Summer Chapter One
WINTER
The moment I stepped into sluagh-world, my lungs rebelled.
I’d hoped to hold that last, deep breath of fresh air I’d inhaled before stepping through the Way long enough to Gather starlight and get a quick look around, maybe even manage a quick Cant for warmth.
But the atmosphere was as bleak as the landscape, and it came at me like a punch to the gut, squeezing the good air from my lungs, hissing as it sizzled against my skin and snuck through my nose.
I collapsed, gagging, and curled into a ball in the sand, arms pressed against my face. The poison air seared the inside of my nostrils, my tongue, my lungs. Even squeezed shut, my eyes overflowed with bitter, caustic tears.
Don’t come home until you fix the problem, scolded a voice from the recesses of my subconscious. It sounded exactly like my mother. Don’t die until you fix the problem, Geimhreadh.
My mother’s the last true Fay Queen. She’s also a supremely cold-hearted bitch. She’s nothing if not stubborn. And I know better than to let her down.
I didn’t die, not then, not there in the grey, gritty sand. I shook and groaned and coughed foul-tasting liquid down the front of my coat and onto the ground. Slowly the fire in my lungs eased. I could breath, if I inhaled and exhaled shallowly.
My tongue felt numb and tasted putrid.
I rolled carefully onto my side, then to my knees. I dashed still-flowing tears from my face and realized my nose was bleeding. In the inky light my blood looked black. I tried to stop the flow with the cuff of my sleeve.
Then I remember the mouse in my pocket.
“Gabby!” It hurt to talk. I dug into the lining of my coat, searching for the warm little body.
My pocket was empty. I checked every other possible place in my coat, in my shirt, in my jeans. Nothing.
My burning eyes made everything blur and waver. I huddled on the ground, shaken, and a cold wind blew up off the lake. The wind moaned as it slipped around grey boulders and scraped across my shoulders. I’ll admit I sat for longer than you’d think, butt planted in the strange sand and knees under my chin, before I understood.
I hadn’t heard a single sound other than the mostly frantic muddle of voices projected into my skull for ten years. Ten years, three months, and fifteen days, and I don’t need marks on a calendar to keep track. The day my mother placed her punishing yellow jewels into the lobes of my ears is a day I’ll never forget.
Gaping like an idiot, I put my hands to my ears.
They popped, loudly, and suddenly I could hear more than just the angry wind. I could hear the thump of my heart in my chest, the scratch of the grains of sand beneath my jeans, and the distant splash of waves on the shore of the lake.
The cold burned my face, but the growl of the wind made me bare my teeth in a disbelieving smile.
I walked my fingers along the curve of my ears. The jewels were still there. I was eight when Siobahn attached them. In ten years I hadn’t found a magic that would remove their torment, and I’d spent a lot of free time looking. Once, on a particularly bad Christmas Eve, I’d tried to cut the fairy amber out of my skin.
Needless to say, it hadn’t worked, and there’d been so much blood Richard had made me swear never to try it again.
“Pog mo thoin,” I muttered. “I can hear.” My voice was deeper than I remembered, more alive than the flat timber I’d grown used to in my head. “I. Can. Hear!”
The last was a howl, as loud as I could get, until my lungs hitched and my throat cramped. I rose on my heels in the sand, laughing. I felt light and bubbly and drunk, just like the time Lolo had snatched a bottle of prime Moët & Chandon from the Capitol Hill Hotel, and the three of us had spent an evening sharing it out as the stars rose in the reflecting pool.
I put two fingers to my mouth and whistled, long and low and sharp. The whistle bounced off the rocks around me, then echoed across the lake. The clear beauty of the sound made me shiver. It also cleared some of the fizzy joy from my head. Common sense woke.
In that strange, empty landscape any sound was loud and I was pretty damn sure I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.
I stood up, wincing because the bare skin on my hands and face was already chapping in the harsh cold. My eyes ached and burned. I pulled the collar of my coat up around my throat, and tucked my fists into my armpits. Then I turned around and looked back the way I’d come.
My portal was still there, undulating about four feet above the sand. The rift between worlds was about the size of a refrigerator, wavy at the edges, like too much heat over an asphalt road. I could see clearly through back into the pit. It would be easy to step right back through, back into the D.C. Metro, back home.
Instead I swiveled on my heel, dismissing the rift. I’d come to rescue Aine, and Richard, and I didn’t have time for regrets and second-guesses. I’d made my choice. I wouldn’t change my mind.
My eyes were watering buckets. I squinted, trying to get a better look around. The moon or sun – I wasn’t sure which – hung luminescent in the sky over the lake, but the light it shed seemed to shred away into nothing when it hit the sand. Rocks and low, jagged hill rose out of the ground, one dimensional in the strange twilight.
The shadows and planes seemed off. I couldn’t tell if the rocks hid sluagh or something worse. And my nose, which usually served me well in the mortal world of sweat and stink, was useless in the acrid air.
I started walking toward the lake. The ground slanted gently downhill toward the water. As I walked I scanned the sand around my feet. A small part of me hoped I’d find Gabby, maybe thrown from my pocket as I fell out of the rift. A bigger part hoped I wouldn’t, because I was pretty sure the aes si had been near death when we crossed over, and I didn’t want to find her corpse.
As I got closer to the lake the fine grey grains of sand thickened and became small pebbles. They slipped beneath the soles of my boots, rattling. It took me a few steps to identify the sound, and a few more steps before I could stop obsessing over the scrape of pebble against pebble.
I wondered if every new sound would be the same way: a delicious, all-consuming taste of a feast I’d forgotten.
My stomach growled, reminding me that it had been hours since I’d had anything more than a cup of coffee and a Danish, and even that small gurgle almost sent me into a frenzy of celebration. Except every time my heart lifted it fell back again to that place behind my ribs where trepidation lurked.
As I drew nearer to the water, the air worsened. I pulled my knitted cap down over my forehead, almost past my eyes, and pressed my arm over my nose and mouth. Still, every bit of naked skin stung and burned. The atmosphere grew heavier, humid.
Literature’s my thing, dead poets – mortal and sidhe – are my hobby. I’m no science geek. But I figured out pretty quickly it was the lake poisoning the air, whether through evaporation or osmosis or just the rush of wind over surface water. Waves tossed grey foam up into the air and onto shore. Where the foam hit, steam rose. The boulders nearest the water line were eroded, melted things etched into strange, ugly shapes.
I stopped walking. The black lake spread left and right, mirroring the horizon. I couldn’t see the other side, only the sun/moon mirrored on the water. And either that orb was growing less bright, or my eyes were failing in the mist, because it was getting harder to see where I was putting my feet, and I kept slipping on pebbles and shale.
“Damnu air,” I muttered, one of my mother’s favorite Gaelic curses, to hear my own voice again, and because I was starting to get worried. I’d had no real plan when I stepped through the rift. I’d been thinking only of Aine, and of the monstrous sluagh, and how they’d bleed her into a shell, and then snack on her bones.
I looked over my shoulder, back up the rocky slope the way I’d come. I couldn’t see the Way any longer, but I could feel it. The magic thrummed in my bones, and in my teeth. It was still open. I could turn go back, before the tainted air ruined my lungs and skin, before I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.
Instead I continued parallel along in the shore, the moon at my left shoulder, in what I thought of as a sort of southern direction. The beach was pretty level. The slope rose up alongside my right shoulder. I thought maybe the lake had formed at the bottom of a crater, from rain or run-off. I also thought I’d probably be wiser to climb my way out of the hole, away from flesh damaging spray, only I’d noticed something about the shore.
I had to go down on my hands and knees to be sure. The grit was damp, the sand beneath wet. The moisture immediately blistered my palms. I hissed, rocking back up to a squat, barely remembering not to stick my fingers in my mouth. I hated to think what the lake water would do to my tongue.
My watering eyes hadn’t deceived. What I saw made me forget the pain in my hands. Drag marks in the gravel, and where the sand was brushed free of shale, bare foot prints, and not your ordinary pleasant-stroll-on-the-beach picture-book prints. Deep, wicked-looking claw marks scored the ground.
“Found you!” Triumphant, I Gathered starlight for a better study.
Only, the starlight didn’t come. For the first time in my life the Cant failed. I could feel the magic buzz on the tips of my fingers, but instead of exploding into life it fizzled away, like a Fourth of July rocket with a bad fuse, all anticipation and no explosion.
I tried three more times before I gave up.
“Well, crap.”
I’d been born a Fay prince in a mortal world. I’d never been without the reassurance of innate power. Maybe I’d felt a little sorry for humans, that lesser race who couldn’t summon fire with a word, or turn an especially annoying family member into a frog, if only for a few hours.
The sidhe are a prideful folk. What had Aine called humans? Insects. And useless.
Now it appeared I was no more than a useless bug, and shit-out-of-luck.
“Okay. Okay, right.”
Maybe I panicked a little. Maybe it was growing way too dark to see, and it was getting harder and harder to breath, and if I couldn’t have my magic, I really wanted my Glock, but I’d left the pistol on the other side with Lolo, because I hadn’t planned ahead.
Rookie mistake. Real rookie mistake, Win.
I wasn’t sure whether that was Siobahn or Bran’s voice my subconscious was borrowing, but they were both right. I always plan ahead. It’s how I survive.
I crouched on the sand, arms wrapped around my chest, maybe shivering a little, maybe trying to convince myself that it wasn’t magic or iron bullets that made me fierce. That it was quick thinking and a thick skull that’s kept me alive in the D.C. underground for the last decade, the Dread Host on my tail.
Only, I’ve never been particularly good at pep talks, and I just couldn’t get this one to fly. Truth is, I might have shuddered there on the beach until the fog etched my skin from my bones and my lungs bubbled with poison, except as the moon gleamed its last effort, somewhere down the shore someone sounded the Horn.
It felt like my heart jumped into my throat, and not because the sound was clear and lovely and real. It rang in my ears, loud as I’d always imagined the carol of church bells, but it was more than music I’d forgotten, it was a family legend, and it was a call no sidhe could ignore.
The Queen’s Horn. Once Finvarra’s, it was herald and threat and summons all at once. Even without my magic it was a trumpet I couldn’t resist; my blood pounded in response.
I staggered to my feet and half-shuffled, half-ran toward the repeating blast. In the dark I stumbled and fell several times, scraping my already tender palms. I don’t know how long the call lasted, or how many times the Horn sounded. I do know the spell lasted even after I couldn’t run anymore and I had to crawl like a worm over the shale, helpless to refuse.
Eventually my strength gave out and I lay curled on the ground. The Horn still pulled, a string to my very center. I had just enough sense to do what I should have done in the first place: I yanked my coat over my head, and pressed my fists hard against my ears, stuffing fabric into my ear canal.
It worked, the way biting the inside of your cheek works when you can’t reach into your boot and scratch that insane itch on the bottom of your foot. Which is to say, I managed to muffle the sound, but I couldn’t block the Horn completely.
I’m not sure how much time passed before the dark landscape grew silent. I know when I came back to my senses I was face down on rock, my fingers still stuffed in my ears. Cramps knotted every muscle in my body, and I had sand in my mouth; I could feel the poisonous grains eating into my tongue.
“Winter. Get up.”
Something grabbed me under the elbow, and hauled me upright out of the sand. The part of me that had grown up in the Metro chasing ghouls knew it was time for heroics. My adrenaline surged, but I could barely sway on two feet, and I couldn’t see at all. Simply breathing was an impossible, painful task.
I knew I was dying. Instead of angry, or defeated, or even scared, I just felt stupid. Really stupid.
“Winter! Pay attention, child!”
I’d heard that voice in that tenor in my skull for most of my life. I’d learned better than to ignore it.
“Gabby?”
“This way.” The grip on my elbow tightened, supporting my weight. I knew it hurt badly, that pressure against my blistering flesh, but the pain was growing distant, and I couldn’t drum up enough energy to care.
“Hurry, Winter. Walk!”
That made me giggle, because I couldn’t even feel my feet. In fact, my entire body seemed a foolish thing, too heavy for use, too much work to tend. A few gentle wriggles and I would float free.
Gemreidh! She slammed me back into my almost-corpse, built an invisible wall around the bit that was me, and filled the rest of my head with Gabbiness. Then she made my body walk, a puppet to her strings.
She’d never done such a thing before; she’d never had the strength to even Summon a slice of pepperoni from my plate to her tiny paws. And I know she’d tried.
It took a powerful Cant to possess someone so easily. My father might have managed, but I’m pretty sure it’s beyond even Siobahn’s skill. Before Gabby had forgotten how to be sidhe, before she’d become mouse, she’d been aes si, a skilled sorcerer, valued beyond gold and jewels in the Fairy Court.
I hated being locked away in my own head. I fought with everything I was to break free, but my magic is nothing compared to an aes si. Our roles were reversed; I was the mouse scratching on the prison wall.
“I’m sorry, Winter. It’s the only way.”
I heard honest regret, but also determination. She knew what she did was loathsome, but she wasn’t going to let me free. This was far worse a betrayal than when my mother stole my hearing.
Gabby was taking all of me. And I’d never loved Siobahn as I did the aes si.
I howled, all rage and disbelief and insult.
“Oh, child,” Gabby sighed, ineffably weary.
Then she snuffed me out.
I inched back to wakefulness under my own power, and immediately wished I hadn’t. My lungs were on fire; my mouth and tongue swelling toward asphyxiation, my eyes crusted shut. I clutched blindly at my throat, clawing against strangulation.
“Drink this. Quickly.”
At least this time she gave me a choice. Obedient in desperation, I opened my mouth. Someone poured sweet, warm liquid onto my tongue. The drink stung like liquor when it swirled around my teeth, then, impossibly, began to sooth.
“Swallow,” Gabby ordered.
I tried. I choked, gagging the draiochta back up and all over my chin. The potion hurt worse than Cold Fire on my suppurating flesh, but it healed even as it stung.
“More,” I begged.
A cup touched my lips. This time I was able to swallow a mouthful, then a large gulp. The draiochta bubbled as it ran down my throat and into my gut, but this time I kept it down. All at once my throat unlocked. My lungs eased. I could almost take a full breath.
“Good. Now your face.”
A wet cloth soothed my fingers. Another pair of hands helped me lift the cloth to my face. Gingerly I rubbed it over my cheeks, and across my eyes. The potion felt unbelievably horrible and indescribably wonderful at the same time. Groaning, I pressed the cloth into the corners of my eyes.
“Bless us.” I could hear the rush of relief behind Gabby’s sigh. “Your mother always said you were my punishment, Gemreidh, but I never thought I’d been so wicked. How many times have I watched you almost die, child?”
“Three times. Maybe four.” My lips still felt floppy. I rubbed the cloth carefully against my mouth. “I’m stubborn. But I thought I’d killed you, Mistress.” Tears leaked between my sticky lids. I let them fall.
“Child.” Hands cupped my trembling fingers. “It takes more than a jump between worlds to kill this old woman.”
Wary, I opened my eyes. Even though I’d felt her touch, I still expected the mouse. Instead I sat almost nose to nose with an unfamiliar fay elder.
Mistress. Wise-woman. Wizard. Aes si. Before she’d earned exile for conspiring against the Fairy Court, Gabriel had been advisor to Kings and Queens, valued for her powerful magics and her treasure trove of old sidhe knowledge.
I’d known her always and only as white mouse with a granny’s protective nature and a preference for ‘healthy’ teas.
I couldn’t help myself; I scooted back away from her touch. I don’t like or trust strangers, and I’ve cultivated a really large bubble when it comes to unfamiliar fay; they’re usually half-mad and they’re always dangerous.
Mistress Gabriel pressed her lips together. She huffed slightly. The sound of her disapproval was new, but the wrinkle above her nose belonged to the mouse. I could almost see imaginary whiskers twitch.
I relaxed enough to glance away and look around. Grey rock closed in on either side, behind and in front. A low ceiling almost scraped the top of my head, and I’m not tall, especially when groveling in the dirt.
“Nice hole.” I couldn’t help but notice the bright ball of Gathered starlight glowing merrily against the ceiling. “Bit of a step down from Metro. Where are we going to put the fridge?”
Gabby huffed again. She was tall, taller than me, taller than Siobahn, maybe even taller than my father, and Malachi was the oldest sidhe I’d known. Gabby had to curl in on herself beneath the rock ceiling. She looked uncomfortable.
But alive. Very much alive.
I grinned, and it hurt, but it was better than the tears, and I couldn’t stop.
“A good rat knows when to hide. Small spaces work best.” She shook her head, at herself, I thought. “And this one is far enough away from the lake that the air is breathable.”
She’d plaited her long white hair into a single braid down her back, and conjured white robes to match. Her right wrist was bound in the same fabric, the make-shift bandage still red and bloody.
“Christ, you’re hurt! I thought you were dead.” I knew I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe I was managing to smile and weep all at the same time, maybe I was falling into a few ragged pieces. I reached for a simple Healing Cant. My magic rose and retreated, useless, there and then not.
“It doesn’t work.” Baffled, I looked up. “I can’t get it to work.”
Gabby nodded. Gloriana created this prison to keep the Dread Host confined. Most sidhemagic is useless here, else they would have freed themselves long before you accidentally ripped a hole between worlds.”
“Most?” I echoed. The Gathered starlight in the ceiling, no larger than a tennis ball but white and clear, pulsed with Gabby’s heartbeat. And I knew she hadn’t carried that healing draiochta through the Way in her mouse cheeks.
“There are other ways,” she replied, arch.
Gabby rescued me from the streets of D.C. when I was eight. She’d taught me how to survive on trash and hand-outs, in soup-kitchens and YMCA bathrooms. She’d taught me how to fight the sluagh, and she hadn’t laughed when I’d sworn to protect every mortal in the Capitol from the Dread Host’s predatory hunt, even though she must have known as I knew now that it was an impossible task.
Siobahn broke my heart. Gabby healed it. And although her sidhe face was harder to read, I knew when my mentor was talking shit.
“What other ways?” I demanded. She twitched, guilty and, looking across at her bandaged wrist, I understood.
“Blood Magic.” I hissed.
Gabby lifted her chin, defiant, and just missed cracking her skull on the ceiling.
“You were dying, child. And, aye, so was I. We were all but corpses on the sand, and I won’t let your mother say I’ve failed her.”
“My mother hates Blood Magic more than anyone. More than anyone,” I added, “except you.”
My family plus one hundred more sidhe were exiled from Court for protesting the Queen’s casual and careless use of Blood Magic. I’d been maimed because I’d been too young and too proud to resist its temptation. Blood Magic is a perversion of the old, true magic, and like all perversions, it walks hand-in-hand with corruption.
“You should have let us die.” I said, bitter. “Mother won’t forgive us this, not now. Better we’d stayed corpses on the sand.”
Gabby shifted. Grey dust off the rock stained her robes, and blood still ran sluggishly from beneath her bandages.
“Better I’d stayed a mouse in Manhattan,” she retorted. “But you had other plans. There are some stories even Siobahn doesn’t need to hear. We’ll go home, and we won’t speak of this. Ever.”
I stared around the hole, at the walls, at the low ceiling. At the pulsing Starlight, at the scars slowly healing on my hands, at the blood and pus crusted on the discarded rag, my blood and pus.
My jeans and coat were tattered and torn where I’d fallen on sharp rocks trying to answer the Horn’s call. Somewhere I’d lost the knit cap Lolo had given me. My boots were still in one piece, and probably the only shiny thing about the mess that was me.
When I’d fidgeted and wiggled and looked around at everything except my mentor, and finally couldn’t dick around anymore, I met Gabby’s steely regard.
“I’m not going home,” I said.
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