Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (43 page)

"Put us in the shadows of your enemies and we'll finish this," said a low voice to his left.

Sio turned to find Daediem holding a knife in one hand and a ragged Eamon in the other. "Why?"

"I've made old oaths and would not be forsworn," the assassin answered, staring transfixed at Sio's neck.

"It is a sentiment we share," Eamon said.

Sio nodded and thought hard, willed that shit until he felt utterly ridiculous. Nothing happened.

"The Progeny have more right to this than we do," Tian said as she ducked out of the way of a warped fixed gear that nearly took her head off. She froze when she turned to look at him.

"I can't send these two and they're standing right next to me. How are we going to get the wonder twins through the shields?"

"Send Tian," Eamon said.

"No."

"He's right. I carry two Progeny sigils and even without them..."

"I'll go myself," Sio told her.

"No!" The collective response was immediate. All three dropped to their knees in the street.

"None but Winter's chosen could do what you've done." Tian wouldn't look at him as she said it, couldn't meet his eyes.

"What does that mean, Tian?"

"It means that you are the rightful heir to the Obsidian Throne of the Unseelie Sidhe and you are marked as such," Eamon answered, eyes flicking down to the cool weight Sio realized was collared around the base of his throat. He couldn't see what it was, in fact he stood there like an idiot long enough that he nearly got beaned by a flying piece of debris. Sio dropped to his knees in front of Tian.

"Tell me what you would have me do," he said. He cupped her face and raised her eyes to meet his own.

"Finish this." Her voice was gritty, despondent.

He ground his teeth together, overrun by her heartbreak and thought about being swallowed by the shadows beneath them. In that moment two things became clear, the first being that the Progeny didn't fit in the darkness quite the way Tian did, or he did for that matter. He had to take time to mentally sort them into their respective corners before he pushed. The second was, as it turned out, there was a learning curve to this shit.

Vengeance was a funny kind of thing. It never burned clean, but it was a concept that even an angel could get behind and push like a motherfucker. Xavier lunged forward on Royal's flank in stops and starts. He missed getting crushed by the remains of a brutalized Volkswagen Passat and it barely registered through the haze of blood lust. Hell, nearly getting maimed only served to piss him off and the fury felt good in the brutal cold, consuming and righteous. It'd been longer than he could remember since his humanity had asserted itself so vehemently, longer still since the angel aspect had been in agreement, so he welcomed the bitterness and raging hostility with open arms. Fuck. God, he'd missed those emotions.

*Quit reveling, dickhead, and focus.*

-Does it look like I'm standing here playing with myself?-

*It does actually. Perhaps you should KILL something to make yourself appear more useful.*

Xavier ground his teeth together and shot Royal a dirty look as he resisted the urge to start bickering like a two year old. The world lurched beneath him. He struggled to remain upright in the dissipating storm while all manner of nonsense rained down from laughable heights. Objects plummeted to the ground like a puppet show with its strings cut. He and Royal scrambled to get out of the way.

One minute he was darting around trying not to get toasted by an errant fireball or skewered by some impaling pointy object, the next, the bottom slumped out of the world and he fell like a stone into the endless pool of shadows under his feet. The resulting sensation was close to the disorientation of getting knocked out, a sharp drop preceding a painfully claustrophobic exile into the black. Xavier's face hurt. Chest hurt too. Come to think of it, everything hurt. The pressure was a full body vise, unbearable and increasing. The acrid tang of Royal's psychic laughter made him lose any semblance of composure. Xavier thrust the burning blade of Heaven's Middle Finger at an angle and jerked it upward. He flexed incorporeal wings and exploded out of another, considerably smaller, living creature.

It had been a wizard from the fading burnt aural after images on the remaining chunks. Had it been anything else he would have been crippled with guilt. He wasn't. Adrenaline pushed him through the roof and realizing he was face to face with Sio didn't do a damn thing to improve his mood. It was hard to look at the bastard for more reasons than one, but the most immediate was that the guy's aura was like staring into the sun, white hot at the center, surrounded by a haze of glistening quicksilver, and Tian's golden balm. There was no sign of the fraying binding that had been unmistakable when they'd removed the male from Union Square.

Xavier's stomach lurched. His emotions grew hazy. If he'd truly been an angel, the sight of Sio's ascension would have been a gift. Apparently though, he was human enough that this particular win felt like crap.

"Quit staring at me, asshole. I know I'm pretty. Kill something," Xavier snapped. He spat several partially liquefied bits of gray matter out onto the street.

"That was...gratuitous," Sio said. "You've got a lil something..." The bastard motioned to the ruined front of Xavier's shirt, then caught a jagged chunk of pavement aimed for his skull. Sio dumped the offending piece of concrete and bolted into the darkness after the wizard who'd lobbed the thing. One second Sio was there, the next he was just another shadow.

Xavier stared after the vanished Sidhe long enough to become a target. He parried an energy ball, sliding around in the wet pile of gore at his feet. The lag time to his reaction nearly saw him sporting a visual hole in his torso to match the figurative one he been toting around. He need to get his head back in the game.

*Been awhile since the last time you were inside a woman...though I'm guessing that wasn't quite what you had in mind.*

-You're a dick.-

An oily multi-hued gout of hell fire leveled a ten foot radius to his right.

*Demon.*

-Half demon.-

*A distinction that is not only laughable, but inconsequential. Watch your left.*

-Says you.-

*I would know.*

Xavier turned into the incoming wizard in time to watch as the oblivious fucker was jerked backward and dispatched with an audible crunch. The guy had been the size of a linebacker so it should have seemed incongruent that Tian would be left crouching over the corpse, showing no visible sign of exertion. It didn't, and in that moment like so many others, she was perfect. Stronger in the broken places as Hemingway would have said, and now all those cracks were fluid.

"Zulpey deserved better," Tian said.

That heavy cream voice of hers gutted him every time.

"So did you."

The way that he already grieved her was terrifying. Tian nodded without meeting his eyes, as if she weren't sure how to respond. She waded back into the fray, all sleek death and brutal indestructible efficiency while he was left there ruined. He mentally shook himself.

Zulpey deserved better...

Damn straight.

The images of the innocent female's last moments were branding their way through his soul, and whether he had to do it clean or do it dirty the perpetrators had died with her. They just didn't know it yet. Xavier threw himself at the last defensive cluster and hurled The Finger into the weakening joint, where the wizards were using their own auras to bolster their shields. The broadsword burned in a clean haze of retribution as it arced through the air with a high-pitched whine. Three Guardian died as the firebrand made impact. Their own magic imploded ripping them to shreds.

*Nice of you to join us.*

-Someone had to save your ass.-

A sharp pain lanced through the front of his thigh, a parting shot from one of the remaining survivors. Xavier's leg gave out. The wound was a bitter ache wound around a slow burn, an easy indicator that whatever he'd been hit with had done more damage than he wanted to contemplate. He dropped to his knees and pulled the gun he hadn't intended on using. Xavier began firing controlled bursts into the shielding wards the Guardian had hastily chalk etched into the ground until they were unrecognizable.

The protective shields guttered and all hell broke loose as the last of the wizards burned out a messy soul fire offense and were either picked off from where Avery and the human must have been waiting on the rooftops or torn limb from limb by the corroborative effort between Royal, Tian, Eamon (who was looking pretty rough around the edges), and the heavily tatted giant whose name Xavier either didn't know or couldn't remember.

In the wake of that shocking extermination the street was quiet, heavy with the somber pall that followed on the heels of all true destruction. Sio took form, spilling out of the night as if he owned it. He was haloed by the chaos of crows that had inflicted such shocking damage earlier. The little fuckers burst forward, landing on everything. They coated the wreckage of the street in an obsidian mass of uncomfortably observant feathered bodies and for some unfathomable reason Xavier couldn't help but feel put out by their presumption. Then again, he'd never liked birds much in the first place. Funny how the irony really stacked up over the years.

Xavier watched as Tian dropped to her knees along with the two Sidhe males. Sio caught her half way down on the decent.

"Nothing's changed for me," Sio said.

Xavier's stomach dissolved. This was what he'd been dreading from the jump. The double edged sword. To see Tian happy with another male meant living in a state of constant heartbreak, the alternative being not only the evisceration of her soul, but Sio's as well. As much as Xavier wanted to hate the bastard for being the one she wanted, he couldn't.

God, you are a cruel son of a bitch.

"You're within your rights to claim ownership if you wish to do so," she said stiffly.

Sio blinked at her as if she'd spoken in tongues. "I don't want to own you."

Tian looked up at him and the despair rolled off her aura in waves. A hard emotion had glazed her features into an expression so close to vacant that Xavier almost looked away.

"The Kings of Faerie do not bind themselves to slaves," she said.

A stubborn fury seared the too human confusion from Sio's expression. "I'll bind myself to whoever the fuck I want, as long as the Goddess possessed halfling I'm asking will have me."

"I'll be damned." The heavily inked assassin shook his head in amusement or disbelief. It was hard to tell which.

Eamon shot up off the street. He loomed over Tian, gripping her arm with a dangerous level of force, and yanking her around to face him. "Tell me why he referred to you as Goddess possessed, Tian."

The air became arctic around them, sub-zero, and painful as hell.

"Take your hands off her," Sio said quietly. The menace in his tone was palpable, each syllable crystalized in the midnight air.

"Tian is a soldier. I do not treat her as less."

"It's alright, Sio," Tian said.

-The hell it is.-

*Stay out of it.*

"No, it's not," Sio said.

An unreadable mask slid over Eamon's features. His aura was a hot mess, but no one had better poker faces than the Purebloods. The fucker had obviously spent a whole lot of time in Tir Na Nog perfecting the expression he was currently rocking. Eamon inclined his head, released Tian, and took a very smart step out of her personal space before repeating his demand.

"Tell me."

"I would be forsworn were I to speak of such things in your presence," she answered.

"And the consequence for failing to make such an oath?"

"The Oracle would lay claim and use me as he saw fit." Tian's tone was dispassionate. The familiarity of the pitch made Xavier realize that it was a tone she hadn't used for a while.

"She doesn't need to say anything," the assassin piped up getting to his feet. "She bears a silver mark."

The Fae looked at him as if all that ink had addled his brain. Xavier tried to chug along in the direction the conversation was veering, but he was beginning to lose his faculties and could only fixate on two things: his leg, cause the damn thing hurt like a mother, and the birds as they took wing, flying kamikaze at one another, and congealing where they impacted practically on top of him. He searched for the demon's familiar frame in the bedlam out of sheer force of habit and came away with nothing.

-Where are you, prick?-

No response. The bastard was ghost and locked up tight. It dawned on Xavier that he hadn't seen Ceyla since she'd blasted past them in the hallway, toting more armaments than an M-1 Abrams tank, and his stomach sank. Royal was already hell to live with. If anything had happened to her, he was gonna be downright unbearable.

Xavier's field of vision swam from blood loss. He blinked, willing his wayward optic nerve to right itself. When he reopened his eyes he was nose to nose with the delicate raven- haired beauty who'd referred to Tian as "The Breed." For that comment alone he didn't like her, didn't want her anywhere near him. Yet there she was, looming over him where he lay sprawled out on his ass. He'd had no idea that he'd passed out, let alone for how long, but the end result was irrefutable.

"A healer has been summoned," the female said. She leaned back as her eyes traveled over the wound in his thigh, sparking with something akin to distaste. "Given your current state one would surmise that he will be able to make himself of use." She paused a moment and cocked her head. "Does the other creature require assistance as well?"

The combination of his body's natural shock reaction and this prissy little bitch made his inner kumbaya ornery. "Creature...
who
says that?" Xavier slurred.

-Please tell me you heard what this female just called you?-

Nothing. No response from Royal, only a big fat donut-hole of empty psychic space. The Pureblood female's dark eyes narrowed and she regarded Xavier with an inscrutable expression.