I couldn‘t hear a thing, but I don‘t have heightened senses unless I‘ve eaten Unseelie, and thanks but no. I‘ll survive with what gifts I have.
―Pull your spear out,‖ she whispered.
I did, and the next thing I knew, I was being whizzed down alleys so fast and jerkily that I wanted to puke. I will never understand how Dani can stand moving like she does. Then we were still and she was pointing. ―Look up, Mac!‖
I looked, and shivered. With all the Fae in the city, I‘d not been able to distinguish castes. I harbored a special hatred for this one: Unseelie Hunters.
Since time immemorial, they have hunted and killed sidhe-seers. Enforcers of Fae law and punishment, mercenary to the core, they work for whoever pays them with whatever it is they want most at the moment. They flip sides constantly. They have telepathic abilities and can get inside your skull and twist you up on yourself. To make matters worse, they chill you to the bone and look like the devil himself, come for your soul.
Two enormous Hunters were circling in the sky, a few blocks from the river Liffey. Twice the size of any I‘d seen in the past, they were blacker than night, with great leathery wings, forked tails, talons as long as my spear, and eyes that blazed like furnaces from hell. They were clawing air, talons forward, screaming at something in the streets the way I imagined dragons must scream, churning black ice crystals into the air with every flap of those deadly black sails.
―D‘ya fecking believe it?‖ Dani breathed. ―Are they nuts?”
She didn‘t mean the Hunters. She meant whoever was down in the streets, shooting at them. I could see holes being punched in their great wings and healing almost instantly, bullets dropping to the street below. I could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire. It was doing nothing much but pissing them off. A lot.
Whoever was doing it was going to get themselves killed!
I looked at Dani, and she nodded. ―Better go save their ass,‖ she agreed, and reached for me. I stepped back. ―Thanks, but it‘s only a few blocks. I‘ll walk.‖
I turned.
She grabbed my shoulder and we were there in a heartbeat. I was really going to have to loot a drugstore for Dramamine, because when she let me go again, I could only stand bent over, battling the overwhelming urge to puke on a pair of shiny black shoes. Momentarily incapacitated was no way to arrive at the scene of potential danger. Superspeed was worse than being sifted. Sifting was smooth. Superspeed was a horse and carriage on a rutted road, at jet speeds, with no shocks.
I looked up from the shoes and blinked. For a moment, words eluded me.
―Ms. Lane. Good to know you‘re alive. I‘d begun to wonder.‖
Turning to the uniformed troops behind him, Inspector Jayne snarled, ―Fire!‖
It seemed a lifetime ago that the tough-talking, burly inspector standing before me had picked me up, dragged me off to the Garda station, and interrogated me for the murder of his co-worker and brother-in-law, Inspector Patrick O‘Duffy. At least half a lifetime must have passed since I‘d opened his eyes to the Unseelie that had invaded Dublin by sneaking bits of their immortal flesh into his dainty sandwiches the afternoon I‘d invited him to the bookstore for tea. 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 Guardi ans! 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.