When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears: The Goblin Wars, Book Three (7 page)

“Keep an open mind,” Mamieo was saying as Teagan came in. “I’ll be introducing you to more than just an
aingeal
.”

We probably should have warned Seamus about the rest of them sooner
, Teagan thought. Thomas, Roisin, and Grendal were sitting on the couch watching the news about the attack at the school. Springing two more Highborn and a
cat-sídhe
on him before he’d met his angel might not be such a good idea.

She hadn’t taken more than two steps into the room when Aiden popped out of a hunting blind he’d built with a blanket and two chairs.

“Look out, Mamieo!” he shouted.

Teagan saw the tripwire a millisecond before Seamus blundered into it. A can attached to the other end of the line toppled, releasing an avalanche of marbles that bounced, rattled, and skittered across the wooden floor—along with Lucy, the sprite.

Teagan grabbed her grandmother’s arm before the old woman could slip on the marbles, and almost fell herself. Lucy zipped hummingbird-like around them, trying to get a look at their guest.

Seamus batted the tiny girl as if she were a bug, sending her tumbling to the floor.

“Let her alone, you bully!” Aiden came all the way out of the hunting blind. Lucy shook herself at the sound of his voice and rose into the air, her eyes flashing a dangerous red.

“Get ’im, Lucy!” Aiden shouted. “Bomb Attack One!” Lucy skimmed the floor, scooping up a marble. Thomas and Roisin had jumped to their feet, and Grendal leaped to the back of the couch.

Lucy climbed up, carrying her marble. The high ceilings of the old house gave her a tactical advantage.

“No!” Teagan shouted as the sprite started her dive. She let go like a cross between a dive-bomber and a shot-putter, launching the marble with all her might.

It bounced off the bone at the corner of Seamus’s temple. He staggered back a step, and the slick, hard sole of his dress shoe came down on another marble. His arms windmilled wildly as he went over. He landed flat on his back and threw his arm up to protect his eyes. Grendal had come off the couch to see if the sprite needed help. She didn’t. She was on the lawyer in a flash, her twiglike arm reaching up his nose. Seamus screamed, and Lucy held up a nose hair triumphantly.

“Stay down,” Teagan advised him. “Aiden, get Lucy off of him.”

Aiden made his way through the marbles and scooped her up. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

“Yes,” Seamus said.

“I didn’t mean you, bad guy,” Aiden said. “I meant Lucy.
You’re not supposed to hit girls
.”

Lucy chittered lovingly up at her hero. As far as Teagan had been able to tell, sprites breathed through holes in their tough exoskeletons like insects, but Lucy still managed to make noises for Aiden. She finished her tirade and held out the nose hair she had harvested.

“Yuck,” Aiden told her. “That’s nasty.” Lucy dropped the hair and rubbed her hands together.

Seamus was sitting up, his hand to his nose. There were tears in his eyes.

“That’s . . . a sprite.”

Mr. Wylltson came through the front door and paused.

Grendal jumped back up on the arm of the couch to stay out from underfoot. Mr. Wylltson couldn’t see or hear the
cat-sídhe
or the sprite, but Grendal enjoyed following him around the house and listening to him read aloud, learning words. When Teagan had explained this, her dad had started talking to the creature, holding doors open to give his invisible guest time to get through. He was so good at pretending, it almost seemed he could see as clearly as the rest of the family, except when he talked to empty chairs where he thought it might be sitting.

“What’s all this?” he asked, surveying the carnage.

“A trap,” Aiden said. “Like Mom used to help me make. I need a trap for the bad guys. Then I can save everybody.”

“Son,” Mr. Wylltson said, offering Seamus a hand, “we do not trap guests, even for practice.”

The corners of Aiden’s mouth turned down. “He attacked first.”

“The pratie has a point,” Mamieo said. “The wee girl was just curious, and Seamus knocked her tush-over-teakettle.”

“I apologize,” Seamus said, still rubbing his nose. “I had no idea it was a girl.”

“You’re not supposed to hit people littler than you, either,” Aiden said as Lucy settled on his head. The sprite immediately started weaving elaborate patterns in his hair, her eyes flashing warningly.

“Seamus McGillahee,” Mamieo said, “I’d like you to meet Teagan’s brother, Aiden, and his friend Lucy, the sprite. Aiden, this is the fellow who got your sister out of jail, so keep a civil tongue in your head and your marbles in your pocket.”

Teagan was glad Mamieo left out the part where the lawyer tried to dump her on the side of the road. Aiden had very strong opinions about how ladies should be treated.

Seamus nodded at Aiden and turned toward the others.

“Aileen’s sister, Roisin, recently of Mag Mell,” Mamieo continued. Roisin curtsied. She didn’t understand much English yet, but she smiled at him. Seamus didn’t offer his hand, and his face went a little pale.

“Yes, I’m using your real name in front of Sídhe folk, Seamus,” Mamieo went on. “We do that here.”

Seamus apparently knew that some Sídhe could use the power in a name to twist and bend your will. Highborn were the worst. Highborn goblins loved to play the game of trapping people with promises. Even
cat-sídhe
could take control of your muscles, making you move when you didn’t want to.

He doesn’t like us
, Aiden signed in ASL behind Seamus’s back.

I know
, Teagan signed back.
We’ll have to help him like us
.
Does he have a song?
Whatever Seamus McGillahee’s song was, Teagan was sure he wasn’t a bad guy. Aiden tipped his head, considering him as the introductions went on.

“This is Grendal,” Mamieo was saying. “You can see for yourself what he is.”

The golden
cat-sídhe
stood up on his hind legs and blinked his abalone-shell eyes.

“Greetingsss,” he said in a little-girl voice. He’d picked up quite a bit of English in the few days he’d been in the Wylltson house.

Seamus nodded again. Freckles that Teagan hadn’t noticed before were starting to stand out on his face, making him look both younger and very Irish.

“And this is Thomas, who has the misfortune of being a damned
lhiannon-sídhe
.”

Thomas smiled and held out his hand, and Seamus literally took a step back.

“A muse who sucks Irish poets’ blood?”

“I’m reformed,” Thomas said. “I don’t follow Doirich anymore.” He took Roisin’s hand. “Some of us never did. And the blood-sucking was . . . usually . . . figurative. It was more about torturing them to death.”

Aiden signed something to Teagan that she couldn’t decipher. He tended to be sloppy when he wasn’t focused.

What?
Teagan signed.

Aiden didn’t sign back. Instead, he came over, pulled Teagan into the alcove just off the living room, and whispered, “He has
lots
of songs.”

“Like?”

“‘I Got Friends in Low Places’ and ‘We Are the Champions,’ but,”—Aiden frowned—“‘Tainted Love’ is the loudest right now.”

“‘Tainted Love’? Did Abby let you listen to Marilyn Manson?”

“Who’s Marilyn Manson?”

“Never mind.”

“Can we look her up on—?”

“Absolutely not,” Teagan said. “Where did you hear the song?”

“Beldar Conehead sings it in a movie. Lennie showed me. There was a monster, and Beldar wanted to run away.” Aiden grimaced. “He wasn’t a very good singer. But it’s our secret code. When the
really
bad guys come, I’m going to say
‘Eh-eh’
like Beldar, and Lennie will run away. If Lennie sees them first, he’ll say ‘Red Alert’!”

“‘Tainted Love’ is really one of Seamus’s songs?” Teagan had to stifle a laugh. You couldn’t tell it from the lawyer’s face.

Aiden nodded. “But he keeps switching. He has a scratch.”

Mr. Wylltson’s massive collection of music was on old vinyl records, which Aiden wasn’t allowed to touch. But he knew if a record was scratched, the needle bounced from one song track to the next.

“Wait,” Teagan said. “You always know who’s coming. You can hear our songs as we’re walking up the street. You should have known we had a guest with us.”

“I was trying not to listen,” Aiden explained as they stepped back into the living room. “I keep hearing bad things. But I
did
tell Mameio to stop.”

“I thought you were watching Aiden,” Mr. Wylltson said to Thomas before Teagan could ask what bad things had Aiden worried.

“Nobody told me he wasn’t allowed to build traps. It’s kept him occupied all day.”

“I suppose no one knew we would be having company.” Mr. Wylltson turned to Tea and Aiden. “‘Traps’ plural?”

“What does
plural
mean?” Aiden asked.

“It means more than one.”

“Yep,
plural
,” Aiden said proudly. “I made lots of ’em. I was going to try them on Lennie. He was supposed to come in. Not you, Mamieo.”

“I headed him off at the street,” Mr. Wylltson said. “That was a very good trap, son, but as I said, we have a guest right now. I need you to unmake every single one and apologize to Mr. McGillahee. And clean up these marbles.”

“I’m sorry,” Aiden said.

“Widdershins, Mamieo?” Seamus lifted a foot so Aiden could retrieve a marble. “
Widdershins?
This place isn’t backward. It’s bedlam.”

“It grows on you,” Thomas assured him. “Where’s Finn? Is he all right? Did Kyle—”

“Finn’s fine. He’s taking care of something outside for me,” Teagan said. “We’re all fine.”

“It was
Kyle?
” Thomas seemed dubious. “And you’re all fine?”

“We had help,” Teagan explained. “Abby and her cousins. And Kyle wasn’t bilocating. He’s dead.”

Thomas’s lips thinned to a sad line. “He was evil. But I’ve known him forever.” The statement was probably a little more literal than if a human had said it. Thomas had been around long enough to know Shakespeare.

“I sent his body back to Mag Mell tied to Isabeau. She
was
bilocating.”

Thomas sucked in his breath. “The last person to kill one of the Dark Man’s children triggered a curse that’s lasted for a couple thousand years.”

“And I declared war on Mab.”

“You what?” Mr. Wylltson asked.

It somehow sounded completely different in her own living room, without a dead Highborn at her feet and an evil bilocate in front of her.

“I declared war on Mab.” Teagan put more conviction into it this time. Aiden slipped his hand into hers and squeezed. He had a worried look in his blue eyes.

“Almighty preserve us,” Mamieo said, and crossed herself.

“I’m just trying to understand what I’ve stumbled into,” Seamus said. “The Wylltson family, Mamieo and Finn, and a group of Italians have declared war on Mab, Queen of the Sídhe, and killed the son of Fear Doirich, the goblins’ god.”

“To be fair, Doirich started it.” Mamieo sounded just like Aiden had a few moments before.

“But—war?” Mr. Wylltson asked.

“We have no choice, Dad,” Teagan said. “They won’t leave us alone, and we can’t run. They’ve hounded the Mac Cumhaills for generations because of what Fionn did, haven’t they? They’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth and they will kill us. They will kill anyone who helps us. If we can’t run, we have to fight.”

“We have a little time to prepare,” Thomas offered. “There was only one gate in North America, and it’s closed now.”

“We still have to deal with whatever creatures have already made it into Chicago,” Teagan said. “And the Highborn will be coming. They’ll just have to step into Ireland, like Kyle and Isabeau did, and catch a flight over.”

“Some creatures definitely made it out before it closed up,” Mamieo agreed.

“There were some teens on the street the first time we drove past,” Teagan explained to Thomas. “They might have been Highborn. I think one of them was . . . eating a dead
cat-sídhe
.”

“What did they look like?” Thomas asked.

“Long legs, heavy shoulders. Not very clean. Their hair was red and black. I’ve never seen a Highborn who looked dirty.”

Grendal’s eyes narrowed, and he growled. “Dump Dogs.”

“That sounds scary.” Aiden backed up against Teagan’s legs, and she put her hands on his shoulders. He didn’t need any more scary things in his life.

“What are they?” she asked.

Thomas sighed. “Let’s just say there are some Highborn no one invites to parties.”

“They came to parties,” Grendal said.

“The Dogs came to your hall?” Thomas turned to Roisin and spoke in Gaelic.

Roisin’s chin went up, and Grendal’s tail lashed as she answered.

Thomas spoke again, and there was an edge in his voice Teagan had never heard before. Disgust. She looked to Mamieo, the only one in the room other than Thomas, Roisin, and Grendal who understood the language.

“They’re . . . disagreeing about the nature of the creatures we’ve been discussing. Roisin feels they’re not as bad as Thomas thinks.”

“A discussion that we should have in private,” Thomas said, switching back to English. “I apologize. The group you’ve described is part of a clan that lives in the city dump in Mag Mell. Shape shifters.”

“Like you?” Aiden asked.

“Not at all like me,” Thomas said. “Mab has the bodies of her slaves thrown on the trash heap. The Dump Dogs eat them.”

“Her Fir Bolg slaves?” Mamieo asked. Thomas nodded grimly.

“They eat dead
people?
” Aiden grimaced.

“Recycling, Mag Mell style,” Thomas said. “Mab wouldn’t waste time burying a slave. The Dump Dogs dispose of them, bones and all, but only if there is nothing small, old, or sick to tear apart instead. They prefer the blood still pumping in their meat. This pack must have made it out in the confusion before the gate closed.”

Roisin studied each person’s face as they spoke. She asked a question of Grendal, and he replied, the tip of his tail twitching. She shook her head, and he growled again. Dump Dogs were apparently a touchy subject all around.