Blankness. Gray blankness. And silence.
Is this all that’s left of me?
No. The gray was the Stone floor under Kevin’s hands, in front of his nose. And the silence was a ring made up of the surviving members of the Demesne of Purgatory, standing around him at a careful distance.
There was more to the silence than that, though. It was a listening silence, the thunderous nothing of his straining to hear an answer to the cry that was still burning raw in his throat.
Someone broke the circle and knelt beside Kevin, staring at the same spot on the floor. Maelduin, Tiernan’s nephew—and his geal’le’mac, his almost-son.
His image, too. Kevin couldn’t bear the sight. He flinched away—only slightly, but more than enough for a Fae to notice.
“I should have gone.” The words stuck in Maelduin’s throat.
He’s mourning too. Even the thought was flat and dull.
Kevin didn’t answer, because what could he have said?
Slowly he sat back on his heels. He still couldn’t make himself look up—couldn’t meet the eyes surrounding him, all the paired sets of eyes. And he couldn’t look away from the place where the world had opened and yanked his husband in.
As long as he didn’t look away, it wasn’t over.
“Conall. Cuinn.” The sound of his own voice startled him. “Can you open it back up? Long enough for me to get through?”
“No.” The mage and the Loremaster answered together, but it was Conall who went on. “There’s nothing there to open anymore. Without the Pattern on the other side, the nexus isn’t a portal.”
“Then he’s gone.”
No one said anything.
Kevin staggered as he stood up. Maelduin sprang to his own feet and caught his elbow, but dropped it like it was hot when Kevin tensed.
“I have to get out of here.”
“Kevin—”
Josh stepped into Kevin’s field of view, hand outstretched, finally forcing him to look up. The bare patch on the tattoo artist’s colorful chest where Areán had been was a vivid reminder of his own loss, the other piece sacrificed in the Marfach’s endgame.
Kevin couldn’t make himself take the outstretched hand. “I’m not going to do anything stupid, don’t worry. But I—I can’t stay here.”
Again, silence greeted him. Kevin thought he understood. No doubt relief and horrified fascination were the order of the day, gratitude at having been spared Kevin’s fate, or Tiernan’s, coupled with a hefty dose of so that’s what half a soul walking looks like. Not even a Fae was likely to have words appropriate to that situation.
A breeze rose, heard but unfelt; unseen moonlight trickled through branches like rain. Like tears.
“I, too, have a heart buried among my roots.”
“These aren’t—”
Yes. These were his roots, the roots of the man he’d become in response to the love of a Fae.
But that didn’t mean he could stay where his husband—his heart—was buried.
* * *
Step. Step. Step.
One step after another, his body on auto-pilot at least keeping a straight enough line that he didn’t walk out into traffic. More than once, anyway.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been walking, but he was pretty sure it hadn’t been long enough yet.
Once I stop listening for footsteps behind me...
Like that was going to happen.
Step. Step. Step.
It’s like walking the labyrinth.
He’d done that a couple of times—the National Cathedral had a replica of the Chartres Labyrinth—it was a kind of walking meditation. The second time he’d walked it, the thought had come to him, out of the still place the walking had brought him to, that sometimes what feels like an incredibly twisted path is actually a straight line, it’s just the world twisting around us that makes us think otherwise.
Which was either one of the deepest thoughts he’d ever had, or utter bullshit, because right now a straight line wasn’t getting him anywhere.
Not even out of his own head.
Step. Step. Step.
After another while, he thought he’d finally figured out where his feet were taking him. It was as good a place as any, he supposed. And it had been a long time since he’d talked to Tanner.
* * *
Bryce snuggled Setanta close, burying his nose in the Fade-hound puppy’s wiry fur. It was good to have a distraction from Lasair’s probing, gentle though it was—anything that sent his thoughts somewhere else was a good thing, when he was being reminded of the taint the Marfach had left in him.
Then there was that other thing he needed to forget.
No one’s life had mattered to him before Lasair. Not even his own. But then his Fae had brought him half of his soul, and now...
That’s idiotic. It wasn’t the first time Bryce had entertained that particular notion, but it was hitting him over the head now with more than its usual force. It’s not half a soul, not if we share it. As if you could divide a soul, anyway.
What did that mean for Kevin, then? Had he just lost half his soul? Or all of it?
Bryce was pretty sure he knew how he’d answer that question, if he were in the lawyer’s shoes.
Lasair made a soft, soothing, wordless sound; his palm opened over the old ache in Bryce’s side. “Almost finished, sumiúl.”
The nexus chamber sounded, and looked, a lot like a funeral parlor.
Terry and Maelduin were sitting on the black leather chaise, Maelduin leaning heavily on his much shorter partner. Bryce had wondered why Maelduin didn’t seem to be crying, despite his obvious heartbreak at the loss of blood kin—until he’d seen the diamonds falling from the Fae’s blue topaz eyes.
Lochlann and Rhoann were still tending to the evening’s surviving casualties—pretty much everyone, one way or another—with their separate forms of healing magick. At the moment, they were both crouched beside Fiachra, checking him out yet again.
Bryce shuddered at the memory of what they were checking for. If what the Marfach had done, had tried to do, to Fiachra was any indication of what it had intended for the Realm, maybe even for the whole human world... losing one of their own was a ridiculously small price to pay to put a stop to it.
Except that it wasn’t.
Long blond hair fell along the side of Bryce’s face, and lips brushed his cheek. “We would have lost this battle, if not for you.”
“Seriously?” Bryce turned to give his scair-anam all the side-eye he could manage. “I was about as useful as testicles on a tennis racquet—”
“You were the only one who could drain the Marfach’s magick. And you kept it from the nexus until Conall could... what in the name of...?”
Bryce never got the chance to find out what name a Fae might have chosen to invoke in bewilderment; Lasair, along with everyone else in the room, lapsed into stunned silence as the nexus chamber was filled with a tree.
Once he’d blinked a few times, Bryce was considerably less sure about what he was seeing. A tree, yes. Maybe. It was several stories tall, easily, even though the ceiling of the nexus chamber topped out at around nine feet. Except that it was also the kind of stunted, wind-gnarled oak he’d seen in pictures of the Scottish Highlands. And then there was the way it wasn’t really there at all—half the room was just occupied by a kind of tree selfness.
Great. He’d kept his sanity through a pitched battle with one of Satan’s fever dreams and the death of someone he’d actually hoped to expiate his past with and maybe someday earn the right to call a friend, only to lose it to a tree.
Coinneach’s sudden burst of pure joy, though, was enough to make Bryce doubt his doubts as to his soundness of mind—anything that could make someone that happy had to be real. The Gille Dubh jumped up and flung himself at the tree.
And that was when Bryce’s eyes more or less gave up trying to account for what was going on. Coinneach was still there, still in the room with them, still himself, but his form changed, merging with the tree. With all three ways the tree was real—the impossibly tall forest giant, the twisted mountain oak, and the idea of treeness.
“My brain hurts,” he murmured.
Someone laughed. Bryce wasn’t sure if it was Coinneach or the tree.
COME HOME. Bryce recognized the leaf-rustling voice, and it sure as hell wasn’t talking to him. THE WAY IS REMEMBERED. COME HOME.
As quickly as it had come, the tree—the treeness, the darag— was gone, and Coinneach with it.
Conall looked like he was trying to stare a hole through the floor where the darag had appeared and disappeared. “That’s not possible,” he muttered at last.
Peri looked up from where he held Fiachra cradled in his lap. The dark Fae didn’t look as if he still needed to be cradled, but Peri’s expression still had enough of Falcon in it to daunt even a Fae. “I challenge you to name me one thing that’s happened in the last few hours that a sane person would call possible.”
“Point.”
“And game, and set, and fucking match.” Terry’s voice was unsteady, and thick, and half-muffled in Maelduin’s hair. “I’m sorry... I don’t know what more we can do tonight, and I—I have to get Maelduin home.”
The Fae blade-master pushed himself upright, brushing tiny diamonds from his cheeks with a shaking hand. “I can stay, if we’re needed.”
One by one, everyone turned to look at Rian, leaning against the wall, his fingers interlaced with Cuinn’s, as if that was the natural thing to do under the circumstances.
Bryce did it, too. Because it was the natural thing to do. The Belfast street kid who always seemed to smell faintly of smoke was also a prince of the blood royal. Their Prince.
Slowly, Rian shook his head. “We’ll stick around a bit longer, clean up here and upstairs. But you needn’t stay.”
He pushed off the wall—Prince or no, elemental or no, the kid was clearly running on fumes, as they all were—and crossed to Terry and Maelduin, who rose to meet him. Without a word, he wrapped Maelduin in an embrace.
Bryce thought he saw Maelduin’s shoulders start shaking again. Rian held on until the shaking stopped, and then a while longer. And when he let go, it was to offer Terry the same.
“Slán abhaile,” he murmured at last, in what Bryce was finally learning to recognize as Irish rather than Faen. Safe home. “Agus Dia a bheith in éineacht bheirt agaibh.” Something about God, and with both of you.
No one said anything, or moved, as Terry and Maelduin made their way up the stairs. Even Setanta sat still and left off licking his sore paw, watching them go as if he could see.
Once the door at the top of the stairs had opened and closed, though, Rian turned on a heel, surveying those who remained. “We do need to get this shit cleared away, and I’m thinking our mage and our Loremaster might like some time to work out what’s happened. But...” The Royal brow creased in a frown. “We need to find Kevin. He shouldn’t be alone.”
“Agreed.” Josh didn’t even seem to notice how his hand played over the newly-bare hawk-shaped patch on his chest, the way a pregnant woman ran her hand over her baby bump, only Josh was trying to get used to a new absence, not a new presence. “But how are we going to do that, with the head start he has on us?”
Setanta surged to a standing position, tail wagging madly. He barked, startled a fart from himself, and sat back down hard.
Bryce waved a hand in front of his nose. “Gentlemen, gentleFae, I think we have a volunteer.”
* * *
The little pools of light at the base of the Wall always startled Kevin when he visited at night, peering up out of the darkness as if they were trying to give light without being noticed.
They didn’t startle him this time, though.
I’m pretty sure that’s not a good sign.
To hell with signs.
There were only a couple of visitors at the Wall this late on a December night; Kevin hung back in the shadows until they’d finished their own personal memorial, then let his feet carry him over to the familiar section, the one where his dad’s buddies’ names were carved into the stone.
Tanner’s name wasn’t here, of course—his brother’s war was still too new, too raw to have its own place on the National Mall. But this was as close as Kevin had to a place he could connect with his only sibling; Tanner had wanted to be cremated, maybe more so after he’d been trapped under a burning Humvee than he had before.
Kevin hadn’t understood that kind of anger then. He might, now. Once this numbness wore off.
Hey, Tanner, what’s doin’?
His brother didn’t answer, of course. He’d been that way when he was alive, too, if he was absorbed in something. And that was cool—Kevin didn’t need him to answer, anyway. He just needed someone to listen to what he couldn’t tell anyone else.
He’s gone... he’s really gone, Tanner.
He’d spent most of the walk from Purgatory trying to bury that knowledge, pretend he didn’t know what he knew. His SoulSharing with Tiernan hadn’t made him half of a whole—it had made him part of everything that was Tiernan-and-Kevin. And it was that sharing, that two-become-one, that was gone now. Gone without leaving behind so much as an echo.
At least you’ll get to meet him now—you’ll see him before I do.
No, he wouldn’t. Not Tanner, not Kevin. Garrett had brought a story back with him from the other side after Janek had killed him. A story of a place where humans went after they died, but Fae didn’t.
Something moved, out where the light met the December darkness. Probably a Park Patrol officer, giving an anonymous visitor respectful space.
Kevin’s memory filled in something else entirely. Just a wash of color, at first, slowly taking the form of a blond man, one who wasn’t really a man. One who had lashed out in the throes of a nightmare, a Pattern-dream, and given Kevin a shiner to remember.
One who had tracked him down, after he’d come here to pour his heart out to his memory of Tanner, and pushed past his own fear to take one more step toward the intimacy of a real SoulShare.
But Tiernan wasn’t there. Not this time.
The ground tilted under Kevin’s feet. He turned, his back slamming against the Wall in time to turn a fall into a slide down the cold stone to the ground.
He crossed his arms over his drawn-up knees, put his head down, and sobbed.
* * *
Kevin’s chest ached with every uneven breath as if someone had punched him in it. At some point, he’d wrapped his arms around his legs to ward off the worsening chill and rested his forehead on his knees. And he didn’t want to open his eyes, because he knew that when he did, they were going to feel exactly like someone had poured steel shavings into them.
But he was going to have to open his eyes, because there were paws on his leg and there was a cold nose in his ear.
“Aw, hell,” he croaked.
A tail swished through the scattering of fallen leaves at the base of the Wall.
Sighing, Kevin let his legs slide out and gathered the squirming Fade-hound pup into his lap. He was rewarded with an uncharacteristically gentle face-washing, licking the salt from his reddened cheeks and rasping against his day’s growth of beard.
Setanta’s eyes glowed in swirling opal shades, which meant one of the pup’s masters was loaning out his sight.
Which, in turn, meant that Kevin was busted.
I wonder who they’re going to send after me...
* * *
By the time Kevin heard footsteps approaching, Setanta had settled down in his lap. His eyes were dull and blind again, but his tail hadn’t stopped wagging since his arrival, and he nosed insistently at Kevin’s hand every time Kevin stopped rubbing the good spot behind his ears.
Kevin didn’t need to look up to know who had been sent to collect him. “Hey, Mac.”
The footsteps stopped. “How’d you know it was me?”
Setanta rolled to show his belly, begging for a good rubbing. Kevin obliged, not yet ready to make eye contact with a human being.
“You were complaining the other day about the noise from the hydraulics in your knee... it’s quiet enough out here that I could hear it.”
“We’ll make a Fae out of you yet,” Tiernan whispered in his memory.
No, you won’t. Kevin’s throat closed up like a fist.
“Hey.” Before Kevin could protest, Mac slid down the wall to sit next to him. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make it worse.”
“It doesn’t get worse.” The words came out choked, but still recognizable.
“You have a point.”
In the silence that followed, Mac patted the pockets of a coat Kevin was pretty sure he hadn’t been wearing in Purgatory; digging in one, he pulled out a stainless steel flask with the seal of the Marine Corps on one flat side.
“Careful.” Kevin coughed. “The Park Police don’t care for that kind of thing.”
“Screw the Park Police. We’re under Lucien’s protection.”
The unscrewed top of the flask became a passable shot glass. It was going to be a while before Kevin’s sense of smell would tell him anything useful, after a few hours of sobbing and choking back sobs and giving up trying to hold back and starting all over again, so the clear liquid Mac was pouring could be vodka, or gin, or even Sambuca—no, Mac would never do that to him.
At least it wasn’t Tennessee Honey. Thank God.
Mac offered Kevin the makeshift glass, and kept on holding it out even after Kevin shook his head. Setanta yipped, nosing Mac’s hand closer to Kevin.
Sighing, Kevin took the metal cap and tossed back the contents, coughing as the alcohol seared his raw throat. “Holy shit,” he breathed, when he could breathe again.
Mac nodded, took the cap back, refilled it, and copied Kevin’s gesture, leaving out the choking and gasping. “I was going to bring Jack and Coke, but have you ever seen what Coke does to stainless steel?”
“Don’t make me laugh, it hurts.” Kevin’s diaphragm was fighting it out with his nose for the title of Most Useless Organ. How long have I been crying?
No time at all, he had a feeling, compared to how long he was going to be.
The two men passed the cup and flask back and forth a few more times in silence. It was a hollow silence on Kevin’s part, fragile. He needed it...but it was poised and waiting to be broken.
Mac broke it. “Everyone wanted to come after you. All the Tirr Brai, anyway.”
That meant all the Fae, plus Coinneach. “That’s kind of weird.” Kevin reached for the flask again. At least when his throat was burning there was part of him that wasn’t numb. “How did you end up with the duty?”
The ex-Marine shook the flask, nodded, and handed it over. “This isn’t a duty, you know that. But the humans had the good sense to realize the last thing you needed was to be surrounded out of nowhere by a Demesne’s worth of freaked-out Fae.”
“Now I know you’re bullshitting me.” Kevin’s hand shook as he poured, splashing a few drops of liquid over his fingers. Setanta nosed at the scent, curious, but Kevin nudged the pup away. “Fae don’t freak out over death. Unless it’s blood kin, or maybe their own SoulShare.”
Kevin knocked back the shot in a hurry, to keep from choking on his own words. Better to let Mac think he was choking on the alcohol.
He wasn’t fooling Mac, needless to say. “Yeah, Maelduin’s taking it hard—Terry took him home right before Lucien and I left. But the others... I don’t know.” Mac settled back against the Wall, tipping his head back to stare up at the waxing moon, veiled in clouds. “Frankly, I don’t think they get it either.”
“What do you mean?”
“You really want to know?”
“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.” And at least for the moment, considering a roomful of Fae Acting Strangely beat the hell out of the other thoughts chasing themselves fruitlessly around the inside of Kevin’s head.
Mac shrugged. “If I were to go all armchair shrink on you, I’d say they’re realizing they’re able to feel empathy, after what, a couple of thousand years of thinking they couldn’t? Or convincing themselves they couldn’t?”
“They’re probably just thinking it could just as easily have been any of them.”
Mac’s eyes narrowed. “That sounds like relief. I promise you, they’re anything but relieved.”
Kevin let out a long, unsteady sigh. Setting the flask and glass on the cold marble at the base of the Wall, he ground the heels of his hands against his closed eyes.
And instantly regretted it. Christ, my eyeballs have been sandpapered.
“No, not relieved. Just... hell, I don’t know. I’m not thinking straight right now.” Suddenly, all Kevin wanted was sleep, even though he knew with a bone-deep certainty that sleep wasn’t going to be coming anywhere near him for a very long time. “It just takes a hell of a lot to make a Fae conscious of mortality. And I think tonight qualifies as a hell of a lot.”
“Sorry.” Kevin could almost hear Mac wince.
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
The ex-Marine’s laugh was short and harsh. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I promise, kidding is the last thing on my mind right now.”
Mac’s head dropped back against the Wall. “Fuck it. Can we just start this conversation over? Maybe the whole night?”
“Please.”
Kevin had never meant a word more in his life. Except the I love you, too he hadn’t had time to say.
Footsteps approached, somewhere outside the glow of the lights. Kevin shoved the flask under his legs, in case the even tread betokened the Park Police.
As the sound moved off, he cautiously shook the flask. Almost empty. Which meant he was probably going to have to get off his ass and do something.
“They aren’t expecting me to come back to Purgatory, are they?”
“Not really.” Mac took the flask back and screwed on the cap. “But if you want to, they’ll be there.”
“No.” Kevin’s jaw clenched involuntarily. “No. I just... want to go home.” He had no idea how he was going to get there, but that was the least of his problems.
“Yeah.” Mac tucked the flask back into his pocket, then rubbed Setanta gently behind one ear with a knuckle. “Hey, pup. Téighras.”
Setanta twisted to lick Mac’s finger, then cocked his head, looking uncertainly up at Kevin with eyes now dim and clouded, whining softly.
I’m going to be doing that myself in a couple of minutes if I don’t get the hell out of here. “Go on. Go home.”
Instead of obeying either of them, Setanta braced his good paw on Kevin’s chest, rose up, and started washing his face, his tongue rasping against Kevin’s rough cheeks.
Mac grunted. “Well, they warned me.”
Kevin was too preoccupied with the squirming bundle of increasingly frantic consolation in his lap to pay much attention to what Mac was doing. Maybe we should have gotten a dog. Coming home to an empty house was going to be a whole new circle of hell.
“Yeah, Bryce? It’s Mac. You were right, he’s not listening. Here, let me put you on speaker.” Mac pushed his phone up next to Setanta, where the puppy could presumably smell it. “Go ahead.”
“Setanta, come.”
Mac snatched the phone back in time to spare it most of a tongue-bath. “Well, at least he knows it’s you.”
Bryce’s sigh came through loud and clear. “Let me call in the big guns.”
A pause, then Lasair’s clear, stern baritone. “Setanta. Téighras, tréan-cú.”
Setanta whined, swiped his tongue up Kevin’s cheek one more time, and disappeared.
“Got him,” Lasair announced a second later. “Bryce, could you put his collar on him just in case he tries to—thank you, sumiúl.”
“Sorry, Lasair.” Mac wiped the phone’s screen carefully with a sleeve. “Maybe I pronounced the recall command wrong.”
“I doubt it. I believe he wanted to stay.” Another pause. “Is... Kevin there?”
A leaden certainty in the pit of Kevin’s stomach told him he was going to have to get used to the pauses, the searching for words, his friends not knowing what to say to him. “Right here, Lasair.”
“Even a small Fade-hound follows its own will over any other, except the order of a Master of Hounds. I could order Setanta to find you, but once he did, it was his choice to stay.” Kevin thought he heard a soft chuckle, one that only sounded slightly forced. “I say this to warn you, in case you wake up some morning soon with a mildly flatulent puppy drooling on your pillow.”
Kevin wanted to smile, but wanting was going to have to stand in for the real thing. “I’ll give you a call if he wanders.”
“Sleep well, when sleep finds you, Ngarradh.”
Kevin frowned as Mac put the phone back in his pocket. “That was one of the words the Loremasters sent through the Pattern, wasn’t it?” The memory of the ultimately useless strategy session, Conall and the others trying to decipher the strange message from the Realm, might as well have been part of another life.
Mac grimaced. “Yeah. It means ‘The Sundered One.’”
“Shit.” There didn’t seem to be much more to say than that.
There was an awkward-as-fuck silence, one Mac finally broke. “Hey, could you give me a hand up?”
“Sure.”
Kevin lurched to his feet, his every muscle protesting hours of motionless tension in the cold. He ignored them. “What do you need me to do?”
“Just brace my C-leg with your foot so it doesn’t skid and give me an arm, and I should be fine.”
It took a while, and both of Kevin’s arms, but they managed to get Mac upright without attracting the attention of the Park Police, or anyone else.
“How are you getting home?” Kevin’s mouth felt like it was on autopilot—as if he were sending his dad’s oldest friend home after nothing more consequential than an all-night BBQ-and-B.S. session at Chez Almstead/Guaire.
Chez Almstead, now.
“I’ll be fine on the Metro, don’t worry about me. Lucien left your car over on 21st Street, right across Constitution, outside the National Academy of Sciences. Closest he could find parking on the street.”
“Is that even legal?—Wait, did you say my car?” Kevin patted his trouser pocket, and was rewarded with the familiar jingle of the Merc’s keys, right where he’d put them.
“Legal? This is Lucien we’re talking about, remember?” Normal humans tended to forget strangenesses associated with Fae or their human SoulShares eventually, and Lucien’s odd Fae gift accelerated the forgetting. “And it turns out that a fire elemental may not be able to stomach riding in a car, but he can hot-wire one just fine.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
The silence that followed was finally broken by the Dopplered horn of a car speeding down Constitution. Kevin blinked, wondering how long he’d been staring at the pavement.
“Are you...”
“Good to drive? Hell yes.” There wasn’t enough vodka in the world to make a dent in Kevin’s numb sobriety.
“Actually, I was going to ask if you were going to be all right alone.” Mac shrugged, visibly uncomfortable for the first time since he’d showed up.
“Damned if I know. But I have to start sometime.”