Shoot the Messenger

by Pippa Dacosta

  The signal crackled. I straightened. “Kellee?!”

  His voice faded.

  “Kellee…!”

  “I’m here… I was testing the limits of the signal. I’m in a building across from Arcon. Any farther and I lose you.”

  I fell back against the wall and closed my eyes. “You have to find out who he is.” My voice shook. He would hear the trembling and know how much this was killing me. “He has power, a lot of it. So far from home for so long, he shouldn’t have any at all. Ask Talen.”

  “Talen?” Kellee balked.

  “He might know who he is or suspect. I need a name to know who I’m dealing with. As I am now, I’m stumbling around in the dark, trying to pick a fight with something that could be harmless or might kill me with a flick of his fingers.” Or worse. I already suspected Larsen was the latter kind. But a name would seal it.

  “All right,” he reluctantly agreed. “But give me more to go on. I don’t even know what he looks like as fae.”

  “He has warfae markings. The generals were marked in the wars. Those with more marks killed m—”

  “I know what they mean.” His frustration and anger simmered through the signal. “Aren’t most older fae marked that way? I need something unique to him. Something Talen might recognize.”

  What would Kellee think of my marks? The death of his people was likely long before my time, but the marks—rewards for slaughter—had remained the same for countless centuries, perhaps millennia. I could never let Kellee see mine. “All right, I’ll get something for you to take to Talen.”

  We fell silent, but the signal still held. The suffocating quiet closed in, waiting to smother me when he was gone. “Kellee?”

  “Yes, Kesh.”

  “Can you… can you just talk?”

  “—what?”

  “Please.” I don’t want to be alone.

  “No, I said… about what? What do you want me to say?”

  “Anything.” The single word came out in a rush.

  “All right.” He cleared his throat. “Do you know how hard it was to get invited to the Arcon party? I had to track down a guest and steal his ID. The guy never saw what hit him. He woke up hungover, with no memory of attending the party.”

  I smiled. “You stole his ID. That’s not very marshal-like.”

  “The law doesn’t seem to apply around you.”

  “Kellee…” I wanted to ask him to stay, wanted to ask him if he hated me for who I was, wanted to ask if he thought we would both walk away from this unscathed. But I couldn’t speak the words. I didn’t know him. He didn’t really know me. I was desperate, I knew that. At some point, Larsen would decide what to do with me, and it would all be over, one way or another.

  “You keep saying my name.” He chuckled. “I’m not going anywhere. What do you want to know?”

  Do you hate me like I hate him? I couldn’t ask him, so I said instead, “How was your day marshaling?”

  He told me how he had helped subdue a protest against water rations outside one of the Halow embassies. A few days ago, he’d caught an armed thief in the sinks and brought him in before the guy could sell his stolen goods. He’d returned the items to their rightful owners. He talked about his work, about others in his department, friends he had, the normal life he led. I crouched against the wall and listened to the sound of his voice. It was nice—too nice. Larsen would return, and I had to get him to talk.

  “Marshal?” I asked, interrupting his story about someone who had tried to pickpocket him in the sinks. “Don’t come to Arcon again.”

  He didn’t answer right away, likely because he had every intention of returning to Arcon. “I have an appointment with Larsen in two days to discuss an assault charge. Somebody reported what they saw at the party.”

  “Cancel it.”

  “No.”

  “Kellee. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  “You forget I’ve dealt with the fae. I know exactly what he’s capable of. I’m keeping the appointment.”

  I remembered the heat in Larsen’s gaze, the terrible knowledge that he could destroy a human life for entertainment. His kind had watched me do the same for them countless times.

  “If he suspects you’re on to him, he will kill you.”

  “I’m not that easy to kill. Will you be there?”

  “I…” I scanned the empty room. “If I get you something solid to bring to Talen, will you cancel?”

  “Kesh, you don’t need to protect me. Doing the right thing…? It’s what I do. It’s my job. I’m not canceling.”

  “Dammit, Marshal. Your right thing will get you killed.”

  “I don’t expect someone like you to understand.”

  Someone like me? As though I couldn’t know what the right thing was? I laughed bitterly and hoped he heard it. “A slave-raised killer, you mean?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Forget it. It’s amazing what I can hear without all your pretty distracting me.” I plucked the comms off and dropped it into my pocket. I knew what he had meant. The fae had raised me to kill. How could I know what doing the right thing meant when I’d been doing the wrong thing since they first put a blade in my hand and told me to kill the child in the cell next to mine for a pat on the head?

  But my moral compass wasn’t so broken that I didn’t know the marshal’s sense of justice meant he would walk into an impossible fight. Larsen would eat him alive.

  I returned to my room and picked up the broken fragment of glass. Dried fae blood flaked off and rained around my boots. I had to turn the situation on its head. While Larsen held my reins, nothing would change. It was time to see just how much I mattered to the warfae and why.

  I sunk the blade into my wrist, embraced the pain, and tore open a vein.

  Chapter 17

  Blood loss made the world spin, or maybe it was magic, because everything around me was soft and bright and smelled fresh and too wonderful to be real. No, wait, that was magic. His.

  I lifted a hand and tried to rub the fog from my eyes. Larsen was here, leaning against a table, upright and rigid like a blade forged in Faerie’s deepest fires and sheathed in leather. Complete with wrist bracers, I noticed, as my eyes cleared. For the first time, I took the time to admire the points of his ears peeking out from his waterfall of black hair. The tight braids were gone. His hair hung loose over one shoulder. It wasn’t all straight. Some ends licked up. I wondered if he hated that. He seemed the type to want everything as it should be.

  Wait. I blinked lazily. Where was I? Dark wood panels wrapped the room up tight. The furniture, all wood, dictated each area. A desk, a table, chairs. But something was wrong here. The softness didn’t fit. And then I realized there was no tek. None at all. What light there was streamed in through the windows. Black drapes stirred. Drapes that looked like his hair.

  Wait, what? Had I been drugged?

  No. Yes. Maybe. Why couldn’t I think straight? I dropped my hand onto the pillow. Oh good, a bed. I was on a bed. A proper bed, not like the cot I’d been forced to sleep in. Maybe if I lay here a while, I’d get to the thing I needed to do eventually—whatever that thing was.

  My fingers brushed the iron collar, and for a moment, I forgot the terrible thing I had done. I was back in Faerie, before that night when everything changed, before the first collar had been removed. Back when I had the illusion of freedom, but really, I had been no freer than the pitiful saru children still locked in their cells. Sometimes—actually, most times, an illusion was enough. Who needed reality when you had Faerie to answer your every desire, to tend to your every need? The only price was blood. And I’d paid with plenty of mine and that of my saru brothers and sisters. The boy, Aeon’s blood. He hadn’t bled like the others. But he had died all the same. “Oh, how fragile mortals are.” The fae had laughed. “Look at them fall to her.”

  “Look at them fall,” I muttered, reaching for the memory of Aeon’s hand, holding on to it for a lit
tle while longer even as it cooled and stiffened.

  And then Larsen was there, peering into my eyes, spoiling everything. “Go away,” I told him and tried to brush the vision of the fae away.

  One of his perfect eyebrows arched. “That was a foolish thing you did.”

  Killing the queen? I wondered. But she had told me to.

  What did I do? What was I supposed to do? Something… something soon. Heat throbbed up my arm. I clawed at the bandage.

  “Leave it,” Larsen’s voice ordered, distant now as he moved away.

  I looked for him and found him walking away, and damn if he didn’t know how fine he looked while just walking. I’d seen them fight. I’d fought ones like him. There wasn’t an inch on that body that didn’t have a purpose. He could run like the wind, and then stop and turn and cut his enemies down before they could draw breath to beg for mercy. They killed mercilessly. I had always admired that, always aspired to it.

  I’m a bad person.

  I blinked at the ceiling, my thoughts coming back to me. My arm. I’d cut myself, and here it had brought me, inside what had to be his personal chambers. Here I would discover things about him. Here he would have secrets. Secrets I would tell Kellee, who would tell the imprisoned Talen. And we’d know for sure who our insane fae was. Though I suspected… didn’t I? I knew…

  I turned my head. Metal rattled.

  My fingers traced a line of iron links. I didn’t need to look to know my triumph had been short-lived.

  “Well, this is degrading,” I mumbled.

  “It is what it is,” he dismissed.

  Chain links dangled from my collar and trailed to where the chain connected to a latch in the wall. I tried to summon rage but couldn’t. He was right. It was what it was. And it was nothing I hadn’t dealt with before. Not since I was a naughty saru child tinkering with tek.

  I dropped my head back down and wished I hadn’t when his citrusy scent tingled on my tongue. He slept in this bed. How nice for him.

  “Unlatch me now and I’ll kill you fast instead of slow when the time comes.”

  “Kill me with what?” He smirked. “Bad thoughts?”

  A snarl bubbled up. “Have I not earned the right to freedom? I bowed to you. I meant it.”

  “Worthless.” He gestured. “Humans lie.”

  “So you keep saying, and yet here you are, living among them. You’ve been here so long, pretending to be human for so long, that maybe you think you are one?”

  “I know what I am.”

  “An arrogant, selfish, sociopathic, narcissistic sluagh-bait?”

  He chuckled, and the sound did horribly wonderful things to the feminine part of my brain that seemed to be more and more in control around him.

  “You really can be entertaining.”

  “Fuck you.” Not exactly my most intelligent of replies, but I was losing my patience. “You want me to entertain you? Unchain me.”

  His smirk grew, and so did my hatred. “I will,” he said. “When I can trust you.”

  I wondered where my coat was. The comms—my only method of reaching Kellee—would be in the pocket. At least Larsen hadn’t undressed me. I lay, fully clothed, on top of his sheets. Five years of freedom, a lifetime of killing, and I was reduced to a plaything tied to a bed.

  Twisting on my side, I propped my head on a hand. “Am I your pet, then?”

  His lips twitched and his eyes sparkled. “Perhaps.”

  No, that wasn’t it. This wasn’t a sexual thing. “A challenge? To yourself.” He wet his lips and looked down. Yes. Something in those words rang true. “You want to see if you can resist the Faerie in me?”

  He looked up, his smile still dancing in the corner of his mouth. No, not that, then.

  I touched my collar. “This is for you as well as me, right?” He didn’t want to make it easy for himself. The collar stopped him from turning me into a mindless human puppet, so he wanted me coherent. He wanted me to fight. I had seen evidence of that already. “You’re curious.” Yes, his eyes focused, unblinking. “Your queen adored me. Your people adored me. They cheered my name. Wraithmaker.” I drew out my name, giving it dramatic emphasis. “But you weren’t there. You don’t understand, but you want to. You’ve missed so much by being here, sacrificed so much.” Yes, his smile faded, and a new intensity settled on his face. “What did they see in me? What did Mab see in me—”

  “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  I knew what he meant. They all wanted to know why I’d killed their queen. “Because I am saru, and no matter how high up you lift me, I will always be saru. Because you taught me to slaughter, because it’s all I’m good at, because I was so close to her that it was almost too easy.”

  “No.” He came forward and stopped a stride away from the bed. “Lies. But I will find out the truth.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Give me my whip. Unchain me. And I’ll tell you the truth.”

  He dismissed my request with a dry laugh and headed for the door. “I will unchain you, saru, when I am ready.” He shut the door behind him.

  I tugged on the chain, knowing it was useless. I got my fingers under the collar and pulled, but it didn’t give. All right. So, this wasn’t necessarily bad.

  As the chain only allowed me a few steps from the bed, I sat on the edge and diligently studied my surroundings. There had to be something here that would tell me more about Larsen.

  Books sat snugly on wooden shelves. The last time I had seen a book with paper pages, it had been on Faerie. Only the fae had access to enough wood to be so frivolous as to paint paper pages with words. The spines of Larsen’s books were all marked with swirling fae text. He must have either smuggled them into Halow or bought them at an underground auction. The sale of fae goods had been outlawed centuries ago, but someone like Larsen would have connections. Unusual pieces were scattered around the room. A lamp that looked as though it had been grown, not made, and even the rug had a suspiciously natural appearance, like living grass.

  If anyone ever had any doubt about Larsen’s identity, it was all here, in this room. All I had to do was find a key piece of evidence that would reveal his true identity.

  He left me long enough for the wound beneath the bandage to start itching and my bladder to ache. I was dozing when he strode in. His human illusion rippled carelessly off him before the door swung closed. He crossed the room, heading straight for his desk. Pressing his palms to the desktop, he bowed his head and sighed. His shoulders trembled.

  I’d been about to demand that he release me so I could at least relieve myself, but now I stayed silent and watched his struggle. After a few moments, he lifted his head, breathed in and held that breath.

  Something had shaken him. If I knew what that thing was, I might have a weapon to use.

  He moved around his desk and melted into the chair behind it. His glare flicked up and widened at the sight of me. He’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. A shadow crossed his face, and then with a flick of his fingers, the chain attached to my collar vanished.

  I reached through the air where it had been, expecting to find the cool metal. When I looked back, he was smiling. Had the chain been an illusion all along?

  Channeling the anger down deep, I visited his bathroom. The luxurious suite was double the size of my container home and furnished with the fae’s typical elegance. A panoramic window revealed Calicto’s domes from hundreds of feet high. I wouldn’t be leaping from this one.

  I stripped off the bandage, finding the wound healed but for a jagged, raw red line. After dry-showering, I rummaged around his cupboards and found a silken robe. It hung off my shoulders and licked around my ankles. The smell of lemons scented the air. A shudder ran through me as the cool silk slid across my skin. Damn him. He wasn’t even with me and his touch still manipulated me.

  All I had to do was find something unique to him. Something Kellee could use. Once we had a name, I would know for certain what I needed to do.

  My hand lingered
on the door handle. There was a way… In his current state he was vulnerable and alone. He had already revealed an attraction to the forbidden fruit that was me.

  Fighting, I could do. But seducing? That had never been in my skill set. All fae were masters of desire. Humans were, and always would be, their pets. The way I was around him? It wasn’t something I could consciously control. Something in human DNA sought the attention of the fae. Master. Slave. It was written into our programming from the time they first seeded humanity on Earth. And I was saru. Born into their service. I’d fought for their appraisal, killed for their adoration, and risen in their ranks, but all that meant was I’d worn all the right clothes, opened all the right veins, and said all the right things while I bowed low.

  I wasn’t sure I had it in me to manipulate Larsen sexually. But he sure had it in him to manipulate me. I was a fly pretending to be the spider, and all I had to capture him with was his own web of lies.

  I breathed in, steeled my iron-like saru heart and soul, and opened the door.

  He hadn’t moved from the chair. With his head resting back and his eyes closed, I wondered if he was sleeping, but he couldn’t be. He would never let his guard down around me.

  “Tell me about her,” he said, his voice sudden and clear. Not sleeping, just resting his eyes. He kept them closed, dark lashes resting against his smooth skin.

  He meant the queen. If I told him, if we found some common ground, he might open up.

  “She was kind.” His lips tightened, and I added, “Until she wasn’t.”

  His chest slowly rose and fell, the leather straps breathing with him. Tantalizing glimpses of his warfae marks peeked out from under his collar. It was too easy, too enticing to imagine sliding those buckles open. But if I uncovered the extent of his markings, I’d know how high in the ranks he had risen, and I’d know the kind of fae I was dealing with. Were his marks from the wars, from killing humans or from slaughtering the likes of Kellee’s people. I wanted—needed to know.