Pale Queen Rising (24 page)

“Your mother is not behind this,” she reiterates. “I know this for a fact, as I have just checked in with her. She is living what she has of a life with as much dignity as she can muster. And she has no clue what is befalling Faerie.”

My jaw drops with my heart.

“You just saw my mother?”

And it’s stupid, in light of everything, but
that’s
what I want to ask her about: How’s she doing? What’s she look like? Where is she? Can I see her? I want to lean in and see if Mab smells different, if my mother wore perfume or was baking. Because I’m no longer thinking my mom was in a coma somewhere. Mab had said
as good as dead.
But that’s open to interpretation.

“Your task is to find who is behind this,” she says, flicking the ticket back to me. “It is clear that the thief of my Dream and the recruiter of my people are one and the same. You will find them and kill them, Claire. Your directive has not changed. And it will not. Your mother is not involved. The circus is not involved. You will not question me again, not if you want to remain in my kingdom.”

She’s threatened me before. I’m over it.

“You seriously think I’d believe you’d just throw me out in the midst of all this?”

The look she gives me is level. There isn’t a hint of love in those eyes, not one bit.

“I keep you around because you are useful. Nothing more. Right now, your usefulness is being put to the question. You have yet to move any closer to finding the culprit, you have deliberately disobeyed my orders and returned to the circus and spoken with Kingston, and your newfound obsession with your mother has impeded your ability to perform your tasks. So, yes. I will kick you out. I won’t even be nice enough to burn out your memory when you return to the mortal world, cursed to wander to the end of your days like a lunatic.” She leans forward. “Do not ever, for the slightest second, forget who I am,
dear daughter.
I am the Faerie Queen. I am in charge of who lives and who dies—you are merely the weapon that does the dirty work. And I have no room for useless weapons.”

She leans back in her chair.

“I expect the culprit to be found by tomorrow. If not, you are finished. And before you ask, yes. I have a replacement. Everyone, save me, can be replaced.”

Her words cut deep, just as she knew they would. I don’t fight back. I don’t respond. I grab the ticket from the table and try not to shake as I stand. I don’t let the tears come until I’m out the door and halfway down the hall. And even then, they don’t last long. I push them down. Tears are useless. Emotions are useless. Thoughts of my family are useless.

And I will not be useless any longer.

I immediately head back to my room and into the study. Roxie’s the only lead I have, and she’s going to talk, going to tell me everything she knows about her roommates and who they spoke to, how they got involved, and how they knew I was coming. I’m going to find the bastard who did this. Tonight. And I’m going to make them pay for making me look like a fool in front of my employer.

I fill in a few of the necessary runes and crumble the chalk, blowing it over the portal and stepping forward, completely numb to the magic of it all. Next thing I know I’m standing in Roxie’s living room. The TV’s on and a candle’s burning on the coffee table beside a wine bottle, but the living room’s empty. I glance at the clock on the wall. It’s barely seven, the sun outside just setting. Has she fallen asleep?

But then why the candle? She doesn’t seem like the type who’d forget something like that.

The door behind me opens and I turn, a knife in hand before I’ve even faced my opponent. But it’s not an attacker. It’s Pan.

He limps in the door, and I’m over at his side in a second. Soot covers him from head to toe, and there’s a distinct chunk missing from his torso. I don’t know how statues work—can it be repaired? Or are there such things as fatal wounds for creatures without organs?

“What the hell happened?” I ask. His body is warm, and I can’t help but wonder if all these wounds are fresh, if I
just
missed the attack.

“I do not know,” Pan chokes. “There was only one of them. A tall figure. Wearing a cloak. I knew they were Fey, but they did not speak. Didn’t even look at me when I fought, either, just brushed me aside like I was nothing. Whoever it was, they walked right through the wards and into the room. I couldn’t move—they pinned me to the wall and kept me there. It was only when Roxie stopped screaming that I was able to enter.”

He closes his eyes.

“I have failed you. And her. You should have never entrusted this to me.”

“It’s fine,” I say. But of course it’s not fine. It’s entirely far from fine. Roxie is my last lead and she’s gone, her captor somehow overpowering my strongest magic. This is bad. This is really bad. I can’t let them use her against me. “Do you have any idea where she was taken?”

Pan shakes his head. “There was no communication. Just screams. Then she was gone.”

I look around. There’s no sign of struggle, no chaos. The intruder must have caught her before she could put up a fight.

“Is there anything else?” I ask. “Any clue?”

Again, a shake of his head. “I scoured the room. There was nothing.”

“Fuck,”
I hiss.

“I am sorry, Claire. I failed.”

I grit my teeth and keep the tears from coming back, these out of sheer frustration.

“No,” I say. “I failed. I shouldn’t have left you here. It’s not your fight. Go home, Pan. I’ve got it from here.”

“I am sorry for failing, my friend,” he whispers.

Something in his voice tells me he’s not just talking about letting someone get to Roxie, but before I can ask what he’s talking about, there’s a small flux of magic and he’s gone, zipped back to Winter. I stare at the space he occupied for a moment.

“Why does it feel like everyone has a secret but me?” I whisper to the empty air. Every inch of me, inside and out, feels like it’s been run through a meat grinder. It doesn’t feel like there’s any fight left, any way to make this right. I’ve lost Roxie and any lead or illusion of comfort I might gain. I’ve lost Eli until I summon him again—a feat that sounds too exhausting to even consider. And I’ve lost a part of me I didn’t even know I had—the part that wanted a loving reunion with my mother, a place to call home. That part feels tainted and torn away, leaving a festering wound in its place. Kingston and Mab made sure of it.

As much as I’d like to just give up and run away, I don’t. I force myself to stand and begin poring over the room, trying to find any sort of clue. Maybe the kidnapper left something, a calling card or trace of evidence, though anyone powerful enough to get past my wards and Pan wouldn’t be so careless.

Unless they wanted to be found.

The kitchen and bathroom and bedroom reveal nothing, so I head into the living room and flop down on the sofa. There’s nothing in here out of the ordinary, either, but then the TV flickers and my eyes are drawn to something white on the glass coffee table. I thought it was just a receipt at first, but when I lean over, I realize it’s a ticket.

For the opening of an off-Broadway musical. At eight tonight.

Handwritten across the bottom in looping script is
Hope to see you there. XO, Renee.

Who the hell is Renee?

I’m not one for coincidence, and Roxie getting kidnapped the night of this show is too perfect to be an accident. But why would she get kidnapped and taken to a show?

That’s when things click. The magically bound name. The roommate wanting to take the stage. She could have easily exchanged her true name for a chance in the spotlight. And if she’s there, for opening night, the dick behind all this is there as well. Which is why he would have dragged Roxie there. For me.

Anyone interested in wrangling human artists has to have a flair for the dramatic.

My heart races with the thought. I shove the ticket in my pocket and head to the portal on the wall, altering some of the coordinates to take me back to the warehouse where I first summoned Eli. We’ve got a show to catch.

Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting in the back of a crowded theatre. Eli’s in a suit again—black, this time, as I used charcoal because I felt I owed him that much—and the skin he wore before. The summoning was almost instantaneous. I’d barely drawn blood before he was standing there in the portal, waiting impatiently. He didn’t speak a word after, didn’t ask what happened or how I made it out alive; his jaw was tense, his knuckles white on his cane. The silence between us is comfortable, driven—right now, we are bound together. We both have an ax to grind.

I knew this was the place the moment we set foot in here, even before I opened the program and saw Renee’s name. The theatre’s built on a nexus. I don’t need Eli to point it out—seven ley lines converge here, and they all cross center stage. Our man’s done his homework.

It feels like life has come full circle as we sit in the back of the theatre and watch the show in silence. Only this time, we’re not watching a rockabilly concert or a circus, we’re watching some musical about a seriously messed-up family living in Atlanta, one of the members of which is a convicted murderer. According to the playbill, Renee is the female lead, the sister of the aforementioned murderer, who’s crushing hard on a guy he’s supposed to kill. None of it makes much sense to me, but the crowd is eating it up—the Dream in here is thick and excited, vibrating with nervous energy. I can tell the power’s going somewhere, and it’s definitely not going to Mab. As I watch Renee sing and act, it’s obvious she’s somehow orchestrating all of this. There’s an air to her, a magic that goes beyond stage presence. She’s part of a faerie contract, of that I have no doubt; it’s the exact same energy that surrounded Roxie. Only this girl seems to be more in control of it.

If only I could be certain this is where Roxie is being held.

Eli is tense beside me the entire show. I know he wants blood as much as I do, but we have to wait. I have charms to slow time and avert mortal eyes, but in a crowd this big, there’s no way to make the kill without causing a stir. And I need to make sure this Renee is actually a bad guy in all of this and not just an innocent trapped into a bad deal like Roxie. She’s too far away for me to sense her true name, so I have no way to know if it’s actually Heather, the girl who tied her name to a Construct. I won’t strike until the guy behind this shows his hand. I don’t want to scare him off.

Thankfully, the show’s not half bad, at least from what I can follow through my inner monologue of
useless, useless
; and before Eli has a stress-related ulcer or I punch the asshole coughing in front of me, the intermission is over and the second act begins. A part of me wanted to sneak behind the scenes during intermission and do the deed, but there were too many people around, and I still had no clue if the faerie we wanted was even here. He
has
to be, though. All of this feels like some carefully orchestrated trap, and I have to believe he would want to be here to spring the final snare.

“You know,” Eli muses in my ear, speaking for only the second time tonight, “I’m starting to understand humans.”

“What do you mean?” I whisper back. Onstage, Renee is alone singing about her lover, who’s just been killed by her brother.

“Your lives are inherently short and meaningless. And so, you spend all of your time trying to be bigger and more permanent than you actually are. It’s not just the act of creating art. It’s your entire life.”

“How sweet of you,” I mutter. But he has a point. And tonight, I’m not just going to
try
to be important, I’m going to achieve it. No matter who I have to kill.

The music onstage changes, becomes a little more upbeat. Odd, not what I’d choose for a mourning love song. Hell, it almost sounds like . . .

“Roxie?” I hiss.

Roxie steps onstage, once more immaculately dressed in a long black gown, her hair perfectly coiffed and her lips red as blood. She looks like some pop-star diva, a microphone in one hand and her vocals perfectly harmonizing with Renee’s. This doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. I start to push myself up from the seat, but Eli’s hand on my arm keeps me down. That’s when I realize that Roxie isn’t entering the stage alone. There’s a man behind her, definitely Fey, wearing a grey suit and sunglasses. He waits near the back, out of sight, and Roxie’s eyes pass over the crowd as she sings. She doesn’t look like she did the night I found her; she looks terrified. She steps up to Renee, still singing in harmony, but I can’t hear the lyrics. All I hear is the blood pounding in my ears as I watch the faerie bastard, the one behind all of this, smile at his prizes onstage.

Just when they hit a high note, the man snaps his fingers. The runes along my back burn, and Eli’s grip tightens, as all at once the audience goes slack, like a bunch of puppets cut from their strings. When the note ends, the only sound in the room is the thwack of heads on backrests and the scrape of slumping flesh.

Dream engulfs me. So. Much. Dream. It floods into the room like a tidal wave, yanked from the hearts and minds of every audience member in one terrible swoop. It’s nearly blinding, that power, and I don’t know what’s worse—the fact that the bastard just killed everyone in this room or the fact that he managed to pull in all that Dream in the process. It fills the theatre, thick as poison and heavy as smoke. I don’t bother checking the pulse of the old woman sitting next to me. I jump from my seat and start running up the aisle toward the stage, Eli close at my heels. I don’t know what I’m going to do, only that I can’t watch this from back here, whatever it is. Roxie and Renee don’t move from their spot—they look shell-shocked, lost—and neither does my hit. He just smiles as we run toward him, my knives already in hand.