A well of endless power lay untapped inside of her, which drew its source from everything within Silver Hollow. To swallow this power whole was a very real temptation for Amie, who wanted so desperately to forget her fears and human emotions.
The Freargde hissed when he straightened in his seat, shutting his eyes tightly while clutching his chest.
Above all, she needed to make sure Dearg survived this scheme of hers. She couldn’t afford to lose anyone else important to her. She rose from her chair and crossed the short distance between them, then leaned forward to cover his hand with hers. He snatched her hand so quickly it stole her breath. Without opening his eyes again, he simply focused on the texture of her skin and breathed. Though she couldn’t explain the reasons why, that desperate touch struck her down to her core, lit her body in a thousand thrills. Breathlessly she waited, uncertain if the moment had sparked from pain or passion.
“I’m not strong like him, Amie,” he said in the darkness, “not the way you need me to be. Emrys was called to guard you. For whatever krumplekined reasons, he loves you. And…and he can touch you…without causing you harm.” He ghosted his rough palm over her bare arm, only close enough to graze her light hair with his calluses. The breath he drew in was a ragged effort.
For all the passion Amie had written about, for the lust she had read in Emrys’s eyes, nothing would move her so strongly as this. “I can’t believe you’re comparing yourself to him,” she finally hissed, garnering his attention. Uncertainty and hope flickered in his flame-tinted gaze and, determined to prove it, she lowered her lips to his for a brief yet purposeful kiss. “I choose you over him any day. You’ve been my only true friend, Dearg, and I swear I’ve never loved anyone like I love you now.” She smothered his gasp with more kisses.
With surprising deftness he pushed himself up with one arm and pulled her into his lap. And the initial pain she felt because of his touch, because of what he had done to her months before, subsided. When she sighed into him his tongue grazed her lips and parted them, dragged against hers as if to memorize her every crevice. He turned her insides out with so little effort Amie shivered to think of all the other things he could evoke in her.
Neither of them noticed how the flames and her silvery blue energy threaded together and fanned out a network of streams across the cavern, or that every sleeping dragon’s eye awakened.
…
Amie was the one to insist they scout out from the stables next. Faye’s warnings kept playing back on her conscience. “I’ve got this, Wentworth! So please don’t do anything stupid like trying to follow me.” Trouble was, they had been waiting for an hour at least and the house only increased its summons, imbuing her with irrational fear.
Dearg followed her without question and Amie thought he must be feeling just as impatient to finish it. He paused before the door separating the stable and cave. “Prepare yourself, lass. No matter what happens never stray from my sight. We shall have victory this night.”
Amie sighed, nodded to herself, for it was now or never. “Are you ready?” Resting his forehead against her shoulder and giving one lingering breath, he moved to stand beside her, never releasing her hand. Their eyes locked. She attempted to smile but did little to disguise her fear. No amount of experience trapped within her ring could reassure her no one was going to die today.
Or that no one already has.
As the tears began to collect in her eyes he smiled and his true Freargde nature shone through as he whispered, “I did nay understand this human emotion before your return, Amie. Now I love because of you. Remember, whatever comes, our love shall nay fail.”
The door creaked and opened. The stables were dark and silent. Not even the animals made a sound in the darkness, but a thick metallic stench filled their noses and made her cringe. “What is that?” Thoughtlessly she attempted to light their way with a nixy orb, until he snatched her hand and buried it between their chests.
“Do nay stop, whatever you smell or hear,” he seethed, eyes glowing burnt orange in the shelter of shadows. She bit her lip, terror prickling up her spine and the hairs of her neck. Again she recalled how she couldn’t hear or sense the animals in their stalls.
Those sick freaks! She imagined terrible scenarios, each worse than the last.
Dearg led her further, not stopping until they were at the opposite end of the structure, facing the rising hill and castle towers beyond. Lights danced across the night sky, traces of the fallen Sidhe and their energies unleashed to fall like ash or the dusty dragon’s skin. Had she not known their source she might have called them beautiful. Instead of the cries of the dying, they heard something even worse and more chilling. Instead of the sounds of war all they heard was silence.
The outline of overturned carriages and motionless figures trapped within dotted the grounds beyond the stables. It looked like a graveyard.
“Henry.” Amie choked on a sob before lurching from their hiding place. Now that her eyes were upon the castle, she gave into the call for its true mistress.
“Amie!” Dearg struggled to maintain his grip on her hand when she jerked them forward. “Stop!” he roared. His voice was the only one that could have kept her from searching for her father.
“Where is everyone?” she whispered, afraid the answer was plain to see. “Why isn’t anyone still fighting? Where’s Slaine?” She stuck her boot in a thick filmy substance, tucked her chin and stared at the blood sprawling over the path. Torn-off wings and misshapen forms had been left to rot in a massacre that stretched from field to hedgerow. Decorations from the night before lay a trashed wreckage over the sweet-smelling roses. The contrast was sickening, sugar sweet rose overshadowed by rot. She rolled the ring on her finger in furious circles with her thumb as they passed the tattered vestiges of a gryphon’s wing.
I shouldn’t have left.
“Come,” Dearg soothed, leading her by the hand again. Ashes fell from the dark cloud, composed of brimstone and precious metals. The cannon-like pounding of the earth increased in volume the nearer they drew to the house itself. Still there was no sign of Faye and their companions, or the dark army laying siege.
Keeping her attention away from the recently dead around them, Amie kept her focus on the towers over the hedge and she and Dearg’s shared heartbeat. Past the hedge was the hill where Henry taught her how to make things grow. Even with winter’s approach it had still been fresh and beautiful as early autumn. They were nearing the garden, almost to the kitchen entrance at the base of the castle, when it happened.
Halfway through the massacre they saw too late and Amie hissed, “Dearg!” Not three feet before them a doubled-over creature crouched over a centaur’s rump, its grotesque features smeared in its blood. She held her breath the instant its solid black eyes locked with hers.
“No sudden moves, lass,” Dearg warned, containing the flames in his fist so his flesh reflected the trapped building heat.
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m all over that idea.” She gasped to feel his strength rush through her veins and realized they had one advantage her ancestors had been too afraid to consider.
Against her ear he whispered, “These golem are not like Ginuog. They can shift into other forms after living so long in darkness. Do nay let go of me or hesitate to slay them.” He brushed her hair with his lips in case it was the last time.
The golem watching them had stood and began to lope at them with a decreasing limp. Its arms hung low towards the ground, dragging against its former victims. Amie thought of Feather as she reached her hand towards it, closed her eyes and saw her first confidant and friend in the Hollow. She saw the countless hours she had spent in the library speaking to a stuffed eagle’s head on the wall and their laughter once she discovered he really had been listening.
Then a different presence, something rooted and deeper she hadn’t been looking for, brushed against her nixy. She felt the wounded earth beneath them. The forest was filled with evil creatures like this one and it was
very angry. Even as the soil began to tremble beneath them the golem stayed its course, a keening wail on its tongue.
“Wait,” Dearg murmured.
She began to shake when the forest’s nixy flooded into her veins. “I can’t!” she gasped, cried out, and then the deep roots burst in a shower of dirt clods and filth, reaching and grasping for anything in its path. The creature still reached for her even as it was ensnared, slashed at the air before her face. As the roots dragged it back into the earth it had desecrated, it shrieked with fury.
Amie watched on with cold eyes, feeling the remaining darkness run to escape the trees of the forest. And then she could feel the entire grounds, called upon it to take its revenge for this desecration. Few escaped unscathed and those who did moaned in pain. As the last golem fought for breath, she neglected to remember one very important fact.
“Get out of the way, Wentworth!” Faye screeched far to the right. Amie lifted her head to see her friend diving through the air in a perfectly suspended twirl. For a moment time seemed to slow and sound literally blurred to her ears.
Just like the movies after all, Amie thought. Dearg was shouting, trying to tug her along. And then Faye rammed into her, knocking the air from her lungs and setting off a reflexive nixy charge, covering the three of them in a tangled web.
Faye shrieked, “Amie! Stop, you’re hurting me!”
Amie gasped and stared at the sky as flashes of red light passed over where they had been standing.
The Unseelie! How could I have forgotten?
Realizing her friend was in pain, she tried to stop drawing on the ring, but that was when she heard the growling of the oncoming horde Faye had been running from. Fear filled her, froze her up so she couldn’t breathe again. Through her new connection to the house, Amie felt its defenses rise up and its added power pulse through her.
“Amie, let go or we’re all dead!” Faye urged.
“I can’t!” she moaned, tears spilling from her eyes as the strength of the ring on her finger outweighed her own. Dearg was on his feet, pulling Amie with him so she broke contact with the Unseelie, and, wrapping her in his arms, he coated them both with orange flames until her energy collided and mixed with his.
Faye turned onto all fours, pushing herself up off the ground with inhuman agility, daggers bared and one word on her lips for the couple behind her. “Run!” she hissed before pitching one of her knives through the air. It sang as it met its target.
Dearg flipped them around in time to see the Unseelie who had attacked them. “Amie, we must press on. More will soon come.”
But she was transfixed by the male who looked so inhuman and so much like them at once. Amie had never seen death before tonight, not any that counted. She wondered bitterly why it continued to follow her after all these years.
I already feel like the Girl Who Lived around here.
The male was gripping the knife stuck in his belly, his frosted appearance only turning paler by the second as he sank to the earth. “Bloody nixed blade,” he gasped with a cackle.
“Who are you working for?” Faye shouted, throwing the Unseelie over his fallen soldiers. Instead of waiting for the male to speak, she screamed louder this time, red crackles of dark energy piercing his flesh. “And don’t give me some filsh about us being on the same side!” Pulling her dagger from his belly so the blood could freely flow, she quickly returned it to the outer edges of the wound and began to press it slightly within.
Amie couldn’t bear to hear his screams. “Faye! Stop, he can’t hurt anyone anymore!” Dearg held her back when she tried to reach and grab the dagger from her friend’s hand.
Faye laughed bitterly, never looking up from her prey. “You don’t know what they do, Amie. There never will be an end to his kind of evil. Good people don’t threaten other people’s families!”
“But aren’t you the one who said not all Unseelie are bad, just like not all Seelie are good? Faye, please! No more killing tonight. I can’t stand it anymore!” She sank into Dearg’s arms, eyeing the house, and wondered again if Henry made it unscathed.
Faye at last lifted her chin to face her, and something softened in her eyes. The Unseelie shouldn’t have interrupted his only chance.
“You’ll never guess what we did to your sister.” the-snow skinned male cackled, choking on its own blue colored blood even as her dagger was pressed to its throat.
Faye’s eyes glowed like twin coals amid dying flames. “How do you know about her?” Crawling almost on top of the other Unseelie, she pressed her other blade so tightly to his throat, Amie was certain he would bleed at any moment.
The Unseelie’s smile was manic, his laughter growing as if she had said something particularly gleeful. “We know everything, Fayelyn Gomora, about you and your pathetic clan. Don’t you want to know?”
“Know what? You’re supposed to have all the answers, right?” Faye’s thin tone could have cut through ice.
Amie cringed seeing her friend like this, a wholly alien version of the person she thought she knew best. But was this because of what happened to Jo? Or had it been there all along, the assassins she and Jo were trained to be?
“Want to know what we did to her? It’s got to be killing you, wondering how she died.”
The Unseelie couldn’t laugh after Faye removed his ability to speak.
Amie wanted to bury her face in Dearg’s chest, to pretend she had never seen her friend do something so violent. It was one thing to write about wars and bloodshed, quite another to have it staring you in the face.
The distant horde had drawn nearer. Though substantially smaller thanks to Amie’s flora friends, they would not attack the Unseelie for some unexplained reason.
Again Dearg urged her, pulling her back towards the castle. “My love, please come. This is their fight now. If we can reach inside the doors, you can draw up the defenses again and they can nay follow.”
Amie sighed, blinking past tears, watching Faye continually stab the enemy. If Ginuog hadn’t appeared then, she wasn’t sure what would have happened.
He came from nowhere, it seemed, and she vaguely wondered how he had managed to avoid the earth’s wrath. He was bleeding in several places and had obviously been nixed to no affect. Yet the edges of his form blurred as he approached Faye, from human to man-beast. Slinging his crossbow over his shoulder, he set his gaze on Amie and Dearg and shouted, “What are you two still doing here? Get inside the house! Find the others and for Creator’s sake, finish this!”
Faye growled when he tried to pull her away. “Don’t touch me! He said they killed her! But my sister’s not dead! I would have felt it!”
“Fayelyn, now is not the moment for grief!” Ben growled even deeper, roughly pulling her onto her feet and picking up her discarded dagger. “They picked up her signature. Looks like Plan B failed.”
Faye rolled her eyes, shivering as she returned to a semblance of her old self. “On to Plan C. Oh joy!”
The last remaining golem met Dearg’s gaze and nodded. “We shall hold the defense. Slaine remains on the rooftops as you insisted.”
Dearg smirked and nodded in acknowledgement. Without another word he pulled Amie with him to the house. The last thing Amie saw was Faye’s quick glance at their retreat and the sorrow in her eyes, before she and the golem turned to face the amassing shadows.
“Amie, turn away. They are more capable than you ken.” He smiled reassuringly before glancing up to sheer castle wall facing them and taking a deep breath, growled, “Rrochgreith!”
High above, the dragon’s roar echoed back to them and, dropping so quickly his form blurred, Slaine lifted his wings over their heads and rushed the last offense. Heat poured from his jaws and turned the night to daylight with balefire.
Chapter 46
Beginning of the End
Home was what you made of it, the place you staked claim on in the world. Home was the people, not the building itself. Home could be where the heart was, where lifetimes were b
egun, spent and lived. At least that was what normal people said. For Amie Wenderdowne, home was the place that breathed a sigh of relief the moment she crossed its threshold. Her home was alive in a way she could never get used to and could never live without.
She wasn’t the sole occupant of her house. It was too ridiculously vast for any sensible person to go hermit in. But she was responsible for its wellbeing, for their wellbeing. Wenderdowne was falling apart when she first arrived and it was because of her it had come back to life.
So let’s keep it that way, she thought as she walked through the halls. Everything looked almost exactly as she had left it. Half of her expected the catastrophe outside to reflect within. Candles flamed to life when she approached and winked out after her shadow had passed. Some objects had been knocked over in the frenzy after the attack. The front door in the great hall still swayed open gently, back and forth in an invisible wind. Nothing had slashed the walls with blunt objects or lit them on fire like the West Wing.
At the Ballroom, the resemblance ended with the lifeless heaps of ballroom gowns and robes and the stain of their blood. Seelie and Unseelie nixy still hung in the air so thickly she could taste the metallic charge on her tongue. Her gaze followed the mark of the warpath and shuddered to see both good and evil had fallen together. For a time they had fought senselessly, nearby stone marred from stray blasts of energy. Frowning, she stopped at the foot of the staircase as a chill breathed down the back of her exposed neck.
Something stopped them.
The nearest figures had fallen in the same direction, their blasts marking nothing but the steps above her. Rather than fear and hate one another they had banded together in those last fatal moments against the shadow. Pressing her fingers to the black stain on the marble stair Amie felt a rush of danger rise, induce her terror. She had felt this same fear before. He had used it against her to keep her from prying where she didn’t belong. He hadn’t trusted her then and she trusted him even less now.
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