Except the Queen (37 page)

S
parrow reached down and plucked up another shot of Jameson’s—one in a long row of them—and tossed it down her throat to the encouraging shouts of the college boys around her. The wire bone of her padded bra dug into her flesh, but she didn’t care. It was doing its job to attract buyers, pushing her small breasts up into twin white mounds over the low edge of her T-shirt. Her tattoos and kohl-smeared eyes just made her seem more exotic to the boys goading her into downing the next shot.

Sparrow snorted a laugh and reached for the glass but the bartender leaned over and grabbed her hand.

“That’s enough.”

“Fuck that,” she said, squinting up at him. He was cute enough, hell they were all cute
enough
. She’d take any of them. What did it matter anymore anyway? She should just give it up and be done with it.

“I’m serious,” the bartender said, leaning in to take the drink from her fingers. “Folks drop dead, pounding shots like that.”

“I can handle it. Really. I never get too drunk. I mean, I just can’t ’cause I’m . . .”

“You’re what?” asked a soft voice over her shoulder. “What are you?”

She lurched around on the stool, and gasped, the alcohol in her veins like frost.

Hawk smiled at her and inclined his head. His hand began to stroke her neck, the tattooed knot throbbing to life under his fingers. It prickled and then stung like nettles, and she flinched at the pain.

“Leave me alone,” Sparrow said, sobriety waking her to his danger.

“Come back with me.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Hey, dude, who said you could join the party?” a beefy-faced boy snarled at Hawk. “Why don’t you fuck off and find someone your own age, asshole.” He put a hand on Hawk’s shoulder, trying to spin him around.

Effortlessly, Hawk snagged the boy’s hand and quickly snapped it back at the wrist. As the boy shrieked in sudden agony, Hawk turned, driving his weight against the wrist bones until the boy stumbled to his knees trying to escape the fierce pain.

“That’s it,” the bartender shouted. “Get out, you and the girl. You’re done here.”

Sparrow needed no more prompting but slid off the stool and pushed her way through the crowd of angry college students gathering at the bar behind her. She heard the threatening shouts and turned once to look.

Despite the warnings from the bartender, Hawk continued to hold the boy’s bent-back wrist captive, sneering as he writhed in pain. Someone grabbed a book and smashed it across the back of Hawk’s head. Hawk relinquished his hold on the boy’s wrist but as he lurched forward, he drove his knee into the beefy face under him. Blood gushed on the boy’s startled face, his mouth agape with missing teeth.

An angry chorus of shouts rose from around Hawk.

Sparrow tore out of the bar, and began sprinting down the street. Fear pumped through her veins, burning away the last of her drunken haze.

“Stupid girl, stupid girl,” she huffed in time to her pounding footsteps.

Ducking beneath the trees, trying to hug the shadows, too afraid to turn around again, too afraid that she would see Hawk loping after her, she kept running. She knew it wouldn’t take long for him to extricate himself from the bar. A thrust of a dagger under an arm or the inside of a thigh, and they would all be slipping in blood. All except Hawk.

She swerved quickly off of the sidewalk and staggered into the park, hoping to lose him in its sheltering darkness. Throwing herself onto the grass, she crawled beneath a tall shrub, chest heaving, bits of dirt and decayed leaves speckling her damp lips. She reached into her purse, hand fumbling for the little silver dove. When she found it, she closed her fingers around its smooth body. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

For long minutes she lay hidden beneath the leaves, listening to the ragged sound of her own breathing. Then everything grew quiet as her breathing slowed, deepened. Now all she heard were the comforting night sounds of small creatures scratching in the dirt, or nesting in the secret shelter of the branches.

Still she waited, unmoving until long after the faint silver of moonlight descended behind the trees. Obviously, Hawk hadn’t followed her; or at least, he hadn’t found her. She was too good at merging into nothingness.

Finally, as the first stretch of pearly daylight inched above the horizon, Sparrow crept out from beneath the shrubs. Dusting off the dirt and twigs that clung to her clothes, and with a silent curse, she reached up under her T-shirt and unhooked the clasp of her bra. Sliding her arms briefly out of the sleeves, she removed it and stashed it beneath the shrub.

“Never again,” she said. She’d been stupid and rash, not once but twice in the last few days. The first time she’d nearly drowned in humiliation while the second had threatened her life and injured an innocent boy. “No more,” Sparrow said. She’d go back to the garden and rip the heart out of the fucking arum.

*   *   *

B
ABA
Y
AGA
’
S HOUSE, DESPITE ITS
usual gloom, was now a welcoming sight. Sparrow bounded up the porch steps two at a time, glancing quickly over her shoulder before she entered the house. The street was empty, the gray smudge of early morning light throwing the tops of the trees in sharp relief.

Satisfied she’d not been followed, Sparrow went in and closed the door firmly behind her.

She didn’t see the gleam of neon green eyes peering at her from the tall stand of yews across the street, or the tall figure emerging from the shelter of the trees. Even if she had seen, she might not have known enough to be afraid.

I
stand hidden by trees across the street, waiting for the light from a window to betray her room. How could I have not seen what she was before? Were her eyes not warning enough? I inhale again, and my prick thickens as I hold her scent against the roof of my mouth: the saltiness of human cunt and the cloying perfume of the arum. She is fey—more so than human, though she does not know it. I wipe my hand across my mouth, still slick with the blood of those useless boys at the tavern. They tried to stop me, but I have long known how to cut a path through a crowd.

Once on the street I had no trouble finding her, following the trail of scent unfurling behind her. She never saw me as I climbed up into the arms of an outstretched oak and watched over her where she lay squirreled beneath the brush.

She knows what I am. It must be she who left the spells of unbinding on my doorstep. Only chance kept her from knowing me when first she came into the shop.

I did not take her there, not in the grass, not under a tree, though it would have been easy and I ached for it. But for the violation to be complete, I will take her in her own house, the old hag’s house. She will not see me coming for I will strew the grounds with my own spells of undoing. And when she is most alone, most vulnerable,
I will harvest her blood in a silver bowl and thrust myself deep inside her. Then none will stand against me. I will send word to the Dark Lord that I have found what he seeks because in truth I have, and he will reward me well. In the darkest corners of his courts I will rebuild our clans, until we are strong enough in blood and arms to claim his power for ourselves. Blood to blood, it is the ransom of nations.

I rub a hand against the ache in my groin. I will make it last, I think. Pain and pleasure. One will be hers, the other mine.

T
wo days and nights passed without sight of Sparrow. It was late in the afternoon and each of us still fractious over what had happened. Robin sulked beneath the withered shade of the trees. Jack struggled to balance a new sculpture in the center of the garden, something with a spiral to soothe these brooding, unhappy children.

The third evening, I was kneeling before a dying plant, trying to convince myself to be patient, to wait for Sparrow to appear and make amends.

I plunged my hand into a patch of dried leaves, shuddering as I brought forth a twisted mandrake root. Sitting back on my heels, I surveyed the garden and saw now where the blooms of my new plants were withering. I went to each and found dark tokens of undoing beneath: nightshade blossom, manglewort, even the red spotted caps of kills-quick.

Sparrow
. It had to be her, getting back at us, punishing us and the garden for her humiliation. I jerked the odious plants free of the soil, braided the roots to keep them from bleeding malice and rolled them in a bit of my mother’s silk I carry in my pocket for protection. The white silk was stained crimson and I could have wept at the profanity were it not for the heat gathering in my breast. I set the evil things down on the new wall and grabbed a handful of stones to pound them into harmless
pulp. As I raised my hand I was startled by a crow’s screech exploding the stillness.

Awxes appeared out of the darkening sky, leading a multitude of crows, their voices raised in a cry of outrage. Arrowing his body toward the house, he crashed against the glass window of Sparrow’s bedroom and the rest of the flock followed by threes and fours, laying siege to the window.

Smoke coiled in a scorched pattern around the window as the crows battered the unyielding glass. Robin staggered to his feet and began to run toward the back stairs. Stuffing stones into my pocket, I followed him from the garden to the house, up the stairway to the second floor, my lungs burning for want of air. Behind me came Jack calling, “Sophia, Sophia!”

On the landing, Lily was lying, stretched out and unmoving, her tongue lolling out of her opened mouth. Blood was speckled over the white fur of her throat. Pounding his fists on the door, Robin was shouting Sparrow’s name over and over. But I could see at once no mortal strength could unbind the door from its spells of closing.

“Away,” I commanded and pushed him aside. I placed my hands on the door and shuddered at the skin of treachery beneath my palms.

And then, amid the harsh battle cries of the crows, Robin’s desperate shouts, even Jack calling out the name that wasn’t mine, I descended into a prescient calm. In the willed silence, I heard Sparrow’s muffled sob, the soft thump of her body, the harsh rasp of her breath.

I should have thanked the arum then, for the power it awoke in me was not sex, but rage when I needed it most. In my breast a blistering dragon unfurled, and filled my body from feet to hands with fire. The wood smoked and charred beneath my palms, burning away the rune meant to keep us out. I pushed harder with growing strength until the planks cracked free from their hinges and fell away. Steam billowed in turbulent clouds as I—blind with fury—entered the room.

Sparrow lay on the floor, the pale ribbon of her naked body mottled with the shifting shadows of crow wings beating against the window. The air was moist with the rotten stench of wormwood punks burning on the floor. A silver bowl waited by her head. Hovering over her was a man, a quill poised over the soft mound of her belly, ink dripping from the sharpened point. I stepped closer and saw where the white skin of her torso was marked with dark spells. The inside of her thighs were covered with scorpions that she should take no pleasure in either touch or cock; a brindled hound snapped at the curve of her breast as though to tear away the flesh. Black adders slithered into knots over her shoulders holding her in bondage, and between the thin stands of her ribs a stake wreathed in mistletoe stabbed toward her heart.

I should have been afraid when he looked up and snarled. Those high cheekbones, that skin of polished wood, eyes like pulsing garnets. Highborn once, but censured for his taste for blood and treachery. I shuddered at the sight of Sparrow in his grip.

“I know you now, Long Lankin, blood drinker, soul swallower,” I cried.

“Go,” Lankin ordered, waving his hand to brush me away, thinking me of no consequence to a Highborn such as himself.

But the arum was not done with me and a renewed power surged in my breast. Retrieving stones from my pocket, I hurled them with all my strength, not at Lankin but at the windows. The glass shattered and the crows flooded through the broken panes in a black rush of beating wings, beaks, and talons and headed straight for him.