28. I Know When Somethin’ Ain’t Right, and Somethin’ Ain’t Right
28. I KNOW WHEN SOMETHIN’ AIN’T RIGHT, AND SOMETHIN’ AIN’T RIGHT
RUSH
Since I first moved into the royal palace nearly four years ago, I’d been searching for ways to escape it. I made a point of exploring every concealed tunnel I could find. Even when Talisa was still playing the part of seductive, alluring, charismatic queen, her darkness had shone through her brittle facade. I realized back then that I was a meal stuck in that very same sticky web Elowyn’s words had just conjured.
If Talisa was a spider, then she was a s?ngmortarán . Though no bigger than my thumbnail, a s?ngmortarán’s venom killed its prey instantly, no matter its size, making it the deadliest arachnid in all the Mirror World.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that the s?ngmortarán queen was herding us the way of her choosing, though I couldn’t fathom why. Logic dictated that she’d want to prevent us from dismantling her hold over her power sources. That we apparently didn’t understand her intentions had my nerves taut as a viola’s strings, and every one of my steps purposefully close to Elowyn’s. No matter what this day held for us, no matter what monster we might encounter, I wasn’t leaving her side.
I would not risk losing the mate I’d only just found. Above all else—above anybody else—I was saving her.
Elowyn followed Ryder through a tunnel. I stalked immediately behind her. When she flicked a glance over her shoulder at me, my lumoon illuminated the wariness all across her alluring face, tightening her eyes. Those eyes of hers, becoming more violet each day, were alert now, cataloging every detail. Tension I hadn’t realized I was holding released from my shoulders. Earlier, her stare had appeared dazed.
She faced forward again without so much as a smile, as if she couldn’t afford even that distraction. Good . She couldn’t.
Ryder slowed, then stopped. The lot of us piled up behind him.
“We pop out of this tunnel,” he said, “cross a single hall, and then we go into another tunnel that’ll lead us down into the dungeons.”
When Azariah squeaked under his breath as if someone had tugged on his tail, Ryder added in a reassuring tone that had to be forced, “We’re almost there. If the fortune of dragons continues with us, the palace proper will be empty this time around too. Just, let’s hurry into the next tunnel, yeah?”
“Aye,” Roan said with a grunt. “I know when somethin’ ain’t right, and somethin’ ain’t right. ”
My friend’s dark beard, mustache, and eyebrows were bushier than usual, so that practically all I could see of his face were his dazzlingly green eyes. They were somber beneath what appeared to be a … horse’s bridle? He wore the wompa leather straps like a headband across his forehead.
“Rompa-Romp?” I found myself asking even though this wasn’t the time to confirm my sudden assumption.
Roan nodded stiffly. “My good, good boy … eaten by umbracs in the service of Dragon Queen Elowyn.”
Elowyn flinched at the use of the title. At least she was no longer denying her role but accepting it with a grace and fortitude that made me fall more deeply in love with her.
“Damn, brother,” I told Roan as Ryder, West, and Hiroshi offered similar sentiments. “I’m so sorry. I know how much that pony meant to you.”
“He was a strong, brave, kind pony,” Hiro said. “I will miss him.”
Roan sniffed as those emerald-like eyes shone. “Thought he’d be with me for a few more decades at least. Raised ‘im from when he was wee, that I did.”
I’d done the same with Bolt. I’d seen his mother-mare push him out into this world. My stallion was bringing up the rear, several feet from the nearest lumoon, but I still could tell he was meeting my stare. Survive the day, boy , I pleaded silently. Please . He neighed softly and jerked his head up and down a few times. I hoped that meant he’d find the way to keep safe. I didn’t want to have to do without him.
“May Rompa-Romp’s memory live forever,” Hiroshi offered so his words wouldn’t carry beyond the walls of the tunnel. “May his essence voyage to the Etherlands.”
Equally quietly, the rest of us, even Ivar, repeated the sentiment. Ivar was gazing at his horse, whom Edsel had healed until all that remained was a mild limp that would likely fully heal with more time. When Ivar caught me looking, he scowled and jerked his head away.
“For Rompa-Romp,” West said, “and for everyone else we’ve lost and who’s suffered for the cause.” The turmoil swirling on my friend’s face made it easy to guess he was thinking of all that Ramana had endured at the hands of the false queen.
“Now let’s move,” Xeno said at my back, stare pinned on Elowyn, as it so often was. “Our allies might be dying out there.”
Grimly, I nodded, as did several others. Xeno was right: any delay was unwarranted. But it had been all too easy to share some moments of connection when they might be our last. Without another word, Ryder swept aside a thick tapestry and allowed it to close behind him before Elowyn could follow. Moments later, he pulled it aside and stuck his head out.
“It’s clear.”
Before his assurance finished landing, Elowyn was out in the corridor with him. Then we were all stalking with hushed footfalls as rapidly as we could across a hall that served as a gathering place for guards and staff. It was wide enough to make me nervous to cross it, but not as cavernous as so many other spaces in the public areas of the palace. It was a fraction the size of the Hall of Mirrors or even the Great Salon of Delicacies. Thank the Ethers for small blessings.
When Ryder was mere paces from the next tapestry-concealed entrance, Gadiel, whom I’d last seen in the fae dungeon with his throat sliced open, materialized in front of it. A moment later, Lady Aleeza, who’d been icepicked to death at one of Talisa’s balls, appeared beside him. Their bodies wavered, the tapestry-lined wall showing through their translucent bodies.
A sense of wrongness sank into the marrow of my bones with an icy chill. I lurched forward to snag Elowyn and tucked her behind me. Xeno had lunged ahead, and he and Ryder formed a wall in front of my mate.
But Gadiel and Aleeza weren’t the only dead to make a reappearance. Several other translucent bodies had appeared between us and our retreat, and more were surrounding us.
Talisa’s trap had finally been sprung…
Weapons out, we huddled together as the specters solidified. A pygmy ogre, one of several, carried his severed head tucked under an arm. Bulging eyes blinked dully at us as the head licked its thick, worm-like lips .
“That’s totally disgusting,” said Zafi’s tiny voice from a patch of blank air. There wasn’t a single other sign that the parvnit was there and invisible—a skill I’d be grateful to also have at the moment.
While the pygmy-ogre head took us in, I recognized many more of the dead. Some of them had died soon after my arrival at court, a variety of lords and ladies I now had little doubt Talisa had murdered, who’d long ago faded from polite conversation. Among the more recently deceased, I spotted Sandor, the king’s potions master who was down one eye, which had apparently been gouged out, in addition to his tongue. Several of the females who’d vied to be my wife and who’d competed in the Nuptialis Probatio wore their fanciful dresses, hair piled in lurid colors, and vicious snarls upon their painted faces. Eliana, daughter of a viscount and viscountess whose parents had disappointed Talisa, stood at the front of a line of the young females, all of them rocking slowly back and forth.
More faces I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place for the discoloration and swelling they’d endured in death filled out the circle that was quickly tightening around us. Others were strangers, and interspersed among them were several more who carried their own heads: Yorgen and his wife Idra, whose children’s lives I’d saved; Millicent, who’d shed her feethle form for her female body, her usual disparaging sneer curling the lip of the head she carried in front of her body with both hands; and Russet Sterling, whose skull had been bitten off by the dragon head that had animated for Elowyn during her match against him in the Gladius Probatio. He’d been a bully and proud lackey of Lennox Heath. His morbid fate was one I didn’t mind.
I scanned the growing crowd, half expecting to find King Erasmus the Bloody and Crown Prince Saturn, who’d been a friend. At this rate, I expected Talisa to treat her father and son with such flagrant disrespect. But all I found were more unrecognizable grim, gruesome faces, many with their eyes, ears, or mouths severed—to become the disembodied observers Elowyn had described to me, surely. Clearly Talisa’s spies were every bit as nauseating as Elowyn had explained.
“What kind of sorcery is this?” Azariah asked in a wheeze of fright that I wouldn’t have recognized as his had I not been standing near him. His tail, mane, and wings shivered.
“This,” Ivar said with a dour press of his lips, “is blood magic.”
“The magic so dark it was forbidden by our ancestors, when they still lived in Faerie,” Azariah said.
“The very one.” Ivar was sounding more like our ally than before, as if even he finally saw Talisa for the monster she truly was.
“ This is how the queen’s become immortal?” Elowyn asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Ivar answered. “I think she uses blood magic only to control them.” He frowned. “Or maybe? I’m not really sure. I knew she used the dead as spies, but I never…” He shook his head. “I never imagined this. ”
“Will killing them hurt her?” West asked.
“ Can we even kill them?” Reed chimed in. “They are, after all, already dead. How do we kill something that no longer carries an essence?”
That was an excellent question, to which none of us had an answer. Silence descended upon our group, made all the more noticeable by the low-pitched moaning from the dead—or was it undead ?
“At least they’ve stopped,” Ryder said, but that was little consolation. They were here to kill us. Or at least to stop us from interfering with Talisa, who wanted to kill us.
Hiro and Reed had moved to stand at my back—or Elowyn’s back, really; we were all protecting her. I spun in place to take a quick count of our enemy. It seemed the last of them had finished materializing and were rapidly solidifying.
“Tula?” The name tumbled from my lips before I fully registered what I was seeing.
“By the Ethers,” Hiro exclaimed on a swift, grief-tinged moan. “Tula … I hadn’t even recognized her, what with…”
Compassion prevented him from describing the sight of my second cousin. Her body was whole, her head firmly on her shoulders, but her eye sockets were hollow, dark as shadow, her face pale and cadaverous, as if her essence had been sucked from her like a beverage through a straw. She was paper-thin skin stretched taut over a skeleton. There was no sign left of her easy smile or her twinkling eyes .
“Fuck,” Ryder said. “That’s just…” Without turning to look at him, I knew he was shaking his head to dispel the shock. My brothers had known my second-cousin well. “So, so wrong,” he settled on.
I gulped, my thoughts leaping to gratitude that Larissa and Ramana were safe and far, far from here.
A thunderous boom shook the stone walls and floor, rattling glass in their panes high up along the walls. One at the end of the hall shattered with a loud pop , and then a musical tinkling as shards rained down to the floor. Like true thunder rolling through a deep valley, the shaking continued, fading slowly.
“W-what was that?” Azariah asked, practically stepping on Bertram as he pressed his weight against him.
El grimaced. “If I had to guess, I’d say Einar’s joined the fight. That could either mean our forces are about to win and he’s helping deliver the final blows, or…”
She didn’t finish her thought. None of us needed her to. Einar might be rushing to aid our allies in a last-ditch attempt to pull victory out of their asses.
Elowyn eased between me, Xeno, and Ryder. I had to forcefully resist my instinct to tuck her back behind me in relative safety. My fingers twitched around the grips of my dagger and sword. I stepped forward to stand beside her instead.
The walls stilled their shaking as she tilted her chin upward and squared her shoulders. She called out, “I am the true queen of Embermere, chosen by the land and its magic. You shall not attack us. You will let us pass unharmed, and in return, when the fight is over, I will do my best to free your essences from the prisons of your bodies so you may pass on to the Etherlands.” Her gaze slowed across Russet Sterling, who’d done his best to behead her in the arena. “Or the Igneuslands, depending.”
The undead only moaned louder, rocked harder.
“I said , stand down,” commanded Elowyn—my mate, my queen.
Millicent was first to bare her teeth and hiss, ringlets framing what had never been a pretty face, even in life, despite objectively pleasing features. The others took up the hiss as if it were a call to arms. Millicent snapped her teeth continuously at us. Her head wobbled in her hold from the fevered movement; her fingers tightened around it like claws.
“That’s…” Reed swallowed loudly. “I won’t be forgetting that sight anytime soon.”
“I hear ya on that, brother,” Roan said, leaning his ax on the floor to tighten the bridle around his head. “Don’t think I’ll be forgetting enough o’ this for a long time to come.”
“Mmmhmmm,” said Ryder.
Millicent hissed so vigorously that spittle sprayed from her mouth.
I lunged and slashed at her with my sword. Despite her solid appearance, my blade swung through her without disturbance, save for a brief shudder of the image, which wavered like a cloud before coalescing .
“So weapons don’t work,” Ryder said. “Fucking great.”
“Hiro, try turning her head into a flower or something,” I suggested.
“My power only affects the physical form of living beings.” But he’d already closed his eyes to focus. After several seconds, he shook his lavender head. “No. Nothing. She’s impervious to my magic.”
Millicent hissed some more, spittle dotting her chin in fat drops. The ringlets framing her face shook with her fury. With a cringe, I crouched so my gaze was level with her detached head, careful to maintain a body’s length distance between us.
“Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” West muttered.
“Let’s hope we never do again,” Reed said.
“No shit,” Xeno commented.
“Careful, Rush,” Elowyn said. “Is it safe to go into the mind of the dead?”
“Probably not.” I was going to try anyway.
I willed myself into Millicent’s mind. Though her eyes never wavered from mine, there was nothing to find. I straightened. “Her autonomy’s gone. She has no will of her own, no thoughts of her own.” I shook my entire body to dispel a lingering cold that had tried to take hold of me.
Ryder spun to face everyone in our group. “Who else has something that might work? My illusions will be useless.”
Heads shook in the negative while the undead continued to hiss, rock, or moan eerily. Necromancy was so profoundly forbidden that no one even referenced the dark art of old. I for one had believed no trace of it had remained in Faerie, where the elves had clamped down on its use with threats of capital punishment.
“I can try something else,” El suggested. “I could connect to them?—”
“No,” Xeno and I blurted in unison.
“I have to at least try,” Elowyn insisted.
“No,” Xeno and I once again repeated.
“Then let’s see what happens when we try to walk through them. Maybe they’re more roar than chomp.”
“Okay,” I said. Before any of my friends volunteered for the job, I leapt forward, aiming between Tula and Sandor. The instant I attempted to pass, they whirled on me, nails hooked like talons, teeth bared like beasts. Their barbed fingers latched on to my flesh. My eyes rolled back, my jaw tensed unbearably. Every muscle in my body railed against what they were doing: draining my own essence.
I thrashed against their grip. The more I pulled, the more they held. The draining continued in a siphon that would only end one way.
When Elowyn reached for me, I tried to warn her off. All that came out was an incoherent grumble pushed between clenched teeth. Her hands were on me— no, El, by the Ethers, no! The draining effect might channel through me to attack her.
She tugged. My feet lurched out from under me. I careened backward into the others, bowling Roan down before everyone helped us back to our feet. I blinked in a daze and whirled back toward Tula and Sandor. They sissed and rocked, snarled and growled—but didn’t advance.
Reed cleared his throat. “My powers allow me to, uh, corral creatures?”
I spun toward him and wobbled. Xeno’s hand shot out to steady me. Reluctantly, I leaned into him for several moments until I could stand on my own, then nodded my thanks.
“Well?” Ryder pressed. “Whaddya mean, Reed? Don’t keep us hanging.”
“Just that, well, that’s all I can do. I can get creatures to stay inside the boundaries I set for them.” He tucked his head down and looked at us from under messy short braids, partially hiding flushed cheeks. “It’s all I can do. It’s why I work in the stables. I can keep the horses where they’re supposed to be. Not sure, but maybe it’ll work with these, uh, people, creatures? Things?”
Roan palmed him on the back. Reed’s stare jerked toward him, making his frizzy braids bounce. His eyes were wide.
“Well, lad,” Roan said on a grim chortle. “Why don’t ya get to it, then? Wastin’ time’s for those with time to waste.”
“You … you think I can do it?”
“By a dragon’s fat balls, laddie, I think ya can do any damn thing ya set yer mind to. ”
Reed blushed all over again.
“Okay,” Reed said.
“How’s it work?” I asked while Reed studied Tula and Sandor.
“I just…” Reed lifted his arms to shoulder height. “Draw out a boundary.” A flash of magic lit up the opposite side of the room, on the other end of a massive wooden table designed to seat dozens at once, and sketched out a large rectangle. “And then, I mark everything I want to corral…” Bringing both hands together, with his pointer fingers extended side by side, he tapped the image of each of the undead in the air in front of him. Tula suddenly glowed, then Sandor, Millicent, then a pygmy ogre.
“This is great, Reed,” Elowyn encouraged. “You’re doing an amazing job. Keep going.”
Reed grinned beneath bright pink cheeks and continued selecting our adversaries. But when he whirled to face Yorgen, Idra, and the others behind him?—
“Fuck,” Ryder exclaimed with a low grunt of despair. “We’ve got a massive problem. Make that two massive problems.”
As if any of us might miss them…
Two dragons, already sissing menacingly, even as they finished solidifying, hunched between the wall and the other undead. Their tails lashed in a whipping, lethal arc. Their eyes blazed a bright, glowing red.
Sorrow yanked my heart into my feet .
“We were supposed to save them,” Hiroshi said softly, voicing precisely what I was thinking.
Appearing every bit the predators they were designed to be, the green and burnt-orange dragons he and I had last seen in the dungeons—chained up, mutilated, and brutalized, though still defiant, still prideful, still resisting Talisa—crouched, ready to attack. Even in death, their injuries wept green blood, the color that was supposed to indicate vibrant nature and life.