A rim of orange touched the horizon, illuminating the trees. The beginning of sunrise glowed over them as they scuffled playfully.
The inauguration was coming. Just a couple more hours.
And then, one way or another, everything was going to end.
To defeat the Starks, they had to think like the Starks.
Luckily, Deirdre had been acting as Everton Stark for weeks. It was easy to guess what he would do—like playing chess against herself.
The Starks would attack Melchior if they thought he was going to go to the inauguration and cut them out of the process, but they were smart enough to do it from a distance, probably using magic. Rhiannon and Stark would also want to do it themselves. They wouldn’t use proxies. They had too much pride—and too much satisfaction in inflicting pain—to let someone else take down the dragon.
Deirdre was counting on that pride to hurt them. If they sent someone else after their Melchior decoy, then she wasn’t certain the oath would truly break.
As the sun rose, the sanctuary prepared. Pawns slid into place.
Vidya carried Niamh-as-Melchior a few miles away, past Northgate, to a farm where vehicles were waiting. They would have to take a long route through Northgate to get to the sanctuary. A long, vulnerable route, filled with hidden curves in the mountains where no witnesses would be able to report back on what happened to the convoy.
No witnesses, as far as Rhiannon knew.
Marion had coated the SUV that would transport Niamh in anti-magic wards. Nobody would be able to attack it from the outside. At least, nobody less powerful than Marion—which was every witch on the planet.
The Starks would have to physically attack in order to hurt the person they believed to be Melchior.
And they were waiting to film it.
Deirdre was positioned on a cliff overlooking the road at a sensitive spot, where the visibility was the worst. There was no guarantee that Rhiannon would attack there. There were no guarantees of anything. She was just like the rest of the team watching the road at Rylie’s command. When she was among the sanctuary residents, she wasn’t a Beta, right hand to the Alpha. Neither knight nor rook. She was another pawn.
It was nice to have that responsibility taken away from her for now.
Having responsibility removed didn’t make her feel any less responsible, though. Her nerves were tangled into knots as she waited for Niamh and the convoy to enter her segment of the road.
“They’re coming,” Vidya said, landing beside Deirdre. “They’re in the foothills.”
Deirdre nodded because she didn’t trust herself to reply verbally. She repositioned the sniper rifle to look at the western end of the road, waiting for the appearance of headlights. The sun hadn’t gotten high enough to shine light on the road yet. They’d have the headlights turned on.
She would see them coming.
And once she did, she knew that Rhiannon and Stark wouldn’t be far behind.
It had been awkward when she went to the first class she shared with her ex-boyfriend after they slept together. But the level of nerves that she’d experienced then was nothing compared to her feelings now. The magnitudes of scale were the difference between grains of sand versus the sun in the sky.
Deirdre’s wrists itched. She wished that she could have taken some lethe.
Gods, she hated feeling hungry. When was the last time that she had eaten?
Headlights appeared at the end of the road.
The convoy had arrived.
Deirdre lifted the Walkie Talkie to her ear, listening as the other sanctuary shifters up the road remarked on the convoy’s passing.
“It looks pretty normal…”
“No trouble yet.”
“Did the convoy start with seven cars? I only see seven cars.”
She pressed the talk button. “Seven cars is correct.” Deirdre tried not to sound disappointed. If the Starks had attacked earlier, then Niamh’s safety would’ve been someone else’s responsibility. Some other pawn would’ve had to worry about her.
Deirdre counted them as they approached.
Two motorcycles. And then the SUVs—seven of them in a row, as one of the other shifters had observed. They were followed by two more motorcycles.
That was everyone who was meant to be in the convoy.
They came around the curve slowly, traveling at a speed appropriate for the twisted roads through the mountains. They must’ve been going twenty-five, maybe thirty miles per hour. The slowness of it made Deirdre even more uncomfortable. Shouldn’t they have been in a hurry? Didn’t the drivers know that death was waiting for them?
Deirdre watched through the scope, hands tight on the stock of the sniper rifle.
She put the window of the SUV carrying Niamh in her sights. The crosshair swayed over the tinted windows, which were so dark that she couldn’t see the people riding inside. Niamh was meant to be protected by two OPA agents. Surely they were watching her as closely as Deirdre was watching them.
Deirdre moved her aim from the convoy to the surrounding mountains, sweeping the trees for any sign of the attack to come. She only looked away for a few seconds.
That was when it happened.
Her Walkie Talkie crackled.
“Six cars. I only see six cars.”
“No way. The road doesn’t split off here. They couldn’t have gone anywhere.”
“Count again.”
“I can count, and there’s only six!”
Deirdre made a count of her own. The shifter talking on the line was right. There were two motorcycles in front, a line of SUVs, and two motorcycles in the back.
One, two, three…
No way.
She now only saw six SUVs.
“Where did they go?” Deirdre asked, sweeping the scope over the road. “Where the heck did they go?”
“I’m looking.” Vidya took off. She soared through the air, diving over the mountains.
The other vehicles in the convoy peeled off, turning around to search the rest of the road. Half of them went on ahead. The other half headed back toward the farm.
The search was in vain. It wasn’t like Niamh’s SUV could have driven away.
But it shouldn’t have been able to disappear either.
Deirdre’s mind raced.
There had been no turn offs. Nowhere else for them to go. It was impossible for one of the vehicles to have gone missing on that stretch of road unless it had driven into the trees, which would have been impossible given the slope. The progress would have been slow. Someone would have seen it.
There was nowhere for a vehicle in the convoy to have gone.
A chill washed over her.
Nowhere at all.
She fumbled for her Walkie Talkie to communicate with the other shifters, but it slipped out of her hands. It tumbled end over end down the cliff, plummeting toward the road.
“No!”
Deirdre tossed the sniper rifle aside and leaped off of the ledge.
Panic burned hot through her. It felt like she floated rather than fell, sliding through the dim light of early morning with a comet trail flowing behind her.
The power of the phoenix pulsed through her veins.
Niamh.
Deirdre already knew what she would find when she reached the street.
She saw nothing. Nothing at all.
But she
felt
a powerful chill.
It should have been impossible for Rhiannon to cast magic upon the SUV. It was covered in so many wards that nothing should have been able to get in. Yet there was no denying what Deirdre felt.
That was sidhe magic.
The air kept getting colder as she ran to the last place that the SUV holding Niamh had been seen. Her boots pounded against pavement in time with the thudding of her panicked heart.
She wished that her heart would beat faster so that she could run faster, too.
It didn’t matter how fast she was going, though. She wouldn’t get there in time.
Deirdre had been too late the instant the SUV vanished.
Her shins smacked into something hard.
“Ow!”
She fell forward onto her hands and knees. Not on the street, but against something hard and metal that she couldn’t see, leaving her crouching in midair.
Deirdre ran her hands over the frosty metal, so cold that her fingers stuck to it and peeled away. The metal felt crumpled. Like a drunken frat guy had crushed a beer can against his forehead, but so much larger.
She blindly found a handle and wrenched it open.
Deirdre pulled so hard that the door tore off of the SUV, rendered invisible by Rhiannon’s illusion.
Her sidhe magic didn’t touch the inside of the vehicle. As soon as the door was gone, Deirdre could see inside to the cushioned leather interior and matte black roof.
One of the OPA agents stood. She was wearing full tactical gear and cradling an assault rifle.
“What happened?” Deirdre asked.
The agent lifted the gun and shot.
A bullet smashed into Deirdre’s chest, just right of center. It was like getting bitten by a dragon. It felt like her whole ribcage was crushed.
She struck the ground.
Hand clapped to her chest, blood pouring from between her fingers, Deirdre struggled to get to her feet.
That was a silver bullet.
“What are you
doing
?” she cried.
The OPA agent pulled her armored helmet off, tossing it aside. Long hair tumbled free. A square face was exposed, more handsome than beautiful.
Marion’s wards protecting Niamh from outside attack hadn’t failed.
Rhiannon Stark had attacked from the inside of the SUV.
She lifted the gun to fire again.
Deirdre flamed. It was an entirely instinctive reaction, with no rational control. Her fire leaped as she did, rolling across the pavement to dodge the gunfire.
Bullets pounded into the road. Holes exploded behind her. Stinging pain erupted down her arm, and her flames flared higher, pouring from the wounds Rhiannon inflicted like blood.
“No!”
Deirdre flung a hand toward the SUV.
Fire pulsed. The gun turned red with heat. Rhiannon dropped it to the road with a cry, hands blistering.
Deirdre tried to drag herself toward the gun, using the one arm that didn’t burn with healing fever.
“Look at the Omega and her fire,” Rhiannon said. She clambered out of the SUV. “You
can
teach an old dog new tricks. Isn’t that funny?” She got to the assault rifle first and kicked it away.
“Your sense of humor sucks,” Deirdre said, clutching her wounded arm. The holes were already closing. The fire seemed to have accelerated her healing.
“Don’t be a sore loser.” Rhiannon snapped her heel into Deirdre’s face, flattening her to the pavement. Ice built over her clenched fists. She made a couple quick gestures, barely more than finger-flicks, and frost splashed over Deirdre’s arms.
A little ice was all it took to destroy Deirdre’s budding flames. She sputtered and lost control.
The pain in her wounds intensified without the fire to numb it.
She rolled onto her back, face screwed up with pain. “Damn,” she groaned. Where was Stark? Having him appear would be the only way that the confrontation could become more humiliating.
“I’m curious,” Rhiannon said. “How did you get Melchior out of the Winter Court without killing him? Not that it matters, since I already had Stark claim the unseelie throne and made him my mate again. I’m just wondering.”
“I didn’t,” Deirdre said.
Stone crashed into the road.
One of Brother Marshall’s gargoyles had landed just a few feet away.
It must have been Dale Junior. The sluagh’s icy fluids had stained stripes into his stone hide. Brother Marshall was mounted between his wings, but he slid to the asphalt as soon as his mount struck.
Rhiannon turned to greet him, arms wide. “Thank the gods. I was worried that I was going to have to deal with this enemy of the Alpha on my own. Arrest her.”
“I’m only here to hold you until Secretary Friederling arrives for your arrest,” Brother Marshall said.
She laughed. “What? Why? Because I shot the phoenix? She killed my former mate. She’s not protected by the oath.”
“No,” he said. “For killing Rylie Gresham’s Beta.”
Deirdre didn’t stick around to see the reaction. She dragged herself to the semi-invisible SUV, pulling herself over the edge into the open door. The metal groaned around her as her weight shifted.
It reeked of quality leather and death within the SUV. Shiny cherry-black blood slicked the seats. The OPA agents defending Niamh were dead—one of them crushed, the other with a slit throat.
Melchior’s body was crushed underneath the roof, only the left shoulder and half of the face visible, eyes shut.
It was a wound that wouldn’t have killed a dragon.
“No,” she whispered.
She gritted her teeth as she pulled the roof apart enough to shift Niamh’s body. She slid her fingers under the mask of the Melchior disguise and peeled it off, the same way that Rylie had peeled off the artificial face masking her features.
Niamh’s eyes were shut underneath. Her hair spilled out from the artificial scalp. White feathers drifted to the ground.
Deirdre shook her head, over and over again, unable to speak.
If this had happened days earlier, she would have been okay. She might have even celebrated.
“What are you doing here?” Rhiannon asked sharply.
Deirdre stood, injured arm shaking as she lifted Niamh from the wreckage of the car. She was limp weight, impossibly heavy, as though death had made the gravity impacting the hollow-boned shifter triple.
The other vehicles in the convoy had returned. They ringed Rhiannon and Dale Junior, cutting off any exit.
Rhiannon turned at the sound of Deirdre rising from the SUV. Her thin smile fell.
Niamh still looked like Melchior from the shoulders down, but her face was her own. Deirdre set her beside the vehicle, sinking to her knees so that she wouldn’t have to bear her weight anymore. Every exposed inch of her skin was glowing. She felt hot, hotter than the sun, like she might ignite every tree in the forest with her grief.
Confusion quickly turned to understanding. Rhiannon wasn’t stupid. She knew when she’d been played.