Chapter 2

BEING SEPARATED FROM Mort made me edgy, and it took all of my self-control to keep from glancing over at the spot where my scabbard was propped against the wall. The broadsword was imbued with my blood and therefore my magic, and I got a little twitchy when it was out of reach.

Maxen, in contrast, was allowed to keep his sword and daggers in King Sebastian’s presence. Something to do with court protocol for diplomats, most likely. I only knew enough of Faerie court etiquette to keep from getting in too much trouble, but I had never bothered to learn the hundreds of finer points that were second nature for Maxen.

I made an awkward curtsy in front of Sebastian, not an easy thing to do in skin-tight jeans. With no skirt to fan out, I just had to lift my arms at my sides as I put one ankle behind the other, bent my knees, and bowed my head. It was the proper practice for female Fae wearing pants, but there was really no graceful way to do it.

With that little ritual out of the way, the king gestured to a couch, indicating that Maxen and I should both sit there.

Rather than the traditional, showy finery and jewels that many Fae rulers favored, Sebastian was dressed in the human style of a rich businessman: a sleek-looking dark suit with a crisp white shirt and tastefully patterned tie. Only the chunky, bejeweled rings on his fingers gave away his love of sparkly things.

“And how is your father?” the Spriggan king asked as he settled himself on a tall-backed, overstuffed chair that actually looked a bit like a throne.

I blinked. “Oliver? He’s well,” I said.

I’d been calling my father by his first name since I was about ten years old. He wasn’t the warm-and-fuzzy type, and even when I was a child it had felt more natural than calling him “Dad.”

My brain chugged as I tried to work out how my father knew Sebastian and guess at how amicable—or not—their relationship was.

“You’re surprised we’re acquainted?” Sebastian asked.

“A bit, yes,” I admitted.

“Ah. Well, I’m making it a point to try to get to know all of your people.” He shot me a knowing smile as if we shared a secret, and it made me want to back away.

Okay, at least I had a clue about why he’d called me up here. I decided not to dance around it. I wanted to get back to work before this stupid visit cost me my assignment.

I gave him a tight smile. “I’ve heard some New Gargoyles have sworn oaths to you. I hope you’re not counting on my fealty. I’d hate to cause you disappointment, Your Majesty.”

Maxen shifted beside me, my directness obviously making him uneasy.

“Perhaps it might help if you understood why several of your people feel the Spriggan kingdom is their rightful home and I’m their rightful king,” Sebastian said. He crossed his legs, visibly muscular even in dress pants.

Fine, I’d bite. “What was their reason, Your Majesty?” I asked.

“The Spriggan’s hedges in Ireland house by far the largest population of nesting Old World gargoyles in Faerie. The creatures from which your own people’s characteristics were derived.” He said it as if he’d made some sort of profound pronouncement that should end any doubt in my mind about swearing fealty to him right then and there.

I snorted a laugh before I could control myself. Sebastian’s expression held, but I caught anger flashing in his eyes.

“But Your Majesty, the Old World gargoyles are to us like the great apes are to humans. Or as a housecat is to a lion of the Serengeti,” I said. “Yes, there is some connection between those creatures in your hedge and the race of New Gargoyles that spontaneously emerged at the Cataclysm, but only in a vague sense. Those creatures don’t even possess sufficient intelligence to be subjects of your kingdom. Are you really implying that I should consider them my ancestors, and because they happen to nest in your hedge I should swear allegiance to the Spriggan kingdom?”

It was beyond ridiculous. And if there were New Gargoyles who had actually bought Sebastian’s reasoning, I wanted nothing to do with them. Marisol should let them go as a favor to the Stone Order’s gene pool.

But as I took in Sebastian’s face, I realized I’d pushed too far. I’d ridiculed him in front of Maxen and the other courtiers sitting nearby. Our corner of the balcony had gone so quiet I could hear the sound of my own pulse in my head. I slid a glance at Maxen, but he refused to look at me. His jaw muscles were bunched, and the tendon on the side of his neck was tight.

I pushed my palms back and forth across the denim fabric that stretched over my thighs, mentally scrambling for some way I could smooth things a little.

Before I could come up with anything useful, movement in my periphery drew my attention upward. Just as I tilted my head back to see what it was, a small person clad in black dropped on a cord from the ceiling like a giant spider from the rafters. Metal flashed.

“Get down!” I shouted at Sebastian.

I sprang to the side, rolling across the floor toward the wall where Mort was. I snatched the blade from its scabbard, whirled, and charged at the intruder.

As I moved, I connected to Mort and activated the blood magic that made me one with my weapon. Violet-blue fire lit around my arm and surrounded the blade, extending the range of damage I could do with it.

In the second or two I’d spent to grab Mort, two more compact black figures dropped from above, each about four feet tall. All three wore masks that obscured everything but their eyes.

The first intruder hurled a throwing knife at Sebastian. One of Sebastian’s men shoved the king to the floor, both of them falling near Maxen’s feet. The knife stuck in the guard’s shoulder. Maxen had his sword in hand, and his own blue-black magic ignited. He rushed at one of the assassins.

I charged one of the others, jabbing forward at the assassin’s torso with deadly intent. He jumped to the side, agile as a cat, and my blade grazed off his ribcage, tearing fabric and drawing blood but inflicting only a superficial wound.

An agonized scream from the ground drew my attention, and a glance revealed that the knife in the guard’s shoulder was smoking. He clawed at it desperately, rolling off the king in an effort to stop the pain. His screams turned to foamy gurgles and then silenced.

Just in time, I turned to see my own opponent fling two very short knives at my chest. In less than a blink, I focused on the magic coursing through my blood and drew it to the surface of my skin, where it formed a thin, stony layer. The knives pierced my shirt but pinged off my natural armor.

The assassin tilted his head in confusion. I dropped to one knee, scooped up one of his knives, and flicked it back at him. It sank right into his heart. He clutched at it and then fell to the floor like a bag of rocks. Smoke began to rise around the blade.

The third assassin had seen his opening, with the king exposed, and was going for Sebastian. I charged forward, my arm swinging, and Mort traced an arc that was only slightly interrupted by the would-be assassin’s neck. The blade, sharpened by my magic, passed through with hardly any friction. The violet flame instantly cauterized the neck opening, neatly keeping the gore inside. I was particularly proud of that trick—beheadings without the mess.

The assassin’s head toppled across the floor and bumped against one leg of the sofa where Maxen and I had been sitting only a few seconds before.

I looked over at him and then down at the body of the remaining assassin, which was face-down and still. Blood pooled from the chest wound and wetted the dark fabric on the back, indicating Maxen’s sword had gone clear through. He tapped the head with the toe of his boot and gave me a grim nod.

I scanned the ceiling, and seeing no more attackers lurking, I released my magic. The violet flames around my arm and Mort disappeared. Aching pain bloomed across my torso where I’d activated my stone armor, and fatigue weakened my legs, but I shoved both aside.

I went to Sebastian, who had pushed up on one hip and sat staring in horror at the twisted, tortured face of his dead guard. The knife was still steaming but had started to droop as the flesh around it began to melt away under a powerful poison.

I squatted next to the king, partially blocking his view of the dead man. “Your Majesty?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”

He looked up at me, his mouth open, and then blinked several times and swallowed.

“No,” he said weakly. He cleared his throat. “No, I believe I’m unharmed.”

Maxen came over and linked elbows with the king, pulling him to his feet. Maxen winced, but not because of the effort of getting Sebastian off the ground. It was the residual pain of having used stone armor, the price we paid for such protective magic.

Sebastian pulled his jacket smooth and brushed a hand down one sleeve. “Gerald!” he called, looking around.

He peered past me and flinched. I twisted around to see Gerald, the head of Sebastian’s security detail, slumped over with a smoking knife sticking out of the middle of his back. Another of the king’s men was sprawled face-up with a blade in his chest. Only one seemed to be still alive and was just coming to after apparently having been knocked unconscious.

The house music was still pulsing, and no one seemed to have even noticed the attack.

“Stay here and guard him,” Maxen said to me. “I’m going outside to move some of the king’s guards in here. With your permission, Your Majesty?”

Maxen waited for Sebastian’s nod and then took off.

“Any idea who would want to kill you?” I asked Sebastian, still scanning for more attackers.

I glanced at the king just as he pushed his fingers through his short, fashionably spiked hair.

“You mean besides the rulers of most of the Faerie kingdoms?” he said with a humorless little bark of a laugh. He was clearly still shaken. His joke fell flat, anyway, as Sebastian wasn’t powerful enough to be the target of all of the rulers in Faerie. He was known for his posturing.

I bent and snatched the mask off the attacker that Maxen had killed. The guy’s nearly-white skin marked him Baen Sidhe, colloquially known as banshees. By his small stature and the narrow ears with pointed tips, I guessed he was also at least half dwarf. Odd combination, but not the strangest I’d ever seen in Faerie. I checked the other two and found the same, except that one was a woman.

I straightened. “Pissed off any dwarves or banshees lately?” I asked.

“Not in particular.” Sebastian went to his chair and sagged down onto it, his hands propped onto his knees. His mouth hardened, and he cast a look down at the bar below. “My men secured this place. I don’t understand how this happened.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, but that’s some nasty poison magic they used. Probably not banshee or dwarvish. Neither race is handy with potions. I’d have your investigators analyze those knives and the poison, and I bet you’ll find who was behind the attack.”

He passed a hand over his eyes. “They were very swift. If not for you and Maxen, well . . . I might not still be breathing.”

I shifted my feet uncomfortably. What he’d just said was dangerously close to “thank you.” In the Fae world, such an utterance was tricky for both the giver and the receiver, and I didn’t want that sort of vulnerability opened up between me and the Spriggan king.

To my relief, Maxen charged up the stairs with half a dozen Spriggan guards on his heels, plus the man with the salt-and-pepper beard I’d seen my mark talking to.

Four of the guards took up posts, and the other two set to work moving aside the bodies of the dead guards and assassins, hiding them behind one of the sofas.

The bearded man bowed in front of Sebastian. “Your Majesty, I don’t know how this happened.”

I figured he must be the owner of the bar.

The king flicked his hand through the air as if waving away a fly. “Assassination attempts are one of the dangers of ruling a kingdom,” Sebastian said with a self-important tone. “We’ll have a full review of your security procedures, of course.”

Sebastian’s cool outward confidence had returned full force, but I’d seen how shaken he was only moments before. He was playing it off for the bar owner, and also perhaps for his men who were nearby.

The owner looked somewhat relieved, but not completely. I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t going to help his business at all once word got out that King Sebastian had nearly been killed in Druid Circle. Or maybe the reverse would be true, and people’s morbid fascination would draw them here. Either way, an assassination attempt on a king when he was in his own territory was unusual and sure to cause some ripples through Faerie.

“I’ll get someone to help with the bodies, Your Majesty,” the owner said with a glance at the sofa that hid the carnage. He bowed low and turned to depart.

I reached out and grabbed his arm as he walked by.

“Hey,” I said, my voice low. I made sure I was turned away from the king. “I prevented a royal murder in your club, so now I want something from you.”

The man was handsome, his face almost regal, I realized once I saw him up close. Mixed race—too diluted to pick out any bloodlines with certainty, but I thought I detected a hint of Tuatha De Danann in the slant of his cheekbones and the deep set of his eyes. The Tuatha were the ancient Fae gods who had established Faerie eons ago and then disappeared over time, except for some descendants who carried traces of their blood. There was no Tuatha kingdom, and Tuatha blood carried no special magic.

He narrowed his eyes at me but didn’t ask what I wanted. That would be too open-ended a question, and one that I could too easily take advantage of. Words could be slippery, binding things in Faerie. Instead, he waited for me to state my request.

“That olive-skinned vamp you talked to earlier, the one who had the VIP table over there?” I asked, and waited for him to nod. “I need to know where I can find him.”

He started to shake his head and pull away, but I gripped his arm harder. I let my magic flow from the area around my heart, sending tendrils of stone armor creeping along the surface of my skin, up my neck, and curling in patterns over my face like mineral tattoos. It wasn’t possible to fully armor my face, but I knew the effect of the patterned designs on people who had never seen them before.

His eyes popped wide as he took it in. With my stature and in the low light of the club, he clearly hadn’t realized until that moment that I was New Gargoyle.

“I can give you the place he frequents,” he said. “He has an address in the Millennium Hotel.”

I nodded and let my magic go, and the familiar thump of pain took the place of the stone armor patterns I’d drawn across my skin. “Which side of the hedge is that on?” I asked.

“Not here in Faerie,” he said quickly. “On the Earthly side, in Las Vegas proper. It’s a new resort.”

In the Old World, there was an actual hedgerow in many of the places that marked a doorway between Faerie and the Earthly realm, which was how the terminology “hedge” originated. The Cataclysm made it possible to anchor Faerie territories to locations in what we called the New World—the Americas. Here, there was usually no physical hedge to mark the boundary between the Faerie and Earthly realms, but we still used the term “hedge” when we talked about the division between the two realms.

“Good. Any aliases?”

“He goes by Van Zant.”

I snorted. Vamps and their pretentious goth names.

I let go of his arm but gave him a stony look. “Were you aware he’s passing around VAMP3 blood?”

I could tell by the look on his face that he hadn’t known. “I’ll make sure he’s no longer allowed to patronize Druid Circle.”

“Don’t do that just yet,” I said. “If the address you give me doesn’t work out, I may have to come back here to find him.”

He looked slightly ill at the prospect of allowing Van Zant back in his club. “Okay.”

I was silently cursing the fact that cell phones didn’t work on the Faerie side of the hedge. I gave him my number anyway, which he wrote on the palm of his hand, in case he might be able to step out of Faerie to call me if Van Zant returned.

“Anything else you can tell me about Van Zant?” I asked.

The man’s brow furrowed. “I’ve heard he has a gambling problem. He likes the high-stakes poker tables at the Millennium.”

“That’s helpful. Your name?” I asked.

“Gregory.”

I nodded.

Gregory looked like he wanted to disappear, and I didn’t blame him—between the assassination attempt and what I’d just told him about VAMP3 blood being sold in his club, his day was really going to shit.

I wanted to slip out but instead forced myself to go bid a proper farewell to King Sebastian.

“You belong in the Spriggan kingdom, Petra,” the king said. “It’s where your roots are, the seat of your origins. And it would be far better for you if you come willingly. Waiting until your people decide as a group to give me their fealty will put you at a grave disadvantage in terms of where you’ll land within the kingdom.”

Irritation prickled through me. I’d literally just saved his life, and he was already threatening me. But for the moment, the threats were empty, as Marisol had no intention of subjecting the whole of the Stone Order to someone else’s rule. For once, I appreciated her obsessive drive to establish the New Gargoyles with an independent kingdom.

Maxen moved closer to us. “This isn’t the first of these attacks in Faerie,” he said. “There was a message at the Stone Order today. Something similar happened in the kingdom of the Undine early this morning.”

I frowned. The Undine were water elementals. These part-dwarf attackers were completely the wrong choice for taking on water folk. Dwarves typically feared the water. Kelpies—water horse shifters and long-time enemy of the Undine—would have been much more effective assassins against water elementals.

Strange, but I couldn’t hang around to investigate. I needed to get back to my assignment.

“I must take my leave,” I said, facing the men. “Your Majesty. Maxen.”

After gracing King Sebastian with one of my ridiculous curtsies and flipping a parting wave at Maxen, I got the hell out of Druid Circle.

It was time to head back to the Earthly realm on the other side of the hedge. I exited Druid Circle and went to a subtly-designed arch in the side of the building next door. Whispering the magic words and drawing certain sigils in the air with my finger, I stepped forward into what appeared to be solid stone. It gave way to the void of the netherwhere, the space between Faerie doorways.