WHOEVER HAD nailed shut the doors to faery had done it a long time ago. Cut off from the mortal world and mortal visitors, the slough had, like a freshly dumped lover, let itself go. The shadows of the mortal world, the cursed highways and eerie ghost towns built from stolen time, hadn’t fallen into disrepair, they’d been cannibalized by the slough to sustain itself.
It had fallen back into wet, sucking bogland, lush green hillocks broken up with black mud puddles, and overgrown forest. The landscape was tied together by thickets of dense, knotted briars that stretched for miles. The black, thorny runners were decorated with great white roses the size of a hand that smelled like candied, rotted flesh.
Conri swallowed. His throat felt sticky and his tongue dry. He’d never been here before. Probably. Places changed. Memories failed. He didn’t think he’d ever been sent here. It didn’t matter. He still knew what it was.
“I guess we wouldn’t have been taking the car anyhow,” he said dryly.
Bell snorted as he pulled on a Kevlar vest and tightened the straps. He’d shifted his gun down onto his hip, and, while it was hidden under his T-shirt, Conri had seen him slip a fair-sized, silver-alloy blade into a sheath along the small of his back. In another situation it would be overkill. Here it was lightly armed.
“You didn’t know that when you wrecked it.” He reached out and touched a gloved finger to one of the hook-thorned briars. It made the flowers tremble, the delicate petals almost flesh-toned under the soft pink glow of dawn light. “The roses hadn’t bloomed last time I was here. Time’s running fast.”
Conri nodded. He could taste it on the air, spun out thin and sharp as cotton candy. It had volume but no substance. Heady. “It hasn’t had any time to play with for a long time, so now that it has, it’s gorged itself. It’s better than the alternative—at least we have a chance to find her before it’s too late.”
“But less chance that we take back a Nora that anyone recognizes,” Bell said grimly. “Or that she’ll want to go back.”
Silence hung heavily between them as they both—Conri assumed—thought about their own demons. Not that anyone had come looking for Conri, but if they had, they would have struggled to recognize him after only a few days. Would he have gone back then if he’d had to step back into his old life at the minute he left it?
Probably. His mortal life had been shabby and hand-to-mouth, but life in the Otherworld hadn’t exactly changed that. If he had a glamour in his pocket to pass as human—he’d never had any desire to pay for his sins, especially ones imposed on him—he’d have stolen back home and pretended he never left. If his imaginary rescuer got there soon enough, Conri might have even been able to convince himself of it too.
But there were plenty of changelings who would have stayed.
“Are we going to ask what she wants?” he asked.
Bell pushed his sleeves up toward his elbows. The slough had decided to be hot, the air muggy and full of the drone of bugs. Bell’s arms were wiry, pale skin pulled tight over whipcord muscles and dusted with freckles and fine, dark hair. A few old scars, faded to white ribbons of skin, dented both arms to different degrees. Conri appreciated the view out of the corner of his eye.
“Probably. If circumstances allow,” Bell said. “Ask me if I can care what the answer is.”
Conri thought of his life in LA—the narrow box of a house that was full of color and mess, the stack of leftovers in his fridge that ranged from Thai drunken noodles to gyros, and Finn’s clothes tossed carelessly around as if “Servants will deal with that” were genetic. He thought of Finn, who wasn’t his blood even though Conri had been the first and only one to hold him, and…. Okay, the kid was a pain in the ass, but Conri still loved him.
It wasn’t the life he’d planned—Conri was pretty sure he’d never heard of Thailand until the Return—but in a lot of ways, it was better. And it was his.
“That’s okay,” he said as he headed out along the marshy rise of sandbar that ran through the bog. The mud plucked at his boots, and in the back of his head—where it might have passed as his own if he hadn’t been wary—the grass muttered about how warm it was and how nice it would be to lie down and sleep. “I already know the answer.”
“Let’s just find them,” Bell said as he caught up with Conri and slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Worry about it too much now and lying down for a nap will sound like a good idea. And if we don’t find them, it won’t matter.”
Conri gave Bell a hard, sidelong grin. “We’ll find them,” he said. “This is what I do, and I’m really good at it.”
THREE HOURS later—by the not entirely reliable clockwork of Bell’s watch—the slough seemed to have put its shoulder to proving Conri wrong. A brittle trail of bent grasses, smears of mud, and the occasional muddy blond hair—garishly mundane in the florid overgrowth that framed it—had led them to a hill white with bog cotton back near where they’d started.
“It doesn’t want to give them up,” Conri said as he sat down on a rock. His throat was tight with the need to pant, but he resisted. He wanted Bell to see him as a man, not a dog. “You can smell how stagnant it has gotten here down in the hollers, like molasses, and it doesn’t want to go back.”
“You talk about it like it’s alive.” Bell dropped into a crouch next to him and took a long drink of water from a bottle. “The fey don’t.”
“The fey don’t like to think about things like that,” Conri said. “It’s why you don’t find many changelings who’ve seen Mag Mell or Annwn. They don’t get to visit. They like to play lords of their own creations, and the last thing they want is to tempt the Otherworld with too much mortality, a hit of time, and wake up with their beautiful cities remade into skyscrapers and tenements. That’s why they make places like this, the sloughs and estates and crannogs, near the borders so they can enjoy trysts with mortality without getting it all over the floor at home.”
Bell offered him the water, but Conri waved it back. He was thirsty, but he could grab a drink from a stream or pool on the way past. Faerie food had bound him once. It wouldn’t bother again. Bell didn’t have that option.
But he was sweaty. It stuck his T-shirt to his back and under his arms, sour and sticky. He peeled the band shirt off over his head and draped it over the cotton to air out. It would make him itch later, but he could cope with that. He raked his fingers through his hair and scratched at the nape of his neck. The salt from his sweat stung his palm as it got into the blisters, and he swore and pulled his hand down to scratch at it instead.
“You were here a long time,” Bell said. He crouched on the dry dirt, flask dangling between his knees, and watched Conri with dark, hooded eyes. His interest wasn’t entirely professional—Conri could tell that as Bell licked his lips—but it wasn’t completely unprofessional either. “The hair is always the first thing to change. But eyes and ears are more unusual.”
“Not that unusual.”
“Uncommon,” Bell compromised. “But here long enough that you can’t bear iron? That’s rare. The only ones I know of are the diplomats… who do make it to Mag Mell.”
Conri picked a shred of skin off his palm. “I never did,” he said. “If I had, I wouldn’t have seen the Court of Roses or the Hall of Thorns. I would have been relegated to the Stables of Shit, probably. I was only ever a servant, but I was… useful and resilient. Not much in the Otherworld is both. I made a good dog. Still do.”
“You’re not a dog,” Bell said. Because people did, even the ones who didn’t mean it.
Conri leaned back so pale skin pulled tight over lean, heavy muscle. He wasn’t built for show or speed, but for endurance. His legs sprawled out carelessly in front of him, jeans pulled low and loose around his lean hips.
“If you really mean that?” he said, the words harsh with challenge as he waited for Bell’s eyes to move back to his face. “Come over here and prove it.”
It was too late to curb his tongue by the time his brain realized that this mattered. There was no reason it should. Bell was nothing to him but the temptation of a good lay and a lot of trouble, but Conri could feel his chest tighten with anticipation as he waited for Bell’s reaction.
Apparently, though, he was destined for blue balls—mental and physical—since rather than answer, Bell scrambled to his feet. He shaded his eyes with his hands.
“What’s that?” He pointed back toward the ford—marked by an X scarred into the greenery with Iron Door–branded graphite paint—as a long slice of the world went thin. It looked like tissue paper for a second, a painted image laid over something else, and then Ned Kessel’s battered yellow pickup with a spray of shotgun pellet holes on the side tore through. The world snapped back into place behind it.
The oversized tires dug ruts into the soft, gray-green banks and splashed black, sticky glaur in thick, clotted patches up the doors and over the windshield. A brief try to clear it off with the wipers smeared the mud more and glued the blades up after three swipes.
“Shit,” Conri hissed between his teeth. “He must have followed us.”
“Well,” Bell drawled sardonically as he absently put one hand on his gun. “Thank God I brought you along for your expertise.”
Conri swallowed the growl that stuck in the back of his throat. “How the hell did he get across? We ripped the ford open, but it’s still a ford. He wasn’t a Walker.”
Sometimes people pinged as Walkers when they weren’t, but Conri had never been wrong about who wasn’t. Ned Kessel ran too hot—too quick-tempered, too resentful, too everything—to play stepping-stones with reality. Walkers could be dumb as rocks—Conri hadn’t gotten to where he was by making good decisions—but they weren’t rash. If a Walker did something balls-achingly, breathtakingly unexpected and insane, like ripping the Otherworld open like a picked-at scab, it wasn’t because they hadn’t thought of the consequences. They’d decided the gain was worth the risk.
Bell fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a pair of binoculars not much bigger than a roll of dollars. He unfolded them and lifted them up to squint through the eyepieces as he followed the truck’s uneven, breakneck progress over the terrain.
He muttered, “Fuck,” and passed the glasses to Conri.
They were so light they barely weighed anything. Conri remembered when he’d first come to the Otherworld and been amazed by their weightless armor and self-taught swords. Now anyone taken would want to know if it was connected to the cloud or not.
He adjusted the lenses and scanned along the raw tracks cut into the bog until he found the yellow truck. It was Ned Kessel behind the wheel, sunburned skin greasy with sweat and hands locked on the wheel. Next to him….
“Son of a bitch,” Conri muttered.
Thistle, raw goblin bones still too close to the top of his skin, hunched in the passenger seat. One arm—too long, too skinny, and with the joint subtly in the wrong place—was stretched up over his head. Blood dripped down from the raw welts the cuffs had scalded into his skin and stained his shirt as he was thrown about.
“That answers your questions about how Ned got here,” Bell said. “Another fey child in distress at the Otherworld’s door.”
Conri handed the little binoculars back to Bell, who folded them and stashed them in his pocket. “And another mortal for the slough to tap,” Conri said grimly. “It’s getting greedy.”
He felt Bell’s assessment out of the corner of his eye. “You sure you were just a servant?” he asked. “You sound way too knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Otherworld.”
Conri’s mouth twitched up at the corner. It wasn’t exactly a smile.
“The Otherworld?” he said. “No. But I know a fey lord’s hunting preserve when I see it and, well, they are what they eat. This place spent years glutted on death and fear and the hot thrill of the kill. Then it was left to starve. It’s like a thirsty drunk—water would do to wet his throat but what he wants is rotgut whiskey.”
He jabbed his finger down toward the pickup as he said that. The mire under it had thickened, the broken-edged ruins of an old dirt road shrugged up to the surface under Ned’s tires. Bell followed the gesture and grimaced as he saw the road.
“And by rotgut whiskey you mean a violent redneck with a gutful of conspiracy theories and bigotry,” Bell said. “On the trail of the kids he thinks kidnapped his sister.”
Conri grabbed his T-shirt and pulled it on. It was still damp, and he’d been right about the bog-cotton making him itch.
“A hunt is a hunt,” he said through the sweaty folds. “And now it has… two? No three… at the same time.”
Bell stared at him for a second and then turned to watch Ned, his face set in grim lines.
“My brother drank,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice. Conri, as he picked a burr of flower silk out of his hair, regretted the comparison. “Before he died, he drank a lot. I’ll tell you one thing he really hated, that was guaranteed to set him off? If you tried to take his bottle off him.”
Conri scratched his ribs and shrugged.
“It won’t want us to leave,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t want the hunt to end either. So it isn’t going to help Ned.”
Bell glanced down at the proto-road the slough had shaped for the pickup and then gave Conri a skeptical look.
“It’s the carrot,” Conri said grimly. “If the prey thinks there’s no hope, they’ll lie down and die. A good hunting preserve is designed to keep them on the move, to dangle the possibility of escape—or rescue—close enough to make them think they have a chance but far enough away to keep them running.”
Bell looked bleak. “Then it needs to throw something our way,” he said as he started back down the hill. The frustration was raw in his voice. “Because we aren’t any closer to finding Nora and the others than when we got here.”
He was right. Which…. Conri paused, his sneakers balanced on two rocks, and cocked his head to listen to the rattling growl of the pickup’s engine as it cut through the eerie silence that had fallen over the slough.
“We have him,” he said thoughtfully. “Tell me, if you were trapped here, would you run toward or away from the sound of a car?”
Bell was smart enough to think about that question instead of making an assumption.
“Toward,” he said after a second. “However she got here—however Ned got his hands on Thistle—right now all she knows is that is something she hasn’t heard for a while. Whether she wants to be rescued or left alone, she’ll want to see what’s going on. If she’s free to.”
Well, he’d made a few assumptions once he got started. It wasn’t his fault. Humans mostly saw what the fey wanted, saw the fey how the fey wanted. Conri hopped off his rocks, altered course slightly, and headed on down the hill.
“Not just Nora,” he said. “Robin might be fey, but he hasn’t been back here since he was a babe in arms. He might have thought he’s ready to come back and be a High Lord of the Otherworld, but a place like this is going to rule him, not the other way around. By now, he’s as ready to get back to indoor plumbing and fruit that doesn’t have an agenda as the mortal children. Finn would be.”
Bell let Conri get almost all the way down the hill before he asked, “Even if Finn knew that he’d broken the Treaty? That he might have caused a war? Would he want to face you then?”
Conri fumbled his next step and planted his foot in a puddle of black mud. He nearly lost his shoe, but the time it took to extract himself let him recover his composure.
“Your mistake is assuming that Finn has any shame,” Conri said. He scraped black goop off his shoe onto a knot of grass. “He’d expect me to fix it for him.”
“And how would you do that?” Bell asked. He didn’t bother to make it sound casual. The suspicion was blunt in his voice. It stung a bit, but Conri appreciated the honesty. “If he had been involved.”
Conri crouched down and plucked a thin, mangled bit of metal out of the mud he’d scraped from his shoe. It was rusted like it had been there for years—iron reacted to the Otherworld the same way the Otherworld reacted to iron—but it was still recognizably a house key attached to a dented fob in the shape of an N. At one point it had been covered with crystals, but only two or three pink studs were left, sparkle dulled under the mud.
Chance or the slough’s machinations, he wondered as he lifted it to his nose for a sniff. It was mostly rust and metal, but it had spent years being handled. The oils from Nora’s skin were rubbed deeply into the metal, and even in its current state, he caught a thread of it.
Daffodils and coal.
“I don’t know,” he said as he straightened up and tossed the fob to Bell…. “I’d probably start by not telling Iron Door my plans.”
CONFESSION, MOCKERY, or both?
Bell slouched back against a twisted thorn tree and chewed on that question as he waited for Conri to get back from scouting nearby for any sign of the missing kids. He’d won the coin toss and left Bell to watch Ned as he made a half-assed camp nearby.
It was nighttime, or what passed for night in the Otherworld. Somehow, although Bell couldn’t put his finger on exactly what the difference was, they had indisputably gone from dawn to dusk.
Ned had driven stubbornly into the dim light for a while, until the press of purple, whispering shadows around the dimming headlights got to him and he stopped. Thistle stayed cuffed, this time to the handle of the pickup, while Ned hunched bitterly over the fire as if he could suck the heat from gray sticks as they burned. He fed it handfuls of plucked moss and cursed in baffled, barely stifled rage as he burned his fingers but still stayed chilled.
The Otherworld didn’t satisfy. It ran on the energy of want, of the grit in the pearl of someone’s perfect, fairy life and the itch of always wanting more.
In the back of his head, the old, sticky trauma tried to squeeze out of the box he kept it in. He pushed it back down impatiently. Everything in the Otherworld brought him back to that—to blood, dirt that smelled like popcorn under his collar, and the ringing in his ears from his dad’s fist—if he didn’t give his brain something else to chew on.
Bell closed his eyes and tried to entice his brain back to the question of Conri’s innocence… or lack of it. There was a flicker of filthy interest from his libido, but otherwise nothing took the bait. Bell didn’t know Conri, but he wanted to trust him. That was probably a bad sign. Instincts lied in the Otherworld. It showed you exactly what you wanted to see before you got pushed in the hole.
How could he trust what his instincts were telling him now about Conri, when they’d been so wrong before?
Bell grimaced to himself. There he went again, nails dug into the same old scab.
“You asleep?” Conri asked. He flopped down next to Bell and tried to steal half the tree to lean on, all damp warmth and the faint salt smell of clean sweat. Bell kept his eyes closed as he wondered exactly what Conri would do if he thought he had an Iron Door agent at a disadvantage. After a moment Conri snorted. “I can tell you aren’t, Agent Bellamy.”
Bell was good at his job. There wasn’t any other option when you were a Walker. He didn’t often feel like an idiot. It turned out he still didn’t like it.
“How?” he asked as he opened his eyes. “Special, heightened changeling senses?”
Conri pulled his knees up and rested his elbows on them. “I used to be a thief. Not a good one, but you learned to tell when people were really asleep. It made it easier.”
It shouldn’t have been funny, but somehow it was. Bell snorted under his breath and leaned forward to rub his hands over his face. He hadn’t been asleep, but it was a temptation.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll arrest you?” he asked. “Theft is a crime.”
“It was a long time ago, remember?” Conri said dryly. “The statute of limitations ran out a few decades back. Anyhow, we have more important things to worry about. Someone has set a trap for Ned about half a mile down the road.”
Bell straightened up as a flicker of adrenaline washed his tiredness away. He’d pay for this later—he always did—but a sour hangover tomorrow was better than sleeping in the Otherworld. It wasn’t quite as bad as eating or drinking here, but if you let yourself sleep, it was comfort of a sort. That could oblige you.
“Our missing kids?”
Conri shrugged. “Probably,” he said. “A trap is usually a bit too sophisticated for a hunting preserve to come up with on its own.”
“Usually?”
Conri shrugged.
“Never be sure of anything here,” he said. “But if you want someone to drive headlong into a trap—”
“You need beaters,” Bell finished for him. He got his feet under him and scrambled gingerly to his feet, one eye on Ned to make sure they didn’t attract the man’s attention. If he wanted to get Ned in panicked motion, he thought, what would he do? The ground was dense and boggy underfoot, but the thin strings of tall grass were dry and brittle. “Fire?”
Conri tilted his head back to look up at Bell. Despite Bell’s dislike for being an idiot, he was apparently determined to be one as he imagined other situations that would angle Conri’s head like that and soften the line of his mouth thoughtfully.
“Maybe,” he said, the word drawn out over his tongue. “It’s not something Robin or the other fey kids would do. It wouldn’t be sporting. The hunt has to be fair. There are rules about how to engage with the prey.”
It was actually reassuring when Bell’s stomach sank in disappointment. This whole thing would be easier if he could find a prejudged slot in his head for Conri. Delusional advocate for the fey was right there to be filled and well away from anything that would end with Bell doing anything stupid.
Fun, until the other shoe dropped, but stupid.
“Are there really?” he asked. Even though he had been to the Otherworld enough times to know that was a lie. “Rules of engagement?”
“No,” Conri said as he scrambled up, easy and graceless at the same time. “But parents are liars, and it’s not exactly easy being fey. Even in LA. It’s easier to believe in fair play and honor than assholes and murder.”
Maybe for some people. It hadn’t been Bell’s experience.
“So, what would they do? They don’t have weapons or numbers—”
Conri didn’t get a chance to answer. The herd burst out of the thick woods at full gallop first, broken branches caught in their horns and trampled under sharp hooves that flashed silver when the light caught them. Hot breaths steamed out of flared red nostrils, and their eyes were wide and rolled enough to show the whites, bright in the dim light.
Aurochs.
That’s what people called them. Unicorn was too fairy-tale a word once they realized the fey used them like cattle—for meat, milk, and leather. Bell had seen them fat and placid in Otherworld fields when he went to check the living conditions of the farmhands hired to tend them.
Virginity, like death, was a mortal concept. At least it was as far the Otherworld and its beasts were concerned. But death had glutted the market, so virginity brought a higher price if someone was willing to hang on to it for a year’s farm work.
These things, though. Bell took a step back, as if that would get him out of the way as the herd charged toward them. They had as much kinship to the horn-docked farm animals he’d seen as boars did to pigs. They were hard, knotted muscle and mange-pocked hides, the silver manes knotted with burrs, and their tails stained with shit and urine.
Not exactly the unicorn of legends, except for the horn. It jutted out from thick, armored foreheads like a spear, white as bone and carved with what old wives claimed were the secrets of the Otherworld. Although they didn’t usually mention the blood and filth smeared into the grooves.
“Stay on your feet,” Conri yelled as he grabbed Bell’s shoulder and dragged him out of the path of the things. “Don’t touch the horn—”
They didn’t get far before the panicked aurochs rolled over them in a tide of muscle, hide, and hot, sweaty stink. One shouldered between Conri and Bell and shoved them apart. A parting kick from its back feet caught Bell in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. He grunted and struggled to stay on his feet as the pain twisted around his hip bones.
Still lucky. If not for the Kevlar, it would have opened him up like a knife and knocked his guts out.
“A stampede,” Conri yelled, his voice thin over the roar of thirty animals moving as one scared beast. “That’d do it too.”
“Again,” Bell managed to grind out through clenched teeth as the wet, matted flanks of the beasts battered him. The sheer weight of them made it feel like being beaten, his bones sore and legs aching. “So glad I brought you along.”
He slammed his hand against a hard, gray shoulder and managed to keep his feet as another sideswiped him on the way past. There was blood on their flanks, so bright and red it looked like paint. It itched when it got on his hands. A big female lashed out with a hoof the size of a dinner plate as she went past. It caught him on the hip and put him on his back in the dirt as hooves thundered past him. He squirmed like a snake to avoid any of them landing on him, with only partial success.
Bell managed to roll over and scramble onto his knees, gray with filth and bruises. He could taste blood in the back of his throat, and his face throbbed with that distinct broken sickly heat that was going to hurt soon. As he tried to get the rest of the way up, something about him caught one of the auroch’s attention, and it dropped its head. Mad, blue eyes—blue like Conri’s eye was blue, liquid as water—sighted along the spike as it charged at him.
He hesitated, but he’d never admit that to Felix, and then he pulled his gun and fired in one smooth, thoughtless motion. The gun bucked against his hand, and a coin-sized blotch of black appeared on the auroch’s chest, right in the middle. It staggered at the impact but didn’t go down right away. Blood sprayed from its nose in a fine mist as it snorted, and momentum kept it going forward even as it stumbled over its own hooves.
Head shot would have been quicker, but a unicorn’s skull was thick as Kevlar. Bell hesitated again as he considered a second shot, but the unicorn was already dead. The news just hadn’t reached it yet.
Two more heavy, juddering strides, and then the unicorn’s knees went out from under it, and the limp, sour bulk of it slammed into Bell. The tip of its horn scraped down his throat, and the weight of it bowled him over. He landed flat on his back, legs and hips pinned under the dead thing.
The herd surged over them both. They jumped over their dead herd mate, metal hooves tucked up toward their bellies, and stamped at Bell on the way past. He got his arms up over his head and hunched up to protect his stomach as best he could.
Killed by unicorns, he thought with a flash of black humor. I guess virginity really doesn’t grow back.
“Fuck,” Conri said. There was a rough edge to his voice, as if the fricative f wanted to be a snarl. “First time I’ve wished I was ugly.”
The weight on Bell’s legs shifted—not a lot, but it was enough to wriggle. Bell opened his eyes and saw Conri with his shoulder braced against the unicorn’s side. Blood matted his patchwork hair down into one matte-brown mess, and bruises mottled the side of his face and arms. The heavy muscles in his shoulders bulged as he threw his weight against the unicorn and it shifted enough for Bell to yank his legs free.
“Because you’d have still been a virgin?” Bell asked as he flinched away from the hammer blow of a hoof and scrambled to his knees.
He grinned hard as he grabbed Conri and dragged him over closer to the unicorn’s corpse. “Pain in the ass when someone points out the obvious, isn’t it?”
They hunched down for shelter as close as they could get against its bulk as the rest of the herd detoured around and over them. The unicorn’s hide was rough, coarse as an old dishcloth as Bell pressed against it, and the smell of bloody fruit seeped out of it.
“Because I’d have been dead,” Conri said raggedly as he panted for air and made a face at the thick-enough-to-taste stink of it. “And this would be someone else’s problem. Are you okay?”
Good question. Bell took inventory. He hurt. His legs itched and tingled as the blood seeped back in, but that was probably a good sign. Less so for his nose, which had started to throb now he had time to think about it. Okay was a stretch, but he was alive.
“It could be worse,” he said. “You?”
Conri shrugged. “Never seen a wild unicorn before.” He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth—the lush curve of his lower lip split and bloody. “Never really wanted to either, but still. I guess I can add it to the bucket list just to cross it off.”
One of the unicorns misjudged its leap over its dead companion, caught a trailing leg on the dead meat, and went down in front of them. There was a nasty distinct snap as it hit, and it didn’t get back up. Its screamed was a piercing sound like a ruined trumpet, and it kicked out violently with three sharp hooves and the spike on its head.
Bell caught a kick on the hip as he scrambled away from it, and Conri bled from a fresh cut on his forearm. It tried to get up and went back down as the other unicorns trampled over it. Bell pulled his knife from the small of his back but hesitated. He did this, and he’d have killed two unicorns, and this one wasn’t in defense of his life. They were mean animals, he knew that, but….
“Here,” Conri said. He grabbed the knife from Bell and darted forward between the galloping legs to slide the knife in, neat and precise, under the unicorn’s jaw. It stopped the god-awful screech and went limp, bloody tongue hanging out of a slack jaw. Conri twisted the knife in a vicious, just-to-be-sure motion and scrambled back to Bell. Sweat cut through the blood on his face, but his hand was steady as he offered the knife back. Bell didn’t take it. It wasn’t exactly procedure to arm changelings, but if Conri wanted him dead, he could have left him. Conri nodded acknowledgment of the gesture and hung on to the knife. “I’ve done it before. After a while it doesn’t feel quite so much like murdering Tinkerbell.”
It had only been minutes, but Bell felt like he’d been in a fight for an hour. He gingerly got onto his knees—and had to choke back a yelp as one of them protested with the hot, wire-yank pain of a dislocated kneecap—and peered over the unicorn’s broad back. The herd poured through the trees like a grubby tide, and he saw smaller, paler things weave through the heaving bodies on fast, sure feet.
“You’ve read Peter Pan?” Bell asked absently.
“Finn was not always fifteen and too cool to like things,” Conri said. He scrambled over and poked his head up above the unicorn’s flanks to follow the direction of Bell’s stare. “Son of a bitch.”
“Hounds,” Bell said, his suspicion confirmed as the end of the stampede grew closer. The slim dogs—long, bony, and sharp—snapped at the unicorn’s heels and faces to harry them on. Ribs showed under their thin coats, and they had lost some of the dog that the fey liked their beasts to have. Still generally dog-shaped—the intent of a dog—but they stretched too long and they were too smooth. The details were gone. “I guess we’ve found Robin.”
“He’s from Mag Mell. They don’t hunt,” Conri said. “The hounds wouldn’t answer to him. Not this quick.”
“They’re answering to someone,” Bell said. He reached around to draw his other knife and unhooked the sap from his belt. Guns were no good against hounds. Bullets tore through the air where they had been, and it was hard to fire a second time with no face. “And it’s not us.”
He flicked his wrist and extended the sap. The click as it locked into place—half felt, half heard—was familiar, but the weight of it was off. His old sap had been dented from use, scarred and scraped from impact. He’d been used to it.
Time to break this one in.
The last of the unicorns—the old, lame, and young—hammered down onto the road. Splinters chipped up under their hooves as they hit the stone, and Bell caught the sound of the yellow pickup as it growled to life.
Something eerie undercut the sound of diesel combustion—an unnerving rattle. Ned had driven a long way today, and the more mundane an object, the harder the Otherworld ate at it.
A few of the hounds stuck to the chase, but most of them peeled away to surround Bell and Conri. Bloody ears pricked and white, rubbery jowls wrinkled back from sharp, ragged teeth as they growled. Blood streaked their necks and chests as it dribbled from the thin, thorned collars that wrapped around thick, long necks.
Conri put his back to Bell’s and growled at them. It was the surprisingly thin, slightly mad snarl of a herding dog at bay, and it made the hounds shy back, but not for long. A lean bitch, whose collar had hooked into the corner of her mouth to give her a wonky smile, lunged forward to snap at Conri. He kicked her back, but the rest of the pack had already committed.
The last time, Bell had run. More often than the Iron Door Press Office was willing to admit, that was the best option a Walker had. They were usually alone, always out-gunned, and far from home. If they wanted to win, they needed to fight smart, not brave.
Time to see how the hounds fared if he stood his ground.
Bell cracked the sap over narrow skulls and against the joints in long, narrow legs. When the hounds lunged at him, he shoved the sap into their jaws, so their teeth cracked on the iron and silver, while Conri slit throats or slashed at stomachs with the knife.
The thorn collars got in the way. They deflected the knives, so the cuts were shallow instead of deep, and they scratched along muscle instead of opening the jugular. If the hounds got too close, the thorns caught on fabric and skin to foul movement and slow them down.
One of the bigger hounds ignored the knife that slashed its sides and slammed into Conri. It ground its teeth down into his arm, through layers of fat and muscle, as they both fell over backward into the mud. Conri groaned and then choked the noise back as he struggled to keep the hound’s teeth from his throat.
He wouldn’t succeed for long.
Bell swore to himself and left his knife jammed between the ribs of one of the hounds. He spun on the balls of his feet and swung the sap in a short, brittle arc that caught the hound under the front leg. It shrieked in pain around the mouthful of Conri meat, and Conri dug his fingers into the scruff of his neck and tossed it away.
“I think Robin’s better at being fey than you thought,” Bell said. He wiped blood off his hands so his grip wouldn’t slip. “They aren’t going to break.”
“Not for you,” Conri said as he scrambled back to his feet. “They were bred to hunt men. They wouldn’t be much good at it if they feared us. Can you hold them for a minute?
Bell grinned with a flash of bleak amusement. “I thought I already was. You can jump in anytime.”
He got a snort for that, but before he could enjoy the moment, two of the hounds charged in. The sap cracked one over the head hard enough to stagger it, and he kicked sideways to slam the heel of his boot into the side of the other hound’s throat before he could reach Conri. He lost his knife in the meat of a hound’s chest and nearly his Achilles tendon to sharp teeth, but his Iron Door–issued boots were thick enough that the fangs only scraped his skin.
In the middle of all that, he was still—very briefly—tempted to look when he saw Conri’s jeans get tossed aside out of the corner of his eye. When the ragged T-shirt followed them, he did steal a second to glance over his shoulder.
He got a brief eyeful of Conri’s long, lean body, and then it blurred, like a child had scraped their fist over a chalk drawing, and snapped back together into a dog. Bell had seen transformations before, but never such a clean one. It was usually a… wet… process, with the leavings left splattered all over the walls.
This time, one second there was Conri, and the next a dog. So neat that Bell wondered if he’d mis-seen.
Except it was obviously still Conri. The eyes were the same, and the scruffy merle-patterned fur now stretched over a rough-coated collie the size of a Newfoundland. Conri-the-dog shook itself, shed what looked like an entire other dog, and then threw itself forward to slam shoulder-first into a hound.
The long, white almost-dog hit the ground and rolled. When it came back to its feet, it snarled and backed away unhappily. Sharp fangs couldn’t dig in through the dense, wiry coat, the collie was nearly as fast and thick with muscle, and a thick, nail-studded leather collar around its throat tore their mouths to shreds when they tried to take it down.
One snuck around to go for the collie’s flank, but Bell grabbed it by the scruff of the neck. The thorn collar tore his palm open as he dragged it back and put it down with a short, sharp blow from the butt of his sap to the base of the skull. He shot another, the quarters too close for the hounds to twist out of the way, and got his knife back from one dead hound in time to slash it across another’s face.
As the hound staggered backward, one eye and one ear wet with blood as it shook its head, a shrill whistle cut through the trees. The hounds all pricked their ears—the ones that could—and then slowly broke away from the fight to flee into the trees.
The last living hound stood her ground, head dropped and lips curled as she glared at Conri. He shook his head—and maybe his fur wasn’t as thick as all that, because he splattered blood—and waited with his paws braced.
Then she snapped at him, the click of her teeth loud as they hit each other and turned tail to follow the rest.
Conri groaned once she was gone and flopped down to roll on the ground as if the dirt would help his bites. Maybe it would. Bell pressed the ball of the sap against his thigh and retracted it as he stepped forward.
“Conri?” he said as he extended his hand. “You still in there?”
The narrow, pointed head that swung toward him didn’t have enough room for a human brain, but the spark of Conri was still there in the mismatched eyes. He wagged his tail as Bell stroked his soft ears and wondered how insanely inappropriate that was. Then the dog scrambled back to his feet for a quick scratch before he took off at a trot after the hounds.
Bell wiped his face on his arm—regretted it as it hurt—and supposed that made sense. He didn’t know if they could save the Treaty anymore—the kids had obviously been trapped here for more than a scary few days—but maybe he could still save Nora.
It wouldn’t change anything. He used to think it would, but no matter how many people he did save, it would never make up for the one he hadn’t. Not to him, not to anyone. But it was still worth doing.
IT FELT too good to be back on all fours again. Conri could feel the press of the Otherworld’s approval against his bones. This was the shape it thought suited him, the skin he should wear, and the thoughts he should think.
There was no malice to it. It was how the Otherworld worked. In the mortal world, people talked about form over function as though it was a bad thing, but here they were the same. Lovers grew more beautiful, bards could—literally—sing like birds, and Conri got turned into a dog because that was how his life always went.
The Otherworld thought he’d make a good dog… and it had been right. Like it or not, no matter what that Kessel hound dog said, Conri was a good dog. It was a shame he’d always wanted more, or he could have been happy.
The stink of the hounds hung on the air like burnt caramel, so strong he could almost reach out and snap off a thread of it. He could taste their blood in his mouth, thick and slippery and undersalted, and the rose-thorn magic that bound them.
Something else too. He ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth and along his teeth as he tried to identify it. Meat and smoke and the crack-slurp of marrow between their jaws.
Loyalty, he realized. It was the smell of loyalty.
That put his ears back. The hounds weren’t loyal. They were hounds. They were hunger wrapped in mist-skin and given bone teeth because the fey wanted dogs to hunt with. Conri’s old master had bred mortal dogs into the line, but that was because he liked their belling howl, not for any doggy attribute.
He’d had Conri for that.
A quick shake of his head dislodged that thought. Collie or man, Conri had never seen any point in worrying about what couldn’t be fixed.
The hounds had been here a long time, with nothing mortal enough to make killing it worthwhile. Maybe, like the slough itself, they were happy to be back to work.
Cold water splashed Conri’s paws and belly as he landed in a thin, brackish stream. He stopped for a second to stick his muzzle in it and slurp up the water. It let Bell catch up with him.
Bell flopped belly down on the bank of the stream and stuck his head into it. Dark hair floated on the water and bubbles trickled up from his nose. Then they stopped. Conri shoved his nose into Bell’s ear and snorted to make Bell surface, spluttering water and blood.
“I’m not drinking it,” Bell said, after Conri woofed at him. He propped himself up on his elbows and let the water drip off his face. His nose was crooked, his eyebrow split and scabbed, and a dark bruise was rising to the surface along his jawline. The scar the unicorns had given him had already faded to a thin, silver line—actual silver that glittered dully when he turned his head. Conri would have to talk to him about that, when he had words again, anyhow. “I needed to…. How far are they ahead?”
Conri tilted his head to one side and then the other. He was still a person in a dog skin—more or less, less if the Otherworld had its way—but how the hell was he meant to convey distance? Bark once per yard?
“Fair enough,” Bell said. He wiped the water off his face and flicked it away. “Far?”
It was a bit undignified, but Conri shook his head.
“Then we want to see what we’re getting into before we have to deal with it,” Bell said. He pushed himself back and into a sitting position so he could fish the trow ointment out of his belt. “Don’t rush in. Stay back and give me a chance to assess that situation.”
Conri laid his ears back.
“You nearly got shot sticking your nose where it didn’t belong back in the mortal world,” Bell said. He cracked the seal on the ointment with his fingernail. It was potent enough that even the smell of it perked Conri up like a good cup of coffee. “I’m not out of line to think you might not wait for me to catch up.”
Conri scrambled out of the water and shook himself. He paced back and forth, sniffing the air as Bell rubbed the ointment straight onto his skin. Open wounds first—they didn’t heal immediately, but blood dried up—and then a bit for his nose and the knee he’d favored the last half mile.
Once he had the ointment on, Bell took a second to close his eyes. He looked oddly young when he did that, and Conri realized with a start that he actually was. After a while in the Otherworld, you stopped trying to work out ages. Old enough for morality was the only standard he really worried about.
Bell, with the set of his jaw softened and the hard impatience he approached everything with faded, was only in his twenties. Mid to late, but still. He was probably younger than Conri had been when he was brought to the Otherworld, before he’d been a Walker.
“Let’s go see who we’re trying to save,” Bell said after a single deep breath that he slowly exhaled. He was still injured, but the ointment dulled the pain enough that Bell was able to scramble easily to his feet. “Then see what the unicorns left of Ned.”
Conri bounced on his paws in agreement and took off again. He followed the track of the hounds through the trees, over and under the twisted thorn runners decorated with brown-edged white blooms the size of his head. Up close they looked less like roses and smelled like nothing at all. Spots of blood stained them, bright and indelible.
Cheater’s Rose, his old master had called them with disdain. Fey grew them in hunting preserves to make the chase easier. Blood stained them forever, or at least until a frost dropped the petals.
Only mortal blood, though. Even a changeling who’d been in the Otherworld any length of time wouldn’t leave much of a mark. So however long had passed for the mortal teenagers, it hadn’t been too long.
The brittle blood-toffee scent of the hounds thickened, pliable and fresh in the air, and Conri slowed down. He stopped behind a thicket of Cheater’s Rose and brambles when he heard the harsh clash of voices. After a minute Bell caught up and crouched down next to him, one arm slung over his shoulder.
“Good… work,” he murmured as he listened to the voices bicker, the “boy” caught behind his teeth. Conri huffed down his nose in amusement and wagged his tail, ’cause… well… fuck it. It did feel good. He’d enjoyed praise before he was a changeling. “Let’s see what’s going on and with whom.”
He pulled on a pair of gloves and scrambled up the thorny twist of the rose briars, the hooked thorns not sharp enough to pierce through the fabric. Conri paced at the bottom for a second, the dog anxiety in the back of his head like pressure, and then forced himself to leave Bell to it as he slunk under the underbrush until he could see into the clearing.
The hounds sprawled around the clearing in awkward, angular piles of bone and hair. Like greyhounds at rest, they looked like puppets with the strings snapped. In the middle of them, a skinny, darkly tanned youth with bleached white hair crouched next to the big female that led the pack and fussed over her like a pup. Thin, gloved fingers, with “nails” that were thorns broken off the roses and sewn onto the fingers scratched behind her ears and under the crease of her long thin jaw.
Good? Yes. Good me. The hound huffed to herself in satisfaction. Her bony whip of a tail slapped the ground twice and then spasmed weirdly as dog instincts tried to kick in and got lost halfway through. Kill more. Kiss pet. Pet kiss. Good me kill. Food?
The other hounds lifted their heads at the mention of the food and moaned a weird, wavering noise.
Kill? Food? Food Kill. Yesssss. Good? Me good. You? Good!
A few of them, caught up in the question of who was good, snapped and snarled at one another. The skinny youth jumped in and pulled them apart, backed up by the big female who asserted she was the good until the others slunk away from her.
Conri glanced past the hounds and their keeper to….
It had been the Hunting Lodge at one time, but the slough had picked the brick and timber down to a shell of a landmark. In its place was a shabby trailer, the painted sides blistered and warped from time. Prisoners sat hunched around it, filthy sacks of sticks and bones with thorn collars around their throats to chain them to the ground.
Conri had to squint to get his brain to cooperate with numbers. Dogs definitely couldn’t count in the Otherworld’s view of things. He overrode that.
Four prisoners.
Not enough for all the kids who’d been taken, but graves were easy to miss out here. He glanced up into the tree to judge Bell’s next move as Bell apparently forgot everything he said and dropped out of his perch. He landed easily, knees flexed to absorb the impact, and snapped the gun up to point at the hound’s master.
“Call them off,” he snapped the command in a cold voice. His finger tightened slightly on the trigger. “Now. Or I kill you and see if they have the heart for a fight then.”
The hounds growled and whimpered as they milled around and looked to their master for direction.
No. No. Bad! Kill bad?! Kill good? What if good goes like olds? Food?
One of them, bony and young, decided to take the risk. It lunged at Bell, teeth bared behind wrinkled back lips. Conri scrambled under and through a tangle of bush and briar that stripped chunks of hair out of his coat. He scuttled forward, low and fast, and skidded under the hound on his belly. Then he stood up abruptly and knocked the hound off its feet. He was shorter than it—he could have nearly run under it without stooping—but there was more of him.
The hound rolled over on its back, and Conri pinned it down with his teeth at its throat. The thorns ripped at his lips and gums, but he ignored them.
“Stop!” the hound’s master said in a low, anxious voice as they raised gloved hands. “Don’t hurt them!”
The hounds were driven mad, writhing over and under one another like leggy worms in a storm at the kindness of it. Whatever they’d been before the Otherworld overlaid dog on them hated the weakling sentiment, but at the same time, they wanted to show belly and get scritched by their master.
Fey weren’t kind.
Conri loved Finn, and he’d lived with Finn, and it had taken him fourteen years to bully the idea it wasn’t compulsory to be spiteful into the boy.
He let the cowed hound slide from under him and sidled forward a few steps to sniff at the hem of the hound master’s coat. It was old leather, cured with unicorn piss and too much blood, and it smelled of the thin ozone-and-infusions scent of the fey. In this case smoked salt and the nose-prickle stink of a lightning strike. Under it, though….
“What have you done, Nora?” Bell asked tightly. The gun didn’t waver, the muzzle aimed directly at the nondescript if darker-tanned face of the girl they’d come to find. “What were you planning to do?”
For a brittle second, Conri could feel the violence curdle in the air as the slough sucked in an anticipatory, metaphorical breath. This was what it wanted, all the dark, hot emotions that would stir the sluggish Otherworld into life. Conri put himself between them—old habits—and growled a warning at Bell. It made Bell’s eyes flicker down to him for an instant, but the gun didn’t waver.
Nora stared at Bell with faded blue eyes and a blank expression on her face.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked abruptly, then scowled. “Did you hurt my dogs?”
THE CONVERSATION stuttered along outside the trailer. It had been a while since Nora had anyone to talk to but her hounds, and she frequently stopped only to splutter out a sudden stream of information when Bell prodded her.
Conri sat on the narrow cot with his head in his heads and tried to muster up the will to finish getting dressed in his scavenged gear and go outside. So far it hadn’t worked. He buried his fingers deeper into his hair until his knuckles dug into his skull and he half-seriously wished for the old days. Back then, with the threat of his master’s whip over his shoulders, he never dallied long, no matter what he felt like.
Cheer up, he thought bitterly to himself, we could still end up back there.
He didn’t register the silence outside until someone rapped their knuckles against the trailer door.
“You okay?” Bell asked. He probably thought Conri had fallen asleep or something.
“Yeah,” Conri said. He didn’t lift his head as he worked his hands down to the soft-furred points of his ears and traced them absently. “Give me a minute.”
The only person he’d had to answer to for over a decade had been Finn. All he would have done is make a disgusted noise and stomp off. So the creak of the door as it opened to let Bell scramble in surprised him.
“So far it’s like Jamie told us,” Bell said. All Conri could see of him without looking up was his boots, scarred and stained from the bog. “I figured you’d want to hear the rest of it.”
Of course, he did. He had to pull himself together and get up. It was all done and dusted now anyhow. There were no takebacks in the Otherworld.
“Is this…? I wasn’t going to shoot her,” Bell said suddenly. It didn’t sound like he quite believed that any more than Conri did. He might not have decided to shoot Nora, but it had been on the table as they stared at each other. All it would have taken was for one thing to fall differently, and it would have ended differently. “It’s just not the first time that I—”
Conri dropped his hands to dangle between his knees. “Not everything is about you, Agent Bellamy.”
“Yeah, that’s not news,” Bell said, a crack of old, bitter humor in his voice. He crouched down, the worn fabric of his trousers pulled tight over his knees and his lean, wiry forearms crossed on top of them. “What is it about?”
It was stupid to care. At this point what did it matter? Conri knew that the same way Bell knew not everything was about him. Painfully.
“It’s not every time,” Conri said. His voice was low and rough in his throat. “But sometimes when I turn back, not all of me turns back.”
He hadn’t cared about the hair, and he could live with the ears—nearly everyone had pointy ears—but it had been a shock the day he looked in a mirror and didn’t see his own eyes. To not even see human eyes in your face. He took a breath and was embarrassed to taste the salt and snot of incipient tears in the back of his throat. It was stupid. He couldn’t shapeshift in the mortal world. The laws of physics were enforced there, and he’d had time to forget this bleak, helpless fear.
Maybe this time what he saw in the mirror wouldn’t be something he could accept as him. Or what if, no matter how bizarre it was, he could? That almost seemed worse.
“What about this time?” Bell asked. He probably talked to victims in that low, steady tone, to confused kids and kelpie-nipped horse girls. Or maybe did. “Did you lose something?”
Ah, Conri thought dryly, just when he thought he couldn’t feel more stupid.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m scared to know.”
Bell reached between Conri’s braced forearms and pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger so he could lift it up for a look. Conri let his arms drop to his sides and clenched his jaw as he braced himself for disgust. Worse. Pity.
Serious, dark brown eyes searched Conri’s face for a second, from his hairline to the tightly set line of his jaw. His grip on Conri’s chin shifted as Bell slid his hand up to cup the side of his face.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. “You look like you.”
A twitch of a bitter smile pulled at Conri’s mouth. “Only half dog, then,” he said.
Bell snorted and pulled him forward into a kiss.
Surprise froze Conri in place as Bell’s mouth pressed against his, soft and still bloody-sweet from the fight. He felt dumb as a virgin who’d realized that this was what all the fuss was about with girls… only not girls. It wasn’t that he hadn’t figured Bell wanted him, he just hadn’t expected Bell to make a move.
Either of them to make a move, since it was such a stupid thing to do.
He exhaled into Bell’s mouth and kissed him back, hungry and desperate in a way he vaguely knew he didn’t want to understand right then. It wasn’t the sex. Conri didn’t have any trouble there. LA had a whole subculture of people who wanted to bang changelings. Something else.
And hadn’t he already decided that knowing wouldn’t do him any good?
He buried his fingers in Bell’s dark hair, loose strands knotted around his fingers, and pulled him in closer. Bell made a low, pleased sound against Conri’s mouth and stretched up into the kiss. His free hand was braced against Conri’s thigh, warm through the stolen leather, as he bit Conri’s lower lip and flirted with his tongue.
Hunger flooded Conri’s body, hot as liquid sugar that stung his skin as it coated his bones. It was a heady, mortal rush that cast into sharp relief the empty, shallow pleasure of the Otherworld.
The phantom of a quick tumble on the floor of the trailer hung over them. It would have been easy. All one of them had to do was push the other down, wet kisses and hasty hands and stickiness. It would put the itch to bed once and for all. There’d be a grubby patina over any potential meetings in the future, the memory of dirty floors and messy distraction.
That would head off a lot of problems.
The possibility faded away as the hounds shrieked at one another over a length of unicorn leg outside and Nora yelled at them. None of the fey had quite decided what accent to adopt from America—so her thick, southern vowels were a blunt-weapon reminder that they had other responsibilities.
Bell was the one who pulled back. Dark hair tangled in sweaty curls around his ears, and the hard lines of his face had softened. He looked young and bemused, and Conri felt the old, seductive urge to do what he wanted and screw the consequences. He turned his head to kiss the inside of Bell’s wrist and felt the flush of blood under the thin skin.
“So,” he said. “This is a thing?”
Bell thought about that for a moment and then smiled wryly with a tight, crooked slant of his severe mouth.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is as far as I’m concerned, anyhow.”
“Huh,” Conri leaned over to press a quick, hard kiss against that dry smile. He rested his forehead against Bell’s when he finished, their breath tangled together. “For the record, everything shoulders down is still… you know… as God made me.”
Bell spluttered out a surprised laugh and pushed himself to his feet. He scraped his fingers through his hair to untangle the curls. “Good to know,” he said.
“Oh, you have no fucking idea,” Conri said as he reached over to grab the shirt some fey had left in the wardrobe—either when they fled or because it had gone out of style—and shrugged it on. The fabric pulled over his shoulders. Fey tended to be built along leaner lines. “That I checked.”
Bell shook his head and turned to head back to the door. His hand was on the doorknob when Conri cleared his throat.
“Look, thanks,” he said awkwardly as he stood up. It was easy to flirt, even roughly, but that touch of honesty felt raw. “It’s just… been a while.”
Bell stepped outside and turned to look at him, eyebrows raised curiously. “Since someone kissed you?”
No, but it felt like it had been. Conri’s assignations before he came back to Elwood had been satisfying, but compared to the tingle of Bell still on his lips, the memory of them was sepia and faded.
“Not exactly,” he admitted. “I do okay.”
“It has for me,” Bell said. “A good while. I’m glad it helped, but I didn’t kiss you to get you to pull yourself together. I did it because I’ve wanted to kiss you since I searched your car.”
The deal-with-it-later urge tickled down Conri’s spine to clench his ass. “Not before?”
“I don’t lust after bad guys,” Bell said. “It’s sort of a rule. I wanted to be sure you were a good man first. Get dressed. We’ll be at the fire.”
He jumped down off the steps and walked away to rejoin Nora. Conri absently straightened the shirt over his shoulders and buttoned it up as far as it would go.
He was a good dog. A good man, though? He didn’t know if he’d ever been that.
THE KISS lingered on Bell’s mouth.
He tried to ignore it as Conri dragged a log over to the fire to sit down, even though it felt like it had to be visible, bright pink and lemon sharp. The pale fire cast shadows over Conri’s face, picked out the heavy bones of his face and the russet patches in his hair as he leaned in to grab a skewer of unicorn meat.
“… I don’t know who they are,” Nora said. The almost-pretty girl in the photos had been pared down to raw bones and fierceness. Her hands were scarred and callused, and her face was lean and grave. She ate quickly and untidily with her fingers, every other bite of charred flesh shared with the big pack leader who sprawled at her feet. It licked Nora’s fingers clean as she glanced over at the sullen chain-line of prisoners. “They were here when we got here. Like these poor puppies.”
She turned her hand absently to scratch under the hound’s chin. Its ears went floppy with delight, and it leaned against her with a grunt of satisfaction. The bony whip of a tail thumped the ground.
Bell didn’t look at it. He knew what the hounds were, down to his bones, while to Nora they were abandoned dogs, dumped in the woods after hunting season like the spotted hounds that couldn’t tree back home. It was better the pack believed in Nora and didn’t remember Bell’s version of them.
“Why are they chained up?” Bell asked.
He rubbed his hands together, his thumbs pressed into the palms as though they could squeeze out the tense ache from his grip on the gun—a reminder of how close he’d come to shooting the girl they’d come to save. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but for a cold, clear second it wasn’t Nora he saw, and he’d come close. Part of him hoped that Nora would say something now that would prove that if he had, he’d have been justified.
“I don’t want to kill them,” Nora said. She wiped her fingers on her trousers and scrubbed her hands through her hair in frustration. A frown pinched at her face under the unruly, sun-bleached mop. “I tried to talk to them at first, but they aren’t really people anymore. They’re just… they’re just him.”
Her voice broke a bit, and she shuddered. The hound stuck its long, beaky muzzle under her arm and snorted fretfully into her armpit.
“Robin?” Conri said.
Nora gave him a startled look and then laughed. Sort of. It was a bitter choke of a chuckle that caught in her throat.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “He’s not here. Your prince is in another castle.”
She scrambled up from the fire and walked over to one of the grubby, hunched figures on their hobble. The hound trailed at her heels with a snarl for the prisoners as one of them spat at her. Nora wiped her cheek on her sleeve and grabbed one of the men by the hair to yank his head up.
“They’re Keith,” she said, and she had the grace to sound bemused, as though it occurred to her how mad it was when she explained it aloud. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but they’re all him. Versions of him anyhow. Old him, one-eyed him, ugly him, pirate him—all of the worst bits of him.”
Not particularly imaginative versions, Bell guessed as he got up to look at the other prisoners and the slightly unique stamps of their faces. But nothing he’d heard about Keith suggested he was a clever boy.
“And the real Keith?” he asked.
One of the prisoners threw himself at Bell, only to strangle on the end of the chain. He fell back onto the ground with a grunt and glared up at Bell with burning, empty eyes. There was maybe the outline of a teenage boy under the grime and scavenger clothes, in the cheekbones and hairlines, but it was well hidden.
“You’ll never get him back,” he said. The words were garbled in his throat, almost there but not quite. “We’ll kill him first. You bitch. Fucking bitch. Whore.”
The hound snaked in low and mean to snap at the prisoner’s hands and face until he recoiled back into place, mouth shut as he hunched down, cowed before the sharp teeth and pinned-back ears.
“They don’t have a lot of words,” Nora said, unflappable and quietly cold. “They reuse and recycle what they have, cut and paste it together to try and talk. It’s kind of pathetic.”
Bell stepped back. The Otherworld was alien, fluid, and strange, but it was usually efficient. The line of half-made, halting clones was more unsettling for how half-assed it was.
“It’s wrong anyhow,” he said. “We’re not here to find Robin. We’re here for you, Nora. We’re going to take you home.”
She gave him the same blank, uncomprehending look as she had when he’d had a gun pointed at her.
“I’m not going,” she said. There was a clean, shocking purity to the passion that filled her face. “I’m not going anywhere without Robin. I love him.”
At least, Bell thought tiredly as he saw the last chance to save the treaty fall apart in his hands, she still had the self-awareness to say “I” not “we.”
“NO ONE stole me,” Nora said irritably as she packed up her camp. “No one forced me to come here. It’s not illegal to go to the Otherworld. People queue up to get visas to go and work there. You’re here.”
“I’m an Iron Door agent,” Bell said. He glanced at Conri, who had stepped aside to study the prisoners. The tips of Bell’s ears felt hot as he looked at Conri, and his stomach tightened pleasantly, but he kept his voice businesslike. “He’s been deputized, and people know we’re here. You disappeared in the middle of the night, after a fight at a contentious party. It’s not the same situation.”
“Fine,” Nora said. She held her hand up beside her face and rattled off, “I hereby attest that I want to be here and that I’m here of my own free—”
Bell pulled her hand down and put his hand over her mouth to muffle what she’d been about to say. The theologians hadn’t yet agreed on where the Otherworld stood with regard to any gods—some theorized it was God—but it would take any oath or prayer for itself.
“You’re seventeen,” Bell said. “You legally can’t make that decision or swear to it by anything.”
Nora shoved him away and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I’m not seventeen. I’ve been here—”
“Not quite a day,” Bell said.
That news rocked Nora back on her heels. She gawped at him and then turned away. Her shoulders hunched up to her ears, and Bell realized how skinny she was under the bulky duster.
“I thought it had been over a year,” she said. “That it had passed my birthday, at least.”
Bell would have been relieved. He had been relieved the first time he staggered back to the mortal world and found only a few weeks had passed. Nora sounded as if her world had fallen in.
“Why did you follow Robin through the border?” Conri asked as he stepped away from the clones. “What did he offer you?”
Nora wiped her face on her hands, sniffed hard, and turned to glare at him. The tears made her eyes look more of a watery blue, but her expression was fierce.
“He was grateful,” she said, her voice thick with contempt. She raised her chin stubbornly. “He said ‘thank you,’ he asked me to dance, and I think maybe I got him killed. So I’m not going anywhere, Agent. Not until Robin’s safe.”
She clenched her hands into fists, and the hounds fell into position behind her. They’d forgotten they were meant to be dogs, the cocked heads and expressive tails dropped like a sheet from the killing machines that had always been underneath.
Bell dropped his hand to his sap out of habit but didn’t pull it. If it was a question of getting Nora back to the ford and to safety, he’d bet on himself against the hounds. He might not come out intact, but he could do it. But kidnap was different from rescue. An unwilling passenger would change the odds a lot.
It was Conri who broke the silence.
“My son was at the party too,” he said as he stepped forward. The apparent non sequitur made Nora give him a confused look that he ignored. “You might have met him. Finn, red hair and a Cali accent. Still looks a lot like a goblin.”
Nora looked annoyed. “Maybe,” she said. “A lot of the fey kids at the party had red hair. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t talk to anyone but Robin. Good girls don’t. They don’t talk to fey. They don’t eat the fruit. They miss out on a lot.”
“Well, he was,” Conri said. “So now he’s in the crosshairs of Iron Door because of you and Robin. The minute the news leaves the county, bounces out of state, the treaty will be torn up… unless we take you back and you tell everyone the right story.”
Bell stalled for a second on right instead of true. The implication stuck in his throat, even though he knew Iron Door would take the same approach. It was hardly the corrupt agency that Ned wanted to paint it as, but everyone involved had bled for that treaty.
Literally. If you looked at the original, there were bloody fingerprints smudged on the corners.
It still didn’t feel right to put the weight of that on Nora.
“We have time. Why don’t you tell us what really happened?” he said as he held his hand out.
She didn’t take it. Bell supposed he’d nearly shot her, so he couldn’t blame her for that. After a pause, she nodded stiffly, and the hounds relaxed. One of them tried a yawn that went way too far back.
“While we walk,” she said as she turned to grab the last of her things and stuff them in a backpack. The bag had been pink once and maybe even as stylish as a girl could get with a pig-farm wage. Now it was grubby and stitched, patched with hide and thorns. “I went to a lot of effort to stampede those unicorns. I don’t want to waste it.”
Conri shrugged at Bell and scattered the greasy bones of their meal with his foot. The heavy leather singed lightly as he stirred the embers.
“Where are we going?” Bell asked.
Nora lifted her hood up to cover her pale hair. “I told you,” she said as she struck out. “I’m going to rescue Robin and the others. With luck, the stampede will have attracted Keith’s attention, and him and Ned can keep each other busy while I get into his camp.”
The hounds slunk off into the trees, glimpses of mist through the branches the only evidence they kept pace. Only the big female stuck with Nora, glued to her shadow.
Bell weighed Felix’s instructions against the current development in the field. He still didn’t need to get Robin and the others back to the mortal realm, but he at least needed to get them to the border if he didn’t want to have to fight Nora all the way there.
And she was definitely more resourceful than he expected.
Useful and resilient, the memory of Conri’s voice sighed in his head. That described him and Nora, and Bell filed that away for later.
It took a few paces, but finally Nora cleared her throat and started to speak.
“Keith only dated me because it meant he got to hang out with my brother and shoot guns,” she said flatly. There was no room for sympathy in her voice. “I don’t think he even liked him, which was okay because I don’t think I ever much liked him either. But I was the pig-farm girl, and he was a football player, so why not? So I wasn’t surprised when he started being a dick to some fey kids from the summer camp, but this time he took it too far….”
THE STORY was much the same as the one that Jamie had told him, although sharper edged from someone who’d been there. The prank was meaner, the fey kids less gullible, and Keith didn’t leave them there so much as flee with his tail between his legs.
“He left me there, on the ground,” Nora said. “I thought I was gonna get a pig nose or something for my trouble. They do that in the stories. And—”
She stumbled over her own tongue as she glanced back over her shoulder at Conri. Color slapped her cheeks, and even though he didn’t react, it took her a second to compose her thoughts again.
“Anyhow, all Robin did was help me up. He thanked me for trying to stop Keith and the others, even though they were my friends. He said I was as brave as I was beautiful.” Nora paused halfway over a tangled briar and smiled at the memory of that. Her fingers tightened around the wood knot of the rose runner, thorns sharp where they stuck between her knuckles, and she lifted her chin. “I told him he was full of shit, and that made him laugh. They walked me back to town and… you know what was the most magical thing about it? Not that they were fey, but that they didn’t come from here. Robin grew up in Providence and Shanko was from Brooklyn and… the farthest I’ve ever gone is over the state line for a pig fair. They left me at the gas station—I wasn’t going to let them meet my inbred bigot of a brother—and figured that was it. That was going to be my story. When I was seventy-two and had spent my whole life on the pig farm with my brother and his family, this would be my big brush with fairy-tale romance. The summer I was almost a fairy bride. Pathetic, but better than most people’s romances around here.”
She stopped, shrugged, and jumped down onto the boggy dirt track that faded in and out between the trees. The hound followed her in an easy, long leap that stretched over the thorns.
“Except then he came to the party,” Conri said. He boosted himself over the knot of briar and dropped easily down on the other side. “And asked you to dance.”
He looked at ease here, Bell noted. In the borrowed fey leathers, amidst the thick white alien roses that hung from trees like kudzu, Conri looked like he was made for this. He had been, from what he’d shared, but it still rubbed Bell the wrong way.
It wasn’t suspicion. Bell didn’t know if Conri could be trusted in a wider sense, but he obviously loved Finn, and that meant he was on Iron Door’s side this time. The irritable itch in the back of Bell’s head felt more like… jealousy, like the moment you saw your boyfriend laugh at an inside joke with his ex and they didn’t include you.
Bell wanted to roll his eyes at his neurotic approach to a one-night stand. A pending one-night stand, at that. It was stupid and needy, neither of which he was. But he could still taste the resentment in the back of his throat for the boggy ground underfoot and the smell of salt and roses on the air. Something old and dark and sullen dug its heels into his mind and chewed on old wounds like they were ribeye steak.
The Otherworld didn’t get to take anyone else from him.
Bell swallowed the sour-skin taste of that old memory and left it to fester while he focused on his own scramble over the vine.
“That didn’t please Keith,” he said. His boots hit the ground with a sticky squelch, and he could smell the crushed roses on his clothes. It wanted him to run. He could feel it as his heart rate sped up and sweat broke out.
“It wasn’t his business,” Nora said sharply. “I’d already told him that, but no, he wasn’t thrilled. Robin didn’t care. He thought it was funny when the fight kicked off. It was funny when I was with him—what were a bunch of hick-town kids when you’re the son of a prince? He only left because he got bored of it, and I went with him because I was bored of all of it. So why not? Except Keith hung out with my brother, goes to the same hateful forums, and when he found out the summer camp was going to be here—”
“He got iron,” Conri said grimly. “How much?”
She shrugged. “What he could afford,” she said. The fey didn’t care for steel much, but it irritated them. It wouldn’t end them. That took cold, pure pig iron, and it was illegal to buy without a license and a valid reason. So people who bought it illegally had to pay over the odds for it. “A crowbar. A couple of shells full of iron ball bearings for his shotgun, but he clipped Thistle with it, and all it did was hurt her. But that’s when it stopped being funny. Keith was… he didn’t even care about me that much. I don’t know why he lost his head over this like he did. Robin told Thistle to go and get help—I guess she did—while we ran for it. Keith was going to kill us, Agent, all of us. I don’t know how Robin got us through to here, but it was to save my life, not to steal me away.”
“Only problem was,” Bell said, “Keith came with you.”
Nora nodded. “It didn’t seem like a problem at first. This is the Otherworld, after all. It’s the fey’s playground. Robin thought he had the upper hand—we all did. Even Keith agreed to stay out of our way, but… nothing worked the way we thought it would. We couldn’t get back, he couldn’t find the way out, and there was nothing to eat.” Her voice broke at the memory, a raw scratch of trauma she’d had no time to do anything but repress. The hound looked up at her curiously, its head cocked to the side. “It was okay, though. We knew someone would come for us. Ned’s a crazy bigot, but he loves me, and the camp would send a Walker to get the fey back. It was okay, we just had to keep it together until someone got here. Except, that’s when Keith found….”
She reached out and pushed a tangle of briars out of the way with her heavily sleeved arms, thorns hooked into the rough stitchwork. The dim light picked out the bloodstains on the leather.
“That.”
Bell ducked down slightly to peer over her shoulder. The ghosts of the old fey structures were there—a stray doorframe slouched crookedly in a stand of grass and old, broken walls used as climbing frames for the briars. The only building that had survived, or been put back together by the diligent slough, was a splintered, gray old house with a bleak aura.
He glanced around at Conri and raised his eyebrows in a mute question. Of the three of them, Conri was the only one likely to recognize the layout of the buildings. Bell had read about the hunts—the Hunt—and come across enough stray hounds, but whatever the fey hunted these days, it wasn’t human prey, so it wasn’t Iron Door’s business.
Conri crouched down to get a good view. He glanced across the space from corner to corner, and a dour frown creased the open, easy planes of his face. He swallowed, an audible squelch of sound in his throat, and answered reluctantly, “It looks like the Stables.”
IT WASN’T a lie, Conri defended himself to the squirming part of his brain that wanted to kiss Bell again. The words were the truth, and it wasn’t his fault if they didn’t all share the same bleak, background information.
Or it was, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it right now.
“The Others were in the stalls,” Nora said. She’d worked her way through a few different terms for the programmed things before she’d settled on that. Until she had someone to talk to, they hadn’t really needed a name. She knew who they were. “I was with him. Shanko too, but he left after we found the clearing to let Robin know. He told us to wait, but Keith never listened to anyone. We went down to explore and found… them.”
She nodded down at the two half-formed Keith clones who were driving long spikes into the ground at crooked angles. One of them looked old, his hair gray and face melted like candle wax into folds and wrinkles, while the other had black hair instead of dirty blond.
“They weren’t him then,” Nora said. “They weren’t even alive, just bones and leather, but he was obsessed with them. He said they were murdered people, that it was proof that the fey saw us as prey, that they were probably our ancestors. Nobody has even seen a fairy circle in Elwood for decades, but everyone insists they have a grandparent or a great-aunt who disappeared and never came back. They probably left town, but… Keith believed the fey took them.”
Keith was probably right. Something had motivated the inhabitants of Elwood to seal off the slough and deal with the repercussions afterward. Fields would have gone sour, fertility of the stock and people dropped, and wells lost their sweetness. Yet based on the state of the tree, not one person had snuck out to try and pull a nail out of the trunk.
There were plenty of complaints that Conri could make about his own time in the Otherworld, but it definitely could have been worse. His old master could be cruel at times, but he’d never been wasteful.
“You didn’t believe him?” he said.
“Of course not,” Nora said impatiently. “My brother used to spout this stuff all the time. I know it’s rubbish. It’s just excuses for why our town sucks so much. Keith wouldn’t listen to me, though. He said that Robin and the others had to explain this before he’d come back to camp. I thought… I thought he’d calm down if I left him alone for a while, so I went to tell them what we’d found. Robin was really excited at first and dragged us all right back there. He said this could get us set up like kings, that we wouldn’t have to do anything now until rescue got here.”
She stopped and unhooked the water bottle from her hip to take a drink. Her eyes were fixed on the far left side of the barn, where the sour, gray grass was churned up and stained with blood.
“It was a trap,” Conri said.
Nora laughed harshly. “Wow,” she said. “I wish you’d been here to tell us that before.”
“He does that,” Bell said dryly. “You got…. How did you get away?”
Nora crouched down and hugged the hound around her thick, muscular neck. “Betty here got me out,” she said. “I’d fed her scraps from my meals when I could—scrapings and bones mostly. She was skittish, near took my hand off a couple of times, but I guess she decided to hang around. When Keith tried to drag me away, she went for him, and I was able to get away. The others were captured, though. I couldn’t help them.”
She pressed her face to the hound’s shoulder and squeezed. Betty. Conri couldn’t remember the last time a hound got a true name, just for itself. His master bred his own, a selected bloodline seasoned with occasional mortality, and even they only had heritage names from the dogs they replaced.
Betty stared at him over Nora’s shoulder. Her eyes might look brown in the overcast Otherworld, but in the mortal realm they’d be red. They both knew what she was, but if she wanted to pretend to be a dog right now, Conri didn’t see any benefit to them in disabusing Nora of the idea.
“Time to change that,” he said. “Are you sure Keith will have gone after your brother?”
Nora wiped her face on Betty before she stood up, her nose pink and eyes watery. She pulled her hood back up firmly to throw her face back into shadow.
“He always has his Others on the borders of my territory,” she said. The absentminded claim made Conri twitch slightly, an itch over his shoulder, but what was done was done. “They’d have alerted him about the stampede, but they can’t really do much more than that. They’re limited. Keith would have to go out and take a look himself if he wants to find anything out. He’d want the jeep.”
Bell shifted back a step, away from thorns, and absently checked his gun in the holster. His palm wrapped over the butt and his finger rested along the metal of the gun. The controlled danger in the gesture, the deadly elegance of Bell’s hands, made the nape of Conri’s neck tingle and his mouth go dry.
“You aren’t worried about your brother?” Bell asked. “He’s here to rescue you. That might not be something Keith wants.”
Nora looked down at her feet and shrugged her shoulders with a sullen heft that was painfully familiar.
“You don’t get it,” she said. “Keith and Ned are cut from the same crazy cloth. Ned’s here to take me back, but that’s not the same as rescue. Unless I do what they want, say what they want, and grovel for what a filthy whore I’ve been? Ned would kick me out on the street to starve the minute he worked out I’m not sorry.”
She delivered the last fiercely, as if it were a relief to find out it was still true.
“Maybe it won’t be that bad, once he hears what really happened,” Conri offered awkwardly. Even he—with the dull ache of his skull as a reminder—didn’t believe it, but it seemed like the sort of thing someone should offer her. He hadn’t had any family—not until Finn—and nothing in the mortal world to be his anchor. If he had, maybe he’d have left with ears he could hide under his hair. “He’s your—”
“He’s my brother, but…. He can’t love me the way I am right now. So I can’t worry about him,” Nora interrupted him bluntly. “So, me and Ned are going to have to look out for ourselves. I guess we have been for a long time, anyhow, but we didn’t want to admit it.”
“SO?” BELL asked as they worked their way through the dense briars along the edge of the clearing.
Nora had stayed above with the hounds. She might not care what happened to her as long as Robin was safe, but Conri hadn’t paid for Finn’s private school all this time to see it all burn down with the treaty. When he crawled out of this bloody slough, it would be with the one kid who could stop a war.
The hounds would be useful too.
“So?” Conri repeated Bell’s question back at him. Thorns pulled at his hair and plucked holes in the thin cotton of his T-shirt as he scrambled through the thicket. His blood dripped on the Cheater’s Roses, but the Otherworld had taken that bit of mortality years ago. It didn’t leave a mark. “So what?”
Bell had lost less skin on their trek. Kevlar and reinforced leather did more than look hot, apparently. He wasn’t beholden to the Otherworld’s rules either—he hadn’t run out of water or protein bars yet—so it had to work harder to leave its mark on him. It was a good thing. His blood would have betrayed them.
“What didn’t you tell us?” Bell asked. He showed his teeth in a humorless smile as Conri glanced sidelong at him. “Someone told you once that your eyes made you hard to read, right? They didn’t spend enough time watching your face.”
It wasn’t the time, but the words slipped out of Conri anyhow. “And you have?”
“I like your mouth,” Bell said calmly. He slowed down so he could maneuver through a tight passage between the briars, turned sideways and with his head canted back. “At least now I can pretend it was for the job.”
Heat stung Conri’s face unexpectedly at the confession. The memory of Bell’s elegant hands on his face, that mouth soft against Conri’s, did nothing to cool the sting of it. He swallowed and tried to come up with a good cover story through the flush of lust.
Neither of them made much noise, but the sudden absence of it jarred Conri. He plucked a knot of thorns and hair from behind his ear and turned to look at Bell.
“I might have kissed you, but I’m not a damsel in distress. I’m an Iron Door agent, a Walker, and I have no misconceptions about the Otherworld or faerie lovers,” Bell said. “I don’t need protection from the truth, so whatever you’re hiding, you need to spit it out.”
Conri looked away at one of the great, white betraying roses. It smelled like salt and faintly off meat. “What makes you think I’m protecting you?”
“It can’t be as bad as what I’m imagining.”
“You’d be surprised,” Conri said. He grimaced at Bell’s glare and gave in. Why should he be the only one with this squashed into his brain. “Or maybe it’s not. We don’t talk about it.”
“We being….”
“Changelings. Stables are… what happens when a Changeling’s mortality runs out and the Otherworld has no particular idea what it wants for them,” Conri said. He turned his back on Bell and kept walking. After a moment he heard Bell follow suit. “What’s left is a shell that an ambitious young fey lordling can upcycle into a semicoherent court, as long as they don’t expect too much. Under normal circumstances they’re a bit more sophisticated than these guys, but not by much. Places like this? Stables? They were secondhand stores for broken-down changelings, spare part skeleton keys for any job someone needs half-assedly filled.”
Bell grunted softly, as if someone had punched him in the gut. “So Keith was right?”
The answer was yes, but Conri struggled to find a different answer.
“He’s not wrong,” he admitted reluctantly. “But they weren’t murdered. They just… did the closest thing to dying you can do here, at least without iron to ease your passage. Most of the courts frown on it, and few of the lords would pass their changelings on like that. My old master never did.”
That had been from arrogance rather than kindness. Like a rich man who’d burn his clothes rather than donate them to charity, he didn’t want to see any down-at-heels fey with his castoffs. It devalued what he kept.
“They frown on it,” Bell said, his lip curled in contempt. “I’m glad they took a stand.”
“A frown from the Lord of Mag Mell has more weight here than your highest courts have there,” Conri said. He didn’t know why he felt defensive. He’d tried to escape the Otherworld enough times back when he thought he could. “That’s probably why the blank stock were left behind here when whatever fey claimed this place abandoned it. Whatever court he belonged to would have punished him for making them.”
“Doesn’t do them much good,” Bell said as he started walking again. He waited for a second and then asked, “Could we save them? If we take them back across the border, back to the mortal world?”
The details wouldn’t take the bite of distaste out of Bell’s voice when he talked about the Otherworld. Conri flicked a delicate, jewel-colored butterfly off his bare arm, the delicate veins in its wings flushed to pink threads with his blood.
“No,” he said. “Sleeping Beauty is a fairy tale. You can’t kiss stock back to life. People have tried. They are more or less dead here, and dead when you take them back.”
“At least they’d be able to lie down and rest,” Bell said.
Conri growled under his breath. He didn’t like thinking about this at the best of times, which this wasn’t.
“Rescue the people we’re sent for first,” he snapped. “Let your boss worry about burying the dead afterward. That’s his job. Mine is to make sure my son doesn’t end up collateral damage from two horny teenagers.”
The silence was strung tight between them, ready to snap into real anger if either said the wrong thing.
“They’re in love,” Bell said after a second, his voice ripe with rueful mockery. “Like Romeo and Juliet, only with more hounds and zombies. Remember when you thought love was all you needed?”
Conri thought about it for a second.
“No,” he said.
Bell’s laugh was a rough, chopped-off snort of amusement. “Yeah, me neither,” he said. There was a pause, and when he spoke again, he’d slipped back into Special Agent Bellamy’s brisk professionalism. “Okay, you said you had a way in. What is it?”
It was a hunch and one that could be wrong. Conri didn’t particularly want to commit to the plan until he knew it was going to work. Not that he had any backup options he could swap it out for on the fly. Still.
“There’s one thing that every fey residence has, be it summer palace or hunting lodge,” he said as they finally pushed their way out of the overgrown briars and into the shadows behind the weatherworn gray barn. Conri paused to catch his breath and run his eye along the back of the building. His shoulders relaxed when he picked out what he was looking for against the battered wood. They might still fail and start a war or get themselves killed, but at least Conri wouldn’t look like an idiot. He gestured grandly at it for Bell. “The servant’s entrance.”
Bell wiped sweat off his forehead and squinted one eye shut against the thin light. “So your big plan is a back door?” he asked. “I suppose it’s better than going in the front.”
That wasn’t exactly the reaction Conri had anticipated. He cleared his throat and tried not to let his ears droop in disappointment. Or think about whether he wanted Bell’s approval because he wanted the man or because dogs lived for a “good boy.”
Of course, it could be both.
“It’s not a back door,” Conri said softly. He could hear the stock—Keith’s shabby attempt at conjuring up his own court of mirror images—parroting their lines back and forth to each other from inside the building. “Back doors are locked, guarded, checked to see if the dog wants in. Whoever lives in the building thinks about it, even if it is to complain about who tracked in the mud and mess from outside. The servant’s entrance is there so no one who matters has to think about it, so the cleaners and shit-collectors and greasy, scalded cooks can get on with their jobs without spoiling the aesthetic. So that means no locks, no wards, nothing that would make the lords and ladies have to deal with the unpleasantness of it all.”
Conri glanced around to make sure none of the stock had ventured out—they weren’t quite people, Nora was right about that, but they could be set to guard and raise the alarm—and then loped across the narrow alley of barren dirt to the hatch half-buried in the dead grass. He grabbed the knotted rope handle and tried his best to remember being his master’s favorite dog—the gnaw of worry about what his master might want next, the barely buried resentment, and the bitter smugness that, while he was a servant, at least he was more favored than some. It came back far too easily for his peace of mind, but when he yanked the rope, the hatch lifted out of the dirt.
“So all the fey have an open door in the back of their castles?” Bell asked as he skidded up to the wall next to Conri. He sounded prickly, as if the hole in security irked him despite how useful it was about to be. “They never thought that an assassin might sneak in through it? Or a thief?”
Conri hooked the rope handle in place to prop the hatch open. “Even if hired to do a job of work, they’re mercenaries,” he said. “The servant’s entrance is only for servants, and the Otherworld knows who that is. It won’t let anyone else in and out.”
He jumped down into the shallow, low-ceilinged larder. Dusty bottles of wine and moldy legs of ham were still laid out on shelves, next to rows of once-shiny copper pots and pans. Conri could almost see his face in the verdigris-scabbed metal, the memory of a hundred other similar moments overriding this particular one. He let it pass and stuck his head back up out of the hatch to gesture the all clear to Bell.
It took a second—Conri could almost hear the grind of paranoia as Bell wondered if this was a trap after all—but Bell scrambled in after him. He bumped his head on the roof and cursed softly as he bent his knees and hunched over to fit.
“Now all we need to do is find where Keith is keeping Robin and the others,” Bell said. He paused as he heard his voice against the narrow walls and adjusted the volume. “Any ideas?”
Conri grimaced. “One,” he admitted. “But maybe Keith is less of an evil little shit than I think.”
Bell took his sap off his belt and extended it with a sharp flick of his wrist. He held it down and slightly out from his side, the handle of it gripped loosely in his hand.
“Let’s assume he’s exactly what you think,” Bell said. “Where do we go?”
Conri sighed and reached for the door. Before he pulled it open, he leaned over and, when Bell didn’t pull away, stole a quick kiss. It was a quick, crooked scrape of his mouth over Bell’s, enough for a reminder of sweetness and a mingled breath on both their lips.
“For luck,” he said. It was a lie. He wanted to chase away the old bitter taste of servitude from his tongue and replace it with the taste of Bell and the promise of later. But it could be for luck too. He wouldn’t turn it away if they got some. “And stay behind me unless it comes to a fight. I look like I belong here.”
“You don’t, though,” Bell said, his voice unexpectedly sharp. He cleared his throat and pushed Conri toward the door when Conri looked at him curiously. “You left. Don’t let this place make you forget that.”