and a white t-shirt. Together, they almost passed for normal.
“I’m sure you know him better than I do,” Sascha said. “We don’t speak anymore.”
“You speak enough that he recently gave you horses.”
Sascha flinched. “Ah.”
“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “Can we go inside and talk?”
He nodded stiffly, but he didn’t lead them to the manor. He took them into the stables.
The horses from Chadwick Reynolds’s high-rise occupied most of the stalls, though Deirdre wouldn’t have recognized them if not for the dappled patterns of their hides. In the short ti
me that they had been under the care of Sascha Stark, they had developed a new layer of fat under their skin and much shinier hair.
“I need to do some work while we talk, if you don’t mind,” Sascha said. “The early morning hours are when I get the most done with the animals. I’m scheduled to be in meetings all day.”
“Be my guest,” she said.
Sascha filled a trough with water. It didn’t escape Deirdre’s notice that he stood on the other side of the equipment, as far from them as he could get without obviously trying to escape.
“Do I know you?” he asked, staring hard at Vidya.
“If you attended Stark’s graduation from boot camp, then you might recognize me.” Vidya slipped Brother Marshall’s robe off of her shoulder to expose a tattoo of the Marines seal. “I was there with him, before Genesis. Me, Stark, and—”
“Melchior,” Sascha said. “I didn’t think any of you survived the skirmish in Bahrain.”
“I’m difficult to kill,” Vidya said.
While they spoke, Deirdre wandered through the stables, examining the horses and their surroundings. She knew that the sluagh could show up at any moment, yet she’d found herself at an estate with Everton Stark’s family name on it. She was with Stark’s brother. She could have answers to every question that had ever crossed her mind about him.
There was no way in heck she’d rush out of there.
“He’s rich,” Deirdre said, startling herself. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud.
“We’ve done well,” Sascha said. He almost looked embarrassed. “Our parents got lucky in the dot com boom.”
“You’ve got an estate.”
“And we attended private schools, with private tutors, and we have trust funds. I’m determined to use my wealth to give back.”
“Your brother uses his wealth to run a rebellion,” Deirdre said.
“It takes more than similar blood to be family with someone,” he said.
There was no mystery as to why Sascha might have given his brother up to the unseelie. He didn’t think much of Stark’s terrorist proclivities. He wanted to save horses and chickens and fluffy little lambs while Stark traveled the country compelling people to acts of murder.
Deirdre didn’t expect to be disgusted by the idea of using his money for charity. Saving animals should have made her happy. But Sascha Stark could have done more with his money—more to help gaeans.
He didn’t need to, though. Genesis had left him mundane.
“I’m guessing Stark joined the Marines so he wouldn’t feel indebted to you people,” Deirdre said.
“Actually, it was because of her.” Sascha turned off the water to the trough. He stroked the neck of a horse as it drank deeply. His hands were so much gentler than his brother’s.
“Vidya?”
“Rhiannon,” he said. “He got tangled up with her. That piece of trash.”
Deirdre didn’t even like the woman, but her hackles lifted at a man referring to her as trash. This rich man in his manor surrounded by beautiful pastures with so much money he could throw it at animals and still feed himself. “How did he meet her?”
“She was entrenched with the local gangs. Mafia. Something like that, I don’t know. I stayed away from her. She came to us for an internship, but we rejected her because of her ties to a crime syndicate. Ever, though—he was entranced. He followed Rhiannon when she left the interview and never came back. Getting him enlisted in the military seemed like the fastest way to get him away from her.”
“They threatened to take his trust fund if he didn’t enlist,” Vidya added.
“We thought we were saving his life,” Sascha said.
“Did you think that summoning the unseelie if he tried to hide out at home with you would save his life, too?” Deirdre asked.
Sascha took a few steps back, until the mass of his body was hidden behind the horse’s. It didn’t make her think any better of him, that he would use a vulnerable creature as cover against an unidentified shapeshifter like Deirdre. “I thought it might save mine.”
Brother Marshall glanced out the window at the dark sky. “We don’t have much time. Give it to me.” He extended a hand toward Sascha. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Sascha pulled boxes of medicine and tools out of cabinets against the wall, then fished a sphere out from behind them. It was marked with sidhe runes. Deirdre recognized them because they’d taken an identical artifact off of Chadwick Reynolds.
She snatched it out of his hand.
“I hope you feel good about yourself,” Deirdre said. She lobbed the sphere to Brother Marshall, who caught it easily.
“You didn’t see what Ever used to do under Rhiannon’s influence. You’d make the same choices I have if you did,” Sascha said.
“Like the fact that he ordered someone to hide his daughters?”
His eyes filled with burning intensity. “The girls. Do you know where they are?”
“No. Do you?”
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “I wish I did. My parents and I want nothing more than to bring them home to us so we can take care of them.”
“I thought it took more than similar blood to be family,” Deirdre said.
“It does,” Sascha said. “But they deserve the chance to become part of ours. They deserve better than Rhiannon and Ever.”
“This is interesting and all, folks, but I’m not here for family drama. I’m gonna go ahead and change this so that it will take us directly to Stark.” Brother Marshall wedged his fingernails into the runes on the sidhe stone. “It’s keyed in to him already. It won’t be difficult. And I can use the pieces I break off to make a tool that will bring us back as well.”
“Then do it,” Deirdre said.
“If you bring the girls back to me, we can take care of them,” Sascha said. “We can keep them safe.”
She turned from Sascha, unable to bring herself to respond. The sight of him made her so angry. But why? Because he reminded her of his brother, whom she already felt so angry at? Because he had betrayed Stark? Because he was another reminder that there were people in this world living in paradise—people who were no different from Deirdre aside from a stroke of luck that had birthed them into a higher class?
Stark had come from that higher class, too. Yet he’d been reborn a gaean. A shifter. And not one of Rylie’s privileged beings, but one of the dregs of society.
He knew both perspectives, and he’d chosen to side with the lower class for justice.
That had to mean something.
Deirdre needed to believe that the man she had chosen to follow into the depths of Hell was still inside of Stark. She needed to believe he’d started the revolution because he believed in it, just as she did, and that he would come back to Earth once he realized how much they suffered without him.
She needed to believe in Everton Stark.
Brother Marshall hunkered down with the sidhe stone, and Deirdre paced, watching the windows. Watching for the attack she knew was coming.
The horses balked when Deirdre passed them, sensing the animal within her. They nickered. Whinnied.
“I think that’s part of what drove him nuts in the end,” Sascha said. “That reaction. It killed him that he couldn’t ride his horses after Genesis.”
That got Deirdre’s attention. “Stark? Everton Stark? He likes to ride horses?”
“He did dressage. Look…” Sascha took a photo off of one of the higher shelves, blowing dust off of the glass. He gave it to Deirdre.
The younger Everton Stark had no beard. He was a short, lean man on horseback, every inch the wealthy gentleman. His Andalusian had its knees lifted in the photograph, caught mid-dance. “Ever loved the control, the relationship with the horse. He prided himself on that. He stopped when Rhiannon entered his life and became this thing I couldn’t even recognize.”
Deirdre opened the back of the frame. She took the photo out. “This is mine now.” She wasn’t sure why she wanted it. Sh
e just felt like it was important.
“You might as well have it. Our parents have gotten rid of every other picture of him by now. Everything that survived Genesis—which wasn’t much.”
“You and your family shun him, and you act surprised when he goes rogue,” Deirdre said.
“He’s a murderer. What would you have done?”
“Incoming,” Vidya said. She stood in the open doors to the pastures, looking out at the dark evening. She whipped Brother Marshall’s robes off over her head, exposing her bare chest and emerging wings.
It was darker than it should have been, even at this time of morning. There were more than clouds on the horizon. There was a deep blackness that slid toward them, making the grass vanish.
Deirdre flashed back to Genesis. To the black void that had devoured her elementary school and everyone inside it. To the shadows that consumed her while she screamed under the blackberry bushes.
This wasn’t the Genesis void.
If possible, it was something even worse.
“Sluagh.” She whirled on Brother Marshall. “We have to go. Open a hole to the Middle Worlds.”
“It’s not ready yet,” he said. “It’s not easy for me to manipulate sidhe magic without destroying it. Hold the sluagh off for a few minutes.”
“Hold it off? Hold it off?” He might as well have asked her to hold a hurricane at bay. Deirdre shoved Sascha toward the rear of the stables. “Run. Get out of here.”
He hesitated. “What is it?”
“Death,” Deirdre said. “Worse than death. You can’t do anything about it.”
“The horses,” he said.
“Would you rather die with them?”
Sascha didn’t need more prompting. He ran through the rear doors of the stable, leaving them swinging open in the wind as he sprinted for the manor.
The sluagh didn’t roar as it approached like the Genesis void had. It screamed. Deirdre could hear the wailing echoing over the pastures, and she wondered how many souls it had added to its morass since the failed execution. How many were members of the OPA? How many were innocent gaeans?
So many people damned because of Rhiannon and Deirdre.
