Lies and Prophecy (36 page)

“I shouldn't have done it,” Liesel whispered. “She got hurt.”

Julian opened his mouth, but found nothing to say. He shared the same guilt. Easy to tell himself Kim had made her own choices; much less easy to accept the consequences. If he couldn't resolve that for himself, how could he expect to do it for Liesel?

Robert answered her. Robert, whom Julian had almost counted out of the situation, expecting that he would provide nothing more than a shoulder to cry on.

“Harm to yourself counts too, you know.”

Julian blinked. Robert's words made no sense to him. But they must have meant something to Liesel, because she stirred.

“You asked Kim to go to the ball,” Robert continued. “But you didn't force her. Kim has free will. Because of your request, she was put into danger, harmed; yes, all that is true. But you were only an indirect cause. You did not do it to her yourself. That blame lies squarely on the Unseelie.

“And what if you had not asked? You would have hurt yourself, by denying your need for release. You would have hurt those around you, because the pain bottled up in you would inevitably have spilled over. And that would have made you feel guilty, because you were not superhuman, and let your emotions become your weakness. Under normal circumstances you would know better; I have heard you chastise others for similar foolishness on more than one occasion. But these circumstances are not normal.”

Robert's voice lowered, until his last words were barely audible. “And Kim, who could have helped all this by doing you a small favor, would have accused herself of failing you when
you
needed
her.
”

Julian went still, understanding. Wilders were raised non-religious; it never occurred to him to view the situation from that angle. But Robert, despite only patchy adherence to the Wiccan faith, knew it better than Julian, and knew the central tenet shared by most:
An it harm none, do what ye will.
Liesel had followed her own wishes, and this was the result.

But keeping silent wouldn't have avoided harm, either.

“No matter what I do, it turns out badly,” Liesel said in a choked voice.

Robert shrugged. “Sometimes there is no good answer. We merely do the best we can. The Lord and Lady will not punish you for weakness. Act according to your heart, and be strong, and deal with the consequences as they come.”

Liesel closed her eyes. Julian felt the raging tangle of emotions inside her quiet slowly. She wasn't locking them down; she was smoothing them out. Fear remained, though—a great deal of it. She didn't have Julian's training, or Robert's confidence, or Kim's determination, and without those she felt very vulnerable.

“You don't have to be strong alone,” Julian said.

She hesitated. He could feel it in her, as if she was standing on the brink of a cliff and trying to believe that someone would catch her if she jumped. He reached out a psychic hand toward her, offering support, and she opened her eyes and looked at him as if she could see it.

Then her mind touched his, not flinching at the contact, and she accepted the aid.

Liesel sat up, brushing her disarranged hair out of her face. Robert stayed at her side. She took a few deep breaths, wiped her face dry, and said, “We have to do something, though.”

“We will,” Robert said lightly, as if the Unseelie were no bigger problem than a cockroach infestation. “We'll get Kim back to her own world, and then we will figure out how to save the world, and then we will have biscuits and tea.”

~

Julian slept badly and woke early, then set himself to the task of reaching the Otherworld without the carving to lead him. Grayson had taken it from him to facilitate official communication, and while he couldn't refuse her, he wanted very badly to contact someone who would tell him something about Kim.

He breathed away his growing tangle of frustration and fear, centered his mind, and tried again.

Twice he managed to touch that space between worlds, but the sun had set before he slipped fully into it. And before he could try to reach further, across the void to the approaching Otherworld, he felt a disturbance ripple the aether around him.

Sidhe were passing physically into the mortal world.

Robert wasn't in the room. No time to look for him. If the visitors were Seelie—he was certain there was more than one—he might be able to get news of Kim from them. And if they were Unseelie, he could follow and see what their purpose was. For he could sense, now that he knew they were coming, where they would emerge.

Julian snatched his coat off the hook and took the stairs at a dead run.

~

It was the Arboretum, of course. Whether because of the cave, or the comfort of green space, or some lingering connection to the riverbank, Julian didn't know and didn't care. He plunged into the cold darkness, running as swiftly and silently as he could. His reaching mind found human auras up ahead—the Guardians who'd escorted him to Grayson's office. Good. That saved him the trouble of alerting them.

He found quite a group: Falcon and Flint, two others familiar only from pain-ridden flashes of memory, and the two Guardians. No Grayson. When they spun to face him, Julian slowed to a walk and spread his hands, nonthreatening. “I felt you pass through, and came to investigate.”

Falcon said dryly, “You are rather slow.”

But Flint stepped forward, suddenly alert. “When did you feel us?”

“A few minutes ago.”

In one swift rush, everyone re-aligned, facing outward and scanning the trees. The male Guardian said to Julian, “They've been here more than half an hour.”

“But we, on the other hand, have been here mere minutes.”

The smooth voice brought Julian around and into a ready stance. Six Unseelie approached through the trees. Of course they would come through here; they sought a place where it was easy to connect the worlds, and the presence of the Seelie would facilitate that nicely. Julian wondered if the two Courts had stumbled across one another before this. From the posture of both sides, they might have. The threat of violence hung in the air, and Julian backed away one careful step at a time, tensing for trouble.

“They will not fight,” a new voice, female, murmured silkily in his ear. “They only bare their teeth and snarl.”

In the clearing filled with sidhe, where the effect of their Otherworldly nature was overwhelming, the woman at his shoulder stood out like a beacon of familiarity. She was human. Not sidhe.

A wilder.

Relief turned to ice an instant later. Wilders had long noted that although they possessed almost every strange eye color possible in the human genetic spectrum, their eyes were never truly green, or gold.

But her eyes were as gold as the Unseelie.

He pulled one swift step away. That unnatural gaze showed mocking amusement, as if she could hear the thoughts screaming through his head.
Shard said they had a way. But how? We can't be forced to their side!

But perhaps they could go of free will. And though Julian had hoped—prayed—that the
geis
would keep all wilders on the right side of the fight, in the end they weren't perfect. Everyone had their price.

It seemed the Unseelie had found one they could buy.

He risked a glance over his shoulder, but the two Guardians were occupied with the staring contest between the Seelie and the Unseelie. It hadn't broken into outright battle, but it might at any second, whatever this wilder thought. Had she come as part of the contingent sent to Grayson? Or had the connection expanded through blood to other parts of the world, where the Unseelie could enjoy richer pickings?

When he turned back, she was smiling. “I know what you're thinking. You assume they're your enemy, that they have nothing to offer you but pain and enslavement. You're wrong.”

Every nerve was alive, burning with contradictory fires that made it hard to think. She spoke in an intimate tone, as if she knew it was the easiest way to unsettle him, and the damnable thing was that it worked. Julian clenched his jaw, then asked the question she was waiting for. “What else, then?”

“Freedom.”

He forced a laugh. “Freedom through enslavement to their cause?”

Her impossible golden gaze bored into him, as if she could see straight through every facade, to his soul. “Freedom from the shield.”

Laughter went away. So did thought. The clearing might have been deserted except for the two of them; inter-world war could have broken out behind him and he wouldn't have cared. “You're lying.”

“No, I'm not.” She came a step forward, drawing close—too close, but he couldn't move, and he
knew
she was slipping through his unsteady shields to call a response from his body, making him aware of hers, but he couldn't muster a defense. “The Seelie would never do it. The deep shield helps keep you in line, and that's as useful to them as it is to your masters. But the Unseelie would free you.”

His breath was coming too fast. Years of study under Grayson; more years before that, examining it every time they gutted him, all toward this end. To break the deep shield.

“And then,” she whispered, almost in his ear, “you would never have to trust someone else with the key to your soul.”

His breath stopped. Julian turned his head the bare inch necessary to look in her eyes—golden eyes, alien and unfamiliar, and the face around them so subtly changed as to be nearly unrecognizable, because change like that should be as impossible as her eyes. But he recognized it.

“
Kim.
”

She laughed, in a voice that didn't sound like her, any more than her features looked like her. Kim, and yet not. Black horror threatened to overwhelm his vision. Kim. A wilder. How?

Kim.
Unseelie.

Smiling at him like some kind of entertaining toy.

Hands clamped down on his shoulders and dragged him back, and Julian couldn't even pull together a defense out of the shattered fragments of his mind. It was the other Guardian, the woman, and people were shouting, sidhe and humans alike; he couldn't focus enough to pick out words, but the Guardians were retreating, the Seelie and Unseelie going in opposite directions, and Kim was going with the Unseelie. Watching him the whole way. Still smiling.

Her whisper slipped into his mind just before she vanished from sight.
Think it over.

~

“They lied.”

Grayson had her head in her hands, fingers laced into brown cage across her white hair, either to defend or to hold something in. She didn't move at Julian's flat declaration, but she answered him. “Now we know they're capable of it.”

Every muscle in his body ached with tension. He hadn't slept; how could he? Instead he told Robert and Liesel, hearing his own voice like a stranger's, and now all three of them waited with those two Guardians in Grayson's office, watching the pale sun rise, counting down the minutes until the Seelie could step through again.

He couldn't murder them. He needed them to answer questions.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Kim's face. Not the face she wore last night, but the one he'd known for years. Human eyes, blue and filled with kindness and determination. A smile that had never once mocked him. Everything he had come to know, to trust—and, in time, to love.

The Unseelie had taken all of that.

Everything was too silent. Grayson's office was the only occupied one; the building had been cleared, and the area around it. The evacuation of campus had begun. Those with a connection to the sidhe, however, were staying until the solstice, whether they wanted to or not.

No sound in the hall, but none was needed. They all felt the sidhe approach. Julian and the others stood as Falcon, Shard, and three other sidhe came into the room.

He held onto his focus, not letting any emotion interfere. Falcon's bored disdain didn't bother him. Neither did Shard's refusal to meet his gaze. He asked, in a perfectly level voice, “What did they do to her?”

“There is a powder we use,” Falcon said, “to strengthen our own abilities, on the rare occasions when it is needed. We believe they used it on her, and its effect was to make her a changeling. And in that moment of change, they bound her.”

She hadn't chosen it. Julian hadn't believed it, not once he realized who she was; maybe everyone had a price, but the notion that the Unseelie could grant anything Kim wanted that badly was too impossible.

But it meant Kim truly was a wilder. Her changed appearance was real.

“Why did you lie?”

Falcon's mouth settled in what might be the sidhe equivalent of an eye-roll. “Because you would act foolishly otherwise—as you almost did last night. You are the one that matters, changeling. Neither they nor we particularly care about her.”

Julian was only barely conscious of the explosion as the room's windows shattered. As if the glass had been his cage, all the fury he'd been holding in roared free of his control, and with it came everything else: his love for Kim, his fear and grief, his sense of betrayal, that the sidhe considered her to be disposable in this fight. Falcon actually flinched, and Julian almost took him by the throat and slammed him into a wall. “You goddamned bastard. You have no idea how much she matters!”

“She is lost,” Falcon spat at him, hunching like a cornered animal. “As you were warned. Do not blame
me
for that.”

Julian fought the rage under control before he could do something unforgivable. Everyone else was standing well clear, sidhe and humans alike. He pulled his anger in, forged it into a harder shape. “So I'll get her back.”

“Don't be ridiculous. She is Unseelie.”

“She's
human,
” he snapped. “More human than sidhe, and we have free will. We aren't born to one side or the other, and can't be bound that way.”

“But the part of her that is sidhe
can
be bound. She can't be helped now, changeling; accept it!”