Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

Her lips brushed his. Her knee eased between his thighs and her hands spanned his shoulders to draw him into her kiss. Breasts brushed his chest. Vai became as rigid as if he had turned to ice. I guessed he was angry at himself for being aroused.

I could scarcely blame him. If I hadn’t known I was me, I would have thought I was her.

If I’d had a body and an axe, I would have smashed in my sire’s head.

“No,” Vai said against its lips, his mouth unyielding.

“But you want me,” the Master of the Wild Hunt said in my voice, like a purr of desire.

Her voice, her hands on him, were claws digging into my flesh, yet I could do nothing.

“No.” Vai’s voice was clear and cold. “I want her. There is a difference.”

“What difference would that be?”

“The shape you wear is an illusion.”

“When she comes for you, as you and I both know she is trying to do right now, how will you know if it is she or I who grasps you close and whispers words of hope and love?”

Vai relaxed. My sire did not know the secrets of the djeliw and bards, with their wholly human magic. He did not know about the way our marriage had bound us. He did not know I wore a locket.

“I admit I can tell no difference between you and her,” Vai said, a cunning statement that had the advantage of being truth because words can have two meanings. “But right now I know you are not her. I will not do this.”

My sire sat back into the other seat, melting back into his young male form, a finger tapping his lips as he considered his captive.

Vai ran a hand down the buttons of his dash jacket, straightening and smoothing, an action that apparently calmed him. I had not been so steadfast in withholding my kiss from the opia.

As this uncomfortable thought chased me, I heard the rumble of wind. The coach rocked and swayed as if caught in the tidal currents of the spirit world. As I clung, barely hanging on, I suddenly remembered why the Master of the Wild Hunt used this coach. In the spirit world, the tides of dragons’ dreams altered the landscape and any creatures caught out in it. But the coachman had been made in the mortal world by the cunning artifice of goblins. He, and the coach and four horses that were a part of him, could not be changed. To travel in the coach was to be safe from the altering tidal waves.

“What do you really want?” Vai asked.

“I want what I am required to want. I do the bidding of my masters, just as you no doubt do the bidding of yours.”

“The servants of the night court answer questions with questions, and you do not. I would like to know who or what the Master of the Wild Hunt calls master.”

“Do not doubt my intentions. If she cannot rescue you, you will be the next sacrifice.”

“Not until the next Hallows’ Night,” said Vai in the clipped tone he used when he was particularly wound up. “So I ask again, if you intend to kill me, what chance is there I would ever agree to sire a child on you if it would gain me nothing? If you do kill me, how can I sire a child on your daughter, if a child born to your daughter is what you require? Neither of these things can be accomplished unless you free me, allow me to return to her, and promise me you’ll never hunt me down.”

“A well-argued point. Why would I need you at all? I could sire a child on her myself.”

The words hit like a punch in the chest. Fingers slipping, I almost lost my grip on the latch.

So fast I didn’t see it coming, Vai swung up his sword and stabbed my sire.

He aimed for up under the ribs to the heart, a move he’d no doubt been taught by rote by the mage House’s swordmaster. But the close confines of the coach and my sire’s astonishingly fast reflexes—an arm flung up—deflected the blow. The tip slid into the meat of my sire’s right shoulder.

Pain pierced like steel sliding into my own flesh.

I screamed. A howl rose, shuddering around me and through me: Every creature bound to the Master of the Wild Hunt by blood felt the cut of that blade.

My sire grabbed the blade with his left hand. A clear ichor oozed from his shoulder. The translucent liquid dribbled down the length of the blade. The fingers of my left hand flamed with agony. I was barely holding on with my right, hanging over the abyss.

My sire did not let go of the sword. He raised his right hand to squeeze Vai’s sword arm. Eyes flared with fury, he spoke in a terrifying whisper. “What is done to me, I do to her. That was her cry of agony.”

Vai froze, struck between horror and disbelief. With a single tug, my sire pulled the sword out of his shoulder and shoved the blade against Vai’s throat.

I choked out a wordless cry. The screams and whimpers of the pack echoed me, their pain and my pain churning like so many merging currents until I was almost obliterated. Vai’s hand spasmed on the hilt of the sword as he fought uselessly against the paralysis washing through him.