Darkest Mercy (Wicked Lovely 5)

“I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t have enough to do both.” Keenan cradled the unconscious, bleeding Winter Queen in his arms, and exhaled on her wounds. The ice he’d inherited from his mother felt like the greatest gift in his life just then.

Tavish stepped in front of him. “If Bananach gets out—”

“If Don dies, I don’t care,” Keenan interrupted.

“The court—”

“Get me to Far Dorcha,” Keenan told Cwenhild as he stepped around his former advisor. “I don’t care who you kill to do it. Now.”

The head of the Winter Guard didn’t hesitate. She raised her arm in some sort of signal, and winter fey flanked them. As they walked, Keenan concentrated on the Winter inside him. He exhaled on Donia’s heavily bleeding wounds again, freezing them shut as best he could.

In only a few minutes—which seemed too long—they stood at the door of the warehouse. The ice wall that Donia had erected now stood in Keenan’s way. He needed to get her to help, and he had no sunlight to melt this wall.

A cry of frustration spilled from his lips—and with it came a breath of frost.

Both hopeful and afraid, he leaned against the wall and attempted to draw the ice into him as he’d once pulled warmth into his body to try to resist the cold. He tried to ignore the thought of his body filling with ice, of shutting down as that cold poured into him as it had so often when the last Winter Queen was angry or punishing him.

For Donia. Even if it does feel like that . . .

He pulled the cold into his skin, but he wasn’t a regent any longer. The wall softened in front of him, but it didn’t vanish. A section of the wall was not ice but slush now, and Keenan pushed through it.

On the far side of the mostly still intact wall, the winter fey were strong enough that they were slaughtering those of Bananach’s faeries who had remained in the street. A cadaverous faery stepped toward him and frowned.

Keenan backed away and clutched Donia tightly to him when he realized who the faery was. “No.”

“You need not carry them to me. I can collect them without anyone’s help. . . .” Ankou paused and sniffed Donia. “She’s not dead yet.”

The look Cwenhild leveled at the death-faery would’ve frightened most anyone, but Death was unconcerned. She simply walked away and resumed her corpse gathering.

Far Dorcha, however, was nowhere to be seen.

He can help. He will. He has to.

“Find the Dark Man,” Keenan told the winter fey, and then he sank to his knees in the street.

Aislinn had heard Keenan’s words to the Scrimshaw Sister and to Tavish, and at the edge of her vision, she had seen him carry Donia’s limp body outside. That leaves me and Niall. She had no idea if Niall was still standing, or what the situation was. She could see a wall of shadows farther into the room, and she hoped that it was Niall who had erected it.

And that Seth is safe behind it.

She glanced toward the ice wall; on the other side of it, a fight continued. Niall and Bananach were slashing at one another. On her side of the hole in the ice, the head of the Summer Guard waited. A Hound with an unsheathed blade raced toward her guard.

“Tavish!” Aislinn focused more sunlight in her hand—but then remembered that in this, the Hunt was on their side. She lowered her upraised hand just as Tavish looked her way.

“My Queen?” He came to her.

Around them, several more Hounds appeared and cut down Ly Ergs. The Hunt—which had been stretched thin only moments before—seemed to be everywhere at once. The tide had shifted against Bananach’s faeries.

“What’s happening?” Aislinn asked as Tavish arrived at her side.

“That.” He motioned.

The Summer Queen followed her guard’s gesture to the unexpected sight before them. Fey the likes of which she’d never seen were flowing into the warehouse. Water trailed in their wake as they gathered faeries into their embraces and departed. The newcomers wrapped amorphous bodies around Bananach’s faeries, and then flowed back out the way they’d come.

One faery stood in the doorway; its hands were raised as if conducting a symphony. The faery’s body seemed to be a droplet of water shimmering in the air, as if it would finish falling in another instant.

“What is that?” she asked.

The water-droplet creature turned its attention to her and said, “Ally. Of his.”