by Reine, SM
He didn’t see her shoot. And Rhiannon was too busy saving herself to be able to stop the fireball.
Fire smashed into Melchior’s chest. It engulfed him.
He shot backward with a roar, blowing through the icy portal. The force of his momentum made the whole room shake.
The fireball melted the ice around the portal. Water sloshed across the floor to drench Rhiannon’s feet. “Melchior!” she cried, throwing a hand toward the portal as though to draw him back.
Deirdre fired her Sig again.
The iron bullet punched through Rhiannon’s shoulder, just a little bit too far to the left to strike her in the heart. The blood that flowed from the wound was red. A human color, without the tint of sidhe magic.
Rhiannon covered the wound with her hand. She uttered a word of power and the wound vanished instantly, taking the blood with it.
But not before Deirdre saw.
The queen’s blood was red. She was human—not unseelie sidhe.
“Wow,” Deirdre said.
Stark didn’t notice. He thrashed as his muscles swelled and rearranged. His roar of pain reverberated through the entire medical bay and made icicles fall from the top of the portal. Gage had once told Deirdre that it hurt when someone forced him to transform, and Stark was definitely in the same kind of pain. That was fine with Deirdre. He deserved it. He deserved everything that was coming to him.
Rhiannon advanced on Deirdre, and she scrambled backwards like a crab, pausing only long enough to pop off a couple more shots. The queen dodged them as easily as she had the first one.
The queen flung her hand toward Deirdre.
Invisible magic yanked Deirdre off the ground. The grip was so tight that her ribs didn’t want to expand when she inhaled. She beat against it with her hands, but it did no good. There was no way to push the magic off.
Rhiannon’s eyes focused over Deirdre’s shoulder.
“We have company,” Rhiannon said, releasing the grip of magic with a flick of her fingers.
Deirdre landed on unsteady feet. She turned to see Niamh sneaking through the doorway that had been barricaded.
The sight of the swanmay’s downy white feathers filled Deirdre with a strange mixture of relief and fear. She had worried that Niamh was somewhere among the numerous bodies that Deirdre hadn’t had time to search.
Yet she was alive. She was alive, and as far as Deirdre could tell, uninjured. She wore a vintage Reading Rainbow t-shirt with a plaid skirt that barely covered her hips.
And she wasn’t armed.
“Niamh, run!” Deirdre shouted.
But her friend came into the room anyway, ignoring Deirdre’s plea.
Rhiannon’s hand lifted again—ready to cast more magic.
Deirdre leaped to shield Niamh, flinging her arms wide to block her as much as possible. She was wider than Niamh, but shorter. She could only defend her so much.
“Run, stupid!” Deirdre said.
“I’m so sorry, Dee,” Niamh whispered.
Pain punched through Deirdre’s back. She looked down to see a blade jutting from her breastbone.
A silver blade.
She touched it with her fingers. It must have burned, but she didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel much of anything beyond the wall of pain that pressed upon her.
“Tombs!” Stark shouted. His voice was distorted by the change.
His voice was distant, echoing.
She dropped to her knees. The blade remained inside of Deirdre’s body as she fell.
Her heart wouldn’t beat around it. Blood dribbled down her chest.
Deirdre landed on her side. She stared up at Niamh—her friend, the swanmay, the woman who had recruited her to work for Stark in the first place, whose hand was now coated with Deirdre’s blood.
Her other hand clutched something feathery and black. Deirdre couldn’t identify it. But it seemed important, somehow, that Niamh would be holding a bundle of black feathers.
Kristian stood beside Niamh. It didn’t seem right, Kristian visiting—he was an artist, not a shapeshifter. He wasn’t part of the rebellion and shouldn’t have known where to find them.
It might have been the blood loss, but Deirdre thought that Kristian’s skin sparkled with a diamond shine.
He was wearing a long black jacket and square sunglasses.
Deirdre had seen those sunglasses before. They had been worn by the would-be assassin who had chased her to the meeting with Brianna.
Kristian was far away now, taking Niamh with him.
The room was receding.
“Tombs!”
Deirdre felt hot all over. The healing fever was racing to repair the damage, even as oblivion sucked her under.
No amount of healing fever would be able to fix a silver knife to the heart.
I’m dead, she realized.
She would have said it aloud, but when she opened her mouth, nothing came out.
Niamh killed me. She’s with the unseelie sidhe. She betrayed Stark and she betrayed me.
The words swirled through her head. Her vision filled with blazing white light, like she was being consumed by flame. It was nice to be warm again, considering how cold the wind from the Middle Worlds was becoming. Deirdre embraced the fire.
Gage was in the flames with her, his fur curling from the heat. The smell of scorched bear fat stung her nostrils.
Her eyes shut.
She was dead.
Death wasn’t that bad, actually.
Deirdre had done it once before, so dying a second time wasn’t a big deal, all things considered.
When her eyes opened, she found herself standing among blackberry bushes. The brambles came all the way up to her waist. The thorns pressed against her skin without leaving a scratch.
“Deirdre,” said a man.
She turned to see a familiar face waiting for her. He stood beyond the bushes in an endless, grassy field, where the beginnings of dawn tinted the night sky a paler shade of sapphire touched with fiery orange.
“Daddy?” she asked.
Alasdair Tombs was so much shorter than she remembered, only an inch taller than Deirdre was now. He had always seemed impossibly huge to her—so big that nothing could have ever hurt him, or gotten between them. But he was small now. Just a man.
He looked a lot like Deirdre in many ways. They had the same little gap between their front teeth. His hair was curlier, a little lighter, almost more brown than black. But that wide smile was all his.
“I hoped I wouldn’t see you so soon, Deirdre,” he said. “It’s too early.”
She laughed and tried to step out of the blackberry bushes. They were too dense for her to push through. “What are you talking about? It’s been years. I’d say it’s about damn time I got here.”
“No, baby girl.” He wasn’t trying to reach out for her. He looked so sad. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. You’ve got business to take care of. A whole life.”
The blackberry bushes tugged more sharply as Deirdre tried to break free. She was starting to get annoyed. She wanted to join her father in the grassy fields, not remain all tangled up in thorns. “I didn’t ever want to take care of business on my own in the first place. Help me get out of these bushes. They pinch.”
Alasdair Tombs remained impassive.
Anger and grief twisted within Deirdre’s chest.
“Come on, Daddy!”
“I can’t,” he said. “You know I can’t. That’s not how it works.”
“Why not? Don’t you want me to come back?” She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I want to be with you.”
His eyebrows creased. “I know, baby girl.”
It had been so long since anyone called her that. The sound of it hurt all over.
But most of the pain was in her chest.
Deirdre touched her fingers to her breast. She couldn’t seem to look down to see herself, but she felt warm blood slicking her hand. It pulsed from between her fingers. She was bleeding.
Tombs.
Her heart leaped.
Somehow Alasdair Tombs was further away than he’d been moments earlier. He wasn’t just beyond arm’s reach now. He was on the next hill, a distant point so small that she could no longer make out the gap in his teeth that she’d inherited from him.
“Daddy!” Deirdre cried, holding her arms out.
She couldn’t hear his response. The wind was picking up now.
Dawn erupted, engulfing her in sudden heat so intense that it felt as though the sun had fallen onto the fields. Its fiery blaze made the grass catch. Flames swept in rippling orange waves to encircle Deirdre’s feet.
The blackberry bushes ignited.
She sucked in a breath to shout to her father, but there was no oxygen left. She was hot—so hot. Deirdre was consumed.
But she wasn’t afraid.
The fire felt right. It was a piece of her, as natural as the breath from her lungs.
Her father was beyond it all. It formed a wall that couldn’t be breached between them.
“Daddy!”
If he was yelling back at her, she couldn’t hear it. The roar of the fire filled her ears. It buoyed her up, lifting her into a vast, sunny sky, where it never rained and it was always warm.
Her arms spread. Her chest bled.
And Deirdre finally flew.
—XX—
When Everton Stark had woken up that morning, he had planned on doing two things. First, he’d planned to save Deirdre Tombs from the Office of Preternatural Affairs, killing anyone who got in his way. And second, he’d planned that he and Tombs would get revenge upon the sidhe.
He was a man who liked having a plan.
Too bad everything was rapidly going to hell.
His wife’s compulsion rattled through him. It suffused every atom of his bones and muscles. It filled his every thought until there was nothing but those words: Shapeshift. Now.
It hurt. It hurt more than anything he’d experienced before.
Stark pushed against Rhiannon’s compulsion, railing against it. But it was like a vortex sucking him into the depths of a bottomless ocean. It dragged him down, ever lower, into a chasm where there was nothing but her command.
Shapeshift.
You’re too weak.
Stark had last seen Rhiannon shortly before Genesis. He had been searching through a hospital’s security footage for signs of his family, and he had discovered that Rhiannon had been there just one week earlier.
In the footage, Stark had seen that her hair had been pulled back into a practical knot. She had been wearing a men’s leather jacket that had dwarfed her body, making her shapeless and masculine. But Stark had recognized her hands.
He’d never forgotten her hands. The shape of her knuckles, the angle of her wrists.
For Ever, she had whispered when she handed him that watch so many years earlier. The links of the wristband had been draped over her fingers, jingling softly as they swayed. He would never forget what her hands looked like.
Her voice filled him.
For Ever.
Shapeshift. Now.
Stark was paralyzed by the change, locked in a battle against himself, trapped halfway between human and animal.
His hands dug into the floor. He wanted to stand up and use those claws against someone who deserved them—someone like Niamh—but if he moved an inch, he would move in many other ways. He would lose control. He was already on the brink, and it would take so little to push him over the edge.
Good gods, did he want to kill Niamh. The swanmay’s knife was still drenched in Tombs’s blood.
And Tombs was dead.
She wasn’t paralyzed by magic, like Vidya was. A valkyrie was far more difficult to kill than that. Even before Vidya had been reborn as a gaean, she had been the strongest of their unit in the Marines. She would survive.
But a shifter? A fragile Omega like Tombs, with a blade buried in her back?
She was surely dead.
“Hurry, Niamh,” Rhiannon said. “I can’t hold the portal much longer. Melchior must be unconscious.” She beckoned to Niamh and her boyfriend.
“No,” Stark growled. “Traitor.” He wasn’t certain that anyone could understand him anymore.
“I’m sorry, Stark,” Niamh said, eyes shimmering with tears. They spilled down her cheeks. “I had to.”
Vertebrae twisted inside Stark’s body, grinding against the muscle. He felt them pop. They were trying to extend into a tail. Stark pushed against it, drawing his energy within himself, trying not to hear his wife’s lingering command.
Shapeshift.
There was a sense of permanence in that word. If he changed by her command, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to change back.
“Tombs,” Stark said from between his gritted teeth.
“Aw, come on. You sound so pathetic. But don’t waste time mourning your Beta,” Kristian said. He stepped up to the portal, agile on the ice. Of course he was comfortable walking on ice. He was from the damn Winter Court. “She betrayed you first. She’s been lying to you this entire time.”
“No,” Stark said.
It was impossible. She’d shot Gage without needing to be compelled. She had helped rescue Vidya from the detention center. He had seen the joy in her eyes when she put a bullet in Dr. Landsmore’s head.
“It’s true,” Niamh said. “When you gave her a day off in the city, we followed her to see what she was doing. We saw her coming out of a basement where she’d been talking to a witch—someone named Brianna Dimaria, who we tracked back to an office in Las Vegas. Do you know who Brianna Dimaria is? She’s an ally of Rylie Gresham’s.”
It didn’t mean anything. Tombs could have been merely seeking information.
There was no way to ask her now.
Tombs was crumpled only a few feet away, beyond his reach, where he couldn’t have acted in time to save her. He’d watched Niamh lifting the knife and known what she was going to do and he’d had no choice but to remain frozen in Rhiannon’s compulsion.
Stupid woman. She might not have been dead if she hadn’t been trying to protect Niamh.
Fur swept down Stark’s shoulders, carpeting his arms.
He wouldn’t succumb.
Stark stared at his arms until the hair fell out again, puddling on the floor surrounding his hands and knees.
He was regaining ground. He was going to win.
Kristian slipped through the portal to the Middle Worlds.
Niamh threw the mass of black feathers around her shoulders. It was as long as a cloak, and when it closed around her body, she changed.
Her body grew, her feet changed, the world shimmered with unseelie magic.
Within seconds, she was no longer a woman, but a bird. Niamh hadn’t become the elegant white swan she was meant to be, but a hulking black thing, more like a vulture or the ugliest eagle he’d ever seen.
Niamh didn’t change above the shoulders. Her head remained.
She wasn’t a swanmay anymore. Niamh had become something else entirely.
A harpy.
She extended her wings to display the charcoal plumage that covered her body. There was pain and pride in her expression as she stretched out to her full wingspan. Stark knew what pain Niamh had endured when she lost her skin, but that pain was assuaged by her new form.
Stark had tried to give her revenge for what had happened to her. But the unseelie court had given her wings, and that was something that Niamh would have given anything to possess.
In this case, she had given Tombs’s life.
Rhiannon stroked her fingers through Niamh’s feathers. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said.
Niamh threw one last look at Tombs and then followed Kristian through the portal, flapping her wings hard against the blasting winter wind.
The entrance to the Middle Worlds was contracting to expose more of the wall behind it. Rhiannon would have to move quickly if she wanted to get through before it closed. But sh
e was sauntering toward Tombs’s body.
“Don’t touch her,” Stark growled.
Rhiannon scooped Melchior’s gun up with one finger. It was still steaming from when Deirdre had shot him.
“My mate will want this,” she said.
The word punched through him.
Mate.
Stark should have been her mate. They were married, for gods’ sake. They had both come back from Genesis as sidhe, so they could have been mated through magic and biology as strongly as they had been mated through law before the world ended.
But she didn’t want him.
“When I step through that portal, my magic will lift,” Rhiannon said, lashing Melchior’s revolver to her hips using cobwebs. “Your valkyrie will be fine. I won’t kill a rare gem such as her. You, however…”
She plucked the Ethereal Blade from Vidya’s immobile hands.
“I’m impressed by how well you’re resisting my command,” Rhiannon said. “Impressed, but not surprised. You were always very stubborn.”
The bone-white blade glimmered as she approached him. She made the sword look weightless, even though it must have been heavy for a woman with wrists as delicate as Rhiannon’s. She had always been stronger than she looked.
Her strength and ferocity were the things he loved about her most.
“Do you know what’s a shame?” Rhiannon asked, bending in front of him to look into Stark’s eyes. “I like you so much more than Melchior. I wish he wasn’t better than you.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Stark growled.
She drew back the sword to swing at him.
Stark finally let go.
His hands wrenched from the floor, swinging his hand at Rhiannon. His wife. The woman who had birthed his children and motivated his rebellion against Rylie Gresham.
He had changed enough that his claws remained sharp and long.
They sank easily into Rhiannon’s belly, as though she were no more solid than the cobwebs fluttering from her dress.
Stark had planned to shove his hand elbow-deep and find her heart, just as he had done with a sidhe earlier. But none of his plans were working very well that day. He saw Rhiannon’s eyes widen with shock, and he withdrew. It wasn’t even deliberate. It was instinctive.
