The Danger of Destiny (32 page)

It took four “Mississippis” for her to disengage from Ralph. Another two for her and the glowering Ralph to step onto my palm. My throat hurt as I picked up their chains and placed them over my head.

They hung from my neck. A burden of guilt and love.

I turned around to stare at the old man.

He said, “I need not be your enemy.”

“Oh, we're far too late for that.”

“Perhaps I shall leave you to ponder my offer.”

“Don't let the door slam on your ass.”

Clearly, another insult lost in translation. I needed a Merenwynian lexicon of smart put-downs for the Fae.

“You will need me soon.”

I got off my knees and stood. “Door. Ass. Bye-bye.”

*   *   *

There is dusk and there is dawn. Both can bleed. Both can have a terrible beauty. Watching the soul-light resume in my twin's eyes was as hard as watching it fade. Losing him had evoked pity. Gaining him back brought anger.

I was furious. Coldly and implacably so.

I knew the moment Lexi was back, for his expression changed. And I knew when he'd finished replaying what had happened in his absence, for the look in his eyes turned from fuzzy to shamed. His gaze cut away from mine.

“I am faint with thirst,” the Gatekeeper reminded me.

“You had a chance,” I said curtly. “Mouse? Bring me your burlap sack.”

He brought it to me. Just like that. No back talk, no “what about,” no pauses to sift possibilities of action. It's something I liked about the boy: you gave him an order and he did it. “We lose the pony here,” I told him, untying the bag's strings. “She's too noisy. Take off her bridle and let her go. We're leaving now.”

“But the Son of Lukynae is not back,” said Mouse.

I stared him down until he looked away. Balance of command restored, I extracted the two bottles of juice from the burlap bag and threw the now-empty sack behind some bushes. One vial went into my right pocket.

Lexi finally spoke. “Trowbridge is not back?”

What, didn't his
mage
give him the entire 411?

“Trowbridge said it was less than an hour to the castle,” I said tightly. “I want to do it in fifty minutes, tops. But you've been limping.” I jerked my chin at his leg. “I take it that's because of the pain?”

“You may not find him in the castle,” he said quietly.

No. That's where I'll find him. I have to find him there.

“Answer my question. Can you keep up?”

“He could have met other dangers. He could be—”

“Or do you need a hit of this?” I held up the bottle of juice. “Because nothing is going to slow us down, got that? Nobody is going to stop me from doing what I said I was going to do. Not you or your leg. Not the Gatekeeper. Not the Fae. Nothing and nobody.”

You'd think I'd just offered him a capsule of cyanide.

Well, Lexi could take his sense of betrayal and stuff it. My anger was a wooden roller coaster, shuddering upward toward a precipice.

Blotches of color mottled Lexi's neck. “I don't need it.”

I jammed the bottle into my other back pocket. Good enough. One of us might. Trowbridge. Me. Mouse. “If you have anything you need to do—like check to see if you still have your balls—I suggest you do it now. Because we're leaving as soon as I get the Gatekeeper fitted with her new harness.”

I turned for the Fae woman.

Though the belt cinching her arms behind her back had taken care of any instinct she might have felt in passing to toss a few balyfires at me, it didn't do much beyond that. She was not working with us. She'd lagged wherever she could; she'd been a monument to passive resistance. And I meant it about moving fast: if the truculent Fae needed motivation to hotfoot it to the secret entrance, I was the girl to give it to her.

I prodded the magic inside me. “Donut time,” I murmured.

The Gatekeeper was going to lead us to the secret entrance. She was going to do it before the sun slipped below the horizon.

“Hell, do not turn your back on me and give me orders,” said Lexi.

Oh?

I slowly pivoted to face my twin. “Okay, I'll give them to you face-to-face. You've got one job from here on: shut up and walk. When we get to the castle, you're going to show me where I can find your mage's book and then we're done. You'll come back to Creemore, but then you go your way and I'll go mine. It's over. Whatever we had is finally done.”

“Don't give me commands.”

“Really? I'd think you'd be used to them, because you just demonstrated how easily you come to heel. Not five minutes ago, your mage said get lost and you went away. You tucked your tail between your legs and slunk off.”

“I—”

“Shut up. You failed two tests, Lexi, not one. After you realized that you couldn't break Merry's spell, you should have stuck it out. You should have faced Merry and me. Admitted that you were wrong, and told Merry you were sorry. But instead, you just melted away. I watched your face—you didn't even fucking fight it. I don't give a shit why you left. Maybe you were ashamed; maybe you felt beaten. The point is: you left.”

“I—”

“I don't want to hear it,” I said harshly. “I know now what Trowbridge didn't have the heart to say to me. You are a freakin' grenade with a loose pin. One day you're going to explode, but I'm not going to let you do it until I've crossed a few things off the list. My world—the one you were born into, the one that I'm probably never going to see again—is going to be safe. The mistakes the Stronghold twins made aren't going to impact the people I care about. Your daughter is going to be safe. Cordelia's going to live out her life without worrying about world-walkers, and mages. From now on, there's only one thing I want from you. Try to be a Stronghold, okay? Just for one more freakin' hour you keep the Old Mage on lockdown. You get that? You have the backbone to keep him away from me. I don't want anything messing with my head. We're going to go to the castle right now, because that was our plan—the one that I made with my mate. We're not going to sit here and reflect on why Trowbridge hasn't made it back. If he could have, he would have. Speculating on how to stop the Fae from executing him isn't going to get it done. We're going to follow through. But that's what he'd do. That's what leaders do.”

Even if some of the decisions kill you.

I told my magic to do what it had to do. She flowed through me, through my blood, through my will, to accumulate at my fingertips. “Leash her,” I said, casting my magic at the Gatekeeper.

My magic flew to her, green and so very alive. The Gatekeeper flinched as my magic's kiss touched her chest. She leaned away from my magic as she curled herself around the Gatekeeper's torso.

I walked toward her, the magic between us tightening.

“Get up,” I said.

She shook her head.

I bent so that she could read the conviction in my eyes. “Get up, or I'll tell my magic to tighten up and break a few ribs.”

She got up.

I'll find you, Trowbridge. I swear, my love, I'll find you.

Lexi said, “You're making a mistake.”

“I'm a Stronghold.” I gave the invisible lasso a motivational jerk. “That's what we seem to do.”

What my brother would have said to that I'll never know. For that's when Mouse cried out, “Beware, Hedi!”

 

Chapter Twenty

The three hunters materialized so quietly from the flora and fauna, they could have been wraiths. One male was bearded, well over six and a half feet tall, and had abs that could send a handful of change bouncing. The female was about five inches shorter than Very Tall Guy and had no visible body fat.

They were Raha'ells—easily identified by their long dreads, general air of ferocity, and the liberal application of mud.

How'd they know about the mud?

Mouse spoke out of the side of his mouth. “I don't like the looks of this. Particularly that one.”

I agreed: “that” one was giving me the willies. Though all of the Raha'ells were armed, the third man—a clean-shaven, auburn-haired specimen of scary—was the only one with his bow primed and his target chosen.

Why is it always me?

His right fist was bunched on the midpoint of the bow's long shaft, and his left fist was bunched at his jaw. The string was taut, the arrow primed. He observed me through a single eye. Presumably, he had another, but my focus had narrowed to his bunched fists and the die-bitch intent in his unforgiving eye.

I flexed my fingers on my free hand, mentally stripping some power from the donut surrounding the Gatekeeper. Magic streamed back up my arm, surged across my shoulders, and pooled at the tips of my nails. If they fired at me—if they hurt me, or Mouse, or anyone in my party—the last thing they'd feel was the slow throttle of my magic.

What happened next always made me think of when jazz dancers strike a pose just before delivering that sudden flick of fingers that turns their closed fists into starfish.

Jazz hands.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking when Scary Guy let loose his arrow.

Jazz hands
—that and
I hate Bob Fosse
.

*   *   *

There was nowhere to go. On the bell curve of fast-moving things that are going to kill you, arrows are right up there with speeding bullets. All I could do was duck, tuck, and pray.

Please be a lousy shot.

Please be the worst marksman in the whole pack.

I heard a soft sound—not a thud, not a comical
boing,
but an impact of sorts, which was quickly followed by a surprised cry. Heartless creature that I am, I put the two sound effects together and came up with “not me.”

Good.

Mouse!

I spun around.

Not Mouse, but the Gatekeeper. She'd chosen the dumbass option of backing away.
Never run from a wolf.
Now her little head was bent, to best examine the arrow that was buried in the center of her torso. The marksman's arrow had neatly pierced the fancy emblem embroidered on her vest.

A kill shot.

Very slowly, the small woman looked down at the thing protruding from her chest. Then, she lifted her stricken gaze to mine. “Don't move,” I warned her, but she took another step backward and the rope of magic between us tightened until my arm rose and my fingers stretched tautly into a terrible mimic of a plea.

A feeble flicker of flame erupted from her fingertips.

“Don't!” I said, shaking my head.

The second arrow pierced her throat neatly, with the minimum of blood and gore. It went through flesh and found tree and pinned her tightly to the trunk, a butterfly mounted for presentation. Though the Rahae'lls couldn't see my magic, I could, and it's an image that I'll never be able to erase from my memory—the Gatekeeper wavering on her small feet, one arrow through her breast, the other through her throat. Grappling against the unknown, she lifted her arm weakly to claw at her throat and in so doing brushed against the coil of my magic.

It was a rope, green to my eyes, invisible to hers. It was not a lifeline. It could not hold her here in her world.

But the Gatekeeper caught it and clung to it as her eyes glazed.

“Cut,” I said through my teeth, and my serpent of magic severed its ties to the dead woman. Green sparkles flickered around my face and my fingers buzzed. I spread them and bit down on the surge of heat as my magic returned to me. Hurting my knuckles, quickening my heart.

“He killed the mistress,” said Mouse, sounding more astonished than aggrieved.

“Fae filth,” said the archer.

Oh, crap. He's got another arrow.

*   *   *

When I was young and completely unaware that my life was going to flip from happy as a Hallmark Valentine's Day special to as dark as an HBO series finale, I knew one fact: Lexi was faster than me. At navigating the birth canal. At crawling and standing. At figuring out punch lines and exit strategies. At calling rock to my scissors.

And, of course, at running.

My sibling slammed into me, or rather, he slammed into Mouse, who stood between us. Before I could go ass over teakettle, Lexi's steely arm swept around us to squash Mouse and me to his chest. “Meh, meh, his-her-blah-blah-blah!” he shouted in my ear (or something like that). As he spoke the words of conjure, he did something with his right hand, which I couldn't see, because my face was smooshed into his shirt.

I've blundered into a ward, twice. And I've seen one created, once. But I've never actually been inside one as it fell around me. I thought my ears would pop or I'd feel something equally distressing—a prickling of my thumbs, an ache in my sinuses. But there's really no sign or sound when a ward falls around you. No sonic boom to reference the fact that you've just become the oxygen-dependent life-form zipped into what might be an airtight plastic Baggie.

Also: it's invisible. Lexi's hand gesture must have tipped off the she-bitch with the longbow.

“Magic!” she cried.

I didn't turn to say “you betcha” because on the heels of that announcement I heard three zings—the depressingly familiar sound of arrows set to flight. I curled my body over Mouse's, and Lexi's arm tightened painfully around both of us. But the ward held. The zings were promptly followed by a trio of muffled thumps as the three projectiles thudded harmlessly into Lexi's shield.

I pushed away from Mouse and my brother's embrace, to turn to inspect the damage.

The three arrows were buried, flange deep, into the invisible barrier.

Relief, followed by tension. I don't like small places. And in comparison to Lexi's last conjure, which took in Daniel's Rock, part of the field, a stream, and a cross section of woods, this protective shield was horribly cramped. Most wards are bell shaped. If this one followed the general shape and form, the total circumference couldn't have been more than five feet. I tipped my chin upward, wondering if the ceiling was even lower than that estimate.