“You always say no.”
Eldest Gruff shrugged and said nothing.
“Wait,” I said to Kringle. “You’re going hunting?” I pointed at the Erlking. “With
Kringle let out another guffaw and, I swear to God, rested his hands on his belly while he did it. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Dude,” I said. “Dude. You’re . . . freaking Santa Claus.”
“Not until after Halloween,” he said. “Enough is enough. I’m drawing a line.”
“Hah,” I said, “but I’m kinda not joking here.”
He grunted, and the smile faded from his features. “Lad, let me tell you something here and now. None of us is what we once were. Everyone has a history. Everyone comes from somewhere. Each moves toward a destination. And in a lifetime as long as mine, the road can run far and take strange windings—something I judge you know something about.”
I frowned. “Meaning?”
He gestured at himself. “This became the tale with which you are familiar only in fairly recent times. There are wizards enough alive today who knew of no such person when they were children awaiting the winter holiday.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “You became something different.”
He gave me a wink of his eye.
“So what were you before?”
Kringle smiled, apparently content to say nothing.
I turned to Sarissa, asking, “You seem to know these guys, mostly. What . . . ?”
She wasn’t there.
I looked around the immediate area, but didn’t see her. I moved my eyes back to Kringle and the Erlking. The two of them looked at me calmly, without expression. I darted a glance to Eldest Gruff, whose long, floppy right ear twitched once.
I glanced to my left, following the motion, and spotted Sarissa being led onto the dance floor underneath the replica of my original
A young male Sidhe was leading her by the wrist, and from the set of her shoulders she was in pain. You couldn’t have guessed it from her expression. The young Sidhe wore a black leather jacket and a Cincinnati ball cap, but I didn’t get a look at his face.
“A fresh challenge, it would seem,” the Erlking murmured.
“Yeah,” I said. “Gentlemen, if you would excuse me.”
“You know Mab’s law at court, aye?” Kringle asked. “You know the price of breaking it?”
“Yep.”
“What do you mean to do, lad?”
“Seems that what we have here is a failure to communicate,” I said. “Think I’ll go open up a dialogue.”
Chapter Six
Moving onto a dance floor full of Sidhe is like dropping acid.
Partly it’s because they’re just so damned pretty. The Sidhe maidens there were all in Maeve’s league in terms of sheer physical attractiveness, and some of them were just about as barely dressed as she was, only in what must have been the latest trends in the Chicago club scene for the fashionably provocative. And, yeah, the boys were pretty, too, and tarting it up just as much as the girls, but they weren’t nearly as much of a distraction to me.
Partly it’s because of their grace. The Sidhe aren’t human, even though they look like close relatives. When you see an Olympic gymnast or ice skater or a professional dancer performing a routine, you can’t help but be impressed with the sheer, casual grace with which they move, as if their bodies are lighter than air. The clumsiest of the Sidhe operate at about that same level, and the exceptional leave the mortals eating dust behind them. It’s hard to describe because it’s hard for the brain to process—there’s no frame of reference for what I saw, the motion, the balance, the power, the effortless subtlety. It was like suddenly discovering an entirely new sense with an enormous amount of input: I kept seeing things that made my brain scream at me to stop and watch so that it could catalog and process them properly.
And partly it’s because of their magic. The Sidhe use magic the way the rest of us breathe, instinctively and without thinking about it. I’d fought them before, and their power was largely invoked through simple gestures, as if the spells had been hardwired into their motor reflexes. For them, movement was magic, and at no time so much as when they danced.
Their power didn’t come after me, specifically—it was more like I had plunged into it, as if it were a pool of water occupying the same space as the dance floor. It subsumed my mind almost at once, and it was all I could do to grit my teeth and hang on. Ribbons of colored light flared in the air around the dancing Sidhe. Their feet struck the floor and their hands struck upon bodies, their own or otherwise, adding rippling layers of syncopated rhythm to the music. Gasps and cries joined with the beat and the melody, primal and fierce, echoing and challenging one another from all quarters, as if they’d practiced it. They hadn’t. It was just what they were.
Sound and rhythm struck from either side, thrumming against my ears, disorienting me. Light danced and fluttered through the spectrum in subtle, seductive patterns. Bodies twisted and strained in inhuman artistry, their very grace an assault upon my reason. Part of me wanted to just stand there and drink it in, gawking like some ugly, clumsy behemoth among the Sidhe. Plenty of mortals had been lulled into tearful rapture by such dances—and generally speaking, it hadn’t ended real well for them.
I put up every mental defense I could, reaching for that core of cold, clear power that had been within me since the night I’d murdered my predecessor with Medea’s bronze dagger. I hadn’t even realized what was happening to me at the time, since other things had been on my mind, but I now realized that the power had restored my shattered body, and given me strength and speed and endurance at the very limits of human ability— and maybe past them. I felt it only when I sought it out, but apparently my instinctive need to survive had been enough to tap into it back when I’d set out to rescue my daughter from the late Red Court of vampires.
Now it poured into my mind like an ice-cold breeze, and withered away the bedazzlement the Sidhes’ dance had wrought on my thoughts. I started forward through the throng, and for a few feet I tried to skip and slip and duck my way through the moving crowd without hitting anyone. Then I realized that even with whatever I had gained from becoming the Winter Knight, I was still hopelessly dull-witted and slow-footed when compared to the Sidhe.
So I just started walking and left it up to them to get out of the way. It kinda fit my mood better, anyway. They did it, too. None of them were obvious about it, and some of them came within a fraction of an inch of striking me with whirling limbs, but none of them did.
The Sidhe are tall, generally speaking, but I’m NBA tall, and I could see over the crowd. I spotted the red ball cap and a flash of Sarissa’s wide eyes and went after them. I caught up to them near the back wall of the cavernous chamber. The Sidhe who had grabbed Sarissa stood behind her, one of his arms wound around her neck, the other around her waist, holding her back against his chest. Her eyes were wide now. I could see deep red flushing on the skin of her wrist, where bruises were already starting to form in the shape of the Sidhe’s fingers.
I found myself clenching my hands into fists and growling deep in my throat.
Without any evident forethought to it, the dance floor for ten feet all around any of the three of us became clear of moving bodies. The Sidhe had made room for the confrontation. Jewellike eyes glittered and watched intermittently while the dance continued.
“Sir Knight,” said the Sidhe holding Sarissa. He had straight black hair beneath the cap, and cheekbones so
