City of Fae (19 page)

They’d told me I wasn’t real. Miles had alluded to it. The queen had outright said it. Warren had flaunted the facts in front of me. I’d gladly attacked Warren, as though possessed, and Reign had moments ago confessed to wanting to use the queen’s construct. But none of those things made me believe, there and then, that Alina O’Connor was a ghost. Andrews’s video on the other hand showed me everything I needed to know. From one second to the next, the world changed. Before ten fifteen that night, I did not exist.

I blinked and bit into my lip, sharp enough to taste blood. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

I turned his phone off and handed it back. “You knew?”

“Since last night. This isn’t okay, Alina. I don’t know what you are, whether you’re human, or fae, or what, but this can’t go unreported. The queen? She’s real. And the fae aren’t what we’ve been told. I’ve suspected as much, for so long … If they can create things like you, what else can they create? We need to look again at the fae and what they’re doing here.”

He was right, but at that moment, I couldn’t get past how he must see me. Everyone knew. Reign, Warren, and Andrews. They all saw the truth. What a fool I’d been. I met Andrews’s gaze. “Do you think I’m a monster?” I asked quietly.

“No.” He looked so genuine, tied to my towel bar, hope widening his eyes. But he couldn’t understand. Nobody would ever understand: I didn’t know who I was.

“Listen to me.” He leaned closer. “Whatever you are, whatever they created you for, it doesn’t matter.” The tip of his tongue swept across his bottom lip. Determination tightened his face. “What matters is now. You know that, right? What you do from here on out is all that counts.”

He made it sound so easy. “How can you say that? The queen made me.”

“So? We aren’t carbon copies of our parents. My bastard of a father went down for armed burglary. The queen’s magic or draíocht or whatever runs through your veins, it doesn’t define you. Or”—he shrugged—“maybe it does; you tell me.”

“No, I’m not like her,” I denied.

“No, you’re not. You’re sweet and funny, and you talk way too much. You arch your eyebrow when you think nobody is watching. You’re smart, most of the time … sometimes. You chew your lip and bite your nails and ask too many questions.” He stopped and smiled his honest smile. “I don’t know what you are, but I know what I see, and that’s Miss Alina O’Connor, who makes terrible coffee.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with my coffee, I just wanted you cops out of my place.”

He nodded toward the closed bathroom door. “Don’t let them define you. You can beat this. I need you to beat this, to help me figure out what’s going on. This isn’t just about you, it’s about the fae, why they’ve lied, and what they want with London.”

He was right. He wasn’t just a pretty face. He actually had the smarts to back up the detective badge. “Ya know, you’re all right, for a cop.”

“You’re all right for a ghost.”

I snorted, and glanced at his cuffs. If Reign wanted my help, he was going to have to let Andrews go. “Wait here.”

Andrews jangled the cuffs. “Not got a lot of choice …”

Warren and Reign filled my tiny kitchen, the two of them far too striking to be anything but fae. Talking in hurried bursts, they were clearly arguing when I emerged from the hallway, still barefooted, sporting the same bloody pink top and leggings borrowed from Andrews’s sister. “Okay, listen up. Rule number one, we do not cuff my friends to towel bars.” Reign opened his mouth to argue. “
Shh
. Rule number two, I can’t promise I won’t turn on either of you, but I can promise I’ll do everything I can to stop it from happening. If I screw that up, you can drain the draíocht from my veins and kill me.” Warren was the next to try and interrupt me. My glare cut him off. “Rule three, I am not a
thing
or an
it
. I’m Alina. If anyone has a problem with that, they’ll find a dagger between their ribs. Understood?” Neither said a word. Warren brushed a thumb across his lips. He glanced at Reign, who looked at me with an expression somewhere between surprise and amusement.

“So, are we going to stop the queen or stand around bickering?”

Reign’s smile slid sideways. He dug into his pocket and tossed me the keys to the cuffs. Warren snarled and turned away. Fine. Let the ancient fae throw a hissy fit. I didn’t care. I cared about stopping the queen, because inside I knew exactly what she wanted. The City of London and its people. And she would kill anyone or anything that got in her way.

***

It sounded like a bad joke. A rock star fae, a detective, and a keeper, took up residence in my living room. Reign sprawled across the couch, Warren loomed by the window, Andrews leaned against the kitchen countertop, sleeves rolled up and arms crossed, his detective-grade stare on. I knelt by the coffee table. Nobody had touched their coffee.

“By now, she’ll suspect Alina failed to kill Warren,” Reign said, speaking to nobody in particular. All eyes flicked to Warren. “Unless we provide a body.” The collective gazes settled on Andrews.

He snorted. “What? You think I can commandeer a body from a morgue?”

“It’s what they do in the movies when they need to fake a death.” I shrugged and cringed as Andrews frowned at my ignorance.

“I think we’ve already established this is real. Even if I could miraculously get my hands on a body, from what you’ve told me about the queen, she’s not going to be fooled by a random corpse.”

Reign leaned forward. He rubbed his hands together, fingers entwining. “Alina, you said you can hear her …”

“It comes and goes. If I listen hard, I can hear her, but I’d rather not.”

“She was adamant Warren had to die before the end of the week. Any idea why?”

I bowed my head. “No, only that Saturday is important.” Miles had mentioned Saturday too.

“I know why.” Warren practically growled. “If she can get rid of me, she can escape Under. If I die, the ties the Keepers wove to bind her years ago, will unravel. Once she’s out though, she needs to feed. Right now, she’s a fraction of her former self. She’s weak. Cut off from Faerie, she’s not gorged herself in centuries. The first thing she’ll do is search for a crowd, somewhere people gather, so she can harvest draíocht.”

“Okay, so … a park? A cinema?”

“Bigger.” Warren smiled a twisted, bitter smile. “You think you’ve seen the queen in her true form. You haven’t. Think bigger. Think much, much bigger.”

Reign nodded, confirming something in his mind. “I’ll cancel the concert.”

The concert. His concert, at the O
₂
Arena. Twenty thousand fans all crammed into the space inside London’s millennium dome. “Is that Saturday?”

“Yeah. I’ve missed all the rehearsals.” He shrugged. “Being perfect isn’t something you can practice.”

“Cancel it. You weren’t going to go ahead anyway, surely?”

“Yeah, I was.” He stretched his legs beneath the coffee table and threaded his fingers through his hair, sucking in a deep breath. “It would have been my last. I planned on going out in a blaze of glory.” He saw me gaping at him. “What? Fine, go ahead and judge me, you seem to enjoy it. The music is the only thing I have in my life that’s mine, the only thing I have control over. I’d have thought you, of all people, would understand that, American Girl.”

“After everything that’s happened, you were still going to go ahead?”

“Until the FA picked me up. Now I’m out … thanks to Warren. They can crash my gig if they want. The resulting show would be worth the ticket price ten times over.”

“You have to cancel.”

“I know …” He puffed a sigh. “I will.”

“No. Don’t.” Andrews had stayed mostly quiet since I’d freed him. But he’d been watching the two fae closely. Taking it all in, probably filing it away in his head for later use. “Twenty thousand people in one place? Cancel it, and then what? If she gets out, she’ll roam the city, right? That’s the last thing anyone wants. At least we’ll know where she’s going. Shit, this is insane … Why aren’t we bringing Special Ops in on this now? Firearms Command SO-Nineteen?”

“What are they going to do?”

“Shoot the bitch.”

“They can’t get to Under. Nobody can unless they’re fae. You said it yourself. You’ve searched Chancery Lane and couldn’t find a damn thing out of place down there. They’ll just get lost in the tunnels. Bring the SAS, bring the army, but they can’t do anything before she’s out.
If
she gets out … She can’t get out unless Warren’s dead—”

“Wrong again.” Warren grinned, revealing a glimpse of sharp fae canines. “Three Keepers dead. I’m the only one left. When we bound her, we were younger, our draíocht fresh from Faerie, and much stronger. Centuries have passed, and we’ve not had enough strength to reinforce her prison. There isn’t enough draíocht here. As each Keeper fell”—his gaze skipped to Reign, who winced and dropped his head back, squeezing his eyes closed—“their binds unraveled. I’ll do what I can, and keep her trapped for as long as possible, but there’s a chance she’ll escape, given time.”

“How much time?”

Warren’s throat moved as he swallowed. He bowed his head, and with a sigh admitted, “I don’t know.”

Andrews spat a curse. “There must be something …”

Warren’s glare cut deep. “We have the queen’s own construct right here, and her hound.”

Reign jolted, as though startled. I caught a glimpse of the disgust on his face before he turned away, and glowered at Warren. “Don’t.”

“You might not like it, Sovereign, but the truth of what you are isn’t going away.”

Reign was on his feet and pacing within seconds. Teeth gritted, head bowed, his gaze flicked, thoughts working. “I can’t.”

“You could. The hound will kill anything in its way.”

Andrews caught my eye with a question in his gaze, but all I could do was shrug. “What is this hound?” I asked both fae.

A growl, more beast than human, rumbled from Reign’s chest, up his throat, and bubbled from his lips. Instincts, human or fae, wrenched me to my feet and had me staggering back.
What the hell?

“A nightmare.” He flicked his eyes to me, and in a glimmer between one moment and the next, something else looked out from inside him. His eyes widened with fear and he whirled on Warren. “I can’t control it!” He threw his hands up. “I’m not discussing this.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Yes, I’m afraid. Which is what you should be. All of you.” He scooped up his coat and strode from my apartment, slamming the door behind him.

Andrews, beside me, shrugged slightly. “Touchy subject.”

Warren’s gaze on me felt like the crawl of those spiders. “What is the hound?” I asked again, softly, refusing to let the prickly ancient fae wriggle out of answering.

“The reason he pushes you away.” Warren’s lip curled.

Andrews tensed. “We don’t have time for him to have a crisis. Whatever it is, he needs to deal with it. Can this hound thing help us?”

“As much as any force of nature helps anyone.”

Vague, much. “Warren, what about me? I’m her construct. Reign said you could use me. What can I do?”

He leaned back against the wall and rubbed at his chin. “You’re able to get closer to her than anyone this side of Faerie.”

I shivered. Did he know just how close I’d been? “Reign was close when I saw them meet.”

Warren raised his brow. “She’s in your blood. In the way you move. I hear her in your voice. You’re as close as mother and daughter. She can’t control you physically, not once you’ve been set on your task, so you could walk right up to her now and look her in those red eyes, and she wouldn’t stop you.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Bow down to her maybe. The memory of doing just that turned my stomach. What had I been thinking? I hadn’t. That was the point. She’d been thinking for me. I couldn’t go back there. I didn’t want her in my head again. I didn’t want to be that
thing
again.

“You’re her weakness, or you would be, if there was a way to stop her manipulating you.”

Andrews had bowed his head. “There must be a way. We can’t let this happen. What about the fae in Under? Surely they don’t want her out? She’ll ruin everything your kind have worked for. The freedom, the attention … If the people see what you’re really like, they won’t let you live among them. Not anymore.” He spoke with surprising vehemence, and I couldn’t blame him. A fae had taken his sister. He knew what they were capable of, and that was before you turned them into monsters living below London’s streets.

Warren’s smile was a sorry thing, laden with regret. “We’re all glimmers of what we once were. Most are afraid, in denial, and would rather pretend they can live perfectly fine among humans than deal with the queen. The younger ones hardly even know what they’re capable of. And then there are those that believe she can free us all. The queen is old draíocht, from another time, another place … We’re all lesser, shells of what we were, what we could be. Those who might rise against her, she’d crush.” He drew in a deep breath. “The FA are the only ones who might be able to help, but right now, they’re more interested in stopping Reign, and me, considering I let him out of confinement.”

“Surely they’d rally around a greater threat?” I asked.

“Yes, once me, Reign, and you, are behind bars. But what do you think they’ll be able to do against the queen, Alina?”

Every member of the Fae Authority I’d met had been pretty damn terrifying. They certainly wouldn’t hesitate in trying to stop her. Put a few of them together, and they were formidable. “We should get them on our side, somehow, and before Saturday.” I raised an eyebrow at Warren. “Didn’t you and the Keepers create the FA? Don’t you have some sort of power over them?”

“No. We created them, put the laws in place, gave them command over their own means of operating. They’re independent. It had to be that way to have any hope of controlling the fae.”

I’d blown any chance of talking to them when I’d stabbed two in Reign’s apartment, a memory I wasn’t particularly keen on reliving. They’d lock me up before I could say “boo.” I wasn’t human. They had authority over me.
Resistance would be met with deadly force.

“You’re our best chance, Alina,” Warren said. “You’re the only thing that can get close to her before Saturday, before she escapes.”