Rise of the Magi (31 page)

She glanced up at the odd speckled sky above before those violet eyes pointed at me, inducing a shiver along my spine. “Nix told me you were stubborn, but I didn’t believe it until now. And not only you, but the whole lot who came with you. Even the humans have come in droves.”

She knew about them? They hadn’t joined the fight, though, had they?
Idiots!
“Imagine that. People who want to live. Who’d of thunk it?” I continued to search for Laerni with my senses, to scream thoughts at Liam, but they went nowhere. Meline’s circle of protection must have failed. What was happening around my physical body? Had Meline and her crew been killed? Grown too tired to keep me in my own head? Were Andrew and Cas okay? Dead? My fists curled to stab fingernails into my palms.
Concentrate! They’re counting on you. You can do this.
“Tell me why I’m here.”

On Alseides’ outstretched hand, a dragonfly as large as my head came to rest. Staring with boredom, she caressed the insect’s wings with a fingertip, changing them from opaque to neon green like the fireflies, the color bleeding down the veins within. “The Great Mother thought this place would amuse me, would satisfy my need to create and to rule.”

Had she learned evasiveness from Parthalan? Or maybe he’d learned it from her.
Yikes
. “I take it she was wrong?”

“This is all an elaborate elusion—this prison cell she designed to contain her children. Yes, it’s pretty, but a prison all the same. And for what? For becoming only what she desired of us, individuals with our own free will and dreams, to want and love, to take, to own.” Her gaze came to me like a heat wave.

It sounded good up until the take and own part. “No sympathy, sorry. Abuse your freedom at the expense of everyone else and you lose it. Simple as that.”

“We’re very much alike, you and I,” Alseides said.

“How do you figure that?” I stifled another shiver.

“We both want peace for this world.”

“And killing everyone in sight and manipulating everyone who crosses your devil spawn is bringing peace? In what fucking reality could you possibly think that?”

“Imagine a world with no war, joined by a common soul—mine—and a single heart that beats for us all. Imagine a world with no famine, no poverty because all we will need is sunlight and rain to feed ourselves. Imagine the utopia where there are no conflicting religions, creeds or personal agendas. The Great Mother’s world is flawed, on the brink of annihilating itself, and I offer a cure. You will help me set the earth onto the right path, a natural, peaceful path.”

She couldn’t be suggesting what I thought she was suggesting, right? That we’d all be whatever she’d tried to make the elves into. Hybrids of tree and fae? Tree and human? Tree and elf?
Over my shattered soul.
“You offer death. Why did you steal the selkie skins?” I wondered why she was telling me so much. Stalling? Regrouping, regaining power to make me forget everything again? I needed to get to Liam before she did, but no amount of straining turned his spark into his burning spirit.

“Why did you destroy the dark ones?” The dragonfly flipped its wings. “I allowed Laerni to escape so you might have transport to their wood. You were supposed to change them, the first test of your skills.”

I couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d been connected to a lightning rod, standing in the middle of a raging storm. So, it had been her plan for me to go to Freymoor as Liam had suggested. I could have saved them? They were dying, in pain, terrified. My powers of healing couldn’t undo what the Magi had done to them. Managing a hoarse whisper, I said, “Change them how?”

“A melding of consciousness and soul with a truly organic structure. No desire for destruction or war, no aspirations of power or material goods, only pure, clean, obedient existence.”

“That’s what you needed the selkie skins for. You’re using their magic to make the physical bonding, and you need my Force of Will and power for it to stick.” Not that I knew how that would work exactly, but a theory was better than nothing.

“Very good. I studied their ability to change from man to seal and adapted it to my own needs. The first test subjects were miserable failures. Once merged, I could keep them alive and aware in their wooden forms, however, the instant I left them, they perished or descended into madness. None made the successful transition back to flesh, which is necessary for procreation. It is your vast power we require to bring them the rest of the way, to Will them into being, so they would join us, and my sisters you have yet to awaken, once you’ve freed us all.” It was all matter of fact, simple, as if she talked of inevitable occurrences. The more she talked, though, the more her crazy came out.

“I know I created Iress, splitting realms, but I wouldn’t know how to merge realms even if I was willing, and I’m not.” When Alseides ignored me, I added, “How did you get into Freymoor in the first place?”

“Elves, fae and humans are so predictable.” Her laughter set my hair on end. “A few tears from a child or a woman could make you go to war for them. Juliet simply waited for Galati in the woods where I knew her to walk and wept when the elf approached. Galati took her inside without hesitation. Once I’d taken the elf’s mind, I suggested she go about her business and forget she’d seen Juliet, and so she did. Because Juliet was surrounded in a concealing spell, none of the others ever knew she was there, allowing her to relay my magi to the trees the dark ones stole from us without hindrance.”

Rage, thick and red, clogged up my mind, heating my soul into an inferno. “You are truly sick to prey on the kindness of others. No wonder the Goddess wants me to put you down.”

“The Great Mother is either too ignorant of what’s good for her own people, or too weak to make it happen.”

A tug on my mind clued me in that Alseides was getting ready to take me fully again, but the more I knew about her, the more chance I had of figuring out how to shut her down. “You mentioned other sisters,” I said, my heart jumping when I noticed she’d come nearer while I’d been thinking, her face making a good impression of a pissed-off demon. “Do you mean other than the three of you?”
Please say no!

She gave me the smile Laerni always did when I was being dense, and came forward. “You sensed them when you arrived. Did you not? Reach out, touch my kin who have gone dormant in their despair, and tell me how many we are.”

I guessed she meant the Old Ones. Did I really want to know how many Magi we had to deal with? Only if I awakened them, I reminded myself, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it. I’d rather have loosed the Shadowborn again. “How am I supposed to do that with your magical static pressing down on me?” Alseides had released my Light during the last flash into her mental world, but it had gone again. A small test, bringing Light to the end of my fingers, confirmed I had my abilities back. Could I take a chance and blow her to pieces?

I resisted palming my forehead. The Alseides I looked at was a mental projection and nothing more. It was too easy to forget none of what I could see was real.

I took down my inner walls and pushed my Light out until it burned golden along my arms. Tiny sparks burst to life in my mind, barely flickering. At my metaphysical touch, some faded and moved away, fear the overwhelming emotion. “There are a thousand, give or take a few hundred,” I said, reabsorbing my energy. “They’re afraid of me.” I reclaimed the distance she’d shortened by a few feet too many.

“They will keep you from all harm.” Her voice had changed, deepened into a sultry multi-layered song. She drew nearer, offering that smile that invaded my soul, and a hand begging me to accept its touch.

Yes, I want to be safe.

Garret jammed his foot into my diaphragm. I rounded the pond, my spine turning into an ice pole at how easily she’d swayed me.
Nice try, lady.
Thank Goddess for my kid. Laerni must have been right again; Garret had a part to play as my anchor.

“So,” I said, relaxing my stance from the near battle crouch I’d assumed, “how long have you known Nix?” I needed to keep her talking, hoping she’d tell me Gallagher was wrong about Nix.
“Liam … what’s happening out there?”

Alseides smiled wider, passing close enough to one of the black trunked trees to give it a loving pat. “Nix has been serving me for many, many wonderful years now.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, trying to do the math in my head to figure out which answer would piss me off the most. “Exactly how many years?”

“A dozen. Fifteen.” Her sinewy shoulders lifted in a shrug. “He was but a young fae when my eldest found him wandering the human plane looking for his mother, and brought him here to me. Such a sad boy with nobody to comfort him.”

Since my jaw had locked, I just stood there blinking for a little too long. My face heated to explosive levels. “I guess you were pretty smart to kill Damien, my mother’s captain, and get Nix to appoint himself before I got there so I had no choice but to be close to him all the time. If he’d succeeded in seducing me, his influence over me would have been that much greater. He could have paraded me down here without any fuss, handed me to you on a silver platter, and I’d probably have gone with him without a worry.”

“Yes,” she said through sporadic and quite disturbing giggles. “He was a bit of a disappointment in that regard.” Her gaze swung over to me, eyes heavy lidded. “Since I know how persuasive and charming he can be, you must tell me … how did you resist such a pretty man when he worked so hard to make his way into your heart?”

The last of my denial over Nix evaporated.
That lousy, lying shit!
Had he slept with the crazy lady? None of his professed feelings, or even the reason he’d wanted to be my captain, had been one ounce real. They’d all been a big, nasty, effing performance orchestrated by the one still grinning at me with pride. The part that burned me most was that I’d almost fallen for it. If Liam hadn’t changed his mind about taking an Unseelie queen at the last possible moment, I might have.

I restrained an incessant urge to scrub my arms—to get rid of the nasty tingles she’d induced from whatever freaky magic dust she’d put into my mind’s air with that laugh. I had a burning urge to put my fist through her face to shut her up. “How did I resist?” I asked to answer the question too long past. “I almost didn’t.”

“If those brutes from the Unseelie Court had done their part and killed the king as I commanded, you would have surrendered to Nix’s charms.” She said it all with an expectant look, lips parted, leaning toward me as if waiting for me to blow.

Through the red haze that clouded my vision, a distant voice told me she was baiting me. The more she hurt me, the more vulnerable I would become and the more open to her. I watched her through that pulsing red, listening to my heart pounding out a terrible tattoo against my ribs. Nostrils flaring, I conjured Gallagher’s voice in my head,
in through the nose, out through the mouth. Listen to your heartbeat. Will it to calm you.
As I complied with his echo, Laerni spoke up, too, with words she’d drilled into my consciousness:
Accept that it happened, that you had no control over it, that nothing you could have done would have changed it. Accept it. Feel the grief, and set it free.

I glowered across the short distance at Alseides, my face contorted in a sneer I imagined could have melted her bones like Parthalan used to do. How could I accept that grief? She’d tried to have Liam killed, been responsible for his almost taking a queen, for putting us both through relationship hell.

Liam. Our son.
I would accept it for them.

After a few moments of basking in the memory of Liam’s arms around me, I straightened my shoulders and blew out one last cleansing breath, expelling the remainder of my fury. “Why didn’t you just grab me instead of taking all the others?”

Those ancient shadows flamed in her eyes, but her pleasant mask settled back into her depths quickly enough I wondered if I’d seen the change. “Your stubborn mind is not so easily swayed from afar. Men come more easily to my way of thinking, and I have a use for them which is none of your concern. To traverse the portal, you must come of your own free will, but only after another who has passed through the portal before, who has spent sufficient time in our realm, has activated it.”

As usual, Laerni had been right on the money, except for the activating part. Nix had dipped his hand into the pond before Laerni and I had jumped in. I didn’t want to believe anything could have made Liam go through it, not even a mental going-over, but he must have. “What about Parthalan? It was you, wasn’t it? You sent him to hunt me all those years ago. You knew he’d be able to feel when my
cumhacht
became active.”

“Oh, yes. He was special, that one. The night to your day. Perfect opposites designed to lead the fae into a new era of ideal balance. If I hadn’t taken him under my wing, you would have been his bonded mate, not Liam’s.”

Bile rising, I swallowed until my stomach quit its mockery of a storm surge. “I don’t believe you.”

She gave an elegant shrug, rounding the pond, while I maintained our separation. “He was more difficult to lure here and seduce than Nix, but when he gave in to me once, he was mine to command. So eager he was to please me.”

Fuck
. “Why did he kill them?” I shrieked. “I didn’t even know what I was or what I could do. He could have taken me right to you then and left them alone. How can you be so callous to slaughter children? Just how sick are you?”

“You were not yet ready to be cultivated for my purpose. I needed you to realize your potential, set events in motion to ensure you would develop as the Great Mother’s prophesy foretold. The death of your family was an unfortunate necessity.”

“An unfortunate … I’ll kill you!” At the wild excitement in her eyes, I snapped out of my hunting dance. She had my family killed on purpose, sent Parthalan to torment me afterward, and threw it in my face right before the world would go to shit? No doubt about it, she wanted me hurting and was doing a bang-up job of it, too. I repeated my earlier exercise until my Light was barely contained in my skin. “He was a good man before, wasn’t he? Parthalan, I mean.”