Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  He held out a fist.

  Storm rolled his eyes and tapped a finger on Lincoln’s knuckles.

  Frisson settled over Lincoln. The vibrancy of the colors in the surrounding world faded until it looked like an ordinary place on Earth. The beach reminded him of pictures he’d seen of seaside villages in France. All those old buildings with sinuous roofs overlooking the water. The trees were just trees, the sand only sand.

  Storm wiped his finger on his hip as though Lincoln were the gross one.

  “Better?” Titania asked.

  He bowed again. “Yes. Thanks, ma’am.”

  Titania was easier to look at now, and she was still impressive with his altered sight. Her breasts spilled over the square-cut neckline of an empire-waisted gown. Her legs curled underneath her, and oversized butterfly wings slowly twitched at her back. She looked surprisingly young. Early twenties, and curvy.

  “You’re the first mundane man to have made it all the way to Alfheimr,” Titania said. “Congratulations. It’s an historic moment.”

  “I’m driven by a wicked need for help, ma’am. Rather, Cèsar Hawke’s got a wicked need for your help, and I’m the only one who can ask for it right now.” Lincoln gave a short laugh. “Guess it’s good I came with him, all things considered.”

  “All things considered,” she echoed, stroking her finger on the arm of her throne like it was the spine of a cat. “It sent Falias into a panic, seeing something as big as him rising over the hill. Panic’s the last thing we need here. We’ve been under constant assault from the Ard since trying to lay down roots on the shore.”

  “Sorry.” It wasn’t Lincoln’s fault, but it seemed like the queen wanted an apology. She could have whatever she wanted so long as she ended this miserable journey.

  “I’d love to hear how a mundane man survived traveling with a cait sidhe,” Titania said.

  “Is that what he is? Cait sidhe?” The words meant nothing to Lincoln.

  “As far as I can tell, yes. They’re not native to the seelie worlds. I’m grateful. The Winter Court is far more suited for such uncivilized beasts.” Titania gave a repulsed shiver.

  “Uncivilized or not, Cèsar Hawke is brother to the Queen of the Winter Court. He needs—”

  “Ofelia? His sister is Ofelia?” Titania stopped stroking the chair, her nail digging into the wood.

  “Yeah, and he needs her help to figure out how his powers have gotten all mucked up. My understanding’s that you might know how to get a hold of her.”

  “That’s more challenging than you’d think,” Titania said. “She’s been working to establish Niflheimr in the Winter Court. I haven’t seen her in days.”

  “When’ll she get back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Lincoln waited to see if she’d continue, but she didn’t. Titania spoke like that was the end of the conversation. “Can you get her?” he asked belatedly, awkwardly.

  “No,” Titania said. “I can hold on to the cait sidhe in my dungeon until she shows up—if she ever shows up—but I can’t do anything else to help.”

  “Doesn’t it matter to you? He’s one of yours.”

  “Not exactly. Unseelie and seelie are on opposite sides of a coin—the light and dark side of the moon. Whatever happens to those who live in the shadow is beyond my reach.”

  “Except it’s not,” Lincoln said. “Cèsar Hawke is in your dungeon right now, and he’s about as near within your reach as anyone else in the Summer Court.”

  Titania’s wings twitched with irritation. “Our magic is different.”

  “How d’you know that different magic isn’t exactly what he needs? The world’s so new, you can’t have already nailed down all the rules for faeries.”

  Titania’s expression darkened, and the sky darkened with her, as if an invisible cloud were blotting out the sun in advance of rain. “You’re an outsider. A human. How do you have any right to talk to me like this?”

  “I just nearly got ate by two gargantuan monsters in your court, and now you’re telling me you’re not gonna even help,” Lincoln said. “Pardon me if I’m feeling a mite irate.”

  “I didn’t tell you to come here,” Titania said, arms folded underneath her impressive breasts in such a way that they pressed into deep cleavage.

  “Sure, but now I’m here, and my problems are your problems. How do you think Ofelia Hawke’s going to react when she finds out that you let her sickly brother die in your dungeons? And she will find out.”

  Titania rose from her seat. The world pulsed around her with furious rainbow, all hot colors that felt like relentless afternoon heat against Lincoln’s cheekbones. “I never said I wasn’t going to help him!”

  “That’s exactly what you said.”

  “I can’t get him to Ofelia for the same reason that Ofelia hasn’t gotten to visit in the last week! The falhófnir are in the way of the Veil, and their energies lock out all ley lines between the Summer and Winter Courts. I tamed the stallions of the herd, but the mares still run wild.”

  “What in the blazes are falhófnir?” Lincoln asked.

  She crooked a finger as she floated to the balustrade, drawing Lincoln to look down upon a pasture bordering the swaths of golden beach. Muscular horse-like sidhe flowed over the grass, followed by gentry with switches, bridles, bells.

  They were training. Some of the beasts were rearing on command, while others were still shying away from their tack. The sidhe who handled them must have been brave. None even reached the shoulders on the falhófnir.

  “You’d know them as unicorns,” Titania said. “The stallions are relatively easy to tame once bridled. I did it myself.”

  “You’ve got unicorns,” Lincoln said. “Those are fucking unicorns.”

  “Yes, and the Veil is blocked by the ones I couldn’t tame,” Titania said. “You cannot get to the Winter Court from here.”

  “Ask God to relocate the herd,” he said.

  Titania’s smile vanished instantly. “I don’t like your tone of voice.”

  There were a lot of things Lincoln didn’t like about the Queen of the Summer Court, but he’d been taught enough manners to keep it to himself. “You gonna ask God for help if I’m sugary sweet about it? Should I get down on one knee? Lick your toes?”

  “Stop,” she said sharply.

  “I want to talk to God,” Lincoln said. “If you don’t want to ask Him for help, fine. Let me do it.”

  Titania’s upper lip quivered. “You wouldn’t survive it. I’m the only person who can enter His temple for the same reason I was the only person who could tame the falhófnir stallions: I am pure of soul and intent, so the Summer Court bows to me willingly. You’d burn in an instant.”

  It took all of Lincoln’s strength not to laugh in the face of Queen Fancy-Pants Purity of Soul. “God is God, ma’am. If He wanted to talk to me, I’d survive it. And there’s not much point in me going back to Earth if I can’t help Cèsar. As soon as I tell the OPA secretary I’ve failed to heal Cèsar, I’m getting locked in a hole for the rest of my mortal life.”

  “You’re going to tell the secretary about this?” Titania had gone rigid as one of her decorative statues, to the point that not even her wings shivered in the wind anymore.

  In fact, Lincoln wasn’t real sure that anything was moving in the Summer Court. Not the waves or the wind in the trees.

  Finally, she said, “All right. I’ll ask NKF to move the mares—I’ll even ask Him if He’s willing to talk to you. But I’m the one who’s going in, and if He refuses to help, you have to accept it.”

  “Happily,” Lincoln said.

  The cathedral was in Falias proper, outside of Alfheimr but within the city’s innermost walls. There wasn’t so much as a hint of the development elsewhere in Falias; this was an isolated town of its own, replete with a bakery, a blacksmith, a flower shop, and gardens kept within split rail fence that seemed to have grown from ivy and spider webs.

  There were so many trees at t
he peak of their summertime growth that the sun could barely dapple the bricks under Lincoln’s feet. Shade cooled the air from ninety-plus degrees to a comfortable seventy-something. Lincoln was still sweltering, and he sighed when he dropped his jacket. Storm’s magic held firm. Lincoln still had his wits about him.

  And Lincoln needed his wits.

  NKF’s church was hewn from white stone, bright and flawless. The stained glass windows depicted abstracts, the twin spires jutting above the narthex’s buttresses were plain, and the inlets that should have held statues of saints only displayed lumps of marble. A mason sat beside the twin doors, each of which was thrice his height, chipping at the doorframe with chisel and hammer.

  “Runes,” Titania explained. She lifted her diadem from her crown with both hands, setting it atop a pillow that Storm held.

  “Wards to keep Him in? Like a prison?” Lincoln asked.

  “Wards to keep people out for their protection, like you’d do with an omnipotent tiger.” She turned to another of her sidhe attendants. “Anoint me.”

  They must have taken fifteen minutes to carefully swipe oils along Titania’s brow and breast, marking her with green-tinted smears that echoed the shape of the runes on the doorway. Titania looked nervous through all this, and her attendants weren’t immune to the mood. “You can do this,” Storm said, his voice soft and private. “You’re as pure as ever, sweetness.”

  She didn’t manage to smile back at him. “I know I am.”

  Lincoln stood back, arms folded. He pretended not to hear them.

  He was nervous too. Maybe even more nervous than Titania, even though he wasn’t the one about to go into this big white cathedral with its abstract windows looking down at him like eyes glazed by ethereal power.

  That’s what this all was: ethereal architecture, borne of angel minds and angel hearts, probably hewn from the bones of ethereal beasts.

  When Titania was warded and anointed, she stood half-naked on the bottommost stair, dressed only in gauze. Her backside was an indistinct curve of a peach, covered in soft hairs like her cheeks and breasts. The hollow of her spine was more shadowed than the rest. Cellulite dimpled her thighs, though her calves showed muscle definition, and her ankles were bony.

  “Open the doors,” Titania said.

  The mason stepped back. Storm stepped forward, clapping his hands and then spreading them.

  Falias gonged. Windows shivered within their frames, ivy trembled, and the bricks jumped under Lincoln’s feet.

  The doors mirrored the motion of Storm’s hands, opening wide to accept Titania the way a girl’s knees spread to accept the body of a lover.

  For an instant, Lincoln made out the shape of a quire beyond the buttresses, as well as an elevated ambulatory in front of an abstract mural just beyond the altar. But it was all flooded with light. So much light. It jabbed into Lincoln’s eyeballs, and there were no wards sufficient to protect him. His mind bowed around the new input, cleaved in half.

  It hurt.

  But then the doors shut. Titania was gone, locked inside the pale cathedral.

  Lincoln blinked fast to help his eyes adjust to the Summer Court’s afternoon. The blazing sunshine of midday was nothing compared to what had momentarily gushed from beyond.

  “Should we wait here?” Lincoln asked the attendants. “Or is she gonna be a while?”

  “She’ll be a while, but time’s different in there.” Storm had the body language of a person who wanted nothing to do with Lincoln, standing out of reach with his shoulders tipped away and arms folded. “If Titania takes longer than a minute, we’ll know to worry.”

  “Only a minute, huh?”

  “Like I said, time’s different in there. That’s what it’s like when you deal with God.” Storm bounced a step to the left and made jazz hands. “Just like that and an hour passes. Right?”

  How long had Lincoln been moving through the forest, following Elise away from the campsite into the waiting jaws of the bašmu? It had felt like minutes. Sophie had said it was something like an hour.

  The skin on Lincoln’s spine was crawling. Felt like he’d decided to take a nap on an anthill.

  He took his hat off, fanned himself with it. Mostly it felt like it was just moving the hot air around.

  “Have you ever been in there?” Lincoln asked.

  Storm snorted. “None of us is as pure as Titania.”

  “Does it bother you that you don’t get to talk to God?”

  The sidhe raked his nails along his arm, up and down, leaving streaks on skin the color of sunbaked grass. “It doesn’t bother me as much as some people. I just don’t like the show that Titania and Oberon put on.”

  “Do you think it’s a show?” Lincoln asked.

  “Some of it, for sure,” Storm said. “Their chosen names, for instance.”

  “Remind me what your name is?”

  “I’m a rockstar, baby,” said the sidhe. “I have to brand myself. All this…? It’s more than branding. The castle. This dollhouse of a town. That’s downright pathological. Guess I can’t blame Titania. She’s gone through some weird shit and she’s basically a kid.”

  “Then you don’t think the church is real,” Lincoln said. It wasn’t a question.

  “It was here before anything else in Falias. Titania didn’t grow that.” Storm was staring at the cathedral with an unreadable expression, chin wrinkled, eyebrows meeting in the middle. “Like it or not, that’s real.”

  The doors opened again.

  Chimes rang out, and Lincoln clapped his hands over his ears to protect them. But it didn’t matter. He could still hear the thrumming, the singing, the whine.

  Maybe it was true. Maybe someone with evil burned as deep into his bones as Lincoln would melt trying to go inside.

  Titania stumbled out as naked as a baby.

  When she collapsed on the ground, her hair hanging over her shoulders, her attendants closed in around her instantly. Their hands were gentle helping her sit up to drink wine the color of roses. She swallowed and gasped and swallowed some more.

  “Lincoln?” Titania rasped.

  He stepped up. “Does He want me? Is He going to talk to me?”

  Titania said, “He doesn’t want anything to do with you. And He’s not going to help.”

  She swooned, she fainted, and Lincoln was left alone with the mason as the others carried their queen back to Alfheimr.

  CHAPTER 14

  Cèsar Hawke was having a bad day.

  And he knew bad days. Working as an agent for the Office of Preternatural Affairs meant having a lot of bad days. He’d closed the gamut of cases at Fritz’s demand, from silly crap like teen witches transferring their consciousnesses to neighborhood dogs, to scary crap like mass-murdering cultists burning holes into Los Angeles.

  Now Cèsar seemed to be in a dungeon. Not that he could tell, because he suddenly had some kind of big-cat spirit coexisting with his human spirit, and he was losing track of which thoughts came from which hemisphere of himself.

  Human Cèsar thought, I appear to be in a magical stone box. That’s great! I can’t hurt anyone if I’m in here!

  Cat Cèsar thought, Oh my God I’m in a box. I should sharpen my claws on everything to see if I can get out. Nope, I can’t get out. I’m going to die. Is that my tail or a snake attached to my ass? Oh God, I’m still in a box, what’s that noise?

  Neither side of him was very happy.

  Both of them agreed this was the worst day ever.

  Cat Cèsar was behind the mental steering wheel when his cell’s door opened to admit two men. Cat Cèsar didn’t know or care who the tall guy with the mohawk was, but it did recognize Lincoln Marshall. So he stopped worrying about the suspicious snake attached to his ass and instead took a swipe at Marshall, hissing loudly.

  “Jesus Christ’s body in cracker form,” Lincoln said, stepping out of the way just in time to avoid getting gutted.

  Darn.

  Not only was Cèsar trapped in a box, but n
asty burning chains had him tethered to the wall. He could neither gut his visitors nor escape through the gaping door.

  “He looks bad, Oberon,” said Lincoln.

  Human Cèsar was affronted. As far as magical felines went, he thought he was pretty. What wasn’t pretty about a big glowing icicle-cat-ghost? Assuming he survived his own powers going crazy, Suzy was gonna love what Cèsar had become. She’d always been a cat person. Would probably prefer Cèsar as a cat to Cèsar as a human, really.

  “The iron’s burning stripes into him, but we can’t contain him without the chains,” Oberon said. “We’ve got salves to soothe him, and we’ll adjust the chains as often as we can risk getting near him. Titania’s gonna work on his condition with healers too. We’re confident we can stabilize him until Ofelia gets back.”

  “Sure,” Lincoln said in a distinctly unimpressed voice.

  “It’s all we’ve got.” Oberon stepped back, and Cèsar tensed at the movement. Some instinct deep in the pits of his animal-brain anticipated attack. Or vulnerability. Or something that was definitely going to require him to murder.

  “Secretary Friederling’s not going to be happy about this,” Lincoln said.

  Secretary Friederling.

  A ripple moved through Cèsar’s body. The reaction was neither cat nor human, and somehow both.

  He’d spent years working with that man. Years training with him. Years as friends and partners.

  Right now, the only image of Fritz he could summon was how the guy had looked in the wheel chair, tugging an oxygen cannula into place with dignity.

  “What do you want us to do about that? We aren’t equipped for human residents,” Oberon said.

  “I don’t want to move in. I just wanna get this guy to his sister,” Lincoln said.

  “You can’t. We’re sending you and Sophie Keyes back to Earth at first light tomorrow.”

  “Sending me and—no. No way, Oberon, you can’t—”

  “I know how hard it must have been to get to us. I know you had a major disappointment at the cathedral today, and I know this isn’t the end you wanted. But you’ve won as much as you can, gotten Ofelia’s brother into good hands, and now you’re going home safe.” Oberon rested a hand on Lincoln’s shoulder, but the former deputy jerked back, scowling. “This is a happy ending.”