Then I’d taken him on a sightseeing tour and forced him to confront what was happening to his city, for the dual purposes of enlisting his aid in tracking the Book and getting him off my ass. After that, we’d spoken only whenever he had a tip about the Book’s location, and very curtly at that, until the day he picked me up off the street again and shocked me by asking me to make him my special “tea” one more time. I hadn’t seen that coming. I’d expected him to close his eyes and mind to the impossible-to-explain, like most people do. He had surprised me.
I eyed him speculatively. When his men paused between rounds, I said, “Are you still eating Unseelie?” Or was he just going after the ones he could see?
Dani made a choking sound. “Eating Unseelie? Eating it? Are you fecking kidding me? It’s goopy, and some of ‘em ooze green stuff and they have … like … pus-filled things in ‘em! Ugh. Just fecking ugh!” She stuck her tongue out and shook her head violently. “Ugh!” she exploded again.
I shrugged. “Long story. Tell you later.”
“Need-to-know basis. Don’t.” She made a retching sound.
“You get used to it,” Jayne told her. To me, he said, “I’ve been eating it since the day I asked you to feed it to me.”
“You never came back for more.”
“And be dependent on you? What if you weren’t around when I needed it?” He snorted. “I never let it wear off, because if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to see them to kill them to get more. Vicious cycle. Had the wife prepare it for breakfast every day. Now with the lot of them showing themselves, it’s not the problem it once was. My men eat it. Wife feeds it to our kids in sandwiches. Fire!”
The men resumed shooting. Screams of fury filled the night sky.
The noise was deafening. When it finally stopped, I snapped, “What are you doing? You can’t kill them! You’re just pissing them off!” I could feel their anger—dark, deep, ancient. I could feel more than that, too: a cunning patience born of eternity, the unflappable certainty that they would outlive this nuisance in the streets below that dared offend. We were nothing. We were dust already, death waiting to happen. They were outraged that we had the audacity to even gaze upon them without being on our knees, worshipping, praying to them, begging for their permission to breathe.
I learned a few months ago that telepathy with Hunters goes both ways, at least for me. They can get in my head, but I can get in theirs, too. And they don’t like that one bit. Even now I could feel them both pressing at me, trying to decide what I was that made me … different. Guess I wasn’t as notoriously well known among Unseelie as I’d expected after my abduction by the LM and his Unseelie Princes.
“Good!” Jayne said. “Because they’re pissing me off. They’re in my city, and I’ll not be tolerating it. They think I’ll be making it easy for them to hover over my streets? Spy on us? Track down our survivors? We’re showing them otherwise, aren’t we, now? They’re not taking one fecking more of mine!”
He turned back to his group of fifty or so crisply uniformed and helmeted men and issued a quiet command. Four of them broke off, moved down the street, and began setting a massive gun on a tripod. Most of his men were armed with dated-looking semiautomatics, a few with tommy guns—the only ones that seemed to be having any impact on the Hunters. When Jayne shouted “Fire” again, they raised their guns in tight unison and sprayed bullets at two of the Unseelie’s most fearsome.
A smile tugged at my lips.
Jayne was deliberately provoking the Hunters.
Pissing them off because they’d pissed him off.
My smile grew. When I’d reluctantly fed this man Unseelie, I’d never have foreseen this moment. How perfect. How right. We needed him, here in the streets, seeing that those who survived continued to do so. This man would never stop serving his city and his people, even though his pay had been terminated months ago. He was police/protector to the core.
Delighted by the serendipity of it all, I laughed.
Jayne glanced at me sharply, and for a moment his grim expression was tinged by a smile. The admiration must have shown in my eyes, because he said, “It’s what we do, Ms. Lane. We’re the Garda.”
“Feck the Garda,” one of his men shouted. “We’re the Guardians! A new force for a new world!”
“Hear, hear!” the men cried.
I nodded appreciatively. The Guardians. I liked that. “It’s good to see you, too, Jayne,” I murmured. “Especially like this.” What an unexpected boon. The Hunters were pushing at me more insistently now. I sent the only message necessary upward and didn’t need to use one ounce of telepathy to do it.
I raised my spear, shook it threateningly. It shimmered alabaster in the light from my MacHalo. Following suit, Dani thrust her sword into the air.
The Hunters hissed and reared back with such sudden violence that the vortex caused by the flapping of their great dark wings sucked the litter on the streets into the air and lifted the lids off trash cans. Bits of debris stung my face and hands. Lids clanged into the brick buildings, bouncing from wall to wall.
We will hunt you until the end of time, sidhe-seer. We will eradicate your line.
I was pretty sure it already had been, except for me, but couldn’t have replied if I’d wanted to. I was on my knees, clutching my head. It was an awkward feat, wearing a MacHalo and holding a spear.