“And Ciarla? How’s she connected to you?” I pressed. “Because she met a couple of elfin at the hotel in San Diego, and I’m guessing one of those two was you.”
“Ah, the sidhe lord’s sister. I hear her children are sidhe, another one of Valin’s failures…. A useful but problematic tool. She probably could be called Tanic’s… whore.” Her smile was hungry again, an arrogant wrap of teeth around her face. “Much like you are to her brother, Ryder.”
Ryder took a step forward, but I kept him back with a brush of my elbow against his belly. Her eyes narrowed, and she came farther into the room, skirting Malone’s gun. Robbie’s hands were shaking, and I was more worried about the damned traitor accidentally plugging us because he didn’t know what he was doing.
“You can die just as easily as anything else,” I said, hoping to bluff her out. Damned Malone had my ammo belt on him, and I hadn’t gotten my Glocks back from Ryder. Things were going to shit, and while I had a couple of knives on me, I didn’t like carving someone up. A black dog was one thing, but a person—not my cup of tea.
“Human?”
The unsidhe looked worried, and she raised her left hand, crooking her fingers into a claw. I felt a draw of power in the air, and the pull sickened me, dragging serrated threads through my belly.
“You were supposed to disarm them.”
“His shotgun’s empty, and I have his ammo belt,” Malone informed her. “There’s another Stalker, but she’s gone out to do recon.”
“Do I need to send you out to go kill her?” the unsidhe asked pointedly. “Because so far, human, you’ve not done anything other than herded these two against the wall. So little work for so much reward.”
“I sent Cari back to the truck. I’ve run out of ammo, and her shells don’t fit my shotgun. She probably won’t be back for about an hour.” I noticed Malone made no mention of the Glocks Ryder still had on him, so I matched her smile, wondering how long it would take me to get my hands on one of the guns and possibly kick Malone in the teeth at the same time. “Got to be honest with you, I’m kind of tired of siblings falling out of every tree. Especially since all they seem to want to do is kill me.”
“Oh, I don’t want to kill you, Ciméara cuid Anbhás,” she purred at me. “I want to
remake
you.”
“Aisla?” Malone broke in before I could ask what she meant. “We should just get what we came for so we can get out of here.”
“We need Oscar, human, and the others. They are retrieving what I need to complete this,” she tsked. “And do not presume you have any say with me. You’ve seen what I will do to people who push me.”
“I don’t understand.” Ryder sounded as confused as I felt. “Why are you
here
? What was so important for you to kill people—your own men—to reach this place before us?”
“The pretty monster standing next to you is what I needed here, not you, Lord Ryder, but he would not have been here without you. Without something to lure him to the middle of nowhere. You were easy enough to bait, and by killing you, I weaken San Diego’s Court and sever one of the chimera’s bonds.” Her coppery gaze flicked over me. “But seeing him… hearing him… I see he is
tainted
. I doubt he’ll be of any further use to Lord Tanic. He’s human now. Stinks of human. Reeks of their words and culture.”
“You kill because you like it.” I cocked my eyebrow at her. “The kid with the dogs? The one using my name? You sent him after us and then shot him. That was you, right? And what about the poor bastard outside in the city? What did he do to you? How long does Oscar have?”
“I have no intention of killing Oscar. Or at least not yet,” Aisla corrected me, slithering across the hard floor to get to the counter. “I need him. At least for a little while. And why kill? Oh, my little monster, how does that human saying go? You have to crack eggs to make… whatever it is they make out of eggs. I’m going to have to crack a few eggs to get what I want… and one of them is you.”
Ryder shifted, edging closer to me, but his attention was on Aisla. I glanced at Malone, mostly to gauge his willingness to shoot us, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. Ryder’d shifted the Glocks around, using his jacket to hide their grips. Twisting his shoulders toward me, Ryder hooked his hand into his pocket, pulling back the leather jacket’s panel and exposing the guns to me.
Aisla caught the movement, her keen snake eyes fixed on Ryder’s face, but I stepped forward, blocking her view, then asked, “So, Malone, she worth doing this for? You say they’re threatening your family? Like Sarah? Who? Who the hell can they get near that you couldn’t protect?”
“You heard what they did to Marshall, and she’s been in on this since they first started planning a month ago. She only changed her mind about helping them when she found out they’re going to kill Ryder,” Robbie retorted. “I’m second string, guys. If I didn’t help them out, they were going to kill my aunt and mother. Besides, I need the money. I’m not good at anything. The professor was going to fire me anyway. She wasn’t going to go through with this… handing Kai over to the unsidhe.”
“And you are fine with it?” Ryder prickled. “After Kai saved your life, how many times? They would have killed you back at Sparky’s and have tried to kill you since. Are you forgetting that?”
“Maybe he thought it was all near misses so it would look better for him?” I tossed in, turning to keep my eye on Aisla. The unsidhe woman seemed to be paying less and less attention to us, but I knew her kind. Hell, Ryder’s grandmother probably would have cackled gleefully and adopted Aisla on the spot if she thought she could pass the bitch off as sidhe. “Tell you what, Aisla. So far you’ve done nothing to us directly. We just all go our separate ways—no harm, no foul—and no one else gets hurt.”
“Not quite,
brother
,” Aisla murmured as she drew a knife out from somewhere on her body. “There’s a small matter of
you
.”
My elbow hit Ryder’s arm, and I fought the urge to grin at his clumsy attempt to bring himself close enough for me to grab the guns. “If you think you’re dragging me back to Tanic, you’ve got another think coming to you.”
“I’ve no intention of dragging you anywhere, Kai.”
The look she tossed over her shoulder wasn’t a pleasant one. In fact, it made me long for a bath.
“I just need a little bit of your blood. Okay, maybe a lot of your blood, but since you’ll be dead, I’m sure you won’t mind.”
I reached for the Glocks just as a pair of
ainmhi dubh
padded into the thick-walled chamber and came up with two handfuls of loaded gun.
Ryder sucked in a mouthful of air behind me, and I felt the waves of revulsion pouring off his body in a tide of sharp horror and disbelief. A second later, Robbie Crickets Malone went down in a dead faint, his body hitting the uneven floor with a resounding thump.
What came through the door was beyond horrific. I had no word for what I saw other than abomination—exactly what everyone with pointed ears called me.
The creatures were unlike any black dog I’d seen before, and I’d skinned enough of the damned things to write a book on their twisted, arcane forms. For one, they were a blush ivory color, iridescent pinks and greens roiling under their marble white skin. On any other creature, the tone would have been enchanting, a unicorn kiss of hues on a snow-bright canvas. They were more simian than canine, sexless, with sloped-back hips and long flat apelike hands and feet with stubby flat nails where
ainmhi dubh
had claws. Bowed spines angled their backs down, their powerful shoulders and legs thick with patchy spoiled-milk-colored fur, and they loped into the room on all fours, then rose up into a bowlegged, swaggering crouch, their knuckles nearly dragging on the ground as they approached Aisla.
The larger of the two held something in its powerful jaws, its long sharp teeth cradling the dark object in a gentle bite. The
ainmhi dubh
dropped back down to its front legs and rubbed against Aisla’s open hand, smearing a line of spittle across her palm. Smiling, she stroked at its blond fur, then ran a fingertip along the ridges on its forehead.
“As you can see, Chimera, I don’t kill all of my minions,” she remarked softly. “Some of them, like Oscar here, can be quite useful.”
Time and the unsidhe had not been kind to Oscar Bennett.
There was a bit left of the man whose picture I’d seen on the Post’s data sheet. The flat planes of his European ancestry were gone, replaced by a mockery of elfin features. His blond hair was now a mane, thin in spots, a dry straw thatch set on his elongated skull, while the skin around his color-daubed violet eyes turned upward, stretched tight with the edges laid over with a heavy lid. The ends of his mouth were pinched in, and the bone along his cheeks and jawline jutted up, creating hard ridges barely contained by his taut skin.
The man had been turned into a funhouse-mirror pet, a wax-pencil drawing done by a toddler, of a monster dreamed up to live under beds.
“You’re a flesh-shaper. Like Tanic.” Realization hit me hard, because stupidity makes a mark when it leaves the body. There’d been only one unsidhe lord who was depraved enough, sick enough to sculpt out a person’s form to such a repulsive horror, but from the looks of Oscar Bennett, Tanic now had some stiff competition on that score. “Holy shit, you
are
his.”
“You are supposed to heal the body.” Ryder’s horror was thick and bitter, a slice of
ume
served up with a cup of bile. “Not do…
this
.”
“This is how you make an
ainmhi dubh
, Lord Ryder.” Aisla slid behind Oscar, using him as a shield. “We all start off with a base. The stronger the animal, the stronger the
ainmhi dubh
,
and what greater animal to work with than a
human
?”
Oscar spit out what he had in his mouth and rubbed his muzzle along Aisla’s hip, nearly knocking her off balance with his enthusiastic preening.
The object was as familiar to me as my own ass. I’d stolen many an egg, usually cold dead in a nest scraped together by a neglectful dragon. There was good money to be made in an unfertilized dragon egg, but like all things, the prettier and bigger, the better. It was flat in color and, while decorative, looked more like something easily purchased at an overpriced faux-import store to decorate an ugly table you still had to assemble when you got home.
Not the stuff dreams were built on.
“Nice egg you’ve got there, Aisla. Useless on the open market, but hey, still, a nice egg.” I didn’t know the type of lizard it’d come from, and its lack of color could only mean one thing—it was fertilized. Aisla’s pet human hadn’t dragged a gold mine in with his mutilated mouth. It was a piece of shit taken from an active nest. “You
did
kind of go overboard making
ainmhi dubh
just for a game of fetch.”
Leveling the Glocks, I pointed one at what remained of Oscar and the other at Aisla. The smaller
ainmhi dubh
wasn’t much of a worry. Unlike Oscar, it seemed confused, weaving then turning about in circles. Its enormous blue eyes were filled with pain. I knew that pain. I intimately knew the torment pouring out of the creature’s—the former human’s—soul. Imprisoned in an anguish with no end in sight, I’d wanted to die. Killing the smaller
ainmhi dubh
would be a mercy.
Killing the other two would just be a pleasure.
“The egg? That is how I am going to make a new you, Chimera. Because much like the
ainmhi dubh
, something like you needs a base to begin with. That is what is written on these walls, monster. The key to your existence. The words spoken over a sacrifice to create the likes of you.”
Aisla’s serpentine smile got even wider. My look of surprise must have been hilarious, because Aisla burst out into hearty laughter, Oscar snickering in a hyena chortle as he skulked around her knees.
“Did you actually believe Tanic created you without adding something else into the mix? That is how the spell works. A bit of sidhe, a dab of unsidhe, blood, death, and a pinch of something extra—our genesis, our own beginning—a dragon’s egg.
“You might as well put your weapons away, little monster, because it will be so much easier to make a new one of you if there is more of your body to work with,” Aisla said, flicking her hand out with a sharp snap. “Oscar, get it for me.”
Funniest thing about dragon eggs is most lizards are negligent layers, shooting out hard pellets of yolk and whites without doing anything to kick-start a new generation. They’re like large, predatory chickens, with little brain power and a ravenous carnivorous appetite. Dragons lay scores upon scores of eggs, sometimes gulping them down even as they’re laying them to satiate their never-ending hunger. The draconian species would overrun us all if they were more interested in sex than food, but luckily for the world’s continuing existence, a female lizard would as soon have breakfast served fresh out of a nest—be it her own or her neighbor’s—than sit on an unfertilized clutch.
The operative word there being unfertilized.
Because once a dragon has flown and mated, a nest of fertilized eggs becomes a female dragon’s primary focus, and she will tear through entire cities to retrieve one of her stolen treasures.
Which is why any Stalker with a brain cell in their head never
ever
plucks a matte-finish dragon egg out of a nest.
And they sure as shit don’t stick around the immediate area to find out just how invested the momma dragon is in her little reptilian offspring.
Unfortunately for me, Ryder, and Malone, this particular momma dragon wouldn’t give two shits about which mewling sack of wet meat took her precious egg. She was just going to make sure the last thing we saw was her gullet, and if we were lucky, we’d all be dead before she shat us out against the mountain’s rocky crags.
The dragon hit us hard and fast, a pearlescent ebony blur of scales, teeth, and rage. She came down silent, only the faint whistle of her wings beating the air alerting me to the incoming danger. The keen of her wind-filled membranes jerked me into moving, and I shoved the Glocks away, then launched myself at Ryder in a desperate hope to hide us from her hate-filled gaze.