The Vanishing Throne (24 page)

“What the bloody hell was that?” My tongue is heavy, burning with power.

Catherine pulls me away. “We don't go in there.” Her grip on me tightens. “
Never
go in there. They vowed not to harm us when they come to our side, but we have no protection if we visit theirs.” She shakes me, lashing out in her concern. “Do you understand?”

I almost tell her that I don't understand a damn thing, but the power is still so overwhelming that it's difficult to speak, or to concentrate on anything else. I glance up at the door and the taste returns again, this time in a lingering brush of flower petals along the roof of my mouth, less potent. I swear the etchings in the door pulse and glow.

I touch the wood again and the power beats more strongly there. “I can sense them. For god's sake, how many live in there?”

“Hundreds, maybe thousands. You heard the music?” At my nod, Catherine tugs on my arm again and I let her pull me away from the door to the comparative safety of the path. “It's different for every person. It stirs up a pleasant memory so you can't resist.”

I suddenly recall the stories when people were convinced they could hear music in the hills or within crags. There is no music; it's simply one of the many ways the fae manipulate humans. Sorcha once made me think I heard my mother singing.

“Aye,” I say bitterly. “A faery has used it against me before.”

“That's how they took people when we lived in the ruins,” Catherine tells me. “We heard the music almost every night. Some people could resist—the Seers are almost entirely unaffected—but most couldn't.” She sighs and releases me. “My mother couldn't.”

Perhaps Daniel and Gavin were right not to trust me. Being unable to access my full Falconer abilities had left me open to Sorcha's influence, and just now the fae could have manipulated me into walking through their door. Lonnrach used the same weakness against me twice before, and I just barely broke our connection.

“How do you handle it?” I ask Catherine. She was so easily faestruck by Kiaran back in Edinburgh; I can't imagine
how she managed to protect herself without any natural resistance. “How have you withstood this long?”

Catherine sets her jaw. Without a word, she lifts the long sleeve of her thick wool shirt to bare the pale underside of her forearm. There, marked into the skin, are fingernail scratches, some long and jagged, others half-moon marks pressed hard into her arm. Some are faded, scars that look years old. Others are scabbed over and dotted with dried blood, as recent as a few days.

“Christ,” I breathe.

She lowers her sleeve and I don't miss how her fingers shake. “I won't let them control me,” she says firmly. “If pain keeps their influence at bay, then I'll do whatever I need to survive. I won't end up like my mother.”

I won't end up like my mother
. I've lost count of how many times I made the same vow. I promised myself that I would never be murdered as my mother had, in the street, torn up and bloodied. My heart a trophy to whatever faery managed to slay me.

How can I tell Catherine to stop doing the very thing that has kept her alive? After all, I'm a less than sterling example for her to look up to. Seeing what happened to my mother made
me
into a killer.

I stare at the door again and ask, “Why would you allow them to stay? They're not safe.”

Catherine lets out a frustrated breath. “Because we need them. Their blood keeps the thistle alive. They hunt for us and grow food and help us build. They even keep the fae on
the outside from sensing that we're here. It's not an alliance we ever wanted, but we can't survive out there.”

“But they always want something in return,” I snap. “It's not in their nature to help without payment.”

“Aileana—”

“Don't. I think I understand.” The effect of the fae power is still so strong that it churns my stomach. “Why there's no protection for humans who enter their door. Why the truce doesn't extend to their luring music.” I can barely say it. “If people do hear it and can't control themselves from coming down here, you let them, don't you? You all look the other way in exchange for what they're willing to give you.” At Catherine's silence, I step away. “That's—I can't
believe
you.”

Catherine's mouth snaps shut. “Don't look at me like that. Do you think I haven't lost sleep over it?” She looks away. “I deliberately put this field here to keep them safe. As long as they stay in the city, the thistle makes it impossible to hear the music.”

“Then what else do you give them?” I laugh bitterly. “Because you can't tell me the fae are content to wait for their occasional human victim.”

“Shelter,” Catherine says sharply. “Protection.”

I make a sound of disgust. “They don't need protection from anything. For god's sake,
they're
the ones who kill humans. They're probably in there plotting our demise, figuring out a way to get around their truce. They can't be trusted.”

“You really don't know, do you?” she says with sudden understanding. “They were hunted, too.”

I start in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“It's a pledge we make before the Wild Hunt.” Kiaran's voice rings out from behind us.

I turn. Kiaran is on the stone path between the stocks of
seilgflùr
, a risky place to be. If he so much as touches the plant, the thistle will burn his skin. He's dressed in black trousers and a crisp white shirt open at the collar.

Kiaran's eyes lock with mine. It's such an intimate thing, that look. “
Marbhaidh mi dhuibh uile
,” he says softly. “I shall kill them all.”

As if he knows. As if he's said it before.

Beside me, Catherine stiffens. I watch her hand slip just beneath her sleeve to sink her fingernails there. I flinch.

“Forgive my rudeness,” she says. “I believe I'm needed elsewhere.” Before I can protest, Catherine strides away. As she passes Kiaran, she steps between the stocks of thistle, deliberately putting as much distance between them as possible. She disappears down the passage we came in through.

“What did you do to Catherine?” I ask. A thought occurs to me. “Don't tell me she remembers when you accidentally faestruck her in the park.”

His lips twitch. Kiaran's almost-smile; just seeing it makes my heart leap. “That remains our secret.”

“Then why was she looking at you like she wishes she had the means and opportunity to murder you?”

“My kind slaughtered almost everyone she knew,” he says. “She doesn't trust me.”

“Well, you did just threaten to maim her husband.”

I know I shouldn't trust Kiaran either. Not after everything he's done. But the truth is, I can't remember the single defining moment when I decided to trust Kiaran. It just . . . happened. Like the way I came to care so much for him just happened. Somewhere between our hunts and our kills and our kisses, he left his mark on my bones.

Now I see why Kadamach moved heaven and earth to find you
.

I don't tell Kiaran that it was the memories of us I treasured most in Lonnrach's prison. That I would spend hours trying to remember every detail of his kiss, every feeling, every word, for proof that I wasn't just some discarded pet. That it all meant nothing.

I turn away. It's safer not to look at him. I'm already feeling too many things I wish I didn't. “You said it was a pledge
we
make. Does that mean you did, too?”

Suddenly, he's close. I can feel the heat of his body, how his muscles are tensed like a predator ready to spring. His breath is at my neck, lips close enough to brush the skin there. “I was the one who made the pledge first.”

I don't dare move. It's too much when he gets like this, equal parts seductive and dangerous.

In an instinctive move, my hand inches to my belt, where I keep my blade.
Damn
. I left it in my room. “When?”

“When the first Wild Hunt pillaged the land and we killed everything in our path.” I'm about to pull away, but Kiaran stops me, his fingers grasping mine. “Who do you think brought the pixie city to ruin?” His lips are by my ear, a kiss pressed to the tender curve of my neck. I shudder. “I did.”

I jerk away from him. Damn it all, I forgot again.

Kiaran was once Kadamach, a ruthless killer who had been among the worst of the fae. It was his love for another Falconer that changed him, made him side with humans. But that doesn't mean he's good or harmless. After all, everyone thinks badgers are harmless right before they bite you.

“You killed Derrick's family,” I say flatly.

“His family, his friends.” Kiaran's eyes glow in the dim light from the field, so startlingly vivid and uncanny. “Almost everyone he loved.”

Good god. He speaks about slaughter so nonchalantly, as if he's telling me how to use a new weapon. How little he seems to care sparks the anger in me.

“Why?”

“
Why
?” Kiaran sets his jaw. “Why do you sleep, or feel, or do any of the things humans do without thinking twice? I killed them because to me it was like breathing.” He tries to step closer as if to touch me, but I back the hell away. His hand falls to his side. “It's what I was made for.”

I can imagine him like that so easily. It's the way he gets when we hunt together, as if there's nothing else in the world he loves more than a battle. It's an exhale of a sword thrust, an inhale of a blade through sinew and bone—the rhythm of a kill.

I made you the same as me
. I hunted because it was how I existed, one kill to the next. As monsters do.

“Do you ever regret it?” I whisper. “Everything you've done?”

His gaze is empty. No guilt or even a hint of remorse there. “I have little purpose in my life for regrets.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

Kiaran smiles, that beautiful false smile that makes my heart ache. His face is a mask, flawless and immaculate, no hint of passion or emotion. Even statues have more life.

“Do you still seek the good in me, Kam?” He grasps the flower of a thistle between his fingers, as if to remind me what it does. I wince at how his skin blisters and burns almost immediately. He doesn't release it, doesn't show any sign of pain at all. “Do you still wish I were honorable?”

I reach out and grasp his wrist firmly. “MacKay,
stop it
.”

Kiaran releases the thistle, the false smile now gone. “How much do you need to learn about my past before you understand that there isn't a single part of me that's human?”

“You're not Kadamach,” I snap. “Not anymore. You haven't been for thousands of years.”

There's a flicker of an emotion in his gaze, gone so quickly. “You speak that name as if you know what it means.” He gestures behind me. “The
sìthichean
behind that door have long memories. So does your pixie. To them, I will always be Kadamach.”

“And yet when you fought by my side to protect them all, your past didn't matter.” My eyes hold his, and my voice lowers to a whisper. “When you kissed me, it didn't matter.”

There it is, an emotion behind that normally cool, detached gaze. Not wanting to lose it, I inch closer, just as he
did. I listen to his breath hitch—only slightly, but still noticeable. How his hand tightens in mine and something akin to desire and longing crosses his features.

I press my fingers to the pulse at his wrist and relish how it quickens. “You'll always be Kiaran to me.”

He makes a sound deep in his throat and grasps my shirt. His lips are on mine, soft, insistent. Aching.
More
, I want more. I deepen our kiss—

Then a high mechanical wail resounds all around us, startling me out of his arms.

“What the hell
is
that?”

“The early warning system.” Kiaran is breathing hard. “It means
sìthichean
are in the territory.”

K
IARAN LEADS
me through the city streets. I watch as people hurry for the tenements around us, for their balcony rooms in the beehive structure.

Shutters and doors slam around me. I'm amazed by the silence, the lack of panic. If anyone speaks, it's in hushed whispers, encouragements to
be quick
. The people of the city move at an efficient, hurried pace, as if they've done this many times before. They must have, when they lived in the ruins Gavin described.

I wonder if they even realize that these walls won't protect them if the fae breach the city. Whatever wards Derrick put up would only hold for so long. They would be dead in an instant.

“Is this place under siege often?” I ask as a couple rushes past us to their dwelling.

“No.” Kiaran leads me down a close that's so narrow that the light from the street lamps doesn't reach it. “They haven't found
the city. It's usually a few stray soldiers sweeping the forests nearby.”
These alarms are for something as little as that?
He catches my surprised expression. “We're overly cautious for a reason.”

I'm reminded of Gavin's words.
Another raid would leave our population decimated
.

Just before we step out from the buildings, the light cuts from the city and the alarm suddenly goes quiet. One by one the street lamps extinguish and we're left in darkness. I look up. Even the will-o'-the-wisps have ceased to dance above. In a stream of light, they head for a passage at the back of the cave, their lights twinkling out as they flee. The clouds are gone. There is nothing but the effervescent glitter of rocks, the steady sounds of our breathing.