CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“They told you no,” I said to Imogen as she returned.

As I rose from the floor, she flung her arm out, pointing at me. Down I went, my legs giving out, pain ripping through my back as she undid my cure.

I took a deep breath, trying not to panic, as a voice in my head screamed for me not to antagonize her. To remember she could do this.

Yes, she could. And if she did? That was my choice. This was what I’d offered in trade. I’d meant it. I would sacrifice my cure before I’d sacrifice Ricky or Gabriel.

As for antagonizing her, I had to silence the primal fear that screamed at me to stop. I had to antagonize her. Push, push, and push some more, no matter how far that took me. Be prepared for it to take me all the way.

That’s what the ghost had counseled, if not in those exact words. He’d warned that this was a battle I could not physically win. I was the puny human against the ancient dragon. Whatever meager powers I possessed, they weren’t going to help me here.

One way to win.

A million ways to die trying.

Not the best odds, but I’d never been all that good at math.

I sat there, my teeth gritted against the pain until I could speak, and then I said, “You tried to set them against one another. Gave them the chance to take out the competition and win the fair maiden. Well, actually, you offered the chance to survive themselves, but the other version sounds much more romantic.”

She glanced toward the stairs, as if expecting to see an ally who’d turned on her.

“No one told me your plan,” I said. “It’s the obvious one. That’s the inherent weakness in triangles. You only need to get one side to buckle, and the whole thing collapses. But it didn’t, did it? So now you’re taking me up on my own offer. Withdrawing my cure.”

A flick of her hand and feeling returned to my legs, the pain in my back ebbing.

“Thanks.” I got to my feet. “That’ll make this part easier.”

I walked toward the belfry balcony. Part of the railing had been ripped away. I touched the broken and jagged edges.

“Did you see this?” I said. “It should have reminded you not to bother going after Gabriel. Tristan already tried that. He was working with you, right? Tristan. Like Walter and Jack.”

“No one works with—”

“Bad turn of phrase. They were your lackeys, though they may have thought themselves partners. In Tristan’s case, he probably didn’t even realize who he was working with. I bet you impersonated some fae confederate. A lackey of his own.”

Her lips rose in a faint smile. “Tristan was a fool. As arrogant a fae as any. At least Walter had some sense of his true place. Not surprising, given how firmly Ida kept him in it.”

A board creaked deep in the building, and I turned, but the sluagh said, “No, that’s not Walter. Did you fail to notice the past tense to my phrasing? He served his purpose.” The sluagh stepped toward me. “You’ve made your point about Gabriel. He rescued Ricky at that balcony, when he could have let him fall. I thought he might have grown a spine since then. Realized exactly how annoying it was, always having Ricky buzzing about.”

“I’m not standing over here to rub your face in your mistake. I’m admitting that my aunt was right. Well, my great-great-aunt. I’ve seen her here in the asylum. Or I thought I did. Was that her? Or you, playing mind games? Doesn’t matter. Either way, she was right.”

I stepped closer to the edge of the broken balcony. “There’s only one way out of this. That’s all there’s ever been. One way out. One way to stop being a pawn. To take control of my life. Or my death, as the case may be.”

I jumped. I didn’t hesitate, and that wasn’t conviction so much as gut-wrenching terror. I jumped before I could fully process what I was doing.

I dropped, and it was like falling off the bridge, where the moment I hit free fall, I stopped thinking, Oh my God, I’m plummeting to my doom. There was a split second of something like clarity. Yep, I’m falling. Should probably be concerned. Deathly concerned, ha-ha. But I wasn’t.

The sluagh let out a shriek, like a human scream, the sort that should have been coming from my throat. A scream of fear. Then a snarl of rage that set the very air vibrating. A swarm of melltithiwyd slammed into me, shrieking themselves, as if enraged by being called to do something other than rend me limb from limb.

They pecked, and they clawed, but they lifted me, too, still attacking, unable to keep from venting their frustration as they deposited me in the belfry.

“Huh,” I said. “That didn’t end the way I expected.”

Which was, of course, a lie. Yet if one is going to threaten self-annihilation for a cause, one has to actually seem willing to do it.

I got to my feet, swatting off the last few melltithiwyd, who couldn’t resist one final peck. Then I strode to the balcony.

“If at first you don’t succeed—”

My legs buckled, and I pitched to the floor, arms flying out barely in time to catch myself. That now-familiar pain twisted through me, and I closed my eyes, pushing it back and reminding myself it was temporary—the pain, that is. The reversal I did need to accept—that I might survive this but not actually walk away from it. The pain was just my body dealing with the renewed trauma, which would ease, leaving me with the rest. I could live with the rest. People did. I could. I’d have to, wouldn’t I? The alternative was…

Well, the alternative was exactly what I needed to attempt, yet again. I dragged myself along the floor, muscle memory returning, back to those infant days when I’d done exactly this.

“Do you really think that will help?” the sluagh spat.

“I don’t see how it can’t. If I’m removed from play, you three groups have nothing to fight over.”

“If you do this, Eden, we will take revenge. You know we will. We’ll take your soul. Make you one of them.” She swatted a melltithiwyd, still fluttering about. Hit it so hard it exploded in a spray of black blood.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, still dragging myself. “I’m not marked, and I’ve done nothing to deserve the punishment. I haven’t taken part in anything that deserves it. I haven’t been found guilty of anything that deserves it. So I won’t be joining your flock.”

“Then they will. Your lovers. I’ll kill them and take their souls.”

“Again, same issue. There isn’t even a loophole you can exploit with us. We might not be the nicest people around, but we’ve done nothing that can make us one of the unforgiven.”

I moved up onto the balcony, wiggling across it.

She strode into my path. “I can still kill them.”

“For revenge? Sure, but once you do, the fae and the Hunt will exact their revenge. They’ll join forces to do whatever they can to you, and maybe it won’t be much, but will it be worth the few moments of vengeance against me? A dead woman, who’ll never know what you’ve done?”

“Do you really think I’ll let you jump?”

I looked up at her, towering over me. “Does it matter? I can find a way to do it. You have no power over me. Take my cure. Take my Arawn. Take my Gwynn. That only means I would never, ever stop trying to do this, and that you will be left with nothing.”

“She’s right,” said a voice as steps crossed the belfry floor. “She’s won, heb edifeirwch. In giving up, she wins. That’s the hardest thing to do, but it’s the one thing you can’t fight.”

Ida stepped into the moonlight.

“So you’re suggesting we cut our losses?” the sluagh said.

“No,” Ida said. “I’m insisting on it.”

The sluagh laughed. Ida’s aged form disappeared, as she struck the sluagh in a flash of light that doubled me over, hands to my eyes. I heard them fighting, and I tried to get to them, pulling myself along, blinded, using the snarls and yowls and curses of their battle to find them.

As I moved, I caught pulses of light, felt the air rippling, smelled a stink as fetid as the grave. But I saw nothing. Then the thumps and grunts of battle stopped for a moment, and the sluagh said, “You know you can’t survive this fight, old one.”

“True, but neither can you.”

More sounds of battle, and as the air vibrated anew, I felt the beating of melltithiwyd wings, and I pulled myself along faster, swatting and grabbing at the ones that passed, trying to fling them away from Ida, but soon I could see enough to realize the melltithiwyd were circling. Not attacking. Just circling.

The thumps of battle stopped, and I squinted hard against the light until I could make out two figures on the floor.

“Do you want to live?” Ida said.

The sluagh snarled.

“I have you,” Ida said. “I can destroy you. I will destroy you. But I can set you free, too. Just do the same for her. For Matilda. For Olivia. Return her cure.”

More snarling, the sound not even vaguely human now, and when I drew up alongside them, the thing that had been Imogen Seale had blackened and twisted, not unlike the corpses pulled from the burning house.

Ida had her hands around the sluagh’s neck, and light pulsed from her fingers, each flash weakening the sluagh.

“Fix her,” Ida said.

One black and wizened arm rose and then fell, and the pain in my back evaporated. I rose, tentatively, my vision still blurred.

“I suppose you want me to promise to leave her alone, too,” the sluagh said, its voice thick, garbled.

“No, that won’t be necessary.” Ida began whispering under her breath, her hands still around the sluagh’s neck.

The creature began to fight, wildly, rasping, “You promised!”

“I’m fae,” Ida said. “We lie.”

Ida lit up, her entire body, a live wire that whipped through the air, her hands squeezing the sluagh’s neck as it screamed and the melltithiwyd screamed, and I dove out of the way of that lashing rope of energy, feeling it ignite the very air.

The melltithiwyd flapped, frantic, and the sluagh screamed, thrashing itself into a frenzy of shadow, the stench of the long-dead filling the air. The sluagh bucked up under Ida’s hands. And then it exploded in sizzling ash.

I ran over to Ida. She crouched on all fours, light pulsing under her translucent skin, the light beginning to fade as she panted for breath, dark hair hanging over her face.

I pushed her hair gently aside and said, “Tell me what I can do.”

“There’s nothing to be done. She was right. This is the price.” Ida lifted her eyes to mine, bright, impossibly violet eyes. “Thank you.”

I choked on a half laugh, half sob. “I didn’t do anything except get my ass rescued.”

Her hand closed around mine, that energy still pulsing. “You did everything,” she said. “You pissed it off.”

“That’s not exactly—”

“You weakened it. I’d never have been able to kill it otherwise. You won. You just needed a fae to make the killing blow. Before I pass, though, I need to ask you for something.”

“What?”

She gripped my hand tighter. “Don’t turn your back on the fae.”

I smiled, my eyes welling up. “Can’t stop lobbying for them even now.”

“Especially now.”

I leaned down and whispered in her ear, and she smiled as her light faded. Then she fell to the floor.

Something struck the floor beside me. I jumped to see a melltithiwyd drop. Another and another, and as they fell, I heard their voices, the trapped souls whispering as they winged past, invisible now, invisible and free, their bodies littering the floor, where I knew they would finally stay, rising no more.

I was crouched there, gripping Ida’s hand, blinking back tears, when claws sounded on the steps. I jumped up, thinking, Shit, it’s not over.

Lloergan burst through the doorway with another cŵn behind her, both of them bloodied from battle. Brenin and Ioan followed, other Huntsmen behind them, rushing in and stopping short as they saw Ida on the floor, atop that pile of ashes, surrounded by the dead melltithiwyd.

“Is that…the sluagh?” Ioan said, gaze on the ash.

“It was,” I said. “Now we need to find Gabriel and Ricky.”

“Done,” said a whispery voice, so weak it was barely audible.

Helia appeared in the doorway, supported by Alexios. Her skin was bark, fingers tapering to twigs.

“We found them,” Alexios said. “She insisted.”

He lifted Helia in his arms, ignoring her weak protests and Meic’s insistence that the Huntsmen could carry his mate. “She’s mine. I have her. Now let’s get the others. We don’t have much time, and we have a favor to ask, before it’s too late.”