Chapter 6

"Shit." It"s a muttered imprecation from Caspian that wakes me up. "Shit, shit, shit."

I stir, stretching as I glance at him. "What"s wrong, baby?"

He flashes a quick grin at me. "Baby. I like that." He bends forward a little, glancing in the side mirror. "We have company."

We"re in the middle of nowhere. Endless acres of tilled brown dirt stretch away on either side, the two-lane highway we"re on a narrow black ribbon lancing arrow-straight before us. No cars ahead. I twist and look behind us, and see a line of big black SUVs trailing us.

Trailing, and gaining. Four of them. Tinted windows, aggressive bull-bars on the grills. They"re less than fifty behind us and gaining on us very quickly.

"Is it the council?" I ask.

"Don"t know. All I know is they"re not fucking around, and I can"t lose them. There"s nowhere to go, and they"re faster than this old truck."

"What do we do?" I"m instantly awake, and I feel a myriad of things rushing through me.

Fear, anticipation…even something akin to eagerness.

And anger.

Mostly anger.

Caspian growls, something between a human sigh of frustration and an animal snarl. "Gonna have to let them force us to a stop and hope we can fight our way out."

As he"s speaking, I hear the roar of a straining engine, and the lead SUV blasts past us to swerve in front of us. At the same time, two more of the blacked-out vehicles pull up beside us, with one more behind us: boxed in.

The SUV in front brakes, and Caspian has no choice but to stop or wreck—We"d both survive, I know now, but it would serve no purpose and would lead to my capture.

I feel them.

Four to a vehicle. Fae. Cold, determined. Professional. There"s no emotion to any of them—this is just a job.

The formation slows, and as we stop, the four big SUVs halt with us. Doors open, and bodies emerge.

They"re all tall, and covered in some kind of armor. No, not armor, or at least not armor made of metal or kevlar or any mortal material. This armor glows black-purple like blacklight made physical. The light of the sun reflects from it, however, glinting. It's…chitinous. Beetle-like. Segmented at the joints, with a spherical helmet that appears perfectly opaque. Each one carries a spear, or a polearm of some kind, like nothing I"ve ever seen before. They"re roughly six feet from tip to butt, forged from black metal. Instead of a single spear tip or axe head, these weapons have four triangular blades rayed around the shaft, with the obtuse angle facing outward, creating a cylindrical hole in the middle of the tips. They look a little awkward and unwieldy, to me, but as the driver of one of the SUVs slides out from behind the wheel and reaches in to retrieve his weapon, he casually spins it around in a showy maneuver, like something out of a martial arts movie, slamming the butt into the ground at the end of the movement.

As the butt cracks against the road, there"s a brief brilliant flash of white light which I can now definitively identify as a mark of fae magic—a glamour being cast. The flash of white light expands outward in a ring, traveling fifty-some feet in every direction. There"s no visible effect that I can see from my vantage point, So I"m not sure of the intended effect.

I look at Caspian: his jaw is clenched tight, eyes rimmed with black. "Get ready."

"I don"t know what to do," I whisper, threads of panic weaving around my gut and into my heart.

"You will."

There"s a crackle of static from the truck"s speakers—the radio is off. "STEP OUT OF THE VEHICLE, MAEVE SPARROW AND CASPIAN TAYLOR. PEACE WILL BE MET WITH PEACE." The voice is static, crackling, garbled, deafening, the sound waves throbbing against the windows and my eyelashes and in my belly.

I look around us: sixteen warriors, each garbed in chitinous armor, sexless, inhuman, alien, armed with those weird spears. I notice, now, for the first time, that the tip of the shaft of those spears, surrounded by the razor-sharp spear blades, glows with the same black-purple light as their armor.

"COMPLY IMMEDIATELY." The voice resonates against my chest, echoes in my skull.

I cast my mind out, tasting their presence. Fae magic. Fae blood. My hunger, my bloodlust rises momentarily, ripping through me like a tidal wave. I clutch Caspian"s hand and the door handle—I hear plastic crackle and crunch, and even Caspian, blooded enough to feel pain, grunts in response. The wave passes.

I feel them. Sixteen minds. Sixteen souls. Sixteen circulatory systems pulsing with sweet sunlit blood—

I growl, focus on the taste of their minds—sour, dull, cold. I feel their intent:

Take me.

Kill Caspian.

Up until now, I"ve felt a maelstrom of emotions, but chief among them, so far, have been fear and anger. As they boxed us in and forced us to a stop, and as I saw for the first time the forces arrayed against me, fear began to win. Panic. Terror.

I don"t know what to do. I barely understand myself, and certainly don"t have the kind of control over my powers required to fight off sixteen armed and armored elite professional warriors.

But now, feeling their intent to kill Caspian whether I surrender peacefully or not, the fear is burned away by a nuclear wave of rage.

My bloodmate has been threatened.

Fury blazes within me.

Calm settles over me, and I feel myself operating on instinct. I let it happen. Let it flow through me.

Caspian feels it. "Maeve, we need a plan. We can—"

I exit the truck, hands at my sides, and stop face to face with the warrior who seems to be the leader, the one who spun his spear around.

"Leave Caspian alone. He"s got nothing to do with this."

The figure facing me is enormous, towering several inches over me. There"s a muffled sound, a laugh—male, derisive, mocking. "You"re in no position to be making requests, abomination." The last word is spat—an insult. As if he can"t stomach the taste of the syllables in his mouth.

"it wasn"t a request," I say. "It was an order." I have no idea where the calm bravado is coming from, but I like it. "Last chance. Leave us alone."

"Or what?"

I have no idea. All I know is the ocean of power inside me is boiling. Not just boiling—it"s a raging inferno, a hurricane-tossed sea of molten power.

Fury builds. Builds. My blood hums, and buzzes, and then roars in my veins.

The fine hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up, and my skin glows. The ends of my hair lift, floating and wafting in a breeze that doesn"t exist. My vision distorts.

I see the fae, now, as if they"re suddenly devoid of armor. They"re young men, all, or young-looking, at least. The distortion of my version causes a kind of blurriness, making them look like they"ve been video recorded in black and white.

The leader hefts his spear in both hands and levels it at me as if it"s a gun—the black-purple glowing center of the shaft brightens, becoming more purple, more luminous. I feel a humming in my bones, a rattling of something within—the warning rattle of a rattlesnake.

"STAND DOWN." It"s a magically amplified order, laced with some sort of compulsion glamour that makes me nearly bend at the knees, makes me want to drop to the ground and put my hands on my head.

No.

I push back, mentally. The compulsion only strengthens, and my knees buckle. The leader, however, is panting inside his helmet. I can hear it.

I"m coming out, Maeve. Caspian's voice echoes in my skull.

"NO!" I shout it loud, to him and to the leader.

I plunge deep into the ocean of power. Dive in, swim deep. Drown myself in the boiling white hot depths, infuse my very cells, my pores, my muscles, my sinews and tendons and skin with energy.

I hear a rushing in my ears—my pulse hammers in my skull, pounds in my veins.

The world is white.

There is nothing.

"TAKE HER DOWN!" I hear the order shouted.

A blaze of blinding black-purple, like a miniature black hole limned with ultraviolet light, ripples in the air, twisting and fluttering and turning inside out upon itself endlessly, coruscating toward me like a jellyfish.

No.

I push.

It"s instinctual. Automatic. A flex of my magical muscles. There is no image behind it, no intent. Just AWAY.

The inferno of white-gold vitality within me coils like a serpent about to strike, twists like an F5 tornado. When I PUSH, it lances out of me, splintering into multiple streams of searing heat and blistering energy—raw magic. The haze of white obscuring my vision dissolves just in time for me to watch as those streams of energy strike each of the fae warriors between the eyes.

Each touch of my glamour to the armor they wear results in a small detonation, the crackling burst of a transformer shorting out. The bursts echo and repeat like a string of firecrackers—and then the lances of vitality spiderweb outward, connecting all sixteen fae warriors in a shining, glowing, white-gold spiderweb of sizzling, searing, humming, bone-shaking energy.

And then…

Silence.

Not relative quiet, except for a distant breeze and a chirping bird somewhere.

Dead silence.

Not even my heartbeat.

A visible shockwave concusses outward from my chest.

Around me, the SUVs slide sideways, tip, shudder, and then slam back down. Beneath my feet, the blacktop cracks, splinters, and dissolves into dust.

There"s a spray of pink mist.

For twenty feet on either side of the road, the dirt is swept away from the field as if by a giant broom, leaving nothing but hardpan and bedrock.

The silence becomes crushing, deepening, darkening. There"s a ringing in my ears—in my brain.

And then nothing.