Siobhan thought about trolls and how sensitive they were to sound. It was possible this fae was similar and the noises of a modern city like New York were proving to be overwhelming for it. That was the only logical reason she could think of as to why it wasn’t on a rampant killing spree, making up for the seven human lifetimes her family had kept it locked up on the other side. It would take one hell of a distraction to put a monster of its size off a mission for bloodshed.
As it cupped its ears and kicked at the felled tree, Siobhan saw her opening. “Here goes nothing.” She held the bow and without a moment of hesitation let an arrow fly. She was already loading a second arrow when the first struck home, lodging itself in the monster’s exposed neck. It bellowed and jerked its head towards her, black eyes searching the empty space for its attacker. “You might want to get your gun ready,” Siobhan said. “Shit, as you so politely phrased it, is about to hit the fan.”
The second arrow sank into the creature’s skull, a direct shot through the ear. Shane sucked in a breath, and they both watched, expecting the beast to collapse. Instead it ripped the arrow out and hurled it into the air where it bounced as lightly as a toothpick off a still-standing tree.
The fae might have been distracted by sensory overload, but it wasn’t physically weakened.
Siobhan was loading another arrow and Shane readying his machine gun when the monster spotted their location. Though they hadn’t seen any new bodies, it must have eaten
something
because it was towering over twenty-five feet with forearms almost as big as Shane and legs so thick a lumberjack wouldn’t be able to hack them down.
“We’re supposed to kill this thing?” Shane asked.
“Ideally we just need to bring it down. If we can get it to stay in one place long enough, I can banish it back alive.”
The beast was charging for them, its steps so wide it would be on them in seconds.
“Hey, Red?”
“Yeah?” Siobhan’s bow hand was steady, her sights trained on the creature’s eyes.
“For what it’s worth…”
She glanced at him, a quick shift of her gaze, and he was smiling his dopey, charming grin at her. How the idiot could still seem so adorable an instant before certain death was beyond comprehension. But she sort of wanted to keep him around awhile longer.
“I know,” she replied. “Me too.”
She released the arrow while still looking at Shane, turning her attention back to the monster with enough time to see the metal arrowhead lodge deep into its eye. The fae took a wild, blind swing in their direction, and Shane tackled Siobhan to the ground a second before the top halves of the trees surrounding them were broken off like dry kindling.
There was no more time to say anything. He dragged her to her feet, and they ran through the tree line that skirted the clearing. The fae continued to whack at the earth and trees in an attempt to hit them, but with one eye out of service it kept striking a moment too late or a few feet off target.
Siobhan knew what she had to do.
“I need you to distract it,” she commanded.
Shane pulled her over a fallen tree and said nothing, so she wasn’t sure if he’d heard her. Looking beside her, she expected him to be running at her heels, but he wasn’t. Instead he slowed his pace, pushed her farther ahead of him and ran into the clearing spraying bullets at the creature’s knees. She was fairly certain he was singing something as well, but the sound of his voice was lost beneath the bellowing of their target as it flailed.
He’d definitely heard her, because there was no way on earth the creature would be focused anywhere else but on the tiny, irritatingly loud man pelting it with automatic-weapon fire.
Shane ran, dodging the collapsed trees as best he could but stumbling where he failed to see branches in the darkness. The fae was gaining ground, giving Siobhan a scant amount of time to do what she needed to. She followed the path around the outside of the clearing while tracking Shane and the monster, trying to judge where they’d be a few seconds before they got there.
She spotted a tree several yards ahead and picked up her pace, making a break across the clearing to reach it. Clambering up the low-hanging branches, she steadied herself on one of the arms and pivoted, taking aim at the fae’s remaining good eye. Her previous arrow was still lodged deep in its head, and her next target was a wildly blinking black orb.
She pulled back to fire, and the branch she was perched on snapped.
Siobhan scrambled to hold on to the tree before hitting the ground, latching her legs around the nearest limb, her upper body still moving until her head smacked hard against the trunk. Now she was dangling upside down, supported only by her thighs’ viselike hold on the tree with her back against the trunk. Her precarious situation wasn’t going to stop the monster from getting to Shane, and she didn’t have time to reposition herself.
Without righting herself, she reloaded the arrow that was still clutched in her hand and took aim, unleashing the projectile from her inverted vantage point. Only once she’d fired did she pull herself up onto the limb her legs had been clinging to.
The fae was shrieking when Siobhan jumped from the tree and landed on the edge of the clearing. Shane—whose machine gun must have run out of bullets—was blowing shotgun pellets into the blood-smeared legs of the creature. Now blind in both eyes, the monster was staggering.
“To your left,” Siobhan screamed, seeing the huge felled tree next to Shane.
He bellowed at the fae and vaulted across the trunk. The fae whipped its hands in front of it, giant clawed fingers cutting through the air, narrowly missing Shane’s legs as he got out of the way. The beast continued to move towards Shane, but as Siobhan had hoped, it didn’t see the log and stumbled. Briefly it looked as though it might regain its footing, but with four legs tripping at once, the imbalance proved to be too much, and it was impossible for the fae to stay standing.
Shane was almost crushed beneath the falling body but managed to sidestep in time and only took a hard smack to the ribs from the fae’s knuckles as it attempted to brace its fall.
They still had to move fast. Siobhan didn’t know how long it would be before the fae recuperated, and she wanted it to be banished before that happened. Under normal circumstances she would cut out the thing’s heart, but she knew trying to saw the organ out would take more time than she had. She’d have to make due with the plain old regular blood.
Her ceremonial knife was out, and in the presence of fae blood was already glowing brightly and creating artificial daylight within the clearing.
“Girl,” growled the fae. “What are you going to do?” It sounded almost worried.
“Doing what you should have let me do before it got this far. I have to send you home.” Siobhan cut into one of its tangled red hind legs, whetting her blade’s appetite for blood and making the blue light grow brighter.
“It’s nothing like I remember it.” The creature’s rumbling voice sounded sad, resigned.
“Nothing can stay the same for that long.”
“I have,” it said.
She began to draw a circle around the fae’s body. “I’m sorry.” Though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologizing for.
“You’ve sent back hundreds of our kind dead. Why are you not killing me?”
“They left me no choice. You’re leaving me a choice.”
“I wanted to lay your world to ruin.”
The circle was half complete. “Then I’m doing my job. But I can do it without killing you.”
She was only a few feet away from where she’d begun, muttering the Gaelic words she knew by heart.
“I used to be feared. They thought me a god.” The fae’s voice was strained, thick with pain.
Siobhan cut her finger, and as the drop of blood fell, she thrust her knife into the ground, binding the circle. Light flooded outward, but with it came a large clawed hand. In the silence of the vacuum created by her spell, she hadn’t heard the monster cry out. She’d been lulled so thoroughly by the fae’s defeated tone and the sadness in its voice she had believed the monster had given up. Before the banishing could be finished, the creature took its parting shot at Siobhan, running razor-sharp claws over her abdomen even as its body faded out of reality.
Just like the goblin had gotten Percy, she too had been undone by putting her guard down too soon, by trying not to kill something instead of doing what she’d been trained to do.
The banishing was complete and the clearing was left empty. Siobhan took one look at Shane, then down to her seeping stomach wounds.
“I…” She was able to speak but found herself without words.
The lights of the city she’d learned to love blotted out one by one. Her last thought as she crumpled to the ground was,
At least I completed the circle
.
Chapter Sixteen
Shane wasn’t good at giving a shit about people.
Not since his real family had shown him love was a fool’s errand. Not since Wanda died and showed him people who care about you will always leave. So his first instinct was to take Siobhan’s body to a hospital and bail.
He got to the hospital entrance and froze.
It wasn’t that he thought he loved Siobhan. It had been such a long time since he’d allowed for the possibility, he didn’t know if he could feel that way about someone again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever loved his wife, which was a big part of the reason they weren’t married now.
But Siobhan was different.
She’d asked for his help, even needed it. But she’d never been dependent on him. He wasn’t her reason for getting out of bed in the morning. She was strong, and she was independent, and God help him, he couldn’t just leave her.
He needed to be there for her, especially now that she couldn’t ask him for his help.
He
wanted
to be there for her.
A doctor came running out of the hospital doors, shouting instructions at a nurse while asking Shane to explain what had happened to her.
“Something in the park,” Shane muttered, as they pulled Siobhan’s limp form out of his arms. “Looked like a fucking lion.”
Hours later—when Siobhan came to—she wasn’t expecting to be alive.
First she assumed she’d moved into the Afterlands to be scolded by her ancestors for eternity about what a bad little druid she’d been. After a moment of consciousness, she figured she must be in Hell. Why else would her stomach be filled with stinging scorpions and everything be bathed in fluorescent light? Surely Hell was solely illuminated by fluorescent bulbs.
Then she saw Shane.
He was fast asleep with his head on her mattress, his lanky frame folded in half and crammed into an uncomfortable-looking chair. There was an orange sucker half-hanging out of his mouth, and he had one hand protectively clamped on her leg.
He was snoring.
“Shane?” Her voice was rough, and she found it difficult to speak. She wanted water.
“Unh?”
“Shane, wake up.”
Finally processing what was happening, Shane snapped his head up, the sucker falling from his mouth and onto the floor. “Red?”
“Hey,” she said, still groggy. “What happened?”
“You almost died.”
“Did I…? Did the…?” Seeing a plastic pitcher next to her bedside, she nodded towards it, unable to raise her arms easily. He got to his feet and poured water into a paper cup, holding it to her lips so she could drink. The room-temperature water tasted better than anything she’d ever had. Once her throat no longer felt like it was coated in sandpaper, she spoke again. “The banishment?”
“It’s gone. You did it.”
Siobhan heaved a sigh of relief. When she placed a hand on her stomach, she gasped from the sudden shock of the pain. The scorpions swirled and jabbed at her.
“Hey, hey…gentle.” Shane lifted her hand and set it by her side, keeping it cupped in his own. “You’re lucky, you know. It didn’t get anything serious, but you lost a lot of blood. And I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who got that many stitches at one time. They even took care of the bump on your noggin you got the first time it hit you.”
She smiled weakly. The reminder of her head wound made the pain flare up anew. “Can you turn off the light?”
She remembered the first night she’d had him in her bed, when she’d tortured him with her lamp. This would have been the perfect moment for revenge, but Shane didn’t seem to have any interest in tormenting her.
“Sure.” He released her hand and flipped a switch on the wall. The overhead lights went out, but there were recessed lights that remained on, casting a cold blue glow over the room.
After a long pause, Siobhan said, “You sticking around?”
Shane took her hand again. “You want me to?”
She closed her eyes, trying to block out the searing pain the small lights caused her. “I don’t have much left. My people—well, what’s left of them—won’t want anything to do with me after this.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I still need to defend the gate. The fae won’t stop coming. And I have to make sure something like that monster never gets out again.”
“You don’t need to justify yourself, Red. I kill vampires, remember?”