Chapter 52
Ash
He’s gone. Just. Gone.
“No, no.” I rush to the spot where his scent lingers. But the man is gone. I look at Orion and Kieran, their expressions a mirror of my own. “Where? Where?”
“Amarantha.” Tiana reaches down and pockets her Stone.
“How would she even know?” My voice comes out level. The last level thing I’m going to manage for a while. Because right now everything just imploded.
He’s there, Finnian, through the bond. Distant, as though I’m listening to him underwater.
I push harder, demanding the bond to take me to him, to bring me to my mate. But all that happens is the floor cracks beneath my feet. And blooms explode out of me, scenting the air with the sourness of my emotions.
“Ash.” Orion’s hand on my arm.
“Ash.” Kieran. The glass on the bar fogs over. “Breathe.”
I don’t want to breathe.
I want to rip through whatever wall Amarantha built between me and Finnian with my bare hands. I want to follow the gold thread until it leads me to him, and her, and I want to wrap my thorns around her throat, and I want to watch the light leave her eyes while Finnian watches and knows he’s free.
I want to be the weapon.
I pause. That feeling. Being the one to end it all. To take out the other. I don’t know if it’s Fae or Graves. But what I do know is it feels damn good.
I want to embrace it. To swim in my blood thirst.
I close my eyes, breathing through the need to kill her, because even if I do, even if I take her out, then I take her court.
I have my own court to revive.
My eyes flicker open.
The room is staring at me. All of them. My guys. My cousins. The queens. The goddesses. Dagda with his arms crossed behind the bar, watching me the way you watch a storm decide whether or not to make landfall.
I pocket my stone. It’s warm against my thigh. Warm like Finnian’s hand was five minutes ago when he was standing right here and the world made sense.
I turn to Pepper.
She’s already looking at me. Not with concern. Not with pity. With excitement. She’s seen this face before. She’s worn this face before. Her chin lifts a quarter-inch and she bounces on her toes.
Yeah. Let’s go.
“Tiana.” My voice comes out steady and I don’t know how. Because I’m not steady. I’m broken. Ruptured from the inside out. “You’re going after Finnian.”
Tiana’s already moving. Already reaching for her boots.
“I spent a long time in that court. I built half her wards. I know every passage, every blind spot, every servant entrance she thinks she sealed.” She looks at me.
Her violet eyes have stopped being polite.
Not that she’s ever well and truly been polite.
“She took my people. She burned my home. And now she has someone who belongs to us.”
“Bring him back.”
“I’ll bring you her head.” She terrifies me a little.
“Kestra.” I turn to the Unseelie queen. “Moros.”
Kestra nods as though she already knew. Her braided hair is still streaked with blood from whatever she fought through to get here and she looks like she could walk straight into the Unseelie Court and carve a path to the throne room without breaking stride.
Because she can.
“Kieran goes with me.” She doesn’t ask. She tells me.
And here it is. The moment I knew was coming the second the plan started forming.
Kieran looks at me.
I look at him.
The silver-blue bond pulses steady between us, carrying everything neither of us is going to say out loud in a room full of people.
The shadows at his feet are churning. The temperature drops three degrees, then four.
His mouth doesn’t open but the bond between us is roaring, and through it I know exactly how much it costs him to keep his face still.
He should stay with me. But his father is the Unseelie king and his sister is about to walk into that court and try to take the throne and Kieran has spent his entire life protecting Kestra and I won’t be the reason he stops now.
She’s my family, too.
“Go.” One word. It costs me more than the entire battle in the Dark Forest.
He crosses the space between us in two steps. His hand grips the back of my neck, cold fingers threading into my hair, and he presses his forehead to mine. Just for a second. Just long enough for the bond to flare so bright I see it behind my closed eyelids.
“I will come back to you.” His promise vibrates against my lips.
Some part of me, the part that still keeps lists of casualties, files it. Because what if he doesn’t come back?
He will.
“I know.” I don’t open my eyes. “Now go kill your father.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh if it wasn’t so close to something else. Then his hand leaves my neck and the cold leaves with it and I find a knot in the floorboards and stare at it.
I look at it very hard.
Orion doesn’t ask what his job is. He just moves to my left shoulder. Where a guardian stands. His job was always to stand by me.
The thorns under my skin settle. They like him there at my back. My guardian.
“I’m taking back the Academy.” I say it to the room but I’m looking at Pepper.
“Obviously.” She pushes off the bar. Purple sparks trail from her fingertips. “What am I walking into?”
“It’s neutral ground,” Dagda says. “I built it in the center of Faerie. Where all courts converge. Though some courts haven’t gone in a while.
” He taps the counter but I want to know if there are more courts.
If there were they’d be here. He misspoke.
“With Amarantha having a tantrum the Seelie wards will have gone up in flames.”
I crack my neck. “Last time I was there I uncovered that I’m Fae, bonded to two Fae males, and nearly died in a trial designed to kill me. So, it’s got a vibe.”
“Love a good vibe.” Pepper pours herself one more drink and downs it. “Enemies?”
“Everyone and no one. There are factions inside that have been fighting over that school for centuries. Some of them want me on the throne. Some of them want me in the ground. And with Amarantha’s wards destabilized, the building itself might not know whose side it’s on anymore.
” I think about the sentient corridors. The way the marble groaned under my feet.
The portraits whose eyes followed me. “The Academy was built to protect the Treasures. We just absorbed the Treasures into our bodies and scattered across three directions. It might consider that theft.”
“Not true,” Dagda interrupts. “The Academy was built for the younglings. Fucking queens kept stealing babies.” He looks at me pointedly. “Mostly it’s to keep the Fae under five hundred busy. They like to kill each other. The fact that it became sentient was a bonus.”
“So the building might fight us.”
“The building has always had opinions. Last time I was there it grew a staircase out of the floor because it sensed my bloodline.” I look at my hands where the thorns pulse just beneath the surface.
“But that was before Amarantha torched the Seelie grounds and broke the balance keeping the wards stable. So I honestly don’t know what it’s going to do when we walk in. ”
“Great.” Pepper’s chaos magic sparks brighter. “I love surprises.”
“You really don’t.”
“No. I really don’t.” She grins anyway. And whoever meets that grin in a fight, well, it’s the last thing they’ll ever see.
“Ash,” Dagda interrupts. “There’s a door. Somewhere in the Academy. I don’t know where.” He glances at Orion. “It leads to the Sidhe mounds.”
“There’s a door to them?” Orion asks.
“Of course.” Dagda winks. “Don’t worry, I’m coming along.”
“We all are,” Morrigan says.
“I’ll eat anything that gets in our way.” Vanessa cracks her neck. Scales ripple across her knuckles, gold and iridescent, and I watch her pupils slit all the way vertical. “Everything in this world tastes better than Earth food anyway.”
“BBQ sauce is in the back.” Dagda chuckles.
“Don’t encourage her.” Pepper doesn’t even look at her. “Please stop eating the locals.”
“No promises.”
“I’m going to need the high ground.” Sabina is already eyeing the rafters. “Does this Academy have towers?”
“Several.”
“Great. I need the tallest one and a clear sightline to every entrance.”
“You’re a single archer.”
“I don’t miss.” Cocky goddess.
I look at the room. Really look. Not at the people I love but at what they are.
Tiana pulling on boots with the calm efficiency of a woman who’s killed before and didn’t lose sleep over it.
Kestra checking the bone-handled blade at her hip, Unseelie steel that’s already tasted her own blood tonight and is thirsty for someone else’s.
Kieran beside his sister, shadows pooling at their feet and mingling, and I realize I’m looking at the two most dangerous people in the Unseelie Court about to walk into it together and I almost feel sorry for Moros.
Almost.
Orion at my left shoulder radiates enough heat to forge steel.
Pepper behind the bar, purple sparks dripping off her fingers onto the wood, and the wood humming back.
Sabina with an arrow nocked and the calmest expression of anyone in the room.
Vanessa partially shifted, scales crawling up her neck, teeth too sharp, looking at the door like the door said something about her mother.
Dagda leaning on the bar looking proud. Badb and Macha flanking Morrigan, who sits in the corner smiling the smile of a woman who started this fire a thousand years ago and has been waiting to watch it burn.
And the gold bond at my wrist. Muffled. Afraid. But there.
I’m coming, Finnian.
“Pepper.” I turn to my cousin. The one who showed up. The one who didn’t leave the light on but came anyway. The one with five mates and a body count.
“I know.” She meets my eyes and what I see there isn’t the careful distance from the clover. It’s the twelve-year-old who burned down a building because someone looked at Sabina wrong, and she’s been in there the whole time.
“Let’s go get your boy back.”
“All right!” Vanessa grins. “Who wants a dragon ride?”