Shoot the Messenger

by Pippa Dacosta

  “Most believed her fair.” I ran my finger along the edge of his desk, marveling at its warm, glossy polish. So very different from the metal and glass found in the rest of Calicto and most of Halow. “She was, according to fae law.”

  “She was the law,” he said, his tone mild and unreadable.

  I looked up. His eyes were still closed. Had he known Mab?

  He opened his eyes and blinked, but a glassy sheen remained. Dark pupils expanded, soaking up the colors of his irises. I had only ever seen him utterly focused. Now he looked at me as though he didn’t quite see me.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I skimmed my fingers along the desktop as I moved around to his side. He watched with the lazy appreciation of someone lost in thought.

  “Long ago.” He pulled his gaze away and whispered, “She told me the war would end soon.” He rubbed his fingers over the bridge of his nose and massaged above his eye. “This pain? It will end. Soon. Some days are worse than others.” A small laugh escaped him. “Not that there are ever days or nights, just endless false light. The air here is thin, cycled through a million bodies a thousand times a day. The food tastes like ash. And I am…” He swallowed. “I am—” He cut himself off and tossed a careless smile my way. “But I have you. Her killer.” The glassiness washed away. “I am unsure whether I should hate you—as you hate me—or…”

  His focus softened and roamed over me, snagging where the gown had slipped, exposing fragments of the marks climbing my thighs. “You have killed more of your kind than many fae soldiers. Do you think that makes you worth more than them?” he asked with a smile, but this time it was the dangerous one—a prelude to an attack.

  My pulse raced, chest tight. “Mab did.”

  He reached out and flicked my gown open, exposing my leg below the knee and the patterns inked into my skin. Goosebumps scattered across my flesh. He saw. He saw and heard everything. Heard my heart race. Felt my shivers. He read and absorbed all the signs of human desire.

  He touched my knee, settling his warm fingers over an elaborate, sweeping tattoo. “Does your kind despise you as they should?” His hand followed the mark higher, easing the gown back farther. I felt the beat of my heart everywhere, felt desire pulse low.

  “If they knew, they would.”

  That answer brightened his eyes. He leaned forward in the chair and chased the mark higher, across my thigh. Where the ink thickened, his touch became heavier. His hands weren’t as smooth as I’d imagined. He had worked them once, likely around the hilt of a sword.

  He shifted to his feet, scooped his hands around my waist and lifted me onto the table. My thoughts raced, panic battling with need. I planted my hands on either side of me to steady myself, keeping my touch off him, despite the temptation. With his gaze fixed on mine, he eased my thighs open and pushed between them.

  Bowing his head, he brushed his cheek against mine and whispered, “A monster among your kind and a monster among ours. It must be a lonely life, Wraithmaker.”

  Just words. Don’t believe them. Don’t let them in. But they did ease in through my defenses to toy with my heart. He was alone, like me. I didn’t know why he had shut himself away or forced himself to live this life, but I understood the ache of loneliness.

  I touched the hard line of his jaw. A muscle fluttered beneath my fingers. From restraint or anger, I couldn’t know, and the heat he summoned in my veins pulsed harder. He had been alone for longer than I’d been alive. Yes, I needed answers. Yes, I needed to know what was really happening inside Arcon. But in that moment, he was the closest thing to Faerie I had experienced in five years. For him, I was the closest thing to the home he had been shut away from for a lifetime and more. I hated what they had done to me, but that only made this need more savage. I could own him back. He hated me, hated how I was human, how I’d killed his queen, but he needed me… just like I needed him.

  Slowly, methodically, he unwound the gown’s belt, his breath brushing across the curve of my neck.

  I hooked my fingers into the buckles holding his jacket closed and flicked them open one at a time. When the garment hung loose, I pushed it back, relishing the muscular curve of his shoulders. He tore it free, tossed it away, and captured my face in his hands. A fresh madness sharpening his glare, and his mouth. This wasn’t about me. He wanted Faerie, but I’d do. I wanted answers and didn’t care how I got them. I lunged in, sank my hand into his loose hair, twisted my fingers and yanked him into a kiss. He tasted wrong, like everything mothers warned their children about, like the old fairy tales; he tasted like sweet poison, the kind that would slay you slowly while you begged for more. His magic tainted the air, igniting my taste buds, and set my thoughts spinning, and I didn’t care that he was about to drag me down into his fantasy, turning my reality inside out. It would be worth it. His mouth worked with mine, tongue taking, teeth nipping. He pushed and I pushed back, my grip in his hair tightening, reaping shudders from his body.

  His hands fell. One sweeping around my hip, the other falling to my neck where he paused. The collar. If he removed it, he would taste all of me, but I’d also be free and have my magic to hand.

  Do it, I silently demanded. Enslaved, this was nothing. But if he could take me while I was free and taste Faerie’s magic in me? His body trembled against mine, muscles tight with restraint. He tore his mouth away and lifted his head, teeth gritted.

  Do it. Take it off.

  I rode my hands up his chest, lifting the shirt, revealing deep black ink. His marks interwove and danced and swirled like none I’d seen before. Entranced, I shoved the shirt higher and ran my tongue over the bramble-like maze that hooked and curled across his upper abs, leading me astray. I would have continued, would have fallen into the trap of tasting him, if the scar hadn’t caught my eye. The fae didn’t scar. But something had happened to him, something that had opened his chest right over his heart. Scar tissue distorted the flesh around the cut, and stitched down its middle, delicate metal threads glimmered.

  Tek.

  I froze. The thump-thump of his heart beat almost too loudly.

  Larsen’s touch fell away. He stepped back, putting space between us, instantly chilling my skin. He tugged his shirt down, covering the scar, and picked up his jacket. He stood still, holding the garment, his face turned away in... shame?

  I wiped the sweet and salty taste of him from my mouth.

  He had tek stitched into his chest, holding an old wound together. Tek that should kill him, but somehow…

  He pressed his hand to his chest, his usually controlled face racked with pain.

  “This was…” He waved at me, my gown askew, lips and body flushed with heat. “This is nothing.” He wouldn’t meet my eye. “I can’t afford this distraction.”

  He pulled his jacket on and regarded the door across the room. His escape. But he didn’t move, and I watched his expression crumble before he turned his back to me. Because out there wasn’t an escape. This place was his sanctuary in an entire system that wanted him dead—had maybe tried to kill him from the inside out. The tek was inside him, combining with and living off fae magic. Like my whip lived. Like Sota lived.

  Larsen had a human-made heart.

  “You will fix me,” he said firmly while dragging his gaze upward.

  And finally, I understood why I was here.

  The fractures I’d seen on his face had vanished, replaced by a sharp determination. “You can fix this.”

  “I…”

  “You have her magic. Mab’s magic. You create life where there is none. You weave magic and tek together. You’re a tek-whisperer. I am dying, and you will fix me, Wraithmaker. Mab sent you to fix me. She gave you her gift of magic for me. You will serve your purpose. You will serve me as you served her. Remove the tek from around my heart.”

  “And if I don’t?” My voice trembled under the weight of what I’d seen.

  “Then I’ll turn Arcon on itself and open the door to all of Faerie.” He lifted his
chin in defiance.

  I already knew Arcon had complete control of Halow’s security, including the barrier between our systems. He could cripple the entire Halow system at the touch of a button or the sweep of his hand. It was a miracle he hadn’t already.

  “How did this happen to you?” I asked.

  “Just agree,” he snarled. “Unless you don’t want to save your people? Unless you think opening the door will make the fae forgive you?” He paused, watching for my reaction. I didn’t move. Didn’t dare to. “Whatever you want, whatever your dreams, I can make them real.” When I didn’t answer, he came forward. “We’re both monsters among our kind.” He clutched my face, crushing it painfully tight. “Don’t you want all your sins to be forgiven and to be loved by Faerie once more?”

  Chapter 18

  After Larsen brought me fresh clothes and my coat, he left to continue his charade as human. I contacted Kellee using the comms and told the marshal about the scar, the heart, the markings, Larsen’s threat. I told him everything except for Larsen’s offer to remove my crime of murdering a queen.

  Kellee left me alone with my thoughts while he contacted Talen. I dressed, threw on my coat and wandered Larsen’s private quarters. His books drew my eye. I plucked a large tome from the shelf and set it down on the desk with a heavy thwump. Gold leaf embossed beautifully intricate writing. But the content of the text wasn’t pretty. The history of human evolution. The original humans were seeded on Earth and grown to serve the fae. But the fae underestimated their experiment and the time the new civilization would need to evolve. With their short life spans, humans rushed to evolve and learn and create all on their own. In the absence of magic, humans created tek—huge interconnected metal machines with brains.

  By the time the fae returned to check on their experiment, late in the twenty-first century, humans had surrounded themselves with technological advancements that repelled the fae.

  I flicked the pages and ran my fingers over the sweeping words.

  The fae didn’t take kindly to their pets creating what they saw as weapons and attempted to wipe humans from the Earthen system. That was when the fae learned their experiment had evolved beyond the whims of their creators. The resulting war lasted a thousand years. Billions died. Fae and human. Tek evolved and got smarter, launching humans to the stars and beyond to the neighboring Halow system.

  The book described human advancement as a fae-engineered virus that stubbornly resisted the fae’s best efforts to destroy it.

  The final battle saw enormous human-built space-faring battlecruisers encroach on Faerie. The full force of the Fae Courts fought back. The summoning blasted human forces out of Faerie, creating an area of dead space littered with wrecked ships and ravaged worlds on both sides. Queen Mab, leader of the Fae, penned a truce, and a defensive net was strung across Halow and Fae borders, sealing one from the other indefinitely.

  Over the years, the defense net thickened, backed up by human tek. Tek Arcon now maintained.

  No human had seen a fae for at least a thousand years since the war. For all but the few at the highest echelons of government, they had slipped into the realm of myth and legend.

  But one had survived in Halow. The fae with the metal heart.

  When Kellee’s voice came back through the comms, the news was worse than I’d imagined.

  “His name is Eledan,” Kellee said.

  My heart sank. The world grew smaller and colder, the truth contracting around me. Now I knew why he appeared to be so powerful. “He’s Mab’s son.”

  “Supposedly killed in the war, before even my time.” The marshal sighed. “Eledan has been missing and presumed dead for over a thousand years.”

  “Not dead.” I swallowed. “Just hiding among humans, building Arcon and buying time. If he returned to Faerie with a tek heart, they would kill him. Royal or not.” He just wants to go home.

  No, don’t fall for it.

  It didn’t matter why. He was insane, driven mad by tek exposure, and he was dangerous because of it. Whatever he might have been a thousand years ago—Mab’s son, prince of the Fae Courts—he wasn’t that now.

  “Talen is suspicious,” Kellee said, softer now, his words whispering through the comms and into my ear.

  “Is he secure?” The last thing we needed was another dangerous fae on the loose.

  “Yes.” He didn’t sound sure. “He had questions about you.”

  “None of that matters,” I mumbled, thoughts churning.

  A fae prince could disable the defense net and open the door to Faerie. Humans had forgotten what it meant to war with the fae. The fae had not. They thrived on the hunt. Lived by it. Even sought it out. And Mab—the only one who’d had the presence of mind to arrange a truce—was gone. Her son, Eledan’s brother, Oberon, ruled in Faerie now—the same king who reared saru to hunt and kill and entertain their fae overlords. Oberon loved nothing more than bloodshed. Nothing crafted a king and his reign quite like war.

  Billions of human lives hinged on my ability to fix Eledan’s heart. And if I did, would he keep his word?

  “Kesh?”

  “Yes, I’m still here…” I closed the book.

  “Can you fix him?” Kellee asked.

  I lowered myself into Eledan’s chair, listening to the old wood creak. “I don’t know. The tek is there for a reason, either to keep him alive or to kill him slowly, and he’s been resisting it all this time. I doubt it will be a simple case of just removing it or he would have done it himself.” My magic would secure his life during such a tricky operation. “Did Talen say anything about the heart?”

  “No, but I recall a legend, of sorts, from the warfiles during my training. The missing prince led a charge against a line of tactical drones. His unit broke through, suffering massive losses, but he went on to kill hundreds of soldiers before a colossus machine took him down. The colossus tore his heart out. They paraded his body through Aluna’s streets. The city and much of the planet is gone now. Mab’s retaliation was swift.” Kellee’s odd, slightly detached tone had me wondering if the marshal had been there despite him saying it was before his time. “It seems like Eledan survived the impossible.”

  “He’s a powerful illusionary. It’s nothing for him to fool a mob.” Eledan could probably also live without his heart, for a while, but someone must have helped him or condemned him by replacing his fae heart with tek. An unsuspecting human who was likely killed once the job was done.

  For me to operate on his heart, he would need to trust me. We weren’t there yet, but now I knew who he was and exactly what he wanted. The power was in my hands. Once he trusted me, I’d open him up, cut out his heart and kill him.

  “Kellee, don’t come here tomorrow.”

  “Kesh—”

  “Please. I… I’m afraid he’ll hurt you. If he suspects we know each other—”

  “He won’t suspect a thing. Trust me.”

  “Why risk it? You can’t do anything. Putting yourself at risk like this is foolish—”

  “I have to come.”

  “No, you don’t.” His silence grated on me. “Why?”

  “I want to see you.”

  I closed my eyes, ignoring the flutter of silly human hope his words stirred inside. “Kellee, pl—”

  “No. I need to know you’re all right. When I saw the collar he put on you…” An exasperated sigh interrupted. “Look, it’s… I have to do this. His kind killed everyone I knew. They took away my home, my family. They stole everything from me. I won’t let him take you. I know what he is. I need to know you’re… you’re alive, that you’re real. That it’s really Kesh I’m talking with. Do you understand?”

  “I am real. I’m not some trick. He’s not screwing with you. Right now, he doesn’t even know you exist. Stay away and stay secret. I can’t protect you if you come here, Kellee, and I need you on the outside.”

  “You don’t need to protect me. You’re more at risk than I am. You killed his mother. I have to come. I
’m not discussing it.”

  I shook my head, wishing the fool didn’t make me smile. “Are all your people this stubborn?”

  “They were.” I heard the smirk and then the comms cut off.

  “Be careful,” I whispered into the silence.

  Larsen—Eledan arrived early the next morning, demanding I follow him. He spun his Larsen disguise between one step and the next as we left his apartment. Down through Arcon we walked, taking elevators and escalators. These excursions of his were deliberate. He needed to be seen to reinforce his act.

  Larsen’s office was everything his Eledan apartment was not. Glass and steel shone, their surfaces polished and angles sharp. Now that I had seen both sides of the fae, the contrast was shocking.

  “Someone reported my behavior at the Arcon anniversary party to the marshal’s office,” Eledan said, seating himself behind a curved glass desk. “They’re sending a marshal over to question us.” Numerous screens descended above the desk, creating a curtain of monitors. His hands swept across the keys overlaid on the glass-top desk. “You will answer his questions,” he said without looking up from his work, “and make sure to satisfy the marshal without raising suspicion.”

  There was a threat under those words, though he kept all signs of it off his charming Istvan Larsen face.

  His biotek-masked eyes flicked to me. “Do I need to warn you about what you can and cannot say?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Close your coat collar.”

  I flicked up the coat’s collar and sealed it closed, hiding the iron one.

  “Have you thought about my offer?”

  “You mean whether to save one fae or potentially kill all the humans in Halow? That offer?”

  “Or, in exchange for helping me, we have the fae return and tell them it was you who allowed them to enter Halow once more.” He arched an eyebrow. “They will love you all over again.”

  The love of one race at the cost of the lives of another? “I won’t condemn an entire system just to appease my guilt. Besides,” I breathed in, “the Court will never forgive me.”