Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  WITCH-BLOOD

  * * *

  STRANGER MAGICS, BOOK THREE

  ASH FITZSIMMONS

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  COPYRIGHT

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WITCH-BLOOD. Copyright © 2019 by Ash Fitzsimmons.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover design by BespokeBookCovers.com

  ISBN 978-1-949861-05-1

  www.ashfitzsimmons.com

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  The stranger was glowing, and she was calling my name.

  That alone shouldn’t have been enough to concern me. I’d been in Faerie for just over a year by then, and I’d seen my share of its weirdness since leaving the mortal realm. But the last thing I remembered was crashing on Joey’s couch in the barn, and though I was still on my back, his loft apartment seemed to have disappeared. I squinted and tried to make sense of my surroundings, but everything beyond the stranger standing over me was black, either formless or too obscured by her radiance for me to discern.

  She was pretty, a petite blonde in a diaphanous pink dress that revealed more than a hint of what was hiding beneath it. As I was sixteen that October, that would have been enough to catch my attention, even if she hadn’t been self-illuminating. After all, it wasn’t every day—or any day, really—that I was awakened by an attractive stranger in see-through clothing.

  I sat up on the black surface that had once been a sofa and tried to piece together my good luck. The woman wasn’t one of my fae sisters, escaped from imprisonment, nor was she anyone I’d seen around my brother Coileán’s palace. More importantly, I couldn’t seem to find Joey in the darkness, and I couldn’t hear Georgie’s snores—odd, as the dragon’s nighttime noises usually rumbled through the barn like a cranked-up subwoofer. This made the situation exponentially more concerning, as Coileán never allowed anyone to get close to me without being vetted first. My brother worried for my safety—not without cause, as letting a witch-blood run around unsupervised in Faerie is tantamount to introducing a miniature poodle to a pack of wolves and expecting everyone to play nicely. The unfortunate son of a faerie and a wizard, I had no magical ability to speak of, and so Coileán tended to leave someone nearby to keep tabs on me. Joey Bolin, a former seminarian without a shred of magical ability, might not have seemed like the natural choice for a babysitter, but he had three things going for him: he was quick with a sword, best buddies with a dragon, and dating my other sister, Helen, an extremely talented wizard and presumably the next grand magus of the Arcanum. If we got in over our heads, help was a phone call and a gate away. But Joey wasn’t with me in the blackness that morning. Whatever the glowing stranger intended, she obviously wanted to get me alone.

  For a split-second, I thought perhaps I was being visited by my mother’s vengeful ghost. The last time Titania saw me, I was a newborn, and she was ordering my death. If she knew from beyond the grave that I’d had the audacity to return to Faerie—an untalented witch-blood, a mongrel, her genetic gift to me cancelled out by my wizard father’s—she was sure to be at least peeved. But I’ve been told that I have Titania’s eyes, and the stranger’s were nothing like mine: hazel, fringed with thick, gold lashes, and far too old for her face.

  By then, having spent a year in the realm, I’d grown somewhat accustomed to the odd look that faeries above a certain age share. A faerie of fifty or even a hundred might pass for a young mortal without using glamour, but get one much older than that, and his eyes stop syncing up with the rest of him. To the unwary, he might look indescribably interesting—there’s something different about him that you just can’t put your finger on—but anyone in the magical community recognizes that look as the one tell of a faerie’s age. I saw it when comparing my brother and Joey side by side: at first glance, they could have been contemporaries, but Joey was all of twenty-six then, and Coileán’s eyes betrayed him. The look was even more pronounced with Valerius, the captain of Coileán’s guard and Joey’s and my combat coach—twenty-something in most respects, but twenty-two hundred if you knew how to see it.

  The stranger’s eyes marked her as Val’s senior by a significant margin, which in itself was a concern. The fact that she obviously knew who I was did nothing to make me feel any better about the midnight wake-up call—and in case it had slipped my mind, she was glowing.

  I kicked my legs off the edge of where the couch had been and tried to sound like strange, glowing women were a fixture in my life, but all I managed was a weak, “Uh…hi?”

  “Aiden,” she said, softly and insistently, “you must get up now. Run.”

  “Huh?”

  “Run, child.” Her eyes bored into mine, and I noticed the tension in her face as my vision adjusted to her brightness. “I cannot help you now. Run.”

  I tried to ask her what she was talking about, but she disappeared, and I felt rough hands on my shoulders, shaking me back and forth. Startled, I flailed and blinked…

  …and the blackness was gone, replaced with the familiar contours of Joey’s loft. The brass floor lamp had been switched on, and Val, who was shaking me awake, yanked my blanket off and pulled me to my feet. “Something’s happened to Coileán,” he said without preamble. “Oberon returned tonight, and he brought his court with him. I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “Ober…what?” I mumbled, disoriented at being ripped from the dream.

  But he was already shaking Joey awake, and I stared groggily around the room until Val gripped my arms and looked me in the eye. “My lord, the king is in danger. I can’t protect you both. Go to Toula, stay safe, and I’ll come for you when this is past. And don’t let her come after me,” he added, cutting his eyes to Joey.

  I was still trying to put together why Val might be in the loft in the middle of the night, but Joey was quicker on the draw. “What the hell happened?” he asked as he buckled on his sword—the steel one, not the bronze blade he used in practice.

  Val shook his head. “I was off duty, I didn’t see it, but Oberon’s people are running wild in the palace. Something’s happened, I don’t know—”

  “Want a hand?”

  “Joey,” he said, squeezing his shoulder, “you’re a brave fool, but I’m not sending you up against Oberon, especially not here. Protect him,” he continued, cocking his head at me. “Keep him safe until I send word.”

  Joey seemed poised to argue, but he acquiesced and nodded. “Fine, we’ll do this your way, but I’m not leaving Georgie.”

  “As you like. Downstairs, then, and hurry.” Carefully sidestepping Joey’s armor collection, Val headed for the wooden staircase as the sound of shouting rose outside the windows.

  By then, I’d woken enough to recognize t
hat something was terribly wrong. Like Coileán, Oberon was a king of Faerie, albeit far older and somewhat more powerful—the only one of the original ruling Three left alive after my brother and Toula Pavli dispatched each other’s mothers, Titania and Mab. But Oberon had grown bored of Faerie and forced his court to follow him to the mortal realm around 1700. He’d helped us a year ago when we sent a rescue party into the Gray Lands, the dangerous third realm, on a disastrous mission to retrieve Coileán’s daughter, Moyna—who was also Oberon’s granddaughter, though the old king didn’t seem to care. That mission had ended with Nath taking control of the Gray Lands realm, Moyna and the remnants of Mab’s leaderless court on the run in the mortal realm, and Coileán’s girlfriend, Meggy, dead at his own hand. If Oberon was bothered by his youngest daughter’s death, he didn’t let on, and I hadn’t seen so much as his shadow since then. The last I knew of him, he was running a bar in the Florida Keys and enjoying the sunshine while his people found ways to entertain themselves—which, unfortunately, seldom ended well for the mundanes around them.

  That he’d returned unexpectedly was bad. That he’d brought his court along was worse. And as the pieces snapped together in my sleep-foggy mind, I could make out the catastrophic picture Val was painting. I looked wildly around the apartment, nearly expecting to see Oberon himself burst through the door. “What are we going to—”

  “Take this,” Joey interrupted, tossing me his barn jacket, then half-pushed me out of the loft. I barely had time to grab my tennis shoes before he had pulled on his motorcycle boots and the brown oilcloth duster he favored for riding, grabbed a bag, and was heading toward the enormous black dragon blinking blearily below us. “Rise and shine, sweetie,” he said, slipping into the sing-song tone he used only around Georgie. “We’ve got to go.”

  Go where? she thought, looking at Val and me for a clue.

  I’d been in Faerie long enough that the dragon’s telepathy didn’t faze me, even at ungodly hours. For Joey, it was by then second nature—after all, he’d raised her from a hatchling.

  “Going to go see Toula,” he said, and climbed onto the base of her long neck as she started to uncurl. For once, he didn’t bother with a saddle and harness, his usual safety precaution against falling from an unfortunate height. “Val, whenever you’re ready.”

  Val flicked his fingers, and a massive gate materialized in the barn—but then, anything big enough to accommodate a dragon half as long as a football field had to be massive. Peering through the hole in the fabric of the world, I could see nothing but dark pastures, but a blast of cold air reminded me quickly enough of the season. Joey reached down to give me a hand, and I scrambled up behind him as Georgie stretched her legs and twisted her van-sized head back and forth.

  “Be safe,” Val reiterated, then gave Georgie’s neck a last pat. “I’ll send word as soon as I can.”

  “Probably won’t do any good to ask you to come with us, will it?” Joey replied.

  He shook his head and raised his voice above the growing hubbub outside the barn. “My place is here. Go now.”

  With that, he stepped aside, and Georgie lumbered through the gate. I looked back as the hole closed and caught a last glimpse of Val, who distractedly smoothed his close-cropped brown hair as the noise crescendoed around the barn. His tanned face wore an expression I’d never seen on him and couldn’t quite place until I recognized the fear in his dark eyes. I started to call to him, but the gate snapped shut, and then we were alone—Joey, the dragon, and me, ripped from our warm beds only to find ourselves stranded in a cow pasture in rural Montana.

  For me, a homecoming of the worst kind.

  Even in the darkness, I could see the reduced background magic of the mortal realm, swirling colors that seemed muted after Faerie’s abundant supply of the stuff. Not that it really mattered to me—I could neither enchant not cast, only nudge inactive magic around—but still, it was a reminder that I was back in a place I’d hoped to avoid for, oh, the rest of time.

  Smells wrong, Georgie thought as she flattened the frosted weeds, but she perked almost instantly and turned her head toward the sound of lowing cattle. What is—

  “Not ours,” Joey insisted, then sighed and began to dig in his bag. “What do you want to bet he didn’t let Toula know we were coming?” he muttered.

  I looked around us until I spotted the familiar lights of the decoy trailer park hiding the Arcanum’s headquarters, the repurposed missile silo where I’d grown up. My stomach knotted at the sight, and my nose and arms tingled with the memory of fractures. “So what do we do?” I asked.

  Joey pulled a phone from his bag—not the little flip phones Coileán had made for us, but the cheap burner model he reserved for conversations with my sister—and tapped it to life. “Do you have Toula’s number handy?”

  “No…”

  “Didn’t think so. Hang on.” He dialed a preset and waited, and I was sliding my arms into my borrowed jacket when I heard him say, “Hey, gorgeous. Something’s going down in Faerie, and I’m sitting outside the silo right now with Aid and Georg…yeah, yeah, he’s fine, we’re fine. Calm down, it’s okay, I’m sorry. Anyway, it’s kind of chilly, and I don’t have Toula’s number, so would you please give her a call and let her know we’re out here? Or the grand magus?…No, hon, it’s all right, you don’t need to come home…”

  I tuned out the still-uncomfortable reminder that my friend was deeply involved with my big sister and tried to come to terms with our situation: something had happened to my brother, I didn’t know how to help him, and I was sitting atop a giant dragon outside the heart of the greatest magical organization in the mortal realm—a place filled with folks who, on a good day, were apathetic about whether a particular faerie lived or died. I hadn’t seen the silo—or my parents—in over a year, but something told me that not much had changed in my absence.

  Georgie snorted as Joey put his phone away. I’m hungry.

  “I know, girl,” he said, fishing an elastic from his bag and pulling his blond snarls into a rough ponytail.

  They smell good…

  “They’re not ours,” he repeated, earning another snort from the dragon. “And they don’t re-grow in this realm, so we can’t just take them. Bear with me, Georgie, I’m going to figure something out.” He sighed again, a white puff in the cold night, then turned around to face me. “Helen says she loves you, don’t do anything stupid, and call her as soon as Toula gets us settled.”

  “Got it, boss,” I said, then stopped and replayed my words in my head. Joey spoke Fae as well as I did—Coileán had seen to that—and as it was the only language Georgie understood, my conversations around the two of them were usually in Fae with a heavy sprinkling of English. I’d been immersed in the language for the last year, but slipping into it in the silo would be seen as odd, at the very least. I’d have to be mindful of that, I mused, conscious that I was focusing on minutiae to avoid processing the overwhelming larger problem.

  Before I could sink too far into my thoughts, another gate opened outside the trailer park, and Toula—the Arcanum’s witch-blooded yet freakishly talented envoy to Faerie, not to mention Val’s little sister—came running through behind a floating orb that illuminated the pasture ahead. Her ratty, untied bathrobe flapped behind her, exposing flannel pants, a tank top, and fluffy white slippers that, on closer inspection, resolved into rabbits with mouths full of pointed teeth. “Are you okay?” she yelled as she sprinted through the weeds. “What the hell is going on?”

  Joey and I slid off Georgie as she approached. “We’re fine,” he called back. “And I don’t know. Val didn’t have any details.”

  She came to a panting stop and looked at the three of us in the orb’s light. “Where is he?”

  “Back there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s trying to help Colin with whatever just happened. Oberon’s involved, but that’s all I’ve got, really.”

  “Damn it,” she muttered, absently running
one hand through her spiky hair. For half siblings born two millennia apart, Val and Toula had more than their share of common tics. “So you left him to go up alone against friggin’ Oberon? Is that it?” she demanded, her blue eyes flashing.

  Joey kept his voice low even as Toula’s rose. “He wouldn’t come, and he told me to look after Aiden. What was I supposed to do?”

  She paused, considered us again, then huffed her frustration. “What you did, I guess. I’ll get dressed—”

  “Val said to stay here,” he cut in, shaking his head. “It’s not safe.”

  “I wasn’t anticipating a picnic in the park,” she retorted.

  “And we don’t even know what’s happened, so how about giving it a few days, huh?”

  Toula wrapped her robe around her and glared at Joey. “Val could be dead in a few days.”

  “He’s a big boy. Yeah?”

  She stared out at the moonlit mountains with thin-lipped disapproval, but I could that see she was wavering. “He’s going to be okay, Toula,” I said. “He knows the realm as well as anyone, and he said he’d be in touch. And this might all blow over…”

  Toula and Joey gave me twin looks of disbelief, but she rolled her eyes and tied her robe sash. “I’ll give him until morning,” she muttered, then pursed her lips and pointed to Georgie. “We’ve got a problem,” she said, switching to Fae.

  The dragon looked around, saw nothing distressing, then realized the problem was her. I haven’t eaten any! she protested. Ask them, I haven’t touched the flock!

  “Herd, sweetie,” said Joey, reaching up to rub her nose. “A bunch of cows is a herd.”

  Herd, flock, whatever, I haven’t touched it.

  “And thank you, because I don’t want to explain one more thing to Greg tonight,” Toula said, hugging herself against the cold. “But that’s not what I meant—there’s no room for you underground.”