Matt had never seen Fergus so on edge, but he imagined the old keyman wasn’t entirely to blame for his agitation. Since leaving the realm, he hadn’t spent much time off his property. He was still adjusting to the human world and all its fashions and gadgets. As the group stood in the heavy Irish mist, he fidgeted the sunglasses that concealed part of his magic-scarred face.
They were waiting for a group of hikers to pass and doing their best not to look suspicious standing in that boggy clearing. That was a difficult feat, given that their entourage consisted of three male fairies over six feet tall, a leggy brunette with a powerful glower, a bored-looking werewolf who played a bit over-aggressively with her jacket zipper, and an ancient portal-opener who’d muttered old Gaelic prayers the entire transatlantic flight. They’d forced Fergus to conserve his energy to give them the best possible chance at creating a bubble and learned quickly that old fairies and planes did not make a winning combination. He’d been green the whole flight.
From within a shimmering flash of golden light, Katie Ade emerged and quickly tugged the trailing tendrils of her powerful magic back in close to her body. She glanced around, counted fairy bodies and other ones, then embraced her father.
“Katie-girl! What the hell are ye doing here?”
“Ah, Da.” She rocked him a few beats in their hug and sighed. “Simone got me caught up. I’m sorry to have missed all the excitement.” She turned to the Bulgaria Foursome and offered an apologetic smile. “I don’t go off the grid very often nowadays, but we had a problem to deal with in our neck of the global woods. Didn’t want Simone and Heath fretting about it.”
“What kind of problem?” Matt asked.
“A few of Rhiannon’s bastards sniffing about. We had to conceal our compound and disperse for a bit to figure out how many of them were on the trail.”
“She’s still at it, that bitch,” Arthur said.
“That surprise ye?” Fergus asked. “Oh, she finishes what she starts, that Rhiannon, and of course she doesn’t like the idea of me Katie being her equal.”
Siobhan sighed. “I’d apologize for her, but I don’t think it’d make a difference.”
Spinning around to Perry, Katie spread on her broadest grin and grabbed his cheeks. “Ah! Welcome to the family, love.”
“Thank you,” Perry said brightly. “I like that better than what I got from Oliver.”
“Ach, don’t mind him.” She flicked a hand as though to dismiss the thought along with the air she displaced. “Imagine the state of my poor brain when I pulled my daughter into my arms and learned she’d gotten herself attached to Heath. At the very least, dear, you’re a sweet thing and come with no problems attached. Heath’s a whole heapin’ handful of them.”
Siobhan sighed.
Katie clucked her tongue and gave Siobhan a chucking under her chin. “You’re a good girl. Don’t worry, love.”
“Shit, half the people at the Hearth are going to be related by the time all is said and done,” Cora said. She pointed to Matt. “And I still have questions.”
“Oh?” Matt typed Katie just found us into a text message to Heath and chuckled. “We’ve got a few minutes. Little birdie says this trap attempt will work best when the realms align at 9:19 or some such shit, so we’re just standing around holding our asses until then.”
“Okay, good. Were you together in Bulgaria?”
“No and yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Fairy shit, dear,” Siobhan muttered. “They can’t really say when they were together because they don’t actually know when it started to matter.”
Cora blinked a few times at Siobhan, and then grunted in an that-makes-sense kind of way. “So, I take it you fellas aren’t going to stand on ceremony of any sort. You’ve just accepted that you’re settled and carry on as though you endeavored with intention.”
She was looking at Perry, but Matt wanted to let him off the hook so he could concentrate on figuring out how to shape their collective magics. “Yeah. Honestly, it’s kind of a relief.”
“In what way?”
“Because I know I’m not going to get my heart broken.”
She sighed. “I want that.”
“For fuck’s sake, woman,” Arthur groused. “I’m standing right here.”
Cora’s upper lip curled. “And?”
“Do you not feel it? Are you really not fuckin’ around? I’m your goddamned mate!”
“Oh-kay.”
“What?”
Cora shrugged. “Come on. I can put two and two together. I’ve got a brain between my ears, not fur. Figured it out when you lost your shit in Bulgaria. Here’s the thing, though. You want to hear the thing? ’Cause I’m gonna tell you the thing, Mr. Weber. I’m not a fairy, and I’m not even as much as half Wolf. That means the magic stuff doesn’t impress me in the same way because I’m not compatible with it. I don’t go with the flow. I need convincing. Do you understand me?”
Arthur’s head canted awkwardly. “No, I can’t say that I do.”
“She’s asking to be wooed, you rancid twat,” Siobhan groused. “Get yourself together, you pestilent cock sore. Shouldn’t be that hard. The cosmic answer is already yes. You’ve just got to make her feel like it’s worth her while.” She slung her weary gaze over to Katie. “See, this is what happens when fairies get too used to settling.”
Katie wrapped her arm around her father’s shoulders and chuckled. “Is that a warning I’m meant to pass on?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure, you don’t, lass. Sure, you don’t.”
Siobhan narrowed her eyes only to immediately widen them. “Wait, no! I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“About what?” Fergus asked.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Siobhan looked to Matt for rescue.
Usually, he would have left her to suffer for his own amusement, but given his own romance tumult as of late, he had to take pity on her. She was being stared down by her would-be mother-in-law. Matt had yet to endure that sort of interrogation, and he suspected that Perry’s granny was going to be far worse when she finally caught up to them.
“I think we could get this party started.” Matt rubbed his hands together briskly and said to Perry, “You ready for this?”
“Yes, I think so,” Perry said, “but might I ask Katie one question?”
“Ask it, lad,” Katie said.
“How the hell did you find us? We didn’t know precisely where we were going until we got here. We had to feel around for the realm vein.”
“Oh. I can easily go wherever my father or Simone are. Keys are like magnets that way. Why do you ask?”
“Wanted to be sure you hadn’t developed any new abilities I hadn’t accounted for in my algebra. I think we’re fine.”
“Oh, good.”
Matt slid a hand up the back of Perry’s shirt. “I’m calling bullshit.”
Perry gave the most minuscule of nods.
They’d discuss it later. Over laundry, probably.
While Katie probably did have the ability to hop from continent to continent to the exact location her direct relatives were, Matt suspected that her being able to sense that she wouldn’t be spotted by humans upon arrival was some other fairy’s talent.
Possibly not even a fairy’s.
He was going to have to sit down and sketch the Horan-Ade family trees to figure out who might be able to influence her magic. Matt had never heard of fairies being able to borrow gifts that belonged to people other than their mates’ without a talisman or spell or some sort. If Katie possessed such a talent, they might need to see who else did, too. Rhiannon being able to selectively borrow actual magical ability and not just energy would have been a devastating turn of tide.
“How do we do this?” Matt asked him aloud.
He wanted nothing more in that moment than to go home, pile some dirty clothes into the washing machine, and flop onto the couch with Perry as a pillow. Jetlag was starting to catch up to him, or something like it.
“Cora and Arthur are going to keep watch. I think we’ll need you and Princess Siobhan to stand on either side of the realm vein. I’ll grab it, and the two of you grab me. While I’m tilting the realm empty, we’ll have Fergus and Katie generate the waiting room. It’ll be like pouring liquid from a bottle into an empty balloon.”
“Do you want to ground it?” Katie asked her father. “If we shove it into the earth, it’ll be less likely that the rare human walking through will sense anything is amiss about the area.”
“You mean as opposed to creating a bubble in the air, like, on this axis?” Cora asked.
“Exactly. They technically would be living underground. The earth would shift to suit their needs for the time being without disturbing anything up here. The accommodations won’t be lush. I can’t throw magic around with that sort of specificity. I don’t know anyone who can. But they’ll want for nothing.”
“You kind of make that sound like no big deal.”
Katie seemed to have to think about that. She pursed her lips and grunted. “Da always said one never knows what they can do until they’re compelled to do it. I don’t think about whether or not my abilities are unusual. I simply try to find good ways to use them.”
“If Rhiannon appears?” Arthur asks.
“She won’t.” Katie got into position, kneeling next to a shrinking puddle.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because when she had her thugs bouncing around and trying to shake down my husband’s tribe, I got a whiff of her routing. Heath and Simone destroyed a lot of the old portals Da created for Rhiannon, but there are a few between here and there we’d all forgotten. I found one. Stitched up the end so she can’t exit where she was going. Her only way out is through the troll realm.” She helped her father kneel to join her. “She’ll have to learn to hold her breath for quite a long time to get down into the other gateway there. That’s all I’ll say.”
Matt gritted his teeth and held onto Perry, glad she wasn’t going to say more. How the woman could be so diabolical and yet so cheerful all at once had to be some sort of fairy personality disorder.
Or perhaps it was age.
He didn’t even want to think about what kind of menace he’d become if he were allowed to live as long as Katie and Fergus had. Perry had enough of his shit to put up with already.
___
What Perry hadn’t understood about the nature of his magic before that moment was that he’d been trying too hard to intellectualize it. That was what Geers always did, though. They dotted Is and crossed Ts and tried to account for every possible contingency. Thinking got in the way. Sometimes, brute force was a better attendant than caution.
As he stood in that damp, foggy position, shattering the axis of an unseen place and emptying its mouth into another, his body was full of violent vibrations. He’d become a tuning fork humming to the frequency of the reducing realm.
The insistent rhythm should have broken him, even if he did have magic as powerful as others claimed, but because of Matt, he was able to bend it without allowing it to make him a conduit.
He could hear the increasing franticness of the murmurs in all the languages of those spoken in the realm. He could sense their intentions and their haste. Many had been long waiting for such chaos and had been prepared to grab everything they could and run. Others were taken by surprise by the tilting.
That was all Perry tried to understand for there were too many souls rushing and too many emotions to internalize. Those weren’t for him to be concerned with. Those were for whoever led, assuming the fairies wished to be led by them.
He must have lost his awareness of being for a while because in one moment he was contemplating the keening sounds wild magic made when it was disturbed and the next, he was staring into Matt’s eyes as Princess Siobhan, behind him, looked on.
There was a line of sweat collected at Matt’s hairline. His skin was depleted of coloring and his breathing was ragged. “Fuck.”
Perry blinked several times to clear the blear from his eyes. Suddenly, he felt like ten pounds of sugar poured into an eight-pound sack—like his muscles weren’t connected right and his brain was slightly askew of its fastenings.
Perry turned, accounting for every member of the party.
There were Fergus and Katie, still on the ground and murmuring in hurried tones to each other.
Arthur stood several meters away, lower on the hill where he appeared to be doing a meticulous scan of the area.
Cora stood where the vanished realm vein had been, rubbing her arms briskly, unable to stop her teeth from chattering. “You all right?”
“I think so,” Perry said. “Feel a little off.”
“Well, I bet you do. And I’d like very much to be excluded from future fairy shenanigans that involve that sort of magic. The part of me that’s canine is usually very quiet. Whatever you just did made it scream, and if you’ve never had a wolf screaming inside a particular partition of your consciousness for ten minutes on end, you can’t possibly imagine how disconcerting that is.”
“Ten minutes?” Perry shook his head. The job hadn’t felt like ten minutes, but even ten minutes seemed short given what they’d had to do. They’d ripped apart gods-woven magic and reknit it into something different. Such a thing seemed like it’d need an age to accomplish.
Arthur joined Cora at her side. “Do you need to shift?”
“I can’t shift. I assumed I never would. I’m something like thirty percent Wolf.”
“And I’m twenty-five percent Sídhe,” Matt said.
Grimacing, Cora closed her eyes. “Yeah, the rest of you is witch, but I get the point.”
Arthur gave her elbow a nudge. “Do it if you think it’ll make you feel better. You obviously feel like shit. We’ve all been around sorts of magic that’ve jarred us constitutionally. There’s no shame in that.”
She shook her head. “Not doing that here, even if I knew how to force it. Wolves aren’t well-oriented the first time they shift. I don’t know this place at all. I’ll do it at home if I have to.”
“In Norseton?”
Cora opened her eyes and, probably for the first time, looked at Arthur with something other than skepticism or malice. “I don’t know. I’m a drifter. I’m safe and happy in Norseton, but Simone and Siobhan have asked me to stick around for a while. A lot depends on whether Ótama is okay with the transfer. She’s the one who hired me, technically.”
Princess Siobhan planted her palm on Cora’s forehead and let out a breath. “Your energy’s all frayed now. I could try to mellow it, but you might lose a day or two.”
“I’m sorry, Cora,” Perry said.
Cora groaned and squeezed the princess’s hand. “Stop. My fault for not asking questions and knowing how to buffer myself. I feel like a more experienced Wolf would have known better. My mom would have known better.”
“Okay, well, now you know better.” Arthur, evidently uncomfortable by the exchange, shifted his weight agitatedly. “You can take your wolf form at the Hearth, then.”
“And who’s going to keep me from running into traffic? Or snout-first into the ocean?”
“I will.”
“Yeah? You gonna ride behind me all night and make sure I don’t make myself werewolf roadkill? Or a shark’s late-night snack?”
“What’s a night to me? I’m a fairy.”
The fact that Cora didn’t say no outright was promising. At least, Perry thought so. By no stretch of the imagination did he have the right to consider himself an expert on romance. If doing lurid favors or getting unsuitable haircuts weren’t involved, he’d have no ideas at all.
Matt dialed out and put his phone to his ear. “Yeah. It’s done. I think we’re all right, but who the hell knows?”
“Is that Heath?” Princess Siobhan asked.
Matt grunted.
“Put him on speaker.”
Matt did. “Everyone can hear you, Heath.”
Perry was about to drift off to find someplace to sit, but Matt hooked him around the shoulders as he turned and pulled him against him. Perry supposed that was better than sitting, anyway. Being wanted felt nice, but he had to get used to it.
“Is it secure?” Prince Heath asked.
“Secure as a steel trap,” Fergus said.
“A few may be feeling somewhat claustrophobic,” Katie said. “There’s no exit built in, and they may be able to sense that. I tried to imagine some windows and doors into their spaces, but their range of travel will be exceedingly short. In a couple of days after we’ve all gotten to rest, Da and I can take turns escorting crew members into the bubble. You’ll need to establish teams who can identify everyone and sort out how to screen them.”
“I can help,” Princess Simone piped in.
In a somewhat muffled voice, the prince responded, “You can help by keeping your arse right where it is. Your mother and grandfather are perfectly capable of doing what needs done.”
“But—”
“Tell her, Katie.”
“Darling, we’ve everything we need,” Katie said in a treacle-sweet tone. “I know it’s difficult for Ades to sit still when there seems to be so much work to do. You have a good team. They’ll do right by you. Your granddad and I will see to it. I am certain your father will want to assist as well. And I suggest you let him coordinate the tasks, Heath. He has a way of preventing disorder.”
“Fine,” the prince said. “And my mother?”
“We’ll discuss her when we arrive. For the moment, she is no threat.”
“I’m taking your word for it. Are Matt and Perry radioactive right now?”
Perry couldn’t see the others because Matt had pulled him into a teddy-bear hug and had firmly planted Perry’s head against his shoulder. The hug made Perry’s Velcro happy. And his blood pressure. He thought that must have been why small animals made such snug burrows.
Or why humans bought weighted blankets.
I should get one?
“Are you asking if they’re safe to fly?” Princess Siobhan asked in a feeble tone.
“Aye.”
“I… Huh. You know, I actually can’t answer that. I don’t know if any of us are, to be frank. I feel like a walking power line, and I might disrupt the plane’s electrical systems. Fergus and Katie are pretending they can stand, but not trying hard enough to prove it. Cora’s got werewolf issues. Matt’s doing the stoic Viking thing very well, actually, but he’s an inhuman color right now.”
“Wait.” Matt released Perry only to reach into Perry’s pocket for his phone. He swiped it past Perry’s face to clear the recognition prompt and tapped the camera button. “What color am I?” he asked as he tried to get the camera focused in the scant light.
He looked gray to Perry, but Perry didn’t want to alarm him.
The princess pressed on with, “And Perry damn near vanished into the magic for about five minutes and I don’t trust he’s all the way back yet.”
“I’m right here,” Perry said. He looked onto his phone with Matt just to be sure he had a reflection, though.
“Yes, you’re here, cherub, for now.”
“But I’m fine,” Arthur said.
Princess Siobhan snorted. “Aye, you look fine enough, except for the bruises.”
“What bruises?”
“You can’t see them yet, but you know they’re there, just under your skin. Give them a little time like always. You’ll look like you got smashed by a folding chair. Magic gave you a hell of a beating.”
“Gods,” Arthur murmured and dragged a hand down his face. “I thought you all were just being flimsy.”
Matt growled.
“That’s your gift, isn’t it?” Cora pointed a look of incredulity at him. “You can get the shit beat out of you and not feel it until later. Keeps you in the action when it matters most.”
He shrugged in a way that was almost bashful for an invincible road thug of a fairy. “Something like that.”
“Cool.”
Arthur’s eyebrows sprang to attention. “Yeah?”
“Don’t let your head get too big.”
Arthur managed to tuck away the micron of glee that had been showing on his face.
“How about this?” Prince Heath said. “Stand by there in Ireland. Make your way into the nearest town and find someplace to sleep before folks get too good of a look at you. We’ll get teams sorted out. By the time Katie and Fergus are up to creating portals again, we’ll get them flown to where they need to go.”
“No need,” Katie said. “We’ll all fly home in two days’ time. That should be long enough to disperse whatever loud magic’s riding us right now. We’ll make a bio-locked tunnel from the Hearth directly into the bubble. Unlike how the realm was, the bubble’s location is fixed, so the magic we need to use to make the connection should be a bit more straightforward.”
“Bio-locked?” Matt asked.
“Meaning certain people can use it in both directions,” Perry conjectured. “The people inside the bubble wouldn’t be able to access the exit at all unless they’re escorted by someone the tunnel recognizes.”
“Ah,” Princess Simone said. “Kind of like how granddad programmed the fairy mounds so they only admitted people with Sídhe heritage. Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“Ah, we’ll do what needs doin’, me princess,” Fergus said. “We’ll rest soon enough.”
Perry hoped he was right. He felt like he hadn’t slept for months, and so did Matt.
That was mostly Perry’s fault.