City of Fae (27 page)

“We need to get these people moving. How long does it take to clear a place like this?”

“Twenty minutes. They have emergency evacuation plans in place. The dome is rigged with over three hundred cameras. As soon as anything happens, the alarms will sound. The cameras are how I found you, actually.”

“Can you get me there? To the CCTV room? Maybe I can spot where she’ll come through.”

“Yes, come with me.” He strode ahead, exuding enough authority so the staff all veered out of our way. “What happened …” he called back, “When you went down there?”

“Um, that’s kind of a long and complicated story. The short version is, I screwed up.”

We didn’t speak again until Andrews escorted me into the CCTV control room. A bank of monitors blinked fifty or so split screens back at us. Three operators gave us cursory glances, nothing more.

“Okay, you can see the entertainment village, the entrance plaza, the arena … even the back of house, where we were. Almost everything from here. Up to sixty thousand people in total.” Andrews pointed out each relevant screen. I leaned in close and scanned each in turn. So many people … So many lives. Mothers, fathers, families, and friends. People with connections to loved ones. Connections I’d yet to make and probably never would. I had to save them.
Do something important with your miserable existence.
I’d show Warren exactly what I was capable of. The entertainment village, with its cinema and restaurants, brimmed with patrons. This dome was an all-you-can-eat draíocht buffet if you happened to be an ugly-ass spider queen that sucked the life out of people. What would she do? She wouldn’t want them to run, so she’d go about this carefully at first, tentatively, like nursing her web. Spiders set traps.

“Any ideas?”

I calmed my thoughts and tried to focus.
Think like a fae
, Reign had told me often enough. She wasn’t just any fae, she was the queen, possessed by a fae spirit, and starving. “Maybe the loading areas, somewhere she has the freedom to move. She’ll try not to spook the crowd. She won’t want them escaping.”

The camera operators frowned, and cast me sideways glances. They hadn’t yet seen the sparkly daggers inside my coat. I resisted the urge to grin.

“Can you zoom in on the loading bays at the back, behind the arena?” Andrews asked. The operators obliged, and we squinted at the screens. Nothing. I was missing something. “These cameras cover everything? Are there any tunnels?”

“Yeah,” the nearest operator nodded, “The sixty-foot Blackwall Tunnel shaft comes up right through ’ere.” He tapped a pencil at a screen. “You can’t miss it from outside.”

Oh God.
“There. It’ll be there. Can we get to it? From inside?”

He looked at me warily. “There’s a maintenance door.”

“Show us.”

We followed the operator to the south side of the dome, where we met with an official who seemed to want to go over Andrews’s ID with a fine-tooth comb before finally opening the side door. The shaft rose up like a silver monolith. Cool night air rushed over us, bringing with it the sights and smells of London. I tugged my coat closed and ventured into the cutout area around the ventilation shaft. Exterior lights flooded a brittle milky glow around us, scattering insubstantial shadows. No spiders. I’d expected … something. “I was so sure.”

“Maybe she’s not coming.” Andrews gazed up at the vents some sixty feet above. The wind whipped his jacket open and tousled his hair. He seemed almost hopeful, but he couldn’t feel her: the impending storm. If she wasn’t here already, she was close.

We walked around the shaft, but if anything there was a disturbing lack of spiders and their webs. Wherever she was, it wasn’t there. A tunnel. It made sense. Returning inside, I quizzed the operator, but he confirmed there were no other tunnels under the dome. He left Andrews and me in the entrance plaza, outside Starbucks. “I don’t understand …”

“Like I said, maybe she’s not coming.”

I gave him a smile; he seemed like he needed it. “She’s coming. There are tens of thousands of people here. She wouldn’t miss this. Especially as I failed again. She’ll want a few words with her progeny.”

Andrews’s keen gaze scanned the flow of people milling around us. Most headed toward the restaurants, but others hung back by the frosted-glass entrance doors. Reign’s spellbinding voice reached us, albeit muffled below the general background din of so many people. Andrews turned toward me, hand tucked in his pocket, “So, what happened?”

“I was wounded pretty badly. She patched me up.” Tapping my temple, I said, “She went to town up here.” Shivers skittered through me, prompting me to pull my coat tighter. “I came here as her tool. It was only when Reign … We, uh, we fought, and he helped me remember.”

Andrews nodded and mustered a weak but genuine smile. “Good.” He lifted a finger and pressed the earpiece in his ear. The team checking in. I hung back, arms crossed, shivers still spilling over my skin, while Andrews gave his team the all clear. My limbs ached and a dull throb emanated around my skull. I didn’t have time to get sick, especially now.

Lifting my gaze I scanned the ceiling canopy above the entrance plaza. Downward lights sparkled. Glossy advertising posters gleamed. The dome represented the modern, and yet the queen was here, ancient and horrifying. Feverish shivers spritzed my skin with perspiration. Rubbing my forehead, trying to ease the dull ache and wipe off the sheen of perspiration, my thoughts wandered. People paid me no mind while I watched them laugh, chat, and argue. I had to fight not to grab them one by one and shout at them to leave now, before it was too late. They wouldn’t listen, and I’d be arrested.

Andrews turned toward me, his face ashen. “Something’s wrong.”

A shout went up from the plaza. A young woman tugged on the glass entrance doors. She tried another. Others joined in, but the doors weren’t moving. Panic plucked at the mood of the crowd. My feet carried me forward without instruction, but even as I drew close I could see the evidence I’d been looking for all along. The glass doors weren’t frosted. What I’d thought to be opaque glass was a blanket of webbing.

Andrews jostled his way through a growing crowd. “Police … Let me through.” He tugged on the automatic doors. They rattled but didn’t open. The mechanisms had jammed with what looked like white cotton candy. I knew otherwise. My gaze trailed higher, into the canopy above us.

Think like a fae. Look up …
“Andrews, she’s on the roof!”

He broke away from the crowd and relayed my revelation into his earpiece. “I want Air Support here now. Yes, I know the costs. Do it! The doors are sealed. Check all entrances and exits, and get the cutting gear ASAP.”

All the doors would be blocked. While we’d been searching for her inside, she’d been outside, closing her trap around us. The murmur from the crowd grew more urgent as the plaza filled with people. Before long, once they realized they couldn’t escape, they’d panic.

Andrews watched the crowd, the same thoughts clearly running through his head. He apprehended a few of the staff and sent them to check all the exits.

“I have to warn Reign.”

“Go.” He turned, and then seemed to hesitate, as though wanting to say something, but failing to find the words. “Be careful.”

“Not likely.” I grinned.

Fighting my way through the crowd, Andrews’s voice of calm authority rose up above the noise of the crowd. “I’m a police officer. There’s a team outside working to open the doors. Stay calm. There’s no need to panic. We’ll have the doors open soon …”

On my way to the back stage area, I saw exactly what I’d feared. Crowds swelling around the exits. Not yet panicking. They would soon, and if the doors weren’t opened, people would die. I had to warn Reign. If the concert ended now, the crowd would have nowhere to go. He had to keep them inside, and distracted, at least until the cops got the doors open.

***

“I need to speak to him.”

The stagehand blocked my path. “You can’t go out there, you can see he’s in the middle of a performance.”

“This is urgent.”

“No, miss. I can’t allow you. I’ll call security—”

I peeled back my coat and produce a dagger. “Call them if you want, I’m going on.” She balked and backed away.

Stepping out of the shadows into the dazzling lights wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be. I hesitated, and wasted time tucking the dagger back where it belonged. Onstage, the band gave it their all. A wash of fantastic light and booming sound roused my senses and had my borrowed heart racing. I tried to get Reign’s attention, but he was deep in the zone, eyes sparkling, body alive, lost to the music. Another time, I could have watched him perform all night.

A spider scurried across the floor in front of me. Just one, the size of my hand, and not at all concerned by the onslaught of light and sound. I stepped forward, took a deep breath, and in the next steps I was onstage, bathed in light and sound. Throat dry, body trembling, I half jogged forward. The drummer scowled in my direction.

“Reign!” He couldn’t hear me. The music pounded. A waterfall of light slid over us. “She’s here! On the roof!” The band played on, their combined music devouring my shouts.

Reign missed a beat. The band played on, but I saw the drummer glance up at Reign, mouthing “Your cue.” Reign stood motionless, microphone in front of him, lips parted, but he stared out above the arena as though the concert, the crowd, the band, were all forgotten.

“Reign … ?”

He lifted his head, and focused high above the crowd, among the tangled network of lighting gantries and ventilation ducts. I squinted into the lights, desperately trying to make out what had him spooked. The music faded; the cohesive band crumbling apart, and a murmur rose from the twenty thousand strong crowd, the sound like distant waves crashing on a beach. I willed Reign to speak, to say or do anything, and inched forward. “Reign.”

He blinked, and turned his head. His beautiful eyes flooded with crimson. The hound wanted out, and I knew why.

The queen’s brittle laughter rained down from above. The acoustics of the bowl-shaped arena cast her terrible tinkling sound around and over the crowd. Fear snatched a gasp from my lips. There, above, I saw her hooked upside down in the lighting scaffold. Every inch of her glistening black body sparkled beneath the play of lighting. She rocked, back and forth, her claw tipped back legs working at the silken threads of the web she’d cast behind her. She observed those below her with a wicked slice of a smile.

“My time has come, and I shall feed.”

“The final act …” Reign announced, his voice as smooth and sharp as crystal as it rang out across the arena. He smiled, but fear tightened his lips. And those eyes … Concertgoers pushed against the barriers would see how his eyes had changed. Maybe they thought it was an act. Reign played on that; it was the only way to keep the crowd calm.

He glanced back at the band and gave them a nod. Music sparked to life. The drums beat and Reign spun his spell. Light, sound, sparks, exploded over the stage. I backed up, just out of sight at the stage edges, but close enough to see the queen observing Reign and
Touched
bring the night alive with sound.

“Alina, my sweet thing …”
Her voice scratched inside my head, as though clawing at my skull to escape. Flinching, I stumbled back and bumped into a wall. “
It is not too late to prove your worth. You are capable. We are the same, you and I. You feel my life in your veins. My heart beats in you. You have no heart of your own, no life. These are not your people, your family. Only I understand you.”

I froze, locking my thoughts and body down.

“Kill Reign. Do it now. The daggers in your hands. Use them.”
I lifted the weapons, alarmed to find I had no memory of grasping them.
“Yes. Kill him. Fulfill your purpose. He is too volatile, too dangerous, to leave alive.”

No, no. I wouldn’t do this. Unless … unless I could get her to come closer. If I could lure her down, Reign would attack. If I could get close enough, I’d plunge the daggers into her chest. “I need you, Mother.” I ground out the words, forcing them up my throat beside the taste of bile. “Help me.”

“Sweet thing … Do you seek to trick me?”

“No, Mother. I need you … I need your strength. I am weak, sick, this body fails … Give me the gift of your power so I can finish Sovereign.”

I felt her indecision; a moment between seconds. She hesitated, thinking, scheming. Her mind in mine, I knew her wants. She feared Reign, feared the spirit of the hound inside him. Reign’s curse was old draíocht, like hers. He had the potential to hurt her, maybe even kill her. She knew I could get close enough to stab him. Her starved mind had fractured. She was not what she used to be. She cried out for sustenance. To be glorious again. She wanted these people, needed them … She wanted the city of London. She’d weave draíocht through the streets, create a tapestry of life to mimic Faerie, and free the fae. Reign could stop her. He needed to die.

“Yes …”

Black poison surged through me. I dropped hard, knees cracking against the stage. Power whipped up my spine, arching my body and jerking my head back. Broiling draíocht bubbled beneath my skin, plunged into muscle, and rewrote my very being at the molecular level. I tasted her oily perfume on my lips, breathed her petroleum scent into my lungs. She poisoned me from the inside out, but I locked my mind away. She would not have all of me. Not again. When it was over, the band still rocked the stage, Reign’s voice still wove its spell, but I was changed somehow. Changed but me. She didn’t know how stubborn Alina O’Connor could be.

The queen crept down the back of the stage. Light slid off her black body, and licked over her eight skeletal legs. Her shallow coat of hairs glistened moist with poison. Her body twisted, and her all-red eyes fixed on me.

Working to swallow back the bile, I clutched the daggers in hand and strode onstage. Reign saw me immediately this time. Perhaps it was the way I broadcast my intent in my stride. He broke off, mid-note and cast a horrified glance my way. With a tight shake of my head, I tried to convey that this was an act, a ruse.
C’mon Reign, see me. The real me. And behind you, see the queen …