Chaos Conspiracy

by Holly Evans

  “The high-end supernal club?” I asked.

  He smiled at me. I’d been expecting a simple, normal bar or a club like Cross. I should have known better.

  “So, what do you do, Kane?” Dante asked.

  Kane shrugged. “I’m a witch.”

  “He has a witch-supply business. He hand-paints tarot, disposable sigils, and such, too,” I said with pride.

  Kane had worked really hard to build up his business, and he was a talented artist. He should have been proud of all he’d accomplished. His coven had kept to themselves, and while they hadn’t been anywhere near as restrictive as other covens usually were with males, they hadn’t helped him any, either. He still kept ties with them, but he’d moved out and built a life as a solitary witch.

  “And you’re a playboy mercenary who owns a few dozen supernal businesses,” Kane said a little sharply to Dante.

  Dante grinned. “You’ve heard of me.”

  I didn’t miss the deepening of his tone or the tension that ran through his arms. They were swinging their dicks around beneath the masks of civility.

  “Everyone’s heard of Dante Caspari,” Kane said drily.

  I caught a flicker of sadness passing through Dante’s eyes, but it was gone in barely a second. I could have imagined it. He wasn’t the type of man to feel sadness, regret, or anything but anger and pleasure.

  There were no more attempts at small talk after that. We remained in a cool silence as Dante drove us across the city to Lunar. It wasn’t too far from the cyberpunk club Cross, out in the industrial part of the city where it was easier to hide supernal activity.

  We passed by Cross with their large moving sculpture outside. The cyberpunk club was popular with people all over Europe and was unsurprisingly crowded with people laughing and joking outside. Dante drove us a bit further down the road and parked in a small empty carpark next to a broken streetlight. I looked around at the dark street with a mix of residential and retail buildings. It certainly didn’t look like somewhere a top-end supernal club would be. If nothing else, where were the other cars?

  Dante flashed me a cocky smile before he got out of the car. I glanced at Kane, who shrugged before he also got out of the car. I opened the door and stepped out into the darkness, feeling entirely naked with only one small dagger hidden under my skirt.

  SIXTEEN

  Dante put his hand on my lower back again, much to Kane’s chagrin. Kane stepped a little closer to me and walked with his fingertips brushing mine. I appreciated the gesture of support and allowed Dante his ridiculous territorial display. He was our ride home, after all. We walked with Dante up to a rundown brick building with the door almost hanging off its hinges. I looked around, looking for dangerous and unfriendly supernals. That looked exactly like the type of place a group of redcaps would gather, or perhaps some other vicious fae. I made a mental note to brush up on my types of fae.

  We walked into the small dark room with a bare cracked concrete floor and murky windows.

  “Are you scared?” Dante whispered in my ear.

  I rolled my eyes and went to stride off ahead of him, but of course I didn’t know where we were going.

  Dante led us through a doorway with dark peeling paint and splintered wood. There was a layer of magic acting as a barrier into the rest of the dank room. Dante looked over to Kane and gestured for him to go ahead. Kane rolled his eyes before he walked through the barrier and vanished. The damn half-demon was watching my reaction with a smirk on his face, and I walked through the barrier with my head held high. I wasn’t going to show weakness.

  It took a few blinks for my eyes to adjust to the sudden shift. Gone was the dark, damp, miserable room. I now stood at the top of a wide staircase made from pure white wood. Kane was standing at the white railing before me, which was formed from elegantly twisting wood with a blood-red rail curving at the top to form a balcony area. I stepped up next to Kane and tried to look like I belonged as I looked down on the throngs of people below us, all of them supernal in very expensive clothing. I could feel the magic woven into the fabrics from up there. My sense of non-blood magic wasn’t as refined as other witches’, but the magic from the fabrics tickled my fingertips and brushed over my forearms. I wasn’t entirely sure what type of magic it was, but there was a static that came with it.

  Dante’s warm hand returned to my lower back, and he leaned over me. I could feel the smirk on his face. Or perhaps it was more than I could hear it in the slight shift in his bloodsong, the song that serenaded me over the heavy bass of the music playing from the speakers surrounding the expanse of dancefloor below us. Kane took my hand in his on the other side of me, and I got the distinct feeling of being pulled between the two men. I ignored them and looked down at the club and the fae huddled around a small black table just below us. Their pointed ears were showing through their thick hair, and even from up there, I could see the razor-sharp edges of their cheekbones. They were pointing at something on a map that I probably didn’t want to know about.

  The dancefloor was full of beautiful people, from shifters with golden eyes to sirens with blood-red painted lips and barely-there diaphanous dresses. Dante pressed his hand a little tighter to my back.

  “Come on, let’s get some drinks,” he said.

  Kane released my hand but remained glued to my side as we walked down the staircase to the dancefloor below. It didn’t take long for all eyes to turn to us, and the whispering began. Who was Dante’s new girl? I lifted my chin and ignored them all. I wasn’t some piece of meat. We stopped at the long, slender chrome bar where a made shifter was doing showy bartending, throwing the shaker around and swirling it in the air. Kane ran his fingers over my inner wrist, and I smiled up at him. It wasn’t anything like our usual hangout, but I was determined to have some fun.

  Dante ordered us three drinks with names I didn’t catch. Kane tensed but didn’t give Dante the satisfaction of being snarky. I shook my head, turned, and leaned back against the bar as I took in the light show overhead. Fae lights in bright neon blue and vivid sunshine yellow cascaded across the air above us in rapid rolling waves that broke just over the DJ’s head at the far end of the room. The DJ was some form of fae that I didn’t recognise; the pointed ears and sharper bone-structure told me the fae part. There were a few shifters around the edges of the room, an elegant fox shifter with rust-coloured hair in a complicated updo giggling at something a lycan said. Mostly, it was fae, though, and that made me nervous.

  Fae were vicious predators wrapped up in expensive cloth with a healthy dose of business sense to make them spectacularly unpleasant to be around. Being in a closed space with what must have been two hundred of them in various forms, with alcohol, was a disaster waiting to happen.

  Dante reached around and held a pale pink drink up for me to take. I looked at his emerald green drink and took that from him instead.

  “Pink’s really not my colour,” I said with a smirk before I took a sip of his drink.

  It tasted green with a peculiar aftertaste something akin to lemongrass. I frowned and looked down at it, wondering if it was some weird health drink instead of the alcohol I’d been expecting. Given he was driving, that wouldn’t have been the most ridiculous thing. He took it back from me with a smile. I didn’t miss the way his fingers lingered on mine before he handed me back my pink drink, which now had a swirl of dark violet in it. Kane was looking very unhappily at his pink drink before he knocked it back in one and held out his hand.

  “How about we dance?” he said.

  I took a sip of the pink drink and found it sweet and fruity - in other words, very girly. My parents had raised me to have manners, and Dante had brought us to the club, so I didn’t want to throw away his drink and go and dance with Kane. That was just rude. So, I placed the drink back down on the bar and took Dante’s hand in mine before following Kane out onto the dancefloor. I was going to regret that decision.

  SEVENTEEN

  Kane led us through the tight
ly pressed bodies of the fae dancers to somewhere near the middle of the dancefloor. The bloodsongs from everyone were overwhelming. I hadn’t been somewhere so tightly packed since my magic had come into its own. When Kane and I had gone dancing, we’d stuck to smaller bars and clubs where the dancers were spread out. The songs all merged into a heady song full of soft whispers and fae bells. Dante’s song became the bass that thrummed through my bones, but it was Kane’s song that stopped me from losing myself entirely. I clung onto his familiar song and fought to keep up the appearance of being normal and in control as I danced to the beat of the bloodsongs, the actual music entirely drowned out.

  After what felt like a century but couldn’t have been more than a few songs, my control was slipping. I could feel the blood calling to me. I closed my eyes, and I could feel it like warm silk fluttering against my fingertips, begging me to pull it to me and release its full potential. I opened my eyes and almost fell against Kane.

  “I need to go,” I whispered.

  He wrapped his arm around my waist, and Dante pushed his way through the crowd for us towards the stairs. Once we were back in the dank room, the silence was almost painful. It left my skin feeling raw. I swallowed hard and tried to calm my breathing. It was all too much. Dante cupped his hand around my cheek and I looked up into those beautiful ice-blue eyes. His bloodsong washed over me and soothed the rising panic. It had a strength and certainty to it that give me peace and the solidity I needed to pull myself together.

  “What happened?” he asked softly.

  I shook my head.

  “Must have been a bad reaction to the drink, what was in it?” I asked.

  He frowned, and I resisted the urge to press my thumb to the creases between his eyebrows as Kane and I did to each other. Kane’s arm remained around my waist, and I leaned against him, allowing his gentle bloodsong to caress my mind and bring a smile to my face.

  “It was a simple human cocktail: vodka and some fruit juices, nothing fae,” Dante said, the worry filling his face.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’m coming down with something,” I said with a half-hearted shrug.

  Dante took my hand and rubbed his thumb over the palm in slow soothing strokes. “I’ll get you home.”

  We stepped out into a light drizzle. Kane held me close with his arm around my waist. Dante tensed as he looked over at his car that was mostly hidden in the darkness. It took me a moment to realise what he was staring at. I felt the odd arrhythmic song of three people in the shadows near his car.

  “We are here to remove the demon spawn from our world,” a thick masculine voice said.

  I pulled my dagger from under my skirt and felt Kane retrieve his own as we stepped up to stand next to Dante.

  The area exploded with pure white light, and the sound of glass breaking on the ground came a microsecond after the light. I was blind, but I had trained for that. My parents had insisted that I didn’t depend on my sight too much; it was too easy to take away. I instinctively closed my eyes, took a steadying breath, and focused.

  My magic and hearing kicked in. The sound of a fist hitting muscle came from my left and the acrid scent of stale alcohol filled my nostrils, but I pushed it all aside to listen to the bloodsongs. They pulsed and called to me. If I could have brought my magic to the surface, I would have been able to see them in my mind’s eye, the blood coursing through their veins. With Dante so close, I couldn’t risk it. I focused on the feeling of their song, enough to give me a blurred image, a dark red outline against the black canvas of my eyelids.

  I rushed forward, cursing myself for wearing stupid high heels. I should have known better. I trained and made sure I could fight in every pair of shoes I owned, but that didn’t mean the heels were a good option. The arrhythmic song closest to me had stopped moving. The dark red smudge remained motionless, waiting and watching, perhaps. Or maybe they were blind and waiting for their vision to return. I wasn’t going to give them a chance. I closed the space between me and the song, running as fast as I could across the rough concrete, and swiped upwards at a small spot where the song was louder. I hoped it was their jugular. A rough hand caught my wrist and laughed, mocking me.

  So much for them being blind. I didn’t let it rattle me. His contact with my wrist allowed me to focus, to see him more clearly. I wouldn’t miss next time.

  “Such a clumsy attack,” a male voice said as the hand squeezed my wrist tighter.

  A gasp came from behind me, followed by the distinctive sound of bones breaking. Kane could hold his own in a fight. He’d been on plenty of hunts with my parents and me. Of course, the fact he was a combat witch helped. I punched at what I hoped was the attacker’s throat, a thick mass of red right about where the top of my head was.

  The urge to open my eyes emerged when I heard a cry of pain and the sound of breaking bones. I needed to finish this. I opened my eyes, my vision blurry and starting to clear. His head was a large, dark-grey blob. I aimed at the small section of grey between the blob and the wide darkness that I assumed was his shoulders in a dark jacket. He coughed and spluttered before he released my hand, which I used to drive my dagger down into the muscle where his shoulder met his neck. My vision finally cleared as I felt the blood come up towards my hands. It called to me, a reminder that I could end this in a second or two if only I could use my magic.

  I didn’t drive my blade too deep. He’d survive. I didn’t know if we were supposed to be killing them or just scaring them off. I didn’t like to kill if I didn’t have to. I wasn’t the monster people thought I should be.

  Dante came up behind me. I could feel his blood coating half of his torso. In my mind’s eye, it was a veneer of silk against his warm smooth skin.

  “Thank you, Wren,” he said softly.

  I spun around and saw his shirt had been torn to tatters. There was mass of red blood and muscle on his left-hand side where the shirt had been.

  “Fuck…” I whispered.

  He gave me a wry smile. “I’ll take you home.”

  “I have my emergency healing kit there,” Kane said.

  Dante nodded and got into his car stiffly. I rushed around to the passenger side to make sure he was in a state to drive.

  He was leaning back in his seat looking straight ahead.

  “I’ve had worse,” he said with a small smile.

  “Do you heal yourself?” I asked.

  It was a stupid question, but I knew nothing about demons.

  “It looks worse than it is. A good night’s sleep and some light healing herbs and it’ll be as though it never happened,” he said.

  I caught the slight roughness in his voice. He was clearly in a great deal of pain.

  “Who were they?” Kane asked.

  Dante shrugged and started the engine.

  “I never stopped to ask their names. There are a few groups who work to try and remove all infernal beings from this plane: hellhounds, incubi, and people like me.”

  There were plenty of people who fought hard to keep the world as they felt it should be. Hunters, the kind that refused to become enforcers when the new law came in and the world changed, they try to remove all made beings. I had a live-and-let-live attitude. As long as the made stayed within the laws, then I saw no reason to harm them. Others, however, called them abominations, as they had been born as humans and became broken supernals, halfway between human and supernal. They were still fighting to find their place in the world. I could understand their struggle.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thankfully, my flat was tidy when I led Dante into it. To his credit, he didn’t look horrified or disdainful when he stepped into the living area with the large beanbag and a laptop in front of it.

  “I’m sorry, there isn’t really anywhere for you to sit,” I said, the shame making my cheeks burn up.

  Dante held up his hand and gave me a gentle, genuine smile.

  “I’m not judging you, Wren.”

  The hardness in Kane’s eyes suggested that he didn
’t think Dante was being entirely honest about that.

  “Wren, can you get a bowl of hot water and a sterile cloth out? I’ll mix the herbs,” Kane said, his fingers running over my wrist as he did so.

  “Sorry, yes!” I said, feeling a complete fool.

  I’d treated many injuries, I knew the drill, yet I’d been standing there feeling self-conscious about the incredibly rich half-demon seeing my tiny little flat. I had a cupboard devoted to basic medical things that I raided and filled a large bowl with fresh hot water.

  “Can you take your shirt off, Dante?” I asked.

  “It’d be best to throw it away,” Kane said as he pushed the bin towards Dante with his foot.

  The soft scent of fresh rose made me smile as Kane mixed the various herbs and things to make the healing paste. The look of intense concentration on his face was familiar and comforting. I desperately wanted to reach over and tuck the hair that was hanging in front of his eye behind his ear, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate the gesture with Dante standing right there.

  Dante almost took my breath away. He was really living up to the Adonis image as he stood there with his shirt off, exposing his perfectly defined abs and pecs. The clear V leading into his jeans held my attention for a little too long. I placed the bowl of water by his feet and set about cleaning the blood from the large wound that covered half of his side.

  “Wren! Where are your gloves?” Kane said.

  I frowned and looked down at the thin layer of Dante’s blood on my fingertips.

  “You know demon blood is addictive,” Kane scolded.

  He was too late. The faint euphoria was already beginning to take hold. Everything looked that little bit brighter and more vivid. The air caressed my bare skin, and the scent of rose was divine as it mingled with the richer scent of something I couldn’t pinpoint. Everything was glorious and beautiful. I needed more.