by AJ Mullican
I bite down on a succulent purple berry, and a blob of juice squirts across the room, square in Billy’s eye. “Oops!”
Billy’s face flares beet red as he rubs his eye to get the juice out. He scowls, and just as he opens his mouth—probably to yell at me—a purple light flares in his eye. He pauses, cocks his head to the side, and shrugs. Just like that, his anger fades, as though he ate the spirit energy rather than getting it in his eye.
I gape at the half-eaten berry between my fingers before fixing my gaze on Finn. “Finn, babe, can the magic from these be absorbed rather than eaten?”
He blinks with a blank expression. “Yes, but why would you want to consume it that way?”
“How much would it take to absorb? One drop? A hundred?”
Finn shrugs. “The magic contained in fae fruit is extremely concentrated. Some water-touched or life-touched fae create poultices out of their fruits and save them for times when they need to heal someone who is too injured to eat, or if their own magics are depleted. One drop carries more magic than any other substance known to fae.”
Lena narrows her eyes. “What are you thinking, Molli?”
“I’m not sure yet.” The wheels in my head spin at a dizzying speed, and though it’s a little out there, I think I have an idea. “Finn, Oren, Kalen, how potent would the magic be if we diluted it? Like, how much could we thin it out with water or something like that before it’s no longer effective?”
The three fae exchange shocked glances before turning back to me. “You wish to put our magic in water? Why?”
I shake my head. “Not your magic. Mine.”
“You’re going to baptize them!” Lena’s eyes go wide as she blurts out my thoughts, and she sits back. “Damn. Good ol’ Southern baptism. And you can make these magic berries now? Like, that’s part of the fae package?”
“Yep.” I demonstrate with a flash of my white magic light, opening my fingers to show the glistening white berries. “I don’t know how many I can produce before it drains me, but depending on how much we can stand to dilute the juices and still have them be effective, it might be enough. I was thinking of using the warehouse’s sprinkler system to deliver it. We juice a few handfuls of these, pour it in the reserve for the sprinklers, and boom! Just like Lena said: instant fae baptism.”
“What would it do to the lifeline tattoos?” Callie’s face, pale and drawn, wears a mask of terror. “What if it erases those with all the others?”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Cal. I can’t undo those, remember? Mine is positive life magic; it can’t erase life. Just the damage done by the demons.” I extend my hand to her. “Here. Try one. Won’t harm you, I promise.”
It occurs to me as she inspects a little white berry that I don’t know what life magic will do to her. I mean, Kalen’s fire magic increases stamina and energy, Finn’s spirit magic soothes the soul, and Oren’s water magic heals. What will my life magic do?
Here’s hoping I don’t knock her up with this. Lena would kill me.
Callie takes a tentative nibble. Her eyes light up, and she pops the rest of the berry in her mouth. “Mm! This is really good, Molli! I could eat these all day. They’re kind of sugary, but not too sweet. Almost like … mango mixed with pomegranate mixed with strawberry. Just the right combination of sweet and tart. Kind of like you.”
Wait, I’m “sweet and tart”? What does that mean?
“Molli’s flavor has always been perfect.” Kalen flashes a broad grin. “Were you to be a mate to her like us, you would—”
I clamp a hand over his mouth. “Enough of that. Remember what I told you about oversharing?”
He rolls his eyes and nods.
“So you’ll behave?”
Another nod, and I let him go.
Lena walks over and pulls back the collar of Callie’s t-shirt, peeking at the life-coil tattoo. “Well, Cal, you’re still alive, and you’re life tat’s still there. Guess you were worried for nothing.” She pats her sister on the shoulder and ruffles her hair, reaching for Callie’s hand to snag a berry of her own.
Gripped by a sudden insecurity, I swipe the berries back before Lena can try one. “We, uh, need to save these. For the warehouse.” In all honesty, I have no idea what they’ll do to someone who’s already quite literally overflowing with life energy, and I’d rather not spark Lena’s labor right before we plan on storming the warehouse. Something tells me that woman wouldn’t let us stop her from busting down the doors right there with us, labor or no.
Lena frowns but doesn’t press the issue.
I turn to Cherry with the berries clenched in my fingers. “Do you guys have a food processor? Blender, maybe? It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to go all I Love Lucy on these things to get the juice out.”
Rick and Billy gigglesnort at my mention of the infamous winemaking episode.
“Laugh all you want, guys,” Holden says, “but if we don’t have a blender, it’ll be your feet squelching berries for hours on end.”
“Hey! That’s not fair!” Billy pouts.
“You laugh, you volunteer.”
Cherry holds up a hand to stop the bickering. “We have a blender and a food processor. There’s no need to stomp on the berries to juice them.”
“Do we have time to implement this plan?” Aistan runs a hand through his shoulder-length hair. “We do not know how big the water supply for the sprinkler system is, how much of this magic juice we need per possessed human, how long before it takes effect … By the time we determine all of this, the horde we saw in the warehouse could have overtaken Nowhere.”
Holden scrubs his face with his hands. “If Geiger were here, we could calculate all that shit in, like, five minutes. Since he’s gone, we’ll just have to wing it.”
The mood in the room sobers. All the Hunters look down, and their lights dim.
Lena clears her throat. “Well, we’ll have to conduct our own little experiment, then.” She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a small glass vial. “Juice me, Molli. I’ll take this, make a solution of it at home, and we’ll trap a possessed human to see how well one drop works. If we splash the person with the concoction and their possession tats dissolve, then we’ll know it works. After that, it’s just a matter of seeing how much energy it takes to exorcise one—thus telling us how much I need to store to blast the masses at the warehouse. Easy.”
Nothing about Lena’s plan sounds easy, but we reach a reluctant consensus. I squeeze one of my berries into her vial, giving her enough drops to make a few potions, and Lena, Callie, and the demons take their leave of us to go home, where Lena says she has other ingredients that might prove useful.
I think she just misses her home. That, and if she needs to charge her witchy batteries, she’s going to have to get loud. In a house this crowded, it’s tough.
For the next couple of hours, I conjure berries until I’ve expended almost all my energy. It takes all three of my fae to help me back to Rick and Billy’s room, and by the time we get there I’m too exhausted to even think about any kind of bedtime shenanigans. I curl up among my lovers and zonk out almost as soon as my head rests against Kalen’s chest.
Chapter 18
I wake up refreshed and much less drained, but there’s no rest for the wicked today; I have to conjure more stuff for the Hunters to juice if we’re going to be certain that we have enough. I’d rather go for overkill than come up short in the thick of things.
Lena, Callie, and the incubi storm in about an hour after everyone wakes up, and they have three chained prisoners with them. From what I can tell by looking at them, at least one of them is possessed, characterized by the rotting body and jerking movements. Another, younger prisoner—mid-twenties, if I were to guess—sits covered in tattoos, like Callie was. The third seems to have tattoos as well, though more similar to those the incubi wear.
Did Lena bring a fucking demon into Holden and Cherry’s house?
Judging from the look on Holden
’s red face, I think she did.
“Why do I smell an extra demon here?” he growls. “Only two of those people there are human. What the fuck, Lena?”
Lena shrugs a shoulder and rubs her belly. “We needed to test the Molli-juice potion on a pure demon, and I’ll be damned if we try it on one of my boyfriends first.” She kicks the bound demon with the toe of her combat boot. “This fucker was stupid enough to get caught with the others, so she’ll do.”
The female demon hisses, baring teeth that in no way fit with the human shape she’s taken.
A series of snaps and cracks draws my attention back to Holden, and I gape as he starts transforming. “That’s why you brought the fucking potion with you; so you could test it out there and come back with the results.” The gravelly voice that comes out of his half-mouth, half-snout sends an icy chill down my spine. I’ve seen the wolves in action, but never really mid-shift before.
Hollywood’s got nothing on the real thing.
“Chill, dude. I used up what I had to save a few people, but I needed you guys to see what I saw.” She holds out her hand. “Molli, you got any left in you right now?”
I gulp and nod. “Yeah. I rested last night, and I’ve barely gotten started this morning.”
“Good. Hand ‘em over.”
I oblige, conjuring just a few berries, one for each prisoner. Since Lena originally only had the juice from one, I assume three will be more than enough for her demonstration.
“Cool. Okay, so watch this poor sap here who got himself possessed by a demon of wrath.” Lena holds a berry over the head of the rotting person and squeezes. A few drops of juice fall on his snarling head, and they sizzle when they hit. Sparkling steam rises from his scalp, and he seizes in the middle of the living room. The strange black chains binding him rattle, and I cringe at the sight of his convulsions.
Then, a few seconds after the seizure starts, the man’s back arches to an unnatural angle, and a thick black ooze emerges from his chest. The ooze drips to the floor around him, coalescing in a mass of squirming spiked tentacles and teeth.
Wrath demons in their natural form are not pretty things.
“Exhibit A.” Lena walks around the expelled demon, magical energy sparking at her fingertips. “If the body’s almost gone, Molli’s essence exorcises the inhabitant and, if you’ll look closely, heals the host.”
Sure enough, the rot disappeared completely, replaced by freshly-grown skin, if a little raw from the process.
With a flick of Lena’s wrist, the chains unravel from the startled human and wrap themselves around the writhing wrath demon. Despite its lack of a definite form, it seems to remain secured with the chains, though I would’ve figured it could slither out from them. A closer look with my fae sight shows a hint of ruddy orange glow, indicating Lena’s demonic-laced magic.
The freshly-exorcised man trembles at the sight of the chained demon, and his eyes roll back in his head as he passes out, likely from the shock of it.
Ignoring the now-contained spike-ball of hate, Lena steps over to the young woman with the tattoos similar to the ones I healed off Callie. “Exhibit B: One of the babies kidnapped from the hospital recently. This girl’s a couple months old in human time.” She squeezes another berry, and the same sizzle takes place, though without the violent physical reaction. The woman’s head tilts back, and her eyes and mouth open. Through those, the demon slithers out, snake-like. A few quick hand movements on Lena’s part transfer the chains as the woman shrinks and grows younger. Arman kneels behind her and scoops her up into his arms once she’s toddler-sized, cradling her closer as she reverts to her natural infant state.
The reverted baby coos and grabs Arman’s finger with her tiny hand. The life-coil tattoo remains, peeking out from under the voluminous folds of the dress she had been wearing as an adult. I breathe a sigh of relief as I see a long, sturdy lifeline.
“As you can see, it doesn’t matter if they’ve been possessed long enough to rot or if they’ve been marked with possession and aging tattoos; the life-touched fae magic heals all of that, and expels the squatter.”
Holden, still half-wolf, growls. “So now I have three fucking demons in my living room. I fail to see why you brought the spare when you now have two samples right here.”
Lena turns to Cherry. “Hey, Cherry, can I have a cup of water? Half a glass will do.”
While Cherry goes to the kitchen, Holden circles the room, eyes on the three demons bound on the carpet. “Well? You going to explain this?”
Lena doesn’t answer. Instead, she takes the water from Cherry, squeezes exactly one drop out of the last berry in her hand, and swirls the drop in the cup until the whole glass glows in my fae vision. “Molli, kid, you’ve got some potent shit right here. So we’ve seen what the pure stuff does. Now I want to you to see what this diluted version does to the demons, both ones who have been recently exorcised, and to the one that’s still at full strength.”
She takes a few steps back and flings her arm wide, splashing all three demons with the solution. The effect is immediate—and violent.
All three demons writhe and squeal, their screeching voices grating at my ears. I try covering them with my hands, but the sounds still permeate.
As they react to the potion, the demons convulse and fight against their restraints. The one who had taken a human form reverts to what I assume is her true demonic self, humanoid in shape and curvaceous, but with horns, fangs, wings, tail, and claws. I wonder for a moment why she’s still so relatively “normal” compared to the natural shapes of the other two demons, but then I realize that she must be a succubus, a demon that’s supposed to elicit sexual desire from humans. Makes sense, then, that her demonic form would look at least somewhat human.
The demons’ flailing becomes frantic, the screams crescendo, and then a flash of bright white light blinds me for a moment. When my vision clears, the three demons lie motionless, and I can’t tell if they’re alive or dead.
Lena reaches down and picks up the wrath demon by a spiky tentacle. “This dude here? Was at near full strength inside the host. Now? I could probably stomp him to death with my bootheel and not even sweat.” She tosses it at Samsher’s feet, and Sam does just that to the beast. “Same with the one that inhabited the aged baby. This last one, though, is what I wanted everyone to see. Aistan?”
The incubus strides forward and draws a demonblade. He grabs a handful of the succubus’s hair and sneers. “You betrayed Father. You disobeyed His orders, went against His will.” I expect him to use the sword to slit her throat, but instead he twists his hand sharply, and I hear a sick snap.
The succubus goes limp, and he drops her body.
Lena takes back over. “So you can’t kill a succubus by snapping her neck—not normally, anyway. Decapitation or a good ol’ stab to the heart, sure, but broken bones and even severed spinal cords just regenerate—as long as all the pieces are there. Because she was weakened by the solution, though, you can see how easily Aistan dispatched her.” She kicks the body with her boot. “Won’t come back from this.”
“How does my life magic do that?” Despite the fact that the demon Aistan killed was probably an evil bitch, I hate to think that my magic could weaken someone enough to get them killed, demon or no. What if we go to release the diluted berry juice in the warehouse and one of Lena’s incubi are caught in the spray?
“She lived on death. We questioned her, and she had no qualms about killing anyone and anything that got in her way. My theory? Your magic is the antithesis of death; she embraced death. She made herself weak by trying to play tough chick.”
“But what about Kamran, Aistan, Samsher, and Arman? What if they get that stuff on them?”
Lena shrugs again and runs a finger along the inside of the “Molli-juice” cup. She wipes Aistan’s cheek with her wet finger and stands back.
Nothing happens.
“I don’t get it,” Cherry says. “He just killed something.”
; “But he did it out of a sense of justice. He didn’t do it for the pure twisted pleasure of it. My guys are all ‘good’ demons, or as good as demons get. They’ll be fine if they get sprinkled during the assault.” She turns to me. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“Indeed.” Arman rocks the baby in his arms. “We tested the serum on each of us. None were harmed by it.”
He’s gonna be good with Ben. That incubus is a natural with babies; she hasn’t cried once, not even when the other demons screamed. I’m impressed.
From the blissful adoration on Lena’s face, I’d wager she’s smitten by his infant-handling skills. She places a hand on his arm and gazes up at him. “Could you plane shift her and the unconscious one to the hospital, babe? Probably best to make it somewhere they’ll be found quickly enough, but not where you’ll be seen.”
Arman nods, switches his grip to hold the girl in one arm, and hefts the passed-out human onto his shoulder before he disappears in a flash of dark red light.
More pops and crunches and sickening squelches behind me signal Holden’s shift back to normal. When he speaks, his voice remains hoarse but less feral. “You could’ve called or something to warn me you were going to pull that stunt.”
Lena shakes her head. “Not enough time for that. They’re amassing in that warehouse like crazy, and it’s only going to get worse the longer we wait. We caught these three in an alley near the warehouse district, trying to forcefully recruit some teens.”
Callie blanches, and Billy growls. “Teenagers?”
“Barely Calliope’s age,” Samsher says with a scowl. He stomps on the remaining demon, resulting in a sickening crunch, and twists his heel in the remains. “Coward.”
