Forsaken Fae: The Complete Series, Books 1-3 (Last Vampire World)

by Steffan, R. A.

  “Splendid!” Rans said, as though Len hadn’t just threatened to send Albigard to the landfill. “Oh, and don’t forget—you’ll probably want to power down any electronics in the house, on the off chance he wakes up. Fae can be hell on technology when they’re not actively shielding.”

  “Just ask southern England,” Zorah muttered.

  Len briefly pondered the question of when, exactly, his life had gone off the rails. Unfortunately, the answer to that question was far too depressing to deal with right now.

  “Right. Electronics. Sure,” he said. “Now go away, so you can come back as soon as possible and get this asshole off my sofa. Oh—and you’re on your own with taking him to Chicago. Hire someone to drive my damned car back here, or... I dunno, have it professionally shipped or something. It’s not like you can’t afford it.”

  Rans shrugged easily. “Fair enough. Come along, Zorah. Let’s go find someone willing to rent us a vehicle old enough that Tinkerbell here can’t fry the computer system.”

  Zorah hopped to her feet and kissed Len on the cheek. “Thanks for looking after him, Len. You’re the best!”

  “Uh-huh. That’s me,” Len said in a monotone.

  “We’ll be back in two ticks, mate,” Rans added. “If he does wake up, try not to murder him.” He frowned. “In fact, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that part about iron through the heart earlier.”

  “Just hurry back,” Len said, and tried to ignore the tide of dread rising in his stomach as the pair headed out, leaving him alone with the unconscious form on the couch.

  * * *

  The first hour passed with no sign of movement or awareness from his unwanted guest, and Len began to relax a bit. After firing off a quick email to cancel his evening appointment—one of the aforementioned creative outlets for generating cash flow while he was out of work—he took Rans’ advice and unplugged everything he owned that contained a circuit board. Unfortunately, that left him with precious little in the way of available distractions.

  For lack of anything better to do, he disappeared into the tiny kitchen and lost himself in meal prep for the coming week. Normally, he wouldn’t have bothered. It was something of a running joke among people who knew him that the aspiring restaurant chef survived mostly on Pop-Tarts and leftovers from whatever place he happened to be working at the time.

  Since leftovers from work weren’t really an option at the moment, he’d gone shopping a few days ago with an eye to acquiring food that normal people would actually want to eat. He was chopping vegetables for curry when a low groan from the front room prickled the hair at the back of his neck. Len very carefully put the knife down on the counter before going to look. And... yup. The World’s Most Irritating Faerie was, in fact, regaining consciousness.

  Awesome.

  Albigard lifted a hand to cover his eyes as though the light pained him. He rolled into a sitting position on the couch, which made a noise of protest eerily similar to the one he’d just made.

  “So. Not dead, then,” Len said, mentally bracing himself to ignore the magnetic pull that Fae tended to exert on humans.

  Albigard froze at the sound of his voice. Then he lowered his hand slowly, revealing unnaturally green eyes that seemed to see straight through Len.

  “Ah,” said the Fae, his voice dripping with distaste. “It’s you. This is to be my punishment, I take it?”

  “Very funny,” Len told him. “If you want to bitch about it, you can save it for the fang brigade. Zorah and Rans dropped you here while they went to arrange for a better bolthole. They should be back before long. So, how about you refrain from influencing my mind, and I’ll refrain from punching you in the face. Are you hungry? I can throw together a salad or something.”

  “No,” Albigard said shortly.

  Len chose to interpret that as an answer to the question about the salad, rather than the one about mental influence and criminal assault. “Suit yourself. Oh, and kudos for apparently saving Vonnie’s kid. Gotta admit, I didn’t see that one coming.”

  “I take it from your demeanor that the others survived?” Albigard asked the question grudgingly, and Len realized if he’d been taken out of commission during the middle of a battle, he’d have no way of knowing how it ended.

  “No one tells me jack shit,” Len informed him. “But if anyone we knew had died, I’d have expected Bela Lugosi and the Bride of Dracula to be more upset than they were.”

  The Fae didn’t dignify him with an answer. Len shrugged and turned to go back to the kitchen. He made it precisely three steps toward his destination when a staccato pounding on the front door halted him. Albigard tensed, and Len tried to ignore the jolt of adrenaline buzzing along his nerves.

  “Are we expecting trouble?” he asked his unwanted guest.

  Albigard rose to unsteady feet. “Generally, yes.” He moved to stand out of the direct line of sight of anyone waiting on the porch.

  A fresh flurry of knocking sounded, followed by a familiar English accent muffled by two inches of hardwood. “Open the bloody door, Len!”

  Len let out a breath and opened it, only to be confronted with Rans’ grim expression and Zorah’s wide-eyed one. Albigard stepped forward to join them, still looking like a stiff wind would put him straight on his ass.

  Rans’ eyes raked over him. “Oh, good. You’re awake. We appear to have a small problem.”

  “And by small, he means, uh...” Zorah looked over her shoulder and gestured toward the end of the block. She looked as freaked out as Len could ever remember seeing her, and given their history, that was saying something.

  With a deep sense of foreboding, Len followed her gaze, vaguely aware of Albigard doing the same. At the end of the block, billows of thick black vapor curled from what he could only describe as a rip in reality—the shapes suggesting a swarm of shadowy, half-seen creatures trying to claw their way through the growing gap.

  Albigard went very still. “Oh,” said the Fae, “The Wild Hunt appears to be here for me. That’s... not good.”

  TWO

  “ERM, RIGHT,” LEN said, trying to control the creeping sense of horror raising beads of clammy sweat on his skin. “Who or what is the Wild Hunt? And why the fuck did you decide to crash at my house if something like that was chasing you?”

  “It shouldn’t be here,” Rans said grimly.

  “Here... on my street?” Len asked.

  “Here on this planet,” Rans clarified.

  “Uh... guys?” Zorah prodded, as more of the greasy, amorphous form squeezed through the tear in reality. Len thought he saw jaws snapping in the center of the mass, and quickly looked away.

  Somehow, the look of blank shock on Albigard’s face wasn’t reassuring. The Fae’s complexion had been pale before, but it was positively chalky now.

  “This isn’t possible,” he muttered. “It makes no sense.”

  Rans was still watching the... thing... with a wary eye. “Perhaps we could contemplate the unthinkable nature of a mythical Fae archetype of death randomly showing up on Earth from a more comfortable distance?”

  Zorah, too, was still fixated on the nebulous threat. “A distance like, say, Chicago? Albigard, you said it was after you. If you can transport us someplace magically warded, would it be able to follow you? Or would it give up and leave?”

  A horrible screeching, howling noise rolled through Len’s chest. The sound hit him so viscerally that it made him question whether he’d heard it with his ears or his mind. Around the neighborhood, other people were opening their doors, looking out. Screams and cries of shock echoed around the block.

  “Whatever you’re planning on doing, maybe do it before that thing gets any farther through the hole it’s making?” Len suggested. He had no idea what would happen if it reached the people spilling onto their porches, but he suspected it wouldn’t be good.

  Albigard seemed to shake himself free of his shocked paralysis. “I’m too weak to conjure a portal without drawing power from an external sourc
e. And to answer your other question, I’ve no doubt it will try to follow me rather than staying here. Wards... should confuse it. I would assume.”

  He didn’t sound very sure of that last part, Len couldn’t help noticing.

  Zorah gritted her teeth. “Fine. One external power source, free for the taking. But you owe me a favor afterward.”

  Albigard gave a single, tight nod. Before Len could really catch up with what was happening, the Fae made a sharp, circular gesture with one hand. A flaming oval burned itself into Len’s wall. The interior appeared murky, like a cloudy mirror. Zorah grunted out a vicious curse, and Rans caught her around the shoulders as her knees gave out.

  A hand grabbed the back of Len’s shirt. He yelped as he was tossed unceremoniously through the Fae portal, and stumbled as his feet hit clay tile instead of the worn hardwood of his familiar entryway. Three more figures followed him through. Albigard went down hard on all fours as the fiery edges of the oval snapped shut behind him with a crackle. He curled onto his side with a groan before flopping onto his back and staring up at the ceiling.

  Zorah didn’t look much better, still leaning heavily on Rans with her jaw clenched. After a moment, she locked her knees and straightened away from him. “Well,” she said. “That certainly sucked donkey balls. Now what?”

  Len swept a gaze around the unfamiliar room—a kitchen, bare of decoration and not remotely homey, with dust and cobwebs visible in the corners. The only light came from a pair of windows in desperate need of cleaning.

  “Would someone please explain what the hell just happened?” he asked. “Preferably using English. And, y’know, short words.”

  “We’re in Chicago, in a house belonging to Albigard that’s been magically warded to prevent detection by other people,” Rans said.

  “And hopefully by creepy smoke monsters,” Zorah added.

  Len felt the headache that had been threatening earlier bloom behind his left eye. “Right. Okay. We’re in an invisible house in Chicago. Why am I, specifically, in an invisible house in Chicago?”

  “Because you’ve had contact with me. That might have been enough to encourage the Hunt to come after you in my absence—at least for the next few hours until the trace on you fades,” Albigard said from the floor, still staring fixedly at the cobwebs hanging above him.

  Len squeezed his eyes shut and counted to five before opening them. “Terrific. And—once again—the Wild Hunt is... what, exactly?”

  There was still no movement from the Fae on the floor. “The Wild Hunt is a fundamental aspect of the Fae realm of Dhuinne,” he muttered, addressing the ceiling. “It’s a physical expression of the Endless Void. Historically, the Fae Court has harnessed it as a weapon of punishment, sending it in pursuit of criminals to devour their souls.”

  Len opened his mouth, hesitated, and closed it. In the absence of any chairs in his immediate vicinity, he sat down rather abruptly on the floor and leaned against the dusty cabinet behind him.

  “Okay, then,” he said eventually.

  “And, as has been previously discussed, it should in no way be present here on Earth,” Rans stated.

  Len thought of the piles of diced vegetables he’d left sitting on the cutting board in his kitchen.

  In St. Louis.

  Three hundred miles away.

  “Fuck,” he said, not sure if it was in response to the wasted food or the apparent escape of a soul-eating manifestation of the void into the human realm.

  “But we’re pretty confident the people back in St. Louis will be okay, aren’t we?” Zorah asked, proving once again that she had so far avoided being sucked into asshole-dom with the others.

  Albigard rolled into a sitting position, looking as though the effort made him nauseous. “It was there in search of me. There is no other explanation. As I am no longer in St. Louis, and since I had no contact with any of those people, it will have no reason to stay.”

  “And the wards on this property?” Rans pressed. “They’ll keep you hidden from it until we can come up with some sort of strategy?”

  There was a longish pause. It wasn’t what you’d call reassuring.

  “The wards... would not hide me successfully from the Hunt if we were on Dhuinne,” Albigard replied at length. “In the Fae realm, there is no escape from it. That’s rather the point. When they sent it after me, the Court would have considered that they were imposing a sentence of exile. Should I ever attempt to return home, my life—and my soul—would be forfeit. But the Hunt should not be here at all. This realm is completely foreign to it. I can’t imagine it could find me easily within these wards. Not in such an unfamiliar world.”

  One of the fundamental aspects of paranormal reality, Len had learned, was the existence of different worlds layered on top of each other. The way it had been explained to him, the various realms had originally formed in alternate dimensions. They occupied overlapping spaces, but were normally separated from each other except for the occasional gateway connecting them. These gateways were carefully guarded, and Len was pretty sure someone would have mentioned it if one of them was located at the end of his street.

  He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye socket and rubbed. It didn’t help with the dull pounding. “You said you dragged me along because this thing might smell you on me. I assume that goes for the others, too. Does that mean we’re trapped here with you if we don’t want it randomly jumping out at us like some kind of inter-dimensional boogeyman?”

  Albigard waved the words away with an irritated swipe of his hand. “The traces on you are faint, and will fade quickly once you are away from me. Again... it seems unlikely the Hunt would be able to navigate an unfamiliar realm with enough skill to track such a fleeting trail now that we are no longer in its immediate vicinity.”

  Relief washed through him. Thank fuck for that. “Terrific. Next question. What did you do to Zorah just now to nearly make her faint?”

  Zorah groaned. “Oh, god. Here we go...” She still appeared way more drained than a vampire who regularly drank other people’s blood had any business looking.

  “Yes,” Rans said, eyeing Albigard with an unamused blue gaze. “Bit of a sore point, that. I assume you’re aware of the various folklore entreating humans not to eat Fae food or drink Fae wine, Len?”

  Len thought back to the thick volume of Grimm’s fairy tales his parents used to read to him when he was young, before everything in his family went to shit.

  “Uh. Kind of...?”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” Zorah said flatly.

  “Long story short, she foolishly accepted a gift from him early in their acquaintance. And now Alby here has a connection to Zorah’s soul,” Rans said. “Meaning he can track her anywhere on Earth or Dhuinne, as well as being able to drain her animus—her life energy—to power himself whenever he desires.”

  “Erm,” Len said.

  “For what it’s worth,” Albigard put in, “vampire-tainted animus tastes foul. Drawing from it is only ever a last resort, as far as I am concerned.”

  Zorah gave him a very pointed look, her brown eyes flaring with a vampiric copper glow. “The feeling’s mutual, Tinkerbell. Fae animus isn’t exactly a bed of roses, either.”

  “Seems like it came in handy today, though,” Len couldn’t help pointing out. “So, are you both going to be okay now, or...?”

  “I’ll need to feed soon,” Zorah said.

  Len digested that for a moment. Thanks to his history with her, he was passingly familiar with what feeding meant for both vampires and succubi. Suffice to say, they were two very different things, and he’d had firsthand experience with both.

  “Are we talking ‘feed,’ like”—He made fang-y biting motions with his curved index and middle fingers—“or ‘feed,’ like visiting a sex club?”

  Zorah wrinkled her nose. “Yes to both.”

  Rans crossed his arms, giving her a thorough onceover. “Since we don’t know what’s coming next, we should probably get you recharge
d as soon as possible, love. Len, your car is in the garage. You can give us a ride downtown so we can find someplace suitable. I don’t suppose you have any rope stashed in the trunk?”

  It was a testament to how bizarre Len’s life had become that the apparent non sequitur made perfect sense to him. He ran a few quick mental calculations—aware, on some level, that most people’s first thought after being propositioned into going to a sex club with a pair of vampires would not be, ‘Hmm, maybe I can make enough gas money tonight to get the hell back to St. Louis.’

  “Yeah, I think we’re good. There should be a bag with some rope and rigging supplies under one of the seats.” He hooked a thumb toward Albigard. “What about him? Is he coming?”

  Albigard’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t be offensive.”

  Idly, Len wondered if being a stuck-up prude was a Fae thing in general, or specifically an Albigard thing.

  Rans made a dismissive gesture. “Not to worry. We won’t be subjected to Alby’s Look of Disapproval for our wicked ways. Not only does he need to stay behind the wards for safety, but Fae recover best with rest and quiet in natural surroundings.”

  The Fae in question was still looking at Len as though trying to peel back his skull and see inside. “Why would you wish to accompany the bloodsuckers to some repulsive den of vice, human? Such pursuits gain you nothing except the possibility of picking up an unpleasant disease.”

  Len stared at him, too blown away by the level of cluelessness on display to be properly pissed off.

  “Most sex clubs in this country don’t allow actual sex, Tinkerbell,” Zorah said. With a hint of vindictive glee lurking behind her eyes, she added, “And to answer your question, he’s a shibari expert. Sex clubs are kind of his thing. He’s helped me feed before.”

  Albigard frowned. “Shibari? The... artful use of twine to tie objects or packages?” he said, translating the word literally from Japanese.

  “The artful restraint of the human form with rope, for the purpose of erotic stimulation,” Len retorted. “I happen to enjoy it. Not to mention, it’s the way I’ve been paying most of my bills since one of your Fae buddies blew up my job—with private, one-hour sessions for customers paying cash. Maybe you should try it some time. I could schedule you in... though you’d have to pull that stick out of your ass first. It could do some serious damage, otherwise.”