Even before she finished speaking, a great rolling wave of protective power rolled towards me from Christopher, stronger even than Millicent’s, springing forth to unite with his. They were both a split second too late—and I was too distracted by the shock of a body slamming into me to raise any defense of my own against the hammer of light and force the alokhiu hurled into my chest.
Then I was falling, scrambling for balance in air gone thick with magic, falling far greater a distance than any law of physics should have allowed.
And then I was somewhere else.
* * *
I landed so hard that for a few terrible moments, my existence narrowed down to breathless, blinding pain. The sheer physiological need to haul air into my aching lungs trumped everything else, including conscious thought. One gasp, two, and only after I’d pulled that off did I regain enough coherence to take stock of where I was, what shape I was in, and what the hell had just happened.
A polished hardwood floor was beneath me, bright enough that its gleam stung my eyes for a moment when I turned my head just enough to see it. Then it settled down to a quieter gleam of reflected candlelight, and thanks to that light—not to mention the weight of him sprawled across my stomach—I saw that I wasn’t alone. Elessir pinned me where I lay, and from the lax way he sprawled, he had to be out cold. With a logic that felt too calm and restrained even as the thought crossed my mind, I decided he must have been the one who’d tackled me when the bone walker had let fly.
And now we’d wound up wherever here was.
There was no sign of the others, I saw, when I began to struggle to sit up and look around. Elessir and I lay in a crumpled heap in a long, broad hallway flanked by statues of chimerical shapes and unnervingly fluid stone forms. We were alone. No Jake or Carson, no nogitsune, no Millicent—
No Christopher—
Oh God, Christopher!
As I thought of him, as I thought of the panic that must have swamped him if he’d just seen me disappear, my own composure cracked wide open. I fought harder to sit up now, which only served to jostle the unconscious Sidhe collapsed atop me. That was goddamned fine by me. Lacking any other outlet for my fear, I grabbed hold of Elessir and shook him with all my might. Then I slapped him for good measure, and would have done it again if he hadn’t abruptly stirred and seized my hand before I could deliver another blow.
“I’m awake,” he said. “I’m here.”
His voice was thicker than it should have been, putting a bit of a lie to his claim, but I didn’t care. I plowed my other fist into him, not carrying where I hit as long as I struck flesh. “Where the fuck is here?” I shouted. “Where are we?”
My magic surged in response to my anger, more easily than it had ever done before. That should have been a tip-off, but I was too busy wrestling with the Unseelie to notice. Problem was, Elessir had nine-hundred-some-odd years’ advantage on me in comfort with his own reflexes, and the bastard had probably studied eleven hundred types of martial arts for all I knew. I loved Millicent like a grandmother and Christopher like, well, Christopher, but neither of them had taught me a damned thing about physical self-defense yet.
Long story short, in no time flat he’d pulled me up off the floor and slammed me into the nearest wall, making my already abused back shriek a protest. I kept fighting him anyway, clawing with my hands at the arm he’d pressed against my chest while I prepared to clock him right between the eyes with every last bit of the strangely eager power roiling through me.
Then he stopped me cold with his answer.
“We’re in Faerie, Miss Thompson.”
I froze. My magic didn’t so much subside as back off for a few moments while my anger gave way to shock. With that, I remembered what alokhiu-Saeko had said to me just as she’d hit me with the power burst. My mouth went dry. “She opened a portal,” I croaked.
Elessir nodded, looking graver and more earnest than I’d ever seen him. That look of his sent new panic spiking through my heart. “She did.”
“Take us back!”
“Darlin’, I can’t. Melorite still has my magic, and I can’t do a damned thing till I get it back.”
“Then show me how!” I was starting to tremble, which pissed me off; I didn’t want to be so terrified before him. “We can’t stay here! The others need me, they need me, if that kid’s about to go full-on dragon, I have to help!”
He didn’t answer me immediately. Instead he lifted a hand to my cheek, and only when his fingers grazed against wetness on my skin did I notice I’d started to cry. Elessir made no move to wipe tears from my face, or to offer any other such gesture of comfort. If anything, he stared at me searchingly, as if he’d never seen a female weep before.
Maybe he hadn’t?
Then he shook himself, jerked his gaze away from mine, and said, “I will. Stars and moon and frost, I don’t know if I can teach without my power, but we’ll have to do it fast. She’ll know we’re here.”
Right on cue, as if the damned things had been waiting all along, the heads of the two nearest chimera statues turned towards us in a slow, grinding whisper of stone. Two pairs of eyes filled with will-o-the-wisp fire focused on us. And you’d just know that the statue closest to us, the one that looked best suited to coming to life and chomping off both our heads, was the one that opened its gryphon beak to address us. It didn’t move like a human mouth, or even a Sidhe one. It just seemed to exhale a mist of ice-blue smoke, through which a lush and all too familiar voice emerged.
“Oh, I absolutely know you’re here, my bardling, I felt it the instant you arrived. Be an obedient boy and bring our guest to me, won’t you?” The voice paused, just long enough to allow a tinge of dark promise to thread through its words. “Be swift. You know I do not like to be kept waiting.”
The smoke wreathed out around Elessir, transfixing him where he stood. I shrieked, which didn’t help, for unnatural peace stole over his features nonetheless.
Then he reached for me, and when his hands connected with my arm and shoulder to pull me to him, wine-sweet warmth sluiced through me. It radiated out from the places he touched, turning me light-headed, and then flowing down to loosen my knees.
Thrall, I thought in one last burst of panic, before that vanished in the growing compulsion to twine my arms around the Unseelie bard. I’d done it before, hadn’t it? Back at the mall? He’d been smaller then, shaped differently, but no, that wasn’t important now. All I needed to remember from the mall was where my arms belonged. I wrapped them around his waist. And I pressed closer to him, aware now of nothing except that intoxicating warmth and his mouth drifting down to mine.
“Kiss me, darlin’,” he murmured. A tiny part of me noted that his drawl was strangely distant, strangely rote, but no, that didn’t matter now either.
I kissed him, warmth blooming through me, molding me against him.
Then he picked me up and carried me off.
* * *
Even at his most powerful, Elessir had never been able to fight off Luciriel. No one among the Unseelie could. The Queen didn’t suffer rivals in her presence or in her Court. In living memory only Melorite had come close, and her death had been what drove him at last to seek the aid of the Court’s own blood enemies. That—and the vision his Sight had given him one night in Mississippi when he’d faced down a mortal woman who’d been brave enough to confront him in her bar. She hadn’t had the fortitude to stand against the thrall of his singing, but his Sight had warned him that her granddaughter would.
He had nothing whatsoever to defend against Luciriel’s vast magic now, and he didn’t even have time to try before it overwhelmed him completely. Everything vanished from his awareness save for the smell of the girl, that mortal woman’s granddaughter, dazzling in her youth and strength.
And her beauty, Luciriel’s voice suggested in a delicate whisper that wreathed his mind in a ring of smoke. Elessir couldn’t argue with that, and didn’t want to. Not when he saw Miss Thompson’s eyes go brig
ht with need, and not when her arms locked around him in a circle of warmth and power. He sought her mouth with his, and for a moment there was nothing in his existence but the heat of that contact.
Then the echo of it redoubled through him, augmented by sparkling filaments of frost—a net that closed around his thoughts and resounded with Luciriel’s approval.
Does she not taste sweet, my bardling? Would you like to taste her again?
He did. He’d hidden it from Miss Thompson, but from the seeking consciousness of his Queen, there was no hiding.
No, there’s not. I have all your secrets, and I’ll have all of hers, too. If you’re a good boy, perhaps I’ll even let you keep her. Now bring her to me.
Some last lingering shred of his consciousness rebelled despite the futility of it, for that part of him still remembered that if Luciriel could promise him Miss Thompson, it meant she’d captured them both. But his body had yielded, even if that last part of his mind had not, and his limbs were all too willing to bear the girl’s pliant form where the Queen wished it to go.
And all he could do, in the blasted hole Melorite had left in the core of him, was scream.
Chapter Sixteen
“Jesus God! Kenna! KENNA!”
Christopher heard his own terrified shout, but in truth had no real idea of his own words. They didn’t matter, not when color and power exploded around Kendis, ripping open a hole in the air—and not when the creature wearing a young child’s body hurled a missile of force straight at the girl he loved. He threw forth power of his own to block it. But he had no time to aim while he was already hurling himself in Kendis’ direction, bent on shielding her with body and magic alike. Millicent’s power crested along with his, and his Warder First had all the speed of her decades of experience. But it wasn’t enough.
Elessir beat him to Kendis, tackling her, and he wasn’t fast enough either.
The alokhiu’s assault slammed into her, hurling her—and the Unseelie along with her—through the open portal. When Christopher’s own leap carried him to that spot, though, the portal closed with an audible rush of power. Light coruscated across his sight, blinding him for an instant, and his aborted tackle had nowhere to carry him but straight into the ground.
“KENNA!”
Feet thudded near him. Hands grabbed at him, hands whose owners Christopher couldn’t see until his sight cleared and he realized Jake and Carson were pulling him to his feet. He shoved away their hands, for neither man’s presence was as important as the one he suddenly lacked.
Oh God, sweet Christ, where’d she go!
Laughter, too high and sweet of tone for the menace it carried, sliced into his rising panic—laughter, and the sharp bark of Millicent’s order. “Boy, get your head back in the game!”
Christopher whirled, prodded by the older Warder’s rebuke and by that uncanny laughter. There was the bone walker, the small form she’d claimed still glowing, still floating inches off the earth. She grinned at them all with blatant and ancient malice, seemingly unaware that the nogitsune Hiroshi was leaping for her—until she spun in mid-air and hurled a miniature blast of lightning straight into his face. Hiroshi yelped and collapsed, blurring into human form, until at last he looked with anguished eyes up at the thing that inhabited his sister.
“That’s not very nice, oniisan,” she chided. “If you do that again I won’t love you anymore!”
“What’d you do to Kendis?” Christopher roared. “Where’d you send her?” He was ready to charge her like the nogitsune boy had. But Millicent was hanging back, despite the crackle of her power through the earth and air, and even Makiko Asakura was doing no more than warily circling, looking for her own opportunity to strike.
“Oh, come on, pretty Warder boy, where do you think I sent your Seelie girl? Just like my Queen commanded. And now that that’s done, I can play. Play with me!”
With a rumble of thunder, her magic redoubled. Christopher whipped his shields into place barely in time to keep a second blast of lightning from blowing him off his feet—and even then, he staggered back hard, his sight filled with golden spangles of fire once again.
“Jake, get Carson back!” Millicent bellowed. “Melisanda, back off, you’re not fighting her with a sword!”
“Lady Warder, do you plan to fight her with a gun?”
Christopher shook his head to clear it, in time to see the Seelie warrior herding Jake and Carson away from him, further down the path. She cast him a questioning glance, but he waved her off and eyed his Warder First instead.
Millie stood with feet planted wide and her shotgun poised and ready. She scowled down the length of it, straight at the hovering child. But Makiko rushed to her, shoving at the weapon with her right hand. At the same time, Christopher felt the power the nogitsune had hurled at him and Kendis roil round the other woman, charged with her anger and fear. Makiko bit out words in crisp Japanese, and then again in English: “You will not shoot my daughter’s body!”
Frustration clouded Millicent’s expression, yet for a single moment she didn’t argue. That brief hesitation was enough for the bone walker to strike again. Magic blasted into the earth before them all, driving them back several feet and calling up wind that tore into clothes, hair and eyes.
“We have to get her out of the kid, Millie!” How they’d do that, Christopher didn’t know. He’d grown up a Warder’s son, and two months running now he’d wielded Warder power of his own. But he’d never even seen a dragon child, much less had to banish a ghost out of one. Saeko, whether because of the entity possessing her or no, didn’t answer to the magic as one of Seattle’s people. God help him, he had no idea if they’d be able to break the alokhiu out of her at all.
Nor did Millicent have time to instruct him. She pulled back her gun, but her power rose in its stead, answering the crackling wind from Saeko’s outstretched hands with the full roaring strength of her own. Christopher could do nothing except dig down along with her into the deep blazing sea of energy that Seattle offered them, and throw her a line of his magic to back her up. It was reflex by now. He’d done it often enough with Kendis.
Panic threatened to choke him at the thought of her. He tamped it down hard and focused instead on flinging Millicent every ounce of power he could muster.
It didn’t help.
Millie was as staunch and immutable as Signal Hill on the island where he’d been born, or as Mount Rainier towering over the city he now protected. But if the older Warder had the strength of the Rock itself, then the next eruption of power from the bone walker matched her with all the ferocity of the storms that blew into the St. John’s harbor every winter. The air grew harsh and chill, and in the heart of the gusting wind, the body of Saeko Asakura began to change.
Makiko screamed—but Millie, unrelenting, thundered to Christopher, “Get her out of this city, boy! NOW!”
The nogitsune Ryuji Asakura had resisted when Christopher had flung him beyond Seattle’s Wards. Next to the thing that inhabited his sister, though, he might as well have ambled out with a song and a smile. In Saeko’s voice the bone walker shrieked, turning her full attention now upon the Warders. Magic plowed into Christopher, force and light and heat that made him think for an instant that he’d just been set on fire. But his channel to the city held—and, more importantly, his channel to Millicent. He didn’t have enough power or experience to banish this creature by himself.
Millicent, however, did.
Her power, tapping deep into his own, hit him almost as hard as the alokhiu’s strike. Gritting his teeth, digging his heels into the earth, he held onto his consciousness and focused on throwing everything he had out to aid his Warder First. Under Millie’s command, their joined magics reared back. Then they struck, straight into the center of the rapidly growing shape of Saeko Asakura.
Through the haze of power brightening the night, Christopher caught one glimpse of Saeko’s small body rapidly gaining height and breadth and the beginnings of wings.
I
n the next instant, she was gone.
Voices cried out all around him. Not until his vision cleared, though, was he really able to tell that the sudden fight was over. Dazed, Christopher took note of the others. Melisanda, Jake and Carson had all backed off as Millicent had ordered. The Seelie, though, still had her blade drawn. Jake, despite his partner outweighing him, stood planted between Carson and any threat that might come their direction. Makiko had rushed to the side of her son, and though neither spoke, fear was plain in both their expressions as they embraced.
And Millicent was turning to him. Her cheeks were gray with weariness, which might have alarmed Christopher if he hadn’t noticed how she was looking at him first. Grim and furious was nothing new on the face of Millicent Merriweather. That look of unhappy understanding as she tromped up to him and seized his shoulders, though, sank a knife right into his chest.
She knows, he thought numbly. She knows Kendis is gone.
Only then did his legs begin to wobble. He might have fallen save for the iron grip the old woman had on him, keeping him on his feet. “We’re going to find her, son,” she murmured to him. It was the same voice Christopher had heard her use to comfort Jude, and he almost wanted to cry himself at the sound of it. “She’s going to come back to us. Just remember, I need you, Seattle needs you, and Kendis needs you to hold it together so we can make damn sure she does make it back. Can you do that?”
Mary, Mother of God, he wasn’t sure he could. But Christopher swallowed hard and then nodded once, slowly. “I can,” he said.
His voice was the barest croak, barely audible even to him, but it satisfied Millicent. She nodded once in curt approval, and beckoned him to follow her to the others.
“Good. Then hang onto your hat, boy, because I’m here to tell you, we’re in for a long goddamn night.”
Bone Walker Page 16
