Rhiannon plucked Deirdre’s tooth off of the table, sliding it down the bodice of her dress, like some kind of romantic keepsake. “I need to return to the Winter Court. I have a date with my mate.” The way she said that made Deirdre feel all kinds of suspicious, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. There was no way Melchior had survived getting stabbed by the Ethereal Blade. None at all. “I look forward to January Lazar’s report on your execution, fire-blood.”
She strolled out of the office, hips swaying, cobweb skirt swirling around her. Every click of her heels against the floor sounded like wind chimes.
The woman was powerful all right. More powerful than anyone had any right to be.
But she wasn’t unseelie, and she wasn’t powerful enough to control the sluagh.
“You can’t let her feed me to that thing down there,” Deirdre said as soon as the door swung shut. “She’s not going to be able to hold it for long. You’re lucky you people aren’t all dead already.”
“Frankly, Rhiannon can do anything she wants with gaeans right now. Marion’s oath has made sure of that. And so have you, with all of your feisty defense of the election. She’s been elected. She won the war. Isn’t this what you wanted?”
Deirdre’s aching jaw dropped. “So you’re going to let her kill me and all the people I’m working with?”
“You’re criminals,” Friederling said. “Enemies of the Alpha who attempted to assassinate him.”
He snapped his fingers.
The door opened and OPA agents stepped in. They had silver handcuffs.
They were going to take Deirdre to the sluagh.
“Democracy in action. It’s beautiful,” Friederling said, settling into his chair. “Congratulations. You’ve gotten everything you ever wanted.”
Deirdre had to wait a half an hour for her execution. The longest half-hour of her life.
The agents held her near a window so that she could watch the dreary weather. The fact that it was pouring rain seemed like the final, deliberate insult to Deirdre.
She was going to be fed to the sluagh, along with allies who were very nearly friends. And it had the nerve to be raining so she would die cold and wet and soggy.
Deirdre couldn’t find any humor in it. She certainly couldn’t think of an escape plan.
All she felt was panic.
From her vantage point, she could see more than the rain. She could see the sluagh in its magical cage. It looked to be pissed off, if the way it frothed and thrashed was any indication. Who could tell? It was a shadowy organism comprised of a thousand cursed souls. For all Deirdre knew, the thrashing could have been a happy jig.
At least
someone
would be happy.
The weirdest part was that Deirdre wasn’t exactly unhappy. She should have been petrified knowing that she was about to be fed to the sluagh, but she’d taken too much lethe.
She was going to be devoured with a reflexive smile on her face and an itching wrist.
Of all the undignified ways to go out…
The hour struck. An agent jabbed her in the back.
“Move,” he said.
She moved.
The first thing that struck Deirdre when the OPA agents pulled her out of the United Nations building was the noise.
The
noise
.
In the time she had been waiting to die, the crowd had grown even larger than the one that had been at the rally. The bodies stretched as far as she could see all the way down to the docks. They were on the roofs of nearby buildings, on the beach, even in the water.
Everyone was there to watch her die.
She wanted to scream at them to run. To escape. To get away before the sluagh broke free of its pathetic chains.
So many innocent lives waiting for the slaughter.
This wasn’t what Deirdre had wanted to happen. She had wanted to help people. She wanted to save them from the horrible conditions that they lived in, not make them vulnerable to having their souls devoured by some unholy beast.
Run
, she wanted to say.
But she couldn’t.
Rhiannon was truly a sadist: she had disassembled the stage that Deirdre constructed in Times Square and reassembled it in front of the United Nations building.
She was going to die on a platform she had built herself.
The irony didn’t escape her.
Lucifer was slouching on one end of the stage, looking miserable and disgruntled, but Vidya stood tall, shoulders back, charcoal hair blowing in the wind. She was defiant and beautiful and unafraid. She would face death without fear. But even Vidya couldn’t break free of the OPA’s charms that kept her wings at bay, and there was no escape for her. No escape for any of them.
This was Stark’s fault. He had left Deirdre with a mess, chasing his wife into the Winter Court when she obviously wasn’t even
there
.
And now Deirdre was going to die for it.
They forced her up the steps, nearer to the thrashing sluagh within its cage. She locked her knees. Dug in her heels. But the OPA agents were collectively stronger than a shifter.
Once she was on stage, they pulled off her gag. Her lips burned. She worked her mouth around, trying to moisten her tongue, but that only made her jaw hurt worse. She still tasted blood from having her teeth yanked out.
“Where’s Stark?” Lucifer hissed when they shoved Deirdre to his side.
She twisted her wrists in the silver cuffs. The metal sizzled against her tender forearms. “He’s busy.”
“Better things to do?” he asked dryly.
Deirdre’s eyes stung. “Apparently.” Rain matted her headscarf to her scalp. Inside her rubber-heeled boots, her toes were cold and shriveled. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so miserable before.
Voices clamored around them. People pressed against the stage, held back only by magic and a line of OPA agents.
She could make out a few voices here and there.
“Let them go!”
“You cheated! You’re cheating us all!”
“Burn them!”
A lot of people wanted to see them dead. A lot of others wanted to see them released.
None of their opinions mattered, just like their votes hadn’t mattered.
The screen hanging to the left of the stage, sheltered from the rain by a small tarp, flickered to life. Rhiannon’s face appeared. She was regal, long-necked, and handsome, with black lipstick and a diadem that she hadn’t been wearing when Deirdre last saw her. This was a prerecorded message.
It looked like she was standing in Niflheimr, the palace of ice in the Winter Court, judging by the multifaceted silver ice in the background. But Deirdre doubted it. It was probably a special effect. It was hard to use recording devices in the other Middle Worlds.
The video was so huge. Her face was easily four times as tall as Deirdre.
“Good evening, my fellow Americans,” Rhiannon said, the introduction a cruel mockery of Deirdre’s speech at the rally. “And to all the others who are watching today, welcome.” She bowed her head fractionally, the video unresponsive to the chorus of boos that greeted her visage.
“I’m honored to have been elected by my people to lead all gaeans in North America,” she said. “Already I have been granted the authority to create rules and enforce them. I appreciate Rylie Gresham and Secretary Friederling’s compliance in allowing me to begin structuring our world to meet my vision.”
Voices rose in angry shrieks. Magic flashed along the barriers.
The sluagh thrashed within its cage.
Deirdre flinched away from the boundary of magic. Even knowing that Rhiannon had cast an invisible wall separating the stage from the sluagh’s mass, she was afraid. Its tentacles snapped toward her and it was all too easy to imagine the way they would wrap around her body.
No rebirth from her ashes. Never to fly again. The country shattered in her death.
It was all about to end.
“These people are in alliance with Deirdre Tombs, who has violated the oath surrounding the election,” Rhiannon continued. “Behold, my people—the betraying Beta.”
The footage changed to show Deirdre attacking Melchior.
She didn’t need to see it again, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away.
There she was: a small human figure standing up against Melchior’s massive, glimmering dragon form. Somehow, it made her look like she was as much a threat as the beast she fought. This wasn’t a heroic David facing down Goliath. This was video of a murderer slaying a beautiful beast.
The Ethereal Blade had been replaced digitally. Someone had edited the video so that it looked like an ordinary sword.
“You jackhole,” Deirdre whispered.
On the video, enlarged a dozen times, Deirdre thrust the blade into Melchior’s chest.
It looked so bad taken out of context. There was no footage of Melchior trying to kill Ofelia, the true unseelie queen. It didn’t show Niamh’s ex-boyfriend trying to kill Deirdre, or the rest of the fight against the sidhe. All it showed was Stark’s Beta attacking Rhiannon’s Alpha.
Renewed shouts swept through the crowd. At this point, it was impossible to tell if they approved or disapproved of Deirdre’s actions.
The screen returned to Rhiannon’s face.
“Because she’s violated that oath, they’re no longer protected by it. I have respected the terms of the election. I have refrained from taking action against those who would see me fail out of respect for you, the American people, but these conspirators would see your democracy shattered in its infancy. We can’t stand for such behavior. It’s wrong. It’s un-American. And that is why they must come to justice.”
Screams erupted through the crowd.
It took Deirdre a moment to realize that it wasn’t the normal cheering, but actual screams—people shouting from honest-to-gods terror, who thought that they were about to die.
When she turned, it felt like she was in slow motion, her body moving through sludgy molasses.
She knew that she was going to see the sluagh reaching for her.
But its circle hadn’t broken. It wasn’t free, and it wasn’t about to kill her.
A different kind of attack was moving in from the edges of the crowd, dropping off of the nearby rooftops. They plunged to the street from windows of office buildings. When each of them hit the pavement, their bodies gave a faint
thud
. It was an unforgettable sound, like knuckles connecting with a slab of meat hanging from a butcher’s freezer.
That kind of sound should have meant death.
Yet once they landed, the bodies kept moving. The force of them pushing through the crowd caused the tides to surge and shift. Deirdre glimpsed pale skin.
Vampires.
Lucifer’s vampires.
Rhiannon was still speaking, unaffected by her surroundings. “I don’t want to be a cruel leader. My only goal is to protect the people and the good of the many must always outweigh the good of the few. These deaths aren’t intended to be a punishment. I’m merely protecting you, the public, from those outliers who would hurt you.”
She was nearing the end of her speech, and that meant that the execution was meant to happen.
“Blessed be the merciful gods,” Rhiannon said. “And my blessings upon all of you.”
The towering screen switched from footage of her face to footage of Deirdre—live footage. There was a camera mounted on the edge of the stage, focusing on the people who were meant to be executed.
Magic snapped through the air. It stank of ozone, like a lightning strike.
The wards holding the sluagh broke.
“No!” Deirdre cried.
The crowd surged forward.
OPA agents opened fire. Automatic gunfire peppered the air, snapping through Deirdre’s skull like nails driven into her temples.
Screams.
Bodies falling.
The magical barrier surrounding the sluagh sparked and frayed as its tentacles lashed through the air.
A vampire launched out of the crowd with preternatural strength, landing smoothly on the stage. Deirdre recognized Stoker, one of Lucifer’s closest generals. He wasn’t a handsome man, nor was he impressive, but he didn’t seem to register any pain as the OPA agents opened fire on him. He also didn’t bleed as the bullets opened holes in his chest.
He was a vampire, not a shifter. Silver did nothing against him.
Stoker’s eyebrows furrowed as he walked forward, pushing directly into the gunfire as though it were no worse than a hard wind. He clamped his fists together and swung them toward the nearest OPA agent.
His knuckles connected. The agent went flying off the stage and vanished into the crowd.
“Free my hands!” Lucifer roared.
Deirdre pushed him aside. “No, Vidya! Free Vidya!”
A body slammed into hers. She smashed into the stage, unable to control her fall. She wasn’t sure if it was Lucifer or an agent who had hit her—she wasn’t sure of anything.
There was so much motion, so much chaos.
The magic from the sluagh’s cage was fraying faster. Skeletal hands scraped at the sky. They were enlarged, so much bigger than the hands of a dead body, so big that they seemed like they should have been able to crash shut on the United Nations building.
It was beyond Deirdre’s comprehension, this bizarre unseelie
thing
. It didn’t belong in the mundane world. It belonged in the strange dream of the Middle Worlds, where everything was fabricated from imagination and nothing made sense. The edges of its foggy image blurred into the clouds and the ocean and the ethereal architecture.
She couldn’t tell how close it was to her, but she knew that she would be its first target.
Rhiannon had made sure of that.
Deirdre needed to escape.
She jerked her knees to her chest, twisted her arms, and arched her back. She grimaced as she slid her bound wrists underneath her feet so that her hands would be in front.
A boot connected with her skull. Her head bounced off the stage.
It wasn’t a deliberate attack, an attempt to keep her down—there were just so many people on the platform now, both OPA witches and Lucifer’s vampires, that nobody could see where they were going.
Deirdre tried to shove people away, struggling to stand.
She was knocked over again.
Have to escape.