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She climbed over the unconscious attendees to reach the stage, where Cathedra lay still in a pool of blood.
Even in the dimness, Adam could see the crimson ringing her mouth and the unnatural angles of her neck and limbs.
A flash of light, bright like sun on snow, blinded him. The spring air chilled with a taste like midwinter snow. Adam’s vision cleared, and the elves were there.
The Knight of Swords led them.
While she hid her power behind a glamour, she made no concessions to mortal fashion. Her armor was forged of leaf-shaped blades, giving her the look of someone from an online role-playing game.
Like many winter elves, her skin and hair were cast in shades of silver and gray. Like all of them, she had far more power than Adam, and she seemed especially fond of reminding him of the fact.
It did not help that he knew some of her secrets, including one that made him a threat to her.
She took in the scene as her fellows, mostly dressed like they’d stepped out of a black-and-white gangster movie, filtered out among the crowd.
The knight leveled her gaze on Adam and demanded, “Why are you here?”
“We came for the concert.” He waved a hand at the stage where Jodi crouched beside Cathedra, looking heartbroken. Vic was helping Emily to her feet.
“Something crossed from the Between. It came through that man.” Adam pointed to the shredded corpse beside Cathedra’s.
“Where is it now?” The knight never gave him an inch, and only ever the courtesy that their king had commanded her to, but he knew she had some softness in her, even if he’d never seen it, not even toward her half-human son.
“We wounded it. It fled through the ceiling. It wasn’t like the boggins. It was more . . . humanoid.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
“What was it?”
“I have no idea, but it sang. The sound knocked the crowd out.”
Behind her, Dautre, the knight’s squire and Adam’s former partner, stiffened as Adam described the creature and its prehensile hair.
Where most of the elves wore fedoras, Dautre had chosen a pork pie hat. He also didn’t carry a gun or a sword, at least not openly. He wouldn’t look at Adam.
“There is no trace of the creature or its crossing,” Dautre told the knight.
Adam scowled at the cold shoulder.
“It came through the Between,” Adam said.
“The Between is a myth,” the knight barked.
He got the sense the added volume was for the other elves on the scene.
Adam narrowed his eyes at her. He knew it was real. He’d walked there, been sent there, and only escaped after paying a terrible cost, having done what he’d sworn to never do. Even if they didn’t believe him, they had proof in the boggins, the creatures that occasionally slipped into their world through the cracks left by unstable magics.
“Adam,” Jodi said from where she tried to help a young man near the front of the crowd. “He’s not waking up.”
“Neither is Cole,” Emily added.
“Do they have a pulse?”
Jodi shrugged.
“Are they breathing?”
“Yes,” Jodi and Emily answered at the same time.
