“If you attended Stark’s graduation from boot camp, then you might recognize me.” Vidya slipped Brother Marshall’s robe off of her shoulder to expose a tattoo of the Marines seal. “I was there with him, before Genesis. Me, Stark, and—”
“Melchior,” Sascha said. “I didn’t think any of you survived the skirmish in Bahrain.”
“I’m difficult to kill,” Vidya said.
While they spoke, Deirdre wandered through the stables, examining the horses and their surroundings. She knew that the sluagh could show up at any moment, yet she’d found herself at an estate with Everton Stark’s family name on it. She was with Stark’s brother. She could have answers to every question that had ever crossed her mind about him.
There was no way in heck she’d rush out of there.
“He’s rich,” Deirdre said, startling herself. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud.
“We’ve done well,” Sascha said. He almost looked embarrassed. “Our parents got lucky in the dot com boom.”
“You’ve got an
estate
.”
“And we attended private schools, with private tutors, and we have trust funds. I’m determined to use my wealth to give back.”
“Your brother uses his wealth to run a rebellion,” Deirdre said.
“It takes more than similar blood to be family with someone,” he said.
There was no mystery as to why Sascha might have given his brother up to the unseelie. He didn’t think much of Stark’s terrorist proclivities. He wanted to save horses and chickens and fluffy little lambs while Stark traveled the country compelling people to acts of murder.
Deirdre didn’t expect to be disgusted by the idea of using his money for charity. Saving animals should have made her happy. But Sascha Stark could have done more with his money—more to help gaeans.
He didn’t need to, though. Genesis had left him mundane.
“I’m guessing Stark joined the Marines so he wouldn’t feel indebted to you people,” Deirdre said.
“Actually, it was because of
her
.” Sascha turned off the water to the trough. He stroked the neck of a horse as it drank deeply. His hands were so much gentler than his brother’s.
“Vidya?”
“Rhiannon,” he said. “He got tangled up with her. That piece of trash.”
Deirdre didn’t even like the woman, but her hackles lifted at a man referring to her as trash. This rich man in his manor surrounded by beautiful pastures with so much money he could throw it at animals and still feed himself. “How did he meet her?”
“She was entrenched with the local gangs. Mafia. Something like that, I don’t know. I stayed away from her. She came to us for an internship, but we rejected her because of her ties to a crime syndicate. Ever, though—he was entranced. He followed Rhiannon when she left the interview and never came back. Getting him enlisted in the military seemed like the fastest way to get him away from her.”
“They threatened to take his trust fund if he didn’t enlist,” Vidya added.
“We thought we were saving his life,” Sascha said.
“Did you think that summoning the unseelie if he tried to hide out at home with you would save his life, too?” Deirdre asked.
Sascha took a few steps back, until the mass of his body was hidden behind the horse’s. It didn’t make her think any better of him, that he would use a vulnerable creature as cover against an unidentified shapeshifter like Deirdre. “I thought it might save mine.”
Brother Marshall glanced out the window at the dark sky. “We don’t have much time. Give it to me.” He extended a hand toward Sascha. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Sascha pulled boxes of medicine and tools out of cabinets against the wall, then fished a sphere out from behind them. It was marked with sidhe runes. Deirdre recognized them because they’d taken an identical artifact off of Chadwick Reynolds.
She snatched it out of his hand.
“I hope you feel good about yourself,” Deirdre said. She lobbed the sphere to Brother Marshall, who caught it easily.
“You didn’t see what Ever used to do under Rhiannon’s influence. You’d make the same choices I have if you did,” Sascha said.
“Like the fact that he ordered someone to hide his daughters?”
His eyes filled with burning intensity. “The girls. Do you know where they are?”
“No. Do you?”
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “I wish I did. My parents and I want nothing more than to bring them home to us so we can take care of them.”
“I thought it took more than similar blood to be family,” Deirdre said.
“It does,” Sascha said. “But they deserve the chance to become part of ours. They deserve better than Rhiannon and Ever.”
“This is interesting and all, folks, but I’m not here for family drama. I’m gonna go ahead and change this so that it will take us directly to Stark.” Brother Marshall wedged his fingernails into the runes on the sidhe stone. “It’s keyed in to him already. It won’t be difficult. And I can use the pieces I break off to make a tool that will bring us back as well.”
“Then do it,” Deirdre said.
“If you bring the girls back to me, we can take care of them,” Sascha said. “We can keep them safe.”
She turned from Sascha, unable to bring herself to respond. The sight of him made her so angry. But why? Because he reminded her of his brother, whom she already felt so angry at? Because he had betrayed Stark? Because he was another reminder that there were people in this world living in paradise—people who were no different from Deirdre aside from a stroke of luck that had birthed them into a higher class?
Stark had come from that higher class, too. Yet he’d been reborn a gaean. A shifter. And not one of Rylie’s privileged beings, but one of the dregs of society.
He knew both perspectives, and he’d chosen to side with the lower class for justice.
That had to mean something.
Deirdre needed to believe that the man she had chosen to follow into the depths of Hell was still inside of Stark. She needed to believe he’d started the revolution because he believed in it, just as she did, and that he would come back to Earth once he realized how much they suffered without him.
She needed to believe in Everton Stark.
Brother Marshall hunkered down with the sidhe stone, and Deirdre paced, watching the windows. Watching for the attack she knew was coming.
The horses balked when Deirdre passed them, sensing the animal within her. They nickered. Whinnied.
“I think that’s part of what drove him nuts in the end,” Sascha said. “That reaction. It killed him that he couldn’t ride his horses after Genesis.”
That got Deirdre’s attention. “Stark? Everton Stark? He likes to ride horses?”
“He did dressage. Look…” Sascha took a photo off of one of the higher shelves, blowing dust off of the glass. He gave it to Deirdre.
The younger Everton Stark had no beard. He was a short, lean man on horseback, every inch the wealthy gentleman. His Andalusian had its knees lifted in the photograph, caught mid-dance. “Ever loved the control, the relationship with the horse. He prided himself on that. He stopped when Rhiannon entered his life and became this thing I couldn’t even recognize.”
Deirdre opened the back of the frame. She took the photo out. “This is mine now.” She wasn’t sure why she wanted it. She just felt like it was important.
“You might as well have it. Our parents have gotten rid of every other picture of him by now. Everything that survived Genesis—which wasn’t much.”
“You and your family shun him, and you act surprised when he goes rogue,” Deirdre said.
“He’s a murderer. What would you have done?”
“Incoming,” Vidya said. She stood in the open doors to the pastures, looking out at the dark evening. She whipped Brother Marshall’s robes off over her head, exposing her bare chest and emerging wings.
It was darker than it should have been, even at this time of morning. There were more than clouds on the horizon. There was a deep blackness that slid toward them, making the grass vanish.
Deirdre flashed back to Genesis. To the black void that had devoured her elementary school and everyone inside it. To the shadows that consumed her while she screamed under the blackberry bushes.
This wasn’t the Genesis void.
If possible, it was something even worse.
“Sluagh.” She whirled on Brother Marshall. “We have to go. Open a hole to the Middle Worlds.”
“It’s not ready yet,” he said. “It’s not easy for me to manipulate sidhe magic without destroying it. Hold the sluagh off for a few minutes.”
“Hold it off?
Hold it off?
” He might as well have asked her to hold a hurricane at bay. Deirdre shoved Sascha toward the rear of the stables. “Run. Get out of here.”
He hesitated. “What is it?”
“Death,” Deirdre said. “Worse than death. You can’t do anything about it.”
“The horses,” he said.
“Would you rather die with them?”
Sascha didn’t need more prompting. He ran through the rear doors of the stable, leaving them swinging open in the wind as he sprinted for the manor.
The sluagh didn’t roar as it approached like the Genesis void had. It screamed. Deirdre could hear the wailing echoing over the pastures, and she wondered how many souls it had added to its morass since the failed execution. How many were members of the OPA? How many were innocent gaeans?
So many people damned because of Rhiannon and Deirdre.
Deirdre gazed at it helplessly through the window. The grass was dying under the icy spray of the sluagh’s fluids. Sascha’s horses weren’t going to have anything to graze on soon, assuming they survived.
Another scream shattered the air. It was louder than the ones that came out of the sluagh, and far closer.
A mass of feathers slammed into the window just inches from Deirdre. The whole wall shook.
“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said, jerking back.
Niamh shoved the window open from the outside, using her free hand to strip the harpy skin off. “I’m sorry, I tried to get here as fast as I could.” She scrambled into the stables. “The sluagh found me with the vampires at the asylum—it ate a bunch of the murder. Lucifer wasn’t watching me. I thought I could get away and warn you.”
Deirdre helped her through the window, despair swelling within her belly. “You should have escaped!”
Niamh all but collapsed in her arms. The flight to Stark Estates had worn her out, leaving her papery-pale flesh looking downright vampiric. “I had to warn you.”
“But you can’t do anything here except die!”
“Isn’t that what you’d want anyway?” Niamh asked. Her voice was so faint, Deirdre wasn’t sure that’s what she’d really heard.
Stupid harpy
.
“I’ve got the portal!” Brother Marshall announced.
The stable wall broke open.
Lashing tentacles smashed through the stables, slinging icy blood across the stables. The screaming horses banged inside their stalls.
The sluagh was even more terrifying a presence for the animals than the shifters were.
Deirdre couldn’t blame them. Staring into its massive body, she felt pretty damn terrified herself. It seemed to have grown to twice the size it had been outside the United Nations earlier that night, glutted on gaean souls. The skeletons within the darkness were clawing at themselves. Writhing in ultimate misery.
The one thing that could definitely kill a phoenix for good.
But the sheer size of the sluagh was their saving grace at the moment. It could only reach a few limbs into the stable, unable to squeeze its body through the wall. It would need to open a bigger gap to reach them.
Hundreds of tentacles and bony hands beat at the siding, ripping it away.
Vidya extended her wings and leaped in to engage it. She moved like a tornado, whirling through the air to slice the sluagh apart.
She severed its limbs easily, but the sluagh wasn’t deterred. It didn’t even try to fight back. It just kept tearing at the stables, faster and faster, peeling it apart like it was trying to reach the rotten core of an onion.
Deirdre dragged Niamh toward Brother Marshall. “Where’s the portal?”
He pointed at an empty patch of air behind him. “There.”
She couldn’t see anything, but that seemed to be typical of sidhe portals.
“Come on, Vidya!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”
“I haven’t made the thing to help us return yet,” Brother Marshall said.
“There’s no time,” Deirdre said. “Make it on the other side. We have to go.
Now
.”
“I won’t be able to work unseelie magic on the other side.”
“
What
?”
The roof buckled, showering pieces of the roof over the stalls. Niamh tore free of Deirdre to throw herself at the horses, opening the doors one by one, allowing them to escape.
Deirdre hung beside Brother Marshall’s portal, hesitating. It was only visible because of the absence of debris where it hovered, making the wall behind it shimmer faintly. But she could feel it. The frigid air blasted her, and she knew that the cold was coming.
Gods, but Deirdre hated the cold.
A scream drew her gaze over her shoulder. Niamh had ripped one of the posts off of a stall with preternatural strength and swung it at the sluagh like a club. An icy tentacle had closed around it, and now frost crawled over her hands.
Was she stupid? Why wasn’t she running?
“Brother Marshall?” Deirdre asked, edging closer to the portal.
“Almost done,” he said. He had squeezed himself against the wall, as far from the sluagh as possible. His fingers rushed over the glimmering sidhe stone. It illuminated his face from underneath, revealing worry, but not panic.
Vidya dodged an attack from the sluagh, putting herself within Deirdre’s reach.
“Get to the Winter Court!” Deirdre shouted, shoving the valkyrie hard. Vidya’s mouth opened in a cry of protest, but she tipped through the portal and vanished before any sound could come out.
The sluagh punched into the stables.
It was only inches away now.
Deirdre was pinned between it and the portal—no longer capable of running in any direction but the Winter Court.
The wild flailing of its hands snatched at a horse Niamh had been trying to free. Niamh threw herself back from another lashing tentacle. It caught her ankle. Wrapped around her leg.