by Terah Edun
It was a glowing rock. But she didn’t say that.
His ears twitched back and forth as he smiled and waited for her to accept the token.
The bared teeth were actually more gruesome than friendly. Katherine could see bloody bits of whatever the troll had for breakfast still stuck in his teeth. Still she accepted the rock with a smile of her own.
“Thank you,” she said as she held the smooth stone in her cupped hands. She wasn’t sure what to do with it besides hold it.
Fortunately, he didn’t seem to expect much.
“You are the new blood heir. We hear your words. We feel your blood. We will serve you,” he said excitedly. “We will keep the bridge whole and the people will cross quickly.”
“Thank you. Thank you for your song and for keeping the bridge whole. The people who cross are very grateful,” she said. She didn’t think the people who commuted over the bridge cared one lick about the trolls’ efforts now, but she knew they would the minute their access to the town from their farms across the bridge was cut off. It was human nature. Ignore something that worked well and complain the minute it broke.
When nothing more was forthcoming from the smallest troll, she glanced over at the warlock officer. He wasn’t paying her the least mind. She turned back to the troll only to see him bow and start walking backwards to his group of fellow trolls.
As he left, Katherine smiled and bowed to the group. The trolls each bowed back solemnly. For every troll that bowed to her, Katherine bowed to it. There were only four of them. The problem was that they kept bowing over and over again. She could quickly see this becoming a diplomatic incident on the level of the great drug scandal four years back. That particular incident stuck in her mind, because it was the closest the town came to a drug raid with sirens blazing, not to mention that fact that two buildings on the main street of Sandersville had ended up on fire and a group of faerie arrested for dealing in unstable moon nectar.
Scary stuff then. Even scarier now, because if she messed this up, the responsibility wasn’t on her mother’s head. It was on hers.
Fortunately, an officer behind her cleared his throat before she could commit a troll cultural faux pas.
She bowed once again and said, “Excuse me,” as she smoothly turned around.
“They won’t stop bowing until you leave,” he said.
“Great,” Katherine said as she refrained from telling the smiling the officer off for not speaking up sooner. “Let’s go now.”
She gave one more bow and followed the warlock officer out of the rocky home of the trolls and back to the steel ladder that led up out of the gorge.
Seeing the steel ladder from the base, Katherine groaned aloud. If it had taken her close to a half-hour to climb down, it would take at least triple that to climb back up.
The radio on the warlock officer’s shoulder beeped then silenced.
He turned to her and said, “You know, it’s courtesy for a warlock to escort his future queen from point A to point B. Seeing as I didn’t get to see you down the gorge wall, I figure it’s my duty to see you back up.”
With something akin to undying gratitude pasted on her face, Katherine accepted the warlock officer’s offer to fly her up the incline with an utterly sincere, “Bless you.” Her butt hurt and her legs ached. There was no way she was climbing up the ladder the same way she had come down.
He called in a platform of solid air. She stepped onto it with no hesitation.
Before she could ascend, the radio on his shoulder beeped again.
He responded, “Officer Matthews.”
The fire marshal responded, “We’ve got a situation, Todd. You almost through there?”
“Just finishing up,” Officer Matthews responded while looking at Katherine. “Sending Katherine back up to the top now.”
“Good. Out,” said the fire marshal.
Katherine grimaced. “What kind of situation?”
“Not sure yet,” Officer Matthews replied with a grin. “But can’t be too much sadder than depressed trolls.”
She got the joke. She just didn’t see why it was amusing.
“Right,” said Katherine while looking pointedly up the gorge walls.
He lifted her through the air without further comment.
Reaching the top, she stepped off the air platform and took the hand of the human officer waiting to assist her.
Dropping his hand when her feet where firmly planted on the ground, she walked stiff-legged to the SUV she had liberated only to see Cecily with a bag of Cheetos in hand, a road map spread out over the SUV hood, and her pink cell phone floating over a divination grid that made a map of the constellations look like child’s play.
Katherine couldn’t help but shake her legs awkwardly on the way over. Her butt hurt like hell from sitting on a dry riverbed of rocks for two hours and her legs had fallen asleep a half-hour into the presentation.
When she reached them, the fire marshal said in sympathy, “The trolls probably wouldn’t have minded if you got up and moved around.”
“No, but if she had they would have expected her to start dancing along with them,” said Cecily.
Katherine raised an eyebrow. “You saw their attempts at interpretive dance?”
Cecily nodded at the pair of binoculars clutched in the fire marshal’s hand.
“Yep, it wasn’t that bad,” said her cousin while sucking the cheese dust off of her fingers and waving her other hand to push the divination grid over until its gold dots hovered above the road map.
“Speak for yourself,” said Katherine, peering at her cousin’s work. “What’s that?”
“We got a call in,” said the fire marshal.
“From the gods?” said Katherine, looking at Cecily’s divination grid with a raised eyebrow.
Cecily shook her head. “Worse—the dark faerie have called a meeting. They want you, your mother, and the Coven Council to call a new witches’ conclave before the high moon rises tonight.”
Katherine stared in astonishment. “What in the world for?”
Cecily asked, “Is it the dark faerie or their king that is heading this pact?”
Katherine raised an eyebrow. That was a good question. It was important to know who was leaving who in this endeavor.
“From what I heard it is their king alone who wants a new queen,” the fire marshal said.
Katherine asked, “Is Ceidian drunk again?”
“Most likely,” said Cecily.
“Undoubtedly,” agreed the fire marshal.
Their expressions were serious. Katherine sighed. “But we still need to go and explain to His drunken Majesty for the second time in a quarter that the dark faerie have no jurisdiction in the forests west of Sandersville, right?”
“Yes,” said Cecily.
“Uh-huh,” said the fire marshal.
“Lovely.”
“There’s one more problem,” said Cecily before her phone rang.
Before Katherine could say a word, Cecily quickly answered the call and said, “Thank the gods. Did you find out—what? No.”
Katherine raised an eyebrow, wondering whom Cecily was on the phone with.
“Where?” said Cecily quickly into the phone while pointing a ready finger at the hovering golden grid.
“You’re sure?” she continued while moving her finger quickly and making the dots hover over three points on the road map. “Okay, got it.”
Cecily snapped the phone closed.
“Who was that?” Katherine asked.
“Ethan,” Cecily answered while she focused on the road map, missing the grimace that passed over Katherine’s face.
“What did he want?” Katherine asked.
“He was doing me a favor,” Cecily said. “He went to the human representative’s office to find out where the faerie are meeting today.”
“What would the editor of the town’s newspaper know about the faerie?” Katherine asked.
The fire marshal looked over at Kather
ine and said, “He has a name—Jarvis Copper. Jarvis has his fingers in every pie of this town. Which is why your mother works closely with him.”
“Really?” said Katherine dryly. “I thought it was because he demanded the least outrageous kickbacks and kept all the moon nectar, opium, and blood dealers in line.”
“There’s also that,” admitted Cecily. “Which is why he would know exactly where the faerie dealing grounds are on a daily basis. You can’t buy and sell if you don’t know where the product is.”
“If it were up to me, I would have run them out of town years ago,” said Katherine.
“Good thing it wasn’t,” said the fire marshal, a tad too derisively to Katherine’s liking.
When she turned to glare at him, he stared back with stern eyes. “I don’t know what your mother has explained about your responsibilities or town negotiations, but you need to get up to speed fast.”
Katherine opened and closed her mouth. She wasn’t about to compete against him. Mainly because she knew squat. Rose was the heir. Rose went to council meetings. Katherine took care of Gestap and had planned her way out of this podunk town since freshman year. But it was hard to stare into his eyes and not shrink back as the wisdom of twenty-plus years on the force of the town fire brigade stared back. That was a lot of experience when you considered the fact that he frequently dealt with fire salamanders and survived.
Finally the fire marshal cleared his throat and continued.
“Kicking out the dealers would have done nothing but created a void that no one would have wanted to deal with. Your mother was right to keep them around and keep them in check,” pointed out the fire marshal. “The lamias would have nowhere to go for blood, the selkies would go crazy so far from the sea without the opium, and don’t get me started on the moon nectar effect.”
Cecily and Katherine looked at each other and shuddered. The fire marshal had a point. The inferno on Main Street four years back hadn’t exactly been an accident. The moon nectar had dried up and chaos had ensued.
Finally Katherine said a bit uncertainly, “Calling for a new queen will get only same refusals for him then. No one in their right minds would let him control unicorn territory.”
“And yet he persists,” the fire marshal said in a grave tone. “It would behoove a true heir to find out why.”
Katherine got the point. The faerie king wasn’t dumb. Proud, but not stupid. There had to be a reason to be this forceful about the issue, especially when he was so determined that he would not only seek to unseat his queen for a second time, but also risk her wrath on the day of her daughter’s death...a day for mourning.
“Perhaps it’s time I have a talk with the faerie king,” Katherine said finally.
“Perhaps it is,” the fire marshal said with a hint of approval in his voice.
Turning to Cecily, Katherine asked, “So what did Human Representative Copper tell Ethan? Where can we find him?”
If the fire marshal noted her proper respect for the human representative’s title, he didn’t say anything. Still, she could feel his hard stare easing up and even relaxing in the same manner she knew what time it was without looking at a clock or at the position of the stars. There were some benefits to being the minor daughter of a blood family. Exploring the world around her without actually using any of the five traditional senses given to human and coven alike was one of them. She could use a sixth sense to do so.
“He gave us the location of the highest rates of faerie phone traffic today,” said Cecily while busy pushing the divination grid into various sections of the map. “Here, here, and here.”
The golden dots now hovered in bursts of concentrated light above specific points in the map. Points as far apart on the map as they could be without being in the jurisdiction of another queen.
But that wasn’t Katherine’s focus now. She was still hung up on the ‘phone traffic’ part of Cecily’s comment.
“He what? We’re tapping people’s phones now?” said Katherine.
“Not tapping,” huffed the fire marshal, “merely tracking activity. As you well know, the faerie are addicted to their phones. Won’t go anywhere without them. Which works to our advantage. It’s our only way so late in the game to know where the dark faerie gatherings will be tonight.
Katherine’s respect for his twenty years in the fire brigade went down a notch. Was this really the way they were handling this? She felt it was little invasive for the situation; the faerie king and his people didn’t pose a threat to the community, after all. Just her mother’s reign...and peace of mind.
“I’ll be sure to bring that up when people start mentioning their fourth amendment rights. I don’t suppose you have a warrant?” said Katherine.
The fire marshal grunted.
“Right. I thought not,” said Katherine. “Why couldn’t we just ask one of the faerie in the local market where they’re going tonight?”
“Because the king of the dark faerie is a dick, as you know. He’s put a ban of silence on all of his people. Any of them talk to us and they get burned,” said Cecily while looking up from the maps in frustration. “We’re almost out of time. These locations are at the far end of the county line in opposite directions.”
“Your cousin’s right,” said the fire marshal. “It’ll take an hour and a half easy to get to any of these points in addition to the tracking through the woods you’ll have to do on foot.”
“Fantastic,” muttered Katherine.
Then her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wait, what do you mean ‘you’? I said I’d talk to him—I didn’t say I’d go out in the middle of nowhere to do so. Beside I just took care of those whiny trolls. It’s your job to keep the dark faerie in line.”
“And it’s your job as heir to keep the power-drunk dark faerie from ransacking the unicorn lands and the human farms. All of which are part of the territory this faerie king so desperately wants to grab,” said the fire marshal calmly.
“Who knows what nefarious plans he has in store,” Cecily helpfully added.
Katherine glared at them both angrily with her hands on her hips. They were ganging up on her. When both looked over at her innocently, Katherine rolled her eyes and threw up her hands.
“Being heir sucks,” said Katherine. No one disagreed.
But it was her job now. Her sister wasn’t even in the ground yet, and things were going to hell in a hand basket. With a sigh, Katherine put her hands on the map and carefully traced the routes. She looked from one to the other. “How am I supposed to be in three places at once?”
“You aren’t,” said the fire marshal. “We’ll go to the first drop zone together. If the king isn’t there, we’ll go to the next.”
Cecily nodded. “We just need to get there before the sun sets and their power amps up. So, depending on the time, we’ll have to choose the second or third spot carefully.”
Cecily, Katherine, and the fire marshal eyed the map in speculation.
Katherine said, “Then let’s go to the forest grove first. The faerie king loves his picnics and the gods know there’s no place better.”
“I’ll round up my men,” said the fire marshal, walking off with his radio at the ready.
“Ready to be the heir of Sandersville?” said Cecily softly with her hand on Katherine’s shoulder.
“I better be,” said Katherine. “Because if I mess this up, you’re next in line.”
Cecily blinked. “Yeah, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. I couldn’t imagine a job I want less.”
“Hey,” sniped Katherine.
Cecily grinned and rolled up the road map.
Chapter 11
The fire marshal rounded up his men and spoke to them tersely. Before Katherine could join the conversation, they had scattered to the trucks in the area.
“Let’s move out!” said the fire marshal.
Coming up, one officer said to Katherine, “I’ll drive your SUV if you want to ride with the fire marshal, ma’am.”
Exchanging anxious but excited glances, Katherine and Cecily piled into the red truck with the fire marshal. With the fire marshal’s truck in the lead, they whipped along the roads within the southern branch of town.
Katherine gritted her teeth when she saw traffic, or what passed as traffic in Sandersville—pickup trucks parked directly in the road by owners too lazy to go around back, and a horse-drawn carriage complete with a minotaur acting as driver-cum-bodyguard. Cecily’s mouth curdled into a frown as she recognized the minotaur. They had nothing against the servant and everything against its owner. In a town so small that everyone knew everyone else, when disagreements happened, grudges were kept forever. And in the case of raven-haired and blue-eyed Lisa Anne Renner, scion of the oldest and wealthiest Sandersville family, that grudge ran deep for the Thompson cousins.
Lisa Anne was a bitch, plain and simple, and her family owned the largest tobacco farms on this side of South Georgia. Which meant she was a rich bitch. Fortunately Katherine and Cecily didn’t have time to so much as roll down the window and speak to their small-town nemesis before the fire marshal turned on his sirens and cleared the intersection with a few furious bursts of his horn. As they sped through, Katherine’s eyes caught Lisa Anne’s. For a moment their gazes locked, and then Lisa turned away and the truck raced through the main thoroughfare. Once the fire marshal reached the edge of the main block’s limits, he sped up along the empty roads bordered by empty fields to either side.
They were going to Margaret’s Grove. Named after the fourth queen to rule Sandersville, it was the place where the town held the annual barbeque and picnic in the summer. A beautiful clearing surrounding on all sides by cedar trees, it was also the perfect setting for a faerie drug deal or a faerie king’s attempt to rise to power.