Bone Walker (2 page)

Nobody in immediate range looked out of the ordinary. In addition to the teenage girls, I saw any number of software geek types, several parents with young children cavorting around them, and a pair of enthusiastic dykes in matching brimmed caps, waving a sizable Cascadian flag between them. When it came down to it,
I
was the strangest-looking thing in the vicinity, and not only because of my brown skin. Fortunately, nobody nearby was likely to notice the pointed ears hiding under my hair or my topaz-yellow eyes. People had a way of failing to notice those, and I hadn't even had to practice that.

No one noticed, either, that I wasn't the only fey-blooded member of the audience. Suspicious, sparkling flutters in the branches of the trees around us betrayed the presence of fairies attracted to the music, singing high and sweet along with us all. On the way into the show I'd spotted at least two more of the humanoid fey Millicent had allowed into Seattle. One was an older woman of whom Millie had told me nothing except that she had a vested interest in straying no farther than absolutely necessary from Puget Sound, and the other was a little fellow barely four feet high yet possessed of so much shaggy white beard that I couldn't see anything of his face except a pointed nose. Neither had magic above and beyond that of a fey creature's basic existence, at least nothing my own could sense.

Come to think of it, I had my doubts that the band's lead singer was completely vanilla human. There was a jewel-like gleam to his merry eyes and a certain compelling resonance to the tenor he let loose on us even as he sang backup for his compatriot. But then, stage charisma itself was a powerful magic, and both of those singers had it in spades.

Stage charisma, though, wasn't causing the power surge. Nobody around us could possibly have been its source—nobody looked distressed enough. Whatever this magic was, it felt strained, rising and then ebbing again, but with each pulse gathering an almost wild kind of strength. Nor were we the only ones to have sensed something, for some of the fairies in the trees reacted as we passed. A small flock of them trailed after us in curiosity, but held their distance. They vanished right back into the nearest protective branches whenever I looked their way. With as much magic as I was packing, I tended to make fairies and other tiny fey nervous. Tonight, though, they seemed even more unsettled by the raw power roiling through the air.

Seattle Center is full of distinctive buildings and landmarks, the most famous being, of course, the Space Needle. We wound our way past a few of them to follow where the magic led, away from the Mural Amphitheater and the Space Needle's shadow, and north past the massive International Fountain. Even at this hour the fountain was running, and the rush of its spray almost drowned out the echo of music from the concert we'd abandoned. It could not, however, drown out the magic. Christopher picked up the pace as we went by, his face tensing further with every step. As I broke into a trot to keep up with his longer stride, I began to worry. The last time we'd felt magic this strong, my mad uncle Malandor had almost sacrificed us both to a fertility demon. And here I was, trying to be a normal girl out with her normal boyfriend seeing a perfectly normal show. Magic and demons? Not part of the plan.

There were others out and about on the Center grounds, coming into or out of the concert, or just part of the active nightlife of Seattle. But no one got close enough to us that we had to care. No one at all was nearby as we skidded to a halt at one end of a narrow service alley, which was a relief. Less of one was the sheen of brightness floating before us, an illumination that had nothing to do with the lighting from the manmade sources all over the grounds. If light could be said to writhe, then this light did. The formless shape of it twisted five feet up from the asphalt, coruscating through eldritch shades of blue, from pale to dark and back again.

“Something's coming through,” Christopher breathed.

Only then did I realize what I was looking at: a portal.

I'd seen portals before, opening and closing between our world and Faerie—and in the case of the aforementioned demon, between our world and some other place I did my best not to think about. But each of those had been magic wielded by adepts, cleanly defined, solidly controlled. This was something else entirely, a fraying of the walls between the worlds, growing wider and clearer with each moment.

“Whatever it is, it's not very good at it.” Easy for me to say, when I barely had down how not to look conspicuous in front of strangers, much less opening doors out of nothing. Still I let the point stand.

“Or it doesn't know what it's doing. It could be hurt or out of its head. Either way I'm on it.” Christopher took a step forward and then looked down at me. All traces of the boyish glee he'd shown among the concertgoers had vanished from his face, replaced by a look of stern and earnest business. “Are you up for it, then?”

In the glow before us his hazel eyes had gone golden-green, sparking with a light of their own. No matter how normal we'd been trying to be that night, the fact remained that my boy was a Warder, the Warder Second of Seattle. With that set to his jaw and his magic drawing upon the ground beneath us, adding to the rising crackle of power, he looked the part.

I wasn't about to go anywhere. “Bring it. What do you want me to do?”

“Get your phone out and call Millicent. But stay ready. I may need your help.”

He didn't have to ask twice. I whipped my new smartphone out of the patchwork tote bag slung off my shoulder, unlocked it, and tapped my speed dial for Millicent's number while Christopher eased closer to the twisting light. His stance didn't change as he lifted a hand towards the electric radiance. The power thrumming through the earth coursed up to his fingers, a wellspring born out of the wealth of life patterns in a thriving city, ready to let him steady the portal. Or close it, if that was what he needed to do. No passerby would have seen anything remarkable, just a tall young man reaching out for nothing. To my eyes, though, he shone.

“I am Christopher MacSimidh,” he announced all at once, not loudly, but with a resonance that made each syllable ring out above the distant pounding rhythm from the concert. The lilt of his Newfoundland accent, thicker than usual after singing along with the band, lent music to the rhythm of his speech. “By the Pact between Warder and Sidhe, I bid you, show yourself in peace.”

Just beside my ear Millicent's number kicked over to her voice mail. “Millie, this is Kendis,” I said into the phone, never taking my eyes off Christopher. “We're at the concert and there's a portal opening up, call us as soon as you get this!”

On my very last word, as if provoked by Christopher's cautious tendril of power, the portal abruptly expanded. Blue fire stretched across the entire width of the alley, still uneven in shape, but now a broad rent torn open out of the dark. A man-shaped form dropped through it and landed hard on its hands and knees, swift enough that I yelped in surprise. Christopher's reaction time was better than mine. He let loose some of the magic he'd called out of the earth, stabilizing the hole in the air and easing it closed. It was impressive, really—he'd been doing plenty of practicing of his own under old Millie's guidance—but truth be told, I barely noticed. I was too busy being thunderstruck by what had just fallen out of the portal.

Or rather, who.

“Oh God, no way,” I burst out. “No
fucking
way!”

The figure on the ground had no shirt or shoes, and the form-fitting pants that were his only clothing had seen far better days. A long tear down one leg showed bruises and streaks of blood beneath, and what flesh the trousers didn't cover was in similarly dire straits. Half-healed scars crisscrossed his back, and skin that should have gleamed with the translucence of moonlight looked bone-pale with fatigue and cold. Black hair that I'd last seen styled into quite the retro pompadour was reduced to an unkempt mop. For an instant I hesitated, stunned by this piteous appearance; was I really seeing who I thought I was?

When he looked up at me, though, I was sure. So was Christopher, who swore as he and I both charged forward in a rush of reaction. But the newcomer's large, wavering smile stopped me in my tracks, a smile that clued me in that nobody was home behind his eyes. He tried to rise, to push up to his knees in a ghost of his normal grace. Maybe he was trying to bow? I couldn't tell and didn't care, and yet I couldn't help wincing as he promptly pitched forward onto his face.

“My dear Miss Thompson,” he said on the way down, in a Tennessee drawl I knew to be as false as a six-dollar bill, “we've jes' gotta stop meetin' this way.”

Oh yeah, I knew him. He was a bard of the Unseelie Court, a singer who shamelessly exploited his coincidental resemblance to a young Elvis Presley, modulo tapered ears, and eyes that gleamed like sapphires—or would have, at least, in proper health. Like me, he was a mage, though he was many centuries my senior and had had much more time to master his power.

His name was Elessir a'Natharion.

And he'd tried to kill me.

He'd made it.
No sun shone, not in a night sky streaked with autumn clouds. But mortal-crafted lights pierced the darkness, providing almost too much brightness for his dazzled eyes. The breeze carried the scents of water and a nearby gathering of a great many people, and that too pushed his overloaded senses almost past bearing. Chill air struck his skin even as his hands and knees slammed into unforgiving pavement, leaving him trembling and breathless.

And there was music, unrestrained in its ebullience, somewhere close. He might almost have giggled at that if not for the voice purring up from somewhere deep within him, or the cold lodged in his chest—against which the rising heat everywhere else in his flesh seemed all the fiercer.

Well done, my sweet, oh well done. She's a pretty one, isn't she?

There were two faces before him. The pale one blurred in and out of his sight as he collapsed, but the dark one, the one with the golden eyes, he saw clearly.
You can't have her
, he wanted to tell the voice inside him, though he couldn't quite make the thought coalesce. It was too hard to find it amidst Melorite's laughter, or in the unexpected rush of relief that swamped him as he babbled a greeting to those eyes. What words he uttered, he had no idea. Yet it seemed critical somehow that he address them, and hold fast to the name that fueled their astonished gaze.

Miss Thompson.

“Jesus thundering Christ!” Christopher erupted. His accent surged up even stronger in the rush of his anger, turning the words to
Jaysus t'underin' Christ
. “We're missing the show for
him
?”

We'd wound up on either side of the fallen Sidhe, looking at each other in consternation, and I scowled down at the figure at our feet. Elessir had much to answer for, teaming up as he'd done with my uncle and his lackeys and helping them kidnap Christopher and me. Tonight gave me new offenses to add to his list—not only my interrupted date, but also the disappointment brimming underneath Christopher's ire. He tamped it down, but I spotted the brief liquid glimmer in his eyes nonetheless. For making Christopher miss music from fellow Newfoundlanders, I wanted to kick the Unseelie singer right in the ribs.

Problem was, he looked like somebody had beaten me to it.

All at once I remembered what else Elessir had done when Malandor had turned on him and doomed him to be sacrificed with Christopher and me to the demon Azganaroth. Though he'd taken a literal knife in the back along with the figurative, Elessir had thrown his lot in with us and helped us break out of the chains that bound us within a circle of power. Not long after the dust had settled, his angry Queen had caught up with him and hauled him back to Faerie, ready to unleash upon him whatever punishment she'd find warranted for conspiring against her with members of the Seelie Court.

I hadn't said anything to stop Luciriel then; I hadn't known what to say. The guilt of that had never quite subsided, and it rose up now, fighting with the guilt Christopher's expression threw me. From all the way back to the amphitheater I heard the band gearing up into a still livelier number, full of fiery fiddle playing that made me want to moan with admiration and envy. Christopher and I both glanced back the way we'd come. “I'll stay,” I blurted. “I'll wait for Millie if you want to go back.”

He clearly did, but with a palpable effort Christopher hauled his gaze back to me. “It wouldn't be the same without you, and security probably won't let me back in.” Then his gaze dropped back down to the Unseelie, and his crooked wisp of a smile faded. “And even if they would, this one's Warder business.”

I blew out a breath and bobbed my head. “Let's get him up.”

For no good reason I could name, save for a fleeting thought that I was less physically intimidating than Christopher, I kneeled first. It wasn't exactly sound planning. Elessir was obviously ill—his glance up to me had been glazed with delirium, and lurid flushes of color heightened his otherwise haggard complexion, punctuation for the febrile heat that radiated off his skin. I had only a couple months of magical training under my belt, but even I could guess that a delirious mage was a dangerous mage. There was no telling how Elessir would react to us.

He'd recognized me, though. Thinking I could use that, I leaned down and tried to roll him towards me, as gently as I could. “Elessir,” I said. “Wake up. It's Kendis. Come on.”

Elessir convulsed at my touch, a wild thrashing of motion that more or less got him slumping in my arms. I grimaced and fought to catch my breath at how he reeked. My senses had grown significantly keener over the last couple of months, and up close, I almost choked on the stench of sweat and blood and sickness. “W-what?” he stammered. “Where am—did I—”