Changeling Illusion (Thirteen Realms Book 3) Read online

  “Have you seen any more of these guys?”

  “No, and I haven’t seen Willow yet, either.” I could tell she was worried. She crossed to the body and nudged it with her foot, as if to make sure he was really dead. Not that there could be much doubt after taking a headshot like that. Fae were hard to kill, but some things were impossible to survive. “You’d better put that cloak back on if we’re going hunting. I don’t want to be the one to tell the Hawk we got his new girlfriend killed.”

  2

  Invisible once more, I hurried back towards the main pavilion. That gunshot should have alerted everyone in the sith. Where were they all?

  A knot of anxiety settled in my stomach. Was Willow all right? Was Kyrrim? And what about the servants? Kyrrim was lethal enough that worrying about him was probably a waste of time, but Nevith and Zinnia and Yarys didn’t have his expertise in killing people. Zinnia was a mean cook, but that was about the extent of her meanness; Nevith never had a cross word for anyone; and as for Yarys, who tended to the extensive gardens, I couldn’t imagine him hurting the tiniest bug—unless, of course, it was attacking his beloved plants.

  Sage had gone the other way, towards Willow’s pavilion, though I’d told her that Willow wasn’t there. She didn’t move as quietly as I did through the lush gardens, but she had her gun, and clearly she was a good shot. As I stole through the foliage, I listened for any sign of movement. I wished I knew how many intruders we were dealing with. Possibly the guy Sage had shot was the only one, and all this tension was for nothing, but somehow I doubted it.

  A clang of metal inside the main pavilion confirmed we still had at least one. I moved faster, hurrying towards the source of the noise through the midnight garden. Deep pools of shadow could have been concealing any number of assassins. Thank the Lady for the cloak. At least I didn’t have to worry about knives—or syringes—in the back when no one could see me.

  Or thank Raven, I guess. I still had rather mixed feelings about my “benefactor”—particularly since I’d discovered it had been he who’d blown up my house. But his gift of the cloak had come with no strings attached, and had saved my skin several times already. If we all made it through this safely, I’d have to remember to thank him.

  Suddenly, a man burst out of the pavilion in front of me. I raised the bloodied knife in my hand, but before I could loose it, Kyrrim appeared, hot on his tail, and nearly took his head off with a sweep of Ecfirrith. I held the knife throw, not wanting to skewer my new boyfriend.

  This intruder was dressed in black, just like the other, and carried a long pole with sharp blades on each end, which he stabbed at Kyrrim as they circled each other on the grass. Not exactly a typical assassin’s weapon. It seemed a little bulky for stealth.

  A wild wind buffeted the open area on which they fought, and at first I thought it came from the assassin. But when he staggered back, I realised it was Kyrrim’s magic. Leaves whipped about us, and tree branches lashed the dark sky as the Air magic battered the assassin, pushing him off balance and diverting his strikes. Kyrrim fought without expression, his sword flashing through the air in a series of deadly swipes that were almost too fast to see. Obviously the man facing him had some skill, or he’d have been dead already.

  Three more black-clad figures appeared out of the trees, and I cried out a warning that was lost in the noise of the wind, even as I loosed my knife at the nearest. He toppled soundlessly onto his face, but I only had one knife left.

  One of the remaining assassins waved an almost casual hand in my direction, and a blast of icy air hit me, so cold it felt as if I’d fallen through ice into the winter sea. My suddenly numb fingers lost their grip on my last knife, and it thumped to the ground.

  A second later, I followed it, paralysed with cold. My teeth chattered, and I felt as though the blood in my veins had turned to ice.

  I curled into a ball among the bushes, trying to control my shaking limbs. I had never experienced Winter magic before, and I never wanted to again, either. I was lucky; because I was still invisible, it hadn’t been a direct hit.

  All around me, the foliage had shrivelled. An iris not far from me was coated in ice, its deep purple petals looking as though they had sugar frosting on them. The flower bowed toward the ground, its frozen weight too heavy for the stem to bear, then abruptly snapped off.

  Wind continued to buffet the trees, tossing their branches as if a wild storm had hit. I hoped that was Kyrrim, throwing the Winter fae off balance. If he managed to strike Kyrrim with his icy power, the fight would be over.

  I couldn’t turn my head to look; I’d lost control of my shuddering limbs. Now I almost wished I was a Summer fae. I could have blasted these assassins with the same ferocious heat that Blethna Arbre had used when she’d tried to kill me at the king’s palace. My amazing new Illusion powers didn’t seem so awesome right now. Being able to turn into a copy of someone else wasn’t an especially useful battle skill. Particularly as I wasn’t even very good at it yet.

  A storm of frost-coated leaves, twigs, and blossoms whipped past my chilled face. I ground my teeth together, desperate to stop them chattering. In spite of being invisible, I felt like a sitting duck just lying there. And the sound of blade striking blade terrified me. I needed to get back into the fight before Kyrrim succumbed to the paralysing chill of Winter. Where was Sage and her gun when we needed them?

  After what seemed an age, I got my shaking limbs under some semblance of control, though they still trembled with spasms of icy pain. I dragged myself into a sitting position and found that the garden had come alive with black-clad figures. Five of them now faced off against Kyrrim and, as I watched, a knife came whizzing out of the trees, so there was at least one more there.

  Fortunately for Kyrrim, the knife was accidentally knocked aside by the backswing of the assassin’s staff, otherwise it might have ended up in his throat. Wings burst from Kyrrim’s back and he leapt into the air, obviously deciding that the odds had turned too bad to stay earthbound. The change of angle took his immediate opponent off guard, and Ecfirrith soon sent the man’s head bouncing into the bushes, spraying blood as it went. The body crumpled, but no one but me saw it fall. The dead man’s companions were all too focused on Kyrrim.

  My winged knight sent a blast of Air among the assassins, whipping dirt and stones into their faces, then swooped at the closest one. I groped among the bushes for my knife, my fingers feeling as though they belonged to someone else, sluggish and stiff. When I found the blade, it took me three tries before I could close my hand around the hilt and actually pick the damn thing up.

  The temperature dropped and more frozen flowers sagged as one of the assassins sent another blast of frigid Winter into the sky. Fortunately, Kyrrim saw it coming and managed to dodge in time, but how long could he keep this up? I tried to force myself to my numbed feet, desperate to rejoin the battle and even up the odds a little, but my frozen legs gave way, and I tumbled back into the bushes.

  A faint rustle signalled that I’d caught someone’s attention. An assassin crept from the shelter of the trees, knife in hand. Shit. It was pretty obvious from the way I’d flattened the greenery where I was, and his gaze was trained on the body-shaped depression I’d made. Adrenaline flooded my body, going some way towards banishing the bitter cold that gripped me, and I groped desperately for the knife, which I’d dropped again.

  The man leapt, stabbing downward in a killing blow. I rolled aside in a panic, finally finding my damn knife. My fingers closed on it in relief, and I brought it up and sank it into the man’s thigh, which was all I could reach from my position.

  He grunted in pain, but his hand snaked out and grabbed mine, twisting and grinding the bones of my wrist until I was forced to drop the knife. Movement finally returned to my limbs, and I kicked and writhed like a mad thing as he brought his own knife around and lashed out. I managed to kick his hand away, but he still had hold of my wrist, so I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Something glinte
d darkly on the edge of his blade as I scrambled for a rock or anything with my free hand. It looked like poison, and I had no illusions about what would happen to me if he managed to get that knife into my body.

  A lucky kick connected with the stab wound on his thigh, and he let go of my wrist and fell back with a grunt of pain. I scrambled away, the branches of the camellias leaving long scratches on my bare arms, but I didn’t care. I’d take a hundred such scratches over one from that poisoned blade. I pressed myself deeper into the bushes, scanning the dark ground for my knife.

  A high scream followed by a gurgling rattle behind me brought my head whipping around. Kyrrim had dispatched another enemy, but four still remained. One of those lifted a blowpipe to his lips as I watched.

  “Kyrrim! Look out!”

  But the man slowly lowered the weapon, a look of surprise on his face. All at once, I realised there was something protruding from his stomach. Slowly, he folded in on himself, his hands going helplessly to the point of the weapon.

  Only it wasn’t a weapon. It was a tree branch, and leaves now waved incongruously in Kyrrim’s Air winds, as if a plant were growing from the assassin’s body.

  I took an involuntary step back and looked around uncertainly. All around us, the trees stirred, their branches snaking around in search of prey. One looped a vine around the throat of another assassin, hauling him off his feet. He kicked and jerked, clutching helplessly at the vine as it slowly choked him to death.

  A sound at my feet brought my attention back to my own opponent. The roots of a large oak had speared out of the ground and caught him in their grip. He struggled against them, the only sound his panicked breathing, until they drew him underground in a churning of earth. My last sight of him was of his eyes, wide open and terrified, before the soil closed over his face.

  A new figure had appeared in the midst of our struggle. Willow. She held her arms spread wide, head thrown back, and the plants did her bidding. Dressed in jeans and a loose, comfy T-shirt, she didn’t look like a mighty weaver of Spring magic, but the effects of her power were all around us. Every one of the black-clad assassins died as I watched, open-mouthed. And yet not a leaf touched me or Kyrrim, who landed at Willow’s side, his sword still raised in case she needed protection as she worked her magic.

  She didn’t. I drew in a shaky breath as she lowered her arms and opened her eyes. Beside her, Kyrrim was soaked in sweat, his broad chest glistening. The jeans were incongruous, but with those mighty black wings rising behind him and the naked blade soaked in the blood of his enemies, he could have been an avenging angel.

  “Everyone all right?” Willow asked, gazing around at her handiwork with evident satisfaction. She wasn’t even out of breath.

  I pulled off the cloak and crossed the lawn on shaky legs. “Still in one piece.”

  Kyrrim sighed, surveying the destruction, and bent to wipe his blade clean on the grass. “You might have left one of them alive for questioning.”

  Willow considered him without expression. “Oops.”

  3

  Half an hour later, we assembled in the main pavilion, in the kitchen. Zinnia, the cook, had produced tea and cakes apparently out of thin air, declaring that we would all feel better with a little food inside us, but it wasn’t until her husband, Yarys, offered whiskey all round that I felt a relaxing warmth spread through my limbs.

  What a night. It took another whiskey to convince my body that I’d actually lived through it.

  Kyrrim had wanted to do a sweep of the sith, to make sure there were no more intruders, but Willow had assured him there weren’t. She would have felt them if there were. The only living creatures that remained were the ones who were supposed to be here—which begged the question of how the assassins had managed to get in in the first place. So, he had contented himself with ransacking all the bodies before Willow asked the tree roots to drag them under. Sure beat digging graves.

  We gathered around a large table in the centre of the brightly lit room. It was nowhere near as big as the long dining table in the formal dining room, but it was big enough to seat us all—though Zinnia was still fussing with food and hadn’t sat yet—and small enough that we could feel close. That felt important after what we’d just been through. Any of us could have died. I appreciated my friends even more now, knowing how close I’d come to losing them.

  The only person missing was Nevith, the young fae who served as a kind of jack-of-all-trades around the sith, helping Zinnia and Yarys with whatever needed doing. He was more comfortable in the mortal world than the older couple, and was often out and about running errands. Zinnia said he’d gone to The Drunken Irishman to meet with friends.

  The rest of us stared at each other in rather stunned silence until Sage cleared her throat. “So, who do we think they were after?”

  My gaze was drawn to the small pile of belongings on the table—weapons, mostly: knives, blowpipes, throwing stars, a garrotte, plus a couple of syringes and several vials of an unknown liquid. There was also a set of lockpicks and three masks. Our assassins had come prepared for almost any eventuality—except for the strength of Willow’s power. The fact that they’d sent eight men suggested that they’d been aware of it, but they’d seriously underestimated her.

  People didn’t usually consider Spring dangerous. Spring powers were more often used for growth, to create pretty displays at feasts and beautiful gardens. Nobody feared Spring the way they did Night or Fire, or even Winter. But in the right hands, Spring’s powers could be every bit as wild and dangerous as those of ancient Earth. And some had feared that Realm so much that they had neutered it and renamed it Flowers before it was subsumed into Spring and disappeared forever.

  “Could have been any of us,” Willow said, “though we never had this kind of problem before the Hawk came to stay, so I vote we blame him.”

  The ridiculousness of the comment brought a gurgle of laughter to my lips and did more to make me feel better than all the whiskey I’d just poured down my throat.

  “It’s true I have plenty of enemies,” Kyrrim said, “but I don’t think any of them are powerful enough to break into a sith uninvited.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do that.” Willow tapped her fingers on the table, a doubtful expression on her face. “Surely I would have felt the assault on my wards.”

  “It shouldn’t even be possible,” Sage said.

  We all knew that, and yet, here we were. Eight dead bodies rested under the soft grasses outside, and eight people’s weapons glinted in the light, looking very out of place in the warm and homey kitchen.

  Kyrrim glanced at Zinnia, who was cutting thick slices of fresh bread and slathering them with butter. “What time is Nevith due back?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Poor Zinnia was a quiet woman who could happily spend hours perfecting a new dessert. She seemed overwhelmed to have us all huddled in her kitchen, and horrified by the night’s events. She glanced at Yarys, her husband. “We’re normally in bed when he comes in. I couldn’t really say.”

  “The boy’s of age,” Yarys said. “He’s free to come and go as he pleases.”

  “Of course,” Kyrrim said with a grave nod. As the Hawk, he was known and feared throughout the Realms of Faerie. Perhaps it was his presence alone that had Zinnia so unsettled. His fearsome reputation hid the caring man I’d come to know. “But he is the only resident of the sith unaccounted for. I think we need to find him as soon as possible.”

  “Is he in danger?” Zinnia’s eyes were like saucers.

  “You think he has something to do with this, don’t you?” I asked. I knew the way his mind worked. Kyrrim had made suspicion into an art form.

  “I make no accusations, but before we go tying ourselves in knots trying to understand what new magics these killers could have used to gain access to the sith, it makes sense to eliminate more mundane methods.”

  “Are you suggesting that Nevith could have let them in?” Willow asked. Zinnia made
a noise of protest, quickly smothered as Kyrrim’s tawny gaze fell on her.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Or they may have forced him to let them in,” Sage said, to reassure Zinnia, though that raised its own set of problems.

  “Yes. Which is why the sooner we can locate him and ensure his safety, the better.”

  Sage picked up one of the vials. It was small, perhaps half the size of my little finger, and contained a few drops of a thick, dark liquid. “What do you think this is?”

  “Be careful with that,” Kyrrim said quickly.

  She cast him an impatient glance. “I wasn’t about to drink it.”

  “The one who attacked me had a knife,” I said. “It had something dark smeared on the edge of the blade.”

  “Undoubtedly poison,” Willow said. “Yriell would know.”

  Yriell was the king’s sister, a powerful Earth fae. She could probably do more with potions and poisons than these assassins had ever dreamed of.

  “Does it matter?” I asked. “They were obviously sent to kill at least some of us.”

  “Of course it matters,” Sage said. “Different fae favour different poisons, just as different Realms wear different clothes or have different conventions for naming their kids. If we can find out what it is, that will narrow down our list of suspects.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary.” Kyrrim’s face was grim. “They looked to me like Vipers.”

  I thought he was talking about snake poison, and didn’t follow, but understanding dawned on the faces of the rest of his audience.

  “The Night Vipers?” Sage looked at the array of gear on the table with renewed interest. “I thought they were just a myth.”

  “Sadly not. They’ve been around for centuries. An assassins’ guild,” he said, seeing my look of confusion. “They were supposed to have been wiped out in the reign of Ordrin, King Agar’s son, but I’ve heard rumours of them for a long time and found the bodies they leave behind.”