What Dusk Divides

by Clara Coulson

  Through the tether built using Nuada, I pushed to them choice memories. Memories of creatures with sharp fangs. Creatures who drank blood. Creatures who reveled in bloodshed just as much as the Hunt itself. I promised the Hunt that these creatures would make for a much better battle, a more fulfilling victory.

  Riled up by the prospect of massacring a coven of vampires, the Hunt picked up speed, and we hurtled through the sky toward Pettigrew.

  The vampires, fast as they were, could never have escaped from the Hunt. By the time their lookouts spotted the unnatural storm branching off from the rest of the cloud cover, it was already too late to run, too late to hide.

  The scouts raced back to the coven’s primary hideaway, an old office building, and sounded the alarm, shouting for everyone to flee at top speed. The vampires in the building responded in milliseconds, dozens of them leaping from the upper floors with the utmost grace and landing on adjacent rooftops, or the streets, without skipping a step or missing a beat.

  The swiftest of them made it about five blocks before the hollowfiends caught up with them. Because the fiends didn’t have to run forward. They could fly straight down.

  Hundreds of spectral figures broke away from the mass of the storm and rocketed down to the town, thick black streaks marking their devastating descent.

  The battle began and ended in the same minute.

  Vampires fell and rose again and fell again, until there was nothing left of them but dismembered twitching limbs. The buildings fell soon after them, the fiends blasting straight through walls as if they weren’t even there. In the span of sixty seconds, Pettigrew transformed from a relatively untouched town in the post-apocalyptic world to a complete and utter disaster zone.

  Blood on the streets. Ash in the air. Death in its memory. Doom in its future.

  When the remainder of the Hunt had expended about half its energy, I let myself float down to the sidewalk in front of the office building, which the fiends were saving for last.

  Purposefully, I strode inside via the empty gap that had once housed glass doors and took a left toward the stairwell beside the bank of elevators.

  Just before I reached the stairwell door, it swung open, and a female vampire whose countenance reminded me ever so much of Vianu—snide and arrogant, the face of an elder vampire—hurried into the lobby, a stuffed suitcase in one hand, a plastic jug of fresh blood in the other. She stopped short in front of me and immediately bared her fangs, only to falter at my appearance.

  “You really want to challenge the King of the Hunt?” I asked.

  The vampire didn’t reply. She slid by me in the blink of an eye and hightailed it for the exit. She made it twenty feet down the sidewalk before the fiends swooped in from above and mobbed her, ripping her limb from limb as she shrieked in terror. Her head came off last with a loud pop and a soft squelch. It rolled across the street, into the gutter. Where it belonged.

  I eyed it for a second, satisfaction running high, before I slipped into the stairwell.

  In the basement, I found a prison and a sanctuary. A prison for humans who had been forced into blood slavery, and a sanctuary for vampires in need of a drink. The vampires were all gone now, and the humans all dead—because the vampires had cut their losses on the way out of their base.

  I’d seen so many die in so many awful ways today that the sight of twenty people with shredded throats lying in pools of blood, blank eyes staring in perpetual fear, didn’t even faze me. I walked past all the corpses, leaving red footprints behind me, and checked each of the rooms in the basement until I found what I was looking for: a storage room.

  The room was stocked with all manner of magic implements, including healing potions.

  I’d suspected the vampires had a store of them ever since Drake showed up with one to fix me after I’d had a bad date with a hard wall in Maige Itha. He claimed he’d emptied his wallet to acquire it, and he may very well have. The vampires probably had a guard posted at the door to this room, a guard who was perhaps partial to bribes.

  Whatever the case, Drake had obtained the potion, and it had worked wonders despite its initial drawbacks. If I gulped it down again, it might just save my life after the rapidly dwindling Hunt gave up the ghost.

  Grabbing three flasks of the potion and stuffing them into my pockets, I hastily retreated to the stairwell and clambered back upstairs. The entire building was quaking, the result of a gaggle of hollowfiends tearing into the neighborhood with abandon.

  I reached the top of the stairs at the same time the fiends reached the roof of the office building. Plaster and gravel and bits of steel beams rained down onto the sidewalk in front of the lobby, and the entire building shuddered in anticipation of its demise. I strode out onto the sidewalk just as the ceiling of the lobby caved in five steps back, a gray cloud of rubble embracing me from behind.

  As I hit the end of the block and continued on across the street, heading toward an area of Pettigrew I’d last visited half a year before, the office complex emitted an earsplitting groan, tipped forward beyond the point of no return, and promptly collapsed, accompanied by a cacophony of tearing metal and breaking glass and crumbling stone.

  Large chunks of debris pelted the ground all around me, but I didn’t increase my speed. I kept on walking at a modest pace, tracking along the route I’d originally planned to take through the town during the fateful visit that turned Vianu into my enemy.

  By the time I passed the Bed Bath & Beyond, only a handful of hollowfiends remained, the rest of the Hunt having dispersed, its energy expended. In a couple minutes, the last of them would vanish, nothing but black wisps on the winter wind.

  I already felt my connection to the Hunt fraying as Nuada began to untangle his soul from mine, the conclusion of our bargain within sight. Tiny pieces of his soul clung to me though, splinters that would soon ache in the middle of the night, when I recalled things that weren’t mine to remember.

  But pieces of my soul clung to his as well. We’d both be haunted by each other until the end of time. It was a fair exchange, all things considered.

  There were higher prices to pay to get the things you wanted.

  I had seen them.

  The final hollowfiend fizzled out right as I reached the rusted sign marking the city limits of Pettigrew. My tether to the Hunt snapped the moment the storm ceased to churn, and my extreme adrenaline high took a nosedive toward a brutal crash, the pain of my many critical injuries welling up from where it had been simmering on the backburner.

  I halted next to the sign, gazing wistfully in the direction of Kinsale, and tugged one of the healing potion flasks from my pocket. Unscrewing the cap, I held it up, a mock toast, and said to Nuada, “To our successful partnership. May we never meet again.”

  I have no need to ever meet you again, now that there are others of my blood and bone wide awake who seek to take their vengeance on the sídhe , he replied ominously. But I admit that I may watch you from afar, Vincent Whelan, son of air and darkness, kin to ice and winter born. You make for an intriguing adversary, a man of many surprises, with a righteousness that defies your mortal blood and a boldness that defies your faerie logic. You will do big things in the coming war. Great things. Awful things. Things that change everything, for the better and the worse. Interesting it will be to see whether your two worlds still stand after you are done with them.

  The link between our souls unwound to a single strand.

  Of course, he finished, I suppose it will be a miracle if any world survives, given what awaits us at the edge of Otherworld space.

  On that lovely note, Nuada Airgetlám broke the last thread of our connection and allowed the call of death to carry him back across the veil.

  I chewed on his words for half a second, before I shook my head, said, “Fuck it,” and downed the healing potion in three gulps.

  After that, I didn’t think or say anything for some time. Because my entire world became pain beyond pain, and my thoughts degraded


  into mush. Honestly, it was kind of nice, not having to dwell on the weight of life’s problems while my countless broken bones popped and cracked back together, while my muscle tears stitched themselves closed, causing cramps like full-blown tetanus, while my shredded blood vessels staunched the catastrophic hemorrhaging occurring throughout my body.

  But like all moments of peace, the painful and the serene, this moment of blissful agony came to an end. When the wounds were gone and the potion’s magic done, I got back up, gasping and crying, coughing and gagging, shaking and stumbling, and kept on walking forward.

  I had to. I had to know. I had to learn. The truth that I had been avoiding for so long. The truth that had been steadfastly avoiding me since the day I was exiled from the Unseelie Court.

  Dusk had divided the haves from the have-nots, the winners from the losers, the living from the dead, and all of those lots had fallen in my favor. Still, one question remained—that of my past and my future—and I refused to stop and sleep through the coming night until I uncovered the answer, even if the division of those entangled mysteries split my self right down the middle too.

  “Tom Tildrum, King of the Cats,” I spoke to the silence that followed death, “I summon you to my ancestral home. And if you aren’t there when I arrive, so help me every god here on Earth and beyond the veil, I will make you regret the moment you first set eyes on Vincent Whelan.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The dullahan guards let me pass the barrier with nary a whisper.

  Their heads, perched on their saddles, swiveled to follow me as I shambled back into Kinsale, an undercurrent of fear in their normally haughty expressions.

  I had only been visible in the sky above Kinsale for a matter of seconds before the Hunt peeled off toward Pettigrew, but countless people had probably spied my face. Fae and half-fae with superhuman vision. Witches and wizards with sight-strengthening spells.

  It was a good bet that the news of my incredible feat—a mere half-sídhe controlling the Hunt—was spreading through the city even faster than the fires that had scorched it black. Come morning, practically everyone would know.

  A year ago, I’d been worried that the humans would shun me if they learned I was half sídhe. Now, it was likely that everyone would shun me. Because I’d transcended the bounds of my label.

  Half-sídhe didn’t do the types of things I’d recently done. They didn’t sucker-punch sídhe colonels in the face and send them for

  rides through time and space. They didn’t flash freeze scores of attacking vampires at pivotal moments during critical battles.

  They didn’t take command of supreme forces of negative energy and use them to massacre entire vampire covens.

  Those were things that no one did, that no one even tried to do.

  At least no one here on Earth.

  Since I had done all of those things, that made me more than half sídhe. That made me an enigma.

  And people, human and otherwise, feared great mysteries.

  It would have hurt me once upon a time, being feared. It might hurt me some time from now. But today, as I trudged through the city streets strewn with ash and dust, the taste of blood and smoke still sitting heavy on the air, I couldn’t bring myself to care.

  About the huddles of half-fae who paused their work, digging bodies from the rubble of recent fires, and whispered conspiratorially as I passed them by, debating whether they should ingratiate themselves to me—or run the other way.

  About the gaggles of witches and wizards handing out free healing charms and first-aid supplies on the street corners, who gawped at me like I was the ugliest thing they’d seen all day in this blackened wreck of a city.

  About the sídhe soldiers, the ones Orlagh had left behind to help Saoirse get the city back under control, who refused to approach me and offer assistance despite the fact I was practically dead on my feet.

  I ignored the entire world—I’d earned the right to do so, after all I’d done for the world today—and took an old, familiar route to a place I’d once called home.

  The little one-story house with the cute front porch had been left untouched by all the recent disasters, though it still bore the scars of humanity’s prejudice that it had been dealt in the months leading up to the collapse. The faded graffiti smeared across the white siding mocked me as I shuffled toward the bent fence, but the cruel words had long lost their bite, just as humanity had long lost the war.

  So I flipped up the latch on the fence gate, as I’d done countless times in the world before, when the sky had been robin’s-egg blue and the word “future” actually held promise, and I walked toward my past.

  Tom Tildrum was waiting for me there. He sat on the old wooden porch swing that had somehow survived the apocalypse, had left just enough space for me to sit beside him. I did so, climbing

  the half-rotten steps of the porch, stomping across the warped floorboards, and taking my place at his side for what I suspected was far from the first time in my life.

  Without preamble, I said, “My hair isn’t turning gray. It’s turning white, isn’t it?”

  Tildrum tapped a finger on his knee for several seconds before he replied, “It is.”

  “Only one bloodline in the entire Unseelie Court has white hair.”

  He bobbed his head. “Indeed.”

  “Tell me the truth. The whole truth,” I demanded. “Who am I? Who is she ?”

  Tildrum inhaled deeply, his face fixed in the most sober expression I had ever seen the cat sídhe wear. “The answers you seek are the details in a long and winding story. Let me start from the beginning. What do you know of Queen Mab’s children?”

  “That there are three of them.” I wrung my hands in my lap as I dug up everything I knew about them. “Princess Rionach, the oldest, Chief Justice of the Unseelie Cúirt Uachtarach. Prince Ardál, the middle child, High Commander of the Unseelie Army. And Princess Muadnait, the youngest, the Economic Chancellor and Mab’s social proxy in the many decadent gatherings of Unseelie high society.”

  “That is the public’s perception of Queen Mab’s offspring, yes.”

  Tildrum clicked his tongue reproachfully. “But there is more to the story, beyond the public’s eye. One more, to be precise.”

  “Mab has a fourth child?”

  Tildrum glanced at me sideways, and I could have sworn there was something akin to pity in the acid-green eyes of that primordial beast. “Had.”

  My chest tightened. “What happened?”

  “A little over a century ago,” he said smoothly, as if he’d memorized a speech, “Queen Mab and her counterpart became aware of a new and dangerous presence on the edge of Otherworld space.

  A presence whose nature was opaque and amorphous. A presence whose powers were peculiar and nearly impossible to counter. A presence whose goals were resoundingly malevolent, whose every act was violent and deadly.”

  “The Enemy from Beyond,” I guessed, “the thing that’s making realms disappear.”

  He nodded. “To learn more about this enemy proved a great struggle, as most of the agents the courts sent to seek it out

  did not return. It was determined that the only way to adequately study this enemy would be to cultivate a vast but subtle web of intelligence operatives embedded within the societies of the realms deemed most at risk from the enemy’s machinations.

  “But such an unwieldy espionage operation could not be conducted across the vast distances of Otherworld space. The operation required a leader willing and able to spend most of their time on the ground in the imperiled sector of the Otherworld. A leader highly skilled and very powerful. A leader whom the enemy could not kill as easily as it could kill regular sídhe.”

  Practically choking, I blurted out, “Are you telling me Mab had a fourth child specifically to run this operation?”

  Tildrum said evenly, “I am telling you that Queen Mab had a child to fill the role of Spymaster of the Unseelie Court, just as she had children to
fill other important roles.”

  “And this woman, this spymaster…”

  “Was your mother.”

  The whole world seemed to tilt sideways, and I nearly fell off the swing. My vision swam, black dots dancing in my periphery.

  The roar of my own pulse filled my ears, muffling all exterior sound. My heart palpitated wildly, tickling the back of my ribs like fluttering wings. Tingling spread up my fingers, up my cheeks, my lungs refusing to inhale.

  I need to hear this, I told myself. No matter how much it hurts to hear. No matter how much it freaks me out. So calm the hell down.

  I screwed my eyes shut and mentally repeated a set of helpful tips for ending panic attacks. It took me twelve tries to get them to work. Even then, I still felt off kilter when I opened my eyes again and peered beyond the porch at the dreary winter day cast above the bleakness of a city on the verge of collapse.

  Terrible as it was though, the familiarity of the view set a low current of tranquility flowing through my veins. Whatever Tildrum said to me, the world would not suddenly change. Reality would be as it had always been.

  I was just learning the truth about that reality.

  “So,” I said, “Mab is my…grandmother?”

  “Yes.” Tildrum didn’t sound annoyed by my panic attack, or the delay it had caused in our conversation. Either he’d miraculously grown a sense of patience since I last saw him, or he actually did feel a smidgen of pity for me.

  I ran a hand through my dirty, tangled hair. “How exactly did I, uh, happen?”

  Tildrum leaned against the back of the swing and idly glanced upward as he recalled memories that were distant for me but were barely one blink back for a creature his age. “During one of her stints at the edge of Otherworld space, your mother became aware of something you became aware of today: that the agents of the enemy, and likely the enemy itself, cannot cross the veil to Earth. At the time, however, this fact was only theory, so she decided to test the theory by running a series of experiments on Earth.