Dark Surrender (23 page)

She had a vague feeling that things waited in the shadows, watching the house—watching for her. But the Shamlus stone must have done its job thoroughly, for nothing so much as stirred in the surrounding night.

A cold numbness settled in around her heart as she ran down the street. They had betrayed her. Her own kin…but then again, if the insane things they had told her were true, they weren’t even that to her. They were just…just…

No, they weren’t j
ust
anything—
she
was what wasn’t real.
She
was the no one.

Andy made very good time, for before she knew it the streets turned unfamiliar, and she knew without a doubt she was well away from her family—the word brought a jolt of intense anguish with it, as if a shard of ice were clogging one of the chambers of her heart. She had to wake up. She had to get out of this nightmare. It had to be a dream, it couldn’t be real…because nothing in her entire life had hurt an ounce as much as this did.

Her legs started to give out on her, and she slowed to a terrified though weak jog. Her body wanted to slow down desperately, but her mind was still racing, and she could no more stop and catch her breath than she could keep running.

She slowed down enough that she started looking around her and behind, seeing if anyone or anything was following her. She didn’t want to see them…to see Min nor Katarina, but a new riff of paranoia was starting to speak up. What if this wasn’t a dream? What if what they had said was indeed the truth?

But that was impossible.

But so were magic…and vampires and werewolves and…well, a million other things that she knew damned well were absolutely, unalterably real.

She ran into something while she was looking back over her shoulder. She jumped and cried out, pushing against and trying to push through whoever or whatever it was. She felt something cold and sharp cut into the palm of her hand, and reflexively she wrenched herself away from it, staggering across the sidewalk and backing up into a parked car.

The car’s alarm went off, wailing at a deafening pitch. It made her jump again as she swung around to find the black, high end sedan blinking its lights at her, filling the night with lights and sounds galore. She whirled back to what she had run into, and found a wrought iron gate swinging in the night breeze, topped by sharp looking fleur-de-lis. She looked to her aching palm and found the flesh there torn and smudged with her blood.

Is this really blood? If I’m not real, then what is this stuff?

She looked from her bloodied palm, then to her other, and realized with a start that she had somehow lost the Shamlus stone. She turned round and round, looking over the pavement beneath her feet, but saw nothing.

“
What the hell do you think you’re doing?” It was an angry male voice, and it spun Andy on her heel. He was leaning out the front door of the house she’d run into the fence of, and he had a cell phone and a baseball bat in his hand.

“
I’m sorry…” Andy tried to say, but even she couldn’t hear her voice over the ruckus of the car alarm. The baseball bat wielding man sighed, and reached into the pocket of his robe, fumbling as he exchanged his cell phone for the alarm controller. With a queer beep like a sneeze, the alarm stopped, and she could hear the echo of it dissipate.

“
I’m sorry,” she repeated. She pointed at his gate. “I accidentally ran into your gate, there, and it scared me. So I jumped back and ran into your car too.”

The man grumped and his shoulders loosened. He was a big man, with huge shoulders, tousled brown curling hair, and a five o’clock shadow you could use as a scouring pad. He ambled out of his house and toward the gate.

“
You hurt?” he asked as he shut the gate.

“
W-what?” Andy was distracted. Whether it was just paranoia or not, she felt like there were more than just human eyes watching her.

“
You’re holding your hand. Did you get hurt?” They guy seemed genuinely concerned, which was at odds with his bruiser exterior.

Andy worked up a smile to placate him. “No. I just scared myself. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” And she started walking away, leaving behind the Shamlus stone and any protection it might have offered her.

Before she knew it, residential streets grew to more granite and steel buildings. She was approaching down town, and even though it was late at night, there was a steady stream of traffic moving in every direction. She didn’t feel any safer, though, until she began to run into pedestrians. People in cars can always just shut you out when you scream for help. At least with people out walking around, there was a one in ten chance someone would stop and help. At the very least there would be two out of ten that would be witness to your abduction, and one of those people would probably actually talk to the police…if they got to the scene before the witness got bored and left.

But why would they bother?
After all, wouldn’t they know, couldn’t they all tell, that she wasn’t like them. Andy remembered her mother swearing that she was indeed real. What was it she had said? Oh, yes. That whatever in the hell she and the fae queen had formed her from, it had been naturally occurring in this universe. So that was great, just great. Maybe she had been formed out of some mystical mud…or maybe she had been a fae plant of some kind.

Either way, why hadn’t a human noticed this about her before?

Well, Min hadn’t noticed. And Min was attuned to the flow and ebb of magical forces…wasn’t she? Well, that was because Min had been affected by the spell that created her.

Andy wondered if she now looked different to Min? Maybe like an insect, or an alien, or whatever the hell they’d made her out of.

Oh god…what if she really had been made form some sort of magical bugs?

It made her flesh crawl.

*****

Chapter 23

Min strode through the streets of Augusta armed for battle. She had an iron sword at her hip, two silver daggers, one strapped to each thigh, the Bellini shotgun she’d used on the werewolves strapped to her back, and a small arsenal of magical paraphernalia stuffed in a velvet sack, tied onto the scabbard of the sword.

Luca had gotten back to the house a few minutes after Andy’s grand escape, and they’d all three headed off to search the city for her. Not that Min expected to visually find her. She’d somehow taken the small white and silver stone Min had gotten in Scotland ten years ago and used it to make herself disappear. Well, to turn invisible. So she was pretty sure that tracking her would be a fairly silly thing. All she could hope was that somehow she and Katarina would notice something out of place, or pick up on a magical aura, or that Luca would be able to sniff her out in the big, vast city.

Luca had gone east, and would swing up north, and then down south of the city. Katarina and Min had gone west and were going to mirror his search pattern.

They just had to find her. Andy wasn’t a skilled practitioner or spell caster. How she’d managed the disappearing act still had Min stumped. Maybe the stone was some sort of magical conduit that Min had neglected to identify. Clearly she needed to go through her personal belongings with a careful eye. If they all survived the night, maybe she’d have Andy look them over.

If they survived…

Min looked over to her mother, and couldn’t help feeling a wave of happiness pass through her. Their mother—her mother? No, she was
their
mother, and she was alive and well, and with her, looking better and better every minute she was awake. No matter what she’d withheld from them, it was still so wondrous that she was present again, not just some lifeless body, bereft of a soul and cold as marble to the touch.

And god help that treacherous faery bitch if Min ever got her hands on her. Queen or not, Min was going to strangle her with her bare hands…or set her on fire and have herself a fae barbeque.

Suddenly her mother stopped and shuddered. Min thought for a moment maybe she sensed something, some clue as to where Andy had gone off to, but when Min came over to her, she saw her mother had broken down in tears.

Min gathered her mother in her arms and made the same sounds of comfort her mother had always made to soothe her and her sister. Stroking her long silver streaked hair.

“
I’m so scared, Min. What if something happens to her? What if the winter queen’s forces have already seized her?”

“
No, no…don’t even think that.” Min said, though those thoughts had already passed through her own mind. “If there had been any fae around the house, Luca would have smelled them when he was there. She’s probably just walking around, thinking. And with that invisibility spell of hers, she’s in absolutely no danger.”

But no spell is perfect. Min didn’t want to start thinking about what could be happening to her sister this very moment. Logically her mind told her that Andy really wasn’t her sister, no matter what false memories her mother and the fae had dumped into her mind. She remembered the real, Andy free history of her family as well as the alternative reality of having a sister.

A memory of Min once telling her sister that she’d wished on a shooting star that she would have been an only child. Andy had been only seven, and had burst into livid tears. Guilt welled up red hot and sticky, and Min had to force herself to breathe.

“
Luca will find her,” Min said, her voice sounding far surer than she felt.
Please, by the goddess, let him find her.

*****

Luca swept through the city, letting his nose lead him rather than his eyes. Min had already told him that her sister had gone all invisible, so looking for her with his peepers would be of no use. So he let her mild, clean scent lead him from Min’s house out into the night. She seemed to be headed toward downtown—but that was quite a stretch for a human on foot—but if she’d been running, and afraid, maybe not.

Thankfully Min’s little sister didn’t wear any kind of fancy, obtrusive perfume. So, even with her scent being so mild, he wasn’t having too hard a time following it. That was until that scent led him into a small, upscale neighborhood that seemed to appear like an oasis among all the midsized office buildings that were announcing he was getting closer to downtown and skyscrapers.

That’s where a cacophony of scents nearly made Luca lose her trail. It wasn’t just the inundation of human scents, because there were certainly too many in this small parcel of homes for him to weed out. No, there were other scents that practically screamed out to him. First was the redolent musk of wild fae. They were not part of either the winter or summer courts. But they still served the courts to a point. There had been three, and their aromas were as far from human kind as he could imagine.

The other scent was pure sidhe…and fucking familiar. It was the same scent he’d gotten a nose full of when Min had tried that spell on him, to try and bring her mother back to life. It was the thing that had come into Min’s very home, merely in shade form, and had kicked Min to the side like she was nothing.

The Winter Queen.

Well shit.
As if things weren’t bad enough, now the big bad Min and her mother were trying to keep Andy from was already in town.

If she was physically in this realm—and by the overwhelmingly heady scent of her, she most certainly was—then he needed to find Andy, and now. There was absolutely no time to waste. If the winter queen was there, the only place on the planet she might be safe was in her family’s home.

That home’s threshold was strong with only Min’s magic to buffer it. But it hadn’t been able to hold the queen back before. But Katarina had lit some rather odd shaped candles—that smelled like they were made out of belly fat of the Creature from the Black Lagoon—and had told he and Min that they were gifts from the Summer queen. Reinforcements to her own rather powerful wards. They were to be used for exactly a time like this.

The flames had been green, purple and blue, and he could feel the energy they threw off like the heat from a fire. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he was hoping they’d be strong enough to stop anything that was going to attack the house.

But that was before he knew the Winter Queen herself was coming to the party.

Of course, what good was a threshold when Andy was running all over town, her only defense invisibility. For as surely as he’d tracked her scent, so too could the wild fae, and the Queen.

He was about to leave the area, try to extricate himself from all the olfactory sensations, then try circling the area until he picked up her scent again—hopefully they hadn’t already caught her, for the queen could have simply just opened a doorway back to her realm and took Andy with her—then a breeze brought a odor so strong he could almost taste it.

Blood.

Before he could even tell himself to, he was across the street and touching the sharp point of a cast iron flue-de-lei that stood sentinel atop a yard’s iron gate. He touched that point, and the blood was still fresh enough to be sticky. He brought it to his nose and took a long whiff. Andy, most assuredly. But it certainly wasn’t her naturally mild scent. Her blood was just full of power. Power that made the tiny patch of flesh he’d touched it with start to sizzle.

He wiped his finger against the iron gate, letting the nighttime moisture of dew help take the trace of blood from his burning flesh. Min had said Andy wasn’t human…and she hadn’t been kidding.