CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Angus this time managed to get through the door before Jaycee did. He sprang to her at the last moment, shouldered her aside, and plunged into darkness, Jaycee a step behind him.

Jaycee thought that nothing would feel different. Her feet landed on a firm surface like hard-packed earth, and cold air touched her face. She could see only darkness at first, though she swore a gray light like first dawn smudged the edges of her vision.

She turned back. Ben was outlined in the doorway, the bright artificial lights of the room behind him. He couldn’t come in, he’d said. Ben leaned forward but was stopped by an invisible barrier, like a reptile trapped behind glass. “Wait,” he called. “Take this.”

Angus spun back to him before Jaycee could, stepping into the house and closing his hand around the dark-bladed knife Ben had used in the fight in Brice’s basement. Angus gave Ben a grim nod and returned to Jaycee.

“Tell Kendrick,” Jaycee said to Ben. “Tell him—”

Her words cut off as the door behind her suddenly winked out, taking Ben with it. At the same time, the world around her lightened with actual dawn.

She and Angus stood just inside a wood. Beside them was an overgrown stump or some kind of pillar, completely covered with moss and ivy. A marker of some sort, perhaps.

Beyond the wood was a swath of grass, not wild but carefully trimmed, and beyond that were hedges and beds full of blossoms that wound in neat patterns around gravel walkways. A stone wall rose at the end of this, with a gate surrounded by rose vines similar to the ones around Jasmine’s house.

The rising sun didn’t give much light from behind a bank of thick clouds, but enough to glitter on the high, narrow windows of a huge house beyond the wall.

“Not what I expected,” Angus growled. He handed Jaycee the knife Ben had given him and adjusted the too-large black T-shirt he’d grabbed from Brice’s closet.

“No,” Jaycee agreed. This landscape looked tame, civilized. Jasmine’s haunted house, overgrown with vines and giant trees, the land fighting the encroachment of the industrialized river, looked far more crumbling and old than this place. As the sky grew lighter, birds began to chirp, like normal birds anywhere.

“Are we in Faerie?” Angus asked. “It’s not Louisiana—the woods are wrong. Plus, mountains.”

He pointed to the wall of mountains that were becoming visible behind the house as morning light brushed them. High mountains, with snow on their peaks, though the air where Angus and Jaycee stood was cool but not icy.

Jaycee shrugged. “Best way to find out where we are is to look.”

She started forward. Angus, doing is best to be alpha, moved to put himself in front of her. The look he gave her as he passed her told her she’d damned well better stay in the rear.

If Jaycee weren’t so worried about Dimitri, she’d find his behavior amusing. Dimitri always tried to put Jaycee behind him, but he also trusted her when she wanted to run ahead, knowing she was more cautious about true danger than most other Shifters. If Dimitri were here, they’d be strategizing about how to approach the place, dividing the scouting between them.

She could almost hear his voice, see the eager light in his eyes as they made their plans. Jaycee’s throat tightened and sobs threatened to emerge. She gritted her teeth and took a long breath, trying to keep herself under control. She’d find him. She had to.

The gate in the wall opened. Angus and Jaycee halted, fading without speaking into the shadows of trees on the walkway, doing their best to blend with leaves and flickering light.

The person who strolled out was not what Jaycee expected either. It was a woman, tall, with brilliant red hair pulled up under a wide-brimmed hat. She wore flowing garments of dark blue, but they were slim against her body, caught with a belt around her waist, her loose pants tucked into thick boots. She had a basket over one arm and a pair of pruning scissors in the other.

As they watched, the woman walked along the path, stopping every so often to stoop and tug a weed loose with her gloved hand. At one point she tamped down a protruding tuft of earth in a flower bed with her boot, muttering under her breath.

She might have been an ordinary woman coming out to have a look at her garden on a summer morning, except for the fact that her hair in its complicated braids was a brighter red than Jaycee had ever seen before, even from a salon, and the ears that showed when she turned her head were pointed.

The woman lifted her shears to snip a flower from a bush and lay it in her basket, then another. She snipped a third, then she looked up and focused her gaze directly on Jaycee. She had green eyes, so bright Jaycee could see them from twenty feet away.

“You there,” the woman said in a perfectly good, clear English. “Shifter woman. Yes, you. What the devil do you think you are doing in my garden?”

*   *   *

When Brice had said “fortress,” Dimitri pictured ones he’d seen replicas of in North Carolina—wooden forts against the wilderness in colonial America.

He’d never been to Russia, but he assumed the straight tower he saw on the hill before him could be right out of the European Middle Ages. The stone didn’t gleam or have flags snapping in the wind—it wasn’t a fairy-tale castle. The fortress was utilitarian, with no windows from ground to roof, except for narrow arrow slits near the top, under the crenellations.

Brice led him to it up a trail that couldn’t be called a road by any stretch of the imagination. Dimitri had hiked canyons in Arizona when he’d ducked out for a vacation—pretending he was human, of course. In those canyons and mountains, rocky trails switchbacked up sheer cliffs under wide skies, with not much vegetation to stop a fall if one happened. In the southern part of the state, what would stop you was a cactus or equally prickly brush; not a good way to go.

This trail made those look like paved highways. He and Brice began in woods, on a slope made precarious with loose dirt and dead pine needles. They came out of the woods to cliffs above the tree line—here the path was a foot wide with a solid wall on one side, a sheer drop to vicious-looking rocks on the other.

The tower loomed above them as the trail twisted toward it. As they drew closer, Dimitri saw that the thing had an honest-to-the-Goddess portcullis and drawbridge.

“It’s never been taken,” Brice said proudly, as though he’d built the castle himself.

“No shit.” An attacking army would have a hell of a time making it up this trail, especially if soldiers were in place on top of the castle’s walls to shoot downward. “You’d n-need aircraft.” Dimitri had reverted to human to climb, wanting to use his hands. With the change, his stammer returned.

“Exactly. Which Fae don’t have.”

“Why d-didn’t they make eagle Shifters?” Dimitri asked. “Eagles c-could at least shit on them.”

Brice considered the question thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Maybe they tried but the process didn’t work. Birds are of lower classification than mammals. Brains are different.”

“Birds can fly, and they d-don’t put C-Collars on each other,” Dimitri said. “Seems like a good trade-off to me.”

He closed his mouth then, saving his breath for climbing.

When they reached the drawbridge, which was down, Brice approached the soldier guarding it. The bridge didn’t cross a moat; it led over a sheer chasm with who-knew-what at the bottom. Water? Rocks? Dimitri peered over the edge but saw only mist. From this height, it wouldn’t matter what was down there—whatever he fell on would make him just as dead.

The soldier wore chain mail woven from silver and so thin it moved with him like a second skin. How it protected him, Dimitri didn’t understand, but it was probably overlaid with spells of some kind. Fae loved spells. The soldier had covered this with a few animal skins, one of a wolf knotted around his waist. The skins were of wild animals, not Shifters, but even so, Dimitri’s wolf hackles rose and stayed up.

The soldier wore a fierce scowl under light brown hair, his face so thin it looked like skin stretched over an elongated skull. Dimitri had met a Fae—a man called Fionn Cillian, who was the true father of Sean Morrissey’s mate. Fionn wasn’t a bad guy once you got to know him, but while he resembled this Fae superficially, he looked different in all other respects. Fionn had a heavier build, his face squarer, his hair almost white. But maybe Fae looked different depending on from what part of their world their ancestors originated, as did humans in the human world, or as species of Shifters differed from one another.

Brice spoke to the Fae in the Celtic language Dimitri didn’t understand. The fact that Brice spoke it fluently made Dimitri’s temper splinter. Brice must have been hanging out with Fae for a while, or at least had made a study of the language, which meant he’d been planning whatever he was up to for some time.

The Fae grunted words back at Brice and jabbed his finger at Dimitri, the finger lowering to point at Dimitri’s exposed balls.

Brice sent Dimitri an apologetic look. “The Fae don’t like nudity, at least not in public. They think it’s barbaric.”

“So do h-humans,” Dimitri said. “Tell him to move that f-finger or I’ll make him eat it.”

“I don’t think I’ll tell him that. He says there are clothes in the guardhouse we should put on.”

“F-Fae clothes?” Dimitri’s brows shot up. “Forget it.”

“Simeon will insist,” Brice said, and added, “You don’t want him to insist.”

The Fae soldier snarled something at Dimitri, his lip curling. Dimitri couldn’t answer him in words, so he made his favorite sign with his middle finger. Was it truly universal? From the flash of rage in the Fae’s eyes, it was.

“Fuck him,” Dimitri said to Brice. “If he doesn’t like my h-human shape, I’ll use m-my wolf’s.”

Without waiting for the Fae or Brice to argue with him, Dimitri let his fur ripple out to cover himself as he lowered to all fours. Dimitri hid a wolf grin. Sometimes his shift was awkward, with his hair popping out all at once or each limb changing at a different speed. Jaycee would laugh at him, which made her eyes light.

This time Dimitri’s change was as elegant and honed as if he found shifting the easiest thing in the world. He knew he shouldn’t get cocky, because next time, it would probably be as tough as usual, but he felt grim satisfaction at the even deeper scowl on the Fae soldier’s face.

Dimitri also noted that the soldier was a little warier of him in this form. Good to note.

Brice gave the soldier a shrug as though to say, Poor, uncivilized Shifter; what does he know? He then ducked into the guardhouse and came out in an ungainly pair of leggings and a tunic that barely fit his large build.

Dimitri wanted to tell him he looked asinine, but he didn’t want to shift again to speak. He satisfied himself with a wolf yip and let Brice lead the way.

The soldier shouted a word through the gate tunnel, and the portcullis began to creak upward. It rose only about five feet before stopping—whether that was as high as it could go or whoever worked the controls saw no reason to raise it all the way, Dimitri had no idea. Brice, in human form, had to bend nearly double to duck beneath it, but Dimitri trotted under it without a problem.

The arched tunnel beyond the portcullis was about twenty feet long, ending in another metal gate. Not iron, but bronze. No iron for the high Fae.

The tunnel’s ceiling contained several square holes covered with wooden trap doors. “Murder holes,” Brice said. “They can pour boiling oil through them, or throw down boulders, whatever it takes if an enemy gets this far.”

Dimitri had heard of murder holes, having at least watched documentaries about European castles on television. He made no sound, only plodded stoically onward.

The guard at the second portcullis unlatched it and pushed it upward. This guard looked almost identical to the first, down to the scowl—Dimitri wondered briefly if they were twins.

Brice gave him a cordial nod and led Dimitri across an open courtyard toward a massive wooden door.

The courtyard, which was paved with surprisingly smooth stones, showed Dimitri the first hint that some of the Fae in this place might actually be regular people. In one corner, men were building something out of wood, sawing and hammering, sleeves rolled up, yelling to each other over noise as they concentrated on the project.

In another part of courtyard men were repairing a wall with mortar. Fae tended to wear their hair long, and these men had theirs looped up in braids, pinned out of their way. More men and a few women scurried across the courtyard between small doors, carrying bags, boxes, or baskets of whatever was needed for the day-to-day working of the fortress.

Soldiers were here as well, keeping to one side of the activity. These soldiers were training, so didn’t wear the mail the guards did—rather they had short tunics and close-fitting leggings that allowed them to move. Some were doing such prosaic exercises as sit-ups under the tongue-lashing of a sergeant, a few practiced with swords, others sparred hand to hand.

The Fae in the courtyard ceased what they were doing when Dimitri strolled through, following Brice. Those who didn’t see them right away were nudged by their neighbors until they turned around and stared.

No one paid much attention to Brice—his novelty must have worn off, another indication he’d been coming and going to Faerie for some time. They apparently hadn’t seen anything like Dimitri, however. No red wolves in Brice’s makeshift clan.

Dimitri glanced around him, occasionally meeting the eyes of a Fae, who either became fixed in place or looked quickly anywhere but at Dimitri.

That’s right, soak it in. I’ll be doing some serious damage later.

In truth, Dimitri knew there were far too many here for him to fight. If he tried to run, one of the guards only had to push him off the drawbridge or wait until he was on the precipitous path below and shoot him with arrows—end of problem.

Dimitri continued to look around, taking in the lay of the land. The people working at the castle had to be able to bring supplies up here with relative ease—no wagons or even horses would be able to make it up the switchback trail to the front gate.

He wondered if they hauled their goods up the side of the castle with pulleys and winches or carried them up through tunnels in the hill to a back door. Dimitri liked the idea of tunnels. Kendrick’s underground bunker had been chock-full of tunnels—he and Jaycee had become experts at navigating them.

Brice walked through the courtyard without challenge, again confirming he’d been here many times before. Had the run of the place.

Dimitri followed him, his senses alert. He’d chosen wolf form not because it would make the Fae more comfortable with his nakedness, but because he could hear, scent, even see things his human self wouldn’t. He could let his instincts take over.

His instincts did not like the smells he found inside the castle. The large door opened to a wide space encircled by a staircase that led up through the square of the keep. The stairs that twisted upward were stone, flanked by a rickety-looking wooden railing.

The space between the stairs was filled with people occupied by ordinary things—making more repairs to the walls, scrubbing the stone floors, lugging baskets of food into a low-ceilinged hall that must lead to a kitchen. From the smell of things, they kept livestock up here too.

Brice led Dimitri up a flight of stairs, then another. Dimitri peered down through the railings at the working Fae who, like the ones outside, stared at him in amazement with a touch of fear.

So not all Fae were comfortable with the Battle Beasts around. Another good thing to note.

On the second landing, Brice moved down a short hall that ended in a double door. This entrance was guarded by two Fae in the thin silver chain mail. One opened a door and called inside. A sharp voice answered, and then both doors were opened, the Fae stepping back to admit Brice.

Dimitri knew immediately that they’d been admitted into a war room. About a dozen men filled the room—no women in sight—and were studying maps and books with the intensity of generals preparing for battle. The room was high-ceilinged, rising right to the top of the keep, where small openings let in light. There wasn’t much sunshine today, so braziers had been lit for warmth and illumination.

A huge tapestry, which must have taken decades to weave, covered one wall. It depicted a battle with plenty of blood and slain horses, Fae, and to Dimitri’s distaste, Shifters.

One area of the tapestry caught and held his interest. It showed three white tigers—one on the ground, covered in blood, the other two battling another Shifter, a Lupine, over the body of the fallen tiger. The white tigers seemed to be with a man wearing a gold diadem, the wolf with several soldiers in black armor, their heads covered in helmets with full face guards.

The black metal looked like steel or iron, but that couldn’t be. It must be bronze armor painted black, or else those fighters weren’t Fae. Hard to tell with their heads completely covered. Plus, it was a tapestry, not a photograph, and there was no telling whether the weavers were depicting real events or ones in their imaginations.

More disquieting than the tapestry was the glass case that rested near it. Dimitri’s nose wrinkled as he went to it, rose to put his paws on it, and peered inside.

In the case lay a collection of skulls and bones. They were large and not human—Dimitri saw wolf, bear, and big cat. A stretch of hide bore the black and white stripes that had become familiar to Dimitri since Kendrick had accepted him into his clan. White tiger.

Dimitri turned from the cabinet with a snarl for Brice. You’re in with people who kill your own kind and keep their bones as trophies? The Shifters in this case never had the chance to be sent to dust, to the Summerland, you asshole.

Dimitri’s heart squeezed in horror as his wolf growled the last observation. A Shifter’s greatest fear was to die without a Guardian near—the Guardian’s sword freed the soul from the body, letting the Shifter enter the afterlife and rest in peace. A soul floating free could be captured, used, tortured.

What had happened to the souls of these dead Shifters? Were they still floating in Faerie, trapped? Dimitri said a silent prayer to the Goddess for them, and for himself. If he died here, he’d suffer the same fate.

“Dimitri.” A deep male voice cut across the room. The words were clear as ice and just as cold. “Welcome. I have heard much about you.”