Briar Queen (32 page)

“I will not.” Finn was still absorbing the idea that the snow following the Wolf king around was
her
doing. But, then, why should anything like that surprise her?

The wolf girl was annoyed, as if this task had been forced upon her. “Put the dress on or my brother—outside in the hall—puts it on
for
you.”

“I don't think he'd look good in that dress.”

The Fata's mouth curled, and genuine amusement flickered in her ghost eyes. “Be a smart girl. You want to see your Jack, don't you?”

SO FINN WORE THE DRESS—
a small thing of gray silk and filmy gossamer—and a choker of tiny rubies that felt like a slave collar. She placed the mask over her face, but kept her Doc Martens, disdaining the high-heeled shoes as she'd done at the Mockingbirds. Shoes were capricious things in fairy tales.

She was led to a chamber where flames roared in a black hearth, glossing furniture carved from ebony wood into dragons, bears, lions, and wolves. A massive mirror in a gold frame of wolf skulls, briars, and grotesque imps dominated one wall. Beneath a chandelier of green glass was a table set with a feast of almost obscene splendor.

Seth Lot stood near the window, its view a landscape of crooked trees and snow. He looked like a Brontë hero in an expensive suit, his ring-decorated fingers resting on the handle of his walking stick as the firelight brushed his profile and the high cheekbone with its romantic scar. His hair was pulled back.

Finn was glad she wore the deer mask—it concealed her fear. Defiantly, she extended one hand. Her sister's silver charm bracelet glittered. “Why did your people let me keep this? And these?” She touched the lionheart locket Jack had given her and Jack's phoenix pendant.

“To remind you of what you have to lose.” The Wolf moved toward her. “And silver does me no harm.” When he was close, he gazed down at her almost tenderly. “You have forfeited the game, Serafina. What shall I do with you now?”

“Don't hurt Lily or Jack. Are they all right?”

“I thought we would have a proper dinner.” He turned without answering and pulled out a chair. She walked to it, sat down, and wondered what he would do if she threw up on the plate. She wasn't hungry and the last thing she'd eaten had been a cupcake Sionnach Ri had bought her. “Where is Jack?”

“Jack is on his way.”

“Where is my sister?”

There were three chairs. He chose the chair in the center and stabbed a knife
into what looked like a roast pig with wings. “Your sister came with me willingly, Serafina.”

“You faked her
death
.”

“Actually”—he smiled and Finn thought that the Fatas smiled too much, especially when their intentions were bad—“Reiko accomplished the masterpiece of Lily Rose's demise, a bizarre death fitting a ballerina, and a suicide no less.”

There was a steak knife near her plate. She crazily thought of using it. “It didn't matter to you, did it, that it would break her family?”

“Serafina. Your sister will remain beautiful and young forever. No sickness will touch her. No senility will splinter her intelligence. And you never would have met Jack if it hadn't been for us. He would have been dust and rot in a grave.”

“You
destroyed
Jack.”

“You don't understand what those times were like. Jack was lost, hungry, bitter.” His smile was gorgeous. “Those sorts of boys and girls . . . they're the easiest.”

“Living forever isn't what most people want.”

“It's what your sister wanted. It's what Hester wanted. It's what Jack wanted.”

She said, with quiet precision, “It must be horrible, not having a soul. All that emptiness inside. Being nothing.”

Something flashed in his eyes, something like terror, which could also have been a trick of the light. He casually set Eve Avaline's silver dagger in the middle of the table and said, “What did you intend to do with
this,
Serafina? I shall leave it here, and when Jack arrives, I'll show you what
I
intend to do with it.”

She stared at the dagger shining within reach on the polished table. It had not begun to corrode at all, despite being taken from its wooden scabbard days ago.

The doors opened again and Jack, in a rabbit half mask of white wood, wrists wrapped in chains, was escorted into the room by two wolf Fatas in fur and leather.

He was shoved into the third chair. Beneath the mask, she could see that his jaw was bruised, one corner of his mouth caked with blood—somehow, the otherworldliness that had made him infallible had been taken from him, and that terrified her. His masked gaze met hers. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She realized Seth Lot had put them in the masks to keep them from seeing each other properly.

“She's not all right, Jack. The elixir has poisoned her. If she returns to the true world, slivers of it will remain within her until she becomes something strange.”

Jack made a sound that was almost a snarl. The chains around his wrists tightened.

Seth Lot continued, “Shall I make her my new queen? I'm afraid Lily and I have had a bit of a falling-out.”

Finn glanced at the silver dagger Lot had set on the table to taunt them. Jack looked at it and went very still.

“Lot.” Jack sounded peeled to the bone. “Don't. She wasn't responsible for Reiko—”

Leaning forward, Lot took up the silver dagger and traced the tip of it across Jack's throat. Finn stopped breathing. “Jack, the two of you killed Reiko and decimated the Mockingbirds. The Mockingbirds I don't mind, but Reiko . . . you'll both have to pay for that.”

Finn met Jack's gaze as despair splintered through her.

The flames in the hearth burst outward, flowering into black-and-orange butterflies, an impossible storm of them. Finn screamed Jack's name as she was flung backward by thousands of parchment wings that beat against her with delicate, bruising force, pushing her toward the mirror—

—through it.

FINN LIFTED HER HEAD
.
She lay in a night lit only by snow. Not far from her, a monstrous, spiky shadow crouched, surrounded by bones and blood, silently screaming horses, and mutilated men—

Then she stood in a black room before a painting of a Fata man with russet hair knotted with leaves, his bare face and chest tattooed with spirals, his eyes those of a beast.

“See how I play this game, Serafina?” Lot circled her where they now stood in a cathedral-like hall with wooden pillars looming around them and immense arches curving toward a groined ceiling. Leaves and snow crackled beneath Finn's boots. Candles flickered. Primitive music accompanied a banshee voice singing softly as figures masked with ornate representations of animal skulls—birds, bears, stags—waltzed around them, candlelight caressing luxurious fabrics.

Turning her head, Finn frowned into a tarnished mirror in a knot of black
briars. She saw a pale girl with jewels on her fingers, her silver eyes framed by dark ink. Her gray dress had become a gown, its sleeves nothing but ribbons of silver silk. There was a wreath of fresh roses on her brow.

“That was your sister's doing.” Lot stood behind her. “The monarchs. She's learned some new tricks. It used to keep our relationship exciting. Lately, it's just become annoying.”

Finn stepped back, frantically scanning the feral costume ball that surrounded her. She said, “This isn't real.”

He slid a hand over her shoulder, turning her as music blazed through the dead air. Too disoriented to rebel, she allowed him to take her hands. “It is real if I wish it so.”

“I thought only mortals could make wishes here.” She wouldn't let his tricks or his distressing beauty throw her.

“I've told you, Serafina, you're not quite mortal anymore.” He spoke as she concentrated on the dancers around them. A woman in a horned headdress inclined her head. A man whose face was concealed by a beaked mask bowed to her. There were cobwebs and splotches of mold and blood on their beautiful costumes.

“Did you ever wonder”—Seth Lot's hair fell forward to brush her cheek as his scent of expensive cologne and musk made her dizzy and sick—“what would happen if Jack had the chance to meet Reiko again?”

She thought of the Reiko
before
the Teind, the one haunting Lot's house, and ripped her hands from Lot's. Shadows crept through the forestlike ballroom, beyond the animal-masked Fatas moving languidly across the floor littered with debris, dying monarch butterflies, and snowflakes that didn't melt.

“Reiko is
dead
and gone.” She thought she saw a crack in the Wolf's perfect façade and relentlessly continued, “Take me back to your house.
Now
.”

He gestured. As if instinctively connected to him, the dancers drifted apart, forming an aisle. At the end of the aisle were two doors in a wall tangled with thorn-starred vines.

“Go on.” He indicated the doors. “Pick one.”

The dancers stood still in their beast masks as Finn walked toward the doors, snow and crimson leaves fluttering past her. She heard whispers, “
The path of pins or the path of needles . . . the path of needles or the path of pins . . .
”

When she reached the doors, she halted, hands clenched in her gown. One
door was white, carved into images of lilies. The other door, black, was hewn into the forms of loping jackals.

Seth Lot's voice carried to her as he moved down the aisle, toward her. “You'll remain here no matter which you choose, Serafina. But I'll give you a companion. Select which of your loved ones will leave my house—your sister or your Jack—and I'll allow it. The other will remain.”

“I won't choose.”

He said, tenderly, “Then, Serafina, I will kill both.”

WHEN THE BUTTERFLIES SWEPT FINN
through the mirror, Jack shot to his feet, the chains biting into his wrists as he lunged forward. Lot had also vanished in the storm of orange-and-black wings.

“Jack.” The soft voice sent a razor pain through Jack, who raised his head, saw
her
reflection in the mirror, and didn't believe it. Even though her face was shadowed, he knew it was her.
Another of Lot's tricks
.

He closed his eyes against her, opened them to see if she'd gone.

Reiko came forward, her slip dress and gladiator sandals blood red against the chamber's darkness, her long black hair stranded with pearls. He yearned for her with an almost voluptuous shame, but he refused to turn and face her. The rabbit mask was his only shield against her. “Reiko.”

“Why are you in that ridiculous disguise?” Cool fingers settled on his face to lift the mask. He thought of Finn, her warm skin and fragrant hair, her good heart. She was the opposite of this heartless young woman—Circean, lavish, nomadic—who had drawn him, smiling all the while, into the dark.

“Jack.” Reiko's hands slid along his wrists, to the chains. “Who has done this to you? Was it Lot?”

The Wolf's house,
Absalom and Leander had told him,
is filled with memories
.

When he'd been here with Reiko, long ago, he'd been a new Jack. This Reiko from the past, before Finn, before the Teind, the Reiko he had once loved, this Reiko had sheltered him from Seth Lot. He almost broke as her lips touched his. His body leaned toward hers. She spoke against his mouth. “You still love me, don't you?” She kissed him again. He was shaking by the time she drew back. She said, “You're different.”

As he remembered her burning, he whispered, “Reiko.”

She pressed a hand over his slamming heart. Her green eyes glowed. “A
heart,
Jack?”

“I'm not your Jack.”

Her eyes silvered as fury curled her lips. “Then what
are
you?”

“I'm what caused you to die. As you caused those girls to die. And the boys. And all the innocents whose lives you sucked away like the parasite you are.”

He saw the true Reiko then, beneath her skin, a scaled, thorn-toothed thing of blood and darkness. Then she was just a girl, turning away from him and walking from the room, heels clicking on the floor like a devil's cloven hooves. She said, over one shoulder, “I'll forgive you, Jack. I always do.”

When she'd gone, he sank to a crouch, chained hands between his knees, and stared at the giant mirror framed by its grotesque and golden dance of imps, wolf skulls, and briars.

A reflective glint drew his attention to the silver dagger in the center of the table.

FINN STOOD BEFORE THE TWO DOORS.
This time, there would be no tricking a Fata. Behind her, Seth Lot patiently waited as his court whispered among themselves.

“ . . . pins . . . path of needles . . .”

She couldn't choose and Lily and Jack would die because of it. Here, she had no weapons with which to fight the Wolf, magical or otherwise.

She remembered Absalom Askew saying,
Rules keep us in shape,
and an idea cut through her hopelessness. She slowly turned to face Seth Lot. “You invited Lily here. You invited
me
here, and Jack, when you told us to come find you.”

The whispering, skull-masked court went silent. Seth Lot's eyes narrowed, and shadows made his face hard as she continued, “By the invitation from thee to me, I invoke the law of hospitalit—”

“No.” The word was more snarl than voice. “
You will not—
”

“
Your
laws.” Finn pointed at him. “Laws that keep you from returning to night and nothing. What will happen if you break that law of not harming invited guests, Seth Lot?”

His smile was ugly, and she saw the old, hungry thing hiding beneath his skin. “I have broken many laws, Serafina. Don't you know? And this is
such
a little one . . .”

Glass shattered behind her. She whirled.