Silver Hollow (58 page)
“I can’t!” she moaned, tears spilling from her eyes as the strength of the ring on her finger outweighed her own. Dearg was on his feet, pulling Amie with him so she broke contact with the
Unseelie
,
and
,
wrapping her in his arms
,
he coated them both with orange flames until her energy collided and mixed with his.
Faye turned onto all fours, pushing herself up off the ground with inhuman agility, daggers bared and one word on her lips for the couple behind her. “Run!” she hissed before pitching one of her knives through the air. It sang as it met its target.
Dearg flipped them around in time to see the
Unseelie
who
had attacked them. “Amie, we must press on. More will soon come.”
But she was transfixed
by
the male who looked so inhuman and so much like them at once. Amie had never seen death before tonight, not any that counted. She wondered bitterly why it continued to follow her after all these years.
I already feel like the
G
irl
W
ho
L
ived around here.
The male was gripping the knife stuck in his belly, his frosted appearance only turning paler by the second as he sank to the earth. “Bloody
nixed
blade,” he gasped with a cackle.
“Who are you working for?” Faye shouted, throwing the
Unseelie
over his fallen soldiers. Instead of waiting for the male to speak, she screamed louder this time, red crackles of dark energy piercing his flesh. “And don’t give me some
filsh
about us being on the same side!” Pulling her dagger from his belly so the blood could freely flow, she quickly returned it to the outer edges of the wound and began to press it slightly within.
Amie couldn’t bear to hear his screams. “Faye! Stop
,
he can’t hurt anyone anymore!” Dearg held her back when she tried to reach and grab the dagger from her friend’s hand.
Faye laughed bitterly, never looking up from her prey. “You don’t know what they do, Amie. There never will be an end to his kind of evil. Good people don’t threaten other people’s families!”
“But aren’t you the one who said not all Unseelie are bad, just like not all Seelie are good? Faye
, please! No more killing tonight. I can’t stand it anymore!” She sank into Dearg’s arms, eyeing the house
,
and wondered again if Henry made it unscathed.
Faye at last lifted her chin to face her, and something softened in her eyes. The
Unseelie
shouldn’t have interrupted his only chance.
“
You’ll never guess
what we did to your sister
.
”
t
he
-
snow skinned male cackled, choking on its own blue colored blood even as her dagger was pressed to its throat.
Faye’s eyes glowed like twin coals amid dying flames. “How do you know about her?” Crawling almost on top of the other
Unseelie
,
she pressed her other blade so tightly to his throat, Amie was certain he would bleed at any moment.
The
Unseelie’s
smile was manic, his laughter growing as if she had said something particularly
gleeful. “We know everything
,
Fayelyn Gomora, about you and your pathetic clan. Don’t you want to know?”
“Know what? You’re supposed to have all the answers, right?” Faye’s thin tone could have cut through ice.
Amie cringed seeing her friend like this, a wholly alien version of the person she thought she knew best. But was this because of what happened to Jo? Or had it been there all along, the assassins she and Jo were trained to be
?
“
W
ant to know
what we
did
to her?
It’s got to be killing you, wondering how she died.”
The
Unseelie
couldn’t laugh after Faye removed his ability to speak.
Amie wanted to bury her face in Dearg’s chest, to pretend she had never seen her friend do something so violent. It was one thing to write about wars and bloodshed, quite another to have it staring you in the face.
The distant hord
e
had drawn nearer. Though substantially smaller thanks to Amie’s flora friends, they would not attack the
Unseelie
for some unexplained reason.
Again Dearg urged
her
, pulling her back towards the castle. “My love, please come. This is their fight now. If we can reach inside the doors, you can draw up the defenses again and they can nay follow.”
Amie sighed, blinking past tears, watching Faye continually stab the enemy. If Ginuog hadn’t appeared then, she wasn’t sure what would have happened.
He came from
nowhere,
it seemed, and she vaguely wondered how he
had
managed to avoid the earth’s wrath. He was bleeding in several places and had obviously been
nixed
to no affect. Yet the edges of his form blurred as he approached Faye, from human to man-beast. Slinging his crossbow over his shoulder
,
he set his gaze on Amie and Dearg and shouted, “What are you two still doing here? Get inside the house! Find the others and for Creator’s sake, finish this!”
Faye growled when he tried to pull her away. “Don’t touch me! He said they killed her! But my sister’s not dead! I would have felt it!”
“Fayelyn, now is not the moment for grief!” Ben growled even deeper, roughly pulling her onto her feet and picking up her discarded dagger. “They picked up her signature. Looks like Plan B failed.”
Faye rolled her eyes, shivering as she returned to a semblance of her old self. “On to Plan C. Oh joy!”
The last remaining
golem
met Dearg’s gaze and nodded. “We shall hold the defense. Slaine remains on the rooftops as you insisted.”
Dearg smirked and nodded in acknowledgement. Without another word he pulled Amie with him to the house. The last thing Amie saw was Faye’s quick glance at their retreat and the sorrow in her eyes, before she and
the golem turned
to face the amassing shadows.
“Amie, turn away. They are more capable than you ken.” He smiled reassuringly before glancing up to sheer castle wall facing them and taking a deep breath, growled, “
Rrochgreith
!”
High above, the dragon’s roar echoed back to them and
,
dropping so quickly his form blurred, Slaine lifted his wings over their heads and rushed the last offense. Heat poured from his jaws and turned the night to daylight with balefire.
Home
was
what you ma
d
e of it, the place you stake
d
claim on in the world. Home
was
the people
,
not the building itself. Home could be where the heart
was
, where lifetimes were begun, spent and lived. At least that was what normal people said. For Amie Wenderdowne, home was the place that breathed a sigh of relief the moment she crossed its threshold. Her home was alive in a way she could never get used to and could never live without.
She wasn’t the sole occupant of her house. It was
too
ridiculously vast for any sensible person to go hermit in. But she was responsible for its wellbeing, for their wellbeing. Wenderdowne was falling apart when she first arrived and it was because of her it had come back to life.
So let’s keep it that way,
she thought as she
walked
through the halls. Everything looked almost exactly as she had left it. Half of her expected the catastrophe outside to reflect within. Candles flamed to life when she approached and winked out after her shadow had passed. Some objects had been knocked over in the frenzy after the attack. The front door in the great hall still swayed open gently
,
back and forth in an invisible wind. Nothing had slashed the walls with blunt objects or lit them on fire like the West Wing.
At the Ballroom, the resemblance ended with the lifeless heaps of ballroom gowns and robes and the stain of their blood.
Seelie and Unseelie nixy
still hung in the air so thickly she could taste the metallic charge on her tongue. Her gaze followed the mark of the warpath and shuddered to see both good and evil had fallen together. For a time they had fought senselessly, nearby stone marred from stray blasts of energy. Frowning, she stopped at the foot of the staircase as a chill breathed down the back of her exposed neck.
Something stopped them.
The nearest figures had fallen in the same direction, their blasts marking nothing but the steps above her. Rather than fear and hate one another they had banded together in those last fatal moments against the shadow. Pressing her fingers to the black stain on the marble stair Amie felt a rush of danger rise, induce her terror. She had felt this same fear before. He had used
it against her to keep her from prying where she didn’t belong. He hadn’t trusted her then and she trusted him even less now.
But the question remained, why would Henry want Emrys to build a creature army for his defense? Wasn’t the house itself enough? Did Henry even know what his Trapper’s plans had been? She could only assume he had been responsible for bringing so many centaurs and gryphons to Wenderdowne, had overheard pieces of conversation hinting as much.
If this was true, then it was obvious where Emrys had gone during her escape into the caves. He hadn’t fled, but did what he did best, killed. Somehow this knowledge troubled her more than the mutilated creatures her plants had swallowed whole in the gardens. Amie was uncertain of which side Emrys was on, especially since reading Grim’s stolen parchment. So she had to wonder
,
if she crossed
his
path
,
would he kill her too
?
“You al
l
right, darling?” Dearg asked, gripping her elbow.
Glancing up to face him
,
she
offered a quick
smile before nodding
.
“Kind of afraid of what we’re going to find.” His eyes burned with compassion, sharing in her sorrows.
“I ken what you glimpsed Faye do has troubled your soul. So much has changed your perspective in so short a while. But I have seen thee wrap thyself around all of it in a way no one else could, my love.” He brushed her cheek with a stray flame-touched fingertip.
“I couldn’t get through this without you.”
“So let us finish it, Amie.”
Amie turned to face the familiar winding staircase and took her first steps. They passed Henry’s study, Underhill’s favorite haunt and the secret passage to the kitchens. Though the trail of blood and bodies had ended on the stairwell, as people struggled to run from each other and Wenderdowne’s solid walls, an echo of the dead followed her subconscious. Hopefully the something other in her gut was leading them straight to Henry instead of into the hands of her enemy.
Her room was almost exactly as she left it with her books sprawled over her bear rug. Evidence of Underhill’s rush to ready her for the ball was strewn over her unmade bed. Glancing about she wondered why the house would lead her here, until Dearg growled low behind her and his upper body sprouted with threatening flames.
She wasn’t expecting to find a figure staring out her window. With his back turned to her it was impossible to tell who she was waiting for to acknowledge her intrusion. Without his large
feathered cap she had not recognized
the
golden hair now tied at the nape of his neck behind his head.
His silky cultured voice however was another matter. “So you’ve come back to us at last, in the final hour, aye?”
“Grimwich?” Amie tentatively approached before Dearg stopped her.
“Do nay go near that
wirm
, lass! He is a Rumplekin!”
Grimwich turned his head slightly to the left, revealing a
tiny
smirk. “Leave our Queen to make her own judgment, dragon! After what she has seen this night, I am certain she is ready to start calling the shots, as they say. Such actions
are
considered heroic, are they not, Jessamiene? According to form some other obstacles must have come in your way. Indeed, you have been your own obstacle from the start.”
Amie ignored him, pushing Dearg’s hand gently aside as she approached with silver and purple
-
hued sparks popping from her pores. Grabbing Grimwich’s arm, she swiveled him round to face her. “Where is everyone? Where is Henry?” She drew back when she saw the change that had come over his pretty features. His glamour was gone once again, revealing his indigo
-
tinted skin and large dark eyes. With his golden hair tied back and most of the frippery ripped off his costume he was even more unnerving than before.
