by Brie Tart
“A good teacher bends to fit their student, I suppose.” Yoel picked up on Helen’s example and bent to unlace one of his derbies. “If you fail my test later on, I’ll change tactics.”
“We’ll stay away from ground grappling and throws since you don’t got any mats.” Helen slid off her other boot and tossed both of them near where she’d thrown her jacket. “Wouldn’t want your egg head getting cracked on the cement.”
“You’ll find I’m more solid than I look.” Yoel set his own shoes aside and rolled the cuffs of his pants.
Helen stood and brought both her arms up in a loose guard. She tilted her chin at Yoel to do the same.
“There are two groups of fae.” Yoel brought his fists up, his elbows making stiff right angles. “Unseelie means chaos, anarchy, freedom, baser desires, darkness, night, violence. Seelie is its opposite.”
“Unseelie’s me, right?” Helen patted his elbow, then shook out her arm so it moved fluid and flexible. “Loosen up.”
“You’re almost Unseelie.” Yoel followed Helen’s direction and relaxed his muscles. “You have the same kind of energy.”
“Alright, so whatever I have is from the dark part.” Helen pointed to Yoel and punched her hand into her fist. “Let’s see what you got, first. Try to hit me.”
Yoel bit his bottom lip as he shifted his weight, the first sign of uncertainty she’d seen out of the man so far. He clawed for her eyes first. Helen smacked it away with her forearm. Then Yoel brought his knee up for her pelvis. She shoved her own knee into his and sent him stumbling sideways.
“Not bad for a first try.” Helen smirked as she looked him over in a new light. “You fight dirty for a bookworm.”
“You call it dirty, I call it smart.” Yoel wrinkled his nose as a longer layer of his hair hung in his eyes. “That’s how the Unseelie think of it as well. Seelie, however, are all about laws and tradition, order and manners, politics and castes. They’re the ones your uncle fought, the ones he believed took and killed his sister.”
“So I need to know about them.” Helen fell back to a guard and assessed Yoel’s stance for his next move. “Keep going. This time try faking something first.”
* * *
As they traded strikes and blocks, Yoel went over how Seelie fae were generally perceived as benevolent and friendly, but were still known for being callous tricksters. And their attitude toward humans? They saw mortals as little more than animals or toys. If a Seelie fae liked a human for whatever reason, they could adopt their target as a pet, or coax the victim into a relationship. The pet would live as a slave for as long as they held the fae’s interest. The lover would lose their will to live if the fae ever left them. Humans also served as breeding stock for Seelie who wanted children—it was almost impossible for Seelie to have babies with each other.
“What about the Unseelie ones?” Sweat broke out across Helen’s arms, face, and neck. Dark stains ran from her underarms down her back and chest. She’d gotten a more of a workout out of Yoel than she expected, and hadn’t even checked the time as she asked questions between jabs and counters. “They supposed to be worse?”
“Yes and no.” Yoel had shed his dress shirt and glasses halfway through the session. His white undershirt was soaked through, and he panted between his explanations. Helen had switched him to working on defense, blocking Helen’s attacks and keeping his own advances to basic punches. “They’re more brutal. They kill and torture for fun. Most are weaker than the Seelie, but there’s more of them. Unlike Seelie fae, who are by and large another species, Unseelie are made by twisting humans into fae through dark magic. Your energy is like that, but incomplete. And it doesn’t feel like it came from Nicnevin. I’ve never seen or heard of that before.”
“Nicnevin?”
“The Unseelie Queen.”
“You think that has anything to do with why the Seelie bastards are attacking me?”
“It could be that they’re mistaking you for a fully fledged Unseelie fae.” Yoel’s attention drifted away from Helen as he paused. It left him wide open. “But that wouldn’t make much sense with the treaty…”
“You gotta pay attention, Scribbler.” Helen ducked and charged in, grabbing Yoel’s legs out from under him.
Yoel’s thought went unfinished as he fell back and tucked his chin away from the cement floor. Helen pinned Yoel with her knee pressed against his stomach. He pinched at another one of her sensitive areas. She grabbed one of his arms and rolled across him, capturing that arm in her own while she curled her leg around his neck. She twisted his limb in a way it wasn’t supposed to stretch. Yoel grunted as he tried to pry his fingers under her knee and roll out, but every move of his made the angle of Helen’s hold worse.
“You know anybody on that side named Ewan, the Witty Blade, or Alpien of Far Seeing Owls? Ah!” She held on, despite Yoel digging his teeth into her calf. “You tryin’ to turn this into sex or are you gonna tap?”
“I thought...you said...no grappling yet.” Yoel patted her leg a couple times.
“You said you were solid enough to take it.” Helen eased up on his arm and scooted away, grinning all the while. “So, you heard of ‘em or not?”
“What do they look like?” Yoel asked as he sat up and rolled his shoulder.
“I only saw the Ewan guy. Serious pretty boy. Like six foot five, pale, shiny, really funny eyes. He said he worked for the other one.”
“Pointed ears and blonde hair?”
“I’m pretty sure his ears were normal, and he was a brunette.”
“That means he’s from the Sìth, a Scottish race of Seelie. Most likely, the other is his master of the same faction. The Sìth spearheaded the effort to unite the different Seelie races into one group. They and the Norse Light Elves are considered the ruling class.” Yoel winced. Helen couldn’t tell if it was because of his bruises from the day, or from how high up her stalkers were. “You have some powerful enemies, Miss Carver.”
A digitized guitar lick came from where Helen set her phone on a pile of boxes. A text message. She huffed as she hiked herself up and went over.
“How’s it going?” From Dylan.
If Dylan figured Helen was in the middle of something important, he’d expect her to have her phone off. If she replied, it would let him know she was bored and available. They usually chatted when she had to do long stake outs.
“Is someone checking on you?” Yoel got to his feet, patting dust off his slacks. “I’ll have to take these to the cleaners before I open.”
Helen glanced at the time: 11:34 P.M. Odds were that Dylan would be vegging in front of the motel TV watching sitcom reruns. He didn’t have his PC for playing video games, or his collection of worn comic omnibuses to read. The poor guy would go stir crazy while Lucy slept.
“Just a friend.” Guilt scraped at her stomach as she let the phone’s screen go black. She set it back on the boxes. “We calling it a night?”
“Of course not.” Yoel fiddled with something that had slipped out when Helen brought him down, a necklace. It had a long ball chain with a thin, perforated metal square at the end of it. Helen thought she spotted a number indented in it with foreign letters. Were those dog tags from another country? Yoel tucked it back into his undershirt. “We still need to review the centuries of history you missed while you were daydreaming.”
“Try to keep up.” Helen came at Yoel, starting their dance over again.
CHAPTER 9
The rest of Helen’s week had her spending her sun-up hours in the motel with Dylan and Lucy, putting her daughter to bed, then using her nights to learn and spar with Yoel. Yoel started leaving the safe with all of its vomit-inducing artifacts wide open. Helen had to concentrate while trying to hold her dinner down.
“It’s your body’s way of sensing Seelie energy; a common trait among typical Unseelie fae. You’ll build a tolerance to the side effects with time,” Yoel had explained when he got his first hit on her, and she asked about why the artifacts made her
nauseous. “For now, try to harness it. Any kind of fae power is fueled by emotion, molded and affected by the being’s will. What feelings does it stir up?”
“It pisses me off,” Helen huffed out.
“Anger plays well with Unseelie magic. Use that.”
So Helen practiced brainstorming things during her rides to Daath Books that stirred up the same violent urges she’d used against Ewan. The top three motivators were someone killing Tommy, taking Dylan, and touching her little girl. Her family made the best fuel.
Her lessons with Yoel covered history, hierarchy, common powers, attitudes, enhanced abilities, weaknesses, side effects on their environments, tracking. The brainiac ran her through an intensive, but thorough regimen while she taught him more and more about how to defend himself. Helen repeated the main lesson points in a loop as she rode back to the motel every early morning. Her brain throbbed from all the information crammed in it, but it stayed in there. Being able to move, sweat, and get her blood pumping during the lectures made her focus better.
Helen came to their fifth lesson gulping down gas station Aspirin to sooth her throbbing temples. She shed her jacket as she stepped down the stairs and tossed it aside to its usual spot on top of unopened supply boxes.
“Evening, Miss Carver.” Yoel yawned and sipped a steaming mug. The night before, he’d set up a small hotplate, a kettle, and a box of instant coffee on the desk he kept down there. Helen had asked why it wasn’t tea. Yoel pointed out he needed something stronger to deal with all those long nights.
“How’s it goin’, Scribbler?” She knelt to slide off her boots. “What’re we learning today?”
“Leave those on. We won’t need that.” Yoel idly adjusted the black curtain hanging behind his little desk. Helen peeked behind it once to find nothing but a mirror. Apparently he used it like a magic webcam sometimes—scrying—and kept the curtain over it as a privacy screen. “Today’s topic: how to kill a fae.”
Helen’s heart kicked up as she walked over. “We doing theory or practice?”
“Theory, for now.” Yoel went to a large wooden trunk with brass hinges. “Have you killed one before? Or anyone for that matter?”
“Once.” Helen thought back to the alley and that force that seemed to take over her body as she thrust the ladder rung into Ewan’s chest. “The Ewan guy I told you about. He tried to kidnap me. But killing him was an accident.”
“Impressive, regardless. You’ll have to purposefully destroy fae sooner or later if you continue this course.” Yoel unsnapped the latch holding the trunk’s lid.
“What’s in there?” Helen leaned over him to see into the mystery container.
“Tools.” Yoel lifted the lid.
A pile of different blades sheathed in simple leather lay inside. Swords, axes, knives, daggers. European and Asian designs. There might’ve been a couple hammers in there.
“I recently acquired this collection of melee weaponry.” Yoel rifled through the bunch and took out a Bowie knife, a katana, and a few other samples. He set them in a row at Helen’s feet. “Are these fine, or would you prefer something ranged?”
“Favorite thing I use at work is a taser. I’m good with up close.”
“I figured as much.”
Helen tested the weight of a hatchet and the Bowie knife. The hatchet seemed too top-heavy, and the Bowie knife didn’t have enough reach. She tried the katana next. Its lightness made her strikes too hamfisted. She avoided the thin sword that Yoel called a rapier altogether. Each weapon she tried from the trunk had something off about it.
“You think I should suck it up and try a gun like you?” Helen squatted in front of the row of blades, glaring at them for not being just right.
“As much as I prefer them, guns offer you a very limited close range selection, and tend to be too loud.” Yoel’s kettle whistled from the hot plate and he went over with his empty mug for a third cup.
“Why?”
“The problem centers around your ammunition.” Yoel took one of the packets of instant coffee and emptied it into the mug. “It must have iron or it’s not effective. That usually means steel, and that sort of bullet ruins the rifling of any rifle or pistol barrel. Shotguns work because they have none, and you can put steel shot in the shells. But they’re still loud, messy, and ideal as a last rather than first resort.”
“Can’t you order a silencer for it?”
“One, call it a suppressor.” Yoel held up one finger, then another as he recited his next point. “Two, while some exist, they’re very cumbersome and only muffle the blast.”
“Yeah, yeah. Movies lie.” Tommy had given her that disappointed rant whenever he got drunk.
“If someone were to go the steel birdshot route, I would recommend something like a Taurus Judge or a Smith and Wesson Governor. Smaller and easier to conceal.”
“A revolver-shotgun? Still too noisy.” Helen sighed as she stared down at the selection before her. “What’d Tommy use if his Colt wouldn’t do the job? A BB gun?”
“Any air gun with steel ammunition is a viable option, but still rather noisy. Its accuracy and damage potential also decreases over distance. I wouldn’t recommend that either.” Yoel quirked his mouth in one of his rare grins as he poured steaming water over the coffee powder. “Mr. Carver chose crossbows and steel-tipped bolts, a fairly common choice among fae hunters. The first time he discovered a crossbow pistol, he showed it off to me for the next five meetings after he bought it.”
“That’d be a good idea if my aim didn’t suck.” Helen’s lip curled as she recalled the couple times Tommy had taken her shooting at a range. His revolver was heavier than it looked, and the kick always made her shots veer high. “Are you sure these are all the blades you got?”
“Hmm, there aren’t many more.” Yoel set his mug aside and dug behind one of the wall-mounted shelves nearby. He pulled out a medium-length weapon with a basic wood grip, wrapped in a leather strip as beat up as its sheath. “This might work.”
“A machete? Ain’t that for jungles?”
“And preparing food in some houses. It’s a souvenir from when I visited Brazil.”
“When were you in Brazil?”
“A long time ago.” Yoel held the machete out for Helen, handle first. “There was an artifact I had to pick up in a small town near the Amazon. I was still in my bachelor’s, and indulging a childhood fantasy of becoming Indiana Jones when I took the semester off. Nothing too exciting happened, thankfully.”
Helen slid the machete from the sheath. The blade reminded her of a giant steak knife without the serration. She swiped it through the air. The balance of weight made it a natural extension of her arm. A few more test swings made her light up. Was this what brides felt like when they found the wedding dress? “This is it.”
“Finally, a fit.” Yoel sipped his coffee as his eyes crinkled at their corners, evidently pleased. “Should I get you a hockey mask to go with it?”
“If you think it’ll help.” Helen figured it wasn’t anything hokey like destiny or fate that made the grip settle so well into her palm. Was it the fact it looked badass and felt great? Definitely.
“Have you ever fenced before? Or studied some sword-based martial art?”
“Never bothered with it.” Helen dropped into her usual stance, but found a sharp blade hovering by her face. That wouldn’t work. “Have you got a laptop? If we look up some stick-fighting moves, that should help me pick up the basics. But it’ll be harder to learn without somebody to practice against.”
“I’ll get my tablet and join you with one of the swords.” Yoel set his coffee aside and jogged toward the stairs.
“Look at you getting excited about fighting. Did you catch the bug?”
“Nonsense, I haven’t caught any bugs.” Yoel took the stairs two at a time at first, but slowed down at Helen’s comment. “Though, learning the fundamentals of combat is proving more interesting than I first thought.”
Helen and Yoel started off with
slow repetitive drill motions they copied from online tutorials. Helen’s muscles learned entirely new ways to move and left her panting by the end of their session. She blocked, she parried, and they rehearsed those same few basic maneuvers for the rest of the night.
* * *
Helen rode back home with her jeans chafing against her sticky thighs. Keeping her jacket zipped shut made the sweat stains on her tank top worse. The nip in the night air was the only thing that kept her from overheating inside her helmet. She pulled into the parking lot of her and Dylan’s motel and plopped her headgear back into her saddlebag. Drilling with Yoel made a decent workout, and her head throbbed from cramming too much information into a few hours. She debated crashing for the night as she stuck her motel key card into its slot and started opening the door to her room.
“Everything’s fine,” Dylan said from inside, muttering like he was talking into a phone and didn’t want to wake Lucy.
Helen paused and held the door open that sliver. Dylan must not have noticed her coming in yet. Who was he talking to?
“She told me she’s running a surveillance job for some hyper jealous rich guy. His story checked out. It’s keeping her busy.”
Goosebumps prickled on Helen’s arms as a chill ran through her. Correction: who was he talking to about her?
Dylan’s light pacing barely made noise against the thin carpet of their room. He only got that light and quick when he was thinking a lightyear a minute. “Why should it matter to me that your people found the Witty Blade dead?” Dylan stopped. “That’s a heavy accusation. He had an ego and was a condescending asshole. It was only a matter of time before he got careless. It could’ve been any fae hunter that did him in.”
Helen froze as every drop of warmth drained from her body.
“Look, I’m not supposed to report to you anymore. We had a deal. While you’re calling this a ‘friendly chat,’ we both know you’re not asking about how my family is because you actually care.”
