Faerie Blood (30 page)

This, I concluded, was bad.

So was the other thing that jostled with Christopher’s proximity for my attention: the taut crackle of energy scraping along my nerves, thick enough and strong enough that it drowned out any trace of the bond between my power and Christopher’s, leaving me unsure if he was even still alive. Magic streamed inward towards us from a faintly glowing circle the color of starlight, surrounding the young Warder and me with about three feet on all sides, like an electronic fence meant to confine a pair of dogs. Its force set my teeth on edge, making me want to shy away from contact with it, though there was nowhere I could go. The chains held me completely immobile.

I managed only a few seconds to notice everything else about my surroundings. The rain had finally stopped, and we sat on hard, sodden ground in the middle of an open field littered with snapped twigs, scattered needles from conifer trees, and other detritus from the violent weather. Cold, slick grass met my bare feet—in our flight from the house, I’d neglected to put on shoes. High overhead, churning, tattered scraps of cloud allowed only sporadic moonlight down to the earth and to the broad, pale expanse of Lake Washington rippling in the distance. We were, I realized, on Sand Point Head in the middle of Sand Point Magnuson Park. And that we included Christopher, me, and the Sidhe.

Melisanda stood just outside the circle to our right. Her grip on her sword was casual, her gaze harsh and cold and suggesting all too plainly that the weapon’s business end would cross the gap between us at the slightest provocation. Before me, off to the left, Tarrant stood poised in a wavering column of light, his bearing that of someone both keeping tense watch and holding open a doorway for others to come through. More magic at work. I couldn’t feel it as strongly as the starlight circle, but it tugged at my mind nevertheless.

So did the presences of the other two Sidhe, the ones who had exhibited power, the ones who were mages like me.

A few paces in front of the column in the air, Elessir loitered. The Unseelie had his arms crossed lazily along his chest, and of the Sidhe present, he alone had no expression of grim purpose. With an insouciant curl to his lips he sketched me a bow in acknowledgement of my awakening, but despite the courtly gesture there was very little courtliness to his bearing. He stood with his weight rocked slightly forward on his feet, his expression full of the feral anticipation of someone eager to watch some violence commence; he looked like a Roman waiting for gladiators to enter the Coliseum. I would have bet money that he was craving a bag of popcorn.

Lastly, directly in front of me in the circle of light, was Malandor.

Never mind bad, this was right up the scale to ‘indescribably screwed’.

Swallowing back a flood of panic, I forced myself to raise my eyes to Malandor’s face and just look at him. Before now I hadn’t really had the chance. Maybe after devouring every detail of my mother’s picture and tangling with Elessir, I was finding Sidhe features more familiar. Maybe having stared at my own changing reflection was helping, too. Whatever the reason, the Seelie lord seemed a bit more real now, a bit less fantastic; oh, his hair still crowned him in scarlet glory and his gaze was still a sword through my chest. In the ghostly light of the circle around Christopher and me and the watery rectangle that framed Tarrant, his eyes glinted the same color as the lake. But the rain had soaked him, too, plastering that fiery hair to his skull and the fine silken cloth of his garments, garb of design and hues that had to be Sidhe make, to his body. His aquiline features were even more beautiful than Elessir’s, but distinct shadows darkened the corners of his eyes and his cheekbones jutted out gauntly, as though he ran critically short on both food and sleep.

I studied him, searching hard for anything in the shape of his features that would point to a connection to Mom, and therefore to me. As I did, I blurted out hoarsely, “Are you really my uncle?”

Malandor’s eyes narrowed to slits without diminishing the stark fire within them. “Do you presume, girl, that blood kinship to me will save your life?”

That was a yes, and a disgusted one at that. The Seelie stared down at me as though I were a personal affront to his existence, his upper lip arched in the subtlest of sneers. “So you’re going to kill me,” I challenged him, bristling. I’d been lucky through most of my life; I’d grown up in a liberal part of America, in a more liberal time than the one in which Dad and Aunt Aggie had come to their adulthoods. I’d met prejudice, of course, but I’d never been looked at with such scathing hatred of me, of my
self,
through no fault of my own before, and I didn’t like it one damned bit. “You going to bother to explain why, or shall I just assume you murder half-Sidhe, half-human young women on general principle?”

“Mouthy, ain’t she?” Elessir blandly put in, waggling his eyebrows at me when I shot him an infuriated glance. “I still say, Malandor, she seems more like one of us than one of you. You’re quite sure Elanna was your full-blooded sister?”

“What the hell are you doing here? You’re working with
them
? You were fighting them at the bar!” I seethed at the singer before Malandor could reply.

Elessir’s midnight eyes gleamed. “Had to win your confidence and get some of your blood somehow, darlin’. How else were we going to break past Warder magic to get you?”

“You said you wouldn’t harm me or my friends or family with that, you lying son of a bitch!”

“That’s true. But I said nothing of your uncle and his lapdogs.”

If I’d learned anything about the Sidhe in the last two days—aside, of course, from their basic existence—is that they were masters of two things. One was magic. The other was looking truly terrible in their anger, and I mean that in the sense of terror-inducing rather than anything so plebian as mere badness. Tarrant’s eyes flashed azure fire, distinct even against the backdrop of the shining column in which he stood, and though I caught only the edge of the glare he hurled at Elessir I felt my blood chill. “Do keep talking, Unseelie,” he invited, his voice almost a purr and yet as edged as the dagger he unsheathed. As if itching for an excuse to pitch it at the singer, he took meaningful aim. “Please.”

Melisanda slid a sideways glance at the Unseelie, though her attention and her sword remained unwaveringly pointed at Christopher and me. Perhaps a little more on Christopher than me, I thought, seizing this marginal assurance that he still breathed. She wouldn’t have glared so sternly at a dead man, and they surely wouldn’t have bothered to chain a dead man to me. Irritation set her delicate countenance into a mask of unyielding lines; I suddenly remembered that Christopher had fought her, and wondered if that had pissed her off. But I couldn’t fathom for the life of me why the faintest trace of discomfort lingered in her face as well, just beneath the irritation.

As for Malandor, a hot flush of crimson sprang up high across both his pale, haggard cheeks and turned them almost as vivid a hue as his hair. I watched him clench his perfect teeth and haul in a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. Then, without looking over his shoulder at the sardonic fey behind him, he gritted out, “Shut. Up.”

Elessir’s brows climbed almost to his hairline while he fired around a look at each of the Seelie, taking their measures. Evidently he decided against anything that would make him have to worry about being outnumbered, for he inclined his head towards Malandor and murmured, “Shutting up, boss.”

For an instant I thought my uncle was going to whirl around and attack the singer on the spot, either by drawing the blade sheathed at his hip or by letting loose with the power I could feel hanging about him like a cloud. I couldn’t say I’d exactly blame him; I wanted to pummel Elessir, too. But when Malandor wrestled down his rage and refocused on me with something looking more and more like obsession burning in his gaze, it became clear he had a higher priority than beating the snarky Unseelie senseless.

Namely, me.

“You are my sister’s daughter,” he confirmed coldly. “It will not save you to know this. But because I am not entirely without honor or mercy even in these foul days which have befallen my House, if that scrap of knowledge will permit you to make peace with whatever gods your human kin have taught you to revere, you may have it.”

Nausea churned through me at the thought that someone of my own flesh and blood would be able to do me violence, to spill my share of the blood that made a bond between us—that he would be able to kill me. Revolted, I wondered if all the Sidhe were like that, and then remembered my mother’s voice whispering to me in my dream.

I will always love you, Kendeshel
.

Maybe it was just Malandor, then.

“So if I’m your goddamned niece,” I growled, “what’s your problem? Is this a bigotry thing? Are you going to kill me because I’m half-human?” I tried to lunge at him, wanting to get in his face, wanting to hit him. Too late, I remembered that I sat chained on the ground and that Christopher was bound to me. But as soon as the young Newfoundlander at my back shifted and moaned at my movement, my fear for him superseded my fear for myself. “Are you going to kill Christopher because he’s all human?”

Her lips curling into a smirk even more disdainful than those gracing the faces of the males around her, Melisanda shot Christopher another wary glance and then looked at me. “If you think the Warders are merely human, changeling girl,” she said, “you are woefully ill-informed.”

Wait a minute, what was that supposed to mean?

I didn’t have time to figure it out, though. Later, I vowed, I’d hassle Christopher and Millicent for details—assuming Christopher and I actually got out of this alive. Opting not to rise to his lackey’s bait, I kept my eyes on Malandor and demanded, “Did you kill my mother because she jumped in the sack with a human?”

One second he was looming over me; the next, dropped to a crouch in front of me with his hand wrapped around my neck. “Do you think it gave me pleasure to watch Elanna die?” he hissed. “She was my sister!”

“Dear God,” I croaked. “You really did kill her.”

My uncle’s face twisted in a thin, keen kind of pain. “I had already struck her down, for our combat was to the death,” he said hollowly. “But she dealt herself her own death blow. This knowledge will not save you either, child, but I have no reason to conceal it from you.”

“You’re telling me she killed herself? You expect me to believe that?” The words erupted from me in an enraged bellow that I didn’t bother to hold back. “Her own family drove her husband crazy! Did you think she’d just lie down and take it?” Chains or no chains, I tried to throw myself at Malandor again and howled, “Did you kill them both?”

“What you believe is immaterial; I have told you the truth,” said Malandor. He let go of my neck and took my chin in his hand, just as he’d done before at the Penguin, and I stiffened at his touch. Fragments of the nightmare I’d had in Aunt Aggie’s house flashed across my mind, sharp and jagged, like pieces of a fractured mirror: a voice charming Mom’s memory out of Dad’s head, my father’s bone-deep terror, and my mother charging off on a mission of vengeance into the night. I believed the dream now, and as fear swamped me, I realized I believed Malandor, too. Maybe he hadn’t killed my parents directly—but the madness that had made Dad crash his car in his desperate haste to get back what he’d forgotten had killed him nevertheless. And he’d just admitted to fighting my mother to the death.

I was looking at my parents’ murderer.

“Your hue and face from your human sire,” he whispered, scrutinizing me with a haunted intensity. “But by the Lady, those eyes. You have her eyes…”

This strangely intimate anguish scared me far more than my uncle’s earlier cold, insolent superiority. “It’s because I’m her daughter—your niece! Your family!” My own panic made me want to retch; both halves of my blood, mortal and fey, rebelled against this elegant, ethereal being who was no better than any Southern slave owner who’d ever lifted a hand against children in his family who were darker than they should have been. But I was terrified all the same, and I couldn’t stop myself from begging, “At least let Christopher go, he didn’t do anything to you. He was just sticking up for me!”

The Seelie lord gave me an almost sad little smile, as though he approved of me pleading on the behalf of another. “The young Warder does appear to possess the requisite nobility for his lineage,” he agreed. “Do not fear for him, girl; he will feel no pain. And because I am merciful, because you have Elanna’s eyes, I will ensure your passing will be equally painless… Kendis Marie Thompson.”

“Gee, thanks,” I retorted. Or at least, I tried to. I opened my mouth to say the words, but they never made it out of my brain.

With a master artisan’s deft touch, Malandor laid the syllables of my name across my consciousness and his fingertips against either of my temples—and then released his power straight into my brain.

The first two times he’d thralled me I hadn’t felt it coming. This time I managed about half a second of unmitigated horror before a tsunami of energy engulfed my every thought. My own raw, nascent power flickered within my blood only to be swept up by the far greater wave of Malandor’s magic, a single eddy lost in a mightier current that began with my uncle, flowed through me till it found every last corner of my nervous system, and then returned to its source. No longer aware of panic or dread, of the chains that held my arms tight against me or of Christopher’s form huddled against my back, I drowned within that current.

Then, carried back upward by it, I floated.

Somewhere an immeasurable distance away my entire body relaxed. I couldn’t move, but I didn’t care. Memory disappeared from my thoughts along with terror, and even the figures of those who surrounded me turned curiously insubstantial against the backdrop of the storm-swept night—all except the One who crouched before me, the One who caused the floating. He alone shone vibrant and clear in my sight, and I stared at him in rapt fascination, wondering where he would float me next.

“Now, my dear,” came his gentle murmur, “that’s more pleasant, is it not?”