Page 4 of Through the Veil (Endangered Fae #2)

Chapter three

Balor’s Court

F inn swam back to consciousness through murky dreams full of thunder and pain. The heavy stiffness along his spine told him the vertebrae had healed after a hard blow. Good thing his back knitted so quickly, as many times as it had been broken over the centuries.

He pulled in a deep breath. The air…

Puzzled, he tried another. Clean. The air is clean. His eyes flew open and showed him a world tinged in green, with sunlight filtered gently through a profusion of leaves.

With a soft cry of wonder, he leaped to his feet and buried his nose in the leaves. They held no taint of pollution, no sharp scent of iron, no hint of humans.

“I’m home,” he whispered to the leaves. “Sweet goddesses of stream and pool, I’m ho—”

A hard blow took him from behind and a heavy body slammed him to the ground. Finn snarled and twisted around to grapple with his assailant, only to be clubbed over the head from various angles. The need to shield his head with his arms rendered him unable to see how many or who hit him.

This losing consciousness is becoming a nuisance.

“Cover the trail. Herself will come before long,” a rough growl ordered.

That voice… Finn struggled with the familiar sound, but failed to come up with an answer before the dark closed back in.

Hollow echoes of grunts and snorts reached him first, his impression of a cavernous space confirmed when he opened his eyes.

Hang it all, I despise caves.

His head ached. Everything ached. When he tried to move to curl into a ball, his arms and legs refused to obey him. Lying on his side, hogtied and bruised on a cold, rock floor was simply not a pleasant way to wake.

He would have to become something tiny and hide until he puzzled out what had happened.

Eyes squeezed shut, he tried to shift to darkling beetle.

Pain skittered over his skin instead of magic, though, and he twisted to see what bound him.

Braided grass lay against his skin, wrapped tight with thicker, iron-shot rope.

The iron prevented his shifting and explained why he felt so dreadful.

Now what had he fallen into? He lifted his head for a frantic look around, worry for Diego overcoming his native caution.

“The traitor wakes,” a voice hissed nearby.

The cavern erupted in howls and squeals, squawks and growls, repeating the words over and over, the cacophony creating a psychic ram battering against Finn’s mind.

“Diego!” he cried out in desperation, unable to locate him through the din.

“Silence!” a canyon-deep voice bellowed.

The cacophony faded to a few disgruntled mewls and peeps.

Finn lifted his head again to search for that voice, the one from his capture, and found the speaker with little effort.

The throne of polished granite, though large enough for three Finns to sit side by side, barely contained his massive frame.

A crest of boar bristles crowned the huge head rather than hair, fists large enough to crush a skull in each palm clenched on the stone.

Two tusks, not terribly attractive but quite menacing, curved up from the corners of his mouth.

Even after being knocked senseless, Finn knew the enthroned figure well, and if the rest of the identifying features had not been enough, the emerald-encrusted eye patch would have informed him in his most addled state.

“Balor.” Finn hitched around so he faced the throne. “I suppose, given current circumstances, that you are not pleased to see me after my long absence?”

The Fomorian king’s roar vibrated through the stone Finn lay on, and he winced as a stalactite crashed down in the open space between them.

“How dare you speak, filth!” Balor pointed a claw at him. “Rip out his tongue!”

Howls and lowing split the cavern’s air into a thousand jagged pieces as his court took up the litany “rip out his tongue, rip out his tongue!” A Fomorian with a scale-covered head and fingers far too long for his palms crouched in front of him, hissing.

Finn swallowed against a suddenly dry-as-dust throat. “Please, if it’s all the same to you, please don’t trouble yourself.” The tongue would grow back, of course, but the agony was something he could well do without.

“Lie still, Fionnachd. I will be quick.” The scaled Fomorian’s voice held a note of regret. “Bite, and I shall take your eyes as well.”

“But what have I done?” Finn reared back from the reaching hands, not ready to submit to pain.

His thoughts raced in desperate circles, trying to latch onto some incident, some bit of foolishness that would have caused Balor to be so angry.

He had been furious with Finn before, but for seven hundred years?

He failed to recall anything quite that deserving.

“What have you done?” Serpent-pale eyes blinked and the scaled head turned toward the throne. “Balor, he wishes to know what he has done.”

An ominous crack echoed through the cavern.

Balor rose slowly, a chunk of broken granite clutched in each fist. “Lying, treacherous, murderous scum,” Balor growled, each word increasing in volume until he reached a bone-jarring roar.

“Your honeyed words will not be allowed to sway hearts this time!”

“Heart of the Earth, what have I done?” Finn cried out, ignoring the command not to speak. “But tell me, and I will atone in whatever way you choose!”

Balor’s one visible eye pinned him, crimson fire and more than half-mad. “Can you bring my son back? Do you have some new trick that will restore the dead?”

Finn blinked, as stunned as if someone had slammed a rock between his eyes. “Nuada…has died?”

A moment too late, he realized his mistake as Balor charged. A huge clawed hand closed around his throat and lifted him so he hung, hogtied and fighting for air in the Fomorian king’s grip.

I saw this on the picture box once…

Not a fortuitous thought, since that dangling person had expired with eyes bulging and a snapped neck.

“You killed him!”

The spit from Balor’s rage was perhaps the least of his problems, but he did wish his breath wasn’t quite so foul. The things that run through one’s mind at a moment of imminent death are completely irrelevant and unhelpful.

“I did not…kill him…” Finn rasped, his sight darkening. “He was…my friend.”

“Which is why your treachery was so abominable! He loved you and you led them to him!”

Perhaps it was the shaking that accompanied the strangulation and the creeping nausea of the iron sickness, but Finn failed to find any sense in the explanation.

“Who?” he choked out.

“The cursed humans!”

The scaled one— goddesses, he has a name, but I can’t remember it —cocked his head to one side and hissed.

“They shot him through the heart with iron arrows. Then staked him to the ground so he could not slip through the Veil for help. Nuada died screaming. Your scent was on the humans when Balor found them to rip them apart.”

“When?” So blasted dizzy.

“The day you disappeared.” Yellow eyes, vertical pupils dilated, regarded him with more curiosity than hostility. “Herself called and called for you. You were nowhere to be found. Even she thought the worst.”

Finn stopped struggling, shock and horror overriding pain. Nuada the Beautiful was dead, had been dead for centuries and had died at the hands of the same humans who had tortured him and ripped his heart out, metaphorically, then quite literally.

He gathered the memory of that day to the forefront of his mind, all the anguish and torment, the soul-shattering agony of watching his love burned as a witch and the equally horrifying agony of being hacked to bits with iron hatchets.

With his last bit of fading strength, he hurled the memory at Balor just as the darkness closed over him.

A grunt and a muted roar told him he had hit his target. The grip on his throat loosened, and he fell for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. Falling, falling… Oh, no, perhaps not. His cheek rested on cold stone again.

“…a true memory?”

“Without a doubt, Father,” a feline purr answered Balor. “You have accused Fionnachd wrongly, and he has suffered so.”

Eithne .

“And why did he live?” Balor growled. “Your brother is dead, and that pooka lives.”

“And tormenting him with iron will help? The idiot humans threw the pieces of him in the water, Father. He lives only because of their stupidity.”

Balor issued a grunt and a long sigh, followed by, “Let him loose.”

Most likely the closest Finn would get to an apology from the Fomorian king, but he would make no complaint.

Relief flooded through him as the ropes were removed, but he stayed on the floor, curled into a ball with his arms over his head, fighting the urge to whimper.

His head throbbed and his throat hurt, and where in all hells was Diego?

Not that his absence was an entirely bad thing, given Balor’s disposition toward humans at that moment, but Diego waking up alone in an unfamiliar place after a seizure worried him.

Unless they held him somewhere else in their honeycombed caverns, which could be much worse.

“Fionnachd?” A furred hand caressed his hair. “Why do you come now? And how did you pierce the Veil?”

They don’t know. They don’t have him . He walled off his thoughts and resolved not to give them any more information until he understood the lay of the land better. He coughed, cleared his throat and found a rasping version of his voice. “I emerged from the Dreaming. I was alone.”

He uncurled far enough to see Eithne, her lovely pointed black ears swiveling atop her head as she listened. One never lied to Eithne, she would know, but one could tell bits of truth. “I called and called. No one came and the way through was closed to me.”

She took his head in her lap, purring to comfort him.

“There was a magical storm. It hurled me through.” He ended on another cough, wondering how long his throat would take to heal.

A snort came from far above him. “He still reeks of humans.”

“The whole outer world reeks of humans, Balor. And their machines. And their poisons.” One cough led to another, and he soon lost the ability to speak entirely.

“Poor Fionnachd.” Eithne let out a little growl. “For shame, Father. Leave him be.”

“He has changed.” Balor’s deep voice dropped another degree. “He has a certain strength that was not there before.”

“Let him recover, and I’m sure he will tell us everything that has happened.”

Balor’s snort was still angry, but Eithne, as she always did, would get her way.