Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1) (28 page)

Hunter snarled, "All of you. Dead by cockcrow, by my own hands, unless you do as you're bidden."

"You're losing control of your own pack, cowardly dogs that they are," Thomas taunted, but the effort was too great. Once again he slipped to his knees. Tess went with him, her arms tight around him, keeping him from direct contact with the bridge. The cough that wracked him now brought up blood. Tess stroked his face, tears spilling over her lashes.

"Hold on," she whispered. "Oh, Thomas, hold on!"

At last it was Hunter himself who came to them. Thomas had no strength to fight, but Tess would not let go of him. The stag mask panted clouds of steam as Hunter stood on the bare iron. A second burst of hunt magic fizzled uselessly from the staff. With a growl Hunter spun a loop of cording over the two of them and cinched it tight. Tess grunted with pain as Hunter jerked on the cord and dragged them, Tess uppermost, onto the pixie carpet, but she did not let go of Thomas, nor the sack of trinkets.

"You could have saved yourself, human woman," Hunter said to Tess. "But you had to interfere, and now you will be subject to Unseelie law. You will be judged, and you will die."

"Bring it. I'm not impressed so far. You won't even show your face." Tess's fierce grip hurt Thomas's ribs, but he was rapidly becoming too fogged to respond, and when Hunter towed them onto the crumbling leafy carpet, could only feel relieved that the concentration of iron seemed to lessen.

Hunter looked to where his mount steamed and smoked, falling apart into the bits and pieces that glamour had once knitted whole, then turned his back on its uselessness. He flicked a hand at a kelpie and gestured toward Thomas and Tess. "If you will not kill them, you will bear their burden." He dragged the two of them, still bound, across the broad back of the kelpie, and forced the creature to its feet.

They left the Hawthorne Bridge, picking up speed as they neared the shore, racing into the moonlit night and the blue shadows of the empty Portland streets.

Headed for Forest Park.

T
ESS
CLUNG TO
T
HOMAS FOR
dear life—both of their lives—as the Hunt clattered off the bridge. Though she tried to jump or fall away from the kelpie, she was unable to pry her body from its wet, broad back, where she sat sideways, with Thomas slumped astride behind her. The cord still bound them tightly, and Hunter held one end of it as he straddled a second kelpie a few feet away.

"I can't get free!"

Thomas coughed, and she was relieved to hear it didn't sound as harsh or deep as before. "That's kelpie magic. It's how they take women to their deaths. Once you're on one, it's over." His arms tightened around her, and she fought a manic impulse to giggle from sheer over-stimulation.

The Hunt rocketed onto Naito Parkway, turning north. As they emerged from the toxic iron-shadow of the bridge, they shivered into glamour. There was a moment of vertiginous perception when Tess saw the fae creatures becoming the prowling posse of black vehicles, but then the illusion stabilized and she only had to cope with the jolting and the terror, which was more than enough. With the loss of Hunter's mount, the dire lead SUV was no longer, but she could see Hunter in a black sedan only feet away, with the cord stretching between like a spider thread, glimmering in the streetlights, invisible in the shadows of buildings. His antlers were gone—
of course, he has to fit into a car
—and in their place was an elaborate tangle of braids and dreadlocks, animal tails and dried reeds and grasses, worn much like a crown.

The speed of the Hunt was breathtaking, as terrifying on horseback as it would have been in a car doing eighty on a city street, taking turns without slowing and heedless of other traffic.

Of which, thankfully, there was none. The power of the Hunt was chilling, and she struggled afresh, still to no avail.

The Burnside Bridge loomed out of the darkness, and soon Tess saw the market, filled with hundreds of milling people, glamours fringed and shattered and flaring bright and then dark. Her heart jolted into her throat at the memory of the fae surrounding her in the market. Was it only the day before? It seemed forever ago, a memory distorted by months and years.

The Hunt plunged into the crowd, driving into a sea of bodies. Every instant Tess's rational brain expected to see someone's broken, bloody body flying up over the hood of the sedan she was riding in. Except that it wasn't a sedan, though sometimes it was. The ever-shifting glamour was making her ill. The wild grasping and clawing of the crowd terrified her. She struggled to draw a deep breath and could only drag in half of one before a gulping gasp burst from her. Her only consolation was that she seemed to be beyond tears.

Thomas's arms tightened around her, helping, but only a little.

The crowd magically parted like a zipper, bare inches in front of them, as they progressed. She could hear the hungry cries, see their strange whirling dances, leaving bright after-images on her vision like fireworks at midnight.

And she smelled bluebells and freshly turned earth. She glanced to the side, where a group of toothy, moth-winged streetfolk danced around one of the Portland water bubblers. Bark had grown up its concrete pedestal so that it looked more like a stump with a birdbath topping it than a city water fountain. Bluebells and ivy radiated out from it, consuming the pavement.

The fae rejoiced in their Queen's triumph. The Hunt bayed along with it, and Tess saw Hunter slide a knowing glance toward the bag she was carrying. She could not hold it any tighter, but she tried.

Then the hunt was through the crowd and the dancers blurred behind them, their noise quickly growing faint with distance. Naito Parkway became Front Avenue as they blazed into the industrial district near the river. Ahead of her, through the glamour, the city shimmered like a mirage. There was a dark fog rising that, for a moment, she feared was another cloud of pixies, but then the kelpie lurched to the left and Tess knew a moment of exquisite terror.

Then she realized they were skirting the edge of the dark fog where the railroad tracks sent spurs everywhere through the district. The fog showed where there was more iron. Suddenly Tess understood what the city must do to the fae, with its iron skeletons and muscles and arteries. Metal everywhere.

The Hunt landed on Nicolai Street with a sickening lurch—but no corresponding crumpling of vehicles—and swept northwest. The black fog diminished, and they chased through a quieter district of smaller warehouses and brick buildings, the occasional blue-collar cafe and pub. The Willamette was still only a block or two away.

"Will we be drowned by the kelpies?" Her eyes opened wide and she only just kept her head from striking Thomas's chin as they bounced like untethered sacks of meal. How they could bounce so hard and not fall off could only
be
magic.

"No," said Thomas. "Not drowned. Worse. They're taking us to Forest Park."

"What—why? What's in the woods?"

"My Queen, and her Court, and her justice." Thomas's voice was flat and brooked no more discussion. "When we get there, let me do the talking. And for God's sake, keep that sack a secret."

"It's going to be hard," Tess said, looking down at the sack for the first time in what seemed like forever. "My...uh, jacket...is growing moss. And bark. And bluebells." She pinched off a budding bloom head and tossed it aside, where it burst like a silent firework against the kelpie's glamour, and vanished.

"Fuck," said Thomas. She couldn't have agreed more.

To their right ahead of them, Tess could see the streetlight-spangled shape of the most beautiful bridge in Portland: the St. Johns, with its gothic buttresses and verdigris paint. It arched over the Willamette so high it needed no drawbridge for even the largest ship to pass beneath it. It too was shrouded in a dark fog, and Tess realized she must be seeing how the fae saw iron, as a dark miasma to avoid. The Hunt turned left once again, leaving the highway for a steep slope upward.

They had entered Forest Park. Tess saw the familiar, ubiquitous ivy on the ground, and the Hunt plowing through it, one moment wheels, and the next, hooves and feet and bodies, as the Hunt abandoned its urban glamour. The trees were black and silver and motionless in the forest's moonlit midnight, except for the birches, which were walking slowly, shedding their brown-gold leaves like droplets shaken from wet fingers.

Walking
.

Trees, walking. Looking more like the ghosts of girls Tess had known in high school. Slender and winter-pale, untouched by sun, with lovely, strange faces winking and squinting out of the scored and blotched bark. She fumbled for the seeing stone. She had to see what was truly beneath the surface, or if she was now seeing through the glamour. If, indeed, they were disguised at all. These must be the birch girls Stephen had spoken of. They were beautiful beyond comprehension.

Thomas put up a hand and stopped her. She looked up at him to find his mouth shaping a silent "no" in the gloom. "Guard your secrets," he whispered. "All of them. As long as you can."

"Oh." She couldn't imagine what possible good it would do, keeping the seeing stone hidden, but she trusted him. He knew this world, and she did not. "Are those trees...walking?"

"Ghille dhu," murmured Thomas, as if that meant something. "They are always the last to fall to the wintersleep."

"They're
lovely
." She didn't know what else to say as the trees swayed away from the crashing progress of the Hunt. These were Stephen's birch girls, and at last she knew what he'd been talking about. The faces of the girls turned to look at them, gray-eyed and smiling, pale hair streaming upward, half branch, half silk, defying gravity. The old-gold coins of their dying leaves fluttered in the night wind, seeming to reach toward the moon.

"Yes," said Thomas, "very." She heard the yearning in his voice. It left her bereft. What good was an ordinary human woman in the world of the fae? Even her brother had longed for the birch girls and their delicate beauty. Thomas said he wanted to be human again, but the fae still had claims on his soul and his heart. Fortunately the birch girls were swiftly out of sight and Tess ran out of time to consider them. The Hunt raged uphill, breaking the brittle branches of big leaf maples and crashing through the whippy red alder limbs still dangling the last of their miniature cones.

Tess and Thomas were thrown from side to side on the kelpie's back as it dodged and lurched. Now the pack was yelping, in full cry, hounds of night blasting ever upward, until suddenly they were at the crest of the spine of hills that formed Forest Park. Below her to the south, Tess saw the lights of Portland and the shimmering artery of the Willamette, and then vertigo spun her senses as they plunged downward into a black hole. Hunter looked back over his shoulder at them. The antlers had returned with his red eyes, like the scorched eyeholes of her pumpkin at home.

Home.

It was a thousand years ago and yet only an instant.

Tess saw the hole was really a tunnel. They seemed to be racing as fast as they had through the streets of Portland, but in the blackness it was even more terrifying because she could not see the way ahead of them, and did not know the environment at all. There were spots of glowing things on the walls, and the occasional sense of passing openings to the side, when the pack's yelping echoed differently and the space felt larger. Down and down and down they went, the whole place smelling richly of soil and mold and moisture and rock. It smelled alive, in a way the caves she had toured in the past never had.

The further they went, the stronger the scent became. Much like the swooning intoxication of the bluebells in her house, this was a fragrance that summoned deep summery memories of grass and earth, warmth and daylight, and the heavy sweetness of blackberries so ripe they verged on wine.

Thomas put a hand to the back of her head and pressed her down, still holding her tight. "The ceiling lowers soon." He bent with her, and his trow scent mingled with the blackberries.

Sure enough, within a minute the space around them tightened, giving the impression they were hurtling through an ever-smaller pipe. She pictured them shooting out like storm run-off from a culvert and wondered where this strange ride would end, and what new terrifying things they would find when they got there.

From somewhere up ahead she could hear music and laughter, weird atonal songs that were more chants than music. She turned her head, feeling a pull toward the music, a yearning that made no sense. Somewhere close was a party, and dancing, and she longed to be a part of it.

The Hunt clattered out of the tunnel into an enormous space. The noise of the party burst over them as if a door had been opened, voices calling and singing and shrieking. Everything was confusion and sound and she could not tell left from right, up from down, a sensation as extraordinary and disorienting as floating underwater. The room's ceiling and walls were covered with crystals reflecting and refracting torchlight, candlelight, and darting, flickering glimmers she was inclined to label fairylight. The Hunt raced along the room's perimeter, their glamour blurring and shredding away like smoke.

It was like being inside a geode the size of a concert hall. Sound came from everywhere, whispers, screams, laughter and joy and terror. On the floor beside them, the fae wound in a spiral that tightened and unwound itself at the same time, whirling both ways. Vertigo took Tess's last vestige of balance, and she closed her eyes against the myriad shapes of the dancers. The singing grew piercingly sweet.

When she opened her eyes again, the Hunt had joined the dance and was spinning and twisting its way to the center of the room, in a spiral like a whirlpool. All around them a tricky wind was blowing. Her hair lifted like that of the birch girls aboveground. She tried to look closely at the creatures around her, but each time her eyes settled on one, it seemed to turn into something she might find blowing down a Portland street in the city's frequent east wind, or trapped in the gutters. A rustle of newspaper here, a scudding leaf there, a sparkle of broken glass, a crushed paper cup, a budding twig, a trodden soda can, a cluster of gravel or sand. And yet, and yet...it was all so beautiful, brilliant with light and sound. As long as she didn't try to stare at any one thing, she could see the shapes of the dancers. They were slender or thick, heavy or floating, all graceful, all beautiful, all horrible, dark and bright and gossamer. Their touch brushed along the neck and sides of the kelpie she and Thomas rode, stroking over her as they passed. What had been a lurching trot became something more dreamlike and swaying, a slow-motion gavotte.