Summer (2 page)

I knew I was dying. Instead of angry, or defeated, or even scared, I just felt stupid. Really stupid.

“Winter! Pay attention, child!”

I’d heard that voice in that tenor in my skull for most of my life. I’d learned better than to ignore it.

“Gabby?”

“This way
.” The grip on my elbow tightened, supporting my weight. It hurt badly, that pressure against my blistering flesh. I couldn’t drum up enough energy to care.

“Hurry, Winter. Walk!”

That made me giggle, because I couldn’t even feel my feet. In fact, my entire body seemed a foolish thing, too heavy for use, too much work to tend. A few gentle wriggles and I would float free.

“Geimhreadh!”
She slammed me back into my almost-corpse, built an invisible wall around the bit that was me, and filled the rest of my head with Gabbiness. Then she made my body walk, a puppet to her strings.

She’d never done such a thing before; she’d never had the strength to even Summon a slice of pepperoni from my plate to her tiny paws. And I know she’d tried.

It took a powerful Cant to possess someone so easily. My father might have managed, but I’m pretty sure it’s beyond even Siobahn’s skill. Before Gabby had forgotten how to be
sidhe,
before she’d become mouse, she’d been
aes si
, a skilled sorcerer, valued beyond gold and jewels in the Fairy Court.

I hated being locked away in my own head. I fought with everything I was to break free, but my magic is nothing compared to an
aes si
. Our roles were reversed; I was the mouse scratching on the prison wall.

“I’m sorry, Winter. It’s the only way.”

I heard honest regret, but also implacable determination. She knew what she did was loathsome, but she wasn’t going to let me free. This was far worse a betrayal than when my mother stole my hearing.

Gabby was taking all of me. And I’d never loved Siobahn as I did the
aes si
.

I howled, all rage and disbelief and insult.

“Oh, child,”
Gabby sighed, ineffably weary.

Then she snuffed me out.

I inched back to wakefulness under my own power and immediately wished I hadn’t. My lungs were on fire; my mouth and tongue swelling toward asphyxiation, my eyes crusted shut. I clutched blindly at my throat.

“Drink this. Quickly.”

At least this time she gave me a choice. Obedient in desperation, I opened my mouth. Someone poured sweet, warm liquid onto my tongue. The drink stung like liquor when it swirled around my teeth, then, impossibly, began to soothe.

“Swallow,”
Gabby ordered.

I tried. I choked, gagging the
draiochta
back up and all over my chin. The potion hurt worse than Cold Fire on my suppurating flesh, but it healed even as it stung.

“More,” I begged.

A cup touched my lips. This time I was able to swallow a mouthful, then a large gulp. The
draiochta
bubbled as it ran down my throat and into my gut. I kept it down. All at once my throat unlocked. My lungs eased. I could almost take a full breath.

“Good. Now your face.”

A wet cloth soothed my fingers. Another pair of hands helped me lift the cloth to my face. Gingerly I rubbed it over my cheeks, and across my eyes. The potion felt unbelievably horrible and indescribably wonderful at the same time. Groaning, I pressed the cloth into the corners of my eyes.

“Bless us.”
I could hear the rush of relief behind Gabby’s sigh.
“Your mother always said you were my punishment,
Geimhreadh
, but I never thought I’d been so wicked. How many times have I watched you almost die, child?”

“Three times. Maybe four.” My lips still felt floppy. I rubbed the cloth carefully against my mouth. “I’m stubborn. But I thought I’d killed
you
, Mistress.” Tears leaked between my sticky lids. I let them fall.

“Child.”
Hands cupped my trembling fingers.
“It takes more than a jump between worlds to kill this old woman.”

Wary, I opened my eyes. Even though I’d felt her touch, I still expected the mouse. Instead I sat almost nose to nose with an unfamiliar fay elder.

Mistress. Wise-woman. Wizard.
Aes si
. Before she earned exile for conspiring against the Fairy Court, Gabriel had been advisor to kings and queens, valued for her powerful magics, and her treasure trove of old
sidhe
knowledge.

I’d known her always and only as a white mouse with a granny’s protective nature and a preference for ’healthy’ teas.

I couldn’t help myself; I scooted back away from her touch. I don’t like or trust strangers, plus I’ve cultivated a really large bubble when it comes to unfamiliar fay; they’re usually half-mad and always dangerous.

Mistress Gabriel pressed her lips together. She huffed slightly. The sound of her disapproval was new, but the wrinkle above her nose belonged to the mouse. I could almost see imaginary whiskers twitch.

I relaxed enough to glance away and look around. Gray rock closed in on either side, behind and in front. A low ceiling almost scraped the top of my head, and I’m not tall, especially when groveling in the dirt.

“Nice hole.” I couldn’t help but notice the bright ball of Gathered starlight glowing merrily against the ceiling. “Bit of a step down from the Metro. Where are we going to put the fridge?”

Gabby huffed again. She
was
tall, taller than me, taller than Siobahn, maybe even taller than my father, and Malachi was the oldest
sidhe
I’d known. Gabby had to curl in on herself beneath the rock ceiling. She looked uncomfortable.

But alive. Very much alive.

I grinned. It hurt, but it was better than the tears, and I couldn’t stop.

“A good rat knows when to hide. Small spaces work best.”
She shook her head, at herself, I thought.
“And this one is far enough away from the lake that the air is breathable.”

She’d plaited her long white hair into a single braid down her back, and conjured white robes to match. Her right wrist was bound in the same fabric, the makeshift bandage still red and bloody.

“Christ, you’re hurt! I thought you were dead.” I knew I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe I was managing to smile and weep all at the same time, maybe I was falling into a few ragged pieces. I reached for a simple Healing Cant. My magic rose and retreated, useless, there and then not.

“It doesn’t work.” Baffled, I looked up. “I can’t get it to work.”

Gabby nodded.
“Gloriana created this prison to keep the Dread Host
confined. Most
sidhe
magic is useless here, else they would have freed themselves long before you accidentally ripped a hole between worlds.”

“Most?” I echoed. The Gathered starlight in the ceiling, no larger than a tennis ball but white and clear, pulsed with Gabby’s heartbeat. And I knew she hadn’t carried that healing
draiochta
through the portal in her mousey cheeks.

“There are other ways,”
she replied, arch.

Gabby had rescued me from the streets of D.C. when I was eight. She’d taught me how to survive on trash and handouts, in soup kitchens and YMCA bathrooms. She’d taught me how to fight the
sluagh
, and she hadn’t laughed when I’d sworn to protect every mortal in the District from the Dread Host’s predatory hunt, even though she must have known as I knew now that it was an impossible task.

Siobahn had broken my heart. Gabby had healed it. And although her
sidhe
face was harder to read, I knew when my mentor was talking shit.

“What other ways?” I demanded. She twitched, guilty, and looking across at her bandaged wrist, I understood.

“Blood magic,” I hissed.

Gabby lifted her chin, defiant, and just missed cracking her skull on the ceiling.

“You were dying, child. And, aye, so was I. We were all but corpses on the sand, and I won’t let your mother say I’ve failed her.”

“My mother hates blood magic more than anyone. More than anyone,” I added, “except you.”

My family plus one hundred more
sidhe
were exiled from Court for protesting the Gloriana’s casual and careless use of blood magic. I’d been maimed because I’d been too young and too proud to resist its temptation. Blood magic is a perversion of the old, true magic, and like all perversions, it walks hand-in-hand with corruption.

“You should have let us die.” I said, bitter. “Mother won’t forgive us this, not now. Better we’d stayed corpses on the sand.”

Gabby shifted. Gray dust from the rock stained her robes. Blood still ran sluggishly from beneath her bandages.

“Better I’d stayed a mouse in Manhattan,”
she retorted. “
But you had other plans. There are some stories even Siobahn doesn’t need to hear. We’ll go home, and we won’t speak of this. Ever.”

I stared around the hole, at the walls, at the low ceiling. At the pulsing starlight, at the scars slowly healing on my hands, at the blood and pus crusted on the discarded rag,
my
blood and pus.

My jeans and coat were torn where I’d fallen on sharp rocks trying to answer the Horn’s call. Somewhere I’d lost the knit cap Lolo had given me. My Doc Martens were still in one piece, and probably the only shiny thing about the mess that was me.

When I’d fidgeted and wiggled and looked around at everything except my mentor, and finally couldn’t dick around anymore, I met Gabby’s steely regard.

“I’m not going home,” I said.

Summer watched Barker as he approached the sword. She knew he was afraid by the way he walked, loose and slow, like a lion stalking difficult prey. She’d seen lions at the Central Park Zoo and on Animal Planet, and she thought they were beautiful.

But she thought Barker was more beautiful by far, with his dusky skin and wild red dreads, and those yellow eyes that noticed everything.

When she was ten, Summer decided she’d grow up and marry Barker, and they’d have pretty yellow-eyed children, and live together in a posh penthouse off Central Park. That was before Winter told her Barker had a boyfriend back at Fairy Court.

Winter lied sometimes, but as she grew older, Summer decided her brother probably wasn’t lying about that and she mostly forgot her crush.

Mostly.

“It’s called
Buairt,”
she said now, about the sword. “It means ‘Sorrow.’”

“I remember,” Barker replied. He stood over the sword, scrutinizing the blade where it lay on display on Summer’s hotel room desk. Summer had spread an old Chanel coat across the desk under the sword, partly because the cheap desk was gross, partly because she thought the ugly sword looked better against houndstooth.

“I don’t feel anything,” Barker admitted. “Nothing at all.”

Summer, sitting cross-legged on the hotel bed, chewed at her lip. Her mother would go into a temper if she knew they were experimenting with the sword that had killed the Prince of Fairies.
Buairt
had almost killed Barker, too. It had taken a human priest to save the yellow-eyed fay.

Luckily, her mother was still stuck on the island of Manhattan and had no idea what they were about.

“I think Brother Daniel gave you a soul,” Summer suggested. “That’s why you don’t feel anything. He gave you a soul, a mortal soul, and now the sword doesn’t want to eat you anymore. Pretty messed up, if you ask me. But cool.”

Barker shot Summer a disgusted look. She noticed he still wouldn’t touch the sword.

“Souls aren’t accessories,” he said. “And the human gods take no notice of our kind.”

“Ask Brother Daniel,” Summer challenged. “He’ll be back any minute. But first—pick up the stupid sword. Stop sulking, do something useful. Pick up the sword!”

Barker growled. His fingers twitched. Then he bent in a swoop and grabbed
Buairt
by the hilt with both hands. His knuckles clenched when he lifted the rapier off the desk. Summer knew the sword wasn’t heavy; she’d carried it herself. She thought maybe Barker was trying to make himself not let go.

She met Barker’s yellow stare. He glared back. The cheap analog clock on the wall over the hotel bed ticked three times. Summer released a long breath.

“See,” she said, relieved. “Nothing. Soul or no soul, it can’t hurt you anymore. Which means you’re coming with.”

Barker set
Buairt
back onto the desk, next to the ruby-studded scabbard. Summer hated the scabbard almost as much as she hated the sword, because every time she looked at it, she imagined squealing pigs. Pigs who had once been men, before Gloriana turned them into animals and had their skin for tanning. Barker scrubbed his hands on the fresh new Levis Summer had found on sale at Macy’s. His old jeans had just bagged, he’d lost so much weight. His favorite Stones shirt hung from his shoulders the way her papa’s shirts used to hang on Winter, when Winter was eight, before he’d left home.

“I am not,” he said, “‘coming with.’ I’ll get you safely to Yorktown, because I owe it to Himself. After that, my debt is paid.”

Summer drew her knees up under her chin and put on her best pout. She wasn’t really irritated. She knew Winter would change Barker’s mind eventually. She was puzzled. Since she’d been old enough to understand the stories, she’d known every
sidhe
exile wanted nothing more than to cheat Gloriana’s
geis
and find a Way between worlds and return home to Fairy Court. Some of her papa’s people would have killed for a return ticket home. One or two had tried.

Barker, on the other hand, didn’t seem at all jazzed about the Cornwallis Cave, or the possibilities it might hold.

“If Mama knew you’d made it off the island,” Summer said through her pout. “I bet she’d make you promise to be my bodyguard, and to help Winter kill Gloriana.”

Barker ignored her. He walked away from the desk and the sword, instead positioning himself against the closed door dividing Summer’s room from Hannah’s. There he crossed his arms over his chest and went back into what Lolo liked to call ‘CIA Mode’, all watchful and remote.

Summer squelched a pang of jealousy. She wanted to like Hannah. She felt sorry for the other girl. But she was tired of watching everyone treat Gloriana’s daughter like she was the queen-of-everything, when really it should be just the opposite.

“You Warded her doors.” Summer slid off the bed, crossed the room, and rummaged in the tiny mini-bar. She snagged a bag of peanut butter M&Ms and a tiny bottle of Perrier. “We’ll know when she wakes up. Maybe you should catch a nap, too. Because as soon as Winter gets back you know he’ll want us on the road right away. Win’s always worried about wasting time.”

Barker didn’t answer. He was doing a pretty good job of pretending she wasn’t in the room, but something had him rattled. He might be lounging all panther-like, but Summer could see the jumping pulse in his neck and smell the tang of fear off his lovely mahogany skin.

Even though she sometimes pretended otherwise, Summer didn’t really like watching other people suffer. So she decided to give the older
sidhe
space and took her snack out into the hotel hall. The carpet and the wallpaper were the same color—a dirty beige with green paisley—and the repeating pattern was dizzying.

She propped the door open with one of Lolo’s discarded shoes, then slid down the doorjamb until she crouched on the threshold. She used her teeth to rip open the bag of M&Ms and dug for the green ones.

She’d eaten fifteen green and started on the blues when the elevator down the hall chimed and Lolo jumped out. He came down the corridor in a flat-out run, only slowing when he saw her.

“You don’t need to hurry, Win’s not back yet.” Summer uncapped her Perrier and took a healthy swig. “Where’s Brother Daniel? You didn’t lose him, did you? We need him.”

Lolo snatched the bag of M&M’s from Summer’s hand. He leaned against the wall, dumping candy into one palm. Winter had made the younger boy wash his braids in The Plaza’s giant shower; his hair had been full of a year’s dried
sluagh
goo. Lolo had added red wooden beads and bits of ribbon to his new look, plus a necklace of tiny grinning skulls.

Summer thought he looked a little too Rasta, but at least he smelled better.

“I keep trying to lose him,” Lolo admitted around a mouthful of chocolate. “He’s scary-impossible to shake and I don’t think he’s even trying that hard.” He shook his head, beads clicking. “We’ve got a problem, Summer.”

Summer slid back up the doorjamb.

“What now?” she asked, just as the elevator dinged again. Brother Dan stepped out into the hall. A plastic grocery bag dangled from each of the friar’s large hands. He didn’t look in any hurry at all.

“Told you,” Lolo muttered. “Win’s gone.”

“What?”

Summer put her hand against the wall so the world didn’t tilt. Ever since Michael Smith had killed her papa, she’d been practicing not feeling. Every morning after she woke she’d stare at herself in the bathroom mirror for a good five minutes, until she was sure she wasn’t going to cry, and those cold, scream-your-head-off in the shower feelings were safely buried in the pit of her stomach.

She’d almost managed to convince herself that no more Bad Things would happen, because nothing could be worse than watching her favorite parent bleed out on a Sixth Avenue sidewalk.

“What do you mean, gone?” There were little patches of white sparkling in the air. She shook her head to clear them and discovered she was leaning on Brother Daniel’s arm, gripping his sleeve with both hands. “What do you mean?”

Brother Daniel led Summer back into the hotel room. He sat her down in the room’s one chair and pushed her head between her knees.

“Breathe,” Daniel ordered. “Your brother’s fine, as far as we know.”

“As far as you know?”

That was Barker; soft, smooth and dangerous. Summer felt a little better hearing his voice. She stared between her Chanel ballet flats at the carpet and reminded her fluttering heart that Barker was almost as good as Winter at fixing things.

“We followed him down into the Metro,” said Lolo. “Then he sort of disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Summer lifted her head. “That’s just Winter. He disappears all the time. He’ll be back.”

Lolo was holding her abandoned Perrier. He looked down into the mouth of the bottle instead of at her face. “No. He really disappeared. Like—zap—through his portal.”

“Your friend closed the rift,” Barker argued. “Blew it to hell, along with half of Federal Triangle.”

“Yeah, well.” Lolo shrugged. He handed Summer her water, even though she didn’t want it. “It, like, moved, or something. Or maybe he called it up again.”

“He wouldn’t do that!” Summer spat, insulted. “He’d never do that. Win wanted that Way gone more than anything else in the world, because then he could come home to Manhattan.”

Lolo turned away, shoulders slumped. Daniel crouched at Summer’s side. He took her cold fingers in warm hands.

“We watched Winter step into the portal. Lorenzo shouted, but your brother didn’t answer.”

“You should have gone after him,” Summer accused the backside of Lolo’s head. “You should have brought him back!”

“I tried,” Lolo said over his shoulder. “Brother Asshole stopped me. It’s like arguing with a bear—a bear with a shank.”

“It looked dangerous,” the friar replied. “And an empty Glock won’t do you much good against demons,
hermano.”

Summer knew Lolo had been carrying Winter’s gun. She didn’t know he’d been carrying it without Richard’s special iron bullets. It occurred to her maybe that was why her brother had gone back into the collapsed Metro: they were out of ammunition.

“He wouldn’t leave me,” she said. “He knows Mama’s counting on him. He wouldn’t leave
me.
He’s coming back.”

Barker straightened. Summer didn’t like the pity she saw on his usually impassive face.

“We’ll go and see,” he said. To Summer’s surprise he crossed the room and picked up
Buairt
, scabbard and all. “If the Way is open again, her ladyship will need to know.” He passed the sword to Summer. “Wear this. Charm it back. You’re safer with it than without, and I’m
not
carrying it.”

“Better wait until after dark.” Lolo drifted around the room, television remote in hand. “The Triangle is crawling with cops and Feds and Homeland rent-a-guns. It’s like they think it’ll blow up all over again.” He scowled at the TV. “Can’t believe this place just gets local. Who watches local?”

For a vivid minute Summer hated Lolo. Couldn’t he see her world was falling apart? Didn’t he care? She wanted to burst up and pull on his stupid beads until he paid attention.

Then she noticed the way he was chewing a hole in his lip while he played with the remote. She realized he was just as scared as she was and that made her have to put her head between her knees again.

“After dark, then,” Barker said. “What about the changeling?”

Summer felt the room practically hold its breath as everyone eyed the closed door between suites.

“I’ll stay,” Brother Daniel said.

“You’re big, but without Win here to scare Hannah, she’ll probably set the whole building on fire.”

“I’ve got a few of tricks up my own sleeve,” Daniel dismissed Lolo’s concerns. “I’ll stay.”

There wasn’t much moon up when Summer, Barker and Lolo left the Capitol Holiday Inn: just a sickly yellow sliver. There wasn’t much artificial light, either. The power grid still hadn’t recovered from Richard’s bomb. As far as Summer could tell the city blocks were lighted in random and unreliable squares.

She expected Barker to Gather enough light so they didn’t trip over some collapsed junkie or fall into a hole. Instead he pulled three heavy flashlights from thin air, which was really even more impressive.

When he handed Summer hers, the metal casing was still warm.

Lolo whistled softly. “Can you do that? Pull whatever you want from nowhere?”

“No.” She wasn’t going to tell Lolo that she’d spent half of her life trying, and never managing to Summon a single thing. “Neither can Winter.”

“Let’s go.” Barker switched on his light. He started through the night, black biker boots soundless on the pavement.

Summer followed, trying to be equally silent. It took a small tug of power, and a lot of concentration. It helped that she’d bypassed fashion and worn a pair of soft-soled sneakers. When they crossed through a gloomy park covered with frozen leaves, Summer didn’t even crack a twig. She felt a surge of pride.