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An image. Caught for an instant. Long enough for Elisabeth to catch a glimpse. A man and a woman pleasuring one another. His golden body sleek with sweat, her head thrown back amid a river of red hair. Aflame with embarrassment, Elisabeth’s stomach plunged as she watched the man drive himself deep into the woman. Felt a throbbing pull between her own legs as the cresting of their need played out before her.
She blinked, and the image was swallowed back into the clouds, replaced by a second. A man crippled and stooped, his grotesque face aglow with greed and desire and success. He turned to speak to someone barely discernible in the fog but for one pale eye, hollow of emotion.
“Does the mirror answer what you ask of it, or does it play the coy lover and wrap itself in veils to entice?” Madame Arana asked.
Elisabeth tried swallowing, but her throat closed, her mouth dry, her tongue swollen. She couldn’t blink. Couldn’t move. It was the only reason she caught the final fleeting image—the broken body of a man amid a bleeding, smoke-smeared sky. A cry of pain shouted to the heavens that ripped through Elisabeth like a knife.
With a retching, gagging moan she tore free of the mirror, flinging herself into Madame Arana’s waiting arms. Her sobs cracking the icy shell encasing her, her tears scalding her cheeks, leaking hot and bitter into her mouth.
“What, young one? What has the mirror revealed?”
“Brendan won’t be alone.” Elisabeth closed her eyes, but the image seared her brain like fire. “I’ll be with him when he dies and Máelodor claims victory.”
>
North. South. East. West.
Earth. Air. Water—Máelodor cast flame to wick—fire.
All was set to draw upon the mage energy bound within the combined strength of compass and element. To tear the fabric between this world and the Unseelie abyss.
Stepping into the circle, Máelodor immediately sensed the power of the forbidden magics seeping into him. Pain no longer touched him. Uncertainty no longer weakened him. He was no longer bound only to one universe. Instead, his awareness expanded to other worlds, other planes of being, as he traveled on a current of thought. The attainment of this power had cost him—some might say the price had been too high—but he knew better. Knowledge involved sacrifice. As did victory.
He sought both.
As he cast the blood runes upon the floor, his lungs struggled to fill, air and light swallowed into a pinhole stretching outward as if someone had stabbed a knife into the world, ripping downward in a violent rift. Beyond the tear loomed a horrible gaping emptiness, a chasm of freezing, eternal nothing that was the Dark Court’s abode. And a voice rising from that wasteland like Lorelei’s call—pure and soulful and full of pain. “Is it time, son of man? Are we at last able to prove to you our gratitude and loyalty? Your humble servants yearn to join ourselves to you.”
“Patience,” Máelodor replied. “The stone is found. It will not be long now before Arthur stands by my side and I open the gates to you. Together, we will overcome any opposition. The Duinedon will have no chance.”
There was a long silence when all that could be heard was a crackling roar, the infernal emptiness of the abyss beyond the rift roiling with a million shades of black. Then: “The Fey do not suspect? They would stop us if they could.”
“They remain ignorant of our contract.” Máelodor felt his very essence being pulled into the hole, the Unseelie feeding on him like maggots upon a corpse. But in this case, they replaced what they stole with bits of themselves. Dark for light. Power in payment for a soul. They understood it was their only chance at freedom from their prison. “Your spells of concealment, combined with my own manipulations, have kept their eyes turned elsewhere, and I have been left to proceed in peace.”
“We wait only on you, our master and liberator. When the gate is opened, we will come. We will fight. It shall be as you command.”
He smiled, his tongue running over his lips in delicious expectation. “Then go and prepare your armies and await my call.”
Bending down, he wiped a hand through the runes, smearing the blood in which they’d been written. Immediately, the rift shrank, the howling, vicious chasm fading back into four corners marked by four objects—a candle, a pile of earth, an eagle’s feather, a shallow dish of water.
As the tear in the world healed, a final voice rose like the dying shriek of millions. “Erelth, skoa. Soon.”
twenty-one
Macklins stood halfway down Cutpurse Row, the bow-front window fogged over with a half century or more of smoke and grime. From across the street, Brendan watched the crowds of vendors bearing carts of fish, crates of chickens, a knife grinder, a beefy-armed gentleman with stained teeth bearing what seemed an entire half a cow across his broad shoulders. The cries of the street merchants mingled with the screams of children shoving their way through the throng. A shout for a thief to stop. The bells of a nearby church. Beggars’ moans from dark doorways. The rattle of a noddy as it rumbled down the narrow street.
A buxom young woman winked at him from a nearby alley, bending over to retrieve a dropped handkerchief, allowing him a good long look at her bountiful wares. Hitched her skirts to her knees to give him a taste of what could be his for a few coins and a few minutes.
He tipped his hat with a smile, but remained where he was.
A blade pressed cold against his throat. “Tag. You’re it.”
For one heart-exploding moment, he thought it was over; then: “A little up and to the left and you can put us both out of our misery,” he replied, feeling the strength of Roseingrave’s hand behind the steel.
The knife withdrew. “Too easy, but if this is how you manage, it makes me wonder how you survived for so long.”
He’d never lost focus. He’d never let down his guard. And he’d never let himself indulge in stupid fantasies. That’s how he’d survived. Until the last few weeks. Until Elisabeth had tumbled back into his life.
He glanced once more up and down the street for signs he’d been followed. The young woman had retired into the alley with a sailor. The thief had been caught by a gang of enthusiastic youths who kicked and punched him as he rolled on the ground with his stolen loaf of bread.
