What Dusk Divides

by Clara Coulson

  Boyle, heaving in air but only superficially injured, ran over to Graham and hoisted her up in a fireman’s carry. Orlagh, likewise, grabbed a fatigued Indira and hung the woman over her shoulder.

  Odette waved off an offer of help from me—she was bleeding from several lacerations, but appeared to have no serious wounds—so I positioned myself at the head of the group and led everyone toward the waiting line of will-o’-the-wisps.

  We passed McDermott’s body on the way, and all three soldiers gave him a respectful final salute.

  Orlagh, keeping pace just behind me, asked, “Who are we running away from exactly?”

  “Abarta’s people,” I answered. “Some svartálfar, redcaps, trolls, and half-trolls. We could take them, but the fight would slow us down, and Agatha Bismarck is with them. She’s got the Spear of Lugh, she knows how to use it, and now she’s figured out she can kill fae with it by adding an iron piece to the head.

  “That’s what killed McDermott. I broke the tip she had on there”—

  I shook my arms for emphasis, dislodging pieces of iron that had stuck to the fabric of my coat—“but I wouldn’t put it past her to have a spare. The first time we clashed, she stabbed me with an iron hatpin .”

  Orlagh frowned deeply. “Bold of a human, to come at the sídhe with iron in their own realm.”

  “She’s been a lot more cautious about that in the past, because she didn’t want to end up with her head on a pike on the walls of Camhaoir.” I paused to clamber up the embankment, following the sharp turn in the wisp line. “I’m guessing that since Abarta is planning to launch his endgame today, his minions have decided to be less conservative in their conflicts with the sídhe. After all, if the Tuatha do return, the courts will be forced to shift their focus away from Abarta’s lesser henchmen.”

  Orlagh shifted Indira’s listless form into a position that didn’t jostle as much. “Regardless of what the courts as a whole focus on, I do intend to avenge McDermott. And I would prefer to do so in short order.”

  I lightly pressed on the stitched wound in my gut. It still ached, but not unbearably.

  Funneling magic throughout my entire body to bolster my strength, something I would pay dearly for later, I opened my arms toward Orlagh. “Pass Indira to me, and go take a shot, one shot, at the mook squad. Make it count. And don’t fall too far behind. Or get yourself stabbed with that goddamned spear.”

  The corner of Orlagh’s lips quirked up. “I’m mildly offended at your implication that I don’t make all my attacks count.” She handed Indira over, and I suppressed a grimace as the added weight strained my injured abdomen. “But I will let the offense pass on account of your ‘gracious’ offer.”

  Gripping her sword in both hands, she peeled away from me and darted back down the embankment. Just as she reached the streambed, the three trolls lumbered out of the woods on the opposite side and jumped from the top of the bank, landing on the streambed with a trio of thunderous booms.

  Their feet sank deeply into the mud, but they were so strong that it didn’t matter. They tore their feet from the muck, brown globs flying every which way, and stormed toward Orlagh with their clubs raised. Hot on their tails came the half-trolls, then the redcaps, then the more cautious dark elves, puffing into existence at the back end of the mook group.

  Naturally, Bismarck was the last person to appear. And also the first to peg the danger level.

  The others had obviously assumed that the fear gorta had drained the bulk of everyone’s energy. By some miracle though—I could tell from her confident stance—Orlagh had avoided any significant touches. She might not have been packing a hundred percent of her base energy store, but she had enough to throw a spell of the same magnitude as the one she’d used to massacre Vianu’s vampires at the beginning of the battle in the park.

  A spell that had disintegrated a large chunk of a street and toppled several buildings along the way.

  Bismarck, using one of her enhancement charms, leaped almost thirty feet back into the tree cover, yelling, “Retreat! We’ve lost our advantage.”

  The dark elves were fast on the uptake, disappearing in more puffs of smoke and reappearing around Bismarck. But the rest of the mooks were too slow or too stupid to respond in time.

  Orlagh wound her sword back and swung it with all her might, firing off a massive blast of pure force. The ground before her parted like an earthquake had struck, a portion of the streambed shifting backward and leaving a gaping chasm in its wake, into which fell countless fear gorta, the dormant and the dead.

  The force wave then struck the mooks—and practically wiped them from existence. They were there one moment, whole and ugly, and nothing but a fine spray of blood and gore the next.

  The force wave continued onward, tearing up earth and toppling trees, until the streambed and all the pain it represented were buried under thousands of tons of wood that would take millennia to rot away. When the wave finally fizzled out, almost a quarter mile downstream, the landscape was completely and irreversibly altered.

  Orlagh stood still for a moment, tall and proud, breathing hard.

  Before she sheathed her sword, turned around, and jumped twice as far as Bismarck had, landing gracefully at the tail end of our group.

  I didn’t know if Bismarck and the svartálfar survived the carnage or not.

  But if they did, I hope they learned their lesson.

  Chapter Twelve

  Four and a Half Hours Till Dusk

  At the end of an exhaustive marathon through the deeps of the old forests, we arrived at the entrance to what could only be called a cave. Though that name didn’t quite capture the grandiosity of the structure. The mouth was forty feet tall and thirty feet wide and framed by a white stone arch from which hung twisting vines dotted with lush purple flowers.

  The cave lay at the base of a long, narrow valley between two hills, and the peak of each hill was lined with a row of tightly packed weeping willows. The trees, all of them warded to the teeth, created leafy, impenetrable walls that blocked access to anyone not approaching the cave via the stone path that wound through the valley.

  That path led straight to a giant, three-headed, fire-breathing bird monster, know to fae history as the Ellén Trechend.

  The creature sat directly in front of the cave entrance, each of its heads pointed in a different direction, waiting for someone uninvited to step onto its master’s property. The scorched black arc in front of the beast, complete with several sets of blackened bones, clearly illustrated what would happen if you failed to subdue or sneak past the Morrígan’s pet.

  From our vantage point behind a boulder near the top of the stone path, we debated how to manage this new obstacle.

  “According to the lessons I was taught in school,” Orlagh said quietly, “the only way to kill the Ellén Trechend is to sever all three of its heads simultaneously. Its healing factor is so

  profound that if you sever only one or two heads, the creature will grow fully formed replacements almost instantly.”

  “Do we have to fight it?” Odette hissed, nursing a deep bite mark on her arm left by the pointy teeth of a lucky fear gorta. “If this is another one of the Morrígan’s tests, then maybe there’s a way to get around the thing. Maybe this is a test of our brains instead of our brawn. You need a good head in war, right? I feel like the Morrígan, being a war god and all, would harbor a love for clever strategies.”

  “You could well be right,” Boyle admitted, as he used an already soiled cloth to scrub some of the dried fear gorta blood off his face. “Presumably, the purpose of the fear gorta attack—in addition to killing us if we were too weak to defeat them, and therefore, unworthy to see the Morrígan—was to weaken us before we arrived here. Which would suggest that we are meant to defeat the Ellén Trechend by some means other than straightforward combat.”

  “Illusory magic?” offered Graham. Still recovering from her near miss with the fear gorta, she leaned heavily on the boulder, conservin
g her greatly diminished strength. “Perhaps we are meant to beguile the beast and use stealth to bypass it entirely.”

  “The answer’s got to be more complicated than a veil,” Odette said. “Anybody can throw up a veil.”

  “But very few can cast a perfect veil,” Orlagh countered.

  “Depending on how keen the creature’s senses are, our level of proficiency at such magic will likely determine whether we pass it by in one piece or wind up like the other unfortunate souls in that ring of ash.”

  I peeked around the edge of the boulder again and eyed the charred skeletons. Some of them vaguely resembled bipeds.

  “Instead of using a stealth approach alone, we could try adding a distraction into the mix. Set off a really noticeable spell that draws the attention of all three heads to a particular area.”

  “And then we sneak around the thing from the other side, wearing our best invisibility cloaks?” Odette snorted. “Sounds like some cartoon slapstick comedy.”

  “You got a better idea?” I asked, shooting her a challenging look.

  She ruminated for a second, then shrugged. “Well, unless the major over there is willing to try and obliterate it…”

  Orlagh shook her head. “I drained a lot of energy with that maneuver. While I might be able to pull off another, it would leave me at a critically low energy level during our—potential—

  encounter with the Morrígan. I would prefer not to be that weak in her presence.”

  “Hear, hear,” murmured Boyle. “But I do concur with Chao. I think we need to develop a strategy with a bit more sophistication than the metaphorical equivalent of tapping the Ellén Trechend on its shoulder to trick it into looking the wrong way.”

  “Speed,” croaked a faint voice. Indira. She was slumped against the boulder beside Graham, her eyes closed as she tried to recoup all the energy she’d lost to the fear gorta. “You need to add speed. That bird thing’s probably a hell of a lot more intelligent than your standard guard dog. It’ll figure out we’re trying to pull one over on it in no time at all.

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll have five seconds to get into the cave before that thing attacks us. Which means we’ll need to cross a distance of roughly three hundred yards at something close to a vampire’s top speed. My suggestion? A magic rocket boost.”

  “Come again?” said a baffled Graham.

  Indira opened her eyes and rubbed them with the back of her hand, like she’d just woken up from a long nap. “I mean, we should wrap ourselves in one big veil-shield combo and then use a powerful combustion spell to shoot ourselves into the cave at several hundred miles per hour.”

  “We can’t do direct fire magic though,” Boyle pointed out. “We’re Unseelie. And you don’t possess enough energy—at this time—to manage a spell of that caliber.”

  “But you can do indirect fire magic, using mediums. I can show you how to build a charm that will achieve the same effect,”

  Indira said, smiling faintly. “I have a slight knack for fire charms.”

  I returned her smile. “I bet you do.”

  “That plans sounds…risky,” Orlagh said, in a roundabout way of articulating that she thought it was batshit insane. “But as we cannot spend hours around a war table drawing up plans, I suppose it will have to do. How about we split up the tasks? Some of us can design the distraction, some of us the veil, and some of us”—

  she nodded at Indira—“the ‘magic rocket’ charm.”

  I raised my hand. “I’ve made fire charms before. I think I can hack it with Indira’s instruction.”

  “Do you have enough energy to fuel such a spell?” Graham asked, suspicious. “You’ve used an awful lot today, for a half-sídhe.”

  Smirking, I answered evasively, “Pretty sure I have more energy than anyone else in the group. For the time being, of course.”

  Graham squinted at me, wanting to know what the heck I was hiding. But Orlagh, having rightfully assumed command due to McDermott’s death, drew the topic of conversation away from my eccentricities before Graham could shove her nose any further into my business.

  Boyle and Graham were tasked to design the veil and shield combo.

  Graham had completed some coursework in illusory magic during her stint at the prestigious military academy in Camhaoir. Boyle’s upbringing had not been quite so prestigious, but nonetheless, he was well versed in shield design.

  Odette and Orlagh, given their combined destructive capacity, took on the task of brainstorming a spectacle that would draw all six of the Ellén Trechend’s eyes. In the first thirty seconds of their discussion, the word “explosion” was mentioned no less than ten times. An implicit promise that, whatever happened, the rather mystical landscape around the entrance to what was presumably the Morrígan’s home would not look the same when those two were done with it.

  Before I sat down in front of Indira, legs crossed, head tilted, ready to take instruction like a good little pupil, my new truth-sniffing sense zeroed in on Drake. Like usual, he’d seated himself apart from everyone else. But there was something more than his natural unease in social situations haunting the contours of his deep frown.

  Redirecting myself, I squatted in front of Drake and said softly,

  “Hey, you doing okay? Those assholes didn’t hurt you too badly, did they?”

  Drake suppressed a sniffle—jeez, he was on the verge of tears—and replied, “They didn’t hurt me much at all. They wanted me in one piece so they could present me to the coven’s remaining elders for some big reward.”

  Ah, now I see.

  “The Pettigrew coven found out about your betrayal and put a bounty on your head,” I said. “They want you delivered alive so they can exact their own special brand of revenge.”

  He nodded morosely. “The second I step back across the veil, every bounty hunter on Earth will set their sights on me. Now that the fae have kinda-sorta excused my actions in service to Vianu, it’s almost safer for me to stay in Tír na nÓg than it is for me to go home…”

  I grasped his shoulders. “The Pettigrew coven will not be a problem for much longer. I promise. After we fix this Wild Hunt mess, I’ll put the Watchdogs to task to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. And that means ensuring that the

  Pettigrew coven is no longer a threat to the people of Kinsale—or anyone else.”

  He perked up, citrine eyes wide with disbelief. “You’re really willing to take on the whole coven? There are five other elders, and they’re all just as nasty, and as strong, as Vianu.”

  “If I can defeat one,” I said, crisp white vapor rolling off my tongue, “I can defeat the rest.”

  Drake’s expression brightened, ever so slightly, with a glimmer of hope. “Thanks, Whelan.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.” I clapped his arm and rose. “Thank me when Pettigrew becomes a garden of ice sculptures with fangs.”

  The next few minutes passed in a flurry of hushed conversations, as everyone worked out their respective parts of the plan. Drake, the odd man out, volunteered for the role of lookout. He slipped back out of the valley to take a high perch in a tree along the path we’d traveled to get here.

  Abarta’s mooks—assuming any had survived—wouldn’t have the luxury of the wisps to help them find this place. But given that they’d managed to pinpoint our location once, I was sure they could eventually do so again.

  If we were attacked in the middle of our harebrained scheme to slip past the Ellén Trechend, we’d wind up extra crispy in the ring of ash. Or a bunch of shish kebabs, run through with those razor-sharp svartálfar swords or that godforsaken spear.

  Assuming Bismarck is still kicking, I really need to find a way to sever her link to the spear.

  After each pair wrapped up their planning, we reconvened around the center point of the boulder and discussed the specifics of each part of the plan. Once we all agreed on the exact sequence of events, Odette ran off to grab Drake, while Boyle and Graham did a practice run of their spells
. Using a handy rock as my medium, I started putting together the magic rocket, Indira murmuring pointers in my ear every now and again.

  By the time Orlagh and Drake rejoined the group, we were all ready to go. Five of us huddled together on the left end of the boulder, as Orlagh and Odette crept over to the right edge and quickly conferred one last time to finalize their distraction scheme. Then they went to work, Odette funneling magic through her metal arm and Orlagh running it down the length of her sword.

  The pair exchanged quick nods when they were set, and Orlagh gave the signal that indicated Boyle and Graham should invoke their spells. They did so, two sets of tongue-twisting lines hitting

  the air simultaneously, two complex spells threading themselves together in the air around our huddle.

  When they were two-thirds of the way finished, Orlagh and Odette went to work. They popped out around the side of the boulder, and Odette punched the air, discharging a large green sphere of energy toward the Ellén Trechend.

  The birdlike creature immediately fixed on the incoming spell and moved with a speed that defied its size. Two heads ducked away from the sphere while the third opened its mighty beak to spew fire in retaliation. But it didn’t get the chance to roast Odette alive, because the sphere abruptly exploded—into a blinding field of rainbow-colored sparks. A magic fireworks show.

  Its vision overwhelmed by thousands of dancing lights, the creature was slow to respond when Orlagh jammed her sword into the earth and shot a stream of energy deep underground and far forward. The spell destabilized the area atop which the Ellén Trechend stood, and the soil abruptly dropped at a sharp angle, throwing the creature off balance. It stumbled several steps to the side, leaving a space just big enough for us to pass it by.

  Odette and Orlagh lunged for the huddle just as Boyle and Graham wrapped up their spells, and the combined shield and veil flickered to life around all of us. Then we all moved four feet to the left in a vaguely coordinated manner. Holding the charmed rock tightly in both hands, I invoked the short but powerful combustion spell embedded within the contours of the stone.