by Jayne Hawke
“No pets. No more guard animals,” Ethan said.
Sin went to speak.
“No,” Ethan said firmly.
An awful wailing sound came from outside.
“What is that fucking sound?” Dean growled.
“They’re singing to the moon. Their serenade will be over in a few minutes,” Sin said wistfully.
“I’m going to kill him,” Dean muttered.
“I think it’s quite pretty if you actually listen,” Matt said.
“You’re only saying that because you want to keep them,” I said.
Matt ignored me.
EIGHT
Ethan got me up at the crack of dawn for a sparring session. We were going to have to have a talk about that ‘crack of dawn’ thing. I headed into the kitchen post-shower to find an enfield sniffing around the fresh pastries.
“Piss off,” I said.
Dean lowered himself to the enfield’s height and growled at it. The enfield’s ears flattened, but it had the good sense to go and curl up by the back door with its friend.
“You could have just told him to lie down,” Sin said.
“You could have told it to leave my food alone,” Dean growled.
“It’s not as though you’d miss a pastry,” Sin said.
Dean flexed his hands and glared at Sin’s throat.
“You’re welcome,” Sin said, gesturing at the array of baked goods set out around the kitchen.
There was everything from croissant to bear claws, doughnuts to mini pies, tartlets to danishes. Even the pack was going to struggle to eat all of that.
“Do you sleep?” I asked as I picked up a plate.
Sin gave a one-shouldered shrug.
I swore elves slept, but I didn’t know much about them. That elf was certainly weird enough to be going without sleep.
I opened up my laptop and looked over the news of the morning. It was a habit I was trying to cultivate to help with work.
“Two zombies were sighted this morning. They weren’t very well put together, though. The report says they fell over when someone poked them in the chest,” I said.
Dean rolled his eyes.
“Why zombies? Why is it that every young witch feels the need to raise a couple of zombies? Why can’t they form fireworks, or make themselves run really fast or something,” he said.
“Because zombies make them feel like gods. They bent the rules of life and death,” Ethan said.
“An ego trip, of course,” Dean said drily.
“You’re in a cheery mood this morning,” I said to Dean.
He curled his lip.
“I have to play businessman this morning. A client has asked for me specifically for some bullshit job that I’ll probably turn down,” he said.
“Does this mean that you’ll be wearing a suit...?”
“I don’t own a suit.”
I decided to let the topic drop and instead made my way around the kitchen filling my plate with beautiful freshly made pastries.
“Do we have any information on the zombies?”
“The report just says they didn’t last long and a private company was brought in to bury the bodies,” I said.
“Probably just teenagers then. The covens really need to keep a tighter leash on their young witches,” Ethan said.
“The act of making zombies is actually quite fascinating and more difficult than it sounds. I don’t know the exact details, as witches keep all of that locked down. I do, however, know that you need to capture a piece of the body’s life essence before it slips away to wherever it goes. That essence is then combined with death magic. If the witch is particularly skilled, they can use the zombies as puppets but that requires a lot of focus. The more zombies they use, the more their mind is split, which puts them at a risk of snapping,” Matt said.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said with a smile.
“So, they needed to know the people who were turned into zombies, and be there when they died?” Cade asked.
The pack was milling around the kitchen choosing which pastries they wanted. Sin had slipped outside with an armful of what looked like chicken carcasses.
“Not necessarily. You can steal someone’s life essence and leave them alive. And the death magic can come from any death. Although you’ll need a lot of dead rabbits to bring back a person,” Matt said.
“But the witch must have had some interaction with these people to turn them into zombies?” I asked.
Matt thought about it for a moment.
“Maybe, maybe not. They could have cut a deal with someone and sold a piece of their life essence. The witch could have bought that essence,” Matt said.
I couldn’t imagine wanting to sell some of the very thing that made me me and kept me alive.
“Why would someone cut a deal for their life essence?” I asked.
“Beauty, money, love, power,” Ethan said with a shrug.
I wouldn’t trust a witch enough to make any form of deal with them. That was probably closed minded of me, but their reputations weren’t exactly fantastic. There were some very nice witches of course, just like there were some sort-of-non-murderous red caps. That didn’t mean that I’d trust any of them with anything important like my life essence.
NINE
I’d been pulled into a small job chasing down a pixie who thought he could escape the territory without suffering his punishment from the local lord. Apparently the pixie had been stupid enough to steal a favourite book from someone high in the court.
Dean just smirked at me when I got back to the office. Those runs he’d been dragging me on had paid off. I’d been able to tackle the pixie to the ground without breaking a sweat. That didn’t mean that the runs needed to be so early in the morning, though. There was no excuse for that.
The pack had headed out to the moors for a run in their hound forms. I still wasn’t fast enough to keep up with them, so I’d decided to go and sit on the walls in my favourite spot. Matt was safely at home with Kerry and the enfields. I hopped up onto the wall and dangled my legs into the darkness, looking into the fae forest. Knowing that there were deadly fae in there only added to the thrill of the place.
I hadn’t been there long when a tiny thwush sound behind me turned the thrill up a few notches past comfortable. I had less time than I needed to react before what was unmistakably a broadhead struck my left shoulder blade. I was thrown forwards, two more arrows sailing over my shoulder and a third clipping along my scalp as I did. My first instinct was to cling to the wall, to get back up and over the ledge to the safety of terra cognita, but in the moments between being hit and the point of no return, I realized that climbing back up into the proverbial line of fire might not be the safest move. Instead, I pushed off the edge of the wall with my feet and launched out towards the nearest tree. Not trusting my left, I caught myself with my right hand and slid down the thin bough of a hazel tree with sea-green bark for a few feet until I reached a crotch where I could Tarzan my way around to the far side of the stand from my assailants. With luck, they would quickly conclude I was dead and decline to pursue a corpse into the jaws of whatever it was that lived down here.
With that thought, I was reminded of why I’d never taken a bracing little jaunt into the tree cover here before, namely the infamous fae predators that supposedly lived in this little slice of sylvan glory. So far, I wasn’t seeing anything that seemed more dangerous than a quartet of bow-wielding assassins. A squirrel perched on an oak tree a few feet away, looking up at me with the quizzical disinterest his species patented when animals were just getting the idea of facial expressions into their system. A pair of robins were merrily chirping somewhere not too far away. Nothing with teeth as long as my arm or eyes as dark as a midnight shadow. Yet.
I held my breath and listened, hearing the voices of my would-be assassins speaking in whispers maybe ten feet above me but unable to pick out what they were saying. While I lurked and they debated, I tried out the range of motion av
ailable to me on my left arm. Better than I’d expected. It was only now beginning to really hurt, with the adrenaline of the moment sloping off. The arrow was still steadfastly buried in me, my enchanted leather jacket having failed to stop it from entering but helpfully stopped the head from passing through on the other side, meaning the carbon shaft was braced against my clavicle and sticking straight out behind me.
Snapping the shaft of the arrow off with gritted teeth, I dropped it and tried again to move my arm, putting some weight on it and realizing that it simply wasn’t going to work. I needed to get that broadhead out, one way or another, or the arm wasn’t going to do what I needed it to. Even assuming I could wait out my assassins, who were still discussing my fate high above, I needed to get out of there, and that was assuming squirrels and robins were the worst things I met in the meantime.
I summoned a tiny stiletto, its pearlescent white glittering in the sunlight filtering through the trees, and cut an opening in the front of my jacket. My war god magic was more than enough to overpower the enchantment armouring the leather, and in seconds I had an opening just big enough to shove the arrow through. Now came the fun part.
Gritting my teeth, I put the palm of my magically gauntleted hand to the jagged remnant of the arrow’s shaft and pushed forward hard. I’d been fairly confident that there was nothing for it to catch but flesh in that area, but that belief was shaken when a hot, sharp pain shot across my back. It took me by surprise, and I made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a scream. The pain died down quickly, but the noise had been far, far too loud.
The entire forest was quiet, and so were my assassins high above. The silence was broken by a few arrows loosed in my general direction, but with the trunk safely covering me, that wasn’t my concern. Forests, especially faerie forests, don’t go silent because of human sounds. They go silent because of the things that listen for human sounds.
I was just beginning to discipline my senses for the attempt at pre-empting ambush when a scent hit me with all the subtlety of a sarin gas attack. Lush cushions due for replacement, fresh cut laurel, rotting hardwood, handwashed linen and lye... it was the scent of fallen royalty, of a decaying palace. It was the scent, I soon found out, of a faerie dragon. In abject silence, like the ghost of a bitter remembrance, a pale-blue serpent with the head of a dragon swirled up from beneath me to hover inches in front of my face, impossible coils in a geometric spiral that extended beyond the edges of my vision, its bulk balanced on my branch by nothing more than the tip of its tail.
I smiled. Let’s see Ethan be smug about the predators down here when I came back with the head of a dragon on my back. Let’s see anything be smug when the city saw me coming back with it. First, though, I needed to avoid becoming prey for the glimmering monster. It lurched forward, still altogether silent, striking like the serpent it was, and I dodged to the left, leaving it to close its massive jaws over the empty space where I’d been. Inconveniently, the space to either side of a branch is usually empty, and that was indeed the case.
I plummeted in a sort of no-really-I-meant-to-do-that swan dive for a few feet, the dragon not far behind, until I could catch myself on a wall of vines supporting a colony of something that might have been moss. I had a very brief moment to test it, and found it surprisingly robust, the squishy delicacy of it belying surprising strength. It wasn’t long before the dragon caught up, and I rolled out along the wide curtain like a matador, allowing the beast to pass by and through, the sound of rustling vines loud against the ghostly silence of its movement.
In the moments it took to come around, I wracked my brain for any useful information about faerie dragons, but all I really knew was that they were quieter than a breeze and one of the deadliest things the fae had brought with them from their plane. It looked like I was going to do this the old-fashioned way. Nothing lived long without a head. At least, I didn’t think so. There was only one way to find out, regardless.
Spinning around haphazardly on a chunk of vine, I watched the monster bank around for another pass and readied myself for its arrival, war magicking up a hook sword in my good hand and wincingly supporting myself with my other. A glance down told me that I wasn’t likely to get a second shot at this without hitting the ground, and even if the fall didn’t break my legs I didn’t want to find out what else was down there. I met the dragon’s eyes as it made its deceptively silent way towards me, judging speed as best I could, and at what felt like the perfect moment I jerked myself upwards, curled my legs under me, and swept the hook sword down towards its right eye. The ting of metal against crystal echoed naively across the forest, summoning onlookers to a toast that would never come. With a normal blade, the impact would have reverberated up my arm, but the hook grabbed enough momentum to drag me from my vines, the damaged tendons in my arm screaming their pain through a mouth I couldn’t spare the attention to control.
I wish I could say I clutched onto the thing’s back like an Arthurian dragonslayer before plunging my blade into its spine with a roar, but the truth is that its scales were as slippery as fresh ice and I slipped from them almost immediately. I managed to dig my blade into a tree trunk no more than eight feet above the ground, and I very quickly attracted the attention of a pride of what might have been lions but for the blue-black fur and unusually high number of eyes. Less than eager to make friends, I quickly climbed back up, my left arm still sending its throbbing chant of complaint with every ounce I had to place on it.
When next I saw the dragon, it was dangerously close. I had made my way back into the tree tops unmolested, but I had no illusions that it had forgotten me. Nor had I forgotten it. This was not going to be a story of the time I fell into the faerie forest and almost got eaten. It was going to be the story of the time I was shot through with an arrow, launched off a wall, and still managed to kill a faerie dragon before hitting the ground, and you’d better believe I was going to have a trophy to show for it. I’d kept my hook blade, and was taking the down time to focus on honing and perfecting it, extending the blade to a full two feet and pulling magic from the tree I sat on to place a fae resonance into the weapon that just might slip past the crystalline armour that protected the beast from my previous strike.
I was only half finished when I caught movement in my periphery and saw the dragon coming at me. I leapt away from the trunk and the beast, carefully keeping to my branch this time, and brought the hooked blade down behind its skull, yanking as hard as I could and hearing the musical trill of crystal shattering under the resonance of fae tree magic. It quickly turned to finish me off, its gaping mouth still utterly silent even as it should have howled in pain. I tossed myself over its head, relying on the hook to stay planted, and when I made it to the far side of the massive maw that had blocked my vision I found a beautiful wound running blood over its pale-blue skin. Before the hook had a chance to break free, I drove my injured arm into the wound as deep as I could and grasped onto its blood. I felt the rush of a godslayer as the first drops of power reached my senses. It was more powerful than I could have imagined, so much magic that I was drowning in it.
The energy filled my veins like a newborn star, and as it did I felt the crystalline scales begin to fade away. They weren’t real, not physical objects, they were magical wards so pure that I hadn’t noticed. Breaking the spell was as simple as shattering the right threads, and after that it was over. I sliced a bigger gash and yanked harder on the power, and the animal began to die, its meal of a few short seconds ago now sending it to the ground in a lazy drift. I was riding the high, roaring my triumph to the world, hoping those worthless assassins could hear me and know what they had tried so witlessly to tangle with. I was a dragonslayer, and with the energy of its blood I could carve an empire. The blood was burning through me, though, and I’d never get to keep it. I needed to use it fast, and right that second there were only two things I wanted in the whole world. The first was an easy way to carry the head home, and the second was for everyone in the city
to hear my triumphant laughter as I stood victorious over a monster straight out of a bedtime story.
And so they did.
TEN
“I don’t even know what to say,” Ethan said as I came into the foyer with a dragon head as big as me strapped to my quickly tiring back. “I mean, the phantom gloating was maybe a little much, but the kill...”
I grinned and cut the grisly straps I’d made to carry the thing with a flick of my stiletto, leading it thud to the ground with finality.
“Who wants to go fight the weird lion things for the rest of it?” I said, looking around the room as if I hadn’t just shown up with the trophy of the century.
Ethan gently put his hands on my hips and pulled me close to him. I felt his magic deep within his veins, a seductive thick sensation like liquid chocolate.
“You need to ground yourself,” Ethan said firmly.
He wasn’t wrong. The high I was riding from the dragon blood was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. The entire world looked brighter, more vibrant. Breathing in Ethan’s scent, I closed my eyes and tried to ground myself. Mom’s grimoires had warned about this over and over again. Blood witches lost themselves to the high. I had far too much left to do in this world, and I didn’t want the pack to have to kill me.
“We heard the cries of the dragon from the moors,” Dean said flatly.
“Back off, Dean. Everyone knows those dragons are vicious. She was just defending herself,” Kerry said.
I leaned into Ethan, trying to focus on the feeling of his strong hard muscles and not the magic running through his veins. The hunger for more magic was growing with each breath as the dragon magic faded away, turning the world grey and empty around me.
“Those dragons are sentient, some argue they’re more intelligent than elves,” Dean growled back.
“Yeah, and if an elf comes to eat me, I’ll kill it, too, take its head, and I bet you’ll be the very last one to comment on it. Come to think of it, I believe we sent over a pair of elf heads a day or two ago. Do you remember their names? Did you even ask? Or care?”
