by Jayne Hawke
I took the pink vial from him and knocked it back before I wriggled out of my jeans. I felt incredibly self-conscious as I sat there in my pink granny panties with little yellow sheep frolicking on them. Ethan knelt down next to me and gently ran his fingertips over my thigh, massaging the area around the bite. The wound was already swollen and a livid purple colour. My blood coated my thigh. I was so glad that I’d shaved my legs this morning.
Ethan cleaned the drying blood from my thigh with an efficient tenderness that I appreciated. His fingers were long and elegant, and my mind conjured all sorts of wonderful uses he could put them to. I pushed those thoughts aside and gritted my teeth as he began wiping a black goo over the wound. The stinging soon gave way to a horrifying fizzing sensation that sank down beneath the skin and crawled throughout the muscle. I watched on in fascinated horror, waiting for my skin to bubble or something.
“We caught it in time. I’m afraid your jeans will need replacing, though,” he said with a smile.
“I need a jeans budget for the amount I go through, or at least some blood repellent,” I said with a laugh.
His smile spread, and his eyes shone with delight. He looked so beautiful, so normal.
I looked away and reached down for the ruined jeans. They’d cover the essentials until I could get a fresh pair. It wasn’t as though I was going to be strutting through the fae court.
“So, this morning was a complete failure,” I said.
“Not at all. We now know they’re using both fae and god magic, which narrows down our suspect list,” Ethan said.
We headed into the kitchen, where Ethan started a pot of coffee.
“So, we’re looking for someone with enough power to steal god magic, and fae magic. And someone who knows how to target fae in a way that no one notices them missing,” I said.
“Exactly. Although, the fae being missing isn’t a necessity. Our world is rather cutthroat, I wouldn’t be surprised if a higher-level fae was selling off their enemies and underlings that had pissed them off,” Ethan said.
“What would they have to do to steal fae magic?” I asked.
Ethan’s expression darkened.
“It would be an agonising process that would require someone with a very detailed knowledge of fae kind. They would need to very slowly drain the fae of their blood and life essence, and then distil that. Even then, there would be no guarantee, as our magic likes to return to our homeland.”
“So, is it likely we’re looking for a fae? Someone who knows how to do that sort of thing?”
“Perhaps,” Ethan said non-committaly.
“Perhaps? You hired me to help you. I can’t do that if you hold things back,” I said.
The corner of his mouth twitched upwards into a half smile.
“No one outside of my pack talks to me like that,” he said softly.
“I’m not scared of a big bad dog,” I said with a smile I didn’t really feel.
I wasn’t scared of him - I was equally terrified of and attracted to him.
“Is that so?” he said with a soft growl as he prowled towards me.
“It is,” I said as I lifted my chin and held his gaze.
I wasn’t going to back down.
“Your heart rate has picked up,” he said as he got close.
His gaze held mine. He was almost within arm’s reach. I fought to calm my heart rate and find some inner calm.
“Perhaps I’m preparing to kick your ass.”
I ran my fingers over the sheathes of my daggers, just in case.
He smiled, baring a little teeth.
“You think you could take me down?” he said with a growl.
“I know I could,” I challenged.
He stopped with his face barely inches from mine.
“You seem very confident for someone that’s never seen me fight,” he said in a growling whisper that sent chills down my spine.
“You hired me for a reason,” I said with a grin.
I shouldn’t have been so happy to have him growling at me so close, but I wanted to reach out and pull him closer.
“I just patched you up, and he wasn’t a cu sith,” he whispered, his scent enveloping me, tempting me.
“Maybe I was holding back so you’d underestimate me,” I whispered back as I leaned in closer to him.
He grinned at me.
“I suppose we’ll see,” he said as he turned and walked away.
FIFTEEN
Ethan had insisted on making me a huge lunch, complete with a homemade coffee and walnut cake. It was far too decadent, but I enjoyed every bite. The creamy icing melted on my tongue, and the coffee was rich and sumptuous. He was spoiling me, and I didn’t mind.
“We have a list of fifteen names here. Where do we start?” Ethan asked.
I had no idea. This wasn’t my area of expertise.
“These are all dealers who have a history of handling fae magic?” I asked.
“Yes, and they’re well enough connected to potentially have gotten the god magic.”
“Start with A?”
Drug dealers weren’t something that I’d ever really needed to handle. They weren’t entirely legal, but mostly no one cared enough to put a bounty on their head. My job was far more focused on feral shifters and fae that been judged by the courts and were stupid enough to make a run for it. Occasionally, I had to deal with a witch that someone had taken a dislike to due to her cursing a family member or something.
Ethan looked at me with a warm smile.
“Ok, we’ll start with A.”
I looked over at the laptop. We were going to go and interrogate an Axel Fang.
“I’ll take you home so you can change into some fresh jeans,” Ethan said as he stood.
“Are you saying that my bloody jeans aren’t good enough for an interrogation?”
“Perhaps if they didn’t clearly have the bite holes in them they’d work,” he said with a smile.
He did have a point. The bite holes showed that someone had taken a chunk out of me, and that lost me badass points.
Ethan really didn’t screw around with his healing potions. He got the expensive stuff. There wasn’t so much as a mark on me. The type of potions bounty hunters could afford healed the wound and left a scar. As much as people said scars were sexy, I liked the idea of wearing shorts in the summer without people asking why I had a shark-teeth scar on my thigh.
Axel was set up not too far from my house. He had a place in the heart of the roughest area of the city. Ethan’s car stood out like a sore thumb. The cars parked down the street were all old with clear patches of rust, months or even years of dirt, and some of them were up on bricks. The houses were in a similar state of disrepair. Those windows that weren’t covered in rotting wooden boards were dark due to thick layers of dirt and grime.
Ethan parked in front of a narrow, red brick terrace house. His was right in the middle of the row. The long line of slender connected houses had patches of stone in front of them where gardens should have been. I stepped out, and a shiver ran down my spine as I felt lot of eyes watching me.
The curtains in the top floor window of the house to my left twitched, there was at least one person watching us from the other side of the street, and someone was ducking behind a car to our right. Straightening my shoulders, I marched up to Axel’s door and banged on it. The wood shuddered beneath my fist, and I felt pretty badass. Ethan casually strolled up behind me.
The door opened to reveal a wiry blond guy with glassy pale-grey eyes and a scar running from his left ear to his collar bone.
“What?” he demanded.
“Where’s Axel?” I demanded back.
“Busy. What you want?”
“To see him. Now,” I said.
To my intense irritation, his entire demeanour changed when he looked over my shoulder and saw Ethan. Suddenly, he was stepping away and waving his hand for us to step onto the threadbare carpet that looked as though it had been green once.
&nbs
p; The scrawny guy hurried down the narrow hallway and tapped on a white door on the left.
“Mr. Fang, sir, there’s someone here to see you,” the scrawny guy said with a quaver in his voice.
“Who?” I voice boomed back.
“A fae dog,” the guy said back.
No mention of me. I glowered at the scrawny guy, making him flinch and take half a step away.
The white door swung open and a brawny man with short hair and sigils tattooed down his muscular arms peered out at us.
“And to do what do I owe the pleasure of a meeting with you?” he said to me.
I rolled my eyes.
“We’re here about stolen god magic,” I said flatly.
Axel went very still. His large hand gripped the door tighter, and his eyes flicked to something further back in the room.
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Are you sure?” Ethan said coolly.
Axel put his hands up with his palms showing.
“I swear. I do a lot of things, but I know nothing about any god magic.”
“What about fae magic?” I demanded.
His mouth opened as though to say something, but he stopped himself.
“Well?” I pushed as I stepped closer.
“I have bills to pay, and I offer my clients an escape from whatever darkness chases them,” Axel said as he put his hands down.
“And you steal fae magic to help them do that?” I growled.
“I didn’t say that,” Axel said smoothly.
“The lady asked you a very simple question. Do you deal in fae magic?” Ethan snarled.
I hated that the bastards responded to him and not me. My magic began to rise within me, reacting to my anger. I shoved it back down quickly and reminded myself that I was scary. I didn’t have a point to prove.
“I have been known to create things that include pixie dust,” Axel said.
“Do you take magic from fae? Do you use any fae magic other than pixie dust?” I asked.
“There have been times when I have. I’m afraid my supplier passed away recently, so I can’t offer you any further information,” Axel said.
He was such a vile snake. He spoke in such smooth confident tones while he phrased things in a way to be infuriating and get around the point of the thing.
“Give us the name of that supplier,” Ethan said.
Axel nodded to the scrawny guy, who ran away into the back of the house. He returned a few moments later with a scrap of paper, which he went to hand to Ethan. I grabbed it and saw a name and address written in chicken scratch.
The trip hadn’t been a complete waste of time.
SIXTEEN
Axel’s supplier had been called Montgomery something, which wasn’t what I thought of as a typical illegal magic dealer name. It didn’t really matter now, since he was very firmly dead. There was a broad smear of blood outside of his apartment door. It had dried and was clearly a few days old, although I wasn’t sure why no one had made any attempts to clean it up. The small apartment building was well-maintained other than that. A heavy white door had been at the entrance to the main building and the lobby had been a duck-egg blue that had looked quite classy in my opinion.
Ethan frowned at the doorknob and rattled it. The door didn’t magically open. Someone had locked it. Ethan gave a small shrug and slammed his shoulder into it. The door swung open and crashed against the wall behind it.
“Was that really necessary?” I asked.
“No, but it felt pretty badass,” Ethan said with a charming grin.
I refused to let myself smile at him, that would only encourage him.
We stepped into the small entryway and looked around. Blood had soaked into the thick white carpet in the entryway, leaving an ugly stain. Montgomery must have lost half of his blood right there on that carpet. It was a reflection on the class of apartment that we were in that witches hadn’t descended to gather the blood for their spells.
Ethan led the way down the short hallway and into the main living space. There was dust on everything. It gathered in the corners of the window frames and lay in a thick layer along the empty shelves. I’d expected something pristine from a magic dealer; magic was a delicate and finicky thing. That dust would interfere in everything.
The space held nothing to show who Montgomery was, or what he’d been doing. Besides not cleaning. The two-seater couch looked as though it had never been sat on. The shiny navy-blue leather didn’t have so much as a smudge or hint of a dent in it. I sighed and walked past Ethan into the next room.
I’d been expecting a bedroom or kitchen, but instead I found myself in a beautifully fitted alchemy lab. I’d never learnt alchemy myself, but I’d seen it on tv and such. Two long lab tables sat in the middle of the room with pristine white cupboards covering the wall to my left. The glass-fronted cupboards showed hundreds of brightly coloured vials. Every colour you could imagine was represented there.
I opened one of the doors and saw labels with tiny neat handwriting on each vial.
Luck dust.
Love liquor.
Memory syrup.
Why hadn’t whoever had killed him taken his stock? It must have been worth a fortune. Ethan looked around, his mouth pinched, and he glared at the narrow black door in the right-hand corner. I headed over there and opened it.
What lay inside would forever be burned into my memory. Blood stained the black and white spotted tiles. Tangled webs of intestines and other organs had been tossed into the corners of what had once been a wet room. Bones had been neatly stacked up on the shelf behind the sink. There was half of a face staring at me with wide open milky eyes. I swallowed hard and tried to breathe through my nose as the stench of rotting filled my every pore.
“And this is why harvesting magic is illegal,” Ethan said drily.
How many people had Montgomery killed?
“Did they die quickly at least?” I asked softly.
“No.”
It was a horror show, but it didn’t give us anything new to work with. The magic that had once been in those people was long gone. Montgomery had put every last drop into those beautiful vials in the room next door.
“Does this mean it was Montgomery? Can you tell what type of beings were killed here?” I asked.
“No,” Ethan said as he turned and walked back into the lab.
There had been times when I’d wished an awful death on a hag, or a bounty that had pissed me off, but I couldn’t imagine going ahead with such cold-hearted torture as had happened in that room. All for some magic.
SEVENTEEN
Something caught my attention in the lab. As my eyes skimmed over the cupboards with the brilliantly coloured vials, my gaze caught on the last cupboard from the end. Frowning, I walked around the lab table, careful not to touch it now I knew what disgusting things had been put on it. Ethan watched me from the doorway into the living room. I felt the small frown on his face and knew I should just walk away and leave it alone, but there was something there.
Reaching up, I went to tug a sheer piece of fabric away from the glass-fronted door. My hand slipped right through where I thought the fabric was supposed to be. It was an odd sensation that I hadn’t had before. I could see the fabric in my mind’s eye, but to my normal eyes there was nothing odd about the cupboard at all.
“I thought you didn’t have any magic,” Ethan rumbled as he walked up next to me.
Shit. How did I not realise I was doing something magical? I mentally kicked myself.
“I don’t know my parents, maybe I have a drop of fae blood buried real deep,” I said.
Ethan made a non-committal noise.
“Judging from your hand gesture, I think you’re seeing a glamour. I’m very good at hunting and killing, but I can’t break a glamour. I have, however, studied a lot of magic, so I think I can walk you through this.”
Ethan reached down and very gently took my hand in his. He raised my hand right to where I thought the
weird fabric was meant to be.
“Now, grasp onto the edge of the glamour in your mind’s eye. Picture your magic running through your veins into your hand as you do so,” Ethan commanded.
I swallowed hard. If I did this, would he be able to feel my magic?
His thumb caressed the edge of my hand.
“It won’t hurt. And it’s not as though you’re the first person to find out you have fae blood in you somewhere. My brethren did like screwing around for a couple of centuries there,” he said with a rueful smile.
I tried to steady my heart as it threatened to crash right out of my ribcage. Then I did as he had said. I held onto the edge of the fabric in my mind’s eye and allowed the tiniest drop of my magic through into my hand. It felt like a slither of cold metal, a single shard of a powerful sword.
Grasping onto the edge of the glamour, I yanked, with Ethan’s hand still wrapped around mine.
To my surprise the cupboard changed. Gone were the technicolour vials that had been there. Now, each vial was full of softly glowing silvery magic. Somehow, I knew that was stolen god magic. Was that what had happened to Dad? Had he been distilled into a vial like that?
My stomach turned. You couldn’t kill a god, not even a fallen one. If that was what had happened to him, then it would still be happening. Every day since he disappeared. I didn’t want to imagine the agony and torture he’d endured since he vanished. I closed my eyes and quietly hoped that he’d just run away with some pretty woman and was living on a tropical island somewhere.
Ethan exhaled slowly, a deep growl rumbling in his throat as he did so.
“It would appear that we’ve found at least one supplier of the god magic. Montgomery wasn’t the one draining it, though. Gods cannot be killed, and there were only remains in his torture room.”
“What do we do with this?” I gestured at the vials.
I wanted to return it to the fallen god it had been taken from. There was no way to find them, or even figure out which one it had been taken from, though. I knew the hounds had hunted the fallen for centuries. They were all god touched, beings that were chosen by the gods. Dad had said that they drained the fallen of their magic and gave it to the gods. It was a vile and disgusting practise, but even I wasn’t stupid enough to try and take on the gods.
