Fox's Folly

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  He was so out of his depth here. From Paul’s saucer eyes and the catch in his breath, the witch was out of his depth, so Tag supposed he was allowed to feel like screaming like a little normy kid alone in the dark during a thunderstorm. Since Paul hadn’t let his fear take over, Tag wouldn’t either—Paul didn’t need to deal with Tag having a mini-breakdown on top everything else—and there was only one way to cope when things got this hairy. “Jeez, some women take it badly when you don’t call. Do they have therapists for demons? This bitch really needs one.”

  Paul shut the door. “Give me your hand,” he said.

  No—he commanded. Until now, despite the scent of his magic heavy in the air, the young witch had seemed like the type of guy Tag would expect to find in a university library researching minor Renaissance poets or the history of medieval Albania, not on the front lines of fighting evil. But in this second, the air crackled around him, a lightning storm indoors, and he seemed bigger, more solid in his body all of a sudden. Normies who’d seen only the polite, scholarly young man would definitely be freaked. Tag knew, with a knowledge that hit him out of nowhere, that this was the real Paul, passionate and powerful and usually hidden behind a mask that would call no attention to him among ordinary humans.

  “Give me your hand,” Paul repeated. Tag, realizing he’d been stunned into immobility by the shift in Paul’s energy, complied.

  “Hearth, heart, home,” Paul whispered and squeezed Tag’s hand. The lightning wasn’t crackling in the air harmlessly anymore. It coursed through Tag. His body arched. His cock jumped to attention. Paul gestured with his free hand and said something in that language Tag couldn’t identify.

  The nasty sex and swamp smell dissipated. Tension eased out of Tag’s body, although the throbbing excitement in his cock didn’t.

  “I’ve banished some of the magic and contained the rest,” Paul said. “But I don’t know for how long. This magic feels caustic enough to eat through witch magic like acid. I managed to convince the wooden door that it’s steel, so that should at least hold it in the room—as long as the door’s shut.”

  Tag got a horrific image of some innocent housekeeper walking into that magical disaster area and grabbed the Do Not Disturb sign from the room next door. Better to walk in on someone who was sleeping or doing the tube-snake boogie than to get shredded by demon magic.

  “The magic signature was the last bit of proof I needed. We’re dealing with a demon. Mr. Aisling’s not going to like this. Neither do I, for that matter.” Paul’s hand flicked a lock of dark hair out of his eyes. “Good thinking about the sign,” he added and hugged Tag.

  Tag pulled him and didn’t let go, not even when a family walked down the hall, the two children ignoring them but the parents staring nervously.

  Mr. Aisling’s office was surprisingly simple in comparison to the over-the-top décor in the public spaces and guest rooms. The furniture appeared to be actual antiques, patinaed with age and use and not restored to glossy perfection. Early 18th century, English or Colonial imitations of English, Paul guessed, though he was hardly an expert. Lovely lines, simple shapes, good wood shaped by a craftsman whose hand tools still marked the wood visibly. Not at all what Paul would have expected, until he recalled that, on this plane, at least, fae could conjure to their hearts’ content but couldn’t make anything more complex than a sandwich using their hands and skills.

  Sitting among these solid artifacts of an earlier time, fiddling with a computer that didn’t fit at all with the room, Mr. Aisling seemed even more eerily absent than usual, as if the part of him that was fae had left the building or possibly the planet.

  That changed when Paul and Tag told their story. The full force of his fae side roared into the room, filling it with a press of unfocused power that slammed Paul back in his chair like a hurricane-force wind. Mr. Aisling claimed he could access little magic from either his fae or human side, but it occurred to Paul for the first time that “little magic” meant something different to someone whose relatives were fae lords. He could scarcely breathe through the weight of power. Power and…

  “Anger-management time, Mr. Aisling,” Tag said calmly, as if ordering around furious extraplanar beings was all in a day’s work. “Can’t say I blame you, but let’s save it for the critter that’s doin’ the murderin’. I’m pretty sure you can flatten a fox without really trying, but I’d rather you didn’t. And I’ll be right upset if you hurt Paul.”

  Aisling’s eyes shifted so they were entirely pewter, cold and metallic, without whites or pupils. Then he closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. When he let out the breath and reopened his eyes, both his eyes and the air in the room were back to what passed for normal.

  “I apologize, mortals. It has been hard enough to control my rage at these assaults on my guests’ lives and my honor. But to hear of an incubus here, an actual demon, almost drove me past the point I could contain my wrath. I thought they were barred from this plane. I thought your gods had made the barriers impassable.”

  “They can be invited, sir.” Paul sounded like the calm scholar explaining theory, but Tag was never going to be fooled by that cover again. Paul was scholarly and could be calm, but there was so much more underneath. “One does not have to know magic or even believe demons are real to invite them. Untapped magical potential and the right kind of strong emotion can be enough to open a door. Unfortunately, since demons are not of this plane, they are almost impossible to destroy on this plane.”

  Mr. Aisling’s eyes shifted back to solid steely gray. This time, his facial features changed subtly so he lost any illusion of being human. “There is a creature of evil from another plane preying on those under my protection, and we can do nothing against it? Need I call in my cousins? They might know what to do, but I fear what might happen if fae lords and demons go head to head in a human city.”

  Paul shuddered. A full-blooded fae lord wasn’t much of an improvement over a demon. Neither was evil in the true sense of the world, any more than a human enjoying a steak dinner or squashing a mosquito was evil. But they were both so much higher on the food chain than normal humans that they could be carelessly deadly.

  “I can banish the demon, once I get my hands on the proper spells from home. My sister’s already on that.”

  Tag blinked. Paul hadn’t made any calls or sent any emails or texts that he knew of, and they’d been together pretty much constantly.

  Could you send a spell via email, or would it arrive by carrier pigeon or something?

  “Portia’s one of our strongest telepaths, and we’re twins. As soon as she finds the information, I’ll know it. In the meantime, though, I’m going to need to go into lockdown. Lowering my shields enough for that level of detailed telepathic sending, even from my twin…”

  “Is going to leave you vulnerable unless you’re within wards of your own creation, wards keyed specifically to Donovan magic,” Mr. Aisling finished. “Tell me what you need, young witch, and I’ll see that you get it.”

  Paul’s face turned grim. “Answers. You can get me answers. You led us to believe that you had little magic, but the power you just unleashed was immense, though unfocused. Why do you need my help when you clearly have full fae powers?”

  Mr. Aisling’s face, usually impassive, looked very human as he admitted, “I have many of a fae’s innate powers, but my human blood limits my use of them. My recent display of temper caused me considerable pain. Actually working a spell is worse. To do the magnitude of magic needed to defeat a powerful foe would burn away all that is human in my body—and because I am of mixed blood, I cannot manifest a suitable new body here.”

  “So you have powers it would kill you to use? That bites,” Tag said.

  “It wouldn’t precisely kill me, but it would drive me from this plane and into the fae plane, without half of my spirit. It would be…unfortunate. I will help you to the extent it is safe for me to do so, but I cannot confront this creature directly and hope to walk away with my mo
rtal life. You, at least, have a chance. Is that answer enough?”

  “Yes,” Tag started to say, “you’re a coward—” but Paul elbowed him. Okay, he’d shut up now. Even if the half-fae couldn’t use his full powers, he wasn’t someone to piss off.

  “As for what else you can do for us,” Paul said, “how about two breakfasts, one vegetarian, one with steak and bacon, and any further information you have about those who died. And a clean outfit in Tag’s size. He’s a little short on clothes right now.”

  Chapter Eight

  Tag closed the folder Mr. Aisling had given them and set it on the little glass-topped end table in front of the not-as-comfortable-as it-looked William Morris–print sofa in Paul’s room. “If there’s a pattern to how the incubus is selecting victims, it’s sure as sugar not obvious. Three were high-roller gamblers, including my uncle and another one whose name is familiar, but there was also a college boy and an Italian engineer here for a conference. Talk about random. Then there were the two last night. He was an attorney from Dallas. She was a call girl.”

  “Call girl…” Paul, who was sprawled on the unmade bed, supposedly meditating but possibly napping, came out of his half daze.

  “A high-priced one, not a bored housewife who sets herself up on Craigslist to make a few extra bucks. Mr. Aisling knew all about her. She was like one of those old-time courtesans, very elegant and classy unless you wanted something else.”

  “Which means she was probably an untrained red witch. People who are called to sex work and do well for themselves, who aren’t doing it because they’re desperate or coerced, often are.” Paul sat up, looking alert and focused again—maybe he really had been meditating. “Assuming the dead woman was a witch, that makes two Differents among the victims, which is far higher a percentage than you’d expect if the victims were randomly chosen.”

  “Make that three, possibly four.” Tag perked up. “Gambling and Trickster’s children go together like sex work and red witches. Now I remember why I know John McTeague’s name. He and Uncle Randolph had this friendly rivalry going back to the ’70s, and I’m pretty sure Uncle Randolph told me he was a raccoon. I don’t know Acme Meckler, the other gambler, but would anyone but a coyote name their daughter Acme?”

  Paul jumped off the bed, gave Tag a quick kiss on the top of his head and snatched the file from the table. “Let me take another look at the others… Oh Lord and Lady, how did I miss that before? Dr. Cavello is a metal witch! She’s an Angelini by marriage—her husband died a few years ago—but she kept her family name professionally, so I didn’t connect it at first.” He plopped down next to Tag, somehow making plopping look graceful, at least to Tag’s biased eyes.

  “That leaves the college kid and the lawyer.”

  “The college boy could have some powers, but more likely he was a tasty snack the demon couldn’t resist. Face it, the average twenty-year-old is sexual energy going somewhere to happen.”

  “And potential. I don’t know if that would be extra food, but …”

  The witch grimaced. “Good Lord and Lady, yes. I guess we’re lucky in a way that it’s mostly interested in Differents, or half of UNLV might be dead. The attorney could have been claimed because he was a horndog who hired the wrong escort, but it’s possible he had a minor talent for sorcery.”

  It was Tag’s turn to make a face. “I know everyone makes lawyer jokes, but isn’t that a little harsh to assume he’s a sorcerer?”

  “Sorcery isn’t evil in itself. At its heart, it is word magic, magic of persuasion and reason—purely neutral. Unfortunately, it works well for mind control and enslavement, so when a sorcerer goes bad, he goes really bad. The other thing about sorcery, though, is that you can’t do much with it without formal training. It’s not like being a witch or a shaman, which is innate and will manifest even if you’re raised by normies and don’t know what you are. A lot of people with sorcerous gifts never recognize there’s anything different about them because it’s so subtle. They’re good talkers, persuasive and clever, which makes them great at certain professions, like law or politics, but they never actually become full-blown sorcerers because no one’s taught them how.”

  They fell silent. Tag couldn’t read Paul’s mind the way it seemed Paul could read his, but he’d stake the whole pot that the witch’s thoughts were straying in the same direction his were—that if the incubus/succubus/whatever was hungry for Differents, the two of them must smell like Ruth’s Chris Steak House to a hungry carnivore.

  Which was either very good, very bad or both.

  “So are we a buffet or bait?” he finally asked.

  “Both. If the demon eats Different abilities, it will be attracted to us. But the way that card flared up was weird. A taunt, I think. A challenge. It wants us to know it’s hunting us while we’re hunting it.”

  “Seems counterproductive. If you hadn’t been here and something that bizarre happened, I might have gotten on the next plane home,” he admitted. “Speaking as a predator, the last thing you want to do is scare the prey off. But I’d handled the card before, and it was normal. The print was legible, and it certainly didn’t go up in flames.”

  Paul grabbed his hands, clasped them with amazing strength. “That card must have been keyed to send a signal to the demon if it fell into the hands of anyone who was on to it, or who had the knowledge and skills to potentially defeat it. It knows we’re hunters, not prey.”

  “It has to know that Aisling would take measures, unless for some reason one shady extraplanar being can’t recognize another one. Heck, even if it didn’t realize what Aisling is, it would know he’s Different and has wards on the hotel, so it had to figure sooner or later he’d realize what was going on. It doesn’t necessarily know we’re the hunters. She…it…gave me a card, but I doubt I’m the only one. I’m a young dual guy alone in Vegas, and I have to admit I was warm for that particular form it was wearing in a casual way. And she…it…doesn’t know who you are. You don’t smell dangerous.”

  “I’m wounded,” Paul said drily.

  “I mean in the sense of violent and ruthless. You smell sexy and tasty and smart. Now me, I’m from this world, and I’m related to both academics and con artists. I know smart people are the ones you really have to watch out for. The demon might not figure that out until it’s too late. I’m a predator, but I’m a small one. It’s obviously not afraid to take on foxes and coyotes and raccoons, because our animalsides aren’t strong enough to save our bacon if trouble sneaks up on us. But if we know there’s trouble coming…that’s where the smart part comes in. You have magic out the wazoo, more than the demon may know just checking you out, because the smart, polite, sexy part masks it. And in fox form, I can sneak really well.”

  To prove his point, he took a deep breath and called his animalside out.

  Paul had dual friends, but he’d never seen a dual shift before. Part of him felt like he should look away, that this act was too intimate, a glimpse into Tag’s innermost self. The moment of change from one form to another, both equally the “real” one, was unique to duals—and the way Tag changed, the way he let his fox come to the outside where others could see him, would be unique to Tag.

  Which was why Paul couldn’t look away.

  The change wasn’t instantaneous, but before Paul had time to blink, a handsome red fox sat on top of Tag’s abandoned clothes. The fox looked alert and, with his white front paws crossed, decorous in a way the wordside wasn’t.

  He looked like a fox like any other, though perhaps larger and sleeker than most, his thick coat a burnished brown-red. His eyes, though, seemed particularly clever, with something behind them that, since he knew what he was seeing, Paul recognized as more than a fox’s level of intelligence.

  “A Platonic ideal of a fox,” Paul said out loud. The fox made a barking noise that sounded foxlike, yet, in this context, was intriguingly close to laughter.

  He cautiously opened up his witch-sight. To that vision, the fox was clearly no or
dinary animal. It was Tag, though Tag in a different form, and the aura of his energies was both man-shaped and fox-shaped.

  Paul’s cock was of the opinion—rather curious to the rest of Paul—that this shift was incredibly erotic. The fox wasn’t sexy (although Paul supposed he would be to another fox), but something about the dual power so different from his own magic, so much a part of Tag’s nature, affected Paul on a visceral level.

  He fought past the urge to beg Tag to shift back so they could fuck like the wild animal Tag currently resembled. That was for later. They still had work to do. “You’re still conspicuous—a fox in a Vegas hotel.” His voice sounded strained to himself, choking on his own desire. In fox form, Tag’s ears and nose must be even more keen, but would he be paying attention to those cues from a human now? Paul couldn’t decide if he hoped so or not. “But I can do something about that.”

  Lust and need fused with the loneliness of being so far from home and family, entirely on his own without another Donovan for the first time ever. The emotions roiled, a hot ball in his gut and spirit. It took only a little twist to turn those energies into the fuel for red magic. Not as powerful as actual sex would be, but enough for the experiment.

  He reached out, cast a veiling illusion. The foxside Tag wavered for a few seconds, blurred, then faded away. Paul still saw him as a pale, glowing outline, but he had trouble fully locking down his witch-sight—it was why he couldn’t drive and had had to endure the discomfort of a long bus ride here. (Donovans didn’t fly if they could possibly avoid it—too much environmental impact.) A normy would notice nothing.

  “That’s better. Move around a little and see if it holds.”

  A soft thump as something he could barely see hit the floor, the occasional almost inaudible skitter of clawed paws when Tag must have veered off the carpet onto the tiled entrance to the bathroom. Paul saw the glowing outline if he focused on it, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw nothing.