What Fate Portends

by Clara Coulson

  I sprang back to my feet, raised my other hand toward the group with the guns, and made a punching motion, unleashing the last spell on the roster—the last attack spell I could muster without digging too deeply into my magic and risking its siren song overtaking my judgment. A cold blast of air shot out from my hand, and halfway to the group, a hundred pieces of baseball-sized hail formed at its front.

  The humans couldn’t move quickly enough to avoid the onslaught. The ice chunks utterly wrecked them. One woman took a piece to the jaw so hard it gave her whiplash. One man’s nose imploded with a resounding crack, blood spurting out every which way. The rest suffered broken ribs and arms and legs, bruised and ruptured organs, severed blood vessels and wicked concussions. And some poor fellow took a blow to the groin that I was fairly certain rendered him infertile. When the hailstorm ended, all eight of them were down, and no one had a finger on a trigger.

  Somewhere behind me, the half-troll I’d pinned was on the cusp of breaking the ice spike. Off to the right, his buddy was trying to extricate himself from the warped piece of metal that had once been a filing cabinet.

  Time to go.

  I ground my boots into the concrete and made a sharp turn, bounding toward the square of light. Crossing into it, I slid to a stop in the middle, called up my magic again (and ignored its assertive impulse to destroy all my enemies), and funneled energy into my legs. I crouched, took a deep breath, and as both half-trolls were pulling free from my stalling tactics and preparing to make another charge, I launched myself straight up off the floor.

  I shot toward the skylight, arms over my head for protection, smashed through the glass, and drifted another ten feet into the air before I started to come back down. With a few whispered words, I caught myself with a swirling air spell, pushed my body out of alignment with the hole where the skylight had been, and lowered myself gently onto the rooftop. Gently being that I acquired less than ten bruises.

  From below, the half-trolls roared, and one of them made a jump for the hole. He actually managed to grab onto the frame of the skylight, but the jagged glass left behind by my ascent bit into his fingers, and the slippery blood caused him to lose his tenuous grip. He plummeted back down into the warehouse, and from the rumbling boom of his impact, followed by a furious yell, I guessed he landed right on top of his buddy.

  Two birds with one stone. Nice.

  I would’ve loved to look down into the hole and laugh at them. But I wasn’t suicidal.

  After getting my bearings, I located the other warehouse nearby and took off running for the edge of the roof. One magic-powered long jump later, I was in the clear, no half-trolls in pursuit, no goons with guns firing pot shots at me. My magic was still whipped into a frenzy though, which was irritating, because in that state, it constantly challenged my rationality. But I couldn’t bottle it up again. Not yet.

  I was a marked man now, and that mark belonged to the Duchess of Crime.

  If I wanted to avoid having a bounty put on my head, I was going to have to get that mark removed. At the source.

  Fuck you, Tom. You and your stupid harp.

  Chapter Eight

  The first thing I did after I put a wide berth between myself and the warehouse was attempt to call Tom. Now, the cell phone network in Kinsale was about as reliable as the power grid, and my phone was running on a low charge because I hadn’t swung by the library to leech off their electricity in over a week, so it took me almost half an hour of checking my signal in various places, including rooftops, before I finally got enough bars to try Tom’s number. And then the asshole didn’t pick up.

  I considered whether his silence meant he’d been snuffed out by Bismarck, but even if he had, there was nothing I could do about it. Bismarck was too rich and influential to get any blowback from ordering a hit on some schmuck, even if that schmuck was well off enough to live in Rosewood. Plus, I wasn’t entirely sure Tom didn’t deserve to get the axe.

  I didn’t think it was possible that he’d gone to one of Bismarck’s auctions without realizing who the head honcho was. He’d said himself that he had to “schmooze” the right people to score an invite to one of the auctions sponsored by the organization that had recovered the harp. And if Tom had indeed known Bismarck had been in possession of his harp, then he’d set me up to butt heads with her from the beginning. That forty grand was starting to seem less like the big prize I was promised and more like a pittance meant to lead me to my funeral.

  Being tricked really pissed me off.

  Stomping my foot on the roof of the shed where I stood, I turned off my phone to conserve what battery power remained and shoved it back into my coat pocket. Then I hopped down onto the wet brown grass and squelched off across the front lawn of an empty house. By the time I reached the sidewalk, the vague outline of a plan to get myself out of this mess was brewing inside my mind. But as I headed for the nearest intersection, I realized none of my viable options were attractive. They all involved tradeoffs that were going to leave me sore for a long, long time.

  Ultimately, I decided to go with the most direct approach.

  It would hurt more now and less later.

  The first step was to find Agatha Bismarck, for which I already had a lead. Bismarck was known to frequent the only fancy sit-down restaurant left in the entire city, which had been funded with her money and employed a bunch of actual chefs she’d plucked from the initial influx of refugees after the city gained its protected status. It was called Raphael’s, and it served cuisine that was an approximation of French fine dining, the closest you could get from the food that could be grown during this dreary winter.

  She usually stopped in around lunch with a couple of her “accountants” to wash some newly laundered money and have a lovely meal. It was almost lunchtime now, so if I hurried across town, I might get there while she was still eating. She’d have an entourage of personal guards, several of them nonhuman, but I was good enough at veil spells and the basic art of common sense to slip in through one of the restaurant’s blind spots and approach her.

  My plan was to act like a badass and intimidate her until she agreed to stop hassling me. Depending on her degree of stubbornness, that could involve revealing what type of fae my mother was. Which would suck—but it would also instill the fear of god into Bismarck. Or at least a sense of pragmatism. I didn’t know if she actually felt fear. Regardless, Bismarck was smart enough to know she shouldn’t mess around with somebody like me. Humans “messing around” with people like me was the reason Washington, DC no longer existed.

  So, yeah, I was going to verbally bitch slap the Duchess of Crime.

  As far as plans went, it wasn’t my best.

  But it wasn’t my worst either.

  When I made it to the edge of downtown, I slowed from a jog to a casual stride that wouldn’t make me stand out from the crowd. I continued on around the perimeter of the busy market and onto Pequot Street, which housed some of the better-funded businesses in Kinsale:

  A big bank that hadn’t changed much since the collapse, other than switching currencies. A hardware store slash actual blacksmith’s shop that I avoided like the plague—because iron. A clothing boutique run by seamstresses who made their clothes from scratch. And finally, situated in the middle of the street, where everyone could see its sign for half a mile in both directions, was Raphael’s.

  You couldn’t get through the front door if you weren’t on a list, and the crowd around the entrance was too big for me to slip through under a veil—veils made you invisible, not intangible. So I snuck around to the alleyway between the restaurant and the office building next door. After checking to ensure I wasn’t being watched, I whispered a couple sentences and made a motion with my hands that mimicked throwing a blanket over my head. The world around me dimmed slightly, confirming my veil was active.

  Next, I sidled up to the side door and listened closely. I could hear pots and pans clanging in the kitchen, and the murmur of the cooks conversing. I didn�
�t want to have to open the door if it wasn’t strictly necessary, because someone would notice a door opening by itself. So I waited a few minutes in the hopes that an employee would walk out for a smoke break or to toss some trash into the nearby dumpster.

  I got my wish. Three minutes into my wait, a woman bearing trash bags kicked the door wide open. As soon as she was clear of the threshold, I skirted around her and hurried inside before the door banged shut. I found myself in a dark room full of cleaning supplies that let out into the kitchen.

  Shuffling forward, I peered out and scrutinized all the staff working at the various prep and cook stations. None of them stuck out to me as obviously paranormal. When I sent out a very faint ping of magic that didn’t extend beyond the kitchen, no one visibly reacted or sought me out with their own magic probe.

  The coast was clear.

  The trip through the kitchen was fraught with near misses, because the kitchen staff moved like lightning. Several times, I almost collided with someone who moved unexpectedly. But I made it to the double doors that separated the kitchen from the dining room without giving myself away, and yet again waited for a server to come or go. This time, my cue came around a lot quicker, because Raphael’s was bustling. Which wasn’t a surprise. There was no other restaurant in the city where rich people could flaunt themselves.

  Once in the dining room, I hunkered down in the darkest corner I could find and sought out Bismarck. She wasn’t hard to locate. There was a big half-circle booth in the corner opposite where I was standing, and Bismarck was lounging on the plush cushion, sipping a glass of wine and picking at some sugary dessert that had no business being made in a post-apocalyptic society.

  The Duchess was about forty-five, but looked considerably younger, with thick, dark hair wound up in a bun, a full complement of makeup that would’ve cost a fortune before the collapse, and vivid green eyes that gave off the impression they could pierce your soul. There was no one in the booth with Bismarck, but her mouth was moving as if she was holding a conversation. My eyes picked out a cell phone sitting on the table next to her plate. She was on a call. And she didn’t seem too happy about its subject.

  I needed to get closer to hear what she was talking about, because the din of the busy restaurant was too dense to pick out Bismarck’s voice from across the room, even with my superhuman hearing. There was, however, a problem with closing the gap between us: the five elf guards who were hanging out at various points in the room. Not half-elves either. These were full-on elves. Whom Bismarck must’ve paid a fortune. Elves considered working for humans to be a denigrating chore, and needed ample incentive to do it.

  Irony was that elves were practically made to be bodyguards for people who had magically inclined enemies. Their tall, willowy builds caused people to underestimate their strength. Their pointy ears could hear far better than my half-fae variety. And their eyes had the power to pierce through illusory magic. Like the veil I was currently wearing. The only reason they hadn’t spotted me when I walked into the dining room was because there was a large potted plant with tall fronds sticking up from atop a decorative half-wall that set the seating area apart from the bar, which was situated to the right of the kitchen doors.

  Lucky break.

  But now I had a real conundrum on my hands. How could I evade detection by the elves long enough to sneak into Bismarck’s booth? I mean, sure, I didn’t need to sneak into her booth, but it would be way more terrifying for Bismarck if I seemingly appeared out of nowhere sitting right next to her. And I really wanted to rattle her after she sent those half-trolls to beat me to a literal pulp.

  The answer to my problem turned out to be the equivalent of an adolescent prank. When another server bearing a large tray of food emerged from the kitchen and continued straight toward the far side of the dining room, I ducked down beside him and crawled along on my hands and knees, the half-wall protecting me from those keen elf eyes. At the end of the bar area, where the half-wall ended, the server turned to make the single step down into the dining area. At the perfect moment, as the server had one foot in the air and the other on the edge of the step, I reached out and yanked on the man’s pants leg. The guy lost his footing with a gasp and stumbled forward, his tray tipping over and spilling food onto an occupied table with a series of clatters and clangs and the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.

  I rapidly scooted back along the half-wall until I reached the other end, and peered around the edge. All five elves were looking at the dismayed server, the complaining rich people he’d spilled food on, and the general mess on the table and floor, searching for any signs of trouble for Bismarck. Keeping my head low, I crept out from behind the wall and did an awkward squat-shuffle across the dining room, pausing when I fell into the cover of each table, until I reached the back wall and tucked myself in the corner where the row of booths gave way to the restrooms. The elves didn’t even glance my way.

  Now, I thought, peeking around the last booth in the lineup, to make the final stretch to Bismarck. Should I go for speed? Another distraction? Some other…?

  I halted my plotting when Bismarck’s voice drifted into my ear. Only four booths from her table, and with much of the dining area hushed as they watched the confrontation between the mortified server and the irate patrons, I could hear Bismarck’s end of the phone conversation that was still dragging on. My ears also picked up a faint bass coming through the speaker, but I couldn’t make out any of the man’s words. So I focused on what Bismarck was saying.

  “You didn’t tell me you would wait so long to cast the harp spell,” she hissed into the mic. “Now I’ve got the sharks circling me, and they’re moving in for the kill.” She paused while the man on the other end replied. “No, I don’t mean literally. They tapped that half-fae stretch scavenger, Whelan, to look into the harp’s sale. He was a detective before the collapse, and a damn good one apparently. He’s already managed to track the harp back to the warehouse on Morrison Road, and he found the shipping records. He knows there’s something off about the sale. We can only hope he hasn’t figured out what the harp is.”

  The man said something in an angry tone, words almost loud enough to parse.

  Bismarck sighed. “You think I didn’t try to stop him? I sent a whole team to ‘dissuade’ him from continuing to poke around in my business. Now, all those people, good people, are in the hospital, including two of my limited number of half-troll soldiers. And Whelan is in the wind.”

  The man snapped back, and Bismarck inhaled.

  “Handle it how?” she said, more tentative than before. “It’s one thing to send people to take care of Whelan in an otherwise abandoned warehouse in a largely empty neighborhood, but he’s not there anymore. If he’s in a populated area, there’s only so much we can do without raising an alarm. If you do anything too public, you’re going to have the dullahan swarming us in no time. And then you won’t be able to wait for tonight’s full moon, or that witching hour you’re so intent on, because the fae will be ripping you limb from limb.”

  The man spoke again, calmer this time.

  “Really? There exists such a creature?” Bismarck sounded impressed. “I had no clue. But if that’s the case, then go ahead and unleash your hound, or whatever. If it takes care of Whelan and doesn’t risk exposing your plan for the harp—or my role in it—then we’re fine. I just don’t want any blowback on my enterprises as a result of this scheme. I went out of my way to get you that harp while keeping it off the radar of the sídhe. I’ll lose my head if they connect the dots before you successfully wake your friends from their extended nap. And my death was not part of this deal.”

  The man said a few final lines in a way that struck me as mollifying, then hung up.

  Bismarck spent a few more minutes finishing up her wine and dessert before she snapped her fingers, getting the attention of her guards, and slipped out of the booth. She walked to the front door surrounded by the elves, one of whom opened the door for her, one of whom exit
ed first to scout ahead and ensure no one accosted her. When the latter gave the all clear, Bismarck left the restaurant, and despite the sour look on her face, painted lips pursed, she didn’t seem nearly as worried as she should’ve been about the fact she had wrapped herself up in a conspiracy to challenge the faeries who now ruled the world.

  I, on the other hand, was freaking the fuck out.

  For almost ten minutes, I remained squatting behind the booth, next to the men’s bathroom door, grinding my teeth against a gloved knuckle and resisting the urge to hyperventilate. Up until this moment, I had assumed Tom was simply some idiotic young brat with a deep wallet who intentionally left out some crucial details about his aunt’s precious harp and its recent sale in order to convince me to help him get it back. Namely, that it had been sold by Bismarck to an important buyer. But I’d been wrong. So, so wrong. Tom wasn’t an idiotic young brat at all. Hell, he probably didn’t exist. The guy who showed up at my shop was probably an actor hired for the “Tom role.”

  I’d been played. Like a goddamn harp.

  Someone had intentionally pushed me into a conspiracy—with no way out.

  Bismarck was working with a man in Kinsale’s paranormal community to cast some kind of powerful spell. I knew it was powerful because no one waited until the witching hour on the night of the full moon to cast weak spells. That was reserved for the “mother of all spells,” the kind of spells that only got cast once a century. And this particular spell involved that godforsaken harp, which I now understood was no simple musical instrument. It was a magical instrument, presumably one of great effect.

  According to that phone call, Bismarck’s mystery buyer was planning to wake up a group of paranormal creatures from what I gathered was a magically induced coma. A group that the fae would object to being woken. This is bad. This is very, very bad.