by Stark, Jenn
To my surprise, the man’s gravity only deepened. “And I was one of them, exactly so, until the Green Knight started acting the maggot. He’s dangerous. He truly is.”
The Green Knight? I kept my expression neutral as I tried for casual. I hated not knowing what was going on in the Connected community, especially now that I was supposed to be policing it. The Green Knight sounded like something I should’ve been on top of. “Oh, him.”
“Yes, him. A druid who should know better, given all his training. But no. Instead of fearing the gods and protecting those of us who’ve already defeated them once, he welcomes the Tuatha dé Danann back to Earth with open arms.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. So not fairies, then. Actual straight-up gods. Beside me, Nikki straightened.
“He’s already reached out to them?” I asked. Given the full-on Celtic love fest going on around me, I could see how a summons of the ancient gods of the Irish might happen. We’d already pushed back a legit run from the gods last winter, so the only way new ones could wander in was if a human invited them. Which humans rarely seemed to tire of doing. Never mind that gods were bad news, especially the super pretty sparkling ones. Always. Full stop.
“He's done worse.” Seamus grimaced. “He summoned their ancient enemies as well, the Fomorians. Which is why it’s good you’ve come, it is. My fellow spectral opposition warriors have been talking since we all arrived, long into the night, and we’re not wrong. There’s already a movement of the ancient ones underway, facilitated by the Green Knight and his zealots. The old gods from the lost ages are coming back into the light. They’re seeing what we’ve done to the planet that was their gift to us. They’re not happy, not at all. And they’re plotting to take it back, by any means possible.”
“You know, maybe we should start over at the beginning.”
“I’m telling you, there’s no time,” Seamus said. “You’re strong, I can feel it in you. From what I hear, you’re the strongest member of the Council after the Magician, and he’s nervous you’re going to become even more powerful than he is, mark my words.”
“Where exactly did you hear that?” I asked sharply, while Nikki kicked my ankle. Even through my socks, the pain made me blink. The elven boots she was rocking did not mess around.
“That’s of no consequence. What you need to understand is this, Justice Wilde. No matter how strong you are, the spectral opposition warriors can make you stronger,” Seamus continued, leaning forward again. “We can spread your word to all who would hear, extend your reach throughout the world, and defend the weak against the strong. And well we should. Because we’ve run out of time. The Green Knight is ready to strike.”
Nikki fixed her gaze on the man. “Lookit, buddy, you want us to knock some heads, you need to start talking and fast. Who’s coming, exactly, what do they look like, who are they affiliated with, and what’s their dice roll on strength?”
He swung his gaze to her. “You think I’m lying.”
She shrugged. “Honestly? No. Your little calling card showed up in Justice Wilde’s in-box today, so I’m willing to believe you’re telling the truth. But there’s something about this place that’s making me twitch, and I want to know what it is.”
“Fine.” Seamus thrust out his hand, and I jolted in surprise. How had he known what Nikki’s unique talent was?
Still, she didn’t hesitate. She reached out and grabbed his wrist, her eyes going sharp. Nikki had the ability to read anyone’s memories. Not their thoughts, not their plans, simply the way a particular individual had seen the world up to this point—all their collected memories, with an emphasis on any traumatic experiences. This skill set had helped tremendously when she’d been a cop, but it’d also come in handy in the years since as well. And now she dropped the Irishman’s arm like it was crawling with bugs.
“How did you let this happen?” she demanded of him. “You had one job.”
“I know,” Seamus groaned as I swung my gaze between them. “I’m the Green Knight’s sponsor, his mentor. And, most damning of all, his father. But when he started down this path, I didn’t realize what he planned to do. I’ve failed, I know I have.”
“Yeah, and you need to un-fail, right quick,” Nikki said. “There’s not going to be a fairy war in Vegas, boyo. We’re totally not zoned for that.”
I jolted. “Wait, what?”
“It’s already started, don’t you see?” the old man keened. “Why do you think I’m here? The most powerful druid in Christendom has summoned the ancient ones with rites far darker than he understands, and you have to stop him before it’s too late.”
An earsplitting howl erupted directly behind us. Nikki and I whirled, both of us instinctively clapping our hands over our ears.
“Banshee,” the old man gasped. “Someone will die this night!
Chapter Two
The sound abruptly cut off, but our tent emptied anyway, everyone screaming and running in opposite directions. Nikki and I fought our way through the small crowd to find an old woman on the ground, her hands up, her head bowed, her entire body shaking like a dandelion in a hurricane. Standing over her were two bulky men in long robes, menacingly holding small rods that glowed at the end…as if there was any other way you could hold a small rod that glowed at the end.
“Is that a cattle prod?” I demanded, striding forward. To my surprise, the men fell back with immediate and obvious deference. That was weird.
The woman on the ground, barely more than a huddle of blankets, didn’t attempt to crawl away. She didn’t attempt to do anything but shiver. “What’s going on here?” I pressed.
“She sought to bring the blighted fae upon us,” the man to the right said, his voice awed. “We won’t allow it. We’re warded.”
I nodded, glancing to Nikki. As big as these yahoos were, the fact that they backed down so quickly from me didn’t sit quite right. It almost made me think…
Cosplay? I mouthed to her, and her eyes lit up. This could be all an act, a show for the paying guests. Lord knew there were enough of them standing in a circle around us, staring in wonder.
“Okay, well, ah, go easy on her,” I hazarded, though my hands had started tingling. Tingling hands weren’t a good sign, but it was probably because the woman remained curled up on the ground, trembling like it was her job. “She may have wandered into the wrong place, a harmless old woman trying to get to the food carts.”
I expected the men to look mutinous, but instead, they crossed their glow sticks over their chests. “Justice,” they said, almost reverently.
Err…also weird.
“Right,” I confirmed to no one in particular, and I nudged the woman’s foot. “As for you, stop screaming bloody murder in the middle of psychic fairs. You stress people out with that kind of thing.”
“Nooooo,” she moaned beneath me, and I looked down at her more sharply. Had the glow thugs done more damage than I’d realized?
I crouched down, leaning close, but hesitated to put my hands on the old woman. For one thing, my fingers were positively sparking at this point, and she’d been traumatized enough. Getting shocked by my overeager fists of flame wouldn’t help anyone. For another, there was something still super odd about all this.
As if reading my thoughts, Nikki approached from the other side, squatting next to the woman as well. The woman’s hair was a tangled mass of gray spilling over her shoulders, but all Nikki needed to do was connect with her actual skin for a moment, and she’d get the information she needed.
“Let me help you up,” Nikki said.
“No!” The woman moved so fast, I nearly stumbled back, turning to me with a face that—well, it wasn’t a face at all. It was ice and shadow and a mouth that took up most of the real estate where her nose and cheeks should have been. Nikki still managed to get a grip on her.
“Bomb!” Nikki shouted as the woman wrenched her robe open.
I didn’t wait around for the details. I lurched forward, wrapping up the woman in my arms a
nd enveloping us both in my trademark fire burst that would simultaneously distract everyone nearby and allow me to blast this bitch straight to Judgment—
“You dare!” She screeched again, and to my shock, she twisted and writhed in my grip, my hands passing right through her. As my blue fire leapt around us, creating a shield that blocked us from the outside world, I tried once, twice to get a fix on her wriggling form. I got nothing but a handful of robes for my trouble, and even that was difficult to manage. Then the woman’s unearthly howl rose up, up, up to the heavens a second time…and, poof. It blanked out. I was left with the smoking ruins of a shawl.
The fire fell away, burning out as quickly as it had surged—
And the crowd surrounding me burst into wild applause.
I whirled around, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Nikki stood next to me, a protective arm stretched out in front of me while her body blocked the crowd in a menacing pose, while the two men with glow sticks formed similar poses, boxing everyone out. They needn’t have bothered. The onlookers immediately started breaking up, and the chatter that reached me was excited, satisfied—and off-putting.
“Oh my God, was that even in the schedule?” one girl with spiked pink hair sticking out from her head in all directions demanded of her friends. “That should totally have been in the schedule.”
“That was so much better than the guy with the saw,” somebody else agreed from the other side.
“Did she kill that old lady?” These hiccupping, slurred words were nearly drowned out by the ones that came after in a far more authoritative tone.
“Dude, it was totally faked. That was some sort of doll that broke apart—you remember seeing anything until she started screaming and got knocked to the ground? No. She showed up out of nowhere. Total crash dummy.”
I grimaced, not sure if I was happy that people were so clueless, or concerned at how willing people were to see only what they wanted to see. I patted Nikki’s shoulder to let her know I was okay, not yet trusting myself to talk. I winced as the smell of burnt hair hit my nostrils. Oh well. I was due for a haircut anyway.
She straightened, then took the shawl away from me. “You sent her to Gamon?”
Gamon was Judgment of the Arcana Council—sort of my meaner, tougher, older cousin who’d just gotten out of juvie. Once I was called to intervene where some member of the Connected community was wreaking havoc, my job was to deliver the perp to Judgment. In her newfound role, Gamon tended to favor punishing first, asking questions later. I usually had no problem with that. Most of the asshats I’d delivered to her were more than deserving of her wrath.
Only, I hadn’t sent the wailing witch to Gamon. Instead, the woman had ghosted. Literally.
“I tried to.” I coughed. My ears still rang from the woman’s screech. “There wasn’t enough of her to send. And sweet Christmas, that scream at the end.”
Nikki quirked a glance at me. “What scream at the end?”
“You’re safe?” asked a big guy as he and his buddy moved toward us.
I looked down at my hoodie and jeans. Not so much as an ember burn on them. I was getting better at this all the time.
“I’m safe,” I acknowledged, not missing the sigh of relief that went through the warrior detail. Who were these guys?
“And so the gauntlet has been thrown.” Seamus McCarthy emerged from his hidey-hole and pulled what was left of the old woman’s shawl from Nikki, turning it over in his hands. “A banshee, who stared Justice full in the face before you killed her dead.”
I flinched. “Pretty sure I didn’t kill her, I sent her to Judgment. Then again, I was kind of distracted by the bomb, so no promises.”
“Hold up there, Sparky,” Nikki said, her hands going up. “Who said anything about a bomb?”
Real anger didn’t steal upon me unawares; it lit me up, from my crown to my now-sparking fingers. “You did,” I snapped. “That there was a bomb, that the woman was carrying a bomb.”
I shot an irritated glance to the nearest thug with the glow stick. “You heard her say it, didn’t you?”
He shook his head. “I heard her cry out, but I thought she said ‘gun.’ I rushed forward to help, and then was pushed back by your mighty wall of flame.” His voice was filled with awe. I felt a migraine coming on.
“Right. And you?” I asked the other guy.
“I thought she yelled ‘stop,’ but I didn’t know who to stop, so I turned to hold back the crowd. But then there was the screaming.”
“So you did hear that. The screaming part.” My ears still rang from it, so it was good I hadn’t completely lost my mind.
“I did.” The second man nodded, even as his friend frowned. Clearly, he hadn’t.
“Of course you heard it, Theo.” Seamus said quietly, stepping up beside me. “You’ve got the druid blood in you, that you do. There’s probably a lot of fairy folk you’ve heard over the years.”
While Theo blushed, I turned to Seamus. “You sent that flyer to me, and I came. Then this old lady or illusion or whatever she was shows up and starts wailing her fool head off, and when I come out to deal with the situation, she explodes in my hands. Please tell me, I beg you to tell me, this was the reason you called me out here. This was your big Neo-Celt threat.”
“Not exactly.” He shook his head. “She’s but a warning of what’s to come. I called you because my own son has made clear his intention to bring forth the ancient gods of the Celts, both the dark- and the light-bringers, by whatever means he can. He believes he is the Green Knight, and that it is his duty to lead the ancient ones back into the world of the living. We can’t allow that. You can’t allow that. The battle of our distant forebears to defeat the fae cannot be undone to satisfy the whims of fools who do not understand the gravity of what they think they want.”
“I…” I stood for a moment, staring, unwilling or unable to believe my ears. As much as I wanted to write Seamus McCarthy off as a lunatic, the old man wasn’t joking. Every fiber of his being was vibrating with earnest truth, and a quick glance from Nikki confirmed it. Around us, the proprietors of the tents of the other, ah, spectral opposition warriors were now standing in front of their doorways, ignoring the curious crowds of trinket buyers and potion hounds. Instead, they were looking at me. I’d seen this look in the eyes of acolytes before, whether or not I wanted them. They not only believed, they wanted to believe.
Super-dangerous combination.
“How many of these folks are actual Connecteds?” I mused aloud, mostly for Nikki’s benefit.
It was Seamus who responded. “It’s not the spectral opposition warriors you should be worried about,” he said. “They will serve you, and proudly at that. It’s the damned Neo-Celts that are the problem.”
“The Neo-Celts?” I squinted across the tent line to where a huge temporary sculpture of the tree of life had been erected, apparently signifying the opening to Celtlandia. “Seriously?”
“They’re lulling the world to sleep, they are, with their cheap jewelry and terrible harp playing and divine trinity hocus-pocus,” he growled ominously. “Don’t even get me started on the druidic resurgence they’re co-opting. They’re cornering the market on all things supernatural and drawing a base that grows every day. It’s one thing to get a Celtic cross tattooed on your ankle, it’s another to actually believe that the ancient ways are better than the life we’ve forged for ourselves with our own hands and hearts. The ancient foes of mortals are not the impossibly beautiful, oversexed demigods that people imagine them to be.”
“Wait—what?” Nikki asked, looking over at him with real interest for the first time. “No one said anything about oversexed.”
The old man glared at her. “You make light, but you of all people know that glamour is one of the easiest ways to misdirect your foes, to make them believe you’re not as deadly as you truly are. If the Green Knight gets his wish, however, you’ll be on the front lines of experiencing exactly how dangerous the ancient ones tru
ly were—again, not the glittery pinup models people have made them into, but the deadly, deceiving, and merciless magician assassins of the ancient world.”
“Ummm, they still sound kind of hot,” Nikki muttered.
I shifted, keenly sensing the attention of the small tribe assembled around me, then farther, the sprawling mass of people spinning through the psychic fair. Drawing in a deep breath, I flicked my third eye open to see what I could see about the energy dancing across the open park.
And flinched.
Thing one, there was a lot of energy. The entire park was hitting on all cylinders this afternoon. Whether it was due to the excitement being drummed up by the alcohol and stimulants flowing through people’s systems, the thrumming music striking up at the far bandstand, or real magic snaking through the crowd, it didn’t really matter. The bottom line was this festival was a tinder keg waiting to blow, not unlike most sporting or musical events. The difference here, though, was that these particular attendees could get into more than a fistfight.
“Tonight’s not the last night of the festival, is it?”
“It is, though there’s still a half-day left of events tomorrow,” Seamus said. “But more importantly, it’s the last full moon before Beltane, the pink moon, and there is magic in that moon, Justice. It’s a call for new birth and life. To many of these foolish Neo-Celts, it’s a symbol of the return of the ancient peoples they so revere. Or so say the adherents of the Green Knight.”
“Okay, I’m done. You broke me.” I sighed, spreading my hands. “I haven’t even heard of your kid, and you’d think I would have if he was all that impressive. So give me the whole scoop. Does he have a dragon, too?”
Seamus shook his head, keeping his tone serious. “No. He’s only recently taken on the full mantle of druid and drawn adherents to him like moths to a flame. We also sought to pass him off as a joke, none more so than I, but—he is no joke.”