The sight of Tiernan in a tux, complete with pearl-gray gloves, never failed to make Kevin’s heart skip a beat. Or several.
It also tended to make it difficult for him to buckle his belt, which amused his husband to no end. “Are you really sure you want to go out tonight?”
Kevin stuck his tongue out at Tiernan briefly, before returning his attention to his belt. “You have no idea how hard it was to get tickets to this Nutcracker. None.”
Tiernan’s phone started playing delicious hot jazz. Josh’s ringtone.
Tiernan lowered one eyelid in the barest lascivious wink as he peeled off a glove and dug his phone out of his breast pocket. “We’ll see if you’re still singing the same tune in a few—”
A sound like the “ping” of a wine glass shattering with the force of a soprano’s voice fractured the air.
Oblivion followed.
* * *
Some instinct warned Kevin not to breathe. Or maybe it was the couple of inches of water he was lying in face-down that did the warning.
What the hell? Gasping, he pushed himself up onto his elbows, his arms aching with the effort and trembling as they bore his weight. Water streamed down into his eyes; he shook his head, swallowing the bile that rose in his throat with the rapid movement and realizing that the back of his head hurt like a son of a bitch. And he’d somehow lost most of a fingernail, too.
“What the bright shiny fuck?” The voice was Cuinn’s, the tone shaken. Kevin managed to raise his head enough to see the Loremaster pushing himself up to his knees, using the black leather chaise in the middle of the nexus chamber for leverage.
The nexus chamber. Minus all the fireworks and unbound magick—and where had those gone?—it looked almost banal, like a bathtub with a clogged drain. What the bright shiny fuck, indeed.
Groans and curses were coming from all over the room, now.
Rian’s head rested on Cuinn’s knees, as he coughed and spluttered and swore.
Lucien’s distinctive Quebeçois swears were hoarse, vehement and interrupted by coughing, and were not in the slightest mollified by his husbands’ wordless murmurs.
Fiachra sat with his back to the wall, cradling Peri’s head against his chest; Kevin wasn’t sure if Peri was awake. Mascara streaked and ran down Peri’s cheeks, and the skirt of a tattered green gown floated around his legs.
Bryce and Lasair and Setanta were huddled in the corner farthest from the nexus, Bryce with the green-around-the-gills look that said he’d been closer to the Marfach than he could stand, and Setanta whimpering and trembling and worrying at his left front paw.
Lochlann looked the closest to normal of anyone Kevin could see, albeit more bewildered than Kevin had ever seen him as he knelt and stared at the floor, his fingers intertwined white-knuckled with Garrett’s.
Conall and Josh were slumped shirtless on the black leather chaise, their poses so perfectly identical as to suggest the mage had just been jarred out of his scair-anam’s body.
Coinneach sat on the floor in the middle of the wellspring, his palms splayed out flat on the stone and a spark of panic in his brown-green eyes.
Maelduin crouched on the floor, holding Terry up out of the water; Terry had apparently just been clinging to Maelduin as if his life depended on his grip.
And tiny corpses floated in the water around Terry. Eyeless creatures, all fangs and scaly tails.
Kevin scrambled to his feet, nearly levitating out of the water. “Son of a bitch!” His teeth were chattering; his whole body remembered the sensation of the component creatures of the Marfach-monster’s tail chewing their way through his guts.
Everyone fell silent; those who could move turned to look up at Kevin, confusion warring with the echoes of anger, fear, pain, sorrow in human, Fae, Gille Dubh and blind puppy gazes.
“Sorry,” Kevin muttered. “Marfach pieces in the water. Freaked me the hell out.”
He relaxed unthinkingly back into Tiernan’s arms, seeking calm and comfort—so unthinkingly that it took him several seconds to realize Tiernan wasn’t actually there.
Heart racing, Kevin turned on his heel, setting the water sloshing and his head pounding. “Where’s Tiernan?”
Conall pushed himself to a sitting position, frowning. “Maybe he wasn’t taken with the rest of us?”
Fiachra tried to speak, cleared his throat and tried again. “I don’t think we were taken.” He drew a deep unsteady breath. “That chime we heard—we did all hear it, right?” He waited for nods, and Lucien’s merde alors, before finishing, “That sounded like a timeslip. You don’t forget that sound.”
Kevin, like everyone else, turned to look at Coinneach, though Kevin was paying as much attention to the periphery of his vision as to the crouching Gille Dubh. Surely Tiernan would be Fading in any second now.
The sound of rustling leaves and the shifting glow of moonlight filled the chamber. Fortunately, Kevin had exchanged blood with Coinneach and his darag not long after Maelduin’s arrival from the Realm, as had everyone else in the Demesne who hadn’t been able to understand darag-speech. An affirmation of trust, they’d called it.
“Not a timeslip. None of us have moved in time.” Coinneach glanced up briefly, but almost immediately went back to running his hands over the Stone floor, as if searching for something by touch. “This was a different thing, a timewipe.”
Kevin squinted at the floor under Coinneach’s hands. It looks as if the wellspring’s gone... but it can’t be.
Conall’s bright green eyes narrowed. As exhausted as he looked, he was unquestionably in full pissed-off-mage mode. “A few more specifics would be nice.”
Instead of answering, Coinneach closed his eyes; his arms stiffened and trembled, as if he were trying to draw something up out of the floor, or put down roots. After nearly a minute of this, he sighed deeply and sat back, splashing into the standing water.
No one so much as cracked a smile.
“The magick of the daragin is that of time. Time is our ally, our weapon, woven into our substance. And when we bend time beyond bearing in the service of magick, there is a backlash, a price. A timewipe, defacing the memories of all those too close to the channeling.”
Maelduin frowned. “Nothing like that happened when your magick trapped Terry and sent him to Antarctica.”
Coinneach shook his head miserably. “That was a great channeling, but nowhere near the power needed to trigger a timewipe.”
Several Fae whistled under their breaths. Conall, still frowning, was not one of them. “So you’re telling us that you and your darag bent time. So severely that none of us remember coming here, or anything that happened here.”
“Yes.” Coinneach shivered. “That must be what happened.”
Things were finally starting to make sense to Kevin. A little. He and Tiernan must have come here together, and then Tiernan had left for some reason, during the time no one could remember.
There was another alternative, though, one that Kevin adamantly refused to let his imagination explore. One that involved the Marfach, and a sword, and darkness.
“How do we reverse the wipe and get our memories back?” It never occurred to Kevin that the timewipe might be irreversible. He had to find out what had happened, or at least give Tiernan time to Fade back from wherever he’d gone.
Again, Coinneach took a while to answer, and when he did the sound was that of leaves dropping one by one into still, cold water. “The timewipe can be chipped away, bit by bit, if those with fragments of memory share what they have.”
The Gille Dubh had been gazing into the dirty water; now he looked up, pleading and panic in his uncanny eyes. “Let us share, each with all. For the wellspring is gone; I have lost my darag, and unless I remember my way back to it, I will surely die.”