Wicked Enchantment (20 page)

“She’s still alive,” said Ronan. “He’s holding her in the dungeon.”

Relief rushed through him so hard and so fast it made him light-headed. If Aislinn was still alive, there was a chance he could get to her, get her out of this mess, and make up for the wrongs he’d done her.

He had many more questions, but they’d have to wait. He couldn’t help her if he was still locked up in here. Gabriel stood, listed to the side, but caught himself before he collapsed. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“That’s the Gabriel I know and love.” Aeric went for the door, casting a grin over his shoulder. “Purely platonically, of course.”

“You’re not my type, either, sunshine,” Gabriel rasped back at him.

He took a step forward and his knees almost buckled. The charmed iron on his skin had affected him badly.

“Whoa, big guy,” said Ronan, catching and supporting him on one side while Bran got the other side.

He speared Ronan with his gaze. “You and Bella are sworn to secrecy with the knowledge I am Lord of the Wild Hunt and these fae are my host. Got it?”

Ronan nodded once tersely. “Now let’s get out of here before they realize what’s going on.”

They all followed Aeric and Aelfdane out of the cell. The hallway was empty save for one fallen guard dressed in the gleaming silver and black armor of the Shadow Guard. Whether the man was dead or unconscious, Gabriel wasn’t sure. They made their way down the corridor, finding more prone and bloody bodies. Aeric and the others had clearly made quick and clean work of them, but it was hardly surprising. The lot of them had a host of magickal defenses—and offenses—to use.

They managed to make their way out of the corridor and past the main doors of the prison before the alarm triggered. The alarm was silent, but magickal. It shivered through the molecules of their bodies as they ran down the hallway. Just as they turned a corner, additional guards spilled into the corridor, yelling and drawing their swords.

They turned back, only to see a horde of goblins rounding the opposite corner.

“Oh, fuck, we’re trapped.” Aeric had a firm hold on the obvious.

Gabriel listed to the side, caught himself against the wall, and cursed out loud in English and Old Maejian both. His fingers itched for a weapon. “We fight through them. It’s our only chance.”

And then they had no choice.

Gabriel targeted one of the Shadow Guard right off, coveting both a weapon and an immediate dissolution of the iron sickness. Summoning strength and balance from parts unknown, he rode a sudden adrenaline rush into battle. Grabbing the man’s sword, he leveraged his superior upper-body strength and slammed the man into a nearby wall. Weapon in hand, he turned and met the next comer, as chaos exploded in the middle of the corridor.

He, his host, Niall, and Ronan fought back to back, battling their way through the ranks of the Shadow Guard and the goblins with a resolve their opponents lacked. That resolve made them stronger. They slashed with their swords, while the mages and Melia all uttered low spells in Old Maejian to make their blades land true and turn the tide of the fight in their favor.

When the last of the goblins had fallen and the Shadow Guard was long since done for, they ran for the tower stairs, knowing reinforcements were on the way. They went down the spiral stone staircase that would let them out into Piefferburg Square if they followed it all the way.

Gabriel stopped on a landing, his tortured and magick-muddled thought processes finally clearing up a little. He dropped his bloody sword to the stone floor with a clatter. “No! I can’t leave the Black Tower. Not when Aislinn is still here and alive.”

Aeric and Bran rounded on him, slack jawed.

“The whole Shadow Guard is after you,” Melia said in her soft, dulcet voice, bright red hair tangled around her shoulders from their flight, blood marking her cheeks and clothes. “The king will call down the goblin army on your head. You
must
leave the Black Tower if you want to live to fight another day, Gabriel. We’ll figure out the rest later.”

“No.”
The word echoed up through the stairwell. He swayed against the cold, uneven rock wall and shook his head to try to get rid of the fuzziness. The adrenaline-fueled battle fury that had so recently filled him was waning fast, the iron sickness taking hold once again. “I won’t leave without her.” He paused and shook his head again. “I won’t live without her.”

Aeric leaned into his face, his dark brown eyes narrowing. “Who are you and what have you done with Gabriel Cionaodh Marcus Mac Braire?”

“No, he’s right,” Ronan said. “If he leaves the Black Tower he’ll never get back in to help Aislinn, and that’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”

Gabriel blinked at the two Ronans in front of him, trying to get them to merge into one. “Yeah. It’s the only thing that matters.”

Melia rolled her eyes. “Fine, but I think you’re an idiot, Gabriel. Just for the record.” She turned and headed down the stairs. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?” Gabriel had big plans about rescuing Aislinn, but at the moment he wasn’t sure how many more actual steps he could take without collapsing.

Aelfdane pulled him away from the wall. “She helped design and construct this tower. Of any of us, she knows best where to go right now.”

Together they made their way down two more flights. On that landing, Melia touched something on the back of one of the craggy Unseelie statues in an alcove and part of the wall moved in and to the side, revealing a passageway.

None too soon, either, for above echoed the sound of the guards’ boots on the stairs and shouting.

Once the wall closed behind them, blackness fisted them in the narrow tunnel. Bran uttered a spell in Old Maejian and light sparked to life around them. They were on a tiny landing with stairs leading up and down. Melia began to climb up and everyone followed. Gabriel hated going in the opposite direction of the dungeons. Every fiber of his body strained to go downward instead of upward.

Sense won out. He needed to go to ground right now and give himself some time, as little as possible, to regain his strength. Being wrapped in charmed iron for almost two weeks with nearly no food and water had almost killed him. Another couple of days like that and his life would surely have come to an end. He needed to be strong for Aislinn. If he went in now, impulsively, the way his body, heart, and mind were straining to do, all would be lost. He couldn’t count on adrenaline and his willpower driving him any further. Physically, he was tapped out. He would die and so would she.

For once he had to be smart. For once he was going to have to trust others. He hated that. Even if it was his host with whom he was entrusting Aislinn’s life. He would trust his own life to them, but not Aislinn’s. No one was good enough to be trusted with her life.

Least of all, him.

Poor woman, he was all she had.

His muscles protesting every movement, he swayed now and again against the rough, cold walls on either side of him. Every step up was a battle, but he pushed past the iron sickness lingering in his body and forced himself up the stairs. Once in a while he felt Aelfdane and Aeric shove him forward a little, or brace him from falling.

Eventually they came to another small landing, this one with a wooden door. Bran’s light revealed intricate spider-webs covering it. Melia pushed it open. With a whine of unoiled hinges and long disuse, the opening revealed a large room with a fireplace, a cot, and some boxes.

Home, sweet home for the time being.

Gabriel took one step into the room and collapsed.

 

 

 

 

AISLINN
shifted restlessly on the slab she lay on, the fabric of her shift rasping against her skin. Charmed iron chains snaked their way over her body, holding her in place.

It was cold.

She could feel the chill of this place, wherever she was, right down to the center of her stomach. For the first couple of days all she’d done was shiver. Now she was too weak to shiver. She lacked the energy to do anything at all, not eat, not drink. She didn’t even have enough energy to be terrified like any sane person. And maybe that meant she wasn’t anymore . . . sane, that was.

In her iron sickness-laced haze all she could do was sleep, wake up, shift a little, and sleep again. Sometimes she heard voices talking low around her. Once in a while, in the distance, she could hear screaming or moaning. She wasn’t always sure it wasn’t herself screaming and moaning, but a careful analysis had rendered her almost certain the noises came from outside her head. Knowing she was not alone in her misery was an odd comfort. One she didn’t want to examine too closely.

Thus her prophetic dream was realized.

There were no grabbing, pulling hands. No silver pool of a place between life and death. Maybe that was still coming. But surely she was going to die in this place, just as her dream had said she would.

And Gabriel had led her to it.

The voices around her had yielded a few clues to her predicament. She was in possession of four interesting facts. One, she was actually the Shadow King’s daughter, gotten off her full-blooded Seelie Tuatha Dé mother in an illicit liaison. Two, Gabriel had been planted in the Rose Tower to lure her over to the dark side of her own free will. He’d done his job well. Was he laughing somewhere in the Black Tower now as a result of her demise? Three, the Shadow King meant to kill her. Four, the Shadow King didn’t merely mean to kill her, he meant to obliterate her very soul—dismember it magickally and cast it to the four winds.

That was the holdup. That was why she wasn’t dead yet.

Apparently she was, indeed, a powerful necromancer.

Apparently she was her father’s daughter. The thought caused a burst of bitter laughter to rise in her throat like bile. It burned, made her smile. Then she rolled to the side and dry-heaved onto the slab.

Being a powerful necromancer would give her the ability to return from the dead and haunt the Shadow King for the rest of his immortal life. A thing that, if she knew how to do it, she most certainly would. That was why he was seeking for magickal ways to obliterate her soul.

Of course, she didn’t have the first clue how to do anything as a necromancer, most certainly not how to return from the dead and haunt someone. For that matter, before now she’d meant the Shadow King no harm at all. She couldn’t think of the first reason why he would want her dead. Did he think she was a threat to his throne?

She didn’t want his throne. If she ever saw his throne, she would spit on it. But, then again, she never would see it. Never get a chance to spit on it. Instead she’d be dead, her soul obliterated.

IT
was time.

A few hours of rest and a little food and water had made Gabriel feel a million times better.

While he’d rested, Ronan had chanted at him in Old Maejian and blown some bitter-smelling something in his face to prevent magickal tracking spells from gaining a grip. According to the mage, since Ronan and Bella’s flight through the city evading the Imperial Guard, Ronan had been working nonstop on a powerful countermeasure to block tracking spells. Now Gabriel was tracking spell-proof. Aislinn would be, too, with Ronan’s aid.

Ronan, Aelfdane, Niall, and Aeric remained with him. Bran and Melia had left an hour earlier to scout for him. He pushed up into a sitting position and paused, nearly retching.

Okay, maybe he only felt one or two times better, not a million.

It would have to be enough. He couldn’t let any more time go by allowing Aislinn to be kept in the dungeon while the Shadow King’s minions did the gods only knew what to her. He pushed up again, this time all the way to a standing position.

Across the room, Aeric, leaning against a wall, clapped. “Yes, I can see you’re certainly in a condition to mount a rescue from the depths of the dungeons of the Black Tower. Shall I call down now and tell them you’re coming or do you want to surprise them?”

Gabriel growled at him. His knees buckled and he caught himself with a palm to the wall before he could fall back onto the cot he’d been resting on. “I have no choice. It’s a miracle she’s still alive now. Who knows if she’ll be breathing an hour from now?”

Aelfdane regarded him with cool blue eyes in the light of the myriad candles that lit the bare room. “Why do you care so much?”

Gabriel closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. “I care because I’m responsible for her situation. I told her to come to the Unseelie. Without my persuasion, she never would have defected from the Rose.” He opened his eyes and found Ronan’s gaze. “I told her she’d be safe here.” He swallowed hard. “It’s my responsibility to make this right.”

Ronan shook his head at him. “It’s partially guilt. I believe you on that score, Gabriel. But it’s more than that, too. You love Aislinn, don’t you?”