The Angel's Hunger (Masters of Maria)

by Holley Trent

  “I have no appetite, although I’m certain Tamatsu wouldn’t refuse a meal,” Tarik said.

  Tamatsu picked up a stack of papers from inside the empty aquarium and nodded.

  “The deli closes early today,” she said. “Let me run down there and slip an order under Gus’s nose. I’ve got a coupon.”

  Tarik chuckled.

  She poked him on the way past. “Don’t pick on me. The school system hands coupons out on staff development days. They’re supposed to make us forget the state hasn’t approved a budget increase in six years and that we can’t actually afford to live where we teach.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In Maria Heights with the rest of the hooligans.” The screen door rattled shut behind her. “But don’t feel bad for us,” she called through it. “We get cable out there now.”

  Tamatsu grinned and quickly shuffled the hoarded papers. Willa amused him to no end. Many near-immortals held jobs as a matter of necessity—the vast majority hadn’t amassed enough wealth to live off the interest dividends. Tito was a sheriff’s deputy. Some of Gulielmus’s sons worked in construction or did “freelance” hustles.

  And … Noelle sold real estate.

  Apparently, he’d never be able to compile a group of people in his mind without finding some way to slot his little wretch into it.

  The screen door rattled again, but Tamatsu didn’t look up. The deli was three doors down. He suspected Willa had put the order in and returned.

  “Oh. There you are.”

  Not Willa.

  He closed his eyes and pressed his teeth together hard.

  Noelle’s footsteps barely made noise as she approached the dining room.

  Bare feet still?

  “Madam,” Tarik said in greeting.

  “Hello.” Her voice seemed to be originating from the doorway between the living room and the tiny dining room, and he hoped she’d stay on that side. “Lola whisked me back to town.”

  “To here specifically?”

  “Mm-hmm. I need to leave in the morning. I’ve got some work to do in Vegas, but I’ll be back. That’s the only reason I had her bring me here—so I could tell you I was leaving.”

  She obviously meant “you” as “Tamatsu,” but he didn’t look at her. In fact, he turned his back and pulled another empty garbage bag from the spool.

  “What a mess,” she murmured. “Whose house is this? If one of yours, I suggest you hook up with the producers from one of those television shows about hoarding. They’ll help you fix your life.”

  “The house belongs to the former Coyote alpha,” Tarik said with a chuckle, making Tamatsu shoot him a glare.

  She was an enemy, and Tarik had made a noise he rarely ever made for anyone.

  Tarik did not chuckle.

  “We’re not entirely sure at this juncture if he’s actually dead or being detained somewhere,” he added, cutting Tamatsu a quelling look.

  Changing sides, are you, friend?

  “Actually dead?” she asked. “I’m missing some backstory, huh?”

  “Isn’t there always when discussing creatures of supernatural proclivity?”

  “Good point.”

  “Either way, he needs to be replaced, and we’re assisting the pack’s patron, Willa, in finding candidates.”

  “No one in the pack is alpha material?”

  Tarik grunted. “No one stands out.”

  “Messy.”

  She was right about that, but she was brilliant. Of course she would have picked up the thread quickly. When Noelle was on, she always jumped to the right conclusion. Obviously, it was when she was disordered that she was a problem.

  “Suffice it to say,” Tarik told her, “that in my opinion, the pack would probably be better off disbanding. The members should integrate into other Coyote groups instead of remaining here.”

  “But that almost never happens. The last time I heard of anything remotely close was with some Bears up in Canada.”

  “How long ago was that?” Tarik asked.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t make me think in terms of years, or I’ll never give you a good answer. All I can tell you is that it was before World War I.”

  “What were you doing in Canada?”

  Tamatsu turned. He’d been wondering the same thing, so pretending that he didn’t care was pointless. He was a curious creature, and eventually, he’d get his answers. A bit of restrained energy upfront would save him hours of effort later.

  Noelle smirked. She somehow managed to look deadly in spite of her small stature, and in spite of the comically disheveled state of her clothing. She was filthy. There were smudges on her cheeks. The silk of her top was ripped. With a tilt of his head, and he could see that the pantyhose she’d been wearing was gone. Perhaps her savage appeal had a bit to do with the way she gripped her bloodstained stilettos by the heels.

  She’d always been quite the creature to behold, just in a different way now.

  “I was tracking someone who’d taken something from me,” she said, “and I decided to stick around for a while.”

  “What did they take?”

  “My sword.”

  In spite of himself, Tamatsu gave a nod of approval. He would have done the same.

  The woman was fanatical about her blades, and that had been one of the reasons they’d bonded so quickly. She’d been in awe of his katana. The thing was made of metal not found on Earth and weighed nearly as much as she did, but that didn’t stop her from trying to pick it up. She’d had to try, and he’d never laughed so hard before that day. She was always making him laugh, and no one else had made him laugh that way since.

  “At the time of the theft, I was renting a room in Brooklyn,” she said. “I went out to work one day, and that evening I got home and saw that someone had forced his way in and rooted through my things. Naturally, I looked through all the obvious places first for my jewelry and money. Of course, that was gone, but those things weren’t as important. The sword was.”

  “I see you no longer carry it,” Tarik said with a laugh.

  “Concealing a sword on my person used to be so much easier,” she said gloomily. “Beings like you two can put on a long coat and hide any number of weapons and no one will suspect you any more than they already do. People don’t respond with the same degree of trust to women who wear trench coats during warm-weather months. And besides.” She shrugged and, looking Tamatsu’s way, quirked her pink lips up at one corner. “Most of the time, the little bit of magic I have left is enough to deescalate any situation. Mmm?”

  Her lips had done that the day he’d met her. She’d said to him in Gaelic, “Well, aren’t you a pretty one? Stand still long enough, and you’ll find yourself climbed.”

  He hadn’t moved a muscle, and he certainly hadn’t told her no. She hadn’t climbed him, though. His belly had growled and she’d opened her satchel and handed him some sort of dried meat. “You’ll start an avalanche sounding like that,” she’d said. “Go on. Eat it.”

  Having never encountered anyone quite like her, he hadn’t known what to say.

  Eight hundred years later, he was still in want of a response as her smile flagged and her gaze dropped to her hands.

  Look at me, woman.

  “Where is the sword now?” Tarik asked her.

  It was Tarik she looked at. She rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes and let her breath out in a sputter. “In a safe deposit box in Vegas along with other irreplaceable artifacts from my time in the elf court. The banker looked at me like I was some kind of mobster when I walked in with my locked crates. Where do you keep all your things?”

  “I still travel light. Everything I own is on my person.” Tarik extracted a toiletry bag from one deep pocket of his coat. “Unlike many of my kind, I don’t keep domiciles scattered about.”

  His ‘kind’ meaning Tamatsu. He regularly taunted him for having numerous hidey-holes scattered throughout the globe. One wasn’t enough when he needed to be
alone. At times, he had to keep moving. Places that were too familiar made him feel nostalgic. There was madness in nostalgia when the memories he had to keep revisiting were about someone he couldn’t be around.

  “Hmm.” She rubbed at her eyes again and then the back of her neck, leaning her head to one side and then the other just like she used to. “That’s advanced-level nomad living. I prefer to have a place to roost.”

  That was different. She’d been a wanderer before.

  Or perhaps she just wandered.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised that he didn’t know. She’d been right that talking hadn’t been their favorite way to learn about each other.

  “I’ve got to have someplace to store my modern vices. Shoes.” Her smile was weak, but genuine. “Jenny’s are those funny little Precious Moments figurines. Goddess forbid she ever need to pull up stakes and move quickly. She’d be up all night delicately swaddling the damned things in newspaper.”

  “How did Jenny come to be your ward, anyway?” Tarik asked.

  “She’s not exactly my ward. That would imply that she’s younger than me, and she isn’t. At least, not substantially, and I think most of us who had my job in the court ended up with someone that they always looked after. Or someones. When Clarissa’s spell finished pervading the Otherworld, we had no choice but to integrate into human society. We scattered pretty thoroughly.” She leaned onto the table and shifted a few papers away from the edge. “Jenny stayed in Ireland for a long while and then moved down to London. I scooped her up after I got bored in Canada.”

  “Why was integrating necessary?” Tarik asked.

  “Clarissa didn’t see where she had a choice, although she held out on doing what needed to be done, hoping the situation would change.”

  “What happened?”

  “Back then, most elves with any significant amount of magic were almost certainly paired off in arranged marriages. Clarissa was no exception, and she really couldn’t hide what or who she was. Her parents were situated high in the court, and elf parents rarely try to conceal the extent of their children’s magic. Before she was ten, adults had already decided she’d be paired off with the future king.” She cocked her head. “Wait. Did you say Coyote earlier?”

  Tamatsu expelled a silent laugh. He couldn’t help himself. The woman’s brain was a beautiful mess, and he’d never noticed the extent before. They’d rarely talked when they were dressed, and when they were undressed, they touched. She was soft and warm and lovely, and she’d been obsessed with him. People had marveled at him before, but no one had looked at him with such ownership. He’d always thought he couldn’t be owned.

  “Yes, Coyotes,” Tarik said. “But continue your story.”

  She shrugged and set her ruined shoes atop the table. “I was established in her entourage when I was around fifteen. I was still in training, really, but the early attachments were common back then. A queen needed to be able to trust her guards.”

  “Indeed.”

  “When the day came for her to marry, I was there, of course. I had that unsettled feeling in my gut that the match was wrong, wrong, wrong, but I certainly wasn’t unique in that. Others in Clarissa’s entourage felt the same way, but the match was already done, and what could we say, really? Obviously, we had a bias. She was our friend and we loved her. Naturally, we were going to be accused of wanting to keep her all to ourselves.”

  “You stood quietly by during the joining.”

  Tamatsu could see her nod in his periphery. “I sat outside her chambers for three days, almost non-stop, after she was given away. Lorcan came out after the second day. I couldn’t get in until late in the evening of the third.”

  Tamatsu knew what she’d found when she did. He knew that moment had been the first time in Noelle’s life she’d ever been truly scared.

  “She was in a trance,” Noelle said. “Trances aren’t so unusual for elves, though. Sometimes, they’re unavoidable when we have to process a large amount of powerful magic in a short period of time, but I didn’t know that then.”

  “Whose magic was impacting her?” Tarik asked.

  “Lorcan’s. To this day, I’m not certain if the two of them actually had a discussion about what he’d planned to use her for. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d ask for things. He’d just take.”

  “What had been his plan?”

  “As I told you, Clarissa is a very proficient psychic. I suppose even now if she were to try, she could hear the thoughts of any mind she happened to be near. Back before she gave our magic away, she didn’t need to use as much effort. And the king, by virtue of being her spouse, wanted to use her ability for his own gains.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he wanted to use her to get to his enemies. He wanted to know their thoughts, their plans, so he could take what they had.”

  “Clarissa doesn’t strike me as the sort who’d be so mercenary.”

  “She’s not. We never had to have a discussion about what could happen, her and I, but I think the outcomes were pretty obvious. He may not have cared so much about tipping the kingdom into one war after another, but she did. She cared about the people who had to work for them and the people who relied on the king’s decision-making for their continued prosperity.”

  Tamatsu cut her a look out of the corners of his eyes. She was worrying at her lower lip and staring at something on the table in front of her. There was a villain in every story, and hers was no exception. What came next in the story was probably still as hard for her to tell as when she’d relayed the tale to him centuries earlier.

  “For two nights, he tried to bend her to his will. Perhaps he thought he’d succeeded. I can only speculate, but I don’t believe he would have left her chambers at that juncture if he’d thought he’d failed. I think at first, she pushed back as hard as she could and stated all her objections. He didn’t want to hear them. He took what he wanted. I believe that after a time, that become wearying for her, and she wanted him to go away. She changed tactics. She made him think he’d won by getting into his head and making him forget the truth. Every time they were intimate, she had to do the same thing.” Noelle scoffed. “I hate telling this story. I feel like it’s not mine to tell, but I think the context is important.”

  “She failed, then? And that is why you’re in this world now?”

  Noelle held up an index finger and slowly shook her head. “One week. That was all it took to undo all the work she’d done for years. Lorcan had gone off on some mission and she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—go along, and when he was gone, he realized she’d been gaming him. I was there that day. The fact he was such a poor sword handler is the reason Clarissa isn’t terribly maimed to this day. I think he’d meant to kill her, but he didn’t understand how well-trained her guards were. Her parents may have been fools for grooming her to be queen, but they weren’t so stupid that they wouldn’t have picked the best to protect her. He couldn’t make her do his bidding, so he hired someone else to do something worse. He gave her an ultimatum. You do this, or I’ll do worse. He gave her a fortnight, and she made a choice no one would have ever predicted. She decided that if he were going to destroy the realm with war, then she’d rather have the people abandon their homes. For us to integrate here—for us to look the way humans do—we had to give up most of our magic. We needed to agree … or at least, most of us. There were a few who didn’t.”

  She looked down at her hands. Small, but so capable. Easy to underestimate.

  Tamatsu had before, but he wouldn’t again. He’d learned his lesson the hard way.

  “What of those who didn’t?” Tarik asked.

  “I don’t know. The place has to be in tatters with everyone gone. In the end, Clarissa humiliated Lorcan, and he couldn’t do a damned thing to her without his magic. He did try to get her, though.”

  “What happened?”

  Noelle smirked.

  Tamatsu knew why. It was his favorite part of the tale. Grim, but so fucking sa
tisfying because the right side had “won.”

  “I killed him. At the time of the blow, I had one foot in the realm and one out. I was at the rear of the entourage. Clarissa had been right in front of me. Whoever was left behind might still be in that necrotic place, and I give them leave to remain there.”

  “You’re certain he’s dead?” Tarik asked.

  Tamatsu had once asked the same question. Maybe it was an obvious one to everyone except Noelle. Or maybe it was just an obvious one to beings who knew intimately well that life and death weren’t always straightforward conditions.

  “Did I personally bury him?” Noelle asked. “No. But I don’t know anyone who could survive being stabbed clean through the gut. Elves may be long-lived, but we’re not truly immortal. Anyway.” She shrugged. “That’s why we’re here. In the scheme of things, I think we’ve adapted pretty well. I almost never hear of anyone I recognize as an elf getting into any major problem. We suffer from low morale in general, though. I don’t think we’ll ever get quite used to not having our own monarchs.” She grabbed her shoes by the toes and stepped around the table and moved toward the kitchen door. “Also, I know some Coyotes if you want me to make a call or two. I sold a house to one about three years ago and every now and then I see him on the strip. I think he’s part of a pack that’s situated near Sparks.”

  “I heard ‘pack,’” Willa said, stepping back into the room, weighed down with two big bags. “What about a pack?” She glanced wildly around the room, eyes wide and eager.

  Noelle, holding a wet paper towel, leaned out of the kitchen.

  “Who are you?” Willa asked.

  “Noelle Flint. Is this your place? I’ll be out in a jiffy. I’ve got to get guts off my Louboutins.” She added in a mutter, “Jenny says I need to stop treating shoes as disposable.”

  “Depends on where you get them, right? I’ve had a few pairs I’ve pitched into the trash after getting home from the bar. And, no. This isn’t my place.” Willa set the bags on the table and extended a hand toward Noelle. “I’m Willa. What are you?”