Luke held out a hand; Thomas accepted it and pulled himself up. His eyes met mine, but he didn’t say anything as he stepped slightly behind me. Damn, I think I’m getting a retinue.
“I do not see the Daoine Sidhe,” the Queen said to me. “I believe they have forgotten you.”
Perhaps they had. I didn’t know what my move was now.
“Not so quickly,” whispered a voice, equal parts song and chant. Eleanor’s eyes widened as Una slid out from behind her, moving soundlessly.
“You needn’t look so shocked,” Una said. “It was only a pinch.”
“Keep your distance,” the Queen warned, and lifted a hand. “I will snap you in two.”
“Come here!” Brendan’s voice conveyed the worry that was absent in Una’s face. He looked nearly as regal as the Queen, winding his way through the reveling faeries astride a dapple gray horse draped in bells. Bells around the horse’s hooves jangled with each step, and bells hanging from the reins trilled as the horse spooked at a ring of dancing faeries. Behind him, a half dozen more horses pushed their way through the crowd, all dapple grays with coats reflecting the colors around them. All of their bells should have made a cacophony, but instead there was an endless rippling chord of stunning melody. Despite everything, I caught my breath, struck with wonder.
Una spiraled over to where Brendan had stopped, tweaking his mount’s reins to hear the bells again. “Did I not tell you it would be this door? Don’t you look a fool now?” She wiggled her fingers toward the Queen and Eleanor, who stood behind the Queen holding a covered cage. “Behold the peacock and her handler.”
I wasn’t sure whether the Queen or Eleanor was the peacock, but neither of them looked pleased with the comparison.
“Say your bit,” the Queen snarled. “Since you must.”
Luke bowed slightly toward Brendan, as much as he could while still keeping his fingers in mine. “Good Solstice, Brendan. Please hurry. We haven’t much time.”
Brendan nodded back and glanced at the other Daoine Sidhe. They urged their horses forward until they stood in a row of seven, shoulder to shoulder, the faeries’ bare feet touching the toes of the faerie next to them.
“Deirdre,” Brendan said. “You have saved the tarbh uisge, one of ours, on this night, and that binds us.” He sang,
The bird that flies across the fields
Eats the seeds of the meadow grasses
The seed that falls from the beak yields
More than the meadow’s losses.
I stared at him. He was looking at me expectantly, and I’m sure I was supposed to say something clever.
Thomas leaned in and touched my shoulder. “A life for a life,” he whispered. “It’s a song of balance. They’ll give you a life for the life you saved.”
Oh.
Oh.
In my head, Eleanor was pressing a dirty-pigeon soul into Aodhan’s chest and he was falling to the ground, dead, wearing Luke’s face. But it didn’t have to end that way. I could ask for Luke’s life. I could win his soul back and save him. This wouldn’t be the last time I held his hand. My story would have a happy ending.
“Save his life,” Luke whispered, his lips on my ear. “Hurry. He doesn’t have much time left.”
Guilt rocked through me, pricking immediate tears in my eyes. I didn’t know how I could’ve forgotten James, back on the stage, gasping for life. What kind of a person was I? Of course, I had to save James. What was I thinking? I half turned my head toward Luke, swallowing more tears. “But then—but when—if I—if you get your soul back—”
Luke kissed just in front of my ear, so brief and light that it was almost just his lips forming words. “I know. I know, pretty girl. I knew all along.”
I wanted him so badly it hurt, a dull ache somewhere below my ribs. I wanted to say, “save Luke.” It would be so easy.
It would be so wrong.
I looked at the ground, at every little jagged crevice in the asphalt. If you stared at it long enough, you could see little flecks of some sort of shining rock mixed into its surface. Two glistening drops splatted on the asphalt, and I looked up at Brendan and wiped my cheek.
“Thank you for the favor. Truly, you are very kind. Please—please would you save my friend James? If you can?” I almost choked on the last words, but I got it all out before another tear escaped.
“Good girl,” Luke said softly.
“Where is he?” Brendan asked.
Una whirled past us. “I know. I can hear him dying in here.”
Brendan dismounted and followed her through the door, giving me and my iron key a wide berth, even on Solstice. He said over his shoulder, “It will be done.”
And I burst into tears. I didn’t care who was watching—the Queen, Eleanor, all of the faeries of the world, whatever. I didn’t care. Luke squeezed his arms around me, letting me bury my face in his shoulder. I felt him staring at the Queen as he kissed the top of my head.
“Let go of her.” The Queen’s voice was stony.
Luke’s arms tightened around me as I pulled up my face to look at her. Again, the red setting sun was blazing in her eyes. Please don’t let go of me. He didn’t.
“Let go of her.”
Eleanor’s lips curled into a smile at the anger in her Queen’s voice.
“I will when she asks me to,” Luke said. “I told you, I’m done doing your bidding. If this is the way I die, so be it.”
If he was afraid, I could not feel it. The Queen whirled to the cage at Eleanor’s feet, and tugged off the cover. Beneath it, a doorless birdcage with wire-thin bars surrounded a dove so white it hurt my eyes. It flapped its wings in terror, crashing off the sides of the cage and tumbling to the bottom. Luke sighed, his eyes fixed on the bird, his body firmly pressed against me but the rest of him somewhere else.
“Foul, isn’t it?” the Queen asked. “Seems only fitting that the essence of a killer should manifest as a filthy, ordinary pigeon.”
The words burst from my mouth. “Are you kidding? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I stared at that brilliant form in the cage. It felt like the promise of what people could be, before we started to screw ourselves up. It felt like a beginning.
The Queen crooked an eyebrow at me, disbelieving. “One last chance, Luke Dillon. Tell me you will love me, and I’ll spare you.”
Luke just shook his head, a slight movement against my cheek. I stepped out of the circle of his arms, toward the Queen. “You can’t force someone to love you—don’t you get it? You can force them to kill for you. You can force them to be your subjects. You can’t make someone love you!”
The Queen shrilled, “My subjects love me! I do not force them to obey me!”
Eleanor’s eyebrow raised.
I seized whatever meaning I could find in that little gesture. “Prove it. Prove it.”
“You will die, cloverhand,” the Queen snarled. Then, louder, she screamed to her subjects, so loud that her voice cut through every bit of music and laughing and dancing. They froze, and magic hung in the air on this weird night. “Do you see me, my lovelies? Witness my beauty? Now look at the cloverhand—look at how ordinary she is, how dull, how simple! She is nothing, but she claims that my subjects do not love me!”
A slow smile had started on Eleanor’s face as she stood behind the Queen. With every word that the Queen spoke, it widened, until the beauty of her smile was agony to look at.
The Queen lifted her arms, and when she screamed, her voice was as fierce as summer lightning. “Choose your Queen!”
The night was quiet.
It was so quiet that I could hear the cicadas buzzing in the field across the road, and the frogs chirping in the ravine behind the school. A car’s tires hummed on the distant highway and, above me, in the absolute silence, I heard the streetlight buzzing faintly.
Then the faeries rushed toward the Queen, one crazy mass of shimmering bodies and wings and beaks and claws, and I was forced away from Luke by the press of the throng. The noise was unbearable: cries and laughs and growls. I didn’t know what was happening, and I couldn’t see Luke or the Queen or anyone for all the bodies shoving past me.
But one cry could be heard above all of them—a high, reedy wail that went on and on, freezing my blood with its wildness. And then I saw a tall faerie, with shaggy fur growing on his shoulders, stalk by me holding a handful of blond hair in his huge fist. Long blond hair, with a clump of red on the end. I still didn’t get it until I saw a collection of lithe, willowy she-faeries tossing a hand between the three of them. I saw blood drip from it. Then I saw two faeries the color of the sky tugging on either end of a long stretch of fabric from the Queen’s dress.
“Oh my God.” I pushed my hand to my mouth. Next to me, Eleanor made a small, vaguely amused sound.
A hugely tall faerie with the pricked ears of a horse lifted some gory prize above his head, and the wild crowd cheered, primitive and delighted with their kill.
They killed her.
“Dee,” Luke pushed by Eleanor as if she were nothing and gripped my arm. “Are you all right? I thought—” He broke off as he watched a dragon-like creature slither by with an arm in its long, toothy mouth. His pale eyes followed its progress through the strange crowd.
“I didn’t think they’d kill her.”
“I thought it was you.” Suddenly I realized that Luke, for the first time, looked shaken. “I saw them carrying a hand and—”
“Shut up. I’m okay. Nothing happened.” It felt good to be the one to comfort him for once; to hold him together. “What’s going on?”
A tall, beautiful male faerie had caught everyone’s attention, and he held the Queen’s bloody circlet above his head. His voice was like one thousand voices together as he said, “We have chosen our Queen.”
He walked through the crowd, the faeries making a path for him, heading straight for me with the horrible crown—still covered with the Queen’s blood. I couldn’t even begin to imagine its awful weight on my head. I shivered; Luke’s hand tightened on my arm.
Oh God! No!
Still the faerie came, his path unerring, through the crowd toward me.
No. Not me. Not me, I wished fervently. Anybody but me.
The faerie stopped before me, and I saw blood dripping down his arm from the circlet.
Not me.
He stepped forward, closing the space between us, and then he placed the circlet on Eleanor’s head. “Long live the Queen.”
“Oh, that I will,” said Eleanor.
twenty-two
There was silence as Eleanor faced us across the parking lot. Over her shoulder, the moon moved slowly across the sky, the birds still fluttering and trembling on its surface. The silver glimmer they cast mingled with the ugly yellow of the streetlights.
“I have waited a long time,” Eleanor said finally. She knelt and picked up the soul-cage with more grace than any human. “Luke Dillon, you served the last Queen, not this one. Take your soul, darling.”