by Jayne Hawke
“You should check your phone,” he whispered in my ear.
I’d been trying to ignore it, but I had no doubt that I was tense where I wanted to read the text.
Pulling the phone out of the small clutch I’d brought with me, I saw it was from Sasha.
“Looks like there’s a deal going down with some expensive pottery,” I said.
“Come on,” Elijah said as he went to stand.
I wanted to argue. To say that our date night was more important and we’d catch them next time. That wasn’t who we were, though. The safety of the Isles was on the line. There’d be plenty more nights to curl up in his arms. I hoped.
Eleven
Clay pots full of the end of the world made a bad habit of never showing up in nice restaurants, and that meant my slutty dress, pretty shoes, and well-dressed wolf were all going to have to get dirty. I took off my heels and dropped them as we climbed down onto the beach after the box’s new owners, who had politely dragged their feet haggling until we had time to make our way to where they’d been spotted. The shoes weren’t great to fight in, and they’d be murder to sneak in. I wrapped myself in shadow, drastically reducing my chances of being seen at the cost of risking my identity as a shadow walker if someone did see me and put too many pieces together. I also cast a starlight spell on my eyes, turning the near dark into a significant advantage given that, if my magical senses were correct, it was mostly humans I was dealing with.
I felt Elijah transform into his dire-wolf form. It was the right move; he was a gifted fighter in any form, but without a weapon wolf beat human. Once we reached the beach, I made my way carefully over the pebbles, relying on the loud passage of the group of six in front of me to mask what little sound I couldn’t avoid with careful steps and trusting Elijah to do the same.
After a brief trip, we were at the entrance to the old sewers. Thankfully, the old sewers were, as the name implied, not the new sewers, and that meant that they didn’t have any actual sewage running through them. They were more like a labyrinthine series of metre-wide tunnels, vaults full of hidden alcoves, and, if the season was right, tourists admiring the beauty of crumbling red brick and the wonders of claustrophobia. The gate that normally barred the entrance opened freely for them. This was a path they took often enough to have lifted a key.
The sewers were a mixed blessing. On the one hand, their numbers would count for nothing given the single-file width of the tunnels. On the other, every sound would be amplified by the small brick space, and there would be few places to hide in the long halls. I formed a pair of tonfa blades from shadow, short double-ended single-edged swords with a handle extending at a right angle from the flat of the blade about 2/3rds of the way along the weapon, giving it the function of a pair of weapons that could be swapped between or used, if you were careful, in tandem. It wasn’t my usual, but it was one I’d practiced with, and it was excellent in tight spaces where a longer weapon would get bound up against the walls. I held them with the longer blade against my forearm functioning as a buckler, the shorter extended. I’d be more than close enough to use the short spike for my first strike, and even with the shadow serving as both armour and camouflage it never hurt to have a second layer of protection.
Once we were into the tunnel, I heard the humans begin to complain to their god-touched boss about the dark and how there was no reason to be so secretive when no one was on their tail anyway. Their banter continued as we entered the tunnels proper, and it made my job infinitely easier. The rearmost human, a short guy no higher than my chin, went down with an underhand thrust to the brain stem just as he finished a sentence. The closer the gap between his talking and his never talking again, the longer it would be before someone noticed he’d gone dead quiet.
That left four. We were going down a straight tunnel, the humans stumbling into one another like a comedy act from before the invention of funny, and it was easy enough for me to take out a second and third in relatively quick succession. With so many gone, though, the conversation dropped off unnaturally, and the two men turned, weapons clearing their sheathes as they did. I leapt towards the god touched, the more dangerous of the two, and before I’d taken more than a step Elijah leapt over my shoulder and caught the last human by the throat, nearly tearing his head off. As I took another step towards the god touched, a brick underneath me turned to dust, its not-so-eternal vigil as guardian of that bit of ancient floor coming to an inconveniently timed end. It wasn’t enough to take my feet out from under me, not by a long shot, but it bought my opponent a fraction of a second to take the initiative.
He made a quick thrust in my direction, what appeared to be a Chinese straight sword suffering from the closed space but by no means out of commission. I swept the sword out to my right and it slapped into the stone where I held it pinned long enough to push forward inside his guard and make a long slash across his gut with the full length of the other blade. I spun through the strike and went for a killing stroke to the face with the point of the shorter blade, but he ducked under it and took a step backwards that turned into a tumble as the brick beneath his feat broke. I rushed him, seeing my opportunity, but as I reached the point where he had fallen a chunk of rusty metal broke through the ceiling, clapping me in the side of the head before reaching the end of whatever governed its swing.
He’d dropped his sword when he went down, but he came at me again with a dagger he’d had hidden somewhere, and each time I went to block and riposte I found that my weapon would slip and catch him with a bloody but less-than-fatal wound or I’d trip over some stone that broke at the wrong moment. He didn’t have the skill to still be in this fight, and it was only a matter of time until he was out of it. That time, however, seemed to be growing a few seconds longer for every second that passed, and when I realized why it was as obvious as it was infuriating. There were deities tied to luck, and my luck had been appalling this fight. That was his deity, Tyche perhaps, or someone similar, and that gift was what she had given him to keep him alive tonight. It wasn’t much, not a cinematic cars-smashing-through-walls kind of luck, but it was enough to make him far more dangerous than he should have been.
The thing about luck is that it always runs out. I wasn’t sure that divine power held to that same rule, and I needed to find something that couldn’t go wrong. He was backpedalling, and I continued to push forward aggressively but with greater care. When he reached one of the many vaults that had once served some critical civil engineering purpose but which were now mostly alcoves for unsavoury dealings, illegal cults, and anthropophagic monsters, Elijah, who had been walking along behind me with no room to make his approach, burst out into the open space with all the pent-up fury of a deadly hunter forced to watch his meal bumble around a few feet away for the past ten minutes.
The god touched couldn’t split his focus without losing what little chance he had of keeping me at bay. He turned more aggressive, swiping his dagger back and forth desperately, hoping to catch me with a debilitating blow in time to put his back into fighting the wolf he had probably forgotten was there before it burst out moments ago. The truth was, he just didn’t have the time to make up for his mistake. Elijah came around behind the man Tyche had kept going for so long and took one leg in his massive jaws, all but carrying the guy off before letting him drop to the ground face first, his thigh shredded and arterial blood spurting. Not caring to see him suffer, I made a deep cut along the back of his neck, effectively beheading him.
Twelve
I’d lost track of the box during the mess of taking down the humans. Elijah shifted back into his human form, leaving him in nothing but his boxers, which were extremely tight as they needed to be to keep them through shifting. The people of Brighton were going to be enjoying a very nice view as we walked back to the car.
I hauled the god touched’s body over and found nothing but blood. Frowning, I looked around the vault space. It must have been somewhere nearby. It wasn’t as if he’d had a chance to hide it. El
ijah retrieved it from a shadowy corner. There was some splintering at one corner, but otherwise it looked to be pristine. The box itself was a simple thing with plain pale wooden slats and a couple of shipping stamps on it.
Elijah wrenched the lid off, tossed the packing material inside away and pulled out a teapot. It was a very extravagant teapot with lurid pink ceramic and neon-green swirling patterns glittering around its bulbous body. Two spouts protruded from the body, and a cupcake-shaped lid finished off the entire thing. It was a piece of true hideousness, and yet it was worth enough to have had those people sneaking it in.
Worth a lot or not, it wasn’t the storm we’d been looking for. Date night had been cut short for nothing more than a little practise. I consoled myself by reminding myself that the humans were likely responsible for a lot of crime in the city. I’d cleaned the streets of Brighton up some.
I’d sent pictures of the teapot over to Liam to check if it was something worth keeping. He’d replied saying it was by some obscure kitsune designer who only produced a handful of each design. Every one was hand painted and went for a small fortune. We almost left the damn thing in the vault for someone to find and be baffled by, but money was money. I’d drop it in Castor’s lap; worst case scenario, he could drop the price to 10% of value and someone or another would snap it up to auction or whatever shitty teapot experts did with shitty teapots.
I texted Sasha telling her that the lead was bullshit. Elijah walked a little taller as we made our way across the beach where late night revellers could see him stripped down to his boxers. Even in the darkness, he was clearly an incredible specimen, and he knew it. When a pair of beautiful women smiled at him, he wrapped his arm around my waist. Normally, I hated anything vaguely possessive, but it was sweet in that moment. The shifter view of things was something I was going to have to adjust to. They took the life-bond thing very seriously.
The city was alive with people relaxing and unwinding after a day cooped up in the office. A range of music could be caught on the gentle breeze. Most of the buildings had excellent noise cancelling, but every now and again the door would hang open giving people a taste of what was inside. We had to walk down by the main road running through the centre of the city and down around the large park. My feet were complaining after a few minutes, given my shoes hadn’t been where I’d dumped them. It wasn’t surprising.
Elijah was nonplussed, but I soon wove some air magic around my feet to form soft cushions. Screw suffering just to make out I was as much as a badass as him. I had magic; I was going to use it. As we wandered past the park, I saw a pair of puka racing around in their cat forms. Their sleek black fur almost blended into the darkness, but the flash of white on their chests gave them away. I’d assumed they were playing, but one of them sank its teeth into the other’s neck. Maybe they just liked it really rough.
Seth, the jaguar guardian who’d hired us, strolled down the street towards us. The light from the streetlights seemed to hit him weirdly. It almost slid around him like he was wrapped in a thin layer of darkness. I wondered if he was a shadow weaver or shadow walker. If he was, he might be able to offer me some more information than Castor had. My familiar was being cagier as of late. I suspected that the goddess was calling him back to her.
“Do you always walk around in your underwear?” Seth asked.
Elijah grinned at him.
“I have nothing to hide.”
“We thought we had a lead on the pot. No luck,” I said.
Seth nodded and tucked his hands into the pockets of his pale jeans. They didn’t seem right on him. They were too clean, too modern. I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was, but he felt like he was in the wrong time. Maybe it was just where he was ridiculously old.
“Is this how you normally conduct an investigation? You wander around bare foot in barely any clothing? I’d expected something... more.”
Elijah growled.
“We were on a date. The pack is conducting their own research,” I said.
I wanted to tell him if he was so much better he wouldn’t have lost the damn thing in the first place.
“Are your contacts normally so slow?” Seth asked.
“Do you normally lose the artifact you’re supposed to be guarding?” I asked sweetly.
He smiled at me.
“I was beginning to wonder if you had no backbone.”
“Is there a reason you’re here?” Elijah asked.
Seth shrugged.
“I was curious about the city.”
He was lying again.
“Interesting trick of the light,” I said gesturing at him.
Seth glanced down at his shirt, and the light began hitting him normally.
“It looks normal to me,” he said.
“Funny. It looked like you’d wrapped a thin layer of shadow around yourself to me,” I challenged.
“Why would I do such a thing in a city like this?”
“It would be useful if you were sneaking around.”
He smirked at me and walked past us.
“Let me know when you get another lead. I’d like to be kept up to date.”
One of these days I was going to get a client that I didn’t want to punch.
Thirteen
“Is it breaking in if I don’t break anything?” Jess asked.
“You are not sneaking into that house just because you thought you saw something ceramic. People keep lots of normal ceramic items in their homes,” Elijah said.
The news of the valuable teapot down the sewers had sent Jess down a rabbit hole of valuable ceramics. She’d spent the morning searching more of them out. The storm in a pot had apparently been completely forgotten. Rex was out in the Narrows trying to shake some information out of someone.
“There are no Huracan god touched in Europe,” Liam said.
So, we could rule out one of his god touched being behind it. Huracan seemed like a smaller god without many god touched in the world. I felt like that probably wasn’t such a bad thing. We had enough trouble with Zeus’ people throwing lightning bolts around, and Poseidon’s people had caused quite a bit of trouble with ocean damage. The weather had enough encouragement without another god throwing people at it.
“Who can wield this storm?” I asked.
“Anyone strong enough,” Seth said from the hallway.
We hadn’t given him the address for Elijah’s offices, but he’d apparently found them just fine.
“What if they’re not strong enough?” Liam asked.
“Then the storm runs rampant throughout the area it was released in. It would fizzle out eventually just as any storm does.”
“So, if someone was strong enough, they’d be able to point it in a specific direction?” I asked.
“If they were truly strong enough, they’d be able to pull the storm into themselves and use the magic from it as they saw fit.”
Well, that sounded just fantastic. That was exactly what Brighton needed, some asshole with a god-forged storm inside of them.
“I assume you’re here because you have new information for us,” Elijah said.
Seth settled himself down next to me on the couch.
“No, I was just curious to see how you worked.”
“As you’re here, I need you to confirm if any of these people are members of the group you tracked here,” Liam said.
Seth leaned forward to better see Liam’s screen.
“No.”
Liam frowned at his screen as though it had betrayed him.
“They were the primary smugglers operating in the south of the Isles,” he grumbled.
“There has to be someone who knows the city involved in there somewhere,” I said.
“The problem is that’s a very long list. We haven’t even been able to narrow them down to fae, witch, or human,” Liam said.
“Why aren’t shifters on the list?” I asked.
“No shifter could handle god magic like that,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t steal it to sell on,” I said.
It was natural for him to protect his own, but we couldn’t afford to let that screw this up.
Liam rubbed his temples.
“You and Elijah are supposed to know everyone. Where are your people?” Liam grumbled.
“I’m waiting on news from six people,” I said.
“Why don’t you go and be a little firmer?” Liam said.
I wasn’t in the habit of roughing people up for information, but there was a first time for everything.
My phone started ringing. I stood up and checked the screen expecting it to be a useful contact. It was James.
I walked out towards the elevator, not that it would do me much good with the others having shifter hearing.
“Yes?”
“That’s no way to greet your favourite person.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk. Come and meet me at the pier.”
“And if I have no interest in seeing you again?”
“Come now, Lily, we both know what will happen. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
I did not appreciate being blackmailed.
The pier was busy, which was exactly what James had wanted. It reduced the chances of my shoving a shadow blade through him. The small ice cream shop was doing good business with a long queue forming. It was the smell of freshly cooked doughnuts that got me every time I went near the pier, though. The smell of fresh dough, vanilla, sugar, and a splash of cinnamon never failed to make my mouth water.
James was dressed down in a smart pair of black pants and a pale-blue long-sleeved shirt. His violet eyes sparked as he smiled at me. I ground my teeth and reflexively ran my hands over my blades. If I was clever about it, I could shank him right there and then and be done with all of it. I’d thought about poison, a needle in the ribs or the like, but I had nothing strong enough to kill a sidhe except for the forge venom, and that was even less subtle than just killing him the old-fashioned way.