Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1) (19 page)

"You came to
my
home, Hunter. You chased us through
my
streets. Underbridge is
mine
. The Queen gave it to
me
."

"Yes, and why is that?" Hunter's tone grew thoughtful. "Why give it to a half-made who can hardly keep himself in check, let alone the entire goblin market?"

"Because I
am
half-human. I know how to let the humans and the fae mix and yet be separate, and still allow the market to flourish. I am the law in Underbridge."
This is going well, don't you think?
He almost gave an insane giggle. Hunter disturbed him even more than the Queen, because Hunter's goals were unclear in ways the Queen's never were. "Do you want the market? Is that what this is about?" Thomas knew it wasn't, but pricking Hunter's ego seemed to be the only way to get the information he sought.

Hunter flung Thomas away in disgust. "I do not want your leavings, Half-made." The red eyes burned, and from where he sprawled on the muddy ground, Thomas wondered that the deer skull didn't burst into flame. "Very well. Say your piece."

Thomas took a deep breath, getting to his feet. He knocked away the worst of the mud from his oilskin, buying time to think. "The Queen has been marking the Underbridge and some of the streets around it, placing small trinkets soaked in her magic there. Someone has been stealing them, and it is my task to find the thief."

Hunter's head tilted to the side in apparent thought. Thomas hated not being able to see Hunter's expression. "Go on."

Thomas shrugged. "You wanted to hear what I know. That's what I know."

"You summoned me for rubbish gossip like that?" Hunter advanced again, the mailed fingers flexing. "A waste of a perfectly good hound."

"You ruined that bogle, not I. Now, why were you setting snares for me?"

"You have told me nothing."

"You made a bargain." Thomas tried not to swallow and reveal his unease. Hunter despised and destroyed anything weak and uncertain. And today of all days, with the moon building to its Allantide fullest, Hunter was strong, ferociously so. "Think about it. If someone has been taking the Queen's trinkets, that someone must be stronger than we realize."

Hunter's red eyes slitted for a moment, as if the idea of an unknown quantity—a strong one—gave him pause. "Why is the Queen putting markers there to begin with? Has she not told you?"

"The Queen rarely shares her plans with me, unless those plans involve me."

"She is cunning."

"Keep your part of the bargain, Hunter."

The deer skull swung slowly back and forth as Hunter stretched his neck to crack the joints there. "I was going to take what you knew of her plans from you. By force if necessary."

Thomas snorted in disgust. "And the human with me?"

"An unfortunate complication. It was you I wanted."

"But you knew enough to set your hounds on her vehicle."

"I remember all too well the pleasures of the flesh, Half-made. How vulnerable they make one. It's why our Queen enchants all her lovers, so she is never in thrall to human needs and desires. Your mistake was nearly fatal for you both. Next time you won't be so fortunate."

"There won't be a next time," Thomas growled.

Hunter's laughter flared again. "Do you threaten me, Thomas? You may have the Queen's preferment from time to time, but she will never prevent me killing you if it pleases me." He leaned forward, and the sunlight shafting through the naked tree limbs cast a dull glow over the offal-grimed armor. "And it would please me to be rid of you."

"The Queen would be displeased."

"But she would feast on your flesh all the same." Hunter straightened, stabbing the butt of his staff directly into the mound beneath their feet. The ground split, yawning into a great crevice, from which Thomas could hear the clamor of the fae preparing their Allantide festivities hundreds of feet below. "Go and tell her your news. See what it wins you to reveal her own plans to her."

Thomas shook his head. "I will go to her when I have the thief in hand and not before." He tilted his head. "Though it does interest me very much to know you're planning to take her place in the court. I wonder what she'd say if I were to mention that."

As a gambit, it was spectacularly successful.

Hunter ripped his staff from the earth, which slammed shut. Around them, the wakened trees tossed and creaked, reacting to the snares of hunt magic that spewed from Hunter's gauntlets and staff. Thomas was caught in it, and tendrils menaced his face like striking snakes. He fought the instinct to close his eyes, and instead struggled to get a hand inside his oilskin, where his iron nails lay wrapped in their pocket. He doubted such a trick would work again, but he had to try. It was not in his nature to go down without a fight, even against such an invincible warrior as Hunter.

The snares dragged him over the mound to where Hunter stood.

"You would have done better,
human
, to become my ally." Hunter stared into Thomas's wide eyes. "Mark me well. Tell her, and I will hear of it. But I will not come for your life that instant. I will come for that of your pet's, and I will give her to the kelpies for their pleasure—and their meat. Choose wisely. And if you value your own life, make certain you are inside the mound before I ride tonight. Because if you are not, I will hunt you until cockcrow, and only when you weep for mercy will I kill you."

Hunter's staff thumped Thomas's chest. "Mark me well."

Thump.
Thump.

Thomas tried to get his hand beneath the lapel of the coat, but Hunter's red gaze flicked there, and he uttered a single phrase: "Stone be ye." And Thomas was as stone, unmoving, but not deaf, and not blind. The net of the snare magic lay wherever his skin was not covered by clothing, and burned there, hot as the Queen's armband could sometimes be. It was excruciating, like being covered by biting ants or stung by wasps. Thomas felt his heart slowing in his chest as the stoniness penetrated deeper and deeper. His breathing slowed, and then stopped.

This was how it would end, then, with magic, beneath the hard pearl sky of Allantide, atop the Queen's proudest accomplishment. He felt stupid for not realizing Hunter must have magic beyond that of his snares.

Even the fae perished when their hearts were breached or broken, and Thomas was only partially fae. His senses began to swim as he struggled to draw breath. He longed to sleep. A deep ache filled his bones like cold sap, slow and thick.

Thomas fell backward onto the wet, stony earth. The deep pile of Hunter's driven leaves made no cushion beneath him, and the trees pinwheeled above him against the shattering sky. He might have heard when Hunter vanished, with a noise like a clap of thunder, or it might simply have been his heart exploding. He couldn't tell, but he was grateful it was over, no matter what, except for Tess, who would never know what had become of him, and who would take a sack of fae trinkets to Underbridge in the morning, tender and naive as a sacrificial lamb.

Oh, Tess. I'm sorry...

H
OW
HAD THE WORLD BECOME
so strange, in so little time? Tess sat in a fast-food restaurant parking lot just off Sandy Boulevard, waiting for her hands to stop shaking. She held the seeing stone clenched tight in her fist, wondering if a cheeseburger would still look like a cheeseburger, or if it would have the oily rainbow sheen of fairy magic upon it.

Nothing was safe any longer, not a person, not a building, not a lamppost. Not even dead leaves. It was all changed, all frightening, unless Thomas was near to explain it, defeat it, or drive it away. She was unnerved by how much she had come to depend on him. She wondered if he was safe wherever he was now, or if the things that had hunted them the night before hunted him still.

When she started to tell herself the leaf attack was simply an aberrant breeze, she knew she was feeling better. But she still felt shaky, so she locked the Jeep and went inside the restaurant for a sandwich and a caffeinated soda, and some nasty, delicious French fries. She bolted her food too fast, peering through the stone every now and then and finding nothing out of the ordinary. A few customers looked at her curiously, and at last she put the stone inside her shirt, where it lay cool and smooth against her skin.

An hour was too long to linger at a burger joint, even at midday, and finally Tess visited the washroom, then went for the Jeep. A fallen leaf, brown and curled dry with autumn, scudded past her on the asphalt like a toy boat propelled by a gust of wind. She screamed.

Not loudly, but all the same, it proved a point. She locked herself inside the Jeep and sat there with the grocery tote in the passenger seat, her heart pounding anew. The fries, so welcome while they were hot and salty fresh, sat like a rock in her belly. She fumbled the stone out of her neckline and stared through it wild-eyed, turning to examine the entire parking lot, particularly the edges where the curbs trapped the fallen leaves.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Of course.

There had been nothing different about that leaf.

"I'm fine," she whispered to herself, gripping the steering wheel. "I'm alone in my own car and I'm
just fine
." Speaking aloud made her feel a little steadier.

Determinedly she cranked the engine and pulled out into the noontime traffic, heading for her office. She could just tell them she had slept and felt better. She wanted to be around people, good, ordinary people, who didn't change shape or pull mysterious bits of nothing out from under her car and tell her a monster was chasing them.

Except that she knew the monster
had
been chasing them. Ordinary people, or even streetfolk, didn't climb the skeletons of bridges in the darkness with their eyes glowing red.

When she neared her office, she sat at a long traffic light. She happened to glance at herself in the rearview mirror, and saw there a woman who looked completely out of control. Some of her hair had frizzed out of her ponytail. Her eyes were open too wide, and she could not make herself relax enough to stop looking terrified, no matter how hard she blinked or how deeply she breathed.

She couldn't go into the office looking like this. When the light changed, she kept driving, and passed the entrance to the office parking lot.

A moment later she found herself crossing the Burnside Street Bridge, the most direct route home from her east-side office. She sucked in a sharp breath and her foot stuttered on the accelerator. Stupid.
Stupid
. How could she have been so distracted that she neglected to consider the market and the fae beneath that very bridge, especially after having been so careful earlier?

Nowhere to stop. Nowhere to turn around.

There was no barrier in the center of the bridge. If she just pulled gently to the side, as if she had car trouble, eventually the traffic would clear enough that she could make an illegal U-turn and head back to Sandy Boulevard and the east side of town, and a different bridge. She began to slow down, her right turn signal on. The traffic from the west was already diminishing; the stoplights must be with her. She pulled to the right, checking her rearview and side mirrors. In another few hundred feet she would be directly over Thomas's house, across the leaves of the bridge, and into the frightening territory of Underbridge.

Tess checked her mirrors one last time and blinked.

There were several vehicles halted at the east end of the bridge, blocking traffic there. She could hear the noise of horns honking.

Every single vehicle was black.

She jammed her foot on the brake, stopped on the empty bridge, and turned in her seat to look behind her.

Not just a few of the vehicles.

All of them.

She counted quickly: twelve, with their headlights on. For a disjointed moment she thought it must be a funeral procession, but for that they'd have been in single file, following a pilot car from a mortuary, not gathering at the base of the bridge like a group of racers about to burst from the starting blocks.

Twelve.
All black, shining things. In the lead was a monstrous SUV, making its slow way onto the bridge deck. Behind it were arrayed little sedans and coupes, a truck or two, but nothing so ground-pawingly macho as the SUV.

Thomas's voice echoed in her head.
If anything at all seems odd, look through it. Know when you're dealing with the fae.

Twelve black vehicles with their lights on in the middle of the afternoon seemed odd to Tess.

She fumbled the seeing stone out of her shirt and held it to her eye.

They weren't cars at all. Nor trucks. Not vehicles of any kind. They had to be heavily glamoured to be out and about in the human world in broad daylight like this. Glamoured to look like iron, which seemed crazily appropriate and impossible at the same time, given Thomas's reaction to riding in her Jeep and touching the steel girders of the bridge. In the lead was a skeletal horse, gray as steel in the daylight, champing at the bit in its mouth and dripping gobbets of froth from its bony muzzle.

And its rider...dear God, its rider was the cloaked thing that had skulked the girders above them as she and Thomas fled his house. She could see the red glints of its eyes even from a third of the way across the bridge, but it was not hooded now, and she saw what could only be the immense rack of an elk or a stag adorning its ferocious head.

Behind the rider was a milling of smaller creatures, things with too many legs, too many teeth, and not enough flesh to be anything but famished.

And among them, the wet, horselike monsters Thomas had called kelpies. If she'd had any doubt left that the boy-thing that had tried to woo her in Underbridge was ill-intentioned, it was gone now.

The group roiled at the edge of the bridge as if they were reluctant to take that first step onto the deck. Thomas had chosen his home wisely, well protected by iron and running water. But she didn't think the water would hold back the kelpies in the group. They'd probably rejoice if she suddenly entered the Willamette. It would put her in their element.