Melissa Marr - Darkest Mercy

“Let’s hope you make better choices than your parents did, Keenan,” Far Dorcha said.

The Dark Man had offered all the assistance he could without being asked. He could aid the injured Winter Queen because of his debt to the Summer Queen, but there were still natural rules. Some sacrifices must be made willingly. He walked past the guards, and just as he approached the mourning faery, he made himself visible again.

When Death stood over them, Keenan wasn’t sure whether it was to take Donia or not, but he wasn’t going to give her up.

Not now. Not ever.

“Far Dorcha.” Keenan bowed his head as reverently as he could with Donia clutched in his arms. “I need your help.”

The Dark Man’s expression was completely unreadable. “What do you have to offer?”

“I want to give her my Winter,” Keenan said. “My life if she needs it.”

Far Dorcha laughed.

“Mercy,” Keenan begged. “I’ll give everything I have if you save her.”

“And if Bananach were to escape because of your choices? What of the court you’ve served? Of her”—he stroked a hand over Donia’s bloodied shoulder—“court? Of Niall? Of Aislinn? What of all those who—”

“I don’t care. Only Donia matters,” Keenan insisted.

“If I offer you the choice between her life and all of theirs?”

“Hers,” Keenan answered without hesitation.

The Dark Man gestured in the air beside him, and a stone altar, the top covered in thick furs, appeared. “Your immortal life or hers?”

“Take mine; take whatever you need.” Keenan glanced at the altar.

Far Dorcha pointed at the fur-covered thing. “I mean her no harm.”

Carefully, Keenan lowered Donia onto the altar. “What do you need?”

“Do you willingly offer your Winter and your immortal life for hers?” Far Dorcha asked. “If you say yes—”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps wait to hear the terms?”

Keenan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

The Dark Man shrugged, and in less than a heartbeat, Keenan collapsed to the ground. He felt like everything inside of him was being ripped out. As he stifled a cry of pain, a gasp escaped, and with it a breath of icy air stretched toward Donia.

“Could’ve listened to the terms,” Far Dorcha muttered. He nudged Keenan with a boot-clad foot. “Scream.”

So Keenan did. He let the sound of the pain inside him loose, and the frosty air that was extending to Donia grew thicker with each breath. As the Winter he’d been born with was violently torn from his body, it flowed into Donia.

He watched as it healed her, knit the tears in her flesh, and made her whole again. He saw her sit up, still blood-covered but uninjured. The horror on her face as she saw him on the ground screaming was almost enough to make him close his eyes, but if this was it, he wanted to see her as long as he could.

She struggled to get down from the altar, but couldn’t. Her lips formed a word he couldn’t hear but knew was his name. She turned her furious gaze to Far Dorcha and snarled something at him.

Keenan heard none of it. He felt heaviness descend on him, a weight unlike anything he’d ever known, and he couldn’t open his mouth to make another sound. His eyes started to close, but he saw her as she jumped from the altar.

And then she vanished. Everyone in the street faded until he was suddenly alone.

So this is dying.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. The former Summer King closed his eyes and lay back on the street.

The shadow wall in front of him was ripped aside, and Seth could see the remains of the battle on the ground for a moment. Then the room grew blindingly bright under the glow of the faery who strode through those remaining fights with no guards, no soldiers, nothing but her own sunlight to protect her. Ash. Seth watched his rescuer walk up to the cage—which was now a good forty feet above the ground.

Aislinn reached out and gripped the bars with both hands. The metal glowed as brightly as the fire poker had, and then broke. She bent the two bars toward her.

On the ground below her, Bananach’s faeries attempted to evade Summer Court guards and Dark Court faeries. A Dark Court faery impaled one of Bananach’s Ly Ergs with a morning star. The spike on the macelike weapon pierced the faery, and he screamed. His thread blinked out of existence. After so many threads had ended, Seth felt physically sick with the awareness of the losses. Lives were ending because of lies and machinations; the power-hungry Bananach had condemned both her followers and her opposition. Deaths that didn’t need to happen. War was always contemptible, but war for no reason other than greed was unforgivable.

Seth didn’t want Aislinn to see the horror in his eyes; did not know the words to speak of what he’d seen, how helpless he’d been. How terrified for her. She was here now, alive and apparently rescuing him. With blood on her jeans.

The silent Summer Queen extended her hands toward him, and Seth stepped into the seemingly empty air, trusting that she knew what she was doing. Until this moment, as far as he’d known, his girlfriend couldn’t walk on air, but she obviously was doing it.

And holding on to me as she does so.

He suddenly felt like one of the cartoon characters who steps off a cliff, as if looking down would make him plummet. Despite that, he glanced at their feet and saw what looked like sunbeams under each of them. The sunbeams slowly lowered, and he and Aislinn were standing on the warehouse floor.

Seth saw Tavish outside the door. The Summer Court advisor held a thin sliver of steel that would look harmless to most mortals, but was deadly to faeries.

Tavish told Aislinn, “I will leave a few of our guards here with theirs to help look after Niall and . . . the others. You should go. We will tidy up the rest.”

As Tavish spoke, Seth realized that there were words the Summer Court advisor was studiously avoiding, and he wished that he could see threads that were currently invisible to him.

Aislinn looked at Tavish. “Donia?”

“She will survive. She has departed . . . with Keenan.” Tavish looked heartsick for a moment. “Her guards have taken them both from here.”

Seth couldn’t tell what Tavish was hiding, but he didn’t want to ask just then. Whatever grief Tavish was keeping from Aislinn would have to wait.

“She hurt you.” Aislinn looked at the burn along the side of Seth’s face and then directly at his eyes. “Are you . . . all right aside from this?”

Seth glanced at Tavish, who bowed his head with an unfamiliar degree of respect and stepped away to allow them some measure of privacy.

“My head feels like it’s going to split from the things I’ve . . . seen,” he started, but the temptation to tell her all he had seen—and could see yet—vied with the desire to do the very thing she’d asked of him when he returned from Faerie: let the world wait. “I want to tell you . . . I need to tell you, but . . . later.”

She nodded.

Hand in hand, Aislinn and Seth walked through the warehouse; she didn’t seem to even register the fact that vines entangled fighters as she passed them. Behind her, the ensnared faeries who had fought with Bananach’s forces were killed by rowan and Hounds.

Just outside the warehouse, Far Dorcha stood with Niall. Ankou walked around, gathering the dead and placing them in a long black coach that was parked in the street. She sang softly to herself as she lifted bodies into her arms.

Far Dorcha nodded at them as they approached, and then his gaze returned to Niall and he beckoned with one finger as if hooking something and tugging it toward him. “Out. Now.”