The Lost Prince (26 page)

“Be sure that you do, pet.” Leanansidhe pursed her lips, sucking on her cigarette flute. She sighed, and the smoke image of a rooster went scurrying away over our heads. “If I find one more creature in this house turned to stone…” She trailed off, but the terrifying look in her eyes spoke louder than words.

The dwarf grabbed the hissing, cloth-covered box and hurried away, muttering under his breath. We stepped aside as he passed and continued down the stairs without glancing at us, then disappeared into the shadows.

Leanansidhe pinched the bridge of her nose, then straightened and looked right at us. “Well, well,” she purred, smiling in a way I did not like at all, “Keirran, darling. Here you are again. To what do I owe the pleasure?” She gave me a cursory glance before turning back to Keirran. “And you brought a pair of humans with you, I see. More strays, darling?” She shook her head. “Your concern for hopeless waifs is very touching, but if you think you’re going to dump them here, dove, I’m afraid I just don’t have the room.”

Keirran bowed. “Leanansidhe.” He nodded, looking around at the crowd of fey. “Looks like you have a full house.”

“Noticed that, did you, pet?” The Exile Queen sighed and puffed out a cougar. “Yes, I have been reduced to running the Goblin Market from my own living room, which makes it very difficult to concentrate on other things. Not to mention it’s driving my human pets even more crazy than usual. They can barely strum a note or hold a tune with all the chaos around.” She touched two elegant fingers to her temple, as if she had a headache. Keirran looked unimpressed.

The Exile Queen sniffed. “Sadly, I’m very busy at the moment, darling, so if you want to make yourself useful, why don’t you be a good boy and take a message home? Tell the Iron Queen that something is going on in the real world, and she might want to know about it. If you’re here just to make googly-eyes at Annwyl, my darling prince, I’m afraid I don’t have time for you.”

Prince? Wait.
“Wait.” I turned, very slowly, to stare at Keirran, ignoring the Exile Queen for the moment. Keirran grimaced and didn’t look at me. “Care to say that again?” I asked, disbelief making my stomach knot. My mouth was suddenly dry. “You’re a prince—of the Iron Realm? Then, you…you’re Meghan’s…” I couldn’t even finish the thought.

From the corner of my eye, Leanansidhe straightened. “Ethan Chase.” Her voice was low and dangerous, as if she’d just figured out who was standing in her living room. I couldn’t look at her now, though. My attention was riveted to Keirran.

He shot me a pained, embarrassed wince. “Yeah. I was going to tell you…sooner or later. There just wasn’t a good time.” He paused, his voice going very soft. “I’m sorry…Uncle.”

Razor let out a high-pitched, buzzing laugh. “Uncle!” he howled, oblivious to the looks of horror and disgust he was getting from every faery in the room. “Uncle, uncle! Uncle Ethan!”

Part III

Chapter Sixteen

Leanansidhe’s Price

I felt numb. And slightly sick.

Keirran—this faery before me—was Ash and Meghan’s
son.
How had I not figured it out before? Everything fit together: his human blood, his Iron glamour, even the familiar expressions on his face. They were familiar because I’d seen them before. On Meghan. I could see the resemblance now; his eyes, hair and facial features—they were all my sister’s. But Ash’s shadow hovered there as well, in his jaw, his stance, the way he moved.

For a second, I hated him.

Before either of us could say anything, the exiled fey in the room gasped and snarled, surging away from Keirran as if he had a disease. Murmurs of “the Iron prince,” spread through the crowd, and the circle of fey seemed to hover between bowing down or fleeing the room. Leanansidhe gave us both an extremely exasperated glare, as if we were the cause of her headaches, and snapped her fingers at us.

“Annwyl, darling.” The Exile Queen’s tone made the fey girl cringe, and Keirran moved to stand protectively beside her. “Wait here, would you, dove? Try to keep the masses in check while I deal with this little bump. You three.” She shifted that cold gaze to us, her tone brooking no argument. “Follow me, pets. And, Keirran, keep that wretched gremlin under control this time, or I’ll be forced to do something drastic.”

Kenzie, forgotten beside us all, shot me a worried glance, and I shrugged, trying to look unconcerned. We started to follow Leanansidhe, but Annwyl and Keirran lingered for a moment. Leanansidhe rolled her eyes. “Sometime today, pets.” She sighed, as Annwyl finally turned away and Keirran looked dejected. “While I’m still in a reasonable enough mood not to turn anyone into a cello.”

Turning in a swirl of blue smoke, the Exile Queen led us out of the room, down several long, red-carpeted hallways, and into a library. Huge shelves of books lined the walls, and a lively tune swam through the air, played by a human with a violin in the far corner.

“Out, Charles,” Leanansidhe announced as she swept into the room, and the human quickly packed up his instrument and fled through another door.

The Exile Queen spun on us. “Well!” she exclaimed, gazing down at me, her hair writhing around her. “Ethan Chase. This
is
a surprise. The son and the brother of the Iron Queen, come to visit at the same time, what an occasion. How is your darling older sister, pet?” she asked me. “I assume you’ve been to see her recently?”

“Meghan’s fine,” I muttered, feeling self-conscious with Keirran standing there. Now that I knew we were…related…it felt weird, talking about Meghan in front of him.

Screw that. You want weird? Weird is having a nephew the same age as you. Weird is your sister having a kid, and not telling your family about him. Weird is being an uncle to a freaking half-faery! Forget weird, you are so beyond weird that it’s not funny.

Leanansidhe
tsked
and looked at Keirran, and a slow smile crossed her lips. “And Keirran, you devious boy,” she purred. “You didn’t tell him, did you?” She laughed then, shaking her head. “Well, this is an unexpected family drama, isn’t it? I wonder what the Iron Queen would say if she could be here now?”

“Wait a second.” Kenzie’s voice broke in, bewildered and incredulous. “Keirran is
your nephew?
He’s the Iron Queen’s son? But…you’re the same age!” She gestured wildly. “How in the world does that work?”

“Ah, well.” Keirran shrugged, looking embarrassed. “Remember the screwy time differences in Faery? That’s part of it. Also, the fey mature at a faster rate than mortals—comes with living in a place as dangerous as the Nevernever, I guess. We grow up quickly until we hit a certain point, then we just…stop.” He gave another sheepish grin. “Trust me, you’re not the only ones to be shocked. It was a big surprise for Mom, too.”

I glared at Keirran, forgetting Kenzie and Leanansidhe for the moment. “Why didn’t you say anything?” I demanded.

Keirran sighed. “How?” he asked, lifting his hands away from his sides, before letting them drop. “When would it have come up?
Oh, by the way, I’m the prince of the Iron Realm, and your nephew. Surprise!”
He shrugged again, made a hopeless gesture. “It would’ve been weird. And…awkward. And I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me if you knew.”

“Why didn’t Meghan say anything? That’s kind of a big thing to keep from your family.”

“I don’t know, Ethan.” Keirran shook his head. “She never talks about you, never speaks about her human life. I didn’t even know I had another family until a few years ago.” He paused, ran his fingers through his silver hair. “I was shocked when I heard that the queen had a brother living in the mortal world. But when I asked her about it, she told me that we had to live separate lives, that mingling the two families would only bring trouble to us both. I disagreed—I wanted to meet you, but she forbade me to come and see you at all.”

He sounded sincere and genuinely sorry, that he hadn’t been able to introduce himself. My anger with him dissolved a little, only to switch to another target.
Meghan,
I thought, furious.
How could you? How could you not tell us? What was the point?

“When I heard you were at the palace,” Keirran went on, his face earnest, as if he was willing me to believe him, “I couldn’t believe it. I had to see for myself. But when Razor told me what you said—that something was killing off exiles and half-breeds—I knew I had to get to Annwyl, make sure she was safe. So I thought,
two birds with one stone, why not?
” He offered a shrug and a wry grin, before sobering once more. “I didn’t tell you everything, and I’m sorry for that. But I had to make certain you would follow me out of the Iron Realm.”

My head was still reeling. Meghan’s son. My nephew. I could barely wrap my mind around it. I didn’t know if I should be disgusted, horrified, ecstatic or completely weirded out. I
did
know that I was going to have to talk to Meghan about this, ask why she felt it was important to keep us in the dark. Screw this “living separate lives” crap. She had a kid! Half-faery or no, you did not keep that sort of thing from your family.

“Well,” Leanansidhe interjected with a wave of her cigarette flute, “much as I’m enjoying this little drama, pets, I’m afraid we cannot sit around and argue the whole day. I have larger problems to attend to. I assume you boys did not see the abominations lurking around the fairgrounds?”

“We did, actually.”

It wasn’t Keirran who answered the Exile Queen. It was Kenzie. I grimaced and turned away from the Iron prince, vowing to deal with this later, when I had time to think it through. Right now, the Dark Muse had turned her attention on the girl who, up until this point, had been standing off to the side, watching the drama play out. Truthfully, I was happy for that; it was probably best that she avoid Leanansidhe’s notice as much as she could. But, of course, Kenzie could never stay silent for long.

“We did see them,” she repeated, and the Dark Muse blinked at her in surprise. “Well,
they
did,” she continued, jerking her head at me and Keirran. “I couldn’t see anything. But I do know something attacked us. They’re the ones killing off your people, right?”

“And, who are you again, dove?”

“Oh, sorry,” Kenzie went on, as Leanansidhe continued to stare as if she was seeing the girl for the first time. “I’m Mackenzie, Ethan’s classmate. We sort of got pulled into the Nevernever together.”

“How…tenacious,” Leanansidhe mused after a moment. And I didn’t know if she found Kenzie amusing or offensive. I hoped it was the former. “Well, if you must know, darling, yes, something out there is making exiles disappear. As you can see from the state of my living room, the exiled fey are practically tearing down my walls trying to get in. I haven’t had this much trouble since the war with the Iron fey.” She paused and leveled a piercing glare at Razor, humming on Keirran’s shoulder. The gremlin seemed happily oblivious.

“Any idea what’s causing it?” Kenzie asked, slipping into reporter mode like she had at the tournament. If she’d had a notebook, it would have been flipped open right now, pencil scribbling furiously. Leanansidhe sighed.

“Vague ideas, darling. Rumors of horrible monsters sucking the glamour out of their victims until they are lifeless husks. I’ve never seen the horrid things, of course, but there have been several disappearances from the fairgrounds, as well as all over the world.”

“All over the world?” I broke in. “Is it really that widespread?”

Leanansidhe gave me an eerie stare. “You have no idea, darling,” she said softly. “And neither do the courts. Your sister remains happily ignorant to the threat in the mortal realm, and Summer and Winter do not even care. But…let me show you something.”

She strode to a table in the corner of the room, where a huge map of the world lay spread across the wood. Red dots marked the surface, some isolated, some clumped together. There were a fair number spread across North America, but also a bunch in England, Ireland and Great Britain. Scattered, perhaps. It wasn’t as though a whole area was covered with red. No continent was unmarked, however. North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, South America. They all had their share of red dots.

“I’ve been tracking disappearances,” Leanansidhe said into the stunned silence. “Exiles and half-breeds alike. As you can see, darlings, it’s quite widespread. And each time I send someone out to investigate, they do not return. It’s becoming—” Leanansidhe pursed her lips “—annoying.”

I gazed at the map, my fingers hovering over a spot in the United States. Two bright red dots in the state of Louisiana, near my home town.

Todd.

Keirran scanned the table, his expression grave. “And the other courts do nothing?” he murmured. “Mab and Oberon and Titania don’t know what’s going on?”

“They’ve been informed, darling,” Leanansidhe said, waving her cigarette flute in a dismissive manner. “However, the Summer and Winter courts do not think it important enough to intervene. What do they care about the lives of a few exiles and half-breeds? As long as the problem remains in the mortal realm, they are content to do nothing.”

“Why didn’t you tell Meghan?” I broke in. “She would’ve done something. She’s trying to do something now.”

Leanansidhe frowned at me. “That might be true, pet. But sadly, I have no way to get a message to the Iron Queen without my informants dropping dead from iron sickness. It is very difficult to contact the Iron Realm when no one is willing to set foot there. In fact, I was waiting for this one—” she waved her flute at Keirran “—to come sniffing around after Annwyl again, so that I could give him a message to bring back to Mag Tuiredh.”

Keirran blushed slightly but didn’t reply. Razor giggled on his shoulder.

I looked down at the map again, my thoughts whirling. So many gone. A part of me said not to care, that the fey were finally getting what they deserved after centuries of making humans disappear.

But there was more at stake now. Todd was still missing, and I’d promised to find him. Meghan would be getting involved soon. And now, there was Keirran.