Page 3 of Through the Veil (Endangered Fae #2)

Chapter two

The Children of Danu

“ L et me kill it. It should not be here.”

“Hush, Morri. Of course it shouldn’t. We should at least find out how it came.”

“Human sorcerers. They have found a way through. This one is proof. It will bring more.”

Diego struggled toward waking. The dream voices refused to go away even when the crippling aches and stiffness that followed a fierce, prolonged seizure took hold. His head pounded. Nausea crawled in his stomach.

He blinked his eyes open and squinted, unable to focus. Three people stood nearby, but they were fuzzy blurs. Soft light seemed to shine from them, most likely some optical disturbance left over from the seizure.

Who are you? Where am I? Found a way through what? He tried to ask the questions but only managed a low, pitiful moan.

“Oh, poor little thing. It hurts,” the softest of the three voices said.

“No! Don’t touch it,” the rasping one spat out. “It is dangerous. Better I slay it now, while it is weak.”

The third voice vibrated the air in a deep bass. “Only She has that right. We will take the little man to Her.”

A rattling hiss of displeasure followed this command, and Diego no longer wanted to see what made that sound.

The hiss sounded closer to his ear, the voice full of bitter sarcasm. “Very well, Shining One. It will be as you wish. But I will take it so that no one else is imperiled. And I will kill it if it offers threat.”

A hard hand clamped on the back of his neck, claw tips pricking his skin. The hand hauled him roughly from the soft bed and held him dangling so only his toes dragged on the floor. Fire needles of pain shot through his body, and he heard himself cry out.

“Morri, it’s ill. You will kill it that way, and then She won’t have anyone to question,” the soft voice admonished.

Strong arms slid around Diego, and he found himself cradled against a hard-muscled, bare chest. “Finn?” he whispered.

The deep voice rumbling from that chest was definitely not Finn’s, though. “It has expended its strength. There is no danger while it is so weak. Come. No more foolishness.”

Diego let his head rest against a broad shoulder and closed his eyes, certain this was all some strange dream. When he woke up, most likely in the hospital, he would have to figure out what to do about Finn.

What was he going to do? He couldn’t simply kick Finn out.

He had no one else in the world and nowhere to go, except the river.

The image of Finn wrapped around that girl surfaced again and sent a jolt of pain through him.

How could he ever trust him again, no matter what promises he made? The thought bored a hole in his heart.

The surrounding air and light changed, so Diego opened his eyes again.

A breeze ruffled his hair, and trees towered high above in a cathedral canopy.

Vegetation ran riot with huge ferns, climbing vines and fantastic flowers of all descriptions competing for space.

Everything seemed bathed in a soft, green glow, and a fine mist hugged the ground.

This is the forest primeval… So it seemed to him, as if the world were fresh and new again.

He never recalled having such a vivid, sensory dream before.

It had to be a dream, of course, because the progress of his little party through the woods was completely silent, without a single rustle or cracked twig.

If only his dream would stop hurting so damn much.

Voices drifted to him from up ahead, the sounds of laughter and soft conversation. Suddenly the voices surrounded them, strange ones, some tiny and impossibly high-pitched, which whizzed by his ear and were gone, some melodious and fluid like cascades of bells.

His bearer stopped and placed him on the ground with the whispered command, “Stay down if you value your life, little man.”

I couldn’t get up if my life depended on it.

Diego nodded, trying to focus on the scene in front of him.

He lay in front of a giant oak, its trunk massive enough to hide two tanks set side by side.

Its exposed roots had curled and twisted into fantastic shapes, creating the illusion of statuary and furniture.

Shining beings, mostly naked, perched on some of the benches and in the midst of them, on an elevated root gnarled into a throne shape, lounged the most striking woman Diego had ever seen.

A mass of fern-green hair crowned delicate, cool features, one decidedly pointed ear tip visible.

A wispy bit of cobweb-thin material covered her from shoulder to hip, leaving one perfect breast exposed.

The nipple, pale against her golden skin, had no aureole.

Even fully clothed and covered, her eyes would have given her nonhuman origin away.

Deep brown with black centers, they resembled a bear’s eyes, without whites or visible irises.

Her voice, rich and husky, filled the clearing. “What have you brought me, my Lugh? Is it present or prisoner?”

“Grandmother, this is the one Morrigan found by the rent in the Veil.” The male who had carried Diego spoke.

Diego turned his head for a better look, expecting another of the tall, slender beings.

Lugh was tall, easily as tall as Finn, and had the same tipped ears and animal eyes as the others, but he was deep-chested and heavier built.

When he moved a step forward, Diego had a shock.

His muscular legs ended in cloven hooves.

“Morrigan? Is this human the sorcerer who ripped through what should have been impenetrable?”

“It was not the act of any fae, Light of the World,” the rasping voice answered.

She, too, was different from the others—ice-pale and sharp-featured, with long claws on her fingers that clicked together as she spoke.

“An act of slovenly destruction, completely without finesse or beauty. Only a human would do such a thing.”

“Yes. But was it this human?” The queen’s tone implied she thought it unlikely, and Diego felt a flush rise up his throat.

She flowed from her throne toward him, her tread so light she did not bend a single blade of grass. Warmth and compassion shone from her eyes, and Diego felt his apprehension melt. She sat down beside him and ran a soft hand through his hair.

“I am Danu,” she said, her voice the murmur of leaves through the trees.

Danu… Tuatha de Danaan , the Children of Danu, was what some of the Celts had called the sidhe . Not woman, sidhe, the faerie Queen.

“Poor thing. I could take the pain. Do you want that?”

“Yes, majestad ,” he croaked out. “Please.”

“So polite. Are you certain you are human?”

She drew his head to her breast, crooning softly, caressing his face and arms. The pain sluiced from him—the throbbing in his head, the fire in his muscles and joints.

He moaned in relief, sagging in her arms. Her hand moved lower to rest on his stomach, and his cock stirred.

Odd, since women didn’t usually do anything for him, but since it was a dream…

“Now, my sweet, let’s see what you have hidden from me,” she whispered, a sudden chill in her voice.

He struggled to pull away, but her slender arms held him tight, frightening in their strength. She tapped at his mental walls, the ones Finn had always declared impossible to penetrate, then she yanked them down as if they were children’s blocks.

“No, no, please, majestad , don’t, please—” He squirmed and broke off with a scream as she reached inside and plundered his memories.

Childhood memories of his mother, fumbling teenage sex, lovers and friends all tumbled by in dizzying succession.

It felt as if she ripped through the compartments of his mind and turned them inside out, tossing things aside as she went.

The pain she had taken away was nowhere near the agony of having his memories forcibly invaded.

The whirlwind of memories stopped abruptly on one of Finn. He lay in bed beside Diego, finger tracing his nipple. “My hero, you are so beautiful in the moonlight,” Finn whispered before he leaned in to take the nipple in his mouth.

The queen dropped him and rose with a sharp cry. “Fionnachd! He has been with Fionnachd!”

Whispers erupted around the glade, rustling as of a thousand wings. Diego curled into a ball with his arms over his head. He felt violated, stripped bare and flayed.

Rough hands grabbed hold of his T-shirt and shook him. “Where is he?” Lugh shouted in his face. “What have you done with him?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he choked out. “We argued. I walked away. I don’t know if he followed. Dios , I hope he didn’t follow…”

“Lugh, go. If his human lover is here, Fionnachd may be on the other side still or has followed him through the tear.” The queen’s voice trembled. “By the Mother, to learn he lives after so long… Find him!”

Not a dream, not a dream. Carajo . I’m on the other side of the Veil? How the hell…

“Carry him back to the bower,” she went on softly. “We will make some sense of all this.”

Dizzy and exhausted from having his mind torn into, Diego let them take him without a struggle.

He had the vague notion he was on shaky and dangerous ground.

The sidhe didn’t have human reactions or motives—even Finn found them difficult to fathom at times.

Any word or thought might cause offense, and an unintended insult could mean his death.

They placed him down on the same sort of bed where he had first woken, a green mound of soft moss. The queen came and sat down next to him, her head cocked to one side to regard him with a thoughtful expression.

“You are not head-blind like most humans. It would not have hurt you so if you were,” she said softly.

Not quite an apology, but I guess that’s the best you get from royalty .

Diego pulled in a slow breath, the agony in his head already receding. “I’m not good with having someone in my mind, majestad . Maybe there are things I could just answer for you?”

Her alien eyes blinked slowly. “You have been with him. Not for merely a night, I think. He has shown you how to share a memory?”

“Not…really, no.” Diego scrubbed his hands over his face. “He took me into his Dreaming. No, that’s not really right. I wandered in there myself, looking for him. He had memories there and he showed me how to reach for them, to see them.”

“You followed him there?” A note of wonder crept into her voice.

“You should not—” She took his hand, her skin cool and rose-petal soft.

“There have been humans born, perhaps one or two in a century, with such power. If you can do this, you can easily make a gift to me of your memories of Fionnachd.”

“Please, majestad , would you answer a question first? How did I get here?”

“That is a question I must have answered as well.” She squeezed his fingers. “Concentrate, little one. Think of how you met him and separate that memory. Surround it and contain it.”

“What do I make the container out of?”

“Whatever you wish.” She laughed. “It is your memory.”

Diego chewed on his bottom lip as he brought to mind the first time he had seen Finn, filthy, starved and despairing on the rail of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Lost in the Dreaming for seven hundred years, he had woken to a terrifying world he no longer recognized.

With the way to the Otherworld shut, Finn had believed himself alone and exiled, in a world devoid of magical beings.

With this memory held at the forefront of his mind, Diego struggled to surround it with a film of clear thought, a bubble of bright, shifting hues.

“Now push it toward me . ” Her voice slid into his thoughts as silver notes.

He struggled a moment with the impossibility of physically moving a thought but soon he had it, the bubble encased memory drifting to her.

“Well done,” she murmured as she examined the encapsulated thought. “Oh, my poor Fionnachd. If I had known…and what then?”

He continued to send her gifts of memory, small spots of time in iridescent bubbles until she had the whole of it, how Diego had discovered his refugee was a pooka, ill and half-mad from the city’s pollution, and how they had gone north for Finn’s health, where he had inadvertently woken the wendigo.

He shared with her the wendigo’s defeat as well, how the light of the world had helped him fill the frigid void of the monster’s soul until it tore itself to pieces.

Finally, he showed her the promise of faithfulness Finn had made him, his betrayal and the argument that had resulted in Diego’s seizure.

“The lightning… I can’t control it without him to guide me,” he concluded miserably. “If he was following, I may have hurt him.”

“You are his Taliesin,” she told him with a soft smile. “You could not truly harm him.” Her brow creased. “But your lightning has torn a hole in my Veil, a thing that should not be possible. You are more powerful than you know.”

“So he’s said many times, majestad ,” he answered bitterly. “But without control, it doesn’t amount to much.” Without Finn…Dios …

A taurean snort came from the thicket behind them. Diego expected to see a bull charging toward them, but it was Lugh returning.

“He is gone, Grandmother,” he said.

Diego’s heart gave a painful thud as he surged up. “No…no, please. He can’t be dead.”

Lugh gave him an odd look. “I said nothing about dead, little man. He was there, near the tear you made in the Veil, and now he is gone.”

“And where has he gone?” Danu asked with exaggerated patience. “You tracked him?”

“I tried. There was no trail. Echoes of him lingered. But he has vanished.”