She chuckled. “And now the entirety of the magical world knows to be wary of ponytail-free Siberian elves.” When the bartender came over, she pointed at my beer. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
All the Courts were now well aware of der Nord’s proclivities. He’d lost power because of it. They were also now aware of Las Vegas Wolf.
I watched Raven arrange her napkin. “We have a microbrewery in Alfheim,” I said. “Raven’s Gaze, they call it. It’s run by a couple of elves.” I took a swig, then held out my bottle. “Come for the beer. Stay for the magic.”
Raven smiled. “Sounds worth a try.”
I set down my beer. “Remy says he’ll be home in a week or two.” I’d honestly expected him to stay. House would take him in, at least temporarily.
She thanked the bartender when he set down her beer. “Wolf won’t bother him.” She took a swig.
“What about Portia Elizabeth? After what I saw at Crossroads, a punishment seems likely.”
“That dress of hers, it’s not Wolf’s magic.” Raven took a swig of her beer. “Portia Elizabeth was working for Wolf before the dress showed up. Dealing with Wolf’s issues helps her channel her dark tendencies.”
Which made sense. I sipped my own beer.
Raven tapped her bottle on the bar and stared at her fingers. “She and that dress, they have a deal. Portia Elizabeth will be fine.”
Her body language suggested she didn’t believe what she’d just said—or that she had an understanding of Portia Elizabeth’s “deal.”
“Alfheim will take her,” I said. For Remy, at least.
Raven shook her head. “She can’t, Frank. She can’t be around the men of Remy’s pack, especially his nephew.”
“Jaxson? He’s a kid.” Raven wasn’t making sense. Fertility spirits only affected the fertile.
But then again, Portia Elizabeth wasn’t a random fertility spirit.
Raven sipped her beer. “How do you think her powers interact with fated mate magic?”
“Not well?” But then, I was pretty sure I saw fated mate magic flowing between her and Remy.
“Two weeks, three tops, and all males… react… even with her dress suppressing her magic. She refuses to risk it. Not with kids.”
Which meant that Remy wouldn’t be staying beyond two weeks, either.
“What is that dress? The red magic?” I asked.
Raven turned around and leaned against the bar just as the lounge act started up with yet another cover of a well-known love song. “No one knows who made it, or its true purpose.” She shrugged. “Every so often, something unexpected shows up at Crossroads. It’s part of its charm.”
“Charm?” I wouldn’t call such mysterious magic charming.
Raven shook her head. Then she tapped the bar and pulled a business card out of her jacket. “The concealments around House extend to our persons, and thus our business dealings, which was why you didn’t find Portia Elizabeth with a simple Internet search.”
And why Remy never found her in all his years searching.
I took the card. Elizabeth Portman, arbiter and therapist, it said, followed by a string of degree and licensing letters, and a phone number.
“Three quarters of her clients are men. She fixes them up and sends them back into the world.” Raven pushed her napkin around. “She’s built a life here.”
“Impressive,” I said.
“She is also licensed to perform weddings.” Raven grinned. “So am I.”
I laughed. “It is Vegas.”
The address on the card was an office, not an apartment at House. “Does House always mess with time? How does anyone live there?” Three days was a lot to lose when one had to get to work the next morning.
“That was all me, handsome.” Raven leaned against the bar. “How do wolves hunt?” she asked.
“They separate their prey from the herd,” I answered.
Raven touched her finger to her nose, then pointed at me. “I was not about to let my prize service-offering hound be separated from his pack.”
She stole three days to make sure I didn’t start hunting for Ragnar until the elves arrived? Maybe I wasn’t just a shiny, new bauble with which to play.
“Your expression, yet again, tells me all I need to know.” She sipped her beer.
I tucked Portia Elizabeth’s card into my pocket. “I take it I learned whatever lesson you wished me to learn?” What else could she “need to know?”
Raven laughed. “The question is not what you learned, but what I learned from your process of learning.”
“I hope I did not disappoint,” I said.
“No, Mr. Victorsson, you did not.” Raven took a sip. “We’ll send Remy home in one piece.”
“I’m sure you will.” Hoped they would.
“Oh!” Raven reached into her impossible pocket again. “The kitsune asked me to give this to you.”
She held out my phone.
I took it. The kitsune gave Raven my phone?
“You are released from your offer of service, son of Victor.” She bowed her head.
“Thank you?” I said. She’d traded my offer to Wolf, so I wasn’t as sure of my release as she seemed to be.
I unlocked the screen. “Did they booby-trap it?” Chip and Lollipop did like their tricks.
She shook her head and tipped her beer toward my phone. “It’s clean of any trick magic. I checked.”
The woman in the phone still hugged my dog, still beautiful, still a little sad, and still a mystery.
Raven pulled a one-hundred-dollar bill from her pocket. “I’m glad I met you, Frank Victorsson.”
“I’m glad I met you, too,” I said absently. Though I was more ambivalent about Raven the trickster than I’d tell her to her face.
I swiped at my phone to move to my second screen of apps. Right in the middle of my phone’s screen, bigger than any of the other app icons, was a lollipop.
“Do you know what this is?” I showed my phone to Raven.
“The one with the mutant tastebuds said, ‘Tell him we agree to his terms.’”
“That’s it?” What terms were they talking about?
Raven shrugged. “Are you going to open the app?” She slipped the hundred-dollar bill under her beer bottle.
What if my phone exploded? Because I wouldn’t put it past those two brats to set my life literally on fire, no matter if the Raven world-spirit checked it over or not.
Raven stood up. “Open it. See what they have to say.” She squeezed my shoulder. “I suspect it’s not so bad.”
With that, the magical who was much more than she let on walked toward the bar’s door.
I looked down at my phone. I might as well dive in. I tapped the lollipop.
My phone’s screen went white, and for an uncomfortably long moment, nothing happened. Did those brats wipe my phone?
Japanese text appeared. “I can’t read this,” I muttered. It scrolled and scrolled, then stopped on a line of English. We will make contact when the need arises, it said.
The scrolling Japanese was probably a contract of some sort. I’d need to be extra careful, especially until I could get it translated.
But then a phone icon appeared, and an international number. My phone was dialing Japan.
Should I end the call? Allowing a connection probably meant I accepted whatever terms were laid out in the Japanese text.
Unless this was how I got information about my mystery woman. I inhaled, and put the phone to my ear. The line clicked, and clicked, and finally rang.
A woman answered. “Kon’nichiwa?”
Was it her? I didn’t think so. Not at a Japanese phone number.
“Umm, hello,” I said. “My name is Frank Victorsson. You might find this hard to believe, but two kitsune gave me this number.”
“Kitsune?” she said.
“One likes potato chips. The other lollipops.”
“Ah,” she responded. “Yes. They told me you would call.”
“They
did?” Maybe this woman knew something. “Did they tell you why?”
“Mr. Victorsson,” the woman said. “My name is Chihiro Hatanaka. That woman in the photo on your phone? Her name is Ellie Jones. She and her cottage disappeared from my kougai a week ago. She is my best friend.”
“Ellie Jones?” I said. Yes, I thought. Ellie. Her name was Ellie and she was the most wonderful person I’d ever met.
The woman named Chihiro Hatanaka inhaled sharply. “You forget her.”
“I do.” Concealment enchantments, I thought. It had to be enchantments. “How do I stop the forgetting?”
“There is a way,” Chihiro Hatanaka said. “Mr. Victorsson, I can help you find Ellie Jones.”
Epilogue
Somewhere in the gritty fog infesting the borderland hell, a vampire wailed. They prowled out there, the more idiotic of Lord Dracula’s children, feeding on each other and concentrating their toxic blood.
Most understood the warning barrier around his pit and backed away before he caught a glimpse of a pale limb or a red eye. Every so often, one did stumble near and kick debris into his hole, and dust would rain down onto his head.
Sooner or later, one would come too close and fall in. They were soldiers without a general, the howling vampires above, and the pathetic fights to fill the power vacuum would likely lead to an idiot or two tripping during a scuffle.
The small, hunched vampire who had regained his soul—Ivan, his name was—occasionally leaned over the pit’s edge and stared in quiet contemplation. They never exchanged words. Then the Souled One vanished once again into the fog.
He did not remember his own name, though he knew it was not Lord Dracula, nor was it Brother. His body might have been stitched together by the same madman who stitched together Frank Victorsson, but he would not bedevil the man with a fraternal claim ever again.
He could, at least in that small way, redeem himself.
He did remember Lord Dracula’s will and desires, and his solidified ragings. He also remembered the bitter, cold gamesmanship of the personality that called itself Brother. That personality had wanted to be the winner, but of what, he did not understand.
There were other personalities in this body with him, all vampires, all consumed by a cold-as-death need to steal life. It was a force of the universe unto itself, this need to suck away energy and reason.
Was he a vampire? His new body had been built of vampire parts. All the demons dancing its edges were vampires.
Magic still coiled around him, still flitted and touched and boiled inside the now-inert armor he still wore, but access had been taken from him. His magic—the intrinsic magic of his cobbled-together form—wanted nothing to do with the mind who now steered its arms, legs, hands, and feet.
Yet here he was, a man who had broken fingers, ripped out nails, and destroyed joints digging bare-handed through the stone walls of a now long-gone prison—a man wrongly incarcerated for a murder he did not commit—digging yet again.
Had he gotten out of his first prison? Was this his afterlife? Was being the only mundane man inside an eight-foot-tall walking vampire his eternal torment?
No, there was an outside. Brother walked it for close to two centuries. Dracula yearned to ravish it and burn it to nothing. The other vampires wanted to feed on its living corpse.
So he dug. The cutting end of the remains of Dracula’s pike bit into the gravel and dust at the floor of his hell. It sliced through the dry, hard-packed ash. It broke through layers and layers of dust and death. He’d dug down a good twelve feet already.
There had to be a bottom. This pocket curled in on itself—he had walked for what felt like months only to find his marker again—but even a curled ribbon had an edge. There had to be a way through the layers.
He would not give up his one real hope. There had to be a way out.
There had to be.
He raised his arms over his head, breathed in the foul air, and slammed the pike into the shale-like dryness under his feet. Radial cracks snapped though the solid gray, brittle not-quite-stone and echoed off the sides of his pit. Dust puffed, and gravel rattled down the sides.
These pieces were larger than many others, and even. He’d add them to his steps he’d cut into the side of his pit, the ones he used to transport debris to the barrier.
Up above, vampires shrieked. Sounds of a scuffle followed, and the wet thudding of a body broken on his rubble pile.
Then nothing. No shuffling. No footfalls. No disturbances in the ceaseless and sulfuric fog.
He rubbed his eyes and peered up at the edges of his pit.
Black fabric fluttered in the roiling fog. It reached out over the pit, then gently drifted down to drape over the dusty wall.
He could not tell the true color of the fabric’s blackness. Was it so empty it reflected nothing but the void? Did it hold in its threads all possible colors, thus projecting everything at once? Was the black obsidian, and shiny? Did a subtle rainbow dance through it as if it were ink?
It was all, yet it was not.
A blackness-clad leg appeared, then another. Then the legs’ owner leaned forward.
Sweet platinum curls cascaded around the woman’s youthful, round face. A rosy glow brightened her babyish cheeks. Brilliantly violet eyes blinked as she tipped her head. Her large breasts heaved over her knees as she looked down at him, and she also carried more heft and abundant thickness to her than he expected on a vampire.
Her smile was also much warmer and alive than he expected.
“Hi!” she called. “My name’s Anthea. Would you like some company down there?”
He set down Dracula’s pike. “No,” he said.
She pouted. “Ah, don’t be that way.” The black fabric of her dress coiled up her neck and into her hair, and pulled the curls away from her face. “We’re all stuck here, you know. Why not keep each other company?”
She wasn’t like any of the other vampires. Not at all.
“Go away,” he said. He didn’t need an odd vampire taking up room in his pit.
“Now, see, here’s the thing.” She leaned over again, and banged her heels against the pit’s wall. “My dress is telling me that all the magic of this place emanated from you, or at least that body.” She waved her hand through the fog. “There’s another here, someone with a soul. He helped with all this. I can’t find him.” She looked down again. “I’ve been looking.”
She most definitely was different.
“I came through the gate because of Lord Dracula’s call.” She shook her head. “My dress is angry. It thinks I should have been able to resist, but sometimes I’m not as strong as my sisters.”
Power radiated off the black fabric as if it was magic—not enchanted. Not an artifact, but a physical, visceral magic in and of itself.
He stepped closer to her swinging toes. “What are you?” he asked.
She smiled again. “I’m a vampire, silly. Can I come down? The nice thing to do is to invite me in.”
“No,” he said. “You stay there.” He wasn’t about to invite any vampire into the one way out of this pocket borderland hellscape.
Anthea pouted again. “But you’re big and strong and it’s scary up here.” The magic of the black dress tightened around her throat. Her mouth rounded, and she blinked. “Oh,” she said.
The dress did something. It corrected her somehow.
“My dress wants me to tell you that I am more than capable of taking care of myself up here. It wants me to remember that I am a vampire, even if all I ever wanted was to be a singer.” She leaned over again. “It doesn’t like it when I do that.”
“Do what?” he asked.
She waved her fingers in front of her face. “Be manipulative. It chose me because I can be good.” She smiled again. “I tutor the neighborhood kids. Help them audition. Work with them on getting an agent. All that.”
She tutored children?
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s weird. I know. But the dresses, they’r
e sick of being harbingers, you know? Ushering in apocalypses is sort of depressing. They’re not really needed anymore, either. Not with the Internet. So they’re looking to move up in the magical world. Become something new. Adapt or die, you know. So they chose us, the dark ones who can be good, to help them with their retraining.”
She grinned and her vampire fangs shimmered. “My sisters, they want to be good. Their dresses like that. My dress has to remind me every so often that I’m along for the ride, but I don’t mind. Sometimes the whole evil vampire thing as is as depressing and boring as being a harbinger.”
She grinned again. “Do you ever think about that? How boring it is to be a regular vampire? I miss the sun.”
His instincts were to run, but he was in his pit, and had not yet uncovered a true escape route.
She blinked her lovely violet eyes. “My dress says it can help with the digging. It wants out of here just as much as you do.”
“What are you?”
She raised her hands over her head and her lovely breasts thrust forward. “Not what am I, silly! What I’m going to be. I’m going to get you out of here,” she said. “I’m your guide and you’re my first client. My dress and I, we’re auditioning for a new job.”
He picked up the pike and backed against the wall.
“We’re going to take you to Valhalla,” she said. “Because I’m going to be a Valkyrie.”
Wolf Hunted
Coming soon…
When the mundane son of the werewolf who turned Axlam Gerard shows up in Alfheim spewing words of atonement, everyone in town knows he’s lying. There’s nothing they can do though, at least not magically, and unraveling the threat he poses to the Alfheim Pack falls to Frank Victorsson and Sheriff Ed Martinez.
But Frank is consumed with finding his mystery woman, and things quickly spiral out of control…
WOLF HUNTED, Northern Creatures #4, coming in late 2018.
The Worlds of
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Genre-bending Science Fiction about
Elf Raised (Northern Creatures Book 3) Page 19
