by S. M. Reine
“When I came,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. Things just…came out. Not the normal things you expect. Other things.”
“Oh my gods,” Niamh said.
Deirdre’s cheeks were so hot that she thought she might catch on fire again, with or without Melchior’s help. She took another swig of water. “I know.”
“Oh my gods. And he didn’t kill you?”
“He thought it was funny,” Deirdre said.
“Sure he did. He’s sick in the head, and he is a bastard for running off with his wife.” Niamh’s good humor had immediately whipped around to righteous indignation. “How in all the worlds could he want to be with some ugly bitch like that when he managed to land you? Talk about dating out of your league! He should be leaving offerings to the gods in gratitude for getting a shot at your fine ass.”
“I don’t know if I’d call whatever’s going on with us dating.” She groaned, sagging back against her elbows, sinking into the grass. “If it was dating, I think it’s pretty safe to say we’ve broken up.”
“He doesn’t deserve you anyway,” Niamh said. “Wait, was he good? He seems like he’d be selfish and bossy. Like, ‘Hey Beta, suck my dick.’”
“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”
“Yeah, he’s shitty and selfish. He totally compelled you to suck his dick. And then he left you. What an idiot!”
Deirdre tipped her head to study her friend sideways. Niamh was so worked up that her cheeks were pink. “Did Rhiannon really compel you to kill me?”
Niamh’s face grew redder. She ducked her head, swinging her feet against the cliff. The buckles on her boots jangled. “Deirdre…”
“Just be honest.”
“No,” Niamh said. “She didn’t compel me. She said I wouldn’t be able to use the skin if I was away from her, so…she didn’t need to.”
Deirdre had suspected that all along. “If Rhiannon had told me she could give me control of my phoenix form, I’d have given her anything for it, too. I probably would have killed you over it.”
“Aw. You’re so sweet.”
A surprised laugh escaped Deirdre. “What? You think that’s sweet?”
“It is sweet, because I know you’re lying. You wouldn’t have stabbed me. You might be dumb enough to go riding on a terrorist’s disco stick but you’re loyal. And the whole sex thing, that’s probably because you’re so loyal too. But you’re pretending you’d kill me over it to be nice, and that is very sweet.”
Deirdre kneed the harpy gently. “I mean it. I’d kill the hell out of you.”
“You might try,” Niamh said. “I don’t think your heart would be in it.”
“I guess not. It seems like I have to orgasm if I want to kill anyone these days.”
Niamh laughed too. She pushed Deirdre’s shoulder. Deirdre pushed Niamh back.
It was a half-hearted gesture of friendship, nowhere near as genuine as they used to be. But it felt nice. It felt good. Not as good as it was being in school together when they were young, but at least as good as when they’d been playing poker in the asylum with their underwear as betting material.
“I think I’ve said this a few times, but I’m sorry I stabbed you,” Niamh said.
“It’s okay,” Deirdre said. “I got better.”
“Good thing, too. It would have sucked not to hear about how your vagina set fire to Stark.”
Their laughter faded away after a moment, and they sat in silence, gazing down at the sanctuary. The place where the stage was being erected was brighter than everywhere else. There were dozens of spotlights blazing down on the witches preparing their ritual, which was now enclosed within giant blue velvet curtains. They wouldn’t fall until Rhiannon and Stark arrived as the unseelie liaisons to become Alpha.
Hopefully they would never arrive. The end was intended to strike on a distant road in the early hours of morning.
Deirdre wished the morning would come faster. The anticipation would be worse than death.
She’d already died twice, after all.
Someone moved behind them. Marion sat on Deirdre’s other side, having appeared as silently as she had left earlier. The mage girl was no longer carrying the sword.
Deirdre took a long look at her, searching for signs of where she could have gone. There was nothing out of place. The girl’s hair was twisted into a sloppy knot and there was a little dust on the hem of her jeans, but that could have been from hiking up to the top of the waterfall.
“Hey,” Deirdre greeted.
Marion smiled. “Bonjour, my favorite terrorist.”
A thousand questions cascaded between them, unspoken. Where had she left the Ethereal Blade? Why had Rylie called her the Voice? Who was ECF?
Deirdre said nothing.
“Are you ready?” Marion asked.
Niamh responded. “Yeah.”
The mage reached across Deirdre’s lap to take Niamh’s hand. Electric blue magic flashed between them, like a camera going off.
Once the light faded, Niamh was gone, replaced by Melchior’s figure. He was taller than she was, broader, glimmering with golden scales.
“Wait,” Deirdre said. “What did you do? You’re supposed to make me the decoy.”
“Rhiannon would sense you from a mile away, with all that phoenix magic,” Niamh said with Melchior’s deep, silken voice. “Plus you smell like Stark’s dick cheese.”
Deirdre’s jaw dropped. “I do not!”
Niamh-as-Melchior cackled wildly, feet swinging.
She was sick. Sick and ridiculous. Dick cheese? So gross.
It was so offensive that she almost forgot to be horrified by Niamh’s sacrifice. She clasped Marion’s hand. “Change me. Put the Melchior thing on me.”
“It’s already done,” Marion said, pushing away from the edge of the cliff. She stood and dusted off her hands. “Niamh made the arrangements with Abel. Take it up with him if you don’t like it.”
“But Rylie made me her Omega! Niamh isn’t even part of the pack!”
“Actually, as of an hour ago, I’m officially Rylie Gresham’s Beta.” Niamh smiled weakly. “That kinda makes me your boss, doesn’t it? And as your boss, I say that I get to be the decoy.”
Deirdre’s mouth opened and closed silently.
Beta. Omega. Alpha.
“No,” she said. “Marion, wait.”
“See you guys at the inauguration!” Marion headed down the trail with a bounce in her step. Wherever she had taken the sword, it had put her in a good mood.
She didn’t care that she had just resigned Niamh to facing Rhiannon and Stark alone.
“Why, Niamh?” Deirdre asked.
It felt weird to see such a sweet, mischievous smile on Melchior’s face. She still stood like herself, twisting his toes on the ground, hips swaying. “Rhiannon didn’t have to compel me to kill you.”
“Nobody compelled me to let the vampires drain you.”
“It’s okay,” Niamh said. “I forgive you. And this is the only thing that I can do to show that.” She took Deirdre’s hand. “It’s the only way I can apologize to you. Let me fix this.”
Deirdre’s heart ached. It felt like it might explode within her chest.
When she spoke, her voice was thick, jolting. She couldn’t make herself sound properly jovial. “Okay, fine. I forgive you for stabbing me. But I’ll never forgive you for saying I smell like Stark’s dick cheese, Beta.”
Niamh barked a laugh. Deirdre flicked water from her bottle at Niamh, and Niamh flicked some back. It stung a little. Or maybe that was the tears springing to her eyes, tears of love and gratitude and feeling like someone had finally pulled that silver knife out of Deirdre’s back after so many long, painful weeks.
A rim of orange touched the horizon, illuminating the trees. The beginning of sunrise glowed over them as they scuffled playfully.
The inauguration was coming. Just a couple more hours.
And then, one way or another, everything was going to end.
XVII
To defeat the Starks, they had to think like the Starks.
Luckily, Deirdre had been acting as Everton Stark for weeks. It was easy to guess what he would do—like playing chess against herself.
The Starks would attack Melchior if they thought he was going to go to the inauguration and cut them out of the process, but they were smart enough to do it from a distance, probably using magic. Rhiannon and Stark would also want to do it themselves. They wouldn’t use proxies. They had too much pride—and too much satisfaction in inflicting pain—to let someone else take down the dragon.
Deirdre was counting on that pride to hurt them. If they sent someone else after their Melchior decoy, then she wasn’t certain the oath would truly break.
As the sun rose, the sanctuary prepared. Pawns slid into place.
Vidya carried Niamh-as-Melchior a few miles away, past Northgate, to a farm where vehicles were waiting. They would have to take a long route through Northgate to get to the sanctuary. A long, vulnerable route, filled with hidden curves in the mountains where no witnesses would be able to report back on what happened to the convoy.
No witnesses, as far as Rhiannon knew.
Marion had coated the SUV that would transport Niamh in anti-magic wards. Nobody would be able to attack it from the outside. At least, nobody less powerful than Marion—which was every witch on the planet.
The Starks would have to physically attack in order to hurt the person they believed to be Melchior.
And they were waiting to film it.
Deirdre was positioned on a cliff overlooking the road at a sensitive spot, where the visibility was the worst. There was no guarantee that Rhiannon would attack there. There were no guarantees of anything. She was just like the rest of the team watching the road at Rylie’s command. When she was among the sanctuary residents, she wasn’t a Beta, right hand to the Alpha. Neither knight nor rook. She was another pawn.
It was nice to have that responsibility taken away from her for now.
Having responsibility removed didn’t make her feel any less responsible, though. Her nerves were tangled into knots as she waited for Niamh and the convoy to enter her segment of the road.
“They’re coming,” Vidya said, landing beside Deirdre. “They’re in the foothills.”
Deirdre nodded because she didn’t trust herself to reply verbally. She repositioned the sniper rifle to look at the western end of the road, waiting for the appearance of headlights. The sun hadn’t gotten high enough to shine light on the road yet. They’d have the headlights turned on.
She would see them coming.
And once she did, she knew that Rhiannon and Stark wouldn’t be far behind.
It had been awkward when she went to the first class she shared with her ex-boyfriend after they slept together. But the level of nerves that she’d experienced then was nothing compared to her feelings now. The magnitudes of scale were the difference between grains of sand versus the sun in the sky.
Deirdre’s wrists itched. She wished that she could have taken some lethe.
Gods, she hated feeling hungry. When was the last time that she had eaten?
Headlights appeared at the end of the road.
The convoy had arrived.
Deirdre lifted the Walkie Talkie to her ear, listening as the other sanctuary shifters up the road remarked on the convoy’s passing.
“It looks pretty normal…”
“No trouble yet.”
“Did the convoy start with seven cars? I only see seven cars.”
She pressed the talk button. “Seven cars is correct.” Deirdre tried not to sound disappointed. If the Starks had attacked earlier, then Niamh’s safety would’ve been someone else’s responsibility. Some other pawn would’ve had to worry about her.
Deirdre counted them as they approached.
Two motorcycles. And then the SUVs—seven of them in a row, as one of the other shifters had observed. They were followed by two more motorcycles.
That was everyone who was meant to be in the convoy.
They came around the curve slowly, traveling at a speed appropriate for the twisted roads through the mountains. They must’ve been going twenty-five, maybe thirty miles per hour. The slowness of it made Deirdre even more uncomfortable. Shouldn’t they have been in a hurry? Didn’t the drivers know that death was waiting for them?
Deirdre watched through the scope, hands tight on the stock of the sniper rifle.
She put the window of the SUV carrying Niamh in her sights. The crosshair swayed over the tinted windows, which were so dark that she couldn’t see the people riding inside. Niamh was meant to be protected by two OPA agents. Surely they were watching her as closely as Deirdre was watching them.
Deirdre moved her aim from the convoy to the surrounding mountains, sweeping the trees for any sign of the attack to come. She only looked away for a few seconds.
That was when it happened.
Her Walkie Talkie crackled.
“Six cars. I only see six cars.”
“No way. The road doesn’t split off here. They couldn’t have gone anywhere.”
“Count again.”
“I can count, and there’s only six!”
Deirdre made a count of her own. The shifter talking on the line was right. There were two motorcycles in front, a line of SUVs, and two motorcycles in the back.
One, two, three… No way.
She now only saw six SUVs.
“Where did they go?” Deirdre asked, sweeping the scope over the road. “Where the heck did they go?”
“I’m looking.” Vidya took off. She soared through the air, diving over the mountains.
The other vehicles in the convoy peeled off, turning around to search the rest of the road. Half of them went on ahead. The other half headed back toward the farm.
The search was in vain. It wasn’t like Niamh’s SUV could have driven away.
But it shouldn’t have been able to disappear either.
Deirdre’s mind raced.
There had been no turn offs. Nowhere else for them to go. It was impossible for one of the vehicles to have gone missing on that stretch of road unless it had driven into the trees, which would have been impossible given the slope. The progress would have been slow. Someone would have seen it.
There was nowhere for a vehicle in the convoy to have gone.
A chill washed over her.
Nowhere at all.
She fumbled for her Walkie Talkie to communicate with the other shifters, but it slipped out of her hands. It tumbled end over end down the cliff, plummeting toward the road.
“No!”
Deirdre tossed the sniper rifle aside and leaped off of the ledge.
Panic burned hot through her. It felt like she floated rather than fell, sliding through the dim light of early morning with a comet trail flowing behind her.
The power of the phoenix pulsed through her veins.
Niamh.
Deirdre already knew what she would find when she reached the street.
She saw nothing. Nothing at all.
But she felt a powerful chill.
It should have been impossible for Rhiannon to cast magic upon the SUV. It was covered in so many wards that nothing should have been able to get in. Yet there was no denying what Deirdre felt.
That was sidhe magic.
The air kept getting colder as she ran to the last place that the SUV holding Niamh had been seen. Her boots pounded against pavement in time with the thudding of her panicked heart.
She wished that her heart would beat faster so that she could run faster, too.
It didn’t matter how fast she was going, though. She wouldn’t get there in time.
Deirdre had been too late the instant the SUV vanished.
Her shins smacked into something hard.
“Ow!”
She fell forward onto her hands and knees. Not on the street, but against something hard and metal that she couldn’t see, lea
ving her crouching in midair.
Deirdre ran her hands over the frosty metal, so cold that her fingers stuck to it and peeled away. The metal felt crumpled. Like a drunken frat guy had crushed a beer can against his forehead, but so much larger.
She blindly found a handle and wrenched it open.
Deirdre pulled so hard that the door tore off of the SUV, rendered invisible by Rhiannon’s illusion.
Her sidhe magic didn’t touch the inside of the vehicle. As soon as the door was gone, Deirdre could see inside to the cushioned leather interior and matte black roof.
One of the OPA agents stood. She was wearing full tactical gear and cradling an assault rifle.
“What happened?” Deirdre asked.
The agent lifted the gun and shot.
A bullet smashed into Deirdre’s chest, just right of center. It was like getting bitten by a dragon. It felt like her whole ribcage was crushed.
She struck the ground.
Hand clapped to her chest, blood pouring from between her fingers, Deirdre struggled to get to her feet.
That was a silver bullet.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
The OPA agent pulled her armored helmet off, tossing it aside. Long hair tumbled free. A square face was exposed, more handsome than beautiful.
Marion’s wards protecting Niamh from outside attack hadn’t failed.
Rhiannon Stark had attacked from the inside of the SUV.
She lifted the gun to fire again.
Deirdre flamed. It was an entirely instinctive reaction, with no rational control. Her fire leaped as she did, rolling across the pavement to dodge the gunfire.
Bullets pounded into the road. Holes exploded behind her. Stinging pain erupted down her arm, and her flames flared higher, pouring from the wounds Rhiannon inflicted like blood.
“No!”
Deirdre flung a hand toward the SUV.
Fire pulsed. The gun turned red with heat. Rhiannon dropped it to the road with a cry, hands blistering.
Deirdre tried to drag herself toward the gun, using the one arm that didn’t burn with healing fever.
“Look at the Omega and her fire,” Rhiannon said. She clambered out of the SUV. “You can teach an old dog new tricks. Isn’t that funny?” She got to the assault rifle first and kicked it away.
