Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(86)

“Mein Herr!” The smile starts at my toes and wriggles up my body, wrapping about my lower belly, my chest, my throat, my face. The cavern rings with my voice, and all those assembled cringe from the force of it.

All save one.

Sitting at Der Erlk?nig’s feet is a fair-haired youth, long-limbed and lanky, with sharp cheekbones and an even sharper chin. Of all the changelings around me, his are the only eyes that look human. Clear as water and blue, blue, blue.

Josef.

But I don’t recognize my brother. Where the expressions of the other goblins and fey creatures of the Underground are books I can read, Josef’s is like trying to find words in a painting. The flame in my chest stutters and sputters with my uncertainty.

“Welcome home, my queen.” Der Erlk?nig’s thin lips unfurl into a sneer, teeth glinting in the changeable, mercurial light of the Underground. “Have you missed us?” The sneer sharpens, his eyes turning glacial. “Have you missed me?”

“Yes,” I say. “I have longed for you every minute, every hour, of my waking days.”

Color flares briefly in those eyes, a lightning flash of depth and dimension. “And your sleepless nights?”

Lust ripples through my veins, my blood a murmuring brook of want. The monster before me is beautiful in his ugliness, and I imagine those corrupted hands curled around me, our skin alternating black and white like the keys of my klavier. The candle within me glows brighter.

“My nights are spent running from my desire for you. For devastation. For oblivion.”

Der Erlk?nig gets to his feet. “Yes.” He sighs, the sound drawn out in a sibilant whisper that slithers about my loins. “Yes.”

Yes, please, yes. I walk forward as Der Erlk?nig descends from the dais. I bare my throat to him in submission, waiting for the wolf’s bite that will spill my life’s blood onto the floor. He wraps those multijointed hands about my arms and pulls me close, pressing his lips against where my pulse flutters beneath the skin, breathing deep the scent of my mortality.

His fingertips are licks of flame that leave chilblains in their wake, my flesh turning dead-white and deadweight beneath his touch. Claws find my every crevice, as though he can dig into me and tear me apart. I laugh with a scream.

“No!” Josef leaps upon Der Erlk?nig’s back, breaking his grip on me. “Leave her alone! You’re hurting her!”

As the Lord of Mischief steps away, I feel something hot running down my chin. I touch my face and my fingertips come away wet and red.

A nosebleed.

The world slips and slides around me, and when I lift my hands, I can see straight through my skin down to the muscles and blood and bone of my flesh. Der Erlk?nig is stripping away who I am, layer by layer. I laugh again, and my laughter emerges from Der Erlk?nig in a chuckle as he turns to my brother.

“Does she not deserve to be hurt? Does she not deserve to be destroyed? Have not those very thoughts crossed your own head, O nameless one?”

Josef looks to me, but I still cannot understand the words of his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Der Erlk?nig asks him. “Why have you come?”

“I . . . I’ve come home,” Josef says, the pitch of his voice softer than the sound of my thoughts.

Der Erlk?nig throws his head back with a roar of mirth and contempt. “Did you think it would be so easy, changeling? To shed the life of the mortal you once were? I see the strings that still tie you to the world above. To her.”

His eyes dart my way, and I see the bonds of blood that have wrapped themselves in a stranglehold about my brother’s neck and chest, slowly draining him of joy. They are tied to the candle in my own chest.

“Why do you still wear his face, mischling?” Der Erlk?nig taunts. Halfling, half-blood, mongrel, I watch my brother bleed shame and agony. “Show us your real self!”

Josef pales. “This—this is my real self.”

“Is it?” The Lord of Mischief steps closer to my brother, and I see Josef flinch against that bitter breath. His winter’s gaze caresses my brother’s face, and those broken-jointed fingers run their tips lightly across Josef’s brow. “Those eyes are still human, mischling. Shall I pluck them out for you?”

“No!” My shout is a blade, my body a shield as I place myself between my brother and the Goblin King. “You shall not touch him.”

For the briefest of moments, Der Erlk?nig’s glacier eyes melt to reveal the man frozen behind them. His emotions take on the tang of death and mortality, not the clean, crisp taste of the fey and everlasting life.

“Would you save him?” he asks, and his voice is a kitten in my hand, soft and defenseless and vulnerable. “Would you choose him?”

Der Erlk?nig’s lips say one thing, but his words say another. Would you choose me? I hear them both, the man and the monster, and I cannot untangle one from the other.

“Why should I choose?” I ask instead. “Can I not save you both?”

The shadows writhe on Der Erlk?nig’s skin, rustling and hissing like a nest of snakes. As one, the gathering of goblins inhales a sharp breath. The air weighs heavy in my lungs, and I drown in tension and fear as the crawling darkness gathers itself around the Goblin King’s body. He screams in E-flat, iron nails of agony driving into my eardrums as he clutches his head.

Josef begins to keen in pain, a diminished second to the Goblin King’s scream, jarring and dissonant and grating against where I keep my love for him. My brother claws at his eyes as shadows begin to spill from them in blue-black tears, staining them onyx and obsidian.