Knight in Leather

by Holley Trent

The ladies were the only ones from their crew who’d gotten cozy and decorated their little slice of the property, but seeing as how Princess Siobhan had paid for the construction, the personalizing probably was fair. Princess Simone had had no intention of improving The Hearth, but Princess Siobhan, being the opportunist she was, had seen potential. She’d seen a place for their nomadic, ragtag crew to finally have rest, but the motel had been too small to house them all indefinitely. And because of her curse, Simone still needed to be able to provide facilities for travelers. Building something brand new behind the old motel structure had made sense. The new building was a two-story grouping of suites, all a thirty-second walk to the water. A courtyard and a pool divided the new building from the old, sprawling motel. Simone hadn’t wanted the pool—she’d thought the amenity would encourage guests to stay longer—but Siobhan was convincing when she wanted to be. At the moment, the pool was empty because the cement was still curing. They’d be filling it up any day, assuming rain didn’t throw off the timeline.

  In the fridge door, Ethan found a bottle of a dark beer he hadn’t tried before and popped the cap. “Where’d Laurel go?”

  “Don’t know,” Princess Siobhan said. “Daryn shooed her away and followed her to make sure she left, but I’m sure she’ll be back.”

  Ethan took a long draft of the beer and wondered how the hell he always got himself into situations like the one with Laurel. “Fuckin’ mer-fairies,” he muttered. “We had sex one time forty years ago. I wouldn’t have touched her at all if she hadn’t been so convenient.”

  “You knew what she was and you touched her anyway?”

  He shrugged. “It was an orgy. Fairies make questionable decisions at orgies.”

  Caryl grunted and batted the ends of her hair. “True. When you’re in the thick of things, you’re only concerned about satiation, and not long-term consequences. And usually, that’s not a problem. Sídhe know that a fuck isn’t a commitment. We’re too practical to assume otherwise, but that bit of mermaid in her…”

  “Okay.” Frustrated, he threw up his hands. “Don’t know what to tell ya.”

  “I do,” Princess Siobhan said. “You’re fucked, dude. You need to get rid of her. I have no doubts she’s going to come back. Maybe she’ll be sweet and nice at first to lure you in, but she’s going to get angry, and the last thing we need right now is a blubbering mer-fairy on our hands.”

  “You think she’d mess with Dasha?”

  “Of course Laurel will try to if she figures out who Dasha is to you. She’s going to be pissed. She’s going to throw a huge fuckin’ tantrum. The girls and I will do our best to herd her away, but in the end, you might have to deal with her personally. You have to make her understand that you and her aren’t going to happen. My mother probably thinks the disruption will create an opening to get one of her assassins close, but they’re going to fail like they always do because they’re stupid, and Perry and his granny have this place magically warded out the wazoo.”

  “Right.” Ethan paced, sipping his beer.

  No one’s magic worked within a one-mile radius of the motel except the people on Perry’s approved magic user list. People could certainly try to assault them using more conventional methods, but winning a physical fight against anyone in Heath’s crew was a hard prospect. Rhiannon had learned that lesson already, but she kept trying to come up with ways to hassle them all the same.

  “And I suspect that if I don’t deal with her,” Ethan said, “Princess Simone will.”

  Princess Siobhan nodded. “Uh-huh. And if my sister-in-law has to get her hands dirty, who knows where Laurel will end up?”

  Caryl snorted. “Knowing Princess Simone, she’d open a portal to Siberia and drag the wretch through. And then she’d feel bad later and wonder if she should go rescue the nitwit. Let’s not burden the princess’s conscience any more than we need to, aye?”

  Ethan finished his beer and tossed the bottle into the recycling bin. “I’ll fix this.” Before she gets to Dasha.

  “Do what you have to do,” Caryl warned, “but don’t be afraid to ask for help. Our kind can be very crafty when tempted with things we want, and Daryn and I would understand better than anyone what you’re dealing with.”

  “Probably so.”

  Caryl and Daryn were from extraordinarily fertile lines of fairies, and as Sídhe weren’t especially fecund, fairy men who wanted them as broodmares regularly sought the twins out. Ethan’s supposed desirability was for different reasons. He could shapeshift. There were only a handful of fairies who could, and most had, or once had, the surname “Gotch.”

  “You’ve been so good, all things considered,” Caryl said. “The fact you don’t have a little bastard in every third household in the realm is astounding.”

  Ethan rolled his eyes. “Condoms are a fairy’s best friends.”

  “I don’t know about that, given how few people in the realm actually use them,” Princess Siobhan said. “Knocking a fairy up isn’t easy unless they’re from fertile lineages like Caryl and Daryn’s. I don’t know if mer-fairies tend to be a little more fertile than most, but I imagine she’s like so many others and wants what you’ve got. Not to say she doesn’t want you for what’s between your ears as well as what’s between your legs, but I think the more likely scenario is that she’s in love with the idea of your DNA.”

  “My mother gave me this talk decades ago when I was starting to look at ladies a certain kind of way. Trust me. I know. My ability is a rare one. People want their offspring to have it. Better than anyone, I understand why this power should be limited to cautious users.”

  “That’s probably why you have a human mate,” Princess Siobhan muttered. “Too many fairies are nutters.”

  Caryl groaned. “Maybe you…should just not tell Dasha yet that her kids are going to be shapeshifters, okay? You don’t need any new reasons to frighten the poor woman. Uh…” She raked a hand through her silver locks and sucked in a breath. “Actually, come to think of it, you’re screwed, aren’t ya? There’s a mer-fairy terrorist on the loose for you and you’re big and broody and frightening-looking to onlookers. Good luck, Gotch.”

  “Thanks a fuckin’ lot for the confidence. I know exactly who to turn to now for a pick-me-up.”

  Daryn laughed and studied the sparkly hilt of her dagger. “Oh, I’m sure if any of us ever rustles up a mate, you’ll be just as supportive.”

  “You can be sure of that, wretch.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Given the circumstances, Dasha couldn’t help but to be a little more paranoid than usual, so every time footsteps sounded outside the owner’s cottage, she turned her ear toward the door like a puppy on high alert.

  “Simmer down,” Simone said with a laugh as she folded yet another pile of motel laundry atop the cluttered coffee table. The motel needed a dedicated room for linen folding. Dasha added that to her list of bright ideas.

  “Why do they keep walking past here?” Dasha asked.

  “Maybe because I’m on the path to the beach?” Simone shrugged. “You knew the arrangement before you came to visit. The facility hasn’t changed since last time.”

  “Unfortunately, time didn’t fix anything. It just made me more wiggy.”

  “Come on, nothing’s going to happen to you in here, especially not with Heath pacing outside.”

  Dasha let out a slow, ragged breath and knocked the trail of pencil eraser residue off her notepad. “So, did you want to hear my ideas for marketing this place?”

  Simone put her hands on her hips and goggled her eyes. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you wanted me to be stuck here.”

  “I don’t, but if you’ve got to run the place until you cure the curse, you might as well make some money in the process, right?”

  “I keep telling her that.”

  At the flash of bright light and the rasp of that familiar disembodied voice, Dasha nearly jolted off the sofa from flight. “Shit!” Clutching her chest, she tried t
o uncross her eyes and focus on the entity that had just materialized in the room.

  Never gonna get used to that.

  Simone sighed. “You’ve gotta give more than one second’s warning before you pop in here like that, Hestia. Dasha doesn’t recognize your signals, and I saw the smoke ring too late to warn her.”

  The goddess swatted some invisible lint off the front of her long, shimmering white robe and then straightened the laurel leaf headband atop her shiny black hair. “You could show you’re grateful. At least say hello.”

  Simone snorted. “Hello, Hestia.”

  The goddess turned to Dasha, and all Dasha could manage was a nervous titter and a little wave.

  “So, what do I owe for the pleasure of your company?” Simone asked.

  “Oh!” Hestia flitted on her golden-sandaled feet to the rattan chair near the door and plopped onto it. “I come in response to your question.”

  “What question?”

  “The one you asked last month when you were assisting the Afótama with their mission.”

  Simone narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t ask you any questions.”

  “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening.”

  Here we go again.

  Dasha set her pad on the sofa cushion beside her and began working free the knot of her headscarf. “Remind me who the Afótama are.” She didn’t even want to imagine what her hair looked like after a day of travel, but if she didn’t give her head a good scratch soon she was going to scream.

  “Long story short,” Simone said, “the Vikings. They’re the group of witchy weirdoes based out of that compound in Norseton, New Mexico. Heath’s cousin Ollie—Matt’s father—is married to their clan leader.”

  “Okay. Got it. I knew there was a reason the word seemed familiar.”

  “Good.” Simone turned to Hestia. “What the hell did I ask that would make you come here? I mean, you’re pretty random in general, but that was a month ago.”

  “Don’t you recall? Your companion Nadia mused that Brandan didn’t seem to like his wife for all his lack of action in suppressing some of her bad behavior.”

  “We’re talking about Heath’s parents now, right?” Dasha asked.

  “Mm-hmm.” Simone rolled her eyes. “The thorns of the collective side of everyone in the fairy realm, and a bunch of folks in this one, including me.”

  “What made this Nadia person come to that conclusion about their marriage?”

  “I was with Nadia, waiting on my mother. We needed to pull open a portal to Cuba and I’m not as good at throwing passages to places I haven’t been as Mom. She can manipulate the geography between this realm and the fairy realm and greatly shorten the distance between two earthly points. So, we could possibly make a hundred-mile trip with a five-minute walk. She has a knack for magic using that I don’t and may never have, but anyway. I don’t quite remember how the speculation came up, but we were talking about that epic fight Mom and Rhiannon had nearly a thousand years ago and how Brandan didn’t do anything to stop it. Nadia—”

  At the probably very obvious upturn of Dasha’s eyebrow, Simone added, “Oh. Right. I keep saying her name, and you don’t know who she is. Nadia is of the Afótama.” Simone’s cheeks flooded with color, turning from their usual sandy brown to an intense red. “Uh. She’s…Thom’s mate. One of them, anyway.”

  “Is there a story there you need to tell?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Dasha put up her other eyebrow.

  “Or…maybe you do, but I’ll save the explanation for another day. Suffice it to say that Nadia wondered if Brandan didn’t like his wife, which of course is odd, since they’re mates and all. People like their mates for the most part, even if they don’t like the things they do. I sent Heath a message relaying the conversation, and he’d thought the theory was fascinating, but we didn’t make anything else of it.”

  “Well, I did some snooping.” Hestia’s grin was wide and toothy.

  Dasha hadn’t known the lady long, but she’d encountered her enough times to know that gamine grin was suspicious as fuck. Happy gods were plotting gods, and vice versa.

  Dasha furrowed her brow. “I thought gods and goddesses aren’t supposed to interfere like that. Or did I read that in a novel somewhere?”

  Hestia shrugged elegantly and crossed her legs at the knees. “Some can, some can’t. The rules aren’t the same for everyone. So much depends on why they’re interfering. And besides, I didn’t do anything. I just asked some questions among the people in the know in my network.”

  “What’d you find out?”

  “Well, get this.” Leaning her forearms onto the armrests, the goddess waggled her eyebrows. “A very unscrupulous Persian goddess who finds this ordeal far too entertaining told me that Brandan doesn’t have a fated mate.”

  “Wait.” Simone put up her hands and shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. He’s arguably one of the most powerful magic holders in the realm, even if he doesn’t show off. Guys like him generally get a mate for counterbalance.”

  “But here’s the thing,” Hestia said. “Brandan doesn’t need one.”

  The conversation was very close to going over Dasha’s head, but she was trying hard to catch up. If someone had written up a textbook on fairy shenanigans, it would have probably read half like a soap opera and half like a spell book.

  Gaping at the goddess, Simone dropped the pillowcase she’d been holding onto the table and rubbed her temples. “What?”

  “From what I gathered,” Hestia said, that smile still too big and far too devious, “he’s one of the rare fairies who’s perfectly in control of his magic, should he choose to use it. His power is not going to drive him mad over time. Trust me when I say he’s doing far more for Rhiannon than she is for him.”

  “Then why the hell did he marry her?” Dasha asked.

  “Beyond merging their kingdoms into what their territory is now, I’d say there are two reasons.” The goddess held up a couple of fingers.

  “Heath and Siobhan,” Simone said quietly.

  “You didn’t hear that from me. You also didn’t hear that a certain goddess got her wrist slapped by the more powerful entities in her pantheon when she informed the oracle who went on to inform Brandan’s mother what could happen.”

  Simone opened her mouth, probably to ask some follow-up, but Dasha had to get her question out first to ensure that the bits and pieces coming together in her head stayed together. “Wait. You’re saying that some shady goddess—”

  “Uh-huh. Keep going.”

  “Told a fortune teller of some sort that Brandan would sire Heath and Siobhan.”

  “Not would, but could. They were one potential outcome of the coupling. Go on. What else?”

  “And…something’s missing.” Dasha shook her head. “Why would siring them have been any more important than siring children with any other woman?”

  Hestia rolled her hand in a come on, you can do it gesture.

  Dasha reeled with the multitude of possibilities, so she went back to basics and tried to put two and two together again. “He doesn’t need a mate. He saw that he could have those two children with Rhiannon. Rhiannon is terrified of being overthrown…”

  Simone gave a slow nod. She evidently understood.

  Dasha thought she was getting there.

  “Uh…Rhiannon assassinated her parents to take the throne, and she knows Heath and Siobhan are likely capable of doing the same?”

  “Yes,” Hestia said low.

  “Brandan has to know that, too.”

  “Therefore…” Hestia urged.

  “Brandan wants them to undo their mother?”

  Hestia waggled her dark eyebrows again.

  “That is deranged.”

  The goddess shrugged. “These things are orchestrated by the Fates when they’re bored thousands of years in advance. No one expected the mess in the realm to get as far out of hand as it did, though. They underestimated Rhiannon’s
thirst for power.”

  “So, basically, my father-in-law is biding his time, waiting for Heath and Siobhan to take out their mother,” Simone said.

  Hestia shook a finger at Simone. “Now, now. I can’t tell you that.”

  “You just made that implication.”

  Hestia blinked several times.

  Sighing, Simone set the crown of her head atop the back of her seat. “Okay, so you can’t be direct. I understand how this goes. And I guess you can’t tell me when this important event is supposed to occur.”

  “No, and I’m not saying no because I have to, but because no one knows. That hasn’t been ordained. The Fates have cleared the slate on the timeline. There are too many parties involved and the disorder and upheaval could have them working overtime to balance the scales when all is said and done, depending on how circumstances play out. The fairy realm is unstable and shrinking because the magic that was used to create it always had an expiration date. All I can say for certain is that magic folk still in the realm need to get out or they’ll cease to exist when it implodes.”

  “My maternal grandparents live there, so do you have any idea of when that might be?”

  “Less than a year. I can’t calculate specifically without entering the realm, and I’m barred from going there.”

  “Goddamn it, Hestia! That’s a lot of people who need to be relocated. Where are they gonna go? We can’t have trolls and ogres integrating with humans. They’re not going to pass as normal, and there’s not, like, a large continent we can drop them on.”

  “I’m quite certain you’ll figure something out.”

  Simone’s hazel eyes went comically wide. “Me?”

  Hestia polished her nails on her robe. “Well, you are a fairy princess, both by birth through your father’s tribe and through marriage. If finding a home for the displaced is anyone’s job, it’s yours. Isn’t that so exciting?”

  Simone rubbed her temples again and ground her teeth.

  “Cheer up, dear. I’m certain that if you put the right minds together, everything will work out swimmingly.”

  “Any idea of where I might find those minds?”