Death Kissed

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  She rolled over. Long ago, the space had been a ballroom. The parquet flooring and an old stage shimmered in the golden morning sun. A curved balcony ran the entire length of its external wall, separated from the interior by intricately twinkling, intricately cut, leaded-glass doors.

  The space was part of the massive towering structure of crystal and obsidian at the center of Oberon’s Castle, the actual proper castle of Oberon built a millennium ago. The Armory part was more refurbished rooms like this one, granite blocks, and enchanted fae steel doors rather than the towering grown spires outside.

  One needed to be high up in the chain of command to get into the Armory, and Robin Goodfellow was nothing if not a high-hanging link in that chain.

  She’d been in this room several times.

  Sunshine arced through the space in sheets of rainbow colors from the light thrown by the doors. Reds splashed the walls. Greens danced along the front edge of the stage. Blues and yellows jumped and curved.

  All of which camouflaged Robin’s natural shimmering magical aura—and his spells.

  “What were you thinking, Wrenn?” Robin Goodfellow’s deceptively sweet voice echoed off the walls. “On the holiest of all the holy nights, young lady!”

  Wrenn squinted and sat up. The melodrama was a bit much this morning. “Could we not do this, Robin?” she asked. “I need coffee.”

  Somewhere in the room, he laughed.

  Like all the fae in Oberon’s Castle, Robin Goodfellow was a sinewy band of flair and subterfuge.

  Slowly, she stood. The headache would stabilize in a minute or two, but she’d need either exercise or a few moments in the sun to warm her cold flesh.

  A sigil formed just on the edge of her vision, next to her left ear, spinning and pulsing with the power and geometry of the main source of fae power—the natural world. Greens coiled around the sigil’s interior designs. Reds nipped at its surface. Cool blues formed its structure.

  The sigil was meant to lay a sharp smack across her cheek.

  Exercise it would be, then.

  She ducked under the slap spell—and twisted away from it, instead of toward where the spell’s creator should have been standing.

  Something was not right about the spell. The shimmers folded the wrong way, and its tilt felt off, as if she were looking at a reversed photo of a familiar face.

  The fae were masters at such deceptions, twisting glamours and flicking out slight-of-hand tricks to deceive a mundane person’s senses. Sometimes smells came from the wrong direction, or were off just enough to trigger an unwanted memory. Or a sound echoed in a way that made the mundane think they heard ghosts. Or, with Wrenn, made her see a spell where it wasn’t.

  The real slap spell grazed her right shoulder. A fiery sting screamed through her leather jacket and into her flesh.

  She yipped. The fae used magic to glamour up what they wanted the world to see. She used her reputation. Wrenn Goodfellow, daughter of Puck and Paladin of Oberon. Mundane-born witch, yes, but indestructible. Dangerous. Fast.

  Cold. Cutting. Immovable.

  The tension from last night’s flashback released from its batteries. Her muscles coiled. Bones readied.

  Wrenn lowered her shoulder and planted her foot as she scooped her body forward and upward in a one sweeping motion.

  Her shoulder hit Robin’s belly. She felt him, even if she couldn’t see him or his glamour. Felt her shoulder press into his flesh just under his ribcage. Felt her body take his off-balance weight as she lifted and tossed him away from the sun-kissed balcony doors.

  His glamour did not hide the thud when he landed a good six or seven feet away.

  What had been heavy air a moment before manifested as Oberon’s Second-in-Command lying on the floor like a sack of horned young man.

  He still wore his full uniform. Still looked up at her with his handsome if stern and self-absorbed face.

  The tension hadn’t gone with his flip. It stayed coiled in her leg.

  She moved her foot back to kick.

  Robin raised his hands. “Good flip!”

  Wrenn blinked. The ghosts of her flashback danced just on the edge of her consciousness—there, noticed, yet doing their damnedest to return to hiding behind their own glamour. The tension in her leg moved up into her hips and settled, waiting for a good walk, or a run, or more practice.

  She’d almost pummeled Robin’s hip, and a kick from her did damage, even to a powerful fae.

  “You dusted my lead, Robin.” She offered her hand to help him stand.

  He nodded and pulled himself to standing. “The boss sniffed a vampire in his realms,” he said as he smoothed his jacket.

  Being a freewheeling Seelie, he would rather prance around naked than in Oberon’s new dress requirements.

  “Here, of all places!” He shook his head in his melodramatic way. “We’d long suspected they’d try. Turned out turning a dark fae really was the easiest.” He snapped his fingers.

  “So you were expecting that kelpie?”

  Robin looked hurt. “Of course. We figured they’d go after a witch or two first, as well.” He waved his hand at the greater air of Oberon’s Castle. “I wove detection spells into the witch fire uptake infrastructure a long time ago.”

  Wrenn stared stone-faced at her mentor. “And here I’m the vampire hunter,” she said.

  Robin rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so sarcastic.” He fiddled with one of his silver buttons. “I mean, it’s all so obvious.” He waved his hands. “Your photos helped, of course.”

  No, it wasn’t obvious.

  In fact, it was so not obvious she had a strong suspicion that he was lying. “What other structural obviousness have I been missing, Robin? Since I’m just a witch of unknown origin.”

  He pouted like a scolded puppy. Then he grinned and pointed at her nose. “You don’t overheat when you cast spells.” He said it as if he was revealing information she didn’t already know. “Strange and sturdy witch that you are.”

  “And?” she asked.

  He leaned toward her as if to tell her a secret. “That means you’re difficult to detect while here at home.”

  Oh, no, she thought. He had just shared a secret. He considered her family, but he was still fae, and a powerful one at that.

  Now she owed him.

  Robin had asked if she wanted a suppression spell for her flashbacks the moment he found her in that dark frozen Scottish forest. He’d sniffed at her person as if he’d detailed every pheromone and fear her body radiated. His eyes had rounded. Then he’d offered multiple gifts of help.

  At the time, she hadn’t realized who she was dealing with. She only saw a young man, a kid really, who’d been out hunting to help his family. She hadn’t wanted to impose on people who were likely living day-to-day. She’d seen too many starving children on the streets of Edinburgh.

  Robin had told her later that her selflessness had saved her from his worst tricks.

  And with that bit of truth, that tiny bit of revelation, he’d given her a fae boon that tied them together. There was a strange sort of trust between them that had been traded as opposed to earned, but it was there. She literally saw it in his magic every time they were together.

  When he’d found her, she also hadn’t realized what the shimmer she saw around him meant—or what she was.

  She knew now, and she used the tactical advantage it gave her every single time she found herself in the presence of a magical—fae, elf, kami, loa, or spirit.

  His natural magic pulsed outward, then pulled in closer to his body like armor.

  The seeing-magic part of her particular witchdom did have its benefits. “Why do you do that, Robin?” she asked. “The tricks?”

  He bunched up his lips and crinkled his nose as if reacting to the imaginary stink of a social slight. “You’re so… closed off, Wrenn. These emotions of yours are going to get you killed.” He rubbed at his belly before yanking on his jacket hem.

  He didn’t answer her ques
tion.

  “Yes, yes. Use my emotions. Don’t let them use me,” Wrenn said. They’d had this conversation many times in the past two centuries. “I know.”

  He tossed her a flicker of side-eye.

  She knew what that look meant, as well: The boss had not approved of her adventure last night. Oberon never approved.

  So she changed the subject. “I think we have a blood syndicate operating in Oberon’s Castle,” she said. “Sprites keep washing up, Robin. That kelpie might not be the only vamped-out dark fae walking the realms.”

  Robin flipped between seemingly hating the constrictions of Oberon’s new militaristic dress code and loving the fact that he now had lots and lots of silver bits on his clothes for fiddling and trading.

  He stopped playing with his buttons and looked at her. “One kelpie who got himself into a bad situation does not a syndicate make,” he said. “You know how dark fae work.”

  “They’re haphazard,” she said. “Until someone powerful spins them up into a circuit.” Or a syndicate.

  Robin’s eyebrow arch turned into narrowed eyes and pinched lips.

  “I think he is part of it.”

  “That he?” He stepped closer and mimed a massive, hulking, fanged demon. “You sure?”

  “When are my hunches wrong, Robin?” She rubbed the shoulder she’d used to flip him on his ass.

  Robin stared at the light dancing over the doors. “Your hunches are no more statistically significant than anyone else’s and you know it.”

  The modernization of the fae caused interesting science and magic overlaps. The use of statistics, Oberon’s Castle public transit, fae wifi and telecommunications—they’d all appeared in the last fifteen years. All of which felt as if Oberon was readying the fae for something.

  Robin didn’t like it. Once, while drunk, he’d muttered something about privacy and mundanes and a concept called “late stage capitalism.” Then he’d downed another jug of mead and thrown up outside the tavern.

  He’d still use the tools it offered, though.

  He turned toward the sunlit doors and his goat hooves clopped against the wood floor. “Tell me your hunch, Wrenn,” he said.

  “You know I watch vampiric movements in the mundane world.”

  He nodded. “Which watching are you talking about?” he asked. “The watching that’s part of your job, or the watching you do because you’re still obsessed with that demon?”

  She narrowed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t be a jerk, Robin.”

  He frowned again and bowed his head. “I apologize.”

  Still, she needed to be careful with him. The last thing she needed was for Robin to snap because he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—control his own emotions.

  But right now, right here in this practice room with its cold lights, with her cold muscles and her achy bones, the last thing she should have to deal with was an immature fae’s feelings.

  So she stared. No backing down. No words, either. No way for him to twist up what she did in order to fudge his way into extracting another boon or favor, the way he’d done with the secret about the witch-fire uptake system.

  Robin’s entire body stiffened. “You are angry.”

  “You asked me to tell you of my hunches. Engaging in an equal sharing of information will help you, Robin.” Sometimes she felt more like his mother than his adopted daughter.

  He pranced over to the cut glass doors, and with a swoop of his arm, leaned against a particularly dramatic swan.

  “Something happened a month ago,” he said. “Something that disrupted the vampire status quo.” His mouth twisted up. “I’ve heard rumors of gates opening.” His convoluted expression took on a hint of confusion. “Not Heartway gates, so it wasn’t us.” He glanced off to the side as if thinking about it. “The kami have the power to lure in vampires, but they do not interact with other magicals. At all.” He shook his head.

  The kami and their various yōkai did, in fact, interact with non-Japanese mundanes and magicals, it just didn’t happen often. It wasn’t about being insular. Why interact with mundanes who didn’t fuel their magic if they didn’t have to? Especially vampires.

  “So the good money is on elves.”

  Of course he thought it was elves. With the fae, every bad happening was always the fault of the elves. They were still mad about all those Viking invasions. And the fact that every mundane in the Isles with a sensitivity to magic was descended from that elf princess, and not fae royalty.

  But Robin was correct; if it wasn’t the fae dealing with their vampire problem, or the kami dealing with theirs, then good money was on the elves.

  “The fallout seems to be a shift in power,” she said.

  “Hmmm…” he said.

  “A shift that has increased the trafficking in magical blood, Robin.” Which definitely did not indicate elves. Elves did not traffic in anything. They were elves. You got what you saw. When they let you see, which they most often did not.

  Everything about Robin’s posture said she was correct—the angle of his shoulders, the tension of his neck, the furrowing of his brow.

  “I shouldn’t…” He trailed off and made a show of slowly rubbing his face as he looked over his shoulder. “You know about the intel dryads.”

  She nodded. “Samhain was yesterday.” Oberon always sent out intelligence gatherers during each of the Eight Festivals. It seemed counter-intuitive, and sacrilegious, but thin veils meant easier spying. And Oberon did like to keep up to date on both enemies and allies.

  Robin took her hand. “Come,” he said, and pulled her toward the door.

  Chapter 6

  Oberon’s actual castle was part granite stonework, part emerged crystal, and part living timber, and it served as one of the anchor points for the layers and layers of interconnected pockets of fae-made lands.

  Besides a few stops along the public Heartway transit system, a handful of special locations allowed easy movement out of the fae realms. Most were gateways into the mundane world. Most were mapped. Some were secret and used by royalty. All were used by spies.

  The location Robin dragged Wrenn toward sat inside the castle, on a midlevel tier built on top of the intertwined branches of three massive, mighty, east-facing oak trees.

  “Why am I here, Robin?” she asked. They’d wound their way through the crystals and onto a boulevard-wide branch of one of the trees.

  Robin smoothed his well-tailored uniform. “You are here—” Then he did the same with his luscious black curls, smoothing them away from his cute little horn nubs. “—because the dryads are back.”

  The intelligence dryads and naiads sent out 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. “I sent this pair into elf territory.”

  “What?” Did the elves really have something to do with their vampire problem? He must have information about the North American enclave who were harboring vampires.

  Robin’s demeanor subtly shifted from the more personable body language he used with her to his more standard backstabbing prissiness. Robin flicked his wrist and pranced around while wearing his cute glamour as a way to remind the less powerful who was in charge.

  He sniffed, but said no more.

  Wrenn understood the hint. By sending intelligence dryads into elf territory, Robin might have crossed lines he should not have crossed and any hint might prick problematic ears.

  The elves might be fewer in number than the fae, but they were just as powerful. And elves did not freely show their business, nor their magicks.

  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, and probably rightly so.

  Those vampires harbored by the North American enclave might have b
itten the elves on the butt. “Did that video of the little elf girl get Oberon to authorize sending in investigators?” Because one part of this puzzle was understanding why elves harbored vampires. Even minor ones.

  The elves had wiped the video off the mundane internet almost immediately, but Robin had still managed to get her a copy, mostly because he knew she’d been trying to get any info she could about the enclave.

  Robin screwed up his face in an expression that said maybe, maybe not.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. A video like that, one that sort of revealed the little girl’s tall elven ears, could have been a danger to all magicals, not just the elves.

  “It means,” Robin ushered her into the antechamber of the large, leaf-lined sanctum where the dryads reported, “that the why in all this is above both our pay grades.”

  Very little was above 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 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. Each stone had been set into the branch’s wood, and bark had grown up around their bases, holding them in place.

  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.

  The agents 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 wolves masquerading as genies.

  Then they spoke of a vampire.

  Wrenn shuddered as if she’d fallen under a frozen lake’s ice.