"Look at me Rae." Tomas' voice was urgent. I tore my eyes away from Alex to him. "Don't watch," he whispered.
"Do something," I sobbed.
He looked stricken and tried to free himself. Like me was held by chains that drained his strength and mental abilities, and there was nothing he could do. The clear dark that followed him around was a frazzled gray.
"Rae," Alex said quietly, so calm and collected it reached me through the chaos.
"Don't look away, I want to see your face."
My tears streamed as I turned to her. "You're going to die."
"I love you." She smiled and the blue runes on her check crinkled. "You my best friend. I don't know what you are or who you are, but that don't change the way I feel, y'know?"
I nodded frantically and braced myself. "I love you too." It was the first time and last I would ever say those words. They were hers and hers alone.
Another hand, smaller with razors for nails trailed down her stomach, across her hip. Alex cried out in pain as the cries of anticipation shattered the night. The noise and clamor reached peak as Wasp fisted her hand in Alex's hair, drawing her head back, almost in tenderness. Devlin lifted the blade high above his head, and the wicked sharp edge flickered with light. Then he
Another scream erupted from me so loud a blood vessel burst in my eye. My scream cut off, no more air in my lungs to carry the sound.
The figure cloaked in black threw back his hood.
Conall.
My heart crashed in my chest as screams, sounds of death and violence surround me. I was too terrified to open my eyes. All I could see was Devlin's dagger sinking into Alex's throat and the gush of blood. The bonds at my hands went slack. My feet were free and I kicked for all I was worth. Screaming. Too far gone to fight properly, I lashed out like a wild animal. Firm, but gentle hands lifted me up and held me close. I kept my eyes pressed shut in defense against whatever torture I was to be subjected to.
"Be still Rae, I will not harm you," a calm voice commanded.
The voice was singsong, not raspy and seductive. It hinted of magic and light. Still, I pushed, and shoved, and bit with my teeth. I yelled and screamed.
"She can take no more, Lochlann," Maeve's high chine sounded sad. "Leave her."
"No," I said hoarsely. "I won't be fooled. You're all evil. Demon monsters!" I thrashed about, hoping to drag an eye out and to my grave with me.
"Watch. Your brother avenges your friend as you bawl like a baby."
My yelling stopped and my eyes popped open.
Conall had become a phantom figure, massacring the bewildered fairies prancing in the inner circle. A blur, he ripped and tore the beasts to pieces like crepe paper. There was nothing but a whisper of sound as death claimed those who'd held us captive. He disposed of any lingering survivors with a snap of the spine, or blade through flesh. Headless bodies tottered and fell as hot guts spilled onto the cold ground. Then it was done and he was still.
Clad in snugly fitted pants, and soft boots he was tall and sinewy. His dark hair was ponytailed, resting loosely across board shoulders. His skin glowed like a beacon and his ears had the distinctive point of fairy. With competent ease, he wielded his sword in one hand, and saluted to Lochlann with the other. Leather hilted the shiny steel of his sword was drenched in what looked like red paint. Chest splattered in blood and gore, clutched in his other hand was the dismembered head of a fairy. Savagely lifting it high, he laughed boomingly and blood dribbled from the ragged hole where the neck used to join to the body. He tossed it indifferently and it landed with a squelch to roll and gather the pine leaves on the forest floor.
Orchard, the fairy wyld was littered with mutilated fairy bodies and I felt nothing but bone deep satisfaction.
I scrambled over to the dais, and sank to my knees over Alex's body. Her eyes were wide and starring, mouth slightly parted. Rocking back and forth, I wound my fingers into my hair and wailed. She was dead. Gone. I could never laugh or joke with my friend again. She had lost her life for my mistakes, my foolishness. I couldn't bear it, and nor would I have to.
I placed both my hands on her eyes and called magic to me. It came reluctantly, already forming into something dark and unnatural. As I stood in the way of natural order, my nature rumbled with discontent. I was meant to bring balance, not perversion. I didn't care, so I ignored my instincts.
I did not have time to think of the ramifications of what I was doing. I couldn't let her go, and I hoped in time she would forgive me, and understand why I did what I did. I muttered the name of one who might take pity on her.
Her body twitched beneath my hands as if I had zapped her, and I said it again, louder this time.
"What is she doing?" someone asked sharply behind me.
"Loa!"
Her eyelids fluttered.
If this could work, if I could call on the voodoo deity and call back someone from the grave, it would be Alex. She was the daughter of powerful mambo, a voodoo Sorceress who ran wild in demon territory, and battled against witchcraft before the Clerics hunted her down. But Alex had been spared. The Clerics had taken her to the Priests for judgment as a child and they had declared her human, believing the spark had missed her. I could sense something within her. A glimmer of the magic her mother could touch and manipulate. I had never taken her roots seriously the few times she had spoken of it, and all that time I'd known her, in her own way she had been asking me to believe in her.
There. I had it under control. Her life force was trying to depart, but I tethered it to her body.
"Forgive me," I whispered in her ear. All I had to do was lock her soul within her body and she would wake.
A heavy pressure at the base of my neck shocked me still.
Mercifully, it went black.
Before I opened my eyes, I smelt him. His mineral and damp earth smell. I opened my eyes and concluded it had all gone to hell. Tomas was burning. Whorls of smoke rose from his skin, and his head drooped forward. The silver hung him from a tree and bit into his skin cruelly.
It felt like a sack of bricks weighted down each of my eyelids, and my bones slid around inside me.
"Let him down," I croaked.
Lochlann's glacial gaze fell on me, and his face was hard. "He has taken a life," he said stonily. "By fairy law he dies."
I shook my head. It felt spongy and full of empty space. "What life? Uh, the Cleric was going to kill me. He saved me."
"He has killed a fairy. He faces the sun."
"You're wrong," I said, fuming he was bold enough to try and take Tomas' life with such an outrageous claim.
He couldn't have killed anyone; he hadn't had the time to.
"We found her body, Rae," Conall said and knelt down in front of me. Maeve was a step behind him, her eyes wide and sorrowful. "Her throat was mauled and her blood drained."
"There are shifters around. The fairy wylds border a Pride, don't they? And the blood, if she was mauled she would have bled out."
"His trail led from her body to the place in the Wall Breandan took you. We guess it is here you met him?"
Denial at Conall's explanation died on my lips when Tomas' own words came to me as a distant echo. "I have already eaten, a skinny girl, bitter." Was I really to believe a starving vampire would come across a lone fairy and not bite her?
It didn't matter. The thought stoked the fires of my anger, and I rolled onto my hands and knees. It didn't matter because he was mine. I gained my feet and ignored the fact the floor rippled.
As I spoke, I staggered forward. "I am sorry for your loss, but you need to let him go."
"Bind her," Lochlann ordered.
Chains appeared in Maeve's hands, which I now saw were wrapped in cloth, and she looped one around my neck and snaked the other around my torso. I dropped like a stone. Was I really so predictable they had prepared the one person who I would never see as a threat with chains? I stared up at her, horrified.