Wondrous Strange (19 page)

T
yffanwy had gone so far as to tie a little red bow in Lucky’s forelock. He looked like a Pekingese dog fresh from the groomer.

“I figured I might as well give him the full salon treatment.” She snuffled a bit, and Sonny noticed that her lovely eyes were red-rimmed.

“Thank you for this, Tyff,” he said. “I know you know how important it is.”

“Yeah, well. You tell Mabh she’d better take care of him”—the Faerie sniffed fiercely—“or there’ll be hell to pay! I have
a few favors of my own that I can call in, should I find myself so inclined.”

“I will,” he said—and made a mental note to stay on Tyffanwy’s good side. “C’mon, Lucky. Let’s get you home and end this.”

When Sonny pulled a slim rope out of his satchel and tied a loose loop around Lucky’s neck, he seemed to understand. The kelpie lifted his delicate hooves out of the tub, one by one, and stepped lightly out onto the bathroom floor. Sonny eyed the window skeptically. It seemed far too small for the kelpie to make his way through, but Lucky trooped obediently over to it and nudged the pane. Sonny edged past and lifted open the casement, and the faerie horse ducked his red-maned head and, impossibly, squeezed through, out onto the fire-escape landing.

Sonny followed, noting how the kelpie made his way with some haste down the iron stairs. From the street, Sonny waved to thank Tyff then, concentrating sharply for a moment, he drew upon his power and cast a concealing veil over Lucky, rendering the kelpie invisible so that he could lead him through the streets of Manhattan, toward Central Park. Where he would hand the creature off to Mabh’s Storm Hags.

He glanced nervously at the skies as he walked. In another few moments the sun would be down and it would be officially Samhain night. Scattered groups of costumed children and the odd bunch of party-going adults passed him on the
street; there were more than a few carved pumpkins grinning at him from windows and stoops.

Mabh was cutting this awfully close, Sonny thought. Probably just to make him twitchy and satisfy her own perverse sense of humor. But none of that mattered now. Kelley was safe, soon Lucky would be back in the Borderlands, and he would be done with the threat of the Wild Hunt.

As he passed through the park, Sonny noted with dismay that there were a lot of humans in costumes wandering the pathways. He could see Belvedere Castle in the distance, lit up in garish shades of orange and purple. Some foolish millionaire had obviously decided to throw a great big Halloween bash in the park that year.

He followed his Janus senses to find the place in the park where Mabh’s minions would be waiting. In truth, as he walked shadowy trails leading the placid, invisible kelpie, he felt a wash of guilt. The poor creature probably didn’t even know the fate that awaited it. And if it did, it went to it with far more nobility than Sonny would have thought possible from a beast. He reaffirmed to himself his vow to Kelley that he would demand protection for Lucky.

In his mind, Sonny could sense three Storm Hags hovering near. He came out into a little round clearing by Turtle Pond, dominated by an enormous statue of a historic Polish king mounted on a warhorse. High in the air he saw the Hags circling like wispy gray vultures. He lifted the veil from the
kelpie, and Lucky shimmered into view by his side. Sonny opened his mouth to call down the Hags, but suddenly his Janus senses jangled an alarm. A rift was opening nearby.

Very nearby. Right in front of him…

He took a step back and dropped into a fighting stance.

Wham!

It was not a small rift. The tearing sent out a shock wave that hammered Sonny to his knees. Beside him, Lucky whinnied in panic and half reared, pawing at the air with his front hooves. Sonny sensed that the entire Janus Guard had been alerted to the breach, and he knew that those who were able would come running.

The sky rippled. Looking up, Sonny saw the Queen of Air and Darkness herself, lounging on the statue high above the ground as if it were a throne. Mabh was silhouetted against the sky, framed by the two massive swords held crossed in the air by the statue of the king. Just for fun, Mabh had conjured up a pair of glowing-eyed jack-o’-lanterns and jammed them onto the tips of the statue’s swords. They flared like torches, illuminating Mabh’s makeshift court with a lurid glow.

“I hope this meeting was convenient for you, Sir Guard,” she said in a languorous voice. “I was concluding a bit of business with a lady of my court, and we went a little over time.”

By the flaring light of the pumpkin torches, Sonny saw a ghastly sight. From the long, taloned fingers of Mabh’s fist,
Chloe the Siren dangled like a limp rag doll, hanging by the knotted mass of her blond hair. Blood seeped from her mouth and the scores of small wounds that marred her sleek limbs. She moaned senselessly in pain.

“My lady Mabh.” Sonny struggled to keep his voice steady. “I was…unaware that you traveled the ways to the mortal world.”

“Ooh, diplomacy,” Mabh cooed. “How lovely. If you refer to the chains that Auberon and that witch Titania bound about me to restrict me to my realm, they are still there.” She swung one foot carelessly, and Sonny saw a snaking silver chain attached to a fiery manacle that circled her ankle. The chain disappeared back into the boiling rift in the sky behind the queen, and there were fresh, angry red welts scoring her pale skin where the shackle bit into her flesh. “I’m still tethered, little Janus. But mark my words, not for long.”

“My time is short, lady. I expected to meet only with your…emissaries.”

“My hags.” She cast a glance at the sky, but the Storm Hags were nowhere to be seen. “Oh, they’re about. Victimizing a partygoer or two, I should imagine. Never mind. Have you completed the task appointed you?”

Sonny glanced back at Lucky and said, “Obviously. First, the terms of your boon.”

Mabh rolled her eyes.

“You will take care of it.” Sonny ignored her disdain, his
voice firm. “Once returned to you, it will not suffer at your hands.”

Mabh’s eyes narrowed. “You dare call my red-haired beauty ‘it’?”

“Insofar as your ‘red-haired beauty’ has incredibly destructive latent capabilities, I’d rather not elevate its status with a proper pronoun.” It was best not to let Mabh know that the kelpie had made himself actual friends—such knowledge could be used against them all. Sonny kept his inflections carefully neutral, although, under his breath, he murmured, “Sorry, Lucky—no offense.”

“What say you, Mabh?”

“You are disrespectful,” Mabh said. She tut-tutted, a grin playing about her lips.

Sonny shrugged. “Give it to get it, lady.”

The Darkling Queen laughed—a cheery, tinkling sound. “I like you! You’re an angry little thing. And here I thought Auberon would raise you up all soft. Well then. The boon is granted. Now fulfill your part of the bargain. Give me my precious girl.”

Sonny slipped the rope from Lucky’s neck and nudged him forward with a slap on the rump. “It’s a boy, actually—if you’d bothered to check.”

Mabh looked back and forth from the nervous kelpie to Sonny. Then she turned a furious glare on him. “Your jest lacks a necessary component, my little changeling friend.
Humor. Now where is my daughter?”

“Your…”

Sonny’s guts went cold. He replayed the scene with the Storm Hag in his apartment over again in his mind: “
This realm hides something that belongs to Mabh. You know this?”
the hag had said. “
She wants it back. It should never have been sent here. It was a mistake. Find it. Return it. And the queen will grant you a boon.”

He had made the most basic error in judgment that one could make when dealing with Faerie. He had jumped to conclusions. Sonny had assumed that the Hag had referred to the wayward kelpie and had not bothered to clarify that point.

With sudden, crystalline clarity, Sonny realized that he had been wrong from the very beginning. It had
not
been Mabh who had sought to unleash the Wild Hunt after all.

Auberon.

For the sake of securing his own position on the Unseelie throne, Sonny thought, the Faerie king would sacrifice his own daughter. His daughter…and Mabh’s. And he would have had Sonny help him do it, and put the blame on Mabh for awakening the Wild Hunt at the same time. Sick misery filled Sonny, only to be replaced by cold fury.

Mabh’s eyes narrowed, and she watched him—watched him with green, glittering eyes that, were they not so filled with cruel malice, Sonny would have recognized immediately. Kelley had those very same eyes.

Mabh leaned forward slightly. “My Hag
did
convey the
bargain to you, did she not?”

“Cryptically,” Sonny muttered, teeth and fists clenched. “And with exceedingly poor grammar—”

“But you agreed. Then and now.”

“No.”

“And instead of my daughter”—the Darkling Queen smiled dangerously—“you brought me…. a pony.”

“I—”

“If you had any questions, Janus, the time to ask them is now long past.” Her eyes flashed red for an instant.

“I assumed—”

“Ah, well. You know what they say about the dangers of ‘assuming.’”

“My lady, the fault is mine. There must be something—”

“The bargain was for the girl.”

“No.”

“Where is she?” Mabh hissed. “The bargain is broken.
You
broke it. You
must
tell me.”

“N-n…no…” Sonny fell to his knees and felt his head jerk backward as though someone had yanked on his hair. His eyes flew wide, as much as he tried to keep them squeezed shut.

“Oh,” Mabh purred as she gazed into his mind from high up on her perch. “Oh, this is marvelous…. All because of you, little Janus, my imprisonment is at an end! You know the rules. Your broken oath gives me the power to take what was not given to me as promised—and to do
that
, I’ll need
freedom.” She grinned wickedly as the manacle and delicate chain around her ankle shimmered and dimmed to an insubstantial wisp of silvery flame and the passageway in the sky behind her closed. “Thanks to your charming ineptitude, I can once more come and go as I please. I can enter Herne’s precious Tavern. All so that I may take what was not freely given to me. And I can wreak a little havoc while I’m there!”

She laughed merrily.

To Sonny, it was the sound of the world ending.

“This worked out rather better even than I’d hoped. Thanks for your pains, fleshling. I will not forget.” Mabh raised her hand, slicing through the sky to open another rift in front of her like a wound in the air.

In the moment before she stepped through, several of the Janus Guard came bursting out of the trees about ten yards behind Sonny.

“Chloe!” Maddox shouted. “Mabh, you bitch! Let her go!”

Chloe groaned, and the Darkling Queen seemed to suddenly remember that she held the Siren dangling by her hair—twenty feet above the earth.

She let her go.

Maddox was almost fast enough to catch her. Sonny winced as Chloe’s head bounced off the ground. As Maddox got an arm around her and half lifted her, the Siren clutched at his sleeve, and Sonny heard her pained murmur: “I didn’t want to tell him…but he threatened to take away my music.”

“Tell who, Chloe?” Maddox asked gently. “What?”

“Auberon. About the girl.” The Siren’s lovely voice was reduced to a thready whisper. “Mabh was so angry when she found out that I told him. She thinks Auberon wants to do the girl harm….”

“Shh…”

“Tell Sonny…I’m sorry….” Chloe’s hand fell limply to the ground.

With a snarl, Sonny launched himself in the direction of the statue. Mabh wanted a fight? She was about to get one. He could feel the rest of the Guard surging forward behind him. But Mabh stroked the horse statue beneath her and it suddenly snorted and reared, tossing its enormous bronze head. The ground heaved as though an earthquake struck, throwing the Janus Guard about like toys; there was a sound of shrieking metal. High above them, the figure of the long-dead king uncrossed its swords. The horse’s huge, heavy hooves tore free of the statue’s base, and the Janus Guard picked themselves up to join in battle against the bronze, red-eyed effigy.

“Happy Halloween, children!” Mabh vanished from sight, her voice howling back at them. “I’m off to go collect my daughter and do some trick-or-treating!”

The rift spiraled and collapsed in on itself, and a storm of flaming pumpkins rained down from the sky.

“W
ill you walk with me, lady?” Herne bowed his head to Kelley as they left the Isle of Avalon behind and returned to the Tavern proper.

She smiled up at him and slipped her hand around his muscle-corded forearm. They strolled through the Tavern’s garden, past a gathering of what looked like living topiaries—one of them a horse prancing around the terrace, leafy mane and tail rustling as it kicked up its heels. It reminded her of Lucky, and Kelley felt a stab of anxiety. She was worried about him. And about Sonny, who had gone to deliver him to a fearsome being about whom she’d heard only unpleasant things
so far. It was strange, because the man walking beside her had once loved the Darkling Queen. She’d seen it in the vision Sonny had given her.

“In the days before she was so very dark, yes,” Herne murmured. “I did love her. As she did me. Sometimes love can be a terribly destructive thing, lady. I have spent lifetimes trying to make amends for what love once made me do.”

“Can you read my thoughts?” Kelley asked warily.

“No.” Herne laughed softly. “Just your face. You glanced at the pony, frowned, glanced up at me, and your expression became thoughtful. It was fairly easy to interpret.”

“Oh. Right.”

“But henceforward, around your own kind at least, you will probably want to learn to school your thoughts. Or at least keep them from showing so plainly in your visage. That is, if you intend to take up the legacy of your birth.”

“You think it would be dangerous for me to do so.”

“I think it is your blood right, and the decision is yours and yours alone,” Herne said. “But be warned, lady. There are those who might not be so eager for you to embrace that right. The Unseelie king among them.”

“My father? Why?”

“Only Auberon’s direct heir is able to inherit the throne after him. And the thrones of the Faerie kingdoms must remain occupied.”

“So without an heir, Auberon has no worries about having to ever give up his kingship,” Kelley said. “But I thought
that the Fae were immortal.”

The Horned One held up a hand. “Yes, and no. Faerie are immortal
only
insofar as they do not age or sicken. They can still be killed.”

Right
, Kelley remembered,
that’s what Sonny does
.

Her thoughts turned again to him and to what Auberon had said….

Herne was speaking. “That is the way of it for all of the rulers of the Fair Folk. The kings and queens of Faerie are protected by the power of their thrones. Without heirs, they remain utterly inviolate, and without deadly enemies.”

“So…I’m a threat to Auberon.”

“You could be. But you could also be a powerful ally, doubling the strength of the Unseelie Court.” Herne shrugged. “I do not know which way King Auberon perceives you. He is a deep thinker, and I would not presume to know his mind.”

“He offered to make me human.”

“That, in itself, says something. But again, whether he made such an offer for his own sake, or for yours…I do not know.” The Hunter’s gaze was warm, sympathetic. “Think hard on this choice, Kelley Winslow. As one who has lived a very long life tangled in the threads of Faerie webs, I would urge caution when dealing with their machinations. Friend and foe are sometimes indistinguishable. Or one and the same.”

“Can he do it?” Kelley asked. “Can my father make me human?”

“After a fashion,” Herne said. “As Lord of the Unseelie Court of Faerie, he can certainly take back the power of the Unseelie throne that you by blood right hold—but only if you give it willingly. He cannot force it from you.”

“I see.”

Herne stopped her. “Were you to ever do such a thing, lady, I would ask for something in return, if I were you. Such a gift should not be come by lightly. Even by a Faerie king.”

“I’ll try to remember that. Thank you.”

Herne paced slowly beside her.

“You are handling all of this really very well, you know,” he said, a smile in his voice, as if he’d sensed her thoughts once again.

“Oh, I am not,” she said. “I’m in total denial and pretty sure I’m dreaming.” She put her other hand on his arm and squeezed. “But it’s kind of a nice drea—”

Suddenly Herne the Hunter grabbed her by the shoulders and flung her hard against a mirrored pillar—out of the way of a flaming pumpkin that roared out of the night. The fiery gourd exploded into an orange ball of fire as it hit the flagstones of the Tavern courtyard.

All around her, Faerie were screaming—some in panic, but most in rage. The Green was sanctuary, and someone had just violated it.

“Where is my daughter?” shrieked the terrifying specter that appeared in the sky above the courtyard, dressed in a raven-wing cloak, with wild red hair and a flashing, green-
eyed gaze. Something clicked in Kelley’s brain in the midst of the sudden, intense bedlam.

“
You have your mother’s eyes,”
Auberon had said.

Mabh.

The Queen of Air and Darkness was her mother.

“To the princess!” Herne bellowed. “Protect the girl!”

All around her, the Lost Fae shimmered and shifted. With a rush of invocations, weapons of all kinds appeared, gripped tightly in graceful, fine-boned hands. Kelley saw things heaving themselves out of the depths of the fountains—creatures with claws and teeth, wielding cudgels and axes; and other creatures that didn’t need weapons.

The place erupted into chaos, and it was all Kelley could do to get out of the way and avoid being trampled by those trying to protect her.

In the sky above Mabh’s head, she saw cloaked and hooded wraiths, screeching curses and flinging lightning-lashed tempests at the Faerie warriors with devastating effect. She knew suddenly what these were.

Mabh’s Storm Hags
, Kelley thought, terrified.
They’re here for me
.

Something must have gone terribly wrong with Sonny and Lucky.

She ducked and ran for the safety of the arbor that led to the shore of Avalon’s lake. But there were so many twisting passageways in the Tavern that she quickly became hopelessly lost. Bursting through a set of double oak doors out into the
cold night air, Kelley found herself suddenly standing in the car-filled parking lot of New York’s Tavern on the Green, back in the mortal world.

A group of costumed revelers poured out through the doors of the tavern behind her. “Happy Halloween, missy!” one of them slurred, tipping a pointy wizard’s hat in her direction.

Kelley watched, stunned and horrified, as something that resembled a bat-winged howler monkey leaped from the trees onto the unwitting reveler and tore the hat to shreds. Before its claws could rend flesh, Kelley screamed at the people to run for their lives and ripped the clover charm from her throat with one hand. She flung out her other hand without stopping to think, willing the horrible creature to be gone.

Brilliant light flashed in a corona all around her.

There was a
pop!
and the thing disappeared with an extremely surprised look on its face. Kelley fell to her knees, her brightness diminished, winded by the amount of effort it had taken to do whatever it was she had just done.

In the distance, she heard sirens and screaming.

She stuffed the charm into the tiny purse that dangled from her wrist and ran.

After falling on her face for the third time, Kelley finally kicked off Tyff’s ridiculous heels, heedless of cold or the sharp gravel of the path. In the distance, she heard more screaming—terrified cries from human throats. She ran up the rise of a low hill and looked out over a panorama that
could have come from a Hieronymus Bosch painting—of demons torturing the souls of the damned in hell.

The Janus must have been overwhelmed, fending off Mabh and her minions,
thought Kelley frantically,
and so the Samhain Gate had swung wide, undefended
. All manner of horrific creatures from the Otherworld poured out through rifts. Anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the park was being chased and tormented by beings that none of them could have imagined. Kelley saw spiny things and fiery things and pale, bony things with too-large eyes spreading out across the park with malicious intent.

All around her now, she could hear sirens in the air. Kelley knew that New York’s Finest would be no match for the swarming Faerie monsters—the police would be nothing more than fodder against such creatures. She had to do something, and she had to do it fast. She had to find Sonny. Or, barring that, she had to find the one other person who she knew had the power to help her.

As her strength returned, the light started to flare from her skin once again. Kelley concentrated, and her brightness dimmed as she pulled every ounce of power she could grasp at into herself and stretched out with her awareness to try to find her father.

When his presence struck in her mind, it was like the impact of a hard-flung snowball. Suddenly she knew where he was—she just had to get there. Fast.

Half embarrassed to do so, Kelley turned and glanced at
the lacy, shining wings that floated out from either side of her spine. With an effort of sheer brute will, she made them flutter—then flutter faster. She could feel her feet lifting off the ground and felt a surge of triumph. But her concentration wavered. The wings crumpled, and Kelley fell forward onto her face in a drift of fallen leaves.

Cursing, she pushed herself up and started to run.