And by the gods too numerous to name, there was so
much
light.
The natural amphitheater once was open to the sky, but the unsidhe and possibly the Merge shut it away from exposure. Like the mountain, the walls were stygian and reflective, but instead of an unyielding staunch of black, the enormous space was dotted with flecks of glowing blue light, turning the domed cavern into a tiny captured sea of stars buried deep in the mountain’s belly.
A thin stream ran through the middle of the amphitheater, its floor thick with the remains of buildings and enormous chunks of rock broken off of the cavern’s walls and ceiling. Flicks of luminescent white creatures danced through the slow-moving water, but I couldn’t tell if I was looking at some kind of crustacean or fish. The blue spots flickered and dimmed, at times entire spans flaring up to a painful brilliance only to ease back into a soft cobalt glow.
“It’s night-finder moss,” Ryder rumbled in my ear, awestruck and humbled. “It takes years to grow even a foot of it. This would have taken… centuries to cover.”
“Marshall’s notes said there was light in the chamber, but this?” I turned around slowly, thankful for Ryder’s steadying hand at my back. The air was crisp and cold, sharp in my lungs after the dust-mote-heavy stillness of the corridors. “This is insane. Is it safe to touch? This moss stuff?”
Ryder nodded, and I lightly pressed my fingers into the bristly covering. It was wet, damper than I’d expected, and my hand glittered when I pulled it back. The white-blue glow bathed us, and the sparkling moss’s light deepened the green in Ryder’s enormous almond-shaped eyes. A few feet away, Malone crouched next to the stream, his knees dangerously close to the edge. Cari stood behind him, an evil glint in her eye, and as he craned his neck to look at something, she nudged his ass with her toe. His wild-eyed panic was hilarious, and Cari laughed when he ended up elbow deep in the water with his knees spread wide over the bank to stop himself from falling in.
“They’re cute together.” Ryder pressed at my back, a not-so-subtle urge to continue down the path.
“What? Cari and Malone?” I scoffed at the idea. “Cari would eat him alive.”
“Stranger things have happened,
ainle
,” he replied. “Would you have said a few months ago you and I would be standing at the edge of an unsidhe compound, hoping to find an answer to the declining elfin population?”
“You hope to find an answer,” I pointed out, skating the edge of a mossy bank. “Don’t forget, I’m here for the cash and the glory.”
“Oh yes.
That
.” His eye roll was so strong I could hear it in his voice. “How could I ever forget?”
THE RUINS
were the stuff of nightmares.
And I had more than my fill of nightmares.
But mostly, it was the overwhelming unsidhe-ness of the place that sent shuddering whispers of spoiled blood and shattered limbs through my brain.
If I’d wanted to turn around and backpedal when I’d first seen the black mountain, I’d since graduated to turning tail and running until Oighear Bhais was nothing more than a speck of a bad dream in my rearview mirror.
Marshall’s notes were extensive but written in a curlicue logic even Malone had a hard time understanding. Armed with a glowing notepad, he walked through the space we’d found, measuring off spans with a few strides only to be turned around at a dead end. I left him to his wanderings and took a moment to stare at the slice of city trapped behind an avalanche of glossy rock.
Elfhaime—the sidhe city—was a riot of graceful lines, delicate expanses, and impossibly floating towers. The white mountain and the city built around it shone under the SoCal sky with a diamond-sharp brilliance so bright it hurt, while Oighear Bhais’s ruins murmured dusty regrets of its once magnificent past.
The dead city now only reminisced of its faded, delicate elegance, but only in a passing whisper between brutal, harsh walls and tiered walkways. The city’s architects delivered a blunt, unyielding sprawl, each shaken building uglier than the next, and I wondered how the hell some of the structures were even useful. Some were tall, connected with walkways and the remains of abstract sculptures, but there were too many cell-wide buildings barely large enough to take a breath in much less hold a person.
Much of the walls were a dull moray-eel brown, spackled with dark spots and the occasional window, but there were traces of beauty as well. I imagined the city had been a delicate balance between art and function, despite the heavy-handed glut of squat, closed-in buildings. Traces of colorful murals of strange creatures covered more than a few walls, slivers of red and purple caught up in the mossy blue light, but in the jumble, it was hard to make sense of the buildings, the fallen structures forming a maze of toppled walls and caved-in ceilings.
It was hard to imagine anyone once lived in the rubble. Even harder to believe we’d find anything to help the elfin continue to live, but Ryder seemed determined as he picked his way through the seemingly endless trail of chambers.
There were signs of past inhabitants, mainly in wooden fragments and broken pottery, but I stepped into yet another long, empty, roofless room and kicked a piece of stone with my foot. It rolled over, fragile and golden, then came to a rest on a patch of sparkling moss.
The stone had eyes.
Two almond hollows stared back up at me, a delicate canine tooth shaking from its perch on the skull’s upper ridge. Bone tentacles erupted from one of the skull’s unfused parietals, a curious aberration along the otherwise smooth surface. I was about to bend down to pick it up when Malone’s shout cut through the still, cold air.
“Lord Ryder! I found something!” Malone’s excitement pitched his voice to a squeak, and its echo bounced around the chamber. I couldn’t see where he’d gone, but Ryder apparently did because I got a head jerk from the blond sidhe, and then he disappeared through a darkened archway.
“They’re going to get eaten by a giant tarantula.” Cari stomped past me. “Swear to God, I’m going to turn a corner and find a seven-foot spider picking their bones out of its teeth.”
“I thought most spiders injected a toxin into their prey so everything liquefies under the skin so it can all be sucked out like a juice sack.”
I ducked to one side to avoid the rock Cari threw at my head. It sailed past my ear with a soft whistle, and she followed up with a gesture so offensive I knew her mother would make her wash her hands with acid to get rid of its stench.
“Nice. So very nice. You used to be such a sweet little girl.”
“I was
never
a sweet little girl, you asshole,” she shot back. “Now hurry it up before something has them for lunch.”
We found Malone and Ryder at the amphitheater in a long stretch of a chamber still sporting some of its roof. Unlike the rest of the rooms we’d been in, the floor here was clean of debris and rocks and the walls were more or less intact. More of the same scrawled animals covered the interior, glints of metallic paint flashing with blue speckles from the rippling moss clinging to the cracked plaster walls.
Oddly enough, a stone counter sat perched on triangular wooden supports along the chamber’s long wall, its gleaming, veined slab a slash of chalky white cutting through the muted rainbow murals. Ryder and Malone stood in front of the flat stone, shooting images of its surface with some of the equipment Malone’d dragged with him.
“Cover the door outside,” I ordered Cari. “Oscar’s still out there somewhere, and if they’re excited to find this, we’ve got to guess this is what that asshole is looking for.”
“You got enough ammo?” She cocked her hip, balancing her shotgun on her leg. “You went through a hell of a lot back there with the dogs.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll be okay. I went through my iron shot mostly.” I patted my weapon’s stock. “Malone’s holding my ammo belt, but I’m going to switch with Ryder and take my Glocks back. Damned things did jack shit against those dogs.”
“Yell if you need me,” she replied as she stepped out of the chamber. “I’m going to see if I can find someplace high enough to see more than the wall in front of my face. Maybe we’ll be lucky and I’ll spot Oscar before he spots us.”
The place stank of blood magic, or at least that’s what my little lizard brain screamed at me as I studied the nearly empty room. I couldn’t tell if it’d ever been outside of the mountain, but the lack of windows along the back wall led me to believe someone didn’t want to let a lot of light in. Unsidhe symbols wiggled around the edge of the ceiling, elongated curved shapes spelling out words I could almost read. It was maddening, and just as I thought I’d figured something out, the shadows shifted and its meaning was lost to me.
Six-foot hexagon tiles covered the floor, their edges fitted in so tightly I couldn’t see any grout, but their ceramic glaze held enough of a sheen to reflect the sparkling moss growing along the upper walls. Deep cobalt roofing tiles were stacked up in a corner, an enormous triangular gap in the ceiling opening the chamber up to the outside cavern. Other than the counter and fallen-in roof, the room was empty, but the feeling of something being out there watching haunted me as I walked around.
“Kai, come see this,” Ryder called out to me. “Definitely fertility rites of some kind are laid into the stone. I should have brought a healer with me to look at this, but pictures should be enough. Once we document everything here, I can take it back and see if we can use any of the ritual.”
Malone grinned back at me, clearly delighted at the find. They were cute, nearly trembling with excitement and rambling at one another in a string of unrecognizable babble made up of medical phrases and arcane power triggers.
“This is what Marshall—”
I wasn’t listening much to Ryder’s drone. Something else tugged at my brain, an oddity in the middle of the devastation of past lives. Staring at the counter, I asked, “How come the wood’s still here?”
“What?” Malone popped his head up from what he’d been studying, his corn-silk shock of hair standing up nearly straight from his skull. “What wood?”
“The counter’s got wooden supports.” I pointed to the brackets underneath the stone. “It’s damp in here. That stream kicks up a lot of moisture, and yeah it’s cold, so that’ll hold off decay for a bit, but the wet? That’ll eat through wood like nobody’s business.”
“What does that have to do with—” Malone started to say, but Ryder cut him off with a sharp clench of his fingers into Malone’s shoulders.
“It’s pine, I think.” I crouched down to get a better look. “Did they have pine on Underhill?”
It wasn’t like I went around sniffing at logs and declaring their origin like one of those wine snobs who swished a swallow around in their mouths and droned on about raisins, smoke, and honey. I couldn’t scratch a plank of wood, put the shavings on my tongue, and tell jack shit about the tree it came from, but pine I knew. Mostly because it smelled like a cleaner version of the tree-shaped air fresheners Dempsey used to hang in his truck after he’d eaten at a taqueria.
If I’d been troubled by the wood before, the blood-speckled grooves on the slab’s edge were more than enough to send alarm bells going off in my head.
“The wood looks new.” Ryder took up too much space next to me, his shoulders blocking the wash of light from the moss behind us. His fingers ghosted over a bolt through one of the supports, the fastener’s dull matte metal a silvery spot against the pale frame. “These are human made. Someone’s been here. Recently.”
“Safe bet, I think.” I straightened up and found Malone standing a few feet away from us, a gun shakily gripped in his slender hand. He chewed on his lower lip, worry sending a dark flush through his pale skin. “Well, I’ll be damned. Ryder, next time my gut says to not bring someone along, don’t let me talk myself out of it, okay?”
“What?” He glanced over his shoulder when I tapped his back, then stood up to stare at Malone. “Robbie? What are you doing?”
“I think this is called someone screwing us over,” I commented. “Classic, really. Normally it’s a relative or someone with a deep-seated longing for revenge, but in this case, I’ve got nothing. What the hell are you thinking here, Malone? What the hell is so damned important you’re willing to risk me carving you up once I get that gun away from you?”
“Money, my dear Chimera. Money and the threat of his family dying a terribly long and frighteningly horrible death,” a female voice said from the shadows in the outer hallway.
An unsidhe woman stepped into the chamber, her lean body framed by the outer archway. She was tall, a slender sylph of pale skin and black leather pants, easing into the space as if she were returning home after a quick jaunt into the upper city. Her eyes were unsidhe copper, a bright bronze despite the blue glow oozing from the walls, and her violet and white hair was cropped tight to her jawline, accentuating the alien-oddness of her sharp, vulpine face.
I didn’t know who she was, hadn’t laid eyes on her in my entire life, but her hungry grin was mockingly familiar.
Tucking a strand of gossamer white hair behind her upswept, pointed ear, she smiled at me and said, “Hello, my dear brother. You have no idea how
delighted
I am to finally meet you.”
“RIGHT. MY
sister
.” I kept my hand away from the shotgun I’d slung down my back, but it was only a foot and a quick grab at Ryder’s waistband for my Glock. “You’re older than Valin. Sorry, lady. You’re kind of long in the tooth, but I don’t remember you being around when he was stewing me up. If there’d been a daughter he could scrape an egg out of, I wouldn’t be standing here and he’d have been popping out unsidhe overlords like they were pieces of gum.”
“Being Tanic’s get is not something to boast about, and being considered
his
is a liability, of sorts. Then Valin failed to drag you back to where you belong, and Tanic reached out to me. But your existence… complicates things for all of us. It isn’t the healthiest of positions,” she conceded with a tilt of her head. “My Lord Tanic gladly calls me daughter… because his sons have failed him so, so much.”