Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1)

by Mel Sterling

  The snares dragged him over the mound to where Hunter stood.

  "You would have done better, human, to become my ally." Hunter stared into Thomas's wide eyes. "Mark me well. Tell her, and I will hear of it. But I will not come for your life that instant. I will come for that of your pet's, and I will give her to the kelpies for their pleasure—and their meat. Choose wisely. And if you value your own life, make certain you are inside the mound before I ride tonight. Because if you are not, I will hunt you until cockcrow, and only when you weep for mercy will I kill you."

  Hunter's staff thumped Thomas's chest. "Mark me well."

  Thump. Thump.

  Thomas tried to get his hand beneath the lapel of the coat, but Hunter's red gaze flicked there, and he uttered a single phrase: "Stone be ye." And Thomas was as stone, unmoving, but not deaf, and not blind. The net of the snare magic lay wherever his skin was not covered by clothing, and burned there, hot as the Queen's armband could sometimes be. It was excruciating, like being covered by biting ants or stung by wasps. Thomas felt his heart slowing in his chest as the stoniness penetrated deeper and deeper. His breathing slowed, and then stopped.

  This was how it would end, then, with magic, beneath the hard pearl sky of Allantide, atop the Queen's proudest accomplishment. He felt stupid for not realizing Hunter must have magic beyond that of his snares.

  Even the fae perished when their hearts were breached or broken, and Thomas was only partially fae. His senses began to swim as he struggled to draw breath. He longed to sleep. A deep ache filled his bones like cold sap, slow and thick.

  Thomas fell backward onto the wet, stony earth. The deep pile of Hunter's driven leaves made no cushion beneath him, and the trees pinwheeled above him against the shattering sky. He might have heard when Hunter vanished, with a noise like a clap of thunder, or it might simply have been his heart exploding. He couldn't tell, but he was grateful it was over, no matter what, except for Tess, who would never know what had become of him, and who would take a sack of fae trinkets to Underbridge in the morning, tender and naive as a sacrificial lamb.

  Oh, Tess. I'm sorry...

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HOW HAD THE WORLD BECOME so strange, in so little time? Tess sat in a fast-food restaurant parking lot just off Sandy Boulevard, waiting for her hands to stop shaking. She held the seeing stone clenched tight in her fist, wondering if a cheeseburger would still look like a cheeseburger, or if it would have the oily rainbow sheen of fairy magic upon it.

  Nothing was safe any longer, not a person, not a building, not a lamppost. Not even dead leaves. It was all changed, all frightening, unless Thomas was near to explain it, defeat it, or drive it away. She was unnerved by how much she had come to depend on him. She wondered if he was safe wherever he was now, or if the things that had hunted them the night before hunted him still.

  When she started to tell herself the leaf attack was simply an aberrant breeze, she knew she was feeling better. But she still felt shaky, so she locked the Jeep and went inside the restaurant for a sandwich and a caffeinated soda, and some nasty, delicious French fries. She bolted her food too fast, peering through the stone every now and then and finding nothing out of the ordinary. A few customers looked at her curiously, and at last she put the stone inside her shirt, where it lay cool and smooth against her skin.

  An hour was too long to linger at a burger joint, even at midday, and finally Tess visited the washroom, then went for the Jeep. A fallen leaf, brown and curled dry with autumn, scudded past her on the asphalt like a toy boat propelled by a gust of wind. She screamed.

  Not loudly, but all the same, it proved a point. She locked herself inside the Jeep and sat there with the grocery tote in the passenger seat, her heart pounding anew. The fries, so welcome while they were hot and salty fresh, sat like a rock in her belly. She fumbled the stone out of her neckline and stared through it wild-eyed, turning to examine the entire parking lot, particularly the edges where the curbs trapped the fallen leaves.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Of course.

  There had been nothing different about that leaf.

  "I'm fine," she whispered to herself, gripping the steering wheel. "I'm alone in my own car and I'm just fine." Speaking aloud made her feel a little steadier.

  Determinedly she cranked the engine and pulled out into the noontime traffic, heading for her office. She could just tell them she had slept and felt better. She wanted to be around people, good, ordinary people, who didn't change shape or pull mysterious bits of nothing out from under her car and tell her a monster was chasing them.

  Except that she knew the monster had been chasing them. Ordinary people, or even streetfolk, didn't climb the skeletons of bridges in the darkness with their eyes glowing red.

  When she neared her office, she sat at a long traffic light. She happened to glance at herself in the rearview mirror, and saw there a woman who looked completely out of control. Some of her hair had frizzed out of her ponytail. Her eyes were open too wide, and she could not make herself relax enough to stop looking terrified, no matter how hard she blinked or how deeply she breathed.

  She couldn't go into the office looking like this. When the light changed, she kept driving, and passed the entrance to the office parking lot.

  A moment later she found herself crossing the Burnside Street Bridge, the most direct route home from her east-side office. She sucked in a sharp breath and her foot stuttered on the accelerator. Stupid. Stupid. How could she have been so distracted that she neglected to consider the market and the fae beneath that very bridge, especially after having been so careful earlier?

  Nowhere to stop. Nowhere to turn around.

  There was no barrier in the center of the bridge. If she just pulled gently to the side, as if she had car trouble, eventually the traffic would clear enough that she could make an illegal U-turn and head back to Sandy Boulevard and the east side of town, and a different bridge. She began to slow down, her right turn signal on. The traffic from the west was already diminishing; the stoplights must be with her. She pulled to the right, checking her rearview and side mirrors. In another few hundred feet she would be directly over Thomas's house, across the leaves of the bridge, and into the frightening territory of Underbridge.

  Tess checked her mirrors one last time and blinked.

  There were several vehicles halted at the east end of the bridge, blocking traffic there. She could hear the noise of horns honking.

  Every single vehicle was black.

  She jammed her foot on the brake, stopped on the empty bridge, and turned in her seat to look behind her.

  Not just a few of the vehicles.

  All of them.

  She counted quickly: twelve, with their headlights on. For a disjointed moment she thought it must be a funeral procession, but for that they'd have been in single file, following a pilot car from a mortuary, not gathering at the base of the bridge like a group of racers about to burst from the starting blocks.

  Twelve. All black, shining things. In the lead was a monstrous SUV, making its slow way onto the bridge deck. Behind it were arrayed little sedans and coupes, a truck or two, but nothing so ground-pawingly macho as the SUV.

  Thomas's voice echoed in her head. If anything at all seems odd, look through it. Know when you're dealing with the fae.

  Twelve black vehicles with their lights on in the middle of the afternoon seemed odd to Tess.

  She fumbled the seeing stone out of her shirt and held it to her eye.

  They weren't cars at all. Nor trucks. Not vehicles of any kind. They had to be heavily glamoured to be out and about in the human world in broad daylight like this. Glamoured to look like iron, which seemed crazily appropriate and impossible at the same time, given Thomas's reaction to riding in her Jeep and touching the steel girders of the bridge. In the lead was a skeletal horse, gray as steel in the daylight, champing at the bit in its mouth and dripping gobbets of froth from its bony muzzle.

  And its ri
der...dear God, its rider was the cloaked thing that had skulked the girders above them as she and Thomas fled his house. She could see the red glints of its eyes even from a third of the way across the bridge, but it was not hooded now, and she saw what could only be the immense rack of an elk or a stag adorning its ferocious head.

  Behind the rider was a milling of smaller creatures, things with too many legs, too many teeth, and not enough flesh to be anything but famished.

  And among them, the wet, horselike monsters Thomas had called kelpies. If she'd had any doubt left that the boy-thing that had tried to woo her in Underbridge was ill-intentioned, it was gone now.

  The group roiled at the edge of the bridge as if they were reluctant to take that first step onto the deck. Thomas had chosen his home wisely, well protected by iron and running water. But she didn't think the water would hold back the kelpies in the group. They'd probably rejoice if she suddenly entered the Willamette. It would put her in their element.

  The warning blast of an air horn woke her from her frightened trance and she turned in her seat expecting to be obliterated by a massive truck bearing down on her from the west end of the bridge. Instead she saw the lights of the bridge warning system flashing, and the red and white striped arms beginning to descend. Through the body of the Jeep she could feel the thrum and groan of the Burnside Bridge machinery, the same shuddering vibrations she had felt the night before in Thomas's strange little bolt hole.

  To the south, a ship was headed for the bridge.

  Behind her, the collection of black cars crept onto the bridge and began to gather speed as if they had recognized her as their prey, and with that recognition, had found their courage. Their speed began to increase, narrowing the safe gap by the moment.

  Ahead of her, the arms were almost down across her lane.

  She slammed her foot on the accelerator, cut the Jeep hard to the left, grabbing for gears as she sped. She looked over her shoulder to see the black posse forming a barrier across all the lanes of the bridge. If they thought she would drive right toward them, Tess had other plans.

  Even the terrors of Underbridge were preferable to the things waiting at the east end of the bridge. She rounded the end of the gate and zoomed into the no-man's-land between the red and white striped arms, where the leaves of the bridge would separate.

  She pushed the Jeep faster, cutting back into her own travel lane, racing for the dark crack she could see in the middle of the bridge. Sparing a glance in the rearview, she saw the SUV and several of the chase cars coming fast, oh, so frighteningly fast, passing the first arm.

  Through the windshield she saw the bridge operator out on the deck of the western tower, waving his arms to stop her. But there was no going back, even if she and the Jeep went into the Willamette. The Jeep neared the center of the leaves, where the crack in the bridge was widening ever so slightly and the deck tilt was becoming noticeable. Tess stuffed the Jeep into third gear and torqued the engine harder than she'd ever pushed it before. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, and the Jeep crossed the center of the two leaves, bumped sickeningly across the little maw that was opening there in the bridge, sixty-eight and the engine was screaming and the RPMs were into the red but she was across, across. She slammed the Jeep into fourth gear and shot past the line of east-bound traffic waiting politely behind the second barrier, slewed down the slope of the bridge and sob-blessed the red light at the bottom when it winked green. She dared a glance behind her.

  The SUV alone still followed her. Had the rest of the things been too afraid to cross? Too slow? Halted by the iron and the running water beneath? Or would they come slithering in from elsewhere, like rain-drunk worms from the earth? She recklessly jammed the stone to her eye to scan the area at the foot of the Burnside Bridge, but there was no plague of fairy things swarming up from Underbridge. At last she had to jam her foot on the brake to gain enough control to negotiate the city streets without killing herself or someone else in the process.

  The Jeep smelled hot and angry with the stink of scorched clutch as she pulled it sharply to the right into Chinatown, beneath the ornate crimson welcome gate flanked by two guardian fu dog statues. She knew she had pushed the old engine too hard, but she hoped with all her might the faithful vehicle would continue on just the way it always had. It was the only thing she had to get herself out of this mess.

  The light ahead of her turned red, and a stream of pedestrians flowed into the crosswalk from both directions. A sob built in her throat and she turned to stare behind her through the stone, where, sure enough, the black SUV had just turned the corner into her street. Tess heard the note of eager triumph in its deep-pitched engine growl, but suddenly the SUV slewed to the side and rocked hard, nearly off its wheels. She couldn't see what it had struck to knock it so, but then it occurred to her to use the stone—I should just build it into a pair of glasses, never take it off, look like a freak the rest of my probably very short life at this rate—and what she saw next made her jaw drop in utter astonishment.

  It was one thing to see a gargoyle coming to life on the side of a building and snacking on pigeons.

  It was another to see the fu dogs launching from their pedestals on either side of the gate into Chinatown, ripping at the rider and his mount with claws the size of dinosaur teeth. The skeletal horse reared and tossed, a spray of sparks like fireworks spewing from the damage the dogs' claws left wherever they struck and tore. The noises she heard were no longer just the SUV's roar; somewhere mixed in was the outrage of the guardian dogs as they protected their territory, tails lashing, giant heads tossing like dragons in the Chinese New Year celebrations. The rider lifted his bow and shot an arrow into the air. From the fletching trailed a net of brilliant oil-slick light, rippling over the dogs and falling harmlessly on their golden backs.

  Chinatown's guardians didn't like the hunting, prowling creature any more than she did. But they had better weapons with which to fight it, and fight it they did, driving the beast backward slowly but steadily. The rider launched arrow after arrow, which passed through the fu dogs as if they were only smoke. Yet she could see the fu dogs' claws laying open cloth and flesh.

  Here in Chinatown, something other than the fae held sway. No wonder Thomas had always walked around its border, rather than through.

  The car behind her honked, long and loud, and she flinched, meeting the irate gaze of the driver in her rearview mirror. The light had changed; the pedestrians were back on their curbs, safe and waiting, and though half of her needed to stay and watch the astonishing scene behind her, to know the SUV and its driver had been stopped for good, the wiser half knew this was the moment to flee, while the dogs kept the fae monster busy, before it realized other streets weren't guarded by such ferocious power.

  Tess let out the clutch too fast, hopping the Jeep across the intersection, and sped away, the battle growing quieter behind her with each successive city block.

  She kept going, barely pausing even at red lights, pushing her luck, expecting a police car on her ass every second. I'm so sorry, officer, I know it was wrong to cross the bridge like that when it was opening for the biggest boat I've ever seen, but you see there are evil fairies after my boyfriend and me. Here, you can see them if you look through my magic rock... She dodged left and right and left and right and always trending northwest, always looking in her rearview, missing parked cars by inches and scaring pedestrians back onto the sidewalk, headed for the only safety she knew, however dubious: Home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE BREATH THAT SLAMMED INTO his lungs hurt worse than anything he had ever felt. Thomas put an arm across his eyes to shield them from the glaring daytime brilliance above, gasping and thrashing, not ashamed to weep. Apparently Hunter had gone, and with him the spell that turned Thomas to stone. He rolled onto his belly and coughed weakly.

  "Not dead," he gasped.

  But why not? Hunter wasn't known for his mercy or his self-restraint. Therefore he must still have a use
for Thomas, or else he was not certain the Queen would excuse Thomas's death so easily.

  That meant Thomas still had an edge somewhere. He just had to find it. The very thought of looking for it overwhelmed him, and he lay still on the chill earth of the mound, simply breathing, feeling his heart calming from its desperate panicked restart.

  A noise downslope caught his attention and he turned his head, careful to move slowly and make no noise. It was Hunter's hound, the broken bogle, struggling to its feet and wailing pitifully, screeching like a wheel on an ungreased axle. Thomas could hear it calling for help but felt no compunction to assist it. At least the thing hadn't been killed outright. He could take some cold comfort in that fact. He lay where he was until the bogle was out of sight and earshot.

  Did he dare go to the Queen and try to learn more? Did he even care any longer? What if he simply turned his back on the whole mess and walked away?

  He rolled onto his back again and stared up into the bare branches. Leaving wasn't a real possibility. The Queen would use the band to call him back, and he would go. She owned him body and will. Meanwhile, his need to protect Tess was rising again like a will-o'-the-wisp in a marsh, driving him to sit up, and then to get to his feet. Protecting Tess meant he needed information only the Queen could provide. He stared downhill in the direction of Tess's house, not visible through the trees and undergrowth and the choking, ubiquitous ivy.

  He could end all this right now if he were to go back, gather up the Queen's things, and drag Tess into the mound to face the Queen's displeasure whether it was deserved or not. The temptation was strong, but his stomach churned with dread. The easy way out was not the right way out. He hated himself for his cowardly but very human thoughts.