by Jayne Hawke
By the time the enemy began to react, the better part of the force was blind and collapsing onto hands and knees. Reed opened up with what I believed to be a shotgun as soon as he’d thrown his second bomb, a fast sequence of shockingly loud bang-chick-bang sounds accompanied by the patter of collapsing enemies. He had assured me the first magazine would be non-lethal, a must given that our capture target was still in there somewhere and the poison gas obscured things too much to pick out targets, but the whole process seemed a bit, well, lethal from my perspective. It was too late to play nanny now. A few moments later, the poison dissipated, and the area was clean and clear for our incoming reinforcements to assault them from all sides.
A hale of flying daggers was the first sign of life, Chaos and Mayhem’s work in action as at least a dozen blades landed among the enemy throng, the girls themselves still unseen in the rafters. The jaguars landed next, brutal sweeping strikes of their macuahuitl smashing through a line of mercs I recognized as being one of the groups on the list I’d planned on working my way through. Check.
By the time the Black Forest Pack arrived in the fray, the singular baying ursine roar shaking the space as they smashed into the group from the back, the poisoned were already recovering, those who hadn’t taken knives to the back in the mean time. I scanned the room for magic capable of countering poison on that kind of scale and found Varehn’s trio standing aside from the group with hands outstretched like they were calling forth the primal forces of the universe, which on reflection they were. Magic seemed so prosaic sometimes, until you stopped to think about it.
The shortest of the three, an almost human-looking sidhe with grey hair that looked like it had been that color since birth was the one purifying the mercenaries I’d worked so hard to pollute. We couldn’t have that.
I reached into my pouch, feeling for the right vial, and when I found it I shouted, “Kill the shiny one,” and threw it as hard as I could at the grey sidhe.
When it hit him, it covered him in starlight, giving him an unmistakable glimmer from every direction. Within seconds, Liam’s darknet assassins dropped from places unseen and drove blades into the healer from every side. He dropped with six pretty wounds, and before anyone could react, the assassins leapt out a nearby window and made their escape. I wasn’t sure if that was all they thought the fight needed from them or if they were repositioning, but one way or another they’d gotten in and out in a heartbeat. Not what you’d call subtle, but you couldn’t fault their results.
That left us with two of Varehn’s little triad and a good several dozen assorted others. I glanced through the fights on display and found that none of them particularly needed my help. The pack was cutting a path through a group of what might have been cassowary shifters with Hazel’s help while Reed kept their flanks clear with carefully chosen kill shots. Kay and May were still out of sight but in no way out of mind as the rain of steel continued unabated. I shuddered to think about the weight of that many knives on such tiny women. The jaguars and the Black Forest were becoming quick friends, the greater mass of the enemy being pressed back and back, crowding the witches that were clearly supposed to be the heavy hitters of the outfit but were so completely off balance that they likely hadn’t managed a single spell between them.
Varehn, like me, was watching the fight progress and gathering magic. When our eyes met, I grinned at him. He grinned back and made a circular gesture at me that I initially took for a fae insult. I quickly realized that it was a spell when something leapt on my back from behind. I went down but got my balance enough to throw it over me and find it was some sort of fae dinosaur thing. It almost immediately began to dissolve, its magic not suited to life on the earth plane, but I could feel blood running down my back where its work had been done.
So, that was what Varehn’s magic was. Portals. Portals with shitheads in them, specifically. Could have been worse, or at least I thought so until a closer examination showed that his second in command was pouring sidhe magic into him at an incredible rate. I reached for another star marker, but it was too late. The entire fight dropped onto Fae.
The fae plane, creatively called Fae, is something virtually no one from the earth plane ever sees. Those that do rarely come back. We were being treated to a look many had tried and failed to pay huge sums for, a place so strange and vicious that even many of the fae had chosen to move out. As I glanced around, all I could think was that I’d expected more floating rocks and creatures made entirely of eyes, less open grass and pale green mist. Either way, the only way anyone besides the fae were leaving here alive was if I could get Varehn at blade’s end. His mercenaries weren’t good enough to share oxygen with the kind of people who got denied to come here. If he brought them here and back the court would have his guts for garters.
“Welcome to faerieland, ladies and gentlemen,” I shouted over the clash of battle. “Anyone who wants to go home is encouraged to help me capture Varehn. Anyone who wants to be executed and fed to the omnibeast or shoved in a toothstorm or some crazy shit should continue to support the guy who just dumped us all on the fae plane with no intention of anyone but him leaving.”
The witches turned on their heel and attempted to cast, but they were outclassed by Varehn on their own plane and all but helpless here. The magic on Fae was untouchable to our kind. Whatever magic they’d brought with them would still be useable in theory, but nothing was the same here and it would take a gifted witch to make any spell work. I didn’t know any of them, which meant they weren’t that good, and in moments Varehn had dropped a whip-tailed ball of feathers in the midst of them that put them out of the battle.
The flock of cassowary launched backwards, turning in the air and landing behind Varehn and his people, taking on a rearguard that had blended into the shadows moments before, a mass of crow shifters disastrously out of their league. The cassowary gotten clear of the Sentinels so quickly that they were left blinking for a moment, the deadly struggle they’d been in moments before suddenly open space.
The other side of the chevron, the one fighting the Black Forest and the jaguar guardians, had a major contingent of pixies, and they kept the rest in line, knowing that they were free to come and go from here as they pleased and under no threat of execution when the battle was over unless they lost. Their power jumped drastically with access to their own plane, a bizarre kaleidoscope of magics sparkling in the mist. They let loose a screech that was wavered on the edge of human hearing, and a dozen more pixies with barbs in all the wrong places and wings that bled death descended from the mist. Reed’s shotgun opened up once again, the sound of it jarring as I realized I hadn’t noticed it stopping, and their blood spattered over the battlefield even as they descended like hateful insects.
“Ooo, I want one of those,” Jess said as she changed back to her human form, drawing her glaive.
“Liam, Jess, you’re with me. Everyone else go pixie hunting.” That earned me a look from Jess, be she complied.
Everyone else sadly omitted Kay, May, and the assassins. They hadn’t been on the main field, so they hadn’t gotten dropped here. I hoped they were alright, that the building hadn’t collapsed under the absence of magic there or something. It was a concern for another day. They were tactical concerns just then, and tactically we were starting to look a little fucked.
I spotted our target at long last, hidden away behind Varehn. What they’d told him I couldn’t imagine, but he was clearly convinced they were his best bet. Varehn’s little boyfriend was still pouring magic into him, and more and more Fae beasts were piling in. They didn’t seem to be on anyone in particular’s side, happily turning pixies to meat, but that was only marginally better than the alternative. I needed to get this back home where his monster options went from ‘impossible to fathom’ down to ‘concerning.’
I threw down a path of fire, the instability of the magic enough to make my magic strange in my hands but not impossible, and followed it with another of earth, giving us a straight p
ath to our target with walls of fire on either side. The three of us rushed forward in unison, only to have a rock elemental from the earth plane drop nearly on our heads. That hardly seemed fair.
I stopped dead, the stone giant between me and where I needed to be. Jess and Liam both shifted mid-step and dodged around it, pushing on towards the target and leaving me to deal with him. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that, but I couldn’t fault their logic. The elemental immediately began to fly apart, the stone of it spraying shards in every direction, only to be immediately replaced by stone drawn from somewhere in the heart of Fae. It was becoming something else, and it hated it.
I took the brunt of the blame. It threw itself at me, shards of it slashing past even as it struck out. I dodged a heavy blow, but as the fist hit the ground where I had been it exploded outward. Infinity spread between the stone and me, saving my life, and within less than a second had disappeared again. I didn’t have time to wonder if anyone saw. I could only hope the several-ton rock monster and legion of murderous proto-pixies was enough to keep their attention.
I didn’t have time to cast something, didn’t even know what I could cast that would work on the scale needed to hurt this thing while still functioning here. I was on the verge of drawing out a shadow sword and trying it the old-fashioned way when I realized I was forgetting something.
“Bombs!” I shouted, wondering how many others had forgotten the same thing.
I pulled out a half dozen explosive vials and threw them in quick sequence, throwing the elemental into chaos, and as I did I heard shattering glass and fulminating magic coming from everywhere. Finally, I hit the right bomb for the job, a molten hole opening in the poor confused thing, and I took the cue. I drew out a disposable blade and drew my forge poison from the Genie in a Bottle. Pairing the two, I threw the blade into the open wound and watched as the flame sprayed outwards, looking for blood but finding none before simply melting in every direction. Ok, bad guess.
I rushed it, hoping to skim past before it could recover, but it was simply too massive and too resilient. I barely made it a few steps before a gigantic chunk regained its animation and threw itself back in my path, the earth plane stone now completely gone and the beast entirely beyond my knowledge. Before it could take a step, two spotted terrors came gracefully, effortlessly flying over the flame from my left, a pair of broken pixies flying to the ground beneath them. They landed together and struck out at the stone, the ancient shadow of their weapons driving deep into stone that had so recently seemed impenetrable.
I didn’t stop to give them a nod of thanks, slipping past at long last to find Liam and Jess in end phase combat with Varehn, his ally dead but his sword all but slipping past their guards with every strike as a thousand tiny biting reptiles coated them from head to toe. I drew out my sword and a life eater bomb, tossing the bomb to strike Varehn directly in his stupid face and sprinting to his side to press my sword to his throat.
“Take us home while you still can.” I shouted in his ear, the din of battle still echoing from behind me.
“You die here either way. How does the saying go? See you in Hel?” he replied calmly, opening a portal beneath himself.
I held onto him tightly, the portal somehow drawing him in to the limits of my strength. Before I could do anything more than react, Jess walked calmly up and cut off his ear with a beautifully precise swipe of her glaive.
“She asked nicely. Take us home now.”
“No! She didn’t! Fucking fuck!” he shouted, home springing up on every side of us.
I looked around and made sure we really were where we needed to be, then took his head from his shoulders. I pulled on the air magic around me to amplify my voice and shouted with all my power.
“Kill them all!”
A roar came in return, shifters of all stripes glorying in their favorite moment. The pixies felt the death of the last sidhe and heard the sound of my voice. Shaken, they nonetheless fought on. The three of us fell on them from behind as the earth elemental dropped down into the concrete below us, leaving fae stone in his wake as he made his escape, his native plane calming him enough to recognize that this wasn’t his fight. With their opponent gone, the jaguars could join us, and it was a matter of minutes before the pixies were dead, most of them shredded beyond recognition.
As we calmed, I raised my sword above my head, panting for breath and bleeding as I watched the fae monsters flicker and dim or explode in particulate maelstroms. When the celebration was over and the dead were counted, I took a deep breath. Tossing several rolls of heavy-duty garbage bags out, I spoke into the relieved laughter and jocular ribbing of the relief that came at the end of battle.
“Care for your own, then butcher them all. Organs, blood, magic if you know how. Take it with you, leave it for us, fucking eat it for all I care. A message needs to be sent. There can be no covenants between wolves and lambs. The sentinels looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, but no one balked at the work.
Thirty-Seven
“Impressive,” the lord of our territory said with a small clap.
I hadn’t even realized we were back in Fae until I saw him, couldn’t help but wonder how long we’d been there. Had we even left, or had Vahren used an illusion? Even the elemental’s departure proved nothing. Once he turned to Fae stone, there was no reason to think he couldn’t live here as well as anywhere, and the fae monsters turning to dust might well just be a thing they did.
I felt myself reaching for my sword and preparing to spill his guts over the brilliant green grass. How dare he stand there and give us a little clap as though we had just put on a play for him? Blood stained the grass. Dead bodies were sprawled around about, not all of them recognisable. And yet he stood there in his suit with a mildly amused look upon his pretty face.
Exhaling slowly I reminded myself that I couldn’t slit his throat, or gut him in front of the gathering of fae assholes that had apparently watched the bloodshed. Rex shoved Derek towards me. I grabbed the average looking middle-aged man with hatred in his eyes and dragged him over towards the lord. Perhaps Derek didn’t deserve the punishment that would be given to him. I couldn’t honestly say that I wouldn’t have done the same in his situation. Still, we lived in a dangerous world which ran on blood.
I shoved Derek towards the lord, he landed on his knees and had the good sense to keep his head bowed and his mouth shut.
“I present to you Derek Salter. Murderer of fae mixed bloods.”
The lord nodded and made no attempt to look at him. His attention was taken by the battlefield behind me. My pack were standing tense, exhausted, and bloody. It was time to take them home and spend some much needed quiet bonding time.
“You proved yourself to be far more capable than I’d initially thought.”
I kept my mouth shut. Anything I might have said would likely end with us all in some deep dark hole.
“The bounty will be in your account within the next ten minutes.”
And that was it. He turned and walked away towards the gentle rise of the hill. I gritted my teeth and fought to find some semblance of calm.
One of the younger fae, some mixed blood with long golden hair and almost black eyes, waved his hand.
I felt more than saw the change in the veil between Fae and my own earth plane.
“Let’s go home,” Elijah growled.
We followed him without another word. The fae had had the decency to open the veil up in front of the pack house. The fact he knew where it was didn’t make me very happy, but that was a concern for another time.
As soon as everyone was safely back on the earth plane I pulled Elijah to me and kissed him with a ferocious passion. I needed to feel him, to know he was safe and whole. He returned the kiss with equal vigor leaving my lips pleasantly bruised. We would continue once everyone was safe and as they should be. There wouldn’t be much sleep that night.
Alexander led the way into our home. Normally I would have had a co
mment or something to make about such arrogance, but it didn’t matter right then. He had fought at our side, I could allow a little thing to slide.
Nia greeted us with concern written over her face. Whether for us or her I wasn’t sure.
“We have an alchemist friend in Nice, France. You will spend a year working in his workshop building a client base.” Alexander handed her an envelope full of papers. “Your name is now Elodie Bisset. You will create an alchemy business focused on helping people. And you will never step foot on the Fae Isles again.”
Nia’s bottom lip wobbled and tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
I gave her a small smile and nod glad to see that she was getting a chance to start fresh.
The sun was beginning to crest over the tops of the trees as I stepped out into the cool air. Elijah was still sleeping in our bed. I’d felt something tugging at me, drawing me down into the garden below. Breathing in the fresh air I smiled enjoying the small moment of peace before the next thing came crashing down on us.
Castor stepped out of the shadows and my chest clenched. He looked well, particularly given everything I’d assumed that he had endured.
“The time as come Lily. I’m sorry, I’ve done all that I can, but there is no stopping this. It is time to repay your debt.”
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