Julian floated in the space between worlds. Next to him, the silver thread led from the falcon carving to the sidhe who used that name. He wondered if it would be possible for him to reach this space without that guide. After all, the carving could be lost, or stolen, or simply not in his possession when he needed it.
That was an experiment for later. Right now, he wanted to try contacting someone else.
Though he’d spent very little time in her company, the seer called Shard had left a vivid psychic impression. He sent his mind questing outward, brushing with a feather-light touch across the auras populating the Otherworld, seeking that familiarity. It wouldn’t have worked in the other direction; there were far too many people on Earth to pick one out of the masses. The sidhe were vastly fewer in number—though still enough to be a threat.
There.
Julian focused his thoughts into a solid arrow and sent them to Shard, politely tapping to get her attention.
Curiosity.
Come.
That was all he could manage. Without the assistance of the link, conveying anything complex was too difficult. If Shard had reached out to him, creating her own connection, it might have been easier, but she chose instead to merely indicate assent. Julian withdrew, dissatisfied with his bare success.
Then he waited.
Falcon had appeared rapidly in the Arboretum, but he had after all been expecting the call. Julian could have saved time by contacting Shard from there, but he preferred to remain safe behind the layered shields on the dorm and his room, especially while in a trance. He’d go outside once Shard contacted him.
Before that could happen, though, a quiet knock sounded at the door. Julian rose and opened it.
The door across the hall opened at the same time, and his neighbor Declan came out. The other student looked away reflexively; he’d been unhappy all term about living across from the campus wilder. Declan hunched his shoulders and hurried down the hall, and only then did Julian realize he’d been flinching away from more than just a wilder.
Shard had cloaked herself in some kind of don’t-see-me trick, a powerful telepathic suggestion to look away. Julian only saw her when she excluded him from its effect. The sidhe woman was standing right in front of his door, with an uneasy look on her inhuman face. She motioned for Julian to open the door wider; when he did, she edged carefully past the knob, staying as far from it as she could. Or rather, from the iron of the lock.
Once the sidhe was safely inside, he shut the door and turned to face her.
Like Falcon, she was tall and androgynously slender. Julian wasn’t even certain he could correctly identify all sidhe as male or female—or that such categories applied to them in the first place. But that was where the resemblance ended. Where Falcon was predatory and intense, Shard’s inhuman presence had a serene quality, as if she was content to watch the future approach, for good or for ill.
She surveyed the room in a slow pivot, her expression unreadable. Circle completed, she faced Julian and spoke. “It does look peculiar. Falcon tried to describe it, but his words made no sense until now.”
Perhaps that was why she’d come to him here, rather than calling him outside: so she could see for herself. “I told you, the world has changed. We turned to technology. Less so after First Manifestation, when people began exploring their gifts, but we’re even finding ways to combine the two, now.”
“You speak,” Shard sighed, “but the words have little meaning. The ideas in your mind are too alien to me.”
“Forgive me if I don’t mourn that fact. I’m hoping the unfamiliarity of technology will be a strength we can use against the Unseelie. Anything they don’t understand is an advantage for us.”
“It could be a powerful one.” Shard seated herself gingerly on the edge of the futon; Julian took that as his cue to cross to a chair. Speaking to Shard made him want to stand at attention. It took real effort to relax, or to appear to.
“So.” She fixed him with a piercing green gaze. For all that Falcon could stare a hole in a wall, Shard’s eyes made his look soft. “You called me here for a reason.”
Julian nodded. She never liked to waste time on idle chatter, and he respected that. “I need to know whether you’ve learned anything.”
Instead of answering immediately, Shard gave him a considering look. “Why did you call me and not Falcon? He could answer that question, possibly without having to leave the Otherworld.”
“I wanted to see if I could,” Julian admitted. Her response implied that neither Falcon nor she had much information to share. He prayed he was misreading it. “It isn’t easy, though.”
“Falcon gave you that carving for a reason.”
Impossible to tell if she disapproved of him departing from it. He ignored the point and said, “What about the plans of the Unseelie?”
Shard closed her eyes and thought for a moment before speaking. “As you might expect. The Unseelie still seek a way to use you. They believe—or so I believe—that those of your kind are the keys to controlling humanity.”
They might not be wrong. From a social standpoint wilders were useless; the Unseelie would be far better advised to kidnap world leaders. And maybe they would, soon enough. But as far as magical influence was concerned, they could do no better than to control wilders. If it came to an outright battle between the Unseelie and the wilders on one side and the bloods of the world on the other, Julian would not care to bet on the outcome. Possibly even if the latter had Seelie help. “You have to know more than that, though,” he said. Unless they’d been dragging their heels as badly as the Guardians.
“Whispers only.”
“Then share the whispers.”
She looked away. Julian still didn’t know if they could speak falsehood, but they could certainly lie by omission, and he wondered if she was about to. Her words, though, were blunt enough in their honesty. “Supposedly they have found a means to bind your kind as Unseelie.”
Every nerve in his body leapt to alertness. “How?”
Shard merely shook her head. “Whispers, as I said. Possibly even whispers meant for us to hear, to distract us from their true intent. Who can tell?”
At moments like this, her serenity was as grating as Falcon’s disdain. Julian gritted his teeth, banishing memories of golden eyes, mocking laughter, pain. “I won’t let them.”
“They do not expect you would. That is why they make plans to capture you. Falcon came here this night with a warning, but could not find you, and time was running short. He went instead to … your friend, and gave her the word before he had to return. Then you contacted me.”
Julian had tried to explain to the Seelie that human names held no particular power, but he wasn’t sure they believed him. Kim must be trying to find him, though. He would get in touch with her as soon as he finished with Shard.
The sidhe woman was contemplating him with what passed for curiosity among her kind. “How stand matters with her?”
Coming from her, the question could mean only one thing. “I told her about your prediction. She didn’t let it turn her away.” Not that he’d tried very hard to convince her. He hadn’t wanted to—not badly enough. “We’re being as careful as we can.”
“But speaking your love to her makes you happy, despite the danger?”
Where was she leading with this questioning? Julian couldn’t begin to guess. There was definitely an edge to Shard’s curiosity, though; she wasn’t just making idle talk. “As happy as we can be, given the circumstances. I’m glad we did say it, though.”
“Why?”
Now it was Julian’s turn to pause, searching for the right answer. “Maybe this isn’t true of you, but humans feel a need to say things to one another. For most of our history speech has been the main form of communication available to us. Telepathy is useful, but I don’t know a single person who would be entirely comfortable until he’d said the words out loud.”
“Interesting.” Shard’s eyes were, as always, unreadable.
Julian had the feeling that her curiosity, whatever it was, had not been satisfied. Nevertheless, she rose from her seat, with her usual unnatural grace. “I must return. Mind well what I have said.”
He too rose, and reflexively made a semi-bow in her direction before opening the door. “I will.” She passed into the hallway and faded into unobtrusiveness once more.
As he closed the door behind her, cold dread settled its grip on him. A way to make him Unseelie. He’d put a countermeasure in place—but gods help him, he didn’t want it to come to that. Not only for himself, but for Kim, who shouldn’t ever be forced to that point.
But she was the only one he trusted with it.
Kim—she would be searching for him. Julian dug out his port and was about to dial when it rang. Grayson. He frowned and accepted the call.
“There’s an escort waiting for you downstairs,” the professor said. “They’ll bring you to my office.”
~
The escort was no one he recognized, except that both of them were obviously Guardians. A short, heavily built black man, and an even shorter white woman, neither of them wilders. It seemed the cavalry had come at last.
They bracketed Julian on the walk to Grayson’s office, and stood sentinel at the door once they’d delivered him to her. Grayson was pacing—a bad sign. It didn’t get any better when the first words out of her mouth were, “I’m relying on you, Julian Fiain, to remember your training. Rash action is the last thing we need.”
His feet had automatically spaced themselves to shoulder-width, hands clasped behind his back, so that he stood at half-attention. Remember his training? It was reflex. “I won’t be rash.” Over what?
“Good,” Grayson said. This wasn’t her lecturing voice; it was the voice of a Guardian, delivering a report. “We’ve been in contact with the Seelie tonight. According to them, the Unseelie ambushed Kimberly Argant-Dubois—”
He didn’t move, but his entire body tensed at the sudden violence within. It even threatened the integrity of his shields. Grayson paused to stare him down, and Julian forced himself to calm. Measured breaths, centering his mind. Remember your training.
But gods—Kim—
“Their intent,” Grayson went on, “as we understand it, was to use her to lure you into vulnerability. You remain their ultimate target. Fortunately, the Seelie intervened, and have Kim in their keeping.”
Relief drained half the tension out of him—but only half. “So she’s all right.”
Grayson didn’t answer.
Julian clenched his jaw until it ached, then made himself ask with perfect calm, “What is her condition?”
She placed her fists on the desk, knuckles down, and lowered her head. “The Seelie are being … evasive. All they’ve said is that she’s in the Otherworld, and can’t be moved.”
He had himself under control now. It didn’t matter that he’d been warned of this, that he’d ignored that warning and let himself accept a greater connection to Kim, when if he’d acted differently he might have prevented this. What mattered was logic, planning, action. “Who has command?”
Grayson’s eyes were black chips under the white lines of her brows. “That’s a very good question. Broad strategy is the responsibility of the Guardian Ring, in consultation with other officials. But it was determined that field decisions should be in the hands of someone who’s been on the ground here. Even though I’m no longer active as a Guardian.”
He’d feared a stranger, ignorantly barging in. This was better. Julian nodded crisply.
“But,” Grayson said, “I recognize that your firsthand experience of the sidhe is greater than mine. So although you’re under my command, I’m not about to bundle you off into a padded box. If you have any recommendations, make them now.”
Get Kim out of the Otherworld. But Grayson didn’t need to be told that. Julian ran through the events in his mind, dispassionately, examining them for points of action. Ambushed, Grayson had said. “Kim had intended to go to the masquerade tonight. With Liesel Mandelbaum. Did the Seelie say anything about her?” Grayson shook her head. “She might still be there. Liesel’s the next likely point of contact here at Welton, and after her, the remainder of the Palladian Circle. They need protection.”
The professor ran a hand over the white fuzz of her hair, scowling. “This university needs to be shut down, and everyone else moved out of the line of fire. We aren’t going to be able to skate through to the solstice. But yes—for now, we’ll start with that.”
~
They got Liesel to safety—but she didn’t answer when Julian called, that night or the next morning. He tried for her mind, but she was safe behind the shields on her room, which the Guardians had reinforced before they left her. After checking in with Grayson, he and Robert went to Wolfstone in person.
No one answered his knock. Robert’s more vigorous pounding brought no response, either, and the handle wouldn’t turn. “Should I kick the door in?” he asked, only half-joking.
Julian shook his head. No call to break university property or Robert’s foot, not yet. Placing one palm against the door, he tested the defenses around the room. He’d left a small loophole when he built the shields, and it was still there. He had to be physically present to use it, but now that he was, he could send a probe worming through into the room.
“She’s in there,” he said. Robert’s pacing stopped.
He felt Liesel’s presence, but nothing else. No stray thoughts. No emotions. It was as if she’d locked herself into a box. Worried, Julian called out to her. Liesel. Wake up. Robert and I are here, and we need to talk to you about Kim.
As if that name had unlocked the box—or shattered it—everything came spilling out. Terror and guilt and shame flooded over Julian, until he staggered under their weight. The part of his mind that was still paying attention to his body felt Robert catch him before he fell. Julian dug his fingers against the surface of the door and forced his thoughts toward Liesel, against the flood. Let us in.
The onslaught stopped as if she’d turned off the tap. Julian opened his eyes. After a long, breathless moment, the door unlocked. He turned the handle and went into the dim room.
Liesel had retreated to the couch, where she sat in one corner, curled up into a tight ball. She had on a ragged grey dress that looked as if she’d worn it to the dance and then slept in it. Or perhaps not slept; there were dark shadows under her eyes.
Robert closed the door behind them. Julian knelt a short distance away, feeling awkward. This wasn’t his specialty. He had empathic skill, but he couldn’t touch Liesel; the inhumanness of his nature was the last thing she needed right now. Bad enough to have him present.
Robert solved the problem. He was a lousy empath, but he sat on the couch and pulled Liesel to him. After a brief resistance, she huddled against his chest. One long arm went around her shoulders, and then she spoke.
“It’s my fault.” Her eyes were wide and staring, and even in the dim light Julian could see they were bloodshot. “I made her go. She didn’t want to. But I made her do it. For me, so I could pretend things were normal. I thought it would help. But they attacked her and now she’s in the Otherworld and it’s all my fault.”
Robert’s face twisted in horrified sympathy at Liesel’s words. Julian felt the same. Now he could read the strangeness in Liesel’s expression: it was self-loathing, and he’d never expected to see it in her.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, groping blindly for useful words. “Knowing Kim, she wanted to help you.” He hadn’t even thought about how this stress would hit Liesel—worse than the rest of them, because she would carry their burdens as well as her own. Kim had, he guessed, and had done what she could to repair the damage.
Liesel just shook her head. “My fault. Because I needed her to go.”
There. That was the key to the self-loathing. Liesel helped others; she didn’t need help herself. In all the time he’d known her, this was the first time Julian had seen Liesel put her own emotional needs before someone else’s. And look how it turned out.
“But Kim’s all right now,” he reminded her. “The Seelie have her. She’s safe.” He kept any hint of doubt locked well away. Right now he’d lie through his teeth if it helped pull Liesel back together.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” Liesel whispered. “She got hurt.”
Julian opened his mouth, but found nothing to say. He shared the same guilt. Easy to tell himself Kim had made her own choices; much less easy to accept the consequences. If he couldn’t resolve that for himself, how could he expect to do it for Liesel?
Robert answered her. Robert, whom Julian had almost counted out of the situation, expecting that he would provide nothing more than a shoulder to cry on.
“Harm to yourself counts too, you know.”
Julian blinked. Robert’s words made no sense to him. But they must have meant something to Liesel, because she stirred.
“You asked Kim to go to the ball,” Robert continued. “But you didn’t force her. Kim has free will. Because of your request, she was put into danger, harmed; yes, all that is true. But you were only an indirect cause. You did not do it to her yourself. That blame lies squarely on the Unseelie.
“And what if you had not asked? You would have hurt yourself, by denying your need for release. You would have hurt those around you, because the pain bottled up in you would inevitably have spilled over. And that would have made you feel guilty, because you were not superhuman, and let your emotions become your weakness. Under normal circumstances you would know better; I have heard you chastise others for similar foolishness on more than one occasion. But these circumstances are not normal.”
Robert’s voice lowered, until his last words were barely audible. “And Kim, who could have helped all this by doing you a small favor, would have accused herself of failing you when you needed her.”
Julian went still, understanding. Wilders were raised non-religious; it never occurred to him to view the situation from that angle. But Robert, despite only patchy adherence to the Wiccan faith, knew it better than Julian, and knew the central tenet shared by most: An it harm none, do what ye will. Liesel had followed her own wishes, and this was the result.
But keeping silent wouldn’t have avoided harm, either.
“No matter what I do, it turns out badly,” Liesel said in a choked voice.
Robert shrugged. “Sometimes there is no good answer. We merely do the best we can. The Lord and Lady will not punish you for weakness. Act according to your heart, and be strong, and deal with the consequences as they come.”
Liesel closed her eyes. Julian felt the raging tangle of emotions inside her quiet slowly. She wasn’t locking them down; she was smoothing them out. Fear remained, though—a great deal of it. She didn’t have Julian’s training, or Robert’s confidence, or Kim’s determination, and without those she felt very vulnerable.
“You don’t have to be strong alone,” Julian said.
She hesitated. He could feel it in her, as if she was standing on the brink of a cliff and trying to believe that someone would catch her if she jumped. He reached out a psychic hand toward her, offering support, and she opened her eyes and looked at him as if she could see it.
Then her mind touched his, not flinching at the contact, and she accepted the aid.
Liesel sat up, brushing her disarranged hair out of her face. Robert stayed at her side. She took a few deep breaths, wiped her face dry, and said, “We have to do something, though.”
“We will,” Robert said lightly, as if the Unseelie were no bigger problem than a cockroach infestation. “We’ll get Kim back to her own world, and then we will figure out how to save the world, and then we will have biscuits and tea.”
~
Julian slept badly and woke early, then set himself to the task of reaching the Otherworld without the carving to lead him. Grayson had taken it from him to facilitate official communication, and while he couldn’t refuse her, he wanted very badly to contact someone who would tell him something about Kim.
He breathed away his growing tangle of frustration and fear, centered his mind, and tried again.
Twice he managed to touch that space between worlds, but the sun had set before he slipped fully into it. And before he could try to reach further, across the void to the approaching Otherworld, he felt a disturbance ripple the aether around him.
Sidhe were passing physically into the mortal world.
Robert wasn’t in the room. No time to look for him. If the visitors were Seelie—he was certain there was more than one—he might be able to get news of Kim from them. And if they were Unseelie, he could follow and see what their purpose was. For he could sense, now that he knew they were coming, where they would emerge.
Julian snatched his coat off the hook and took the stairs at a dead run.
~
It was the Arboretum, of course. Whether because of the cave, or the comfort of green space, or some lingering connection to the riverbank, Julian didn’t know and didn’t care. He plunged into the cold darkness, running as swiftly and silently as he could. His reaching mind found human auras up ahead—the Guardians who’d escorted him to Grayson’s office. Good. That saved him the trouble of alerting them.
He found quite a group: Falcon and Flint, two others familiar only from pain-ridden flashes of memory, and the two Guardians. No Grayson. When they spun to face him, Julian slowed to a walk and spread his hands, nonthreatening. “I felt you pass through, and came to investigate.”
Falcon said dryly, “You are rather slow.”
But Flint stepped forward, suddenly alert. “When did you feel us?”
“A few minutes ago.”
In one swift rush, everyone re-aligned, facing outward and scanning the trees. The male Guardian said to Julian, “They’ve been here more than half an hour.”
“But we, on the other hand, have been here mere minutes.”
The smooth voice brought Julian around and into a ready stance. Six Unseelie approached through the trees. Of course they would come through here; they sought a place where it was easy to connect the worlds, and the presence of the Seelie would facilitate that nicely. Julian wondered if the two Courts had stumbled across one another before this. From the posture of both sides, they might have. The threat of violence hung in the air, and Julian backed away one careful step at a time, tensing for trouble.
“They will not fight,” a new voice, female, murmured silkily in his ear. “They only bare their teeth and snarl.”
In the clearing filled with sidhe, where the effect of their Otherworldly nature was overwhelming, the woman at his shoulder stood out like a beacon of familiarity. She was human. Not sidhe.
A wilder.
Relief turned to ice an instant later. Wilders had long noted that although they possessed almost every strange eye color possible in the human genetic spectrum, their eyes were never truly green, or gold.
But her eyes were as gold as the Unseelie.
He pulled one swift step away. That unnatural gaze showed mocking amusement, as if she could hear the thoughts screaming through his head. Shard said they had a way. But how? We can’t be forced to their side!
But perhaps they could go of free will. And though Julian had hoped—prayed—that the geis would keep all wilders on the right side of the fight, in the end they weren’t perfect. Everyone had their price.
It seemed the Unseelie had found one they could buy.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, but the two Guardians were occupied with the staring contest between the Seelie and the Unseelie. It hadn’t broken into outright battle, but it might at any second, whatever this wilder thought. Had she come as part of the contingent sent to Grayson? Or had the connection expanded through blood to other parts of the world, where the Unseelie could enjoy richer pickings?
When he turned back, she was smiling. “I know what you’re thinking. You assume they’re your enemy, that they have nothing to offer you but pain and enslavement. You’re wrong.”
Every nerve was alive, burning with contradictory fires that made it hard to think. She spoke in an intimate tone, as if she knew it was the easiest way to unsettle him, and the damnable thing was that it worked. Julian clenched his jaw, then asked the question she was waiting for. “What else, then?”
“Freedom.”
He forced a laugh. “Freedom through enslavement to their cause?”
Her impossible golden gaze bored into him, as if she could see straight through every facade, to his soul. “Freedom from the shield.”
Laughter went away. So did thought. The clearing might have been deserted except for the two of them; inter-world war could have broken out behind him and he wouldn’t have cared. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.” She came a step forward, drawing close—too close, but he couldn’t move, and he knew she was slipping through his unsteady shields to call a response from his body, making him aware of hers, but he couldn’t muster a defense. “The Seelie would never do it. The deep shield helps keep you in line, and that’s as useful to them as it is to your masters. But the Unseelie would free you.”
His breath was coming too fast. Years of study under Grayson; more years before that, examining it every time they gutted him, all toward this end. To break the deep shield.
“And then,” she whispered, almost in his ear, “you would never have to trust someone else with the key to your soul.”
His breath stopped. Julian turned his head the bare inch necessary to look in her eyes—golden eyes, alien and unfamiliar, and the face around them so subtly changed as to be nearly unrecognizable, because change like that should be as impossible as her eyes. But he recognized it.
“Kim.”
She laughed, in a voice that didn’t sound like her, any more than her features looked like her. Kim, and yet not. Black horror threatened to overwhelm his vision. Kim. A wilder. How?
Kim. Unseelie.
Smiling at him like some kind of entertaining toy.
Hands clamped down on his shoulders and dragged him back, and Julian couldn’t even pull together a defense out of the shattered fragments of his mind. It was the other Guardian, the woman, and people were shouting, sidhe and humans alike; he couldn’t focus enough to pick out words, but the Guardians were retreating, the Seelie and Unseelie going in opposite directions, and Kim was going with the Unseelie. Watching him the whole way. Still smiling.
Her whisper slipped into his mind just before she vanished from sight. Think it over.
~
“They lied.”
Grayson had her head in her hands, fingers laced into brown cage across her white hair, either to defend or to hold something in. She didn’t move at Julian’s flat declaration, but she answered him. “Now we know they’re capable of it.”
Every muscle in his body ached with tension. He hadn’t slept; how could he? Instead he told Robert and Liesel, hearing his own voice like a stranger’s, and now all three of them waited with those two Guardians in Grayson’s office, watching the pale sun rise, counting down the minutes until the Seelie could step through again.
He couldn’t murder them. He needed them to answer questions.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Kim’s face. Not the face she wore last night, but the one he’d known for years. Human eyes, blue and filled with kindness and determination. A smile that had never once mocked him. Everything he had come to know, to trust—and, in time, to love.
The Unseelie had taken all of that.
Everything was too silent. Grayson’s office was the only occupied one; the building had been cleared, and the area around it. The evacuation of campus had begun. Those with a connection to the sidhe, however, were staying until the solstice, whether they wanted to or not.
No sound in the hall, but none was needed. They all felt the sidhe approach. Julian and the others stood as Falcon, Shard, and three other sidhe came into the room.
He held onto his focus, not letting any emotion interfere. Falcon’s bored disdain didn’t bother him. Neither did Shard’s refusal to meet his gaze. He asked, in a perfectly level voice, “What did they do to her?”
“There is a powder we use,” Falcon said, “to strengthen our own abilities, on the rare occasions when it is needed. We believe they used it on her, and its effect was to make her a changeling. And in that moment of change, they bound her.”
She hadn’t chosen it. Julian hadn’t believed it, not once he realized who she was; maybe everyone had a price, but the notion that the Unseelie could grant anything Kim wanted that badly was too impossible.
But it meant Kim truly was a wilder. Her changed appearance was real.
“Why did you lie?”
Falcon’s mouth settled in what might be the sidhe equivalent of an eye-roll. “Because you would act foolishly otherwise—as you almost did last night. You are the one that matters, changeling. Neither they nor we particularly care about her.”
Julian was only barely conscious of the explosion as the room’s windows shattered. As if the glass had been his cage, all the fury he’d been holding in roared free of his control, and with it came everything else: his love for Kim, his fear and grief, his sense of betrayal, that the sidhe considered her to be disposable in this fight. Falcon actually flinched, and Julian almost took him by the throat and slammed him into a wall. “You goddamned bastard. You have no idea how much she matters!”
“She is lost,” Falcon spat at him, hunching like a cornered animal. “As you were warned. Do not blame me for that.”
Julian fought the rage under control before he could do something unforgivable. Everyone else was standing well clear, sidhe and humans alike. He pulled his anger in, forged it into a harder shape. “So I’ll get her back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She is Unseelie.”
“She’s human,” he snapped. “More human than sidhe, and we have free will. We aren’t born to one side or the other, and can’t be bound that way.”
“But the part of her that is sidhe can be bound. She can’t be helped now, changeling; accept it!”
“One moment, if you please.”
Robert’s incongruously polite interruption startled both Julian and Falcon out of their focus. Robert had retreated with Liesel to a corner, but now he stepped forward, diffidently, as if hoping one of the Guardians would save him should someone decide to tear his head off. As if he wasn’t sure which one it would be, his roommate or the sidhe. Behind him, Liesel had her hands pressed to her mouth, and tears ran along her fingers.
“I still have difficulty with your telepathic technique,” Robert said with a forced laugh. “So I’m not certain whether I have interpreted your words correctly. She can’t be helped now, you say. By that, do you mean the time to help her has passed—or that it has not yet come?”
A tiny spark of hope flared within Julian.
But Falcon shook his head. “The time will never come. By the time the conditions are right, she will be dead, or too long under their control.”
“What conditions?” Julian whispered.
The sidhe clamped his lips into a thin line, refusing to answer. But Shard spoke, from behind Julian. “The two worlds. To touch her human nature, the Unseelie worked in this world, and caught her spirit as it moved. But now she is split too much between the two, and you cannot reach her completely. In our world, you will miss that part of her which is human, and here you will miss that which is sidhe.”
Caught her spirit as it moved. When Falcon spoke of the powder, Julian hadn’t thought about its implications. They’d precipitated the same crisis in Kim that made a wilder—or killed someone with the psi-sickness. There were many more of the latter than the former. How close had she come to dying?
It was done with. The future mattered more. “So at the solstice—”
Shard shook her head. “That will only open the doors. The worlds will meld in time, but not soon. Years, perhaps. I have not looked ahead to see.”
He didn’t think she was lying. It sounded right; in fact, he was willing to bet the meld would spread as the connection had before it, following sympathetic and contagious links.
But power and sidhe blood weren’t the only things that had thinned the veil here. “Then we’ll force it,” Julian said. “Like I did before, with the summoning circles.”
He’d never seen a sidhe come that close to open-mouthed shock. “You think to move whole worlds?” Falcon said. “I have heard of human arrogance, but this is beyond belief.”
“Not whole worlds,” Julian said, the idea taking shape in his mind. “Just a tiny portion of them.”
He looked instinctively to his roommate and saw Robert considering it, as if this were a theoretical assignment Grayson had set. The professor herself stood silently, and the other Guardians watched her, waiting for a cue. “Blood calls to its home,” Robert said. “The best would be to put sidhe here, and humans in the Otherworld; then they anchor themselves where they stand, and summon their homes to them.”
“The Circle,” Liesel whispered. Her face was still wet with tears, but she’d lowered her hands, revealing a surprising degree of resolve. “They’re still here. And they’re connected. They would do it, to get Kim back.”
Grayson said, “We can defend you while you work.” She was too professional to say more, but Julian thought he saw pride in her eyes, for all three of them—even Liesel, who had never been her student.
Then she turned to the sidhe—addressing Shard, not Falcon, who still looked mutinous. “Will it work?”
“I do not know,” Shard said. “Not everything can be seen. But it is a possibility.”
“Then we’ll do it.” Julian only needed a slim chance. The rest, they would do for themselves.
~
They didn’t race out of Grayson’s office to perform the ritual on the spot. Something like this couldn’t be done off the cuff; it had to be planned, and checked, and checked again, with wiser heads offering advice. They chose their battleground: the wasteland on the riverbank, where Julian had first been attacked. They chose their people: seven humans, seven sidhe, with Guardians to protect them. They chose their configuration: Robert and Liesel with Falcon and Shard on the inner circle, and the remaining ten on the outer.
In the end, however, it would come down to Julian and Kim.
He spent the hour beforehand cross-legged on the floor of his room, deep in meditation. For this, he could not afford any missteps. He had to banish every last distraction from his mind, every emotion that might weaken his focus. All the discipline of his childhood might have been intended for this one moment, when any error would bring a fate much worse than gutting.
A clumsy nudge to his mind brought him out of trance. Robert stood before him, worry written plainly on his face. Not just for what they would do tonight, but for Julian himself. There were certain kinds of details Robert noticed, and he would not have missed the ones before him now: the black clothes, the grim expression, and the long box on the floor in front of Julian.
His roommate nodded warily at the box as Julian rose to his feet. “How exactly do you intend to use that?”
“Any way I have to,” Julian said, shrugging into his coat.
It didn’t reassure Robert, but it wasn’t meant to. There wasn’t any reassurance to be had, tonight. Julian stooped to pick up the box, and when he straightened, he found Robert staring at him with both fear and pity. “One way or another,” Julian said, “I will free her.”
~
The others were waiting for them at the riverbank. The Palladian Circle stood in a wide-eyed clump, nervous of the Guardians’ presence. Julian wondered if they’d seen the sidhe yet. He wasn’t about to ask. He was grateful enough for their aid, without doing anything to remind them of what it was for.
They flinched back from him, too. For once, though, he didn’t think it was because he was a wilder. Julian couldn’t spare the effort right now for any pretense. The coldness inside was plain for all to see.
Michele came forward, though, and shook his hand. The gesture meant a great deal, even though their gloves protected her from skin contact. Hers were thick ski gloves; his were the same black leather he’d worn on Samhain. She fixed her gaze just below his eyes and said, “Lord and Lady bless you, Julian.”
“Thank you.” He nodded at the rest of them, and then Liesel came forward and hugged him hard.
“Bring her back to us,” she whispered.
The air thrummed with rising power, and the sidhe stepped through.
It almost seemed as if part of the riverbank’s lost vegetation had reappeared, amidst the flat and featureless snow. Even in the dark night, the colors glowed vivid and strange. The portal wasn’t a door, though; it didn’t exist only in two dimensions. The effect was more like a summoning circle, with a patch of the Otherworld appearing on the ground, and the sidhe stepping out of it.
Julian sensed Liesel extending her support to the rest of the Circle, and them accepting it. Led by their empath’s resolve, and escorted by Grayson and the female Guardian, they went through, and then the portal vanished behind them.
Leaving him alone with the other Guardian and seven of the Seelie.
“Are you prepared?” Shard asked.
Julian answered by shrugging out of his coat and tossing it outside the snowy circle they had once blasted clean. He scarcely felt the cold as he carried the box to the center of that space; his mind had already sunk inward, preparing. Falcon and Shard took up positions on either side of him, Shard in the east, Falcon in the west. The other Seelie positioned themselves in a larger ring around the three of them, spacing themselves equally.
Then they grounded themselves in the earth and began to pull.
The sidhe chanted nothing, made no ritual gestures. They didn’t have to. For them, magic was a matter of will alone. Even for them, however, this was an epic undertaking, and although their serenity never wavered, he felt the effort.
Then he felt something more: the motion of the worlds. They shifted slowly, grudgingly, stretching in unaccustomed ways in order to draw closer to each other. The sidhe part of his own nature hummed in response. Closer. And closer.
They slid together with a stomach-turning wrench.
Robert and Liesel materialized, seemingly from nowhere, standing in the south and the north on either side of Julian, and beyond them the rest of the Circle appeared in the gaps between the sidhe.
But Julian knew, before he even saw them, that the two worlds had merged. He sensed it, bone-deep, and for the first time in his life knew that he was home. A tension he hadn’t felt until it was gone melted away. The human world rejected the part of him that was sidhe, and the Otherworld did the same to the human … but in this place he truly belonged.
He wanted to luxuriate in the feeling, but he sensed the strain in Liesel’s shoulders, felt in his own jaw the force of Robert’s clenched teeth, and knew he couldn’t spare the time. He had to hurry.
Julian reached out with his mind to find Kim.
It wasn’t like seeking someone between worlds, or even like searching within the mortal world. It was easier than either—far easier. Standing in this place gave him strength he’d never had before.
There.
Even with the alterations, there was no mistaking her aura. Julian began to chant, using the words to direct his will, summoning her to this place of merging.
Resistance. She didn’t want to come. And the resistance built; the Unseelie were trying to hold her where she was. But they weren’t prepared for this, and the glade where the two worlds met was as native to her as it was to Julian. It called to her with a power she could not resist.
Julian opened his eyes and found her standing barely twenty feet from him.
Even though he was prepared for it, the sight of her twisted his stomach into a knot. It was Kim, but not: familiar features cast in an inhuman mold, familiar expressions distorted with cruelty and disdain. But the focus he’d given her hung around her neck, crystal wrapped in silver. He had to believe that, like the pendant, the Kim he knew was still there, somewhere. Could still be saved.
While he was distracted, she struck.
A lance of pure magical force, driving straight toward him. But Julian had been shielded before this ever began, and Grayson’s training served him well. When he spun the blow off, it shattered against a shield now covering the four of the inner ring. A similar barrier glowed around the outer circle. The Guardians were doing their job—leaving him to do his.
But before he could help Kim, he had to fight. She flung a second blow at him, a third. He parried them and cursed himself. Stupid, stupid. He’d worried about the Unseelie following Kim here, but he hadn’t stopped to consider the danger she represented. She was one of them. He was the enemy. Of course she would attack.
Kim threatened him with fire, superheating the air around him. He diverted the energy skyward, but not easily, though pyrokinesis had once been a weakness of hers. Levinbolts slammed into his shields, one after another, as fast as he could sink their force into the ground. Untutored, but strong, and she maintained her own shields with raw power against his attacks.
Julian bored away at her protections, seeking weakness. He had to work quickly; he didn’t know how long the meld could be maintained. But they hadn’t been able to guess in advance what he’d find, much less what he could do about it, and Kim wasn’t giving him a chance to study anything. He had to get inside her defenses.
Gathering his strength, he struck out with a massive blow that sent her reeling for just a moment.
In that heartbeat of vulnerability, he reached through and seized hold of her spirit.
But in his lunge to do so, he left himself open, and even as his psychic grip closed on her he felt hers do the same. Their two minds struggled in a deadlock, each trying to wrestle the other into submission.
Kim. Listen to me. Hear my voice.
There was no sign that she heard, nothing in her expression except cold, unblinking determination.
This isn’t you. They’ve bound you against your will. You can break free; you’re human, not sidhe. Break it. Come back to us. Come back to me.
No reaction. She merely tightened her grip. This pain was familiar: the Unseelie had tried the same thing, hoping to warp him to their pattern. But they had failed, and she would, too. All she could do was hurt him. So long as he accepted the pain, and didn’t let it distract him, he was free to work on her.
His mind slid over the shields within hers, sensing the changes, seeking their cause. It had to be there, somewhere. But he found nothing before Kim realized the futility of her efforts and shifted her energy to something new.
Julian screamed as she drove a wedge at his mind. It struck at the boundary between his sidhe-born gifts and his human self, trying to sunder them. He had never not been a wilder, had never known what it was to be without that Otherworldly touch. Now Kim’s attack threatened to alienate him from himself, splintering his sanity, making his own gifts foreign and uncontrollable—like the men and women who had gone mad during First Manifestation. Julian fought to stop her, but the sharp edge of her attack pierced his defenses as quickly as he built them up, and he could not both protect himself and work against her for long.
Forcing down his own growing panic, Julian hardened his focus to a diamond edge. He dragged vainly at Kim’s mind, striving to bring her back to herself, but there was no net for her to slip free of, no binding he could cut. It had to be there somewhere, but he couldn’t feel it, and couldn’t affect it. There was nothing he could attack. And while he searched, her own strikes came closer and closer to destroying him.
Julian pulled back at the last instant before she broke through, and only his will kept despair at bay. He couldn’t do it. He’d thought he could—had insisted it would be possible—but there was nothing for him to work on. Kim couldn’t be brought back.
He had to free her another way.
Now that he’d loosed his grip, the battle was more even. He struck once more with a blow that shifted her back a step. In that pause, a telekinetic flick sent the lid spinning off the box at his feet, and as Julian stretched out his hand, his sorcerer’s sword rose up to meet it.
She saw it and snarled. Julian caught a glint of metal, and realized she had her athame. He crushed the urge to swear and instead lashed out.
Power flowed through him and down the slender blade, arcing across the circle to strike at Kim. She parted it with her athame, but staggered. No one had trained her for this. He struck again and again, with hammer-blows intended to shatter her shields and lay her bare. She fought back with raw, animal strength, and the deflected energy cracked the air, slammed into the shields of the two circles, ripped apart the snow and soil beneath them.
Julian drove everything from his mind. He could not afford to feel. Kim, the Kim who had existed before they took her, would choose death over enslavement in Unseelie hands.
For her sake—for the sake of who she’d been, and what she’d meant to him—he had to give her that mercy.
Sparks showered down as they threw lethal blows with reckless abandon. Julian drew on the reservoir of power he’d built, heedless of the dangers of backlash. He had to do this. He had to.
He couldn’t.
They were too closely matched. He had the training, but the crisis that made her a wilder had taken her closer to the Otherworld. She was stronger than he was. And she had a purity of purpose he lacked, untroubled by any desire to save him.
But there was another way. Julian took a step forward, then another, praying to the gods that she was too focused on their magical duel to retreat. He’d never been taught to use the sword in his hands as a physical weapon, but it didn’t take training to know that if struck in the heart or throat she would die.
He just had to get close enough.
Another step, and then another. She was almost within reach. One final step—and he was there. Julian looked directly into her Unseelie eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and struck.
Or tried to.
His arms jerked, but would not follow through. Paralyzed, he stood wide open, and she snarled triumphantly and lashed out with a blow that shattered the sword.
Shards of metal scored them both. Julian leapt backward, clutching his shoulder where her athame had cut him. The wound burned agonizingly; she’d backed the strike with malevolent power. Blood trickled down his chest.
He had no chance to recover. With a grin of avid, unholy anticipation, Kim attacked again and again, driving him back one staggering step after another. Julian’s outermost shield shattered, and he knew he had lost. He’d failed to save her, he’d failed to free her, and now she had him on the run. It wouldn’t be long before the last of his shields failed. Then he’d be at her nonexistent mercy.
Only one possibility remained. He couldn’t get an attack through her shields, but if he could lure her in closely enough, he could take her down with him.
Wilders had died that way before.
He still struggled, reflexively, because he’d been trained from childhood to fight, and even at this extremity he couldn’t give up; but he was losing the battle and he knew it. Kim slammed through the last of his defenses.
Pain. Pain beyond anything he’d ever imagined. It drove him to his knees in the snow. She tore through his mind like a serrated knife, like acid, leaving him bleeding wherever she touched. Julian threw his head back and screamed in agony, and in despair. He’d failed. He could only hope to take Kim down with him. And he wept with grief and blind fury at the Unseelie, who had brought it to this, that because he loved Kim he had to kill her.
Another scream overlaid his own, and then it all came to a wrenching halt.
~
Snow. Snow in front of his eyes.
Julian tried to focus. He was on his hands and knees in the snow, and his fingers ached with the cold, but distantly, as though his spirit wasn’t quite anchored to his flesh. His gloves were gone, burned off. He remembered that dimly. His entire body was a throbbing mass of pain that paled in comparison to the agony in his mind.
But he was alive.
The world wavered dangerously. By the last dregs of his will, Julian brought his head up.
Her dark hair fanned across the snow around her head. Kim lay face-down on the ground, not moving, scant feet from where Julian struggled to hold on to consciousness. The world shuddered again, and he knew the circles were losing their hold, that the glade was on the verge of sliding apart once more. He mustered just enough strength to throw one arm out and seize hold of Kim’s wrist before it all dissolved.