by Karen Chance
And I couldn’t channel magic when I was exhausted and starving to death!
But something smelled good, all of a sudden; something smelt amazing, like sun warmed skin and fruity drinks and hot dogs being grilled on the barbecue. And steaks, I thought, putting a hand around Arsen’s neck, and barely registering that one was free now. And chicken—God, yes, some barbequed chicken, I thought, and kissed him.
He kissed me back, immediately, which didn’t surprise me at all. I looked like hell, if that brief glimpse in his bedroom mirror had been accurate, with a dirt-streaked face from falling on it one too many times, bruises blooming everywhere from Guinn’s slap fest, a torn lace blouse, and a pair of sadly soiled bloomers that hadn’t been great to start out with, and were now approaching tragic. Not to mention a number of cuts and scratches and a bleeding arm.
But incubus magic overrode all of that, which suddenly seemed trivial—even irrelevant. Like the damned codpiece pressing into me when I twined a leg around his, and pulled him close. Or the hard arms encircling me, or the experienced tongue plundering me, or the knowing hands—
Okay, getting better, I thought, deepening the kiss.
Much better, because something was tasting familiar. Something was tasting sweet. Something was flowing out of him and into me and it was everything, everything I’d wanted. And unlike with Zeus, this power didn’t burn.
It didn’t bite or tear or hurt. It was soft and gentle, and made me think of that little boy again, running across the terrace with his kite, watching it fly into the air, soaring high on the perpetual winds that blew across his city. The kite had been shaped like a bird, a beautiful eagle, and in his joy in its delicate craftsmanship I thought I saw the seeds of the adult’s gryphon obsession.
And then I saw that adult, scaling a frighteningly high peak under soaring, bright blue skies. He stopped for a moment to stare about at the unfamiliar territory, and to catch his breath. Caedmon’s lands spread out below him, beautiful, strange, and shockingly green. And forbidden—he could be killed just for venturing here. But there was no one around for miles, no person, at any rate. And the nest he sought was just ahead.
He laughed, and tucked his silver hair back under his hood, in case any of Caedmon’s people flew by. He’d be flying himself, soon enough. He’d be flying—
Arsen broke the kiss, and I felt him gasp for air underneath me. Our positions had somehow ended up reversed, and I looked down into a face that was no longer flushed, but as pale as alabaster. Like the body I held, which was quivering, although not from lust. How much of his strength had I taken? I thought, suddenly afraid. How much had I—
Sound broke over me again, a startling wash of it. The newly arrived solders were getting closer, driving the trees this way. They’d be on us in a moment, and although I was completely free now and had to hurry, I knelt in the dirt over the trembling fey with tears in my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean—”
Some soldiers ran by, just outside the glade, with torches in their hands. But they kept on going, and I looked back down to find Arsen staring up at me strangely. “Are you alright?” I asked. “Did I hurt you?”
“Why do you care?” It was a whisper, a barely-there sigh on the air.
“Because I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anybody!”
“But you’re one of them, aren’t you?” His hand held onto mine when I would have gotten up. He couldn’t force me to stay, could barely manage to grip me at all, but I let my hand stay in his for a second anyway. I owed him that much.
“One of who?”
“The gods you say you fight.”
I didn’t know how he knew, or why he thought that. But I didn’t have time to debate it. “My mother was Artemis,” I said quickly. “She was a goddess, but she threw them all out. All of the ones like her, because they were monsters, just like your king. If they come back, they’ll be worse than a thousand Aeslinns. Think on that, when you serve him!”
And then I pulled my hand back, and shifted.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I reappeared inside the circle of guards and promptly fell on my ass. I was dizzy, the short shift having taken a lot out of me. Stealing energy from one fey was clearly not equal to having access to the Pythian power, and it showed.
I got back to my feet, shaking a little, but stayed in a crouch for stability. Which turned out to be a good thing since there was no tent to hide me anymore. Just the backs of a bunch of guards, some blowing sparks from the burning camp, and the rustling tops of retreating trees.
With the dragon gone, it looked like the fey had been able to turn their full attention on the invading forest, and the forest was losing. Or maybe the trees just thought that having more of them burned wouldn’t help the first one. Or maybe they weren’t as organized without Guinn to motivate them.
Or maybe . . . they’d just seen who was headed this way.
I did a double take, my heart pounding, but that was definitely Aeslinn. I could see him with Mircea’s telephoto eyesight, back in his usual body and striding across the burning camp. He was wearing an ill-fitting tunic and leggings that he must have stripped off another unfortunate soldier, which were rumpled and dirty and had a hole in the knee. Yet there was no doubt that he was a king. Every inch said power, fury—and death if we were still here in less than a minute.
So, yeah, time to go.
I got my arms around the guys and tried to shift, but no way in hell. I couldn’t budge us an inch, which meant that I was going to have to take them one at a time—if I could even do that. It honestly didn’t feel like it, but I grabbed Pritkin and tried anyway. But while some power swirled around me that time, it was thin and weak, not the golden ocean of Pythian energy that I was used to. And it wasn’t enough.
We were going to have to fight, but nobody looked remotely up to it.
Mircea was slumped over, almost nose to the ground, beside the tent pole. He had a bloody shirt front, black and sticky, maybe because there was a stake jutting out of it. It was directly over the heart and explained why he’d been unable to communicate with me.
He hadn’t been able to do much else, either, by the look of things. He had blotchy, bruised skin and what appeared to be numerous sword cuts, which he’d been unable to heal. He had rope burns, too, which I saw when I cut him free of the feys’ nasty, bespelled cords, which snapped and burnt my hands where they touched, and he’d been wearing them for how long?
I felt a wave of anger sweep over me, which I ruthlessly tamped down. I didn’t have time for that now. I had to get us out.
“Mircea,” I whispered urgently, cupping his face. “Mircea, I’m going to take out the stake. We’re going to have to fight. Okay?”
No response. Which could have been for a number of reasons, but was probably because he didn’t have the strength. Or maybe there was nothing to say.
This was going to be a bitch.
I grabbed the stake and tugged on it, but it was buried deep in the muscle and didn’t want to budge. But at least that got a reaction. Mircea’s head came up, his mouth wide and shocked and gasping, his eyes meeting mine out of heavily bruised sockets. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear, and there was no time to figure it out. I got a filthy foot, which had long ago lost its shoe, onto his chest, and heaved.
The stake came out, along with a lot of almost black blood, splattering both of us. Mircea gasped again and did not do it quietly, but nobody heard. Because all the soldiers were busily coming to attention.
Guess they’d spotted the king, too.
But Mircea couldn’t fight like this, not against these odds. And of the three prisoners, he was the best off, still being conscious. I stared around, looking for something, anything, that might help, but I was out of both time and ideas.
I’d come too late, I thought blankly.
We were going to die.
It didn’t compute; I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea. That a
ll we’d done, all we’d suffered, was for nothing? That it ended like this?
I knelt again, and cupped Pritkin’s face, feeling a three-day growth of beard scratch my fingers. I did the same to Mircea’s, which had dried blood on it, because his grievous wound hadn’t allowed him to reabsorb it. I loved them both, so much, and maybe I did lose them today, but it wouldn’t be for nothing.
Because I had a knife and vampire speed, and right now, Aeslinn was just another fey. I didn’t need to take all of them; I just needed him. To end this war, to make all this count, I only needed a single stroke and I was taking it. I turned with a snarl on my lips to see the soldiers drawing aside, making a door through their ranks, creating a path for a tall, silver haired fey—
Who wasn’t Aeslinn, I realized, halfway through a lunge.
I had brief moment to see Arsen—half naked and looking like death, but with tawny, sunlit eyes—grabbing the hand with the knife in it; to notice another fey striding forward with his bow raised, as if planning to strike me; to watch the rest of the guards spinning with shock on their features, only now noticing that they had an intruder.
And then the earth convulsed, throwing us all to the ground.
It kept on doing so, a violent upheaval that rippled outward from our position across the camp, flattening most of it. The rest of the tents collapsed, fey everywhere were knocked off their feet, and the remaining trees fled for cover through the suddenly churning soil. I clung to the dirt myself, feeling it move like liquid under my hands, a truly disturbing sensation. One that made my insides feel a little watery, too, because some part of me, some ancient, instinctive part, knew what was coming.
I guessed the fey did, as well, because they were leaping to their feet, were grabbing the prisoners, were preparing to run—
Too late. Because the ground heaved once more, a violent, aggressive motion, like a giant fist was being thrust up through the soil. And a sound tore through the night, hitting the surrounding tree line and echoing back to us, over and over, until I wanted to scream, because once had been bad enough.
It was so loud that it was felt as much as heard, vibrating through my body as if I’d just been thrown from a speeding truck and was rolling down the highway. Which considering how much the ground was bucking underneath me, wasn’t that far off. Fey were also hitting down everywhere, but they no longer looked like I was a top priority.
It would have been a good time to run, but there was just no way. And that was before a huge fissure slashed through the middle of camp, rupturing the ground and almost swallowing several fey. And allowing a column of lava as wide as a bus to spew skyward.
It was bright red and gold and flying everywhere, along with a ton of noxious gasses that threatened to choke me, and highlighted the formerly stoic guards’ panicked faces. But the fire didn’t stay that color. Because the lava, still fountaining up everywhere, also started raining down—on fleeing trees, on scrambling fey, on the remaining tents.
And on something else.
“Seriously?” I yelled, although I couldn’t hear myself. I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of every munition’s box anywhere near the eruption going off, all at once.
Multicolored explosions shot deadly missiles in all directions—including at us. The few surrounding fey who had tried to resume their feet promptly hit the ground again, as an army’s cache of magic lit up the night in every color of the rainbow. It was so bright and so loud that, for a moment, I just lay there, literally stunned.
But then Arsen was jerking me up with one hand, and savagely gesturing at the guards with the other. I couldn’t hear what he was saying; I couldn’t hear anything, even my own thoughts. But I guessed the fey could.
Because they moved as one, forgetting about their prisoners, throwing up shields, and wading into the deadly mass explosion—
To rescue their king.
I stared after them as realization hit. I was barely able to see anything but exploding colors and leaping after images, but then, I didn’t need to, did I? Everything had centered around the spot where Aeslinn had been walking.
I felt my heart clench in my chest, felt hope—dead and buried a moment ago—suddenly rise once more, felt—
Arsen shaking me, and yelling something in my face.
I couldn’t hear him, but then he shoved the goat thing at me and grabbed Pritkin’s limp body off the ground, obviously preparing to run. Until he caught sight of the third prisoner, and oh, shit. Oh, no, no, no, no!
I grabbed his arm when he pulled out his knife, and clung like a limpet. “No!” I yelled. “No, you don’t understand—”
Arsen was yelling something back, which probably had to do with the attack on the capitol and Mircea’s part in it, but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything but goddamned explosions, echoing in my head like a kettledrum from hell. Until something cut through the din, but not because it was loud.
But because it was soft.
My head came up as a cool glissando reached my ears, like a tinkle of bells tossed about on the breeze, or a silken whisper, or a blowing song . . .
I kept hold of Arsen’s arm, but turned my head to look out over the forest, facing away from the camp, and the song grew louder. It seemed to be in my mind more than my ears, and was a chorus now instead of a few random notes, soft and cool and beckoning. It didn’t sing words, much less sentences, but the idea was there.
The idea was deafening.
“The tree line,” I murmured, and Arsen stopped yelling to stare at me, as if he’d heard something, too. Or maybe he was wondering why I was suddenly just standing there, with my head cocked, while the world burned.
A silence spell clicked shut over my head, and the sudden absence of sound was staggering. Quite literally, causing me to fall into Arsen when he stopped pulling away, only to have him shake me some more. Which . . . wasn’t helping, I thought, right before my ears popped painfully.
“—is wrong with you?” I heard him yell.
I swallowed and tried to focus. “I—we have to get to the tree line. To the forest—”
“You think I don’t know that? But I’m not taking him!”
He kicked Mircea, who looked up, fangs bared.
“Why are you taking any of us?” I challenged, despite the fact that this wasn’t the time for a conversation. But anything was better than he and Mircea fighting it out, two half dead men in the middle of a goddamned inferno! “If the king is still alive—”
Arsen gave a laugh utterly devoid of humor, which made me stare at him some more.
“—he’ll kill you for this!”
Arsen, who had been staring down with Mircea, turned his attention on me, which would have been enough to end him, if I hadn’t shot Mircea a warning glance. His hand paused halfway to the bloody stake, not that he needed it. We both knew that, with it out of his body, he could drain Arsen in a heartbeat if he wanted.
But I guessed he wanted to hear this more, because he waited.
“He was going to kill me in any case,” Arsen said savagely. “I would not allow your ally to be a meal for a monster, nor permit the king to bring back the old gods!”
“But . . . don’t you worship them, too?” I asked, feeling confused.
“Worship them?” he stared at me. “They almost destroyed us in their constant wars of the past! And we have done nothing but fight since the king began his current campaign. I prefer to give my allegiance to those who value life!”
“We all value life,” Mircea said, and for once, the master negotiator misread the situation. And I guessed he was also still working on getting his equilibrium back, because he didn’t manage to dodge when Arsen kicked him savagely in the face.
Mircea fell backwards and I grabbed Arsen again, before he could go after him. “Listen to me—”
“Why should I? When you bring that monster with you?”
“He’s not a monster—”
“You lie! I saw the things it did—”
�
��—any more than Ronog is!”
He had been facing away from me, pulling against my grip. But at that he stopped, and his head snapped back toward mine. His eyes were suddenly tawny slits, and his face lean and dangerous.
“How do you know that name?”
It was a whisper, but it sent a chill up my back, nonetheless. More so than a shout would have done. I had better choose my words really damned carefully, I thought.
I decided to go with honesty, since he seemed to respect it. And since coming up with a convincing lie right then would have been impossible. “I saw her in the Common,” I admitted. “I saw the two of you together. It was beautiful—”
He grabbed my arms, both of them, Mircea forgotten. “Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying! She’s beautiful, with long, curly red hair and a freckled face. She was pregnant with your child—only that was a while ago. I assume he—or she—has been born by now. That you two have a—” I stopped, because a look of such pain crossed Arsen’s features that it made me draw in my breath in shock—and pity. “She’s dead?” I whispered, because I didn’t know what else could have caused that kind of despair.
“I do not know what she is, or where,” he said, his voice dull. “I had to send her to her mother’s people, far to the south, to protect her. The king threatened her and . . .” he paused, his throat working. “I could not risk knowing where she would be. If the king turned on me . . . he has gone after others’ families in the past. I could not risk it.”
“So, you sent her away. And haven’t seen her since?”
He shook his head. “It was before the birth. I do not know what her child—our child—was. Or whether she survived, or whether the child did . . . I do not know anything.”
I put a hand on his arm in sympathy. “Then you understand what Mircea was doing at the capitol,” I said, and saw his face change.
