Exiting the foyer into the second anteroom beyond brought us out on a balustrade draped with yet more vines and drugging blossoms from which we could view the entire club. They’d further taken a page from Chester’s by dividing Elyreum into numerous, individually themed subclubs, staged around a single, central dance floor that was packed with humans and Fae gyrating, grinding, having sex.
I’d never seen so many castes of Seelie before, vibrantly etched in the dazzling, seemingly Photoshop-enhanced shades of the Four Courts: the blush and rose of Spring threaded with metallic green; the dazzling, countless golds of Summer; Autumn’s copper and crimson fire; a thousand frosted shades of Winter’s ice. Tall, tiny, large, dainty, some flew, some glided, all hunted.
I narrowed my eyes. I’d dialed back the volume on my sidhe-seer senses the moment we stalked into the club, muting the cacophony of so many Fae clustered in close quarters.
Mac told me she hears the individual castes as melodies, pieces of song that play inside her head. I do, too, but my perception of the various castes is heavy on the percussion, a kind of Godsmack’s battle of the drums meets Roisin Murphy’s “Ramalama (Bang Bang).” There’s some serious dissonance for you.
Tonight I was getting something else, too, a thing I’d never noticed before…or never heard. There was a low, annoying buzzing sound beneath it somewhere. A sort of distracting static on my channel.
Something about the dance floor wasn’t quite right. I nudged my volume up a hair, to no avail. I dialed it higher, and still nothing. I cranked it even higher until the presence of so many Fae was deafening, charring a hole in my gut. With supreme force of will, gritting my teeth against the savage onslaught of primitive drums beating in my blood, telling me to Kill, kill, I punched it up yet one more notch, going wider open than I’d ever before been. I’d never needed to.
Oh!
There wasn’t a single person on that dance floor.
It was empty. I could see that now.
But no other human could. Holy insidious illusions, the Fae had gotten better at glamour! The Shedon needed to know about this!
Like the foyer, the dance floor was fashioned of brilliantly lit LED screens, featuring still more graphic images of humans having sex with Fae streaming across the surface.
I dialed my volume higher, wincing as the presence of so many Fae crashed and banged inside my head with the storm and thunder of the “Ride of the Valkyries” meets the worst, most bone-chilling parts of “The Requiem.”
Oh, God. There were no Fae having sex with humans in a TV screen at all!
It was only humans. And they weren’t images on the surface of an LED screen, they were real live people.
Trapped beneath it.
Some were clawing at the bottom side of the floor, trying to escape. Others…oh, God, others were dead. There was a tangled, seething mass of humanity, some fucking, some fighting to escape, amid hundreds of corpses.
What was this? If you stepped on that treacherous dance floor, were you abruptly sucked below, never to be released again? Forced to make the choice of either dying trying hopelessly to escape or dying doing something that felt good, while the icy Fae sat by, soulless, emotional vampires feeding off the passion of human suffering, savoring each morsel of torment? I’d thought only the Unseelie were so depraved!
Was this what happened when the Light Court ran unchecked by a queen? They devolved to the worst possible version of themselves, like the worst of humans cut loose when the world went to hell, and indulged their basest urges to riot, loot, and pillage? How many people had we lost over the past two years in this damned club?
I dialed my volume back down, to see the club the way humans did. Above us, a starry sky twinkled at the high domed ceiling, around us four courts decorated as the seasons beckoned. It was utterly lovely, seductive and pain-free and utterly false.
I turned it up again, blasting my channel wide open.
We were in a living Hell. The interior was completely undecorated but for the LED panels. Concrete walls. Concrete floors. And I’d been wrong, there was only one Seelie Court in attendance at Elyreum, the iciest of them all. The others were illusion.
Winter had claimed our city.
“We’re going to kill every last one of them one day,” I gritted.
“Agreed. For now, objectives and get the fuck out.”
“Agreed.”
We glided into motion and began to descend the staircase together. Before we even reached the bottom, heads whipped our way, conversation stopped, and a tight, suspended hush fell over the club.
The silence had fallen so abruptly, I scanned the subclubs, certain the Fae had killed their human partners. They hadn’t. They’d immobilized them somehow.
They’d known we were here the moment we stepped inside the club. They’d permitted us to walk in, been waiting for us.
This was not what I’d envisioned happening. I’d imagined a small skirmish, with the majority of Fae otherwise occupied. A bit of bear-baiting. We’d saunter off. Laugh. Having stirred up enough shit to get some answers about what was going on in Faery.
As it was, we were the sole focus of a thousand Winter Court Fae, rising, approaching, closing in on us. From below, from above, behind the balustrade and the foyer beyond. They surged in a glittering, icy wave, moving with predatory, inhuman grace.
The power they radiated was exponentially greater than I’d ever felt coming from a court sans royalty, and with my sense wide open, I could tell there wasn’t a single prince or princess anywhere in the club. Royalty’s melody is unmistakable, drums from hell, seductive, hypnotizing, mind-stealing.
The Fae had changed. Even their gazes were different, no longer shimmering a uniform, swirling iridescence. Lethal as razors, they sliced into you, each a unique color, for lack of a better word, though I’d be hard-pressed to name the shade: here, a tint of immortal decay, rot, and graveyards; there, the precise nuance of toxic nuclear war without end; here, the hue of rabid, bone-stripping hunger; there, the stain of madness galloping down on you with thundering hooves.
I used to mock them, these strutting, beautiful, but relatively innocuous Fae without royal blood. They’d struck me as poseurs who weren’t what they pretended to be, bidding us believe they possessed far greater power than they did.
Now your average Winter Court Fae was—I had to force my brain to accept the truth—viscerally terrifying.
Objective one accomplished. We knew our enemy was far more powerful than they’d ever been. “The Song definitely changed them, Ryodan,” I murmured as we drew to a halt halfway down the stairs.
“No shit, Sherlock,” he agreed.
In spite of the gravity of our current situation, I smiled.
It was about damned time he’d finally gotten our roles right.
I would give everything I own
IF DANCER HAD LIVED.
There’s a rabbit hole I’ve fallen down a few times.
Sometimes reluctantly, other times, on dark nights, Shaz snoring beside me, one of his downy legs kicking restlessly in dreams, unable to sleep, I’ve walked deliberately to the dirt-crusted edge and plunged down. Gone exploring that fantastical, killing wonderland of madness, monsters, and maybe.