Faerie Blood (23 page)

“Well?” I barked, hoping I didn’t sound as shaken to everyone else as I did to myself.

“That…” Elessir sounded shaken himself. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the silver blade, and then slipped the weapon back down behind his back where he’d gotten it. With the handkerchief he dabbed at my finger, proffering a slightly skewed edition of his arrogant smile. “That will, ah, be adequate. My profoundest thanks.”

Still clinging to my other hand beneath the table, Christopher prodded the Sidhe, “Answer her next question, then.”

While I snatched my hand back from him, Elessir mustered a more assured smile. “Certainly, if Miss Thompson will elaborate upon what has befallen her employer.”

“He doesn’t remember me,” I said tightly, pressing my thumb against the finger Elessir’s knife had poked. “He does remember Jude. We’re assuming magical causes.”

Elessir leaned back once more against the wall, folding his handkerchief into quarters, and returned it to his pocket. “You assume correctly. Any suitably skilled mage can spirit away a memory, though it may also be done with boggles. Perhaps you’ve seen them. Small and black, with red eyes,” he said. And with a subtle upward lift of one brow he added, “They make excellent spies, and Malandor has the power to command them.”

I flashed back on the thing I’d seen under the vending machine, and then upon the red-haired Seelie lord. Malandor. My uncle. The thought made me want to throw up. “Do you know if he did it?”

“Is that your third question?” countered the singer.

For a moment, I was ready to say yes; then I remembered Millicent. I hauled in a deep breath, braced myself, and said, “This is. Do you know where we can find Millicent Merriweather?”

The Sidhe’s gorgeous eyes went wide. “The Lady Warder of this fair city?”

“That’s the one.”

“She has been mislaid?”

My heart sped up within me. “I was hoping you’d tell us that,” I said, stunned that my words came out so steady. Especially since Elessir delayed answering me for several seconds, drawing out my tension as he seemed to deliberate the matter. I itched to shake him and yell at him to say something—but when he did, it was not what I wanted to hear.

“I’m afraid I will have to ask for a higher price for this answer, Miss Thompson.”

“Name it,” I whispered.

With a serenity that completely belied his words Elessir told me, “Nothing too taxing, to be sure. Since my Court desires your bloodline joined with ours, all I require is for you to lie with me.”

Before either Jude or I could react
, before I could rip Elessir a new one for his shocking proposition, Christopher leaped to his feet and lunged, wolf-like, for the Unseelie’s throat. Electricity poured off his frame in a turbulent flood. Dishes clattered, his chair fell over, and the table jarred between us all as he seized Elessir by the front of his white shirt.

“It’s over my dead body you’ll touch her!” the Newfoundlander thundered.

Someone shrieked—maybe Jude, maybe me. Then a second, stronger surge turned the world a blinding blue-white. My sight and hearing shorted out; my sense of space and of the shape of my own body vanished, as every inch of me seemed to transform to crackling flame.

When the moment passed I found myself pitched onto the floor, spangles of light exploding and fading dizzily behind my eyes. Through them I glimpsed Jude, who had flung her sturdy, plump form across Elessir, pinning him to the bench and thrusting his shoulders against the wall. Her cheeks were livid and her eyes dark with visible fear, but as my hearing came back I heard her shouting, “—enough, pal! I don’t know what you did but you’re not doing it again!”

One look at the Sidhe showed me why Jude was scared. Christopher’s power made every hair on my neck stand on end; Millicent’s was a hammer that could knock me almost off my feet. But Elessir’s turned the air around me to ice. I forgot about coincidental human resemblances, and saw instead the knife-edged smile, the predatory gleam in his eyes, and the chill, translucent shine that blazed out from beneath his skin, changing his face to something with no connection to humanity whatsoever.

“Release me, mortal girl,” he commanded Jude in soft, deadly tones. “I will not give you another chance.”

“Not if you’re going to lay another one on Christopher!”

Christopher.

I scrabbled around to find him sprawled atop the nearest empty table, now tipped over on its side, with napkins and silverware strewn all around him on the floor. The blast of power had thrown us both from our chairs—but it had hit Christopher like howitzer fire. His face twisted into agonized lines, he struggled to rise, to breathe; when I looked his way, though, his eyes opened just enough to hurl a seething glare at the Unseelie singer. “Oh, he’s welcome to bring it on, he is,” he ground out, teeth clenched, his power roiling about him without focus or control.

Elessir grinned, a feral, hungry grin that rattled me right down to my bones. “I’d be delighted, Warder-blood.”

“Back off!” I jumped up to plant myself squarely between mortal and Sidhe, with a palm pushed out to each. As my fear and anger surged, my prickling energy—my
magic
—swelled up like a tidal wave from within me and crashed into Elessir and Jude. They slammed against the wall as if I’d physically smacked them, and each of them locked astonished gazes upon me. A remote corner of my brain wailed at the look on Jude’s face, and tried to cry a warning about startled voices shouting out across the restaurant, but I could spare no attention for any of it. The roar of power within me and without consumed everything I had. “Back the fuck off! You’re not doing this!”

Midnight eyes met mine; Elessir’s grin grew disturbingly larger. “Weren’t you the one advocating free will just now, Miss Thompson? I don’t believe it’s your place to get in the way of Mr. MacSimidh’s challenge,” he said, bizarrely conversational—and a wall of force whipped out from him towards me.

“It is if it’s not a fair fight!” The power roaring out of me smashed against that wall just before it struck me; I barely stayed on my feet. Directly between us, two of the glasses on the table shattered into dozens of pieces and sent water and melting ice spilling all over the table.

Behind me, with awkward effort, Christopher pushed up onto his knees. “He’s not touchin’ you!” he panted. “I’m not lettin’ him touch you!” The words had no strength, but when I risked another swift glance his way, I saw an expression that alarmed me almost as much as Elessir: an anguished, fervent determination that burned through the pain in his face. He looked like a wounded soldier on a battlefield, about to shoot his final bullet into an oncoming enemy squadron. And more importantly, he looked like he’d just gotten his ass kicked. Because of me. Again.

“You have your priorities out of order, mortal,” Elessir drawled at Christopher, with a dark, avid glee that sent dread slicing along all my nerves. “A Warder’s bond is to a city and not just one person, you know. One might wonder whether you shed your blood on Miss Thompson here, given the ardor of your defense.”

Blood. The word raced through my brain, and for an instant all I could think of was Christopher slumped in my arms on the Burke-Gilman trail, his blood soaking through my shirt, warm against my shoulder.

He
had
bled on me.

And he remembered it too. Our eyes met; his reflected my own unmitigated shock back at me. But we didn’t have time to figure out what it meant. Not now.

“Get out of here!” I hollered at him.

“I’m not leavin’ you!”

We didn’t have time to argue, either. Cold, numbing energy stabbed at me all the harder the longer Elessir stared my way, stoking the power boiling in me to greater and greater heat. My head began to throb in time with the pounding of my heart, and every bone in my body seemed about to tremble itself into pieces. As my vision swam with hot sparks of light, it was all I could do to screech at Jude, “Get Christopher out of here! And anybody else in the restaurant!” Eyes round as coins, she gaped at me with much the same fright she’d just shown Elessir, and my voice cracked as I repeated, “
Go
!”

Jude scrambled off of Elessir and over to Christopher’s side. With a desperate kind of speed she grabbed his arm and hauled him bodily upright; he didn’t have the strength to resist her, though he tried, swaying and lurching against Jude’s far shorter frame. She dragged him over to the archway that led to the next seating area over, flashed me one last stricken look, and fled towards the front of the restaurant with Christopher in tow.

The Unseelie seemed utterly uninterested in their retreat. Poised where he sat like a panther about to spring, he stared fixedly at me, his eyes burning an infinite, fathomless blue, that malicious grin curling his mouth. “So you wish to champion Mr. MacSimidh, then?” he said. Blinded by the sweat streaming down into my eyes and by the power screaming through my entire system, I heard him more clearly than I saw him. But his voice was every bit as potent as his power, a whip of quicksilver that lashed against my consciousness, seeking a way in.

“Just standing in for Christopher till he’s up to speed,” I croaked, quivering as I wrestled with the invisible storm that rolled back and forth between us. “You know what Warders are—you should know about the Pact!”

“Oh, I do, I do,” Elessir assured me, rising from his seat without the slightest tremor of disturbance to the energy he hurled forth. “I also know that since your Christopher is not yet Seattle’s Warder in truth, I’m not yet obliged to answer to him. And as you are not a Warder at all, Miss Thompson—”

His power flared, struck, and threw me backwards into the table over which Christopher had fallen.

“—I’m also not obliged to answer to you.”

My head spun; my roused magic crumbled into disordered chaos through my senses. For the briefest of moments I fought to pull breath into my body, and that was all the time Elessir needed to crouch at my side. His fingers reached out for the hair falling in wild disarray before my eyes—and as my vision refocused, as the necklace I wore pulsed with renewed warmth, they halted scant millimeters from actual contact. Surprise widened the Unseelie’s eyes, and then he flung me a warm, melting smile of something that looked strangely like approval.

“Darlin’, this doesn’t have to be difficult,” he crooned, almost gently. His voice slithered all around that shield of warmth the pendant laid over me, and to my alarm, I began to feel faint tendrils of the same hypnotic pull wielded by his singing. “I can tell you’re feeling it now—your fey blood. Your mother’s blood. I can tell it wants out. My Court can help you make it happen, and teach you how to control that power your mother’s blood has given you. You’re going to need it, you know. For what’s coming.” I started, and the Sidhe’s smile grew warmer. “You know what I’m talking about. Dreamed of it, I’ll bet—or Saw it. We all have a touch of the Sight.”

“H-how did you know—?” I was flat on my back against the overturned table, but my power still churned through me. A row of lights along the wall exploded, raining pieces of bulbs down upon us and filling the room with the crisp stench of fried wires. “What do you know about—?”

Elessir slowly drew his fingers through the air directly in front of my face, never once touching me, but setting off shivers throughout me nonetheless. “Now, now,” he chastised, “that’s two more questions. What are you willing to pay for the answers?”

“What happened to ‘we’re not the bad guys of Faerie’?” I gasped, trying to make myself get up. I couldn’t. My body shuddered beneath the triple rush of power: mine, the pendant’s, and Elessir’s sliding like silk just beyond them both, pulling in closer and closer.

“Such lack of faith, honey—Kendis.” His voice took on the slightest touch of a drawl, just enough to soften each syllable he uttered and to add to their beguiling lure. Even his feigned accent, I realized in fright, was a weapon. “May I call you Kendis?”

“N-no.” I tried to bark out the denial. It came out a whisper instead, and I couldn’t make myself look away from the Unseelie’s warm, wicked smile.

“Pity. But don’t worry, Miss Thompson, I never gainsay a lady.” Elessir leaned in a little farther, his hand hovering just above my chest; heat spiked up there, rising in a palpable wave through my shirt to push at his fingers. “And I promise not to ask for anything bad. Just take off that l’il’ ol’ Ward.”

My throat went dry at that velvet cajoling, and my hands twitched of their own accord up towards the chain around my neck.

“There you go, darlin’,” Elessir murmured encouragingly. “It’s for the best; your mother’s Court won’t want you. They’ll think you tainted because half your blood is human. The Unseelie are not nearly so prejudiced.”

That last word jabbed like a spear through the haze thickening in my head.

Prejudiced.

A powerful word to use on a girl with a black father.

The wolf’s head went so hot beneath my shirt that it felt like it had caught fire. Like a new blaze set to stop a wildfire’s spread, the eruption of energy flared through the overall wash of power in the room, breaking the compulsion Elessir was weaving over me. It scoured through every thought in my head—but left them sharp and clear as it passed.

“What makes you think,” I hissed, “that I want to be in either one of your goddamned Courts?”

Elessir’s smile vanished, turning his expression instantly into a mask of lupine alertness, but I didn’t give him—or myself—time to react. Fury strong enough to make me see red filled me as I thought of Christopher wounded, James with his memories altered, Millicent missing and very likely in danger. And then I thought of the old Warder tapping into the earth beneath Aggie’s house, and I instinctively tried to do the same. Magic rushed down through me, digging its heels in deep somewhere far beneath the floor, and then came surging back up in a burst of inexorable, incandescent flame.

I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t try. Instead, I let it loose on Elessir.

He went flying, landing hard against our table and overturning it along with everything on it. Every remaining light along the walls exploded, plunging the room into shadow, and only when the Unseelie tumbled onto the floor in the middle of the destroyed remains of our dinner did I realize he wasn’t the only thing I’d struck. Even in the darkness, I could see gouges in the wall above the bench where he and Jude had been sitting.