Soul Kissed (31 page)

Mason dropped his chin into a one stroke nod. “Now.”

 

 

Cari felt the punch of Shadow before she saw the bloom and smelled the trees of Twilight. She whipped around, her gown scraping heavily across the floor, to see Khan emerge from Twilight into Dolan House. She’d had no idea that Khan could cross wardlines too, but then, as Death, he must have been the master of all crossings.

And Mason was beside him. Sweet, stupid Mason. What about Fletcher?

“The wards, Cari,” Mason said, even as Maeve flung him back at the wall. Cari heard the crack of his spine, felt it viscerally in a lightning strike down her own. But Shadow etched across his skin to hold him together.

Stacia screamed.

Mason’s gaze bore into Cari’s, as he gritted through pain while Khan and Maeve went hard at each other—black magic to death magic.

Right.
The wards.

Meant they were bringing the fight here . . . all those innocent people outside . . . but then, compared to all the people there were in the world, it wasn’t so many after all . . .

The wards had to be down for the angels to get inside. Time and again across history, Dolan had held out against an assault from Order. But this was the first that it was necessary to welcome them with open arms. Come on in. No, really. Please.

She tried to lower the wards at will, as she’d done so easily since she’d inherited. She forced all her strength and hope and love into the effort. The blood pounding in her brain felt like a stroke coming on. Bile raged up her throat. But her umbra hit a wall made of faery, and the wards held.

“The cellar,” Cari breathed to Scarlet. There was more power to be had in the cellar, where the ward stones were close, just buried in the foundation. “I need to get to the cellar.”

Mason pushed up from his fall, his face flexed into fury, and he threw the fat gold blade at Maeve, where it
thunked
through the fae’s back and came out through her belly. “Go!”

Cari dragged her gown across the room, and the load got lighter as Scarlet lifted it to hurry behind her. And almost became weightless when Stacia picked up the other side.

Windows shattered behind them, but Cari didn’t look back. Help had to be able to get inside.

“You know Maeve?” Cari sobbed to Scarlet as they rounded the hall to the double doors and gained the grand stair that led down to the foundation of the House, where magic was thickest, the fae’s whispers loudest, the drugging scent the strongest.

“I was married to your father for over twenty years.”

“What the fuck—?” Stacia cried.

Cari almost tripped as she descended. “Did he say how to beat her?” She should’ve asked Scarlet before. She should’ve asked immediately.

“He said to triumph over her was to deny her existence.” At the base of the stair, Scarlet reached around to open another door, older, made of thick oak and treated with centuries of magic. “He said to allow her no purchase in this world, even in the mind.”

Too late for that.

It seemed her father hadn’t known that Maeve would be louder to a Dolan woman. That the fae would be more present, more insistent, more possessing to
her
than anything he’d experienced. A key component of the family lore had fallen away with time. He was right about one thing: time was magekind’s most insidious enemy, even to a House as long-standing and prestigious as Dolan.

But still . . . “Why didn’t he warn me?”

The cellar was roiling with Shadow, currents of magic pushing at her body and tugging her gown this way and that. For the first time in her life, Cari could clearly see the semi-androgynous shapes of fae prowling in the darkness. No huffing necessary.

“He left it to me,” Scarlet said, “so that her name would never pass his lips. And until tonight, I had no idea she’d already touched you.”

Maeve had touched her all right.

Cari gained the middle of the room, equidistant from all the stones. She reached for power over the stones to bring the wards down. Didn’t matter that a mob was at the gate. Didn’t matter that Order wanted to assail her home. She strove against the barrier until her nose bled, her hearing dimmed, her heart shuddered, and her lungs screamed for air.

Nothing. The kickback from the effort made her want to vomit.

Maeve was too strong. Forever too strong.

Cari brought her hands shaking to her head.

“What’s going on?” Stacia cried. “What is that thing upstairs?”

“Faery queen,” Cari murmured, a lump forming in her throat.

All Mason had asked her was to bring the wards down, and she couldn’t even do that. He might be dead already, and still the wards were up.

How to get more power? How to draw more than even a fae queen?

An eardrum-shattering crash came from above, and the house shook, dust falling on Cari’s head. She needed to bring the wards down now.

The heavy door to the cellar opened, and Zel lurched inside. Half her face was purple-red and blistered, the eye bloodshot. A tooth missing from bloody gums. Scarlet reached her arms to catch her.

“No,” Cari said. She needed Scarlet first. “The storage room on the other side. See what tools are there. Shovel. Or a pick. Anything. I’m going to dig up the stones.”

Scarlet was shaking her head, her eyes full of rage and alarmed disagreement.

Cari shrieked at her to get her to move. “I’m going to fucking hold them in my hands and make the wards come down!”

Her stepmother wavered, white-faced, Zel heaving for breath in her arms. Was Scarlet going to follow direction and do what was asked, no matter how terrible?

Scarlet turned to Stacia. “Help me.”

Okay. One impossible thing accomplished: her stepmother had cooperated.

Cari held out her trembling hands, palms down to the ground, to search for the warm hum of a buried stone. She found one in a dark corner, where the stony floor should have been cool, but was hot to the touch. Fae creatures looked on, omnipresent, but still on the other side of the Twilight veil. Cari knelt down and began prying at the cobbled floor with her bare hands. The ashy smell of old earth touched her nose.

Never before would her fingers and nails have been capable of tearing rock from concrete, but she was made out of stronger stuff now. Her nails raked across seams, fingertips finding only the slimmest edge by which to pry up a small boulder.

Scarlet and Stacia were chattering when they rushed back in, so her stepmother had to have filled in Stacia on what was happening. Zel got a shortened version, and concluded, “But there are people outside.”

“Can’t be helped.” Cari reached out her hand for the shovel Scarlet held, then struck the floor with all her might to get at what she sought. The concrete cracked and the faeglow of a large, soft stone appeared, just small enough for her hand to grip, but too large for the hold to be comfortable. A Dolan ward stone. She pried it out with her fingers, which finally bled as she pulled the stone free.

The House shook again.

Oh, please Shadow. Mason.

Cari concentrated on the stone. Spoke to it with her blood, with the blood of her father, and his before him. All the generations of Dolan Dark House lined up to command one stone. But, as before, the wards wouldn’t even weaken. Maeve was omnipotent.

In frustration, Cari rocked forward, and hit the stone against the floor of the cellar. Tears spilled from her eyes; helplessness weakened her resolve. The cold finally touched her bare flesh, even as the intricate lace pinched her skin.

Her stepsisters were weeping on the far side of the room.

She picked up the stone again and hit it harder against the floor, her sobs finding voice. Khan had said the Dark Age started with her. She’d done this. She smacked the stone down again, ill at the thought of Mason bleeding, dying for her upstairs. What good was she?

And then she went utterly frigid as she regarded the stone again.

“You’ll destroy the House.” Scarlet’s voice was tight. She knew exactly what her stepdaughter had decided.

“That bitch is our House,” Cari answered. But
she
was her father’s daughter, his heir, the Dolan. And if she wanted the wards of Dolan House to come down, then by pitch, they would come down.

She wiped at her snot with a dirty hand. Brought the ward stone up with real strength, fae-endowed strength, immortal strength, and crashed it down onto the ground.

The stone broke into two pieces of jagged mundane rock.

 

 

A sickening warp of energy rushed through Mason as he choked on his own blood. Khan wavered on his feet, arms raised to strike again. Maeve doubled over, keening. The mob outside the property roared.

“Whazzat?” Mason’s jaw was swelling.

Khan drew his sharp face into a smile. “Did I ever mention how much I like your woman?”

The woman he’d thundered about killing not a week ago at Segue?

“Wha-she-do-now?” Mason panted.

Khan used magic to set Mason on his feet again and raise his sword arm, long gone numb. Fight not over yet. Mason was held together only by strings of Shadow.

“She’s breaking her House.”

What was this foolishness? A betrayal from blood? No. This would not do.

Maeve brought a hand up to count on her elegant fingers. How many stones remained? She reached with her senses to find and assign an earthly hum of stone to each digit. This one, and this one, and this . . .

“
Five
more,” Shadowman said, throwing a blast of old age and decrepitude in her face.

The human followed with a long, hot stroke across her side from his sword. Did he wield his manhood as fiercely? Too bad he’d be dead soon, or else she might be inclined to find out. She tricked her body to again reform, beautiful as moonshine on a desolate earth.

“We’d best stop playing, then,” Maeve answered. Cari had set a clock ticking down to a perilous moment. Six chimes, and the first had already sounded. Who would prevail?

Maeve’s power had diminished but the cosmos had more than enough left for her. She drew from Shadow until the magic coursed like the sea. Creatures of faerie came with the surge. Humanity clamored at her gate. The statue of the white lady that had watched over Dolan House rose from her repose and stalked into the room like a sightless marble goddess.

“If Cari gets ’em all?” The human was a lickable wreck of blood and sweat. She even liked his earthy smell. Maybe she wouldn’t kill him.

“Dolan House will be no more,” Shadowman answered.

And Maeve’s foothold lost.

A second warp of weakness shuddered her Shadow, but the excruciation was more intense, weakness doubly acute—two stones had been broken, each against the other. Maeve’s power faltered for a moment. Those Glamour mages had to be helping Cari—they would pay in service and misery for eternity.

And yet . . . a vast source of power stood before Maeve, smoking with strength and purpose. Shadowman’s magic was not his own—no, it was not—not since he fell out of Twilight and became mortal. His skin and bones and blood had cost him dearly—and for what? The silky cunt of a human woman? He could not get a soul for himself by fucking someone who had one. He had to
eat
a soul, or three or four, and thereby see and feel as a human could.

The fae queen reached out her hand for magic, and the Shadow within Death obeyed her summons. It came off his dusky skin like thick mist and twisted into a stream toward her. The one these humans called Khan gasped as his strength left him.

“No!” Mason sliced with his sword to cut the trail of magic, but Shadow has no substance. Magic hissed against the blade, but still flowed to its mistress. She grew and grew and grew until she was fully restored. Shadowman, however, crashed to his knees as if begging for mercy. Kill him now, or let him have the true human experience—utter weakness and dependence. And then death.

A fourth warped twang, followed by new weakness. Its shiver reminded her of the coldness of the Otherworld.

Enough. Cari’s mischief was at an end.

Mason lunged to detain his queen, but she cast him back again. If nothing else, the man was relentless, yet another excellent trait in a lover. She
would
have him. Cari had sealed his fate.

The humans outside cheered their queen on.

 

 

Mason’s vision blacked on impact with the doorway. Spots swam in his sight. Tangy blood coated his mouth. He tongued a loose tooth. His body pain was a muzzy hot blanket of stabs and bruises.

Khan was down on his knees, a palm planted on the floor. He’d said that Cari was breaking her House.

Breaking her House? Might as well be her heart. And Mason was helping her do this thing? Take apart her family? Her heritage? Her legacy to her children? The thought made his soul sick, worse than any of his other injuries.

No, Cari.

But she’d never been one to flinch. She was proud, but she would always do what she must. Must have gotten it from her father. And that was how her House had stayed strong. The people within it were Dolan’s power, not the Shadow itself.

It’s why he wanted Cari to be Fletcher’s mother.

“If the House fails, so does Maeve.” Khan’s voice was only half its usual timbre.

But what would be left of
Cari
when she was finished crushing this part of herself?

Mason struggled up to face the faery queen again.

How many stones remained? A few or a million? Didn’t matter. He would distract the witch and then spend the length of both this life and his next, his skill and magic, making Cari whole again.

Dragging the sword, he lurched forward, the last man standing.

“I want you, too, lover,” Maeve said. “You will be the price for Cari’s treachery.”

And then the fae was gone.

It took a couple blinks for his eyes to pierce the dark murk of smoky magic enough to confirm that fact, as other things moved in the room, too.

Cari. The cellar. Ward Stones.

He dove past Khan, leaving Death on his knees. If Shadowman could stand, he’d be doing so on his own. Down the hallway—thank pitch he knew the lay of the House—to the double doors, shut tight like a tomb. Shadow crackled through the wood where he clutched it.

As he hauled one door open, a woman’s scream sliced through Shadow and up the stairs toward him.

He was too late already.

 

 

Cari scraped at the earth to release the fifth stone. Felt its smoothness, the heat of its magic soothing to her cold and bloody fingers. She wanted to hold it close to her to get warm. She felt like she’d never be warm again.

“You can’t have her,” Scarlet said to Maeve, her body interposed between the fae and Cari. Her hands were raised, as if she could possibly hold the queen back.

Cari lifted the stone.

“Caspar gave her to
me.
” Maeve thrust her stepmother roughly to the side.

Stacia cried, “Mother!”

The sound of pain put even more emotion behind Cari’s downward strike. The force of the stone’s destruction sent her flying back from Maeve, while the fae only wavered.

Scarlet was dead, her body a skinny long heap, too misshapen to ever draw breath again. Cari choked on sobs, her eyes burning with tears. Her head was so clogged with sadness she could only lever herself up to all fours. What had she done? Her father had entrusted her with Dolan House; it had taken her little more than two weeks to bring it down. And the only mother she’d ever known had just died for that decision.

Cari lifted her face as the door burst open across the room. Mason entered, his face so bloodied, she didn’t know how he could stand. Zel held the last stone on the other side of the room, its light shining on her sister’s face from below, her shock and loss amplified by the upward cast of the shadows. They were all stray now.

Maeve reset herself with beauty and wonder, as if she were illuminated from within, when there was only darkness inside.

The sixth and last stone was across the room. There was no way Cari could reach it in time. All this death and destruction, and still she’d failed.

And Maeve knew it. “Now, dove . . .”

Mason reached over and took the stone from Zel. His palm was easily big enough to clutch it. He used the sword as a cane to hold himself up with his other hand.

Did he think to throw the last Dolan ward stone across the room? It was absurd. Success was too far away, with too great an obstacle in between.

Maeve laughed, a trilling, layered sound of mirth.

“Just don’t hurt them,” Cari begged. She’d do whatever Maeve wanted, sit on that throne or whatever. “Please let them go. I’ll belong to you.” She couldn’t face her sisters anyway, nor give Mason and his son the safe House she’d promised.

“No, Cari.” Mason lifted the stone, concentration in the tilt of his head and strain of his body. The stone’s glow flickered, making her feel strange inside, something weak tugging. “You belong to
me
.” The gray stone riddled with jagged black lines, his Maker’s power, and he crushed the last Dolan ward stone in his hand.

Dust and crumbled stone fell from Mason’s hand, just as Cari dropped soundlessly forward from her knees, eyes wide open, insensible. He felt as if he’d crushed
her
.

And Shadow convulsed into a sudden hurricane of magic that moaned and howled, cyclonic in the deep earth. The scent of dreams and sex and seduction thickened in the storm, like the smell of rain in the desert. Maeve opened her mouth to speak or shriek, but her face and person warped in the gale and she was absorbed in the stewing torment. She had nothing to hold her here, no House, no kin to claim her.

A punch of noise, a million voices crying out, and the cellar became an antiquated basement. The silence was ominous.

But Mad Mab was gone.

And Dolan House with her. Cari was collapsed in tatters, her hands bloody before her.

A wail of anguish rattled up Mason’s throat. The sword dropped. His weight pitched forward to lunge toward Cari. His transport from here to there was a blur, but then he was gathering her up into his arms.

“Cari!”

Her skin was cold. He pushed her hair out of her face, strands combed by her lashes. He put two fingers to her neck to search for a pulse. He’d have to get this awful gown off her so she could breathe.

The sisters had moved, too, and were sobbing quietly.

There. A flutter against his fingertips.

He pressed harder. Sought deeper. “Cari?”

Her heartbeat answered.

He put his cheek to her mouth and felt the warmth of breath. Still alive.

Relief burned through him, like lava in his veins. The pain of it was brutal, angry, and utterly welcome. Cari was still alive. “Sweetheart?”

No answer.

Alive, but her mind was very far away. Which was okay. He could work with that. He’d find a way to coax her back to him. He’d been training for it all his life.

Pulling her up to him, he kissed her forehead, leaving a smear of his blood on her pale skin. Then he locked his arms around her, because he couldn’t stand.

Help would come. The wards were down. An incredulous laugh shook him. Trust Cari to do what she had to do to get a job done. It was a good trait and a dangerous one. He was duly warned.

He looked over to Stacia and Zel. The elder had taken off her shirt to cover her mother’s head. Next to the fallen body, the sisters held each other, faces into each other’s necks.

One minute ran into another.

“Help is on the way,” he said. The Order just might not know where they were. “Won’t be long.”

And they’d get to safety. He’d make Cari warm and comfortable. Make her sleep for a while. Get some food in her stomach. See if she’d come around on her own.

The sisters broke apart and Stacia turned to him. “Is she going to be alright?”

“She’s alive,” he answered. “It’s a start.”

Stacia nodded. “That’s good at least.” But she sounded empty. Shock.

To help her understand . . .

“Your mom,” he began. “It was a good death.” He’d already discarded any bad feeling over Scarlet stabbing him, had determined to win her trust. But he hadn’t expected to love her. She’d bought Cari a minute more of life—a critical minute—with her own. It was an easy trade for a parent. It didn’t require any thought, not even bravery, really. All personal considerations disappear when your child faces danger.

“I don’t understand what happened,” Zel said.

Mason inhaled to explain what he could, but the door flew open, cutting him off.

Armored angels filled the threshold, shining with purpose, ready to do battle with darkness. A clamor of far-away voices was behind them.

Mason shook his head. “You’re too late. Cari and Scarlet beat her.”

Further explanations would have to wait.

“The fae queen is dead?” They’d be searching his mind about now.

“Gone,” Mason corrected. “Back to Shadow.”

A stunned pause, and then movement as Laurence pushed to the fore. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Mason wouldn’t relinquish Cari, but was grateful for the assistance of two angels at his back, just in case. They were led up the stairs again and into noise and chaos and darkness. Shadowman was gone, and Mason hoped it was by his own power. Shattering glass had him bending over to shield Cari.

“No more Sha-dow! No more Sha-dow,” voices chanted.

The angels urged his little group on, fast, to the front door.

Fire and smoke clogged the dark rooms and passageways. But he’d caught the gist: the mob was overrunning the house. They would not tolerate magic, especially after the unnatural darkness wrought by Maeve.

“We’ll save what we can,” Laurence said in his ear.

The way they were moved through the insanity without drawing attention made Mason think that the Order was buffering them from the interest of the mob, even though the witch everyone wanted was clutched in his embrace.