Then a blow of pure telekinetic force smashed into me, picking me up and throwing me half a dozen feet backward. The shadow glamor shattered, as did my flame whip, and Laurie advanced on me, all glamors faded and her full true features exposed.
“What the fuck?” I demanded, rising to my feet, and the momentary distraction allowed her to unleash another hammerblow of force. This one caught me in the same shoulder as the first shadow tendril, and this time bone did break. Excruciating pain radiated from my upper arm, where her strike had landed.
“My Lord’s orders were clear,” she told me, brushing aside a burst of flame I managed to conjure from my left hand. “You were to avoid Clan Tenerim.”
I sensed the next force strike coming and rolled sideways, coming up to my feet facing the withered form of the hag.
“He himself was there; he knew why I saw them,” I snapped at her. “What the hell is this?”
Another hammerblow of kinetic force slammed into my chest, but the armor absorbed much of the impact again, and I managed to stay upright, though I still stumbled back.
“He did not authorize you to walk into their Den and utterly flout his restrictions,” the Unseelie fae told me. “He respects you, but you cannot flout his authority like that and not expect consequences.”
Anger burned within me now. Oberis’s precious authority was more important than Mary’s grief? After the service I’d freely provided, working together with his people, and even his knowledge that I served the Queen, he was this petty? I obviously didn’t know the Seelie Lord as well as I thought!
Pain mixed with the anger and drove me upright. I let my left arm hang where it fell, and raised my right to a ready position, letting my anger fuel the flame of my mother’s gifts.
“Don’t be a fool,” Laurie snapped. “Accept your punishment; you cannot face me.”
The mix of pain and anger drove me, and with a snap of my fingers, I re-conjured the vicious whip of green flame and lashed out at her. Fire hammered into her cheek, and I smelled her flesh burning as the whip seared her flesh.
“I’d like to test that theory,” I told her. “Bitch.”
20
EVEN AS I faced the hag through the gathering fog, conjured flame in my hand, I knew this was not one of my smarter ideas. Physically, we were about equal. She, however, had far more Power and more ways to use said Power.
Anger and adrenaline rushed through me, and I advanced on Laurie, slashing the whip at her again. She managed to dodge this time and conjured tentacles of shadow, stark and black amidst the fog and the snow that was starting to fall.
I cut the whip through the tentacles, snowflakes vaporizing as they hit it. The tentacles broke apart as the flame hit them, and I carried through to bring the whip flicking back around to wrap around Laurie’s arm as she raised her right hand to conjure something.
The hag screamed as the flame struck her flesh again, but it wasn’t merely pain. My ears rang with the echoing noise of her voice, and I used the whip to jerk her toward me so I could punch her. My fist collided with her jaw, and the scream cut off.
However, that left Laurie mere inches from me, and more black tentacles suddenly flashed out. One drove into my broken arm, the pain making me cringe away from her. A mass of blackness encased and snuffed my whip as other tendrils of darkness grabbed my wrists and legs and tried to hold me in place.
I channeled the pain from the pressure on my broken arm, and for an instant, I was utterly encased in green faerie flame, glowing like the will of the wisp who’d been my grandfather.
The shadows that held me burnt away in the green light of the fire, and I stumbled backward, trying to break free enough to conjure more flame.
Laurie didn’t give me the time. In my moment of focus as I burnt away the darkness she’d shackled me with, she loosed another hammerblow of force. I was too busy trying to get distance to dodge, and it slammed into my left leg, just below the knee, with a sickening cracking noise.
I fell. Another blow of telekinetic force hit my right leg, just above the knee, with another sickening crack. With three broken limbs, I collapsed into the half-packed snow, pain rendering me incapable of thought, let alone motion or fighting back.
She knelt by me, the glamor of a pretty young woman I’d first seen her in flickering into place around her.
“I told you,” she said sympathetically. “You brought much of this on yourself.” The hag surveyed the snow I lay in and the snow falling.
“I’d leave you here,” she said bluntly, “but my Lord ordered you left alive. Like I said, he respects you. You just can’t defy his authority like that.”
Pain swept through me again as she scooped me up. She made no attempt to be gentle as she walked through the doors of my building like they weren’t there and carried me down to my apartment. Once there, she casually dumped me in the middle of my living room floor, totally ignoring how my broken bones fell.
I couldn’t prevent myself from whimpering in pain, and she looked back at me as I lay helpless in pain.
“I told you, you brought this on yourself,” she told me. “Obey my Lord’s orders, and I won’t have to do this again.” She eyed me as she paused judiciously and then concluded, “Bitch.”
At some point after she left, I passed out from the pain.
BLURRY PERCEPTION RETURNED, pain dominating the world.
“I can’t stay,” a female voice said softly, my ears hurting at even that volume. The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “If the Seelie lord did order this, he cannot know I was here—and I can only conceal myself from him for so long.”
“I will heal him,” another voice, also female but totally unfamiliar, promised.
“Good,” the first voice answered. “I do not like where this is going, and he is my only Sight into this mess. I need him.”
I had a sensation of motion, and then pain screamed back into my world, dragging me back into unconsciousness.
I WOKE a second time to even blurrier perception but less pain. I was on something soft, and I had a vague impression of a blonde woman leaning over me. She saw that my eyes were open and smiled gently before laying a hand on my forehead.
Sleep, not unconsciousness, claimed me in gentle arms.
THE THIRD TIME, I woke to soft female voices talking at the foot of my bed. I was conscious enough to realize I was in my bed this time and to compute that there was at least one person sitting on the end of my bed.
I slowly opened my eyes and blinked against the harsh brightness for a moment. Then I realized that the room was actually very dimly lit, only a lamp in the corner turned on, as my eyes slowly adjusted to any light at all.
I recognized one of the voices now and croaked her name.
“Mary?”
The conversation stopped, and I suddenly had two women at the head of my bed. Mary all but threw herself on top of me, hugging and kissing me. My limbs responded slowly, stiffly, but eventually I got an arm around her.
“Give him a moment, m’dear,” the blonde woman told Mary, her voice carrying a thick Irish accent. “Only his right arm really works right now.”
The stranger’s words reminded me, and I tried to move my other limbs. They were stiff, slightly unresponsive and painful to move—but they moved. They weren’t broken. Mary helped me sit up, and I looked questioningly at the stranger.
“I think I owe you thanks, but who are you?” I asked her.
“My name is Niamh,” the stranger told me. Her eyes were a stunning green color, and she had tied her blond hair up in a braid that wrapped around her head rather than falling to the ground. “Our Queen brought me here to heal you.”