Quicksilver (The Fae & Alchemy Series Book 1)

Lightning raked its claws across the night sky. Rain pelted us, torrential and freezing, as we ran along the western line of the war camp. Ren and Fisher were dark ghosts, blurring through the mayhem, darting straight through campfires that had already been kicked over, and around knots of warriors attempting to roll massive boulders toward the river’s frozen edge. Fisher hung back, waiting for me, but I was right on their heels anyway, following at a dead sprint.

Along the other side of the Darn, a line of ravening vampires snapped and snarled at the ice’s edge. I could make out their shattered teeth and ruined tongues even through the lashing curtain of rain. Tonight was a little warmer than it had been since I’d arrived at Irrìn, and the smell that floated across the river—rotting flesh and the tang of foul, metallic blood— made me gag. I switched to breathing through my mouth, only barely managing to keep my stomach.

Fisher and Ren stopped abruptly at a switchback in the river, where the snowy banks were closest and formed a narrow bottleneck. Only fifty feet separated Irrìn and Sanasroth here. It wouldn’t take much for the feeders to make the crossing.

Panic lived and breathed in my veins, multiplying by the second, but I gathered it in an iron grip, refusing to succumb to it. “Why aren’t there as many of them here?” I panted. There were vampires on the opposite banks here, yes, but nowhere near as many as there were further down, where the river was wider.

“The water still flows beneath the ice. The current’s stronger here as it moves through this channel. That means the ice is thinner,” Fisher said. “More dangerous to cross.”

“And they know that?” I asked incredulously.

“Not in any intelligent way,” Ren supplied. “Vampires can’t pass over running water. They sense the current here and are afraid. But inevitably, one of them dares to step out onto the ice. Then the others follow.”

“When they do, we’re here to make sure they don’t make it across.” Fisher glowered at the pack of vampires, pushing and shoving each other on the opposite bank. His eyes were distant, his expression troubled. “He didn’t come this time,” he muttered.

No need to ask who he was referring to. Ren and I both already knew he meant Malcolm. The silver-haired king of the vampires was nowhere to be seen. Tonight, he’d sent his servants out to do his dirty work and hadn’t deigned to come out himself. I wasn’t sorry for it. The sight of Malcolm, standing on the other side of the river, had struck a chord of fear in me that was still rattling my bones even now. He’d been no taller than your average Fae male. In truth, he’d been leaner than most of the warriors here in camp. But the sense of power he’d given off had been staggering; I’d felt it pushing and pulling at me, looking for my weak spots, as if it had wanted to force me to my knees in supplication. If I lived another thousand years and never saw that dead-faced male again, it’d still be too soon.

BOOM! BOOM!

BOOM! BOOM!

Like a two-part heartbeat, the sound of the hammers smashing down on the thick ice rang in my ears.

“Be ready,” Fisher said. His smoke rushed from his hands, forming a dark pool at his feet. It crept to the edge of the river but hovered there, going no further.

Shouts went up to the east—a furious roar of war cries. I scanned the writhing mass of bodies on both sides of the Darn, terror and relief holding hands in my chest when I saw the first wave of vampires racing out onto the ice there, but that the huge icebreakers had succeeded in shattering the surface of the frozen river as well.

“They’re through,” Ren observed. “It’s over now. A few more solid hits—”

As if the crowd of vampires closest to us knew that this was their last chance, a ragged old man with half his jaw hanging loose stepped boldly out onto the ice. His shirt was in tatters, clinging to his emaciated frame. His pants were frayed and filthy, hanging from his protruding hips. Side to side, his jaw worked, his lips cracked wide open and leaking black ichor.

Across the river he shuffled on rotting feet. A hundred feet away, back toward camp, the Darn splintered apart, ice groaning as it gave way to hammer and axe. Vampires plunged through the widening fissures, sinking into the rushing waters below.

The dead didn’t swim. Nor did they float. A few of the blood-mad feeders grasped hold of chunks of ice, using them to buoy themselves above the surface of the water, but it was no good. The most determined among them held on for maybe ten seconds before their lifeless hands lost traction, and they sank below the choppy surface of the water.

The ancient old man crossing toward us must have been hollow-boned like a bird. The ice held under his feet as he grew closer, which gave his companions courage. A woman came next. Her face was a ruin, her eyes missing, cheeks clawed to shreds. The wounds looked fresh, still pink in places. A day or two ago, she’d been alive. She was wearing an apron, which was a strained brown with old blood down the front. It looked like the aprons the cooks wore back at the Winter Palace. Had she worked at some fine estate somewhere? Had she stepped out for a moment to escape the heat of the kitchen, to catch a glimpse of a star or two in the night sky? Had some awful nightmare leaped out of the shadows and torn her face to shreds as it had fed?

A boy, next, naked and scrawny.

A woman with blackened hands and corkscrew dark curls, dragging a lifeless doll along behind her as she came. My stomach pitched when I realized it wasn’t a doll. That it was a baby, punctured with hundreds of teeth marks like it was a pin cushion.

“Gods and Sinners,” I whispered. “What is this?”

“Walking hell,” Renfis answered grimly. “It just keeps coming.”

Soon, there were at least twenty vampires on the ice. The others held their positions on the bank, refusing to come forward, either too overwhelmed by the sense of the water rushing close by or held back by some other voiceless command. But the twenty on the ice were plenty to be worrying about.

“They’re almost halfway,” Ren muttered.

“The moment they cross, I’ll have their fucking heads,” Fisher growled.

The rain came down harder, lashing the tents and putting out the unattended fires back in the camp. It struck our skin, soaking our clothes to our bodies and plastering our hair to our scalps. I watched the vampires’ slow but determined approach and had to ask, “Why wait? Why not do it now?”

“We’re bound by the rules of war,” Fisher said. “We can’t use magic to attack or affect an enemy until that enemy has breached our border. And anyway, our magic doesn’t work on Sanasrothian soil. Fae magic needs light and life to survive. And there’s nothing on their side of the river but death, darkness, and decay. Our lands are divided directly down the centerline of the Darn. But the second these fuckers cross over…”

It happened right as he said it. The old man with the shattered jaw stumbled beyond the midway point. Ren and Fisher acted in unison, drawing their power to them. The air crackled with energy. My teeth buzzed with it. Both warriors moved with lethal precision. Ren drew his hand back and launched a ball of blue-white light into the steel-grey sky. At the same time, a forceful ink-black wind surged from Fisher’s outstretched hands. The wind struck the male vampire in the chest, howling around him and burning through the remnants of his clothes, through his sloughing skin, through the bare yellowed bones of his ribcage. The vampire snapped, infuriated by the assault, but he kept coming.

One more step.

Two.

The wind tore away what was left of his jaw…

…and then Ren’s brilliant orb came crashing down onto the river. It exploded into a sphere of light and heat that smashed the fragile ice from one bank to the other. The other vampires, who had still been standing on the Sanasroth side of the river, screeched and howled as they plummeted into the fast-moving depths below and disappeared from sight.

All up and down the river, the ice was fractured, the way impassible. In other words, all was safe.

A cheer went up amongst the Yvelian Fae, bawdy and full of contempt. How many times had they stood on this bank and sent Malcolm’s beasts back to Ammontraíeth with their rotting tails tucked between their legs?

Innìr was an ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail. Its purpose would never be fulfilled. There would always be another night, and the ice would always freeze, and there would always need to be a battalion of warriors here to keep the horde at bay and be ready should they one day succeed in making the crossing. The thought of it was exhausting. Some of these warriors had been here for decades, performing the same task every god’s cursed night. So long that they’d named the place. They’d built homes here. Had families, for fuck’s sake. Because, without loved ones close by and some sense of imagined normalcy, what kind of life was this? With no assistance from Belikon—

“The shore! Look to the shore!” The cry was full of terror. It stopped my thoughts dead in their tracks. Kingfisher whirled around, facing the camp, his face pale as the snow, the quicksilver in his eye forming shifting patterns as he picked apart the edge of the river, searching for the cause of the alarm.

He found it before me. Renfis did, too. They both stiffened, a gasp of dismay slipping past Ren’s lips. “What? It…it can’t be. That’s not…possible.”

But I could see it now. Amongst the icy rocks and the churned-up mud, there was something crawling out of the river. And it had teeth as sharp as razor blades.

“Breach! Breach! Breach!” The warning spread like wildfire.

“Go. I’ll stay with her,” Ren told Fisher.

“This is where you keep your promise and stay right here, Osha,” Fisher said. In the blink of an eye, he had become something wild. His skin cast off an eerie pale glow, his dark waves blowing on an invisible wind. He had never seemed very human to me, but now, balancing on the precipice of danger, he was unspeakably Fae.

“I’ll stay. I promise.” A crashing roll of thunder drowned out my words, but Fisher nodded, his eyes lingering on mine for half a second, and then he was gone.

“There are more! More crossing!” a female warrior yelled.

Sure enough, the vampires who had remained on the bank were now slipping down the dirty snow and falling into the river. I watched as they were swept away on the current in twos and threes, blindly clawing at each other, trying to reach the other side. But there were those that vanished below the surface of the water and did not re-emerge. I watched, horrified, as more and more of the vampires started to crawl out of the water.

“Ready yourself,” Ren said tightly. “Let’s greet the fuckers with steel.”

And us…an excited voice whispered. Us, too! And us!

Solace. The blade with the crescent moon pommel was a god sword, after all. Of course it held quicksilver. And it was awake. Alive. Listening. Talking. Talking to me.

No time to marvel at that. There were three vampires scrambling out of the water, and they hadn’t been slowed down by their ice-cold swim. The first shook itself like a dog, bared its teeth, sighted us, and moved. With unnatural, jerky movements, the naked young boy galloped up the bank on all fours, his jagged claws tearing holes into the snow. Ren met his attack with a flash of his sword, barely even moving as he whipped his blade around and parted the creature’s head from its shoulders.

The old man came next, though not as quickly. He was in rough shape after Fisher’s magic, and barely managed to break into a run as he came for us. Ren spun, slicing upward, and severed the clawed hand the old man tried to strike him with. While he was unbalanced, Ren brought his blade singing through the air and took his head, too.

More bodies rose from the Darn. Far more than the twenty that had gone in when the ice broke. It made no sense. Ren cut them down as quickly as they emerged from the water, but soon there were too many for him to tackle alone. He sent orbs up into the air, which came down with frightening force, detonating the second they made contact with flesh. The feeders erupted into pale blue flames, stumbling into one another, screaming, but still they came.

“Saeris! Find Lorreth! Head back up to the forge!” Renfis bellowed.

“No!” I drew Solace, and a ripple of heat charged up my arm. The sensation took me by surprise. Two seconds later, I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ren before sixty snarling vampires.

Ren looked at me like I was madness personified. “You promised him!” he shouted.

Nodding, I raised the sword. “I promised I’d stay here. If I run off into the dark by myself, I’ll definitely die. He knew I’d have better odds if I was with you.”

There was nothing he could do. Gritting his teeth, Ren twisted, jamming his sword up through the skull of a vampire so disfigured that I couldn’t even tell if it had been male or female. “Stubborn girl,” he growled. “Don’t you dare die on my watch, Saeris Fane! Fisher will never forgive me if his sole reason for living is torn to pieces on her first fucking battlefield.”

Wait a minute. What did—ohfffUCK! I brought Solace up just in time. The vampire who had been about to lunge for my throat caught the weapon’s edge right in the mouth. I pushed, following through on the swing, and took the top of the cursed thing’s head off.

It dropped to the floor, but it wasn’t done with me. A bunch of mangled meat and a fragment of its lower jaw was all that was left of its head, but that was apparently enough. It grabbed at my legs, claws scraping at my leathers, its bare feet kicking at the snow. Thick as tar, black ichor spurted all over my boots.

“All of it! You need to get all of the head!” Ren yelled.

All of it. Okay. I could do that. I took a deep breath and stilled my mind. My training took over. All of the endless hours locked away in the attic with my mother’s rebel friends, learning how to put something sharp to good use. How to move my body. How to use my opponent’s own momentum against them. How to strike and retreat, strike and retreat, strike and retreat. How to shut myself down and focus on the task at hand.

The vampire’s lower jaw and what was left of its brain stem flew into the mud, sliced clean away. The monster fell limply to the ground for good this time. And I got to fucking work.

There was a split second when the vampires were sluggish as they emerged from the water. Ren took them down in droves as they came up the bank, but I went to the water’s edge and began carving them apart before they could get their bearings.

Solace hummed in my hands, sending waves of energy up into my shoulders with every hit I landed. I sank down, settling my weight into the balls of my feet and my hips and immersed myself deep into the flow of killing.

“Back, Saeris! Come back!” Ren was right. There were too many of them coming to shore at once now. I danced back, light on my feet, and took up position beside him. “I’ll wound them. You end them,” he snarled.

A blanket of black smoke swept across the river, shoving back so many of the vampires who were trying to climb onto the banks. If there was black smoke, then that meant that Fisher was alive somewhere close by. Relief rode my blood like lightning. I slammed the point of my sword through a vampire’s cheek, spearing it to the ground, then ripped the sword free and severed the vile creature’s head just in time to repeat the process when Ren sent another slathering feeder my way.

Time slowed down, and the strangest thing happened. My heart rate dipped. A sense of peace washed over me. Acceptance and understanding. The vampire on the left bypassed Ren and came straight for me. He was moving fast, I knew he was, and yet it seemed as if he was running on loose sand. He would drop down and try to tackle me to the ground; I could see the mindless, animal plan of attack already causing his knees to bend and his shoulders to hunch. The claws at the ends of his fingers, sharp as broken glass, curved, reaching for me, begging to find flesh.

The answer to this was simple. I dropped to my knees and swung the blade around my face, over my head, angled the blade up…and it was done.

The vampire’s head rolled back down the bank and bounced when it hit the pile of bodies that had begun to form there, landing in the river with a splash. Ren paused, double-taking, his eyes round as he took me in. “What was that?” he breathed.

“I don’t know. I just—” The rest of the sentence was cut short when a plume of black smoke swept me up off the floor, and suddenly I was in Fisher’s arms.

His face was streaked with ichor, eyes full of panic. “Are you okay? What happened? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. I’m okay, I swear.”

The doubt on his face said he didn’t believe me, but it faded away when Ren called out to him. “She’s been kicking ass, brother. She wields Solace almost as well as your father did.”

Well, that might have been a bit of an exaggeration. It was better than the general telling him I was a liability, though, and I’d sure as hell take that. Fisher regarded me with something that looked a lot like pride. “Is that so?”

“Catch up later!” Ren shouted. “We’re kind of busy right now!”

Fisher was all business again. He set me down and went to Ren’s side, his magic boiling out of him in a curtain of darkness. The second he drew Nimerelle, I knew this fight was over. Ren moved fluidly, holding back the remaining vampires with ease, but watching Fisher was something else. He didn’t swing the sword. Didn’t wield it. The tarnished black blade and the warrior were one. He flowed. Where Nimerelle cut through the air, trailing tendrils of smoke, vampires fell like stalks of scythed wheat in the sword’s wake.

It was both beautiful and terrifying to watch. Kingfisher turned killing into an art form.

I was still admiring the way he moved, when a brilliant white light lashed through the air like a whip on the lower side of the bank. For a split second, night became day. Raw, unfiltered threads of power probed across the edge of The Darn, seeking multiple marks at once, and surprised shouts went up all along the bank as warriors locked in battle watched their opponents burst into flames like torches.

It was Lorreth—Lorreth, and the angel’s breath Avisiéth had granted him— and the sight of it set my soul on fucking fire.

Fisher swung Nimerelle one last time, slicing through his quarry’s neck so fast that it took a moment for the creature’s head to topple backward off its shoulders. Our stretch of the river was clear of vampires at last. He grinned like a madman, eyes lit up, reflecting filaments of white light as he turned to watch the spider web of power jumping from point to point amidst the melee, destroying everything it touched and turning Malcolm’s army into pillars of ash.

Fisher threw back his head and howled. Ren joined him, and slowly, all across the rain-soaked camp, more voices joined them. Wolves all, singing out their victory.

The baying shouts were still going when Fisher speared Nimerelle tip-down into the dirty snow, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed so loudly that his cry seemed to shake the very heavens. “Lorreth of the Broken Spires! Lorreth of The Darn!”

“Lorreth!”

“Lorreth!”

“Lorreth of The Darn!”

The name went up again and again; the sound of every Fae warrior in camp chanting Lorreth’s name was so powerful that it made my chest ache. For the first time in a thousand years, a god-sword had found an Yvelian worthy and granted him magic to defend his people. I wasn’t Yvelian, and even I was knocked on my ass by the raw emotion filling the air. There weren’t fucking words…

“KINGFISHERRRR!” The shrill cry rose above the shouting and whooping. Even the angry crash of thunder didn’t swallow it. It was female.

All three of us whipped away from the celebration taking place, searching for the voice. It didn’t take long to find it. There, on the other side of the river, was a woman in a ruby red dress, her bright blonde hair streaming out behind her like a banner of gold on the howling wind.

It was Everlayne.

And she was flanked by at least a hundred vampires.