This one is not only pre-Emrys, it's pre-Arthur-gets-Excalibur from Lady.
. . . . .
The sidhe dropped from the sky like bloodthirsty rain. Church bells across London warned the masses to get behind iron doors, but many would be trapped inside panicking crowds.
And sometimes, if you got behind iron doors, they just ripped through the walls.
Arthur's hand automatically went to his gun. "Guinevere, get inside. Now."
The balcony was wide. It took five steps to get from the railing to the door that led to the relative safety of Arthur's study.
Guinevere made it only two.
One of the sidhe, a twisted, splintered caricature of a man, caught her effortlessly by the arm and swung her around. Arthur strode forward, gun coming up as that thing dodged her fist, but the world was moving slowly and strangely, reality breaking into shards of glass falling into their lives on a slow drip of molasses, and time wasn't what it should be.
When it came back into a fractured focus, the creature's hands were caressing her neck, threatening to squeeze, and she stood frozen in a spell lock. He must have fired a bullet because he could see where it had shattered the window instead of the sidhe's skull.
Then the world focused a bit more, and he felt the bite of a sidhe's blade on his neck.
"He actually managed to get off a shot," she cooed in his ear. Her breath was teased with maddening, dancing magic that made him shiver involuntarily. His throat caught on the blade, and a small spot of warmth seeped up. "I like him. Can I keep him?"
The gun was still held up in a shaking hand. Only part of that was involuntary. If he could just move it enough to get off a shot . . . It wouldn't kill the sidhe, he didn't have right kind of bullets for that, but it might give Guinevere a chance to run.
His own chances he knew all too well.
"The Queen requested him specifically," the man reminded her, and he might as well take the shot now, a slashed throat was preferable to whatever horrors they had cooked up for him as minister of defense.
Just an inch more. Let it shake, pretend your arm's tired. Forget about the screams from the street, forget about the blade at your throat and the magic that's ripping you up like you're a carcass it's picking over. Just breathe.
One. Two.
The magic she had breathed into his ear clenched around his stomach in a blinding coil of agony. He gasped, the gun falling out of numb fingers. The sidhe girl laughed. It sounded like bells.
Every pretty, tinkling note shot another stab of pain into his stomach.
"Oh, you'll be fun. Are you taking the girl, Rhys?"
"Tempting." He considered. "More trouble than she's worth, I think. She's fighting me."
"But those are the best ones!"
He sighed. "Sadly, there's no time."
"Well, get rid of it then and let's go."
Arthur finally caught his breath back. "No - please, just let her go - No!"
His hands were tightening, and Guinevere still couldn't move, and when he tried it step forward, he couldn't breathe for the agony that sent him crashing to his knees.
And then something dark and dangerous appeared on the balcony in a swirl of shadows, and he just be hallucinating because someone with that much power crackling around them shouldn't smell like chocolate.
He could breathe now, tight, gasping breaths. The magic looked like shadows, but it felt gold and familiar, and it curled around him tight enough to chase the other out. A little tighter than necessary, like it was claiming its territory.
Mine, it whispered.
"What," the man said in a voice that made the sidhe seem positively cuddly, "have you done?"
The sidhe stumbled back, the male letting Guinevere go. "Lord Emrys - "
The man tilted his head to the side. "You've hurt them."
"They'll recover," the woman said hastily.
"They will," the shadow man agreed. Only he put slightly too much emphasis on the word "they".
The sidhe took another step back. They were pressed up against the balcony railing now.
The man smiled, sudden and swift and sharp.
The glass of reality wasn't so much shatters as it was pulverized.
When bricks were once again bits of the wall instead of small planets crashing into an earth made of black trench coats, there were two smears of blood on his balcony, and the man was still smiling.
Arthur lunged for his gun and had it up between the man and Guinevere before he could turn around.
The smile turned brilliant and cheery in the space of a heartbeat. "Emrys." He swept a bow that would have disgraced half the court. "If you'll excuse me, the rest of London is still under attack. I expect you'd like me to do something about that?"
"If you don't mind," he managed, gun lowering just a fraction.
The smile widened. "An honor as always, Arthur. I'll be back shortly. We can talk then." The shadows claimed him in a silent moment more intimidating than a thunderclap.
Then the sound of jagged, cut off screams came rushing back like water released from a dam, and Arthur did what he had to do, what he always did, shoving aside everything but the immediate. Get Guinevere into the iron room. Get onto the streets with a proper weapon. Protect the people.
But he could still feel a pulse of warm golden magic that he'd never felt before yet was strangely familiar, and it deflected enemy weapons with whispers of "mine".
Smears of blood and possessive gold and promises of "back shortly" and "talk then".
A threat or a promise, he isn't sure which. He just knows it tugs at him like gravity, a secret whispered in the glint of sunlight across the metal of his weapon, shouted in a child's toy that has no reason to be at his feet.
But he is not his sister. He has never seen the magic in the still places or felt more than a dull chill outside of the Pits. It was a miracle he had felt the sidhe's magic at all, and then only as a whisper. He is blind and deaf to the secrets the trees whisper as he makes his way through the blood soaked streets.
Even he, though, keeps an eye on the shadows, and he jumps when he passes the shattered store front of a sweet shop where the scents of blood and chocolate float out on the breeze.
