Wondrous Strange

status with a proper pronoun.” It was best not to let Mabh know that the kelpie had made himself actual friends- such knowledge could be used against them all. Sonny kept his inflections carefully neutral, although, under his breath, he murmured, “Sorry, Lucky-no offense.”

“What say you, Mabh?”

“You are disrespectful,” Mabh said. She tut-tutted, a grin playing about her lips.

Sonny shrugged. “Give it to get it, lady.”

The Darkling Queen laughed-a cheery, tinkling sound. “I like you! You’re an angry little thing. And here I thought Auberon would raise you up all soft. Well then. The boon is granted. Now fulfill your part of the bargain. Give me my precious girl.”

Sonny slipped the rope from Lucky’s neck and nudged him forward with a slap on the rump. “It’s a boy, actually-if you’d bothered to check.”

Mabh looked back and forth from the nervous kelpie to Sonny. Then she turned a furious glare on him. “Your jest lacks a necessary component, my little changeling friend. Humor. Now where is my daughter?”

“Your…”

Sonny’s guts went cold. He replayed the scene with the Storm Hag in his apartment over again in his mind: “This realm hides something that belongs to Mabh. You know this?” the hag had said. “She wants it back. It should never have been sent here. It was a mistake. Find it. Return it. And the queen will grant you a boon.”

He had made the most basic error in judgment that one could make when dealing with Faerie. He had jumped to conclusions. Sonny had assumed that the Hag had referred to the wayward kelpie and had not bothered to clarify that point.

With sudden, crystalline clarity, Sonny realized that he had been wrong from the very beginning. It had not been Mabh who had sought to unleash the Wild Hunt after all.

Auberon.

For the sake of securing his own position on the Unseelie throne, Sonny thought, the Faerie king would sacrifice his own daughter. His daughter…and Mabh’s. And he would have had Sonny help him do it, and put the blame on Mabh for awakening the Wild Hunt at the same time. Sick misery filled Sonny, only to be replaced by cold fury.

Mabh’s eyes narrowed, and she watched him-watched him with green, glittering eyes that, were they not so filled with cruel malice, Sonny would have recognized immediately. Kelley had those very same eyes.

Mabh leaned forward slightly. “My Hag did convey the bargain to you, did she not?”

“Cryptically,” Sonny muttered, teeth and fists clenched. “And with exceedingly poor grammar-”

“But you agreed. Then and now.”

“No.”

“And instead of my daughter”-the Darkling Queen smiled dangerously-“you brought me… a pony.”

“I-”

“If you had any questions, Janus, the time to ask them is now long past.” Her eyes flashed red for an instant.

“I assumed-”

“Ah, well. You know what they say about the dangers of ‘assuming.’”

“My lady, the fault is mine. There must be something-”

“The bargain was for the girl.”

“No.”

“Where is she?” Mabh hissed. “The bargain is broken. You broke it. You must tell me.”

“N-n…no…” Sonny fell to his knees and felt his head jerk backward as though someone had yanked on his hair. His eyes flew wide, as much as he tried to keep them squeezed shut.

“Oh,” Mabh purred as she gazed into his mind from high up on her perch. “Oh, this is marvelous… All because of you, little Janus, my imprisonment is at an end! You know the rules. Your broken oath gives me the power to take what was not given to me as promised-and to do that, I’ll need freedom.” She grinned wickedly as the manacle and delicate chain around her ankle shimmered and dimmed to an insubstantial wisp of silvery flame and the passageway in the sky behind her closed. “Thanks to your charming ineptitude, I can once more come and go as I please. I can enter Herne’s precious Tavern. All so that I may take what was not freely given to me. And I can wreak a little havoc while I’m there!”

She laughed merrily.

To Sonny, it was the sound of the world ending.

“This worked out rather better even than I’d hoped. Thanks for your pains, fleshling. I will not forget.” Mabh raised her hand, slicing through the sky to open another rift in front of her like a wound in the air.

In the moment before she stepped through, several of the Janus Guard came bursting out of the trees about ten yards behind Sonny.

“Chloe!” Maddox shouted. “Mabh, you bitch! Let her go!”

Chloe groaned, and the Darkling Queen seemed to suddenly remember that she held the Siren dangling by her hair-twenty feet above the earth.

She let her go.

Maddox was almost fast enough to catch her. Sonny winced as Chloe’s head bounced off the ground. As Maddox got an arm around her and half lifted her, the Siren clutched at his sleeve, and Sonny heard her pained murmur: “I didn’t want to tell him…but he threatened to take away my music.”

“Tell who, Chloe?” Maddox asked gently. “What?”

“Auberon. About the girl.” The Siren’s lovely voice was reduced to a thready whisper. “Mabh was so angry when she found out that I told him. She thinks Auberon wants to do the girl harm…”

“Shh…”

“Tell Sonny…I’m sorry…” Chloe’s hand fell limply to the ground.

With a snarl, Sonny launched himself in the direction of the statue. Mabh wanted a fight? She was about to get one. He could feel the rest of the Guard surging forward behind him. But Mabh stroked the horse statue beneath her and it suddenly snorted and reared, tossing its enormous bronze head. The ground heaved as though an earthquake struck, throwing the Janus Guard about like toys; there was a sound of shrieking metal. High above them, the figure of the long-dead king uncrossed its swords. The horse’s huge, heavy hooves tore free of the statue’s base, and the Janus Guard picked themselves up to join in battle against the bronze, red-eyed effigy.

“Happy Halloween, children!” Mabh vanished from sight, her voice howling back at them. “I’m off to go collect my daughter and do some trick-or-treating!”

The rift spiraled and collapsed in on itself, and a storm of flaming pumpkins rained down from the sky.

XXXIII

“Will you walk with me, lady?” Herne bowed his head to Kelley as they left the Isle of Avalon behind and returned to the Tavern proper.

She smiled up at him and slipped her hand around his muscle-corded forearm. They strolled through the Tavern’s garden, past a gathering of what looked like living topiaries-one of them a horse prancing around the terrace, leafy mane and tail rustling as it kicked up its heels. It reminded her of Lucky, and Kelley felt a stab of anxiety. She was worried about him. And about Sonny, who had gone to deliver him to a fearsome being about whom she’d heard only unpleasant things so far. It was strange, because the man walking beside her had once loved the Darkling Queen. She’d seen it in the vision Sonny had given her.

“In the days before she was so very dark, yes,” Herne murmured. “I did love her. As she did me. Sometimes love can be a terribly destructive thing, lady. I have spent lifetimes trying to make amends for what love once made me do.”

“Can you read my thoughts?” Kelley asked warily.

“No.” Herne laughed softly. “Just your face. You glanced at the pony, frowned, glanced up at me, and your