“Yes, yes. Whatever.” Hrokr would let the kelpie believe what he wanted as long as he stayed motivated. He slapped the kelpie’s non-wounded shoulder. “Skylar, my new friend, we have work! There’s someone I want you to find….”
* * *
II.
* * *
Alfheim Regional Hospital, Alfheim, Minnesota….
His wife had promised their child to the World Raven.
Dagrun had needed to get free of St. Martin’s magic. She’d had to placate a trickster. The elves needed to learn the truth about whose magic they were dealing with. The world was on the cusp of a new Ragnarok.
Arne understood why. Reasons and whys connected up in spectacular clarity in his mind.
He rubbed his notched ear. His wife had promised their child to a trickster.
He’d already known a Ragnarok approached. The world had its cycles. The new information Dagrun brought home was the intensity of the coming storm.
Most Ragnaroks hit like hurricanes. Some were category twos. Other, category fives. Involvement of World Spirits meant they were staring down the barrel of an extinction event.
And his wife had traded their unborn babe for help saving the world.
Arne stood at the window and rubbed his sore shoulder—the scuffle with Titania had left him with a twinge he’d need to massage out tonight, something he shouldn’t have to do, with his magic. And as King.
His centuries were clearly catching up with him.
Dagrun flipped through a city file her office manager had brought over. His wife would continue serving the mundanes through the coming storm, and through giving birth if the healers would let her.
She tapped the paper. “The grant money came through.”
She and Magnus had been working on establishing farm-to-table distribution from the neighboring tribal lands into the Farmer’s Market and restaurants of Alfheim. They could have easily funded the entire project themselves, but securing federal-level grant money helped legitimize the project in the eyes of the wary local Tribal Councils.
Arne nodded. “Good.”
Dagrun’s head tilted to the side. She, like Arne, only partially glamoured while in her private hospital room. Most everyone who came in and out of the room understood that they were magicals, and knew to keep that information to themselves.
She’d been at his side for centuries, standing with him as the town grew, managing their interactions with the mundanes’ rising technology, and running diplomacy with her father in Iceland. She was the backbone of Alfheim, not him.
A thousand years ago, his mother had stepped between Fenrir and her people. She saved the mundanes even as that Ragnarok caused cataclysmic damage to the elves and their gods.
This time, there were more mundanes to worry about, and more gods.
“The children will be all right,” Dagrun said. “No matter what Raven wants.” She closed her folder and set it aside.
He walked over and sat on the edge of her bed. She leaned forward and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. Arne Odinsson gently hugged his wife, careful of her mending ribs. At least this time, they had each other, promises to a trickster god notwithstanding.
A wave of power rolled through Alfheim. Both Arne and Dag—and all elves and wolves in Alfheim, he knew—turned toward the source: the woods around Frank’s lake.
Hot power hit the hospital. Overheating, witch-born power.
They’d known they had a witch in Alfheim. She’d appeared the night after Frank’s “brother” attacked Akeyla, but no one had been able to locate her, or to communicate, or to judge if she was a danger because there were concealments much like the ones he’d installed to keep his son from becoming a problem.
This witch likely supplied the flawless seer photographs that Frank lied about coming from that useless notebook, which meant she wasn’t showing the psychosis that took Rose. And Frank was clearly in love with someone no one in town had met.
Arne understood how to work around concealments he could not influence. He trusted his gut, and his gut said that this witch was worth protecting.
Dagrun’s eyes widened. “We have another witch?”
Arne wove his fingers and held up her hand. “Yes. Our new seer.”
“Ah,” she said, as she remembered that they could not remember anything beyond “seer.”
Arne closed his eyes and tuned his ear into the wave. “Listen.”
The wave slowed and cooled. It fluttered for a second, almost at a standstill, until the engine generating the concealments began to pull it back.
Dagrun’s lips rounded. “Arne, that much power in Alfheim is not safe.”
No, it wasn’t. But they had an extinction-level Ragnarok coming. They could use all the help they could get.
And this witch wouldn’t take their babe.
The wave changed.
What had been fae-born became steadfast and sturdy. It rooted to the earth and it reached for the sky. It knew all the cycles, old and new, and lived them intimately. And it touched all the realms.
Dagrun stared at the window. “By Odin, it’s here, Arne. It came here,” she breathed.
There was no stopping the Ragnarok now. No recourse.
Yggdrasil had come to witness the end of their world.
Arne kissed Dagrun’s fingers. He refused to let the inevitable happen. He refused to allow World Spirits or Titania or that scum-sucking bloviator, Oberon, to harm his family. He would keep his wife and children safe.
No matter the cost.
* * *
III.
* * *
Oberon’s Castle, the Fae Realms….
“Why am I here, Robin?” Wrenn Goodfellow watched her mentor smooth the lines of his well-tailored midnight-blue uniform. His fidgeting made her fidget too, and she found herself mimicking his flattening of pockets and checking of jacket buttons.
Neither of them enjoyed the crispness of Oberon’s new dress requirements. Robin, being a freewheeling Seelie, would rather prance around nearly naked. Wrenn, being taller and stronger than most mundane and fae alike, had found comfort in modern high-performance athletic apparel. Two centuries of corsets and idiotic shoes had finally given way to stretchy, shimmering jackets, leggings, and butt-kicking boots.
“You are here—” Robin smoothed his luscious black curls away from his cute little horn nubs. They weren’t always cute or little, but he tended to glamour more toward “sweet young man” than full Bacchus these days, “—because the dryads are back.”
The intelligence dryads and naiads sent out to gather information after Samhain would trickle back in over the next few days. Two coming in early didn’t mean anything.
Robin tossed her one of his prissy looks. He leaned close to her ear, still faux-shocked at her lack of enthusiasm. “I sent this pair into elf territory.”
“What?” There were agreements. Nothing particularly binding—the elves were not stupid enough to make deals with the fae—but they did offer each other respect. No nosing around. No spying. General good neighbor stuff, which it seemed Robin had decided to ignore.
He could have gotten into real trouble if they’d been caught.
He waved his hand dismissively as if he’d take on any pain if it helped her get the information she needed.
Elves did not freely show their business, or their magicks, but she’d already gathered enough evidence that the North American enclave had harbored vampires—and that those vampires had likely bitten the elves on the ass. “Did that video of the little elf girl get Oberon to authorize sending in investigators?”
Robin screwed up his face in an expression that said maybe, maybe not.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means,” he ushered her into the antechamber of the dryad’s reporting sanctum, “that the why in all this is above both our pay grades.”
Robin Goodfellow had found her wandering in the forest outside Edinburgh the night she escaped her captor. Robin had never once as
ked for favors. He was now, and had always been, a gentleman. When Oberon offered her a place in his court, she’d declared herself of Robin’s band as her thank you.
Which meant she knew the access that came with the Goodfellow name. “Above our pay grade” did not often apply. She nodded and followed Robin across the shimmering red and green magic that was the gate into the dryads’ sanctum.
Robin held his finger to his lips. One did not speak inside the sanctum. One only listened.
Two quick steps and they stood under the massive stones that made up the henge in which the dryads reported. The two intelligence agents in their antlered armor stood in the center. They mirrored each other’s movements, as was their way, and sent their report into the curls of magic flowing through the sanctum like ghosts of an aurora.
They told of the elves’ land, and a blizzard. Of how, with elves, the forest and its animals lived protected from the pollution and murder of the mundanes, and how the land understood that soon, not even its magicals could stop the coming death and damage.
Wrenn shook her head. Mundanes were destructive to the natural world.
The dryads continued: The land spoke of werewolves and elves and witches gone mad. Of concealments they could not read and of the wolves masquerading as genies.
Then they spoke of a vampire.
Dracula.
Wrenn shuddered as if she’d fallen under a frozen lake’s ice. Only parts of Dracula existed anymore. Parts the man who had enslaved her had found.
It’s him, she mouthed to Robin. She now had proof that he’d survived that night in Edinburgh—and evidence that he might still be out there terrorizing the world.
Robin touched his lips again, and leaned his head toward the dryads.
There was another, the dryads reported. A big man who was mundane, yet not. A man who heard the dryads, and saw their magic.
Robin squeezed her hand.
No, she thought. The vampire her captor had created was bad enough, but this man—this monster—was why he’d kidnapped her in the first place.
She had no memory of her life before she’d come to live in Edinburgh, but she knew that all the pain, all the imprisonment, all the abuse happened because her captor had promised the monster a bride.
Robin nodded once. He understood.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket. He tapped on the fae app he used to call up gateways, then turned it so she could see.
The closest gate to the elves’ home was some distance north, situated on a trail inside protected land labeled Paul Bunyan State Forest.
Thank you, she mouthed.
Victor Frankenstein had held her captive. He’d unleashed a demigod of a vampire. And he’d lied about the death of his first mistake.
A mistake, like the vampires, harbored by elves.
Wrenn Goodfellow turned on her heels. She’d never, not once, made others pay for her pain and existence. The men of Frankenstein did.
So now she hunted monsters.
Death Kissed
When Wrenn Goodfellow comes looking to clean up Alfheim, it’s up to Sheriff Ed Martinez to keep her away from not only Frank and the elves, but also the people he cares the most about—his family.
* * *
DEATH KISSED available now!
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Monster Born
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Wolf Hunted
Fae Touched
Death Kissed
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Fate Fire Shifter Dragon
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All But Human
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Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories
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Witch of the Midnight Blade
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two
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Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series
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About the Author
Kris’s Science Fiction universe, World on Fire, brings her descriptive touch to the fantastic. Her Urban Fantasy series, Northern Creatures, sets her magic free. She’s traversed many storytelling worlds including dabbles in film and comic books, spent time as a talent agent and a textbook photo coordinator, as well written nonfiction. But she craved narrative and richly-textured worlds—and unexpected, true love.
Kris lives in Minnesota with one husband, two daughters, and three cats.
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