Tempestuous

  Sonny had to warn Carys. He had to get Neerya somewhere safe. He had to—

  “Sonny!” Maddox hissed—for what was probably the second or third time by the sound of things. He reached out and grabbed Sonny by the arm, pulling him to a stop. “What in seven hells is going on?”

  “You tell me. Just what exactly happened while I was in the Otherworld?” Sonny whispered fiercely. “Was Carys right? Have the Janus gone rogue, Maddox?”

  Maddox shifted his shoulders nervously and looked as though he would laugh off the question—until Sonny turned abruptly and, grabbing him roughly by his jacket, slammed Maddox up against the wall of the tunnel, beside another archway that branched off into darkness.

  “Tell me!” Sonny demanded. “Are we hunting for sport now? Is that our noble purpose?”

  Maddox went very still. Sonny knew there was a decent chance that—if he’d really wanted to—the other Janus could flatten him where he stood. He didn’t. Instead, he lowered his hands to his sides and looked Sonny square in the eyes.

  “I think maybe, yeah,” he said quietly. “For some of us.”

  Sonny took his hands off Maddox and stepped back. “Why?” he asked, wounded that he would even need to ask such a question.

  “I dunno, Sonn.” Maddox ran a hand through his sandy hair. “Boredom? Rebellion? But . . . yeah. It’s gotten bad. The real hard-arses—Godwyn and that little psychopath, Ghost . . . even Camina, I think—they’ve been tracking down Lost on a full-time basis. Tracking them and . . . well, you know. I suspect Aaneel’s been egging ’em on.”

  “Then we have to warn Carys and her folk.”

  “No, Sonny!” Maddox made a grab for his arm as Sonny turned to continue on to the reservoir.

  “You want them to get caught unawares? Only Carys and a few of the others are warriors of any sort. The rest are just misfits. Maddox—it’ll be a bloodbath in there.”

  “I—” Maddox snorted in frustration. “Gods! Am I the only one who hasn’t lost my crackerjacks lately? Look.” Maddox pointed back toward where, at that very moment, Cait was working to breach the enchanted veil far down at the mouth of the tunnel. “Those guys—they’re the ones we’re supposed to be siding with. That’s our team. Not some half-wit water beetle like your little playfellow.”

  “She’s just a child, Madd.”

  “She bloody well is not—”

  “And what about Chloe?” Sonny interrupted.

  Maddox’s anger wavered. “What about her?”

  “I thought you cared about her.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Maddox’s chin jutted out stubbornly. “You said it yourself, Sonny. She’s just a Siren. A monster.” The sarcasm sounded particularly bitter coming from someone with such a big, open heart as Maddox. “I’m probably just another pathetic human plaything to her. Why should I give a damn? About any of them?”

  “I don’t know,” Sonny said quietly. “Do you stop caring about someone you love—just because they don’t feel the same way?”

  In that moment Sonny realized that he still loved Kelley. In spite of everything. Maybe when this was over he would try to find her. Talk to her and find out what the hell had happened between them. When there was time. At the moment, there were other pressing matters.

  Maddox kicked at the ground, miserable, and then his gaze drifted back down the tunnel. Back toward the reservoir. He did care. Still, Maddox was a good soldier—a good Janus Guard—and he said, “I dunno. You heard Godwyn back there—he seems to be under the impression that all this stuff that’s happening . . . that it’s under Auberon’s orders.”

  “It isn’t. He’s not issuing any orders. He’s barely—” Sonny stopped himself before he said anything further.

  “He’s barely what?” When Sonny didn’t answer, Maddox pressed him on it. “Auberon’s barely what, Sonny?”

  “He’s dying, Madd.”

  “Oh. Oh . . . hell.”

  Maddox looked as though he was at an utter loss for words. Sonny understood the reaction. To even think of the Unseelie lord as anything other than invincible and eternal was to question everything they had grown up learning. It also meant that things were seriously awry in the Otherworld. And it meant that wherever this new Janus agenda was coming from, it wasn’t from Auberon. Sonny gazed at Maddox, waiting for him to make up his mind.

  But there wasn’t going to be time for that. A rumbling vibration of sound and a flash of weird light washed over them from the direction they’d just come.

  “Damn it!” Sonny hissed.

  Maddox nodded grimly. “Cait’s no slouch.”

  When Sonny turned to keep running toward the reservoir, Maddox grabbed and pointed toward the archway next to them. “Where does that lead?” he asked.

  “Up to the Tavern on the Green, I think,” Sonny answered impatiently. “Why?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Maddox said. “Will Herne help the reservoir Folk?”

  Sonny nodded. “He’s the one who built the place.”

  “We’ll never make it with enough time to warn the Lost properly,” Maddox said. “You go topside, find Herne, and get reinforcements. Let me take care of this.”

  “I’ll stay,” Sonny said. “You go.”

  “No.” Maddox shook his head. “The other Janus don’t know you’re back, Sonny. I can—”

  There was a noise from down the tunnel. Maddox shoved Sonny over the threshold of the Tavern archway and threw a quick-and-dirty veil up in front of the opening, hiding Sonny from sight. Then Maddox moved swiftly in a loping run, stopping a dozen yards back down the tunnel where it bent at a sharp angle, still close enough that Sonny could clearly hear his friend’s voice as Maddox said, “About bloody time!”

  “Maddox?” Cait’s voice floated back.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” asked Godwyn—and Sonny could hear the edge in his voice.

  “Waiting for you lot,” Maddox answered, as if it should be perfectly obvious what he was doing there. “Hullo, Ghost. Camina. Where’s Bellamy?”

  “Don’t be cute, Maddox,” Camina said sourly. “You know Bell’s no part of this.”

  Sonny held his breath at the misstep, but Maddox recovered quickly.

  “Yeah—of course. It was a joke. Don’t be so touchy.” Maddox laughed derisively. “This is it then. . . .” He left the statement hanging.

  Sonny knew what Maddox was doing. He was trying to give him a head count—to let Sonny know how many of the rogue Janus were there in the tunnel.

  “This is it,” Godwyn answered.

  “Except for the redcaps you told us abou—”

  “Shut up, Mina.” Godwyn silenced Camina, coldly.

  Redcaps, thought Sonny. This was going to get ugly fast. He could hardly believe that Godwyn would stoop to using the likes of those mercenary trolls to fight his battles.

  “Who sent you, Maddox?” Godwyn asked.

  Maddox snorted. “Same person who sent you, Wynnie-boy. No reason to get pissy just because I found the Faerie freaks’ hidey-hole before you did. Now listen up, you lot.” He turned his voice on its edge, and began speaking as though issuing commands. “I’ve already done recon, and there’s a sanctuary up ahead about three hundred yards. Didn’t see anyone in the passageway, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Cait, you should go back out into the subway tunnel. Reinstall the veil and keep watch so’s we don’t tip off the mortal authorities and get some poor transit worker killed—or get ambushed from behind. Send up a flare if anything’s on the move.”

  So, Sonny thought, Maddox trusted Cait. Or, at the very least, didn’t think she was exactly culpable in this madness. Sonny was glad of it. He’d heard the uncertainty in her voice before she’d breached the tunnel veil.

  “The rest of you,” Maddox was saying, “sanctuary’s that way, if you please. Get a move on.”

  Sonny sensed the Janus starting to head in his direction.

  “Hey!” Sonny heard Maddox call out from where he now brought up the rear of t
he group. “If any of you darlings brought party favors, I’d get ’em out and ready. Arm yourselves, kiddies. You never know what might be coming for you.”

  Sonny shook his head, grinning viciously at his friend’s perfidy; Maddox, of course, knew exactly what would be coming for them. And he knew the consequences of fighting back. Sonny retreated farther back from the opening as he heard the sounds of blades being unsheathed, a crossbow ratcheted and loaded, the rasp of a mace chain. . . .

  Within seconds, there was the roaring in the distance that signaled the onrushing approach of the tunnel wraiths that came screaming out of the darkness. Sonny felt a momentary surge of conflicting emotions as he heard one or two of the Janus Guards scream in alarm—and pain. Then he shut the lid on his feelings and, turning, ran, climbing upward toward where the tunnel he was in would come out inside Herne’s Tavern on the Green.

  Chapter XII

  “Transformation isn’t like casting a glamour, Kelley,” Tyff said.

  Kelley ignored her and frowned fiercely, staring at the corkscrew lock of fiery auburn hair she held up in front of her face.

  “It isn’t easy. Seriously. It’s almost impossible.”

  “Tyff—shh . . .” Almost impossible, maybe. But she’d done it. And she was determined to do it again. . . .

  “You are so messing with stuff you shouldn’t be.”

  “I’m Faerie, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I know how to do this?”

  “It’s high magick, Kell. Most Fae don’t.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m not most Fae.”

  “Neither am I,” Kelley said obstinately.

  “Oh gods!” Tyff tossed her nail file onto the coffee table and stood in a huff. “I give up on you! Haven’t I told you that magick taints things? Just look at whatsisname. . . .”

  “What’s whose name, Tyff?” Kelley asked. She knew Tyff meant Sonny—she just wanted to know if Tyff knew who she meant.

  Faint confusion clouded Tyff’s eyes. “Um . . . I forget. What the hell are we talking about?”

  The enchantment held. Kelley felt relief and guilt all at the same time.

  “Magick,” she said. “You were going to teach me how to use mine, remember?”

  “You really are the world’s worst liar,” Tyff muttered, and wandered off to her own room, taking one of her glossy magazines with her as she went.

  Kelley turned back to the task at hand. Transformation. At least she tried to, but her mind kept drifting off onto tangents that always, eventually, circled back to thoughts of Sonny. If he’d been there, he would have thought what she was trying to do was worthy of the effort. She remembered the look on Sonny’s face the first time he’d ever seen her Faerie wings—how he’d reached up to catch her and keep her from flying away. And when her wings had flickered and dimmed, he’d told her she’d “have to work on that” with a smile playing on his lips and a proud gleam in his beautiful eyes.

  Kelley stared at an auburn curl and redoubled her efforts.

  One feather. Just one . . .

  Eventually, instead of being able to transform a lock of her hair into even a single feather, all Kelley’s intense concentration managed to conjure was a headache. A pounding one. For a moment, she thought she could actually hear the pounding.

  No . . . that’s the door.

  “Are you gonna get that?” Tyff hollered from her bedroom. “I’m trying to relax here!”

  Pulling her hair back into a ponytail and securing it with an elastic band from around her wrist, Kelley went to get the door, which was shuddering under the blows from whoever was knocking so insistently. She stood on tiptoe and peered through the peephole—straight into one of Fennrys’s ice-blue eyes.

  “Hey,” Kelley said, opening up. “Did my door do something to really piss you off, Fenn?”

  The Wolf stood in the hallway, fist raised. “There’s trouble,” he said without preamble. “In the park.”

  “Trouble . . . in the park,” Kelley said. “And this is different from every other day how, exactly?”

  “Because it’s more trouble than I think I can handle alone.”

  That was a worrying thought. Still, Kelley was a little wary of Fennrys and his whole pick-your-battles demotivational speech. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s good you’ve got the other Janus Guards to help you out, then.”

  But Fennrys shook his head, his expression grim. “The other Janus Guards are the trouble.”

  * * *

  “Aren’t the Janus supposed to be the good guys?” Kelley was appalled. “Code of honor and all that?”

  She paced back and forth in front of the couch, where Fennrys sat impatiently, elbows on his knees, lacing and unlacing his fingers.

  “Where, exactly, in this code of honor does it say that it’s okay to plan a surprise attack on a bunch of Folk who are, as far as you know, living in peaceful accord with the mortal realm?” Cold anger made it hard for Kelley to speak without raising her voice. “I thought you and your buddies were only supposed to fight against dangerous lunatics like the Wild Hunt,” she said. “Or that leprechaun jerk.”

  “That’s what I always thought,” Fenn said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—hell, I’m just as happy to go on a rampage as the next changeling—but I don’t go in for sneak attacks on non-aggressors.”

  “Non-aggressors?” Kelley stopped and crossed her arms.

  Fenn smiled wanly. “You know what I mean. Most of the Lost who live in this realm are just a bunch of sparkly misfits, and I’m really not into ripping the wings off butterflies.”

  Kelley felt a sharp, phantom ache where her own silvery wings had once briefly fluttered. “How on earth am I supposed to help you?”

  Fenn shot her a look. “I’ve seen you in a fight, remember? I’ve fought by your side. And, more importantly, you’re Auberon’s daughter. I’m hoping that your words might hold a bit more sway than my fists with some of the Guard who think they’re doing this thing on Old Man Winter’s orders. Failing that, your power packs a wallop that might do some convincing.”

  Kelley frowned and thought about what he was saying. She didn’t want to see innocents get hurt—Lost Fae like Tyff who were just victims of circumstance.

  She was startled by Fennrys reaching a hand toward her face. Kelley jerked backward away from his touch before she could stop herself, and he smiled grimly. Then he reached for her again . . . and pulled something from her hair.

  It was a single small, fluffy reddish feather.

  Kelley snatched the thing from Fenn’s fingers, blushing furiously.

  He shrugged and stood. “I just figured you might want a piece of this action,” he said. “But, y’know, just tell me if I’m wrong and I’ll go.”

  “No . . . no, you’re not wrong, Fenn,” she agreed reluctantly.

  He wasn’t. But Kelley also wondered, in the back of her mind, if this shift in attitude among the Janus might have something to do with the gathering unrest in the Faerie Courts. Still, even if it was just the Guard going rogue for no other reason than because they were bored, she wasn’t about to stand idly by and let it happen. “I’ll come with you.”

  She went to get her shoes but stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Except I can’t. Crap.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have rehearsal later tonight.”

  Fennrys glared at her. “And?”

  Kelley glared back. “And it’s important for me not to let the company down. The only reason the Avalon burned to the ground in the first place was because of me, remember?”

  Sure. And she’d made herself a promise to help save the theater company—just like Tyff had told her she could. But what if this situation was the “save the world” thing her roommate had referred to? The lightbulb went off in Kelley’s head. Without another word to Fenn, she went and knocked on Tyff’s door.

  “Sucks to be you, sometimes,” Tyff commiserated blandly from behind the creamy-pink frosting of a honeysuckle-scented facia
l treatment. “No lie.”

  “But you could,” Kelley said, excited by the prospect. “Be me.”

  Tyff’s eyes narrowed. “I just said it sucks to be you.”

  “You wouldn’t actually be me. I mean, you could just cast a glamour that would make you look like me and then you could go to rehearsal in my place and I can go with Fenn and—”

  “Whoa there, tiger!” Tyff cut her off. “I’m a model—not an actress.”

  “It wouldn’t be for long. Just so you could learn the blocking and give me notes. Just for a rehearsal or two.”

  “Not just no, Winslow.” Tyff crossed her arms over her chest, her facial mask creasing into a clownish frown. “Hell no.”

  “Tyff . . . hear me out,” Kelley pleaded. “I can’t be in two places at once. At least, I don’t think I can. Tell me right now if that is something I can do, and I’ll totally forget this whole idea.”

  Tyff glared at her. “It’s not something you can do,” she admitted reluctantly. “Damn it all.”

  “Okay.” Kelley took a deep breath and plunged on. “Weren’t you the one who told me that I should do what mortals do? Weren’t you the one who told me to multitask? What better way to do that than this!”

  “I said that?”

  “You said that.” Kelley nodded emphatically. “‘Save the theater. Save Sonny. Save the world. Save yourself.’”

  “Me and my big, perfectly shaped mouth,” Tyff muttered darkly. She stalked to her dressing table, plucked a handful of Kleenex from a box, and began to tissue off the cream with waspish little swipes. “I was obviously waxing poetic.”

  “But you were right. I can do this. At least, I can try to do this—all of it—but only with your help. Will you help me?”

  “The last time I agreed to help someone—i.e., you and Sonny-boy—out of a bad situation, it ended even badder, Kelley,” Tyff said bleakly, wadding the now-greasy tissue into a ball and lobbing it a foot wide of the wastebasket. “I’m pretty sure I don’t need to remind you of that.”