by Amy Hoff
“I have to say, it’s upsetting even me,” said Milo. “I’m not accustomed to the idea of not knowing the answer."
“Arrogance,” said Magnus, who knew that failing all too well.
“No, Magnus,” said Milo. “You’re arrogant. In my case, it’s just fact. I am rather brilliant, you know.”
Magnus’ incredulous look was sure to be followed by something stupid, so Hazel stepped in.
“So what can you tell us about the body?” she asked.
“Another collapse,” said Milo, already absorbed in the mystery again. “Humans are dying all over the city. Seems to last for around two weeks, and that's it. We're not sure whether –”
The corpse groaned.
“This person isn't dead yet,” Hazel pointed out helpfully.
“Not yet,” said Milo. “He will be soon.”
“What are we doing here, watching someone die?” asked Dorian. “You have strange ideas, Milo.”
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” said Milo, ever the pragmatist. “I want to see if he manifests as a ghost.”
“You want to fill us in here?” asked Ben.
Milo scratched the back of his head with his pen.
“Ghosts,” he murmured to himself, as if no one else was there. “It's not about the plague. Or the Smoke. It's about ghosts. I think Hazel haunting Magnus is unrelated to the illness, but I had to bring him here to be sure. Now I’m certain. This has something to do with Magnus alone.”
“Why would that be?” asked Dorian.
“Punishment?” Milo offered.
“But didn't Magnus kill a lot of people? Wouldn’t that mean –” Yoo Min began, and her voice died in her throat.
Magnus looked around in horror. A blonde woman covered in blood was glaring at him from a doorway, with her arms crossed. Further away, down the river, another woman stood on the quay. A young man in a beret sat staring at him in accusation. Two more young men seated on the steps nearby turned to look at him.
Magnus went white.
“There are so many of them!” cried Magnus. Hazel raised an eyebrow.
“We have to sort this out! I mean –” he said.
“How many people did you murder, brother?” interrupted Dorian softly.
“But...all these people!!!” Magnus said. “You can't let them do this! It's torture!”
The old giant stared at Magnus, and said nothing.
***
The clouds parted above Caledonia Interpol’s library. The fire roared in the fireplace as Dorian walked into the office. He sat down on the antique sofa and looked at the empty seat usually occupied by his partner. Leah’d be hungover as usual and giving him the evil eye over his newspaper. Then she’d crack a lewd joke he would never admit he found funny. He sighed. He missed her, and hoped Gregoire and Robert were looking after her.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed his brother was sitting at the desk nearby, talking with Yoo Min. He was still surrounded by various bloody ghosts. His hair was dishevelled and he looked a mess. It seemed like there were new ghosts now. Caledonia Interpol may have been large enough to generate its own weather, but the place was starting to feel rather crowded.
Dorian stood from the sofa and went to his desk. He ignored Magnus, although he could feel the selkie’s eyes on him.
“Why won’t you look at me, brother?” Magnus said.
Dorian rifled through the papers on his desk with impatience. He really needed to get back to the Highlands, and Leah.
“I don't know who you are speaking to, using that word,” murmured Dorian.
“I am suffering, Dorian!” Magnus said, in anguish. “These ghosts, they won't leave me alone –”
“Then suffer, Magnus Grey!” Dorian shouted, startling everyone, including himself.
Magnus stared open mouthed at his brother’s back as Dorian retreated into the distance. He couldn’t even catch the eye of the other officers. Suddenly he was aware of someone on his left, and he looked into the worshipful eyes of Yoo Min. She smiled slowly.
“You wouldn’t mind terribly, would you, if I ate your liver?” she asked sweetly.
CHAPTER TEN
CESSNOCK BANKS
THE LAND OF THE FAE
The Cessnock Water was once a beautiful, secluded river, its water running clear. For the humans, it still did. For the Fae, it seemed as though it never would again.
There wasn’t much desirable about war. The air was filled with smoke, the tents along the riverside stuffy, and their inhabitants too wary to risk themselves out in the water for a bath, because it made them vulnerable. This particular war, and its soldiers, were hidden from most human eyes, apart from those who could see in other ways, by scrying glass or crystal ball. Some humans were born with an innate ability to see their world, but they were extremely rare.
Robert Burns turned out to be just such a human, much to Desdemona’s chagrin.
The camp of the Fae battalion was on Cessnock Banks, where she had set up her tent. Her soldiers followed suit, and so they made up a sort of village at the water’s edge. Fortunately, the trees hid them from the surrounding fields, and the dun colour of the tents hid them from prying enemy eyes.
Disregarding any need for invitation or announcing himself, Robert approached Desdemona’s tent and pushed open the flap.
Desdemona was seated on a small stool, alone, stitching up a wound in her arm by candlelight. She looked up, startled, only to be confronted with Robert’s big, sad eyes.
“What are you doing here, Robert?!” she hissed. Robert did not reply, only watched her pull the thread through her wound, and then looked away.
“I had to see if you were all right,” he mumbled.
“How the hell did you get past the sentries?” she demanded. “Even Iain?! How did you even find this place?”
Robert gave her a troubled look.
“I had to see if you were all right,” he repeated, a helpless look in his eyes.
Desdemona barked a humourless laugh.
“I'm a vampire, Robert Burns,” she said. “I'll survive. I always survive.”
Explosions thudded dully around the tent. Desdemona stared at Robert, as if trying to puzzle him out. Robert sat down beside her. She looked very tired.
“You’re telling me that you could see the camp just because you wanted to?” she asked.
Robert shrugged.
“I wanted to see you,” he clarified. Her green eyes sparked, a strange fire, and she dropped that line of questioning.
“What's it like out there?” she grit out.
Robert shook his head.
“It’s not going well,” he replied.
Desdemona nodded, tightening the thread she had sewn through her wound with her teeth. Robert gently took her arm, and turned her toward him. She stared at him with suspicion until he tied the thread off for her.
“Thank you,” she said gruffly. She sat back and stared at the ceiling. “All this, just for the Smoke. I should’ve stuck to whisky.”
Robert shouted a laugh, more an expression of stress than anything. He nodded.
“Fae Wars,” he said. “Had I known –”
He was interrupted by a loud explosion. Robert looked up, as a bomb rattled the earth and dust fell. Desdemona shook the dust from her hair with the kind of nonchalance bred of familiarity.
“We are as unreasoning as humans, in some ways,” she said.
Robert turned to her.
“Desdemona, I...”
She shook her head, smiling. The pain bothered her, a little.
“Save it,” she said. “Don't you start that, Robert Burns. You poets are all the same.”
Robert looked at her desperately.
“But I love –”
She held up a hand.
“You love every woman you come across,” she said. “If you want to do me a favour, get back out there and save those stupid new recruits. They are in over their heads.”
“I might die!” Robert
said, emotion getting the better of him. “You forget, I am mortal.”
“And you forget,” she said, “that I am not.”
She stood, and left the tent.
***
The forest around the Cessnock Water was deep and gloomy, even at midday. Desdemona liked to walk among the trees, as they offered some shelter from the sunlight, and respite from what sometimes seemed like a never-ending war.
As she walked in the soft dusk of the forest, she sensed that someone was following her. She halted on the path.
“Robert,” she guessed easily. “What are you doing?”
She turned around to face him.
Robert looked at her, and then at the moon, hanging white and silver in the sky.
“I need you to make me one of you,” he said. “And you're the only one who can.”
Desdemona laughed.
“You're an idiot,” she said. “Anyway, you'd make a better selkie. But no, Robert. We're doing this for you. For all humans.”
“I have lived out my human life now, as you advised,” he said. “I have had great success – fame, love, riches. And it has been a good life.
“I have done all you asked, and I have returned as I promised. Let me help you.”
“This is self-sacrificing nonsense, Robert, you have plenty of time –”
“I'm sick, Desdemona. This whisky is going to be the death of me. Or the fever. The good doctor tells me I don’t have much time left.”
“We're defending your kind,” Desdemona said. “It’s been risky enough having you around as it is, but part of your blessing is that you’re mortal. I’m not taking that away from you. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Yes, I’m mortal,” he said. “And I’m one of the only humans who is even aware of this war. I want to fight with you, Desdemona, and to do it without you having to protect me all the time. I need you to turn me into a vampire.”
Desdemona felt her resolve beginning to weaken, before this strange young man who could apparently see Faerie just because he really wanted to check up on his crush. She paced back and forth, wondering if he didn’t have some kind of magic of his own.
“I don't know if I can,” she said. “Like I said, I’ve been baobhan sith for centuries, I was born baobhan sith. It's the only reality I’ve ever known. Besides, all baobhan sith are women. I don't even know if it would work on a man – and if it doesn't, then I'll have killed you. No thanks.”
She turned away, and much to Desdemona’s consternation, Robert fell to his knees behind her on the forest floor. He made quite the image, bowed in supplication in the thin shafts of sunlight drifting across the forest. Desdemona looked away, embarrassed for him and even more convinced there was something fey in him, after all.
“I know you don't believe in the love I have for you,” he said, in a loud and clear voice filled with absolute conviction, “but it is sincere, and it is all-consuming. I trust you, Desdemona, and I would rather fight than die by your side.”
Desdemona looked at him. She felt herself pulled forward, almost as if it were not by her own design.
The baobhan sith approached Robert, who remained on his in deference to her, but his large, brilliant dark eyes stared up at her with something akin to worship. She touched his cheek, a caress that was almost loving. He pressed into it, eyes slowly closing in his ecstasy, as he savoured the first time the star of his heart touched him. She could taste his thoughts, now that they were close to each other, images scattered and tumbling through the void, stars and stardust, a chant against the beating of his heart
Love…love…she is…she is…want…
submit
The sexual imagery that followed this order confused her, as she grew her talons and her eyes flashed green, burying the sharp points deep in his neck til the blood throbbed out, coursing rivers down her nails, and she ran out her tongue for a taste. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she snarled; the mere taste of him had turned her feral, her eyes sudden bright green embers in the dark. She retracted her talons in one swift motion and closed her mouth over the pulsing wound, sucking hard at the life there. She wrapped herself around his body, and he let out a whine as she sat astride him, clinging to him in her hunger as it roared a waterfall in her head, and she could feel him, and the want in him, as he clutched at her and the sharp slant of his hipbones pushed against her in mindless want, now an urgent tattoo, and his fingertips dug into her skin as he filled the air with a piercing cry, his desire slaked as her thirst was…
She pushed him away suddenly, and he fell to the earth where she had found him. He looked up at her with amber eyes more reverent than before, blood still pulsing from the wound at his neck, his skin want-white, and she had to force herself to pull away from him, to stand up and turn around so she would no longer be tempted, to remove the scent of his blood from her nose so he would survive, the taste of his life was so sweet, so uniquely him that it had taken her breath away. She licked at the blood spread across her lips and face, and doubled over, nearly turning back to him with the want of it.
Images suddenly flooded her consciousness, unbidden and strange.
The future, fanned out like a deck of playing cards in her mind. His face, rendered in bronze, from Glasgow to Camperdown to Milwaukee.
There has been no man like him, nor will there be.
She found herself crouching near the ground, when she came to. She finally steeled herself to turn and look at him again. His amber eyes now glowed softly, lamps in the darkness much like her own. She tried to ignore the weak pulse of blood at his neck and remain aloof to the situation. She wondered how much of her own mind Robert could see. So far, his worshipful expression hadn’t changed, so it appeared he did not have the power to taste minds quite yet. She felt bizarrely thankful for this, because she didn’t understand the feelings coursing through her own body, as if she had taken a particularly wild and dangerous drug. It’s his blood in you, she thought. She sat back on her heels, staring at him for a moment, before she opened her own wrist with a talon and let him drink his own blood from her veins, for she had none of her own.
She was reeling. She drank the blood of men every week. There should not have been anything particularly different this time.
Brusquely, she hauled Robert to his feet, and was a little rougher with him now, because this time it had been different. She had been a vampire for eons, further back than most could remember, and she had never experienced anything quite like their encounter on the soft pine needles of that forest floor.
“Come on,” she said, wiping her mouth to rid herself of the last remnant of his blood. “Dawn’s coming. Let’s get you inside.”
***
Once upon a time, there was a young boy in Seal-Hame.
There were shadows and secrets among the rocks, in the seaweed that undulated slowly through the underwater kingdom of the seals. This boy's birth had been the celebration and joy of every seal in Seal-Hame, and echoed throughout vast oceans, the silent heavy darkness of the deep.
For, among the beautiful, he was transcendent.
He was the most beautiful child recorded in all the history of Seal-Hame. There had been no other child like him before, not in all the years winding down into centuries, not in the blood memory of the people.
Iain Grey was the pride of the seal-folk.
He was unnaturally quiet. This concerned the Elders but they assigned his reticence to an introspective nature. He would be, they felt, the most successful of all selkies; an earnest and passionate lover, soft and gentle, strong and kind. The hopes and dreams of the selk rested on the boy.
He grew into a lithe young man, and was even more lovely than he had been as a child. He was impossible, and his clan boasted of him at every opportunity. As a seal, he was sleek and moved through the water like a current. In his human form, with his long, straight brown hair caressing a white and well-formed cheek, his black eyes captivated human and seal alike.
Iain Grey, beauti
ful and perfect prince of the seals, had a secret.
He longed for battle, and war.
Selkies, on the whole, were a peaceful race, content with flowing through the seabeds in the cold darkness of Seal-Hame. They dreamily composed poetry about their future loves, male or female; their hearts were easily excited and broken, their love of beauty famed.
Iain could not fall in love. He did not want that for himself. He could tell no one.
Once upon a time, a seal-boy strayed too far from the beach.
Iain walked in the forest, wondering at the strange cool feeling of the pine needles against his bare feet. The shadows of the pines played across his white and stately frame, as he walked staring up at the trees, and the sky, which seemed to him just another sea, blue and deep.
There was someone standing in the clearing ahead.
Curious, Iain approached. The sturdy figure turned, and he gasped at the green eyes, so striking to a boy who had seen only the dark eyes of the selk. The eyes were all he could focus on, for the moment, until the figure grinned. The white teeth startled him.
“Well,” she said. “Not that I'm complaining, but where are your clothes?”
Iain stared at her, and then pointed behind himself, towards the sea.
“Selkie?” she asked. He nodded.
“You'd better get out of here,” she said, “this is no place for one of you. The battle's over the hill but I think it might come to the edge of the water, foolish as that'd be. I'm scouting for the medic, he's going to need room for the wounded.”
“You're a soldier?” the boy asked, startled at the sound of his disused voice. It was clear, and sweet, if rusty.
“More than that,” said Desdemona, “I'm the commander of the army. I'm telling you, get out of here.”
Iain looked toward the sea again, and home, and the endless litany of praise, of the hopes of his people.
“Can I join?” he asked. Desdemona's eyes narrowed, the green flash unmistakable.
“A selkie's got no business in this place,” she said. “It is dark and violent and love is very far from here.”
Iain nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand. Let me join. I cannot go back home.”
