by S. M. Reine
Deirdre gazed at it helplessly through the window. The grass was dying under the icy spray of the sluagh’s fluids. Sascha’s horses weren’t going to have anything to graze on soon, assuming they survived.
Another scream shattered the air. It was louder than the ones that came out of the sluagh, and far closer.
A mass of feathers slammed into the window just inches from Deirdre. The whole wall shook.
“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said, jerking back.
Niamh shoved the window open from the outside, using her free hand to strip the harpy skin off. “I’m sorry, I tried to get here as fast as I could.” She scrambled into the stables. “The sluagh found me with the vampires at the asylum—it ate a bunch of the murder. Lucifer wasn’t watching me. I thought I could get away and warn you.”
Deirdre helped her through the window, despair swelling within her belly. “You should have escaped!”
Niamh all but collapsed in her arms. The flight to Stark Estates had worn her out, leaving her papery-pale flesh looking downright vampiric. “I had to warn you.”
“But you can’t do anything here except die!”
“Isn’t that what you’d want anyway?” Niamh asked. Her voice was so faint, Deirdre wasn’t sure that’s what she’d really heard.
Stupid harpy.
“I’ve got the portal!” Brother Marshall announced.
The stable wall broke open.
Lashing tentacles smashed through the stables, slinging icy blood across the stables. The screaming horses banged inside their stalls.
The sluagh was even more terrifying a presence for the animals than the shifters were.
Deirdre couldn’t blame them. Staring into its massive body, she felt pretty damn terrified herself. It seemed to have grown to twice the size it had been outside the United Nations earlier that night, glutted on gaean souls. The skeletons within the darkness were clawing at themselves. Writhing in ultimate misery.
The one thing that could definitely kill a phoenix for good.
But the sheer size of the sluagh was their saving grace at the moment. It could only reach a few limbs into the stable, unable to squeeze its body through the wall. It would need to open a bigger gap to reach them.
Hundreds of tentacles and bony hands beat at the siding, ripping it away.
Vidya extended her wings and leaped in to engage it. She moved like a tornado, whirling through the air to slice the sluagh apart.
She severed its limbs easily, but the sluagh wasn’t deterred. It didn’t even try to fight back. It just kept tearing at the stables, faster and faster, peeling it apart like it was trying to reach the rotten core of an onion.
Deirdre dragged Niamh toward Brother Marshall. “Where’s the portal?”
He pointed at an empty patch of air behind him. “There.”
She couldn’t see anything, but that seemed to be typical of sidhe portals.
“Come on, Vidya!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”
“I haven’t made the thing to help us return yet,” Brother Marshall said.
“There’s no time,” Deirdre said. “Make it on the other side. We have to go. Now.”
“I won’t be able to work unseelie magic on the other side.”
“What?”
The roof buckled, showering pieces of the roof over the stalls. Niamh tore free of Deirdre to throw herself at the horses, opening the doors one by one, allowing them to escape.
Deirdre hung beside Brother Marshall’s portal, hesitating. It was only visible because of the absence of debris where it hovered, making the wall behind it shimmer faintly. But she could feel it. The frigid air blasted her, and she knew that the cold was coming.
Gods, but Deirdre hated the cold.
A scream drew her gaze over her shoulder. Niamh had ripped one of the posts off of a stall with preternatural strength and swung it at the sluagh like a club. An icy tentacle had closed around it, and now frost crawled over her hands.
Was she stupid? Why wasn’t she running?
“Brother Marshall?” Deirdre asked, edging closer to the portal.
“Almost done,” he said. He had squeezed himself against the wall, as far from the sluagh as possible. His fingers rushed over the glimmering sidhe stone. It illuminated his face from underneath, revealing worry, but not panic.
Vidya dodged an attack from the sluagh, putting herself within Deirdre’s reach.
“Get to the Winter Court!” Deirdre shouted, shoving the valkyrie hard. Vidya’s mouth opened in a cry of protest, but she tipped through the portal and vanished before any sound could come out.
The sluagh punched into the stables.
It was only inches away now.
Deirdre was pinned between it and the portal—no longer capable of running in any direction but the Winter Court.
The wild flailing of its hands snatched at a horse Niamh had been trying to free. Niamh threw herself back from another lashing tentacle. It caught her ankle. Wrapped around her leg.
This was the person who had betrayed Deirdre. She shouldn’t have cared if the sluagh killed her. But the thought of Niamh getting dragged into the belly of the sluagh was unbearable—a fate worse than death.
Even Niamh didn’t deserve that.
Deirdre drew her gun. “Get off of her!”
She fired into the tentacle. It snapped free of the sluagh’s greater mass, spurting icy fluid from the wound. It splattered on Deirdre’s pants. It was so cold that it stung through the cloth.
But Niamh was free.
“Run,” the harpy said. She was kicking one leg against the floor, but the other was immobile, numbed by the sluagh’s grip.
Deirdre gripped Niamh under both arms and hauled her back.
The sluagh smashed through the wall. A skeletal hand snapped onto one of the nearest horses, and hooves flailed wildly in the air as the murky darkness crawled over its flesh, devouring its entire body.
“Deirdre!” Brother Marshall roared. The gargoyle, Dale Junior, had appeared behind him. It was about to spirit him away from the stables to safety. But the monk was lingering, holding something aloft—a fragment of the stone sphere. It was a small, flat crescent that glowed with unseelie magic.
The monk had done it. Despite being human, he had reassembled a sidhe artifact, and created a way for Deirdre to bring Stark back from the Winter Court.
But there were about a dozen stalls and a dozen tentacles between them.
Deirdre lifted one hand. “Throw it to me!”
He hurled it like a baseball.
Brother Marshall was strong. His form was great.
The teleportation device soared toward her.
Then one of the sluagh’s deadly hands slapped it out of the air. Another hand reached for Deirdre.
There was no time to search for Brother Marshall’s tool. Not if she wanted Niamh to survive—and not if she wanted to keep from getting eaten as well.
Deirdre threw herself backwards, holding the harpy, and they both plunged into the Winter Court with no way back.
IX
Deirdre plummeted into a snowdrift that was at least ten feet deep. It closed around her body, consuming her with chilly frost. At first, everything melted when it contacted her Maine-temperature skin, but she quickly grew colder.
“Damn!”
She scrabbled at the snow, which closed like a blue-tinged sarcophagus over her face. Her hands punched through the surface. Chilly wind bit at her panicked fingertips.
A body struck against hers. “Dee? Dee, where are you?” Niamh’s voice was muffled by the snow.
“I’m here!”
Deirdre gripped her wrists. Together, they reached the top of the drift, heads erupting from the surface. Snow stuck to Niamh’s feathery curls. Her lips were already turning blue.
They were in a deep valley between two hills, which were carpeted in the same dead forest that Deirdre had seen when she visited with Melchior. The branches shimmered with sapphire ice crystals, just a few shades darker tha
n the stars in the velvety sky beyond. From a distance, looking at a picture of it, the cold forest might have been beautiful. Being submerged in the center of it was horrifying.
“I’ve got you.” Vidya appeared from between the trees, flapping her wings with more fervor than usual to keep herself above the snow. There wasn’t enough wind to hold her aloft.
She stretched an arm down. Deirdre took it, and the valkyrie lifted her from the snow. Niamh clung to her legs.
The faint wind was agonizingly cold. Deirdre wished she would numb to it. Anything to keep from feeling like knives were stabbing her in the cheeks and chin and lips.
Vidya’s wings slowed. They drooped in the air.
“I’m landing somewhere that looks firm,” she said.
A half-second later, Deirdre and Niamh hit the nearest hilltop.
She wrapped her arms around the trunk of a tree to hold herself up, trying not to sink into the snow. But even the tree was cold. Maybe colder than the air itself.
“Did you catch the doohickey?” Niamh asked. “The thing Brother Marshall made to get us back to Earth?”
Deirdre squeezed her eyes shut, envisioning how close it had come to her hand. “No,” she said.
Niamh shivered harder. “How are we going to get back? Are we trapped?”
“No,” Deirdre said again, sharper than before.
“What about Brother Marshall himself?” Niamh asked.
“He’s got Dale Junior,” Deirdre said. “He’ll be fine. We need to worry about Stark.” The words came out jilted, trembling. Her jaw shook so hard that she nearly bit her tongue. “B-brother Marshall said he’d send us to Stark d-directly.”
“I can look for him.” But Vidya stood unsteadily nearby, wings wrapped around her bare torso for some scrap of warmth. She didn’t look eager to fly again.
Deirdre never would have expected to miss Melchior, but she did.
She didn’t need a dragon, though. She was a phoenix. Fire flowed through her veins as surely as it did through his. She could save them from the cold if only she could harness her anger the way that Melchior had described.
There were plenty of things to be angry about.
But Deirdre was so tired of trying to work up her rage, her fury. She had plunged into the coldest place in the Middle Worlds without any way back to search for a man who didn’t even want to return, and she mostly just felt like she was going to burst into tears.
She didn’t dare allow that to happen. She was afraid that her eyelids would freeze shut.
“There’s got to be a path to Niflheimr nearby, right?” Niamh hugged her arms tightly around herself as she hunkered down between Deirdre’s legs and the tree. “If we can get to the castle, we can make it. I just need to figure out where we are.”
“You shouldn’t have come at all,” Deirdre said. “What were you thinking, standing up to the sluagh like that? There wasn’t a damn thing you could do to it. I told you to run!”
“I wanted to help you,” Niamh said.
Gods, she sounded so heartbreakingly pathetic.
There was Deirdre’s anger.
But the anger didn’t bring on the flame of the phoenix. It faded into regret too quickly, and something that might have been sympathy.
Niamh had been trying so desperately to make amends for her betrayal that she almost died for it. Multiple times. Yeah, she was crazy, but she was crazy for Deirdre.
She dropped to Niamh’s side, hoping to warm her with proximity, even if she couldn’t summon the fire. “Can you fly?” she asked Vidya. “Stark must be nearby. He must be. If you can get up in the air again, we should be able to spot him, wherever he is.”
“I think I can,” the valkyrie said stiffly. But still, she didn’t move.
Everyone was rapidly freezing, and they were only there because of Deirdre. Because they had followed her into the Winter Court to help, trusting that Deirdre would have had a plan.
She should have been able to protect them.
Yeah, even Niamh.
“I’m so sorry,” Deirdre said. “I want to be able to keep you warm. I should be able to, but… Oh.”
Flames flickered over her arms.
She lifted her hands to look at the fire dancing along her fingers.
It didn’t start out all that warm. It started out cool and red, and then tinted orange as it heated, becoming brighter and brighter. As she warmed, the chill of winter receded.
Had she finally harnessed her anger?
But Deirdre didn’t feel angry at all. It made no sense.
She was too grateful for the break from the cold to care. Deirdre drew back from Niamh, mindful of the way that she had incinerated Chadwick Reynolds.
Snow melted around her body, soaking her clothes and then evaporating within moments. Like Melchior had done before, she cleared the ground around them. She made space for Vidya and Niamh to stand.
“How are you doing that?” Niamh asked. “What happened to being an Omega?”
“I’ve learned a few things,” Deirdre lied.
She trudged up the hill, clearing a path for her companions to walk behind her. They progressed slowly. Even though Deirdre was warm enough to melt the snow, she was fighting against eternal winter. A fledgling phoenix was nothing in comparison to that.
“I hear something,” Vidya said.
Deirdre paused, perking her ears.
All she could hear was the wind whistling through the tree branches.
“What is it?” she asked.
Vidya’s cheeks flushed with fever that had nothing to do with proximity to Deirdre. “Battle.”
She flapped her wings a few times, as if to test them, and then took off. She made a quick spiral above the hill.
Whatever she saw, it got her excited. She vanished beyond the trees.
“Damn,” Deirdre said.
She picked up her pace, and Niamh ran behind her, using the path she carved over the dead grass. They weaved through the black forest, which thinned toward the top of the hill.
“I think we’ve found him,” Niamh said.
Deirdre followed her gaze to the valley beyond the next hill.
What she had initially believed to be a denser copse of black trees wasn’t forest at all—the ground was actually bare of flora in that area.
They were bodies.
She dimmed her flame to help her eyes adjust to the darkness in the valley. Once she did, she could see the splatters of emerald and sapphire that heralded sidhe blood. There were broken limbs, scorch patterns where magic had blazed into the earth, and spears of ice thrusting from the snow.
There were dozens of bodies. Maybe a hundred.
And they formed a trail leading deeper into the hills.
“Damn,” Deirdre said again.
They’d found Stark all right.
At least, they’d found signs of the one thing that Stark did best.
She slid down the embankment, Niamh close behind her. The harpy put her feet where Deirdre put hers, walking in the melted areas and trying to remain as close to her warmth as possible.
Vidya dropped down to join them a few moments later. She was shivering, wings stiff with ice. “They’re all dead.” She sounded disappointed. Deirdre doubted that it was mourning—more like regret that she hadn’t arrived at the battle soon enough to get a piece of it.
The trail of dead led further than Deirdre had first seen. They were seelie and unseelie, clearly factions at war, but they hadn’t killed each other. Their throats were ripped open. Claw marks gashed open their guts. A few of them had been dismembered.
These were signs of death from a very angry bear wolf.
“Do you hear that?” Vidya asked.
Deirdre shook her head. “More battle?”
“Oh yes.”
Vidya raced ahead of them. Her body had warmed enough from proximity to Deirdre to fly again, and she shot across the snow, dodging between swells of earth.
Deirdre was only a few seconds behind, her pace s
lowed by the effort it took to melt her surroundings.
She stopped dead when she rounded the hill.
Sapphire magic sizzled through the air, smashing into a snowdrift with a muffled whumph. She dodged it in time to miss the bulk of the energy. But the splash damage struck her.
Deirdre flared as she whirled on her attacker. He wasn’t even looking in her direction. He hadn’t been trying to kill Deirdre—he was a seelie sidhe, bundled in magic and furs as defense against the cold, and he had lobbed that magic at a different shifter. A huge, monstrous beast that didn’t look like it belonged on Earth.
Everton Stark.
He pounced on the sidhe instants after the magic hit the hillside. Magic flared between their bodies. The faerie screamed wetly as his throat shredded in the jaws of the bear wolf, splattering glittering gem-blood on the snow.
Another sidhe leaped at Stark from behind. Her magic was colder, brighter—unseelie.
Stark’s presence had stopped the sidhe from fighting one another. He had given them a common enemy.
It wasn’t enough to save them.
Vidya smashed into the unseelie. Her momentum carried both of them into the trees. Deirdre assumed that the valkyrie killed her, but she didn’t get to see—another pair of unseelie attacked at that moment. Deirdre hadn’t even seen them coming. They were just suddenly there, warping the Winter Court around her, making the trees swirl like wine dribbled down white silk sheets.
Deirdre wasn’t surprised by the way that they distorted reality anymore. But it made them hard to track.
She drew her guns and fired.
Deirdre glimpsed one of the unseelie collapsing. Deirdre had shot her in the throat.
The other one was building a new ball of electricity between her hands.
Deirdre fired on the second unseelie, and she knew by the pulse of magic that her shot had hit home.
No life remained between Deirdre and Stark. Just bodies. A lot of bodies. He’d already done most of the damage.
The bear wolf rounded on her, lips peeled back in a snarl.
Deirdre hadn’t seen him fully shapeshifted in a long time. He was majestic and terrifying, as intimidating as Melchior’s dragon form in his own way.
