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Peter turned from me to Emmet, who had managed to sit up, although he was still obviously in a state of shock. “I asked you what the hell’s going on.”
“Peter,” I managed. “It isn’t what it looks like.”
He spun back to me, his face flushed red and a pulse visible at his right temple. Such anger burned in his eyes. “I don’t even know what it looks like, Mercy, so why don’t you tell me what you two are doing here?”
“We’re here looking for Ellen,” I said. That at least constituted part of the truth.
“And what? You thought you’d find her in his coat pocket?”
“We can explain if you’ll allow us,” Emmet said, managing to stand and regain a bit of his sense of decorum.
“You shut up before I shut you up.” Peter’s voice quivered. “What’s wrong with you?” he addressed me. “I thought we had this settled once Jackson took off, that we had decided it was going to be you and me. Now here I find you doing I don’t know what with this guy. I mean, for God’s sake, Mercy, he isn’t even real. He isn’t even a man.”
I looked at Emmet, begging him with my eyes not to retaliate with the knowledge he held about Peter. Nodding slightly, he lowered his head and stepped away. “It isn’t like that,” I said, even though my conscience took little nips at me as I said it. “You don’t understand what’s been going on.”
“Well, how about you break it down for me? Nice and slow and easy so I can get it.”
I stood there trying to find the words to say to him, to explain how my life had turned upside down and nothing at all felt like it was under my control. The words would not come. He started shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was from rage or heartbreak. I wanted to say something, to make it right, but a movement in the corner of my eye drew my attention. I looked away from Peter to see my mother coming toward us. I reached out to Peter to get him to turn and look, but he stepped back from me.
“To hell with it,” he said and turned to leave, but in that split second, my mother appeared directly behind him and drove a blade deep into his chest. He convulsed and coughed up blood.
“There,” she addressed me. “Mama just made it an easy choice for you. That one”—she nodded toward Emmet—“looks good in a tux. This one works my last nerve.” She pushed Peter away, and he fell to the floor.
“What have you done?” I broke from my rigor and threw myself down at Peter’s side.
“That blade is made from iron, you know,” she said. “Iron through the heart is the one sure way to kill a fairy.”
I knelt next to Peter and, my hand trembling, pulled the blade from his chest. I threw it aside, and it melted in midair. Emmet tried to run to my side, but Emily raised one hand, palm out, toward him. An unseen magic flung him up and backward, pinning him to the wall. He struggled, but couldn’t release himself.
“Why?” I asked that woman, the woman who only seconds before I had still thought of as “Mama.”
“Call it ‘Plan B’ if you like,” she said and stepped toward us. She moved her foot gingerly forward and kicked Peter’s body. “Go on. I’m curious to see what you can do. There’s still a little life in him. Let’s see if you can save him. That is, if you want to save him.” She smiled and leered at Emmet. “Quickly now, before I change my mind.”
>I tried to envision the energy coming into my grasp, my control, but I sensed the hall around us changing. A sound, caught somewhere between a human moan and the buzzing of locusts, began to reverberate around the space, although only Emmet and I seemed to notice. The partiers remained blithely unaware of any change in the atmosphere. I struggled to look beyond Emmet’s shoulder. A beam of light, cold and uncomforting, bounced from one mirrored surface to the next, weaving a web around all those who were gathered here.
The beam pierced my heart with horror because it revealed that we were no longer standing in the mirrored hall, but in the hexagonal entranceway where I’d seen my mother murdered. The dome hovered over us once again, backlit in a way that attested to its presence, but lent no illumination to the space beneath it. Even though the mirrors had disappeared with the plum walls that held them, I could still see everything around us reflected from a thousand different angles. I looked forward and saw myself from behind, my arms raised and intertwined with Emmet’s.
The servants who had been purveying their stupefying substances had dragged one of the partygoers to the center of the room. The shaved head and mangled stump of an arm identified him as Ryder. The participants who had been so intertwined that they’d appeared to be a single mass of writhing flesh began to disengage, each body unknotting from the others, individuating. Some rose to their feet, others only to their knees. The most terrible of all were those who’d abandoned any pretense of humanity, rising up on all four limbs. Faces dotted with black and alien eyes turned to focus on Ryder at the center of the gathering. “His blood for their glory” came from one side of the circle that had formed around him, and then the others took up the cry, chanting it over and over again.
A symbol, like an Egyptian ankh mated with the symbol for infinity, had been carved into Ryder’s forehead. It glowed an angry red, but Ryder himself seemed indifferent to the situation unfolding around him. He knelt, too wasted to protest, too intoxicated to care what was happening. The revelers cheered as another man, naked except for a mask of Janus that covered his entire head, stepped forward and slid a knife across Ryder’s throat. His body slumped forward as it bled out. The blood defied the laws of physics, running up the walls instead of pooling at the lowest point of the room.
The dome was no longer fixed in place—it started ascending, and the staircase that led to it started to grow longer, level after level. This was no longer the room where I had seen my mother die. It was growing into a tower, and it kept growing ever more quickly, stretching higher and higher and gaining speed as it did so.
The man with the knife removed his mask and cried out. He turned to face me, his eyes entirely black except for glowing crimson dots that had replaced his pupils. I recognized him instantly. It was Joe, Ryder’s buddy. The crowd turned their attention from Ryder’s exsanguinated corpse to Emmet and me, and they began to advance on us, chanting in a language I could not understand. I screamed and struggled, trying to alert Emmet to what was occurring behind him, only to realize that he was frozen in place, trapped by the power we had tapped into as surely as you can get stuck to an electrified fence. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t disconnect from the power that rose up through him and into me. The black magic filtered into my body, settled in around my solar plexus, and then found its prize, the point at which the line had connected its magic to mine. It had found a vulnerability in the line itself, and I had provided it with an entry point. The full gravity of absolute darkness pulled at me, its source, the power I had been so foolish to welcome into myself, the power of Tillandsia.
THIRTY-ONE
“What the hell is going on here?” Peter’s voice caused the world around me to shimmer, and then break apart. He grabbed Emmet by the shoulders, and even though Emmet was by far the larger man, he threw him onto the floor.
I was shaking, a scream still caught in my throat. The tower and its dome had vanished. We stood in the true entranceway of the house. All the other guests were gone, and the room where we stood was still very much in a state of aborted renovation.
Peter turned from me to Emmet, who had managed to sit up, although he was still obviously in a state of shock. “I asked you what the hell’s going on.”
“Peter,” I managed. “It isn’t what it looks like.”
He spun back to me, his face flushed red and a pulse visible at his right temple. Such anger burned in his eyes. “I don’t even know what it looks like, Mercy, so why don’t you tell me what you two are doing here?”
“We’re here looking for Ellen,” I said. That at least constituted part of the truth.
