While I’m trying to decide just how Ryodan managed to reach Barrons in Faery, Fade glides from the shadows, tall, packed with muscle and scarred like the rest. He’s prowling in that half-invisible way Barrons moves only in private. If you’ve not seen it before, it’s eerie and impossible to mistake for human.
The Highlanders close ranks on themselves.
Fade laughs, fangs gleaming white in the moonlight.
Two of the Highlanders move their hands to ancient, odd knives in sheaths at their waist. I wonder if they have mythic properties like my spear.
Ryodan shoots Fade a look he rebounds with a snarl, but he settles into moving like the rest of us.
Our army is small yet impressive. In two groups we stand, Barrons, Fade, Ryodan, and I, near Dageus, Drustan, Cian, and Christopher, preparing to meet our unknown foe.
And a known one that’s somehow stirring, despite the ice and bars.
Provided war doesn’t break out between us—which could easily happen with this much testosterone in such close quarters—I put our odds of reclaiming the abbey from at least one of our enemies tonight at reasonably good.
The new sidhe-seers didn’t just take an abbey—they took a radioactive one.
I’m no longer certain what worries me more: the danger beneath Chester’s, the one beneath the abbey, or the one inside me. I’d like them all to go away. Reverse order would be just swell. “Do you think things will ever get back to normal?”
Barrons gives me a look. “They were normal? Did I miss that century?”
Ryodan says, “Fuck normal. Give me a good war any day.”
“No shit, boss,” Fade agrees.
Drustan snorts. “You’re daft, the lot of you. I’d give my left nut for a century of peace.”
The rest of the Keltar heartily agree, adding various body parts to the mix.
Surrounded by alpha males that know more magic than all the teachers at Hogwarts, I’m about to ask who’s going to do what to get us through the gate, when it becomes a moot point.
Powered by an unseen hand, it begins to move slowly open.
21
“This house doesn’t burn down slowly to ashes”
MAC
I used to know precisely where I was headed and how I’d handle things when I got there.
Before any event, I’d ponder the possible variables and decide what I’d say or do, if X or Y happened, or maybe Z. Although something as exotic as Z almost never happened in small-town Georgia. We closed schools and held parades when it did.
It’s how I used to prepare for dates in high school: when Billy James asks me out will I say yes the first time or make him wait; will I wear the low-cut top or something flirty and sweet; when he tries to kiss me, will I let him; if he takes me to the less popular party at Amy Tanhauser’s house instead of the party of the year at Heather Jackson’s, will I dump him; if he wants to have sex, am I ready?
Ah, my long-lost shallow life.
Back then, things unfolded so predictably. I wore flirty and sweet, I dumped him when he took me to the wrong party, and I didn’t have sex with Billy but I did have sex with his older brother later that summer.
My careful prep doesn’t work so well anymore.
Each time I think I’m braced for any possible scenario, gravity changes, my trajectory shifts, rocket fuel gets dumped into my gas tank and I end up hurtling at inconceivable speeds at some entirely new crash site I’d never considered, a big, fat nasty planet I didn’t even know existed that explodes on the horizon so suddenly no amount of frantic braking can save you from impact.
How do you brace yourself for a collision with the unimaginable?
The closer we get to the abbey, the more sultry the clime. On both sides of the drive, mist steams from the lush lawn. I feel like we’re taking a bad trip down a yellow brick road, but what waits for us behind that curtain is no charlatan, rather an enormously powerful, staggeringly dangerous wizard of chaos.
Although it’s two hours till dawn, in Ireland, for heaven’s sake, I’m sweating and my hair is sticking damply to my face. It’s hotter here than it was in Dublin. The fountain isn’t the only new addition to the grounds. Golden trellises draped with black roses offer shelter above marble benches, and I suspect the scent of the blossoms would be drugging to anyone foolish enough to pause in the alcove beneath.
“They’ve stones now,” Drustan says, eyeing a cluster rising from the mist, great bleached-bone fingers reaching for the sky.
“I care naught for the looks of them,” Cian rumbles.
Dageus agrees, “Nor do I.”
Cian grunts and points, a darker-haired version of Lor, at two enormous black megaliths. I think they might like each other. Grunts and all.
“A dolmen awaiting the cover stone,” Ryodan murmurs.
Barrons says, “We bring jackhammers next time. I want those stones destroyed.”
I agree. I watched Darroc usher an Unseelie horde into our city through a dolmen at 1247 LaRuhe, in the heart of the Dark Zone adjacent to BB&B. I later asked V’lane/Cruce to crush it. I want this one crushed, too, before it’s completed and who knows what arrives on our planet next.
As we skirt the fountain, I say, “You do realize we’re walking into a trap, right? Do we have a plan? Is someone going to tell me what it is?”
Seven male heads swivel my way.
“Would you shut her up,” Ryodan says to Barrons.
Barrons slants him a cold look that shuts Ryodan up. I’d sacrifice my eyeteeth to perfect that look. Then again maybe that’s precisely what’s required: long, inhumanly sharp ones like theirs to pull it off.
“I doona ken why you permitted the woman to come. We doona risk ours in battle.” Cian’s brogue is so thick it’s hard to follow.
“Tell that to Colleen,” Christopher says grimly. “She’s inside.”
Drustan gives him an incredulous look. “You let her come tonight? And she’s already inside? How?”
“We need all the information we can get if we hope to rescue Christian from the Hag. These women know the Seelie nearly as well as we do, the Unseelie even better. Colleen joined up with the new sidhe-seers a week ago, to infiltrate the abbey and search their archives.”
“The new group? How?” I demand. “She’s not a sidhe-seer.”
“And you allowed this?” Cian explodes.
“Keep it down. They’re going to hear us,” I warn.
“Honey, they opened the front gate,” Fade says. “They know we’re here. Trap. Remember.”
Christian’s father snorts. “Try stopping her.”
“Is she?” I press.
“What?” he snaps.
“A sidhe-seer.”
“She has other … skills.”
“Why the bloody hell are those Unseelie following you, lass?” Drustan demands. “At first I thought they were drawn to all of us for some reason, but the moment Barrons moves away from you, they’re on you like midges. Is there something about you we should know?”
Seven male heads turn my way again.
“She said they’re ghosts of the Unseelie she’s killed,” Dageus says.
“Not a ghost of truth in that one,” Ryodan says dryly.
“Oh, just shut up, all of you,” I say, exasperated, moving closer to Barrons again, reclaiming a little personal space.
We continue walking in silence toward the abbey.
“So, do we have a plan?” I say again after a few moments.
“Walk up to the front door and go inside,” Barrons replies.
“That’s not a plan. That’s a suicide mission.”
“We’re a little hard to kill,” Fade says.
“Some more than others,” I say pointedly. “I’m not so sure the Keltar get back up quite as easily as—” I bite that one off myself when all four Keltar shoot me looks of death.
Clearly, I impugned their virility, when all I was trying to do is remind my team that the other team doesn’t have the same Get Out of Death Free card.
“Why did you bring her again?” Dageus says.
“Because once she gets with the plan, she’s as useful as the rest of us,” Barrons says.