“Jesus God! Kenna! KENNA!”
Christopher heard his own terrified shout, but in truth had no real idea of his own words. They didn’t matter, not when color and power exploded around Kendis, ripping open a hole in the air—and not when the creature wearing a young child’s body hurled a missile of force straight at the girl he loved. He threw forth power of his own to block it. But he had no time to aim while he was already hurling himself in Kendis’ direction, bent on shielding her with body and magic alike. Millicent’s power crested along with his, and his Warder First had all the speed of her decades of experience. But it wasn’t enough.
Elessir beat him to Kendis, tackling her, and he wasn’t fast enough either.
The alokhiu’s assault slammed into her, hurling her—and the Unseelie along with her—through the open portal. When Christopher’s own leap carried him to that spot, though, the portal closed with an audible rush of power. Light coruscated across his sight, blinding him for an instant, and his aborted tackle had nowhere to carry him but straight into the ground.
“KENNA!”
Feet thudded near him. Hands grabbed at him, hands whose owners Christopher couldn’t see until his sight cleared and he realized Jake and Carson were pulling him to his feet. He shoved away their hands, for neither man’s presence was as important as the one he suddenly lacked.
Oh God, sweet Christ, where’d she go!
Laughter, too high and sweet of tone for the menace it carried, sliced into his rising panic—laughter, and the sharp bark of Millicent’s order. “Boy, get your head back in the game!”
Christopher whirled, prodded by the older Warder’s rebuke and by that uncanny laughter. There was the bone walker, the small form she’d claimed still glowing, still floating inches off the earth. She grinned at them all with blatant and ancient malice, seemingly unaware that the nogitsune Hiroshi was leaping for her—until she spun in mid-air and hurled a miniature blast of lightning straight into his face. Hiroshi yelped and collapsed, blurring into human form, until at last he looked with anguished eyes up at the thing that inhabited his sister.
“That’s not very nice, oniisan,” she chided. “If you do that again I won’t love you anymore!”
“What’d you do to Kendis?” Christopher roared. “Where’d you send her?” He was ready to charge her like the nogitsune boy had. But Millicent was hanging back, despite the crackle of her power through the earth and air, and even Makiko Asakura was doing no more than warily circling, looking for her own opportunity to strike.
“Oh, come on, pretty Warder boy, where do you think I sent your Seelie girl? Just like my Queen commanded. And now that that’s done, I can play. Play with me!”
With a rumble of thunder, her magic redoubled. Christopher whipped his shields into place barely in time to keep a second blast of lightning from blowing him off his feet—and even then, he staggered back hard, his sight filled with golden spangles of fire once again.
“Jake, get Carson back!” Millicent bellowed. “Melisanda, back off, you’re not fighting her with a sword!”
“Lady Warder, do you plan to fight her with a gun?”
Christopher shook his head to clear it, in time to see the Seelie warrior herding Jake and Carson away from him, further down the path. She cast him a questioning glance, but he waved her off and eyed his Warder First instead.
Millie stood with feet planted wide and her shotgun poised and ready. She scowled down the length of it, straight at the hovering child. But Makiko rushed to her, shoving at the weapon with her right hand. At the same time, Christopher felt the power the nogitsune had hurled at him and Kendis roil round the other woman, charged with her anger and fear. Makiko bit out words in crisp Japanese, and then again in English: “You will not shoot my daughter’s body!”
Frustration clouded Millicent’s expression, yet for a single moment she didn’t argue. That brief hesitation was enough for the bone walker to strike again. Magic blasted into the earth before them all, driving them back several feet and calling up wind that tore into clothes, hair and eyes.
“We have to get her out of the kid, Millie!” How they’d do that, Christopher didn’t know. He’d grown up a Warder’s son, and two months running now he’d wielded Warder power of his own. But he’d never even seen a dragon child, much less had to banish a ghost out of one. Saeko, whether because of the entity possessing her or no, didn’t answer to the magic as one of Seattle’s people. God help him, he had no idea if they’d be able to break the alokhiu out of her at all.
Nor did Millicent have time to instruct him. She pulled back her gun, but her power rose in its stead, answering the crackling wind from Saeko’s outstretched hands with the full roaring strength of her own. Christopher could do nothing except dig down along with her into the deep blazing sea of energy that Seattle offered them, and throw her a line of his magic to back her up. It was reflex by now. He’d done it often enough with Kendis.
Panic threatened to choke him at the thought of her. He tamped it down hard and focused instead on flinging Millicent every ounce of power he could muster.
It didn’t help.
Millie was as staunch and immutable as Signal Hill on the island where he’d been born, or as Mount Rainier towering over the city he now protected. But if the older Warder had the strength of the Rock itself, then the next eruption of power from the bone walker matched her with all the ferocity of the storms that blew into the St. John’s harbor every winter. The air grew harsh and chill, and in the heart of the gusting wind, the body of Saeko Asakura began to change.
Makiko screamed—but Millie, unrelenting, thundered to Christopher, “Get her out of this city, boy! NOW!”
The nogitsune Ryuji Asakura had resisted when Christopher had flung him beyond Seattle’s Wards. Next to the thing that inhabited his sister, though, he might as well have ambled out with a song and a smile. In Saeko’s voice the bone walker shrieked, turning her full attention now upon the Warders. Magic plowed into Christopher, force and light and heat that made him think for an instant that he’d just been set on fire. But his channel to the city held—and, more importantly, his channel to Millicent. He didn’t have enough power or experience to banish this creature by himself.
Millicent, however, did.
Her power, tapping deep into his own, hit him almost as hard as the alokhiu’s strike. Gritting his teeth, digging his heels into the earth, he held onto his consciousness and focused on throwing everything he had out to aid his Warder First. Under Millie’s command, their joined magics reared back. Then they struck, straight into the center of the rapidly growing shape of Saeko Asakura.
Through the haze of power brightening the night, Christopher caught one glimpse of Saeko’s small body rapidly gaining height and breadth and the beginnings of wings.
In the next instant, she was gone.
Voices cried out all around him. Not until his vision cleared, though, was he really able to tell that the sudden fight was over. Dazed, Christopher took note of the others. Melisanda, Jake and Carson had all backed off as Millicent had ordered. The Seelie, though, still had her blade drawn. Jake, despite his partner outweighing him, stood planted between Carson and any threat that might come their direction. Makiko had rushed to the side of her son, and though neither spoke, fear was plain in both their expressions as they embraced.
And Millicent was turning to him. Her cheeks were gray with weariness, which might have alarmed Christopher if he hadn’t noticed how she was looking at him first. Grim and furious was nothing new on the face of Millicent Merriweather. That look of unhappy understanding as she tromped up to him and seized his shoulders, though, sank a knife right into his chest.
She knows, he thought numbly. She knows Kendis is gone.
Only then did his legs begin to wobble. He might have fallen save for the iron grip the old woman had on him, keeping him on his feet. “We’re going to find her, son,” she murmured to him. It was the same voice Christopher had heard her use to comfort Jude, and he almost wanted to cry himself at the sound of it. “She’s going to come back to us. Just remember, I need you, Seattle needs you, and Kendis needs you to hold it together so we can make damn sure she does make it back. Can you do that?”
Mary, Mother of God, he wasn’t sure he could. But Christopher swallowed hard and then nodded once, slowly. “I can,” he said.
His voice was the barest croak, barely audible even to him, but it satisfied Millicent. She nodded once in curt approval, and beckoned him to follow her to the others.
“Good. Then hang onto your hat, boy, because I’m here to tell you, we’re in for a long goddamn night.”
They all regrouped at Kendis’ house, for though nobody wanted to break the news to Aggie, even less did they want to keep it from her. The very idea made Christopher ill. Yet he couldn’t stand the thought of meeting Aggie’s eyes to try to explain what the hell had just happened, and so, when Kendis’ aunt met them at the door as they trudged in, he hung back and left the unhappy duty to Millicent. He did catch a glimpse of Aggie’s face going bleak, as if all the hope had been sucked out of her—and that, too, made him sick at heart.
Makiko’s other son Ryuji met them at the house once Millie cleared him to cross back over Seattle’s Wards. He proved to be younger than his brother, barely out of his teens, with halting English at best. Jake saw to patching up his partner. Then he saw to all three of the nogitsune, offering tea and sake and what other refreshments he and Carson could provide, as well as conversation in soft Japanese. While Christopher didn’t have a word of it—he’d barely muddled through his French classes in school, never mind any other language—the worry in their voices was plain. It was the same worry shared by them all.
Makiko, however, soon enough spoke up.
“There are others of our people in and near Seattle,” she said. “Jake Tanaka knows of this. My sons and I will warn them. And we will patrol past the edges of the city where you Warders cannot go.”
The edges of the city.
How permeable, Christopher wondered, were the boundaries of the city for him?
He didn’t dare voice the thought aloud, not when Millicent had point-blank ordered him and Kendis not to share his strange new flexibility of range with anyone else. But he didn’t miss the measuring glance his Warder First threw his way, even as she sternly handed out duties to everyone in the house. Jake and Carson, as much as the latter’s battered condition would allow, were to assist the Asakuras in scouting outside Seattle proper. Melisanda would carry word of the threat to the Seelie Court. To everyone’s surprise, Jude abruptly announced that she wanted to go with her. The young woman Christopher had known for the last two months should have outshouted everyone. But this Jude, pale-faced and hollow-eyed, clammed up as soon as she made her proclamation. Not even Millicent could get her to talk. The old Warder grudgingly let this stand, even as she sent everyone else scattering—and even as Melisanda, in quiet tones Christopher could not overhear at all, drew Jude outside to talk.
Only Aggie remained, eying the two Warders with a set to her mouth that brooked no contradictions. “I’m old, slow, and mortal, and I’m not going to be a damned bit of use to any of you running around the city,” she said bluntly. “But Kendis is my niece, and I will not be shunted aside. I need to be able to help. I need to know I’m going to see my little girl again.”
“We’ll find her. I’ll find her,” Christopher said. Ideas on how began to glimmer across his mind, and he eyed Millie. He wasn’t used to pressing for his way with her, not yet. But in this, he wouldn’t be denied. “I’m going out there. I can cover the city faster than you can.”
Because she’d asked it of him, he stopped short of adding and more of it—but he could see the thought crossing Millie’s eyes nonetheless. “We have to get the word out,” she said. “Every Warder between Portland and Vancouver needs to know what just happened and that their cities are at risk.”
“You don’t need me for that, Gran.”
Her eyebrows rose, for Christopher rarely called her that, though she was the closest thing he had to a grandmother these days. “The rest of the Warders need to know you. And you’re going to have to start learning how to work with the fey to get help when we need it. We need that help now.”
“Kendis needs my help now.”
He waited and held his ground under her canny, considering stare. No one was with them but Aggie, not to mention the restless Fortissimo, twining back and forth around all their ankles and mewling in aggravation at the tension still hanging in the air. Not even before Kendis’ aunt and cat, though, did Millicent give away what they’d kept to themselves. For that, he was grateful.
If the rules of Warding were somehow bending for him, he was loath to speak of it out loud, lest those rules snap back to the places they were supposed to be.
And if that bending was born of Kendis, that fierce, bright crackle he’d felt from her from the first moment they’d met, he didn’t dare risk it now. Not when he needed to bring her home.
For the longest of moments Millie held his gaze. “I take it you have a plan, son?” she said at last.
Only then did Christopher realize he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out on a sigh of relief. “The start of one.”
“Then go do it. And I’ll expect you to keep me posted.”
“Keep both of us posted,” said Aggie.
She hadn’t been born to power, not like the Warders, not like the Sidhe. Not, God help them all, like the child born of nogitsune and dragon blood alike, with an Unseelie’s vengeful ghost inside her. But in that instant, with the fear, worry and love in her eyes making tears she hadn’t yet let herself shed, Agatha Deveaux looked as if she had.
To pay those unshed tears their due, Christopher stepped up to the woman who’d raised his Kenna like her own daughter, and hugged her with all his strength.
“I will, Aggie. You’ll know the moment I find her.”
He hugged Millie for good measure, smiling crookedly when she hugged him back. Then he fetched his bouzouki and his staff, and took them both out into the night to look for the girl he loved.
It usually hadn’t bugged Jude much, being magic-free, human, and, well, normal over the last couple of months. Sure, she’d been blown away by all her best friend’s changes; any sane person would have been. And it had always helped that Aggie and Carson were just as human as she was, since it meant she wasn’t Token Mortal Girl in a circle of connections that tended to get weirder with every passing week.
But that’d been before Elessir had come back and brought with him the spirit… bone walker… alokhiu. The ghost. The thing that’d taken over her brain, crowding into her so thoroughly that there hadn’t been room for her in her own skull. She still felt scoured from it. Her limbs wanted to shake, and she wanted to curl up in the center of Kendis’ Warded house, just like she might have done if a tornado were about to strike.
Not that a tornado was at all likely in Seattle, but hey, elves and dragons and magic weren’t supposed to be likely either.
The point being, she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life, scared to the point of nausea, almost to the point of pain. Jude hated the feeling. So she forced herself to get Melisanda’s attention, though the full, direct stare of a woman of the Sidhe did nothing at all for her composure.
In fact, as soon as she got Melisanda out Kendis’ front door, she almost burst into tears under the Seelie’s jewel-green regard. There was no magic in it, no compulsion that could threaten her—none that she could sense, anyway.
But the thought struck her that she’d never seen eyes so beautiful in her life. Meeting their gaze as the two of them stepped outside was the hardest and most glorious thing she had ever done. Just a moment, Jude almost lost hold of the resolve she’d mustered.
“Do you have a full name?” she blurted. “We’ve all just been calling you Melisanda, but it’s kind of presumptuous of us to not even have asked what it’s proper for any of us to call you.”
Apparently, it was possible to surprise a woman of the Sidhe. “You’re the first to have thought to inquire in decades,” the warrior said, fair brows rising, speculation breaking through what Jude had thought so far to be her habitual reserve. “I serve House Kirlath but my family House is Sharran; I am Melisanda ana’Sharran. Melisanda will serve. But I don’t think this is what you brought me out here to ask me, Miss Lawrence.”
“No,” Jude admitted, blushing, but keeping her gaze up nonetheless. “I want to know why you don’t think I should go to your Court with you.”
“I made no such utterance.”
“You didn’t have to. I could see it in your eyes. So out with it. Is it because I’m human? You and the others came after Kendis after all.”
Melisanda’s mouth drew into a thin line, and she turned away, only to slant a look back at her. “You remember, I trust, that I’m here to make amends for that?”
“That doesn’t mean you want the likes of me coming to visit your people.”
Melisanda blew out a sigh, so softly that Jude wasn’t entirely sure she’d heard it at all. Her beautiful eyes went hard with tension and then closed, and she stood like that for a long moment before finally murmuring, “No. I don’t.”
“So what’s your problem?”
The Seelie opened her eyes again, swinging back round to face her. “While I have witnessed honor from its individuals, by and large, I do not trust your species as a whole. The Sidhe have learned how to live with you because we must. You outnumber us. So no, I do not want you in my house.” Her flush deepening, Jude opened her mouth to reply, but to her surprise Melisanda held up a hand to stop her. “But that’s a general you. You in particular… Kendis Thompson calls you friend, and that’s worth much. But do not take it the wrong way if I say that you look like walking death. You need a house of healing, not to stand in a council of war. Which is exactly what will be called when I return to Faerie with word that the Unseelie have taken House Kirlath’s Heir, and that an alokhiu in dragon form now roams free. She threatens human cities now, but if unchecked, she will eventually threaten us. The Queen of Wind and Morning will not permit this to stand.”
None of which, in all honesty, Jude could argue with. “And what happens if your Queen decides the dragon takes higher priority than rescuing my friend? Who, I might add, you yourself said is the friggin’ heir to your House? Are you going to stand at this council for Kendis?”
Melisanda stared at her in that remote, never-wavering way the Sidhe she’d seen so far all had, a gaze that not even Millicent had ever matched. “Kendis,” she pointed out, “has not yet chosen to stand for House Kirlath.”
“But she’s important enough to your Queen that she sent you here to make up for trying to kill her. Pro tip: if you’re serious about doing that, then getting your people in on helping her is the way to do it. Not only for Kendis herself, but for those of us humans who give a damn about her too.”
“Like you.”
The Seelie’s tone was speculative now, and though her stare remained cool, Jude knew a sizing up when she saw one. Lifting her chin, she answered, “Like me.”
“That, then, is why you wish to come to Faerie? To stand on her behalf before House Kirlath, and before the Queen of the Seelie Court?”
Now it came to it. Now was the part where she’d have to step up to the plate. Nervousness already made a snarling hole in her belly, and it was only getting worse. To hide the shaking of her hands, Jude shoved them into her jeans pockets. There was nothing she could do, though, for how her jaw quivered even as she tried to talk. So she blurted the words out as fast as she could, before she could change her mind or allow her panic to smother them down until she couldn’t say them at all.
“Not just that. I want you to teach me how to fight.”