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forever-gone blue or the black of night with the thousand and one stars…not the random handful that remained, but gray was all there was. The gray of nothing. The gray of indifference. The gray that would slowly eat this world’s remains and move on to eat the whole of reality for all I knew.
    I heard Pie lie down next to me with a grunt, blocking me from further fire. It’d be nice to say I’d known Pie since he was a frisky colt, but Pie had known me when I’d been the shaky legged newborn. He’d no doubt thought I was a nuisance the same as I’d once thought about Scotch. I hope he’d changed his mind like I’d changed mine.
    Scotch’s rifle fired, the shots so quick that the sound blended into one massive crack. I heard a scream, I was glad of that. I wanted to hear that murdering freak shriek until his throat bled and much more—so much more, but I settled for the scream and then a second one followed by a splash. I managed to turn my head towards the spring and saw Pie’s lambent gold eyes staring into mine. The cat’s-eye pupils dilated. “Hungry,” he muttered, the words pushed harshly through the long throat. “Eat. Now. Hungry .”
    “Go,” I said, words slow and painful. “Feast as you deserve, honored one.”
    He stared at me longer then dipped his head. The kelpie rose to his hooves and cantered into the water. He buried his teeth, sharp and curved, in the flesh of the dead human lying the opposite bank. There was a flash of tangled beard, gaping mouth, and an eyeball pulped by a bullet from Scotch’s rifle before the body was dragged into the water. I wouldn’t have thought it was that deep, but kelpies are versatile and Pie and the body both disappeared under the boiling surface. In a moment or two the water calmed until a geyser, far redder with blood than poisonous green, gushed upwards. Then it fell, splashing back heavily, and beneath the water Pie fed. He’d more than earned it. The desert was hard on him. He dripped water wherever he walked, that was how kelpies were born—in water. They spent their lives leaving it wherever they went, which was good for Scotch and me when springs were few and far between. We had our own water source. But Pie had been meant for Lochs and rivers--the desert pushed him to the far reaches of his endurance. He needed this meal.
    “Blind fool. Suicidal half-wit. Careless. Idiotic beyond all measure of the word.” Scotch was kneeling beside me. “How did you last in the courts, much less the Unseelie Court, with strategy such as that?” He used his knife, a human-made knife to cut my shirt open with one subtle slice. We had no blades of our own. Once we’d come from Under-the-Hill to the Earth that was now, all our dwarven and elvish-forged blades had disintegrated. Our rainbow-chased armor turned to dust and blew away. The magic that had made them had been undone by a human magic grimmer and blacker than we could ever comprehend, because it had torn something. It had slashed through reality itself to destroy not only their world but all the others unfortunate enough to be close to theirs. As close as Under-the Hill had been.
    “I relied on my unfathomably handsome face.” I tried for a grin, but didn’t make the shadow of a smile. “He was a human. A grubbing in the mud human. A worthless adversary.”
    “Excepting these worthless adversaries destroyed their world and ours,” he exhaled. “Ego and vanity, always the downfall of the Dark Court.” He pulled off his gloves and probed the bullet wound in my upper chest with his bare fingers. They felt warm against the icy chill of my skin. He already knew. From the appearance of the wound, he would. I’d seen the same wounds before and the pain—it was far worse than it should’ve been. I didn’t need to see the mercury tainted veins pulsing and striating outward, my black blood flowing far more freely than a normal bullet or blade would cause.
    I said it for him. “It’s silver. There is