Radiant Shadows (16 page)

Devlin held Ani’s discarded shirt in his hands. He’d kissed Ani, shared a dream with her, and for a few brief moments, his life had been his own. After an eternity of existing as an object in an endless conflict between his sisters, the possibility of living on his own terms was intoxicating—and interrupted already.

Sorcha’s maudlin emotion over Seth was forcing Devlin to choose between staying at Ani’s side to keep her safe from his mad sister or abandoning her because of the solipsism of his other sister. Being near Ani had made him realize he wanted a life that he knew he couldn’t have as the High Queen’s Bloodied Hands. He was made to exist as the fulcrum between Order and Discord; he only had value because he served the will of the Unchanging Queen and reminded War not to kill them all by killing Order.

I want to determine my own path.

Ani returned to the main room. “I have questions. You’re
keeping things from me, but they’ll wait. I’ll wait.”

“You’ll wait for what?”

“Answers. You. Time. Whatever this is”—she came over and took his hands—“it’s not going to go away. I don’t really buy the whole fate thing. I know the Eolas claim to know the future, and so do… your sisters, but it’s not always as set as all that. Some things, though, feel like they’re
right
. You and me? It’s one of those things. I don’t know what they see or why things are such a mess, but in the middle of it all, I do know that being around you is really the best thing that’s happened to me in, well,
ever.
”

Her words only made him surer that he needed to keep her safe.

“My sisters cannot see your threads.” He looked down at their hands and then back at her as he added, “They cannot see those whose threads are tangled into their own futures… or, they say, into mine.”

She held tight to him and asked, “So I’m in their future or yours? Can
you
see future threads?”

“I can.” He pulled his hands free and paced to the window of the tiny room. This wasn’t a topic he enjoyed discussing.

“Can you see mine?”

“I tried, but… no.” He didn’t look at her or speak of the fact that this meant that their lives were entangled as far as her future stretched. “The only way for
them
to see you is through ordinary channels—a faery who carries word to them, or your presence where they can see you.”

“You can’t see my future at all,” she prompted.

He wasn’t hiding his emotions away, not now. Instead, he let Ani feel his worry and his hopes. “I haven’t been able to see your future since you were not-killed… since I didn’t… It’s not that you’ve lacked an existence but because you… we…”

“Because your life and mine are entangled,” she finished.

“In some way.” He looked out at the parking lot. “Maybe you should stay here in the room, maybe—”

“No.” She was right behind him when she said it.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “Either of my sisters would kill you without compunction. I can’t lose you.”

“I know.” She put a hand on his arm and tugged so he was facing her. “You aren’t using
any
sort of logic, Devlin. Hounds can’t stay trapped, and even if I could, wouldn’t it at least be safer to have someone with me?”

He growled, a sound that was very not–High Court, but nothing inside of him felt High Court anymore. “I don’t know whether you’re safer in the mortal world or in Faerie. Perhaps stay
here
, and Irial—”

Ani reached up and pulled him down for a kiss. “No.”

“Call Irial. See if he’d come here.” Devlin hated the idea of Ani trapped in a room with the embodiment of temptation, but he hated the idea of Ani being killed even more.

All of these emotions are… too much.

She felt them all, knew every emotion he was trying to make sense of, allowed him to express them even if his centuries of hiding them kept them from being visible.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“You with me and safe.” He knew it wasn’t logical, but he didn’t want to be apart from Ani.

“One problem solved then.” She picked up the shirt he’d been holding earlier. After she shoved it and the rest of her belongings into the bag, she zipped it. “That’s what I want too. I’m going with you at least as far as Huntsdale. We’ll figure out the rest after we talk to Iri.”

“And Niall. We will consult the Dark King,” he said.

She lifted her bag. “And Gabriel. He’s likely to be difficult. There’s this whole no-dating-the-Gabriel’s-daughter thing….”

Devlin shrugged, but he let her feel the excitement that filled him. “We are, though.”

“We are,” Ani repeated in a soft voice. She stared up at him. “I would fight him for you… well, if he
would
fight me, but he’s afraid I’m going to get broken.”

For a moment, Devlin stared at her, not wanting to tell her that she was far more likely to break others than to be broken. He was willing to sacrifice everything he’d ever been for her. He brushed his lips over hers. “Gabriel is a fool. You are not invincible, Ani, but you are not mortal-weak. You are a worthy fighting partner.” Devlin reached through a false pocket on the side of his trousers and slid a knife from a thigh sheath. He held it out. “Here. I know you have yours, but… I would give you… if you…”

She took it. “A girl can never have too many weapons.”

He lifted her bag from her shoulder. “You need to wake the steed.”

“Dev?” She gave him a very serious look and put her hand on his chest. “I’ll do my best to be careful with everything you are giving me.”

He didn’t have the words to answer that, so he merely nodded.

She reached out to turn the doorknob, but before she opened it, he put a hand on hers: there were faeries who wanted her dead.

“May I go first?” he asked.

“Today, but not always.” She smiled at him. “You
know
that if there’s any chance to fight, I won’t sit on the sidelines like some silly High Court faery.”

“You’re the daughter of Gabriel. I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Devlin repressed the surge of happiness he felt at having someone want to fight alongside him.

The Queen’s Assassin was to be alone. He lived and fought alone. Sorcha had always made that detail explicitly clear. She’d given him soldiers and guards to train; she’d allowed him almost complete power in such matters. There were only two rules: unlike in the other courts, no High Court soldiers were to be female, and his own prowess was to be held as an example. His ability to kill efficiently was proof of his other sister’s parentage. The bloodthirstiness Sorcha abhorred in Bananach, she exploited in Devlin.

Ani, without meaning to, challenged every limitation he’d lived by for eternity. He hadn’t truly known what he
lacked until Ani’s vibrancy had illuminated the emptiness in his life. He had a fleeting image of training Ani. If they were able to leave Sorcha and live as solitaries, they’d need to be stronger than any other faery they met. Her heritage certainly predisposed her to be so: Gabriel had been the left hand of the Dark Court, the dispenser of Irial’s punishments, for centuries. Other Gabriels had preceded him, and Ani was very much like them. Devlin suspected that expectations of mortality were all that had kept Gabriel from training her to lead her own pack. Devlin knew better: when the last of her mortal blood was consumed by her faery blood, she would be able to stand against most any faery.

He thought of the wolves that attended Ani in her dreams. They were harbingers of the Hunt, but they weren’t feral things pacing near her. They looked to her for guidance.

Was that what you saw, Sorcha? That she would be strong? Or was it merely that she would be mine?

Once the High Queen was retrieved from her dream, Devlin had questions he wanted answered before he left her side.

Rae returned to the room where Sorcha slept. Outside the window, the sky appeared to have dimmed, not into darkness but into a chalky palate as if the color was being leeched away. Neither day nor night existed, only perpetual dusk. It meant Rae was free to roam, but that freedom was of little consolation when the world was vanishing.

“Could you go to the other world?” Rae asked the queen’s attendants. “The mortal world—”

“No.” One of veiled mortals turned to face Rae. “We stay with our queen. If she dies, we die.”

“Why?” Rae stared at them.

“There is nothing for us there. Our queen brought us here, and here is where we stay.” The mortal paused, and longing crept into her voice as she added, “The lives we had there are gone; the people we knew are dead; the rules… it’s not
our
world now, not with the way time passes.”

The muted light that fell through the window threw gray
shadows over the glass-encased bed. The bed had shrunk and now had a more funereal shape. Rae wasn’t sure if the casketlike appearance was a reflection of the shrinking of the queen’s world or something more; regardless of the reason, it was unnerving.

With nothing else to do but await dissolution of the world, Rae entered the queen’s dreams once again.

The leonine guards hissed at her.

“I don’t want to see you,” Sorcha said. Her gaze did not leave the mirror.

“Devlin is bringing Seth to you, but he says that Faerie must be as it should be so Seth can reach you.”

Sorcha gestured at the image in the mirror: Seth was walking down a street. “I can see him. He is
not
in Faerie.”

“He will be,” Rae insisted. “Maybe you should wake to ready yourself.”

At that, Sorcha did pull her gaze from the mirror. The look she gave Rae was withering. “I need a heartbeat to ready myself, child. I am the High Queen, not some mortal who must work at attempting to achieve perfection. When he comes, I’ll wake, but not before. Go and do not disturb me until he is here.”

There were no more words. One of the winged creatures licked its maw and gave Rae an approximation of a smile. The High Queen’s dreaming guards were extensions of her will, and her will was that she not be disturbed.

Rae shuddered and stepped back into the darkened room in Faerie.

Hours later, the stillness was broken by a scream—and another, and then several more. Through a tall glass window on the far side of the cavernous room, Rae could see an unfamiliar faery striding down the street. As she walked, she slashed out with a battle-ax and flung knives at fleeing faeries. All the while she smiled.

I know you.
Rae wasn’t sure how, but the new faery felt familiar. The faery had thick feathered wings, dark tresses that were a combination of hair and feathers, and patterns drawn on her face. Her gaze was darting around assessingly.

She paused across the street and looked at Rae. The smile she gave Rae was familiar, an unpleasant match to Devlin’s.
Devlin’s other sister. Bananach.

“There you are, girl.”

Rae heard the words; through wall and glass they flew as if they were physical things sent crashing toward her. She stepped backward, putting herself between Sorcha and the faery who must be Bananach, the High Queen’s mad twin. It wasn’t that Rae could stop Bananach: the insubstantial couldn’t impede the physical. It wasn’t even that she cared to protect Sorcha: the High Queen had done nothing to earn Rae’s loyalty. Rae’s action was the instinctual movement to keep safe the entity that created the world around them. Sorcha created; Bananach destroyed. That simple fact was enough to align Rae’s loyalty for the moment.

Bananach grabbed a sleeping faery and tossed him through the window. Shards of glass crashed on the stone
floor in a dangerous shower. The faery she’d thrown lay unaware and bleeding. The queen’s two mortals didn’t react at all. They stayed beside their queen’s casket.

“Run. Now,” Rae said to them. She didn’t turn to see if they obeyed.

The destructive faery looked to her left and right, reached down and uprooted a small sapling, and used it to knock out the remaining glass in the window frame. Shards hit the stone floor like a glittering rain shower.

Rae didn’t move, couldn’t move, as Bananach stared at her.

Bits of glass crunched under Bananach’s boots as she stepped through the window frame into the room.

“You belong to my brother,” Bananach said by way of greeting.

The raven-faery leaned close enough to Rae that for a breath it felt like she was going to walk into Rae. Rae moved to the side.

Bananach sniffed, circling Rae as she did so, and then paused. She tilted her head so close to her own shoulder that it looked as if her neck muscles had been severed. “You smell like him. He’s not here.”

“He’s not,” Rae agreed.

Beyond Bananach, Rae could see a few still-awake faeries who stood in the street. They watched the raven-faery as she stalked and circled Rae. They didn’t move, not to help or to flee. They stared with very un–High Court looks of horror on their faces.

“You have worn his skin”—Bananach sniffed again— “more than a few times. He let you inside of his body.”

“Devlin is my friend,” Rae said.

Bananach cackled. “He has no friends. He wasn’t made for such things.”

Rae straightened her shoulders and stared at the faery. “I am whatever he wants me to be.”

The faery stared at Rae as if she could see things, and Rae suspected she
was
seeing things, looking at the threads of Rae’s future. The sensation of being studied thusly was disquieting. Bananach was weighing and measuring her, and if the results weren’t to her liking, there was no reason to believe she’d ignore Rae.

Can she kill me?

But whatever Bananach saw as she peered into Rae’s future apparently wasn’t cause to try to strike her.
Does she see anything?
The expressions on the faery’s face were unreadable. She merely nodded and stepped around Rae.

“And there
you
are, sister mine.” Bananach reached out as if to touch the glass casket. Her talon-tipped hand hovered in the air over the blue glass. “Do you hear me?”

Rae had an unpleasant moment in which she wanted very badly not to respond, not to draw the raven-faery’s attention back to her. It was a normal response: prey rarely wanted to summon the predator’s gaze. It was also not the acceptable response. If Bananach could injure Sorcha, could further disrupt the High Queen’s grasp on reality, the consequences were too large to fathom.

“She can
not
hear you,” Rae said.

Bananach’s head swiveled at an inhuman angle. “But she hears you, doesn’t she?”

Rae shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“And what does she dream, the mad queen?” Bananach’s hand lowered to the glass even as she stared at Rae. Absently, she scraped her talon-nails over the glass, making a screeching sound.

“Ask Devlin.”

Bananach’s wings flexed, opening so that the shadows blocked the scant light from the window. “He’s not here, child.”

“He will be.”

“Aaaah, he will be… do you suppose he and the Hound received my message then?” Bananach asked. “I left them a gift.”

“A gift?”

“Bloodied, but no longer screaming.” Bananach looked crestfallen for a moment. “If I could have saved the screams, I would’ve, but they died with the body.”

Rae didn’t know what to say or do.

Bananach shook her head. “I have faeries to kill before I speak to my brother, Dreamwalker, but I’ll be back soon.”

Even as she spoke, she brought both fists down on the glass. A large clang echoed throughout the hall, the sound loud enough that Rae winced and covered her ears. The walls seemed to shudder—but the glass was unbroken.

“Alas.” Bananach laid her cheek on the glass over
Sorcha’s face. “I’ll slaughter them all while you rest. Well, not all”—she stroked the glass—“today. I needed a bit of discord to soothe me, to help me make ready to destroy the betrayer.”

She left as calmly as she had come, stepping through the window frame. As Rae stood helplessly, Bananach departed, resuming her slaughter as she went down the street—stabbing abdomens, twisting necks, and flinging bodies. She did not distinguish between the sleeping and the alert. The world of Faerie shifted around War. Fires for the dead flamed into existence; screams echoed long past the ends of lives; and a charnel scent rose in the air in a sickening cloud.

Come soon, Dev.