Been meaning to catch up with you. Mind if we stop by on Tuesday?
She slowly raised her gaze and I shrugged. He’d answered in the same letter, below my note. One word.
10am.
“Do you have a death wish?” Kyla asked conversationally. “It’s okay if you do, but it’s probably something a partner should know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, I don’t know Finvarra well, but I do know one thing. These ancient creatures are bored. They crave the new and unusual. My only hope of keeping the alliance alive is to amuse or entertain him in some way.”
Kyla sighed. “I can be entertaining.”
Despite the anxiety making my stomach twist, I grinned. “I bet you can.” My grin fell and I raked my hand through my hair. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’ll do if Finvarra chooses to kill the alliance. Ag’s right, I could be doing more damage than we can take. Lucifer’s spies are everywhere. If they find out the alliance is dead, while Samael is out of action, they could choose that moment to strike.”
Kyla was silent for a long moment. Finally, she frowned. “You know when someone gets critically wounded, and the doctors or healers triage them?”
I nodded and she reached for her coffee, which she’d set on my desk. “Samael is the demons’ heart. You have to resuscitate that heart before you can focus on the bleeding and fractures.”
“I know,” I said softly. “But I’m terrified that if he wakes up, he won’t even be able to look at me after everything I’ll need to do to save him.”
Kyla smiled. “Somehow, I don’t think you’ll ever have that problem with Samael.” She glanced at the clock. “Our meeting with the unseelie king is in an hour. Where are we going?”
I sighed. “He’s making us go into his realm. It’s a statement. We traveled to the seelie king, so even if Finvarra would usually be available in our realm, he’d still make us go through the portal and meet him on his turf.”
Kyla rolled her eyes. “Sounds like a hell of a guy. Just tell me I don’t have to wear a dress.”
I laughed. “Nope. I don’t think Finvarra gives a shit. Now I just have to sweet talk Vas into telling us where the hell the portal is.”
“Vas already knows what you’re up to,” the demon announced, leaning against my doorway. I rolled my eyes, and he grinned at me, but it quickly fell from his face.
“My uncle is pissed,” he said.
“Yeah, I caught that.”
“I’ll help you any way I can. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
* * *
DANICA
Thankfully, Vas had been to the unseelie realm before. Had even traveled to Finvarra’s main home as part of Samael’s entourage, when they were in negotiations back before I was born.
The closest unseelie portal was deep in the Duke Gardens, next to a small pond almost completely covered in lily pads. Instead of handing the botanical gardens over to the unseelie when the portal had appeared, the humans in charge had simply erected a twelve-foot fence surrounding the portal. Vas landed us inside the fence, and I took one moment to examine the portal—shades of pink—before we stepped through.
“You’re in luck,” Vas told us. “We’re close to Finvarra’s main base.”
A cobblestone path led us away from the portal.
“If the shit hits the fan, we’ll distract the king,” I told Vas. “You need to escape and get back to the demons.”
Vas didn’t look pleased by this plan, but he clearly knew better than to argue, because he nodded, his expression hard.
We rounded a bend, and Finvarra’s home came into view. My mouth dropped open. While the seelie king’s castle had shot into the sky, the turrets gleaming like trapped moonlight, Finvarra had taken a different approach.
His home had been built into the side of a mountain, preventing any attack from that side. This wasn’t a castle, it was a keep, a…fortress, with each level rising into the sky. And it sprawled over what had to be hundreds of thousands of square feet.
It was designed for war. For outlasting magical attacks. From the slightly blurred air that shimmered for several feet around every inch of the huge building, it was continually shielded from any such assaults.
