by Lyra Evans
The world tilted on its axis, and Oliver had the sense that Sky was standing above them, like some maniacal child playing god with a toy set. Connor growled deep in his chest again, dragging Oliver back to reality. There was only one way forward.
“I can see you’ve thought this through,” Oliver said carefully. “You know I would never let anything happen to Rory, and Connor would never let Donna die when he could stop it. The bond we share with our friends is a powerful one.” The clasp clicked into position. “And that’s why I’m afraid we’re going to have to decline.”
Sky’s face shifted in slow motion. His sparkling, malevolent eyes suddenly shaded, blank in confusion, the smirk on his face faltering. Oliver watched it happen, his gaze laser-focused on Sky’s face as he drew his hand out of his pocket and called the right cutting spell to mind. As he cast, Connor shifted next to him, his body morphing into that of a massive, white Wolf. Connor bounded forward over Oliver, mirroring the path of Oliver’s cutting spell, but Sky was faster than Oliver hoped.
One hand swiping upwards before his face, Sky turned his arm to steel, his other arm weakened and soft to compensate. The cutting spell hit the steel arm and rebounded to the side, slamming into a tree instead. The tree trunk snapped and the head of a palm tree toppled over into the forest behind.
Oliver was already moving, throwing spell after spell from his hand with the obsidian stone as guidance. Connor landed to the side, skidding to a halt by the edge of the cliff as Sky dodged him and deflected Oliver’s spells with his steel arm. Changing tactics, Oliver cast at the ground under Sky’s feet, turning the soft earth to mud, and Sky’s foot slipped sideways, throwing him off balance. With one arm completely useless, he was forced to trade back his steel arm for his regular one in order to catch himself and get back to his feet. But losing the steel arm meant making himself vulnerable to Connor’s attacks, and Connor pounced on him, his razor-toothed maw locking on to Sky’s fleshy forearm.
Sky screamed as Connor jerked his head back, tearing the skin and sinew from Sky’s arm, leaving the bone and ravaged muscle exposed to the air. Oliver shot a shield spell at Connor as Sky tried to swap out the air in Connor’s lungs for the blood running down Sky’s half-limp hand. As Oliver protected Connor, Sky traded the ocean water for the bindings holding the cabin together. The logs of the cabin creaked and bloated, the magic speeding up natural processes, and the trunks slid out of position, crashing forward.
Oliver threw himself out of the way, casting a diversion spell on the crumbling cabin to send the logs off the cliff instead of toward him and Connor. Meanwhile, Sky gave up strips of his wounded arm to launch a cutting spell at Oliver’s back. Oliver cried out in pain as the spell hit his back like lashings from a whip. He stumbled forward, turning through the pain to cast the first spell that came to mind at Sky. Connor barked and threw himself at Sky, catching his other arm and dragging it backward, stopping Sky from defending himself just in time for him to be hit, full force, by Oliver’s spell.
In an instant, Sky gasped, struggling for breath, his body thrown backward against a tree with all the force of an F5 tornado. Oliver shot a binding spell, blinking through the blinding pain in his back, and pinned Sky to the tree, his hands tied behind him around the trunk of the tree. Blood seeped down the bark from both ragged arms, and Connor stood growling, hackles raised, before him.
Oliver collapsed, seeing his spells take effect, and desperately cast healing spells on his own back. With so little experience with healing spells, they weren’t terribly effective, but they did enough to close the wounds and stop the bleeding. The slashes would leave scars if he didn’t get medical attention, but for now they were healed enough to get back on his feet and do what needed to be done.
Connor padded over, nuzzling beneath Oliver to help him to his feet. Oliver grasped the thick white fur of Connor’s neck with both arms, allowing himself to be positioned upright, and pressed his face to Connor’s head for a relieved caress. When he pulled away, mostly steady on his feet, he found Connor standing in humanoid form before him again.
“What should we do with him?” Connor asked, his voice ragged and rough. The sharp tang to his words spoke of a desire for violence Oliver wholly understood. But glancing at Sky, his ruined face contorted in loathing as he tried in vain to fight against the bonds, Oliver shook his head.
“We can’t kill him,” he said, casting another spell to reinforce the bonds he’d cast. The spell he used could only be undone by a Fae if they traded honest regret for past wrongs, and Oliver knew Sky felt no regret for his past behaviour, beyond regretting when they didn’t succeed.
“We can’t trust him either,” Connor said. Oliver nodded.
“Connor’s right,” Sky said after a moment. A vile smile on his face. “You’re going to have to finish the job, Oli. Or I’ll keep coming for you. Forever. I won’t rest until I’ve tortured and killed you, shattering everything you are and everything you’ve ever been. There’s nowhere to hide from me.” He laughed, and the sound spoke of insanity. Oliver had never thought Sky insane. Psychotic, of course. But not insane. Not unhinged. But this Sky was an unfinished version of the original, as though he lost some of his mind when he gave up half his face. “Do you have it in you, Oli, baby? Do you have it in you to kill me? Come on,” he said, licking his lips. “Let me make you a murderer.”
Oliver grimaced, the taste of bile in his throat. Then a thought occurred to him, and he looked a Connor, a slow smile creeping on to his lips.
“No,” he said. “We can use him. Make him confess to all he’s done, and implicate the High Warlock and Kayla in everything they’ve done.” He smiled darkly at Sky. “Then he can pay for his crimes the right way.”
Sky barked a manic laugh, throwing his head back against the bark of the tree. “You think Nimueh’s Court can hold me? You think your petty prisons and luxurious punishments hold any fear for me?” He laughed louder. “And I’ve already been subjected to Werewolf justice. Let me tell you, I’ve had better.” His mouth was a ragged slash across his face, punctuated by his sharp teeth. Every passing moment, Oliver saw more and more goblin in him and less and less Fae. It was difficult to imagine any version of this creature Oliver could have loved.
Taking deliberate steps up to Sky, Oliver stood just out of reach of his mouth, his eyes locking with Sky’s mad green ones. Oliver’s smile widened.
“No, I think I’ll take you to someone who really scares you,” he said. The slightest shade of concern passed over Sky’s expression. Oliver offered him his most falsely sweet look. “I think it’s time you face your Queen.”
Chapter 27
It was stepping into a photograph in a war museum. The wreckage of a town, sprawled out before them like the carcass of a shattered animal, sculpted itself in the bones of its buildings and the blood of its people. It smelled of horror. The scents of death and decay, the bitter, rancid cousins of despair, clung to living flesh like oil. There was no washing away that smell, no escaping it. And the burning—the ash and smoke, the spiced, choking scent of a fire out of control—seemed to remain, though all the flames were put out.
Oliver stood at the base of the main thoroughfare of Tirnanog, the cobbled street pictured in all the footage of the aftermath of the attack. The winding road was lined with cottage-like structures, bed-and-breakfasts, mini spas and aromatherapy shops. Candle makers and gemstone setters, charm weavers and rune carvers—the street was once packed with boutique shops that catered to every fancy and whim. But now, all were devastated, left in smouldering chunks and shattered fragments ground into the cobbles.
“This is horrible,” Rory whispered, her voice uncharacteristically quiet. Even a veteran reporter like her stood silent, awed, before the sublime sight of Mount Razortooth in the distance, a bloodied fang amid the bones of its victim.
“This kind of devastation hasn’t been seen since the war,” Oli said, barely able to muster enough volume to be heard over the whistling of the wind through
the broken windowpanes. He pulled the slouchy beanie lower over his hair, self-conscious about the disguise he still wore, now on the land of his own Court. It felt wrong to face this kind of tragedy, this kind of horror, dressed as someone not himself. Dishonesty in the face of loss this large felt like a further assault on the people who lost their lives here.
But the cobbled streets were not only lined with the wreckage of the quaint little town this once was; they were also dotted with NCPD in full uniform, searching through the remains around them, trying to locate more possible survivors or witnesses, or collecting relevant evidence. They would not treat this with as much disdain as the murder of Logan. This time the dead were their own, the property destroyed their own homes. This time, the crime went too far.
Too many of the NCPD had little care for the Wolves or Fae of the other two Courts. Too few of them designated the appropriate respect to Maeve or Logan, always ruing their assigned protective duties or their crowd-control days. They threw themselves on cutting curses just to get chosen to protect Nimueh or the Council members, but Logan, Alpha of all the Werewolf Court and one of the Three Leaders, was just another mutt that needed a leash.
Already, Oliver could sense the teeming fury in the nearby officers. They paid no mind to Oliver and Connor, disguised as Fae press assistants to Rory, but their powder-keg vengefulness pressed hard at the surface of their behaviour. They believed the Werewolves responsible for this violence, and they would see to it that Werewolves were the ones who paid for it.
“This looks bad,” Connor said, speaking through the side of his mouth to avoid alerting a nearby officer. “The paw prints throughout the streets, the claw marks on the walls… I don’t see how anyone not in animal form could have made them.” He paused, leaning in subtly to a set of deep scratches in the remaining wall of a little shop. Flaring his nostrils almost imperceptibly, Connor sniffed the scratch. He shut his eyes and frowned in frustration. “I can’t get a clear smell signature through all the interference. There’s too much death and ash.” He shook his head, tipping the edge of his cap downward.
“We need to find something,” Rory said, her keen eyes roving over every surface. “I can’t stand it here much longer, and the disguises you’re wearing won’t fool anyone looking at you too closely. If we linger too long, they’ll start wondering why.” She nodded toward the small groups of officers, some of whom were already glancing curiously in Oli and Connor’s direction.
Oliver walked slowly down the street, moving steadily toward the border between Nimueh’s Court and the Werewolf Court. Paw prints appeared and disappeared in uneven, broken patterns, the ash having covered half, some others washed away with the explosion of the fountain. Water had swept the streets in a massive rush, wiping clean large swathes of the road and leaving it clear to accumulate the falling ash from the nearby buildings.
Stopping in front of a broken, red door, Oliver considered the building and the prints left around it. The door was marked by a crossed set of scratches, but the black burn marks on the door spread into the scratches, as though the fires had begun after this door had been marked by a Wolf. Eyebrow raised, Oliver studied the building.
There was little left of it, but from what there was, it was clear this building was one of the first to burn, based on the destruction it faced. Only the front door and the doorframe survived mostly intact. The perimeter walls were all scorched, inside and out, the old-fashioned thatched roof having gone up in a matter of seconds. Oliver stepped gingerly through the doorframe, studying the insides of the building. There was nothing left, really. Only ash and soot and pieces of splintered wood littered the floor. Even that only survived because it was made of thick blocks of flagstone, worn and scuffed by years of use, now coated in a thick layer of black that spread outward from a corner.
Oliver stared at the corner. “I need to know who owned this building,” Oliver told Rory. She caught his eye a moment, then nodded, and disappeared back down the road to ask an officer.
“What is it?” Connor asked, sidling up to Oliver, trying to see what he saw from over his shoulder. Oliver shook his head slowly.
“Not sure yet,” he said, his mouth providing words while his mind raced the length of the town and back again, taking in new details. Rory reappeared a few moments later.
“I’ll be glad when I never have to talk to an NCPD officer ever again,” Rory said, and Oliver cast her a pointed look. “Except you, I mean. Though I think becoming a wanted fugitive kind of nullifies your police contract,” she added, then went on quickly when she saw Oliver’s expression, “the building belongs to no one at the moment. It did belong to a Wizard who sold gemstones and custom jewellery, but he had to retire last year and closed up the shop. He tried to sell it, but apparently the market here is tougher than it looks, and he never managed. He died of apparently natural causes about a month ago.”
Connor stared at her, his eyebrow slightly arched. “Apparent natural causes?”
Rory shrugged. “Well, with this case, you never really know, do you? But the doctor who performed the autopsy seemed pretty sure, anyway.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “So the old man probably wasn’t involved in the coup, then,” he said, deadpanned. Rory pulled a face.
Oliver paid little mind to his companions, walking instead toward the corner of the room. Crouching low, he studied the strange scorch marks on the floor where the two walls met. The black mark there zigzagged outward in jagged teeth, as though a painter scribbled angrily with a paintbrush, and then stretched upward in a straight strip toward the roof.
Glancing over his shoulder to ensure none of the officers were watching them, Oliver called to mind a spell to visually recreate the fire that would have caused those burns. A little-known forensic spell, very tricky and often dangerous as it had a tendency to recreate the actual fire if performed incorrectly, it gave Oliver the answer he needed. He watched silently as the flames snapped into life before him, a tiny ember growing to a lick, steadily spreading around a circle and climbing the wall almost instantly, as though it leapt there, determined to reach the thatched roof.
“This was wolves,” Oliver said, and Connor and Rory both looked taken aback as he turned to them. “Just not Werewolves.” He turned back to the corner and cast another spell, pulling something invisible from where wood and stone pressed together. Something filmy and iridescent emerged from the walls, hovering on the air like soap on water. Turning his back to the street, Oliver cast an evidence bubble around the filmy substance and sealed it with his fingerprint.
“Come on,” he said, leaving the ruined house to follow the paw prints out of the town. The prints were erratic and uneven, as though the wolves running from the town weren’t entirely comfortable on four legs. There were marks, here and there, of a creature stumbling as it tried to land both front feet or back feet at the same time, more bouncing forward than running. Connor quirked his head to the side, kneeling down to sniff the prints when they were suitably far from the nearest NCPD officer.
“Smells nothing like any Wolf I know,” Connor said. “Plus a Werewolf would have to be high out of its mind to try and run like this. What’s going on, Oliver?”
Oliver had continued on a few feet, looking for something specific. When he found it, he stopped and looked over his shoulder to the other two, a smile on his face. “This,” he said, pointing down in front of him.
Connor and Rory approached, Rory pulling out her handheld camera. As soon as Rory spotted what Oliver had, she began snapping photos, the flash nearly blinding Oliver.
The paw prints stopped abruptly, just around the bend of a copse of trees. The tracks apparently pointed toward the border between Nimueh’s Court and the Werewolf Court, but immediately beyond the wolf tracks were a different kind—Human ones. They stumbled around side to side slightly, blurring together in places, but as Oliver followed them around the corner of the trees, the Human tracks lead distinctly back down the path toward Tirnanog and the rest of Nim
ueh’s Court. The clinching detail of the evidence was that the Human tracks were not shoe treads. They were prints made by bare feet.
“I think we’ve got all we need now,” Oliver said, capturing an imprint of the scene with another forensic spell. The obsidian collar wrapped around his wrist pulsed slightly from the wear.
“I’m so very glad,” came a voice from further down the path. Oliver and Connor swung around to find the High Warlock Carmichael standing, serene and uncomfortably pleased, flanked by a full unit of NCPD officers in riot gear. “I do hate to interrupt people before they’ve finished.”
Rory stood just behind Oliver and Connor, Connor blocking her as much as he could with his massive frame. A slight clicking sound told Oliver she’d changed the settings on the camera.
Oliver swallowed invisibly, his pulse vibrating in his head. “I thought your instructions were to shoot on sight,” Oliver said, blinking slowly at Carmichael, affecting an air of composure and coolness to rival even the High Warlock’s own. Carmichael’s mouth pulled into a placating smirk.
“That was Nimueh,” he said. “I much prefer to bring you in publicly and execute you. That way there’s never any question as to who actually brought justice for the murder of one of the Three Leaders.”
Connor’s body thrummed with tension next to Oliver, his muscles so tight Oliver could practically hear them screaming. The knowledge of what Carmichael had done sparked a wildfire in Oliver’s chest, consuming everything in its path, but Oliver fought to tamp it down. Nothing would be gained by exploding on Carmichael here and now. They had to clear their names.
“We’re surrounded,” Connor breathed to Oliver, his jaw tight as a locked vise.
“Of course you are,” Carmichael said, his silver hair glinting in the rising morning light. “It would have been foolish of me to alert you to my presence before ensuring I could capture you. You are woefully outnumbered here and outmatched, if I say so myself. These Witches and Wizards are the finest shooters in all of my Court,” he said, and his claim on the Court made Oliver’s skin crawl. “They’re all equipped with silver bullets, of course, but also shield-piercing ones. I’ve had them etched with runes and imbued with charms to break through magical shields.” His smile grew, and his handsome, electable face shifted. The expression turned him to a salesman, a conman, a snake. He was the liar laid bare.
