The Danger of Destiny (19 page)

And then everything Lexi and Trowbridge had gone through since I made the pact with a wily old goat meant nothing. Isn't it good enough to stop bad things from dripping into my own world?

Mouse cleared his throat and jerked me back to the here and now. “I don't need to do that now, though, do I?”

“What?”

“Seems to me I don't need to find what's left of the Raha'ells.” He picked up the bottle of sun potion and pulled the cork out with his teeth. He spat it out, then gave me the same sort of smile Lexi used to send my way after he'd conceived a grand new plan. “I'm healing the leg of a girl who wears two amulets.” He drizzled a thin stream of liquid into my wound. “Is the Son of Lukynae alive?”

“My Trowbridge is a hard man to kill.”

“Trowbridge, is it?”

I stared at him, feeling my eyes burn.

“Will it be him or the Shadow we'll be finding at the rock?”

“I. Don't. Know.” Three broken words.

He stared at me, then nodded. “I guess we'll have to wait and see, then. Now would you like a sip of the juice before I bind it?”

*   *   *

The path between the Two Sisters was a well-worn deer path, complete with deer droppings.

Finally. I turned in my saddle to glance at the sun.

“Keep doing that and you'll break open your wound, again,” muttered Mouse.

I hadn't seen a cloud. Not a single one.

“If you're looking for a jinx, you needn't,” Mouse said, apparently adept at mind reading. “They only like the pure-blood wolves. We mutts are beneath its notice. They like the Kuskadors too, but that stands to reason—for all their airs, underneath their serving uniforms they're full-blooded wolves too. The jinxes take no notice of the difference between the two. Agitators or ass-lickers, it doesn't care. They look for the pure blood. They'll skim across the sky until they find it.”

Trowbridge's blood must read as a pure Raha'ell. “You're talking about the milky haze that has glittering bits inside it.” I wanted to be absolutely clear that we were on the same page. “What are they?”

“They're conjures.” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Unnatural incubuses that feed on the hunt. But as I said, you need not bother your head over it. They have no taste for our blood.”

I closed my eyes briefly.
Jinxes.

“How many are there?” I whispered.

He nodded. “Every dawn, the mother jinx gives birth to four little ones.” Without breaking pace he cupped his hands. “No bigger than that they are, when they're firstborn. Full of sparkles and light. Fair wondrous, they are at first.”

“They don't stay that way. They turn into storm clouds.”

He grimaced. “Before the Rahae'lls start to howling in the Spectacle pens, we know the mage's hunting party is coming back with new captures. It's written in the sky. Every jinx follows her bounty, rumbling like a vengeful consort who's brought her cheating lover back to heel. My hair stands up on the back of my neck, watching the jinxes flow back into their mother's belly.”

“How big is the mother?”

“She's grown as big as the Spectacle grounds. It won't be long before she'll be hanging over the castle's back walls. You'd think the court would be in a fine fettle about that, but they're so glad to see the Raha'ells being herded into the pens, none of them have said a word in public. Though who knows what they say when they're abed?”

He lapsed into a short, but thoughtful, silence during which I savaged the soft skin inside my cheek.

Bad things had begun to drip.

“I was there for the birth of the first,” he said reflectively. “Me and a few lads. To be honest, little was done in the kitchen and the stables that morning. Anyone who could find a reason to loiter on the back ramparts without getting a boot in his ass for his trouble did so. We all wanted to see the Black Mage conjure his way out of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“They blame him for the night the Raha'ells broke free. Once the dust settled and the court discovered that he'd lost both the Son of Lukynae and his own Shadow … he was in dire trouble.” Mouse stared ahead, but I don't think he was seeing the trail or the stiff back of the diminutive Fae. “It was quiet the morning of the conjure,” he said. “So quiet—”

“You could hear a pin drop,” I added.

“A pin drop,” he repeated, “aye, that's a good one. It was so quiet, a pin could have dropped and all would have heard it. The Black Mage walked to the center of the Spectacle grounds. He stretched out his hands, wide as this”—Mouse pantomimed a medium-sized fish—“and said that it was time to end the court's problem with the wolves outside the castle's walls. Some tittered in the back, because any stripling of the Royal Court can make a balyfire and that's what it appeared he was going to do. But instead of fire, he produced the jinx. He let it float upward, and it grew bigger and got those shiny flashes … tiny pretty jewels … and then those titters turned to silence. ‘This is a jinx hound,' the Black Mage said as proud as could be. ‘It knows the scent of the Rahae'lls and it will hunt, never tiring, until it has run to ground every single Raha'ell man, woman, and babe.'”

“How many of the Son of Lukynae's people have been captured?”

“I don't know how many Raha'ells have been captured, but there can't be too many left free. The pens are full and they've had to build three more. The jinxes are bringing in young ones now. And we've never seen that before. They say the Raha'ells cherish their children and would die protecting them.”

A piece of information that would cut Trowbridge to the bone should he know.

I flinched. “If it finds the trail of a—”

“It won't stop.”

 

Chapter Eleven

We met the ward before we met my twin at Daniel's Rock. As per usual, the Gatekeeper was in the lead, trudging along with the enthusiasm of an enlisted man on his first twenty-kilometer hike. Mouse walked alongside Seabiscuit and me. The trees had begun thinning, providing tantalizing glimpses of a gray rock face.

Being on my guard wasn't on my list anymore.

I've made it.

Be alive, Trowbridge. Be there.

Karma must have a hotline to every thought I've ever spun in my head. No sooner had I envisioned Trowbridge standing outside the rock, his face wreathed in relief and pride, than the entire vista in front of me—the Gatekeeper's resentful form, the tall trees, the sun-filled space beyond—was suddenly obscured by a wall of blue.

A curved one. Like someone had taken a glass bowl, poured a cup of thick blue paint in it, upended the whole damn thing, and slammed it down in front of us.

“It's a ward!” I yelled.

“Sheep's teats!” said Mouse, lunging for my pony's bridle.

The frightened pony pranced forward, heedless of the fact that we were heading into trouble instead of moving away from it, and barreled right into the Gatekeeper.

Her shoulder hit the ward, went right through the barrier, and kept going.

It could have been any type of ward—one created to hide things, or one fashioned with the intent of filling someone with so much ill ease that they'd walk away not knowing why they felt compelled to, or even one that made no pretense at being anything other than a barrier.

But it was the bad kind. The one filled with a sticky, syrupy sort of magic that sucks you into its suffocating hold. The weight of the magic is a vise grip of pressure around your ribs and diaphragm. You're drowning in heavy liquid, and time seems to slow, so you're fully aware as you suffocate. I'd been in one such ward only once, in Threall, and there had been a point midway through it where I hadn't been sure I was going to make it all the way out.

The Gatekeeper half-pivoted toward me as she was drawn into it, her brows lifted to the sweaty fringe of her bangs, her mouth a big wide O, in anticipation of an “oh shit!” that required no translation from Merenwynian. Then, without even a pop or a slurp, she was pulled backward into the ward's treacle grip.

All parts of her disappeared except for the long green shimmering rope of magic that she'd complained about off and on all morning.

“Cut!” I cried, but it was too damn late. I was the Pekingese owner who'd been too slow to step into the condo elevator only to watch the doors close abruptly on her pet, leaving her holding one end of the leash while the happy pooch took a sky ride to the penthouse. And I can tell you now with absolute authority that the horrified owner must have thought something along the lines of—

Oh shit, there goes my bitch.

“Magic!” my Fae exclaimed. A sparkle of titillation went right through my hand all the way to my plummeting heart.

“Cut!” I hollered again, trying to control Seabiscuit.

But it was all too late. Too late to figure out how to get a panicked pony to back up—she snorted; she pranced; she danced.

Too late for Mouse. He didn't even get a chance to comment on sheep's teats before he was swallowed by it.

Too late for Hedi. The line of magic between me and the Gatekeeper drew taunt.

I sat back in my saddle and shouted belatedly, “Cut, cut, cut!”

Also too damn late.

Genghis Khan must have had at least one moment when he sat on a knoll overlooking a town and thought,
All this war and death is just too freakin' hard.
But you know what he did? He sucked it up. He spurred his trusty steed and ransacked that village anyhow …

If there was no reverse on this horsie, I was going in full speed.

I gifted Seabiscuit's fat flanks with a heartlessly vicious kick. She whinnied, her back quarters bunched, and then, by golly, I got my slow-motion moment. I entered the ward on the momentum of the pony's leap into blue oblivion and enjoyed the slow slide toward the back of her saddle.

For the count of three, I stayed there—hellishly caught in the no-no instant before the big fall—time no longer slowed, but frozen. I was surrounded, a culture specimen being sandwiched between layers of blue-tinted viscous material.

Pressure, all around me.

Can't breathe.

And then, inexplicably, between one heartbeat and another, it all changed. The sticky stuff dissolved around us and my trusty mount's front hooves broke through the thinning veil of blue.

Immediately the laws of gravity and principles of physics resumed.

Mouse, still grimly hanging on to Seabiscuit's bridle, broke through first, shouting a blue streak. Then the pommel gave my lady parts a farewell bruise, and then—
oh sweet heavens
—I was Supergirl, except she flew with her hands out and I was flying nose first over my pony's ears, trawling a tether of magic and one irate Gatekeeper. My arm was pulled up and backward as the full weight of the diminutive Fae made itself known.

My landing was predictably nasty and, as per usual, done headfirst. My teeth snapped together, my jaw tested the concept of dislocation, my boobs flattened, and my knee lost an inch or two of skin.

A pause, then it was the bungee cord all over again: another wince of hot flared in my shoulder sockets as she was sling-shot past me.

She landed with a thud-thump and a grunt.

In the moments following land ho, I listened to Mouse hacking up a lungful of magic, and the Gatekeeper's wet wheeze, and the sounds of Seabiscuit presumably heading hell-for-leather for the winner's tape.

“I hate wards,” coughed Mouse.

“I think I love them,” I replied.

Before we'd been outside of the bowl; now we were inside it. And
now
I understood why the ward had turned blue. Not only was the interior of the ward's walls tinted blue, so was the late-morning light within it. It was alive, this light, and it carried the lingering heat of an Alpha's open-throttle flare; it goosed my flesh and sent my heart into a thump of joy.

Trowbridge.

Blue light everywhere. My man was flaring.

*   *   *

Daniel's Rock was a twenty-foot misshapen hump of pale gray, textured with fissures and stained with vertical streaks of dark charcoal. My mate had been facing a slit carved into the rock when I tore through the ward, but as Seabiscuit cantered past him he spun around with a warrior's coiled grace, the blade he held balanced and ready to swing. His mouth was set in an ugly clenched-tooth grimace, his body language primed for battle.

I love this man—
the knowledge was a fist bump to my solar plexus.

Even if dirt was caked on either side of his mouth and his expression was more furious than loving. Angry, half-naked, dirty. Less than pretty what with his warrior's leer beginning to sag in relief …

I didn't care.

I love this man.

I will always love this man.

He looked like he'd seen hell, left a memo on how to improve it, and then done a tour in purgatory. Since we'd parted ways, his clothing had been edited down to his jeans and those had seen a rough and drastic revision, the legs of which having been hacked off at mid-thigh. His custom-made cutoffs rode low on his narrow hips. But more significantly, he carried a sword.

My soldier of impossible causes had found himself some weaponry.

“Whose sword?” I asked in a voice that barely trembled.

His flare blazed, then blinded.

“That's all you say? ‘Whose sword?'” His voice rose. “What the fuck took you so long?” He was a tall shadow on the other side of a field of fierce blue. “You should have been here! When I came here and only found him…”

Him?
As quickly as the question formed, I tossed it aside, for I heard him take another ragged breath, this time through his nose. Trowbridge finished hoarsely with a “Jesus, Hedi.”

“I had to take a couple of pee breaks.”