What Dusk Divides

by Clara Coulson

  between two icy peaks, great bursts of lightning and fire, great blasts of ice and snow. The sídhe soldiers of two armies fought side by side to prevent the resurgence of a threat they had worked as allies to defeat so long ago.

  When the Hunt caught the scent of blood on the air, felt the static of powerful magic, its need for destruction rose toward a mighty crescendo, and it tugged hard at the reins held by its King. But I didn’t let them go.

  We soared between the peaks, and I led the Hunt down toward Maige Mell, passing through the flickering remnants of a defensive ward array so vast and complex that the mere brush of its many glitching parts against my consciousness nearly ripped my mind to shreds.

  Using the cataclysm of rage that rode behind me, I gripped my need for vengeance tight and used its intensity to disperse the effects of the psychic backlash. I would feel those effects again later, the intense confusion, the agonizing migraine, the sensory overstimulation. For now, however, the pure adrenaline high kept me attuned to my singular goal.

  From a thousand feet above Maige Mell, I saw him.

  At the center of an otherwise barren field of dead grass lay five interlocking rings of stone slabs. Upon each slab, encased in a crystalline substance grown by magic, lay the sleeping figures of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

  Abarta stood before one of the slabs, using his fingers to paint golden lines and symbols on the crystal prison with what must have been the Potion of Copper Sight, the potion that Kennedy had described when I asked him to list the ways you could wake the Tuatha from their enchanted sleep.

  Abarta held a large ceramic jug filled with the golden potion. He dipped his fingers into it quickly, repeatedly, messily, moving with a swiftness impossible to achieve even for a vampire. He had once again erected a shield with a time dilation spell tucked within it.

  While the battle between the sídhe and the diminishing battalion of his expendable followers dragged on, the latter partially protected by a number of staggeringly powerful shields and wards glowing gold, Abarta moved faster than time itself should have allowed to raise his comrades from their virtual graves.

  Behind Abarta stood four such comrades.

  He’d already woken some of them up.

  But there were over two hundred Tuatha asleep in Maige Mell. He would never be able to wake them all before the sídhe broke

  through his line. Which meant he was working in a predetermined order. Waking them up according to their usefulness to his cause.

  Waking them up based on strength, on skill.

  Those four minuscule figures, two women and two men, could probably wipe out half the sídhe on the battlefield with relative ease. Why they hadn’t done so yet, I could only guess.

  Perhaps they were tired or weak from the prolonged dormancy.

  Perhaps they were unconcerned with the slaughter of lesser creatures like svartálfar and redcaps. Perhaps Abarta did not want to risk their health and had asked them to hang back and let his cannon fodder serve their purpose. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

  The reason for their loitering didn’t matter.

  What mattered was their state of wakefulness.

  We have to remedy that, I said to the Hunt. Those are allies of our prey. Let’s destroy them too.

  The Hunt bellowed with thunderous applause: the barks of dogs, the growls of wolves, the whoops of ghostly warriors, words and sounds produced by black-cloud creatures so alien that their exact meanings were lost to time and space.

  On the echoes of that grand cacophony, the soldiers below noticed our arrival, and the fighting abruptly ceased as they scattered like ants. The sídhe pulled back to the defensive battlements Abarta had broken through, taking cover within the cracked stone towers, bracing themselves against the lichen-covered walls, raising their strongest shields in the hopes that the Hunt would choose easier targets.

  Little did they know they weren’t even on the hit list.

  As the black mass of the Hunt neared the ground, hollowfiends split from the collective by the dozen and dove for the fleeing svartálfar, the redcaps, the trolls, and an assortment of other bitter, ugly creatures Abarta had coaxed into service with gilded promises.

  Shadow warriors on spectral horseback shot obsidian arrows into exposed backs, piercing hearts and severing spines, leaving crippled bodies for the other fiends to feast upon. Black dogs the size of barghests snapped heads clean off with foot-long fangs. Phantom snakes the size of trains tunneled through the earth and burst out with such intensity that the shockwaves toppled countless mooks and slung compacted dirt like cannon balls, crushing bodies left and right.

  In seconds, the battlefield that had been an expanse of dead grass, half scorched, half frozen, pockmarked from myriad explosions, became a mural made of blood. The scent of copper

  tinged the air, driving the Hunt further into its frenzy. The hollowfiends sought out more pain, sought out more death. Killed more. Killed faster. Killed more brutally.

  Dismembered limbs landed everywhere. Severed heads rolled and bounced. Unwound intestines fluttered in the air like party streamers.

  At any other time, the sight of so much gore would have sickened me. But the fervor of the Hunt ran hot through my blood, my veins turned black, my skin on fire, my mind filled with nothing but the desire to destroy, destroy, destroy.

  It took every ounce of willpower I possessed and then some—a memory of Saoirse, fixed firmly in my mind, the day she explained to her rookie partner how to keep a cool head no matter how much a loathsome perp pissed me off—to guide the reins of the Hunt on toward the one true prey.

  Abarta, startled by the Hunt’s arrival, finished waking up one more of the Tuatha. Before the man could even shake off the sleepiness of a millennium’s nap, he found himself slung over Abarta’s shoulder and moving at high speed away from the interlocking circles of stone slabs.

  With a wave of his hand, Abarta brought down his time dilation shield spell, slowing himself back down to normal speed. But the top speed of a Tuatha was nothing to scoff at.

  Abarta whistled sharply, and the other four of his awoken comrades, who’d been waiting near the shield’s boundary, took off at a hard sprint, with Abarta and his luggage bringing up the rear.

  As fast as the Hunt soared on, the dashing Tuatha were slightly faster. They put just enough distance between themselves and the storm front from hell to allow the two allies waiting in the wings enough space to enact their escape plan.

  Manannán mac Lir and a man dressed in black, with a rifle slung across his back, jumped out from where they’d been hiding behind an overturned stone column within a small ruin hundreds of feet away from the stone slabs.

  The man in black waved his hands, and a trio of rip portals tore wide open with a sound like ripping silk. Manannán, meanwhile, siphoned several thousand gallons of water from a nearby mountain stream and sculpted them into a dense, spinning dome of water, cutting off the Hunt from the fleeing Tuatha.

  Rage flashed to steam within me, peeled off my skin in curling black wisps. Oh no, you don’t. You’re not getting away from me that easily!

  I yanked all the fiends in the Hunt away from the carnage they were wreaking and funneled every last ounce of their power into my own soul, forcing it down into the very core of my being.

  Until I alone was the Wild Hunt in all its awful glory, the fury of a million wrongs compressed into a mortal form.

  Then, with nothing but the barest breath of will, I flung myself away from the black mass at the speed of sound, Fragarach poised to cut down whatever stood in my way, whether it be a god or a mountain or the entire realm of Tír na nÓg itself.

  I smashed through the water dome as if it was made of tissue paper, the force of the impact destabilizing the whole spell and collapsing the structure into a frigid downpour. My gaze homed in on the portals, which the Tuatha had nearly reached.

  The man in black, spotting the incoming danger, hopped on through first, followed shortly by the two female Tuatha leading
the pack. Manannán, coward that he was, threw himself into a portal next, leaving only four targets within my reach.

  Abarta glanced over his shoulder, and finally, splendidly saw me.

  Shock shot through his body, and disbelief flooded his one remaining eye. Disbelief that I, a pathetic little half-sídhe, had managed to be crowned King of the Hunt. Disbelief that the war phantom I’d used to achieve that impossible feat was his own former king.

  He could sense Nuada riding my soul, the familiar aura shining bright. And oh, how that hurt him, to see a Tuatha monarch perverted in such a way. How it infuriated him. How it stoked the deep-seated hatred he already held for me just enough to tip him over the edge—into making an impulsive choice.

  He hurled the Tuatha he’d been carrying through the nearest portal, and as the other two ran onward in the natural panic spurred by the Hunt, Abarta stopped running altogether, drew a blade from a sheath at his side, and turned around to face me.

  “How dare you!” he screamed across the rapidly closing gap between us. “How dare you disgrace my people’s legacy? How dare you make a mockery of our king?”

  “How dare I ?” I bellowed back. “How dare you destroy my world?

  How dare you destroy my people? How dare you destroy my life?”

  Abarta huffed in rage, his golden aura billowing outward, and raised his sword.

  I yelled in incoherent fury, the black smoke of the Hunt clinging to me like a ragged cape, my own sword drawn back to strike a single decisive blow.

  Abarta and I swung our swords at the exact same instant.

  And when those two blades touched, Maige Mell ceased to exist.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ash fell like snow upon the ruins of Maige Mell.

  I blinked awake, unaware of how long I’d been out or what had happened in the interim. I was floating a few feet above the smoking earth, the power of the Hunt still holding me aloft. My back was to the ground, so the first thing I glimpsed was the stormy mass of the Hunt, smaller than before, and calmer. Much of its energy had been expended in the clash between Abarta and me.

  There was still enough left of it, however, to do a substantial amount of damage if I didn’t use up the remaining energy forthwith.

  I looked from side to side, peering through curls of gray smoke rising from beneath me. But no matter where I looked, the terrain was the same. A flat, barren expanse of charred earth, all the way up the slopes of the mountains that bordered the valley in which the plain lay.

  No grass. No trees. No snow. Nothing. The entire landscape had been wiped off the face of the realm.

  Orienting myself, head up, feet down, I surveyed the direction in which the battle between Abarta’s forces and the sídhe had taken place. The rings of stone slabs were still present and accounted for, but many of the slabs were broken, and the crystalline tombs that had sat atop them had been blown away and scattered across the valley.

  All the tombs were intact, thankfully, the sleeping Tuatha securely locked within. But someone was going to have to check each magic prison to make sure the spell’s integrity hadn’t been compromised by my boneheaded move to unleash a small nuke upon Abarta.

  I let the raw emotion of the Hunt get the better of me, I thought, biting my tongue until I tasted blood. I should’ve maintained better control of myself.

  The feeling of someone lazily unfurling from a nap tickled the back of my spine, and Nuada said, While I disapprove of everything you are and everything you seek to do, I must say you are far too hard on yourself, Whelan. The power of the Hunt very nearly tore your mortal form to shreds, body and soul. Yet you act as if you should have possessed some composure in its presence. That you are not dead at its feet, burned and broken, is impressive enough. I mean, look at yourself, will you?

  Surprised he would offer me any compliments, no matter how double-sided, I examined myself. Where the black energy of the

  Hunt had run wild through my veins were pale, jagged lines etched into my skin, as if I’d been struck by lightning. Around these pale lines was extensive bruising, hundreds of dark-purple splotches scattered across my skin like splatters of paint.

  If that was how awful I looked on the outside, then I could only imagine the extent of my internal injuries. And yet, I felt no pain. My connection to the Hunt had left me numb and drowned me with adrenaline, and I would remain in this state until the Hunt fully dissipated. After that though…

  Am I even going to survive this? I asked Nuada.

  He thought about it for a minute. Without a high-level healing potion, I’d say it is a fifty-fifty chance. The immense strain of hosting the Hunt has inflicted serious damage to practically every part of your body. At the moment the last of the Hunt’s energy leaves you, you will begin to suffer multiple organ failure. If you were a full-blooded sídhe, then you would be fine. But I am unsure if your half-sídhe healing factor will be enough.

  Of course. I sighed. It always comes down to my heritage.

  And it always shall, he quipped, then fell silent.

  Resigning myself to a high chance of a miserably painful death, I went in search of Fragarach. I only vaguely remembered what happened after my blade met Abarta’s—a bright flash, a deafening boom, an intense shockwave, a scream that might’ve been my own or belonged to my adversary, the splash of hot blood against my skin, and other lovely things—but I did recall that Fragarach hadn’t broken. My hands simply hadn’t been able to hold on through such a monumental backfire.

  To my surprise, I found the sword sticking up out of the epicenter of the craggy crater, near where the now closed rip portals had been. And to my delight, there was something else lying just a few feet away from it: Abarta’s severed left arm, all the way up to the elbow.

  His own sword, inferior to Fragarach, had shattered, and the resulting power surge had flowed directly into his arms. That immense force had torn one arm clean off his body, and likely mutilated the other, before the shockwave from the resulting blast had hurled his battered body backward through a portal.

  The arm was a mess, more a pile of lumpy flesh than a functional limb. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t reattach it. The Tuatha healing factor was extraordinarily high.

  To attempt a reattachment, however, he needed to have the arm in his possession.

  Still feeling fairly vindictive under the influence of the Hunt—

  and my own hatred, admittedly—I snatched up Fragarach, flew over to the arm, and jabbed the end of the sword into it, sending a frigid pulse into the flesh. It froze solid and then crumbled away, the strong winds of the Hunt scattering the remains into the ether.

  Now I had taken an eye and an arm from Abarta.

  Maybe next time I would take a leg.

  Maybe next time I would take his life.

  I could hope, right?

  A wave of frustration thrummed through me via my tether to the Hunt, the violent mass of fiends unhappy to loiter so long in one place without wreaking havoc. Steeling myself for another horse ride on the front of hell, I floated back up toward the waiting storm.

  As I neared the edge, my spectral steed coalescing beneath me again, I racked my brain to come up with another target that would appease the Hunt’s bloodlust. There was no one else in Tír na nÓg that I wanted to attack—all of Abarta’s other mook groups would have long been annihilated by the sídhe—but I couldn’t just take the Hunt for a spin through this realm without…

  This realm. As opposed to the one across the veil.

  Ah. There we go. I do have one more enemy that hasn’t yet faced my wrath.

  Raising my sword once more, I directed the Hunt back the way we’d come. We rolled across the sky, casting a shadow onto the quieted battlefield below. All of Abarta’s goons had been killed, either by the sídhe or by the Hunt, their corpses rendered nothing but fertilizer that would go to waste in this land of ice and snow.

  The soldiers of both courts, who’d been violently rattled by the enormous blast in the valley
but not quite killed, now stood or sat in the fragments of the stone battlements, staring up at the sky in awe. Awe for the once-a-millennium sight of the Wild Hunt.

  Awe for the near impossibility that was the sight of the man leading the Hunt.

  This was going to be the biggest story of the century in Tír na nÓg, a half-sídhe becoming the King of the Wild Hunt.

  Just what I needed. To be a fae celebrity. To have the sídhe paparazzi chasing after me.

  But I’d done what I had to do to protect my world. So the pieces could fall where they may, and I would deal with however they aligned, the same way I had dealt with my many other misfortunes.

  The trip back to the hole in the sky took no time at all, the Hunt so much reduced that it no longer felt as if I was dragging the whole night behind me. With a grunt of effort—my body was growing tired, even with the Hunt’s energy still buzzing through my bones—I steered the storm into the gaping tear between worlds.

  We passed through the tattered fabric of the veil and emerged into the sky on the other side, thousands of feet above Kinsale.

  From this height, Kinsale looked even worse than I’d thought it did.

  Whole sections of the city spewed thick smoke into the air, though the fires had been quelled hours before. Whole streets were charred pitch black, rows and rows of homes and businesses rendered empty skeletons. People walked the streets with their heads hung low and their backs bowed, hauling bodies toward open spaces, where they could be laid out for identification, or digging through the rubble in the fading hope of finding trapped survivors.

  Abarta and Vianu had done this to my home, and I’d punished them both for it—but I still wasn’t satisfied. I wouldn’t be until Kinsale was whole again. Though I could assuage my ire with a soothing balm, in the form of a touch more vengeance.

  Tugging hard on the reins of the Hunt, I pulled it away from the city, the hollowfiends screeching and cawing in anger at being directed away from fresh meat. I pulled from the flame the bubbling pot that was their growing disdain for their mortal King by promising them a more delicious prey than downtrodden human beings.