Pas (14 page)

And they died in the most spectacularly messy of ways.

Like balloons filled to bursting, they erupted at the slightest wounds. The seelie were the worst of it. They couldn’t seem to hold themselves together in the brutal cold of the Winter Court. And as soon as they popped, they froze into hideous statues of blood and ice.

The surviving seelie seemed to be making a push for the gates of Niflheimr, but the unseelie were holding them off.

A bloody stalemate.

Niamh flapped hard, sliding over the currents of the wind. The gate drew near.

It was a towering thing, that gate. It must have been almost as tall as the UN building—and that was the tallest structure on Earth these days. Yet it barely covered a fifth of the tower it led into. The castle was so much bigger than Deirdre had realized. She felt tiny in comparison, tiny and helpless, and she wished desperately that she could flame up and fly away.

Instead, Niamh flew faster to reach it, struggling to beat her wings through the paralyzing cold. Even Rhiannon’s harpy skin didn’t protect her from that.

They were falling.

“Faster!” Deirdre shouted, her voice carried away into the frozen night, drowned out by the death-screams of battle.

Niamh tried. She really did.

But then something changed.

Tension rippled through the Winter Court, and the fighting on the crystalline bridge below slowed.

The wind stopped. The gates opened.

And a man stepped onto the bridge.

Deirdre realized who he must have been too late to stop Niamh’s flight. The icy hair, the shimmering sapphire diadem, the heavy velvet robes—it was the gods-damned king of the unseelie, the
real
king, and he was looking right at Deirdre as she descended.

Too late
.

She jammed her heels into Niamh’s flanks, pulling out fistfuls of feathers in an effort to slow her.

“Turn around! Turn around!”

To Niamh’s credit, she tried. She tipped to the left. She tried to wheel away.

But the king lifted his hand.

“Stop,” he said.

Niamh’s wings buckled.

An instant later, they both smashed into the icy bridge, flopping over one another in a tangle of limbs.

Stark and Vidya hit shortly thereafter.

They shored up at the king’s feet.

Deirdre fought to untangle herself from Niamh, reaching deep within herself for the anger and fear to make a fire burn. But the flames didn’t return. She was so very cold, and there was nothing she could do against the king of the unseelie.

Stark came off the ground swinging his fists.

The king flashed forward, effortlessly dodging the blows that should have been too fast for anyone to dodge. His hand closed on Stark’s face. Ice spread over his beard, gripping his eyes, encrusting his ears. “You’re the Alpha,” the king said. “Who’s your Beta?”

Stark didn’t say anything. He barely even glanced at Deirdre.

It was enough.

With a flick of magic, Deirdre was jerked off of the ground, smashed into Stark, and hauled through the gates.

“Bring the others to my dungeon,” the king called over his shoulder.

Unseelie guards swarmed Vidya and Niamh.

The gates of Niflheimr slammed shut behind them all.

The throne room in Niflheimr was nothing like the place where the seelie sidhe kept the Sapling Throne. That had been out on a patio overlooking the ocean, decorated by fountains overflowing with wine, plump vines, and sweet music.

This was more like a machine shop made entirely of ice. Those huge white cogs looked like they should have been ground into powder by the way they turned. Spikes of ice thrust from the ceiling. Metal was embedded into the slick floor. Chains had been frozen into the walls, one end buried while the other end coiled on the ground, tipped by shackles.

The king gestured, and those chains came to life. They slithered around Deirdre’s ankles and wrists.

She was locked down again, just as she had been in Rhiannon’s control.

Stark tested his strength against the bonds when they trapped him. He was too dignified to struggle, but she could tell that he was straining against them with the full force of his muscles by the way his veins bulged and his shoulders trembled.

The chains didn’t break.

Against the full force of an Alpha’s rage, they didn’t even creak.

When the king moved up the stairs at the end of the hall, stalagmites erupted around him, the way that a flower girl paved a path for a bride. They grew taller and taller as he ascended. When he finally reached the apex of the throne room, looking down on Deirdre and Stark from a hundred feet above, a glorious seat had grown out of the palace. It shimmered like gemstones. It was cruelly sharp, as though it could cut Deirdre’s eyes just by looking at it.

The throne stretched toward him, yearning for his touch.

The king didn’t sit. He stood beside it, hand resting lightly on the arm. He surveyed them with chilly golden eyes that looked like December’s full moon.

“Cooper,” Stark said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

The king—Cooper, such a common name for a king—didn’t reply. His nostrils flared as he scented the air.

His hair was frosted underneath the diadem, but he didn’t look cold. He wore his raiment with confidence. Unlike the King of the Summer Court, who had seemed uncomfortable in the trappings of royalty, Cooper was a king down to the marrow. Deirdre wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his bones were made of the same ice spears that decorated the hall.

The entire wall beyond him was clear glass, permitting Deirdre a clear view of the motionless ocean beyond. The faintest hint of light glowed on the horizon. It was high noon at the Arctic Circle during winter, just barely touched by sunlight.

“Someone fill me in,” Deirdre said. “If you’re holding Niflheimr, then how the hell is Rhiannon laying claim to the Winter Court?”

The king’s eyes were chillingly empty, distant. “I don’t care what she’s saying on Earth. I don’t care about anything on Earth. What have you done to my queen?”

“I didn’t do anything to her,” Deirdre said.

“I smell her flesh on your hands.”

Deirdre had touched the queen’s body, searching for injuries that didn’t exist. She had abandoned the body itself in Original Sin.

“It was the sluagh,” Stark said.

Cooper’s gaze intensified. “She didn’t.”

Stark seemed to understand what he was asking. “She did. Her last request was to kill Rhiannon. I’m here to make her wish come true.”

“Her last request,” Cooper echoed.

The king paced away from them to look out the windows at the vast, frozen ocean. He was a beautiful man against the stark landscape of the Winter Court. He was frosty, a creature who belonged on that throne of ice, and as intense as a blizzard while remaining as quiet as the night after snowfall.

When he spoke again, his voice cracked.

“Do you mean that she’s dead?”

“Her body might live somewhere,” Stark said. “Her soul doesn’t.”

Cooper didn’t react to that news except to press one hand against the crystalline window. Frost curled from his fingers, creating swirling patterns like veins that spread toward the edges of the windows.

“No.” He clenched his hand into a fist, slamming it into the window. “
No
.”

“She died trying to take the sluagh down. She sacrificed herself to stop a terrible monster,” Deirdre said, unsure if it would help at all. She doubted it. Nothing had helped her when she learned about her father’s death—even knowing that he had been leaving to search for her, trying to help his daughter.

There was no warning that the king was about to break. He smashed his fist into the glass again with a roar. His hand punched straight through it.

The whole wall fractured. It exploded into a snowy powder, raining down on the ocean below.

He whirled on them, face contorted as he screamed, deep lines carved into his tortured features. His fists shook and the entire castle shook with him.

Magic coursed through Niflheimr. The floor rumbled under Deirdre’s knees, and panic swelled inside of her. She hoped that fear might funnel into her phoenix powers—might make her capable of shapeshifting, melting her shackles, and beating an escape. But fear only made her flame gutter and die.

The walls cracked. The sound echoed all around them, like being inside of a bell smashed in a car compactor.

Deirdre heard something snap. She threw herself to the left, bumping into Stark’s shoulder, just in time for an icicle to crash into the place she had been kneeling.

One by one, the stairs popped free of each other, cobwebbing with cracks.

Another wall broke. Tumbled off into the ocean. It exposed them to the howling wind, which blasted with new furor, fed by the rage of the king.

It was so cold. Everything was cold.

Everything
hurt
.

Cooper silenced suddenly.

And then he was standing in front of them, tall and glowing with his grief, skin shimmering and jewel-like.

The king fisted a hand in Stark’s hair, jerking his skull back so that the bear wolf had to look at him. “What happened to the sluagh? Where is it?” Ice flowered from his fingers where they were embedded in Stark’s shaggy hair, spreading over his temples. “Devouring Ofelia could have only made it stronger!”

“Let me go,” Stark said. His voice resonated with compulsion.

Oh gods.
He was trying to compel the king of the unseelie. A faerie so powerful that he could shatter the whole castle around them with his grief, who had been worthy of marriage to the ridiculously powerful queen.

And Stark was trying to
compel
him.

Cooper’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be considering Stark’s order.

“Royal blood,” he said. “You’re from the Brotherhood—but you’re so much older than the others. You must have been the first of them.”

Stark tensed. “What?”

“You’re unseelie. I should have seen it.” There was so much turmoil behind Cooper’s golden eyes, like the entire force of the Winter Court’s storm was trapped inside his skull. “I understand why she would have saved you to preserve the line, but I’d rather you and the entire Brotherhood have died a thousand times than lose my mate.”

Deirdre wanted to ask him what he meant—what the hell the “Brotherhood” was. But Cooper looked like he was on the brink of bringing all of Niflheimr crashing down around them. She didn’t dare speak.

“I’m not unseelie,” Stark said.

“You’ve got one of our talents.” Cooper’s fist tightened. Stark’s frozen hair snapped off. “What beast are you? Dire wolf? Sabertooth?”

Stark’s face reddened. “I’m not unseelie!”

“Bear wolf,” Deirdre said. “He’s a bear wolf.”

Both pairs of eyes turned on her. It was an uncomfortable feeling, having both of those powerful, unhinged men focused on her.

“Bear wolf and phoenix,” Cooper said. “Okay.” His fingers uncurled from Stark’s hair. “Okay.”

He gestured.

The chains released them.

“You’ll kill Rhiannon,” he said. “Kill her for me…for Ofelia.” He only took two steps away from them before stumbling over his own feet. He spilled to the floor, his robes swirling around him. He cradled his forehead in his hands. “Ofelia. God,
Ofelia.
”

Stark tossed the chains aside. “Tell me where Rhiannon is and I’ll rip her throat out.” Cooper didn’t immediately respond. Anger seized Stark, and he strode toward the king. “Tell me!”

Deirdre grabbed his shoulder. “Stop it,” she hissed. “Can’t you see he’s in pain? And about a thousand times more powerful than we are?”

He glared at her from inches away, and Deirdre realized that Cooper wasn’t the only one in pain.

Being told that he was sidhe, just like Rhiannon had said, might have been the straw that broke Stark’s composure.

“I don’t know where Rhiannon is. I’ve had Niflheimr locked down since Ofelia went missing,” Cooper said without rising from the floor. “I wanted to preserve everything for her until…” He trailed off.

With an unpleasant lurch, Deirdre realized that Cooper’s hands were turning blue.

Not frostbite-blue. Ice-blue.

His fingertips melted into the floor of the throne room as he kneeled there.

“Where is she?” Stark demanded.

“Search her quarters,” Cooper said. “She was friends with Ofelia. She had a room beside ours. Search it.”

“Are the girls there? My daughters?”

But now the icy pallor had crawled all the way up Cooper’s elbows, consuming his biceps, his shoulders, his throat. It swept quickly down his body.

Only his face remained human, and only for a moment.

“Don’t you dare run,” Stark said.

“Niflheimr is yours,” Cooper said. “Kill her.” Ice cracked as he turned to look at Deirdre. “Open the sluagh wide. Only you can free them all and return them to the natural cycle of rebirth.”

“Open it?”

The ice consumed the last of his features.

There was nothing living left in him. Nothing that vaguely resembled a human being, and nothing that could answer Deirdre’s question.

A pulse rocked Niflheimr, like a heart beating in its depths. The walls shook. The floor jumped under Deirdre’s feet, hard enough that she almost fell.