With a Golden Sword (DFZ Changeling Book 2), page 20
He wasn’t the only one. The whole time Victor had been yelling at him, the mailroom thralls had continued their business, quietly cleaning up the mess the fake Lola had made. When the head came out, though, every human in the room snapped to attention, their eyes locking onto the dead fairy with the worshipful attention that was normally reserved for Victor. They looked at Valente next, baring their teeth as they crept closer.
Valente fell into a crouch in reply, ready to kill if that was what it took to keep the fairy for himself. It seemed impossible that he’d ever cared about anything else. But just as he was forming a hammer of invisible gossamer to protect his prize, Victor said, “Stop.”
Everyone in the room froze. Then the magic crashed on top of them, pushing the thralls to their knees as Victor replaced the dead fairy’s enthrallment with his own, far bloodier version. It pushed Valente down as well, forcing him to the ground as Victor said, “Put it on.”
Valente didn’t need his oaths to obey. As much as he hated everything about this, for once, Victor was the lesser evil. Nothing could be worse than the sticky, decaying infatuation pouring off the dead fairy like plague water. At least when it was on his shoulders, the fairy’s head couldn’t enthrall him, so Valente shoved it down, letting out a soundless scream as the icy gossamer dug its fangs into what was left of his humanity.
He’d never get used to how much that hurt. The head clamped onto him like a crocodile, filling him with all the things being headless normally muted. Exhaustion, sorrow, rage, and physical pain took turns pounding through his body in waves, leaving him gasping on the mail-strewn floor.
When it finally receded enough for Valente to stand back up, the thralls were gone, leaving the wrecked room empty save for Victor, who was waiting in the doorway with his fingers drumming impatiently on the hilt of the Hero’s golden sword.
“Took you long enough.”
“You didn’t let me put it on for almost a month,” Valente reminded him, wincing at the feel of the fairy’s inhumanly smooth voice inside his raw, newly-formed throat. “The cost builds up.”
“And whose fault is that?” his master snapped, tossing Valente a fresh copy of the Rider’s mirrored helmet. “If you hadn’t been such a disobedient swine, I wouldn’t have had to take such drastic measures.”
He paused like he was waiting for an apology, but Valente just slid the helmet over his head. “How did you hide it inside me?”
“Clever, wasn’t it?” Victor said with a smirk. “Though, technically, your head was never ‘inside’ of you at all. Like all the fairy monsters, you’re made of gossamer. Any attempt to hide your head inside your body would’ve been the same as letting you wear it. To keep it truly safe, I had to put your head somewhere no one but me could reach, so I hid it inside the last part of you that’s still human.”
“My heart?” Valente guessed.
“Your death,” Victor replied, his eyes shining with triumph inside the handsome illusion of the Hero’s face. “It was quite the feat. Seeing as you haven’t been fully human since you were a teenager, your death had grown extremely fragile. One wrong move was all it would have taken to scatter the last remnants of your mortal soul, but this is me we’re talking about. I was able to tuck your head away without you even knowing what I’d done.”
He looked incredibly pleased with himself, but Valente narrowed his glowing eyes. “If it took a master blood mage to hide it, how did you make me get it out? I’m not even a mage.”
“That’s what made it so brilliant,” Victor informed him proudly. “When I performed the spell that merged his gossamer with your human body, I tucked your soul inside the fairy’s head. Not only did this enable you to become functionally immortal, it meant the only way to reach your death was through your head. But since your head is just a lump of gossamer rather than flesh, I could take it into the realm of magic with me just as I took Morgan’s.”
His face split into a grin. “It was the perfect hiding place! Only someone possessing your head could reach your death to place the head inside. Once it was in position, you became a closed circle, an infinite loop that only you could break. This should have meant your head was lost forever, since, as you just observed, you’re not a mage, but you are my knight. Anything you are technically capable of, the oaths can force you to do at my command. And since every human is capable of moving magic at least subconsciously, all I had to do was order you to fetch your head, and you broke the lock yourself.” He grinned wider. “Is that not genius?”
Valente stared at him with the Rider’s heavy silence until Victor rolled his eyes.
“Pearls before swine,” he said, pulling a set of earbuds and a small microphone out of the pocket of his red jacket. “I’d explain further because this triumph deserves to be appreciated, but Orlando will be here any moment. I’ve already notified the press, so get down there and earn your keep.”
“The press?” Valente couldn’t believe it. “You’re revealing me to the public?”
“I have no choice,” his master said casually as he inserted the earbuds into his ears. “Heroism requires an audience, and while you’re not a patch on Fenrir, a good fight still draws in the rabble.” He clipped the mic onto his collar next, tapping it a few times to be sure it was on before he asked, “How long until we’re ready?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Simon’s harried voice replied, the sound bleeding through the earbuds so softly that only the Rider’s gossamer-enhanced senses could have picked it up. “I’m bringing the last batch of pills down now. As soon as I distribute them, your army will be ready.”
Victor cut off the conversation with a smile. “You heard my apprentice,” he said as he tugged his red jacket straight. “I don’t care if you die. I don’t care if it destroys you. You must hold the Wild Hunt back for fifteen minutes.”
Valente looked down at the letter-scattered floor. If he was still following his old plan, that order would have ruined everything, but he wasn’t throwing himself away for this pig of a man anymore. He’d made a promise, and for once in his life since the fairy had appeared at his door, Valente was going to keep it.
“Did you hear me, slave? I—”
“I heard you,” the Rider said, lifting his mirrored visor to Victor. “And I’ll do more than just hold them back. When this is over, I’ll have Orlando’s head.”
The Hero’s perfect eyebrows arched suspiciously. His knight’s new eagerness must not have interfered with his plans, though, because Victor just waved him away.
“Then get down there and do it,” he said, glancing out the window at where the dread riders were galloping past like leaves in a tornado. “Just make sure you don’t make your entrance from my tower. I have a reputation to maintain.”
Valente supposed it would look bad if the serial-murdering Black Rider came marching out the Hero’s front door, but he didn’t care about Victor’s plots. When he ran down the Tower’s fire escape as fast as a streak of shadow, Valente did it for Lola. For the arrow in his head that still pointed steadfastly at her light. She was still alive, still fighting, and so long as she was fighting, he would fight with her. He would fight for her as she’d fought for him, and maybe, just maybe, they’d win.
That hope put wings on his boots as he raced through the tunnels that ran under the Hero’s Tower and up the hidden ladder Victor had ordered the city to build beneath the giant square outside. The secret door was disguised as a storm drain covered with a locked steel grate. Valente didn’t have the key, so he broke the lock with a slam of his invisible gossamer, pushing the metal cage up with his shoulder.
He’d tried to be quiet about it, but spotlights still found him the moment he cracked the lid. The crowds that normally mobbed the front steps of Hero’s Tower had cleared out the moment the Hunt showed up, leaving only the flock of news drones buzzing through the air. The AI-driven cameras locked onto the Rider’s helmet the second it emerged, nearly driving Valente back down the ladder as hundreds of TV spotlights flashed over from every angle to smack him in the face.
If physical eyes were all he’d had, the glare would have left him completely blind, but the Rider’s vision had always been only partially based on normal sight. The magical half of him had never needed eyes to see, and it didn’t need them now as he climbed out of the drain to stand in the middle of the square. The kick of disbelief that came next, however, was a lot harder to handle.
Valente’s gossamer wasn’t as vulnerable as Lola’s. Thanks to the stories Victor had spread, so long as he acted like the Black Rider, people generally believed in him just fine. This meant when he did get hit, it was always a sucker punch, and right now, the world was clearly not expecting the Black Rider to come crawling out of the ground like a rat.
Their surprise whacked him like a mallet, causing Valente’s normally ice-hard gossamer to become soft and stretchy. He wasn’t in danger of melting, but if Orlando caught him like this, the fight would be over before it began. He was scrambling to get himself back together when a word shot through his mind.
Hold.
The order washed over him like a tide. It took a lot for Victor to command him from a distance like that, but it worked. The moment his monarch spoke, the oaths obeyed, locking Valente’s gossamer in place until the storm of disbelief subsided.
It did so surprisingly quickly. Valente didn’t know if people had just accepted his appearance as part of the insanity or if Victor had gone on TV and justified his presence, but something was definitely happening. All the remote news drones were swarming like flies for a shot of Valente as he braced his resolidified legs. He lifted his head next, his mirrored visor shining white in the reflected glare of the TV lights as he turned his face toward the cloud of horsemen swirling overhead.
It was an especially apocalyptic sight for Valente. With his eyes closed to keep out the spotlights, there was no veil of illusion to hide the true horror of the Wild Hunt. Just gleaming eyes and flashing teeth as the riders circled in and out of the gray clouds.
It must really have been only the vanguard, because he didn’t see the monster that was Alberich’s true shape anywhere. None of the hunters were attacking yet, either. They were only here to stir terror in the hearts of everyone watching, which would then serve as fuel for the actual assault.
It was the same strategy they’d used on every city. Valente was wondering why Victor had sent him out so early since all the attention he generated would only make Alberich’s main attack even stronger when he heard something heavy land on the pavement behind him.
There was no need to look. There was only one fairy with that sticky, rotten taste. That said, when Valente finally did turn around, the monster waiting for him was nothing like the one he remembered.
The first time he’d faced Orlando, the fairy had looked like a pile of rusted armor. Now, Alberich’s knight was sharp and shiny as a brand-new knife. He’d always been enormous, but he must have been feasting nonstop these last three weeks, because he’d grown even bigger, his huge body covered in armor that gleamed like a mirror under its syrupy layer of fresh blood.
Seeing him this way, Valente finally understood why Tristan had called Orlando “The Red Knight.” He’d been more of a rusty brown before. Now, though, Alberich’s killer was blindingly, glossily, lewdly red in the blazing TV lights. Only his voice was still the same, rattling like an angry pile of chains behind the flat visor of his helmet as he aimed his giant sword at the Rider.
Valente cracked his real eyes open in reply, focusing all of his senses on the enemy as he gathered the mountain of gossamer that came with his head. The lights were so intense, he could actually see his normally invisible magic shimmering around him like a blue ghost. If Orlando noticed what he was doing, though, the knight clearly didn’t care. He just charged straight at Valente, his rattle rising to a hungry, tongueless roar as he swung his sword to take his enemy’s head.
The wide swing should have been easy to block, but when Valente grabbed it with his invisible gossamer, the Red Knight’s sword—which was now as sharp, shiny, and red-coated as the rest of him—sliced straight through it, forcing the Rider to jump before he got sliced in half.
He danced backward across the square, his boots sliding over the dropped signs and other trash left behind by the Hero’s fleeing crowds. But while he was moving faster than last time thanks to his master no longer being lost, Orlando was even better. He shot after Valente like red lightning, his tongueless voice revving like a chainsaw as he stabbed his huge sword straight into the Rider’s chest.
Valente blocked with his gossamer, engulfing the sword and shoving it back out before it could cut deeper than his leather jacket. But while he’d avoided getting skewered, the force of the blow still sent him flying into the huge front doors of the Hero’s Tower. He went through the bulletproof glass like a cannonball, wrapping himself in gossamer just like he’d seen Lola do to keep from getting shredded as he crashed into the marble wall of the elevator lobby.
He pushed himself out of the wreckage with a groan, brushing the dust off his helmet, which had cracked when his head hit the wall but done its job of keeping his skull intact. The relative darkness of the empty lobby was a relief after the blinding TV lights, but he knew he couldn’t stay, and not just because Victor wouldn’t let him hide. It was obvious now that he wasn’t the only one who’d put on his head for this fight, which meant if Valente was going to keep his promise to Lola, he was going to have to get creative.
Shaking his head, Valente pulled in all of his gossamer except for one tendril, which he used to smash the lobby’s lighting control panel and plunge the already dim room into total darkness. This panicked the fleet of camera drones that had flown into the lobby after him, but not nearly as much as what he did next would have. The moment the lights went out, Valente sank into the floor, his body dissolving into invisible gossamer before racing back across the square into the shadow cast by his gloating opponent.
It was the only place he could come up. The dissolving-and-moving thing wasn’t one of his stolen fairy powers. It belonged to the Black Rider, and in all his stories, he always appeared right behind you.
This was the first time he’d ever done it voluntarily. Valente hated being the Black Rider. He hated scaring people, hated being the thing in the night. He’d only played the monster because Victor had made him during the years when he’d been trying to make his knight into an urban legend he controlled.
Much to his master’s disappointment, Valente had never managed to make the jump. He still had some of the Rider’s powers, though, and unlike gossamer, they worked better with an audience. All he had to do was embrace people’s horrible expectations of him, and the Black Rider did the rest, letting him rise silently out of the giant’s shadow with a spike of frozen gossamer already ready to stab into Orlando’s back.
The Red Knight howled like tearing metal when he drove it in. As his magic tore through the bigger fairy’s, Valente felt something slide around his spike. Something hard and round, almost like there was a rock floating inside of Orlando’s otherwise gelatinous magic.
The feeling vanished when Orlando yanked himself off the Rider’s invisible blade. Valente caught him by the shoulder as he moved, clenching his magic to freeze the other knight’s gossamer and shatter him to pieces. He’d just about wrapped his bitter cold around Orlando’s neck when the tongueless knight made a sound like a thousand hornets and blew apart, scattering into a spray of bright red and silver droplets that flew across the square to recondense a dozen feet away.
But not without cost. The fairy who came back together was as red and shiny as ever, but the blood on his armor this time was his own. It ran down his faceless visor like wet paint and turned his rasping voice into a gurgle.
For a soaring second, Valente thought this meant he was winning. Then he saw that the fairy’s shimmering redness wasn’t spilling like normal blood. It was gathering, welling in pools inside his armor as Orlando whipped his hand forward, throwing his bloody gossamer like a hail of swords straight at Valente’s face.
There were no shadows to sink into this time. As soon as he saw the red blades flying toward him, Valente turned and ran. His silent motorcycle appeared by the second step, condensing out of thin air between Valente’s legs to send him racing forward. It wasn’t actually faster than the flying blood, but the bike made it easier to maneuver, letting him use the rest of his gossamer to knock away the blades he couldn’t dodge.
He still couldn’t avoid them all. By the time he made it to the other side of the square, three of the bloody swords had found their marks: one in his leg, one through his arm, and one just under his shoulder blade. If he hadn’t been wearing his head, that would have been enough to poof him. With his head, though, it was almost worse, because he couldn’t get away. He just sat there bleeding real human blood, not the bright-red Halloween-store gossamer kind Orlando was spewing like a fountain as he readied his next volley.
Valente slumped over his handlebars. He was starting to think he hadn’t injured the fairy at all with that backstab. He’d seen the blood and gotten excited, but Orlando wasn’t fleshy like him. He was all gossamer, a bag of tricks to terrify and fool humans like Valente into mistakes exactly like this. The flying swords weren’t as big as the one in the knight’s hands, but they were much harder to dodge, and they still did the job.
Too good a job. From the dark spots swimming across his vision, Valente knew he couldn’t take another stab. He was going to die if he kept letting the knight hit him. That would have been great if he’d still wanted to lose, but it hadn’t even been ten minutes yet. Victor had ordered him to hold out for at least fifteen, but while the oaths could and would force Valente to fight to the death, they couldn’t force Orlando to lose. The other knight was already launching another volley, forcing Valente to ride like hell or be skewered under a volley of gossamer spears.
