Silver and Salt(12)

Everything and nothing.

The human race’s unnatural magic obliterated ours. What we’d once had, we had no more. Our weapons and armor faded away. Any charms, spells, or pure destructive streams of magic were gone. We were no more than humans with pointed ears and a severe allergy to silver. It was pathetic. We discovered we couldn’t go home again—not that it mattered. Time Under-the-Hill passed as a river compared to a stone on the bank that was earth. If we had had the magic left to re-open the door, we would have found nothing. Not death, but nothing at all. Earth had died, but Under-the-Hill was only the memory of a gravestone. Those of us that had left had barely escaped in time. Under-the-Hill had washed away, we knew, for no one there had ever followed us out.

I closed my eyes, clenched dirt and sand in my fists as the silver-agony spasmed through my body.

Fairy tales…I had been thinking of fairy tales. Humans remembered us better than we remembered them. Iron and silver, some of them recalled our weaknesses. When we joined together, Light and Dark, to vent our fury on those that would be the Grim Reaper of us all, and unleashed the first Wild Hunt in a thousand of their years, tens of thousands of ours, a few of them knew enough to fight back and how. A bullet was a bullet, but a silver one was a bullet made of the deadliest of poisons.

Pain in the ass humans. What were they living for? We lived for vengeance. When they had slain the world and perhaps all of existence as well, tearing a gaping wound in reality itself, I’d have thought they’d have lain down and gone with it. But no. Stupid and predatory to the end.

Stupid, but they had learned magic of their own. It took me forever to puzzle out what an automobile…a car…was supposed to do, but when I did, that was magic I would’ve liked to have seen on the move. Their magic was greater than ours had ever been, cities I couldn’t have imagined if I had tried, and a surplus of weapons that, despite our heritage, even we of the Unseelie Court found to be obscene. With our swords gone, we’d learned to use the least offensive of them: guns.

Then there were the ones called nuclear bombs. Little suns. They had possessed thousands upon thousands of those, a human had told me after I sliced off his ear. When the end came, they had none left…that information had come with the removal of his other ear. I’d removed his nose as well…wasn’t that one of their sayings? Cut off thy nose to spite thy own face? And wasn’t that precisely what they had done? Thousands of small venomous suns erupting all at once…in one last battle…one last pitting of ego against ego.

And here we were.

For now.

I didn’t know how long it would take the earth to rot away, the last star to disappear, the sun to set and not rise again, but the Hunt would remain…at least until there was no one left to punish. And as much as Ialach would deny it, the Hunt would survive without me.

“Why do you call yourself Seven? There has never been a time you have not called yourself that and these years we have ridden together you would never tell me why.”

I slitted my eyes. “I am dying,” I pushed the words through the pain, “and you would like a bed-time story?”

“It would be only fair as you were the one to name me.” Ialach shrugged as he placed the point of his knife against my chest and sliced me open much as a goose for a banquet. Or a pig for a barbeque with all the fixings. The slippery, words of the Fey—water over a pebbled stream--and the harsh ones of humans were mixed up now. “And I thought it might distract you,” he added, but those words were distant. Far away.

I sucked in a breath and decided breathing was distinctly overrated. I didn’t think I’d closed my eyes again but the darkness came all the same as I felt fingers slide past my skin and into my chest. Then those things like feeling and pain went away and I lived in the memories. I had named Ialach Scotch. But it hadn’t begun as Scotch.

It had started as Buttercup.

Seelie and Unseelie, enemies before anyone knew when, but that didn’t mean we didn’t all know each other, duel with each other, insult each other, screw each other. The Courts were small, time was long. What else was there to do? Ialach happened to be the only unlucky Seelie bastard to be born with yellow hair. All the others naturally had wind-swept silver-white veils to rival the feathers of the purest white dove. The dove was a notoriously stupid bird, which seemed appropriate to we black-haired Unseelie. I was the first to pounce on the difference. There were flowers that were the same color as the buttercups outside in the human world, with an equally embarrassing name that grew Under-the-Hill—in the High Court at least, needless to say. In the Dark Court we had black roses that wept tears of blood and scarlet lilies that ate butterflies. Yes…ate butterflies.

We were truly beyond pretentious.

From the moment I spotted Ialach he became Buttercup to the entire Dark Court. That was the cause of our first duel. It was a tie, but as I swore up and down it was only because I could not stop laughing every time I addressed him as Lord Buttercup.

When we had come here and discovered what the humans had wrought, I’d stumbled across a sweet in one of their shops. Butterscotch it had been called and it was similar to the color of Ialach’s then much shorter hair. As a peace offering between new partners, I called him Butterscotch instead of Buttercup and tried to kill him for only the first week or two. Eventually we discovered something from the time we remembered humans last: uisge beatha. The ‘water of life’. Scotch whisky. Scotch had seized upon several bottles and drank nothing but that or water from then on. Taking the name for his own. After three years, I gave in and stopped telling anyone and everyone in the outposts we passed the truth of it. Once you decide not to kill your partner, you have his back. Not in the Courts, but here. Always here.