Night Vision (19 page)

Rhia’s eyes narrowed. “I can smell it, too,” she whispered.

Praying that we were wrong, that whatever it was we were smelling was throwing us off the mark, I moved toward the door leading into the dining room. Grieve grabbed my arm, shaking his head. Chatter had already darted out back, and now he returned with Check and Fearless.

The guards took the lead, motioning for us to stay behind until they’d checked things out. I didn’t bother arguing. I knew it would be futile.

A moment later, Check shouted for us and I rushed through the half-open door, followed by the others. There, in the middle of the room, Peyton and Luna were huddled near Kaylin. The girls were tied up but conscious, and duct tape was strapped across their mouths. Kaylin, unbound, was sprawled on the floor, covered with blood, and he wasn’t moving.

“Kaylin!” I pushed past Grieve, dropping to his side.

“I found a body over here!” Check called from the living room.

Grieve motioned for Chatter to go help him, while Fearless scouted the room and then ducked out. I could hear him going up the stairs—faintly but enough to tell me he was making sure we weren’t going to be ambushed.

Rhiannon knelt beside me as I frantically ripped open Kaylin’s blood-soaked shirt. His chest was unharmed, but he’d been stabbed several times in the side, and he’d lost a lot of blood by the looks of the pool of it drying around him.

“Kaylin!” I screamed at him, trying to jog his demon awake. His night-veil demon was strong, and maybe it could help me revive him. I began compressions on his
chest, counting to thirty before I cupped his face and gave him mouth-to-mouth. Then back to compressions.

“He’s still bleeding out!” Rhiannon turned to Grieve. “Give me your shirt! Now!”

As Grieve stripped off his shirt and handed it to her, I thanked whatever power it was that manifested his clothing as real and not
just
illusion.

Rhiannon rolled it into a ball and, maneuvering around me, pressed it against Kaylin’s side, trying to stanch the blood. Grieve began to remove the duct tape around Luna’s and Peyton’s wrists. He gently tried to remove it from their mouths, but it was stuck firm, and finally, frustrated, Peyton shoved his hand away and yanked it off her face. Luna did the same. Both of them gave little screams as the adhesive ripped, leaving abrasions on their skin.

I was still trying to revive Kaylin. He wasn’t coming around.

Luna crawled over to my side. “I can help.”

I shifted to allow her room, and she took his head and placed it in her lap. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but somehow she found her voice and began to hum. The melody was haunting and made the hairs on my arms stand up. As she grew louder, the weaving sounds became words and she was suddenly singing.

“Heal…”
Her voice stretched out into one long, sonorous note.

Kaylin jerked under my hands—I’d been continuing the compressions. A moment later, he shook his head and weakly opened his eyes. Rhiannon removed the cloth—the bleeding had stopped.

“Kaylin, can you hear me?” I leaned down, looking into his face. His eyes were dark, flashing with red, and I could feel his demon close to the surface. We’d had words when his demon first awoke in his soul. In fact, we’d had a knock-down, drag-out fight.

“We hear you, woman.”

So it was the demon. “Is Kaylin…is he with you?”

“Yes, but he’s too weak to speak. His body has lost a lot of blood and needs attention. I cannot bring him back further from the veil until he’s attended to. Even then, he will need a great deal of recuperation.” The demon closed his eyes and Kaylin fell into a deep sleep, his breathing shallow.

“We need to take him back to the Barrow.” I looked up at Luna. “What happened? Are you and Peyton all right?” I’d been so focused on keeping Kaylin alive that I’d forgotten to ask how they were.

“We weren’t hurt. Kaylin tried to protect us, but…they were too strong.”

“Shadow Hunters?” But I didn’t think so. If it had been the Vampiric Fae, they wouldn’t have stopped until all three of them were dead.

“No. I think…day-runners.”

Leo. Or Geoffrey. It had to be one of them or both. “Did they say anything?”

“They were threatening to kill us if we didn’t take them to you. Then Kaylin came in and started to fight them. He hurt both of them—bad.”

“He killed both of them, actually.” Check returned from the other room, Chatter behind him. “Two of the yummanii. Dead in the other room. Looks like Kaylin released his demon on them—they’re ravaged worse than he is.”

“They had tied us up by the time Kaylin stumbled in on us. He chased them into the other room and we heard a horrible noise—shouts and screams. Then Kaylin staggered
back in, and he was trying to undo the tape when he passed out. Luna and I couldn’t do anything.” Peyton stared darkly at Kaylin. “I haven’t felt so helpless since Myst captured me and had me in her lair.”

Luna ducked her head. “I can do nothing magically without my voice. The duct tape…prevented it.”

“It’s obvious that we can’t do anything until we catch Geoffrey and Leo. Come on; we have to get him back to the Barrow, and you two are coming with us. We should also take the bodies back. Maybe we can figure out some way of getting information out of their spirits.” I stood back as Fearless hoisted Kaylin over his shoulder.

“I’ll head back as fast as I can go. The rest of you follow, and be careful.” He took off, a blur against the snow as we watched him race across the yard from the window.

I pulled out my cell phone and sat down at the desk to check my messages. Kaylin was in good hands, and he should make it. Fearless wouldn’t let anything happen to him on the way there.

As I punched in Lannan’s number, I knew he wouldn’t pick up—he’d be sleeping—but I got his voice mail. “Geoffrey and Leo’s sidekicks just about killed Kaylin, and they were threatening to do the same to Peyton and Luna. We have to find them, and we have to find them soon. I’m going through my coronation tonight, but tomorrow night I want to meet with you and Regina.”

After leaving the message, I checked the news on my phone’s browser. The headlines made me cringe. “Fuck. Another three deaths. Crawl—it has to be Crawl. He’s always hungry, and he’ll be gorging himself. I wonder if he’s staying with Leo and Geoffrey, or if they just turned him loose to his own pursuits.”

My messages showed that Ysandra had called me. I tapped in my voice mail password and listened. The news was just as bleak. The Consortium was demanding our appearance, and she had only been able to put them off for another two days. So day after tomorrow, we had to show up in front of them.

I told Rhiannon this, and she shook her head. “This is bad.”

“Things are chaotic. I’m glad we’re taking the thrones tonight. We’ve been spending so much time focused on this whole mess that we haven’t had time to really pay attention to what’s pushing our buttons.”

Grieve cleared his throat. “The problem isn’t that you’ve had to focus on the coronations. The problem is that there aren’t any aspects to your life right now that aren’t a priority. The Fae Courts, the situation with the rogue vampires, the Consortium, and Myst—they are all major concerns in their own right, and they are all competing for your attention.”

I pushed myself to my feet and texted Ysandra that we’d be there. After I finished, I turned off my phone and asked Check to lock the front door.

Turning to Grieve, I shook my head. “I try to make up to-do lists, but they keep getting blown away by the other stuff coming in. Strict will just have to postpone the tutor for a while until we catch Geoffrey and Leo. You can work on teaching me until then, and you can keep an eye on anything that needs a translator to understand. I think, my sweet, that you and Chatter are going to have to do more than the former Kings had to do. Share-the-wealth kind of thing.”

We headed out the back, Luna and Peyton in tow. The snow kicked in again and was beginning to fall in great, thick flakes. I realized that I wasn’t shivering like the others. As we entered the Golden Wood, the afternoon was beginning to wear away. Even though I was about to become Queen of Winter, the chill mist and ice scared the hell out of me, because I knew Myst was out there, waiting. A lone owl began to hoot softly from a nearby tree, and I glanced up. Not my father, that much I could tell, but it was another Cambyra Fae—another one of the Uwilahsidhe. As we passed by, it flew down, dipping in front of me in an almost aerial bow. I raised my hand in salute as the pale glow of blue and white glimmered through the woods.

When we made it back to the Barrow, the healers had swept Kaylin away and he was being worked on. Seeing that he was not one of the Fae, but instead one of the magic-born with a night-veil demon attached to his soul, they were having to feel their way around, but they’d bound up his wounds and prevented them from getting infected. Luna sat beside him, holding his hand, but he was still unconscious. I sat down beside her and took her other hand.

“How are you holding up?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Everything has been so topsy-turvy the past few weeks that I’m not sure whether I’m coming or going. I never expected…” She gazed down at Kaylin’s sleeping form. “I never expected to walk into this.”

“You and Kaylin…are you…” I wasn’t sure how to ask it—I knew he had it bad for her, and I knew she cared about him, but I wasn’t sure how far it had gone between the two of them.

She quietly replaced his hand, making sure the blankets were tucked around him. The healer—who was standing in the corner—nodded to her.

“Can we talk outside the room?”

I slipped my arm around her waist and we strolled out. She was tense; I could feel the stiffness in her shoulders. Once we were in the hall, we found a bench and sat down. I kept my mouth shut, sensing that she was gathering her thoughts. After a moment, she sat back, leaning her head against the wall.

“I could love him. I really could. Maybe I’m on my way to doing so. But…life…so much is up in the air. Where are we going to be tomorrow? Next week? You and Rhiannon have your lives mapped out for you now, but
we
don’t. Peyton and I want to get our businesses started, but now it seems we can’t, not until Geoffrey and Leo are caught.” She grimaced.

I hung my head. “And they’re on the prowl because of Rhia and me. We’re the cause of this.”

She shrugged. “True. You are. But if you weren’t here, if all this hadn’t happened, I’d probably be dead or in the hands of Myst, if what you read for me in the cards that first day is correct. In fact, the whole town would still be in her grasp. So a little uncertainty? Not a bad price to pay.”

“What about Kaylin?”

“We’ll take things slow. One day at a time. See where it goes.”

Her practicality startled me. I’d pegged Luna for a very talented, sensitive woman, and here she was thinking logically. I smiled softly, realizing my own preconceptions were showing.

“But you need to go. You have your coronation tonight.”

“Will you be there? You and Peyton? I doubt if Kaylin will be in any shape to make it.”

Luna laughed then. “He’ll live, but no, he won’t be there. I will, though. And Peyton, too—at both your ceremonies.” She stood, then leaned down and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. “Thank you, truly. For everything. New Forest would be lost without you.”

“Without you, too,” I whispered back, hugging her tightly.

It was nearly four in the afternoon and I was starving. I hurried back to the common area, where I found Druise, frantic, looking for me.

“Oh, Your Highness. We have to begin preparing you for tonight. Where were you? I looked everywhere.” She seemed to be at loose ends.