Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1) (26 page)

"Oh, no, no, no!" Tess hit the steering wheel with a clenched fist. "Come on, baby, come on, just a little farther! Don't do this now, not now!"

Thomas turned to look behind them. Still nothing. If it weren't for the turned-away people in the streets just behind them, he might have let hope take root in his heart. "What's happening, Tess?"

"Out of gas. I knew it was low, and I should have filled up today but I hoped...oh, I hoped...God
damn
it!" The Jeep hiccoughed and lurched, and Tess pulled it to the right, as snug to the railing as she dared.

Thomas let out his own little curse. She'd blocked his door, locking him in as effectively as if it had been one of the Queen's little oubliettes, those wet pits deep in the dark heart of Forest Park. To escape Tess now, he'd have to climb out over her or rip away the soft top of the Jeep. Tess pulled the keys out.

"Come on." She reached behind her seat for the mossy bag and stood beside the open car door, looking back the way they'd come.

"You have an idea?" Thomas scrambled to exit the vehicle through the driver's side door, struggling to control his glamour. His human form would make it simpler to climb out, but the iron all around them seemed to fill his lungs and his brain. He coughed again. As he squeezed out of the Jeep, he saw the river below them through the grating deck of the bridge. Of all the bridges in Portland, Tess had chosen the one with the least paving, the most exposed iron. It made sense, but it hurt him, almost more than Hunter's beating that morning.

"This is it," Tess said, slinging her purse across her body and taking the mossy bag in one hand, then gripping his left hand in her other. "I was hoping to get the Jeep to the center of the bridge, I guess—as much running water and iron around us as I could manage, but now...I don't know. I guess let's walk."

Thomas coughed again. This much iron would weaken him in the end, leave his mind foggy and slow, if it didn't outright kill him.

They began to hurry east to the center of the bridge. Thomas could feel the Willamette in every straining muscle and breath, a deep, curling pull that changed his heartbeat, turned it into something thumping and slow. Was this strange lethargy the spell the kelpies used to quiet their victims? Or was he truly more fae than ever? Or was it the proximity of the Queen's trinkets? His head was spinning, and he was glad of Tess so close to his side. She looked so small, so human, next to his bulk, yet she was solid and real, and she was in the thick of it with him, determined to see him through.

A vehicle pulled up on the eastern flank of the bridge and paused. Tess halted, bringing Thomas to a stop next to her. He heard her sharp inhalation. The car backed and turned around, returning the way it had come.
No one can look upon the Hunt and live
.

It was only a matter of time before Hunter and his hounds found them, and after that, it was anyone's guess how long the two of them survived. He kept walking east with Tess, his back resolutely to what he knew, in his very bones, was coming.

W
HEN
T
HOMAS STUMBLED
,
FEAR CLENCHED
Tess's heart. She pushed her shoulder hard against him, propping him as best she could. She looked behind them to the west end of the bridge; still nothing.

"Would it be easier if you changed back to your human form, Thomas?"

"I can't. It might, but I can't. Too much iron, and the river's too close."

He sounded exhausted. In the lights from the bridge she could see how ill he looked. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. Maybe we should go back."

He shook his head, lumbering forward. "This is as good a place as any to make our stand. It might work."

"You look terrible. I—" At the west end, headlights swept onto the bridge deck. It was, of course, the black SUV. She fumbled her seeing stone out of her neckline and held it to her eye. No SUV, but the dreadful horse-thing and antlered rider. Its black car escort had changed to the horrible creatures she had seen earlier in the day, kelpies and redcaps and scrawny, twisty bogles. "They're here."

"Keep going," Thomas grunted. "Put that stone away. It won't make things any better if they know you can see them for what they really are. Better to let them think you're a glamour-blinded human as long as we can." This time it was he who pushed them along. Tess did as he urged, but she kept looking back. Their pursuers waited restlessly at the edge of the bridge, as if the iron was indeed a strong deterrent, but after her glance through the stone, they no longer looked like cars. Maybe she was becoming immune to the glamour, or maybe Thomas was right and the magic of Halloween was building and she was within its fae influence.

The lead rider's mount circled away from the bridge repeatedly, but the rider brought it back each time. The horse put a foot on the bridge and gave a tremendous shudder. The rider raised his hand, and the hounds fell silent. Tess heard her own indrawn breath. The silence was worse than the yelping; while the hounds were noisy, she felt they were stymied and frustrated, and the longer they stayed that way, the better. But now they were silent, and she feared their leader was getting a grip on the situation. She and Thomas struggled on, and at last they were on the span that could lift up into the superstructure of the bridge to allow ships to pass beneath.

"Just a little farther, Thomas." She wanted to be on the other side of that, in case the bridge lifted. The gap could only help them, but more importantly she did not want to be on the deck as it lifted into the trusses above. She envisioned the two of them stranded like flightless birds, high above the river, a gathering of yelping wolves waiting below.

From the eastern slope of the bridge came a yodeling howl. The lead rider at the other side nodded, a slow and stately movement that could have been beautiful if it hadn't conveyed so much menace. Tess looked east and saw a single creature there: a kelpie, with its large, white horseteeth bared in what could only be called a hungry smile.

They were trapped on the bridge.

She wondered how far they could swim, if they had to jump into the river, before something from the dark, poisonous depths of the Willamette ate them for a midnight snack. She didn't want to find out, but it was a chance she would take if she had to.

Finally they crossed the gap onto the eastern half of the bridge, with the lift span behind them. Tess called a halt, and Thomas sank to his knees, and then collapsed onto his backside, his head down. She knelt beside him.

"Is it bad, Thomas?"

"Pretty bad."

"Do you think you can stand it?"

"What's my other choice? Go to them?" His hand flapped weakly toward the Hunt. "Let them take me?"

"I won't let them." She laced her fingers together around his upper arm.

"You won't be able to stop them. Only the iron and water will stop them, if it can."

"So this is an okay plan?" Tess desperately needed to feel she had done
something
right in all this mess.

Thomas lifted his head wearily and looked into her eyes. "The best ever."

Tess bit her lip. "Not if the iron hurts you first."

"Stop worrying."

"I can't help it. It's what I do." She cupped his face—that ugly, puffy trow face, with Thomas's eyes peering out of it—between her palms, and looked intently at him. "Tell me if you can't do this, and I'll...I'll think of something else."

"Like what?"

"Like...I don't know. I'll go talk to them, or something, and—"

Thomas laughed, a deep, painful rasping sound that made her afraid he would cough up blood any second. "They're not like your clients, Tess. Remember the fae of the Underbridge? Salt and blood is what they want. Mine, foremost, but they wouldn't say no to a tender bite of human woman for an appetizer."

"I'm not going to let them have you." Tess couldn't help repeating her vow, though she had no idea how she would keep it. Thomas's head sagged again, and she pressed a hurried kiss against his temple, where the skin felt rough and clammy, not at all like the warm, suede skin she had felt in the dark as they made love. The iron was making him sick, and she wondered which would run out first: the night, or Thomas's strength.

From Hunter came a long, thrilling call. Tess's body hairs all stood on end, as if an electric charge had run across her skin, or his call had awakened them. Thomas's head came up again, and they stared at where Hunter now sat astride his beast with his back to them, his arms held up to the sky, the antlers silhouetted against the city lights beyond. The juxtaposition of the giant stag in the city tilted her reality right into the crazy zone, but what happened next shattered every notion of reasonableness she'd ever had.

Out of the northwest came a black cloud, thicker than the flocks of migrating starlings that roosted in season on the girders of the Interstate Bridge linking Oregon and Washington. The cloud was dark in the moonlit sky, and swirled and looped just like the birds would, except that birds didn't fly at night unless they were forced to. As the cloud drew closer she could see it wasn't birds at all, but a storm of autumn leaves, borne on no wind she could feel. She clutched tighter at Thomas, who separated his knees and pulled her between them, where he could close her in the cage of his arms.

Hunter turned his horse, slowly, arms still raised, masked face lifted in the moonlight, as if he were calling down the wrath of God upon the bridge.

"Pixies," said Thomas, just as Tess remembered the vortex of leaves that had surrounded her at Aaron Eisley's house, and the fluttering fairies in her kitchen, now lying dead in the sink. If there even was a sink anymore.

"How can there be so many?"

"Hunter must have tolled every pixie out of Forest Park."

"What can they—will they bite us?"

"Maybe we'd better get ready to run."

"Run where?" Tess got to her feet and helped Thomas rise. "Swim for it, maybe?"

"Kelpies." Thomas shook his head. "Sooner the pixies than the water horses."

"Dead is dead, whether by nibbles or mouthfuls."

Thomas gave another of those horrible, sickly laughs, putting an arm around her. "Now you're starting to think like a fae. Keep it up." He never took his eyes off the cloud of darkness drawing closer and closer to the bridge. Tess kept glancing over her shoulder to be sure the kelpie guarding the east end remained on shore, but her gaze returned to the pixies. So many in one place seemed unnatural to her. The pixies swooped and circled through the girders of the bridge, and sick dread overwhelmed her when Hunter turned to face the bridge, arms still upraised. She could see his red eyes, like dire Christmas lights, shining out of his mask, and she could feel them when their glow swept over her.

Thomas felt it too. Tess knew it when he planted his feet more widely for balance and gave his broad shoulders a loosening shake, as if to jostle that stare from his body.

Hunter let out a cry and his arms flew wide, as if he were conducting a savage orchestra. The cloud of pixies separated into two halves and crashed into the girders as if splattered there, thrown by a wicked child's angry hand.

The screaming was horrible, like so many nails on chalkboards, as the pixies tried to avoid the bridge's iron and failed. Tess let go of Thomas's hand and the sack of the Queen's trinkets, hands clapped to her ears to shut out the terrible sound of suffering. The pixies swooped at the bridge and then away, but Hunter overrode their reluctance and fear with his voice and the utter command of his hands. The creatures slammed against the iron and clung there, shrieking their cries of death and fear and pain. Layer after layer gathered on the girders and the roadway grating.

Thomas said something she could not hear through her hands over her ears, so she took them down, gritting her teeth and squinting at the screeching of the pixies. "He's killing them," she said.

Thomas nodded. "Using their bodies as a shield against the iron of the bridge." The two of them looked down at the bag of the Queen's things, where the sides did a slow, peristaltic creep, as if the trinkets inside were crawling over and about one another. Where it touched the iron, there was a faint, dusty brightening. Even here among so much iron, the Queen's magic was working. Tess thought of her bluebell-swallowed home, and her lips tightened.

Tess glanced over her shoulder. The kelpie had not moved, but when it saw her looking at it, shifted into a beautiful young man, nodded and beckoned. Half of her brain seemed to see the motions of a nightmare carousel horse, tossing its head and pawing savagely at the earth. It was as if the influence of the iron stripped some of the glamour, which explained why Hunter no longer looked like an SUV even without her seeing stone. She turned her back, determinedly, and followed Thomas's gaze.

So many human souls and psyches, crammed together in that one little sack. She shuddered, and bent to pick it up again. She hadn't meant to put it down to begin with; she would have to be on guard against such impulses. The fae made her doubt her very eyes and the evidence of her brain. The slow squirm of the things inside the bag made her feel anxious, and her face must have shown it.

"Be careful," Thomas said.

"I'm trying." She looked up at the sky, wondering how long they had until dawn. It must be hours yet, and still the pixies streamed out of the northwest, and still they clung to every inch of the bridge, coating it with trembling oak leaves, maple leaves, sweet gum and sycamore, alder and birch. Every molecule of air filled with the shattering noise of their deaths.

The dark, screaming tide halted a yard from where Thomas and Tess stood. She could not tell if there simply were no more pixies to be slaughtered, or if Hunter had deemed the mass sufficient, or if the Queen's magic held them at bay. The noise diminished, and every now and then a dead pixie fell from the girders above, fluttering down, riding the breath from the river below, falling, falling, a leaf in search of rest, the forest floor, and the quiet peace of rot.

At the west end of the bridge, Hunter's mount stepped onto the carpet of pixies.