“So block the doors.” Irial grimaced. He wasn’t the only one swayed too much by his bond with Leslie. His weakness for her flowed into his whole court: they all had an unreasonably hard time doing anything Leslie disliked.
I weaken them. My affection for her cripples them.
The only way to work around it seemed to be keeping her from asking his faeries to do anything asinine. The alternative, breaking her irreparably, wasn’t a path he wanted to consider.
Could I? He suppressed the answer before he let himself go further in that thought. Handing Niall over to his court had been horrific enough that he still dreamed of it. For centuries, he’d dreamed of how Niall had rejected him afterward. Weak kings didn’t thrive. Irial knew that, but knowing didn’t undo the ache when Niall chose to go to another court. That was a long-dead pain.
Being tied to Leslie, indulging in parties with the mortals as he and Niall once had, these things had brought long-silenced memories back to the surface. It was yet another proof that her mortal influence had tainted him, changed him. It wasn’t a change he liked. The vine that stretched like a shadow between him and his mortal grew suddenly visible in the air before him as his agitation increased.
He told the Hounds, “Don’t speak to her other than to tell her that I forbade you to let her leave the room. Tell her you’ll bleed for it if she goes anywhere. If that doesn’t work, tell her Ani will.”
They snarled at him, but they’d tell Leslie. Hopefully, it would inspire her to obey his wishes for a few hours while he cleaned up the latest mess.
Inside the first room the floor was strewn with the weeping mortals who’d survived the most recent round of festivities. They’d endured longer than the last batch, but so many broke in mind or body too easily. They were wailing as the madness of what they’d seen and done settled on them. Give them a few drugs, a little glamour, and some simple enticements, and mortals willingly dived into the depths of hidden depravity. Afterward, in the light, when the bodies of those who’d died were entwined with the still living, there were those who didn’t know how to hold on to their sanity.
“Chela’s found a few sturdy ones to replace them. They’re enjoying the amenities over in the other room.” Gabriel tossed a girl’s handbag into one of the bins and then motioned at a corpse.
“Dibs.” Two of the Ly Ergs lifted her. A third opened the door. They’d take her somewhere else in the city to leave her for the mortals to find. “She’s ours.”
“No posing this one,” Gabriel snarled as the Ly Ergs left. The faery who opened the door lifted his hand in a dismissive gesture, flashing his bright red palm.
Irial stepped over a couple who stared blindly past him.
“She kept encouraging them to fight over her. Whatever’s spliced with that new X made her violent.” Gabriel emptied pockets and stripped away some of the shredded clothes, directing grinning thistle-fey as he went about the grisly task. “They’ve been posing the ones they like. They set tea for several yesterday.”
“Tea?”
One of the Ly Ergs grinned cheekily. “We got them proper things, too. They’d have been naked but for the hats and gloves we nicked.”
A leannan-sidhe added, “We painted their faces, as well. They were lovely.”
Irial wanted to chastise them, but it wasn’t any worse than most of the things they’d done for sport over the centuries. The Dark King doesn’t require kindness for mortals. He tamped down his unease and said, “Maybe we should set up a stage over in the park by the kingling’s loft…. A scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream… or—”
“No. The other mortal that was scrawling plays then. What’s the one with the parade of sins?” A Ly Erg rubbed his blood-red hands over his face. “The fun one.”
“I like sins,” a leannan-sidhe murmured.
One of Jenny’s kin picked up a corpse. “We’ve got our gluttony right here. This one serviced every willing faery in the room.”
They were laughing.
“That’s lust, sister. Gluttons have the extra meat on their middles. Like this one.”
The surly Ly Erg repeated, “What’s the play?”
“Faustus. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,” Leslie said. Her voice was soft, but they all turned to the doorway where she stood. Her lacy pajamas were mostly covered by the robe she’d slipped on. “Marlowe wrote it. Unless you believe the theory that Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same person.”
None of the faeries answered. Had it been anyone else, they’d have snarled at her or invited her to join the fun. With Leslie, though, they did neither.
She pulled a pack of Irial’s cigarettes out of her robe pocket and lit one, silently watching as they gathered the newly mad mortals. When they approached her, she opened the door for them.
They crossed the threshold and extended their own glamour to mask what they carried. She saw it, though. She got a close-up view of wide-eyed madmen, a fresh corpse, and bare flesh. Her horror and disgust peaked. She didn’t feel it, of course, but the rush of emotions she should feel swarmed to Irial.
Once the faeries were all gone, she walked toward him, flicking ash on the red-stained floor. Her bare feet were stark white against those stains. “Why?”
“Don’t ask me that.” Irial saw the fine trembling in her hands, watched her resist the backlash from the feelings he’d sought out.
“Tell me why.” She dropped the cigarette and ground it out under her bare foot. The trembling became worse as waves of mortal terror surged through her.
“You don’t want this answer, love.” He reached out for her, knowing that despite her best intentions, the backlash would soon pull her under.
She backed away. “Don’t. I want to”—she stopped—“it’s my fault, isn’t it? That’s why you’re—”
“No.”
“I thought faeries didn’t lie.” Her knees gave, and she dropped to the floor. She knelt on a wide red stain.
“I’m not lying. It’s not your fault.” His attempts to be the King of Nightmares, the Dark King, all faded because she looked lost. It was him who faltered, not her.
She gripped the carpet, bloodying her fingertips as she tried to hold on to the floor so as not to reach out to him. “Why were they here? Why are they…”
She obviously wasn’t going to stop asking questions, so he stopped avoiding them. “If I’m sated, I feed the court enough that you can have some freedom. The court starves a little, but not enough to cripple them…and as long as you stayed in the suite you didn’t need to know.”
“So we tormented them so—”
“No. You didn’t torment anyone.” He watched her grasp at the horror she wanted to feel, felt it slither into his skin. He sighed. “Don’t overreact.”
She laughed, a sound as far from humorous as a scream would be.
He sank to the floor beside her.
“There are worse things.” He didn’t tell her that those worse things were inevitable if the peace between the seasonal courts grew much stronger, that this was just one step in their path. She stared at him for several heartbeats, and then she leaned forward and laid her head against his chest.
“Can you pick criminals or something?”
Somewhere inside he was saddened by her acceptance of these mortals’ deaths, but that was her mortal essence tainting his judgment. He pushed the sorrow away. “I can try…. I can’t change what I need you for, but I would spare you details of it.”
She tensed in his arms. “And if I can’t take it? What then? What if my mind…”
He said it then, admitted his weakness, “I hadn’t planned this part, Leslie. I just needed your body to stay alive. Most of the mortals from the earlier exchanges…they didn’t fare as well, but I’d like you not to be comatose. If that means a few other mortals die or slip into their own minds while you black out for a few hours or days—”
“Then that’s what you’ll do,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 35
Niall had stop
ped by the loft to gather a few belongings when Aislinn walked in. “I don’t want to discuss it again,” he started, but then Aislinn stepped to the side. Leslie stood behind her. She was wan, with dark circles under her eyes. Bluish veins were so clear through her skin that, to his vision, she had a slight blue tint to her.
Aislinn said, “She wants to talk to you…not to me.” Then his queen-no-more left, closing the door behind her, leaving Niall alone with Leslie.
“Has something happened?” he asked.
“Irial sends his regards.” Her movements were as stilted as her words. She wandered away to stare out the window. Shadows danced in the air around her; he’d seen those same shadows dance in Irial’s eyes, formless figures that leaped and spun on the edge of the abyss. Now they hovered around Leslie, a retinue of nightmare’s handmaidens.
Niall didn’t know what to do or say or think. So he waited.
“Can we leave?” She looked over her shoulder. “I can’t do this here.”
“Do what?”
She watched him, dispassionately it seemed. “What we talked about before.”
And he knew that whatever she wasn’t saying was horrific enough that she’d decided to leave Irial.
“Will you help me, Niall?” she asked. “I need to set things right.”
For a moment, Niall wasn’t sure if it was Leslie or Irial asking: her voice sounded wrong, her words not matching the intonations he’d heard from her before. But it didn’t matter. The shadows danced around her, and he gave the only answer he could offer either of them: “Yes.”
Leslie felt the strange whisper of Irial’s nature rustling through her, even now. And it was a comfort, even though she was hoping to end it. What he gave her, what he cost her, it wasn’t right for either of them. She would find it easier if she could call him evil, but none of this was about values or ethics. Those answers were too simple. Irial did what he deemed necessary to save his fey, what he thought best for his court—including her. It wasn’t what was best for her or for the people who’d been brought to terror in the hands of the Dark Court. It wasn’t best for the thousands of mortals who’d inevitably get drawn into Irial’s plans once she grew less important to him or he grew more desperate.
She smiled at Niall. They stood in her old room. She hadn’t been back there since she’d left with Irial. When she’d walked in, the house was empty, as if no one else had been there in weeks. If she could feel it, she might worry about her father, but as it was she merely noted that she wanted to worry.
Deal with that later. After.
Niall pulled her into his arms, holding her as securely as if she’d been falling only to be snatched back from the edge. His hand cradled the back of her head. “Will you look poorly on me if I admit that I wish I weren’t the one to do this?”
“No.” Later, though, when Irial’s influence wore off, she suspected she might.
“Come on.” She took his hand in hers and led him to the bed, her bed, inside her house. It was safe. Because of Irial.
Niall stood motionless as she sat down on the edge of the faded rose covers. She could feel rare brushes with her feelings—thanks to what Irial had done, thanks to the mortals who’d fallen into the arms of the Dark Court—not all of her feelings, but a few of the stronger ones. She felt disgust at the way the faeries treated the dead bodies, horror at the fact that people had suffered because of her. She cringed at the sin-sick weight of it…and at her yearning to return to numbness so she didn’t have to feel it. That’s what she’d pursued—numbness—and it wasn’t worth the cost to her or anyone else.
She pulled Niall toward her; he looked at her with sad eyes.
Her stomach clenched at the fear that threatened to smother her—not in the way it once had, but in hunger.
Irial’s hunger.
Then her fear fled, swallowed down by Irial as he sat in one of his clubs, surrounded by the fey who’d been slowly flocking to his side. Hopefully Irial’s hungers would take the edge off the pain she knew was coming.
She rolled over, removing her shirt as she did, and tried not to think of what was about to happen. Eyes closed, she said, “Please?”
Niall lowered his hands onto her skin, onto her ink, onto that mark where Irial’s presence was anchored into her skin. His touch burned from the small ball of sunlight that Aislinn had given him at the loft, that he’d carried inside him, that he’d brought.
At my request.
The frost that the other queen—the Winter Queen—had given him followed the sunlight: Leslie thought she felt icicles piercing her skin. And she screamed, though she tore at her lip to keep that sound inside. She screamed as she’d done only once before.
This isn’t Niall’s fault. MY choice. Mine.
“Forgive me,” he begged as he forced the sunlight and frost into her skin, freezing the tears in the ink, searing away the tinge of Irial’s blood that was blended into that ink, killing the roots of the black vine that Irial’s ink had anchored in her body.
“Leslie?” Irial whispered.
She could see him clearly enough that he looked like a hologram in the room. If her eyes hadn’t been closed, she would have believed he really was there. Startled, he stood, unsettling the faery who’d been curled on his lap. “What are you doing?”
“Choosing.” She bit the coverlet to keep from screaming again. Her hands were fisted so tight that she felt the cover rip. Her spine bowed. Niall’s knee was on her back, holding her down.
Tears were soaking the blanket under Leslie’s face.
“I’m mine. Not anyone else’s.”
“I’m still yours, though. That won’t ever change, Shadow Girl.” And then he was gone, and her emotions crashed over her.
Niall pulled his hands away, and she turned her head to look at him. He sat beside her, staring down at his hands. “I’m sorry. Gods, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” She wasn’t sure of much else, but she knew that. Then the agony in her skin, the memories, the surge of horror, it was too much: she rolled over and threw up in the wastebasket. Her entire body clenched as pain coursed through her. Tears joined the perspiration on her face as hot and cold flashes switched in and out of control. Muscles she hadn’t known she had were knotting up in response to the pain inside her.
She smiled despite it all; for just a moment, she smiled. She was free. It hurt like hell, but she was free.
CHAPTER 36
Leslie drifted in and out of consciousness for several days while the world moved around her. Niall stayed beside her. Aislinn and Seth visited. Ani and Tish and Rabbit visited. Gabriel visited, carrying more flowers than could be considered reasonable. He set the flowers down, clasped Niall’s shoulder and nodded, kissed Leslie’s brow, and left. The others all talked—words of support and apology from Aislinn, praise from Seth and Rabbit, forgiveness for leaving the court from Tish and Ani. Irial did not come to her.
She lay on her stomach wearing jeans and a bra. She hadn’t spoken more than a few words yet. There had been too many things in her mind for her to try to formulate sentences. Neither her father nor her brother ever showed up at the house. She didn’t know where they were, if they were coming back, or if they were being prevented from coming back. She was in her home—healing and safe. That was what mattered right then.
Niall was putting some sort of soothing cream on the sun-and frost-burned skin of her back. She turned her head to look at him. She saw them, stretched across the room: burned tendrils of the shadowy vine flowing from her skin—a connection still, but not a conduit. “It’s never going to go away, is it?”
Niall stared at the blackened vine. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see it before. I can now.”
“It’s closed off. That’s what matters. And it’s not going to open again.” She sat up and had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.
“Are you…how do you feel?” He was tentative, still not pushing her to words or actions. He was near enough that she could take his arm if she need
ed support, but he didn’t get in her space.
“Awful, but real,” she said.
“The aloe should help. It’s the best I can do. The mortal things won’t work since it was faery…. I called Aislinn and—”
“It’s good, Niall. Really. I don’t mind that it hurts.” She watched him look at her with such sorrow that it broke her heart to see it, to realize how difficult the past days had been for him too.
“Help me up?” She held out a hand so he could steady her until she saw how she was going to handle moving. Sometimes standing was painful enough that she’d fallen back down. This time she wavered a bit as Niall helped her to the bathroom, but it wasn’t as awful as it had been. She was recovering, physically and mentally. It’s time. She leaned on the doorframe and motioned toward the cupboard under the sink. “There’s a hand mirror under there.”
Without comment he got it out, and she turned in front of the large mirror and held the hand mirror up so she could see her back. The ink in her skin had faded to white and gray. It was as beautiful as before, but it’d been bleached, lightened by the sunlight and frost Niall had pressed into her skin.
My art now. My body. She lowered the mirror and smiled. It wasn’t the tattoo that had changed her, had given her repossession of her body. It was her actions, her choices. It was finding the path when it looked like there weren’t any paths to be found.
“Leslie?” Niall stepped behind her and looked at her in the mirror, holding the reflection of her gaze. “Are you going to be all right?”
She turned so they were face-to-face and gave him back the words he’d offered her their first night together: “I survived. Isn’t that what matters?”
“It is.” He pulled her closer and held her carefully.
They stood there, quiet and together, until she started to sway. Blushing, she said, “I’m still weak, I guess.”
“You’re not weak at all. Wounded, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” He helped her to the bed. Hesitantly he said, “Aislinn would come care for you if you’d allow it. I’ve left them, left Keenan, but they’ll look after you. We can sort it out, and then—”