Shadowspell

Chapter Twenty-Five

Fred turned his attention back to me, and I was so shattered by the failure of my spell that I barely had the will to struggle. What was the point anymore? Struggling would only prolong the inevitable. However, I’m one of the most stubborn people I know, and even though my heart wasn’t in it, I still put up a fight, enough to get Fred cursing. I opened my eyes just in time to see him draw back his fist to hit me.

“Now!” a deep, familiar voice shouted, the sound echoing so much it was hard to tell where it was coming from.

Everyone was startled by the sound and started looking around wildly, trying to find the source of the voice. Grace immediately started chanting something, which I figured was the start of one of her nasty offensive spells.

But one person apparently wasn’t startled by the voice. Ethan took advantage of his captor’s momentary distraction to surge to his feet and throw the bastard off. In a moment of déjà vu, I saw the glint of silver in his hand, and realized that knife of his had appeared out of nowhere again.

Grace turned to him, and I screamed out a warning. I’d seen what Grace’s magic could do, seen it completely crush a car. But although Grace was now shouting the words of her spell, nothing seemed to be happening, and Ethan plowed into her. His knife found a space between her ribs, and he shoved it in all the way to the hilt.

That was the last of Ethan’s strength, and he let go of the knife, falling limply to the floor. Grace stood there in shock, staring at the knife that now protruded from her chest. Her hand shook as she reached out to grasp the hilt and pull it out. She cried out in pain as she pulled, and when the knife was all the way out, blood poured from the wound.

A cloaked and hooded figure materialized out of the darkness only a few feet from me and Fred. Fred decided that the new arrival was more of a threat than I was, so he let me go and charged forward with a battle cry that might have been intimidating, if his target were capable of being intimidated. Fred’s hand reached for the gun tucked into the back of his pants.

“No!” Grace yelled, but even if Fred heard her, he ignored her, firing off a muffled shot that hit Arawn in the head and momentarily rocked him back. But the Erlking had survived having his head chopped off, and the bullet didn’t seem to bother him much. He let his hood slide down so Fred could see his unmarred face.

Either Fred wasn’t very bright, or he was just completely desperate, because even once he saw that his bullet had failed to hurt the Erlking, much less kill him, he still kept firing. Until the Erlking’s sword skewered him right through the chest, that is. The light went out in Fred’s eyes, and the gun fell from his limp fingers. The Erlking calmly put his hand on the dead man’s shoulder and yanked his bloody blade free.

Grace’s other accomplice had much more sense than Fred, and started running like hell, quickly disappearing into the darkness. I was betting he had a flashlight on him, but he didn’t turn it on. Better to run blindly than to light a beacon, I supposed.

“He won’t get far,” Arawn said as Fred’s body fell in a heap at his feet. “The Hunt is waiting for him.”

Grace had sunk to her knees, her face ashen as blood continued to flow from the knife wound. She was pressing on the wound with both hands, but it seemed to have little effect. Ethan dragged himself away from her. He was obviously still weak and in pain, but he was also obviously in better shape than Grace. Even the exertion of fighting his way to his feet and stabbing Grace hadn’t started his wound bleeding again.

Either Ethan had hit a more vital spot, or my spell had had more effect on Grace than I’d thought. I remembered her light spell going out, and remembered her failed attempt to cast something at Ethan before he’d stabbed her.

Arawn kicked Fred’s body out of his way and advanced on Grace, who forgot about trying to stanch the blood and held her hands out in a warding gesture.

“No!” she begged, but Arawn kept coming.

I wondered what was going on. Arawn had been able to kill Fred because Fred attacked him, but Grace was just sitting there, helpless and bleeding. I thought maybe he was trying to trick her into attacking him in self-defense—like he’d tricked Ethan—but frankly, she didn’t seem to be in any shape to attack even if she fell for it.

“Please,” Grace tried again, but this time, to my shock, blood dripped from her mouth, and she began to make a noise somewhere between a cough and a choke. It should have taken more than a small stab wound, no matter how well placed, to kill one of the Sidhe, even if my spell had taken her healing magic offline. So why did it look like she’d taken a mortal wound?

The Erlking’s sword whistled through the air, moving blindingly fast. It sliced clean through Grace’s neck without even slowing down.

I caught only the briefest glimpse of what happened, because the Erlking quickly stepped between me and her, his cloak completely blocking my view. But that brief glimpse was more than enough to haunt my nightmares for years to come. It might have been a quick death, but it sure as hell wasn’t a pretty one. Even Ethan’s face turned green at the sight.

Blood still dripping from his blade, the Erlking turned to face me. “Are you all right?” he asked, and the question was so absurd it startled a nearly hysterical laugh out of me.

“Oh, sure, just peachy,” I said between giggles. “I was just almost raped, and I watched you stab one guy and behead my aunt, oh, and I got knocked around a bit, but other than that, I’m having a blast.” I was still laughing, but there were tears on my face, and I was having trouble getting a full breath into my lungs. Okay, so maybe that sound coming out of me was more like sobs than laughter.

It was hard to read the Erlking’s face in the flickering, erratic light of the downed torch. His eyes were hidden in shadow, but I felt the pressure of their gaze on me even as he pulled a rag from somewhere under his cloak and started wiping the blood from the blade.

“I am sorry I could not get here sooner to spare you some of what you’ve been through,” he said, sounding like he meant it.

The calmness of his voice and his manner took a bit of the edge off my hysteria, though now that it was over, I started to shake all over.

“How did you get here at all?” I asked.

It was too dark to tell for sure, but I think he smiled. “As Ethan has told you by now, he is still bound to me even if he is no longer bound to my Hunt. When he was hurt, I sensed it. Then I used our bond to find him.”

“And communicate with him,” I said, because I remembered the Erlking shouting “Now,” which had obviously been a signal to Ethan—one Ethan was expecting.

Arawn nodded. “And communicate.”

“But how could you kill Grace? She’s a citizen of Avalon, and you’re not allowed to kill anyone in Avalon unless they attack you.”

“There is one other condition that will allow me to kill in Avalon,” he said.

Of course there was. Both he and Grace had mentioned that he was hunting her, and my dad had said he was allowed to pursue his quarry into Avalon. I’d assumed the Erlking had come to Avalon in pursuit of the Fae I’d seen him kill the first day he’d come, but now I figured the Fae had been a bonus and Grace his main quarry.

Ethan forced himself up into a sitting position with a grunt of pain. Arawn dismissed me for the moment and went to kneel beside his former Huntsman. I don’t know for certain if it was on purpose, but he managed to position himself in such a way that his shadow hid Grace’s decapitated body from my vision.

“Lie down,” the Erlking ordered Ethan, and though I saw the spark of rebellion in Ethan’s eyes, he obeyed. I guessed he didn’t have any choice.

The Erlking put his hand over Ethan’s wound, then pressed down hard. Ethan screamed in pain, and I tried to scramble to my feet. What I could possibly do to help Ethan against the Erlking was anyone’s guess. But after that scream, Ethan’s body went completely limp.

For one terrible minute, I thought he was dead. Then the Erlking lifted the hand he’d laid on Ethan’s chest, holding something between his thumb and index finger. It was the bullet.

“It had to come out before he could heal properly,” he said.

I steadied myself with a hand against the wall. “You could have just taken him to a healer. A healer could have fixed him up without hurting him.”

He nodded. “Even so. And in the intervening time, he’d have been in constant pain. Better to have it over with quickly, don’t you think?”

I wanted to disagree with him, but that would make me a hypocrite. After all, I’d decided to let Keane heal my hand when I’d hurt it for just that reason.

Dropping the bullet, Arawn stood up, the shadows and his black cloak making him seem even larger than he really was. “I take it you fully understand the terms of our bargain now.”

“Yeah,” I said weakly. I could have lied, but Ethan had heard Grace’s big revelation, and it was pretty obvious now that anything Ethan knew, the Erlking knew.

I closed my eyes to stop the tears that wanted to spill out. I had known from the moment he’d made the offer that Arawn was angling for more than sex, that giving him my virginity would have some kind of unpleasant consequences. So why the hell did it hurt my feelings to discover those consequences would have included my death? He was the bad guy, a cold-blooded, cold-hearted killer. Yeah, he’d just saved my life, but he’d done it entirely for his own purposes. I couldn’t put out if I was dead. So it should have come as no surprise that he was planning to use and kill me, just like Grace had planned to.

“I would not have taken your life,” the Erlking said, and I jumped because he was much closer to me than I’d been expecting.

I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “Yeah, right.”

“Dana, I have no need of your life. It is only your Faeriewalker magic that I crave.”

“Well, you’re not getting either.” It seemed I was taking a lifelong vow of chastity. That reality would hit me harder a little later, I knew, but with everything I now knew, there was no way I could ever have sex. Doing it with the Erlking would literally be the death of me—and of who knows how many innocent people—and doing it with anyone else meant Ethan would be sucked up into the Hunt again.

He smiled at me. “You never know what the future will bring.”

“In this case, yes, you do.”

His look was all confidence and conceit. “You speak with the certainty of the very young. We’ll see if over time I can find the proper inducement to change your mind. I will vow to you right now that if you fulfill our bargain, I will not take your life. I would even agree to a geis to that effect.”

“Which we’d need to seal with a kiss or with blood, right?” He nodded. “No thanks.” No more blood, no more pain, no more kisses.

He shrugged. “Then I suppose you will just have to trust my word.” The look on his face hardened. “Trust my word on this, too. If you reveal my secret to anyone who doesn’t already know, I will make your brother suffer for it every day of his immortal life.”

I swallowed the lump of fear that formed in my throat. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the Erlking would keep that promise. I didn’t even know Connor, but I couldn’t let him take the punishment for it if I opened my big mouth.

“I won’t tell,” I whispered.

His face softened into a smile again. “I know you won’t,” he said, his tone strangely gentle. “That is why I can make the threat in good conscience. You are very protective of those who matter to you, and it takes very little to make someone matter.”

I had no answer to that, so I just kept quiet.