Unbinding (36 page)

“I could fire it, but I wouldn’t hit anything. I’ve never even held a gun. I’ll stick with what I . . . oh, shit.” The imminence suddenly cracked open, freezing Kai in place.

A face appeared in the sky directly over the hobbit house. A beautiful face, startlingly so, with dusky skin, full lips, Asian eyes. The cheekbones were Slavic. The nose was as Roman as Nero. The face glowed, as did the mist swirling beneath it. Mist that grew solid, or solid-seeming, until a man the size of a high-rise stood amid the lowering clouds. A man with the face of a god.

“My people,” the god-man said, and his voice was the wind, heard everywhere. He smiled sweetly, lovingly. “Though you do not yet know yourselves to be mine, you will. I am called Dyffaya áv Eni. My realm is chaos, and I am here to make you mine.

“Oh, but I am besotted with you—your love of change, your delight in the new and the different! I would court you like a lover, if you allow it.” The clouds framing him turned golden, swirling into fantastic shapes—castles, flowers, birds. “I bring dreams and dance, song and story, the electric arc of change. I have much to give, for all things flow from chaos—the joy of discovery. Delight in the odd or peculiar. And darker things. Your city has had a taste of chaos now. I can do more.” The clouds darkened. “Dreams may be nightmares. Do not turn me aside.

“I am not a jealous lover. I long for a place in your hearts, but I don’t need to be your only one. Attend your church or synagogue if you wish, but don’t turn me aside, my lovely ones. I insist. You
will
worship me.”

He knelt up there in the air and held out two vast, cupped hands, as if offering a drink of water. Opened them—and spilled out monsters.

“Call on Me,” he said, and his voice was thunder now, not mere wind, as creatures rained down on Old Town—red-skinned beasts like hairless hyenas. Two-legged lizards with saber-toothed grins. Scaled creatures with enormous claws. They floated down as the god spoke. “If one of My pets finds you, fall on your knees and ask for My protection. Call on Dyffaya. Call on chaos. I will hear, and you won’t be harmed. You may be marked, but you won’t be harmed. Afterwards, look for My sign.”

One finger moved, tracing a lightning-bright sigil shaped like a backwards C with the arms almost touching. “
Look for my sign!”
he thundered—and vanished.

Kai wasn’t paying much attention to him by then. She was busy.

The creature charging her had red eyes and a lot of slobber around its toothy muzzle. It was the size of a St. Bernard. The one José was firing at was the size of a small pony, with scales and great big claws. Maybe Ackleford was shooting at that one, too. She couldn’t see, but she heard his gun go off.

Fortunately, the beast was as slow as a St. Bernard, too, and a lot dumber. It all but ran itself up on her blade. Which in turn slowed her a moment. She barely got Teacher free in time to deal with the pair of red-skinned monsters coming up behind it.

They had the massive chests and sloped backs of hyenas, mottled red skin, and the teeth of crocodiles. And they weren’t as stupid as the first beast. They dodged her blade and split to circle her and the others, looking for an opening.

Maybe they’d never seen guns before. One of them charged José. The other went for Ackleford. It didn’t work out well for them.

“Pull back!” Ackleford yelled, moving in front of her with his gun extended.

Something really large and hairy had spotted them. It looked like a cross between a lion and a woolly mammoth—lots of fur, short legs, massive body, tusks. And big. Fifteen feet at the shoulders. It lumbered toward them at a fair clip for something so large. Ackleford fired. It didn’t seem to notice.

Kai reached for the beast’s mind—a seething turmoil of angry reds and oranges that scarcely qualified as thought, but was the product of that mind, not under someone else’s control, and so available to her.

The great beast’s front legs folded. It sank slowly down, fast asleep.

“Cool,” José said.

A fusillade of shots sounded from the police barricade, out of sight due to the curve of the road. A scream.

Kai spun just as Ackleford shouted, “Incoming!”

A damned battalion of the hyena creatures streaked around the curve of the road, heading straight for them. Too many, way too many to send into sleep, but she could get a couple of them. Kai reached out quickly and touched the mind of the one in the lead, sending sleep. It faltered and collapsed.

“Fall back,” José commanded tersely, and began retreating backward, firing steadily. Ackleford kept pace with him. One, then another and another of the creatures fell—but there were too many, and the tide of beasts was splitting as they ran, aiming to surround them. Smart beasts, or controlled? She didn’t see the signs of control she’d seen in the chameleons, just lots of maddened, red-orange fury.

They weren’t going to make it to cover.

“Take this,” José said, handing Ackleford his gun. “I need teeth.”

As he began the Change, the beasts charged.

Kai set her feet, made sure her body was loose, relaxed.
Teacher, I’m going to need some help.
That was her last clear thought for a while.

She took the first one through the neck before José completed his Change. The second and third fell to Ackleford’s gun and to her blade. She lost track after that, though she remained aware of the enormous wolf—bigger than the red beasts, and faster—who kept them off her back while she shifted and spun and coated the street with slippery red blood.

At some point Ackleford’s gun stopped firing. Out of ammo. She closed up automatically, keeping the beasts away from the unarmed man. One of the animals got through, but he blunted his teeth on her vest. And then she split his skull open.

She did not notice when the Marines arrived until they started firing. Whatever they were shooting was very, very loud. And effective. After a few seconds of that devastating fire, the remaining hyenas took off.

Abruptly Kai was back in charge of her body again, panting for breath, her arm aching—but from exertion, not a wound. Everything the vest didn’t cover was covered in blood, but none of it was hers. She was amazingly intact and about to ask if the others were okay—when the lion-mammoth stirred and shoved to its feet.

She gathered her focus. She’d sent sleep twice, but she wasn’t tapped out. She could—

“Now that,” Ackleford said, “is just not right.”

She was about to tell him it was okay, she’d handle it—when a peculiar gust of wind, some swish of sound, made her look up.

Another battalion of monsters had arrived, this one airborne. Bats. Giant bats, their wingspans longer than a pickup, and two of them were stooping down on Kai, Ackleford, and José. “Come on,” she said, grabbing his arm. They needed cover—and to get out of the line of fire so those Marines could fire whatever-it-was without hitting them.

The lion-mammoth was between them and the Café Coyote. Ackleford, jarred into motion, did a fine job of dragging her toward the hobbit house. With its overgrown, vegetative wall at her back she stopped, turning to look for José.

Something smashed into the back of her head. Pain blinded her, swarmed up from the depths and swamped her, carrying her down into darkness.

K
AI
had woken from a head injury twice. The first time, after the crash that killed her parents, she’d come back in bits and pieces, knowing a terrible grief but not the reason for it. She’d been in a coma that time, which was why she’d come back piecemeal, bits of memory tangling up with the present, words elusive at first. The second time had been in Faerie. She’d awakened pretty much all at once, her head sore but her mind clear.

This time seemed to hit somewhere between the two. She floated up into pain, bobbing along on its surface for some timeless interval, aware only of the pain . . . and failure. Failure so deep and terrible it made a weight she could barely breathe through.

Eventually she realized that pain must mean she’d been hurt. But she wasn’t in a hospital. It didn’t smell right . . . though she did smell blood, the rest of the smells weren’t right. And she was lying on her side, not her back, and whatever she lay on did not feel like a hospital bed.

Monsters. There’d been monsters, yes, she remembered now. And Ackleford and José and . . . she got her eyes open.

Her vision was badly blurred. She blinked a few times . . . oh. Not a damaged retina. A dislodged contact. When her eyelid moved she could feel it stuck up high on her left eyeball, which felt dry and scratchy. She had drops in her pocket. She started to reach for them—only she couldn’t move her arms. Either of them. Her hands were fastened behind her back.

She closed her left eye and the room came into focus, though what she saw didn’t make sense. She lay on a too-short couch in a nineteenth-century parlor. Where in the hell . . . oh. Whaley House. She’d been outside it. Now, apparently, she was inside.

Or maybe she was still unconscious and having the weirdest dream ever.

“There’s no point pretending you aren’t awake,” a smooth, light voice said from somewhere behind her. “I can tell the difference between waking and sleeping thoughts, you know.”

Kai jolted. Which hurt her head enough to wash away most of the shock from hearing that voice, though the sense of failure persisted. How had she not known? Not guessed? Not had one bloody clue . . . “Not pretending anything. Not moving because my head hurts. Someone cracked my skull.”

A woman moved slowly into view. She was beautiful, of course, long-limbed and ethereally slim. It wasn’t a human beauty, though the dress she wore was a human style. Her eyes were too large and widespread, and no human ever had irises of such pure aquamarine, or hair in that soft, pale shade of yellow. Her limbs were overly long in proportion to her trunk, her shoulders too narrow—but that’s how elves were built. Soon you stopped seeing those proportions as odd and saw only the grace.

“That was I,” Eharin An’Ahedra said languidly. “I wasn’t sure how hard to hit, and it seemed better to err on the side of too much force than too little. Why are you keeping one eye closed? It looks odd.”

Kai’s mindhealing teacher was speaking excellent English with a hint of Midwestern twang. That had not been true the last time Kai saw her. “My contact is stuck in the wrong place. Would you mind untying me so I can put some drops in my eye?”

“Yes, I would. What is . . oh, a lens you put into your eye. How primitive.” She sat on the coffee table and tilted her head. “I had expected to be bombarded with questions. You’ve always been so dreary about that—questions, questions.”

“Where are José and Ackleford?” She’d failed them. Failed everyone.

“Who?”

“The two men who were with me. Well, one was a wolf at the time you cracked my skull.”

“I don’t know what happened to the wolf. Probably he was killed.”

No, José couldn’t be dead. Couldn’t. It would be all her fault and—and that dreary gray bubble clinging to her temple wasn’t hers. She didn’t see her own thoughts. “Stop that,” she snapped. Rather clumsily—it was hard to focus when her head hurt—she shoved Eharin’s malicious thought bubble away.

“It took you long enough to notice.”

“Have you ever had a concussion?”

“I thought you were claiming your skull was broken?”

Kai lay quiet a moment, gathering her resources. Trying to think about something other than how much she’d like to kill Eharin. The desire was almost pure, it was so vivid. She’d always believed that anyone could be driven to kill, under the right circumstances. She hadn’t known that a split head and betrayal were her own triggers.

“Is it my death you’re contemplating?” Eharin asked, mildly curious.

Kai’s teacher might not have much power, but she had two centuries’ more experience than Kai did at interpreting what she sensed. She couldn’t read Kai’s mind, but she could make uncannily good guesses about what she sensed. “Oh, yes. What about Ackleford? Is he all right? And those four people, the ones you brought here—where are they?”

“They died happy, providing the fuel we needed to enact today’s script.”

Kai felt a sudden spasm of grief. If only she’d been faster, better, able to detangle the mess Dyffaya had made of those minds. She thought of the young woman who’d struggled briefly against the compulsions. It hurt.

Eharin made a
tch
sound. “If you were going to live long enough for it to matter, I would counsel you, as your teacher, to abandon your absurd sensitivity. It interferes with the detachment necessary for careful work.”

As if her counsel meant anything now. Kai’s throat was thick. “Ackleford?”

“He’s busy telling everyone what to do. I believe he’ll succeed in getting that woman out of jail. She’s supposed to be good with wards. He hopes she’ll be able to lift the one barring them from this floor of the house.”

“Will she?”

“Not in time.” She smiled faintly. Eharin did everything with exquisite restraint. An all-out smile would probably crack her face. “Your Ackleford is destined to disappointment in another way as well. One of those Marines he’s ordering around is not going to do as he says. Instead he’ll do my bidding.”

Kai’s head hurt too much for all this elliptical shit. “Why am I lying here with a cracked skull?”

“Do you think it’s really cracked?”

“Hard to say. Why are you here?”

“I felt sure you’d get around to asking that eventually.” She shifted, tucking one leg up under her in a way that should have looked awkward and crudely revealing, given the snug sheath she was wearing. It didn’t. “Dyffaya wants you.”

“I guessed that much. Though he seems to have trouble deciding whether he wants me alive or dead.”

“No, he’s quite clear on the subject. He wants you alive. I’m the one who wants you dead.”

That was direct enough. “And yet I’m not.”

“You will be.” This smile was no wider, but her eyes glittered with real emotion—one that turned her thoughts a biting, acrid yellow. Bitterness, long-held and consuming. “It would have been simpler to kill you with that blow to your head, but simpler isn’t always interesting. Dyffaya expects me to keep you stashed here until he has time to retrieve you.”

“He isn’t going to get what he expects?”

“He believes I am under his control. Silly of him, really. I am far too good at my work to leave his compulsions in force. I couldn’t remove them completely—he would have noticed that—but I could and did tie his additions up in tidy little knots. They don’t trouble me at all.”

Kai sorted through that and came up with, “He’s got a hook in you. Probably he can see and hear what you do, when he wants to. So mostly you have to look like you’re obeying, but you don’t obey if he isn’t watching. That’s why you tried to shoot me. He wasn’t watching.”

“He gave me such a great opportunity. He was using my eyes to show Nathan that he could have you killed at any moment. He didn’t intend to, of course, but as soon as he turned his attention elsewhere, I took my shot.” She sighed. “Such a shame that didn’t work.”

“And at the moment he’s preoccupied, keeping track of all those monsters he dumped on the city. You believe you can speak freely.” But why talk at all? Why was Kai still alive?

“That was almost clever,” Eharin said. “It reinforces my decision to kill you.”

“I suspect Dyffaya will notice that.”

Eharin gave her a familiar, contemptuous look. “He’ll notice your death. He won’t know my part in it. Soon, a young Marine is going to shell this house. He’ll believe he’s destroying the source of all those monsters. Sadly, I won’t be here to stop him.”

“Soon, but not now?” Funny how her mind caught on that one word. Such an optimistic word, “soon.” She’d like “tomorrow” even better, or “next month,” but anything that wasn’t now, right this minute, gave her something to hang her hope on.

“We wait for my other little surprise to catch Dyffaya’s attention. An explosion in the building where I’ve been holding services for his worshipers. He’ll send me to deal with that, leaving you here alone.” Her smile was as restrained as ever, but the sharp spike of red in her thoughts announced her bloodthirsty pleasure. That faded into the cool gray of intellectual curiosity. “You don’t seem as frightened as I’d expected.”

“Surprise dulls fear sometimes, and you’ve really surprised me. I could have sworn you thought too highly of yourself to break your sworn word.”

“If you refer to my agreement with the Hound, I haven’t violated one word of it.”

“And yet you swore not to harm me.” Kai might not have been a party to the deal Nathan struck with Eharin, but she knew he’d included that.

Smugness smeared itself over those lovely features. “No, that was the wording the Hound suggested. Much too broad. How could I know for certain what a human considers harm? And of course I couldn’t swear not to defend myself, should you try to harm me. So I swore not to use my Gift or other forms of magic on you, save in those ways a teacher must in order to correct or inform. I have not done so.”

She believed what she said. That bit of nastiness she’d attached to Kai’s thoughts while she was unconscious—no doubt that had been a training exercise, in Eharin’s mind. “So . . . why? Why are you here instead of in Aléri? You must know you can’t return. You aren’t part of court”—and that was a jab, yes, because Eharin resented that, convinced she’d never been properly appreciated—“but Winter samples thoughts widely at times. One stray thought at the wrong moment, and she would know what you’ve done.”

One eyebrow lifted in delicate scorn. “You believe the Queen cares what happens to you?”

“She cares deeply about what happens to Nathan.”

“Oh, yes, she cares about
the
Hound.”
For a moment, her careful masks—the tight control of both face and thoughts—slipped. On her face was naked hatred. Her thoughts roiled with sulfurous yellow. “She spoils her pet, encouraging him to believe himself above the true people of the realms.”

“My God. You’re a Firster.” That was Kai’s name for the phrase that, in elfin, meant Elves First, a tiny group who had a lot in common with the KKK here on Earth. They believed that every evil of their worlds could be traced to the mingling of the races that diluted the purity of the elfin soul. “How did you hide that from Nathan?”

Eharin ignored Kai’s question in favor of what she wanted to say. “He had the gall to force me—me, a daughter of Ahedra!—to teach one such as you. The insult was too much. I will have my revenge.”

There had been no force involved. Kai knew that. Nathan had offered the woman a deal, and after some dickering, Eharin had accepted. But Eharin believed what she said. Her thoughts were twisted into distorted patterns by that virulent bitterness—the distortion of serious self-deception. “All of this is about taking revenge on Nathan?” she said incredulously—and then, thinking of Winter’s reaction: “You are going to die so slowly.”

Eharin’s face twisted so that, for a moment, it matched her thoughts.

“Eharin will be famous,” another voice said smoothly—another
familiar
voice, this one as much of a shock as Eharin’s had been. “She is composing a masterwork, though in a genre you may not be familiar with. Have you heard of
p’tuth
?” Malek asked as he moved into view.

Malek was a small man. He looked as trim and tidy in Dockers and a nicely fitted sports jacket as he had in the robes of court. The little dab of mustache beneath his pug nose looked just as affected here as it did there, too. She gaped at him.

He smiled at her. “You’re surprised to see me. That’s natural, though you must have realized Eharin had someone to help her with the little things. She couldn’t have carried you in here all by herself.”

Elves were stronger than they looked, but no, Eharin probably couldn’t carry Kai down a flight of stairs without help. But Malek was surely the last person she’d expected to see in that role—especially since Eharin had just revealed herself to be a Firster. “She couldn’t have traveled here all by herself, either,” Kai said slowly. “You can, though. You brought her.”

He gave a little bow, acknowledging that. “
P’tuth
is the art of revenge. Eharin composes a work such as has not been known for centuries. To take such subtle and complex revenge on one as powerful as the Queen’s Hound—it will be spoken of forever.”

He was just as slimy here as he was at court, too. His thoughts were coated in pus green. The color of lies.