by Jayne Hawke
“I’m already seeing what I can find on the hidden archives on phoenixes, phoenix witches, and anything remotely tied to the worship of the aforementioned,” Liam said.
I pulled out my phone and looked down my contact list. There was someone who knew a lot about phoenixes in there. I’d been avoiding talking to her, as she never did anything for free and her prices were usually measured in fae Faustian bargain type shit. Now that I knew we were up against Varehn and his crew, I needed to do whatever I had to in order to up my game. This was a job we couldn’t afford to lose.
Six
Kate had called me back at five in the morning to discuss payment for information. She probably did it thinking that I’d be half asleep and agree to anything so that I could go back to sleep again. Unfortunately for her, I was wide awake and ready to talk phoenixes.
“Kate! Long time no speak,” I said brightly.
I could almost feel the narrowed eyed glare down the phone.
“Since when were you a morning person?”
“What can I say, sometimes you just have to rise with the sun.”
“The sun won’t rise for another hour yet.”
“The early bird and all that. Can we get around to the part where you talk phoenixes?”
“For a price.”
I forced myself to smile. I hated this small talk and posturing stuff.
“I’m aware. What price?”
“A favour of my choosing.”
I laughed so hard that I doubled over. The idea that I’d give her something as valuable as an undetermined favour for a bit of information on phoenixes was beyond ridiculous. Favours were something no one in their right mind handed out, let alone without clear and detailed limits.
“Ok, now name your real price.” I said.
“Three hairs from that alpha wolf.”
“Oh, stop fucking around and name a realistic price,” I said.
Hair wasn’t as powerful as blood, but if it was freely given then it could open someone up to outside control. A talented witch could use someone’s hair to reach into the giver’s mind or unravel their secrets. Kate wasn’t outstanding, but she was good enough that I wasn’t going to take that risk.
“It is very difficult to find information on phoenixes,” Kate said sharply.
I rolled my eyes.
“Look, I’ll give you five grand. That’s very generous,” I said.
It was a complete rip off, but I was ready to get on with the information exchange part of things. Varehn and his lot did have at least one person from the court backing them, after all.
“No. I want information in exchange for information.”
I waited and braced myself for her demand for information on my past.
“I want to know why Killian is in town.”
I wracked my brain trying to think who Killian was. The pieces slid into place and I remembered. He was a fallen fae lord turned fixer. Rumour was that the courts gave him only the most difficult jobs. He swept everything about any problem under the rug so that the wider world never had any idea it had happened. Ryn himself was supposed to have kept him on retainer for a decade or more.
“Deal,” I said.
Surely it wouldn’t be that hard to see what the fixer was up to? A few texts here and there and I’d be done. Easiest bit of info I’d secured to date.
“Killian’s the best in the business, you can’t just rock up to him in a cafe and ask him what he’s up to,” Elijah said.
“Why not?” I asked around a mouthful of croissant.
He gave me a flat look full of weariness. I smiled sweetly at him.
“He’s a fixer. His job is to keep things hidden and out of the spotlight. Why would he tell a bounty hunter why he’s in town?”
“Because I’m downright adorable?”
Elijah sighed.
“You’re sure Kate’s going to have something we can use?”
I shrugged.
“She’s the best I can think of right now.”
“What if I could get you into the Knight library and archives?” Liam asked.
I laughed. He was good, but there wasn’t anyone good enough to get a non-knight into that place. It was locked up tighter than a dragon’s vault.
“I’m working on it,” Liam said with a confident smile.
Everyone needs a challenge in life.
Rolling my shoulders, I checked my phone for any interesting or useful texts. Nothing. Liam was digging into the phoenix angle with the symbol. That meant I needed to get out there and find out something. Until I could come up with an angle on Killian, that meant getting out to the fires themselves and seeing if there was anything more to learn. Maybe the firemen had missed something.
The shadows might be able to tell me something about what happened, too, although their communication and willingness to try and communicate were spotty. Still, it was better than hanging around the house staring at my phone. Varehn and his lot would be out leaning on every contact and lead they had. By the sounds of it, they had at least one person in the court trying to help them too. I was not going to be beaten.
Jess was bouncing on the balls of her feet as she watched some songbird flutter around just outside of the window. The house cats I’d seen watching birds had all been very still, but Jess couldn’t keep still.
“Has anyone had songbird pie?” she asked.
“We are not having songbird pie. We’re having spaghetti Bolognese and Rex is cooking it,” Elijah said.
“Since when?” Rex asked.
“Since now. You haven’t cooked in too long.”
Rex muttered under his breath and stretched before he huffed and looked around the kitchen for something to do.
“I suppose I should go to the Narrows and see what people have to say about this arsonist,” Rex said.
“That would be useful, yes,” Elijah said drily.
Rex glanced at the TV and said nothing.
“We need to find out more about the dead fae,” Liam said.
“Jess can do that. The fae like her,” Elijah said.
“How far can I go with my information retrieval methods?” Jess asked.
“Broken bones, no deaths. We do not need dead fae on our hands,” Elijah said.
Jess pursed her lips.
“I can manage that.”
“Liam, can you send me the addresses to the burn sites? I’m going to see what there is to see,” I said.
“As much as I’d love to join you, I have a meeting with a contact,” Elijah said before he leaned in to kiss me.
“Oh, how will I survive being away from you for a few hours?” I said melodramatically.
Elijah grinned at me, an expression full of predatory lust. Staying out of his bed was becoming increasingly difficult.
Seven
The wreckage that had once been a building was on the very outskirts of the city. Soot-covered beams and girders stood bare and exposed against the elements. Skeletons of a couple of chairs and the remnants of internal walls occasionally dropped a thin flake of something charred. Looking around, I saw that the building stood mostly alone. There were a couple of warehouses nearby, but not close enough to ever have been at risk of catching fire themselves.
Concrete surrounded the building. It was well worn with old oil stains and splatters of paint that might once have been colourful but were now rendered a shade of dark greyish brown. The warehouses hadn’t seen attention in a long time, if they were in use at all. There were no other cars or signs of life around. Old locks hung from the wide doors of the nearby buildings.
Everything about it would have given the arsonist the perfect opportunity to enjoy their burn without any interruptions. The question was, why did the body end up there? I slowly reached out with my magical senses, trying to see if I could feel anything the firemen might have missed. They’d checked for accelerants, but their job was to save the person and building. Mine was to find the clues the arsonist had left behind.
There we
re small flickers of magic clinging to the beams that had once held the roof, but it was the faintest thing. I knew that it must have been fire, but there wasn’t enough to tie it back to anyone or learn anything else. Sighing, I began walking towards the building to get a closer look and see if I could find more symbols or something useful.
Rex’s car pulled up next to mine. I turned to frown at him. He was supposed to be in the Narrows shaking someone down.
“Contact rearranged the meeting, so I came to see what there was here,” he said.
“You thought you’d come and play CSI,” I said with a wry smile.
He shrugged at me.
“Alright, genius, what are we looking for?”
“Phoenix shit,” he said unhelpfully.
I rolled my eyes at him, which drew a genuine smile. They were a rare and fleeting thing from the grumpy wolf. I felt like I was supposed to throw a party or something.
“No, seriously, we’re looking for more symbols, any remains of an artifact or some ritual thing,” he said.
“No scents?”
He frowned and lifted his chin slightly.
“Actually, there is something.”
Maybe we’d get ahead of Varehn after all.
“Hyenas,” he growled.
That wasn’t what I’d been hoping for.
“Where?”
Then I felt them. A mass of life essences coming at us from behind the building. It looked like we had some unwanted company.
The term ‘dog pile’ is very rarely applied to dogs, enough so that I couldn’t quite picture a dog pile in my head. However, the mass of hyena shifters in forms corresponding to every binary fraction between full human and full hyena gave me the strong impression that I’d have a very personal understanding of the concept as it applied to four-legged carnivores in the near future.
The salient thing to know about hyena shifters is that they communicate almost entirely through manic laughter. Actual hyenas make a sound that resembles human laughter without actually representing humour, but hyena shifters universally integrate the sound into their human repertoire as a hysterical giggle. It’s said that shifters have a bestial component to their personality that corresponds to their animal, accounting for the shared personality traits among a given species of shifter, but the hyena shifters give me the strong impression that they’re mostly just playing to an imaginary audience which in turn calls the entirety of the shifter animalism thing into question.
It was a point I intended to make to the pack later, but for that exact moment I needed to focus on which of the giggling idiots was the biggest threat so that I could put them down in the right order. Rex, beside me, was snarling back at them and seemed to have his usual tactical approach – that is, indulgence of a desire to bite things – in full readiness. That made two of us and at least twenty of them. Luckily, hyena shifters are notoriously lackadaisical fighters and the pack (Pride? Cacophony?) in Brighton stood out even among their own kind as being roughly as threatening to serious fighters as the gangs in West Side Story. Whoever had hired them was clearly trying to distract us from investigating this arson and get some good paw marks covering up any evidence that might be around more so than actually expecting to do anything more serious to us than add a couple quid onto our health potion bill for the year.
That said, a tickle fight can be concerning when you’re outnumbered ten to one and supported by someone you’ve hardly trained with and never fully trusted. Before the hyenas could quit posturing, I drew my sword and made my move. I didn’t dare pull on my shadow in such an uncontrolled situation. It would be too easy for one of the huge mass of snarling bodies to slip away with my secret. My first strike went to the temple of the biggest and least scarred of the bunch, the sharp steel easily splitting the skull until the top of his head was barely attached to the bottom. He wasn’t dead before he hit the ground, but he probably wished he was. His friends stood in shock at the brutality of the opening gambit, and Rex quickly took advantage of the situation to drive a knife I hadn’t seen before into the back of the neck of a fully transformed hyena a few paces to my left.
The shifters reacted quickly after that, and I had to jump back and make a sweeping riposte to keep from being surrounded. The blow made a gory mess of an upper arm and left a long shallow wound across a partially transformed beast’s chest, enough to make them reconsider their dog piling intentions. Splitting my focus, I pulled magic from the earth below me and began hardening my skin, starting at my core and spreading across my chest, abdomen, head, and finally beginning on the limbs, which were the most challenging part. The magic was carefully woven to be strong enough to block claws and teeth without stiffening enough to slow me or limit my range of motion. It was a simple and common spell, but one I had made much more effective with attention to detail.
As I worked, I continued to move through practiced attack patterns, keeping my movements simple and automatic, keeping my opponents under pressure and bloodying those bold enough to push forward without putting myself at risk. Weaving magic as I fought was something I’d been practicing, but neither sword work nor spellcasting was particularly easy, and I’d only gotten as far as a neophyte’s rote style. It was enough for the hyenas.
Even as I was putting the finishing touches on my spell, I saw a hyena that had moved back in the pack collapse, the wounds that had given him cause to retreat catching up to him. When I could turn my focus back to the group, I found that Rex had made a killing field of the area to my left, a heap of corpses building as he pressed the attack on the disorganized throng of snarling beasts. I needed to catch up to his kill count if I didn’t want to hear about it for the next month.
With confidence born of the near invincibility my earthen enhancement gave me, I launched forward, driving my blade through the throat of a mangled, runty beast who had shifted only his head and had been gamely trying to grab onto me for a vampire-style neck bite for the last several minutes. Another shifter came at me from my right, his spotted hirsute form a slight but sculpted parody of a magazine model on too many diet pills. I elbowed him in the clavicle, less an attack than a delaying tactic, and pulled my sword through the motion to behead him as he took a step to the side. With two of their number dead in as many seconds, I expected the hyenas to back off and take stock, but they seemed to find the whole thing hilarious, kicking up their inhuman giggles several notches and shifting almost in unison a few steps further along the number line of human to animal.
It was unsettling, watching so many creatures in so many different stages of transformation all shift in unison, and it gave me a moment’s pause. Rex had no such difficulty, blood running down his shifted muzzle as he lashed out with his bowie knife at one attacker even as he pulled a mouthful of flesh from the neck of another. Letting the flesh fall, he let out a snarl as he leapt at yet another target, his blade coming up under the man’s left arm to strike at the heart as his jaws took hold of a semi-human ear. It was the picture of a mad dog, violent as an end not a means. Even as I returned to work, efficient kill strikes leaving most of my opponents dead before they had a chance to know they were dying, I kept an almost astonished eye on his progress.
I felt myself drawn into his fury, if only a little bit, my strikes more forceful and less precise, recklessly aggressive. It felt good. A full hyena leapt over his dying friend to grip my neck with his teeth, the natural weapon finding no purchase on my hardened skin and leaving him to snarl in frustration even as an underhand thrust from me impaled him. Before I could get my sword free, a second and third opponent came at me from either side, their combined weight enough to push me over onto my back even though they could do nothing to pierce my skin.
I couldn’t get my sword free, so I gave up and turned to hand to hand, extending sharp spikes from my fingertips and blades running down the fingers. I used my massive new claws to tear through skin and wrench bone free, the feel of squishy flesh tearing apart like cheap pork sensual even to the deadened nerves of
my reinforced fingers. Their blood was pouring onto me, a layer of the dead, dying, and debilitated collapsing into a meat shield through which I blindly clawed, tearing at monsters I couldn’t see but could distinctly hear and intimately feel. It was a genuine disappointment when I started to feel the weight lift, Rex finishing mangled foes and tossing them free one by one until I surfaced from the gory mess like a maenad reborn in grisly massacre.
The crime scene was completely trashed. Corpses were strewn around the bare floor with blood and guts pooling around them. There had to be twice what I’d originally counted, enough that the hyena population of Southern England could only be on the verge of extinction. The adrenaline coursing through me with the savage edge of something that had been buried within me and left untouched made me want to do it all again. Rex had shifted back to his fully human form and was casually wiping some blood away from his mouth. There was a fire burning in his eyes, one that I understood in that moment, a cruel and prideful grin on his face as he looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.
I’d never killed for fun or sport. I had my limits and certainly wasn’t a monster, but in that moment I really understood what the wolves felt when they hunted. I wasn’t sure what had changed, what made that particular fight leave me riding that sharp-edged high, but I needed to. The more I poked at the feelings I was going through, the thrill and the desire, the more I knew that it was dangerous. Swallowing, I tried to quell it.
The wolves were all equipped to keep themselves in check. I wasn’t sure if I’d have the will power should that time come.
