Glimmerglass (30 page)

“Damn it!” my rescuer cried, and I realized it was Ethan.

I felt him kick whatever had grabbed me, and the grip loosened.

“We have to get out of the water, Dana!” Ethan yelled at me.

I was
so
with him!

I was still coughing and choking too much to swim on my own, so Ethan towed me. I blinked water and tears from my eyes and saw that Ethan was taking me under the bridge.

Whatever was in the moat made another grab, and I felt a hair-raising pulse as Ethan threw some kind of magic at it.

“Kick with me!” he commanded, and I did the best I could despite my continued struggle to breathe.

It was an agonizingly slow, terrifying swim. I sensed the moat monster lurking below us in the depths of the muddy water. Waiting for us to show a sign of weakness. Or maybe just waiting for Ethan’s magical attack to wear off.

I’d recovered enough of my mental faculties to see that we were heading for the base of the bridge, but what I saw there didn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies. There was a narrow concrete ledge that jutted out of the water, but it would take a pretty big reach to grab on to it, and I knew that even if I grabbed it, Iwouldn’t have the strength to haul myself out of the water.

“Almost there,” Ethan said, but though he was trying to comfort me, he sounded scared himself, which was not comforting at all.

A few more frantic kicks, and we butted up against the concrete.

“I’m going to give you a boost,” Ethan said, panting with the effort of swimming for both of us—and fighting off unseen monsters to boot. “Grab hold of the edge.”

I still didn’t think grabbing hold of the edge would do me much good, but I wasn’t about to argue. Ethan shifted his grip once again, and in any other situation, I’d have objected to where his hands ended up. But somehow, I didn’t think he was trying to cop a feel at the moment.

Ethan pushed me up out of the water, and I reached my hands above my head. They connected with the ledge, but I was still in the water from the butt down. It meant I didn’t have to support my full weight as I hung there, but it wasn’t enough to give me the strength to pull myself up. If I survived this, I was going to have to spend some time in the gym building up some upper body strength.

Beside me, Ethan lunged up out of the water, his hands grabbing the ledge without any helpful boost. Unless the monster was helping, which seemed unlikely.

“Hold on,” he ordered me, then easily pulled himself up and onto the ledge.

His hands had just closed around my wrists when the monster grabbed me again.

“Ethan!” I screamed, kicking wildly.

“I’ve got you!” he assured me, and started to pull.

The monster had let go with little encouragement the last couple of times, but maybe it saw that its prey was getting away and decided to make a last stand. Whatever the reason, it didn’t let go when Ethan started pulling.

I couldn’t help glancing down at the water, trying to see the creature that was trying so hard to pull me back in. The water was so murky, and the area under the bridge so dark, that I couldn’t see anything under the surface.

Something wrapped around my other leg, and I screamed again. Ethan cursed, but held firmly to my wrists as the two played tug-of-war for me.

A ghastly, dead-fish-white face rose from the water near my legs. Hair like sticky gray spiderwebs flowed all around its colorless head, moving this way and that, not—at least as far as I could tell—affected by any kind of current or wind. My stomach cramped as I realized it was the hair that was wrapped around my legs.

The creature’s eyes were as white as its skin, giving the impression that it was blind. But I didn’t think it was, because it sure seemed like it was gazing balefully up at Ethan.

“Mine!” the creature said in an awful gurgle of a voice. When it spoke, I saw the double row of needlelike teeth in its mouth.

“Ethan,” I whimpered. I would rather have drowned than let this creature have me.

“No, she’s
mine
, ” Ethan told the creature in a fierce, throaty, snarl that sounded barely human. Of course, Ethan
wasn’t
human.

The creature hissed, its weirdly grabby hair wrapping more and more tendrils around me.

Ethan’s eyes practically glowed in the darkness, and his grip on my arms hadn’t wavered, though I was beginning to feel like I was being stretched on a rack. My shoulders were screaming in agony, and I was afraid any moment now, muscles would start tearing.

Ethan said something in a language I didn’t know. I guessed it was either Gaelic, or some kind of weird Faerie language. With his words came a soft pulse of power that traveled down my body toward the creature.

The creature hissed again, baring its teeth at Ethan.

“You do not wish to make an enemy of me or my house,” Ethan told it through gritted teeth, and the look on his face would have scared anyone—or any
thing
—that had two brain cells to rub together.

With a final sullen hiss, the creature let go of me and sank back into the water. The moment I was free of its grip, Ethan hauled me all the way out and onto the ledge.

I was on my knees on the narrow ledge, back hunched with strain as I tried to hack up a lung for what felt like the better part of forever. Ethan patted my back and murmured comforting words, but I was too miserable to be comforted.

My throat and nasal passages burned from expelling all that water from my lungs. My chest ached from taking all that water in. And all my joints throbbed from being a tug-of-war toy between Ethan and the moat monster. I was also soaked through and chilled to the bone, my whole body shivering violently.

When the coughs had calmed some, Ethan pulled me against him, wrapping his arms around me and holding me close to the warmth of his body. It was only then that I noticed he was wearing nothing but a pair of pants. Even so, his body felt like a furnace compared to mine, and I curled into myself and huddled against him.

“What
was
that?” I rasped, shuddering at the memory of that awful, evil face in the water.

“It was a Water Witch,” Ethan explained. “They are natives of Faerie and at least nominally belong to the Unseelie Court, which is probably the only reason I was able to make her let go. There are dozens of them in the moat, and they will attack anything, Fae or human, that falls in. If the moat were just empty water, then people—and Fae—could enter and leave Avalon at will and the Gates would mean nothing.”

I shuddered again at the thought of
dozens
of those horrible things patrolling the moat, hoping for a free meal. Not that I was sure the Water Witch had planned to eat me, but with those teeth she’d flashed, it didn’t seem out of the question.

I started to cry, then, for once not ashamed of my weakness. I remembered Grace yelling the fateful order into her cell phone moments before she threw it—and me—into the moat.

“She killed my mom,” I sobbed against Ethan’s chest.

He held me tight and rocked me. “Maybe not,” he murmured. “I called your father after I called mine. He said he’d send Finn to rescue your mother. We can only hope that he made it there in time. I wish I could offer you something more certain, but I think my cell phone is at the bottom of the moat by now.”

I sniffled and tried to hope. Finn did this kind of stuff for a living. If anyone could have saved my mom from Kirk, it would be him. But everything had happened so fast, despite my attempts at delay. Would Finn really have had time to get to the hotel before Grace ordered my mother’s death?

“I want to go home,” I said, though I couldn’t rightly say where home was anymore.

“I know,” Ethan said. “But the purpose of the moat is to keep people out of Avalon, so there isn’t exactly an easy exit. There’s a trapdoor in the bridge above us, but my father’s going to have to get someone to undo the locking spells on it, and then they’re going to have to haul us up somehow. We’ll be stuck here for a while.”

I was so cold I felt like I’d never be warm again in a million years, and the contrast of Ethan’s warmth only made me feel colder. He scooted backward until his back was against the concrete piling. He had to let go of me to do it, but then he patted his lap.

“Come sit on my lap,” he said. “I’ll keep you as warm as I can.”

I thought briefly about what had happened the last time I’d found myself on Ethan’s lap, but I shoved that thought to the side. Even Ethan wasn’t enough of a player to make a move on me now, of all times.

So I crawled onto his lap, and he wrapped himself around me. His arms surrounded me, and my face was pressed up against his bare chest while his body heat seeped through my sodden clothes.

“Aren’t you cold at all?” I asked him.

I felt him shrug. “Not really. We only feel the cold when it’s extreme. And as you can probably tell, our body temperatures run higher than humans’ anyway.”

Yes, I could tell. Every inch of me that was in contact with his body was toasty warm. Unfortunately, there were a lot of inches left, and I shivered nonstop.

“You saved my life,” I whispered into his chest.

His chin rubbed across the top of my head. “It was the least I could do.”

I thought about the Water Witch, with her milky eyes, razor-sharp teeth, and sticky cobweb hair. Ethan had jumped into the moat after me, knowing there were dozens of those creatures in there. And while they were supposedly both members of the Unseelie Court, they obviously weren’t kissing cousins.

He’d lied to me. He’d tried to use his magic against me. And he’d set me up for an attack that could have gotten me killed. But in the end, he’d risked his own life to save mine, so how could I not forgive him for the bad things he’d done?

“Let’s just call it even now and leave it at that,” I said. Ethan kissed the top of my head but didn’t respond.

“How did you know Grace was about to cast a spell at my father?” he asked me. “You saved his life with your warning.”

That thought made me feel a tiny bit less wretched. At least I’d done
something
right. And I was glad to have saved a life, even if I’d needed rescuing myself.

“I could feel the magic building up,” I explained, and I felt Ethan go still. I tried to lift my head from his chest to see his face, but he wouldn’t let me.

“What?” I asked. “What did I say?”

“You felt the magic,” he repeated, and he sounded like he couldn’t quite believe it.

“Yeah. At least, that’s what I think it is. The cameo my dad gave me heats up, and then my skin starts to feel all prickly. I’m pretty sure that only happens when there’s magic around.”

Now Ethan pushed me away, allowing me to see his face. Not that I could see much in the darkness under the bridge. But I could see the intensity of his expression.

“I’m going to forget I asked you that question,” he said. “And I’m very certainly going to forget your answer. If your father or mine ever asks you, say you heard her muttering something and made an educated guess as to what it meant.”

“Why?”

“Because traditionally, the magic has always treated Faeriewalkers like humans, even though they are truly half Fae. But if you could feel it building, that means you have an affinity for it, which means you might be able to train and use it yourself. You are a powerful and frightening enough weapon as it is. If anyone thought you could do magic as well…” He shook his head. “Too dangerous. It wouldn’t be just the Queens who wanted to eliminate you then.”

“But it’s only because of the cameo,” I protested. “If I take it off’” I reached for the clasp behind my neck, but Ethan’s hands closed around my wrists.

“Keep it,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what it does, but if it reacts to magic, then it’s an object of power of some sort and could come in handy someday. You wouldn’t have felt the effects if you didn’t have a natural affinity for magic. A human wearing it would feel nothing. So we never had this conversation. Got it?”

My eyes no doubt wide as saucers, I nodded. Why would my father have given me an “object of power” if he thought I couldn’t access the magic? Had he somehow guessed that I would be unusual even for a Faeriewalker? Or had he just figured that since I couldn’t sense magic, the cameo was harmless, just a symbol of my Seelie affiliations? If I couldn’t ask him about it, then it seemed likely I’d never know the answer. “And you’re not going to tell anyone?” I prompted Ethan. “Not even your father?”

“Tell them what?” he asked, and though he was trying to sound dry and witty, he just ended up sounding nervous.

The moat had killed my watch and Ethan wasn’t wearing his, so I had no real concept of how long we huddled there beneath the bridge, except that it was far, far longer than I would have liked. During that time, I discovered a new pain. My skin apparently didn’t react well to Water Witch hair, so there were raised red welts all along the lower part of my legs where she’d grabbed me.

They burned and stung, and by the time Alistair arranged for someone to open the trapdoor that led under the bridge, I was starting to feel the warm flush of fever in my cheeks. They had to haul me up with some kind of harness. I’d have been scared, except I felt too awful to bother with fear. Maybe everyone—including
me
—would be better off if I fell and splatted on the concrete below. But I didn’t fall.

Alistair and my father were both waiting for me on the bridge, and they helped the emergency folks extract me from the harness. I locked eyes with my dad as they went to work on the buckles that held me safe. He looked pale and worried, impatient to get me out of the harness.

“Mom?” I asked in a terrified whisper, trying to keep myself from bursting into tears yet again.

Dad gave me a reassuring nod. “She’s safe.”

I didn’t try to hold back the tears anymore. I wasn’t up to standing, so when all the buckles and straps were loose, my dad picked me up and started carrying me toward his car, which was hard to miss, sitting in the parking lot in its bright red glory.

“Wait!” I cried, looking over his shoulder at Alistair.