Bastion of Magic (The Sidhe (Urban Fantasy Series) Book 4)

by S A Archer

  Moving gingerly, as if not trusting that the pain was truly gone, Tiernan jerked his head toward the black and purple portal several meters away. “They aren’t fey. They can’t enter the realm. You probably dumped them in a heap on the Isle of Fey.”

  Kieran shook his head frantically. “It wasn’t me!”

  “Then who the bloody hell was it?” Tiernan snapped back.

  Kieran knew he had to look as white as if he’d just seen a ghost. “Donovan.”

  Tiernan pushed himself to standing, shaking his head. “No. You just feel him in the realm’s magic. I feel him in the magic, too, but that doesn’t mean he’s alive. You saw how he vanished, like a ghost. He’s gone Kieran, even if the essence of him remains in everything.”

  “That’s not what happened. How else do you explain this?” He gestured to Tiernan’s skin showing through his torn shirt. “I couldn’t have done that.”

  “Something in the teleportation then. Something about teleporting right into the realm. How would I bloody know?” Tiernan stalked off, not even limping, even though Malcolm had certainly torn the ligaments in his knee.

  A vibration tingled at his back and rose the hairs on Kieran’s neck. As he turned, he felt certain he would find Donovan standing right behind him.

  But he wasn’t. No matter how intensely Kieran could feel him. “I know you are here,” he whispered to Donovan. “I know you can hear me.” He felt it more than anything he’d ever felt in his life.

  As the fey moved about Kieran, he caught glimpses of something white just past them. A building of marble and gleaming in the sunlight. Still dazed from the teleportation, Kieran started for it.

  Inside the temple, beyond the pillars that held aloft the ceiling instead of walls, the image of Donovan looked back at him.

  Kieran kept going forward. Too afraid to stop or even rub his eyes in case he lost the vision.

  The figure of Donovan, carved from stone, didn’t react to any of the fey milling about like tourists. Not many of them probably knew that Donovan had actually turned his living flesh to rock once.

  But this statue wasn’t Donovan. The dwarves or the dark elves had fashioned it with their magic, along with the images of the other great, and lost, heroes of the Sidhe.

  Kieran didn’t stop walking, even though he knew this. He didn’t stop until he collapsed against the step at the statue’s feet. Sitting there, elbows on his thighs and face in his hands, Kieran spoke inwardly to the connection to Donovan that he felt inside. I know that was you. I know you are alive, somewhere. And I know you can hear me.

  No sensation or word answered.

  We need you. Kieran thought. Malcolm needs you. We’re making a muck of things without you.

  Even though there was no answer, Kieran just sat there and waited. Waited like Malcolm had once done.

  Waited for Donovan to return.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Donovan…” The echo of Kieran’s voice swirled in the mist.

  For the longest time, Donovan couldn’t have said if his eyes had been opened or closed. He couldn’t have determined if he was floating in sleep or some other state of non-awareness. Or perhaps total awareness.

  All magic moved through this place.

  Through him.

  “Breathe it all in. Breathe it all back out. It is in the flow that there is life.” The deep and familiar voice spoke gently, rousing Donovan from the fugue.

  Within the golden mists, Donovan reoriented himself from laying upon his back to floating upright. Before him, less dream than anything he’d yet experienced, a man dressed in rough leathers leaned against his club like a walking stick. Even for the Sidhe, the man was ancient. His trimmed gray beard and the flow of his silvered hair around his shoulders belied the eternal youthfulness of the fey. Beneath his club and his booted feet the mist gave way to golden earth. The man asked, “Will you sleep again? Will you dream of the realm?”

  No one needed to introduce the Dagda to him. The ancient Sidhe had lived and ruled in the first realm of fey, ages before Donovan’s first breath. And yet, he knew this man. He recognized him like a forgotten father. He recalled the details of the Dagda’s life as stories and distant memory, a mingling of what he’d believed as a youth and of the truth that opened before his mind now. Among the chorus of the ancients that guided Malcolm’s hand in the forging of the artifacts’ magic and that called Donovan to sacrifice, the Dagda’s voice had been most clear.

  “Donovan…” Again, Kieran’s distant plea resounded through the magic.

  “Why do you not go to him?” The Dagda asked, as soft in voice and demeanor as a warrior at his most calm.

  Still floating, not formless although bodiless, Donovan replied, “It is better to let them get used to life without me.”

  The Dagda huffed, casting a glance to the side where the vision of a young man, soaked with lake water and near unconscious lay upon the shore. “You went to Malcolm in his need.”

  “Malcolm stumbled.” He’d lost his footing, his balance, without Donovan to guide him. So much so, that he’d unthinkingly flung himself from a cliff. Had Donovan not intervened, the bloodhound would have unintentionally committed suicide.

  The Dagda laughed, knowing the fullness of Donovan’s meaning. “Yes, he did. And he continues to do so.”

  The distant report of a gunshot echoed through the golden fog. A single shot that resounded with eternal regret. A new scar for the bloodhound to bear.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the wash of Malcolm’s pain and knowing he wasn’t blameless for the thing Malcolm had become.

  “You love him like a son.” The Dagda’s voice brushed close to his ear.

  When Donovan opened his eyes he stood upon a golden and barren rise overlooking an eternity of foothills below. Not the new realm, nor the earth realm, nor even the Mounds. This was the memory of the first realm of fey, the world the Dagda had a hand in creating.

  The Dagda finished his circle around Donovan, standing before him now with the vista behind him. “Not just him, but you cherish all of the earthborns you gathered under your mantle.”

  Donovan paused, enduring the weight of the implications. No point in holding anything back from the Dagda, who remembered it all. “Yes.”

  “Do you love all of the fey so much?” Around them the first realm released its shape, becoming smoke and dust to swirl around them, only to reform. This wasn’t just the vision of the newly created realm. They stood unseen on the portico to the Temple of the Ancients overlooking the valley in which the portal to the earth realm remained ever open, ever welcoming new arrivals. Even now, the fey emerged from the vortex of purple and black magic in an unending stream. “I can’t be there for all of them.”

  “Why not?” The Dagda leaned against his club, considering the flood of emigrants. “Why not give them a foundation upon which to build their hopes?”

  “The fey are self sufficient.”

  The Dagda laughed. “Is that what your experience in the Glamour Club taught you?” Turning so his muscled arms encompassed the grandeur of the temple, the Dagda’s deep voice rumbled with the weight of the ages. “And this temple?”

  “The realm connects to every one of them, sustaining their lives and their magic, and I am the realm.” Even now, as each and every one of the fey arrived, threads of magic flicked out through the heart of the realm’s magic, which was Donovan himself, binding him to each and every soul. The chorus of the ancients was nothing compared to the constant murmur of thoughts surrounding him like a cloud of midges. “So many.”

  “And more every day.” He agreed, chuckling for Donovan’s struggle as only one who understood could. “Will you do as Danu did? Will you limit their numbers? Will you relinquish the wandering fey to the residual magic of the earth realm?”


  “Danu interfered.”

  “And you think you shouldn’t? That you shouldn’t have a vision for the fey and direct them? That you shouldn’t reach through the power of the realm to pluck one of your children out of the jaws of death and deliver him safe once more to the bosom of the realm?” Aggravation and amusement chided Donovan. “That is your job. Your purpose. You were chosen by us, but you also chose this path for yourself.”

  “I never craved this!” He pounded the pulsing within the form of his chest, and then flung out a gesturing hand to the statuary of himself among the Ancients within the heart of the temple.

  “That is why you are the perfect one. Dedicated enough to sacrifice yourself not once, but twice. Both in the Collapse and in the Creation. Each time, willing to die for the fey.”

  Overlaying the world, the memory of the Mounds Collapsing thundered down from the sky in a rain of broken boulders and pulverized rock. The ghostly images crushed down around them, but touched nothing even as the tons of remembered earth buried Donovan into a cocoon of darkness. The first time he’d sacrificed life and magic for the fey.

  Then the darkness shattered apart into the brilliance of the Creation. The threads of magic wove around Donovan, calling out his essence to join with it. Not a smothering death, but a shattering one as he was torn from form into pure magic and flung to the farthest reaches of the new realm as it manifested.

  Donovan wiped the memory from his vision as if dragging away a veil of Glamour, leaving nothing before him now but Kieran. The young man sat at the foot of the likeness of Donovan as he rubbed his thumb over the markings on the leather wristband which belonged to Malcolm. The lost tumble of emotions and thoughts scattered around Kieran, no closer to clarity than when he first began to doubt everything he’d believed.

  “Will you leave the realm to your charges then? Do you trust them that much?” The Dagda spoke over Donovan’s shoulder, witnessing the same struggle as he.

  “My life ended.”

  “Perhaps.” The Dagda conceded that. “But as you were in form, you now are as memory.”

  “But only memory. A dream of who I was. Of what the realm would be.” Donovan leaned a forearm to one of the great pillars holding the roof aloft. The constant pull of the magic through him wearied him. He felt himself flicker as his exhausted form toiled to maintain its shape while the incorporeal dream in the heart of the realm called him back into its peace like the need for sleep.

  But the Dagda gave him no rest. “We remember. The life of every fey, we remember. Even when their life returns to the cycle, we remember. The magic that sloughs off onto our possessions, the artifacts, we remember. The magic in our lineage, which passes from generation to generation, we remember. We remember it all.” With significance of bearing, the Dagda drew closer like he stalked Donovan’s reluctance. With a voice lowered to a whisper laced with layers of meaning, he asked. “Among the ancients who have been where you are now, at the very heart of magic, do you see Danu?”

  When Donovan lifted his eyes he gazed into eternity. The chorus of the ancients appeared before him like the ephemeral magic and impression of memory that they were. But the All-Mother, Danu, wasn’t among them.

  The Dagda’s murmur grazed Donovan’s ear with the nearness of his warning. “That is the power Manannan wields. He stripped her essence from the Mounds so completely that she has not returned to us.” The Dagda crossed in front of Donovan as the vision of the new realm dissolved around them and the golden mist returned. “Do you understand now?”

  Donovan glared at him. In his lifetime, Donovan had harbored little tolerance for any Seelie and their deceitful ways. He’d battled against them in every war between the Courts for thousands of years. For ages, no Seelie stoked the fires of his hate more than Lugh. Not until Manannan’s rise to power led him to the ultimate betrayal. Donovan had witnessed it in Kaitlin’s mind and he recalled it now through the memory within the magic. Manannan hadn’t just assassinated Danu. He’d stripped her very essence from the heart of the Mounds. He’d very nearly supplanted her, inserting himself in her place, had he not been interrupted.

  Something Manannan would do to Donovan, if given the chance.

  The Dagda laughed. “Not so magnanimous now, are you Elite?”

  Donovan turned away from the ancient Sidhe, but could not escape the guilt of all those who died at his hand. Every death he’d caused, every life he’d snuffed out, the magic remembered. The weight of it closed around him with a thickening burden. “That is not who I am anymore.”

  “Then who are you, if not Jhaer, leader of the Elite?” The Dagda passed before the gathering memories, stained with the faces of Donovan’s dead enemies, and dispersed them with the wave of his hand. “Donovan, the great gatherer of the earthborns? The reviver of the Unseelie doctrine? Leader of the fey outcasts and refugees?”

  The ghostly remembrance of the Glamour Club swirled slowly around them. Most of those fey souls around him still lived, even though the imprint of their memory from that brief time fixed into the fabric of the realm. From his private table, Donovan could see them all there, his earthborn charges. Bryce and Dawn dancing to the band. Malcolm on the drums. Kieran and Trip making out at the bar. And Tiernan, there beside him, as an ally and a friend.

  Donovan blinked away the memory, which blurred and faded into the mist.

  “Not that anymore either, are you?” Dagda moved closer. “Then who are you to be?”

  Glancing over his shoulder, Donovan looked into a window in the retreating mist at the fey entering the realm. Threads of magic formed like spider silk from within the heart of the realm that was Donovan, and rising to connect to each of them. Compassion rose within him for each of these fey who connected to him, like his children. “I will be who you called me to be.”

  The Dagda chuckled with irony, as if Donovan still didn’t understand. “You don’t have that excuse any longer.” His fatherly smile faded, replaced by a warrior’s seriousness. “Not here. Not in this place of memory. For all your incarnations, you have never reinvented yourself. You have always rediscovered yourself.”

  And in the heart of him, Donovan knew this was true. He’d always become who he needed to be. Who the Unseelie and the fey needed him to be.

  “Who will you be now?” The Dagda demanded of him. “This time, you must decide.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Trip leaned against the rock wall beside the cave entrance. Her head rested back against the stone as she watched the torn fragments of cloud play at smothering the moon.

  She felt Cormac drawing up beside her at the mouth of the cave before she saw him. But it wasn’t just the dark elf’s magic that stroked over her senses. “Water from Crom’s well. Pure darkness.” Cormac lifted the bottle so the oily, clear liquid shimmered in the moonlight. “Will you always hide in his shadow? Or be heir to it?”

  Propping his forearm against the wall beside her head, he leaned in close. His whisper tempted her, “Can’t you feel it resonate?”

  Trip wrapped her palm around the cold glass. The darkness moved through the liquid like serpents, swimming in endless patterns. The scales slithered across each other with unheard murmurs and promises. “Crom’s power,” she breathed. Shaking her head, her gaze slid away from the dark elf’s. “What if I’m not ready for that much magic?”

  “You’re ready.” Cormac covered her hand with his own. He uncorked the bottle, and then tilted her hand to tip a splash into his mouth. Instead of swallowing, he leaned against her body, trapping her against the rock wall. The heat of his lips covering hers softened her resistance. The tender invasion of his tongue swept the intoxicating darkness into her mouth.

  Trip responded, deepening the kiss with her desire for more. More of him. More of the enchantment.

  He bit her lower lip and tugged b
efore surrendering her mouth. “See?” He breathed hard. The pupils widened like a predators, set within the faceted beauty of his amber eyes.

  With his hand still cupping hers, Trip raised the bottle to her mouth. The cool liquid snaked across her tongue. As she swallowed, it spread through her, spiraling around every shred of her being, and then coiling low in her tummy.

  Cormac drew back the bottle and finished off the other half. Turning his head, he squeezed his eyes closed and stifled a cough. His voice scratched as he said, “That had bite to it.”

  The rising darkness within her breathed power through her magic. She felt dangerous. Sexy. Potent.

  Dropping the bottle to shatter on the ground, Trip caught his strong jaw between her hands. When Cormac looked back at her, the glaze of sensual intoxication glistened in his eyes. Plunging forward, his mouth found hers again. The rough demand of lips, teeth, and tongue plundered her mouth.

  When he lifted her, her legs wrapped around his waist. He carried her deeper into the cavern to the side chamber where she’d a simple room for the nights she spent in the company of the sluagh.

  Like a dark dream, the passion consumed them. The mingle of their personal magic with the shared enchantment bound them in a driving need. Cormac knew what he wanted and didn’t hesitate to demand it. Trip tangled her fingers into his hair to drag him down and claim him as her own.

  The first time they made love, the sex was good and rough and she knew they both needed it that way.

  The subsequent times they slowed into a long, sensual dance of bodies, petting and caressing and kissing. She Touched him with her magic, letting the darkness spill across his skin and deepen the connection. From early evening to the deepest still of the night, they shared the most intimate parts of themselves until they finally lay spent, wrapped in each other’s embrace.