“I will burn for you with fire and fury.”

When the Hunter circled above Chester’s preparing to land, I was surprised to see there wasn’t the usual boisterous crowd gathered outside the club, jostling and bribing and arguing to get in.

Fewer than fifty humans loitered near the rubble of the former club at a safe distance from the cordoned-off black hole.

There wasn’t a single Fae in sight. Normally, there were more Fae than humans, the lower castes that Ryodan wouldn’t permit into the club, trying to seduce the bored, hungry clientele denied entry with an immediate, less potent (and far less attractive!) fix.

As I slid from the Hunter’s back, I was the target for dozens of sharp, envious glares. Jealous of my “ride,” that I had such a powerful beast seemingly at my command, wondering what magical gifts it bestowed—and if it could be eaten for a high probably.

I wasn’t afraid of fifty humans. Not this close to Chester’s.

I had guns, Voice, a Hunter, and Barrons a text away. Still, I stayed near my ride, one thickly insulated glove on its icy flank. I shivered from cold. Without Unseelie flesh in me, it wasn’t nearly as comfortable to be so close to one of the icy beasts. My thighs were numb and my ass was completely frozen. I rubbed it briskly with my palm, trying to thaw it and restore sensation.

“Where are all the Fae?” I demanded, glancing at the underground entrance, surprised to find it was unguarded.

“The doors are locked,” a woman said. “Does it let you eat it?” she asked with a frighteningly bright smile, shooting a greedy look at my satanic ride.

The Hunter swung its great horned head around and snorted a stunningly precise tendril of fire at the crowd.

The woman’s hair went up in flame. She ran off screaming, clutching her head. The rest of the crowd backed warily away from me.

“The door to Chester’s is locked?” I said incredulously. No one answered me and I got a brief bizarre flash of myself as I must look from their point of view: blond Barbie as Barrons had so pithily said, with crimson-streaked hair tangled wild from the wind, coated from head to toe with a light dusting of black ice, standing next to a demonic-looking winged dragon-beast, weapons bulging in my pockets, spear strapped to my thigh, and a snub-nosed automatic I’d tossed over my shoulder as I left for no reason I’d been able to fathom. Just a bad feeling I might need more weapons than usual tonight, or maybe all that kinky, rough sex with Barrons had made me feel more like my badass self. “Chester’s never closes,” I protested. That would be like the sun not rising.

Suddenly the door in the ground rattled and shot open from below. “Ms. Lane,” Barrons growled as he stepped out. “About bloody time. Let’s go.” He closed the door then bent and traced a symbol on it, murmuring softly.

People began to hem him in, chanting, “Let us in, let us in!”

“Get the fuck out of here!” Barrons roared in Voice that staggered even me, and I felt my feet begin to move of their own volition. Not you, Ms. Lane, he shot me a look.

I stopped and stood, watching in astonishment as fifty people turned like zombies and trudged woodenly down the street. The most I’d ever managed was four with a single command.

Then I scowled at him. “One,” I snapped, “how did you do that to fifty people at once. Two, why did it work on me when I thought I was supposed to be immune to you, and three—”

“The abbey is under attack. Get on the Hunter, Ms. Lane. And read this.” He thrust a paper at me. “We didn’t understand why the club was so empty. One of the patrons brought this in. Then Jada called. The others have already gone ahead.”

He’d waited for me. That must have driven him bugfuck crazy, knowing a battle was being fought and he wasn’t there. Waiting for his girlfriend.

“You’re not my girlfriend, Ms. Lane,” he said coolly.

“You could have gone without me,” I said just as coolly.

“You could have checked your bloody texts.”

I gave him a blank look. “I didn’t get any.” I tugged my cellphone from the front pocket of my jeans. It was completely coated with a thick layer of ice. When I fly, I scoot up beneath the bony apex of the Hunter’s wings because it gives me more to hold on to, and my phone must have been pressed to the underside of the frigid crest. I tapped it against a nearby trash can to crack the ice. Sure enough, three texts messages, and the last one was pissed as hell. I made a mental note to carry it somewhere else when I flew in the future.

“You still could have gone without me.”

“I bloody fucking know that.” He cut me a seething glance.

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because, Ms. Lane, when the world goes to bloody hell, I will always be at your bloody side. Read the fucking paper. Not even Ryodan saw this one coming. Seems his ‘news’ isn’t as spot-on as it once was.”

I snatched the paper and scanned it quickly.

 

The Dublin Daily

 

August 7 AWC

STOP THE BLACK HOLES THAT

ARE DESTROYING OUR WORLD!!!

FREE PRINCE CRUCE!

Held hostage beneath ARLINGTON ABBEY is the most

POWERFUL FAE PRINCE ever created!

He is our SAVIOR!

He has the power to stop the black holes that are DEVOURING EARTH.

He ALONE possesses the magic to heal our world!

Fae power damaged it and only FAE MAGIC can SAVE it.

WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME!!!

A secret cult known as the sidhe-seers has taken him PRISONER and is holding him in a vain attempt to EXPLOIT HIS POWERS for their OWN purposes!

They have the ability to travel to other worlds and care nothing for THIS ONE.

JOIN THE CRUCEAID!

FREE PRINCE CRUCE!!!

Meet at Arlington Abbey and help us liberate our champion!

See map below!

 

“Who would print this?” I exploded.

“No bloody clue,” Barrons said tightly. “Up. Now.”

I scrambled back onto the Hunter and, as Barrons settled behind me, reached for the great beast’s vast, unfathomable mind. Can you help us fight? Call more Hunters?

We do not attend matters of Fae and man.

You’ve been flying me around.

You amuse.

Because it sensed the king in me? I wondered. I order you to help us fight.

Not even you.

Can I offer you something? If bribes were what it wanted, I’d try.

It rumbled deep inside, a chuckle of sorts. You have nothing. We have all.

Well, then just hurry! I urged it. My friends are in danger. Take us to the abbey as quickly as you can get us there!

You do not mean that. It rumbled again and I felt its mirth. You would not survive. But it flapped its enormous leathery sails, churning black ice beneath us, and pumped up and up.

We soared beneath the clouds, where the day was still bright, then through the clouds and above them, sailing higher and higher into blackness and stars and cold, cold sky, then just when I thought my lungs might explode and it was getting dangerously hard to breathe, it tucked its wings close to its body like an eagle preparing to plunge and whispered in my mind with a soft rumble, Hold, not-king.

I shoved my arms beneath its tightly wrapped wings and hugged the bony crest, clutching it, clenched my thighs and pressed my face to its frosty hide. It burned and I drew back sharply, but too late, I left a layer of my cheek on its back. “Ow!”

It suddenly went motionless, hanging in the sky like a dead weight, not moving one leathery scale. I remained just as still, bracing for whatever was about to happen.

Suddenly it rocketed forward so fast I’d have flown right off its back if it hadn’t given me warning. I felt like the Enterprise, entering warp speed.

I tucked my face low (but not too low!) to its hide, as Barrons’s arms tightened around me, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the cutting wind. I could feel the skin of my cheeks dragging back with gravitational force humans were not intended to experience without helmets or space suits.

After a moment I slitted my eyes open and watched stars trail past, like silvery party streamers.

Behind me, Barrons laughed with raw, ferocious exhilaration. I felt the same. Best. Damn. Supercar. Ever.

I sensed the Hunter prodding gently at my mind, making sure I was breathing and alive.

Best safety features, too.

We bulleted through the sky, dropping down and down until at last fields came into view, lush and fantastical from Cruce’s magic. In no time at all we were nearly to the abbey.

“Oh, God, Barrons, look at all the Fae!” Nonsifters crammed the narrow winding road to the abbey, Seelie and Unseelie alike, while more loped and slithered and crawled through meadows, splashed and lumbered across streams. There were humans, too, though not many. I suspected there may have been more but this dark, wild army had fed on them, all pretense at seduction abandoned to the hunger of battle-frenzy. “All for Cruce?” I yelled over my shoulder. “I thought the Seelie despised the dark court!”

“They’re unled,” he shouted into my ear. “The unled are always fickle.”

Once before, I’d seen Seelie and Unseelie gathered en masse. Not in clusters here and there like I’d seen mingling at Chester’s but facing off like mighty armies.

V’lane had been leading the Seelie, while Darroc and I had stood at the front of the Unseelie.

I’d felt the shuddering in the tectonic plates of our planet, even with both sides holding their enormous power in check.

Now there was no division between the courts. Seelie and Unseelie were rushing toward a single place with a single goal.

Our abbey.

To destroy it.

To free Cruce. Break out the most powerful Fae prince in all creation. And they didn’t even know he had all the power of the Sinsar Dubh at his disposal.

“Uh, Barrons, we’re in a world of shit,” I muttered.

“Same page, Ms. Lane. Same bloody word.”

“Where are Ryodan and the others?” I cried as we soared low over the battle.

Five hundred sidhe-seers were down there. But I didn’t see a single one of the Nine.

My sisters were facing thousands of Fae with more marching directly for them.

The front lawn of the abbey was a scene straight out of one of the Lord of the Rings movies. Amid towering megaliths and silvery fountains, humans battled monsters of every kind imaginable, some flying, some crawling, others stalking. Some beautiful, some hideous. There were those damned death-by-laughter fairies darting around a sidhe-seer’s head! I watched, horrified. She was still laughing as she was killed by a ghastly Unseelie with tubular fronds all over its body.

There was Jada, slicing a circle around her, the alabaster blade of the sword gleaming. But it was only one weapon and there were thousands of Fae down there, flying, slithering.

“They aren’t bloody sifters,” Barrons said and snarled. “They fucking drove. And they sure as bloody hell can’t be taking the road.”

I sometimes forgot the Nine had limitations. They seemed so all-powerful to me. If I knew them, they’d shift not far from the abbey and lope to battle smack in the middle of the Unseelie. “Well, why didn’t you call more Hunters for them?”

“This is the only one that ever comes.”

“Shit,” I cursed, leaning low, peering over the side.

I heard a low growl behind me, followed by the crunching sound of bones shifting, then the Hunter tensed beneath me and shook itself violently. I clung to the crest of its wings with all my strength.

“You are not my enemy,” Barrons roared behind me. “I’ll change and drop.”

You’ll drop and change, the Hunter snarled in my head. It arched its long neck and shot an enormous burst of flame over its shoulder, blasting Barrons right off its back and singeing the hell out of my coat and hair.

“Barrons!” I screamed as he went tumbling off the Hunter’s back, falling toward the lawn, transforming as he went.

The Hunter banked hard and began to circle back around. I stared down, watching Barrons fall. He was fully transformed by the time he hit the ground, horned, fanged, and ferocious.

He surged up, a sleek black shadow, grabbed the nearest Rhino-boy by the throat and ripped off its head with his enormous jaws.

Then his jaws opened even wider, impossibly wide, then the Barrons-beast vanished.

When he reappeared an instant later the Rhino-boy slumped dead to the ground.

Damn. And I still had no idea how he killed Fae.

The black-skinned beast exploded into battle, savagely ripping and clawing and killing, spraying guts and lifeblood everywhere, its crimson eyes glittering with feral glee. Vanishing. Reappearing.

He does not ride again, not-king. Nor do you.

The Hunter soared lower and turned its head, apparently about to dismount me the same way it had gotten rid of Barrons. I raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’ll jump, okay?” I said hastily. “Just go a little lower, I’ll jump. But try not to dump me in the middle. Get me closer to her.” I pointed to Jada.

The Hunter dropped like a rock, and some twenty feet from the ground I braced myself and dove off the damn thing. I wouldn’t hold up so well under the same blast of fire it had turned on Barrons. I lost my automatic halfway down, watched it smash into the ground. I didn’t care. It was the spear that could make a difference in this battle, and it was secure in its holster.

I tried to tuck and roll to minimize the impact, but the objects I was plummeting toward were moving and I landed smack on top of one of the red and black Unseelie guards and took it to the ground beneath me. I slammed a hand into its ridged breastplate, nulling it, then yanked out my spear and drove it into its gut.

Adrenaline was raging through me, smoothing out my edges, perfecting my reflexes. I rolled, leapt to my feet, and began methodically slashing my way through the slithering, lumbering Fae, determined to get Jada’s back. Criminy, how had she been holding them off this long?

All around me sidhe-seers were fighting Fae in a horrifically unmatched battle. We had three weapons: spear, sword, and Barrons, at least until the others of the Nine got here, and sidhe-seers were going down hard and fast.

As I spun, kicking and stabbing, I was painfully aware of the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire going off. I have a special hatred for digging bullets out of my body without Unseelie flesh in me, and I’m trying really hard to abstain. I whirled, nulled, and was about to stab when the Unseelie I was after went flying backward, knocked off its feet by a concentrated burst of bullets.

“Hey!” I snarled. “Get off my kill!”

“Sorry!” one of the new sidhe-seers, trained by Jada, snarled back as she hurled herself past me, taking a Rhino-boy off its feet. As I watched, she yanked a machete from a sheath on her back and began hacking the Unseelie into pieces. Damn. The sidhe-seers might not have weapons that killed immortals but they were pretty darned good at slicing them up, rendering them ineffective.

I felt an Unseelie behind me, spun, hand out to null, stab, move. Null. Stab. Move. It was beginning to seem the Fae were ridiculously easy to kill. I was fighting better than I ever had before. Not one of them was managing to land a blow on me, as if deflected by an invisible shield. I was astonished by my own amazing prowess, how much better I’d gotten without even practicing.

I plunged into the battle with ferocity, periodically catching a glimpse of the ebony-skinned beast that was Barrons, lunging, powerful muscles bunching, jaws wide, ripping with talons, shredding with fangs. As I worked my way toward Jada, Barrons pushed farther into the crush, and I realized he was shoving sidhe-seers from harm’s way, trying to make them see he was on their side by taking down Fae in front of them.

I began shouting to all the sidhe-seers I passed, knowing the other Nine would soon be joining us: “The black beasts with red eyes are on our side! Don’t attack them! Don’t kill the black beasts. They’re fighting for us!”

Shit. Not even Jada knew their true form. This was a liability. Although they’d definitely come back, we needed them here to fight.

As I closed in on Jada, I tried to keep an eye out for Barrons. I hated knowing he might die tonight. I suddenly realized how much he must hate knowing the same about me. At least I knew he would come back. Not so for him: I didn’t have a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I shook that thought from my head as I plunged my spear into a particularly vile Unseelie with wet, flailing tentacles and shoved and fought my way through the throng to Jada.

Then I narrowed my eyes, staring at the cuff glinting silver on my wrist. The next Unseelie I turned on, I didn’t null or stab. I just stood there and gave him ample opportunity to take a swing at me.

His fist bounced off as if it had hit an invisible shield.

I scowled. It wasn’t my amazing prowess after all.

I had the cuff of Cruce on and it was as good as V’lane had claimed it was. The Unseelie couldn’t touch me. Damn.

Still, that was sweet.

“Watch your sword,” I snapped to Jada as I moved into range. Like my spear, it could do horrible things to me. I wanted her to know exactly where I was at all times.

Her head whipped up and she looked at me, and I sucked in a breath. Oh, yes. She killed. That was what she did. Her emerald eyes were completely empty of all emotion. She was so drenched in guts and blood that her face was camouflaged and the whites of her eyes were blinding in comparison.

We stepped back-to-back, fell into perfect sync, whirling, slicing, stabbing.

“Who the bloody hell published that daily?” Jada demanded.

“No bloody clue,” I told her grimly.

“I found it on my way back from Dublin. They were already holding them off. My women are dying,” she snarled.

“I brought some…beasts…with me,” I told her over my shoulder. “I have an ally you don’t know about. They’re fighting for us. Let your sidhe-seers know that.” I described them to her.

“Where did you find them?”

“One of my times in the Silvers,” I lied. It felt good to be here, doing this, slaying with Jada. We’d done this before and I’d missed it. I felt so bloody alive fighting with her, as if I was exactly where I was supposed to be and together we could beat anything.

“You trust these allies of yours?”

“Implicitly. They can kill the Fae.”

“Dead dead?” she said incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Is Ry—Are Barrons and the others coming?”

I didn’t know what to say to that and suddenly realized we had a problem. If the beasts showed up but the Nine didn’t, she would wonder why they hadn’t come to help. “I’m not sure how many of them,” I finally said. “I know some of them are off on some kind of mission-thingie for Ryodan.” Wow. That was pathetic. Mission-thingie?

But Jada said nothing and moved away for a time, and I lost her then, as she vanished into the battle to spread the word to her women, and no doubt verify for herself these beasts I’d brought were indeed allies and indeed capable of the impossible.

I devolved into a killing machine, understanding the purity Jada and Barrons found in the act.

Here, in war, life was simple. There were good guys and bad guys. Your mission was also simple: kill the bad ones. No facade of civility required. No complex social rules. There are few moments when life is so uncomplicated and straightforward. It’s disconcertingly appealing.

Eventually I found myself near the front entrance and Jada was there, with several of the Nine in beast form, snarling around her, helping block the door to the abbey.

Ryodan and Lor were there as well, both in human skins, vanishing, reappearing, sticking close.

I snorted. Ryodan thought of everything. Some of the Nine would show their faces, and others would be “off on some mission-thingie.” Great minds think alike.

Around us, the Fae were beginning to fall back. It was one thing to march in to free a prince, but few of them were willing to sacrifice their immortality to do it. Humans could be motivated to fight to the death, protecting the future for their children, defending the old and weak. We’re capable of patriotism, sacrificing for the long-term survival of our progeny and well-being of our world.

But not the Fae. They had no future generations, cared little for others of their kind, and had a serious aversion to parting with their arrogant, self-indulgent lives.

I warily dialed my sidhe-seer senses to a distant, muted station, in no mood to be assaulted by the cacophony of so many jarring melodies.

As I suspected, there was strong discord spreading through our enemy. Some in the outer ranks were loping away, others, near the center, were fighting their way free to do the same.

This was not a focused army. They were stragglers from here and there, unled, un-united. They might have come pursuing a common goal but with no more fully formed plan of attack than frontal assault. And that assault was getting them killed. Permanently.

I sighed, knowing even if the Fae pulled out right now, darkness would soon come crashing down and some would try again. They would launch better attacks, stealthier, more focused and brutal. The news was out: the legendary Prince Cruce was trapped beneath our abbey.

A sudden explosion behind me nearly took me off my feet, and a spray of glass rained down on my back.

“Fire!” someone screamed. “The abbey’s on fire!”

My head whipped around just as another explosion rocked the abbey.