War Of The Alphas: Alpha - War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 29
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War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 29

Life with Stark was life in Technicolor, constant adrenaline and emotion. It was the first time she'd breathed in years. The first time she'd seen light at the end of the tunnel where the preternatural system had buried her, no matter how distant that light may have seemed, or how much violence waited between her and escape.

At least it was there.

She hated him, but she didn't want him dead.

Deirdre heaved a sigh. "I expect you to come out of this alive too."

Stark gestured, and everyone followed him into the icy depths of Original Sin.

"Go inside and kill everyone" was a horrible plan. But Everton Stark wasn't a man who needed to get more complicated than that.

They crossed the edge of the unseelie wards on the sidewalk outside the club, and the protection magic erupted.

In an instant, the club went from a few feet away to a few thousand miles away. It appeared so distant that Deirdre couldn't have reached it if she flew for days. She knew that it must have been an illusion-that the club couldn't be as far away as it looked.

Yet the more she railed against the magic, the tighter it held her.

Time slowed, blurring her motions. Her arms pumped at her sides as though she were trying to fight her way through the ocean.

Stark pushed through the magic without looking back. He aimed for that distant front door, unperturbed by the distortion.

The unseelie guards appeared in front of him.

They were beautiful statues, skin glimmering in jewel tones. Magic lashed along their arms and haloed their heads. It was physically painful to look at them, like staring into the sun.

Stark looked. He did a lot more than look.

He plunged his clawed hands into the gut of the man on the left and said, "Die."

Shock rolled through the unseelie's body. His eyes blanked, his head fell back, and just like that-he was dead. Sapphire blood gushed from the place that Stark's fingers were embedded in his gut.

The magical distortion faded.

For an instant, Deirdre could see the street as it truly was. They were right in front of the doors to Original Sin. The city glowed with the fires started by Rhiannon and rioters.

Then the illusion began to rebuild, coalescing around the second unseelie guard.

He grew in size, looming over them.

"Shoot!" Stark shouted.

Deirdre fired on the second unseelie. She couldn't tell if she hit. He leaped across the pavement to tackle her, and Deirdre barely dodged him. His fingers barely brushed her arm.

Ice immobilized her from shoulder to elbow and the cold penetrated to the bone. It hurt deep inside, as though blasting directly into the phoenix fire waiting within her.

The unseelie knew about her. They knew what she was, and her weaknesses.

Melchior had prepared for her.

Deirdre pushed the pain away, tracking her gun along the unseelie's body as he leaped for Geoff.

She popped off one clean shot.

Skull fragmented. Blood the color of juicy emeralds splattered to the pavement. He fell against Geoff, and the werewolf gutted him with the iron blade.

The illusion shattered as though Deirdre had driven her boot heel into the surface of a frozen lake. The doors to Original Sin snapped into place, just outside of arm's reach.

Vidya wrenched the entrance open with both hands, biceps and shoulder muscles flexing.

Magic popped around them. Deirdre felt it in her eardrums, in her skull.

She plunged into Original Sin after Vidya and Stark.

It was freezing inside of the club. Beyond freezing. The dance floor was slicked with a thick layer of ice, and all the tables and couches had been replaced by silver trees glistening with frost leaves, much like the forest that she'd seen in the Winter Court. There should have only been a few feet between the dance floor and the walls, but the forest looked endless.

There were no walls. Original Sin opened into a vast night filled with stars.

More illusion.

Stalagmites of ice thrust from the ground between the trees, forming crystalline pillars twice Deirdre's height, distorting and magnifying everything on the other side.

Through one of those stalagmites, Deirdre saw motion.

"Over there!" Her breath came out of her in plumes of mist that froze her lips, chilled her nose, bit at her cheeks.

Three more unseelie swept toward them through the club's darkness, cloaked in ice, pristine and beautiful. "Don't let him speak," said a woman with opal-dark flesh.

Stark opened his mouth to issue another command.

Two of the unseelie slammed into him before he could say anything, and where their hands contacted his flesh, ice sprouted. It was a thick crust that collared him from nose to chest. It should have kept him from speaking.

Focusing that magic on Stark left them vulnerable to Vidya, and she didn't need words to kill.

Razor feathers flashed through the air. She whipped her wings across the sidhe woman to eviscerate her from navel to breasts.

Shiny black skin tore open. Whatever she had inside was not like a human's, bloody-red meat touched with orange fat, but like she was pure magic-muscle of liquid silver that erupted on contact.

When she hit the ground, she was already dead. And so was the sidhe beside her. Vidya was a force of nature more powerful than unseelie ice and far less merciful than any of her opponents.

The third launched away from Stark before Vidya could kill him. He spotted Deirdre and went for her instead.

She rolled behind one of the silver trees. Ice blasted past her head. Where the magic passed, the forest distorted, dripping and elongating like a painting left in the rain.

Ember took cover behind another of the ice pillars and opened fire, laying down a spray of bullets that peppered the trees.

Deirdre's back bumped against the silver tree. She brushed against it with her knuckles-just the barest brush.

Ice turned to heat. Her knuckles burned.

She jerked away with a gasp.

The trees didn't just look silver in color.

They were silver.

Deirdre and her companions had come armed with iron, and the sidhe had prepared for a shifter assault in their own way. They had created a forest of metal that was fatal to shapeshifters.

"Oh my gods," Deirdre breathed.

She turned to search for Geoff, who was driving across the icy dance floor in pursuit of another sidhe. He'd already forgotten Stark's instructions to stay close.

And he was going right for one of those trees.

"Don't touch the forest!" Deirdre shouted. "Everything is silver!"

He didn't seem to hear her. He was roaring, attacking, fighting with the sidhe. The unseelie magic tangled him in spider webs of light, clinging to his flesh.

Stark was still struggling with his icy collar, and the others didn't seem to have noticed that Geoff had run off.

Only Deirdre could save him.

Shivering and sluggish, Deirdre leaped over the railing and landed on the icy dance floor.

Her boots got traction well enough. But once she stepped away from the relative shelter of the silver trees, she felt the wind. It was the same cruel, biting storm that seemed to perpetually blast through the Winter Court, sucking away her breath and freezing her to the marrow.

The sidhe Geoff was fighting tossed him into a tree. He wasn't wearing a jacket. His arms hit the branches, and he screamed at silver burn.

His shouts were drowned out by Deirdre's gunfire.

She hit the sidhe twice. Once above the left eye, and once just below the nose, shattering teeth. The plumes of blood froze into spikes, plugging the wounds even as the sidhe collapsed.

The corpse shattered on impact.

Deirdre rushed to Geoff, but her balance failed. She struck the dance floor on hands and knees and scrabbled toward the werewolf.

"The trees are silver!" Geoff groaned. Contacting pure silver had carved inch-deep furrows into his flesh.

"I tried to warn you." Deirdre holstered her gun, yanked her jacket off, and packed it around his wounds.

Geoff's hand clamped down on her wrist. "The sword. I saw it."

"Yeah, your sword. I'll hang on to it." He had dropped the iron weapon a few inches away, so Deirdre picked it up. Who knew? Maybe she could make use of it.

"No," he hissed. "The sword."

"What?"

But he was incoherent from pain, no longer focusing on her.

Deirdre muttered a few choice swear words under her breath, turning to look for the others.

There was nothing behind her but silver trees.

The icy, open dance floor resembling a lake was gone, along with the body of the sidhe that Deirdre had shot. The forest had closed around her. Silver branches speared the sky, tipped with ice leaves that reflected Deirdre in mocking glitter.

It was unseelie illusion magic. That was all. The dance floor was still somewhere nearby.

And so was Stark.

Yet she'd never be able to find him if she couldn't see reality.

She returned her attention to Geoff. He was still breathing, but it was shallow. The sweat was freezing on his skin. His face was screwed up in pain. "Okay," Deirdre said, rubbing her upper arms to try to warm them. "This is bad."

It didn't change the goal. She needed to find the queen. If she located Ofelia Hawke, then the queen would be able to unravel all this magic and save Geoff, too.

Deirdre tucked her jacket around him as tightly as she could manage. "I'll be back."

"I wouldn't count on that."

She turned at the sound of a man's voice.

The bar on the far end of the club had appeared out of the unseelie illusion. Deirdre could see a bare concrete wall and a hallway that led to the bathrooms.

Niamh's artist boyfriend stepped out of that hallway.

"Took you long enough to get here," Kristian said. "The riot started hours ago. It feels like I've been waiting forever."

A bone-white blade glistened in his hand, and Deirdre suddenly understood what Geoff had been trying to tell her. He had seen the sword.

The OPA hadn't detected the energy levels for the unseelie queen in Original Sin.

They had detected the Ethereal Blade.

Niamh had terrible taste in men. She and Deirdre had fought over a lot of the same guys when they were teens, largely because Deirdre had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for men who didn't care she was an Omega, and Niamh had always preferred to lick the bottom of the barrel.

But a snake shifter with the unseelie court-a snake shifter who now sauntered toward Deirdre holding the Ethereal Blade-was a stunningly bad choice, even for Niamh.

The heeled boots and hooded jacket emphasized his lean figure, but his sunglasses were silly in the darkness of Original Sin. He probably would have made Deirdre's deprived loins go lusting a few years earlier. Now he left her cold. Literally.

Kristian circled a silver tree. "I know Niamh escaped to beg forgiveness from you. Did you give it? Or did you kill her?"

Deirdre wasn't actually sure what happened to Niamh. It was hard to worry about the swanmay-slash-harpy after everything she'd done. "I didn't hurt Niamh, but the vampires might have."

That knocked a little of the confidence out of him. "Vampires?"

Kristian took a step toward her and Deirdre took a step back. She wasn't going to take any chances getting within the range of the Ethereal Blade. It was terrifying to see him holding it so casually, as though he wasn't wielding a weapon of indescribable power and death.

"Is the real queen even here?" Deirdre asked.