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Lifting her pistol, she took dead-eye aim. Cocked the hammer.
“Wait!” Killer shouted as she pulled the trigger.
With a roar of fire and smoke, she shot Máelodor square in the chest.
Heard the snap of a twig. Felt the chill of a shadow across her shoulder.
An explosion burst behind her eyes.
She knew nothing more.
Máelodor’s death would have been too much to hope for. Engorged as he was on Unseelie magics, it would take more than a pistol shot to kill the master-mage, but it had been enough to disrupt his concentration. To sever the soul-devouring link between them.
Brendan would die here. There would be no return from this place. For some reason, the idea did not terrify him as he thought it might. Instead, it filled him with a calming sense of purpose. If this was his inescapable fate, he need not fear the struggle with his own blackened soul. The dark magics he’d loosed would serve their master one final time. And die here with him.
The Unseelie hovered in the prison of between. Howling, razor-clawed, fangs and jaws clacking, their greasy, fetid charnel-house stench burning his nose and throat. Not yet anchored to this world by ties of the flesh but no longer imprisoned within the abyss, they hovered in a crimson, smoke-filled sky.
Lightning split the sulfurous air, thunder deafening. The storm broke over him, rain like knives, pinning him to the slick, churned mud. He willed his body to respond. Dragging himself to his knees, then his feet. Already his mind fragmented as Máelodor’s poison ripped him apart. But he knew what he had to do.
The spell formed unbidden in his head before lying like acid in his mouth. “Una math esh gousk—”
A kick to his side interrupted the flow of words.
Brendan rolled away as Oss drew back to level another rib-crushing blow, but even that small movement almost caused him to pass out. Something was definitely broken. Probably a lot of somethings.
Brendan looked calmly into Oss’s chillingly blank eyes, but just as the final blow should have descended, a huge snarling blur of fur and teeth barreled into the muscle-bound servant, knocking him to the ground, ripping into his throat with bone-crunching, blood-spraying gusto.
End this, Erelth! Now!
The words formed like a shout in his head. No time to understand. No time to question. Brendan completed the spell, its power searing his vision, ringing in his ears and firing his mind.
Throwing open every chamber of his mind, he drew the power of the thin place into his body before casting it wide in a battering, unstoppable flood of mage energy. If one doorway could be forced open, so could another. And in such a way that both sides must confront one another. Must clash.
Wind froze to ice. Ice shattered. The chime of bells became the clang of shields and the cries of the dying. Smoke burned his lungs. Ash clung to his lips.
Battle was joined in a maelstrom of fury and rage and madness as Unseelie and Fey—Dark Court and Light—raged and swarmed the air of the grove like an evil tempest.
Máelodor fought to control his army, but the demon swarm once freed was deaf and blind to all but a wild killing frenzy. They turned on him, rending him limb from limb before the Fey swept down upon them. Brendan’s last view of him was as a headless corpse tossed back into the abyss to be imprisoned alongside his erstwhile allies.
Lifting his face to the storm, Brendan let the rain scour clean the poisonous fog.
And for one moment saw a flame-haired king lifting a sword above his head. His shout carrying a ring of command, his gaze like silver steel as he beat back the challenge.
Arthur. The last great king of Other.
Leading the armies of the Fey as they drove the Unseelie of the Dark Court before them.
The shine of his armor. The golden crown upon his brow. The bloody stain of a crimson sky. The storm blurred them until, like looking through rain upon glass, he saw nothing clearly. Heard only the rush of wind and the ring of bells.
And a voice sounding clear above the din. “You have done well, heir of Kilronan. Now you may rest.”
Elisabeth woke to birdsong. The drip of water upon the leaves. The cleansing wash of a gentle rain upon her face. Her head throbbed. She winced, probing the goose egg at the back of her head. Whose side was Killer on anyway?
Crawling from beneath the overhanging branches, she stumbled to her feet, her gown clinging wet and muddy to her legs, twigs and leaves scattered over her bodice and caught in her hair. No sign of Máelodor or Oss or whatever had stripped the trees bare and churned the clearing to a sea of mud and broken branches. She didn’t think she wanted to know.
The shape-changer
knelt beside Brendan, his face grave, Rogan’s knife in his hand.
