Death's Mistress

“Yes. I checked yesterday, and it will be a while before anyone can come after me.”

“How long?”

“It depends on how long they look for me in Faerie before thinking that maybe I slipped through. The current bend in the river—if you want to call it that—isn’t huge. So yes, a few more days. Maybe a week if I’m lucky.”

I stared at the yard, unconvinced. “Then why do I feel like I’m being watched?”

“Probably because you are,” she said sourly. “The fey have spies all over the place, and not all of them are human.”

“Meaning what?”

“They can use elements of our world to spy on us. The Blarestri are descendants of the fertility gods, the Vanir—or so they claim. It allows them to co

“What about the Svarestri?”

“They’re descended from the other, rival group of gods—the Æsir, who influence things like the weather.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I’m not sure what they can do. They weren’t a popular topic at court.”

“I can understand why!”

She shook her head. “It goes back a lot farther thansubrand’s ambition. There was some war, a long time ago, between the two groups of gods. The Æsir won, and their followers ruled Faerie for ages. Then one day, they suddenly disappeared, with no warning, no explanation. It left everyone to sort things out for themselves. So, of course, there was another war.”

“And the Svarestri lost.”

“Not… exactly, no. Nobody really won that time. They were too evenly matched, and it just ended up being a slaughter. I don’t know much about it because none of the older fey who were there want to talk about it. Anyway, after a while, the Svarestri settled in the lands they’d been able to hold, and the Blarestri did the same in theirs. And they’ve just gone on hating one another ever since.”

“But Caedmon let his sister marry one of them?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not just anyone, the king. And I don’t know about ‘let.’ Efridís was determined she wasn’t going to marry beneath herself, and because she was princess, everyone at her own court would have been beneath her. Caedmon went along with it, thinking the marriage might improve relations between the two camps, foster goodwill and that sort of thing.”

“But it hasn’t.”

“Nothing is going to do that! All the Svarestri care about is getting back into power. It’s like they’re obsessed with it. I think they made the marriage because they thought if Caedmon died childless, their prince would rule everything. Only now Aiden is in the picture.”

“And the Svarestri are scrambling.”

“They don’t have to—they have Efridís!” Claire got up again, like she just couldn’t keep still. She’d always been the peaceful one between the two of us, but now her nervous energy skittered around the porch, like the distant lightning. “I don’t know how that woman can be Caedmon’s sister. She belongs with the damned Svarestri—she’s as ice-cold as they are. And I tell you, Dory, if she comes after my son, I’ll kill her myself. I swear I will!”

“Why do you think she’s—”

“Because she stole the rune! She wants her evil son to inherit, and for him to do that, Aiden has to die. That’s why she really came to court. She told everyone it was to visitsubrand, but that was just an excuse. She wanted Naudiz, and she knew no one else could get to it.”

“How did she get out with it?” I demanded. “If only three people had access, it shouldn’t have been much of a mystery.”

“There was no damn mystery at all! The caretaker of the vault was suspicious when she just dropped by, una

“So everyone knew she’d taken it?”

“Yes, but not what she’d done with it.”

“They didn’t search her?”

Claire laughed angrily. “Oh, they did. And you should have heard the uproar over that! But Caedmon insisted, and of course they didn’t find anything. Or in her belongings, either. Then she left in a huff, saying she wouldn’t stay where she was insulted. And a few hours after she’d gone, after she was already to the damn border, they found out how she’d done it. She’d handed it off to a traitor in Caedmon’s guards, probably one of the bastards who tried to kill him—they never found out who all of them were—and he took off with it.”

“And met her later to pass it back. Clever.”

“That’s just it,” Claire said, leaning back against the porch railing. Red curls blew about her face, bright with reflected light from the house. Framed against angry green-black clouds, she looked a little otherworldly suddenly. “He didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Meet up with her. He also didn’t take it tosubrand, if that was the plan. Caedmon thinks it might have been. A person who can’t be killed can escape from anywhere, even the best-guarded prison.”

I suddenly felt like buying this guard a beer. “Where did he go, then?”

“The guards at the nearest portal recorded him going through an hour or so before the stone was discovered missing. He didn’t have authorization, but he knew a couple of them, and anyway, he was a fellow guard. They let him through.”

“A portal to where?”

“To here. To New York,” Claire told me urgently. “Caedmon thinks he’s going to try to sell the rune, that he double-crossed Efridís. The thing’s worth a fortune, and I guess it was just too much temptation.”

“That was a lucky break.” An invinciblesubrand was not something I wanted to contemplate. He was already too close to that for comfort.

“Yes, but it still leaves Aiden unprotected! Naudiz is here somewhere, and I have to find it before the damn Svarestri do. It’s the only way to ensure that—”

She stopped, because the temperature plummeted about fifty degrees in an instant, like we’d suddenly stepped into a deep freeze. I looked down to see a pattern of ice creeping over the threshold, curling across the wooden planks of the floor. The day’s absorbed heat had kept them soft and warm against my feet, but suddenly they were hard and cold and slippery with frost.

A glance out at the yard showed a swirl of small flakes spiraling out of the black sky, gilded by the glow from the house. I got up and walked down the steps, catching one on my palm. It melted immediately in the heat from my body, leaving a small wet spot behind. I smelled it, just to be sure. Water, ice.

It was dog days in Brooklyn, and it was snowing.

A few small flakes landed on my lips, feather soft. More drifted in the open side of the porch, collecting in Claire’s hair and shining, golden bright, on her lashes. “What is it?” she asked, frowning.

“Get in the house,” I told her, my heart rate speeding up.

“You said it didn’t matter—that the wards protect the porch as well,” she said, even as she gathered up the kids.

“The wards were designed to stop magic,” I reminded her, a chill spreading through me that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Not the damn weather.”

Like an exclamation point to my sentence, a fist-sized hailstone slammed through the porch roof, punching through the tin like a baseball through paper. It hit the old steps right in front of me, splintering into a thousand shards that flew everywhere. Pieces as long as my finger embedded in the railing, the side of the house and my flesh.

“Dory!”

My leg buckled, a sliver the size of a penknife sticking out of my knee, blood welling up darkly around it.

“Go!”

I didn’t see if she obeyed, because a wash of hail-laden wind gusted across the porch the next second. It shattered every window behind us, forcing me to dive for the floor. That was just as well, since at least it gave me something to hold on to when the porch whited out the next instant, caught in the grip of a blizzard in the middle of summer.

I felt around blind for maybe a minute, until my hand grabbed something cold and hard. It took me a second to identify it as the chain to the porch swing, because it had already frozen solid. I used it to pull myself into a crouch, turned around and headed for the approximate location of the door—only to have the wind pick me up and throw me through it.