Bone Walker (29 page)

But then again, maybe it was all because of the storm. If there was such a thing as Unseelie weather, this was it. And if the gleam in Elessir's eye was any indication, he was enjoying it, the bastard.

“More like waving our cape in front of a very large, very angry bull,” he said. “But if it's any consolation, darlin', I'm pretty sure she only wants to take
my
head off.”

“Keep calling her darlin' and
I'll
take your head off,” Christopher growled.

I couldn't tell whether the strain in his voice was due to the magic he was pouring forth or the daggers he was glaring at the singer. Most likely both. “Boys, boys, you're both pretty!” With my left hand I grabbed hold of Christopher's nearest fingers. With my right, I gestured peremptorily at the tote bag in which Elessir had stowed the object that had brought us all out into the squall. “Let's get this done and dealt with, okay?”

“By all means.” Elessir unzipped the bag. Within it, in a nest of towels and washcloths we'd added for padding, the
alokhiu
's skull was a cold flash of white. His mouth twisting, he drew the thing out and held it forth for me, dropping the bag negligently at our feet. “We'll both have to be touching it…” The Unseelie paused, slanted a glance at Christopher, and finished blandly, “Miss Thompson.”

“Don't make me turn this park around,” I retorted, and then glanced at Christopher myself, squeezing his hand tightly. “Got my back?”

“Always, Kenna-lass.” For me, his voice was still strained, but without the growl. More importantly, the power he was putting out pooled around me, a warm brightness palpable enough to almost have weight of its own. I blinked at him. This was stronger magic out of him than I remembered.

Then I caught myself. He'd been working on his magic for a month and was pulling from a broader range of territory now. It showed. My own power rose up to meet it, taking the temperature of the air around us up, and making me forget the lash of the rain.

I laid my free hand on the skull that Elessir held. To my surprise, Christopher laid his other hand over mine. His power and mine together whirled around all three of us in a column of light.

The instant we made contact with the thing, physical and magical alike, my entire consciousness nearly buckled under an onslaught of visions as merciless as the rain.

Melorite. I saw her, or rather sensed her, as if from within her own head: the lifting of graceful white hands, wavy auburn hair blowing across my line of sight, the blood-deep pull of magic that seduced what it wanted and swallowed it whole. She cut a swath through half a dozen mortal cities in the memories that swamped me in those few seconds: London. Vienna. Paris. Moscow. Oslo. Rome. Faces and figures spun through my head, some male, some female, all clad in the garb of different eras. Each one succumbed to the siren call of Melorite's Unseelie power.

In almost every fragment of vision, I also saw Elessir.

He changed with the passing of the centuries, assuming and discarding each one's fashions with practiced ease even as he immersed himself in its music. A dozen different instruments found their voices in his hands, including a violin with a sweet, silken timbre that made me want to weep. I saw him rousing a crowd of mortal listeners to bright-eyed ecstatic dancing while he unleashed a smile of angelic brilliance back at them with his singing… and I saw Melorite drinking it in, twisting it, turning that feedback loop of unmitigated joy into something darker and predatory.

I saw her ensnaring him in her arms and in her magic. She laughed as he resisted her, only to stumble harder into the trap of her thrall. Time and time again she feasted upon him, until at last, even with her bodily form destroyed by her Queen, there was nothing left of her but that urge to devour him whole.

And I was going to have to call her hungry spirit, clad in a dragon's form, down upon him.

Something of my horror at that thought must have flared up in my face, for Elessir—the real one, not the one in the visions assaulting my mind's eye—abruptly shouted in a voice that reverberated as only a master singer's could, “Do it, Kendis! Find her! Call her!”

Now he decides to use my name?
I couldn't stop that one wild thought from careening through my head. But I locked down every other one threatening to come after it, because he was right. I had to focus.

So I grabbed onto that memory, a memory that wasn't mine, of Elessir and a violin. I threw it on a burst of magic straight into the skull, and just as had happened when I'd helped Christopher and Millicent search for Jude, my awareness abruptly expanded far beyond the physical space I occupied.

Without warning, part of me was aloft in the full blast of the storm. I couldn't feel the rain and the wind, but from this new dizzying height, I saw much of Discovery Park spread out below me. The individual shapes of most my friends were lost against the greater roll of the land; Millicent and Christopher, though, stood out as the nexus points of the shining wash of light they'd raised here at the very western edge of the city, and of the city's Wards. Trees that had no business being below me without an airplane involved swayed violently in multiple directions at once, and even as I watched, the top of a towering conifer snapped off and went flying.

Around the airborne fragment of my thoughts, far more palpable than the storm's natural elements, magic raged with force enough to almost send me plunging back down into the confines of my body. Azganaroth's primal might had been stronger than this, as was the magic of both of the Queens of the Courts… but with the storm to back it up, this maelstrom of power was almost their rival.

Oh God
. I didn't dare let that wisp of panic take hold of me even though it tried really, really hard. There was no time to think about what the hell I was doing or how in the good green world I was going to do it. Down on the ground I was pretty sure I'd raised our prize of the skull high, pulling it away from the hands of both the boys with me, but I couldn't think about that either. No other option was before me except to take that image of Elessir a'Natharion playing Tchaikovsky on that violin like a goddamn boss, wreathe it in the fire of
my
magic like I was tying it up with paper and bow, and hurl it westward into the thunderheads.

Hey, Melorite! Look what I've got! You want it? Come get it!

I don't know how I screamed it, mentally, vocally, magically, or all of them at once. Not that it mattered. The instant I threw that challenge down, lightning cracked the sky in answer, stoking the clouds into higher and higher frenzy, until something massive tore out through them and into my line of sight. It had no wings, but it didn't need any. The great coiling length of it rode the thermals with all the ease of a creature born to do nothing else. Even though I had no perceptible form in the air as far as I could tell, a horned and whiskered head with eyes like spotlights lashed around until it pointed straight in my direction.

And with a deep percussive boom of thunder, the dragon roared.

Saeko.
Melorite.
Alokhiu
. Bone walker. No matter what you wanted to call her, and no matter what terrible beauty I might have found in scales gleaming in countless shades of blue, silver, and green or the white mane and whiskers and horns, it all added up to one thing: twenty feet of pissed-off dragon, and all of it bearing down on me. I should have retreated then. I
tried
to retreat then, tried to will myself back down into my body where I belonged. Before I could, a raw torrent of power overwhelmed me, turning everything to a formless, lightning-bright void. There were the faintest traces in that blast of by-now-familiar Sidhe magic, but the vast majority of it, young and strong and fierce, was from the dragon child. For a few terrifying moments, I couldn't do a damn thing about it. All I could do was try to keep my consciousness from blowing apart while my body, somewhere down on the ground, crumpled over.

YOU!
Surprise and fury clanged through my head, and that at least was all the
alokhiu
, amplified a hundredfold until she spoke with the voice of the storm itself.
Why are you here? Why did the Queen let you go?

So not a topic I was going to get into with her, in so much as I had any wherewithal for astral repartee.
I guess she just likes me better than you!

The
alokhiu
-dragon bellowed again, much closer now, before barreling right through the scrap of space where my awareness hovered. There was no physical impact, but the psychic one hit me like a mountain falling on my head. I was dimly aware of myself screaming. Bright golden magic flooded into me—Christopher's support, shored up in turn by Millicent—and that was barely enough to keep me from shattering entirely. If Christopher had his arms around me, I couldn't feel them. All of my senses were still oriented on the sky, not the ground.

Do you really think you can take me, infant?
Melorite's contempt, every bit as tangible as her roar, scorched my faltering thoughts. Layered through it came her mocking laughter.
What, pray tell, do you hope to accomplish?

At any other time I might have pumped a fist in triumph that I was adding telepathy, of a sort anyway, to my magical skillset. Right then I couldn't string two mental words together, much less reestablish the link between my body and my mind, and terror flooded through me at the realization that I had no idea where my fists actually were. That panic, more than anything, fueled the volley of raw images I lobbed in the bone walker's general direction: Elessir wielding her own skull, me smashing it with magic as well as the sledgehammer we'd brought along with the rest of our tools, the wrathful grief of Makiko Asakura. To finish it off, I hurled her the fury of Luciriel, not taking it kindly at all that her
alokhiu
servant had slipped out of her control.

Melorite, to my horror, was decidedly unimpressed.
And all she could send to challenge me was you?

She wheeled in the air, a bright writhing coil of grace upon the wind. Before I could begin to hope she was backing off, she came at me again in a second, swifter charge.

You're a child,
chica,
a child who can't be trusted with that much magic.

Her mouth gaped wide, baring fangs above and below, each as long as my forearm.

If Her Majesty's going to make me such a gift, I'm just going to have to take it from you.

This time, instead of roaring, she inhaled. The great wind of her breath snared me, and all I could do was flail, invisibly and futilely, for purchase I couldn't grasp when my body was down on the ground with the others. There should have been no way I could actually feel her drawing me in, no possible reason I'd perceive those fangs of hers sinking into my flesh—yet I did. They pierced me through with the same drugging cold she'd wrapped around me when she'd held me in Jude's arms.

I frayed around my edges, the storm-lashed air around me going gray and then a brilliant, overwhelming white.

And then I was within her.

Christopher had thought that the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen in his life was Kendis hurled through a portal into Faerie. He'd been wrong. Seeing her eyes flare white-gold an instant before she crumpled in a boneless heap was worse—because with all the magic at his command focused on defending the park and the city, he didn't dare let himself be distracted by her fall.

“I've got her! Keep the Wards up, damn you!”

All he could do was let the Unseelie catch her, and take what swift, small comfort he could in how the link between them reported she was still alive. There wasn't even time for jealousy, not with the dragon's fury bearing down.

It was the rowan tree dream all over again, except worse. That part of me I'd flung into the sky to bait a possessed dragon now hung suspended in a web of ice and shadow. I moved along with it, but not of my own volition. Each sinuous twist of the powerful shape commanded by the bone walker was far outside my control. Melorite herself was a smothering weight of a presence, behind, above, and inside me. Even though I'd lost all sense of my proper form, I heard—I
felt
—her satisfaction rippling through me as clearly as if she'd purred it right into my ear.

Hello there, pretty Seelie girl. You are quite delectable indeed. And now you're mine.

Phantom teeth drove deeper into me, deepening the cold that held me immobile. For an instant, something vital rushed up from the core of my awareness, drawn out by that piercing frost, and left in its wake a heady, languorous weakness. That wasn't the frightening part. No, what scared me out of my mind—and yes, I hear you groaning, and yes, I want to smack myself too for what I did there—was that when that instant passed, whatever the
alokhiu
had just done, I wanted her to do it again.

Oh,
chica,
sweet little
chica,
I will, I promise
. That thought came through in echoes of Jude's voice, and it swamped me with the sensory memory of Jude's arms curled tight around me, her lips brushing along the side of my face. Only it wasn't Jude. I couldn't see Melorite—but I didn't need to, because I was she, or she was I, or both at once, a dazed realization that triggered another dark peal of laughter.
We are indeed one, and between you and little Saeko I'll live for many, many more years to come. I think we'll celebrate by killing your boyfriend down there. Won't that be fun? I've never killed a Warder before!

Dread blotted out everything else, enough that I managed to wrestle my awareness outward… and then I could see.

I—we—were diving at the field below, and as we dived, Melorite spat lightning. The bolt sizzled earthward, only to ricochet off the incandescent dome rippling out from Christopher's upraised hands. He was glowing full bore now, brightly enough that I shouldn't have been able to make out the other two shapes behind him. But I was peering out from behind a dragon's eyes, the eyes of an apex predator of the elements, and so I saw Elessir crouched behind my man. The Unseelie hadn't drawn his sword, because his arms were occupied.