by Jayne Hawke
Cade insisted that I tried the elf specialty, fireborn venison. I looked down at my plate, which the pack had heaped high with slices of pizza, chips, half a battered haddock, and now a large steak of fireborn venison. As the venison was on top, I began with that. Having never had venison before, I had no idea what to expect.
The dark red meat melted on my tongue and gave way to a warm spice with a slight berry aftertaste. It was incredible. I was about to take another bite when Dean put what looked like half of a crispy duck on my plate.
“I’m making sure you get your fair share,” Dean said.
He’d replaced the blood-stained dark-green plaid shirt with a grey plaid shirt and a fresh pair of pale blue jeans. There was still a sharpness to his eyes, though, where the hound within hadn’t quite settled.
“You haven’t told us about your day,” Ethan prompted.
He had already devoured an entire pepperoni pizza and was on his second battered haddock.
“I got a call from your office earlier. There was a blood witch not too far from home. I headed over and dealt with it,” I said with a shrug.
The pack paused and looked at me.
“By yourself?” Dean asked.
“There wasn’t anyone else,” I said a little too defensively.
“I knew you were a badass,” Kerry said with a grin.
I relaxed a little.
“Tell me everything,” Ethan said.
“She literally fell on her own knife and died. It was honestly kind of tragic. Had the victim hung up like a kosher heifer and was sucking up the blood with what seemed like more or less normal blood magic. I didn’t manage to get much evidence from her, but I think she might have been one of those blood draining murderers,” I said.
“So, she was a vampire,” Kerry said with a grin.
“A day walker no less,” Cade added.
I scowled at them both.
“She wasn’t a vampire,” I said.
She had been very eager to get my blood. That could just have been where she could feel my magic, though. She definitely wasn’t a vampire.
“When I got there, she’d was just finishing draining a young fae mongrel. I didn’t see any sign of where the blood went, which was weird.”
Cade and Kerry looked at each other. They spoke in unison.
“Vampire.”
I sighed and took a bite of my duck.
“She clearly drank it,” Kerry said.
I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t going to encourage them.
“Did she use a magical signature you’d recognise? Was there anything unusual about her that we could look into?” Ethan asked.
“‘Magical signature’ being a unique feel or character to the magic? It felt like a dark fractured version of mine and my Mom’s. She looked like a normal woman. Jeans. Sensible coat. She could have worked in a shop or office and not stood out,” I said.
“I think it’s reasonable to think that these murderers we’re looking for are witches,” Dean said.
“We still don’t have enough evidence to remove any suspects. There’s nothing to say this isn’t a deranged fae. Given the focus on fae victims, it could well be someone who blames their own kind for something, or someone who has been deformed in such a way as to need fae blood,” Ethan said.
“Or god touched,” Cade added.
Ethan growled.
“Or god touched. They do like looking for anything that will cause trouble for our kind. I understand that they have their uses for business, but I think Ryn should tighten their leashes,” Ethan said.
“That’s a difficult thing, though. They’d have to start putting tight border control in place, and then where is the line drawn? God-chosen witches? People who worship a particular god or pantheon?” Cade asked.
Ethan shrugged.
“I don’t really care about the details, as long as the occurrences like we went through today are reduced,” Ethan said.
“Are they really that common?” I asked.
I’d thought that the god touched mostly caused trouble in the business arena in the fae territories.
Ethan’s lip curled.
“Not as common as, say, witch murders, but too common for my tastes,” Ethan said.
“Don’t worry about him. An Apollo god touched has been causing problems with a big alchemy contract,” Cade said as he cleared the empty cartons away.
“It was a clear and simple contract. My people produced the potions, and now they’re trying to get out of paying up,” Ethan said.
I remained happy that I didn’t have to deal with paperwork or politics. It looked beyond exhausting.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kerry and Matt had headed upstairs, Cade was out getting more groceries, and Ethan had gone to his office to handle another phone call. That left me with Dean, who couldn’t stay still. He kept standing up and sitting back down.
“What’s wrong?” I finally asked.
“I don’t know. There’s just something bugging me,” he said.
“Well, talk it out. Where? What does it feel like?”
He sighed and looked into the distance.
“Somewhere near the road. I can’t explain it, but my instincts have latched onto it,” he said.
“Come on, then,” I said.
He laughed.
“I see why Ethan’s so taken with you.”
We pulled on our boots, and I did up my jacket, which doubled as light armour. Night had fully descended, leaving the outside a deep all-consuming black. It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust as we walked out along the driveway towards the road. The sky was mostly clear, but with the moon in shadow I wasn’t going to be spotting much with my eyes. I sent threads of magic in every direction, feeling for anything living but expecting nothing.
Our breath plumed in front of our faces as we walked in a comfortable silence. We reached the road, and Dean looked around, peering across the moors, looking for something.
It came out of nowhere.
Dean yelped, a canine sound that would have been funny under other circumstances, something to tease him about. The boys didn’t squeal for broken toenails, though, and whatever was enough to make a cu sith yelp wasn’t fun as I would describe it.
The dark was still all but complete. I’d become used to feeling things, knowing their magic without needing to see them, but I was going to learn that not everything had blood. Some enemies were older than blood, older than mortality. I heard it in a half-snarl as Dean’s voice was subsumed into his hound’s voice box.
“Fury.”
I knew the name, everyone did, but it was like being attacked by Charybdis – it was a pantheon away, part of stories we hardly believed, a creature that existed to remind us of what normal humans went through more than a genuine threat. It didn’t matter, I was Dean’s pack now, and if he said Uranus himself was picking a fight I’d be on my feet and ready.
I let go of my blood-magic feelers. She was close enough to strike at Dean, which meant she was close enough to sink my barbs onto – unless there was no blood to touch. It would have taken a lot to get the furies to York, someone from the Mediterranean where they belonged or someone local with just the right cantrips. They weren’t our kind. They weren’t the battles we trained to fight at Elise’s informal training sessions. They were primordial, spawn-of-the-old-gods monsters. I didn’t have a special plan, but I knew what they taught in school. Wings, claws, scourges, black all over. Antecedent to magic and death.
Nothing was immune to steel.
I heard the beating of wings as she came around again. The blackness was complete, but I closed my eyes anyway. I could picture her, picture her path, I knew I could. I just had to...
Before I could finish my echolocation, I felt the scourge for which they were infamous. Each and every knot swept through my jacket without ruffling it, a thrup-thrup-thrup of agony diagramming itself onto my flesh. I didn’t know what I was being punished for, but I knew I wasn’t going to accept my sent
ence. I jumped and grasped at the instrument of torture as it flew by, hoping to throw the fury down or, at the very least, disarm her. My hands caught nothing but air. Was my enemy ethereal, coming into being only to strike, or had I simply missed her?
I felt fur against my legs and knew it was Dean. I told him to wait and listen for the sound, then imitated her wing flaps with my mouth and felt stupid. It was impossible not to think of them as actual dogs.
Dean stayed mercifully silent, though I knew I’d be hearing about that for months later, and we waited for the fury’s return in the utter, breathless silence of a huntress and hound. I heard the sounds of the moors and listened closely for any disturbance. Maybe I was a city girl, but I could tell a startled animal as well as any druid.
I slowed my breathing, listened to my heartbeat until it faded to white noise. Next I heard Dean’s heartbeat in time with the very slight intake of breath. I took a moment to admire his silence, knowing that no one had ever had a dog at their side to match this one. As I listened to him, he, too, fell into the background, and I began to hear more and more around me. The grass rustled ever so slightly under wind too gentle and distant to reach us. A single leaf from the oak trees lining the driveway cracked not far away. Dean was calm, so I was calm. Nothing disturbed a single leaf and then attacked a demigoddess and her cu sith. I hoped.
I fought the urge to fidget, a stupid nervous reflex, and then felt Dean’s muscles stretching against my shin and remembered something I’d been told once: Your instincts were surviving the savannah when you were a monkey fresh out of the trees. If your body wants to do something, do it. I followed the instinct, but remained as silent as I could, letting the nervous energy slide into my fingers and toes and out.
My next instinct made more sense and left me feeling silly for not thinking of it. The stars could see. It was what they did, what they were. Their magic was splashing down around us, and I was squinting in it like a fool. Allowing my magic to furl out, I grabbed onto a few beams of starlight and borrowed a scrap of their sight. Not enough to make an enemy, just enough to survive. The stars were generous, granting their light to the entire world even when the moon hid her face.
When I did, I saw the fury in sudden white-on-blue flagrancy. It was crawling down the tree we were next to, its black wings tucked by its sides as it slipped down the trunk in search of its quarry.
Before it could notice that I was watching it, I drew a throwing knife and tossed it upwards with all the self-assuredness a city-slicker blood witch fighting off a bloodless primordial avenger in an unfamiliar moorland with nothing but her pet cu sith at her side could muster. I watched the dagger sink into its chest and savoured the pure, glorious A-sharp scream of the beast as it flew away in agony. Dean matched it with a loud howl, a sound so perfectly beautiful I almost wished it was meant for me even though I knew that the fury whose ears it was meant for had been infused with the most perfect fear a fae hound could instil.
I took a brief moment to consider whether the Greek primordials even experienced fae influence the way we did. Perhaps their power was as much a result of our primal terror and respect for them as it was a literal magical ability.
Before I could give the idea any more thought, I felt a dark emptiness pass overhead and felt my tie to the starlight float down as if any tether to things above was a pretty fantasy now forgotten. Instantly, the blackness returned. Maddened, I swept my blood witch webwork around in a circle as if a poor fisherman sweeping his net at nothing. I almost reached into Dean’s skull, hoping his canine senses would catch the enemy this time, but realized I had nothing like the knowledge to be digging around in the minds of my friends for sensory threads. I was getting desperate, and that was dangerous.
I pushed down my panic and took stock. Our enemy could sever magic and fly. It could hide in the dark. Those were its strengths. Its weaknesses were that it was outnumbered (insofar as Dean’s recumbent lump could be considered a participant here), out of its territory, wounded, and armed only with the tools of a disciplinarian.
Well, that and claws.
The fact was, there were only three furies, and they weren’t invulnerable. Nothing was. That meant that they’d been fighting and living to fight another day since before the invention of time gave meaning to ‘forever’. As long as she thought she could break us down with her scourge and her speed, she’d keep it up. She was probably enjoying making us wait, scared in the dark like this.
If she thought she could actually die, though, that would be something else entirely. Nothing survived as long as she had without knowing when to let go of a target. I didn’t want to start a war with the furies; I hadn’t even wanted to find out they existed. All I wanted as to see this threat off and go back to my life, and that was what I was going to do.
With a plan in place, I placed myself in an open clearing where I’d be easily found. Dean sat at my side, faithful to the end.
“You realize you’re not all that useful, right?” I whispered to him.
He turned a circle and sat back down, chuffing at me. I didn’t have time to argue with a dog, fae or otherwise. I could hear the flapping of the fury in the distance. It was off to my right, so I turned that direction and reached into my war-god magic with as much will and force of personality as I could. It had to know who was boss, know that this was the moment I needed it most, and with my will feeding down into the quicksilver orb of it I was sure of what I and it could do together.
I closed my eyes and listened to the slow, languorous flapping. It was pitch black anyway, but somehow closing my eyes let me focus on my other senses. I listened to every wingbeat, picturing it coming closer. Flap, flap, flap. So close now, grass rustling in the downdrafts as it passed over, the scourge so close I could feel it on my back.
Now. Time to spring my trap. I threw my hand up above me and dragged at the war god within me, ready to shock the fury out of its dreams of killing me and send it running for the hills. I envisioned a sparkling flare of magic and some sort of weapon in its wake. What I got was... nothing.
The fury swooped down at my undefended form and struck unimpeded. The thrup-thrup-thrup sound again landed along my shoulder blades, jacket untouched, and again I felt the wounds cut deep into me until blood slid down my back in prideless acknowledgement of the battle’s course.
I heard Dean at my feet once again and restrained the urge to kick him. Whatever game he was playing, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of getting upset. If that meant a thousand turns under the fury’s wheal, I’d take them and let him see me smile under the needle when it was over.
I knew my plan was still sound, even if the show of force I’d hoped my war magic would grant me wasn’t meant to be. Brave Greek monsters got clubbed by Hercules or turned into stone by Perseus. The ones that survived to torment the likes of me were canny, wary, circumspect. They walked away from losing battles.
I leaned down to whisper in Dean’s ear, the massive hound still lolling uselessly at my feet. “Alright Wonder Dog, you’re up. She slows down, you jump on her and cu sith your little heart out. I want her complaining all the way back to the Aegean, or I’m going straight to the pound to trade you for a Yorkie and see if I fucking don’t.”
Again I stood in the clearing, again I made myself a target. Every second I could feel the scourge at my back, but it took forever before I heard the flapping of our quarry. In she came, flapping hard, confident now despite her wound. She had forgotten where she was. This was the Fae Isles, and her kind weren’t welcome here.
The second I felt her weapon piece my skin, I slid my mind into the blood of my back and clutched on. There was plenty of me already on the weapon, more drawn out from the latest strike, and I built it all into a glue so strong she couldn’t hope to break her scourge free. It was only a moment’s window before she’d have thrown down the instrument of torture and moved to her claws - far deadlier anyway – but it was enough. Dean was in the air, black dog howl on his terrible lips, an
d I felt as much as heard his chops grip on fury wingbone.
A sound that was more a magical projection than a vibration in the air scraped free of the beast as it threw Dean free of it and sped off into the night. It was simply acknowledgement, nothing more or less. I gave a small nod towards the departing sound and wondered if I would ever meet it again, meet its pantheon even. I hoped I would, even as I knew that I was more likely to meet their assassins than their peacemakers.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Having no use of my magic against the assassin had been scary and frustrating. I chastised myself for getting so dependent on it so fast. Even the little bit I used at the end there was a rush that tinged on euphoria. Breathing the crisp air in slowly, I pushed it away. That way lay madness.
“What happened?” Ethan shouted as he ran up to us.
He ran his hands over me and growled when he touched blood.
“Your stupid fucking dog decided to play Scooby fucking Doo instead of help me against a fury, is what happened.”
Dean was switching back to his human form even as I spoke.
“What do you mean? I was the one that drove her off!”
“Don’t even think about playing games with me now. You wanted to test me? You wanted to see what I could do? Maybe have a little fun while you did it, pretend you were a real doggie? Well you did it. I drove off a fury with nothing but the world’s stupidest wolfhound and the power of hope. Watch your back next time you need a real fighter to hold your leash, you just might find that war dogs really do fight alone.”
Dean laughed, no artifice or deception in it.
“You were new to the pack; I gave you your shot at glory. You did fine! You want someone to hold your hair back while you puke, we’re not that. We’re cu sith and cait sidhe, war dogs and bog cats, we fight to live or we die trying.” He nodded to Ethan, no hint of deference present. “He’s in love with you, that’s plain, and he’s the alpha for as long as he can hold it.”
