Pale Queen Rising (22 page)

“They tried,” I say. “But I figure the one thing no one will tell me about is the one thing I need to know.”

“You know we aren’t able to talk about that.” Her voice is tight, and I’m wondering if maybe she
can
talk about certain things. I just have to find them.

“But some of you can. That girl, Lilith. She seemed more than willing to tell me my mother used to be a part of this place. Did she work here?”

I don’t know why it seems important to know. I’ve spent my whole life not wondering or caring, but now it’s staring me in the face, this tiny little crack that could lead to more knowledge, and I want to rip it open and learn everything that’s been kept from me for all this time. Especially since, judging from how rough the last hit was, I don’t know if I’ll be making it out of this alive. I’d like to know about where I came from before I return to the dirt.

Melody doesn’t answer. But she does nod her head. Slightly.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Complicated.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Complicated.”

I pause. “Was she . . . was she mortal?”

Melody looks me in the eye. “Complicated.” She doesn’t look away, and it feels like she’s trying to convey something, like there’s more meaning than what I can grasp in everything she can’t say.

“We can’t talk about it, not anymore. Not after what happened.” Melody looks down then, and her face darkens. When she speaks again, she keeps her voice light, but I can tell she’s hiding something. “She wouldn’t want you to be here,” she finally whispers. “If she knew . . .”

“Does she know?”

Melody shrugs.

I’m not the only mortal girl in Faerie, to be sure. There are dozens of changeling children, kids stolen from their parents in the crib and replaced with a faerie babe. I was content knowing this, even though I never tried to spend time with them. They were commoners, and even if I was a changeling, I was on a different level. Now, all I can wonder is who took my place. Does my mother even know her real daughter is missing? That her real daughter is sitting in the grass in a place she once might have called home?

“Were you her friend?” I ask finally. Because I need that connection right now. I need someone to have known her and cared for her, so I can do the same by proxy.

Melody nods.

“Bestie,” she whispers.

“Do you miss her?”

“Every day.”

And maybe it’s all an act, maybe she’s performing more than she admits, but a tear slides down her face right then and drips to the dry grass.

“Could I find her again?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve not seen her since . . .” She chokes and puts her hands to her throat, making gasping noises. Immediately my hands are on her shoulder and back, trying to, I don’t know, calm her down or make it stop or something. But after a moment she takes a raspy breath and shakes her head, flopping back to the grass.

“I can’t talk about this anymore,” she whispers. “I wish I could, Claire. I really do. There’s so much to tell you. But I can’t. Mab made sure that when your mother left, she left without a trace.”

“It’s okay,” I say. It’s not. It’s not at all. My heart is racing, and I want to shake her and force her to talk, but I know she can’t. Which means my fight’s not with her. It’s with the woman who drafted all these damn contracts in the first place.

I can’t even imagine how Mab’s going to take this.

“You going for the second course?” Eli asks from behind us.

I glance back to see him striding out of the tent, his suit once more immaculate and his mask dangling from one hand. He doesn’t look like a man who has recently done terrible deeds—he looks like he’s on the way to a fancy masquerade ball. It’s his eyes that give him away, though. Even with the sunglasses, the blue burn behind them is easy to see.

“Are you finally ready?” I ask. I’ve found that, with Eli, it’s best to stay on the offensive.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he says.

“I should go,” Melody begins.

“No, don’t worry about it. We were just leaving.” I push myself to standing. I don’t pick up my own mask. I don’t want any mementos from this place. It’s already stained me.

“It was a pleasure,” I tell her. I don’t wait for her to stand or say good-bye. I don’t want Eli asking questions, not about this. If Melody’s upset by it, she doesn’t show it, just mutters her own good-bye and takes a swig from her flask.

“What was that all about?” Eli asks.

“Girl stuff. You ready to kill?”

“Is that even a question?” He adjusts the lapels of his coat as he says it. The mask’s nowhere to be seen anymore.

“Good. Because I need you on your A-game.”

“I’m always on my A-game. It’s you we should be concerned about.”

I don’t pause. I know he’s trying to get a rise, but tonight just isn’t the right night to push me.

“You worry about your own ass, I’ll worry about mine.”

“Speaking of, that guy . . .
Damn.
I should really spend more time at the gym.”

I don’t answer, because we both know he doesn’t need a gym to bulk up, if they even have gyms where he’s from. It’s just Eli being Eli, and right now, I’m okay with him entertaining himself.

Then we reach the semitrailer, and I grab some more chalk to redo the portal. My skin is buzzing as I work. It has nothing to do with magic or runes. I’m close to finding out about my family. So close. And for some reason that makes me feel more alive and more alien in my own skin than I’ve ever felt before.

Fourteen

Despite my first stop being the circus, I hadn’t been lying about needing to stop home for supplies. The coat I’m wearing is an assassin’s wet dream—the interior is lined with pockets and straps holding all manner of weapons: enchanted whips, throwing knives, small explosives, and a pack of Tarot cards that . . . well, do more damage than a sword ever could. Even the coat itself is magicked—it looks like leather but is stronger than steel and can curse any attacker in a pinch. From head to toe, I’m ready. Which is good, because the portal linked to the second name leads us into what feels like a mausoleum.

The air is cold and dusty and dark. Even with my enhanced senses, I can barely make out anything. There are blurred shapes all around, and after a few blinks they become a little more tangible. They seem humanoid, but none of them move.

Great. Did we seriously just teleport into a room of more demented mannequins?

“What is this place?” I whisper. I keep my voice so low that even I can barely hear the words, but I know Eli makes them out just fine.

“I’m not sure,” he replies. He rubs his fingers together and a gentle blue light appears between his fingertips, barely more than the glow from a firefly. It illuminates the figure nearest us and I nearly laugh. It’s a statue. Like, one of those ridiculous concrete garden statues of an angel that rich people have to show they can poop out more money in a day than you’ll earn in a week. Or it’s a gravestone. I prefer to think the former, seeing as we’re surrounded by them.

“But something feels strange . . .” Eli continues.

“This is just weird,” I say. A part of me really wants to reach out and touch one of the statues, but I don’t. Not after what happened last time. “Is this a museum or something?”

“Personal gallery, actually,” comes a voice. If my skin wasn’t cold before, it is now.

The lights flicker on all at once, harsh and fluorescent and tinting everything the antiseptic white of a morgue. And really, with all those statues around us, it’s not that much of an imaginative leap.

A girl strides out between the statues about fifty feet away. She’s maybe my age, midtwenties, and she’s in plaster-smeared overalls and a short-sleeved shirt with a bandanna around her light-brown hair. She looks like a pixie Rosie the Riveter. One that hasn’t seen a lot of sunlight lately.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“That’s a stupid question,” she replies. She stands there with her hands in her pockets, staring at us like she’s not at all perturbed to have her space occupied by strangers. Once more, we were expected. Somehow. “You know my name, otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten in here.”

“Fine, Laura, I know your name. What I really want to know is how you’re involved in all of this.”

She smiles. “Involved in what?”

I start walking forward. Being this close to her, I can taste her true name—only three small words and she’ll be forced into submission. Before I do that, I want to deck her. I want her to taste blood before she spills her truth.

“You know very well what I’m talking about,” I say through gritted teeth. My hand clenches on the knife in my pocket; this isn’t my normal strategy, this in-your-face bravado. I was trained to stick to the shadows. But I actually sort of like zeroing in on my hit head-on. I look forward to watching her eyes widen when the first strike lands. “And you’re going to talk, Laura. Or we will make you talk.”

She laughs. It’s not some evil melodramatic laugh, just your normal girlish chuckle. For some reason, that just makes her weirder. I’m about ten steps away, and she still hasn’t moved.

“By that you mean just you, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

Then I realize that Eli’s not beside me, or a step behind me.

“Your friend. I heard what he did to my best Construct. Not very nice if you ask me.”

I don’t look back—I’m not going to turn my back on this girl.

“Eli?” I call.

No answer.

“He’s not here, I’m afraid. Not anymore. You see, I’m not a big fan of astral creatures coming in and fucking things up for me. Especially not in here, where he could really do some damage.” Now she’s taking a step forward, hands still in her pockets and a shit-eating smile on her face. “You didn’t really think I’d let you repeat the same tactic twice, did you? I sent him back. You should be more careful where you set your portals next time.”

She points up to the ceiling.

“Damn it,” I hiss. Because there, carved into the paneling, are glyphs and wards and runes that basically dispel astral creatures. No wonder he felt strange being here.

She’s only a foot away when she stops, still smiling.

“Looks like it’s just you and me, then,” I say. I try to keep my voice tough, even though a small part of me knows I’m screwed. I have her true name, but that’s really only good at stopping her from using magic. And although there’s power flowing through her, I don’t think it’s enough to consider her a witch.

“Not quite.” She winks. “Remember when I said that mannequin was my best Construct?”

Damn it . . .

“Well,” she continues, “I’m a firm believer in
waste not, want not
,
know what I mean?” Her smile goes wider. “And I’ve had lots of practice.”

There’s no signal from her, but I sense the movement at my side and duck just in time to avoid the fist that slams past my head. I spin and slash out with a blade, but I might as well be using a twig. The knife skitters across the concrete statue’s abs like nothing, my hand almost going numb from the impact. I register its features fast—shaped like a man, with winged slippers and a winged helmet and perfect physique—but the moment I do the runes on my spine burn, and I flip sideways as another statue rams through the space I just occupied. This one I don’t see, but I do catch the serpentlike tail that tells me everything I need to know. This chick loves mythology, and I get to play in her coliseum.

Great.

I don’t have time to bitch, though, because every statue has come to life, and it takes all my concentration to keep from getting my skull split open. For being concrete, these things are fast. The Hermes statue swings again, this time with his caduceus staff. I grab the pole and pull myself up, flipping over the statue and into a slightly cleared space, but I already know this is a losing battle. These are statues—they have no trigger points or weaknesses. My blades are nothing.

So, before I land on my feet again, I reach into another pocket and grab a piece of chalk, one kept for very special occasions. It’s warm to my touch, practically tingling from the layers and layers of faerie magic that enchant it. Then I toss it to the ground and land on it, my foot crushing it to powder that poofs out and around me in a cloud.

But that’s just the beginning of the physics fuckery.

Time slows down, everything stretching out like a bad slow-mo action sequence. Everything slows except me. I’ve yet to figure out if I’m just speeding up or if time really is slowing, and getting faeries to understand the difference is pointless. The one thing I do know is that this magic doesn’t last long. Thirty heartbeats, which is a terribly short amount of time, even if I’ve trained myself to slow down my pulse.

I grab the explosives from my pocket and begin to run, smacking each small crystal onto the back or arm or forehead of every statue I pass. I’ve got about a dozen of the gems, which isn’t nearly enough, and ten heartbeats later they’re gone and I’m running the other direction, dodging in and out of extended arms that are slowly, so slowly, in motion.

Laura is nowhere to be seen.

I don’t know if the bitch snuck out or cloaked herself or is just impossible to see among all these bodies, but it’s not important, not right now. I grab the Tarot cards from my pocket and snap my fingers over the deck, visualizing hard. Four cards immediately prick out from within, all from the suit of Swords, and I begin tossing them throughout the crowded room, not caring where they land. With Swords, it doesn’t matter.

Another visualization, three heartbeats left, another snap of my fingers, and
The Moon
slides from the deck and into my waiting grip.

Two heartbeats. The room starts to speed up. I keep running toward a clear wall. I need out.

One heartbeat. Nearly to the wall. I hold
The Moon
tight to my chest, slip the Tarot deck back in my pocket, and grab a fresh piece of normal chalk with my free hand.

Time speeds back up.

It’s not a gentle switch, not a slow transition. One minute it’s silent and slow and the next it’s chaos again. Especially because the moment time goes normal, the gems I’ve placed explode. There’s a high-pitched whine in the air, and then a pulse of blue light when, as one, all the bombs go off. The noise they make isn’t so much a boom as an inhalation, as the targeted statues are sucked into the ether. Perhaps explosives is a misnomer. Implosion is more accurate.

At the same time, there’s a sound of drawing steel as the Tarot cards come to life.

I don’t glance back to see my apparitions floating through the crowd, slicing through stone like butter. I can hear them, though, as my court cards—Knight and Page and Queen and King—do battle. Again, it’s not a magic that lasts forever, but I’m nearly at the wall and
The Moon
is burning against my chest. I hold it there, press tighter, lock my eyes on the wall only five feet away and blocked by a dozen angry statues. The world tilts as
The Moon
rises.

I’ve used the card once before, and that was more than enough. I’m still not ready for my vision to shift as everything goes insane. Light becomes dark and dark becomes neon as the room is thrown into madness—I can still hear my Swords fighting against the statues, but it’s dulled from the sound of ocean waves and howling coyotes as shadows flicker past my legs. Then it’s no longer just the clash of steel on concrete, but snarls and shattering chunks of stone as ghostly wolves and coyotes attack. I keep the card pressed tight to my chest—the only thing keeping the creatures from attacking
me—
and duck under a minotaur wielding a huge battle-ax. Another statue roars at me and I’m wondering how they got vocal cords as I spin past it and another shadow wolf latches onto the offending statue, cutting the roar short.

I skid to a stop by the wall and hastily scrape out a tiny portal. It’s not fancy by a long shot, and it won’t take me anywhere close to Mab’s kingdom, but it will get me the hell out of here. I’ve completed the rectangle and have the first two-thirds of the spell done when something clamps down on my arm. I scream out of frustration and lash backward, but in that moment the Tarot card flies out of my grip and falls to the floor. The dumpy dwarf holding onto me doesn’t seem to notice and doesn’t seem intent on letting me go; its grip crushes my left wrist, but I struggle to finish the portal anyway. One more glyph and I’m . . .

An arm around my neck yanks me up and back. I drop the chalk as my vision blanks into stars and shadows. Then another arm around my waist, or two arms, and I’m kicking and trying to scream, but there are more arms than ever and I can’t move or breathe and my brain is dying so fast it can’t think.

A second later the pressure on my neck vanishes, though the rest of the restraints do not.

“Did you really think I’d let you get away that easily?” Laura asks.

She strides forward,
The Moon
card burning slowly in her hand, while around her, her creations kneel like they’re bowing to a queen. A small part of me wonders if maybe she’s the Pale Queen the buyer dude was talking about. But as she gets closer, I know she’s just floating in her own delusions. She might have magical proclivities. She might even be good at it. But she’s no faerie goddess.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” I say. “Even if you kill me, Mab knows where I am. And when she realizes I’m dead, she’ll bring the full force of her army in here to rip your children apart.”

“So fucking what?” she says. The card burns down to her fingers, and she tosses it to the ground, letting it smolder by the foot of a satyr. “My death means nothing.”

What is it with all these martyrs? Seriously, what cause could they think is worth dying for at the hands of rabid Fey? And why is it that they’re willingly serving this person, when Roxie was forced to against her will? Did she just get the wrong end of the deal?

“You all say that.” I grunt. “And yet you all die. So far, I’ve seen nothing worth the loyalty.”

I glance around at all the statues.

“I mean, really, are these the best you can do? The only friends you have at your disposal?” Then something clicks. “Wait, how the hell are you even involved in this? You’re not pulling in any Dream here.”

She smiles wider. I keep expecting her lips to crack and bleed down her chin. She looks demented enough.

“Not all of us work for her in the same way,” she says. “So many of my creations have found their ways into the homes of the rich and fanciful. And they Dream such lavish things.”

Of course. The same way Mab pulls my own dreams into her cache. This girl’s been planting Dream-stealing statues in the homes of her clients. Kind of genius, but still pretty small-scale.

“Let me guess, you were hired because whoever this goddess bitch is, she needs someone who can create Constructs.”

She just shrugs. Damn, I was really hoping I’d get her with that
bitch
comment—zealots hate it when you insult their idols.

“I play my part.” She shoves her hand back into her pocket. “Yours, however, is just about to end.” I fully expect her to draw out a knife or something sinister, but she doesn’t. “I think you’ll make a good statue, you know? You have such lovely features, and it would be a shame to let them go to waste. You’ll be dead before you see it, of course. But it will be a fitting homage.”

She nods to the statue holding me in place—I’ve not been able to get a good look at it, but judging from the dozens of arms holding me, it must be some Hindu deity.

“Try not to break any visible bones,” she says.

The creature holding me begins to squeeze, and I know the popping noises in my head aren’t imagination, but actual bones. My chest feels warm as something snaps and my vision goes blurry around the edges. Goes black. My lungs fill with red and everything is cracking and grinding and compressing. I don’t scream. I can’t scream. So why do I hear screaming?