Hollows 11 - Ever After (21 page)

I came out from against the wall, both curious and afraid to see the rest of Newt’s apartments. “Oh.”

“I almost had the harlot the last time, but she turned into you.” He gestured weakly, his eyes pinching at the corners as he tried to explain the last five minutes. “I couldn’t do it.”

“Pierce . . .” I started, my hand on the table so alike but not the same as the one Ivy had. Perhaps I should have tried harder to get him back on the reality side of the lines.

“It’s who I am,” he said solemnly, taking my hand and making me look at him. “I think she enjoys my trying to kill her.” He winced, looking worried. “You’re on her mind. Be careful. That’s not a healthy place to be.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, pulling away. “She’s out, right?”

“Oh, aye, she’s out on the surface. The ever-after is shrinking, and she’s trying to talk to sleeping gargoyles.” He leaned back, arms over his chest. We could almost be in my kitchen, if you didn’t look close. “There’s talk of killing you. Ku’Sox is petitioning for it in soft whispers.” He pushed forward, eyes eager. “We can kill him, you and I. Rachel, is that why you’re here? It is, isn’t it! Why else would you risk it, especially now!”

“No. Pierce, I can’t kill Ku’Sox.”

He turned away, opening cupboards to show tools and instruments my kitchen had never had. “Not alone, certainly,” he said confidently. “With my help, it’s possible. Let me gather my things, and we will be away, that monster dead in five minutes.”

Distressed, I felt the rings in my pocket. “Not even with your help,” I said, and he glanced up from a drawer, frowning. I remembered that frown, and I stifled a surge of tired anger. “Pierce, I’ve fought him before, and he’s too strong. Too fast. I’m not that good.”

“Mmm,” he grumbled, then shocked me when he opened the gas oven and pulled out a heavy lockbox. “I have a curse I was going to inflict on her next time I found her sleeping.”

The box hit the floor with a thud, and I jumped. He wasn’t listening. “Pierce.”

“Here is the wicked thing!” he said, having opened it up. “That’s a demon killer if I ever saw one!”

“Pierce, stop.” He had stood, and I took his hands, folding them about whatever ley line charm he’d made. Eye to eye, he squinted at me in mistrust, and I slowly let go. “I’m not going to confront Ku’Sox in a test of magic. I’m not afraid of him,” I said when Pierce took a breath to protest, “but everyone else is and I know my limits.”

“Rachel . . .”

“I know my limits,” I said again, silent until he brought his sour expression back to me. “I don’t have to kill him, just prove that he’s the one who unbalanced my line.”

Pierce frowned, looking capable and disappointed in the fake sunlight coming in the window. It was foggy past the blue curtains. It would always be foggy. “Then why are you here if you’re not seeking my help to kill him?”

Heart pounding, I brought out the rings. “These,” I said, and he picked up the largest one. “I need to reinvoke them. You said it was possible.”

“They’re deader than a three-day possum,” he said dryly, handing it back. “What do they do?”

“Create a bond between two people. They’re elven chastity rings.”

Pierce started, his blue eyes jerking from me to the rings and back again. Shoving the “demon killer” ley line charm in a deep pocket, he slid the box back into the oven. Smooth muscles moved under his thin cotton shirt, and I remembered the feel of them under my fingertips. He was a beautiful man, but I didn’t trust his decisions, especially when they impacted my life in a big way. “Chastity rings?” he questioned when the oven door shut.

The rings felt heavy in my palm. “I think I can fix the line, but I need a spotter to pull me out if I get lost. And since the rings make a connection between two magic users . . .”

“An all-fire close one, I’d think,” he muttered, his manner closed as he wiped his fingerprints off the oven door with the towel drying on a cabinet knob.

“Can you do it?”

His eyes flicked up to mine. “I’d rather kill him.”

My sigh was heavy, and I waited. I needed his help, and I knew he wouldn’t let me leave without it. I hadn’t been able to love him, but he had loved me.

Head down, he gestured, and I jumped when a circle tinged with his green aura rose up around us. It was a great deal stronger than I remembered—his time with Newt had done him good. Perhaps I’d misjudged him.

“Does she often make her kitchen look like mine?” I asked as I came closer, the corner of the center counter between us.

“Only when you’re on her mind. I’m powerfully concerned for you, Rachel.”

I wasn’t embarrassed by asking for his help, but it was hard knowing that I meant more to him than he to me. “Thank you,” I whispered as I put the rings on the counter.

“The trick is to not flood them,” he said, ignoring my guilty look. “You can’t use a ley line. That would break them for sure. Even your aura is too much when it’s all together, but if you splinter it . . .” He picked up the rings, positioning the smaller inside the larger. “Fill them with one resonance before allowing the rest in, you can make a pie of it.”

He set the rings in my palm, cupping his hands about it. A shiver went through me, and he smiled. “It’s much like a rainbow is the sum of visible light. You first put in the red, then shift it to orange, then yellow, then green, and so on until you finally get all the colors singing together and they melt into a white light and the charm invokes.”

He was standing close; his warmth and the scent of coal dust and shoe polish were bringing back memories, good but uncomfortable. “Show me?” I asked, and we both looked at the rings in my hand, his cupping mine.

“Push your aura off your hand,” he said, and my head snapped up. “That’s why the circle,” he soothed. “Go on, do it.”

My face puckered up, but I imagined my aura going thin at my fingertips, peeling back from my fingers, soaking into my skin and vanishing to leave a huge gaping hole in my first line of defense. Cold pinpricks stabbed my hand. My aura wanted to return, but I held it off.

“Good.” It had been a hopeful grunt of approval, and I caught back my adrenaline before I lost control. Before me, Pierce shifted his shoulders, clearly uncomfortable as well as he removed his own aura. The rings felt unnaturally heavy in my palm, and Pierce’s loose grip around my hand, intimate.

“Now, I’m of a mind that your gargoyle, Bis, has been leading you in the practice of shifting your aura,” he said, and I nodded, nervous. “Then simply tune the entirety of it to the clearest red you can imagine.”

I met his eyes, seeing an unknown emotion. I couldn’t see my aura, but he could, and flustered, I shifted it, knowing I had it right when he nodded. “Just so,” he said. “Let a thin ribbon of it spill down into your hand. Mind you keep it a trace!” he exclaimed, and I backed off. It was hardly a whisper, but as it touched the rings nestled in my palm, I swear I heard them chime, like the ringing of a glass when you run your finger along the top. I could feel my aura like warm silk, tracing down the soft part of my arm and making a warm pool in my palm.

“You have a knack,” he prompted, clearly pleased. “But even so, there’s too much. It is an art, and you have to plan ahead such that it just fills the memory and no more.”

I licked my lips, eyeing the rings and my aura echoing from them. “How’s this?” I asked as I backed off until there was almost no “sound” at all.

“Perfect. But be of a mind that it’s harder to remove it once given. Err on the side of hunger.”

Smiling, I looked up. There was a happy contentment in his eyes. My smile faded. “Pierce, I can’t do this.”

“You’re halfway there,” he cajoled, and I shook my head, pulling my hand from his.

“No, I mean you! You’re standing there, looking at me as if we just came out of that hole in the ground in Trent’s woods. I can’t do this! I can’t ask you to help me when you think there might be a chance that someday . . .”

My words cut off. I was helpless to continue. Head shaking ruefully, he took my hand back in his own. “I know when I’ve been given the shrug,” he said, tilting his head to keep me quiet when I rushed to explain. “You did well by me, and we both turned our attentions elsewhere. I’d be a cad to expect you to think of me as anything other than fondly. But a man can’t help but remember. Now, hold the aura as it is and shift it to orange. What is needed of the red will remain within the charm. Easy now. If you can do this, then you can do the rest.”

“Thank you,” I breathed, hanging my head and closing my eyes because I couldn’t bear to look at him anymore.
Orange,
I thought, shifting my aura as Bis and I had been practicing. This was easier than the melding of colors that we usually did, sitting at an outside café and trying to mimic the auras of people passing by, and Pierce’s grunt of approval was like a wash of hope through me.

“Now to yellow,” he prompted. “More than before since yellow is so thin to begin with.”

I knew what he meant, and like hearing a partial chord of a song and knowing what came next, I layered another complexity over the rings, seeing it soak in as the excess orange melted away. The rings were starting to hum, taking on a note all their own.

“The blues and purples,” he whispered, excitement in his voice. “You are a caution, Rachel. The demon you will be!”

I almost lost it, but caught myself, concentrating on the feel of his hands around mine as I added the last. Sweat trickled down, and I cracked open an eye at the funny tickle of feeling in my chi. My aura wanted to flood the rings with power, and I held it tight.

“My God . . .” Pierce breathed. “Easy, Rachel. Hint at a shadow of black. It should have invoked. It needs a harmony of something else, something dark. I’ve never charmed elven silver; it needs something else.”

I was holding my breath, and I let it out as I turned my aura to an ultraviolet hue. It was as if smut snaked down my arm, but when it hit the rings, it pooled around them, refusing to join.

And then tiny cracks appeared in the cold, dead metal.
Shit.

“Easy . . .” Pierce whispered as he stared at them. “Let it soak in.”

My head was starting to hurt, and my arm felt dead. Pinpricks coated it, and I began to shake. The cracks grew, sending spiderwebs of instability through the surface of the rings. Panicked, I froze. There wasn’t enough energy in there yet to rekindle the charm, but any more, and it would break. “Pierce?” I warbled, and his fingers around mine grew warm.

“I can’t do anything,” he said. “Rachel, you have to finish it!”

“It’s going to break!” I said. “I can’t hold it!”

“It’s that damned elven magic,” he said, and I caught my breath when his hands left mine. “Your energy is not mixing with the original maker’s. Can you . . . think elf thoughts?”

Think elf thoughts,
I mocked in my head, but the cracks weren’t going away. I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t move forward. I knew it would blow them to hell if I just let it go. “Elf thoughts,” I muttered, frowning as I thought of Trent, tricky, proud, arrogant.

The skin of the rings seemed to shimmer, and I took a quick breath. The cracks were still there, but it felt right. My teeth clenched, and the memory of Trent’s music as he sung my soul to sleep slipped into me, hazy from my subconscious. It was his plea to his goddess that he didn’t believe in to listen, the source of his wild magic. It circled around and around in my head until I felt a somnolent nothing seem to take notice, hesitating in its glorious song, turning one of a thousand eyes to me.
Hear me,
I thought, begging.
See what I’m doing. Lend me your skill.

Wild magic smiled at me, and the skin of the rings warbled. My last shining of aura reached for the rings, and with a ping of sound that echoed in my soul, the magic vibrated through me and became one. That simple, the rings reinvoked themselves and sealed.

I gasped, staring at the rings glowing in my palm like glory itself.

“Well, I’ll be!” Pierce beamed as his protective circle flickered and went out. “You did it! First time out of the box!”

Elated, I clutched the rings. I had a chance now. I had a chance to fix the line, to free Lucy and Ceri. I looked at the clock on the stove before I remembered where I was. I had to get back to Trent. We had to move on this, and now!

“Thank you, Pierce, thank you!” I said, pulling him into an expansive hug, my clenched hand with the rings tight to his back. “I couldn’t have done it without you. I can do something now. Thank you!”

He was smiling when I dropped back, his curls at his forehead damp with the heat, and my expression froze when he touched my hair. “You did it, not me,” he said. “All of it. I only told you how. You never needed me. Even when you were but a young woman.”

I let go of him, the memory of what lay in his eyes rushing back. “I did,” I said, needing to be honest. “I did need you. I was strong with you. You helped me find that.” Eyes down, I shoved the rings away. “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was over, but not remembering why.

Pierce took a step back to put more space between us. “I demanded too much,” he said, his sadness at himself, not me. “I see in your heart you found someone who makes you strong who does not hold too tight, who has learned that the pain of losing you to fate is more than the pain of you dying in a cage. Who is he?”

I looked at the clock again. “No one.”

“Ivy?” he guessed, immediately shaking his head. “No. Someone new? No, someone old,” he said firmly, his eyes going to my pocket. “An elf?” he guessed, then became ashen. “Kalamack?” he blurted, taking my shoulders. “Rachel, no,” he pleaded. “I know I have no right, but he lies. He deceives. It is their nature. This is his plan, isn’t it? That you come here, risking yourself instead of him?”

“It was my plan,” I said, pulling back in anger. Oh yes, now I remembered why it hadn’t worked. “It was all I could do to make him stay and not follow me here. He would’ve been recognized. I have a right to be here.” I glanced at Newt’s kitchen. “Well, not here, here, but the ever-after. Besides, would you’ve taught him how to invoke the rings?”

Damn it, he’d made me mad at him again, and I didn’t want to be.