Courts and Cabals 3

by G. S. D'Moore

  I didn’t know the specifics, but I could tell we weren’t going to get the guy with the big gun. Then, I heard the truck rumble.

  “Shit,” I tried to get up, but the brunette imp pushed me back down and shook her head.

  When I’d last looked at the street, I saw the sisters had taken down a half dozen wannabe heroes, but it wasn’t worth one of us to stop the truck. There was some definite structural damage to the vehicle, but not enough. I heard it groan as it started moving, and I followed it with my ears as it finished its eastward movement, turned north, and then headed down the west side back towards us.

  “They’re going in a circle.” I didn’t get it.

  “They’re going in a circle,” Ariana’s beautiful face paled a shade. “Daddy . . .”

  “I know,” Thomas replied before they could get started. “I got the call out. Your grandmother knows what’s going on. Hopefully, we’ll get the backup we deserve.”

  “Wait. What is . . .” I felt the answer before I finished.

  The car was heading back along the south wall when it completed the rough circle it had been drawing with whatever it was dumping out the back. I felt the air shudder around us, and my ears popped. The hair on my arms stood up and the tingling sensation of magic I’d been feeling increased tenfold. It only lasted for a second, but when it finished washing over me, I felt like I was suddenly indoors. I looked around, expecting to see four walls, but it was still the cloudless blue sky of midafternoon.

  “They drew a circle,” Ariana answered. “Just like they use in some theurgy ceremonies. You draw a circle, and empower it with magic to create a barrier. It helps focus energy, willpower, and everything else a mage needs to do more complex spellwork.

  “So why . . . oh,” I got it.

  “With us enclosed in a circle, they can work serious magic on us, cut us off from communications; magical and mundane, and most important of all, keep the sounds of battle from reaching the authorities.” The imp was trying to hide it, but I saw the flash of worry cross her face.

  “They have to have heard it already,” I pointed around the roof, where dozens of shell casings were still smoking.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not as if there aren’t gunfights in this city every day,” Ivanna laid prone on the ground not far from us, and started to army crawl back toward the door to the stairs. “And even if they did; both the cabal and cartel have enough people on their payroll to keep the cops away. Coupled with no more gunfire, and we’re on our own.”

  I tried my best not to watch her ass flex her short shorts to the limits of their endurance, but it was literally impossible.

  “What do we do now?” I unconsciously licked my lips.

  “We get downstairs and fortify the shit out of this place,” Ariana answered, as she dropped to her knees and elbows, and started to follow her sister. “This was just the opening move to isolate us. Next, they’ll probe us to see our strengths and weaknesses, and after that, they’ll hit us in earnest; most likely after nightfall when the Duke will come out and play.”

  “And we just sit here and wait?” I vented, as I followed, not even trying to avert my eyes anymore. “How do you know all of this? How do you know they won’t do something different?”

  “It’s standard military procedure, and the Tikals have been using the same tactics against us since the thirties. It works. You don’t fix what isn’t broken.”

  I knew the sentiment well enough, and it kept me distracted from the fact that Ariana was probably the next best thing to ninety years old. If I combined the view of her ass, with her half-succubus genes, and centuries worth of experience between the sheets, I was in trouble.

  I had a real problem, and I wasn’t talking about the siege. It hadn’t escaped my notice that I’d been a giant fuckup during the fight; celebrating a kill, lacking situational awareness, and getting shot as a result. If I was human, I’d be dead right now.

  “Good thing I’m not . . . whoa,” it had turned into a trend today that my own mind caught me by surprise.

  I was pretty sure this was the first time I considered myself supernatural. Not confused, or half-and-half, but fully in the ranks of the magical creatures that roamed the world.

  “What a day.”

  There’s a first time for everything.

  ***

  The door opened and he entered. Aveena didn’t look up from her plate even though her brain screamed a warning. Something was definitely wrong.

  “Shit,” she didn’t react. “So close.”

  Everything had been going so well with her UN negotiations, she’d hoped against hope she could get through this without the hairless monkeys fucking her. She held back a sigh and continued cutting into her steak.

  There was a great pub in the town that had sprung up around the complex that housed the rift; where she was being held during her asylum proceedings. Agent Dud, and everyone else she’d talked to had been emphatic that she wasn’t being kept here, but that was bullshit. She hadn’t tried it, but if she did try to walk out, she’d put her money on some type of fisticuffs.

  She’d executed her latest powerplay by having the UN spring for dinner. You could always tell how effective you were being if the other party gave into the little things. She practically had Vernon and the other agents bending over backward for her.

  “That’s always the case until it isn’t,” she worked the frustration out of her jaw by chewing.

  The man who entered wasn’t Vernon. She didn’t know who he was, but she could tell by how the newcomer walked into the room. Vernon’s gait was part cocky stride, part stalk. She could always tell how close the beast was to the surface depending on which way his gait leaned. The new guy took brisk steps, covering only half the distance the big shifter could.

  She guessed he was small, probably a bureaucrat of some kind, and likely just as clueless about the situation as they wanted her to be. It was a smart play, but no matter how devious humans tried to be, they couldn’t hold a candle to the Fae.

  Hot anger flashed through her for a moment before she could regain control. She was getting fucked left and right: the humans, the queen, her own mother; she might as well be a whore by now. The thought made her laugh, and the newcomer stopped.

  “Ms. Aveena?” he asked, his voice squeaking a little at the end.

  “Please,” she gestured for the man to take a seat; finally looking up at him.

  If there was one word to describe the newcomer, it was soft. He was medium height, above average weight, with an impressive set of glasses, and a suit that was trying to look expensive while still being reasonably affordable. She stood by her initial assessment, middle-manager bureaucrat.

  “Yes, thank you,” he pushed up his glasses and sat. “We just have a few final things to sign before the paperwork is finalized, and, of course, if you have anything else to share it’ll be greatly appreciated,” he smiled nervously.

  “Maybe he has an idea what is going on after all. Or, he realized something just doesn’t smell right.”

  She looked down at the paper forms in front of her. The UN couldn’t possibly be broadcasting ill intentions more than that. It might not look like a threat, but Aveena knew the organization had gone paperless years ago. You only printed out important documents after the fact. Everything was signed electronically, so there was a record in the system. It was too easy to simply lose or misplace paper documents.

  “Sure,” she smiled. The man flinched; she’d subtly shifted her glamour to give herself pointier teeth.

  If they were going to fuck her, then she could swing around her huge, metaphorical, magical dick as well. She could . . . a lightbulb went off in her head. “Eureka!”

  “I do have one more bit of information I forgot to mention.”

  The man practically froze as he organized the forms between them. “Really?” he sounded surprised.

  “Of course. I want to be an asset to my new realm,” her tone dripped with irony, but the paper-pusher d
idn’t pick it up.

  He picked up a pen and removed a pad of paper from the mountain of documentation. “What is this new information?”

  “Cameron Dupree.”

  It was a sign of just how out of the loop the guy was that he didn’t know who she was talking about. That, or he was the best actor she’d ever seen. Her paranoia spiked for a moment, and she reached out with her senses. The man had no cold iron on him, or scent of magic. He was a mundane human, but that’s what Cam had been before this shitshow got rolling. She leaned back in her chair, away from her steak dinner, to give herself a little more room to move if needed.

  “Is that one or two Es?”

  “Two,” she replied calmly, but put some urgency in her tone. “You have to tell your superiors he’s back. He’s a menace. A danger to us all. He’s going to bring about a time that makes your biblical apocalypse look like a children’s summer camp,” she put as much fear as she could into the statement, and looked the guy right in the eyes with big, anime eyes that no human could possibly pull off.

  From the look on his face, he bought the whole thing.

  “Fuck you, Cam.”

  She didn’t have to dig deep to find the fear. She’d been in that throne room, and seen what the Aesir were capable of. Was Cam capable of the same level of destruction? Maybe. Either way, setting the UN on him, again, was going to be her parting gift to these assholes. She might be getting fucked, but she could give as good as she got.

  “I’ll make sure to relay this critical information to my superiors,” the man nodded fervently. He continued scribbling diligently onto the notepad.

  “Good,” she smiled at him when he looked up, and stepped.

  The land between slid into place around her, and she flinched. It was also called the Land of the Wild Hunt, and she had no illusions who the queen had sent after her. Thankfully, the humans had done a competent job of warding their facility. However, it was designed to keep things out, not necessarily in. To try and trap a Fae when they entered this realm was the height of rudeness, and some Fae were prickly about their pride. To avoid any misunderstandings, the humans kept the area open to step from. You had to enter through the gate the old-fashion way on the return journey, but that was acceptable.

  “They’ve been busy little bees,” Aveena looked around the room, which looked a hell of a lot more like a cell from this point of view. “I’m Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment,” she laughed.

  The UN’s mages had definitely been hard at work to make sure Aveena couldn’t run off like she was planning to do at the moment. A ward had been erected around the room, but it was a quick job, done when she wasn’t around to avoid catching her attention. She had to give them kudos for that, but quick jobs meant they were bound to make mistakes.

  She approached the walls of the room where there should have been a solid barrier of impassable white light. Instead, it looked like a shit-ton of high-security lasers were crisscrossing the space to prevent her from escaping. She’d have to squeeze between those lasers to get out. Now all she needed was a skin-tight, black bodysuit to complete the look.

  “Why not,” she altered her glamour to look like a femme fatale.

  She made a circuit of the room to find the optimal starting point, while keeping one eye on the mortal realm. The bureaucrat was freaking out, and a bunch of agents had flooded into the room. She laughed as one picked up her chair and looked under it like she was somehow hiding there. Vernon wasn’t one of them, so she put her money on the shifter not willing to go along with his agency’s dishonorable conduct. She filed that bit of knowledge away for the future.

  “Okay,” she found the weakest point, “let’s do this.”

  Space didn’t have the same meaning here. That’s why one step could take her a hundred miles. The same was true of the walls. Twelve inches in the other realm, was more like a hallway in the land between. She got on her belly, and slid under the first laser ward. She felt the heat on her back as she cleared it by an inch. After that, she was only able to get up to her knees, before she needed to step over the next white line in reality.

  Thankfully, she was young and limber. Still, she got close enough she winced as she grazed it. She smelled burning flesh for a moment before she cleared it, and stopped to catch her breath. Her skin shifted to red and then new-pink as she planned the rest of her course through the wards. Things were getting tighter, and if she went any farther, she wasn’t going to be able to turn back. She spent precious minutes checking and double checking her route before continuing. She went under, over, dipped, dived, shimmied, limboed, and even slithered like a snaky snake through the wards. A few minutes later, and she was sweating like a whore in church.

  There was a lot of power brimming around her. It pushed at her every time she got close, and she had to repel it with her will, while contorting in ways no human ever could. That’s the beauty of glamour, and it made her freaky as hell in the sack. The power wasn’t enough to kill her, but it would knock her back into the mortal realm. That would suck, since she was pretty sure machine guns armed with cold iron rounds were waiting for just that.

  Slow and steady, she pushed through the ward grid, until she was two movements away from freedom. Out here on the edge, they were closer together and harder to get around. This was where the mages had the most time to work, and it was impregnable.

  “Shit,” she frantically looked around, but there was no way through. “I could have sworn . . .” something started to glow above her head.

  That answered her unasked question. Right before her eyes, another white line started to appear and descend diagonally; right through where she was standing. The path had been clear when she started, but the mages weren’t trying to hide now, they were rushing a solid shell around the exterior to trap her.

  Sweat dripped down into her eye, and she blinked away the salty sting as she frantically looked for an answer. She ground her teeth, and knew she had to chance it. She did her best to slip between two, horizontal white lines one step away from freedom. If Cirque du Soleil could see her, they’d give their left nut to hire her. Still, even her best wasn’t good enough.

  She screamed as her thigh cut into the white light. She tried to focus through the pain, but it was like continuing to write a theoretical physics paper while someone slowly drew a heated knife across your leg. The result was flickering.

  “What the fuck!” one of the agents in the room went for his gun as Aveena flickered in and out of existence right in front of him. From the look on his face, he’d have nightmares from it.

  By the third flicker the agent was ready. Bang, the cold iron bullet ricocheted off the wall when she vanished, but it was too close for comfort. She felt the nullifying power of the bane of her people come within centimeters of ruining her escape. It also would have killed her, but she tried not to think about that. Dying by the hand of some mortal goon was just depressing.

  “Fuck this shit!” she roared, finally passing through the ward line. Small globs of her silver blood floated in the air like they were in zero gravity. The land between had some weird quirks to it.

  There was no way to twist herself through the more solid outer barrier of the ward, but that wasn’t the plan. She was pissed. She wasn’t fucking around anymore. If the mages wanted to fight, she’d fight.

  “Let’s see how they do against a noble Fae,” she summoned her power and targeted the ward.

  Pressure was the first thing she felt. The air started to get thick and push against her. Next came the heat. She already had a pretty decent case of swamp ass, so that sucked a lot more than the pressure. She focused harder and continued pushing; pulling up power from the deep well inside of her, and directing it against the ward. Reality around her started to wobble like some divine being had decided to kick a field goal with the planet as the ball. It was quickly followed by a tearing sound, and screams. She didn’t bother taking her attention off the ward, but she bet a mage or two was on the ground in the mortal rea
lm writhing in pain. Fighting a Fae wasn’t for the faint of heart.

  Slowly, too slowly for her liking, the ward started to fray and disintegrate. Brilliant white fibers, glowing hot like molten metal, started to float in the air beside her silver blood. With that, the ward’s power started to flicker. She looked for a pattern, found it, and when it went out, jumped through.

  “Haha!” she threw her hands up in triumph before the weariness hit her like a Mac truck. “Take that bitches.”

  Now, she took the time to look behind her. Three mages were down in the hallway outside the room. All bled profusely from their noses, eyes, and ears. It served them right for thinking they could fight in her weight class.

  “Noble. Fucking. Fae,” she said to no one but herself. It didn’t matter if she’d been banished, she still had power; a lot of it.

  Teams of agents in armor were running all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off, but there was nothing they could do to stop her. She laughed at their impotence as she took a step and the world fast forwarded to the front gates. A wall of pure white reached out to either side, but here, it was open per the treaty with Queen Maeve. Even if they wanted to, the UN couldn’t close it without risking Her Majesty’s wrath. Aveena might be on the queen’s shit list, with no love lost for the Fae monarch, but even she wouldn’t wish the queen’s smack down on her worst enemy.

  One, final step, and she was free. The white wall was behind her. Now, it was time to find her way to safety. She needed to find the beacon she’d discretely placed at her destination, which was specifically attuned to her. No one else would be able to find her. It would give her time to recoup, assess her options, and plan her next steps. It wasn’t close; quadruple digits in the mortal realm, but she could do it in thirty minutes at a jog.

  She was just about to put one foot in front of the other when a howl in the distance sent a spike of fear through her heart.

  “Uh oh,” she gulped. The small pool of swamp ass froze in her panties as her terror threatened to overwhelm her.