Blood Sacrifice (26 page)

“At least we’re not still stuck Between,” Tucker said. When I shot him a murderous look, he shrugged. “Just trying to lighten things up a bit. Daffyd, any chance of you scoping out what’s what?”

“Of scoping… you mean of spying on the high queen? You must be joking.” Daffyd’s voice raised in surprise and not a little bit of anger. “I cannot spy on my queen.”

“Not at all.” Tucker rose and approached Daffyd, his large frame towering over the slender Sidhe. Daffyd was tall, but Tucker was taller and much broader. His red hair gleamed, his expression menacing. “You swore fealty to Keira,” he growled. “You owe her. You owe all of us.”

“It will do no good if I were to be discovered,” Daffyd said, standing strong. “Though a cat may look at a queen, a courtier interfering in a queen’s business ends ill. Though your cousin is no longer at Court, there are others with whom our queen plots.”

“She is not
my
queen,” I muttered. “I owe allegiance to no one but my own clan chief.”

“Who is missing,” Tucker said. “Until she is found, Keira is in charge of our clan, as her heir. So, Daffyd, does that alter your attitude? After all, the Kelly leader is of the same rank as the Sidhe high royalty.”

Daffyd stepped around my brother and approached me. “Your chief missing? I do not understand.”

“Gigi… Minerva Kelly, chieftain of the Kelly clan is missing. She’s disappeared and hasn’t been reachable.” I slumped against a smooth part of the wall. “Daffyd, Tucker’s right. In principle, I’m head honcho right now. Since this position is the equivalent to that of the high queen—”

“Keira, your leader is far from missing. She’s with Queen Angharad.”

“If we still advise we shall never do.”

—Elizabeth I

I
didn’t waste any time. “Okay. That’s it. You’re coming with us,” I said and grabbed onto Daffyd’s arm. “Tucker, lead the way. We’ll have to take our chances crossing the cemetery.”

“Where are you taking me?” Daffyd asked.

“Home with me. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do and I want Adam to hear all of this.”

Without a word, Daffyd followed Tucker and me as we climbed up the rock pathway, through to the cave mouth. It was still light outside. No sign of the priest anywhere, though if he had truly consecrated the cemetery as he said he had, he wouldn’t be able to walk the property—at least I thought so. Hopefully, he was waiting in the car.

I pulled out my phone and checked the time. Great, it was only a couple of hours after we’d begun the ritual. We’d been lucky—or Daffyd had traveled fast.

I dialed Adam the moment we reached the cave entrance. “We’ve found Gigi,” were the first words out of my mouth.

“Found her? Where?”

“She’s playing at something with Angharad,” I said.

“It seems our esteemed matriarch thought she’d head them off at the pass, so to speak,” Tucker interrupted, explaining nothing.

“I don’t follow.”

“Stupid bloody woman decided to confront the bloody Sidhe queen.”

“She did what?”

“She’s gone Underhill. Holed up with Angharad. Effectively, she’s missing in action.”

“How do you know this?”

“Tucker and I got stuck in a Sidhe trap set by Daffyd. He’d been trying to guard the open door. He showed up to get us out and just told me about Gigi.”

“Damn it. I was afraid of this.”

“You knew?” How could he have? “Not knew, but guessed.” Adam sounded weary. “I didn’t sleep much after you left. Woke early so I could make some calls. It occurred to me that Minerva may have tried the door in Vancouver, realized she couldn’t enter that way, so went somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Wales. Raine is still in London and I was able to get in contact with her. She confessed that Minerva set us up. Minerva glamoured herself so no one would recognize her, hopped the plane with Raine just after we spoke to her. She and Raine were the ones to lay a false trail for your father to find.”

Bloody fucking fool of a Kelly matriarch. What in all the seven layers of my own special hells had she thought she was doing? Gigi may be a Kelly, but Angharad was a right bitch of a Sidhe who held nothing but
contempt for us upstart aboveground magickal folk. In her eyes, we were lower than nothing. Not that she’d ever admit it in front of anyone who mattered. I only knew her true feelings about us because she’d never noticed me. Not once she’d decided I was less magickal than her left boot, an invisible girl, sliding through the shadows and twisted pathways of Faery, hearing so much, understanding so little until adulthood. I knew I’d suppressed most of it, memories surfacing only as I’d begun my Change to adulthood, started my transition to Kelly heir.

“Gigi planted the phones at the hotel, didn’t she?”

“Seems so,” Adam said. “At least, one of her Protectors did the deed, whilst Raine flew Minerva to Wales after dropping off our vampires. Raine flew back after Gigi went Underhill. Evidently, Minerva’s glamour was strong enough to fool even Rhys, Ianto, and Liz—none of them noticed. They thought that the person with Raine was a copilot. Some cousin they’d not met.”

“Damn that woman,” I gritted out the words through teeth so tightly clenched, if I were human, I’d be buying an entire fleet of luxury cars for some orthodontist. I whirled to face the cave opening, held back the energy swirling around me, my own Texas tornado, itching to be loosed on someone, somewhere. It was probably a good thing that neither Gideon nor my mother were around.

Two hands caught me before I stormed outside.

“Keira, get a grip,” Tucker said softly. “You can’t just prance through the cemetery without taking precautions. We can’t know for sure if the ground’s safe—even if it may be consecrated again.”

I stopped and took a deep breath, then spoke to
Adam. “We’ve got a bit of a situation, love,” I said and quickly told him more about what had happened. “The door here’s still open. You and Niko can get out here via the overhang, then we can all go Below. We’ll go get Gigi. You and me, Tucker and Niko. Slide down, through Faery, find her. Settle this stupidity once and for all.” The Four Musketeers… or the Four Horsemen, I thought bitterly. Though this apocalypse would be for Angharad, not the mortal world.

“And that will accomplish…?” Adam sounded skeptical.

“We can confront Angharad on her own turf, three rulers against one. Find out what Gideon’s truly up to and put a stop to this.”

“How, Keira? Storming the castle isn’t an answer so much as a declaration of—”

“War?” I whispered, realizing that my bullheaded “go now and kick some fey ass” impulse would be less than effective unless I truly planned to trip that particular wire and take the consequences. Truce, I’d break, but starting a war? I couldn’t make that decision foolishly.

“All-out war,” Adam agreed. “We can’t afford a Faery war, Keira. We’re not in the days of the Firbolg and the Tuatha Dé Danann and tiny human tribes cowering in their caves or crude huts. Billions of humans populate the Earth. Too many would die as a result of what is, after all, a simple family squabble. Our spells could not directly affect them, but we could kill the land for good. Do you wish to unleash full-on famine, drought, pestilence? That’s what we could bring, if we do this.”

Damn it all, he was right. The apocalypse wouldn’t be confined solely to Angharad. “So what
do
we do?” I asked. “What
can
we do?”

“We wait?” Niko’s voice came over the speaker. “We continue to work on our strategy, work on the Challenge and we wait.”

A horrible thought occurred to me. Being trapped in Faery… oh holy… “Adam, would the same rules apply to Gigi as to humans?” I asked, my words tumbling over each other in my haste to wash that thought out of my head. No, they couldn’t? We weren’t human, but as magickal as any Sidhe, if not more so. Gigi was our matriarch, our leader, a couple of millennia of practice, of wielding stronger magicks than I’d ever seen Below. “Insofar as being Below, I mean. Trapped there, loads of time passing up here?”

“I do not know,” Adam admitted. “Minerva, you—you’re both strong, more talented than any one Sidhe, any fey in existence.”

“And Gigi’s beyond crafty,” Tucker said. “She’s at least as sly as any in Faery.”

“Oh yeah, she’s a right Slytherin,” I snorted, feeling a little better. “But… it’s the Seelie Queen—”

“Queen or no, Minerva is an equal if not higher ranked ruler,” Niko said. “I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of the Faery courts, but I did learn about intrigue at the feet of the best in Elizabeth’s court. If another queen had approached her, she would cause them no harm.”

Yeah, but no harm didn’t mean freedom, I thought. Nor did not being the overt cause of harm preclude getting someone else to do your dirty work—a Seelie Talent. Elizabeth herself had been known to play some pretty sneaky tricks, and she wasn’t even of Faery. As for not harming a fellow queen, tell that to Mary, Queen of Scots. She’d lost her head thanks to her royal cousin.

“I’d not rest easy yet, Niko,” Tucker said. “Gloriana was just as ruthless and wily as any Sidhe monarch.” A soft smile played across his lips as he confirmed my own thoughts.

Niko sounded startled. “You knew her majesty?”

“For a time.” Tucker seemed a bit sheepish. “It was long ago and far away, and of no consequence,
cariad
. We would not have crossed paths then,” he said. “I came well after the plague that nearly took you.”

“Okay, well then, enough of who’s stronger, who’s cannier and whether or not my brother might have seen or met his future lover in sixteenth-century London,” I said. “We can muddle around and wonder, or we can figure out some sort of plan. Do we try to find Gigi? Do we leave her to her own devices in Faery? For that matter, is this part of some sort of twisted subplot of Gideon’s?”

“Minerva going to Faery?” Adam asked. “If I were to gamble on an answer, that was pure Minerva. She wanted to help you, help us by intervening directly with Angharad.”

I leaned against the rock wall and slid to the ground. “Fuck.” Could Gideon, too, be a pawn in some overarching plot of the high queen? I’d heard of stranger plots. Then again, Gideon wasn’t the type to allow himself to be used, queen or not. No, whatever the underlying machinations, I’d no doubt that both Angharad and Gideon were in this as partners.

“So do we go Below?” Tucker asked. I looked up at him, Daffyd standing at his side seemingly unsure of what to do. I didn’t envy my cousin, for all his Sidheness, he’d been helpful before. He’d sworn fealty to me, yet was still sworn to his own queen, as well. His deliberate
siding with us could cause interminable repercussions for him Below. Unlike me, he was full Sidhe, full Seelie. Everything he was belonged to Angharad. That was the way of the Faery Folk.

“Come back to the house and let’s regroup,” Adam said. “You’ve got the priest there with you. We couldn’t just leave him while we go Below, if we decide to do that. No matter the decision, we’ll need to wait until dusk so Niko and I have the ability to join you.”

“That’s hours from now,” I said. “Adam, I don’t like leaving this door open, at least, not without us here to guard it. I propose that Tucker and I wait right here at the cave mouth. You two can drive over soon as it’s dark.”

“Is it safe for you?”

“I think so. Antonio claims he re-consecrated the place, but we’ve not set foot on cemetery ground yet. This part of the land—at the cave entrance—is neutral, not included in the cemetery, so neither consecrated nor spelled.”

Daffyd touched Tucker’s shoulder. “I could help you with the runespells whilst we wait for Aeddan,” he offered. “I can feel them from here. There are many of them. Simple, if annoying.”

“Unseelie?” I asked.

“Mostly Seelie,” he said. “Other things woven in, though. Darker things.” He looked out toward the graveyard. “It might take some time, but between us, we should be able to remove the spells.”

I rubbed my face. “Adam, I think I’m going to see if I can at least get out to the car and let Antonio know what’s going on. He can go back to the ranch. Then Tucker and I will stay here with Daffyd and help him defuse the trigger spells.”

“Keira, you can just phone Fray Antonio,” Niko suggested. “I gave him a phone.”

“Good thinking. What’s the number?”

“As a matter of fact,” Niko continued. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of that for you. You three just concentrate on your side of things… and stay safe.”

“Please be careful, love,” Adam said. “Both of you. Retreat if you run into anything you can’t handle and phone us. We can send someone for you if need be.” Now that we’d told Carlton, it would make things a lot easier if we needed his assistance. No more trying to come up with a convoluted explanation for the weird.

“Will do,” I said, crossing my fingers and ending the call.

“I saw that,” Tucker said. “What was with the finger crossing?”

I scrambled to my feet and tucked the phone back into my pocket. “Just being careful,” I said. “What Adam considers something I can’t handle and what I know I can handle could be two vastly different things. I don’t want to stop if we can get this cemetery de-rigged. And Daffyd thinks we can, right?”

“That we can remove the spells? Yes.” Daffyd walked to the edge of the cave. “There are many traps, many tangled charms, but it can be done.” He turned to look at me. “Without involving your consort. Or yours.” He bowed to Tucker, who smiled back. “I must ask, however, if you could tell me the specifics of the Challenge that was presented. A battle for land?”

“In a way, though not quite so simple. Gideon Challenges that the land is barren, dying because of us. It
states that we lose the land to him if it does not claim us, acknowledge us.”

“Ah.” Daffyd seemed to understand the premise, at least. “Though, perhaps, I do not grasp his purpose. Why should he wish to have your land? The world Above is large, surely there are other places.”

“Many places,” I said. “He does this because he can. It’s personal between us,” I said.

“Perhaps he simply wishes to start afresh.”