The Dark Divide Read Free Page B

expose her throat. Ren was shoved roughly to his knees beside her by the man holding Trása’s hair.
    ‘Rónán!’ Trása cried in panic. ‘Do something! They’re going to kill me!’
    ‘For God’s sake! Call them off!’ Ren demanded of the woman who was obviously in charge, still on his hands and knees. ‘She didn’t do anything to you!’
    The dog growled low in this throat, forcing Ren to lean back. The woman stood impassively, ignoring his pleas, doing nothing to stop Trása’s impending execution.
    He scrambled to his feet and tried to lunge toward Trása, but one of the warriors grabbed him from behind. Not that he could have done much against four armoured men with swords, anda dog probably trained to kill, but he couldn’t stand by and let them murder Trása just for being Faerie. At least, he assumed that’s what they were panicking about, given the way the man had spat the word Youkai .
    He couldn’t understand that, either. This world fairly dripped with magic. The woman commanding them to slay Trása wielded it with impunity. Why the fuss over one half- beansídhe interloper, even if she was annoying at times?
    Faerie were magical creatures, and without them, humans had no magic. In Ren’s limited experience — and certainly his brother’s memories offered nothing to contradict the impression — one tended to appease the Tuatha if one wanted to use their magic, not kill them on sight.
    And yet, in this reality, being identified as even half-Faerie seemed enough to get you slaughtered on the spot.
    ‘Trása!’ he called to her, as he struggled to shake off the men holding him back. ‘Change!’
    ‘ What ?’ she screamed as they forced her to her knees.
    ‘Change into a bird and fly away!’ he cried in English, as she thrashed about in the grip of the man trying to keep her still long enough to line up the blade so he could cut her throat. Fortunately, the men trying to hold Trása didn’t understand what he was saying. There was still a chance at least one of them could get away. ‘Fly away! Now!’
    ‘But what if I can’t change back?’ she sobbed between cries as she fought them with every ounce of strength she owned.
    ‘I’ll find a way to change you back,’ he promised urgently. ‘But even if I can’t, better a live owl than a dead Faerie!’
    Even through her desperate struggles, Trása must have seen the logic in his words. Without warning, she went limp in the arms of her captors. Her sudden capitulation took them by surprise. The warriors stepped back from her for a moment looking puzzled and more than a little concerned.

    It was enough. Before they could grab her again, the half-human, half- beansídhe girl morphed into the white owl shape she favoured, flapped her wings once, and launched into the air with a screech of protest.
    The dog lunged forward, snapping at her tail feathers, while the woman in the kimono screamed in anger as Trása flew away into the darkness to freedom.

CHAPTER 2
    Marcroy looked through the shimmering opening of the rift and saw only rotting corpses.
    The smell wafting back was beyond awful. Marcroy’s eyes watered with the stench of it, and he hadn’t even stepped across to the other side.
    Nor would he. For Marcroy Tarth, stepping through this rift would be just as fatal as it had been for the thousands of dead Faerie who lay rotting around this abandoned stone circle in the other reality.
    The earth on the other side of the rift was piled three-deep in bodies, most of them obviously fleeing something in their own realm. What had driven so many to throw themselves into a world without magic? What had driven them to certain death? These sídhe must have known what they were doing. They must have felt the dearth of magic with the first breath they took of this new reality’s depleted air. Still, they stepped through rather than stay behind and face — what?
    Marcroy looked at the djinni , Jamaspa, who had opened the rift to show him this