What Dusk Divides

by Clara Coulson

  Cautiously, I stood up too, my gaze never straying from the man on the bench who looked like McCullough. Here I was, wondering how the hell McCullough got back from Maige Itha unscathed. And the truth is, he never came back at all. This doppelganger came back in his place.

  This fake had come to Fort Drochrath pretending to be McCullough, then purposefully set up a scenario that would result in my team being sidetracked from our mission to find the Morrígan—and put us all in close proximity to him.

  The man pretending to be McCullough let out a deep sigh and said in a grating tone so at odds with McCullough’s natural voice that it made everyone in the room visibly cringe, “Aw damn. And it was going so well too.”

  What happened next would always be a matter of contention among the witnesses in the inquest room.

  The doppelganger moved. But he moved unlike anything that anyone had ever seen. He didn’t run. He didn’t walk. He didn’t teleport.

  He didn’t use telekinesis to carry himself from one place to another.

  But in the blink of an eye, he crossed the distance between the accuser’s seat and my own, tackled me back into my chair so hard that the wood splintered beneath me, pinned me to the floor, straddled my waist, and wrapped his hands around my throat.

  My head bounced off the stone floor, dazing me. And before I could blink the static out of my vision, a black haze crept in at the corners, my brain begging for air that my lungs couldn’t inhale past the thumbs pinching off my trachea. I grabbed the fake McCullough’s wrists and tugged, but his vise-like grip didn’t falter. His fingers curled inward, the nails tearing through my flesh. And as my blood dribbled out and ran down his fingers, something dribbled out of his fingers and ran into my bloodstream.

  Something cold.

  Something ice cold.

  I seized up in shock, a choked gasp caught on my tongue. Because I had never felt cold before. Not once in my entire life. I knew

  what cold was—I sensed cold—but as an Unseelie half-sídhe, I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t have a physiological response to even the most freezing of temperatures. Because a touch of winter ran through my blood, and its frigid nature lurked within my soul.

  You could not make cold what already was.

  Whatever the doppelganger was doing to me was suppressing my Unseelie nature, overriding the sídhe part of me and rendering me human through and through.

  My magic fled. My senses dulled. My strength ebbed. Shivers racked my body, and numbness spread up my fingers and toes, weakening my already pathetic resistance. A sense of frail mortality welled up in my chest, riding on the back of panic as I struggled so desperately to breathe.

  All these effects occurred in a second that crept along at a snail’s pace. And for that whole horrid second, the face of the colonel who hated me so much took on a translucent veneer of something, no, some thing , so twisted in appearance and hideous in nature as to be indescribable in the words of any language I spoke.

  The second passed, and Orlagh arrived. She brutally kicked the false McCullough in the side, and what must have been all its ribs audibly shattered. But the body didn’t so much as twitch, and it showed no signs of pain. If anything, it seemed annoyed.

  The monstrous overlay atop its face vanished, and it slowly cranked its head around, way too far around, in a distinctly mechanical fashion, to look at Orlagh, its dry lips drawn into a thin line.

  Orlagh stumbled back, wincing at the pain in her foot. Her boot had split, and blood ran out of the tear from a few badly broken toes. It was like she’d kicked a solid wall instead of a body.

  Her stunned gaze drifted from her bloody foot to the awkwardly twisted head of her adversary, and she said breathily, “What the hell are you?”

  The creature with McCullough’s face curled back its lips and blew a puff of air through its teeth. A punishing force slammed into Orlagh and hurled her backward at high speed. O’Sullivan leaped up from her seat to try and catch Orlagh, but the latter was traveling so fast that the impact ripped O’Sullivan off her feet too, and they both flew into the crowd, bowling over nearly a dozen people.

  The creature’s head snapped back toward me, and the sensation of cold crept deeper into my body, deeper into my soul. But it didn’t appear to be doing whatever the creature wanted it to do, as the dark amusement in its eyes gradually gave way to confusion. It redoubled its efforts, the cold surging through me with such intensity that my fingers turned blue and frost that

  was not of my own making crackled across my face, freezing the anxious sweat that had sprung from my skin.

  Still, nothing else happened. The creature growled, and its disturbing façade flickered in and out of sight several times, a sign of some kind of internal struggle.

  Odette, Indira, Drake, and Boyle, who’d been forced to scramble aside when the creature initially tackled me, finally collected themselves and tried to come to my aid. “Tried” being the operative word.

  Odette threw a magic-powered punch with her metal arm. The fist hit the creature’s head with a resounding clang, and while the creature’s skull cracked just like its ribs had, it still wasn’t thrown off me. Its head whipped toward Odette, and she dove aside a millisecond before another extreme force blew past her and pummeled another ten soldiers in the scattering crowd.

  Indira threw a long-range fire attack, a pinpoint stream of pink flame hot enough to burn through steel. But the fire fizzled out a couple inches from the creature’s face, as if it struck some sort of shield. And then Indira too was forced to take cover as the creature spit at her, and the floor where its glob of saliva landed exploded into a hail of stone chunks. Boyle took one of those chunks to the side of the head and fell to his knees, blood pouring down his face.

  Drake, watching everyone else badly fail to deal the creature any crippling damage, didn’t immediately approach. Rapidly shifting his weight from foot to foot, he muttered to himself, trying to brainstorm a solution with what little information he’d gleaned from observing this bizarre being wearing the costume of an Unseelie colonel.

  Lucky for Drake, someone else came to my aid first.

  An imposing shadow loomed over the monster and me. It belonged to General Máire Maguire, face drawn in fury, sword drawn to kill.

  She brought down that sword with a strength greater than any I had ever witnessed. A strength that I felt all the way down to my individual molecules, the mere vibration of its presence threatening to disintegrate me. A strength that carried with it the full magic might of a sídhe who’d lived for more than a millennium.

  The edge of the sword struck the neck of the creature—and sliced right on through it.

  The head dropped, bounced off my face, and rolled across the floor, coming to a stop at Drake’s feet. The body, meanwhile, maintained its grip on my neck for five whole seconds more,

  before it finally lost its muscle tension, tipped over, and slumped onto the cracked stone beside me.

  I tore the limp fingers away from my neck and sucked in a gallon of air, then promptly coughed it all back out.

  Before the air and saliva and blood finished flying off my tongue, General Maguire grabbed me by the ankle and dragged me away from the body of the doppelganger. I almost complained, because I hurt all the way down to my soul and the slide over the rough floor wasn’t helping. But then I caught a flash of movement in my peripheral vision.

  The headless body was twitching, not as if it was coming back to life, but as if something was crawling out from inside it. The skin bulged and rippled in a manner not dissimilar to a writhing snake. Then, as if the thing inside the body saw the light at the end of the tunnel that was the stump of the body’s neck, a black puddle of goo oozed out onto the floor—and straight through the stone.

  But the creature didn’t just vanish into the ground. Instead, the amorphous black goo seemed to cast an equally black reflection downward, as if the floor was made of glass instead of matte-gray stone. And from this impossible shadow emerged a vaguely h
umanoid figure, with two arms and two legs and a head. But every single one of its proportions was just slightly wrong, dropping me deep into the uncanny valley and disturbing me all the more.

  When the strange shadow finished forming, it set off at a brisk walk to the exit of the inquest room. Being that it was upside down, somehow inside the floor, the creature didn’t need to open the doors. It simply walked underneath the doors, and in so doing, bypassed the obscenely powerful ward that had sealed the room as if it wasn’t even there.

  General Maguire struck the floor with her sword, producing a rolling peal of thunder, and shouted, “Sound the intruder alarm, and send word to all fort personnel: do not attempt to engage in combat with the shadow creature.”

  A group of seven soldiers who’d hopped to attention at the first part of her command stiffened at the second half, and one of them asked, “You want us to…let it escape, ma’am?”

  The general shot him a glare that could freeze a star. “Did I stutter, Major?”

  “No, ma’am!” the intimidated major replied, then he and the other six rushed toward the doors.

  When they were halfway there, Inquisitor Bradigan, who’d finally shaken herself out of the stupor that had overtaken her when her hearing was abruptly derailed, deactivated the room’s ward,

  allowing the seven soldiers to pour out into the hall. They vanished around the nearest corner in a blur, and a few seconds later, a high-pitched alarm blared to life.

  General Maguire turned to Bradigan and brusquely nodded.

  Bradigan sighed, grabbed her gavel, and slammed it down. “This hearing is adjourned. All personnel, head to your action stations.”

  Training kicking in, the rest of the confused mass of sídhe soldiers dashed out of the room in something that wasn’t exactly an orderly fashion but wasn’t chaotic enough to be called a stampede. Once the bulk of them were gone, leaving only those who’d been injured by the creature, General Maguire switched her attention to the McCullough costume the creature had been wearing. When she had severed its head, the creature hadn’t bled at all, and after the goo exited the body, both the head and the body had deflated like popped balloons.

  General Maguire cautiously approached the empty husk of the body and nudged it with her foot. All at once, the skin of the body and the head firmed up, and then the entire husk dissolved into fine gray ash, leaving only a pile of bloodstained clothes behind. The general stared at the ash pile for a long moment of contemplation before she murmured, surprisingly in English,

  “Well, this presents a unique challenge.”

  Splayed out on the floor to her left, still huffing and puffing, I rasped, “And what, exactly, is this ?”

  “Yeah, I want to know that too,” said Odette, picking herself up from where she’d landed hard after her uncontrolled dive. “I get that this is the Otherworld and all, but that thing seemed bizarre even for a realm like Tír na nÓg.”

  Indira got to her feet as well, hand pressed to her chin to staunch the blood flow from a laceration left by a sharp piece of flying flooring. “Also, if that was some creature pretending to be McCullough, then where is the real McCullough? Is he still in Maige Itha? Or is he floating around somewhere in the afterlife?”

  “He is definitely dead,” answered General Maguire as she swept the room with her calculating gaze, cataloguing all the damage the creature had done. She lingered for just a hairsbreadth longer on the scene of her injured daughter trying to disentangle herself from the pile of soldiers who’d been knocked senseless.

  “But as for where he died, that I cannot answer. What I can tell you is that he suffered a terrible end at the hands of the foul creature you just observed, and the creature used what remained to bait us into this trap.”

  “‘Used what remained’?” I rolled over onto my stomach—which was aching and bloody, my iron wound aggravated when I hit the floor—

  and forced myself to my knees. “Are you saying that…that thing was wearing McCullough’s actual body?”

  General Maguire eyed the pile of ash once more and replied, “Yes, that is precisely what I am saying.”

  Chapter Six

  Seven and a Half Hours Till Dusk

  “It is called the Interloper,” said General Maguire, “and it hails from a realm unknown.”

  We were in the general’s office, all six members of my group plus Nollaig O’Sullivan, with a half-dozen layers of wards that suppressed sound and rebuffed scrying spells wedged between us and the rest of the fort. Most of us were still nursing wounds, the sheer strength of the strange creature’s unnatural abilities—

  which, scarily enough, hadn’t ever read as magic to my senses but rather as some wholly foreign force—having dealt serious damage to everything they touched.

  Orlagh and O’Sullivan were seated side by side in matching chairs set against the wall between two bookcases. The former’s foot had already healed, and she’d replaced her ruined boot. But the invisible energy that had thrown her across the room had smashed bones and torn muscles and riddled her head to toe with bruises.

  The latter wasn’t much better off, as the impact with Orlagh had driven her back into the wall hard enough to crack her skull in two places. Her hair was matted with blood, and she was suffering through a wicked headache.

  Boyle, leaning against the bookcase next to Orlagh, had acquired a more minor head wound from the piece of floor that walloped his skull just above his ear, and that wound had already healed. But a sliver of that flooring chunk had broken off and pierced his right eye at an awkward angle.

  Someone had had to delicately extract it with a pair of tweezers before the damaged portion of his eyeball could regenerate. The white of his eye, consequently, was bright red, and blood was still weeping out of the tiny hole, pooling on his lower lid like perverted tears.

  Indira and Odette, seated on the floor near the door, had come out of the fight with an assortment of minor bumps and bruises that would heal without consequence. And Drake, squatting in a corner that was partially concealed by a table, had only sustained a single injury. A tiny cut on his cheek left by a flying piece of debris. His hesitation to engage the creature had worked out strongly in his favor.

  Then there’s you, Whelan, I chastised myself, pretending like your half-sídhe heritage means you can take infinite punishment.

  I was sprawled in a leather chair in front of General Maguire’s desk, the only comfortable chair in the room besides the general’s own, no doubt meant to be reserved for visiting generals and high-ranking politicians. Maguire had allowed me to use the chair because when I first entered the room a few minutes prior, I had still been shivering uncontrollably. Despite the thick quilt one of O’Sullivan’s subordinates had fetched for me while the fort’s infirmary head examined my body and soul as I lay listless and quivering on the floor of the inquest room.

  The verdict? Six of my ribs were crack from the impact with the floor. My trachea was badly bruised from the strangulation. And the shell of my soul was covered in spider-web cracks from whatever the creature had been trying to do to me.

  The energy that didn’t read as magic was the reason I felt cold.

  It had seeped into my soul and was still leaking back out. Once it finished draining, the infirmary head assured me, my soul shell would heal and I would feel much better.

  I wished that process would hurry the hell up. The sensation of being truly cold was awful, and it was so at odds with my Unseelie nature that it also made me feel nauseous.

  I really hoped General Maguire wouldn’t mind if I threw up in her trashcan.

  Licking my chapped lips, I said hoarsely, “What is it? This Interloper?”

  Leaning back in her chair, General Maguire sighed and began,

  “Before I describe the nature of the Interloper, I must bring us all to the same page regarding the current status of the war between the combined forces of Tír na nÓg and the encroaching Enemy from Beyond.”

  Orlagh perked up, and winced at
a pain in her neck. “War? When did we declare a new war?”

  “There has been no official war declared,” Maguire clarified,

  “but both courts have been fighting a de facto war in secret, a

  ‘shadow war,’ if you will, for decades. The origins of this conflict stretch back to the turn of the previous century, when the intelligence operatives of the Unseelie Court stationed in the most distant of realms first caught wind of the existence of an enemy unlike any that had ever been seen in the Otherworld.”

  Maguire’s attention drifted to me. “You are already aware of this issue in some capacity, are you not?”

  I stiffly nodded. “Tom Tildrum gave me a brief overview, but he refused to give me any details.”

  “By the queen’s standing orders, no member of the War Council is permitted to give anyone more than an ‘overview,’ and even this overview may only be given to agents of the court who serve a critical function that in some way relates to the war,” Maguire said. “Your role, up until this point, has been to hamper the plans of Abarta of the Tuatha Dé Danann in a way that allows both courts to forgo taking direct, public action against him, in order to prevent the Enemy from Beyond from recognizing him as a legitimate threat to sídhe society.”

  The three other soldiers tensed, and O’Sullivan murmured, “Ah, General…”

  Maguire held up her hand. “There is no longer a need to feign ignorance of Abarta’s identity, as the circumstances that necessitated the ruse to begin with are unraveling rather quickly. As I have already sent a missive to the members of the War Council in Camhaoir, detailing what happened in the inquest room, I suspect there will be a formal proclamation regarding the issue of Abarta, and the Enemy from Beyond, before first midnight falls across the Unseelie Court. Which is why I am now invoking the caveat that Queen Mab provided when the standing order of secrecy was first issued.