Pas

by S. M. Reine

  The gates of Niflheimr slammed shut behind them all.

  The throne room in Niflheimr was nothing like the place where the seelie sidhe kept the Sapling Throne. That had been out on a patio overlooking the ocean, decorated by fountains overflowing with wine, plump vines, and sweet music.

  This was more like a machine shop made entirely of ice. Those huge white cogs looked like they should have been ground into powder by the way they turned. Spikes of ice thrust from the ceiling. Metal was embedded into the slick floor. Chains had been frozen into the walls, one end buried while the other end coiled on the ground, tipped by shackles.

  The king gestured, and those chains came to life. They slithered around Deirdre’s ankles and wrists.

  She was locked down again, just as she had been in Rhiannon’s control.

  Stark tested his strength against the bonds when they trapped him. He was too dignified to struggle, but she could tell that he was straining against them with the full force of his muscles by the way his veins bulged and his shoulders trembled.

  The chains didn’t break.

  Against the full force of an Alpha’s rage, they didn’t even creak.

  When the king moved up the stairs at the end of the hall, stalagmites erupted around him, the way that a flower girl paved a path for a bride. They grew taller and taller as he ascended. When he finally reached the apex of the throne room, looking down on Deirdre and Stark from a hundred feet above, a glorious seat had grown out of the palace. It shimmered like gemstones. It was cruelly sharp, as though it could cut Deirdre’s eyes just by looking at it.

  The throne stretched toward him, yearning for his touch.

  The king didn’t sit. He stood beside it, hand resting lightly on the arm. He surveyed them with chilly golden eyes that looked like December’s full moon.

  “Cooper,” Stark said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  The king—Cooper, such a common name for a king—didn’t reply. His nostrils flared as he scented the air.

  His hair was frosted underneath the diadem, but he didn’t look cold. He wore his raiment with confidence. Unlike the King of the Summer Court, who had seemed uncomfortable in the trappings of royalty, Cooper was a king down to the marrow. Deirdre wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his bones were made of the same ice spears that decorated the hall.

  The entire wall beyond him was clear glass, permitting Deirdre a clear view of the motionless ocean beyond. The faintest hint of light glowed on the horizon. It was high noon at the Arctic Circle during winter, just barely touched by sunlight.

  “Someone fill me in,” Deirdre said. “If you’re holding Niflheimr, then how the hell is Rhiannon laying claim to the Winter Court?”

  The king’s eyes were chillingly empty, distant. “I don’t care what she’s saying on Earth. I don’t care about anything on Earth. What have you done to my queen?”

  “I didn’t do anything to her,” Deirdre said.

  “I smell her flesh on your hands.”

  Deirdre had touched the queen’s body, searching for injuries that didn’t exist. She had abandoned the body itself in Original Sin.

  “It was the sluagh,” Stark said.

  Cooper’s gaze intensified. “She didn’t.”

  Stark seemed to understand what he was asking. “She did. Her last request was to kill Rhiannon. I’m here to make her wish come true.”

  “Her last request,” Cooper echoed.

  The king paced away from them to look out the windows at the vast, frozen ocean. He was a beautiful man against the stark landscape of the Winter Court. He was frosty, a creature who belonged on that throne of ice, and as intense as a blizzard while remaining as quiet as the night after snowfall.

  When he spoke again, his voice cracked.

  “Do you mean that she’s dead?”

  “Her body might live somewhere,” Stark said. “Her soul doesn’t.”

  Cooper didn’t react to that news except to press one hand against the crystalline window. Frost curled from his fingers, creating swirling patterns like veins that spread toward the edges of the windows.

  “No.” He clenched his hand into a fist, slamming it into the window. “No.”

  “She died trying to take the sluagh down. She sacrificed herself to stop a terrible monster,” Deirdre said, unsure if it would help at all. She doubted it. Nothing had helped her when she learned about her father’s death—even knowing that he had been leaving to search for her, trying to help his daughter.

  There was no warning that the king was about to break. He smashed his fist into the glass again with a roar. His hand punched straight through it.

  The whole wall fractured. It exploded into a snowy powder, raining down on the ocean below.

  He whirled on them, face contorted as he screamed, deep lines carved into his tortured features. His fists shook and the entire castle shook with him.

  Magic coursed through Niflheimr. The floor rumbled under Deirdre’s knees, and panic swelled inside of her. She hoped that fear might funnel into her phoenix powers—might make her capable of shapeshifting, melting her shackles, and beating an escape. But fear only made her flame gutter and die.

  The walls cracked. The sound echoed all around them, like being inside of a bell smashed in a car compactor.

  Deirdre heard something snap. She threw herself to the left, bumping into Stark’s shoulder, just in time for an icicle to crash into the place she had been kneeling.

  One by one, the stairs popped free of each other, cobwebbing with cracks.

  Another wall broke. Tumbled off into the ocean. It exposed them to the howling wind, which blasted with new furor, fed by the rage of the king.

  It was so cold. Everything was cold.

  Everything hurt.

  Cooper silenced suddenly.

  And then he was standing in front of them, tall and glowing with his grief, skin shimmering and jewel-like.

  The king fisted a hand in Stark’s hair, jerking his skull back so that the bear wolf had to look at him. “What happened to the sluagh? Where is it?” Ice flowered from his fingers where they were embedded in Stark’s shaggy hair, spreading over his temples. “Devouring Ofelia could have only made it stronger!”

  “Let me go,” Stark said. His voice resonated with compulsion.

  Oh gods. He was trying to compel the king of the unseelie. A faerie so powerful that he could shatter the whole castle around them with his grief, who had been worthy of marriage to the ridiculously powerful queen.

  And Stark was trying to compel him.

  Cooper’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be considering Stark’s order.

  “Royal blood,” he said. “You’re from the Brotherhood—but you’re so much older than the others. You must have been the first of them.”

  Stark tensed. “What?”

  “You’re unseelie. I should have seen it.” There was so much turmoil behind Cooper’s golden eyes, like the entire force of the Winter Court’s storm was trapped inside his skull. “I understand why she would have saved you to preserve the line, but I’d rather you and the entire Brotherhood have died a thousand times than lose my mate.”

  Deirdre wanted to ask him what he meant—what the hell the “Brotherhood” was. But Cooper looked like he was on the brink of bringing all of Niflheimr crashing down around them. She didn’t dare speak.

  “I’m not unseelie,” Stark said.

  “You’ve got one of our talents.” Cooper’s fist tightened. Stark’s frozen hair snapped off. “What beast are you? Dire wolf? Sabertooth?”

  Stark’s face reddened. “I’m not unseelie!”

  “Bear wolf,” Deirdre said. “He’s a bear wolf.”

  Both pairs of eyes turned on her. It was an uncomfortable feeling, having both of those powerful, unhinged men focused on her.

  “Bear wolf and phoenix,” Cooper said. “Okay.” His fingers uncurled from Stark’s hair. “Okay.”

  He gestured.

  The chains released them.

/>   “You’ll kill Rhiannon,” he said. “Kill her for me…for Ofelia.” He only took two steps away from them before stumbling over his own feet. He spilled to the floor, his robes swirling around him. He cradled his forehead in his hands. “Ofelia. God, Ofelia.”

  Stark tossed the chains aside. “Tell me where Rhiannon is and I’ll rip her throat out.” Cooper didn’t immediately respond. Anger seized Stark, and he strode toward the king. “Tell me!”

  Deirdre grabbed his shoulder. “Stop it,” she hissed. “Can’t you see he’s in pain? And about a thousand times more powerful than we are?”

  He glared at her from inches away, and Deirdre realized that Cooper wasn’t the only one in pain.

  Being told that he was sidhe, just like Rhiannon had said, might have been the straw that broke Stark’s composure.

  “I don’t know where Rhiannon is. I’ve had Niflheimr locked down since Ofelia went missing,” Cooper said without rising from the floor. “I wanted to preserve everything for her until…” He trailed off.

  With an unpleasant lurch, Deirdre realized that Cooper’s hands were turning blue.

  Not frostbite-blue. Ice-blue.

  His fingertips melted into the floor of the throne room as he kneeled there.

  “Where is she?” Stark demanded.

  “Search her quarters,” Cooper said. “She was friends with Ofelia. She had a room beside ours. Search it.”

  “Are the girls there? My daughters?”

  But now the icy pallor had crawled all the way up Cooper’s elbows, consuming his biceps, his shoulders, his throat. It swept quickly down his body.

  Only his face remained human, and only for a moment.

  “Don’t you dare run,” Stark said.

  “Niflheimr is yours,” Cooper said. “Kill her.” Ice cracked as he turned to look at Deirdre. “Open the sluagh wide. Only you can free them all and return them to the natural cycle of rebirth.”

  “Open it?”

  The ice consumed the last of his features.

  There was nothing living left in him. Nothing that vaguely resembled a human being, and nothing that could answer Deirdre’s question.

  A pulse rocked Niflheimr, like a heart beating in its depths. The walls shook. The floor jumped under Deirdre’s feet, hard enough that she almost fell.

  The unseelie king vanished.

  XI

  The dungeon was not in the depths of the castle as Deirdre would have expected. They were kept under the stairs leading up to the throne.

  Stark found them easily, as though he’d known where they were the entire time. He walked to the shattered stairs, pressed his hand against the ice, and a door opened. It hadn’t been visible until that moment.

  Vidya stepped out. She looked annoyed. “Where are they?” she asked, scanning the throne room with her wings flared. “Where are the guards who brought us here?”

  Deirdre peered around her shoulder to see Niamh sitting under the stairs, still struggling to get to her feet. It wasn’t a very large room. They must not have intended to keep many prisoners there.

  “Get her out of there,” Stark said.

  Deirdre had been operating on her own for so long that it took time to register the fact that he was ordering her. And when she did, she didn’t obey as automatically as she once would have. She just looked at him.

  Stark looked back at her.

  Something passed between them.

  The Brotherhood.

  Deirdre had heard Stark’s darkest secret—the secret that even he didn’t know. Both of them knew it now, even if they had no idea what any of it meant.

  He was unseelie. Not a shifter.

  Deirdre didn’t obey him.

  Vidya stepped back into the dungeon, extracting Niamh. “He’s dead?” she asked. “The king?”

  “Something like that,” Deirdre said, at the same time that Stark said, “He’s gone.”

  This time, she didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to.

  He was in her head. He’d been in there for weeks. Now neither of them knew which one of them was Everton Stark.

  “Rhiannon had quarters beside the king’s,” Stark said. “My daughters might be there. Find it.”

  “Find them,” Deirdre told Vidya.

  The sooner they found the kids, the sooner they could leave. Not just to return to Earth, but to get away from what was left of the unseelie king and his grief—the shattered ice, the crystals, the throne room.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Vidya said. She stepped up to the doorway leading to the hall, spreading her wings.

  She stopped before taking flight.

  The shock on Vidya’s face spoke volumes. She wasn’t a woman who was easily bothered. Deirdre had never seen her as anything but mechanical, numb to the world around her, as much a machine as her wings indicated.

  Now she was bothered.

  “What?” Deirdre asked. “Did the king collapse the whole place?”

  Niamh peered over her shoulder. “Oh my gods. You need to see this, Dee.”

  Deirdre stepped up to the doorway.

  There was no hall beyond.

  The king of the unseelie had done more than just collapse most of Niflheimr, though. He had dropped several of the towers into the ocean, leaving the throne room alone upon the spindle of a single icy pier. With the surface ice of the ocean cracked, Deirdre could see into the inky depths of the water below.

  And every single sidhe who had been outside the walls was dead.

  Every last one of them.

  Deirdre didn’t have an enhanced sense of smell, like many shifters did, but even she could smell the death on the air. Even sidhe blood smelled somewhat coppery. And there was a sour bite to it that she didn’t recognize.

  She grimaced, covering her nose from the cold wind. “What is that?”

  “Intestine,” Vidya said. “They exploded. That’s what the inside of the intestines smell like.”

  It wafted through the air, carried over the ocean to them at the top of the tower.

  Deirdre swallowed hard. She assumed that the king and queen’s bedroom was in the same tower as the throne room, but what if it had been in one of the towers that plunged into the ocean? That would mean that Rhiannon’s quarters had gone, too. And if Stark’s daughters had been in there…

  She glanced at Stark. He had scaled the broken stairs and stood by the throne now, as though contemplating what it might mean to have royal blood.

  It didn’t look like happy contemplation.

  He wouldn’t care that the sidhe were dead. Those thousands of extinguished lives would mean nothing to him.

  “Search the rest of the tower,” Deirdre said quietly, trying to keep Stark from hearing her. “Rhiannon’s room has to be in here.” She wasn’t going to consider what it might have meant if it wasn’t.

  Niamh jerked the harpy skin closed around her, assuming the swollen form of a bird. She looked even more ragged now that the king’s magic had snatched her out of the air. The wind lifted her feathers, ruffling her hair.

  “Careful,” she said, jerking her chin toward Stark.

  Vidya took off first, and Niamh followed a moment later. They swirled into the night together, graceful on wings of metal and magic.

  Deirdre was alone with Stark.

  She stepped away from the door, gathering her flame around her as protection from the wind that blasted through the husk of the throne room. Stark must have been freezing up there, so far away from Deirdre, but he seemed oblivious to the surrounding world.

  When she put her foot on the first broken stair, he spoke.

  “I’m not unseelie.”

  “Who cares if you are?” Deirdre asked. “It’s a label. A word. You haven’t changed because the king stuck it to you.”

  “You don’t understand why this matters.”

  “It’s hard to understand anything with you. You’re not exactly an open book in which I can turn to any page and learn The History of Stark.”

  “My
daughters,” he said. “It matters because of them.”

  “You think they won’t like you if you’re unseelie rather than a shifter?”

  He circled the throne, prowling behind it, dragging the animal hides that they’d taken from dead sidhe behind him. “Rhiannon and I married in Bahrain, while I was deployed. She quickly became pregnant. Our first daughter came out…wrong.”

  “Cold thing to say about your kid,” Deirdre said.

  “Forget it.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Forget everything. I’ve almost found them. We’re almost together again.” He turned to survey Deirdre, as if searching her face for answers.

  It made her uncomfortable, the way that he looked at her.

  What was he seeing?

  She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, trying to smooth down the prickling flesh. “Did you really think hiding them was gonna do you any favors?”

  “I thought it might be the only chance Rhiannon and I would have at piecing our relationship together,” Stark said. “She was hurting them—using them. I needed to shelter the girls without losing Rhiannon. I did it to save our family.” He said it with such desperation, like he wanted Deirdre to understand. Needed her to understand.

  “That’s so screwed up,” she said.

  Stark stood behind the throne, gripping its back in both of his hands, like a king waiting to sit.

  He belonged up there, cold and strong.

  Really cold, actually. He was shivering but didn’t seem to realize it.

  “What do you want from me, Tombs?” Stark asked.

  Deirdre mounted the stairs. She had to do it quickly to keep them from melting under her feet. “You know what I want.”

  “I don’t think that I do.”

  “If you want to get revenge against Rhiannon, you know the best way to do it. You just don’t want to face it yet. You’ve gotta go to Earth with me and claim the Alpha position from her. You built this empire to become Alpha. It’s what you wanted all along, it’s why I joined you, it’s why you’ve done such horrible things.”

  “No, I did that for her,” Stark said. “And I gathered people around myself who would be ruthless enough to execute my every command. People who could destroy someone with soft parts. Someone like you.”