Death Kissed

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  For a split second, she had a vision of a parade of tiny literal goblins, all about the size of her fingertips, sitting along the arch of her thumb where she held her mug of tea. One wrinkled his wee puke-green nose and nodded toward her. Hey baby, how ya doin’? he screeched. The two on either side of him grabbed their crotches.

  Wrenn pinched her eyes closed. Damned fae Samhain twisting her ability to see magic. She never had these problems when she spent the holiday in the mundane world.

  She sipped her tea. The work called, anyway.

  The next file was surveillance on a kelpie under suspicion of moving in and out of the mundane world more than he was legally allowed. His regular evil kelpie behavior wasn’t the problem. Someone was keeping an eye on him because he was basically jumping the turnstiles and misusing the fae realms’ public transportation system to move in and out of real-world cities.

  Seemed also he’d dappered himself up all nice and clean and started a Nazi-lite group of women-haters. An extraordinarily wealthy group, and all that gold wasn’t coming from his group’s social media grifts, either.

  And he’d figured out how to move between the fae realms and the real world with impunity.

  This kelpie was likely trafficking for someone powerful.

  Wrenn looked up at the ceiling of her small kitchen. She needed to remember that the kelpie might not be part of their vampire problem. His nexus of power could be any dark magical. Some nasty elf, or even a malicious nine-tailed kitsune looking to expand outside of Japan.

  But there was a chance.

  Likely suspects would be out tonight, popping in and out of Oberon’s Castle as they took advantage of Samhain’s thinning veils, partying and visible and accessible. So would every sprite and house fae on the list she’d lifted off the vellum sheet.

  Some she could bring in. Most, not. On the streets, the power and word of a paladin only carried so much weight. But she was not to be out tonight. Not being a—

  She glanced back at the threshold into her sunroom. Accidentally, and without thinking about the sunset, or the light, or possible triggered vivid thoughts. She’d let her mind wander with her work and now…

  Now she paid the price.

  Chapter 2

  It’d been six years since she’d had a flashback. Six years of thinking that maybe, just maybe, the out-of-nowhere memory intrusions had finally stopped. That after over two hundred years of living with the fae she’d finally found some semblance of peace.

  Wrenn had stupidly thought she could look at case files involving dark fae—no, vampires—and that all she’d have to deal with was a little extra pain because she wasn’t allowed to cast relief spells for the next twenty-four hours.

  But it was Samhain, and her ability to see magic—no matter how unique and coveted by Oberon it might be—made her vulnerable.

  The Samhain sunset hit the edge of her window and etched a line across the floor’s stones. On one side of the boundary, shadow. On the other, extending from the window’s arch into the kitchen, and to the side of her unadorned big toe, a harsh, icy-hot line of white light.

  And an uncalled, unbidden memory sideswiped Wrenn’s mind:

  Blue light streamed off a metal rod so tall it poked up through the roof of the tenement. Blinding, bottled electricity arced from that rod to the racks of bottles and tools along the walls.

  The little hairs on her forearms stood on end. She stood on end, too, drawn up onto her toes by the buzz roiling from the laboratory and into the living quarters.

  She lived in the tenement with a man. Her captor. He mostly worked at night, under the moon, but this evening a storm raged.

  And that rod…

  The shrillness of the machinery had almost drowned out the driving rain pounding against the tenement. The building rocked. Thunder crashed. Lightning struck and the rod screamed with light so bright it turned the laboratory white.

  Then an edge cut that light, too. A shadow slashed the cold blue touching her foot.

  The monster shimmered with the blinding electrical buzz. The raw lightning bolt scar on the side of his face glowed. He rolled his massive shoulders and he roared at the storm outside.

  In his laboratory, under the blistering blue light, her captor had stitched arms to a chest. He’d implanted a heart meant to pump a monster’s blood through its stolen veins. He’d added legs. A head.

  Fangs.

  Her captor stood two paces from his creation and for some reason, for some prickly numbness, she remembered the dark, blotchy stain on the arm of his otherwise perfectly white shirt. He liked his clothing pristine. He always smiled and thanked her when she cleaned his shirts well. Told her that whiteness reminded him of his mother’s loving touch and that she should be proud to be compared to such an excellent woman.

  The monster clasped his massive hand around her captor’s throat.

  “Oh, Victor,” she’d whispered. You fool, she’d thought.

  This will be your final mistake.

  Fear stiffened her bones. Horror quaked through her arms and legs. The monster was a vampire. He was a monster’s monster, and all monsters were a threat.

  To her, yes. But mostly to their makers.

  The vampire sank his fangs into the side of Victor Frankenstein’s neck.

  One, she counted. Two. Three, and the white tone of Victor’s skin changed from the ruddy physical manifestation of abject terror to the rubbery thickness of meat without blood.

  The vampire lifted his head away like a swimmer coming up for air. And then he ripped Victor’s skull from his body.

  The memory changed: A flash of running through the storm. Of trees and wolves and deep wooded darkness.

  Then Robin Goodfellow found her in the muddy forests outside Edinburgh.

  Wrenn inhaled sharply. The exhale stuttered out of her throat as one popping whoosh. Two more quick breaths followed.

  She wasn’t in Victor’s lab. Her feet touched the stone floor of her apartment.

  And she stood up.

  Stood so fast that she’d knocked her tea onto the files.

  “Damn it!” Damaging the pixie vellum meant—

  She dropped a towel onto the tea and the files. When had she picked up the towel?

  Samhain, she thought. Damn it damn it damn it.

  This wasn’t the first time a thinning veil had caused a flashback. She should have realized one was coming.

  She should have realized. She…

  Wrenn extended her arm, her hand perpendicular to the floor. Her fingers shook. Her eyes blinked rapidly. Her breaths were too shallow, but she had the magic to get it under control, rules be as damned as her flashbacks.

  She sighted along the shaft of bright pre-Samhain sunshine touching her toe. She inhaled again and mentally grabbed at the red and green magic floating around her body. A containment spell manifested at her fingertips.

  She flicked it at the shadow’s edge.

  The flick was more symbolic than direct; the memory was inside her head, not on the floor. But the magic understood, and the magic did its work.

  The tension caused by the flashback yanked out of the muscles of her head. The tightening around her eyes that distorted her vision and the spasming in her jaw that caused her to grind her teeth pulled away. Then the spell forced the tension down her neck and into the large muscles of her upper back.

  She placed her hand on her stomach. The magic forced the knots in her belly into the large muscles of her backside and her legs.

  The panic would wait there as potential energy, in storage, for as long as she needed.

  “Why now?” she whispered. It’d been six years. The monster’s not here, she thought. Not in Oberon’s Castle, and most certainly not in her apartment.

  Her investigations had not yet yielded any concrete information about the demon built by the fool named Victor Frankenstein. The monster had vanished after he killed Victor. No overt signs remained. No trail of corpses, or tales of an eight-foot demon. Nothing at all.
She had only the artifacts and papers rescued from Victor’s burned-out laboratory—a diary detailing his first attempt at his corpse-building alchemy. About how that monster had murdered Victor’s younger brother.

  And the monster’s other travesties.

  At least Victor had left her evidence that he’d killed the fiend on an Arctic ice floe.

  She looked at the case files again. When she looked back at the threshold, the line between light and shadow distorted. The shadow buckled and the sun refracted around the door’s frame.

  A rainbow of color manifested for a fraction of a second. Only for that fraction—only that micro-moment—as the light transitioned across the edge.

  “Heh,” she said. If she believed in portents, she would have dropped to her knees and wailed.

  “He’s part of this, isn’t he?” she asked the magic of Samhain.

  He had to be. How, though, she didn’t know.

  On the floor, the edge of light moved away from her big toe. She inhaled yet again, and exhaled slowly, and a little voice at the back of her head said it was safe to look at the windows again.

  She hated that little whispering inner voice. Hated that it was both her savior and her jailor.

  Wrenn blinked a few times to clear any residual vividness. She faced the Samhain sunset. She’d go out. She’d find a concrete lead. Something that would let her take care of Victor Frankenstein’s demon once and for all.

  Time to do her job.

  Time to hunt monsters.

  Chapter 3

  Outside Wrenn’s windows, beautiful chrysanthemum fireworks blossomed in the sky in blues, greens, reds, and purples. Booms followed, and lots of laughter from the street.

  She’d chosen this particular realm because it reminded her of the Edinburgh of her memories—cobbled streets and strong, solid timber-and-brick buildings, though the streets here were narrower and the buildings stretched taller. Rich oranges and savory browns warmed every corner and gave the borough an autumnal harvest/Samhain feel. The fae here preferred the thickness of velvet and brocades and tended to dress as if they were the true royalty of the realm.

  And tonight, they would be out and glammed up to the fullest extent of their gloriousness.

  Wrenn buckled the top closures on her black boots, then zipped her black leather jacket. The fae of Oberon’s realms understood why a witch of unknown heritage had been allowed to live among them—her life with Victor Frankenstein had unlocked gifts of speed, strength, and stamina as well as her ability to see magic. She was also taller than most fae and mundanes alike, and remarkably durable.

  When Robin had found her, he’d immediately recognized her potential, and Oberon had agreed.

  It gave her a life in the Royal Guard, which in turn gave her training, access to a wealth of data for her searches, and worthwhile work.

  Wrenn coiled her black hair into a knot and secured it with two sticks specially charmed to hold her thick, uncooperative locks up and out of her face. Like the rest of her body, her hair liked to stay ever-stalwart and unchanging, and would immediately return to its default cascade down her back the moment she set it free. Without access to fae hairdressers, she would have given up and shorn it off ages ago.

  She fed her fish and placed her paladin star on her belt. Then she made her way into the Samhain celebrations gearing up all through Oberon’s Castle.

  Some of the royals slapped their names on every single blade of grass and pebble in their territory—Titania’s Falls, for example, or the Titan River, which flowed through not just Titania’s lands, but pretty much every fae realm.

  Maybe the King was mad his wife had named the river after herself. Maybe he wanted to outdo the intricately manifested shadows of Tokyo and Osaka built by the kami. Or maybe he was mad that the fae could not live in the real world alongside their mundanes the way the elves did. So he compensated.

  King Oberon controlled the fae metropolis called Oberon’s Castle.

  Goblins, brownies, pixies; gorgeous Seelie and terrifying Unseelie; changelings and every half-breed fae-born witch ever located by the Royal Guard—Oberon modernized his magicals and set them up adjacent to the mundane world in an interconnected, urbanized maze of interlocking realms.

  Wrenn stepped across her building’s threshold into air thick with sparking fae magic. Pixies drew curlicue trails at eye level. A moose-antlered Unseelie hunter danced in the street despite his kind’s aversion to Oberon’s urbanization. Sprites twirled in dresses as gossamer as their wings. Satyrs pranced. The Seelie paraded in processions. And above it all, fireworks blazed and boomed.

  And this was just Wrenn’s quiet, backwater home.

  Tonight the world moved into the dark half of her year, the cold, dead part called winter. The entire planet crossed a threshold, and in doing so made all crossings easy. Anyone with enough fae blood could cross over into the mundane world with ease tonight if they so desired, and without paying a toll on the fae side.

  Wrenn walked into the festivities. Crystalline laughter rose to her left. To her right, a tall, muscular male fae stripped off his shirt before lifting a smaller, curvy pink female into the air. A small band of drunken domestic hobgoblins, all carrying steins of sweet-smelling mead, sang out a well-harmonized chorus of “Ah great lady Queen, oh our divine comedy be seen,” as they stumbled by.

  Wrenn pulled out her phone and checked the contacts list she’d transferred from the pixie vellum. The murdered sprite had been from a realm called Applebottom, an adorable place of twinkling bluebells, fluffy clouds, and talking squirrels in pantaloons whose entire purpose was to turn the realm into a civilization sized for rodents, from root to crown of the realm’s grand apple trees.

  It also happened to be sized for sprites, and wasn’t a place the six-foot-tall Wrenn should be stomping around after dark. Especially Samhain evening.

  But there was another option.

  If Wrenn wanted to find leads, she needed to head into the heart of Oberon’s Castle—Oberon’s actual castle. Lords and ladies would be about, and other high-powered fae, which meant she’d have access to their many servants.

  And the odds of her finding a talkative sprite were much higher.

  She did a mental check on the slight tingling along the Celtic tattoos circling both forearms just above her wrists like a pair of wide, intricate silver cuffs. The tattoos acted as anchors—wallets, really—for any non-work-related enchantments and tokens she wished to carry.

  She might be a witch, but her magicks were limited and mostly protective. She could shield herself from a lot of what was tossed at her, be it magic or a punch. She couldn’t enchant or enthrall, or even hit someone or something with much of a jolt.

  So she had to buy enchantment tokens. Some were simple lidding magic she used so she didn’t spill her coffee. Some were tracers for situations where she didn’t want to use official enchantments from her star. But mostly they were tokens to pay for her Heartway use in a way that didn’t open her soul.

  Even though the Heartway was a public transportation system, it was still fae, and it demanded an exchange. Most fae paid with a little bit of their magicks. Some witches did, also. But Wrenn didn’t want to deplete her inherent shielding magic any more than she wanted to allow the Heartway to take as it pleased from her psyche.

  Letting others into her head—even if that other was a systemic magic and not a person—was not… comfortable. And after her little intrusive visitation from Victor earlier, the last thing she wanted tonight was to give the systemic magic of the fae more access to her deepest wounds.

  She counted one tingle. One token. She had been planning on stopping yesterday on her way home but forgot when she got her hands on the case files spread out on her kitchen table. And now, this late and on Samhain evening, refilling her tattoos would be difficult.

  Fireworks exploded down the street and the boom rolled through the air like a pressure front before a particularly strong spell manifested. It washed over her, wince-inducing and
amplifying and crackling like electricity. The entire street brightened for a split second and all the ambient magic—all the wisps around the dancing sprites, all the aurora-like sheets trailing the Seelie parading through the streets—howled.

  Wrenn pinched her eyes closed and reflectively grabbed her ears as the wave’s crackle rolled by. She blinked and willed her eyes to focus through the blue-white haze left behind by the spell and—

  Victor, she thought.

  No more flashbacks! she yelled in her own head even though she knew better. She wasn’t having a flashback. Not like the one she’d had in her kitchen. Victor wasn’t here. Nor were his demons. She was on the street in the fae realm she called home. Fae partied all around her, happy and boisterous and full of glee.

  This was not a place of obvious danger.

  Yet her body braced for the possibility of the danger that welled up around her flashbacks. The loss of control. The semi-blackouts. The ragings and the screams.

  She was terrifying to everyone around her when she flashed back, and she couldn’t do that on the street. On Samhain. Why had she come out here in the first place?

  Someone put a hand on her shoulder. “Wrenn?”

  Wrenn whipped around.

  Rich raised her hands. “You shouldn’t be out here.” She stood in front of Wrenn in the sturdy pants and black leather bustier over a spotless white blouse she always wore while tending bar. Behind her, a warm glow poured through the grand window of her tavern and framed Rich’s semi-controlled blaze of red hair.

  Rich and her partner Lush were both beautiful women—both red-haired, though Rich’s hair was more red than orange—and both half-fae witches who often didn’t get a lot of respect from the full fae in the area.

  Rich shouldn’t be out in the reverie any more than Wrenn.

  Nor should Wrenn be standing in front of the tavern.

  All the buildings in her neighborhood faced the same street. Turn a corner, and you were back on Main Street, just in a different area. The whole cross-section hatchwork of the magic had been confusing for about three decades until she’d figured out the underlying geometry.