Glamour of Midnight

by Casey L. Bond

  I entered the room to see an interesting sight. Alistair was lounging in a red velvet chair while Finean was pinned to the wall by two shadows. He fought vainly against them, wrenching his arms and twisting his body to get free, but he was losing. I raised my brows and the Leancan gave a slight shrug. “Sometimes we need to remember our place.”

  “Karis is in trouble,” I blurted. “I need you to take me to Nemain’s castle, Finean.”

  “What did you do?” he roared.

  “It’s like she’s a completely different person,” I answered evasively. “I don’t know what happened, but it was like… it was like she snapped, and suddenly she was colder and darker than Nemain herself. She’s going there, and while I have no doubt that Karis can win the battle with her mother, she’s reckless. She could get herself killed. We can’t let that happen, Finean. No matter what’s between us.”

  Alistair stared at me with a grin on his face. “I’m coming along, too, of course. I wouldn’t miss this for all of Faery.” He commanded the shadows, “Release him.”

  They obeyed, and Finean stumbled forward. Walking toward the mirror, Alistair leaned in and whispered, “Glad to see she heeded my warning.”

  “She’s not herself,” I answered shortly.

  He smiled. “Good.”

  Finean clasped my hand, keeping distance between him and Alistair. “She looks exactly like Nemain,” I added. “She glamoured herself before she left. I’m not sure I could tell them apart if they stood beside one another.”

  “That poses a problem,” Finean growled.

  “That means no one hurts Nemain. It could be Karis,” Alistair warned, focusing on the King of the Court of Reflections.

  Instead of responding, Finean led us into the mirror. As we stepped inside, it was like walking through warm water. Finean’s hair floated upward. The farther we traveled, the more nauseous I became. Alistair’s grip was so tight, it felt like he was going to break my hand. He didn’t want Finean to leave him in the space between.

  We came to a stop when Finean paused to peer out another mirror, this one larger than any I’d seen. It covered an entire wall. Instinctively, I knew we had arrived at Nemain’s court. I tried to pull away from them both – She needs me! – but neither was having it. Finean shook his head and pointed across the room. In the corner was another smaller, less conspicuous mirror. That was where we’d enter. I nodded, and in a flash, we were behind the small mirror. I was the first to step into the empty room.

  A second later, Alistair followed me and slipped around to hide behind the throne that sat upon a stone dais. Finean stayed in the mirror. Hiding there was a good idea. They wouldn’t know he was there until it was too late. He had the element of surprise.

  His image rippled and then disappeared, the surface hardening behind us. I assumed our clothes would be wet, but Alistair and I were completely dry. Beside us was a cage, only a few feet high and barely as wide. In it was a boy with brown hair and eyes.

  “Iric?” I whispered.

  He scooted into the back of the cage as best he could. His leg was wounded; a large, rectangular strip of flesh was gone from it, exposing bloodied muscle. I remembered the Banshee’s grim offering and knew this was where it came from. This sort of wound could kill a human.

  Dark tendrils began to stretch out and swirl around the space, like they were made of the Shades themselves. The two women were in the eye of the storm, orbiting one another in a deadly, beautiful dance.

  “You dare come here glamoured to look like me?” Nemain roared.

  “It is you who look like me!” the other Nemain refuted.

  Which one was Karis? Both wore dark gowns of delicate black feathers, but only one wore a smile. That must be Karis. She was having fun tormenting her mother. Alistair watched with a satisfied grin. He knew.

  Black feathers danced around the room all around them as Nemain called for her Banshees. Three flew into the room, hovering erratically above the two women. “Attack her!” Nemain screeched.

  “Attack her!” Karis echoed, pointing at her mother. The Banshees were confused. They darted back and forth between the women, uncertain whom to attack.

  Nemain and Karis circled one another. Karis leveled a glare at the Banshees, and in a flash, turned them back into the Seelie fae they were. She didn’t even have to touch them. The faeries fell to the ground, gasping.

  “Keep calling them, Mother. They can’t hurt me. I’m their master. They can’t tell my power from yours.”

  “Don’t call me mother,” Nemain seethed.

  “But that’s what you are,” Karis purred. “You wanted an heir? Well here I am!” she announced, stretching her arms out wide. “Aren’t you proud?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Stop acting like you don’t know. Stupidity isn’t flattering,” Karis tutted.

  Nemain muttered something beneath her breath, and what looked like a hundred daggers appeared in the air surrounding Karis. When the Queen slashed her hand forward, their sharp tips tilted toward their target and flew.

  Karis laughed, turning them all to ash with a flick of her wrist. Then she grinned. “My turn.”

  In her hands, she conjured a ball of light, undulating with streaks of serpentine energy, and launched it at her mother. Upon contact, the streaks wrapped around Nemain and constricted. As I looked closer, I could see that each streak was an Asper, with fangs snapping toward Nemain’s face and skin. Nemain cried out, but let out a burst of dark constrictors that battled Karis’s light. Paired off, they fell away from her, fighting one another.

  “I want your heart!” Nemain roared, lunging at Karis and clawing at her chest.

  “No, you want my power,” Karis replied in a cold voice, backhanding her mother across the room. She braced, anticipating the moment when Nemain shot heat out of her hand. The air waved and rippled in front of us as we watched.

  “Alistair?” I whispered. “Help me with this lock.” I’d promised to help free Iric and get him home safely, and right now, it was something productive I could do. Finean could take him back to Ironton. “I’m trying to help you,” I told Iric. “We can take you home. It’s what Karis wants more than anything.”

  “She didn’t even recognize me,” he confided.

  “A part of her does, but she isn’t… herself right now.” She literally had no heart. I felt it beating in my chest, reminding me.

  Alistair was suddenly beside me. He crushed the iron lock in his hand, the pieces tinkling to the ground. I opened the door. With a metallic whine of the hinges, everything went still.

  “Burn me alive,” I cursed, knowing they had been alerted to our presence, but accepting there was nothing to be done for it now. I reached in for Iric and he crawled forward and out of the cage.

  “Oh, Loftin?” Alistair drawled.

  I waved Iric out. “Go to the mirror,” I instructed. Finean would help him.

  “Are you bartering again?” Nemain asked me. “You for the boy? I’m afraid I must decline your offer this time. I simply love listening to his screams,” she said dreamily, watching Karis for a response, her grin falling when she saw none.

  Nemain wasn’t going to win this battle of wills. Not with power. But I could see when a new idea sparked. She left Karis and turned her attention to those of us around her.

  “What do we have here?” Nemain quipped, suddenly right in front of Alistair. Karis appeared at her side.

  “The King of the Leancan,” Nemain cooed. “I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”

  Alistair mouthed the word run and then lunged forward, fangs snapping toward her face. As I hurriedly helped Iric straighten and stand, Karis took in his bloody, dirty form, her eyebrows knitted. And then she dropped her glamour.

  “K?” he asked.

  “You look familiar…”

  “K, it’s me. It’s Iric.”

  Her eyes glazed over.

  24

  KARIS

  A cold rain is falling
. My hair and clothes are soaked and I can’t see anything. Something must have happened to my vision. I touch the skin around my eyes, but there are no wounds. Feeling my way forward, I stumble over something, trying to keep my balance.

  A voice calls out, “Are you okay?”

  “Who’s there?” My hands stretch out before me.

  “What are you doing out here?” the voice asks kindly.

  “I can’t see. Can… can you help me?”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A warm hand wraps around mine. “Listen, you’re safe. My name is Iric, and I’ll help you.”

  “Why? You don’t know me. I don’t even know what’s happening.”

  “Do you know your name?”

  I think hard, and a single name echoes in my mind. “Karis.”

  “Okay, Karis. Let’s get you out of the rain, for starters. Are you hungry?”

  “I’m starving,” I tell him, my voice breaking. There is a sound, a tinkling sound that echoes all around us. “And my head hurts.”

  He laughs. “I can make a tea to help with that, too.”

  “Why would you help someone you don’t know?”

  Iric pauses and squeezes my hand. “Because I’d hope someone would be decent enough to do the same for me.”

  “Why are you here, Iric?” I asked.

  “She brought me here,” he replied, nodding toward Nemain, who looked to be winning the fight against the Leancan.

  “Was she going to hurt you?”

  “She was going to kill me.”

  I zeroed in on Nemain and grinned. “Well, she’s not the strongest creature in Faery,” I confessed with a wink.

  LOFTIN

  I eased Iric toward the mirror and banged on it twice. Where the hell was Finean?

  Karis threw an invisible shield over us, a dome, just like the ones she used to guard the human cities, but clear as glass. We could see and hear her. We could do everything but reach her.

  “Mother, you really should stop fighting. You’ve already lost,” Karis called out. She strode across the room, and at the sound of her daughter’s approach, Nemain let go of Alistair’s neck.

  “I haven’t lost anything,” Nemain growled.

  “Mirror, show me the Court of Reflections,” Karis beseeched quietly. The surface of the enormous mirror on the wall across from us shimmered and an image appeared. Fae from every court were there, busy and happy. Not only surviving, but thriving. There were homes built high into the sky, Spring fae helping Winter fae grow food, and Summer fae bringing warmth to the place. The image zoomed out to reveal streets and shops and fields full of gardens farther out. It zoomed out further to reveal a smoky dome shield.

  “This isn’t possible,” Nemain stuttered, reaching toward the mirror.

  Karis grabbed her arm. “Without you ruining it, Faery will thrive again. It already is. Without you, the Unseelie will be sent back to hell—where they belong.”

  “No,” Nemain breathed.

  An explosion of light energy burst from Karis’s middle. Aspers, brighter than the sun, filled the floor and slithered out of the building to hunt down the Unseelie scum Nemain had brought with her. “It’s already done. You’re all alone now.”

  Nemain backed away slowly. “No.”

  “But you won’t be going with them. The fae call you a goddess, but I know what you really are.” She shook her head, disgusted. “You’re nothing.”

  Karis stretched her hands out and withdrew Nemain’s power, taking into her body a dark force that was almost blinding. She drained Nemain of all the power she’d had before she took it from others, as well as everything she’d stolen since. Nemain wheezed and inhaled, the tendons at her neck tightening into thick cords. She clutched at her chest and reached out to Karis.

  Karis shoved Nemain into the mirror on the wall, trapping her inside. In a tone I’d never heard come out of her mouth, Karis screamed, shattering the mirror into a billion tiny shards of glass. And Nemain shattered with them.

  Karis kept screaming. Darkness exploded from her, like she’d taken in too much from her mother and had to purge it from her body. Plumes of smoke and ash poured from her and she fell on her knees. I beat on the dome, begging her to let me out, but she couldn’t hear me. She stayed there until she was empty. Until the entire room and everything in it was coated with ash.

  The heels of my hands and elbows were going to break, but I didn’t stop beating the dome.

  “Let us out, K!” Iric yelled.

  “No!” I screamed. Finean stepped into the room through the mirror that remained. I pointed toward him and yelled his name.

  25

  KARIS

  “Finean!” the dark-haired fae yelled.

  The fae I knew as Finean stepped into the room through a small mirror. He’d given me an Asper—a gift that I first bestowed upon him—and pretended it was protection, when it was really a leash. “You should have killed me in the Leancan lair,” I tutted.

  “It wouldn’t have been a fair fight.”

  “You never wanted a fair fight. When did you decide to use me to end Nemain?”

  He lunged forward, a knife in his hand, but I batted the blade away effortlessly. It clattered across the floor, his eyes following its path. The wood of the handle was carved into the shape of an Asper, mouth wide, fangs exposed. It was no wonder Finean liked serpents, he was one; lying in wait until the right time to strike. He used me to get to Nemain, to end her, and now, he wanted to kill me so he would be the most powerful fae in all of Faery. He would make the fae of every court bow down to him, and I refused to let that happen.

  “I hid you so you would be strong enough to take her out of this world,” he grunted, running across the room and taking up the knife again.

  “So you could swoop in and claim it for yourself,” I spat.

  He strode toward me and I closed my eyes. Iric and the dark-haired fae pounded on the barrier I made to protect them, screaming at me to open my eyes, but they didn’t understand. I was listening. Years of blindness left me able to hear the slightest of movements, of shifting fabric and arms slicing through the air. When Finean struck out at me again, I was able to anticipate his movements.

  He stabbed and I jumped backward. He slashed and I sucked in my stomach to avoid him. He brought the knife down from above and I disappeared into shadow. “Open your eyes!” he roared.

  “You were the one who blinded me. I’m merely showing you what you taught me. I’m exactly what you made me.”

  He gritted his teeth, spinning in a circle to see where I would manifest again.

  “You put me in the gutter, and now you’re surprised I fight like a rat.”

  Finean roared, cutting through the dark tendrils I sent toward him, and then he shook his head and fastened his eyes on the shield around Iric and the dark-haired fae. He ran toward them, blade raised high, and embedded it into the top of the magic dome. But instead of disintegrating, it emitted a powerful shock, and the reverberating blast sent him careening to the floor. He groaned, still lying on his back as I checked on the two inside.

  A flash of orange.

  Loftin. His name is Loftin. How do I know him?

  I couldn’t figure it out, but everything inside me wanted to keep him safe.

  He pounded on the glass. “Behind you!”

  A burning sensation rippled from my back to my chest, taking my breath away. I glanced down to see the tip of a blade sticking out of my flesh. Finean had stabbed me through where he thought my heart would be.

  Iric’s face turned pale. His mouth gaped open and he screamed in horror. But it was the look on Loftin’s face that scared me.

  LOFTIN

  Her gasp filled the air, and suddenly, I fell forward as the dome disappeared with a pop. Finean left the knife in place, right where her heart should be. “Karis!” I screamed as she fell to her knees and looked at me.

  She glared at Finean. “You’re dead,” she pr
omised.

  “No, you are,” he answered smugly, but then the smile fell from his face. He coughed and doubled over. “What did you do to me?” he choked.

  “My biggest mistake was making you. Yours was thinking you could live without your creator.”

  He fell to the floor, writhing and crying out in pain.

  I got to her as she fell onto her side. “No, no, please no. Don’t do this. He couldn’t have hurt you, right? You’re fine. We just have to take this out.”

  Alistair scrambled over to Finean. “He’s fading,” he cried out.

  Fast, his bloody eyes warned as they flashed to me.

  And so was Karis.

  “The Unseelie will be obliterated, and the Aspers will disappear as soon as they bite into one of them,” she said calmly. “Faery will be safe now.”

  Iric cradled her head in his lap.

  “I’m fine.” She grinned up at me. “He missed.”

  Her breaths were erratic, and then they became shallower and shallower. Something was wrong. Wincing, I pulled the blade from her chest. A strange, unfamiliar and fruity smell came from the metal. “Alistair? What is this scent? What did he do to her?”

  Alistair left Finean prone on the ground and sniffed the blade, revulsion curling his lip. “It’s deadly. He coated the blade with juice from the fruit of a poisonous tree.”

  Iric was beside himself. “Karis? Come on, K. You can’t leave me now.” Her eyes fluttered closed.

  I couldn’t move. “What can help her, Alistair?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.” As Karis let out a long breath, Finean did the same at the exact moment. “His entire existence depended on hers,” Alistair divulged. “She created him.”

  No. There was no way Karis created something like him.

  “She created him,” Alistair explained, “for the same reason her mother wanted an heir. She was lonely. But that doesn’t matter. We have a larger problem.”

  “What could be worse than this?” My voice broke as I brushed her hair back from her face.