by K. F. Breene
I stabbed it in the back.
“All’s fair in illegal magical battles!” I ducked under another elf’s blade, rolled, and chopped at its ankle. It hopped out of the way and met the yeti’s big paw. Cole slapped the face off that elf, and it was very, very gross. “Don’t look, Penny!”
The lesser-powered fae and shifters worked around my fire, taking swings at the cowering horde, which was now focused on the magical creatures closing in on them. I still hadn’t figured out how to make my creations solid, but the elves’ pets were too stupid and scared to catch on.
I pushed the fire out and ran down the middle of the horde, spraying hellfire as I did so. I’d been so good for so long. I needed to let off some steam. “Here’s Johnny!”
Skin and limbs and magical parts burned away. There wasn’t much that could withstand hellfire, and I did not look forward to eventually meeting the creatures that could. Spoiler alert: it was my dad and his upper-tier minions.
I stabbed into a chest and then hacked at a neck, not nearly as graceful and elegant as the fae, and not caring in the least. A wolf took down a sorta blob-looking thing, and I wondered if it was a dybbuk—a disembodied soul. I didn’t even know how one of those killed. Not like it mattered. The wolf solved that problem by killing it first.
Turning, I went to slash, only to lose the mark to Yasmine, her white wolf form just as lovely as her human form. Some women had all the luck. On the other side, an elf met a grisly end in a combined attack from Steve and Kairi, and the wolf of Sour Face took down a cute little sprite that apparently spat acid. Yikes.
Before I could find a new target, I found myself standing in flickering firelight amid a bunch of bodies and panting good guys. Or, at least, “guys and gals with sometimes questionable ethics, who were currently not in the wrong.”
“Dang it, that was too fast,” I said, let down.
I cleaned my blade as Romulus worked his way closer, a smear of blood on his cheek and a sparkle in his eyes. He stopped beside me and looked from my still-flickering fire to the darkened sky.
“Here.” I fished another cloth out of my pouch.
“Thank you.” He took it and applied it to his blade. “That is a very handy…”
“Pouch,” I supplied.
“Yes. I saw some in the Brink. None so plain as that, but I like it all the more for it.”
“I’m not after the fashion element of it.”
“I wish no one was after the fashion element of it,” Emery groused as he wandered by.
“What’d you do, one spell?” I asked him.
“Half of a spell. I’m that good.”
“Lazy.”
“Ungrateful.”
I smirked and bent, stuffing the dirty cloth into a dead creature’s pocket. It wasn’t technically littering that way.
Romulus was still standing there. He was clearly trying to tell me something, but these guys seemed to prefer charades to words, and if it didn’t involve a weapon, I didn’t read body language.
“Hi,” I said, just to break the ice.
“Use your words, Dad,” Charity called, stowing her sword and then looking at the sky.
Taking the hint, I said, “Oh right, yeah. I’ll put the Realm back.” I grimaced and got to work. Not too many people made me nervous, but this guy did. It wasn’t that I feared for my life—I didn’t—but I felt the discomfort of being the crude chick among rich and polished people. It was the same nervousness I got when trekking into Darius’s French Quarter house, with its cream-colored rug and decor. This feeling had once prompted me to take off my shoes to eat dinner in his house, only to try to hide my shoeless feet when the very posh Marie joined me. In other words, it made me an even bigger shitshow.
“Use my words, yes.” Romulus chuckled quietly to himself, staring out at nothing. “Charity’s mother always used to say that to me. I do miss her. I wonder if the longing will ever go away…”
“Yeah…I’m not really…sure what to say to that.”
“Of course, yes.” He paused for a moment, and I wondered if something was expected of me. Where was Darius when you needed him? “I must say,” he finally went on, “you are effective.”
I gave a little smile and nodded, but something caught me up short. It sounded like a compliment, but his tone wasn’t all that different from the one he’d used to make a fool of that elf earlier. I didn’t want to be the person who preened when they were actually the butt of the joke.
I was going to end up embarrassing myself with him. It was inevitable.
“Until this moment, I had no actual proof that you were Lucifer’s heir,” Romulus continued. “Now, there can be no doubt, of course.” Romulus gestured around him as I reset the orange sky. The cold breeze still blew across us, though, so that wasn’t right. It should be a gentle, warm breeze with a hint of spicy fragrance. Except the fragrance and temperature of that breeze were supposed to be tailored to each person, something I didn’t know how to do. “You have been in the Brink all this time, within the magical community, and no one was the wiser. Amazing.”
“Kinda the same with your daughter, though, right?”
“No.”
He and Penny should get along well. They both had the radical honesty thing down pat.
I set the yellow-orange glow of the faux-sun, only then remembering it was actually nighttime. So I took the sun out, but then I didn’t really know how it was supposed to rise in the daytime. Did I, like, put it on a timer or something? Could I do that?
“I probably shouldn’t have torn this down,” I murmured. “This’ll be a dead giveaway that I came through.”
“Yes, most likely.”
“Good, yeah. Honesty. Very refreshing,” I said dryly, stitching the flowers back in and laying the cobblestone path.
“You clearly don’t have a mastery of the intricacies of your magic, but your fighting prowess is exceptional.”
“Thanks. I have a lot of experience.”
“It seems so, yes. The colors of the trees and flowers are completely wrong, by the way. The type of cobblestone is not accurate either. This color scheme will never work.”
“What do you mean? The flowers were purple, red, and yellow. That was the color scheme. And how many types of cobblestone are there? It’s brown. Wasn’t the other stuff brown? Or was it gray? Crap, I can’t remember.”
“The flowers were heliotrope purple, carnelian, and butter yellow. These are—”
“Whoa, whoa…wait.” I tried to pour over the words he’d used for colors. “So…deeper purple…maybe?” I changed those out.
“Now you are using majorelle blue.”
“Blue?” I dropped my hands. “What are you seeing? I’m seeing purple.”
“No.”
I gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, hell, I don’t know. Obviously this is not going to work. I don’t know colors.”
“It is not your specialty. There is nothing wrong with that. In the Realm, a master gardener usually works with a magical structuralist to create the designs, and then lesser structuralists to maintain them. Your imagination is very vivid, but your gardening…”
I left the flowers as they were. Hopefully no master gardeners would be wandering through anytime soon. The trees were easy enough, even though Romulus’s tsking when I added the leaves indicated they were the wrong green. The gold filaments came next, and since those were annoying and I had no idea why they were here in the first place, I didn’t bother. Maybe they’d get the hint.
“I do wonder, if you were fae, what your contribution to the community would be,” he wondered aloud.
How did you politely tell someone they were starting to get annoying?
“Demolition. I’d give all your masters something to do.” I finished up and surveyed my handiwork. “The colors look kind of like a circus.”
“Yes. It is quite hideous. I think you should pass it off as making fun of the elves. It’s the only way to avoid public ridicule.”
“Wow. Don’t pull any punches,
huh?”
“You don’t seem like the type of person who would appreciate it if I did.”
“You’re not reading me very well.” I put my hands on my hips as Darius sauntered over, just as freshly pressed as ever, with his suit jacket buttoned and a hand in a trouser pocket. He didn’t believe in dressing down for the occasion. How he was comfortable traveling—or fighting—in a suit, I did not know.
“They are going to know someone messed with their scheme,” he said.
“We’ve established that, thanks. Maybe get on my team for a moment.”
“What I mean to say is, if you can’t join them, beat them. Make your father proud.”
I studied his handsome face for a moment, seeing the glitter of mirth in his eyes. This was a plot of some kind. It was part of his strategy, the one he’d probably just developed after the elves showed their cards.
Given it sounded like an amazing idea, I didn’t question him. I just tore the illusion down again.
“Can we help?” Emery walked over. “If you’re going to mess with them, let’s really mess with them. I have some experience with that.”
He certainly did. It was why they were so eager to hang him. Grinning, I nodded at him.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Penny asked, standing behind us. “Won’t we get in more trouble?”
“What more trouble can I get into?” Emery asked. “What are they going to do, hang me twice?”
“They’re not going to hang you,” Penny said with grit in her tone. “My mother would not send us to the elves to be hanged.”
“You, no. Me…” Emery let his words hang.
“They will not hang you, Mr. Westbrook. Their bounty on you is a gross miscarriage of justice. We will rectify the issue,” Romulus said, and his arrogance was on par with that of any vampire.
It didn’t seem like he’d learned much from the meet-and-greet we’d just had with the elves. Thankfully, he clearly had no problem with extreme violence when things didn’t go his way. I assumed it would be no different at the castle. Our best bet was to believe the Seers and stick together. Otherwise they could pick us off one by one.
Thirteen
“Home.” Romulus heaved a sigh of relief as we dragged our weary butts along the path and into gorgeous lands filled with real flowers, lush, green, natural trees, soft, springy grass, and dusky stone slabs. A sweet perfume filled the air, but it wasn’t magically generated like the perfumed air in most of the Realm. The scent was from the actual plant life around us.
“I just do not get it,” I murmured, veering off to the side and bending to touch a bush with waxy, deep green leaves. Romulus could probably tell me the exact shade of green, not that it would matter. I couldn’t be bothered to remember it.
I peeled a little of the magical construction away from the ground and found the exact same fertile earth. It was like someone had taken the real scenic elements and painted over them with magic.
Darius knelt down beside me, and Penny and Emery stepped off the path, Penny’s eyes on the ground, probably looking for rocks. She’d found a whole bunch so far, and Emery was now making her choose a select few from her bounty. The decisions were not quickly made.
“These paths need more benches along them,” Callie said, stopping on the path and not bothering to get out of anyone’s way. She looked ahead with longing. She was clearly happy to be done with the journey, or at least to have halted for a little while.
The fae pushed on, speeding up now that they were within sight of home, a natural preserve that reminded me of a greener version of Seattle, but without the clouds and rain. And cold.
The shifters followed, a couple of them in human form to carry packs, and the rest in animal form. We’d run into a few more kidnapping parties, a couple of them more robust than the first. Romulus had tried to talk the first two around, but by the time the third showed up, he just offered them a warning, very polite and lovely, and then gave the directive to kill them all.
That guy did not fuck around. I was on the right team. There was no question.
“How are these multiple worlds working?” I rubbed my head as I looked beneath the layer of magic around us, seeing down to the bones. I’d gotten good at doing that without affecting the magic too much. If I accidentally delved a little too deep, then the image would sag, sure, but that hardly ever happened anymore, and it wasn’t noticeable unless you were looking. Kinda. “These are all earth-type settings. This one is lush and fertile. There was the desert, those huge tracks of dirt that were probably fields at one time, and the hills with the scraggly bushes made into weird shapes. Like…is this an alternate universe? Or a parallel universe and the gateways are where the two universes kiss, or what? It’s bending my brain.”
“You read too much fiction,” Penny said.
“And you think rocks have personalities. You’re the last person I’ll be listening to. Because there is no way this world could fit into nooks and crannies in the Brink.”
“Not even with magic?” Emery asked.
“I mean…” I threw up my hands and stood. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What I’d like to know is why they cover every inch with magic,” Penny said, then gasped in delight and bent behind a bush. She came back with a beaming smile and an ugly gray rock.
“They don’t. A lot of these trees and plants are actually real. But the ground is covered in magic. I think that is necessary to keep the integrity of the whole thing intact. Like…if you build a house without a foundation, it’s weak. But anchor it to a solid foundation, and the whole thing will be stronger.”
“It’s something you can take away from here,” Darius murmured, studying a pine tree.
“I’ll be taking a lot away from here.” I started after the others. “Including any gold nuggets I find lying around.”
“Why would this place have gold nuggets just lying around on the ground?” Penny asked as she followed.
“Who knows? Stranger things have happened.”
We made our way through a flowered wooden archway, to a flowered square packed with people welcoming the returning fae. The shifters stood removed in a cluster, most having changed to human and a couple, like Cole and Sour Face, staying in their animal forms. Which seemed a bit rude.
“Right.” I stopped before the crowd, the others stopping with me. We didn’t have anyone to greet, and I wasn’t in the mood to start a fight with the shifters, which might happen if I ventured too close. They were a very touchy bunch. “Now what? I assume we just wait around for Romulus and Charity to sort out their family drama with the First?”
“That would be the gist of it.” Emery nodded and glanced right. In the distance, behind a wall of trees, I could just make out some construction going on.
A woman stepped through the crowd, wearing a weird, long robe-like thing decorated with sequins and beads and stitching. Her wheat-colored hair was pulled up into a bun, and she didn’t smile as she approached. Given her smooth face and her stiff walk, she was more of an errand girl than anyone with experience or clout. Her arrogance wasn’t on par with someone like Romulus, and she wasn’t old enough for something like a council position, if these people had them.
“Welcome,” she said.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” I replied, because she wasn’t even trying to make that greeting hospitable.
Her deadpan stare said that she wanted a punch in the mouth. I refrained, of course. We were outnumbered.
“Follow me.” She led the way, heading in the direction Emery had glanced. Quaint bungalows overlooked a fragrant garden boasting benches and a fountain. It felt a little like overkill. Half of the area was still under construction, as I’d noticed, but the other half seemed fine and dandy for a little R&R.
“Oh good, a bench. Finally.” Callie hurried to sit down. Dizzy followed, tromping through the flowers. I smirked.
“These are nicer than the last ones,” Penny said as the woman stopped in front of the finish
ed section.
“Yes,” the woman replied, turning away from them. And us. “It was thought…by some that the guest quarters should be a little roomier.”
“Why have guest quarters if you don’t actually want guests?” I asked, honestly confused. I mean, I had a spare room back home—three now—but they’d come with the house (or the unasked-for remodel).
“If you should need to order food, the order form is in there.” She lazily gestured to the side instead of turning. “If you need anything else, I believe the Third is your point of contact.”
“Dang it,” I murmured as she left. “If Charity held a grudge for that one time I killed her mark and then beat her up, this would be the perfect time for her to get even.”
“She’s not the type to hold a grudge,” Penny replied as the shifters approached, Charity and a strange dude in the lead.
“I would hold a grudge,” I said.
“That’s because you’re an asshole.”
“Touché.”
Charity’s gaze took in the construction and then the completed bungalows.
“After all that,” she said to the man, and I noticed Kairi was following close behind them, “you still put them way out here?”
“It was decided that this would be a good location for guests wanting a little privacy,” the man said.
Charity huffed, marching straight past Penny and up the couple of steps into the closest bungalow. Both Kairi and the warrior fae dude followed. I could hear their quick-fire exchange of words but not what they were actually saying. A moment later, Charity came back out, her face screwed up with anger.
“I will take this up with Grandmama,” she said, stopping in front of everyone. “Roger, forgive us. It seems we don’t have the capacity to house you as you housed us. Rest assured, I will take it up with the governing body immediately.”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” Roger replied, holding a folded-up garment, his backpack, and standing nude. He’d stayed in animal form in the rear for most of the journey, ready to be the first line of defense turned offense. The last two of the three groups foolish enough to approach us had been dispatched by him before everyone else caught on. “We’ll be fine here.”
