by Richard Amos
Except, that was bullshit. These two weren’t any old perps, were they? Not simple target practice. A bullet wouldn’t do. The arseholes had lived for centuries, somehow got themselves glued together (oops), and the only way to kill them was to bring down that woodland prison.
Their daughter…
Why did I keep thinking about Orla?
Wait…
No. What a cock! How could I be such an idiot?
The Roses. Pods. Faerie. Parker said they were heading over there.
Dean was in Faerie.
I struggled, trying to force my body to move, to overcome the effects of the pod. Talk about a losing game.
Was I dying?
“Such a shame.” Parker was still present. “You’re the most disappointing failed experiment I’ve ever had. This was supposed to be the crowning moment of everything. That stuff you heard about the Roses and you? I really believed you would take control, transform into a god, and use them as your army. Who knows what you would’ve done? That red pod I threw at you? Infused with my magic the same way as the Roses.” He grinned. “Yes, pod-fae infusion. Amazing, isn’t it? I’m so proud of my creations, but you…” He shook his head.
As amazing as cat sick. No verbal comeback for me. My tongue was a fat slug now.
The sounds of the chaos still cracked and crashed out there.
“The world is failing, Jake. There is no way to stop it now. The pod apocalypse has come. The Roses will spread beyond Amsterdam. They are unstoppable, untamable.” He sighed. “This is the end for you now, Jake. You’ve left me no choice but to hand you over to my brother and his church. They will burn you. Today is the day. The Spring Equinox. Had to be today. Don’t ask me why. I don’t care. It wasn’t happening on my watch, but now that you have failed me, your protection is gone. Goodbye, my bitter disappointment.”
My fingers were gnarled, throbbing with what I could only guess was arthritic pain or something like it.
I was changing, my bones shifting, my skin a mass of ripples.
Elijah was back, pulling a phone from his pocket. “I have waited a long time for this. God has aligned the stars, especially for this day. We waited, we endured so much, and now we are here.” He turned his back on me. “Hello? Yes. It is time. I have Jake Winter with me. Send transport immediately. But be prepared. He is contaminated.” He hung up and turned back around. “Here we are, Jake. At the moment I promised you. Just don’t die yet.”
It was supposed to be Lou’s birthday.
Twenty-Seven
Dean
Before I hit the ground, there was a jolt in my falling speed, then I landed on my hands and knees.
Back on the balcony.
Ignoring the sharp pain from the impact, I jumped up, spinning to make sure this was real, that it wasn’t some attempt from my brain to trick me, to lull me into death easily.
Orla was there, and the guard who’d thrown me was walking away.
Orla giggled. “Yes, you’re really here, Dean. That was simply a demonstration of how trapped you are. There’s no way out and no way to throw me over the edge. The door is the same. You step out, you step back in. I think of everything. I really have you by the balls.”
You wish. My knees and hands ached, but I was ready to fight. I’d no choice but to come here, but I’d arrived in Faerie with no leverage. Just because she said she would put Louise back to normal again didn’t mean it came with a time frame. It came on her terms and with my behavior towards her. The more I stroked her ego, the quicker the time would pass.
No more losing my cool.
This was going to be tricky. She’d tried to seduce me, so did I now throw that back at her? Trick her? Make her think I was falling for her? Not straight away. It would have to be over the course of a week. Stay here, work on her, soften her, get under her skin even more than I already was.
It made me feel dirty but also determined. If this was the way to get my daughter out of her frozen state, then so be it.
Then I’d deal with the rest of the issue with Louise and the pods.
“So don’t start thinking you can throw me over the edge because it will only end in tears for you,” Orla added. “It would break my heart too.”
I watched her. That smile, that winning aura. She really had won in her head. But I wasn’t a man to roll over and be stomped on. I was alive and ready for action.
Time to slip on the meek face. “I’m sorry.”
“You are?”
“Yes. I’ll comply. I’ll behave.”
“You said that before.”
“I needed to be taught a lesson. I’m really sorry, Orla.”
She took a moment to answer. “I’m glad you now see sense. Apparently. You’d better not be lying.”
“I’m not.” I looked behind her. “It is a lovely view.”
“Finally, you agree.”
I sighed, went to the balustrade to lean on it, making myself look all brooding.
“Oh, Dean. Don’t be so glum. This is the beginning of something beautiful. A cleansing, a new awakening for you. I can feel it.”
You feel wrong. I didn’t speak. Silent sadness now. Warming up later. Sell the lie. Grabbing that thing around her neck that held Louise’s essence would be at the top of my list when I found a way to break out.
Play it smart. Be patient.
My time would come.
“Can you believe that one day this will all be mine?” She swept her hand across the view. “Everything. Mine. There is so much work to do, so much change to make. I keep saying change, don’t I?” Some of that perfume wafted from her. “I could make this change so much easier. Consume you with this scent, take you in that bed right now. I wonder how long you can hold out until you succumb and stick your cock inside me.” She giggled again—a grating sound. “Sorry, that was too coarse.” She placed a hand on my back. “I’m sorry, Dean. I won’t be so smutty from now on. You’re just so sexy. I can’t help it. But I know that won’t win your heart, and neither will talking about him. All I can do is show you, open my heart to you. Win you authentically. No tricks, nothing but truth. I want it to be real, and I want you to have your daughter back.”
There were others linked to this, to Louise and her power. More strings being pulled in the background, and everything pointed at Parker and Elijah.
What was Orla’s connection to them?
I needed to talk to Dad, even if it made my stomach churn. He’d tell me. I’d make sure of it.
“Dean?” she said softly.
“Yes?”
“I’d really like it if you’d join me for dinner tonight. I know you probably want to be left alone, but maybe we can have a nice sit-down and a conversation. Calm. No drama.”
Step one. “Okay.”
She cupped my chin. “I’ll turn that frown upside down. Just wait and see, Dean. Everything is going to be—”
A huge explosion shook the palace. Orla shrieked, and I staggered back.
It’d come from above, not within the walls. In the distance. The direction I’d come into Faerie from.
The bedroom door burst open. That same guard who’d thrown me ran onto the balcony. “My Lady! The borders! Something has broken through the Faerie portals!”
A second blast, this time in the sky. Thunder like I’d never heard it before. Dark clouds quickly rolled across the day, more thunder cracking, the sky blazing with red lightning.
“What’s happening?” Orla said quite softly for someone who’d just been shrieking.
There was noise in the city streets below, the sound of war horns. Soldiers were pouring out of the city gates, chariots taking to the air, heading in the direction of the portals.
Faerie under attack? From Earth?
“Stay here, My Lady,” the guard said. “You’ll be safe. We will protect you.”
Four figures flew through the clouds, heading straight for the palace.
Orla moved to stand next to me, gazing up at the strangeness. “I’m afrai
d, Dean.”
Good. I didn’t speak, keeping my attention on the sky. Were they… No. That couldn’t be right.
“Dean?”
“What?”
“They’re women, aren’t they? Naked women. With…. Roses? Are there roses on their skin?”
Red light on their chests, glowing brightly.
The dead women.
Pod and fae magic.
“Oh, no.”
Pod gushed from the roses, red streams spilling over the lands. Even from this height, I saw it strike the grass and start to spread in thin lines across the ground.
“We need to get out of here, Orla.”
“Those bastards!” she yelled. “They’re betraying me? They’re actually betraying me when I let them out?”
My head snapped around. “What did you just say?”
“Oh, fuck it. Who cares now? Those two? Parker and Elijah? Should I say, Oisin and Ronan. They’re my fathers. At least one of them is. It’s confusing. The results are always inconclusive, so I call them both Dad.”
“You’re… The daughter? Aoife’s daughter? How is that possible?”
“Doesn’t matter now. They screwed me over. Let’s go. Everything has changed. I have some men to castrate.”
She led the way through the bedroom as the sky roared with thunder. She flung the door open and stomped into the corridor. There were four guards waiting there.
“My Lady?” one of them questioned.
“This way,” she told them all.
Two guards took point, two in the rear, moving without question.
As we hurried along, she spoke. “Bastards! We had a deal. Just wait until I get my hands on them. They’ll wish I never freed them from that damn place.”
Movement behind me, a yell. I turned to see a rose woman flying down the corridor, coming straight for us at great speed.
She dodged the guards’ swords and poured pod over them. They wailed as they went down, throwing a fit on the floor as the pod aggressively consumed them.
“My Lady!” a man called.
I ducked and rolled, leaking red pod missing me by inches. The guards tried to defend Orla but got doused in red.
“Get away!” Orla yelled, hands glowing pink.
The woman grabbed her by the hair, lifted her up to the ceiling.
“No!” Orla screamed. “Let me go! Let me go! Dean!”
Pod was dripping from the rose all over the amber carpet, slithering in all directions, climbing the walls, making its way to me and away from me. Blobs appeared, some bigger than others.
Shit!
“Dean!”
The woman tossed Orla to the ground, and she landed face-first in a pod. It didn’t swallow her whole head but smothered her face. Upon impact, the necklace broke, the vial bouncing across the floor, stopping centimeters away from a small pod river.
My daughter’s essence.
The pod woman turned her attention to me, making a grab. I jumped back, then rolled forward, scooping up the vial as I came out of the roll, hopped over the pods, and darted down the corridor.
I burst through the doorway I remembered being dragged up here through. A stairwell was there, and I charged down it, back in the direction I’d been taken. Back to the throne room.
It was empty, save for one man standing at the center.
“Dad.”
He was holding a sword. “Son.”
“Dad.”
He knew.
He was in on it.
“Deannnnnnn…”
Orla.
“Oh, Deany….”
“No…” Dad gasped, looking behind me.
Orla was transformed, along with her guards. They were all covered in red boils, dragging their bodies across the ground. Weak. Pathetic, but their faces dripped with menace as well as pod.
The rose woman wasn’t with them from what I could see.
“Deannnn… Oh, Dean. I’m coming to get you…”
She sounded like she was off her face on drugs. Her speech slurred. She pawed at the ground in desperation, trying her best to get to me.
Her guards moaned around her.
“Kiss me, Dean. Come and be mineeeeeeee…”
Orla. Daughter of evil fae. Not who I thought she was. Remnant of a long-dead past.
Taker of what was mine.
She’d come into my city and affected my life. Scared my baby girl. Tried to destroy everything I loved, everything I’d built. As crazy as her fathers.
Icy rage took over, the kind free of hesitation. “Dad?”
“Yes, Son?”
“Give me that sword.”
I listened to him hurry over, placing the hilt in my hand.
“Deannnn…” Orla lifted her head, her hand opening and closing, reaching for me. “Oh, Deany. Here comes my Deany. He’s mine, and no one else can have him.” She started to sing. “All mine, never Jake’s, because he doesn’t deserve him. Kill the Jake. Kill the Jake. Take the Dean. Take the De—”
I drove the blade into her skull. She convulsed, then died, a pool of blood spreading from beneath her face.
The guards moaned some more, pawing at her, coming for me. One by one, they met the same fate as their queen.
Dead.
She was dead.
I turned to face my dad. “You.” I pointed the sword at him. “You knew. You helped. You came and caused pain and disruption. This is on you just as much as her.”
“Son, I—”
Something dripped from the high ceiling. There was a hole burning in there, and the drips were red. Pod was leaking through.
No time. Had to leave.
“Dean! Look out!” Dad cried.
The rose woman, or at least one of them, soared at me from across the throne room, and I braced myself. This had to work. Timing was everything. She was leaking pod everywhere.
Three. Two. One.
I sliced upwards and cut her head off, diving to the side after the cleave. The sword flew out of my hands, clanging on the floor somewhere over to my right.
Her head bounced and rolled to a stop, body smacking into the wall with a sickening thud, then tumbled on top of Orla and the dead guards.
She was only one, though.
“Son! We have to go. I can get you out!”
The hole in the ceiling widened to a gaping maw, a waterfall of red cascading down, thunder shaking the palace.
“Dean! Come on!”
There was no other choice left if I wanted to live.
I followed him.
Twenty-Eight
Jake
Fished out of the hole by some men in balaclavas, my body swollen and covered in pods, barely breathing, feeling nothing now. Not even that dull pain. It was amazing I could still see, still smell and hear the city as I was transported in a wooden sleigh attached to the back of a van, dragged slowly through the streets with Elijah in there with me. Out of sight. He was behind my head, sat in the front of the two-seater sleigh while I was laid in the back one. My view was the sky and the lightning and the pod worms crawling across the buildings I passed.
The city had gone to shit in the blink of an eye. Now and again, the Roses would fly over, drop pod, or some new pod-born would zip through the sky. Everything was a chorus of death and devastation.
And the rain had stopped. Probably thought it was being upstaged now.
At least when they burned me, I wouldn’t feel any pain. Hopefully. Maybe I’d kick the bucket before we got to wherever it was we were going.
I’d given up. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but there was no way out of this now. I knew my body, and it was dying, shutting down. There was no cure for pod, and I was one of the unlucky ones. I wasn’t gonna be a Sonny the Snake, or a tree creature. Not like that was lucky, but I was heading for the death. My life was over. I’d never see Lou grow up now, or finally marry Dean.
Everything was over.
“Not much longer now,” Elijah said in his soft voice. He sighed heavily. “My
foolish brother and his experiments. I knew he would fail, that there would be nothing but this chaos. But this is what he wanted, wasn’t it? An apocalypse, but with you at the helm. Never mind. It is good for the world that I’m here. That the Conclave is here. We will end this, not some child.”
What the hell did that mean?
He didn’t elaborate. “And those attempts to frame me by forcing our shared body to be me and naked with those two women he killed. It was all a game to him. Fun. Turn public eyes towards me and the Conclave. Kill women of lust and sin. He could have used anyone to be his Roses, but he chose them because of their sin, because it would be fun to cast suspicion at the Conclave. Wouldn’t that be a Conclave thing to do? After all, we had made them face their shame.”
Yeah, one sick piece of shit. He made me so fucking angry.
“Parker always had to try and torment me, to stir the pot. I told him not to, but he was always tougher than me. He’ll never be told no, so I let him play his games, made a deal that if he failed, it would be the holy way. This is the only way.” A pause. “I mean everything I say, Jake. I loathe magic. Look at what it has done to me and now doing to this city. And it will spread if we don’t cleanse the sin, go back to where it all began. You. This is on you. Now is the time for you to pay the price, for me to clean up your mess, along with the mess of my brother.” He laughed. “Did you enjoy that story, Jake? Did it surprise you? Make you want to dig deeper?”
Not really. The stuff about the child was weird, really bugging me.
“One day, I will be free from him and him from me. Then we will see who remains. I only hope my darling is safe from his chaos.”
Darling?
“You have no idea how hard it is to live in a sinful body like this, Jake. But your burning will set me free. The catalyst of hope. You should be proud to be doing something worthwhile with the last moments of your existence. I’m sure you’ll burn in Hell, but won’t it be wonderful to take the knowledge of saving the world with you?”
I wished he’d shut the fuck up.
“I would imagine that’s not true,” he added. “You don’t care about the world. If you did, you wouldn’t have done what you did.”