All That Burns (11 page)

Fall. Tumble. Plummet.

Black.

T
here are no dreams. No thoughts. My mind is empty, crammed full with black, black, black.

And then there’s a roar. Like a giant wave pulling fast into the shore. Or the hum of a distant motorway. The noise tugs at my heart. I’m not supposed to be here in this dark. I’m supposed to be doing something else . . . something important.

There’s a crack in my eyelids. This isn’t my bed. I open my eyes wider, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. My vision reels like a drunkard kicked out of a pub. At first it’s only colors. Wine-soaked burgundy, aching gold, mist and mint. Then shapes. The squares of upturned cushions. The point of my strappy heel.

And the
noise
. . . there’s so much of it. Everywhere. Horses keening, the clatter of hooves. Screams and snarls. Pure, utter panic. The sounds swirl around, beat through the windows and open door of the carriage.

The carriage . . . crowds and masks and screams and . . .
Richard. Fighting against so many men. Going limp. And me, trying my hardest to save him.

The memory hits me like ice water. I jolt up, ready for whatever fight I can manage, but I’m alone in the carriage.

Outside is chaos. People running, mouths open to join one long and never-ending scream. I try to scan their faces—searching for black masks and clothes—but this seems to be the only color anyone is wearing. And then—a flash of pure, soul-sucking black.

It takes a moment to process the presence of the Black Dog in the middle of Trafalgar Square, looming under the high shine of the sun. The very air around it looks dimmer, overcast. As if the creature is a black hole swallowing all traces of light.

The beast gnashes through the crowd. Its teeth snap air, shred coats. The edges of its canines are laced with red, but still it wants more. I can feel its hunger from here: the burn in its eyes. So much like . . .

Blæc.

This is the same Black Dog which spared my life that night just weeks before. Frithemaeg fly around the soul feeder, diving like frantic swallows, trying to lash it into submission with roping spells of light. Blæc ignores them, shaking off their magic like water.

“Lady Emrys!”

I turn to see Ferrin crouched in the doorway. Her eyes are impossibly wide as she takes in the gutted carriage.

“Where’s King Richard?”

I open my mouth but nothing comes out. I doubt she’d hear it anyway—Blæc has started howling. The air grows heavy with its magic: wet dog, hissing coals, and rain-flecked evenings. It soaks through my shock.

That’s when I see it. Placed on the only cushion which hasn’t been torn to shreds. It’s in the center—where Richard’s royal crest is embroidered into the velvet—just between the lion’s paws and the unicorn’s hooves.

A single, yellow flower.

It’s a perfect specimen, petals fresh and unbruised. As if it had just been plucked. The color of sunshine. Beautiful poison.

Not just a warning this time.

Outside Blæc keeps howling. Ferrin keeps shouting questions I can’t hear. I stare at the birdsfoot trefoil. Try to understand why it’s here and Richard isn’t.

“Lady Emrys!!” Ferrin pulls in front of me so that her wide blue eyes are the only thing I see. “The king! Where is he?”

“Gone.” One word is all it takes to realize and cement
the truth. Richard is gone. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The Black Dog is closer now, just outside the window. The carriage shudders against its howling spells. The flower tumbles off the cushion.

“We have to get out of here. Now.” The Fae’s fingers tighten around my wrist. Pull.

I stumble forward, crush the birdsfoot trefoil under my heel. The carriage lurches just when we reach the door, leap out.

There’s an earth-shattering crash as the carriage keels onto the road. I look over my shoulder and see the Black Dog writhing on top of what used to be the Gold State Coach. The soul feeder twists and flails over the coronation carriage—all magic and weight. Crushing it the same way my heel just demolished the flower.

How easy it is for beautiful things to be destroyed.

We run until my high heels snap and my feet bleed. It doesn’t matter how far we go: Blæc’s howls still cling to my ears. Visions of black masks and white terrycloth crowd my mind. And through it all, one awful, horrifying thought.

Richard is gone. Gone. Gonegonegone.

Suddenly I’m not running anymore. I’m leaning into Ferrin’s sharp shoulder, staring through the wide arch of Westminster Abbey’s west doors. Thousands of eyes stare back. Cameras flash and click. The Abbey comes alive with gasps, whispers.

We shouldn’t have come here.
I want to turn and tell the youngling this, but it’s too late. We’re here and the cameras are flashing—capturing every detail of my broken heels, this shattered day.

“Your Majesty!” Ferrin’s call arcs into the vaulted ceiling, slices through the slants of colored window light.

Titania stands. And Anabelle with her. It’s like a dream, the way they turn and walk the wrong way down the aisle. Their steps are measured, silent against the crimson carpet runner. The whole world watches them pass.

Richard’s mother follows them both, her lips and steps both tighter than a letterpress. Embedded with deeply written panic. The same anxiety lurks under Anabelle’s face—novels of it scrawled under pristine makeup. The princess stares at me with pleading eyes, and it’s like I’m back in Herne’s wood—with the damp leaves and Breena’s shattered body and Anabelle asking me over and over where her brother is. And me: not knowing. Not being able to voice the horrible truth.

Gone.

This time, I have to tell her.

Ever since I unveiled to the mortals, Richard’s mother has made it a point not to acknowledge my existence, much less my relationship status with her son. For months I’ve stood in the same room as Queen Cecilia without so much as a glance. But she’s staring now, and her eyes are nuclear.

“What did you do to my son?” The church snatches and radiates her words—a fallout for the whole crowd to hear.

“Mum.” Anabelle’s voice is low, as solid as the stone pillars which brace the Abbey’s roof. “Not here.”

“Come, we’ll speak in private.” Titania turns and starts walking. We follow the wake of her gossamer gown like ducklings. Along the back wall, through a series of corners and doors which swing open at the Faery queen’s command. Into the shelter of the Abbey’s back rooms.

It’s not until the final door swings shut and its lock slides into place that Ferrin speaks.

“There’s a Black Dog loose in Trafalgar Square. I don’t know how it evaded our perimeter. The mortals caught sight of it and panicked. We left to take care of it.” The youngling pauses. I notice her chin is trembling. “When I
returned to the coach the king was gone.”

Her revelation falls heavy. Crowds the room. Even Titania looks stunned. It’s easy to see how just this small time in London has drained her. How even with all the changes brought by Lights-down she’ll have to leave the city soon, or else risk Mab’s fate.

Queen Cecilia reacts first. Her eyes are still fastened to me, sharp and biting. “This is your fault. I told Richard over and over again you weren’t safe but he was too infatuated to listen—”

“Mum, stop being ridiculous. You’re not helping anything,” Anabelle says. For someone who just had a panic attack over flower arrangements she’s eerily calm. “What do they mean, Emrys?”

“They took him . . .” It doesn’t feel like I’m the one talking, but it’s my voice. Faint and brittle, yet still mine. “Men in masks. I tried to fight them . . .”

But I couldn’t.

Weak. Powerless. Fire without flame.

Richard. Gone.

“Men?” Titania’s eyebrows dive into a silver V. “Mortals did this?”

Mortals. They were mortals, weren’t they? The thought startles me. I hadn’t felt any magic in their fight. Their
touch. If they’d had any powers, they wouldn’t have used chemicals and cloth.

But Blæc. The dreams. The twinge of magic I felt just seconds before the world fell into hell . . . those couldn’t have been just a coincidence.

Could they?

The door at Queen Titania’s back shudders with the pounding of fists. The handle twists and when that doesn’t give way there’s a fierce yell. “PROTECTION COMMAND! OPEN THE DOOR!”

“I felt magic”—I stumble over my words—“just before they took him . . . before the Black Dog appeared.”

“Ferrin. Stay here.” The Faery queen strides across the room, toward the many-paned windows. The glass warps when she draws close, melting around the contours of her body. “I’ll go to Trafalgar Square with the rest of the Guard. Do what I can.”

The door groans. Titania is all the way through the window when the old lock splinters. The royals’ bodyguards pile into the room. There are two I recognize: Jensen and Eric. But even more crowd behind, hands clenched around their weapons. Not guns, but stun guns. The entire room is alight—singeing with bastardly blue light, razing electricity.

Every single, crackling edge of every stun gun is aimed at Ferrin.

“Your Majesties.” Jensen sidesteps to Richard’s sister and mother. “There’s been a security breach. We need you both to come with us.”

All of them are dressed in black. The sight catches me. I can’t stop looking at the sapphire stun guns, how Eric has his leveled straight between Ferrin’s blue eyes, ready to strike. Electricity: the only weapon a mortal has against a Fae.

It’s almost as if they planned for this to happen.

The charges aren’t touching her, but they’re close enough to feed the youngling’s sickness. Ferrin doubles over, hands folded over her stomach, where nausea is about to overflow.

Queen Cecilia’s arm hooks into her daughter’s. “Let’s go, dear.”

Anabelle stays rooted next to me, swallowing the scene. The buzz of a dozen stun guns dances like fireflies in her eyes. “Officer Jensen, what’s going on?”

“Your Highness, your brother has disappeared from the coronation coach. We have reason to believe magical creatures were involved—”

“You think
we
did this?” Ferrin breaks in, panting
through her illness. “We’re King Richard’s Frithemaeg! We’re sworn to protect him!”

“Quiet!” Eric snaps at the Fae and shoves his stun gun closer. Beads of sweat dew her brow as she fights the growing sick.

Jensen keeps speaking as if nothing happened. “Our orders are to take you and your mother to a safe location.”

Our orders
. His words make the hairs on the back of my neck stand alert. That’s what the masked man had said, standing over me in the coronation coach.

I try to feel for magic, any trace of it. But I sense nothing. These men are clean. Then again, so were the men behind the masks. Just because I don’t feel it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There’s so much I can’t sense anymore . . . now that I’m mortal.

But I do feel Ferrin’s aura tensing, rallying itself against the stun gun charges, piecing together a spell.

“Ferrin,” I say her name, my voice heavy with warning.

“Put the guns away.” None of the anxiety I saw beneath Anabelle’s makeup comes through her voice as she looks at Eric. “Ferrin is my Frithemaeg. My guard. Same as you are.”

“Apologies, Your Highness, but it’s not your call,” Jensen tells her firmly.

Across the room Ferrin’s magic flares, brimming almost over the edge.

“Ferrin, don’t! You’ll only make it worse,” I say before she can release the spell. I turn to Jensen, look straight into his eyes. Try to remember if I’ve seen them before under a ski mask. They’re a plain, unmemorable color. “Ferrin will stay. I go with you.”

“Of course you’re coming!” Anabelle says. “Why wouldn’t you?”

The bodyguard in front of us clears his throat. His stare slides out of mine, refusing to look at me when he says these words, “Princess, Lady Emrys was in the same coach when the king disappeared.”

“You think she was a part of this?” Anabelle pauses, takes the whole room in—the buzzing lights and bristling black suits—and steps closer to me, twisting her free hand into mine. “You’re wrong. Emrys would
never
do anything to hurt Richard. Never.”

“Your Majesty—these creatures—they’re not like us.” It’s Eric who’s speaking this time. He’s still holding the stun gun high, glaring at Ferrin’s flawless snowflake skin through its neon blue sear. “They have powers of persuasion. They can make you believe what they want.”

“Emrys wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.” With every steel-coated word she says, the princess grips my hand tighter. Her touch holds all of the room’s tension, the clash of electricity and magic, building and warring and ready to explode. “She even tried to get me to stop the coronation this morning!”

“Is that so?” Jensen’s eyes flick across the room, skate over Eric and the others. I don’t need magic to read the meanings behind their glances. The subtle change in their body movement. Eric’s stun gun is still latched toward Ferrin, but his eyes drift toward me. Glint suspicion.

I stare back—eyes green and just as glinting.

“Enough of this, Anabelle.” Queen Cecilia is still trying to reel her daughter across the room. “I’ve lost a husband and a son to these creatures. I’m not going to lose you too. Let’s go with these officers.”

Anabelle jerks her arm out of her mother’s and sidles even closer to me. The edges of our dresses—mint silk and white—pool together on the floor. “I go with Emrys or I don’t go at all.”

Jensen’s unremarkable eyes study me—all questions and calculations. Trying to judge the risk. The reward.

“Fine,” he says, and waves both of us forward. “Let’s go.”

The room unwinds all at once. Stun guns fall to officers’ sides; Ferrin sighs with relief and sick. Anabelle’s grip loosens in mine, but she keeps holding on as the tide of officers pulls us out the door. I follow, dragged and straggling like seaweed, into the unknown.

A
nabelle doesn’t let go of my hand. Her grip is just tight enough to make my fingers tingle. By the time we reach the underground bunker I can’t feel anything at all. Yet while my flesh grows numb, my insides become anything but. They’re churning and undone. Jolted by each and every pothole the Protection Command officers speed over in their black Jaguar.