by Eva Chase
I made a disgruntled sound. “Only after you put me through a long muddy ride in the rain or something equally horrific.”
“Yes,” Darton said lightly, “I probably deserved ever spark of that temper.” He tipped his head, lapsing into silence as another memory must have swept over him. When he spoke again, it was with a chuckle. “And you did have an odd sense of humor at times. Why did you enchant Lord Barimeld’s clothes to smell like pickles?”
A snort escaped me. I’d almost forgotten that little act of revenge. I’d never told Arthur exactly why back then, because he hadn’t been there for the conversation I’d overheard.
The sun danced over the forest floor between the shadows of the leaves. I settled myself in a patch of it, examining the patch of coltsfoot I’d found. The tiny yellow petals tickled my fingers as I snapped one of the flowers off.
The tramp of horse hooves carried through the woods. I went still, murmuring a quick concealing spell.
Two horses walked into view, one carrying a man I recognized as one of the lords currently visiting the castle, the other his servant. The lord was speaking in low, harsh tones.
“It really is ridiculous, all that running about from town to town, getting involved in every tiny peasant concern. You’d think he’s a laborer, not a prince.”
I bristled. The servant’s head bobbed in automatic agreement, his gaze vague as if he was lost in his own thoughts and hardly listening. “Yes, m’lord.”
“Someone should set him back a few paces. Remind him that he’s as human as the rest of us. Trip him up in front of the other lords so they stop looking at him like he’s some kind of hero, and not just a spoiled brat whose head’s got too big.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
The lord tsked his tongue. “You’re helping with the serving tonight, aren’t you? I’ve still got some of that mushroom powder left. Lace a little in his cup, and let’s see how he talks when we’ve loosened his tongue.”
“Yes, m’lord... M’lord?”
“Yes, that’s the perfect plan. He won’t know what hit him. Now the way you’ll need to play it...”
His voice trailed off as the horses wove on through the forest. I glared at his retreating back, my hands balling into fists.
The lord had never gotten his chance to drug my prince, of course. I’d dashed straight back to the castle, snuck into his rooms, and found the packet of dried hallucinogenic mushroom in one of his trunks. I’d burned it to a crisp. And then I’d enchanted his entire wardrobe with a thick briny smell as if it’d all been pickled. With all the angry energy I’d put into that spell, I suspected the stink had stuck on for at least a month.
I started to formulate a vague excuse and caught myself. No. No more lying to spare my king the discomfort that would come with the truth. This might be a little thing, but I owed him my honesty after all the bigger truths I’d kept from him so long.
He was stronger than I was, when you came down to it. Maybe all this time it’d been my own discomfort I was trying to prevent. Wanting to feel I’d kept just one small weight off his back, with all the other responsibilities he’d had bearing down on him.
“Lord Barimeld was an ass,” I said. “I overheard him scheming about how to undercut you. So I made sure he didn’t and figured out a suitable punishment. And kept a close eye on him whenever he was at the castle again. It obviously worked, though, because he played nice after that incident.”
“Ah,” Darton said. “I remember wondering about his sudden change in attitude. He must have thought I’d found out about his scheming and sent someone to undercut him myself.”
“Almost the same thing,” I said. “We were a united front.”
“We were.” He ducked his head closer, his lips grazing the top of my forehead. His voice dipped too. “You know, over the years a lot of people gave me a piece of their mind about how closely I worked with you. But I’ve never regretting trusting you, not for one moment, Merlin.”
I smiled, my heart swelling with a glow to match the magic ball I’d conjured. Right then, skin to skin, warmth to warmth, I couldn’t imagine a greater bliss than lying there in my king’s arms. He needed me. I was here for him, like I always was. Like I always would be.
My eyes drifted closed. “Is it safe enough here for us to sleep?” Darton murmured.
I nodded against his shoulder. “I laid down a ring of salt just in case. If any dark fae do come out this way, we’ll know. But all they should be able to see now is the darkness around us.”
“That doesn’t sound like it should be comforting, but somehow it is.”
He managed to scoot even closer to me, his breath rising and falling in a deeper rhythm. But my eyes had blinked open. I stared past him at the wall, thinking of the lines of dark energy I’d drawn around us. Like a cage. Like a trap. A memory flashed through my mind of the fae hunters’ electro-guns and their crackling light. My heart leapt.
“I think I know how we can stop the Darkest One.”
Chapter Seventeen
Keevan looked over his shoulder three times as he eased the storage room door open.
“I don’t think you need to be quite that nervous,” I said under my breath. “You have a key. No one’s going to think we’re breaking in.”
“A key I stole from my sister’s apartment,” Keevan whispered, and groaned. “Why do I always let you talk me into the craziest things?”
“Hey, don’t put the blame for this on me,” I said. “From the way I remember it, you volunteered.”
“Okay, fair. But if I’ve developed an addiction to adventure, that is definitely your fault.”
“Less talking, more checking out the inventory,” Howard said. The third member of our party, a thirty-something guy with long black hair in a ponytail nearly as long as mine, was the fae hunters’ local technology expert—the one who’d invented their electro-guns. And possibly the key to my plan for dealing with the Darkest One.
We slipped into the room and shut the door behind us. The still air had a slightly floral smell, as if someone wearing a strong perfume had recently walked between the stacks of equipment. Keevan flicked on the light.
The stainless steel shelving units that filled the room were piled with all sorts of lab supplies for the physics department’s use. I poked at one box and peeked inside another, but I didn’t know exactly what we were looking for. I’d come up with the concept, but the logistics of the mechanical arts were far from my specialty.
“Let me know if you see any spools of wire,” Howard said. “I’ll have to check to make sure the conductivity is appropriate.”
“Roger that,” Keevan said, giving him a salute.
“I don’t want you to get into any trouble,” I said to Darton’s best friend. “If there was an easier way...”
He waved me off. “It’s for Darton. Which means it’s not a problem. The college has a crapload of stuff, obviously. And you’ve saved the place at least once, so you probably deserve some payback.”
While that might be true, it was also true that the campus wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place if Darton and I hadn’t been here. But Keevan clearly had enough on his mind with this criminal turn. He paced the aisles with a slight jitter in his step.
Howard had drifted toward the back of the room. He picked up a metal tube with some sort of circuitry protruding from one end, frowned, put it down, and checked another. “None of these is an ideal voltage.”
“Is there one close enough to what you think we’d need?” I asked. No, this was our one chance to overcome the Darkest One. We couldn’t skimp. “Grab whatever you can make do with, but if there’s something better you can’t find here, make a list. I’ve got funds. We’ll track down whatever you need.”
At least, I hoped we would. We didn’t have much time for searching out lab equipment suppliers and the like. It wasn’t as if we could just waltz into a Wal-Mart to grab what we needed.
“Emma and her bottomless bank account,” Keevan s
aid. His tone was teasing, but my gut twisted.
I had saved an awful lot of money over the decades, across my most recent lives. Computerized banking had made keeping track of my funds between each death so much easier. I hadn’t had much to spend it on, most of the time, so it’d just sat around accumulating interest. But the last couple months had put quite a dent in my savings, between replacing cars and custom building entire houses at a rush rate and last-minute international flights. If I kept going at this rate, I’d be penniless by next year.
But I had enough to get us through this, and that was all that mattered. It wasn’t as if we were going to get another do-over. If I didn’t spend that money keeping Darton and me alive now, then no one was ever going to spend it.
“How much electricity do you think we’ll be able to keep flowing in a continuous circuit?” I asked Howard. “You said we should be able to flood the entire surface of the trap with it, and reduce the amount of energy lost to almost nothing. But there must be limits to what the materials can handle, right?”
“Oh, I can build something sturdy enough that the strongest dark creature out there couldn’t stand the touch of,” Howard said. He picked up a jointed metal rod, gave it an approving nod, and stuffed it into the duffel I’d lent him. “The trickiest part is going to be getting a natural source for the volume of current you want in the first place. The guns I rigged using static are only capable of a small fraction of that power. But I’ve got some ideas to tackle that difficulty.”
“Ideas you can get working in less than twelve hours?” I said. I had no idea how long it would take the Darkest One to reach us even once she hit the east coast, but we couldn’t count on her taking her time.
“I’ll work as fast as I can work,” Howard said. “Ah, these will be useful.” He scooped up an entire box of something that clinked as he dropped it into his bag.
“Hey!” Keevan said from the other side of the room, where his restless feet had taken him. “I think these are the coils of wire you were asking about.”
Howard hustled over, and I ambled along behind, wishing I had the knowledge base to be of more help. My studies had followed my light fae inclinations toward the sciences of life: biology and chemistry. Machines tended to be more the domain of the dark, with their orderly construction. But there were areas where mechanics and the chaos of light could interact. It just wasn’t going to be as simple as calling down a lightning bolt this time.
Not that the lightning bolt had been simple. I rubbed my arms in memory of all that wild power coursing through me.
Howard started examining the coils of wire one by one, dismissing most of them. Keevan wandered over to join me. “So Darton didn’t want to join our little field trip?” he said.
“Oh, he would have if I’d agreed to let him,” I said. “But he’s a heck of a lot safer back in the mausoleum.”
Keevan raised his eyebrows at me. “That doesn’t sound like the Emma I know. You’ve always been pretty strict about keeping him right by your side.”
That was before the itch of that deadly oath had started pricking at me. And before entire armies of full dark fae had gone on the attack. “There are too many fae looking for him now,” I said. “The second he steps outside the barriers I set down, they might sense him. When we were just fighting glooms, that was one thing, but I’m no match for the average dark fae on my own.”
“Right,” Keevan said. He’d help me destroy the first—and only—full dark fae I’d ever killed, so he should know. But he still sounded doubtful.
The twist in my gut tugged tighter. I didn’t like leaving Darton behind, and I knew he didn’t like it either. Before she’d even set foot on this country’s shores, the Darkest One was managing to tear us apart.
“I don’t see you bringing Izzy along to make her a criminal accomplice,” I pointed out, keeping my voice light. Keevan and I didn’t always see eye to eye, but I did have sympathy for his crush—and his reluctance to reveal it. After all, it’d taken me fifteen hundred years to come clean about mine.
“The more people with us, the harder it’ll be to avoid getting noticed on the way out,” Keevan said. “I just didn’t tell her. You think she’d listen to me if she decided she needed to be a part of this? I don’t have any great wizardly knowledge to make my arguments convincing.”
“You’ve never been very good at listening when other people tell you there’s danger up ahead either.”
“Fair.” He rubbed his face. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to protect other people from danger when I can. Unlike you, we’re not going to get to start over if this all goes wrong.”
At that comment, my entire stomach balled into a knot. “Neither are we, this time,” I said.
Keevan’s head jerked around. “What? What happened to your special reincarnation spell?”
I hadn’t realized he didn’t know. We’d told him and the others about the Darkest One getting free. I’d assumed the other consequences were obvious.
“It was all part of the same magic that was keeping the Darkest One shut away,” I said. “A big tangled mess of an enchantment. When she broke free, she broke the spell—all of it. We’re just ordinary one-lived mortals now... who happen to have very old souls.”
“Oh.” Keevan looked vaguely ill. “I thought— You’ve got no more safety net, then.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Just thinking about it made me feel sick too. I turned back toward the shelves. “All the more reason we need to make sure this plan goes off without a hitch.”
Howard strode over, hefting the now-bulging duffel bag. “I’ve gone through the whole place. I think I’ve collected everything here that we can use. I have some bits and pieces back home that we can add to the mix... We may just have enough.”
That wasn’t quite the level of confidence I’d have liked to hear. “Remember,” I said. “Anything else you need, let me know what it is, we’ll track it down as fast as we can.” I had at least the rest of today. The Darkest One couldn’t have caught a boat faster than that.
We ducked back out into the basement hallway. Keevan locked the door and shot a guilty look at the key before tucking it into his pocket. “Thanks,” I told him. “If you want to dash right back to your sister’s place to return that—”
He shook his head. “I’m coming along with you two. Darton must be going stir crazy, cooped up in a cemetery of all places. I don’t have classes until the afternoon. I can keep him company while you all work on that crazy contraption.”
A thread of worry ran through his usual playful tone. “Of course,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.”
Neither of us wanted to say what we both knew: This might be Keevan’s last chance to spend any time at all with his best friend. If my “crazy contraption” didn’t work...
No, I wasn’t going to think that.
We hurried through the hall and up the stairs to the doors leading to the parking lot. The fae hunter van we’d taken looked a lot like the one I’d borrowed from Jagger—the one that the dark fae had pretty much destroyed yesterday—only even bigger. Howard yanked open the back doors and scrambled into the workshop area he had set up behind the seats.
“You want this done fast,” he said. “So I’ll get right to work.”
“Perfect,” I said, with only a small twinge of relief. We still had so much to do. And I didn’t even know yet if my imagined invention would work once we’d put the thing together.
I got into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. As I drove toward the parking lot’s exit, my gaze roamed over the buildings and green around us. This campus was where I’d spent most of my waking hours in the last few months. Where Darton had gone to school like a normal college guy for the last two and a half years.
All the uncomfortable feelings inside me condensed into one huge lump just below my heart. I’d told him—no, I’d promised him—that I’d give him as much of a normal life as I could. I’d wanted him to have
at least a little more time to be Darton instead of a fae-hunted king. I’d barely given him a week before that plan had fallen apart.
But if my contraption did work, if I could contain the Darkest One like I had before, after that—
The handheld radio mounted on the dash crackled. Jagger’s voice broke through the static. “Emma and crew, are you there?”
Keevan tugged the radio out of its holder. He glanced at me and I nodded, my hands tight on the steering wheel. “We’re here,” he said. “Heading to the cemetery now.”
“Good,” Jagger said. “Make it fast. The dark fae are on the move—and it looks like a bunch of them are heading this way.”
Chapter Eighteen
A truck honked at me as I whipped the van into the lane ahead of it, but I didn’t give a sow’s ass. In normal circumstances, it was nearly an hour’s drive from the campus to the cemetery where Darton was holed up. If I had my way, I’d cut that time in half.
“We’re watching the energy readings on the ground here,” Jagger was saying over the radio. “Our scanning system has picked up some major fluctuations moving toward the cemetery from a few different directions. They’re still en route.”
“Thanks for the update,” I said, jerking the wheel to veer around a slower moving car. “If you can stay there, standing guard as well as you can, that would be great. And be ready to jump in the cars and take off. Now that they know we’ve holed up there, we can’t stay. Darton is still in the mausoleum, right?”
“Hasn’t left it for a second, though he looks like he’d like to take a chunk out of those fae with that sword of his.”
I’d bet. My hands tightened around the steering wheel. If Darton hadn’t stepped outside my ring of protections, I didn’t think it was my king’s soul that had led the dark fae to us. It was too convenient that they’d honed in on the cemetery only after I’d left.
