Matthew the Magician leaned against a wrought iron lamp post on 42nd Street, idly picking at the edges of his ten iron rings and listening to his city breathe into the warm September night. That breath rippled up from underground, a hot draft exhaled in time with the harsh pulse of subway trains. A quiet night, as nights went in the belly of the beast...

....until his hands grew cold under the rings that focused his otherwise senses, and he raised his eyes to the night. Trip trap, trip trap. Who's that tripping across my bridge, Brer Fox?

Even before the sensation of cold resolved into something more defined, he had an idea who might have come to trouble him.

He tugged the placket of his camouflage coat together and stepped out of the shadows, into the dapples and patterns of light that were the substance of New York City at night. The coldness gave him direction; he followed it cautiously, although he could tell his targets were not close. And not together--which gave him pause. The stronger chill, the one that sank into the bones of his left hand, had the flavor of age and wildness about it. Ancient hunger, and the musk of a predator.

But the right-hand one was closer, and carried the blood-sharp sweetness he had expected. Besides, whatever was hunting the waterfront was too old and too deep for one lone Mage to face. He dug his cellphone from his pocket as he moved, and called it in.

Then he picked up the trail of the Faerie huntress just off Broadway and followed her toward Times Square. She moved quickly, erratically, as obviously on a scent as Matthew himself--and, as obviously, she had not yet noticed him. He kept to the shadows, running when he had to, his hands balled into fists around the ice in his palms.

She flitted shadow to shadow, but he finally caught sight of her silhouetted against the lights in the eye-shattering cacophony of Times Square. She was big-boned, too thin for her frame, in a green peacoat and blue jeans, her dark hair falling loose except for a few seemingly random braids swinging among the uncut tresses. Her nose was a stubborn, Grecian edifice, her chin notched as if by a thumb. She walked quickly, boots clicking, glancing up now and then at the buildings arrayed like broken teeth against the sky.

Only tourists look up in New York City, he thought, and noticed that she, too, drew her large long-fingered hands from the pockets of her peacoat to rub them as if they hurt. That wouldn't be from any iron rings; the city itself pained her.

Slime splashed Matthew's boots as he followed. His quarry prowled past a pack of lean young men on a streetcorner, and one grabbed at her shoulder. She didn't turn, but Matthew--trotting to catch up--saw the shadows writhe around the man who reached, and saw him recoil, staring at his own hand.

Glamourie, Matthew diagnosed, before ice jabbed his palms, and he ran faster. Don't touch that, boy. You don't know where it's been.

Honesty made him admit, And so am I.

A blur, another chill on the air made Matthew turn. The cold of Faerie magic pierced the warmth of the night; the Seeker's will cast a chill shadow as she paused under a streetlight, again chafing her hands. He drew his own awareness tight as the coiled life inside an acorn, slowing to a trot as he sidestepped through crowds, hoping the magecraft in his rings would hide him from her otherwise senses--what the uninitiated might call second sight.

She raised her chin like a hound scenting the wind and turned on the ball of one booted foot. Matthew forced himself to keep walking, moving steadily, watching his quarry from the corner of his eye as she raised a hand and stepped from the light into a shadow--

--gone.

Dammit.

Her reappearance, three blocks distant, sent a twinge of cold through his bones. Oh, no, you don't, my lady. Whatever you're after is mine.

Matthew ran.

#

Seeker hated stepping out of the shadows almost as much as she hated the cold ache of the iron city in her bones. Shattered images taunted her: an inkblot silhouette settling on Liberty's torch; a gaunt and curious willow following a jogger through Central Park; demonlings leaping among the flashing LEDs of Times Square; a unicorn bowing its cold and final beauty to a savage, cage-eyed panther in the Central Park Zoo. She could not lay a hand on that cold silver neck without taking back a charred obscenity--could not have stroked that purity without leaving a smear of tarnish in her wake.

Seeker moved in a place of Names and glamours, of knotted hairs and deadly magics. Reaching into a silent blankness among the images that surrounded her, she found a Mage, dark-eyed and golden-haired and as human as she once was, wearing a jacket of army camouflage he'd no doubt chosen for symbolism over fashion, slipping along a filth-encrusted alleyway. He snarled into the shadows without stopping--I see you too. Sorceries hung around him on threads of cold iron and brass.

His glance was assured, mocking... and the mortal Magi had a long and unpleasant rivalry with the Fair Folk. She riffled shadows faster: long ripples curled white foam and black against the wharves; that unicorn turned away, flickering silver through the night: the whole otherwise reality, magical and unseen by mortals, except a lucky--or unlucky--few. Seeker tossed her hair, braids moving among the strands. A man with a blade lashed out at a huddled girl. His image shuddered, a reflection split by a stone. His victim emerged brightly from the ripples.

Seeker stepped forward, shadow between shadow again and then out. She waited while the man noticed her and glanced from his prey. His gaze traveled up Seeker's boots and raked her face, tension becoming dismissal when he glimpsed dark, straight hair and her angular jaw. Just a woman, she read on his face.

"Leave her," Seeker said. "She's mine now."

He snarled, and lifted the knife.

"You are out of your depth. I warn you twice." She smiled at him, a very little smile that hurt the corners of her mouth.

He swiped. She stepped aside, her shadow lashing a tail on the concrete. As he overreached, her left hand stroked one of the braids binding thin sections of her hair.

She spoke a word.

A Name.

"Gharne!" Casual with the blade as a butcher, the pimp slashed for Seeker's face. A feint at her vanity. She leaned away, fearless as the cat whose shadow she wore. Wingbeats sounded over her shoulder; her assailant's eyes widened. He threw up arms to protect his own pretty face.

In Faerie, you are granted three chances only. Never, never more. A winged black silhouette like an inkstain with teeth took him high on the chest. He sprawled across the girl still crying on the pavement. Seeker clawed after the shadow of that Mage, for safety's sake, and didn't find him.

Beak bloody, the inky thing gouged for the pimp's heart. The girl dragged herself away, his blood like a sash across her chest. Seeker's familiar demon hunkered over dying bubbles, hell-lit eyes focused on his mistress.

"Good hunting," he said.

She squatted and laid a gentling hand on his neck. "Enjoy your meal, Gharne. Thank you."

"Don't mention it." His beak dipped as she turned to collect the girl.

The girl, who had vanished into warrenlike alleys as if she had never been. Sure. Now, she ran.

Seeker's footsteps followed comfortably; the scent of her quarry hung on the reeking air. The shadow that paced her was a running doe, four footsteps meeting Seeker's two.

"Seeker!" A voice like the crack of a whip. She stopped, midmotion spin on cat's-paws.

The human Mage grinned at her. "I know your Name," he said.

"Much good may it do you. It's claimed."

"Ah," he said. "What if it wasn't?" He stepped forward, extending his hand.

"Since when do Magi have any power over bindings?"

"We don't." His hair was a slick, yellow ponytail revealing iron rings spiraling his ear. He wore round spectacles that hid his eyes in reflected twinkle.

"Then why ask? You exist to destroy Faerie, Magus, and I exist to defend it."

"That's not what we want."

"Don't lie to me, Magis," she snapped. "Trust me, I see no wrong in destroying Faerie. But you--you should know it's not safe to talk to fey things. This isn't a fucking fairy tale."

"Really?" That extended hand came down on her wrist. Something burned, searing her flesh. Cold iron rings on his fingers. "My name's Matthew. Szczegielniak. I'll give you that for free, not that it will help you: I'm a mortal man. And this looks like a fairy tale to me. What are you hunting tonight?"

She swore and jerked back. "Seeker," she reminded him. "It takes more than blood and iron to wound me."

He shrugged. "It was worth a try. I have other allies." His hand slid under his jacket. He has a knife, she thought. A gun.

Before he could pull the weapon, Seeker crouched and leaped, over his head and away. "Look me up!" he yelled after her. "Szczegielniak! I'm in the book! We can help!"

#

Matthew watched her rise, his cell phone warm, winking in the palm of his hand. The number was on speed dial, even if he didn't have it memorized, and he was out of time--he could dial, or he could follow her up the fire escape and, as likely as not, he could lose her on the rooftops.

He pressed the button with his thumb. It rang one time.

"Matthew?"

"I lost her, Jane," he said, as the chill in his hands ebbed and eased. "I'm sorry."

"Her?"

"Yes. Elaine."

"Damn--" A pause, a whisper of breath he could picture, Jane's silver-black hair blown from her eyes. "That's the closest in some time. Did you speak to her, at least?"

"I gave her my name," Matthew said, unzipping his jacket one-handed as he walked out of the alley and toward the lights. "There's always the hope that she'll call."

"She can't," the transmitted voice of his archmage answered. "She would if she could. She's forbidden."

#

The shadow of an owl floated up the wall. Matthew was right. She should be put a stop to. Her footsteps fell light and level across the rooftop. She saw as the owl sees; she leaped the twenty feet from rooftop to rooftop as the doe leaps--until the cliff-edge of a warehouse brought her to a halt near the river.

Lifting her face, she sniffed the wind and sent her awareness otherwise, then leapt the roof-edge parapet into emptiness. The girl was below. Seeker smelled her. And another... Damn that Mage for delaying me.

Which was worth a wry grin. The Mage was less likely damned than she. She spread the owl's soft wings and floated down beside brick. She touched pavement. Predatory tunnel vision leached the edges of her awareness. She ran until the companion shadow of her doe deserted her, exhausted, and the shade of the cat ran beside her: hunter, leaper, stalker of prey.

Someone else stalked the same prey. The shadows showed her his footsteps: long black feet, pearly bare toenails, water dripping from his tattered cuff. A slow puddle spread where he passed, wet prints following him across the pavement.

Seeker pelted toward him, and he paced toward his prey.

The girl huddled in a doorway. Seeker glimpsed as much otherwise, and past her quarry saw the stalking enemy. Black of skin and long of face, clad in the rags of white pants and a shirt of archaic cut--and the very shadows seemed to recoil from his presence. He strode past the doorway and the girl.

Seeker turned the corner in time to see his sure steps hesitate. He paused, turned back. Delight or something passing for it creased his face as he smiled with square white teeth. "Are you hurt, child? Can I help you?"

She hesitated, but took his hand. As he helped her up, Seeker dug in and ran. The black cat still paced her; the tall man had not heard her footsteps. He turned the girl away, an arm around her shoulder, and she whispered something too soft to hear through the shadows.

When he replied, his voice was low but clear. "You're a pretty one to be out so late alone."

She glanced down and blushed: a child, vulnerable, whom the unicorn might once have adored. The dark man looked sideways at her, as if used to viewing life from only one eye at a time. White ringed his crystalline blue iris.

"Tell me, child," the thin man asked the girl, "have you ever ridden a horse?"

The exhausted cat-shadow vanished like a wind on water. Seeker's footsteps echoed, and she faltered to a stop. She had only the owl left, who couldn't help her now. And Gharne, but this would eat her familiar in half a bite, yawning.

Shadows lay tangled on the ground behind man and girl, hers slight and mortal, his suddenly powerful, mane-tossing in fury.

"Kelpie!" Seeker shouted as he turned. A challenge, a demand. Not his Name. Kelpie came about to face her, his bare wet feet clattering on the stone.

He threw the girl down; she rolled and landed roughly, got her hands under her and started dragging herself away. Shadows twisted and writhed in Seeker's mind, slithering across her face. Kelpie relaxed, waiting.

"I charge you stay, child," Kelpie whispered. He stepped forward, his haunches and shoulders bulging.

Seeker shifted her weight, crouched, braced. I'm dead. Even if I guess right, I'm not strong enough to bind that.

They faced one another across ten cracked feet of asphalt. Seeker drew a brackish breath. "The child is claimed."

He snorted, vapor curling from nostrils grown broad and fierce. "Hardly by you, changeling. Or you should not leave your toys unattended, if she was."

Her hands shook. And he was deeper by far. He came on.

"The child is mine," Seeker repeated, "and the Mebd's."

"Contest me." Grotesquely swelling, and the girl's horror at last fixed on him. He towered. They stood in a shallow sea.

"By my hand and my heart," she replied, "By the name of your soul..." A gamble. A gamble, and maybe he would back down.

Hah.

You never knew.

The impact of Kelpie's hooves splattered Seeker's boots. His mane tossed froth-white. Pale hide shone under streetlights, wet and taut over muscle like bent and knotted ropes. He whinnied laughter, mane raining salt water, taste of the hurricane on his breath, as it was always meant to be.

He was glorious as he came to kill her, but Seeker remembered a teacher's voice in her ear. Calm. Maternal. Four things, if you forget all else, to be hoarded against need.

Seeker cringed under his hooves, a lock of wet hair tangled between her fingers. Jewels of water shattered around her; behind Kelpie, the girl crouched in a puddle.

"To bind a thing, you must know its right Name," he said.

"By this lock of my hair, I know you to me..." Her hands trembled. His weight bore her down--beyond control, beyond thought, beyond panic. Four Names: Scian. Lile. Maat....

The hooves came down.

There was no time to move and so she stood. Her will bent against his: strength crushed strength like blind, slick behemoths striving in the depths of the sea. Resilient, muscular, vast. Please, please, please...

"...Uisgebaugh!"

Her fingers twisted the tangle into her hair as hooves shuddered above her. He all but vibrated--all power, all courage, and wilderness surged in his Caribbean eyes.

His shadow fell across her face. She reached out, gasping, and bent his power back like the fingers of a hand.

Until he failed.

Squarely and sullen, his neck bent like a bow, he came to earth. Seeker wiped from her cheek, below the eye, some flecks of salt water that must have been thrown from his shaking mane.

"Mistress," he muttered.

She stepped away. "Fetch the girl."

#

The moon rose over the ocean, wearing a weary smile, her light reflected on billowing waves and Kelpie's sleek mane. His magic moved him quickly, for he was a part of this water and all water everywhere: all tides and currents, the great cycle that falls and flows and falls again into the vast blue cauldron of the ocean... and where there was water, there was also Kelpie.

And Seeker and the girl sat his back--Seeker shaking wet hair from her eyes, the girl growing stiffer in the cold.

Stormclouds massed on the horizon, black in the silver-lit sky. Distant lightning flashed, but Seeker didn't delight in its rumble. She saw the misery in her burden's face revealed in every flicker. The girl shivered and sobbed. She cried for water, and Kelpie gave her sweet water. She cried of the cold, and Seeker cloaked her. She cried for her pimp to come and save her, and Seeker bit her lip on a scathing Gladly would I send you to join him.

"Have courage, girl. There's worse to come."

They'd be rid of her soon. And then Kelpie and Seeker would continue their business. Though Seeker had bound him once, Kelpie might try two times more to kill her. If he failed thrice, he would belong to her--until she chose to unknot that lock of hair... or he died. Should she die first, his heart would stop with hers.

Which was why Seeker was here, on his back, following his paths from the iron world to the moonlight one. If it had been merely her quarry and herself, she would have taken the thorn-tree road, her own path through the shadows not being made for sharing. But she judged it better to keep the Kelpie close and under her command, rather than trusting whatever devices he could get up to in her absence.

Waves pitched up and sideways, the sea hungry and unkempt. The ocean reached out contemptuously; the tips of the girl's fingers slid through Seeker's as a wave struck her from the Kelpie's back. She clawed upward, spluttering, shocked that the ocean should be so terrible.

Seeker leaned out, her fingers knotted perilously in Kelpie's pale mane, and clutched at the girl's grasping hand. She felt no fear, no rush of courage. Only an overwhelming weariness that threatened to drown her as surely as the ocean would the girl. Seeker's fingers locked on her charge's wet wrist; she hauled the girl gasping and choking across Kelpie's withers. He tossed his head, eyes rolling, reflecting lightning as water sheeted down his face.

"Is this your storm?"

"Mistress, no." He might omit, but he could not fail to answer. And she had charged him to bring them safely to Annwn. "We are opposed."

"By whom?"

His shrug rolled his shoulders under her. "Magi? The Unseelie? I know not."

Seeker licked the salt cracking her lips. "You need a name," she said.

"I have a Name."

He snorted and kept swimming, great muscles writhing under her thighs. She tightened her fingers in his mane.

Wet and wept out, the girl eventually slept in Seeker's arms. With her easy breathing, the storm subsided, and for a moment the Kelpie forgot himself enough to twist a look over his shoulder, one blue eye meeting Seeker's in surmise.

"Whiskey," he said. "Call me that."

The clouds shuddered to pieces before a setting moon and the easterly sky grayed. Seeker shook her charge awake. "Dawn and the clouds are breaking; you must see this."

The girl's eyes flickered open, the color of lichen: neither gray nor green nor hazel. Seeker had seen such eyes before, in the mirror and elsewhere. The girl seemed calmer now. Nothing was ever as bad in the morning as it was in the night before. "Who...?" and then her eyes registered Seeker and she sat up, squinting in mounting brightness.

"What do you see, girl?"

She grimaced.

"Water. Waves. The sky." She glanced over her shoulder, skin like honey once the makeup had washed away, her dark hair matted as stiff with salt as it had been with hairspray. "My name is Hope."

Seeker made an odd sound, a strangled laugh. "Certainly, it is." Then she leaned forward and kissed the girl's stone-colored eyes and her salt-wet mouth. The girl, who flinched and, when Seeker drew back, stared at her. Seeker pointed westward--where green hills welled up, visible to the otherwise eye. Taller swells on the ocean, hills like the call of the heart for home.

The sunlight touched those hills with gold.

Seeker's voice rose, off key. "What are yonder high, high hills, the sun shines sweetly in? Those are the hills of Heaven, my love, where you will never win...."

Dawn in the Western Isles. How she'd grown to hate it.

Hope jerked against Seeker's grasp, her face lit in wonder as Seeker sighed once, quietly. They were lovely, high downs and the white faces of cliffs wrapped in rainbows struck from the golden mist. "The Westlands, Hope. Hy Bréàsil. Annwn. Tir Na Nog. Your home."

Whiskey snorted and surged forward--the end of his journey in sight. Seeker wondered if he truly swam so fast, or if his magic shortened the distance. Morgan would know....

The Mebd's castle came into sight around a rocky curve of land, the reaching arm of stone protecting a half-moon of white stand at the base of a terraced, magical lawn. At the crest of the hill a beechwood harbored mist and chill morning. The line of trees vanished behind the palace, a fantasia of latticed golden stone translucent in the slanted light, green banners snapping in the stiff sea breeze.

A cluster of fair-haired fey ladies and Elf-knights waited along the beach. The impact of the Kelpie's hooves on the sand jarred his riders as he heaved himself from the ocean. Leaving the water was such an effort for his kind.

The courtiers of the Mebd came down to meet them, to receive Seeker's burden. Seeker handed the girl down willingly. And as she was off-balance, her steed melted beneath her with a breaking crash. Seeker rolled, scooping up a handful of sand. "An old trick, little treachery. And hardly your best...."

The wave struck before she saw it, knocking the precious bit of earth from her hand. It sucked her under, churning; she struggled for the surface, breathlessness an iron band across her chest, fingertips breaking into blessed air as she dragged herself upward. Sweet breath filled her lungs in the moment before he knocked her under. He was implacable as the bottomless lochs of Scotland, and he liked to play with his prey.

Violent currents twisted her. She struck for the bottom, hoping he would think her disoriented. One hand clawed through rocks, into sand. A sharp shell gashed her, blackness billowing. But she brought cupped hands to her mouth, blowing into them through the blood and watching the bubbles rise through water gone still and silent.

She drifted. Knowing he could push her back if she struggled upwards, wait for her to drown. Hoping that he needed a more direct vengeance. Until a mammoth blow, a wall of water, slammed her chest, would have hammered the air from her lungs if she had any left, struck again. She spread her hands, the silvery net between them terribly frail.

She cast the net into the sea.

The ocean grew still, as if lost in memory. When she broke the surface, gasping and fuming, a cheer went up, and when the Kelpie arose behind her draped in her net as if in seaweed, a laugh. Seeker was not well-loved. But nothing tamed is fond of that which still has freedom, and it amused the Mebd's courtiers to see one of the wild Fae bound.