Remnants of Magic (36 page)

“Trap?”

“Possibly.”

Tiernan covered the electronic keypad with his cupped hand. With eyes closed and head tilted he concentrated until the system made a tone of acceptance. Then he gripped the doorknob. The tumblers moved with metallic clicks and the deadbolt slid open with a soft scrape. Tiernan glanced back. “I’ll go left.” He pushed the door open, and hurried off on silent feet.

Donovan slipped inside and veered to the right. The interior boasted no attempt at decor with only the minimal of functional furnishings. The odor of medicinal antiseptics covered the lingering putrid undertones Donovan anticipated. A soft murmur of voices from a television droned from the parlor. Inside, a human leaned forward over the low coffee table strewn with the contents from the open bag of crisps. A rifle propped against the sofa beside him. No doubt lazy in his duties because of the false belief that no Sidhe would risk leaving Ireland. Like any bully who goes unchallenged, he trusted that his illusion of intimidation made him invulnerable.

From his pocket, Donovan withdrew a marble-sized rock. Propelled by his magic with the force of a high powered rifle it punctured the back of the human’s skull. The only sound of his demise was the thump as the body hit the floor.

Suddenly, the silence shattered with the snarling commotion of attacking dogs, followed closely by Tiernan’s explosive cursing.

As the clatter of pots and pans crashed and bashed, Donovan sprinted toward the back of the house. He nearly ran into Tiernan, no longer wearing Glamour, hustling out of the kitchen.

Blood flowed from beneath the torn arm of his leather jacket and dripped from his hand, leaving a trail. “I better not get rabies or I’m going to be pissed.”

“So much for the element of surprise. Let’s finish this.” Since Tiernan couldn’t maintain his Glamour, Donovan abandoned his. He wouldn’t leave the younger Sidhe as the only visible target. Nor would he allow him to be the first in the line of fire. Without stealth, he hoped to rely on speed. Donovan charged up the steps ahead of Tiernan.

Just as he reached the hallway on the second floor, thunder exploded, giving Donovan only a moment to dive out of the way of the lightning bolt that lanced toward him.

The hallway was only fifteen foot long at most, not a lot of room to maneuver. Especially not with the wizard aiming his staff at Donovan for another attack. Donovan rippled the ground beneath the building with an earthquake so violent that it toppled the wizard and sent his next lightning strike wild, hitting the ceiling with an explosion of plaster, instead of either of the Sidhe.

Hanging onto the stair rail through the quake, Tiernan barely managed to claw his way into the hallway. He reached out a hand as his magic jerked all the metal from the wizard, including the deadly staff with its platinum headpiece.

The wizard came up swinging. Donovan dodged the blow, but the wizard’s fist slammed into the wall with enough force to crumble a section of it. No novice possessed that kind of magicraft skill. The mass of embroidered patterns on the wizard’s robes enchanted him with an untold variety of stolen magic. No doubt he had far more tricks up his sleeve than just enhanced strength and lightning javelins.

Wizards like this one were the reason Donovan hadn’t risked his earthborns on this mission. Devious and deadly, there was no telling the concocted tricks up his sleeve. No two wizards were ever alike in power, skill, or creatively brutal enchantments. The longer a wizard fight lasted, the more likely they were to suss out the Sidhe’s aspect of power or exploit their weaknesses, and the more likely the wizard would prevail. Before the end of the Sidhe-wizard war, dozens of Sidhe warriors lost their lives to them.

Better to end this fight quickly.

Proximity gave Donovan the advantage. He struck the wizard in the face with the heel of his hand. The blow hit true, sending shards of his nasal bone into his brain. An instant kill. Luckily, the wizard hadn’t enchanted himself with some spell to harden his body against injury, or the battle could have easily gone the other way. Gracelessly, the wizard’s lifeless body crumpled to the floor.

The house calmed as Donovan ceased the tremors.

He stilled, listening for any more signs of movement.

Only the sound of an electronic beeping persisted. He cast a questioning glance back at Tiernan.

“Heart monitor.” He nodded to the room to the left. “Loads of electronics in there. I can feel it.”

The room beyond was indeed crammed with a bank of electronic gizmos. A young woman lay unconscious on the bed, her arms restrained to the sidebars by leather straps. Tubes and wires ran to her on the right side and a line ran from a vein in her left arm down into a blood bag; feeding her fluids at the same time as leaching off her magic-laced blood. Her fair hair was short, only a couple of ragged inches. The Sidhe was so pale, Donovan almost didn’t notice that she was Fading. The fairness of her skin was heightened by the white of the sheet beneath her partially transparent arms.

“I got this.” With intimate familiarity with needles, Tiernan removed all the tubing while Donovan detached the wires and restraints from the woman’s body. Tiernan taped gauze in place to stop the flow of blood from the puncture wounds.

“We done here?” Donovan scooped the lass into his arms. She slumped softly against his body. Beautiful and fragile. Her head rolled to rest against his shoulder. Cradling her closer, he gritted his teeth against his fury.

Someday, he meant to hunt down every wizard alive and crush them. There was no other way. They would never stop. Never.

“Hold up.” Tiernan claimed the partially filled blood bag, then checked the mini-fridge and found two more labeled ‘Sidhe.’ He cradled them in his wounded arm, and then gripped Donovan’s shoulder with his good hand. “Let’s go. Get me away from this place.”

Chapter Three

Tiernan’s ruined jacket lay across the back of the chair he lounged in. He smirked lecherously at Dawn as she healed his mauled arm. The healer affected boredom at his interest, but when she turned away Donovan caught the hint of her own salacious smile. When she returned to the bedside, her back to Tiernan, he made no secret of checking out her rump with a lazy tilt of his head. The two played at this flirting game periodically, without any real hurry to see it to its eventual conclusion.

But as Dawn stroked her fingertips over the needle in the young woman’s semi-transparent arm, her expression turned serious. “I’ve done all I can for her.”

Disconcerting, since the young woman looked no better than she had in the wizard’s stronghold, even with the transfusion of her own blood returned to her. Donovan had feared as much, though. “So it’s definitely the Fade and not something the wizards did to her?”

“The wizards accelerated the decline, to be sure.”

Donovan ran his fingers through the girl’s shorn hair. “Fair features, typical of the Seelie. My guess is that she’s Mounds born. If the wizards captured her in the wake of the Collapse and shaved her head, it might have grown out this much by now.”

“Still has her fingers,” Tiernan observed coolly. “What about her toes?”

“She’s intact.” Dawn silenced his morbid speculation, though the lass was indeed lucky to still have them. “Though there are needle tracks. They bled her regularly.” Taking the girl’s hair and blood had been only the first stages of the brutal process. The wizards harvested all parts of the fey for their magicraft.

“She’ll Fade completely soon, without the Mounds to renew her magic.” Donovan searched the faces of the other two. “How do we get her connected to the earth realm?”

Dawn shrugged. “The earthborns are connected at birth. I’ve never heard anyone even speak of any other way.”

With a sigh, Tiernan leaned back. His head rested on the back of the chair as he stared off into middle distance. “I was Mounds born. So were my parents. I was nothing but a sprout of less than a decade when they chose exile. After we came to the surface, seems as though it just occurred over time, gradually weaning off the Mounds and connecting with the earth realm. Took maybe a decade or two, I guess.”

“She doesn’t have that kind of time.” Dawn sat on the edge of the bed, lightly holding the girl’s frail hand

“And she’s not strong enough to survive what I went through to connect.” Donovan cut a glance to Tiernan. “It’s almost as if the wizards intentionally meant to cause the Fade by siphoning off her magic. We know they were drugging her, even in this state, to extract the Touch.”

“Wizard brew?”

Donovan nodded.

The string of curses from Tiernan was a creative blend of Gaelic and dark elf dialects. He pushed himself up and stormed to the window, glaring out of it. “I’m telling you! These wizards are not just threatening my business and my trade routes. They are not confined to England. And the protections around Ireland are starting to crumble.”

He turned around and propped his bum against the windowsill. His fingers gripped the sill so tightly his knuckles turned white. “Since the Collapse the fey have weakened, but the wizards grow stronger. Now, how is that? They steal our magic to power theirs. And yet they grow bolder and more powerful by the day.
How is that?
I’m telling you Donovan, this isn’t just my problem. We’ll all be strapped to beds, bald, and bleeding our last drop before this is over.”

“You and I alone cannot defeat them. And the earthborns aren’t ready.”

“Better the bloody hell get them ready!” He shoved himself up from the window, stomped over to the bed, and pointed a shaking finger at the girl. “I don’t wanna end up like this!”

“We won’t.” Spoken with stone-cold determination.

“There’s a war coming, mark what I’m telling you. And there aren’t enough Sidhe to drive the wizards back the next time they swarm Ireland.”

Chapter Four

Leaning on his forearms over the equipment, Malcolm drummed his thumbs on the amplifier for the electric guitar, playing along to the music in his head. Only it wasn’t just in his head. It was in the magic. Echoing weakly.

Getting weaker.

The girl’s magic. The one Donovan saved from the wizards. The one lying unconscious upstairs with Dawn’s constant attention, but who still wasn’t getting any better. The one who was Fading by the second.

Dying.

Malcolm drummed louder, matching her music with his own, as if that might help. Every second, she died a little more. It made him edgy. He drummed faster.

Kieran reached up and squished Malcolm’s hands down flat. “Will you stop already? I’m trying to concentrate.”

Like his concentrating made any difference. For the last three hours Kieran sat cross-legged in the center of a tangle of cables, wires, and threads of magic, surrounded by the sound equipment and enchantments at the back of the stage, and he was still no closer to weaving the magic that Eircheard wanted of him.

Malcolm jerked his hands out from under Kieran’s. Normally, the Glamour Club’s music would have drowned out anything Malcolm might have heard in the magic, but the live band for that evening left early, chased off by the dwarf in charge of maintenance and renovations, so the place was pretty quiet.

“Focus!” Eircheard swatted Kieran on the shoulder with a rolled up parchment. The dwarf’s braided mustache dangled all the way down to his barrel chest and bopped around with his energetic aggravation. “The music through the old enchantments sounds like it’s piped through a tin can in a thunderstorm.”

“I think it sounds like the music in any other club,” Kieran mumbled, earning himself a whack in the head with the rolled paper.

“Tin can in a thunderstorm, laddie! Has snogging all the lassies puddled your brains? Focus!”

After a bunch of frustrated grumping noises, Kieran demanded, “What am I doing wrong?” He wasn’t asking the dwarf, but Malcolm. Kieran stared down at his hands. He couldn’t see his own magic, but Malcolm could. Thin little tornadoes about as tall as a bottle of Guinness appeared, dancing in his palms. Nothing like the threads of magic Eircheard could draw out of himself and weave together into enchantments.

Malcolm leaned over the amplifier. “You keep making sound magic. It’s gotta be the raw stuff.” All the fey had loads of magic inside them, just flowing and filling them up with threads of energy. You had to look real close to see all the detail, otherwise it was just a jumble of color and lights. Leastwise, that’s how it was for Malcolm, who could see the magic like nobody else could. “You’re never going to get it, doing it like you are. Here…” He reached over and caught one of the threads of Kieran’s magic moving close to the surface of his palm and gave it a tug, trying to help him to get it out before he could twist it into a tornado of sound.

“Ow!” Kieran yanked away. “What the bloody, blinking crap, Malcolm!” He shook out his hand like he’d just snatched it back from a hot stove or something. Pain-tears glistened in his eyes as he gripped his palm and rocked back and forth like he was in all kinds of hurt.

“Now you don’t be doing that, laddie!” Eircheard pointed his rolled up parchment at Malcolm’s face.

“What? What did I do?” He drummed his hands on the amplifier, matching the girl’s music again. It was constantly there. Constantly playing in his head. Playing over and over. Desperate. Afraid. Almost too soft to hear. Only just barely there, so he had to strain to catch each note.

“Will you stop drumming already?” Pissed off, Kieran smacked at Malcolm’s hands.

“I can’t stop!” Malcolm pushed up from the amplifier. His insides prickled, knowing that the music was fraying and falling apart. It made him feel icky inside. Twisted and hurting on accounta the music hurt so bad and no one could hear it crying out.

Once he got going, he couldn’t bear to slow down. Panic bubbled up inside, driving him into a full-out run up the steps to the second floor.

The music needed him.

Now!

Malcolm banged against the door to Dawn’s flat. He tried the handle. Locked. If he could teleport, he’d have gone right inside anyway. So instead, he kicked the door. “Dawn! Let me in!”