Witchbane (Book 5 in The Twilight Court Series)

by Amy Sumida

  That's how cunningly evil Moire Thorn was.

  At the Battle for Unseelie, Moire had attacked my father. Bress had come between them, and saved Keir. An act which shocked all of us. Previously, Bress was wound so tight around his mother's finger, it seemed impossible to separate them. But Moire's attack on Bress' beloved uncle, had somehow freed her son. Bress stood up to her, and Moire fled. After the battle, Bress came to Twilight to live with us. But Moire got away. We hadn't seen hide nor hair of her (both hide and hair were pure white and very hard to miss) until Halloween, when she'd started stalking me.

  So now I was back in HR (the Human Realm), with my mentally fragile cousin, Bress, and my fierce dragon-djinn boyfriend, Raza. Oh, and all of our assorted guard members. As royalty, Raza and I both had our own Guard, a collection of fairy knights whose only job was to protect us. Raza had his King's Guard and I had the Star's Guard. We both tried to leave them behind pretty often, but a fairy knight takes his (or her) duty seriously. They can be hard to shake. I told Raza he shouldn't have assigned himself guards if he didn't want to be followed around, but he had told me it was tradition. Dragons liked tradition.

  The combined mass of our guards couldn't fit in the meeting room with us, so they were all waiting upstairs. There were only two ways down to the subterranean levels of the council house. You either had to take the elevator or the stairs. Our guards had stationed themselves outside of the entrances to both. One of the members of my Star's Guard, currently standing his post upstairs, was actually my ex-boyfriend, Tiernan Shadowcall, Lord of the Wild Hunt. Can you say awkward?

  But if Tiernan found it awkward, he didn't let on. I'd tried to free him of his vows to me, but he'd been furious at me for the offer. He insisted that he still loved me, and it was his honor to protect me. Even if I was behaving like a child with a potty mouth (his words). So Tiernan continued to follow me around with all of my other guards members. And I continued to feel weird about holding Raza's hand in front of Tiernan.

  But Tiernan wasn't in the meeting room, so I could hold Raza's hand without any weirdness. Well, without Tiernan weirdness. It felt kind of strange to hold Raza's hand at the moment. He was in his human glamour, and without his talons curving over my skin, his hand just didn't feel right. But one glance settled the feeling. I'd seen Raza use this particular glamour often enough to be comfortable with it.

  Instead of his usual, true black skin, Raza appeared to have a tawny complexion which matched the glamoured topaz shade of his normally golden eyes. His dragon wings were gone, as were the aforementioned talons, and his dragon features; the prominent brow and cheek crests. But his massive, muscular build was the same, and so was his rock star hair. Thick swaths of ebony strands hung around his regal face in angled points, two of which were colored deep ruby. They crimson stripes were at his right temple and below his right ear.

  I had used a little glamour for my visit into HR as well, but it was minor. I covered the silver stars which spread out from the pupils in my eyes. Now they just appeared vibrantly green. Striking but still human. Beyond my eyes, my only other fey feature was the ombré stripe of purple in my hair, and that could easily be explained as a dye job. I flicked the long length of it back over my shoulder and focused my attention back on Councilman Murdock.

  The Head of the San Francisco Council House was pointing to areas on a map where Moire had been spotted. It had been nearly a month since I'd first seen my Aunt at the Halloween party, and we still didn't have a single clue as to what she was up to in the City by the Bay. At first, she was simply taunting us by popping up in random locations without any discernible reasons. But Murdock had called us all here, saying that there was finally some evidence which needed to be evaluated... by fairies. So now we were down in the council meeting room, surrounded by human council members, two representatives of the Coven, and Killian.

  Killian Blair sat with the Coven representatives, even though he had once been considered a mutant by them. The Coven was composed of several tribes of witches. These tribes were all descended from fairies, a fact only recently revealed. The discovery had occurred when I'd taken a few witches into Fairy with me, and their fey blood had physically altered them to look more like their ancestors. Killian had gone through the same transformation, but he didn't get features from only one fairy race. Because Killian was a mixed witch.

  The witch tribes didn't intermarry. It was forbidden. I think they believed it would have a negative affect on their magics. After all, some of them had talents which manifested in physical ways, like the Pack witches who turned into wolves, or the Bite witches, who were basically vampires. Killian's parents had been part of a group who had decided to thwart convention in the name of love. They had left the Coven so they could marry outside of their tribe, and ended up forming their own tribe. They called themselves the Casters, and they lived in a guarded community called the Hallow. This was where they secretly raised their blended children. Children like Killian, who was a combination of Flame and Storm witches.

  This mixture affected Killian in an even more unusual way than it had the other witches who had entered Fairy. Killian was changed into a twilight fairy. The first of a new race. He's a blend of snake-djinn and sylph, which created the twilight race of the nathair-sith. A pair of vividly green snake eyes had replaced Killian's deep emerald stare, and he now sported a useless but beautiful pair of dragonfly-esque wings upon his back. They were embedded in his skin, their cartilage veins raised just enough to be felt. Just enough for you to be able to tell that it wasn't a tattoo.

  Killian Blair's new twilight status had launched him into a new life. He was now my partner in HR, a sort of ambassadorial intermediary. He worked out of the SF Council House, but he traveled a lot, all over the world, to meet with Coven tribes and Councils. With his twilight ability of walking the In-Between, travel wasn't a big deal for him, a fact which the Councils made great use of. Killian had become an important part of the new truce between the witches, the fey, and the humans. And he'd also become my friend.

  “There have been casualties in every location,” Murdock was saying as he hit the map. “But we didn't make the connection to Moire until now.”

  He held up what appeared to be a gleaming arrowhead, it sparkled as he lifted it, catching the light like a cut diamond. Both Bress and Raza made surprised sounds, and I glanced at each man for an explanation. But they were both fixated on the little piece of metal Murdock was holding.

  “This item was recovered from the latest crime scene,” Murdock leaned onto the table in front of him and put the arrowhead down. “And it was a crime scene,” he tapped the arrowhead angrily. “One of our extinguishers reported that they witnessed Moire firing an arrow into a crowd of people. Yet when they raced to the victim, all that was left, was this arrowhead. The rest of the shaft had disappeared.”

  I felt Raza tense beside me.

  “What happened to the victim?” I asked.

  “He is in critical condition at UCSF,” Murdock said grimly. “The doctors can't figure out what's wrong with him. Shortly after he arrived, he went into a coma and he hasn't woken since.”

  “Damn her,” Bress whispered.

  “Do you know what this is, Lord Bress?” Murdock asked urgently.

  “Elf-shot,” it was Raza who answered. “Why Moire would have it in her possession is beyond me.”

  “She's close with the dark elves,” Bress ground out.

  “No,” Raza shook his head. “My people would not help her.”

  “You know my mother,” Bress looked across me to Raza. “You know how she can manipulate people. Her allies are loyal to her. As loyal as I once was.”

  “Could someone please tell me what elf-shot is?” Murdock ground out.

  “Yes, I'd like to know as well,” I narrowed my eyes on Raza.

  “It's poison, but only to humans,” Raza's jaw clenched. “The equivalent of iron poisoning in a fairy. In fact, that was why it was created.”

  “Go
on,” Murdock took a seat and slid the arrowhead across the table, straight to Raza. Raza caught it with a smack of his hand. “Tell us if you recognize this one in particular.”

  “It doesn't work like that,” Raza said as he held up the shimmering arrowhead. Now that it was closer, I could see that it wasn't metal at all, but some kind of stone. “There's no signature to find on elf-shot. You can't do a ballistics test on fairy ammunition.”

  “I can,” Killian smirked and made a gimme gesture with his hands. Killian had psychometry, a talent he could use to sense who had handled an object, and what they were thinking at the time.

  “Hold on, Killian,” I took the arrowhead from Raza. “Tell us more about this, Raza. You said it was created? When? How?”

  “Elf-shot has been around for thousands of years,” Raza shrugged. “The dark elves sing the stones up from the earth, and the light elves imbue it with magic. It's a combined effort, which makes for a very powerful result.”

  “Wait,” I blinked at him in shock. “You're telling me that unseelie and seelie fey work together to make elf-shot?”

  “The elves were the only race of fey who remained neutral in the fairy wars, at least until Twilight was created,” Bress answered before Raza could. “Even though there are light and dark elves, and they are considered seelie and unseelie fey, they personally believe they are the same race. There is no animosity between elves.”

  “That's rather enlightened of them,” I noted.

  “King Raza the First once tried to make the dark elves go to war with him against the Seelie Kingdom,” Raza sighed. “He was unsuccessful.”

  “Did he hurt them?” I asked.

  “No, he couldn't find them,” Raza chuckled. “Elves are very good at hiding, especially dark elves. They simply weren't around when the battle began.”

  “They sound peaceful,” Councilman Rachel Forester observed.

  “To each other, yes,” Raza smirked. “But they didn't create elf-shot to use as a tool for hunting game. The elves were the most effective of our soldiers during the Human-Fey Wars.”

  “How effective?” Murdock asked with narrowed eyes.

  “There were no elf lives lost,” Bress said with a smirk. “Not ever. Their archers were like modern day snipers. They'd hide among the trees and kill whole platoons before they could be spotted.”

  “As I said,” Raza grimaced, “they are very good at hiding.”

  “So this is imbued with seelie magic?” I frowned at the arrowhead. “I don't feel anything.”

  “It's a combination of magic. The dark elves leave a trace of power from their song. But there is no magic to it now. The magic was released when it hit,” Raza explained. “As soon as the stone strikes flesh, the poisonous enchantment is freed and the discharge of energy disintegrates the rest of the arrow.”

  “It's another reason they were so effective in battle,” Bress added. “The evidence disappeared so quickly, leaving only the little arrowhead, that half the time, the humans didn't understand why their comrades were dying.”

  “Similar to a gun,” I mused and then slid the thing over to Killian. “Alright, Snake-Eyes, go ahead and do your thing.”

  “Similar perhaps,” Raza shook his head. “But these bullets are poisonous.”

  “Is there an antidote?” Councilman Ray Teagan surprised me by asking a sensible question. He was a bit of an ass normally.

  “Only one,” Raza answered. “It's a fairy flower called suvanis. A single petal will combat the enchantment, if taken within an hour.”

  “And if it's not taken fast enough?” Murdock asked.

  “Death is assured,” Bress ground out.

  “Damn it all,” Murdock hissed.

  “Can you get us some of these flowers, Dragon King?” Killian asked Raza.

  “Possibly a few,” Raza narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

  “I think we're going to need a lot more than a few,” Killian put the elf-shot down and slid it into the center of the table. It twirled, casting sparkles in all directions, before it went still. “Moire has just declared war. And she has an elf army to back her.”

  About the Author

  Amy Sumida lives on an island in the Pacific Ocean where gods can still be found. She sleeps in a fairy bed, high in the air, with two gravity-defying felines and upon waking, enjoys stabbing people with little needles, over and over, under the guise of making pretty pictures on their skin. She, like Vervain, has no filter but has been fortunate enough to find friends who appreciate this... or at least tell her they do. She aspires to someday become a crazy cat lady, sitting on her rocker on her front porch and guarding her precious kitties with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. She bellydances and paints pictures on her walls but is happiest with her nose stuck in a book, her mind in a different world than this one, filled with fantastical men who unfortunately don't exist in our mundane reality. Thank the gods for fantasy.

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