I scanned the ceiling, and seeing no more attackers lurking, I released my magic. The violet flames around my arm and Mort disappeared. Aching pain bloomed across my torso where I’d activated my stone armor, and fatigue weakened my legs, but I shoved both aside.
I went to Sebastian, who had pushed up on one hip and sat staring in horror at the twisted, tortured face of his dead guard. The knife was still steaming but had started to droop as the flesh around it began to melt away under a powerful poison.
I squatted next to the king, partially blocking his view of the dead man. “Your Majesty?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”
He looked up at me, his mouth open, and then blinked several times and swallowed.
“No,” he said weakly. He cleared his throat. “No, I believe I’m unharmed.”
Maxen came over and linked elbows with the king, pulling him to his feet. Maxen winced, but not because of the effort of getting Sebastian off the ground. It was the residual pain of having used stone armor, the price we paid for such protective magic.
Sebastian pulled his jacket smooth and brushed a hand down one sleeve. “Gerald!” he called, looking around.
He peered past me and flinched. I twisted around to see Gerald, the head of Sebastian’s security detail, slumped over with a smoking knife sticking out of the middle of his back. Another of the king’s men was sprawled face-up with a blade in his chest. Only one seemed to be still alive and was just coming to after apparently having been knocked unconscious.
The house music was still pulsing, and no one seemed to have even noticed the attack.
“Stay here and guard him,” Maxen said to me. “I’m going outside to move some of the king’s guards in here. With your permission, Your Majesty?”
Maxen waited for Sebastian’s nod and then took off.
“Any idea who would want to kill you?” I asked Sebastian, still scanning for more attackers.
I glanced at the king just as he pushed his fingers through his short, fashionably spiked hair.
“You mean besides the rulers of most of the Faerie kingdoms?” he said with a humorless little bark of a laugh. He was clearly still shaken. His joke fell flat, anyway, as Sebastian wasn’t powerful enough to be the target of all of the rulers in Faerie. He was known for his posturing.
I bent and snatched the mask off the attacker that Maxen had killed. The guy’s nearly-white skin marked him Baen Sidhe, colloquially known as banshees. By his small stature and the narrow ears with pointed tips, I guessed he was also at least half dwarf. Odd combination, but not the strangest I’d ever seen in Faerie. I checked the other two and found the same, except that one was a woman.
I straightened. “Pissed off any dwarves or banshees lately?” I asked.
“Not in particular.” Sebastian went to his chair and sagged down onto it, his hands propped onto his knees. His mouth hardened, and he cast a look down at the bar below. “My men secured this place. I don’t understand how this happened.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, but that’s some nasty poison magic they used. Probably not banshee or dwarvish. Neither race is handy with potions. I’d have your investigators analyze those knives and the poison, and I bet you’ll find who was behind the attack.”
He passed a hand over his eyes. “They were very swift. If not for you and Maxen, well . . . I might not still be breathing.”
I shifted my feet uncomfortably. What he’d just said was dangerously close to “thank you.” In the Fae world, such an utterance was tricky for both the giver and the receiver, and I didn’t want that sort of vulnerability opened up between me and the Spriggan king.
To my relief, Maxen charged up the stairs with half a dozen Spriggan guards on his heels, plus the man with the salt-and-pepper beard I’d seen my mark talking to.
Four of the guards took up posts, and the other two set to work moving aside the bodies of the dead guards and assassins, hiding them behind one of the sofas.
The bearded man bowed in front of Sebastian. “Your Majesty, I don’t know how this happened.”
I figured he must be the owner of the bar.
The king flicked his hand through the air as if waving away a fly. “Assassination attempts are one of the dangers of ruling a kingdom,” Sebastian said with a self-important tone. “We’ll have a full review of your security procedures, of course.”
Sebastian’s cool outward confidence had returned full force, but I’d seen how shaken he was only moments before. He was playing it off for the bar owner, and also perhaps for his men who were nearby.
The owner looked somewhat relieved, but not completely. I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t going to help his business at all once word got out that King Sebastian had nearly been killed in Druid Circle. Or maybe the reverse would be true, and people’s morbid fascination would draw them here. Either way, an assassination attempt on a king when he was in his own territory was unusual and sure to cause some ripples through Faerie.
“I’ll get someone to help with the bodies, Your Majesty,” the owner said with a glance at the sofa that hid the carnage. He bowed low and turned to depart.
I reached out and grabbed his arm as he walked by.
“Hey,” I said, my voice low. I made sure I was turned away from the king. “I prevented a royal murder in your club, so now I want something from you.”
The man was handsome, his face almost regal, I realized once I saw him up close. Mixed race—too diluted to pick out any bloodlines with certainty, but I thought I detected a hint of Tuatha De Danann in the slant of his cheekbones and the deep set of his eyes. The Tuatha were the ancient Fae gods who had established Faerie eons ago and then disappeared over time, except for some descendants who carried traces of their blood. There was no Tuatha kingdom, and Tuatha blood carried no special magic.
He narrowed his eyes at me but didn’t ask what I wanted. That would be too open-ended a question, and one that I could too easily take advantage of. Words could be slippery, binding things in Faerie. Instead, he waited for me to state my request.
“That olive-skinned vamp you talked to earlier, the one who had the VIP table over there?” I asked, and waited for him to nod. “I need to know where I can find him.”
He started to shake his head and pull away, but I gripped his arm harder. I let my magic flow from the area around my heart, sending tendrils of stone armor creeping along the surface of my skin, up my neck, and curling in patterns over my face like mineral tattoos. It wasn’t possible to fully armor my face, but I knew the effect of the patterned designs on people who had never seen them before.
His eyes popped wide as he took it in. With my stature and in the low light of the club, he clearly hadn’t realized until that moment that I was New Gargoyle.
“I can give you the place he frequents,” he said. “He has an address in the Millennium Hotel.”
I nodded and let my magic go, and the familiar thump of pain took the place of the stone armor patterns I’d drawn across my skin. “Which side of the hedge is that on?” I asked.