CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Tamsin clenched the talisman until it dug into her palm. She didn’t reach for Angus, because they needed to be ready to shift, to fight, in an instant. But how could they fight a being who could make the rain stop?

Lady Aisling gazed at Tiger with interest. “You again, eh? I didn’t know what to make of you when you intruded upon my home, and I still don’t. And what is this?” She shifted her gaze to Ben. “A goblin, you called him?”

“Yes,” Tamsin croaked through her dry throat. “That’s what he said. Or gnome.”

Lady Aisling studied him. “I believe he’s one of the Ghallareknoiksnlealous. But they don’t look like this.” She waved her hand in front of Ben’s face.

“He says you didn’t help save his people,” Tamsin said in a rush. She caught Angus’s warning glare, but she couldn’t stop. Her anger rose on Ben’s behalf. “He says you let them be killed off, and did nothing.”

Lady Aisling blinked in surprise. “I didn’t know. In time, I mean. There are so many wars between the various races in Faerie that one can’t keep up. I am sorry for him, if the hoch alfar destroyed his people, truly sorry. The hoch alfar so like to destroy things.”

“You could destroy them,” Tamsin said.

Lady Aisling shook her head. “No, I couldn’t. Erasing entire races is forbidden to the Tuil Erdannan. What sort of monster would do that? That would mean killing off even the little children in their cradles who know nothing. I’m glad it’s forbidden. The Tuil Erdannan need to keep their egos in check. Annoying and threatening the hoch alfar—now that, we can do. But you did not bring me to this damp and smelly place to irritate the hoch alfar. If I come to the human world, I prefer large, international cities with many restaurants, but ah well. Can’t be helped. You mentioned something about a problem?”

“My problem,” Tamsin said. “My mate and friends were drawn into it because of me. They shouldn’t die for choosing to help me.”

“Very commendable.” Lady Aisling’s gaze flicked to the motionless SUVs and police cars. “It seems many humans would like to prevent you from doing whatever it is you wish to do. Which is . . . ?”

Angus broke in. “Destroy a cache of human weapons before they get into the wrong hands. Human or Shifter.”

“I see.” Lady Aisling’s very red brows went up. “Whose are the right hands?”

“In this case, no one’s,” Angus answered.

“You’ve decided this, have you? Weapons are tricky things. They can be used to defend as well as attack. But the distinction is often beyond the reason of the people who wield them. I am pleased I have no need of them. I suppose you would like this taken care of before they reach you?” Lady Aisling glanced at the cars.

“Can they reach us?” Tamsin asked. “They’re frozen.”

“No, no. Just moving very slowly. Or rather, they are moving normally, from their perspective. I wanted time to speak to you, so I decided to remove us from the regular motion of the world, just you and Angus. But I did not seem to be able to exclude this one.” She pointed at Tiger.

Angus answered. “He’s . . . unique.”

“So is she.” Lady Aisling moved to Tamsin, who clutched the talisman as though it would keep her safe. The scent of lemon clung to Lady Aisling, along with a bite of mint. “A fox Shifter,” Lady Aisling said. “Those are rare, my dear, very rare.” She lifted a lock of Tamsin’s hair, which was nearly as red as hers.

“Like tigers,” Tamsin babbled. “I hear they’re rare.”

“Rare because they were made exclusively for Fae princes and almost died off when they were Battle Beasts. Foxes now. They weren’t made by the hoch alfar at all. They were made by the Tuil Erdannan.”

Tamsin’s lips parted in shock. Angus stared at first Tamsin, then Lady Aisling, as though trying to see the resemblance between them. Only Tiger watched, unmoved.

“Not by me personally,” Lady Aisling said with a little laugh. “By my friends long, long, long ago. I thought fox Shifters had died out, but of course, foxes are very good at hiding. They were never enslaved by the Fae—never enslaved by anyone. My friends created fox Shifters, patted themselves on their collective backs, and then forgot about them. I’m not surprised the foxes slipped into the human world, and I’m not surprised you have evaded the humans—well, until now.” She turned a warm smile on Tamsin. “Sacrificing yourself for your mate. A moving speech, my dear. But I came because I sensed you were different. Call me curious. My gardener says it will get me into trouble one day, and he is usually right, drat the man.”

Tamsin gulped, a flood of emotions beating on her for attention. Astonishment, certainly. She’d thought all Shifters had originally been creations of the Fae playing with genetic engineering and magic. Shifters were their own viable species now, but they’d begun, more or less, in a Fae laboratory. Elation—the Fae were horrible, from what she’d heard, and not being descended from their creations was a huge relief. Trepidation—were the Tuil Erdannan any better? People so powerful they created species for fun and then forgot them and moved on to their next hobby?

She sucked in air. “I’m going to have a talk with you about my ancestors,” Tamsin said, forcing the words out. “A long talk. But right now—can you help us with the weapons? Or not?”

“What? Oh, of course. I’m surprised you haven’t figured out how, but no matter.”

Lady Aisling turned from Tamsin, pausing at Ben so near. She flicked her fingers, and he stumbled forward, nearly running into her.

“Shit.”

“Good afternoon to you too,” Lady Aisling said. “Will you show me the way to these weapons? Let me guess. They’re in there.”

She waved her hand at the trailer. Beyond it, Zander got out of the truck and sprinted to them. Lady Aisling must have released him too.

Zander slowed as he reached them. “Hello again,” he said to Lady Aisling.

“Hmph.” Lady Aisling looked him up and down. “The young man who sprawled so insolently on my stairs. You are lucky I found you amusing. Well, help me up there. I don’t have all day.”

Zander blinked, then swung around and headed for the trailer’s open door.

Ben gaped after her. “Shit,” he whispered.

Lady Aisling paused a stride and looked back at him. “Do goblins, as you call yourselves, know no other words? Perhaps your friends will take pity on you and teach you.”

She turned away in a sweep of her jacket, following Zander.

Ben stared after her, his dark eyes huge. “You did it,” he said to Tamsin. “Wow. She has a presence, doesn’t she?” He sounded admiring, no longer outraged.

Ben started after her. Tamsin, swallowing hard, began to follow, but Angus pulled her back.

“You all right?” he asked.

His solid presence and his touch cut through her shock, curling warmth through her body. “Sure. I think.” Tamsin stared down at the talisman in her sweating hand, then slid it into her pocket. “It’s not every day you’re told your ancestors were made by people who can annihilate whole races.”

Angus nodded. “I caught that. She said it’s against their rules to, which means they could if they chose to break those rules.”

“Yes. Comforting.”

Angus put his arm all the way around her. “Are you really all right?”

“No.” Tamsin gave him a shaky laugh. “But I meant what I said.”

Angus didn’t bother to ask what she was talking about. He leaned down and kissed her neck, his hot breath tickling her skin. The look in his eyes when he raised his head told her everything. The mate bond they’d formed was real, and Angus felt it too.

Tamsin took Angus’s hand and walked with him to the trailer.

Inside, Zander was lifting the door that led to the weapons cache—the local men had broken Ben’s iron strap with a sledgehammer. The rifles and pistols were no longer in neat lines, having been jumbled up as the men stealing them had flung them down and fled. Tiger came in with an armload, which he’d been gathering from where the men had dropped them outside.

Lady Aisling dusted off her gloved hands, though she’d touched nothing. “Smelly.”

Tamsin scented must from the shut-up half cellar, the tang of human sweat from the men raiding the place, rust, and oil. Lady Aisling slid a very large linen handkerchief from her jacket pocket and pressed it to her nose and mouth.

“I’m not used to being around so much iron at one time,” she said apologetically. “We don’t have the anathema to it that the hoch alfar do, but it is strange.”

“So how do we dispose of these?” Angus rumbled, waving a hand at the weapons Tiger and Ben were sorting through.

“Can you melt them with magic?” Tamsin asked, staying close to Angus. “Beam them into outer space?”

Lady Aisling gave her a perplexed look. “What odd ideas you have, child. I suppose it comes from living among humans for so long. No, it’s quite simple. We will break down all parts to the components that make them up. You might not understand the words, but I mean destroy them on the molecular level. Break the bonds and disintegrate the metals into their atomic components.”

All four of the Shifters, Tiger included, and Ben, stared at her.

Lady Aisling sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. You see—”

“We understand,” Angus cut in. “Can that be done?”

“Of course,” Lady Aisling said as though he’d asked a too-simple question. “Atoms are mostly empty space. There is a huge distance between the nucleus of an atom and its electrons. The fact that anything stays together at all is rather amazing. If we tear down the weapons into their elemental components of, say, iron, copper, aluminum, and whatever else is in them, then they will fall to bits and be nothing but unusable dust.”

“Show-off,” Zander muttered and then chortled. “This I gotta see.”

“Won’t things blow up?” Tamsin asked. “When atoms are split, cities are destroyed.”

“Really?” Lady Aisling looked surprised. “Not if we are careful.”

“You keep saying we,” Tamsin said. “But we don’t have the ability to disintegrate metal. Well, at least not without special facilities and a lot of heat.”

Lady Aisling looked straight at Tamsin, all amusement gone. “You do, my dear. But perhaps you never knew this. You were made by the Tuil Erdannan, which means you are not constrained by the limitations of the hoch alfar. You are a Shifter, yes, and much like them, but you are a different variety. Like him.” She pointed at Tiger, who set the last rifle on top of the pile.

Tiger finally spoke. “I was bred by humans. They were trying to make a super Shifter.”

“Well, they succeeded,” Lady Aisling said. “I wonder if they tapped into Tuil Erdannan magic? Something to think about. And worry about a bit, yes indeed. Anyway, shall we begin? My roses aren’t going to plant themselves.”

“Shouldn’t we stand back?” Ben asked.

“No reason.” Lady Aisling put her hands on her hips. “It just takes a bit of concentration. Which means . . .”

The noise outside began with a rush. Rain drummed on the roof, and sirens split the air. The cars and SUVs roared forward, sliding in the mud, surrounding the trailer.

“Even I can only do so many things at once,” Lady Aisling said apologetically. “Ben, dear, will you hold my hat for me?”

She swept it from her head and held it out to Ben, who took it with a sort of reverence.

Tamsin stepped back, the carpet feeling tacky under her booted feet. Angus remained in place, partly shielding her from whatever was about to happen.

Lady Aisling’s hair was flame red, a more intense red than Tamsin’s, and must be very long, because the looped braids wrapped several times about her head and then hung to her shoulders. Delicate pointed ears pricked from among the braids. Tamsin resisted reaching up and touching her own ears. They were ever so slightly pointed at the tip, but she’d always thought that came from being a fox.

Lady Aisling’s eyes were a brilliant green, unlike most Fae’s, which were dark, like Ben’s. The color was brighter than any jewel and glittered in the drab room.

Outside the vehicles halted, doors opening. A man spoke through a bullhorn. “Very slowly, come outside, hands on your heads, and kneel on the ground.”

“How rude,” Lady Aisling said. “I would get very dirty.”

“Now,” the man said. “Or we will open fire.”

Tamsin twitched, anticipating bullets entering her back. Angus stepped behind her as though to shield her from the humans outside.

Tamsin ducked past him to the door before he could stop her and lifted her forefinger to the mass of police outside the trailer. “Can you all wait just one minute?” she called. “We’ll be out in a sec.”

“Tamsin,” Angus said in exasperation.

Whether Tamsin had startled the cops or they weren’t in position yet, the bullets didn’t fly, and the man with the bullhorn was momentarily mute.

“Tamsin, would you like to assist me?” Lady Aisling asked.

“How?” Tamsin turned to her in bewilderment. She didn’t know anything about breaking molecular bonds in gunmetal.

“I will teach you. Take my hand.”

Tamsin caught Ben’s expression, a warning. Lady Aisling didn’t notice, only held her hand out, somewhat impatiently, to Tamsin.

Tamsin slid her fingers around it.

“Now,” Lady Aisling said.

And Tamsin could see. Everything. What it was made up of, bone and muscle, metal and wallboard, iron and steel. The lattice structure of every single thing imprinted itself on her mind, showing her the world as a series of geometric shapes, from cubes to tetrahedrons to spheres, like the rain. Even the raindrops outside the door coalesced into crystal lattices.

Lady Aisling herself was a frame filled with pure power. The red-haired woman in gardening clothes was not her, Tamsin suddenly understood, but the image she projected.

Everyone in the room appeared like that. Ben’s human form was transposed over something huge and dark, bigger than Tiger or Zander, its essence stuffed down into Ben’s shorter frame. It was ugly, monstrous, but at the same time, Ben’s compassion and sense of fun emanated from it.

Zander shared his human space with a giant polar bear, bear’s and human’s dark eyes glistening as they focused on her.

This must be how Shifters could shift, Tamsin realized with newfound clarity. They were two-natured, both forms taking up the same space. Her own body was transposed with that of a red furred fox with slender dark legs. Shifters simply became more of one than the other when they chose, she abruptly understood. Anything in the way of that space, like clothes, got torn apart.

Tiger was the oddest, as there wasn’t much difference between his human and tiger forms, which were occupying almost the exact the same space. No wonder he shifted so easily—his two natures molded and flowed into each other without impediment.

And Angus . . .

He was a black wolf through and through, his human shape and wolf very close in stature. Dark fur rippled as he moved, his gray eyes narrowing identically in both forms, which made Tamsin want to laugh.

Angus also contained a flame deep in his chest that burned blue white. It matched the glow that shone from within Tamsin herself, and then she saw the silver threads that stretched between them.

“I didn’t realize.” Tamsin touched the strands, her voice dropping to a whisper. “The mate bond is a real, physical thing. Not just a metaphor for Shifters who fall in love.”

Tiger nodded, gazing straight at the shimmering silver threads as though he saw them too. So did Ben. Zander, who obviously couldn’t, frowned.

Tamsin put her hand on Angus’s chest, right over the glow. It wasn’t hot, but soothing somehow. “Mate of my heart,” she said, a tremble in the words.

Angus covered her hand with his and then leaned to her and kissed her lips. “Mate of my heart,” he said in a gentle rumble. “We’re about to be arrested.”

Tamsin grinned at him, kissed him one more time, and turned back to Lady Aisling. “Let’s do this.”

Lady Aisling gave her an it’s-about-time look, raised Tamsin’s hand in hers, and gazed down at the weapons.

She didn’t say a word, didn’t chant, didn’t sing. A jolt went through Tamsin as Lady Aisling simply willed the stiff cubic forms and polyhedrons of the bonded elements in the weapons to revert to their natural state.

Whatever heating, cooling, pouring, or molding had been done to make the guns and the ammunition now came undone. The weapons radiated heat, metal protesting being broken apart, the objects creaking and groaning as they struggled to stay together.

Then they weren’t weapons anymore—guns, rifles, the strange avocado shape of the grenades—but parts, shapes, pieces held together with pins, rivets, or the melting of metals. They all shook apart, crumbling, dissolving.

The many carbon-bonded substances that made up the deadly explosives came apart the most reluctantly, but break down they did, their long chains of bonds clinking like real chains as they became carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. The gases floated away to be absorbed into the air while the rest fell into a carbonate mush.

In a matter of seconds, Gavan’s treasured hoard of weapons were nothing but a formless slag covered with dust. The slag itself began to break down, mixing with the dust until a layer of uniform gray about a foot thick coated the space under the trailer.

A puff of this dust wafted up on the breeze through cracks in the floor, and floated away.

Zander sneezed. “Huh,” he said, peering into the hole. “Anyone have a vacuum?”

Lady Aisling released Tamsin’s hand. The true outlines of everything around Tamsin blurred and returned to what she usually saw. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she willed herself hard enough, she’d be able to again see what Lady Aisling had shown her.

“That is a gift I will give you, my dear,” Lady Aisling said. “The ability to see, and to understand. You have it,” she said to Ben. “Somewhat.”

Tamsin thought she understood what Lady Aisling meant. Ben could meld his true form into anything, including a mimicry of his surroundings. “That is how you make yourself unseen,” Tamsin said to him. “Wonder if I could do that.”

“You already do,” Lady Aisling said. “You might think you have escaped detection because you are clever, but it is mostly to do with the abilities the Tuil Erdannan bestowed on your kind. Use them wisely, my dear.”

Tamsin shook her head. “It didn’t help me when I was running through the woods trying to get away from Angus. He caught me without a problem.”

Lady Aisling patted her cheek. “Because he’s your mate, dear. Now, off you go, and explain things to your human guardsmen. I will give you another gift, Tamsin, because I like you. You have the power, like Ben, to not be noticed and to be quickly forgotten. I sense one man out there is determined to capture or kill you, and I would not like that. You need to practice to fully use your abilities, so I will give you a boost. Now, I really must be going. My gardener is not made of patience, and he is correct—we have a very small planting window. Good-bye, Shifters.” She glanced at Ben, a frown puckering her brows as she took her hat from him. “I have a daughter about your age. Perhaps . . .” She shook her head. “No, never mind.”

Lady Aisling turned her back on them, walked to the corner of the trailer where the gloom on this rainy afternoon was deepest, and vanished.

“Perhaps,” Ben repeated. “Perhaps what?”

“Sounds like she’s trying to fix you up on a blind date,” Zander said in his booming voice. “Don’t go for it. Never works out.”

“Hey, bear-man, I know how you met your mate, so you don’t qualify to comment,” Ben said. “Shall we, people?”

Angus stepped in front of Tamsin and gave her his fierce glare. “You stay behind me, no matter what happens. Understand? Behind me. If it comes to a fight, you let Ben take you out of here.”

Tamsin nuzzled his shoulder. “I like it when you’re all growly and my alpha mate. I have a feeling we won’t have a problem getting away though.”

The police had their pistols trained on the trailer, but they had not commenced firing as threatened. Ben walked out first, not because Angus let him, but because he simply slipped by.

“Evening, officers,” he said in his laid-back, friends-with-everyone voice. “What can we do for you?”