“I think Setanta is happy you could come out with us tonight.”
“And you aren’t?” Bryce grinned, watching the Fade-hound pup quest ahead of his masters in his badass truesilver harness and chain leash. They’d had to cannibalize most of the Demesne’s remaining truesilver to make them, but it had been worth it; the magickal metal was the only substance capable of keeping Setanta from Fading back to the hotel—or even all the way home, to Greenwich Village—whenever he felt like it.
Lasair made a rude noise. Bryce had never heard a human make it; judging from his experience of Fae lips under other circumstances, he guessed there were slight differences between Fae and human facial muscles, leading to a uniquely Fae embouchure.
The thought lent a slightly wicked curve to Bryce’s grin. He’d been spending more time smiling lately. A lot more time. Which was bizarre, considering he’d spent most of the last couple of weeks waiting for the lethal twist in his gut to tell him the monster he’d once been so intimate with had made another Fade-jump.
More Fae than a Fae, Lasair had called him. Once Bryce had realized what love was, he’d treated it as a game, a ritual, a commodity to be won or lost or traded. And unlike his start in life, with all the financial privilege of a fourth-generation investment banking family, he’d started the love game with loose change in his pocket and a pair of deuces in his hand.
Or so he’d thought, until Lasair opened his eyes to what was actually going on around him, and inside him.
The three of them stopped as Setanta cocked a leg beside one of his favorite bushes; the pup never failed to water it, and tonight was no exception.
“You think he knows that’s Congress, across the street?”
Lasair frowned. “I thought you told me your Congress was behind us.”
Setanta was taking his time about his bush-watering duties; Bryce glanced back over his shoulder at the Capitol dome while they waited for him to finish. “No—well, kind of. They meet in the Capitol, but they have their lairs across Independence and down First Street—”
Cold sweat streamed down Bryce’s temples, cheeks and throat, and glued his shirt to his chest. His gut churned and twisted in all three dimensions, and a few it appeared to have invented on the spot. His vision swam; when it cleared, he was on his knees, staring resignedly at his dinner, splattered in the grass behind the overgrown bush.
Setanta whined, standing on his hind legs to nose at Bryce’s ear.
“It’s here.” Lasair didn’t bother making it a question; he knelt beside Bryce, an arm around his shoulders, drawing him close.
“Yeah.” Bryce coughed and spat, then tried to settle against Lasair. He could feel his scair-anam’s magick, probing to draw the foulness out of him. “I think... it’s been here a while. But more dead than alive. Until now.”
Funny thing, though. He felt like hammered dogshit, sure, but he didn’t feel nearly as bad as he’d expected to, with the monster on their doorstep and ready to rumble.
Maybe I’m getting used to this.
Bryce had definitely had happier thoughts.
“Can you tell where it is?” Lasair rested his cheek against Bryce’s hair.
“Purgatory, I think. Or somewhere nearby.”
“Folathón.” Lasair grimaced; Setanta, picking up on his master’s mood, growled.
Bryce knew how they both felt. All the half-baked plans that had come out of their summit the other night had involved the Demesne getting to the nexus before the Marfach.
Wait. Wait justafuckingminute.
“If it was actually at the nexus, we’d know, right? I mean, the world would be ending or something.”
Lasair nodded. “You think we might still have time.”
“Maybe.”
Bryce knew what Lasair’s next question was going to be—his Fae was already turning a pale shade of green.
Sure enough, Lasair steeled himself. “How close is the nearest Metro station?”
“I love you. But there’s no time for that.” Bryce’s heart was hammering against his ribs, hard enough to be audible to his Fae lover and their Fae hound, he was sure. “You’re going to have to Fade all three of us.”
Lasair pulled back just far enough to stare at Bryce. “You’re mad.”
“I thought you figured that out a long time ago.” Bryce’s breath caught hard on what felt like a swift kick to the gut; he suspected his half-smile didn’t fool his SoulShare one bit.
“I will not kill you.” Turquoise eyes narrowed. Even Setanta was getting in on the stern act, lips curling back from what would someday be fangs.
“I’m not asking you to.” I hope. “One Fade shouldn’t kill me.”
“I am not convinced.”
“I am. Mostly.” I think I need to pick better times to be honest. “Each time I’ve gotten sick, since the Marfach escaped... I think I’ve been sharing its Fades. I’ve gotten... acclimated.”
“I would hardly call this acclimated.” Lasair inclined his head toward what was left of a medium rare rib-eye.
“I would. Remember how bad it was the first couple of times? How you spent hours getting me to the point where I could sit up without help?”
Setanta whined and licked Bryce’s ear. Bryce grimaced apologetically and gave the pup a skritch under his harness.
“Yes.” Somehow, the Fae made the single word sound like I’m still not giving in, so don’t get any ideas.
“We’re out of time, Rapunzel.” Lasair’s enjoyment of the nickname Bryce had given him had been one of the first things to help Bryce to his new understanding of love. “We have to find out what’s going on. Then you can take Brimstone-Butt and rally the troops.”
“While you do what, exactly?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet.” Jesus, my nose should be growing for a whopper that big. It was perfectly obvious what he was going to have to do. “We’ll have a better idea once we get there and see what’s going on.”
“Seeing without being seen is likely to be... problematic. Especially since the Marfach is probably as sensitive to your movements as you are to its.”
Setanta crouched in the grass, paws splayed, tail wagging and ears perked up, all hunt-and-play.
Those ears drooped as Bryce and Lasair both said “No.” The pup put his head on his paws and whined softly. Bryce thought he could see a faint green cloud emanating from just under Setanta’s no-longer-wagging tail.
Lasair picked Setanta up and cradled him tenderly but firmly against his chest. “Stay with me, tréan-cú.” Bryce wasn’t sure what went into being a Master of Fade-hounds, a pack-alpha to a pack of apex predators, but it had something to do with the way his scair-anam was talking to Setanta. “Stay. Guard. Orthú.”
The tiny Fade-hound had learned that orthú signaled an unbreakable command, as binding on him as his love for his masters. Even so, he growled softly and licked his canines in frustration.
I guess this means I win. The thought wasn’t exactly exciting.
His excitement level didn’t matter, though. Not if he could finally do something to make up for 30-plus years of assholery, and just maybe save two worlds. “We don’t have to risk our favorite scent hound. Not if we shoot for a landing in the dancers’ lounge.”
Lasair blinked. “Why not Tiernan’s office? The security monitors would show us everything we need to know.”
“Tiernan’s office is almost directly over the nexus.”
“Shit.”
When Lasair cursed in English, he was almost as careful and precise about it as Conall. It was almost enough to make Bryce crack a smile. “Precisely. This is going to scramble my innards enough without kicking the nexus in the nuts.”
Lasair shook his head, more in a you’re incorrigible way than in outright disapproval. At least, that was what Bryce hoped.
“We’ll make it work.” Bryce swallowed a sudden lump in his throat. “We Fade in, find out what the monster’s up to, you and the odorous one Fade back out and go collect the cavalry.”
“Correction.” Damn, Lasair was talking to him exactly the way he’d been talking to Setanta. “We Fade in, I help you recover, and then we do whatever else needs to be done.” Narrowed turquoise eyes told Bryce exactly what his SoulShare thought of his omission.
“Unless the Marfach’s breathing down our necks, in which case you leave me to—”
“No ‘unless’.” Lasair shook his head calmly. “A choice between your life and my own is no choice.”
Damn. Just when I thought I was finally getting the hang of this love thing. Bryce unbuckled Setanta’s harness, hoping neither the hound nor the Hound-master noticed his hands shaking.
“Why are you—oh.” Lasair nodded. “He would not be able to Fade with us if he wore it.”
“Exactly.” Bryce swallowed hard, forcing down the lump in his throat one more time as Lasair’s arms settled around him and Setanta nestled against his chest. “Let’s do this. Before someone comes along and finds us.”
Lips brushed Bryce’s forehead. “Open to us, sumiúl.”
For once, Bryce did as he was told.
And the world went dark and twisted.
* * *
Bryce was convulsing in Lasair’s arms almost before he was solid.
His thoughts filled with dire—but silent—curses, Lasair spared a glance for his surroundings, enough to be sure he’d brought them all to the dancers’ lounge behind Purgatory’s stage as he’d intended. Then, carefully, he eased Bryce down to the floor; as soon as Setanta had wriggled out from between them, he covered Bryce with his body, the way he always did when Bryce was suffering from contact with the Marfach.
Setanta, too, had his usual comfort to offer; the wan light from the phosphorescent telltales plugged into the outlets around the room turned the pup’s fur a sickly green and lent his clouded eyes an eerie glow as he gave Bryce’s sweaty face a tongue-bath.
Not knowing what else to do, Lasair concentrated as best he could under the circumstances, trying to draw the Fade-sickness out of his scair-anam’s body the way he dealt with the Marfach’s foul energy.
It’s working. I think. Bryce’s tremors were slowing, his breathing gradually becoming less labored. Setanta’s tail thumped softly against the leg of a nearby chair.
Bryce opened his eyes—closed them, barely in time to avoid a tongue-swipe. Where? he mouthed, as he cautiously opened his eyes again and tried to look around without moving anything but his eyes.
Lasair lowered his head until his lips brushed Bryce’s ear. “Dancers’ lounge,” he whispered. The lounge’s sound insulation had been installed last week—a necessity, if the dancers not on stage were going to be able to relax this close to the monster sound system the new Purgatory was going to boast—but the door was ajar, and unless the Marfach was wearing Janek’s body, its hearing was probably as acute as that of any other magickal creature.
The Fae could feel Bryce’s tight nod echoed all through his still-twitching body. For all his scair-anam’s evident suffering, he had obviously been right in his assessment of what had been happening to him since the monster’s escape from the Antarctic icecap. He was acclimated to Fading—as much as a human could be, in any event.
Need to find it.
“Are you sure you can—”
By way of reply, Bryce tried to push Lasair off him. Moving a determined Fae would be impossible, of course, unless that Fae allowed it.
Lasair allowed it, reluctantly. In fact, he helped Bryce to his feet, trying not to wince in sympathy with the effort required of his scair-anam. Because Bryce was in the right. They had no time to spare for his recovery.
The three, Fae, human and puppy, padded down the hallway, around the right angle that would keep light from the dressing room off the dance floor. There would be a curtain at the end of the hall eventually, but for now there was only the chrome rod from which it would hang; they pressed as close as they could to the left wall and inched down the last few feet.
Lasair could hear his own heart pounding, of course, and Bryce’s. Even Setanta’s, though the pup’s hunting instincts had taken over and locked his tiny fangs together, just enough to let him breathe without tell-tale panting.
The crash of shattering glass froze them all where they stood.
“Fuck,” a male voice muttered, the single word laden with lust and ire and madness. “It has to be here.”
Lasair felt as if something had hold of his head, clamping it in an invisible vise, trying to prevent him from moving those last few inches. Whatever it was, it tried in vain; he edged forward just enough to peer around the corner, his arm sliding around Bryce’s waist as Bryce came up beside him.
One look was all they needed before falling back. The dreadlocked male aspect of the Marfach was behind the bar, frantically searching the back wall in the light from the tell-tales and a strange red glow that might have been coming from the bar, or from the creature itself. The fresh scent of rum told Lasair what bottle had just fallen to the floor; other less fresh scents told him the rum hadn’t been the first to go.
Hopefully all of them together were enough to cover the scents of Fae and human and Fade-hound.
Lasair didn’t breathe until the three of them had regained the comparative safety of the lounge. He pulled the door most of the way closed and eased Bryce into a chair; Setanta rested his front paws on Bryce’s thighs, looking very much as if he wanted to whine.
Lasair empathized.
Bryce motioned, and Lasair ducked his head to put his ear next to Bryce’s lips, for once not even noticing the soft tickle of his SoulShare’s mustache.
“It’s looking for the door to the basement,” Bryce whispered.
Lasair nodded. The last time the Marfach had been in Purgatory, the only way into the nexus chamber had been through the door behind the bar.
“But we’re going to have to get it down there—whatever plans we managed to make the other night all depend on access to the nexus and the wellspring.”
Fuck me with an eggbeater.
Bryce let out a breath of laughter, as if he could hear Lasair’s thoughts. “I can handle that part. But you and Brimstone-Butt have to get out of here and summon the cavalry.”
Lasair pressed his lips to Bryce’s ear, the better to keep sound from escaping to be overheard. “If you think I’m leaving you alone with that monster—”
“I managed to live that way for the better part of a year.” Bryce gripped Lasair’s shoulder tightly. “It would kill you without a thought. I should be able to keep it interested long enough to lead it downstairs. At which point I really, really need you to have alerted the heavy artillery.”
Otherwise known as the Defense of the Demesne. They had joked about the name, when making battle plans had been mostly an intellectual exercise, since Rian had flat-out vetoed the notion of having a “proper” Royal Defense. But there was no elite cadre of warriors in the Demesne of Purgatory, and no one person singled out for them to protect.
Lasair had never wanted to shred an attack plan so badly as he wanted to savage Bryce’s. Unfortunately, his scair-anam was right. “And I have to take Setanta with me.”
The puppy’s fangs bared in a silent growl as Bryce nodded. “I can’t protect him here... and frankly, all it would take is one good fart, and game over.”
The wounded expression the blind puppy turned on Bryce was almost enough to make Lasair laugh, even if the Fae did suspect his scair-anam was blowing smoke to distract him. “We will go. But if I come back and discover you have taken any unnecessary risks...”
“Me? Never.”
Humans set great store by angels, Lasair had discovered, and he suspected Bryce thought he resembled one. “I call bullshit.”
There was no more time for banter, though—had never been time to begin with. Lasair brushed his lips across Bryce’s cheek and gathered Setanta into his arms. “Keep safe, m’anam-sciar.”
There was no safety for any of them now; the cold weight in the pit of Lasair’s stomach as he and Setanta Faded out was eloquent testimony to that fact. No safety until the unkillable Marfach was dead.
* * *
Bryce closed his eyes, just for a second. He needed more than a second, that went without saying, but a second was all he dared to take. He’d recovered from the Fade a hell of a lot faster than he’d expected, which was probably why Lasair had been willing to leave him behind. But Lasair had apparently forgotten about the twisted lump of Bryce’s own flesh that was in thrall to the monster, and what that lump did to Bryce when the Marfach was anywhere near.
Bryce didn’t have the luxury of forgetting.
“Couldn’t stay away, could you?” The voice came from immediately behind Bryce and to the right; a broken fingernail caressed his cheek. “Loyalty’s so rare a thing, even in ass-puppets.
Shit.
The chuckle behind him turned his fortunately-empty stomach. “You deserve a reward. Maybe we’ll make sure you stay dead this time.” The voice dropped to a feral snarl. “After you tell us what the fuck you did with the nexus.”
“You can go straight to—”
A sharp, brittle chime, wire under tension, shattering glass, cut Bryce off in mid-curse.
Then... nothing.