Stone Cold

by Rory Ni Coileain

  “Yes. It is time, and past time.”

  Janek could feel the other three crouching, getting ready to jump.

  Fuck no.

  He thought he’d figured out how much control he had over their shared body. It was time to find out if he was right.

  Gritting what few teeth he had left, he imagined their body stepping back from the drop. This wasn’t part of our deal, asshole. Assholes.

  * * *

  THIS-MOMENT. THIS-NOW.

  Coinneach, incorporeal within his darag, had no need to cover his ears against the ancient tree’s shout. Yet he did. And still he felt the echoes of that cry to the bones that only existed in his darag’s memory.

  What he did not feel was the great shift, powered by the magick of all the daragin, Gille Dubh, and Mother Sun, placing the network of the wellsprings out of the monster’s reach for as long as they could hold it there.

  He could not feel the shift because he, like the daragin and the other Gille Dubh, were caught within it. At least, he hoped that was why he felt nothing. The other option, the possibility that the untried plan had not worked, did not bear contemplating.

  * * *

  The female lurched backward and fell hard on her ass on the ice.

  Janek couldn’t tell who was more freaked out, him or his parasite. But the bitch’s steam-whistle shriek of rage gave him a pretty good idea.

  The male was a lot calmer. Outwardly, anyway. Not sure where you got the idea it was smart to dick with us, Meat. Christ, his voice was almost as cold as the monster’s.

  It was a lot fucking harder to stand his ground than he’d thought it was going to be, when he didn’t have control of what his body—their shared body, the only body they had now that they were out of Dary’s prison—was doing, and the male’s voice was enough to make his nonexistent balls shrivel to the size of raisins. But if he didn’t stand up to it, them, right fucking now, he was going to lose the only thing he’d been living for, these last couple of years.

  You made me a promise. Back when I was all you had. Janek didn’t have a lot left to be proud of, but he was proud his voice didn’t shake or catch. Guaire’s head, to pay for what he did to me. And as long as you still need my body, that deal’s still on. When you don’t need it any more… He shrugged. I don’t give a shit.

  Which was a pure fucking lie. The only death he wanted almost as much as he wanted Tiernan Guaire’s was his parasite’s. But even a mostly brain-dead zombie was smart enough to keep that to himself.

  You putrefying piece of—

  “Wait.”

  Janek couldn’t remember the last time he’d been glad to hear the bitch’s voice. Probably because he never had before.

  “Even before the Fae divulged the true function of the wellsprings in front of the toad-human, we knew that we could draw living magick through them.” The bitch smiled. The smile felt oily. “We can restore ourself to full strength… and then, perhaps, we will be able to find a solution that will let us keep our promise to our meat wagon before we go home.”

  Janek knew better than to let himself hope the bitch meant what she said. But if she could hold off the male, and the monster, for a while, he might have a chance.

  The male’s laugh reminded Janek of slime. Never thought of you as the sentimental sort. But sure, we can give that a try. Janek felt the male’s gap-toothed grin. Thing is, either way, we have to touch the wellspring.

  Fuck me bloody.

  Gonna trust us, Meat?

  He wasn’t given a choice. Their body toppled forward—

  And bounced. Hard. On the suddenly glowing air, a few feet under the edge of the hole, and a good couple of stories over the pretty magick.

  * * *

  Maelduin dared not look anxious, or at least not as anxious as he felt. Too much depended on Terry’s acceptance of what was happening to him. “Magick. The proof you wanted.”

  Terry was silent, watching the play of eldritch light around his feet. At least, Maelduin thought he was watching. He had no way of knowing what a human could or could not see of magick.

  He waited as long as he could stand to. “What are you seeing, lán’ghrásta?”

  Terry looked up, and his intense expression, his slight frown left Maelduin flushed and short of breath.

  “Do you see the magick?”

  “I’m not sure.” Terry’s gaze went back to the floor around his feet. “I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t believe a word you’re saying. Every time I listen to sweet talk from a guy who’s too good to be true, I fuck up my entire life.”

  There was pain shadowing Terry’s voice. Maelduin wanted to put a stop to that pain, with an intensity that surprised him. “This is not ‘talk.’ Sweet or otherwise.” His heart pounded like a Midsummer bonfire drum. “This is magick.”

  “So you say.” Terry leaned on the last word, drawing it out. “And you ask me to believe you.”

  Human. Stubborn blind beautiful human. “I ask you to believe nothing but your own eyes.”

  Terry looked down again. Maelduin held his breath, and was angry with himself for holding it. Have all humans stopped believing in magick? Or only the one I need to convince of the truth of it?

  Terry traced out a slow arc on the floor with his toe. And when he looked up again, something was different. Something that made Maelduin remember how it had felt to hold this male, after sex, to feel him relax into the warmth of an embrace Maelduin had never offered to another. Something that made the Fae forget to breathe.

  Maelduin wanted to be different from the others. The ones who had been too good to be true, who had made Terry wary. He wanted to deserve Terry’s belief, to deserve his trust.

  Would a human call this strange stirring love?

  A human, perhaps, but never a Fae. And surely not a Guaire.

  Was it need, then? Impossible. He needed what Terry had in his temporary custody, yes. But needing Terry, himself… no. Fae needed humans for nothing. Even the SoulShare bond suggested in the note tucked into his boot was only a legend, and the suggestion itself might have been nothing more than a step in someone else’s dance.

  Fae could want, though. Any Fae could want. Even a Fae of the Cursed House.

  Yes. That had to be it. His heart wanted Terry, in the heedless way of his entire race. Perhaps he wanted something new and unique from Terry, but that was all. No Fae was capable of more.

  Terry glanced back at the floor, then met Maelduin’s gaze squarely. His hesitant smile made Maelduin’s heart race. And in that instant, Maelduin realized that everything he had ever believed about Fae, about his line and House, about needing, about wanting, was wrong.

  Terry took a step forward. “I want to—”

  Between one word and the next, Terry disappeared.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What the hell?”

  The floor tilted and swooped under Terry. Except that it did no such thing—his inner ear assured him he was on solid ground. The rest of his body, though, totally ignored his inner ear, because it was convinced he was on a tumbling satellite being piloted by a drunk. He dropped to his knees, bent forward until his forehead touched the floor, covered his head with his forearms, scrunched his eyes closed. Anything not to fall off the floor; anything not to have to look at the distorted nothingness that had surrounded him in the instant before he shut it out.

  I’ve been here before. Done this before. Which was the most insane thought he’d ever had, because if he’d ever been surrounded by reality turning itself inside out in ways that made his stomach try to do the same thing, he was sure he’d have noticed. But yeah, he was having deja vu. On steroids.

  “Maelduin!”

  He was screaming into the floor, and into his knees. Nobody was going to hear him that way. Well, he’d just have to scream louder, then. Fine with him. “Maelduin! Make it fucking stop!”

  * * *

  “No, seriously.” Josh tilted his head to one side, just enough to let Conall lean forward and read the computer moni
tor over his shoulder. “It’s an ancient Roman recipe for tattoo ink.”

  Conall frowned. An Air Fae’s natural gift, understanding every language carried by the air, didn’t extend to written languages, and while Josh was well aware the ginger mage was a quick study, his written vocabulary was nowhere near as extensive as his verbal one. “What’s vitriol?”

  “Iron sulphate, I think.”

  “You’re not seriously thinking of trying this.”

  Josh, grinning, decided to say nothing, and Conall shook his head. “Egyptian pine bark, well, I suppose I can see that… what’s gall?”

  Somehow, Josh managed a perfectly straight face. “Insect egg deposits.”

  “Humans are strange—”

  Conall’s head jerked up, his peridot eyes wide with alarm.

  Josh suddenly had trouble breathing. “What is it? The nexus?”

  “No. Next door, the dance studio. Someone’s shouting. Yelling for Terry.”

  Josh had no reason to doubt his partner’s acute Fae senses. He bolted for the door, upending his chair and sending it skidding across the floor of the little alcove in the lobby of Raging Art-On he used as a design studio, Conall practically stepping on his heels. He slammed through the door—the sound of it crashing against the outside wall was still echoing when he burst into the dance studio next door.

  Now he could hear the voice Conall had heard from next door. “Terry! Lán’ghrásta!”

  A man with long blond hair and what looked like a sword belted at his waist stood toward the rear of the unfinished front studio, his back to the door, silhouetted by a glowing column of translucent air traced through with feathery patterns of what could only be magick—though it didn’t look like any magick Josh had ever seen, whether with Conall inside him and using his senses or any other way.

  Conall pushed past Josh, but stopped short of the figure on the far side of the room. “Tiernan?” The question skidded off the upper end of Conall’s vocal register, uncertain.

  The man spun around, and for a second Josh thought Conall had called it. The hair was nearly right for Tiernan, maybe a shade too pale, and the light caught faceted blue topaz eyes that could only be Fae, in a face that could almost be the Noble Fae’s. And the way the man’s hand went to the hilt of his sword as if the blade were a part of himself, that was all Tiernan.

  But there all resemblance to Tiernan Guaire ended. The man—the male, the Fae—glared at Conall, his eyes like chips of glacier ice. And the hand gripping the gorgeously-worked silver hilt of the sword, white-knuckled, was obviously flesh, bone, and blood, not living Stone.

  “I am here to wipe that name out of memory.” The voice wasn’t Tiernan’s, either; the accent was different, the pitch a little lower. “Let it be as forgotten as the name of my father.”

  * * *

  Maelduin’s instincts were at war with themselves. Unknown enemies were before him, one of them a Fae bearing a striking resemblance to descriptions of a Fae mage whose disappearance over a year ago had startled a Realm unaccustomed to that sort of startlement.

  Behind him, Terry was… gone. Though Maelduin thought he could sense the male, behind the wall of light that had sprung up between them. He hoped. He would have ‘prayed,’ as he had seen some of the trapped spirits in the box do, if Fae had any more of gods than the memory of the ones worshipped by humans in the time before the Sundering.

  As it was, Maelduin and his sword were all Terry had. But what were they—what was he—supposed to do for his human, when faced with foes friendly with the very male he was sworn to kill? A male with whom he dared not risk any contact at all, until he had back from Terry what the Pattern had stolen from him? Too late to try to Fade to Terry’s aid; he dared not leave himself vulnerable even for an instant, much less the time it would take to Fade to the other side of the strange wall. If such were even possible.

  “Who are you?” This was the dark-haired human, who seemed to be trying to look at Maelduin and the mage and the wellspring all at once. “What are you doing here? And where the hell is Terry?”

  The high ground was his friend, and his opponent’s enemy. “I could as well ask you the same, as you are the intruders here. And how is the human your concern?” A safe enough question, surely, for a human who consorted with a Fae.

  Unless the human had no idea what his companion was. Maelduin was suddenly dewed with cold sweat. I cannot afford carelessness.

  The sharpness of the gaze the human brought to bear on him did nothing to make Maelduin any more comfortable. “Josh LaFontaine. And my partner, Conall Dary.”

  Yes. The most powerful Fae mage since the Sundering. I may have a whole new problem.

  Josh didn’t seem to notice Maelduin’s sudden unease. “And Terry Miller is quite possibly my oldest friend, and my business partner. I know Fae well enough to know that you—”

  Conall was making a violent shushing gesture at the human. “I think this—” His head tilted toward the column of light serving as Terry’s prison. “There’s a wellspring in there, Josh. There has to be.”

  Josh turned pale beneath his scruff of beard. “I know you… have a good reason for wanting him back.”

  “That is not what you meant to say.” Maelduin’s grip tightened on the hilt of his oath-blade.

  “That’s exactly what he meant to say.” The mage suddenly seemed several inches taller, his stony expression a solemn promise of dire consequences for wrong speaking. “And it would be a very good idea for you to tell us what that reason is.”

  Maelduin thought about scoffing at the notion that he should reveal anything to friends of his foe. However, the expressions of the mage and the mage’s consort—surely that was what Josh was, one only had to look at them to see it—made it clear that the near environs of a wellspring were a bad place for him to indulge such an impulse.

  Waste no step. Yet be wary of the ground; it may shift under your feet. The only thing constant is a Dancer’s heart.

  He could not remember where that wise counsel had come from. Some scroll, some tome on the art of the scian-damhsa, the blade-dancer. But he knew it for truth. His heart was his constant, his truth. His heart had been trained on one thing, since he had been old enough to know one end of a blade from the other. His heart demanded vengeance, for the mother he had never known, for the father who had been no more to him than a tale no one would tell, for the curse his father’s murderer had laid on them all.

  Yet…

  His heart now quietly, insistently, impossibly, demanded something else. Someone else.

  Waste no step.

  Be wary of the ground.

  Josh and Conall were both waiting for him to speak, and there was little of patience about the way they eyed him. There could be no trusting a Fae—that, at least, went without saying. Especially not a legendary mage who had mistaken him for his father’s killer, and who apparently thought of that male as a friend, or at least an ally. It could be no safer to trust a human in thrall to that Fae. He would be worse than a fool to tell either of them the truth, whether it was his revenge he sought, or aid in recovering Terry.

  But while Maelduin stood here parsing the problem, the male he had been so sure only moments before he neither needed nor loved was sealed away from him, somewhere on the far side of a wall of magick. And he had no hope of regaining him without help, and the only help to be had was the help of the friends of his enemy.

  An’Faei a ngaill, ta’Fhaei an tráll. The Fae who needs is a slave. No matter what was needed, and no matter the reason for the needing.

  Shall I be a slave to my enemy’s friends, for the sake of the beautiful dancer?

  If it meant seeing Terry’s smile again? And learning whether this strange yearning might be enough to bring down the wall the human had built to lock magick away?

  “There is a thing in Terry’s keeping that belongs to me. And… I want him back.” He cleared his throat, his gaze retuning yet again to the glowing wall, behind which a figure might be movi
ng.

  Or perhaps he only saw what he wished to see, needed to see, in the play of the magickal light.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Terry’s stomach offered the cautious opinion that it might actually be safe to look up. He gave it the space of a few ragged breaths, just in case, then lifted his forearms off the back of his head and slowly sat back on his heels.

  The rocking in three dimensions had indeed stopped. If it had ever been happening to begin with. And reality had stopped trying to turn itself inside out.

  Though what it had decided to do instead was a mystery. Standing in a little island of what passed for normalcy, except for the silver-blue light playing around his feet, he was surrounded by… well. If he were in a YouTube video, he’d say someone had applied a blur effect to everything outside the circle of light he’d stepped into. And somehow put up a wall between him and the blur. He wasn’t quite sure why he thought there was a wall, but he was as sure as he could be.

  Looking at the blur—at anything outside the circle of light centered on the flooring sample he stood on—made Terry feel dizzy. Plain old dizzy, thank God, not what he’d just been through, but it still wasn’t a feeling he was used to, not after years of pirouettes and grands jetés, and it was definitely one he didn’t like. I’m not going to look any more. There’s no point.

  Until he found himself looking again, trying to make sense of the weird chaotic blur all around him, where a few minutes ago there had been the shell of his studio. And a gorgeous Fae.

  Fae. No doubting that now. Unless he wanted to assume he, himself, had suddenly had a psychotic break, and was imagining all the whirling insanity outside the calm eye in which he sat.

  He had to get out, though. Which meant he was going to have to try to penetrate the not-quite-there barrier between his new little island of almost-normal and whatever was still out there. Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet, bracing himself, his feet shoulders’-width apart, his knees slightly bent.