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.
“It would have gone better for you if you’d stayed amusing. I’d have sheltered you then, at least until next Hallows’ Night. Now you’ve made me angry. I’m throwing you into the pit. No mortal can survive there.”
I struggled to open the latch, but my limbs had no strength. I was as frozen as I had been in my dream. Frost crackled out from the ichor that seeped from my sire’s wounded shoulder, like winter devouring the dying memory of summer. Its lacework beauty ate through the human form my sire had taken. Ice engulfed the interior of the coach, consuming every morsel of space that was not the coach itself. Ice entombed Vai, so cloudy and dense I could see only the line of steel that marked his sword.
Last of all, ice crystals bristled down the length of the latch. With a whimper of fear the outside latch gremlin shut its eyes, leaving me alone in the dark.
9
Yet instead of falling, I held on. Nothing, not even my sire’s vile threat, could make me give up. The rocking ceased, and I found myself back on the tree as abruptly as if I had never left it. Clutching the nub of a broken branch, I heaved myself up, gritting past the blaze of pain in my right shoulder and left hand. The pain told me that what I had witnessed was real, not a dream.
