The Danger of Destiny (17 page)

Then, he had to ruin all that athleticism by falling on me. I'd only just landed and was processing the fact, lying flat on my back.

Seabiscuit reared, showing her rounded belly, before she galloped away.

The next part was kind of a visual montage of quick-sliding snippets, coupled with an audio of drumming hooves. Momentum carrying him, Mouse stepped on my stomach. I rolled again, his feet tangled, and then he was half on me and half off, his weight pinning me.

We were still tethered!

“Cut!” I shouted.

My Fae talent exploded in a starburst of green sparkles. The boy gasped, choking on inhaled particles he couldn't see. I held on to Mouse's arm with an iron grip as he choked up that and my magic. It didn't take long—only two hacking coughs—before his breath was clean of anything except the sour smell of his fear.

The rider was close, my ears informed me.

In and out Mouse's breath rasped—a challenge to the cacophony of yips and hoofbeats thundering toward us. He scratched at my fingers, trying to tear them loose.

He had no magic.

“Go!” I opened my claws and gave him a shove toward the ditch. “Get into those trees and keep going!”

I didn't wait to watch him run off. Before he'd cleared the ditch, I was rolling to my feet. The horseman had disappeared, but I could hear him. The sound of his mount's drumming hooves echoed through the field of rock.

Goddess. He's already navigating the boulders.

I raised my arms toward the cloud of confused green sparkling in the daylight. “Come to me!”

 

Chapter Ten

All of my magic heard my call. The donut around the Gatekeeper's waist blew apart. She shimmered in a momentary cloud of confusion—bees suddenly dislodged from their hive—that quickly coalesced into a torrent of intention.

My talent hadn't left me, departing to find a better host in this realm of full-blooded Faes. It flowed right to my primed fingers

“She has magic!” screamed the Gatekeeper as the rider kicked his horse past the last of the boulders. “Beware of it!”

It better be enough.

I braced my feet to face the charge. I told my bowels to give it up—
you don't have time to cramp in fear
. I informed my rippling horror to stuff it.
Do not look at the horse. Do not feed that fear. The rider doesn't intend to crush you under its hooves. Look at his arm, how it is raised high, the tip of his sword pointed at you.

He has no plans to flatten you. He means to cut you in two.

Stop the sword,
I thought as he came thundering down the first hill.
Get his wrist.

Plan intact, my vision tunneled, my focus centering on the arm that held the weapon. Get the wrist and I had a chance. Miss it with my magic and I was going to be minced up like an onion on a cutting board.

“Beware of her magic!” she shrieked again.

Get the wrist.

“Cut off her hands!” she howled.

He heard her. During those last seconds, when I was trying to squelch the thought that maybe he was planning to mow me down, he pulled on his reins and canted his body to the side. Dust plumed as his mount fought to answer the command issued by his knees. And for a second, I couldn't see through the cloud churned up by the horse's hooves. All I got was a confused glimpse of horse legs, and girth, and riding boots as the animal veered for a sharp right.

Get the wrist.

I saw the flash of his arm in motion, swinging up to cut me down.

“Attach!” I screamed.

My magic surged up, a living bolt of green fire. It hit the tanned circle of skin above the sleeve of that awful bottle blue jacket and wrapped itself around it, a living manacle of my talent.

I experienced a brief spurt of elation.

Then physics fucked me.

The horse and rider were still moving, even if their trajectory was slowed and no longer in a straight line. And I was no immovable object.

The shock of impact went right through me.

“Ah!” I was blown backward, the laws of science that I didn't understand propelling me willy-nilly off the path and then off it into space—this is where the trailing
h
of my cry rose in a shriek—and still, I kept going.

Gravity made a snatch for me halfway over the ditch.

I had a brief touchdown in the curve of the pebbled gully. Then, a hot poker of pain stabbed as my shoulder's ball joint did things it shouldn't when the object I'd grabbed—the wrist of one big man with a sword—went shooting over the ditch.

I saw him fly: a blur of bottle blue, shiny silver, and flailing legs.

Then, I noticed the green bungee cord trailing after him.

Oh shit.
With a sense of inevitability, I watched as the line tethering the two of us grew tauter than a tightrope. There was a snap, sharp as a whip crack. And then, I was being pulled again by my fingernails—
sweet heavens, when's it going to end
—right up and over the lip of the gully.

We didn't go far, my magic and me. Our bungee cord lesson was thankfully brief.

I landed in a patch of wild daisies.

The rider landed elsewhere. I heard a bad sound that I equated with meat being thrown on a counter: a cross between a splat and a thud.

I hoped he was dead.

*   *   *

My landing, though relatively soft, was a stunner—the culminating blow on top of everything else. I found myself dazed, stretched on my back. My spine hurt like it had spent some time on the rack. My shoulder was on fire, and my arm was twisted painfully over my head.

I could feel my nails; they burned with fierce pressure.

I tilted my chin and rolled my eyes for a look-see.

The landing had twisted up my Fae. Her lines were kinked, her flow all jammed up. She was the garden hose that was threatening to burst. I could sense the dam of her anger; I could measure the insult she took from being twisted and bent like a pipe cleaner.

Got to fix her.

“Chop off her hands!”

The screech came from the beaten path, where in the instant
before
I'd sat on a fat pony named Seabiscuit. The Gatekeeper had followed our flight and now danced on the other side of the ditch, screaming encouragements. She was using her hands, punctuating her shrieks with chopping visuals.

She wasn't talking to me.

I swung my head, my gaze following the line of my magic past the crimped part. The rider lay sprawled.
Please be dead.
He looked like a corpse; he lay unmoving, though he maintained a death grip on his damn sword.

Can corpses really do that?

“Kill her!” the Gatekeeper shrieked.

His toe twitched.

No, no, no.

He sat up. A rivulet of blood spilled, hot and fast. Smelling sweet but faded.

“She has no balyfire! Use your blade!” shouted the Gatekeeper.

Where was
her
balyfire? The thought was fleeting, and I didn't pause to examine it further because the rider was shedding his lethargy with impressive speed. He shook his head, then rolled to his side, and the coil of green between us swelled obscenely into the fatter knot.

Pain in my hands.

Distress in my ears. I could hear the hiss of my Fae—
sss, sss, sss!
She was wordless with suffering. From the squeeze, from the knot.

I rolled as the rider had, in a desperate effort to unkink the current running between us. And it was a partial success; the bend started to open, and the awful growing heaviness in my head and hands—

He twisted again, moving onto one knee.

I gasped at the spike of unbearable pain.

He forced the fingers of his clenched fist open, allowing the sword to drop. He reached for it with his free hand.

“Go!” I screamed, releasing my Fae. “Hurt him!”

“Yesss!” I heard her hiss as she exploded into a cloudburst that dappled the leaves and the grasses with flashes of bright shiny green light. In the space of one eyeblink, she re-formed herself into a stream of glittering maleficence, beautiful and deadly. Now, tethered to no one, grounded by none, she surged toward the rider, a hungry python.

A snap of her tail and she was a coil around his throat.

She squeezed.

The rider dropped his weapon. He tore at his skin as she swelled around the purpling column of his neck. Gasping for air, he staggered to stand. She bore down on him, her rage cold and cruel. His back arched, his eyes bulged. Then, he whined, high through his nose, as she cracked the first vertebra.

He dropped.

He died with the second crack.

*   *   *

I turned my head away from the sight of my magic twisting around the corpse's neck. Her color was a gloating green, her movements almost orgasmic.

“Abomination!” screamed the Gatekeeper as she scuttled down the pitch of the ditch toward me. Her lips were pulled in a pointy-toothed grimace.

“Whore!”

I raised my aching hands to ward her off, but she had no intention of her flesh touching mine. When she reached me, she lifted a foot, twisted slightly at the hip, and swung her little black boot.

Her aim was true; her kick got me right on my wounded ankle. Though I didn't feel pain, I felt horribly, stomach-turning wrong.

Goddess, where's my strength?

Her expression darkened into a troll's leer. She took a step back. I knew her next kick would be aimed at my head. I raised my free arm to crook it protectively in over my head as I opened my mouth to summon my magic.

The words on my tongue were never uttered.

From out of nowhere, Mouse came at her with a roar, no weapon other than his hands and his speed. His dive was a bruising tackle that swept her off her feet. As they crashed to the earth, her voluminous skirts flew, dark wings of a crow.

They landed in a tangle of dress and shouts. She jerked up a knee to get him in the balls. “Base-born scum!”

“Dog cock!” he shouted, twisting to avoid her sharp little knee.

“Touch me?” she screamed, pushing at him. “I'll have them boil your balls, you—”

He hauled off and hit her. His palm was open, but the slap was wide. Her head whipped to one side.

Goddess, where's my strength?
I was sliding … slipping toward some place I shouldn't go. I shook my head to clear it, blinking hard to bring the scene into focus.

The Gatekeeper's cheek was no longer pale. I could see the outline of Mouse's hand: four red fingerprints, with a red smudge below them for his palm.

Her eyes were hard, black pebbles. She raised her hands—not to point or to plead. Her fists were turned toward him, clenched so hard that her knuckles gleamed. I knew it meant bad things were coming, but I couldn't remember what they were or how they would hurt me.

Or us.

Or we.

As I struggled to untangle the meaning of the “wes,” and the “mes,” he lunged for her wrists, snaring them in his own punishing grip. I nodded, owlishly wise.
That's right. Get the wrist and you'll be safe …

She kicked out with her leg.

He twisted, swinging her around, and then he shoved her hard, and she fell, her hands briefly starfishing. Before she could rise or turn, he placed his foot on her back and pushed her down until she was flat on the ground.

Fast as a crocodile hunter, he jumped on her back, his legs snaring hers. “Chop off her hands, you said?” he said, grabbing her wrists again. “Cut them off? Shall we do that to you?”

She bucked and cursed. “Get off me! You verminous—”

He ground her clenched knuckles into the earth. “If I had a knife I'd do it. I'd chop them off so you could never use your balyfire again.”

“Scum!”

“Aye, I'm scum. And wouldn't you like to singe me with your fire?” He leaned over, lowering his face so that he could speak into her ear. “But you can't, can you?” His voice dropped to an intimate whisper. “You haven't got any balyfire left. You've used it up, haven't you? Who did you lay a streak of sulfur on?”

Me,
I thought.
She shot a fireball at me. She came up the steps from the Safe Passage and popped her head into my world, and then she sent a ball of sizzling fire my way. And still I followed her to this world …

Why did I do it?

Mouse was shaking his head. “By all the Gods in the sky above, if I'd known that you would never have got me out of the castle. And now look what you've done. I can't go back. There's nothing left there for me but a terrible death. You bat-fowling bitch, you've killed me without using an ounce of your talent.”

His hands went to her neck. From the look on his face, I knew his intent was to squeeze until her skin was the color of a boiled beet.

“Stop.” My voice sounded thin.

I don't think he heard me. Shoulders bunched, he leaned into the task of killing her.

“No, Mouse!” I summoned authority, even as the world around me dimmed into shadows, and blurred light, and creeping numbness. “Don't kill her,” I explained, my words smearing into a weary trail. “I need her alive.”

A beautiful serpentine stream of sparkles undulated past me, drawn to the boy who wished his mistress dead.

“Donut time, magic-mine,” I murmured. “Keep her away from me if you can.”

The sky winked blue. Then it was gray.

Movement in my pocket. Faint warmth on my chest.

Can't be Merry. I think I lost her.

Burning in my eyes.

Only damsels in distress pass out.

Be a dame, not a damsel.

*   *   *

“Breathe through your mouth slowly,” I heard Mouse mutter.

How long had I been out?
I worried.

“The fresh air will clear your head,” he said.