She tried to pluck the ball of energy off of her, but there was nothing there to touch. That portal yawned wider and deeper, like a tunnel that should have bored through Deirdre.
Kristian must have attached it to her when he attacked the dirigible. That was why he hadn't bothered trying to fight Deirdre. He had affixed something far worse to her-something that now had the seelie sidhe screaming and fleeing, abandoning their fountains of wine. The sluagh, whatever that was.
Melchior had warned her that she would die if she left the Winter Court.
The thing clawing its way through Deirdre's aura to reach the Summer Court had a thousand limbs, a thousand faces, and a thousand screaming voices.
"Don't let the sluagh in the castle!" Donne said. "Kill her!"
The sluagh erupted through Deirdre's body.
She didn't feel it coming through. It was just suddenly there, taking up space in front of her, stirring the air in the room, gusting her hair back from her face.
In many ways, the sluagh reminded her of Marion's magic, at least in the sheer vastness of its form. But where she was filled with an awe-inspiring light, the sluagh was shadow, a black hole absorbing everything around it, inhaling magic and life and devouring it in endless gnashing mouths. There must have been thousands of them-millions-but it was perpetually shifting, from mouths to hands to spines to eyes. She couldn't focus on it.
Worst of all was the screaming.
Gods, the screams.
The sluagh launched itself toward the Sapling Throne. Donne leaped out of the way.
It smashed into the throne and fluids gushed over the dais, freezing in cruel fractal patterns that looked sharp enough to impale.
Tentacles whipped wide, shattering the pergola's pillars and showering wood over Deirdre.
The few remaining seelie fled. One male sidhe didn't run quickly enough, and one of the sluagh's skeletal hands lashed out, seizing his ankle. It jerked him off of his feet. It hauled him into its belly.
His scream joined the thousands of others.
And its body swelled.
Sidhe guards hurled magic into its wintery black core. But the sluagh devoured everything that they threw at it, and it only seemed to grow with the power.
It reached out to grab other seelie who thought they had fled far enough to escape, swallowing them with a sickening wet sound.
Deirdre's back hit the castle's wall. There was nowhere else to go. Nowhere to run.
Secretary Friederling dragged Rylie away from one of the lashing tentacles. He moved pretty fast when he wanted to. There was no sign of a limp when he was dodging death. "Don't attack it with magic! You're only making it stronger!"
His advice came too late. The sluagh snapped a nearby guard into its maw, consuming him instantly. He didn't even have time to scream.
The sluagh kept growing.
One of the tentacles lashed over Deirdre's head. She rolled under it, dodging the blow. But it was faster than she was. The second strike caught her ankle, shooting ice all the way up her hip. It jerked her across the floor.
"No!" she shouted.
Deirdre fired her Sig. The iron bullet snapped its tentacle in half.
The sluagh screamed in its multitude of voices, drawing the offending limb within itself.
Deirdre was now close enough to see all the skeletons inside of it. The bones were crumbling and luminous, like an entire cemetery's worth of bodies churning within the graveyard of its maw.
She had its attention now, though. The sluagh's hands reached for her.
It was going to rip her apart, and she'd get to find out if there was a limit to how many times a phoenix could regenerate.
Then the pergola shattered.
Massive stone bodies punched through the patio cover. They landed one at a time, pounding into the stone floors hard enough to dent them.
They had broad wings, twisted faces, and gray skin that seemed hewn from solid rock.
Gargoyles.
And not just any gargoyles. Deirdre recognized the patterning of runes over their animated flesh. She had been chased by those exact creatures when she'd been trying to steal a sword from Holy Nights Cathedral.
"Lincoln!" Rylie cried.
Brother Marshall leaped off of the back of a gargoyle, using his staff for balance. "Morning, Rylie," he said, touching the brim of his cowboy hat in greeting.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
"From the looks of it, it seems like I'm saving your life." Brother Marshall parried one of the sluagh's tentacles with the staff, beating it away before it could touch him or the politicians he now protected. Where staff and limb contacted, unseelie magic sparked.
The sluagh's voices shrilled in pain. Deirdre clapped her hands over her ears as she ran, skirting the patio to try to reach Brother Marshall. He seemed to know what he was doing.
But the monster slammed into the wall, cutting her off from the others.
Her ankle was still cold from where it had grabbed her earlier. The numbness threw her off balance. She stumbled backward, falling onto her butt.
The gargoyles closed in. They thrust their stony fists into the mass of the sluagh, faces immobile as they seized its thrashing tentacles, yanking them away from Deirdre. Thousands of souls thrashed and screamed, painting the arms of the gargoyles in blood.
She scrambled to put distance between herself and the fight, kicking her heels against the ice-slick ground.
The sluagh was still growing. Stretching. It tried to wrap itself around the gargoyles, attempting to consume the animated stone the way that it had consumed the sidhe guards. But there was nothing to eat, no bodies to absorb into the darkness. The gargoyles pounded their fists against it and didn't react when the unseelie magic clung to them like taffy.
Between the gargoyles and the sluagh stretched between them, Deirdre couldn't see the others anymore. She couldn't even see Marion with all her magic. All she could see was thrashing shadow, emotionless golems, and the screaming faces of the dead within the sluagh.
"Rylie!" Deirdre shouted.
She skidded around a patch of ice. She wasn't able to stop herself and slammed into the low wall separating the patio from the ocean, giving her a view over the side to the beach down below.
There were more seelie guards fighting in the crashing foam of the surf. For a heartbeat, Deirdre thought that Kristian had followed the sluagh into the Summer Court too-but then she realized that the man fighting the sidhe was far more familiar.
He was also wielding a tree as a club. As in a tree ripped out of the ground.
Where he struck the sidhe, their blood splattered all over the sand, mingling with the lapping waves. They couldn't even get at him with their magic. He knocked every spell away as a batter might hit foul balls.
Even at that distance, Deirdre recognized the horrible grace and deliberation of his movements.
Everton Stark had come for her.
She felt the same confusing mix of emotions that she had when he'd brought down Rylie's private jet to save her: fear and gratitude and annoyance and something that felt like a grudging, growing affection.
She was actually happy to watch him ripping through the sidhe.
Secretary Friederling had backed Deirdre into a corner with a terrible decision. But Stark's arrival meant she could choose secret option three. Instead of making a statement that would piss Stark off, or getting thrown into solitary confinement, Stark was going to rescue her. She could run away with him.
Deirdre needed a way to reach him on the beach.
She turned to search the patio for an exit. There was no sign of the king now-only his guards. Additional reinforcements had also arrived. They moved in from the outer edges of the patio, magic rippling in their clenched fists, making the room warp and distort around them.
Between the seelie and the sluagh, Deirdre's senses were breaking down. Everything twisted around her, lensing as though she were surrounded by a spherical magnifying glass. Even the sounds were warping as the sidhe battled.
She heard screams and sizzling, cries and thumps, but she couldn't tell where anything was coming from.
So it took her a minute to realize that the seelie guards had left fighting the sluagh to Brother Marshall and his gargoyles.
Now they were coming for Deirdre.
Rough hands seized her by the arms and ripped her away from Rylie.
They thought that Deirdre had brought the sluagh deliberately. They thought she'd been trying to assassinate the king.
Great.
Deirdre's gun was in her hand. She had drawn it instinctively when the guards moved in on her. But she couldn't tell where to aim. The more the sidhe touched her, the faster their tenuous illusion fell apart, exposing her vulnerable mind to the distorted reality of the Summer Court.
The chateau was in ruins. It was also under construction. And it was completed, covered in ivy, shimmering in the sunlight.
The ocean was calm and glassy even as it frothed with the fury of a storm.
So many different images, so much conflicting sensory information, a thousand smells and colors.
Her whole body jerked, and the room spun around her. She recognized the feeling of being pulled through the ley lines from when Melchior had transported her the night before.
The guards were going to remove her from the patio.
Something told Deirdre that if they took her away, she wasn't going to be coming back.
"No!" she yelled, thrashing in their grips.
The chateau flipped upside down. She watched as the gargoyles, conducted by Brother Marshall and his staff, continued to shred the sluagh. She watched as Rylie ran in slow motion toward Marion and Friederling. She watched as the Sapling Throne shrank into itself, drawing into the floor, hiding from the assault.
And Deirdre glimpsed Stark climbing over the half-wall.
But now everything was receding, like she was watching it from the end of a tunnel. The ley lines contracted around her.
"Stark!" Deirdre cried. "Help me!"
The patio snapped back into focus instantly.
She smashed into the floor facedown, palms slapping against the floorboards. Sluagh blood stung her fingers. Gargoyle feet thudded around her head.
But the patio wasn't warping anymore.
When she pushed herself up to look around, she saw why.
Stark stood knee-deep in seelie blood, drenched in fluids from the guards he'd killed. His shirt had ripped at the shoulders when he'd partially shapeshifted. Emerald handprints marked his bare arms. Bits of flesh clung to his beard.
He'd murdered the seelie guards trying to take her away.
And now he stood over her, barely even breathing hard, looking more relieved than angry. Whatever they had been fighting about back at the high-rise seemed inconsequential.
"Tombs," he said.
Deirdre smiled weakly. "Stark."
Another of the seelie guards lunged at them, dodging the wrestling gargoyles to attempt an attack.
Stark put himself between the guard and Deirdre. "Walk into the sluagh," Stark said. The command resonated. He put so much willpower into it that even Deirdre's skull ached.
The seelie stopped mid-step. He spun on his heel. And he leaped into the morass of souls that formed the sluagh. Dead in an instant.
Stark had killed him for Deirdre, just as he'd killed all those others.
Movement in the corner caught Deirdre's eye.
Secretary Friederling twisted the hawk's head on the top of his cane, yanking away the shaft to reveal that it was a sheath for a long stiletto. The blade was shining silver. Probably pure silver-the kind of metal that hadn't been sold since Genesis.
Enough silver to kill Everton Stark.
But not enough to kill her.
"I'll take him," Deirdre said.
Stark responded by plowing into another of the sidhe, smashing the guard's body into a wall.
The secretary moved forward. Deirdre snapped a high kick at Friederling, and he moved with surprising reflexes, ducking underneath her boot heel. When she kicked again, he blocked her leg with the flat of his stiletto.
"Remember how I offered you a way to avoid going to prison for the rest of your life?" he asked with a wry twist to his mouth.
"Remember how I hate your guts?" Deirdre replied.
Secretary Friederling moved faster than she expected. The cane came swinging out of nowhere, rapping Deirdre sharply on the side of the head. She staggered.
He didn't try to stab her with the stiletto, but he didn't need to. Not with that much silver. It stung her scalp. She smelled burning flesh instantly.