by CK Dawn
“What.”
“Look, man, I been sticking my neck out for you, but I can’t keep doing it. Gemma…she’s got me by the short ones this time.”
Fel snorted. “You always say that. Pour me some of that, will you?”
Charlie pulled open a couple of drawers and found a dusty shot glass snuggled amidst dress socks. He wiped it with a finger, filled it with Scotch and handed it to Fel, who’d put a couple of pillows against the headboard to support his back.
“It’s different this time.”
“If you say so,” Fel said, taking a healthy gulp. “Oh, that’s good.”
“Gemma’s got something going on, I’m telling you.” Charlie filled his mug again and eased onto the ugly green sofa, stretching his long legs and crossing them at the ankle. “Calling in all outstanding miscellus debt. Humans get a pass, but everyone else…something’s seriously up. Can’t cover for you anymore.”
“That’s really unfortunate.”
“Tell me about it. So, you got any prospects?”
Fel thought of Dragon, the way she’d willingly suffered her boyfriend’s clumsy and self-serving touch then later, with him, fled her own pleasure guiltily. He closed his eyes and sank into the memory of her smell, citrus and clean like barely opened freesia, and her taste, tart at first like star apples then morphing to frothy sugar like ripe, sweet sap, surpassing even the magical high he got shooting undertow. “Nothing promising.”
“Liar.” Charlie sighed a bit of a laugh.
“She doesn’t have any real money.”
“You got talent, buddy; get blood out of a turnip when you put your mind to it.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“Fuck me? All right, fine.” Charlie shifted to get more comfortable and took another sip of his excellent Scotch. “Tell me about Miss No Money.”
“Nothing to tell.” Fel wasn’t about to reveal to anyone that just having Dragon in his arms had generated a longing for home so profound, he’d given his first-ever free consultation. He wasn’t about to reveal that he’d been so grateful for her touch, like the first glimpse of fae he’d had since the war, that he’d begged a human to allow him to please her (they always pleaded with him); that he’d been near desperate for her to stay another hour, the night, the weekend, forever; give him a few lousy minutes to lose himself inside her heat, then a few more to watch her explode one more time.
Charlie would want to know the whys and Fel had no interest in confessing that he used undertow not only to regain the magic he lost in the war, but just to be himself again. Sober he was a damaged creature with more than two thousand years’ worth of memory to remind him of all he’d lost. High he was Flannacán map Cinid ocus Barita seirbhíseach Mahb Tóisech again, feared warrior lord of the Sun and favorite of the queen. A watered down version to be sure, but better than nothing.
He had no interest in confessing that he’d found his truest self—the magic and mystery he’d lost in the war and the crude patience he’d learned lingering in this broke-down world—in a girl named Dragon, not even to himself.
“She smell good?” Charlie peered over the rim of his mug at Fel’s relaxed form and closed eyes. He answered his own question before Fel could ignore it. “The good ones always smell like a fucking dream.”
Fel looked at Charlie, lost in his own revelations, the mug of thousand-year uisce beatha resting against his chest. “Why?”
“Just the way it goes,” he said with a hint of a shrug. “The girls you can have are right there in front of you like crap booze in the liquor store; easy to spot ’cause their pussy’s in your face. And crap because there are rows and rows of the shit to be had by everyone. Even a bum off the street can gather up enough pennies to afford the cheap shit. It tastes like swill, but it’s better than nothing. The ones that you can’t have, which incidentally are the ones you want the most, they’re like the good stuff: the better the booze, the harder it is to find, the more you gotta shell out. One taste and you’re lost.” Charlie looked at the rare liquid cupped between his scarred hands. “Women who smell good ruin you for anything else and are a plague upon the fucking earth. Take it from me, my friend.” He raised the glass in salute then downed the rest.
Fel stood up slowly and filled his own glass to the brim. He stared at his reflection, and for an instant his tired fae eyes fell away and he saw the verdant, bewitching gardens of home, full of excess and dark beauty. He blinked and it was gone. His soul cried out as if it suffered the loss of his family for the first time and he downed the Scotch swiftly and poured another.
“I can pay you back,” he said without turning around. “All of it. But I need some help to be able to work my magic.” He squinted at Charlie’s reflection and winced when his friend’s angry eyes met his.
“I tell you Gemma’s up to her neck in some shit and you beg for drugs.”
“It’s either that or find Mahb’s Stash. I thought you wanted to get paid.”
“Okay, all right.” Charlie nodded and put his mug on the floor. “When I say some shit, I’m talking about the kind of shit we saw at Pumpkin Delight. You might wanna get clean.”
“I’m clean,” Fel said, pretending to straighten a non-existent collar and tie. He licked a finger and smoothed it over his brows. “Cleaner than the Board of Health.”
Charlie stood up and strode towards Fel, grasping the back of his neck and twisting one arm, he forced him against the mirror. “You’re a fucking addict, Lieutenant.”
“So?” Fel gritted out his breath, fogging the mirror. “Never bothered you before.”
Charlie let Fel go and shrugged into the leather jacket he’d laid over the armrest of the horrible green couch. He opened the front door and stood in the fluorescent light of the hallway. “I’m cutting you off. You don’t need undertow to make money or get women.”
At that Fel charged him, plowing his head into Charlie’s mid-section. “You can’t!” he yelled landing a solid right to Charlie’s ribs.
He grunted, but easily overpowered Fel, still groggy from undertow’s ministrations and the air’s counter effects. He held Fel in a chokehold that, in the old days, he could’ve easily broken out of. Disgusted, Charlie pushed Fel away and watched as he stumbled heavily and fell on the bed.
Fel flipped onto his back and looked at his friend desperately. “If you don’t help me out, I’ll get what I need from someplace else.”
“Your choice,” Charlie sneered. “Half the shit on the street is laced with gunpowder or Clog-Be-Gone or God knows what else. But that’s your fucking choice.” Charlie ran his hands over his head before clenching them into trembling fists. “Fuck!” he yelled. “I don’t know what else to do with you. I indulged you at first. Mostly because I didn’t have a choice, but also because I figured that after everything that Pan bullshit put us through, you deserved a little R-and-R, but now…”
He leveled a glare at Fel through squinted eyes as if changing how he viewed his friend would somehow give him answers. “You think Miss No Money would fuck a junkie? Love a junkie?” He walked through the open door, grasping the knob as he left. “It may not be me, but one way or another, Gemma will get her money. I’ll be disappointed as hell if you’re too strung out to fight them off,” he threw over his shoulder and shut the door behind him.
“You owe me, buddy!” Fel yelled at the closed door. “Charlemagne!” he bellowed before letting his head fall onto the cheap mattress.
Fel knew what he was, knew what he would become when he decided to move in a direction opposite to his queen’s will and throw his lot in with the idealistic fervor of the young Prince of the Shade.
Banished.
Back when he was dissatisfied with court life in the Sun, never again setting foot in that decadent world seemed like a welcome cure.
“Idiot,” he cursed himself again. “You could be home right now.” Not selling his body for the promise of drugs that barely simulated the Sun. He thought of all the souls his wartime service had saved
and all those he’d been forced to kill and, instead of being satisfied with his decision, he debated the merits of it for the thousandth time.
Innocents used to satisfy the curiosity of scientists and the vanity of men.
What is that measured against the fact that I have no magic and have to rely on fucking Carlos and Goat for a decent drink? he thought petulantly. He remembered the last time he saw them both, Carlos fucking the hell out of Goat and Goat bleating for all she was worth, her hooves scraping against the hardwood floor for purchase.
He remembered the first RUFO lab he and his men infiltrated. Whole families of sacred apis, shaved and unnaturally swollen. Brownies and other lesser fae so pumped full of drugs and ridiculously scarred from barely-healed surgeries they could hardly lift their heads, and human “volunteers” bloated beyond recognition and catatonic, suffering Shiva-only-knew-what mental tortures from having the limbs and the organs of miscellus grafted onto them.
He had vomited in an empty corner of the lab until tears streamed down his cheeks.
Before he was deployed, Fel had seen the pictures of POWs that Docque had somehow gotten ahold of. Seeing the enemy’s capabilities had been a standard part of his training, and yet a grainy picture couldn’t convey the smell, the unbearable scent of the dying, and they couldn’t voice the ceaseless, keening despair of the victims, and they couldn’t capture the kernel of his heart that did not quite believe his queen was responsible for such atrocity.
After that first lab, he’d gladly killed any member of the RUFO army he came upon, the image of that first lab and the countless others he’d shut down fresh in his mind.
They made a name for themselves: him, Charlemagne, and the rest of their platoon. Nothing catchy like “The Enforcers” or “The Cleaning Crew” aka the Double C’s. Bunch of no-talent show-offs was what Fel always told his team when news of the Double C’s successful missions hit the rumor mill then were exaggerated enough to make the papers—at least the good parts were. The bad parts were swept so far under the rug, Mary Poppins in the middle of a ’roid rage wouldn’t be able to get them out again. “Where’s the finesse in being a butcher?” Fel had shrugged. “Go in, do the job, get out, no muss no fuss.”
Their successes weren’t noticed by the media, but were closely observed by CRA’s brass. As a result, Fel and his people were sent out on increasingly dangerous missions. As a two-thousand-year-old fae warrior of great renown, Fel found the combat, after centuries of “civilian” life at court, exhilarating. It was like his anima had finally sobered from a prolonged drunk, he’d sincerely told a courier for the Shade prince six months into K'Davrah. Worth it, he’d nodded to his men, who had nodded back.
The next day he slaughtered the cousin of a fae warrior he had a passing acquaintance with. Slate blue eyes and a bushy carrot top, the resemblance between the two was a bit startling. Enough so that Fel took a moment to close the dead man’s eyes before chucking his head into the mass grave he and his men had dug. One of his own men, a human, lost his arm in the skirmish. Another, a valkyrie, had walked through a trip-wire and was wounded so severely her ability to communicate with Odin had to be amputated to save her life.
The following week he tortured a courtier from his former queen’s court to death. He knew the man; was seated at the same table with him for various functions and had conversed with him.
The day after that, one of his men killed Dev. He’d held his oldest friend in his arms while he died, alternately cursing Dev for his foolishness and begging forgiveness for Fel’s own. After that, in every third or so skirmish they engaged in, the death toll included someone he once loved, cared for still or had hoped to know better.
When word came of CRA’s victory and a global ceasefire, Fel had lost all his magic fighting a war he no longer understood or cared about. The anima that had once been thrilled at the combat was now glutted, a year into Pan, and drowned in regret. Of all his men he knew were alive, only Charlemagne resisted undertow. Even the Enforcers and the Double C’s had succumbed, preferring to be high than be reminded of their part in a war that had pitted brother against brother, made streets run with blood, and reduced those with magic to little more than ordinary.
Dragon, her reckless selflessness, her smell, and the way she tasted—these were the first bits of bold-as-brass truths he’d experienced since the ceasefire. She had, in the few hours he’d been in her company, scoured some of the taint from his soul, and like a bear emerging from a long winter, he wanted more of the sun, as much of her light and heat as he could get his greedy hands on.
He reached in his pants pocket for the business card he’d filched from her purse while she was in the bathroom.
“Elemental,” he read the name out loud. “Hair care, therapeutic bodywork, reflexology, organic skin care.” He wouldn’t have pegged Dragon for a salon gig; her look had a thrown-together kind of feel that most fashion plates took hours to smooth away.
He made ephemeral plans to seek her out, nixing the image of himself in a Giancarlo suit, giant glass-slipper roses in hand. Too contrived. They’d engaged in unanticipated physical intimacy; just the thought of it made him hard. Him in a custom-made suit would embarrass her. Jeans then, and a plain T-shirt. Maybe a pair of flops. He pictured himself approaching her, shy smile, one hand diffidently curled in his pants pocket, while the other held a bouquet of lily of the valley. The small blossoms were too decorous, but their smell was exquisite. She’d forget the blooms but remember the scent every time she looked at him.
He ignored the fact that he was giving the royal treatment to someone who wasn’t even a viable mark. He needed to see her again. End of story.
Meantime, undertow beckoned, and the need for a soft, brown body suffused in the scent of home fell to a longing that shamed him like nothing else. When he finally rose from the bed, it was to seek a synthetic solace.
Five
Jasper sat on a claw-foot settee of patchy, silver velvet, today’s paper hiding most of his face. A corner of The Rapture drooped down, his annoyed blue eyes following the erratic path of the Jack fly that had investigated the crack of a partially open window, fell off the sill into the house and into the potted soil of a just-planted orchid, and now couldn’t find its way back out again. The stupid creature flew right past the open French window and into the glass of its closed twin with an enraged squeak.
Jasper suppressed a long-suffering sigh and straightened the fallen edge of his paper. The thing’s pathetic existence was his own fault and not just because it had been he who’d forgotten to close the living room window. It was his lackluster magic that had changed the creature’s nature when he claimed this place for their home eighteen years ago.
In its day, Le Salon Neuf was the place to be seen. A restaurant and ballroom, high tea for two ran upwards of a thinking-man’s monthly pay. During the war’s first skirmishes, the Salon valiantly kept its doors open, accepting trade in exchange for tea and pan-seared sea bass and martinis made with smuggled champagne and secretly grown white cranberries.
Finally abandoned at the height of K’Davrah, the baroquely decorated rooms were occupied by enemy squads using the restaurant as a base of operations. Years of spells being lobbed at the structure had forced the inhabitants out, had changed the façade from staid and elegant to unabashedly fantastical.
It was a generally acknowledged fact that as bad as the war could be, it was made infinitely worse by the presence of inexperienced spell-casters recruited and trained by humans who knew nothing of magic and disdained it besides.
When Jasper passed it for the hundredth time almost eighteen years ago and decided to claim it (eviction from their current digs was imminent), the Doric capitals topping the columns of the low balustrade that surrounded the restaurant had long since been transformed into ornate urn-like pedestals, each topped with an intricately carved marble rabbit whose ears puddled dejectedly to the sidewalk, or a four-foot sea-horse replete with bat wings done up in blue stone.
The iron gate, ornamented with an iron lion and lioness in repose, was not present before the war, but appeared after the now infamous McBattle—an op funded by a fast-food chain that had gone terribly wrong. Occasionally, a glimpse of the feline couple would show them rutting as energetically as the nearly unmovable iron would allow. Litters from this activity were extremely rare and manifested as an iron frieze of a cub or two playing rough and tumble among the gate’s bars.
Inside, the famous rooms were riddled with frogs and locusts—the attempts of those who’d had only Grimm’s tales and Jesus Christ to inform their intention and arm their weapons—but it was the Jack flies that caused the most hardened squatters to keep their distance.
Born from the desperate mind of a drafted Private First Class using a book of children’s tales to arm her spells, they were insects in their first incarnation. Flies as big as your fist and, likely as not, the pests that had irritated the giant Jack had scaled the stalk to find. When Jasper had pried opened the Salon’s front door and stood in the entryway, a thick cloud of them swarmed around him like he’d been dipped in honey.
Over their size Jasper had no sway, despite his two-thousand-year existence. His own wartime service had crippled his abilities leaving him with only dregs of his former power, so he nixed the idea of reversing the magic that had changed the files and whatever threat it might eventually pose—the charmed landmines of K'Davrah were everywhere and could be anything, and were usually just as potent years after being positioned as they initially were—in favor of undertaking the chores he had an outside chance of completing.
After he’d opened the kitchen door to inspect the room and a landslide of locusts and frogs covered him like a twitching, suffocating blanket, and after he’d had a pint to help relieve him of his disgust and rage, he’d banished those biblical plagues using several cleansing spells he got at the local dollar store inadvertently causing the Jack flies’ wings to change from translucent bits of exoskeleton to gloriously colored swallowtails.