by SM Reine
“Oof!”
Before she could hit the ground, an enormous, gentle hand caught her. “Careful.”
It was alive. The wall she’d struck—it was alive, and looking at her with round, inquisitive eyes.
“Gods,” Charity breathed. “Who are you?”
He stooped over her. “I’m Ymir.” Like that explained everything.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she said out of habit. “My name is—”
“Charity. We’ve met.”
It took her a moment to piece together his childlike voice and blue everything. “Ymir? Marion’s friend?” Charity had heard he was a good guy. Or a good kid, to be more precise, although he was one of the biggest kids she’d ever seen. “What are you doing out here?”
“I was with Marion,” he said. “When the Godslayer came…”
“She ran,” Charity said.
Ymir’s head bobbed in a nod. “She was trying to get the seelie to a ley line. We have a deal with the Spring Court to hide them.” He scratched his head thoughtfully. “Refugees? That’s what she called them.”
Charity’s heart leaped. “You mean there’s an opening in the wards protecting the Spring Court? And the seelie can get through there?”
“Jaycee set it up when I asked,” Ymir said. “That’s where Marion was going before…” He cast a worried look over his shoulder.
There were no massive explosions, like bombs dropping on the forest, or any other indication of gods fighting. Once it started, though—and Charity was certain that it would start—there might not be enough warning to get everybody out of the area.
“Let’s get them to the Veil,” Charity said.
Ymir looked relieved. “You’ll help me?”
“As long as you’ll show me where the hole is.”
Ymir pointed in the opposite direction from where everyone was running. “That way. Between the two cairns.”
The cairns he indicated were just barely visible atop a gentle slope. They looked like piles of bone connected by enough vines to form the rough shape of a doorway.
Everyone was going in the wrong direction.
Charity chased after the sidhe, shouting. “Hey! This way!”
But when she yelled and ran, people just started yelling and running too. They saw Charity coming after them and fled like she was one of the warring gods themselves.
“No! You’ve got to go to that part of the Veil!”
She pointed, but nobody was even looking at her.
Ymir thudded past Charity, his enormous feet flattening the earth where he stomped. “Hey!” His shout boomed like hers didn’t. “Follow me!”
Heads lifted that time. People looked at him.
Charity would have been scared if something that big was yelling at her, yet the exact people who panicked at the sight of a revenant stopped to listen to a frost giant.
She tried not to be insulted that they were all too happy to scurry through Ymir’s enormous footprints to follow him through the Wilds.
“Seems like you don’t need me after all,” Charity panted, rushing to keep up with him.
“You’ll have to help with the army,” Ymir said.
“The army?” Charity splashed through a stream. The water was unexpectedly warm—and it wasn’t clear. There was so much blood mixed in that it looked like mud.
As soon as the seelie followed Ymir through that stream, an entire legion of unseelie materialized.
“They found us!”
Konig had sent his army to wipe out anyone who had the gall to run away.
Exposure to all the sidhe in the forest had been bad enough when they hadn’t been attacking Charity. But as soon as the army’s wave struck, Charity’s head felt like putty squeezed within a toddler’s fist. Temples pressing inward, jaw aching, throat constricting.
The magic wasn’t really crushing her, no matter how it felt.
She was fully capable of whistling loudly.
The Hounds came pouring through the trees. They were swollen from gorging on the dead, mouths caked with blood. They presented almost no threat to the unseelie army. But they didn’t know that, and when the Hounds crashed into them, the unseelie started to scream.
It was chaos.
Ymir rose above it all, fists swinging as he knocked unseelie away to clear a path toward the cairns.
Seelie fled. And two statuesque, glittering gentry stood at the Veil. The space between them—between the cairns—was dense with magic. It made the trees appear to ripple. The very earth was turning to wild waves slopping over stone.
Beyond the pair of gentry, Charity could make out the shape of brilliant green-blue ocean.
They’d found the Spring Court.
And there were at least eighty unseelie between Charity and escape.
“What do we do?” Ymir whispered.
Charity let out a long, slow breath. “I’ll take care of it.”
Eighty sidhe, one revenant.
How hard could that be?
Seth’s first instinct at seeing the Godslayer was to go full god. Four arms couldn’t do much against Death. At his peak, he had access to unlimited power that even an avatar couldn’t fathom. If he wanted, he could drag the Godslayer anywhere—like the balefire at the heart of the Pit.
But then the ash heart would be gone.
Marion had spotted Seth. She was watching him without moving her head, her eyes round, her nostrils flared. There was no hope in her expression. It looked like she was trying to memorize Seth’s face because she would next see it on her way into the afterlife.
Seth couldn’t leave her. But he also couldn’t let her get killed.
They were close to a ley line—so close. If he could just push Marion through it…
He drew in a deep breath, gathering himself into a near-mortal form. “Elise,” he called.
The Godslayer’s head turned. Even though her face was blank, he could tell that she was somehow watching him.
One of her hands lifted, aiming a gun at him.
He could almost hear her saying, You’re next.
“Let Marion go,” Seth said. “The Elise I know wouldn’t hurt her.”
But that didn’t seem to be in contention. This was the Godslayer, an idea that Elise had formulated, not the god herself. The Godslayer had unique impulses.
He risked a step into the clearing.
The Godslayer twitched.
One of her blades bit into Marion’s throat. Blood slipped down the blade, and she gave a tiny gasp.
Seth stopped.
“Let’s figure this out,” he said. “Whatever vendetta you’ve got against Marion…” There were several potential reasons that Elise might have decided to terminate her sister. Seth didn’t even know how to begin arguing in her defense. “We can figure it all out if you give us a chance.”
Marion shook her head just the tiniest bit. “Back off,” she whispered to Seth without moving her mouth. “I’ve got this.”
He took another step.
The Godslayer moved—lunging for Seth. She took the blades off of Marion’s throat. She swung for him.
Seth hadn’t expected her to attack him. He’d been prepared to sweep Marion out of the way, but not defend himself. Twin blades colored like shadow and light lanced toward him.
“No!” Marion shouted.
She hurled a potion bottle to the ground. It exploded just behind the Godslayer.
A portal opened.
The wind blasting through it knocked everyone down. Even Seth. Even the Godslayer. Hot infernal air swirled through the clearing, clashing against the power of the sidhe.
And a woman stepped through. She was tiny-waisted, brown-haired, and carrying an enormous potion bottle nestled in one arm.
Ariane had made the portal in Sheol work.
The Godslayer went still at the sight of Marion’s mother. She was sprawled on the ground, weight resting on all four elbows, blank face turned toward the portal.
On the other side,
Sheol was teeming with activity. LCI had successfully relocated its shifters to the Nether Worlds. That would have been good news if Seth hadn’t expected Adàn Pedregon to be in Ransom Falls right at that moment, along with his shifters, getting Leliel out of the way.
The wind tossed Ariane’s hair around her shoulders as she advanced on the Godslayer. “I almost didn’t believe it was true, and yet here we are.”
The Godslayer stood smoothly. Slowly. She lowered the weapons to her sides.
Marion rushed around the portal, and Seth caught her, holding her steady. “Are you okay?” he whispered, hands traveling down her arms, searching for wounds. She was wearing that terrible armor again. Nothing was left to the imagination. She couldn’t have hidden major injuries without a lot of magic.
“I’m fine,” she said. “For now.”
Ariane and the Godslayer were circling each other. “I have spent every year since Genesis wondering about you,” Ariane said softly. “I got to know you so well after Marion was born. You held her on the nights when she couldn’t stop crying, as a fragile little infant, and you held her hands when she learned to walk. We talked then, Elise—we talked so much. For the first time I knew my daughter.”
The Godslayer stopped. Ariane did too.
They were facing each other from opposite ends of the portal
“I am with Adàn Pedregon now, in the way I was with your father, and Marion’s father,” Ariane said. “Adàn had another wife before me, but his family was killed in the conflicts after Genesis. So I studied you, Elise. I studied you because I wanted to understand why you did this to them. To all of us.”
The avatar didn’t even look like she was breathing at this point. She was a statue.
Ariane, on the other hand, was trembling.
“I don’t know you as I thought. The daughter I loved wouldn’t have hurt the world like this. She was a hero, and you? You are a monster.”
The Godslayer’s back was to Seth. Ariane had her full attention—and Seth’s, too.
He didn’t even notice that Marion had been spinning spells until she shot them all at the Godslayer.
The avatar moved.
She was so fast that even Seth couldn’t track her motions. He only knew that Marion didn’t manage to hit the Godslayer with her lightning, and that the Godslayer jerked Marion away from him a heartbeat later. She put Marion in a headlock with one of those arms. Another pressed a blade against her throat.
The Godslayer began dragging her toward the ley line.
Seth had been hoping to use it as an escape—but not like this. He didn’t know where that ley line would go if the Godslayer took Marion through it. He wouldn’t be able to follow quickly enough to save her.
“Stop!”
Ariane’s voice ricocheted off the trees, sending birds into flight. The whole world stopped to look at her.
She pressed a knife to her own neck, right over the pulsing jugular vein.
The Godslayer froze.
“Take another step or hurt Marion again,” Ariane said, “and I’ll kill myself. Let her go. You’ll prove you’re a hero and save us both.”
Nobody moved.
Seth gathered himself to strike.
But then the Godslayer released Marion. The mage tumbled to the ground in a spill of enchanted chainmail, blood dripping from her throat.
The Godslayer turned from the ley line, turned from the portal—she even turned from her mother.
And she vanished into the forest.
Arawn would have been proud of Charity if he’d seen what she did in the Summer Court.
It would have been nice if he’d seen it for another reason, too. Because killing eighty unseelie soldiers had put Charity’s brain into such a state of shock that she didn’t actually remember how she had done it after the fact.
The only thing that she knew was that she was suddenly knee-deep in bodies and as bloodstained and swollen as the Hounds.
“Wow.”
Ymir’s voice snapped Charity out of her killing reverie. She looked up to see him holding a limp soldier in each fist. It looked as though they’d died from being smashed together like cymbals, and also like they were probably the only two that someone other than Charity had killed.
She looked down at the ground surrounding her. And all the limbs. And all the blood.
Her stomach was so full.
“Is everyone safe?” she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of a bony wrist. It didn’t help clean anything. She was bloody everywhere.
“No,” said Jaycee Hardwick. “You killed them all.” She snorted harshly. “But if you’re wondering about the seelie refugees, yes. They’re mostly through.”
The rest of them were clustered on the other side of the stream, looking totally traumatized by what they’d witnessed Charity doing.
“Get them out of here,” she said, straightening and trying to step over the bodies. There were too many. Plus the Hounds were swarming her, butting her with their bloody noses, lapping at her exposed flesh.
“Are you certain you’d rather not eat them?” Jaycee asked. “Kidding! There’s no way you’d fit more in that big mouth of yours.” She clapped her hands at the other refugees like she was a kindergarten teacher. “This way. Come vacation in the Spring Court. We aren’t being invaded by the unseelie yet and there are no vampires.”
It was a convincing argument. The rest of the seelie ran for the cairns, giving Charity a wide berth.
Ymir was the last of the sidhe to go through the ley line. He lingered beside Charity like he’d been fixed in place by glue. The shyness of his posture didn’t jibe with the confidence he’d shown yelling orders. It also didn’t jibe with how incredibly, frighteningly tall he looked. Charity wasn’t used to feeling dwarfed by anyone.
At least he wasn’t scared of her.
“That’s everyone who survived, I think,” Ymir said, casting an anxious gaze around the trees. “Do you think that’s everyone?”
“Except you,” Charity said.
“And you,” he said. “Come with us?”
She gazed down the hill at the Hounds as they galloped through the trees so they could harass more of the surviving unseelie. Konig’s army had begun to realize that the hell-dogs weren’t trying to eat them, so the Hounds wouldn’t be able to hold them off for very long.
And past the army, there was a quiet clearing where gods were clashing.
“I can’t go through.” She wouldn’t leave without Seth, even if he were a god who could surely take care of himself. “Go without me. Worry about protecting the refugees so I can worry about everyone over here.” When he didn’t immediately move, she added, “Including Marion.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Ymir’s mass rolled forward. When it touched the Veil, he warped into a tiny pinprick and disappeared, exactly like the others.
The Hardwick woman gave Charity a brief, annoyed glance, and then turned to follow Ymir.
The door to the Spring Court shut.
Charity spun to search the surrounding Wilds. Which turned out to be a bad move. When she jerked like that, the trees pitched drunkenly around her, swirling and whirling and making her knees go weak. Even faint sparks of sidhe magic were enough to disorient her.
“Where’d I leave Seth?” she asked aloud.
She knew she’d come through a narrow aisle of trees to reach the Veil, but the forest seemed to have reconfigured itself. The only thing she recognized was the cairns.
A Hound looped around her legs with a yelping wail. It smelled like acid. Ichor dripped from its flank.
The unseelie were figuring out how to fight the Hounds.
“Help me find Seth,” Charity said, holding her hands down to the Hound. Its leathery nose tickled her palms. “Death. Find him.”
It raced down the hill and disappeared into the shadows of night.
Charity hadn’t even begun to follow it when she heard the yelp of pain. It terminated abruptly.
The Hound was dead.
“No!”
She leaped through the trees to find whoever had hurt it. She pushed through a cluster of bushes—and cold steel kissed her throat.
Charity froze. Her eyes tracked from the hand holding the blade to the muscular arm to which it was attached. She had to count how many arms there were twice, because she didn’t want to believe it the first time.
Four arms.
The Godslayer had found her.
And even though the avatar of god was on the short side of things, comparatively speaking, she had no trouble holding the point of the blade to Charity’s jugular. Even a revenant would be susceptible to having a major artery sliced open. The vampiric races didn’t produce blood on their own, so losing anything she’d consumed that night would be a fast road to permanent death.
Charity would have swallowed hard if she hadn’t been afraid of cutting herself.
“Hi,” she said in a tiny voice.
The Godslayer shifted a few steps to the left without letting her sword drop an inch.
It was so creepy to look into a face without features.
Charity tensed her muscles, preparing to attack. She had to attack, didn’t she? If the avatar was here, then she must have killed Marion and Seth. Charity had to get revenge. Or, maybe not revenge, but she needed to defend herself. Or something.
Before Charity could make up her mind about attacking, the Godslayer lowered her blade. She gave a half-bow to Charity. A silent show of…was that supposed to be respect?
What the hell?
And then the Godslayer rushed past her, tucked all four arms against her chest, and plunged into the Veil. She vanished even though Jaycee had closed the door, and Charity was left staring after her, slack-jawed.
Charity stumbled over her own feet lurching into motion.
She was only a few hundred meters from where she had left Seth in the forest, facing down with the Godslayer. Charity erupted into the clearing expecting to see a whole lot of death. Instead, she found Seth cradling Marion against his corporeal chest, and an unfamiliar woman sitting on a rock looking haunted.
They were alive. The Godslayer hadn’t killed them.
Charity was so damn confused.
“What the fuck did I just miss out on?” Charity asked.
