She put her hand on my arm. “Don’t do this, Connor.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the one here he’s afraid of,” I said.
She pressed against me. “You don’t know that. You don’t.”
I glanced at Murdock. “You can always shoot him if you change your mind.”
He shook his head and looked away. “Maybe I’ll shoot both of you.”
Despite my lack of popularity with the Murdocks, I told myself he was joking. I was sure he was. Pretty sure.
Vitniri paced beside me as I crossed the intersection. Several ran close in, their eyes glazed with the heat of the hunt, tongues lolling as they scented me. One or two nipped at my clothing, then backed off, barking in frustration or confusion.
I hadn’t seen Vize since the night of the riots in the Weird. Then, he had been a little worse for wear—binding burns, cuts, bruises, and a nice split across his cheek where I had clocked him. He pulled the darkness back, let it rise and curl over us like a canopy. It didn’t touch me. Touching each other had ramifications, usually bad ones. That much Vize understood.
He cradled Gretan against his chest. “Odd company you are keeping,” he said.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said.
“You’ll miss the point of all this if you do,” he said.
“There is no point, Vize. There never was. It’s all chaos and power games,” I said.
He arched his eyebrow. “And you’re playing and being played. Of course, it’s chaos and power. The reach for power always causes chaos. It’s the Wheel of the World, Grey. Without chaos, there is no change, and without change, nothing progresses.”
“You expect me to believe you’re in this for progress? This city is in ruins because of you. You’re not going to spread your brand of progress. I won’t let you. It ends here.”
“You know you can’t touch me,” he said.
“I don’t have to,” I said. I pulled the dagger from my boot, the enchanted one that Briallen had given me. It radiated heat, the runes on the blade glistening with pale fire. The air around my hand rippled, and the blade stretched to the length of a sword. I held it with the tip stopping short of Vize’s chest.
Unimpressed, Vize looked down at the blade, then back at me. “You think you can kill me. You’re not who you think you are.”
I pressed the tip against his tunic. “Last chance to surrender.”
He lifted his hand, not toward the sword, but toward empty space. “And you.”
The air crackled with a blinding white flash of essence, and a spear appeared in his hand. Not any spear, but the spear—the one that had disappeared when I closed the gate into TirNaNog. The spear had bonded to me, to my body signature back then. It operated by some arcane set of rules no one knew. Vize had bonded with it, also, and, for some reason, it preferred him to me at that moment.
Vize pressed the tip against my jacket. The dark mass in my head burned against my skull. Spots flashed before my eyes as I tried to fight against the pain they generated. “Where did you get that?” I asked.
With a flip of his wrist that I should have seen coming, he parried the sword away and slammed the spear against the side of my knee. I fell on all fours. The dark mass bulged against the back of my right eye, pressing forward. Vize grabbed me by the hair and wrenched my head back. “I will have the stone, Grey. The only way to stop the Seelie Court is to destroy it.”
Streaks of essence-fire rained into the intersection. Vize tilted his head up to watch. “And I am not without allies.”
In TirNaNog, a ragtag collection of Celtic and Teutonic fey had joined his cause, some powerful enough to take on Danann fairies and Alfheim elves. I didn’t realize how many of them had managed to hide in the city.
Darkness sprang from my eye and hit Vize in the face. The contact jolted me to my feet as it slammed him against the wall. I staggered back as essence seared the air between us.
Get out of there. I flinched at the force of Meryl’s sending.
Vitniri screamed and howled as they scattered. Fairies swept the air, firing down. Solitaries flooded into the streets from the surrounding buildings. Behind me, Meryl and Murdock pushed across the street, their hardened body shields sizzling with the incandescent light of essence strikes.
Vize smiled at me as he pulled darkness around him and Gretan like a cloak, the spear blazing within it like white flame. The dark mass seeped out of my eye. With a shout of pain, I contracted my body essence, helping the darkness release.
The darkness boiled out of my chest in a cloud. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t care. I fed it my anger, and the darkness leaped forward, hitting Vize’s cluster of darkness like a fist. I flew backwards from the contact, hitting the pavement. I blacked out, my vision, already cluttered, going darker. The blackout lasted a few seconds, my awareness returning to see the backs of Meryl and Murdock over me as they held off attacks from either side.
I pulled myself up a wrought-iron fence. Essence-fire pinned us down, but Meryl’s and Murdock’s shields held it off. The air in front of us rippled, and Uno’s hulking form appeared, his shape swelling in size as he howled against the sky. Fey folk scrambled away in fear. Murdock swung his firing arm back and forth, panic etched on his face.
“What the hell is that?” Meryl shouted.
“I told you I got a dog. A big dog,” I said.
The sky lit with a growing halo of blue light that swept into the square as a boiling haze. Uno pressed against us, forcing us away from the fighting. Shouts echoed against the shadowed walls of a narrow street. The essence billowed toward us, clouds of indigo and white filling the width of the street. It hit Murdock’s shield in a shower of yellow sparks. His hardened crimson body shield bent and shifted, forcing itself back against the wave. He had learned how to deal with the essence wave from our last encounter.
Figures ran in the fog, distorted human shapes that leaped and screamed. They swept by us in eddies of blue, essence I recognized. The Wild Hunt had come calling, and it was attacking Vize’s allies.
A deep indigo light flickered in the midst of the Hunt. As it rolled closer, people fled in confusion. The shape resolved into a huge figure on a dream mare, its eyes burning with fierce red light. The rider reined the beast and turned it toward us. The horse stamped its feet, bloodred sparks flying up from the pavement. The rider stared down, eyes glowing with flames from a helmet mounted with enormous antlers.
Follow. The sending had a rich, deeper baritone that made me shiver. With a jab of sharp-heeled leather boots, the rider wheeled the dream mare about and cantered down the street.
30
The blue light of the Dead flickered as the Hunt continued the fight on the next block. Murdock stared after the rider. “Was that a friend?”
“If I’m not mistaken, we’ve been invited to follow the King of the Dead.”
“What, like the devil?” Murdock asked.
I twisted my lips in amusement. “The King’s more of an administrator and occasional hunter, but I don’t think that means he’s the nicest guy around, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“And we want to go meet him because . . . ?” Murdock asked.
I looked back up the street. Uno guarded the sidewalk, his massive bulk obscuring the scene in the intersection. “Given the options at the moment, I say the King of the Dead is the least of our problems. Don’t drop your body shield, though.”
“Great,” he muttered.
Meryl slipped her hand in mine. “You know, usually when we go out, all hell breaks loose, but I don’t think it’s ever been this literal.”
The sounds of the fighting diminished as we walked deeper into the Tangle. Faint blue light hazed the air, the residual trail of the dream mare and the rider. The surrounding walls glowed pale white. The street turned into a dead end.