Apparently, I hadn’t been upgraded to threat—just annoyance. Which was fair, as that was about where I was classifying myself.
He’d backed me against the window, and I suddenly realized I was trapped between two giant pots holding evergreen trees. An evil smile crossed the Enforcer’s face, and I tried to dodge forward, past him, as he stabbed toward me.
Something clicked in my head, and the world went cold. For a moment, I thought he’d killed me, and then I recognized the cold. I was Between. How the hell was I Between?!
Then I stepped out of Between and was back in the room with Eric and Oberis, the gnome staring at me in shock from where he’d been desperately trying to wrap enough cloth around Winters’s sword to allow him to pull it out of Oberis.
“You can’t walk Between in here!” he said, astonished.
“I can’t walk Between at all,” I replied, equally astonished. Of course, I then realized that if we hadn’t said anything, I might have managed to remain undiscovered.
“Go,” Oberis groaned. “MacDonald’s Order is...” he gasped around the sword, “…already sending help. You can’t...save us. If you can walk...Between...take Eric and GO!”
I didn’t let Eric try and argue. Hoping that it would work, I grabbed the gnome’s arm and tried to step.
It was like pushing into putty. Somehow, I could tell we got halfway across but then were catapulted back, and the gnome gasped for breath, shaking his head at me.
“The quicksilver lets you cross over, but it’s not enough to take two,” he told me.
“We have to get back to the entrance. Run,” I ordered, “I’ll keep him distracted.”
At that moment, Winters charged back into the room, heading for the gnome and me with that black and deadly blade.
With a deep breath, I focused on that mental click, the barrier I felt around us, and stepped. A flash of cold later, I was behind Gerard Winters and punched him in the back of the head.
I’ve punched walls with more effect. Hitting the Enforcer hurt, and it told him I was there. He turned, flashing around in a deadly spin with the sword cutting at neck height. I stepped out of the way, dropping into Between.
This time, I stopped in Between for a moment to capture my breath. I could breathe there. I’d always been there with someone else; I’d never been able to breathe there on my own before. The quicksilver was more impressive than I thought.
With that thought on my mind, I stepped back into reality. Winters had Eric in his grip, lifting the gnome off the ground with the sword in his other hand. It looked more threatening than actually lethal, but I didn’t like the look of it anyway.
I hit Winters with another blast of Faerie flame. Fueled by my fear and the quicksilver, it was a lethal blast of flame that continued around his head and hit the wall behind him. Concrete and steel exploded above us, but Winters didn’t even have singed hair as he turned back toward me, dropping Eric.
The gnome scuttled out of the room as Winters and I glared at each other.
“You’re starting to annoy me, changeling,” he told me. “All you’re doing is drawing things out. You will change nothing.”
I dodged backward as he slashed at me, retreating out of the room with my face to him. For a moment, I almost hoped he wouldn’t follow—but if he hadn’t, I knew I’d have had to find a way to make him.
Said following, however, took the form of a blurringly fast charge I barely dodged by bouncing through Between to the corner of the building. Missing me as I stepped into another reality, Winters crashed into the glass window, sending glass shards careening through the greenery.
He turned to glare at me, and giving in to an unknown impulse, I gave him a cheery wave and stepped again. This time, I emerged amidst the bodies of the Enforcers who’d ambushed us when we arrived, and by the time Winters came charging around the corner, I’d engaged in another moment of stupidity and picked up two of the boxy bullpup assault rifles.
The weapons were light enough and manageable enough that I could hold two. Even aim two. Firing two, as I discovered, was a different matter. With the quicksilver in my veins, I was easily strong enough and fast enough to do so and absorb the recoil.
But strength didn’t do much for the fact that I’m almost skinny enough for a light breeze to blow me away. Without the mass to help absorb the recoil, the two guns quickly climbed for the roof and threw me.
Like every other time I’d shot him, the small high-velocity bullets bounced off of Winters, and then he was in my face. I was too close to dodge, too distracted to step Between. The first punch broke several ribs and drove me to the ground. The second shattered my left shoulder. The follow-up kick tossed me into the room we’d entered from.
I hit Eric and carried the gnome to the ground before bouncing further. There was no barrier there—I could feel it. I could walk Between there, save both myself and Eric from this room. Then I tried to stand, and the warmth and heat of the quicksilver faded almost instantly from my body as I realized I’d broken my leg when I landed.
Winters walked into the room slowly, his grin a terrible thing as he saw my injury. Ignoring Eric, the gnome lying where he’d fallen, he advanced on me as I struggled to get into some kind of position to fight back. Without the quicksilver in my veins, I didn’t stand a chance at evading him. I barely managed to lurch to a kneeling position as he approached me, to die with some semblance of dignity.
The Enforcer stepped within reach of me, and then Eric shouted at me.
“Remember, under it all, he’s still mortal.”
There must have been some quicksilver left in me, because time seemed to slow as Winters’s sword arm drew back to end me.
He’s still mortal. How was that relevant? There was enough magic woven into Winters’s tattoos to protect him from any weapon, magic or attack I could come up with. It didn’t matter if beneath those protections, he was still mortal.
He was still mortal. There are places mortals can’t go, I remembered. Places no mortal could survive—not because it attacked them, but because the place was inherently hostile to them. Places no one except the fae could walk and live.
Knowing that if I failed, I died, I managed to half-lurch forward. I grabbed Winters’s leg and stepped.
THE SWORD DIDN’T COME with us. That was the first thing I realized—cold iron can’t go Between any more than non-fae can do it without a fae with the gift.
The lack of a sword saved my life, and I jerked away from Winters, abandoning him in the cold as he tried to strike at me with his bare hands. There, despite my broken leg, I could move and stand by thought, and I faced him squarely.
“What is this?” he demanded, and then clutched his throat as the last of his air left.
“This is Between,” I told him, and then something swept through me, and words that were not mine issued from my lips.
“Gerard Winters,” I found myself saying, my voice harsh and cold on my own tongue, “for breaking oath and trust and Covenant, you are sentenced to the Cold Death.”
Winters’s tattoos slowly turned black under the cold, and his skin blue around them. Gasping desperately for air, for any kind of breath at all, he looked at me in mute horror as he fell to his knees and mouthed a single word. I could make it out easily. Mercy.
“I’m sorry,” I told him quietly. “There’s no air here—no warmth, no life. No mortal, however shielded, can survive here. I can no more give you mercy than I could have let you kill MacDonald.”