“You won’t be leaving this house alive,” I said, my chest pushing against the floor with each bitter inhale.
Somehow. With little magic. And quickly so I could find Kason.
The fae stood stone still, waiting for my next move. If only I knew what that was. The silence flickered unease through me, as if the fae kept a hoard of secrets that would be my undoing.
My muscles tensed, my palms slicking the wood with a cold sweat, I crawled slowly out from underneath the side of the bed closest to the door, my hands screaming with pain. As soon as my head cleared the mattress, my gaze leveled on my family’s murderer.
14
I nodded, blanking my face, while betrayal ate up my insides.
Ty. My best friend. Cold. Quiet. Dark hair slicked back with no bow, wearing normal clothes and killer shoes in place of his rattling buckled shitkickers. With smoky black fairy wings swelling out from his back that hadn’t been there before. Wings I hated to see on my best friend, even now that I knew the truth. He stared at me through narrowed eyes as if I had done him wrong.
“You peed on the floor,” he said in a harsh voice I’d never heard before.
I bit down hard on my lip while our four years of friendship flashed through my head. A fucking fae. I wasn’t even sure how that was possible.
“You murdered my family.” The plainness in which I said it shocked me. “Mind telling me why? And while you’re at it, go ahead and explain why you suddenly have fairy wings.”
“Not suddenly.” He gave me a tight smile. “I’ve always had them. I just hid them with a little magic. Them, and the so-called stink you witches claim to smell on us.”
A little magic. Right. “So, what, you’re some kind of spy living among us lowly witches?”
He quirked an eyebrow, somehow sarcastic-like, as if he wasn’t at all interested in what I had to say. Or if he was keeping secrets about what he’d just done to Kason. If Ty had hurt him in any way, I would kill Ty and resurrect him just so I could kill him again.
I strode casually toward the end of the bed, closer to the door, still with no plan how to get out of here alive. “Why my family? Why leave me alive? You had to know I was here.”
“The portal the fae used to invite humans to our world after World War III apparently didn’t turn all of them into witches. It’s said that one of them stayed human, broke the portal on their way through, rendered fae magic moot before the fae fixed the portal again. Your dad hacked into the fae computer system and found a list of people who passed through the portal before and after that window of time. He’d been tracking down their descendants ever since.”
“You killed him because he was right,” I said, the words thick with conviction. “Because there is a Legacy.”
Ty regarded me coolly, and his non-answer confirmed the threat against the fae was real.
“And Mom and Talamond and Jake? He was five, Ty.”
“A liability,” he said, his voice cold and lethal.
They were so much more than that. “And me?”
“Bait,” he spit the word out like it tasted rancid. “I needed you alive to want to avenge your family’s deaths and find out more about the Legacy so it can be destroyed. For good.”
Was he saying the Legacy wasn’t destroyed yet? That Kason was fine? I wasn’t about to clue him in that I wasn’t certain Kason was the Legacy or not. Nobody would know unless he swallowed some poke root.
“Is it just you with a big stiffy for this human or…?” I asked.
“Some high-up government types.” He shrugged. “And me.”
Like Claudia and her clones. She’d wrangled all of my knowledge about Kason right out of my head and into hers after I’d melted her face off with the Devil’s Sun. How many fae had she shared that information with? And since Ty had hired me to find Kason, I’d used him as a sounding board until I became hesitant to trust him. Then at Dimic’s Everlasting Ink, I’d seen that dark-haired man with the same shoes as Ty talking to someone about me. Likely that had been Ty. Was that his dad, who worked at the Fae and Witch Relations Department and whom I’d conveniently never met?
“It wasn’t that man who followed me inside Kason’s house from Dimic’s.” I sucked in a sharp breath, the realization cutting deep. “It was you.”
“There was an impressive variety of spells on his house that I undid. Your dad hid your human and all his secrets well.” He clasped his hands behind his back, his hazel eyes narrowing. “But you were taking too long to figure them all out.”
“And…” I swallowed. “The letter from him?”
“Under an incredible amount of encryption on his computer, which used to be”—he pointed at an empty space next to my mom’s herb garden box—“right there before I took it that night.”
I exhaled a short, choppy breath. Dad would’ve known I could’ve easily found that letter if I hadn’t buried this bedroom in a heavy layer of black, vengeful thoughts for the last two years. And unless Ty hadn’t stolen the entire computer.
“Fucking asshole,” I whispered.
He took two steps closer, barring me from the door. “Tell me where your human is.”
My body seized up while a spark of bright hope bubbled inside. He hadn’t seen Kason on his way in the house, right there out front in the jeep with blood staining his entire front? If not, then where was Kason? Had he driven off with a bullet stuck inside him and decided to hell with me? Or had someone else gotten to him first? All hope withered away to a sharp pinprick inside my heart.
I shrugged, attempting to paint my face with innocence. “Holed up somewhere safe.”
“You’re lying,” he said with a malicious glare. “I can tell.”
“Right. Because you know me so well after all these years,” I snapped. “Well, you can’t kill me if you want to find him, so what’s going through that fairy head of yours?”
He leaned against the bed and smoothed a wrinkle from the blankets. “Torture.”
Those particular movements, that single word, slimed bile up from my stomach. I hated him right then, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about my gay best friend who I’d shared all my silly teenage secrets and fantasies with. Who I had trusted completely.
I hardened my voice into stone that matched his expression. “Really? Whose?”
“Funny.” His mouth thinned into a pseudo-smile. “I always liked that about you.”
“I always liked that about me too,” I said, then I bolted past him toward the door with no real plan but to get away.
I twisted through the barbed wire hole with my head, torso, and one leg. Just as he dived toward me, I shoved my elbow into a wire, between barbs, straight toward him.
A barb punctured his chin, and he stopped, his nostrils flaring. Blood seeped out from the wound, red at first, and then growing as dark as his wings.
I jerked my elbow back from the wire, releasing the barb from his skin, and hurried to drag my other leg through the hole. He caught the ankle of my boot and yanked. Still straddling the wires, I crashed down. The instinct to catch myself smashed my other leg against the wall of wire. Inch-long barbs pierced me through the inner thigh, the crook of my knee, down the length of my calf to my Achilles’ heel. Pain lanced the air from my lungs, but adrenaline, the will to survive, the need for vengeance drilled through my veins sharper than any barbs ever could.
But before I could move, Ty’s fist smashed into my jaw. The force knocked me into more wire, stabbing into my face. I reached out blindly to catch myself but only tangled in more barbs.
“Where is he, Hadley?” Ty asked.
“I don’t know,” I croaked.
“You’re lying.” He sighed as if this whole thing was an inconvenience for him. Then he knotted his hand into my hair, yanked my head down several barbs, and back through the hole into the bedroom.
Blood rivered down one eye, shading the room behind him in a painful red. No way would I be going back in there with him and his talk of torture still echoing in my
ears. Because this conversation was over.
Bent over as I was, I flashed out a hand, grabbed everything between Ty’s legs, and twisted as hard as I could. Agony blazed to my fingertips, piercing my nerves with white-hot knives.
He pulled in a wheezed gasp.
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do, you son of a bitch,” I said through clenched teeth.
I let go and freed myself from the wire pincushion trap. He stumbled forward, his hands swiping at empty air just as I pulled away from him and crashed into the hallway.
Blood soaked through my pants and oozed a steady stream to the floor. Parts of my leg had gone numb while the other parts shrieked. The bloodied holes in my face from the barbs screeched in agony. A black haze tunneled my vision, but I blinked it away to the edges.
A buzzing filled the doorway between Ty and me, and a bright white light ignited up the length of it to shield him. Then the light shoved outward toward me.
I spun to the side a second before it slammed into where I’d just been and barreled a hole through the wall into Jake’s room. I pushed to my feet and dragged myself down the hallway, past the dying green flames in their wall sconces.
Footsteps thudded behind me. The whistled tune started up again and raked a shiver across my shoulders. As I passed the rest of the doors in the hallway, the barbed wire sprang loose, whipping at my face, snapping at my thighs, tugging at my clothes. Slowing me down. That fairy needed to fucking die.
As soon as I made it through the barb-wire gate and into the living room, I spun around. “Fugit.”
The gate soared backward, but with a simple wave of his hand, it barely clipped him.
Seven clicks left. Six if I wanted to live. But how to kill him without magic when he likely had more than I did?
I rounded the corner into the kitchen where broken wine bottles lay scattered across the table and floor. Spilled wine stuck to the bottom of my boots on my way to the nearest unbroken bottle on the countertop. Alcohol. The fire in the hallway. Good enough.
I spun around, hiding the bottle behind my back as Ty entered the kitchen with his fingers splayed out in front of him. With a muttered spell from him, the buttons on my sweater burst open, baring my chest. Ice seized my heart. I took in a ragged breath as Ty’s fingers curled inward. Even though he stood several feet away, he gripped my heart through my rib cage with magic, slowing its wild pulses.
“Tell me where he is,” Ty warned.
I flopped along the edge of the countertop, writhing at the pressure around my heart, as terror frosted my veins. The bottle dropped from my hands and rolled toward the refrigerator. A trickle of dark red wine settled into the cracks on the floor. A black haze swept in over my eyes like smoky fae wings, threatening to fly me under a frozen black abyss.
“Effundo ignis,” I whispered.
Several crashes from the hallway, then a small gust of green fire billowed toward the spilled wine.
Ty waved it toward the living room with an angry snap of his hand. The fire rushed toward the fireplace.
“Stop wasting time,” he shouted.
The ice in my chest expanded. A warning bell needled into my brain and set off bursts of light so much like stars. I faded into the countertop, my legs no longer able to support me. My atern clinked against the floor as I collapsed, triggering a thought that blazed then faded behind the wintery squeeze around my heart.
“Where is he?” Ty yelled.
All of my thoughts wilted behind a frozen wall that climbed higher through my chest and into my…
A dark shape blurred behind Ty and stalked up on him. “I’m right here, asshole,” a voice growled.
The familiar outline and rough voice sparked a fight through my limbs. I scrambled for drawers and something, anything, inside to help. Every floor tile, every sharp corner my fingers grazed shot unholy pain from wrist to fingertip, but this time I welcomed it. It chipped away the icy haze from my brain and heart and clarified what needed to be done.
Four clicks on my atern. Three if I wanted to live. And I did to save Kason and the rest of this frozen world. Those two things were what I wanted most.
The vague shape defined itself into Kason. His face twisted with menace, he tackled Ty to the ground.
The time had come to choose which memories would haunt me—my family’s slaughter and the resulting aftermath, or letting their murderer go free.
“Gaudium,” I whispered into my hands. My atern ticked down three. If I used the last click, the poison spikes inside my atern would trigger, and that would be it for me.
Soft blue light misted from between my lips. I touched it to my palms, and it scraped all the pain away into nothingness. Gone, leaving an empty feeling behind it, as if I were missing something I had relied on for the last two years—the guilt I’d made tangible. The rest of my body, however, still throbbed and leaked too much blood, and my iced-up heart was still under Ty’s spell.
I dug my hand into a drawer and curled it around something weighty and sharp. Memories of my own sobs that night tumbled through my head, a bloodied knife clutched in my hand, my family dead because I couldn’t save them. But I could avenge them. And I would. I would make this desperate world a better, brighter, happier place.
But my body objected and dropped me to the floor. With the handle of a cleaver—not a knife—secured in my fist, I crawled toward Ty. I hadn’t had the presence of mind or the time to try something bigger and sharper on Dad.
With a muttered spell, Ty propelled Kason off of him. Kason crashed onto the coffee table and snapped it in half. He lay there stunned.
Not dead. I refused to think he was dead. Not. Dead.
I opened my mouth to scream it aloud, but all that came out was a low hiss.
Ty turned, and his crazed eyes caught me slithering toward him along the floor. His mouth distorted into a grin as he pushed to his feet.
I blinked at the blood that dripped into my eyes, but it kept coming, threatening to blanket my vision if unconsciousness didn’t. My heart sounded faint with too many empty spaces between beats.
Ty stalked toward me. I gripped the cleaver tight, my lips peeled back in a pained grimace.
Behind him, one of Kason’s hands twitched at his side. Not involuntary twitching. He was alive! He fumbled for something in his jeans pocket with his red, swollen fingers. A metal can of fennel seeds with a lid that didn’t close right. He let it drop to the floor, spilling fennel seeds in a wide arc.
Counting. He’d said fae had a thing about counting.
The gold-toed tips of Ty’s shoes drew closer. The power inside him vibrated outward. “Praemium—”
“Seeds,” I choked out. “Behind you.”
His contorted face relaxed some, replaced by a curiosity that seemed to compel him to turn. “No…” He took a step toward them, his shoulders heaving.
“Better go…” I dragged in an inhale, the movement constricting my frozen chest. “Count them.”
With a frustrated growl, Ty walked toward the spilled seeds with jerky limbs, as if he had no control. He fell to his knees and began to sort the seeds into an orderly pile.
I hauled myself across the floor toward him, my gasps for air fading behind a darkness that threatened to slip over my eyes, and slid up behind him. One of his arms braced his weight as the other continued sorting the seeds. I slipped my fingers across his flesh and knuckles and the silver atern to hold his hand in place, and I didn’t even think. I plunged the cleaver down.
He screamed. Terror flared his eyes wide as they ticked from the blade stuck in his wrist to my fist wrapped around the handle.
I plucked the cleaver free and collapsed face-first on the floor. My body twitched with rapid blood loss and the inability to draw more than a shallow breath through the ice binding my chest. I had no control over my movements, but I needed his hand, his atern, his magic. I tucked the cleaver’s handle to my chest, hoping for one last burst of energy, enough to push myself up.
My
gaze floated underneath the black couch where a monster eyeball stared back. A monster eyeball attached to a crazy straw. Jake’s birthday present. And this fae who I’d once called my best friend had taken Jake away from me.
The thought of my baby brother, my whole fucking family, struck a match that streaked vengeful fire through my arms. I clutched the cleaver, and with a breathless scream that rang between my ears, I sailed the blade home once again. Split flesh, carved bone. Ty’s hand slumped to the floor.
“Bitch!” He hugged his bleeding stump to his chest, still bent over the floor while counting, a wild, pained look in his eyes.
I wrenched his atern from his lopped-off hand and clinked our aterns together, absorbing his magic until he had none. His arctic heart-stopper spell lifted. My heart slammed into my chest with renewed vigor. I dragged in a breath, clawing at my neck and chest as if that could make the air funnel in quicker. I tried to push myself to my feet. My legs weren’t cooperating, though, especially the punctured, bleeding one. The floor was slicked with blood, both mine and Ty’s.
“Kason?” I summoned the will and the energy to crawl over to him. “Kason, answer me.”
“I hope he’s dead, you fucking bitch,” Ty hissed.
I swung my good leg into his pile on my way to Kason, and his carefully counted seeds skittered across the floor.
“Why did you do that? Why did you do that?” Ty screamed.
I picked my way over the broken coffee table and anchored my hand to Kason’s blood-soaked chest. A glance down at my atern showed I’d absorbed 305 clicks from Ty. Not an infinite amount, but compared to my one click I’d had left before, it sure as hell seemed like it. Unfortunately, fae didn’t die without magic like witches.
“Curare.” Warm buttery light curled off my lips, and I pressed the healing power into his mouth. “Come back to me, Kason.”
I waited for his wounds to melt away, for his eyes to snap open and meet mine, for the moment we could walk away from this nightmare, hand in hand.
But nothing happened.
15
I wasn’t too late. I wasn’t too late to save him, to resurrect him, like I’d been with my family. But I didn’t want the resurrected version of my Kason, whatever that might be. I wanted him.
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 15
