Janek didn’t think the bitch really wanted to touch the stuff, even though she’d been the first to agree with him. But she reached out and rested a palm on the shiny surface. He could feel the skin prickling. She started talking to it, in their foul language, the way she had before they’d sucked down the tainted magick that had gotten them into this mess. Janek could hear the male’s voice, too, and even the monster’s.
Fuck, I’m going to hurl—
Blinding light exploded inside their head as they were hurled back from the edge of the hole.
Janek had time for one thought before the light went out.
If I’m not the first one to wake up, I’m never going to wake up again.
* * *
What do you need my help for? And what truce? And—who are you? Terry glared at the floor.
Coinneach’s toes rooted briefly in the magick-imbued wood on which he stood. He drew scant comfort from the contact, but it was better than nothing. The voice is that of my darag. My tree.
Your tree talks. The human did not seem skeptical, merely resigned to one more strangeness in what undoubtedly seemed like a never-ending list of strangenesses.
ONLY WHEN NECESSARY. The darag seemed amused, in its slow way, if only for a moment. MY INDWELLER MUST PUT SUSPICIONS ASIDE. WE FACE A DANGER GREATER THAN THE SLAIDARIN.
Suspicions? Terry arched a brow at him.
Coinneach stifled a groan. Daragin had a tendency to assume that other beings sorted reality the way they themselves did, setting aside the dull and unimportant to deal with the most vivid and urgent matters. Humans, in Coinneach’s experience, did no such thing. And a human with a Fae soul was likely to be stubborn and contrary enough to refuse to move on until he had the answers to which he felt entitled. Was entitled, he admitted grudgingly.
Merely because the human deserved an explanation, though, did not mean there was time for a lengthy one. Especially not if his darag thought there was a danger urgent enough to interrupt. The slaidarin deceived the daragin and the Gille Dubh—they stole the magick that kept us alive. Now the magick is returning, and the slaidarin have come to us for help against a common enemy. We are aiding them, but on condition that they prove to us that we need not fear being deceived again.
The human’s face was as unreadable as bark. There are more like Maelduin, then. And you suspect they’re lying to you.
Lying is as natural to them as—
You want me to tell you that Maelduin—my soul-mate, my SoulShare—is a liar. Magick-light reflected and flared in Terry’s eyes.
I wanted, yes. Coinneach could feel roots straining to escape his toes again, to become one with the small square of wood on which he stood. It would be even better, more calming, to feel the wood of his darag closing around him, but that comfort was not to be his, not yet. To protect my kind from—
THIS MOMENT IS NOT FOR FEAR OF THE SLAIDARIN.
Coinneach’s mouth dropped open. His darag had never been so sharp with him before, not in all the centuries of their shared existence. But, then, he had never opposed it in anything, would never have considered it possible to do so. And opposition to his darag left him feeling hollow, as if he had damaged a part of himself. I am… sorry.
The air was filled with the sound of a great tree bending, or bowing. The sense of hollowness eased, leaving behind only a memory of itself. And a human who looked as if he were trying very hard not to say, or think, something.
THIS MOMENT IS FOR DECIDING, AND FOR ACTION, LEST THE TIMESLIP FAIL AND THE ENEMY TAKE THE WELLSPRING IT CREATED.
Terry frowned. The enemy? What is this shield of yours protecting us from?
Coinneach winced. If whatever urgent thing had just happened left no time to indulge the ancient enmity between the Fae and the folk of the wood, surely there was no time to explain the Marfach and the threat it posed to two worlds.
SEE. UNDERSTAND.
A familiar vertigo swept through Coinneach, token of his darag’s sharing of a past-moment; when the disorientation passed, the sharing opened into a shady, sheltered horror, a pitched battle between a great many slaidarin, humans, and the roaring half-faced monstrosity that was the mostly-human guise of the Marfach. Coinneach thought he recognized the human Bryce, lying in a pool of blood, pale and unmoving, save for one hand which gripped the Marfach’s foot like white-knuckled death, drawing foul and tainted magick from it—living magick, tortured and defiled.
I did not see this when it happened. The Dark Men were no strangers to death—Coinneach himself had witnessed hunting accidents, murders, even a sacrifice or two—but the scene before him left him shaken.
I CHOSE NOT TO SHOW YOU. THOSE MOMENTS, AND OTHERS.
“Jesus fucking Christ, make it stop!”
The sharing dissipated, allowing Coinneach to see Terry, on his knees, doubled over, his arms crossed over his midsection. Coinneach knelt beside him, hesitantly wrapping an arm around his shoulders. Shhh… it has ended. You are safe. The blood-gift translated the spoken word less readily than pure thought, but it took no gift to let him understand the human’s distress. The darag, too, understood, and was whispering, wordlessly soothing.
Terry did not seem to hear either of them. What was… Jesus, that was Bryce. And his boyfriend. Lasair. And Josh, fuck, what was he doing? And Garrett… Perhaps the silence of thought-speech was a comfort, after the creature’s feral bellowing in shared memory.
Coinneach was unaccustomed to being gentle, but he tried. I suspect you already know most of the slaidarin of Purgatory, and their humans.
Terry’s head came up at this. Everyone I saw was either a Fae or one of their…?
All but the creature they fought. The Marfach is the special enemy of the slaidarin.
IT HATES, DEVOURS, ALL THAT IS GOOD. The darag’s voice was the creaking and straining of wood near breaking. ALL THAT IS LIGHT, AS WELL AS THE PEACE, THE SHELTER OF THE DARKNESS.
Coinneach’s chest hurt. He remembered the last days before the Sundering, and his darag’s calm insistence that the evil embodied in the Marfach could never touch the folk of the wood. It had been wrong. The monster defiled everything it touched. His darag would carry the wounds of the horror he had just witnessed—and more, it had said so—for the rest of their unending shared life.
And Cuinn had tried to warn them. Cuinn the slaidar-mhor, the great thief, had tried to spare them.
They had refused to listen.
Even at the end, he had given them one last chance, at a time when chances must have been few and desperate.
What’s happened? Terry stared at the floor, as if he could see the darag through the silver-blue spark-dancing web of the wellspring.
IT HAS TRIED THE BARRIER. OUR MAGICK HOLDS. FOR THIS MOMENT.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kevin stared grimly at the road, not really seeing it. No more than he was seeing the bone-whiteness of his knuckles where he gripped the steering wheel, anyway. All he could see was the scene he was trying not to play out in his head, the one where his husband Faded calmly into a room with a swordsman as good as he was himself, sworn to kill him.
A light turned red in front of him; Kevin slammed on his brakes and pounded the steering wheel with a closed fist. Fuck. You promised you’d give me time to get there. He’d left Conall and Tiernan behind; both Fae had turned green at the thought of accompanying him in the Mercedes, but had agreed to give Kevin a head start before Fading to confront Tiernan’s nephew. Enough time to let Kevin try to stop the waking nightmare he still hadn’t told anyone about.
Kevin was as sure as he could be that Tiernan wasn’t going to be able to wait that long.
* * *
That thing is going to get through if this wall comes down? Terry sat back on his heels; he couldn’t stop shivering, not after what he’d just seen, even hugging himself didn’t help. But he looked Coinneach straight in his uncanny eyes—the Gille Dubh wasn’t the one speaking, but he had to look somewhere, and the floor wasn’t going to look back at
him. It’s going to get into the wellsprings?
YES.
Will it? Come down, I mean? He almost asked if the monster he’d seen could move from one wellspring to another. But asking questions he didn’t want the answers to was a habit he’d broken a long time ago.
IT… MAY. Terry had a feeling the darag was uncomfortable with words of uncertainty. Maybe even with the whole concept—he could see how a tree might have problems with things that weren’t solid or definite. SOME CHOICES BRANCH INTO THAT MOMENT. SOME DO NOT.
Coinneach looked down at his feet; Terry followed the direction of his gaze, and was startled to see the Gille Dubh’s toes rooted in the wood of the floor. He was mildly surprised that anything still startled him.
What has happened to the timeslip, m’darag? Coinneach’s voice was softer than the darag’s, and quicker; moonlight glinted through the leaf-whisper and scattered.
IT FORMED WITH A FLAW. THE WATER FAE, RHOANN, WAS CAUGHT IN THE SLIP, HALF WITHIN, HALF WITHOUT.
Coinneach’s reply didn’t quite translate—it sounded like a rotten branch breaking. His expression, though, didn’t need translating. The shit was deep, and getting deeper.
Is Rhoann all right? Terry didn’t know Rhoann well, but he’d met him with his husbands a few times. Mac and Lucien. Rhoann was another Fae. Which meant Mac and Lucien were his SoulShares.
RHOANN IS WELL. HIS SCAIR-ANAIM WERE ABLE TO FREE HIM.
Ill fortune, though. Coinneach glanced around, as if he half expected to see cracks in the wall around them. The only possible way for a flaw to have formed was for something magickal to have been both within and without the timeslip at the moment it was created.
Murphy’s Law of magick.
Coinneach’s expression was perfectly blank, and something about the faintness of the breeze coming up through the floor told Terry the darag’s was, too. Even for a tree. Never mind.
M’darag, what does the flaw portend?
Terry thought the tree sighed. WE KNEW ONE BREACH OF THE TIMESLIP WOULD WEAKEN IT EVERYWHERE, EVERYWHEN. BUT IT IS WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT. ANOTHER BREACH WILL COLLAPSE THE TIMESLIP.
Terry couldn’t stop seeing the monster, the blood. Couldn’t stop hearing the screams, the forlorn crying of a puppy. But it can’t be breached again, right? If no one else was stuck part inside and part outside…
Coinneach looked at Terry in silence. Terry counted a dozen of his own hammering heartbeats.
Someone else was. A soul was.
* * *
Bryce could get used to Lasair’s gentle touch, the hand draped with a cool cloth stroking his temples and wiping the sick sweat from his face and neck. He could have done without the pocket nuke that had gone off in his gut, though. Maybe sometime he’d talk with his scair-anam about getting the one without having to go through the other.
Setanta was trying to get in on the act, too, of course. Right now, about the only thing available for him to lick was Bryce’s nose, and the pup really didn’t seem to care whether he licked the outside of it or the inside.
“Off,” he grumbled. Neither the Fae nor the Fade-hound paid him the slightest bit of attention.
“What happened, sumiúl?” Well, maybe Lasair was paying attention. Lips brushed Bryce’s forehead, and the burning where the piece of the Marfach had been ebbed.
“Damned if I know.” Slowly, Bryce raised his head; Lasair cupped the back and held it up off the floor, enough for Bryce to be able to get a look around. He lay where he’d fallen, on the floor next to the bed; with Lasair propping up his head, he could just see the glow at the bottom of the corner window that told him where the Jefferson Memorial stood, several stories below and across the water. Other than the great view, he hadn’t had much of a chance to take in the luxury of the Oriental suite before his early warning system went off. “About the only good thing I have to say about it is that whatever it was, it’s a safe bet our favorite monster got a hell of a lot more of it than I did.”
Setanta bared his puppy fangs at the mention of the Marfach and growled. Bryce wasn’t sure, but he thought those fangs had gotten longer since the last time he’d seen them.
“Should we warn the others?” Lasair rubbed behind Setanta’s ears to calm the pup; Bryce could imagine him doing the same thing to the adult Fade-hounds he’d been in charge of, back in the Realm. Only then he would have had to reach up to do it.
“Probably.” Anything affecting the monster enough for Bryce to feel it was Big News. And not news anyone was going to be happy to get, unless it meant the unkillable horror was actually dead. And Bryce didn’t have that kind of luck. “I wonder if it would do any good to call Conall.” The mage hated cell phones for some reason, and managed to ‘forget’ his most of the time—and he was the one who needed to know most of all.
Lasair shook his head. “I doubt it. Best if we went to his home. Do you need my help to a taxi?”
“Give me a minute. And…”
“And?”
“Hold my hand? It helps.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Amazing, how knowing one was Fading into the presence of one’s mortal enemy focused one. It was also amazing how a few years of marriage to a lawyer fucked with one’s vocabulary.
Even before he was fully formed Tiernan reached out with his magickal sense. Nobles were more sensitive to elemental magick than to the living sort, but the magickal wall Conall had warned him about would have been obvious as fuck to an eyeless trych. Rhoann, too, stood out from the background noise in the unfinished studio, a cool glow of Water magick. Josh wasn’t visible yet, though Árean and Scathacrú were.
And…
Tiernan curled the fingers of his crystal hand around the grip of his sword; the sensation was his first upon becoming physical, and purely reassuring. No amount of reassurance, though, could have prepared him for the face and form before him. Fae genetics were often thought of as an elaborate joke played by magick on their race, and Maelduin Guaire was living proof that magick loved irony.
It wasn’t quite like looking in a mirror—if anything, the intact left hand gripping Maelduin’s sword hilt would have been enough to dispel that notion. But Maelduin looked more like Tiernan’s brother than his nephew—more like Tiernan’s brother than his own brother ever had. In fact, Maelduin looked a few years older than Tiernan did; Fae stopped aging when they came into their birthright of magick, and Tiernan had come into his early for a Noble. His hair was a shade or two blonder than Tiernan’s, his face slightly leaner, his nose sharper.
One similarity, though, was more important than any of the others. Maelduin Guaire’s training as a scian-damhsa was sure to have been at least as exacting as Tiernan’s own. And Maelduin had had a very specific goal in mind during his 150 or so years of blade-dancing. A goal presently sitting squarely between Tiernan’s shoulders.
What is it about my head, that so many people besides me want it?
Maelduin, too, was staring, which was unsurprising. “How can this be?” he murmured.
Fortunately, he didn’t also have Tiernan’s voice. Tiernan wasn’t sure where his own personal ‘freak the fuck out’ line was, but he suspected it was somewhere short of that.
And at least Maelduin hadn’t opened their dialogue with the recitation of his oath and the ritual challenge that went with it. Which was peculiar, all things considered. As was Tiernan’s contentment to have it be so. Surely a male who had murdered his own brother should have no qualms about dispatching his nephew, especially when his nephew was undoubtedly waiting for just the right moment to continue the family tradition.
Hells yes, he had qualms.
“The resemblance isn’t so strange, considering you’re both thair-mhac and fiur-mhac to me.” Faen drew careful distinctions between blood relationships—brother’s son was different from sister’s son. Usually. And commenting on such was safer than bringing up the ties of vengeance.
All the color drained from Maelduin’s face.
Fuck me comatose. �
��No one ever told you.”
* * *
Oh, Jesus. Terry blanched. He was the danger. Him and Maelduin. One soul in two bodies, caught on opposite sides of the wall keeping the monster out.
Coinneach nodded slowly. This was the other reason I had hoped you might reject your slaidar. I have some small hope that if you do, the flaw might mend.
I… can you give me a minute?
Just a day ago, it would never even have occurred to Terry to wonder what it would feel like, not to have something as simple as the privacy of his own thoughts. And he couldn’t think of a time when he might have needed that privacy anywhere near as badly as he did right now. All he could do was turn his back on Coinneach, again, and hope the darag understood what he meant by doing so.
Assuming he now had privacy, though… what was he going to do with it?
The carnage the darag had showed him had to have been real—there was no way in hell his imagination could have come up with anything like that. And anything that kept the monster he’d seen away from here, away from what looked like a network of… something… that linked up places all over the world, and maybe even the other world Maelduin had come from, had to be a good thing.
And all he had to do to make that happen was reject Maelduin. The man—the Fae—he’d been planning to show the door anyway, since anyone who wanted to hook up with Terry Miller was bad news by definition. By association.
I fucking deserve better than that.
The thought surprised him. But maybe it shouldn’t have. It felt like a thought that had endured through years of bad choices, buried under the weight of years of loneliness and self-abuse, waiting for the moment when he was finally ready to listen to it.
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