Copperhead

Chapter 15 BLOOD AND COPPER

Helen was flung back against the wall with the force of the Fey King’s power. Everything splintered, fractured. She was pushed aside and soon she would be no more.

And then as quickly as the attack had come it was gone and her mind was clean and clear. Rook was standing over Grimsby with a steel dagger, its point poking the soft flesh of his neck.

The tall man with the snake eyes cowered, blubbering. She saw the man he had once been: a weak drunkard, now pitiful and crying. Inside him raged the fey, sharp and cunning, choosing to let the human take control for the sake of those tears.

Rook’s knifepoint did not waver.

“No,” Helen said. “He’s not worth it.”

“He would have destroyed the city,” shouted Rook. “Sometimes things are worth it.”

She thought he might be right, but at the same time, she had seen his face when he told her about his past, his present, about the indentured servitude of spying that went on and on and on, all for the mistake of being born havlen. It was not right that this man should bear any more guilt. “No,” she said, and slammed Grimsby back, hard, into the wall away from Rook. He was hooked into the machine still, and so she still had access to the little power he had left, in addition to her own. He could never be stronger than her.

“You lied,” she said, and she was vast and blue. “I thought your kind had to keep promises.”

“You heard what you wanted to hear,” sneered the Fey King, and oh misery perhaps that was true. All the fey had promised except this one. But she was not going to waste time in self-recrimination. If she had to have a blot on her soul, so be it. Sometimes you had to bear up under things.

The fey from the city were all gone, but she seized all the power from Grimsby himself, sucking it through the machine and into her until he was nothing, an ordinary man with a bit of fey remnant, cowering in the warehouse.

“You can’t hold me forever,” he said weakly. “You have to let go or keep me inside you.”

Helen could feel the power of the Fey King thrumming inside and realized he was right, and that further, she knew how strong the Fey King was. He would wear her down and take her over if she was foolish enough to think she could hold him.

But there were not only two choices. She could contain him in iron, she thought. Forever. “Rook, get that iron cage. We’ll put him in there for now and then get handcuffs.” She pointed at Grimsby, motioning him toward one of the hundred cages. “Push him in the minute I say go.”

Snarling, Grimsby backed up. At the mouth of it he stood, and she had to leave the door open to let the fey completely back into him. “Watch him,” she said, and then she let the power unspool, going back, back, back, until Grimsby was starting to stand, whole and healthy and hale.

He started to lunge, and she shoved the last bit back into him with all her might, shouting, “Go!” but he leapt at her.

He leapt at her with a sharpened copper pipe in his hand and she hadn’t thought to counter for anything like that, and it was coming at her, and Rook was still turning, still hurrying, but it would be too late, too late.

Then a heavy bright shape flashed in front of her, an iron stake held high. It bore Grimsby down to the ground, and she saw then that the iron stake was held in two canary yellow gloves. The copper and the iron flashed; the bodies rolled over and over in a tangle before Helen could fully register that the dark shape was Grimsby, and the bright one was Alistair.

“Let him go,” Helen shouted, and Rook, who had no weapon, plunged in to try to pull Alistair free. Long after, she remembered that.

Rook shouted in pain and her rapidly beating heart threatened to break, a bright hot thing that would shatter at any minute.

But this was not the battle in her hometown. And that was not Charlie.

And then Alistair shouted, a shout of victory, and as Rook pulled him out of harm’s way she saw the sharp iron spike lodged in Grimsby’s ribs, heard the shriek, felt the universe expand and collapse as the self-styled Fey King inside shredded out and dissolved, obliterated.

He was safe. They were safe. She looked down at Grimsby’s body and wondered how it had felt to be Grimsby, to be slowly eradicated over time. To know, like Jane, what was happening. To not be able to fight your way out. To lose your wife, your son. To vanish.

“Helen,” Rook said quietly.

She turned, heart willing him to be okay. But he was. He was kneeling, and his hands rested quietly on Alistair’s shoulder.

“Alistair,” she said brokenly, and she dropped to her knees on the hard cement beside him, as Rook backed away, one silent shake of his head signaling everything that was already obvious.

The sharpened copper pipe had sliced through his gut. She knew, she remembered from that battle, about belly wounds, and even if she didn’t, only a fool could stand and look and smell and expect something besides what was going to happen.

Alistair breathed faintly, his eyes closed.

Helen took his left hand in her own. Her fingers trembled as she closed around it.

“Rook,” she said then, and looked up at him with anguished eyes.

Rook looked somberly at her for the space of a heartbeat. Then in a low voice, jagged and slow, said, “I will leave you,” and turned, and walked down the long echoing warehouse toward the door. All that work of splitting herself with the blue fire and yet now was when she felt split in two. A piece of her walked out the warehouse door with Rook, into the icy November night, and somehow she knew it wasn’t coming back.

Gently she held her husband’s hand, and listened for his breath.

His eyes flickered, opened halfway. “Did she get out of harm’s way?” said Alistair. His voice was so thin, like wind shaking the dry leaves.

“Who?” said Helen. He was so white, so clammy-pale.

“Jane,” he said. With pauses between the words that grew longer and longer, he said, “I sent her. A warning.”

Helen couldn’t figure out what he meant, but his eyes held hers, pleading for her to understand without further words. The cold damp of the warehouse floor seeped into her knees. Then realization. “The death threat.” Cut from liquor labels.

“To save her,” Alistair said.

Helen crushed his hand between hers, as if by doing so she could keep him from dying before help arrived. “You sent it,” she said.

A little smile. “Not a coward,” he said. “Tried?”

There was a great rushing void of grief inside for this man who had tried to break away from his friends, his vices, after all. Too little, too secretly. But he had done one thing. He had tried to keep Jane from playing into the hands of Grimsby, and starting down this terrible path. A foolish, ridiculous thing.

“You tried,” she said to that taut body, but there was no air in it and he could not hear her. She could see him, past all his vices and depravities, him, Alistair, living on the map of his face. His skin was a hundred years old, but the last bit of life in his body lived right there on it, waiting for Helen to tell him he tried, that it was okay, that he could depart from this world in some sort of peace.

She couldn’t make it okay. Couldn’t make everything he had done or failed to do vanish, like clouds parting in the sky. But she could tell him he tried, for it was true, though sad and touching that at this moment all he could think of for proof was a frightening torn-paper note.

But there was more to credit to his account. Alistair had saved her from her own foolishness once. No matter how he found her, that he might have thought she was easy prey—still. In this moment she could give him the benefit of the doubt and go by the bare cold facts of the matter, which were that he had paid her debt then—and just now he had saved her life.

He had been a terrible husband, would have been a terrible father. But these things he had done.

“You tried,” she said, carefully and clearly, because that much she could say.

He breathed then, and relaxed, as if everything had been waiting for that one benediction. The wrinkles on the map of his face smoothed out, relaxed.

Then he was gone.

Helen released his hand and laid it gently on his body. His wedding ring was tarnished, but still there, on his finger. Gently she tugged her own off and placed it between his fingers.

Perhaps he had loved her after all, in his fashion.

Helen knelt beside the still body and wept for them both.