Deirdre turned on the hilltop, searching for any sign of a hideout—anything bright, a flash of light, some flaring magic, a signal that people might live within the shadowy chill of the Winter Court.
There.
It wasn’t a bright spot on the next hill over, but a dark circle in the shadow beneath a cluster of trees. It might have been an area that the ambient light couldn’t touch.
Or it might have been a cave.
Vidya saw where Deirdre was looking. “I’ll check it out.”
Deirdre couldn’t stand back while the valkyrie scouted. She couldn’t linger on the hilltop with Stark and Niamh and all of the questions that hung in the air between them.
As soon as Vidya flared her wings and took off into the night, she followed, leaping down the mountain.
The other two probably followed, but it didn’t really matter.
As she drew nearer to the dark patch under the trees, Deirdre realized that it was definitely a tunnel leading into the depths of the earth. She only realized how steep it was once she stood on the brink, cold wind wailing at her back and a hollow silence beyond the tips of her toes.
This was it. This was what Stark had been looking for. This was all they needed before they could return to Earth.
Deirdre’s stomach flipped.
Return to Earth, sure…but to where? To the hidden Stark home in South Africa, where he’d kill his servants so they could live off his trust fund in privacy? Or to rescue the gaeans of North America?
A shoulder bumped hers. Stark wasn’t lingering at the mouth of the cave like she did, and he wasn’t stopping to look at her, either. He rammed past her and headed down the steep slope into the unknown.
Was he angry with her? Or just determined to find his daughters?
Deirdre didn’t want to find out.
Vidya followed Stark down. It was Niamh who offered her the tentative smile, cheeks ruddied by the chill. “I’ve got your back,” Niamh said.
Deirdre couldn’t muster even the faintest hint of anger at that.
The sound of the wind chased her all the way down the tunnel. Even once the faint light had vanished, she could still hear the whining, the shriek of a blizzard whistling through the rocks. The further away she got, the more it sounded like the screaming of a child than an actual wind.
A few hundred feet down—or maybe just a few steps, it was hard to tell—she could no longer see Vidya’s razor wings swaying in front of her.
She couldn’t see anything.
It was so dark.
Deirdre kept walking, shuffling her feet so that she’d feel a precipice if she came across one, hands lifted to search for a wall. She wished that she could have summoned her fire again. It would have made everything brighter. She could have lit up the whole damn Winter Court, judging by how crazy a flare she’d been able to summon while intimate with Stark.
But there was nothing for her. Deirdre’s flesh barely smoldered.
A light appeared at the end of the tunnel.
It was such a dim crimson glow that Deirdre thought at first that it was her eyes playing tricks on her. Once she saw the outline of Stark’s silhouette and Vidya’s wings outlined against it, she knew it was real.
The glow flickered.
A flame.
The tunnel twisted, corkscrewing into the earth, and when Deirdre finally turned a sharp corner, she saw the origin of the fire. It wasn’t a fire at all.
It was Melchior.
He rested at the mouth of a cave, lying on the floor, curled into the fetal position with his cheek resting on his hands. His broad, muscular back was splattered with blood. Pale metal glinted between his shoulder blades.
The dragon still had the Ethereal Blade buried in his body.
“Melchior,” Stark growled. He spoke softly, but the words echoed throughout the entire tunnel. He advanced on the resting dragon with new speed, but Vidya barred him with an arm.
“Wait,” she said.
Deirdre stopped beside them. “What?”
Vidya didn’t respond. She was looking deep into the cavern, expression unreadable, brow creased.
Most of the cave looked shockingly mundane. The walls were ragged, carved from the stone without the help of tools. Judging by the rippling patterns, it had probably been magic that had cut it open.
The strange cavern was furnished like a typical bedroom, with two beds along the left-hand wall. One had sheets patterned with soccer balls. Its twin was plainer, with pink sheets trimmed by white lace. An empty laundry basket waited at one footboard, laundry strewn around its base. A dresser with scalloped trim stood beside the other bed.
There were toys in the cave—toys and books, including some things that Deirdre recognized from her time as a young girl before Genesis. The inhabitants of the cave had been reading
The Babysitters Club.
There was a Barbie doll near Melchior’s feet, half of her hair torn from her scalp.
The cave was so long that its rear vanished into the murky depths beyond the bookshelves. Deirdre couldn’t see anything back there. Melchior’s fire wasn’t glowing that brightly. He was barely able to summon any flame to dance over his bare, scaly flesh.
Stark took in the sight of the cave in a breath. And then he was tossing the hide cloak off his shoulders, and Deirdre realized that he had already partially shapeshifted, allowing long claws to thrust from his fingertips where nails should have been.
He advanced on Melchior.
Deirdre noticed the line on the ground too late—a thin line of tiny magical runes.
She threw her hand out to try to stop him. “Wait!”
Stark stepped over the line.
Magic erupted in a protective shell around Melchior, lashing out at Stark in a wave. It crashed over him. Knocked him into the wall, forced him to the floor.
A pair of sidhe appeared at the sound of the magic, running from the cave’s depths.
“Papa!” one cried.
She entered the ring of runes around Melchior without triggering the magic. She dropped to his side, grabbing his arm protectively.
Stark leaped to his feet with a snarl, claws raised to kill.
But then his eyes focused on the two sidhe, who were short and square, completely bald, and had skin the color of a summer lake. Their huge eyes were faceted. They looked like something that should have developed out of the darkest depths of the ocean.
Deirdre drew her gun. Stark grabbed her arm.
“Stop,” he said sharply.
Vidya wasn’t attacking, either.
“What the heck is going on?” Niamh asked.
Once Deirdre saw past the gray-blue flesh and the strange hairlessness of their scalps, she realized that she recognized their stocky builds, their square features.
They looked very much like Rhiannon and Everton Stark.
“Alona and Calla,” she said.
Stark didn’t look surprised at the sight of them.
He had known that they weren’t human. He had always known.
“Who are you?” the younger one asked. She didn’t blink. She couldn’t. She didn’t have eyelids. But she did have long fangs filling her jaw and a bioluminescent antenna dangling from the center of her forehead.
Stark’s daughters.
Deirdre turned to him wonderingly, trying to see him in a new light with this new information.
He’d said that they had been born “wrong,” but she had been imagining some kind of birth defect, not that they could have been born as sidhe. Not before Genesis.
How must they have felt, Rhiannon and Everton, taking their new babies into their arms to see blue skin and fangs? Not just sidhe, but a lower class of sidhe that couldn’t even pass for human?
That was why Stark feared being sidhe rather than a shifter.
He feared that it was his fault his children had been born “wrong.”
“Oh my gods,” Deirdre whispered. She cleared her throat. “Uh, I’m Deirdre. I’m here to save you from—from Melchior.” The dragon that they had called “Papa.”
Alona grabbed Calla, pulling her little sister into the circle beside Melchior, as if to hide her from Deirdre’s horror. “Don’t come any closer,” Alona said. “I’ll blast you all.”
Deirdre believed she could do it. They were flush with elemental seelie magic.
“It’s me,” Stark said. He took two steps toward the circle. “I’m your father.”
“Stop,” Alona said.
She flicked a bolt of magic at him. He jerked to the left, dodging it with a growl. “Did you hear me?” he demanded.
“They heard you.” Rhiannon stepped out of the back of the cave, swathed in cobwebs and ice. Deirdre’s heart plummeted. “They just don’t remember you.”
“Rhiannon,” Stark snarled.
She gave a thin smile. “When was the last time they saw you? Alona was two, and Calla was still suckling at my teat, not even walking. You’re nobody to them.”
It didn’t seem like he was “nobody.” Not exactly.
They wouldn’t have been afraid of him if he’d been nobody.
“Who is he, Ma?” Alona asked. The cute little girl voice lisped through all of the fangs. She enunciated carefully, as though she had been trained to speak as humanly as possible.
“He’s your father, as he said,” Rhiannon said. “Now shut up. The adults are talking.”
Alona paled with fear. She glanced between Melchior’s body and Stark, as though she didn’t understand what she was being told.
They believed that Melchior was their father.
“You have a lot to explain, Rhiannon,” Stark said.
“Yes, we can cover that later. For now, I have a problem,” Rhiannon said. “As you know, I’m a witch, and I can’t be an Alpha on my own. If I show up at the inauguration alone—without the unseelie Alpha—nothing will happen. Melchior will die if I move him out of this cave. He’s useless to me now.”
“Go on,” Stark said.
“Be with me,” Rhiannon said. “I’ll make you my mate so that we can claim the unseelie court together. You’re eligible, after all. And once you become Alpha, I’ll be your Alpha mate.”
Stark bristled. “That’s your offer? I don’t care about the election for Alpha. I don’t care about any of it.”
“That’s not what your Beta said on your behalf.”
Cold washed over Deirdre.
She shook her head, silently beseeching Rhiannon not to tell him about the statement that she had made putting him in the running for Alpha.
Stark turned to her slowly. The look he gave her was one of mingled confusion and suspicion.
“Tombs?”
She didn’t say anything.
Rhiannon wasn’t a stupid woman. She saw the horror in Deirdre’s expression and Stark’s disbelief, and she knew she had hit on something critical. An unpleasant smile curved over her lips. “You must have already been in the Winter Court to hunt for my blood when she made the announcement. I assumed you’d told her to do it—keep affairs running in your absence. Didn’t you tell her to campaign for you?”
No, Stark had told Deirdre that he wasn’t going to participate in any election, and she wasn’t supposed to take action to change that. He had been very clear about it.
Furthermore, he had been clear that Deirdre was supposed to have died if she defied him.
His confusion only lasted a heartbeat. And then he understood.
Melchior, a dragon, could only be compelled by Stark with his consent.
And Deirdre, a phoenix, was the same.
She hadn’t consented to any of his compulsions from the beginning of their time together, so he had never once swayed her behavior. The memory of their shared history skittered over his face like a living thing.
In Montreal, when he had ordered her to kill innocent lives.
At the asylum, when he had ordered her to shapeshift for the first time.
When he had compelled her to die if she disobeyed him.
Deirdre had never once been under his control. In fact, she was completely beyond his control on every level. And she had pursued her own machinations behind his back while letting him believe that he was in charge.
You’re just like Rhiannon
, he had said, or something like it. He had already been suspicious of Deirdre.
Now he feared her.
Stark stepped away—a small movement that spoke volumes. He moved closer to Rhiannon. “The perfect spy,” he said. “An Omega immune to my compulsion.”
Her heart ached with fear and regret even though Deirdre had done nothing that she should feel guilty about. From the beginning, she had only ever been trying to survive. Stark would have killed her as soon as he realized she was immune to him. She needed to survive.
But there it was: regret lodged in her ribcage as surely as the Ethereal Blade was in Melchior’s body.
“Even if you don’t care about the election, I do still have something you want.” Rhiannon stepped over the line of runes. She settled her hands on the shoulders of her naiad daughters, as though posing them for a perverse Christmas card portrait. “We can be a family again.”
He was thinking about it. She could see him considering the offer.
That was everything he had ever wanted.
“Stark, don’t,” Deirdre said. “Don’t do this.”
“Be their father, Ever,” Rhiannon said. “Be my mate.”
He took another step toward her.
Alona and Calla looked miserable enough to be close to their mother. Stark’s approach made both of them clutch at Melchior’s unconscious body, as though asking him to protect them. The dragon didn’t react. Damn it all, but Deirdre wanted him to wake up and embrace those children, wiping the fear off of their faces.
“No,” Deirdre said. “Stark,
don’t
.”
“Don’t speak to me,” he said.
He took Rhiannon’s hand. She smiled wickedly.
“Stark!” Deirdre shouted.
“You heard the man,” Rhiannon said. “Enjoy your time in the Winter Court, Beta.”
The entire family vanished.
Deirdre slapped Melchior’s unconscious face as hard as she could—twice.
He didn’t respond.
“Come on,” she muttered, digging her fingernails into his scaly chest and shaking his shoulders. “Wake
up
.”
The magic surrounding Melchior had vanished when Rhiannon took her family out of the Winter Court, allowing Deirdre to approach him. What if their departure had destroyed the magic keeping Melchior alive despite the Ethereal Blade, too? What if he was never going to wake up?