Death Kissed
Northern Creatures Book Six
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Contents
The Worlds of
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
God Forsaken
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The Worlds of
About the Author
The Worlds of
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Smart Urban Fantasy:
* * *
Northern Creatures
Monster Born
Vampire Cursed
Elf Raised
Wolf Hunted
Fae Touched
Death Kissed
God Forsaken
Magic Scorned (coming soon)
Genre-bending Science Fiction about
love, family, and dragons:
* * *
World on Fire
Series one
Fate Fire Shifter Dragon
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
* * *
Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories
* * *
Series Two
Witch of the Midnight Blade
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Three
* * *
Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series
* * *
Series Three
World on Fire
Call of the Dragonslayer (coming soon)
Hot Contemporary Romance:
* * *
The Quidell Brothers
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul
Thomas’s Need
* * *
Quidell Brothers Box Set
Includes:
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Roberts’s Soul
Copyright 2020 Kris Austen Radcliffe
All rights reserved.
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Published by
Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance
* * *
Edited by Annetta Ribken
Copyedited by Juli Lilly
“Northern Creatures” artwork created by Christina Rausch
Cover to be designed by Covers by Christian
Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew.
* * *
Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, programs, services, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
For requests, please e-mail: [email protected].
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First electronic edition, July 2020
Version: 4.15.2021
* * *
ISBN: 978-1-939730-75-6
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Chapter 1
Oberon’s Castle, the Fae Realms…
Malfeasance is a sticky syrup that took effort to create—one had to boil down one’s narcissistic tendencies just right to get that perfect gooey consistency for smothering the life out of the world. And there was always someone—mundane or magical—who lived for the perverse satisfaction of brewing up the worst of the universe. They didn’t care who suffered.
What caught Wrenn Goodfellow off guard was the number of knives-out sous chefs ready to do the villain’s chopping and slicing.
Wrenn peered at the magic dancing along the edge of the bayberry-scented, semi-translucent vellum she held. Such sheets were milled from the scales shed by butterfly-winged pixies, the self-righteous kind who supposedly never lied, and were hard to come by. They were renowned for their clarity of “truth and magic.”
In Oberon’s Castle, “truth” keyed itself to its holder and more often than not, “magic” was the lock imprisoning what was real.
Such slipperiness made whipping up a vast kettle of malice all that much easier.
Wrenn rotated the vellum slightly to better catch the last golden shine of the sunset flowing across the threshold between her sunroom and kitchen. She adjusted the angle slightly to keep the sheet perpendicular to her line of sight, and watched the eddies and vortices of aurora-like blues, purples, and greens as they swirled and flowed over the data spells attached to the sheet.
That shine was why she spent a significant portion of her monthly Royal Guard salary on her small but comfortable apartment. Why she’d fought to get a west-facing place in one of the calmer premium realms. Her aquariums did well here—her fish plinked and gurgled in the sunroom—as did her rainforest’s worth of potted plants.
Those huge windows on the other side of the arched threshold, those sheets of glass made by fae artisans, acted as a megaphone.
And there, along the edge of the vellum, a little bit of truth surfaced out of the dancing magic: A tiny ballerina manifested on the corner. She danced to one side, then back, like a looped video.
Wrenn had no idea what the ballerina itself meant. Did the dead sprite identified on the clarity-laden vellum moonlight as a dancer in the mundane world? Did she dance here, for one of the Royal Courts? Or had dancing been her dream?
Charmed artifacts like pixie vellum tended to be well cared for and used again and again. Wrenn had managed to get this one before the report was transferred into Oberon’s new digital archive and the paper sent to be used for a more important case.
She rotated it again to get a good look at the overwritten magic under the report, just in case something leaked through and corrupted the information.
The clarity of that dancing ballerina said it wasn’t a corruption. Whoever made this report cared enough to take the extra steps necessary to restrain older ma
gic from seeping up into the details of this particular murder.
Some officer had decided he needed to write up his report on the special lie-detector paper. Not, she suspected, because at the time he thought the eyewitness account all that important, but because he thought the witness was lying.
Every cop knew that sprites were “like that” when they thought they could get something from a lie, like ruining the reputation of a good and charitable fae lord. Because when was every cop wrong?
Then the sprite washed up dead on the banks of the Titan River three realms distant from the good and charitable fae lord’s lands, her ethereal gossamer wings chewed down to her back and her body drained of blood.
Such murders were a dime a dozen in the fae realms that made up Oberon’s Castle. Every magical group had their malevolent entities. The kami had their evil yōkai, and the elves had their Loki aspects. But the fae had entire breeds who specialized in terrorizing not only mundanes, but also other fae—ogres who ate children, kelpie who stalked and murdered women, boggarts who were snot-eating cowards who harassed strangers on both the mundane and fae internets. Plus at least fifteen other types of fae whose entire reason for being was maliciousness.
So no one in Oberon’s Royal Guard even batted a sweet eyelash when the sprite washed onto the shore hacked up and exsanguinated.
Wrenn did, though.
The sprite had made the harassment report detailed on the vellum a year—almost to the exact date—before she washed up. There was nothing particularly magically special about the number of days, or weeks, or hours for that matter, so the investigators chalked it up to chance.
Wrenn set the vellum on top of the pile of case files spread out across her kitchen table. Magic wafted off the report in waves and tightly woven curlicues. No jagged breaks or unharmonious colors distorted the account.
The witness definitely had believed what she reported.
The sprite’s big-eyed photo shimmered on the top left of the sheet. Next to it, her name and home realm. Under that, a sigil that unlocked a spell replaying the sprite’s interview.
Wrenn’s inherent magic was neither intricate nor powerful enough to replay a record spell, so she tapped her paladin star to call up a replay token. The star—a rosy, seven-pointed shield made of a lovely champagne-colored fae silver-and-gold steel—was standard issue for the Royal Guard. Like most law officers’ identification, it was about the size of her palm.
As an official Paladin to the King—the Royal Guard equivalent to a mundane detective—she never pinned it onto her jacket but instead carried it in a flip wallet much like mundane FBI agents. Her star had an enchanted clip that would hold it to her belt no matter what hits she took.
Wrenn’s star also carried the enchantment tokens issued to her by the Royal Guard.
She absently ran her finger over the surface of the star to pick up an unlock spell, then touched it to the vellum’s written documentation to bring up the transcript of the sprite’s complaint.
There’d been a party—there were always parties, with the fae lords—and the sprite had been employed to serve wine and mead. Drunkenness happened. Unsurprising gropings occurred. The fae were not particularly modern in their understanding of consent or bodily autonomy, and boundaries had not been respected.
Again, Wrenn was not surprised. She continued to read.
And there, buried deep in the debauchery, the words for which she’d been hunting: There were… (witness pauses) I don’t remember, witness says.
Sprites remembered everything. Not remembering suggested an enthralling.
I feel so tired…. (pauses again)
The sprite had been pale when the Guard arrived that night.
I don’t think they were fae.
Wrenn tapped her kitchen table and sat back in her chair.
Two hundred years in Oberon’s Castle had taught her one thing: Dark magicals would work together if a sufficient nexus of power pulled them into its orbit. A nexus such as a powerful vampire.
Only a handful of Guard knew the truth: No magical was more cancerous than a vampire—so cancerous that their presence inflicted damage on the realms. When the black void of death magic that was the demon at the heart of a vampire corrupted enough, it changed a realm physically, structurally, and magically.
A strong enough vampiric presence would destroy a realm if left unchecked, literally breaking down the spellwork that held the realm in place.
So Wrenn watched the Eastern European vampires for signs of organization, something that signaled the rise of power among their kind. She watched the Japanese vampires for the same reason, though most of those vamps were born from a different process than their European counterparts, and did not tolerate outsiders. She watched the American Gulf Coast clans, and consumed every scrap of information she could about the North American elves who, for some bizarre reason, were harboring low-powered vamps. She kept tabs on the Peruvian vampire hives. She knew of small gatherings in several African nations, and of one or two in Australia and New Zealand.
Even though her personal magic was close to nonexistent, she was the King’s best vampire hunter. Keeping vampires out of Oberon’s Castle, and out of all fae business both Seelie and Unseelie, light and dark, inside the realms and out-, was why she held Paladin status within the Royal Guard.
The dead sprite was the eleventh incident in the last month.
Exsanguination. Often mutilation. Always a low-powered magical whose blood would at least give a vampire a high, and at most act like super-soldier serum.
And now the King had vampires inside his Castle. At least one of the bloodsuckers had found a way to get across one of the many veils between the mundane world and the fae realms.
Which meant a dark magical somewhere figured the central realms under the King’s control were robust enough to invite a vampire into the house.
Probably. She had no actual proof that a vampire had gotten into Oberon’s Castle. The sprite could have been trafficked into the mundane world and then dumped here.
Still, operating directly under the King’s nose would not bode well for any vampire or hive. Unless something big had happened, disrupting the power hierarchies among all the vampires, and they were out of control.
She had no idea what, or how, or where, which strongly suggested the involvement of other magicals. Powerful ones capable of hiding their tracks.
And there was another truth here. One the Royal Guard needed to deal with now.
The fae had a blood trafficking syndicate on their hands. A syndicate that, until recently, had been operating on a low enough level that it had been able to hide. Or the King didn’t care.
Wrenn rubbed her forehead and looked out over the table at the golden evening light streaming through the doorway into her sunroom. She was pretty sure this vampire issue was about to merge with her other vampire issue. The personal one. And that the King would think she was blowing the whole thing out of proportion because of her past.
But her gut told her that what had likely been considered a “minor” dark fae problem in the eyes of the royals was about to blossom into an all-out war.
If only Oberon would believe she wasn’t chasing her own ghosts.
Wrenn swiped a transfer spell off her star and used it to pick up the list of known contacts for the dead sprite. She tapped her phone’s screen and the list transferred to her official Royal Guard app.
She tucked the vellum sheet into its protective sleeve and picked up her mug, carefully curling her aching hands around the blue water pattern along its outside. Ignoring her background pain was easier with her mind on the files, but the warmth moving from the mug into the death-like chill encompassing her fingers shifted her attention to her joints.
The chill danced on her skin and hardened her muscles when she slept. It stiffened her limbs and made moving difficult until she’d exercised enough to warm up.
But today—Samhain—was special. There was something about the Eight Festivals in a
fae realm that shifted her basal metabolic rate. Beltane brought too much heat to her bones. Samhain caused the cold aches to ride her muscles into the evening.
Reviewing case files meant lighter work for the day, which she needed, since she couldn’t whip up a relief spell. Not until dawn tomorrow morning, when Samhain ended.
She was a witch living in Oberon’s Castle. Witches were forbidden to use magic during any of the Eight Festivals, and today was the most magical of all. The veil between realms was at its thinnest tonight, and witches weren’t good at magic, so they were to stay quiet and leave the spells to the good full-breed fae who were capable of controlling all those vivid interactions.
So Wrenn Goodfellow, the Fae King’s investigative paladin and witch of unknown heritage, closed her eyes and once more did her best to will away the pain, which she knew wouldn’t work. But at least it allowed her to pretend it sent away the army of nerve goblins chewing on her muscles.
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