Biting Cold

chapter TWENTY

THE FAIRY TALE

We hurried into clothes and ran down the stairs. Cops in black shirts and cargo pants with yellow SPECIAL UNIT designations on their backs were tearing through the first floor of the House. The yard was littered with paper and other objects, as the cops had already overturned furniture and flipped open drawers, as if the secrets of the city’s sups were hidden away in a notebook in a foyer drawer.

The leader appeared to be a woman in a black pantsuit. She was tall and slender, with dark skin and darker hair pulled into a bun so tight it stretched the corners of her eyes. She might have been attractive if her face hadn’t been pinched into an “Aha, I caught you!” expression.

“Lieutenant Tamara Hays,” she said, flipping out a wallet-style badge for Ethan’s inspection and then shoving it back into her pocket.

“We have reason to believe you are harboring a fugitive,” she said. “Mayor Seth Tate. He’s wanted in connection with a series of murders.”

The city might have known supernaturals were out of the closet, but they really had no clue what was going on behind the scenes.

“Mayor Tate is not here,” Ethan said, and I hoped he was right and Juliet had gotten Seth out in time. I doubted the cops would check the skies to see if a white-winged Seth Tate was flying by overhead. On the other hand, they had seen Dominic.

Hays gestured toward one of her cops, who passed a couple of folded sheets of paper to Ethan. He looked them over, then handed them to Malik. “Call Fitzhugh and Meyers,” he said. I assumed they were our attorneys. Hays blanched at the name, so the firm must have meant something to her.

“High-profile lawyers won’t help you here, Mr. Sullivan. We have the authority to search the premises.”

Ethan held out a hand. “Then do so.”

There were probably a dozen cops in all. While suited Cadogan vampires looked on, they stormed up the stairs, eager to find evidence that would implicate us all, whatever that might have been.

“Keep the vampires calm,” Ethan told Luc. “Have the guards get as many as possible onto the first floor in the event we need to make an exit. Tell them not to lock their bedroom doors—there’s no point in giving them an excuse to break the hardware, too.”

Ethan stood beside the open door, hands on his hips, watching as strangers ripped apart his home and terrorized his family. But his gaze was calculating, recording each wrong move they made, no doubt for recollection to the House’s attorneys later on.

One way or the other, the city would pay for this.

Magic erupted in nervous bursts as vampires began to funnel toward the first floor. I pasted on a smile and directed them into the front room.

“Everything’s under control,” I said, watching to ensure they were settled and wouldn’t—given the rising tensions—make everything worse.

An hour later, Lieutenant Hays came storming out the front door.

Ethan followed her but stopped on the threshold. “As I was saying, my attorney looks forward to your call and your explanation about your apparent lack of probable cause.”

“This isn’t over,” Hays said. “We know you’re behind this, and one way or the other, we’ll prove it.”

“ ‘We,’ as in Mayor Kowalcyzk’s misguided administration, or ‘we,’ as in you and whoever else in your office believes harassing citizens is the way to a promotion?”

She growled. “Just watch yourself,” she said, then marched down the sidewalk again, her cabal of officers behind her.

We all released a collective breath.

“It seems we have made another enemy,” Ethan dryly said.

“We’ll add her to the list,” Malik said, stepping behind Ethan. “But first, let’s get this place cleaned up.”

I volunteered to help clean up the yard, raking bits of the hacked-away shrubbery into piles and moving furniture back into the House again. It wasn’t glamorous work, and the night air was chilly, but the manual labor was a nice change from the usual. I could lose myself in the rhythm of the work, instead of fretting over the problems I couldn’t solve.

I’d just raked up the final pile of branches when one of the fairies at the gate approached. I stopped working but kept a hand on my rake just in case.

“What do you want?”

His gaze was narrowed, his expression fierce. “Come with me.”

I gave him an Ethan-esque eyebrow arching. “You may ask me, and I will accept or decline. But you do not dictate where I do or do not go.”

His lip curled. “She wishes to see you again.”

Claudia wanted to talk to me? “Why?”

“She does not share her motivations with us,” he said. “Nevertheless, we understand there has been a falling out of sorts.”

“Between her and Dominic?”

He nodded. “You will see her. I believe you will find it…enlightening.”

He gestured toward a black SUV that pulled up to the curb in front of the House. Two fairies already filled the front seats. It was odd to see a mercenary fairy driving a car, probably because I imagined them in different times, perhaps standing in an ancient keep, bow and arrows at the ready.

“I know where she lives. I can drive myself.”

“She is not there.”

“What? I thought she couldn’t leave the tower.”

“She cannot—not without cost,” he said. “She wanted fresh air and believed the matter worth the risk.”

I looked back at him. “What’s your name?”

He looked confused. “My name?”

“You want me to go with you. I’d like to know your name.”

He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “My name is Aeren.”

“I’m Merit.”

“The car, please, Merit.”

But I shook my head. I’d well learned my lesson about running off alone with supernaturals. “I appreciate your invitation, but you have your procedures, and I have mine. Give me a moment?”

He didn’t look happy about the request, but he acceded. I ran back to the House but found Ethan’s office empty. Malik, however, was in his, straightening files disturbed by the police. He looked up when I darkened his door. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Claudia, the fairy queen, wants to talk to me about Dominic. Apparently they had a falling out. I think I need to go. There’s a connection between her and Tate that I need to figure out, and they aren’t going to wait around.”

“As per usual, this could be a trap,” he said.

“Par for the course,” I agreed. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

“Your instinct says to follow this through?”

I appreciated the question. “It does. But let everyone know. You can plan a rescue mission if necessary.”

“You have your phone?”

I assured him I did. My due diligence addressed, I ran back to the car again and cast a final glance at the House behind me.

The car smelled of flowers and grass, and I wondered if Claudia had ridden in it. We didn’t drive toward the park, but toward the lake. The driver steered the car into a public parking lot, and the man in the passenger seat hopped out of the car and opened my door.

“Take that path,” he said, pointing to a sidewalk that led closer to the lake. “She awaits you there. Alone.”

Claudia was waiting for me, and without guards. Dangerous or not, this certainly bore investigating.

I walked closer to the lake, huddling into my jacket as the wind picked up, icier as I neared the water. The lake was bounded by a long sidewalk. It was usually filled with runners and bikers on pleasant days. But tonight, in the dark and chill, it was empty. A lone figure stood in one of the low stone circles that offered seating along the path.

It was Claudia, in a long brocade dress with pointed sleeves, and a voluminous velvet cape long enough to pool on the ground. The hem was dirty, and the hood was pulled over her head, but tendrils of strawberry blond escaped.

“You wanted to meet me?” I asked, stepping inside the circle as a hundred Irish and Scots women might have done in older days to seek an audience with the fairy queen.

She lowered her hood, her hair gleaming in the moonlight. “It is time to tell the truth,” she said.

I thanked God my instincts had been right.

“He was strong,” she said, and I assumed she meant Dominic. “A messenger. A man of right and justice and willpower. I was a queen, with legions at my command. The union between us was powerful. It was righteous.”

“You were in love?”

“Fae care not for love,” she defensively said. “We understand desire.” Her expression darkened. “We are not cowards, but nor do we involve ourselves in the adjudication of others. We are brave, but we do not fight battles for the sake of the fight. Dominic began killing more often. Fighting more often. Humans were angered. The magicians believed they could simply lock the messengers away. The messengers, of course, had no desire to be confined for eternity.”

“So what happened?”

“We had not spoken in many moons, but he came to me one night. We shared our bodies and he asked for a boon. He did not trust the magic makers, and he feared he and the others weren’t strong enough to avoid their magic.”

“He wanted you to keep him out. To protect him from being sent into the Maleficium.”

She nodded. “This I would do for him, although he was not fae.”

I was so close; I could feel it. “How did you help him?”

“I offered him the only boon I had to give. We cannot make magic; it is part of us. We are beings of magic that connects us to this world and the next. You know he is a twin?”

I nodded. “Seth and Dominic. The messenger of peace and the messenger of justice.”

“In your parlance, yes. They were conceived into this world as one but split apart from each other at birth. He believed, he hoped, that he might make use of that bond again. That magic, if powerful enough, could reconnect him to the brother of his birth and bind him to this world instead of the Maleficium.”

A memory sharpened into focus—a memory of Celina and Ethan in a park beside the lake, Celina insisting things were changing in Chicago. That was before Mallory had begun her quest to reunite good and evil magic. She’d said the bonds were breaking between angels and demons.

She’d been ahead of her time, but she’d been right.

“And you offered to help him rebond to Seth?”

“I offered, and I helped. There was a mage who believed in his cause. His name was Endayel. The only magic I could barter was that which connected me to the green land, but Endayel took it and used it to save Dominic, to rebind him to his brother so that he might have a chance to live again. And so I was relegated to my tower, apart from time, apart from green meadows, apart from the immeasurable sky.”

“A prison,” I muttered. “Did other messengers try the same method?”

“I know not, but messengers were powerful things; I doubt they went willingly into confinement.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“At the break of day, I summoned him to the tower. Centuries have passed since last I have seen his face, or him mine. He is so handsome. So powerful. Even his wings—defiled as they are—sway me not. I offered my body to him.” She looked back at me, her expression fierce, and magic lifted. “I gave him everything. And now, finally, he has escaped his bondage, and how has he repaid my boon? He has rejected my sacrifice. He has rejected me.”

She may have been a centuries-old fairy queen, but the despondence on her face was the same as that of any other woman who’d been rejected. No matter the species, human or supernatural, we all had emotions in common.

“How do we stop him?”

Her expression went fierce, and I imagined her a modern-day Boadicea, leading her troops into war. “You control the terms of the battle. It is the only way to fight his ilk.”

“How do I do that?”

“Summon him. Each demon has a sigil—a symbol—a secret name assigned to him. If you draw his sigil correctly, Dominic must appear.” She reached into the pocket of her cape and pulled something out, then handed it to me.

It was a circular disk of wood about two inches across. A symbol had been burned into it—a triangle containing smaller figures. “This is his sigil?”

She nodded. “His brother will know how to use it for the summoning. When he appears, you’ll only need a sword.”

I definitely had one of those. I tucked the sigil into my pocket. “Thank you, Claudia.”

She nodded and took a step forward but nearly stumbled. I reached out to grab her arm before she could fall and caught a whisper of her flowery perfume. But beneath it, a subtle smell, cloyingly sweet. Decay, I thought. She was dying even as she stood here because she’d left her lair.

That’s why she wanted to meet me here. She wanted me to know—to understand—what she’d given up for him. The entire world outside, all for the chance that he might survive the making of the Maleficium and escape his bonds.

He had, and although that victory could be laid entirely at Claudia’s feet, he’d rejected her.

“I will see him punished,” I said, using words she might have. “I will see your boon collected.”

“So it is done,” she said, walking to one of the stone ridges and taking a seat, the fabric of her dress and cape spreading out around her, the moon on the rise behind her.

I walked silently back to the car, and the fairies drove me silently back to the House again.

As soon as the door opened, I dropped to the ground and ran into the House. I found Ethan and Malik in Ethan’s office.

He jumped up as soon as I entered. “Thank God.”

“I’m fine. They were telling the truth, and I think I know how to stop Dominic.”

Eyes wide, Ethan sat down again. “I’m listening.”

I made him wait until Seth, Luc, and Paige had joined us in person, and Jeff and Catcher had joined us on the phone. If we were going to discuss battle plans, we needed the entire team.

Everyone was too nervous to sit, so they stood around Ethan’s desk, awaiting the rest of the fairy tale. I sat on the edge of his desk, and I wove my tale.

“Dominic and Claudia, the fairy queen, had an affair. Things went south when he got violent, but that wasn’t enough to shake her affection. When he found out what the sorcerers were trying to do, he went to Claudia for help.” I looked at Seth. “Claudia realized Dominic could use his bond with you to keep him in the world. So Claudia used her limited power—her connection to the fairy world—to power the spell that linked Dominic and Seth back together.”

“That’s why she can’t leave her tower,” Ethan said.

I nodded. “And Seth was the anchor that kept Dominic out of the Maleficium. That’s why it hurt. He was, quite literally, ripped away.”

“It makes a kind of perverse sense,” Luc said. “You’d been twins before. It probably wasn’t difficult to reimagine the magic that made you twins again.”

“Did you feel anything when it happened?” Paige asked. “When the Maleficium was completed and Dominic would have tried to rebond himself?”

“There was pain,” Seth admitted. “Weakness. But we all thought that was the result of the separation of magic. Of good and evil. That division was artificial, and all supernatural beings felt the sting.”

“Dominic undoubtedly wanted to lie low,” I said. “If he popped up too often or tried to control you outright, you’d have known what was up.”

Seth nodded. “And I would have immediately found a sorcerer to rip him out again and force him into the Maleficium.”

“And that would have put Dominic back at square one,” I said. “He had no incentive to make himself known.” It also explained why Dominic was so eager to let Mallory do her thing. She was his first real chance in centuries to get out.

“But Dominic is the only one who split when the book was finally triggered. Why only him?” Paige asked. “Surely others tried the same thing. Why didn’t the Maleficium release all of them?”

“There may have been others,” I agreed. “But Dominic is the only one who actually touched the book when it happened.”

Seth nodded. “Any other demons who didn’t bond would have been pulled into the Maleficium in the first place and were destroyed when it was. Or they were bonded to their twins and weren’t able to escape as Dominic was because they didn’t have contact with the Maleficium.”

“So what do we do?” Jeff asked.

“We fight him,” I said. “It’s the only thing we can do.”

I pulled out the wooden token Claudia had given me and handed it to Seth. “This is his sigil. We can use it to summon him to a battlefield of our choosing. When we call him, he must appear.”

“Correct,” Seth said, looking over the sigil. “But we’ll need supplies.”

“I’ll get help with that,” Paige said. “I know a bit about summoning, and the tools you use can make a big difference in the operation of the magic.”

Seth nodded. “We can certainly make him appear, but then what?”

“I will fight him.”

We all looked at Ethan.

“I owe him one,” he said. But before I could object, he held up a hand. “I know the arguments you will make, Sentinel, and while I’m sure you would have made them well, this fight is mine. There will be no discussion. There will be no debate.” His eyes narrowed. “He has brought this battle on himself, and I mean to see it through.”

“All due respect, Liege,” Luc said, “but Jonah and Merit together couldn’t take him out with two swords. A few nicks and cuts aren’t going to do it. Hell, a few slices and stabs aren’t going to do it. The man can fly, and he made Merit disappear just by touching her. I’m not objecting to your doing the deed, but we have to even up the odds.”

Ethan and I looked at each other. I had a duty to object, but he seemed to understand my objection even if I didn’t voice it to him or the rest of them. That said, it was easy to see that he needed the battle. And if that’s what he needed, far be it from me to stand in his way.

But I’d certainly stand by his side.

I looked at Ethan. “If the odds are bad, we even the odds.”

He gave me a smile that curled my toes. “And how do you propose we do that, Sentinel?”

“He’d be easier to fight as a toy poodle. Or a dire badger,” I jokingly added, then looked at Paige. “Got any spells for that?”

“Yes, we do,” she said.

I frowned. “Seriously? You can make him a toy poodle?”

“No, I meant more generally. If we can’t fight him the way he is because he’s too strong, let’s make him less strong. Let’s take away his magic. Let’s make him human. Or more human, anyway.”

Ethan’s expression lifted. “Can that be done?”

Before Paige could answer, the clock in Ethan’s office suddenly chimed, striking twelve.

It was midnight—the witching hour and the time for Darius’s meeting.

“Time is short for all of us,” Ethan said, rising from his chair. “Paige, Seth, Catcher, talk to Mallory and see if there’s anything to this idea. We’ll meet back here in two hours. And God willing, we’ll have a plan.”

We might have a plan. But would we have a House?