Dark Duets Part 22

There was a dazzling explosion that erupted without sound. A ring of bright green light punched out from the glowing red wall.

"Again!" cried Rhymer. He was crawling toward her, his body broken and bleeding.

"No!" howled the prince of the elves. He yanked at her foot, tearing her sneaker off.

Stacey stabbed again, then raked the stone blade from top to bottom.

Across the line she made the fiery light vanished.

She stabbed and stabbed.

Wherever the blade touched, the red wall disappeared.

The elf prince was still half in this world. One leg, one arm and shoulder, and his misshapen head. He roared at her and slashed her leg with his claws. Her blood seeded the air.

Then an arrow struck the clawing hand, pinning it to the ground for an instant before dissolving. But a second struck. And a third. Rhymer was on his knees, scooping up fallen arrows, tearing them from rotted corpses, and firing them as fast as he could nock and pull and release. They held him off for seconds, long enough for her to pull her leg out of the prince's reach.

The wall collapsed bit by bit. Line by glowing line, shrinking in on the struggling Yvag.

Rhymer fired a final arrow, and it struck the elf in the left eye and knocked him backward through the fiery wall, out of this world and back into his own or into h.e.l.l. Which it was, Stacey did not know and did not care. She swept her arm up into the remaining angry hole, and that other place vanished.

The sneaker torn from her lay on the mound like some failed sacrifice.

Overhead, clouds scudded across the sky, and birdsong echoed from the woods below. Had the fenced site not looked like an overturned cemetery, it might have been a lovely afternoon.

She heard Rhymer's bow thud to the dirt, and as she collapsed onto the rocky ground the sacred stone slipped from her fingers, struck on its edge, and rolled away into the gra.s.s. It lay there, looking like any other polished black stone.

12.

Thomas Rhymer did not call an ambulance or any other aid.

As darkness closed over Stacey, she was half aware that he was dragging her up the slope toward the parked Bentley.

When she opened her eyes for a moment, the light outside had changed. Rough bandages were wrapped around her wounds. She wasn't bleeding, but she didn't know if she had any blood left to lose. She lay in the plush backseat of the Bentley watching treetops flicker past the windows. She had only one red sneaker on, but her other foot was bathed in enough blood that it almost looked like a match.

She said, "Where are we?" Managed to turn her head enough to see him.

Rhymer was hunched over the wheel, his face gray, his fists white-knuckle tight on the wheel. He did not have the strength to answer.

"Oh, well, that's fine then." Darkness came for Stacey and took her down again.

13.

The cafe was quiet. The waiter came and poured fresh coffee into their cups, murmured something in French, and walked away. Traffic whisked back and forth, but no one seemed to be in a hurry.

The bandages beneath her long sleeves chafed, the st.i.tches itched. They would have to come out soon.

Stacey sipped her coffee, wincing at the pain in her lip. It had been split and was taking its own sweet time to heal. Rhymer wore sungla.s.ses even at night. A broken nose had given him black eyes.

People walked by, some of them laughing, a few hand in hand.

"Is he gone?" she asked. It was not the first time she'd asked the question since that day. For a lot of that time Rhymer had remained silent, morose, lost in his own inner darkness.

This time he answered her. "We hurt him," he said softly. "That's the most you can say for certain. He's not like most of the Yvag. He's royalty. I'm not sure if he can die." He paused a moment. "But either he steps into the well of the d.a.m.ned or someone else of his bloodline has tae. 'You'll scream for a thousand years' was nae hyperbole."

"G.o.d . . ."

"At the very least a princeling of the elves has been wounded by a mortal, a woman, and that's only happened once before in the whole history of the world, to my knowledge." He added sugar to his coffee, stirred as if everything depended on it.

"Will it stop them?" she asked.

He shook his head. "It'll complicate things for them. Opening the gateway takes a lot of power. I . . . don't know if he can accomplish it with what we did to him. Others will, though, next time. And next time they'll come early to the party. You came dear."

She nodded and they sat together for a quarter hour without talking. Then she said, "Rhymer . . . I was the t.i.the."

"Aye."

"Now we spoiled that."

"Aye."

She looked around at the square. Paris glowed with life. "The Yvag said that my life would buy the safety of the whole world. Of all the worlds. Is that remotely true? Has saving me opened everyone up to something bad?"

"They sold you a lie tae make you cooperate in your own sacrifice. Their idea of fun."

"So . . . h.e.l.l won't take revenge?"

Rhymer smiled. "Not on us, la.s.s," he said. "Their bargain."

She opened her mouth to reply, but all she said was, "G.o.d . . ."

"Some believe that the Yvag were angels once," said Rhymer. "When certain angels revolted, G.o.d ordered that the gates of heaven and h.e.l.l be shut. Any angels left in heaven became the true and sanctified angels. Those who were shut into h.e.l.l became demons. But there were many who were trapped in the worlds between."

"And they became the Yvag?"

"According to that version of things." He nodded. "Not pure enough for heaven but not evil enough for h.e.l.l." He laughed. "More like us than they want to believe."

"Or . . . maybe they do believe," she suggested. "Maybe that's why they mess with our world so much."

He considered it, sipped his coffee awhile before speaking again. "As I said, that's one version of it. The t.i.the paid is to stay free from h.e.l.l. As fallen angels they belong to h.e.l.l, and the t.i.the buys their freedom."

"So . . . why would h.e.l.l take it out on us if the t.i.the isn't paid?"

"It wouldn't. And that's your version of them filtered through Christian theology. I know a deal more. They're older than our religions. Older than our race, maybe our world."

She thought about that. "h.e.l.l will go after the Yvag, then?"

"Aye. It's a war they cannae hope tae win. But h.e.l.l . . ." He looked grimly at some memory. "h.e.l.l is like nothing Christianity ever dreamed up, and vaster than worlds."

"The well of the d.a.m.ned?"

His mouth twitched at her repeating his own phrase back at him. "The universe balances on a knife edge."

"So saving me you forced an immortal creature to sacrifice itself to buy the Yvag time?"

"Which runs differently in their world between worlds. But, aye. The span until the next teind comes due."

A cold wind seemed to blow among the tables. "Twenty-eight years, you said."

"Your being their t.i.the is done now. The mark on you is no good to them anymore. Like the one on me."

"Then I'm safe, am I?" She knew the answer but needed to hear it laid out.

Rhymer's mouth pulled tight with sadness and weariness. "They won't come after you as their t.i.the, no," he said quietly. "But the Yvag are a bitter race. You injured their prince. Maybe slew him. They'll ne'er forgive you. Never stop hunting you."

Stacey felt like she wanted to cry, but she didn't. She'd known it already.

Instead she asked, "You said only one woman has ever injured a prince of the Yvag before."

"I did."

"Who was it?"

He finished his coffee, then looked into the cup, head bowed. When she thought he wasn't going to say anything, he replied, "Someone that mattered. A long, long time ago."

"And you've been running from them and fighting them, what, ever since?"

"Ever since."

"Alone?"

"It's not a journey ye . . . Of course, alone."

She reached across the table and took his hand. "Well, not anymore."

He smiled at her, but there was so much sorrow in that smile that Stacey knew that behind the sungla.s.ses his eyes weren't partic.i.p.ating. She turned and looked away, looked out at the pa.s.sing traffic on the rue de Rivoli. Every once in a while one of the people in the pa.s.sing cars would catch her eye. The looks were brief, except sometimes they went on just a second too long.

Rhymer squeezed her hand, and they sat in silence as the world turned around them.

SHE, DOOMED GIRL.

Sarah MacLean and Carrie Ryan.

I stood alone in the gray, surrounded by cloud.

My throat burned and my eyes watered as the frigid wind snapped at my face. I'd never felt emptier in my life. It was like that sensation you have after waking up from a dream, when your emotions are still trapped somewhere else and all you're left with is a feeling that you don't understand.

Sure, I'd left everything behind when I'd stepped onto the ferry, but I hadn't expected it to hurt like this. There'd been nothing keeping me in my old life-nothing I couldn't bring with me.

Nothing that wouldn't be forgotten.

Silently I cursed the airline for losing my luggage, leaving me to finish the trip with only my purse and a handful of change.

And a deed. And a key.

And no idea what I was getting myself into.

"You're headed for the castle."

The voice startled me, coming from the fog like in some old gothic movie, where the terrifying Vincent Price character growls the words, all skeletal angles and crooked fingers. But I wasn't in a gothic movie. I was on a boat. In Scotland. And despite the rolling fog that had come down off the hills and pooled in dark cinematic swirls along the banks of the North Sea, hiding both the land I'd left and the land where I was headed, there was nothing gothic about the bearded Scotsman in front of me.

There was nothing skeletal about him, either.

I swiped at my eyes to clear them, but the bitter wind drew fresh tears. It was obvious looking at the Scotsman that he'd spent his lifetime out on these waters. His cheeks were weathered red from the sting of cold salt air whipping across the deck of the ferry and his words disappeared into a laugh that betrayed a lifetime of whiskey and cigarettes.

I wrapped my arms around myself, bracing against the wind and wishing I had the winter coat I'd packed when I left Los Angeles. The Scotsman was wearing one of those beautiful, warm fisherman's sweaters-the ones that are probably knitted using wool spun from the sheep outside the house. The ones you don't need in Southern California-but that you absolutely need here. I'd have to buy one tomorrow.

Now, I just wanted to get to where I needed to go. I was tired. And I wanted a bed. I'd always been a terrible traveler, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept.

The man stared at me, expecting an answer. His eyes gleamed nearly silver in the strange light of dusk and the bleak, gray sea, and I realized that I'd forgotten what he said. "I'm sorry," I said, shaking my head, "I didn't-"

"I said, you're headed for the castle."

I nodded, feeling numb. At least there was good news in that he'd confirmed there would be a castle at the end of this trip.

At least that hadn't been a lie.

"I'm Charlie." He extended one hand, the size of a Christmas ham, and added, "Charlie MacLaron. And you're Emily."

My hand stilled inside his ma.s.sive grip.

"How did you know that?" I mean, this might be quiet Scotland, and this guy might be wearing a sweater no doubt knitted by his loving wife, but it didn't mean a girl shouldn't be careful.