Stark smashed his hand into her head.
Her skull cracked.
"No!" Deirdre dragged him off of Niamh. She had no idea how she did it. She wasn't anywhere near as strong as Stark was-or at least, she shouldn't have been. But she somehow dragged Stark off of the harpy.
He whirled on Deirdre, slamming her into the wall. "What are you doing? This is the woman who killed you!"
"You compelled me to kill when we first met. Was that my fault?"
"There are no innocents in this world, Tombs. She deserves to die."
"No more than we do," Deirdre said.
"Yes," he said. "We deserve to die. But you did, and you came back, and nobody has managed to bury me yet. Survival of the fittest. Niamh isn't fit and I don't protect anyone."
Anyone except Deirdre.
"You're a goddamn hypocrite," she hissed.
Darkness flashed over Stark's eyes. "I'm a man of principle."
"I thought you were," Deirdre said. "I thought that we had the same vision for all of America's gaeans. I don't know about that."
He braced his hands against the wall on either side of her head. "You don't care about sidhe politics any more than I do. You only want to save the queen to make your idiotic election work."
"Of course this is about the election! The masses want to vote for you. I've seen it." Deirdre put a hand over his heart, which beat slowly and steadily. He was calm. "If we can save the queen, we can have it both ways. Secretary Friederling wants me to make a statement declaring your compliance with the election. I could do that even if you don't take the oath."
Stark's heart beat a little faster.
Niamh stirred on the floor behind him. Her curls spilled over her shoulder and the white feathers caught the light. "I know so much about them. Kristian, Rhiannon, Melchior... I've dealt with them all. If we work together, we can kill them, protect Deirdre, and save the election."
Deirdre's stomach twisted at being included in the to-do list.
It didn't look like Stark appreciated that, either.
By recognizing that Deirdre was his weakness, Niamh had pushed him too far. She had finally pushed a button that never should have been pushed.
Stark crushed Deirdre's shoulders in his hands. "I want you to listen to me, Tombs, and when you listen, I want you to know how serious I am." His voice lowered with compulsion. "The next time you defy a direct order from me, you will stop breathing. Your heart will not beat. You will die."
Deirdre gaped at him.
She wouldn't actually die by his command, but Stark thought she would. He still believed that she was susceptible to his compulsion.
And he'd just told her to obey him or die.
She was too stunned to speak.
"This is the last time we discuss this," Stark said. "You will stop asking me to participate in the election. And you will not make any kind of public statement on my behalf. If you do either of these things, you will die. Understand?"
"Screw you, Everton Stark." Deirdre couldn't manage to put enough vitriol into those words.
Stark turned from her, convinced that the shackles of compulsion held his Beta tightly. He dragged Niamh to her feet. "And now you are going to tell me everything you know about the unseelie sidhe."
So she did.
-XV-.
Niamh spoke under compulsion while surrounded by vampires and shifters subordinate to Stark. They didn't have to tie her down. Stark had told her she couldn't move, so she couldn't. She didn't even move when Lucifer inserted a needle into her jugular. Blood began flowing into a wine glass, sluggish and purple-black in the dim light emanating from lethe pipes.
"They've been keeping her at Original Sin," she said again. It must have been the fourth or fifth time she'd said that. Niamh kept looping back to it, as though her brain was a hard drive that kept skipping back to the broken sectors and crashing. Stark's compulsion had been too strong for the fragile harpy.
Deirdre watched from the corner, arms folded tightly over her chest. She didn't intervene. She just watched.
Niamh had been one of dozens of best friends that Deirdre had made during her time in the system. She wasn't special, really. Deirdre hadn't had family, hadn't had stability, hadn't discriminated between friends. She'd hung out with anyone who would take her. Anyone who wouldn't call her an Omega.
Niamh didn't really matter. She wasn't all that special.
But she'd helped hairspray the swimsuit to Deirdre's butt cheeks so she wouldn't flash anything when walking across a stage built out of folding tables. She'd taught Deirdre how to do makeup. Figured out the right foundation for her cocoa skin tone.
And then, many years later, she had driven a knife into Deirdre's back-maybe because Rhiannon had forced her to, or maybe because she just wanted that harpy skin.
Niamh didn't really matter.
Her blood dripped into the wine glass.
"Rhiannon gave the harpy skin to me." Niamh's hair was greasy and tangled. Her cheeks grew pallid from blood loss. "She made it for me personally. It's unseelie magic, and it would only work for me if I did what she wanted." Mascara streaked her cheeks. "She said it won't work if I betray her."
"Melchior," Stark said. "Tell me more about Melchior."
"They think that dragonfire might be able to kill the queen. They're going to magically augment Melchior and he'll try to burn her. I don't know how. All I know is..." She swallowed hard. A tear slid down her cheek. "They've been keeping her at Original Sin."
Lucifer twisted the catheter, shutting it so that the blood would temporarily stop flowing. He held the wine glass under his nose to inhale the scent of Niamh's fluids.
His eyes were locked on Deirdre's as he drank slowly, throat working, hair fallen over his forehead.
Deirdre left the room.
It was raining outside. The smell of damp asphalt and hushed whisper of tires skimming through puddles made Deirdre shiver, even though it wasn't all that cold.
Geoff followed her out, lighting a joint. "Doesn't feel right," he said, pausing to inhale. "Niamh was practically Stark's right hand before he made you Beta. He used to have her keep watch over the asylum."
"She betrayed us," Deirdre said.
"Compulsion," Geoff said.
He was preaching to the choir, but she couldn't say that. Stark had told her to keep her opinions to herself. He had compelled her to keep her opinions to herself, at least for the night, so that she wouldn't make him look bad in front of the vampires.
If Deirdre said that she agreed with Geoff, Stark would expect her to die. And he'd know that he couldn't compel her if she didn't.
She wasn't sure if she was angrier with Niamh or Stark.
Either way, she couldn't trust anyone. Not her former best friend, her would-be Alpha mate, or the actual Alpha whose office was up for grabs. Nobody.
Gods, but Deirdre missed Gage.
"Look at this." Ember Bane emerged from the lobby in a cloud of acidic lethe smoke with a tablet clutched in his hands. He lifted it so that both Geoff and Deirdre could see.
He was streaming a news report. Deirdre only glimpsed January Lazar's familiar face before it cut to a different familiar face-one with a square jaw and the hint of a glittering scale pattern marking the side of his muscled neck.
Melchior's smile heart-shatteringly perfect. He was a deadly man, rendered so much deadlier by the way that he made Deirdre's heart race.
"Why aren't I on the ballot for Alpha? I am the shifter mate to the queen of the unseelie. I have the Alpha power of control over other shifters. But the Office of Preternatural Affairs has refused to allow me to take the oath." He had the same magnetic charm that Stark did when he was being filmed. It felt like he was speaking directly to Deirdre.
The camera cut away to an image of the Summer Court. The image was blurred and distorted, since the magic in the Middle Worlds was so strong. It must have taken powerful wards to permit a camera to work there at all.
But they had gotten a clear shot of the seelie sidhe ladies with Secretary Friederling. The news had blurred the picture, but it was obvious that the politician was having sex with them.
"Holy crap," Geoff said. "Nice."
Ember looked horrified. "Are you kidding? The secretary of the OPA is taking sexual favors from the sidhe!"
Deirdre's hands lifted to her mouth. "Oh gods." What was it going to show next? Rylie getting a foot rub? Deirdre hanging out with the Summer Court?
It would make it look like everyone was conspiring against the unseelie.
The election would be ruined.
Yet Deirdre wasn't shown. The image cut back to Melchior's wounded visage. "The unseelie should be candidates for the Alpha position, but Rylie Gresham won't let us participate. The OPA is in the pocket of the seelie. This election for Alpha is a show and nothing more."
"Is he right?" Ember was speaking to Deirdre directly, giving her that look she knew all too well. The one that people got when their hopes were crushed into a fine powder.
"This is part of his ploy to cause riots," Deirdre said. "They're just trying to destabilize the election."
Ember turned off the tablet. "How do you know? Stark hasn't taken the oath, he's not involved in the talks. We don't know anything! Maybe Melchior is right."
The heavy silence of night snapped.
Glass shattered blocks away. Something heavy thudded.
Fire glowed around the corner.
"The riots," Ember said.
Deirdre tried to mentally map where those sounds had originated from. She might have been paranoid, but she thought it might be the elementary school where the Gaean Citizens for Democracy had set up the local polling station.
The lobby opened. Stark stormed out, dragging Niamh behind him. Blood was smeared down the side of her neck and all the way across her shoulder.
He held the remnants of the harpy skin in his other fist.
"She's told us where to find a ley line juncture that will take us directly into the Winter Court," Stark said. "We're leaving, Beta."
"Melchior just made an announcement. He's telling everyone the election is fake," Deirdre said.
"It is fake." Vampires poured out onto the sidewalk behind him-vampires and Alphas and all their other random allies.
Deirdre couldn't disobey him. She couldn't even argue with him while those people were watching. She clenched her hands into fists, squeezing so hard that her fingernails cut into her palms.
Geoff gestured vaguely at the burning city. "But the queen," he said. "Who's going to save the unseelie queen?"
Another thump.
This time, glass shattered all along the street, bursting from every window between the bodega and the condemned laundromat five doors down.
An instant later, people came racing around the corner. They were shouting indistinctly. Throwing things. Breaking more windows, jumping on cars, howling their rage into the night.
They were definitely coming from the direction of the polling station now.
"Damn it," Deirdre swore.
She broke into a run. It was hard to tell how many of the people emerging on the street were vampires and how many were shifters. In the darkness, their preternatural grace all looked the same to her.
There were mortals among them, though. Mundane humans.
Soon to be collateral damage.
"Fraud!" someone shouted behind Deirdre.
A bottle pinwheeled past her head, its wick etching spirals of smoke into the air. The Molotov cocktail smashed through the broken window to her left. The bodega caught instantly. All the paper charms hanging on the inside wall lit up first, even faster than Niamh's feathers had upon contacting Deirdre's flame.
The shouting down the street grew.
She twisted to see one of the vampire-occupied tenements emptying out. All those people who lived in public housing, just dumping out onto the streets, racing away and screaming.
They couldn't have all seen Melchior's announcement-could they?
Thump.
The top three floors of the tenement erupted. Columnar fists of white-hot flame punched out of the windows, gushing black smoke and sizzling with hints of green.
Magic.
To be specific, sidhe magic.