An Artificial Night

I could feel the blood the Luidaeg used to make my candle even before I realized that my fingers were still wrapped tightly around it. The flame blazed up as soon as I looked at it, growing until it was a foot high and burning brilliant red. That couldn’t be good. Raj was nowhere in sight. That could have meant he’d managed to escape the Hunt, but I didn’t think so. There was probably some ceremony he’d already gone through that I still needed to undergo in my new role as one of Blind Michael’s captive children. There are always ceremonies in Faerie, even in the parts that we’d rather ignore.

The room I was in was probably a ballroom before it became a prison. The walls had been shattered about ten feet up, and the roof was entirely gone. Brambles boiled over the walls on three sides, obscuring all the doors. Tattered tapestries hung between the loops of briar, their patterns worn away by dirt and time. The sky had grown even darker while I was unconscious, but there were still no stars. No stars at all.

Shadows too dark for changeling eyes to pierce pooled at the base of the walls, and I could hear giggling and rustling noises coming from inside them. That wasn’t promising. I’ve learned to never trust the laughing ones; they’re either insane or genuinely glad to see people frightened and in pain, and either way, they’re likely to cause problems.

I stood, trying to ignore the shivering weakness in my knees. The Rider that knocked me out had obviously done it before, because I wasn’t dead—it takes skill to knock someone out from behind without smashing their skull. If I was lucky, the pain would pass before I needed to run. I seemed to be counting on luck an awful lot.

It took a moment to be sure I wasn’t going to fall down. When I was confident my balance would hold I called, “All right, I know you’re there. Now come out where I can see you.” My words almost echoed Acacia’s, and that coaxed a small, wry smile from my lips, even as I wondered whether May knew where to find me. What good is a Fetch if she isn’t there when it’s time to die?

My voice echoed against the walls. As the echoes faded, the children came creeping into the open. At first they came in little groups—two and three at a time, staying tight and close together—but the groups grew larger as they got bolder, until they were approaching in clusters of five and six and even eight. They ranged from toddlers to teenagers on the edge of adulthood, and there were a lot of them, moving too quickly for me to count. I froze, watching them. They were wrong. The children were . . .

The children were wrong. It was hard to tell their breeds or make my eyes define what I was seeing. Some of them were easy to identify—he was Daoine Sidhe, she was a Bannick, he was a Barrow Wight—but subtly changed, until they looked more like parodies of their races than actual fae. Others were strangely blurred and blended, twisted into strange mockeries of what they should have been. Pointed ears and cat-slit eyes, scales and fur, wings and long, thrashing tails were combined without any visible logic, creating things that were entirely new, and entirely wrong.

There was a Tuatha de Dannan, perfect and unaltered, except for the streaky brown feathers that turned his arms into ragged wings. Behind him was a Centaur with the hindquarters of a small Dragon. He had iridescent green scales in place of fur, and his hooves were more like talons. A Piskie with webbed hands and legs that tapered to fins straddled his back, her snarled hair tied out of her eyes with a strip of dirty linen.

I opened my mouth to test out their bloodlines, and gagged on the impossible mixture that hit the back of my throat. Their blood might remember how they started, if I had the time to taste them out one at a time, but in a group, they were smothering. He hadn’t just changed them on the outside. He’d changed them all the way down to the bone.