Unsidhe Assassin (Darkly Mine Season 1)

by Leona Windwalker

  “Why did you say this place was abandoned?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t,” came his reply. “But I don’t mind telling you. They evacuated the area due to a broken ley line. Lower Fae were having their magic go awry due it, and to prevent serious accidents, the Queen ordered the area evacuated until the Board of Magical Energy finish work repairing it.”

  I’d heard of ley lines. I’d thought they were just some hippy-dippy shit people who collected crystals and didn’t use deodorant believed. “Okay. So, how long does something like that take?”

  “A break this big?” he mused, coming to a stop before a door at the end of the hall. He opened it and waited for the light to go ahead before going through it. “About six to eight weeks. The lines cut through all of the realms, so it’s a pretty big operation. Have to have engineers on each side of the rip in all of the realms. The permit from the Sidhe Court finally came through last week, according to ANR. Now we’re just waiting on Valhalla to agree.”

  ANR? Valhalla?

  “Okay, I’m lost,” I admitted. “What is ANR? And Valhalla, do you mean like the actual Valhalla? As in Asgard and all that malarkey?”

  He snorted, stepping around a chair. Huh. Unlike back to what I was now thinking of as home, this was not a night club. It looked like some sort of spa or hairdresser or something. We came to another door, this one leading to the main hallway. There wasn’t an elevator in this building. Instead, there was a balcony. Just a balcony, with a rail. Did these guys pop out wings or something? I fought the urge to laugh, memories of the Tinkerbell balloons springing to mind.

  He turned to face me. “Okay, I need you to put a hand on my shoulder and hold on.”

  No way. Nope. Nuh-uh. The last time he and I touched, he did a little hop and took me to some kind of never-never land. If he was going to jump again, this time off a balcony, where the hell would we end up then? A circle of Hell? Or maybe he’d leave me to go splat on one of the floors below. Nah, probably not. He still thought he’d get me to kill a bunch more people for him, for a steeply discounted price, as part of some damned so-called fairy bargain. But he might try scaring me with hell first.

  “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you,” he said, leaning his head against mine while staring deeply into my eyes.

  I widened my eyes in surprise, staring right back for a split second too long before recalling exactly why that was a bad idea. An intense cold swept over me, and once again, I couldn’t move. This time, I didn’t fall over, though.

  “I can’t believe I had to do that again,” he muttered, grabbing my hand and turning away. To my surprise, he didn’t jump, dragging me with him. Instead, the world about us shivered. One moment, we were on the balcony. The next, we were on the ground floor. Now, if he had explained that was how we were to get down, I’d probably not have resisted. Okay, that was a lie. Despite all the weird shit going down, I probably would have thought he was lying. He hadn’t exactly proven himself to be trustworthy thus far.

  “You still with me?” he asked, snapping his elegant fingers in front of my face.

  “Yeah,” I managed to answer through a thick tongue and frozen, rubbery lips.

  “Good. Try to keep up,” he said, still holding my hand. A piece of balcony railing landed next to us with a sudden cracking noise. “Well, damn. Now even High Fae magics are having unexpected effects. Come on, we’d best go. I’ve wished for a Flyt, but they won’t collect us any closer than Beetle Avenue.”

  A flight? Wait, why did we need transport? Not that I could ask him, my mouth could barely make sense with a simple ‘yeah’.

  I ambled along, managing to keep up with him. We passed grim looking buildings, the brickwork old, the glass milky. Just how long had they been waiting for those permits? It looked like decades have passed. As we walked, he answered my earlier questions. “ANR is Avalon News Reports. It covers all fae related news for both Courts as well as major events in the other realms. And yes, I meant Valhalla as in the place with Valkyries. I try to stay away from them, they tend to take a dim view of Court politics and have no respect whatsoever for our rules.”

  He kept mentioning these rules. It sounded as if they were akin to being actual laws, though ones that were magically binding. I needed to learn what all of these were and how to use them to my advantage, and fast.

  4

  Willow

  The human still didn’t grasp the reality of the situation he was in. I could excuse that to a certain extent. After all, until I revealed myself, he had lived in blissful ignorance of the Realms and their inhabitants. From his oddly calm manner, I knew he was in shock, but that didn’t seem to dull his keen sense of self-preservation. The questions he asked and his stubborn refusals all pointed to a man in survival mode. Not surprising, really, given his chosen profession.

  Still, I didn’t have the luxury of allowing him too much leeway. The rules were quite clear. A faerie contract was soul-binding, so he was stuck. I was willing to give him some wiggle room- extra rewards to be given as he completed his duties. I’d left myself an out as well. The human hit that he thought was the sole purpose of the contract was actually optional, when you read the hidden text, the option being mine. It also did not give a specific date for the man’s demise. The arrangements made for tomorrow were all made through later messages we sent between us, and I’d carefully dangled the time as a suggested opportunity, not an order.

  There was another rule that he was about to discover, though. Humans brought to the Realm were property. They can’t do magic, so are at the mercy of those of us who can. That’s literally everyone else. Humans are the only sentient beings in the realms without any magic. Quite puzzling as to how that happened, but there you have it. They don’t have any and have no defenses against it. This means when one crosses the Veil and enters one of the other realms thanks to one of us magical Folk, the one bringing him is responsible for him. Or her, as the case may be. Like it or not, the rule, which is now enshrined within the Inter-Realm treaty, says we are entirely responsible for our human though that responsibility may be sold or bargained away to another of the Folk. My bringing him here and him coming along basically forms the basis of a second bargain, one where he gave himself to me in exchange for the trip.

  That brings about the third rule. It’s a rule of nature, not one we made up, and it is imbued into the fabric of the Realms by magic. Humans cannot remain for more than a few hours outside of their own mundane Realm unless they do certain things. Valhalla, for example, requires the human to be at death’s door with the purity of unselfish heroism burning bright within their soul. Faerie is a much simpler proposition. The human must eat food or drink liquid native to the Realm, thereby taking part of the Realm inside and making it part of them. Once done, it can’t be undone, and while short jaunts can be made back to the human world, they have to be mere hours long. Food from their own world will no longer sustain them, either.

  It could be worse. Atlantis requires drowning and being placed just before death inside a giant clam. It takes in grit, and after several years, it spits out the human who comes out as some kind of merfolk, usually either a selkie, water horse, or a merperson. They don’t get to choose either. It’s apparently entirely random.

  In a nutshell, I own him, and if I want to keep him, I have to get him to where he can eat. Eat first, then explain how this will work. He’ll need to be taught his place. I’ve already decided what that will be. He’ll not only take out my enemies but serve me in all the best possible ways. Sucking my cock, eating my ass, getting fucked, gifting me his tears, I’ll take it all. He’ll learn to serve me and be rewarded. After all, for a High Fae, especially one of the Unsidhe Court, I’m a reasonably nice fae. Not like Lord Pine. He has a human that is a living footstool. That’s it. The poor guy does nothing but kneel and be used as a footrest, a status symbol for the fae he serves. A complete waste of resources.

  We make it to Beetle Street to find our Flyt is waiting. The Pixie operat
ing it looks us over. “I didn’t know there’d be a human.”

  “He’ll be fine,” I reassure her. “He’s mesmerized.” I understood her trepidation. Humans are known t react badly to things in our world that we take for granted until they become used to them. Things like giant dragonflies pulling a carriage, for example. It’s why we call it catching a Flyt.

  “Fine. He takes a dive, it’s on you,” she said.

  I ignored her to help Ghost in. I really needed to learn his name. Names have power, and it would help solidify my hold over him.

  That stubborn pride of his needs to be dealt with, too. It was essential for him to learn when to bend his knee and bow his head here. Until he did, I had no chance of presenting him at either Court and getting the Queen to recognize him as a professional, thereby earning him his sigil to operate as one. That was non-negotiable. My entire plan hinged on that happening.

  The carriage took off with a lurch as the Pixie showed her disdain for my bringing such a lowly being into her vehicle. That would change once he had his sigil and was properly attired. First, though, I’d have to get him to accept his place here. That meant breaking him.

  5

  Jase

  I did not like being made into a puppet. The mesmerizing thing freezing me was bad enough without me moved about like one of Molly’s Barbies. It wore off about halfway through that crazy-ass version of Uber and Lyft. I wasn’t dumb enough to try opening the carriage doors, no matter what the snarky driver thought. No, I stayed put. Then we landed only for me to almost have wished that we hadn’t.

  We were in another part of the city, and this time, I could see signs of habitation. This did not make it look any less dystopian. Those damned vines were everywhere and it was still cold. It was also dark, a purple haze to the sky that made me wonder just how time flowed here. If it was late afternoon, going into dusk, when it had been in the early hours of the morning back home, then time did not sync.

  My feet rooted to the spot as a memory from high school flitted through my brain. It was around Halloween and my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Boyd, had put on a movie for us to watch. Sleepy Hollow had been followed by an assigned reading of Rip van Winkle and the next day’s class discussion had brought up the fact that a lot of people correlated the beings who kept Rip with fairies. The following week we began a Midsomer’s Night Dream and I skipped school the whole week thanks to my dad. He’d caught me dancing to Whitney Houston as I worked clearing junk out of the old barn. That earned me a beating as he yelled about queers and boys only dancing if they were out with a girl on a fancy kind of date. He’d apologized once he was sober, asking me if I’d been practicing for a school dance. Then he began demanding to know who the girl was, to make sure she was from a good family. That was a joke, given who we were. Of course, there was no girl, and I didn’t want to just pull some innocent into my family drama, so I denied there was a girl. I claimed that I was planning to go stag to the next dance and had hoped to impress the girls there enough that one would approach me. So, I didn’t do the class study of the play, but I knew it was about fairies and that they were tricky as fuck.

  I stood staring at the sky while this all went through my head. Of course, the gorgeous asshole took offense to that.

  “Come on,” he hissed at me. “We have a bit further to walk. My building is in the middle of the no flying zone, which begins here.”

  I turned my stare on him. “What time is it?” I made the mistake of asking.

  “Questions later!” he snapped, his artic eyes blazing with fury. “I can’t stand out here pandering to you!”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. What the ever-loving fuck? He brought me here, the least he could do was answer a simple question. Hell, he could have told me the time and explained the differences as we walked to our destination. But no, he had to keep the bratty act up.

  He pursed his lips. “Fine. I hadn’t wanted to do this to you,” he said as he began making odd little gestures with his fingers. My foot lifted off the ground and jerked forward. He turned away. My body followed, stumbling along behind him drunkenly. That was how I now found myself shambling along getting stared at, all the while screaming at him in my head, because, yeah, he sealed my lips, too. It’s a damned good thing I don’t have a cold.

  It’s humiliating to be so out of control. The worst part, though, is the children giggling as they spy me. Their mothers don’t even hush them. No, they glanced at me, lips twitching in harsh amusement. Fairies are all definitely a bunch of assholes as far as I could see. If he treats me like this, I’m not surprised that he has made enemies among his own kind and that they’re the sort he needed to hire an assassin for. I kind of felt like killing him myself, to be honest.

  Then we were in front of a tall glass and chrome building, still covered in vines. The pavement had plant life pushing through here, too. The difference here was the vines were trained wisteria honeysuckle, the paving now slabs of decorative flagstone artfully arranged to give clumps of moss room to grow. I bet they had gardeners who kept the weeds at bay. This guy was rich, alright. I had known he must be as he could afford to hire someone like me, and I didn’t work cheap. I just hadn’t put together that he was wealthy enough that he could have afforded someone much higher up the food chain and wondered why he hadn’t. Time, maybe? Liked to save his money? Though didn’t fairies also make gold they’d give people and which would disappear?

  He turned to face me. “If I release you, will you follow me like a reasonable person, or do I need to embarrass us both by making you?”

  I couldn’t open my mouth to answer him, so I gave him a curt nod. I was going in there no matter what, so I might as well have a bit of dignity doing so. I’d get my revenge later, once I finished with this contract. He made another gesture, and I found myself free to move as I pleased. He didn’t wait for me to thank him or anything before whirling around and walking off across the courtyard. Good thing, because I wasn’t going to thank him. Jerk off should have never treated me like that, to begin with. Self-entitled shit. How does one take down a fairy, anyway? I assume bullets work. Or do they have to be magic ones? Was it silver that was their nemesis? Nah, that was just werewolves, wasn’t it? Oh, Christ. Were werewolves a real thing, too? I swallowed, knowing I needed a lot more information before I could make any kind of plan. Not just to take him down a peg or two, but to take out his enemies.

  A shadow fell over me, and I glanced up, I’d been following him thinking so hard that my gaze was down towards the ground, mindlessly following his heels. I came to an abrupt stop, barely managing to not run into his back as he paused under the porch overhang in front of the large glass double doors. A doorman nodded obsequiously at him before reaching a white-gloved hand out to open the door.

  I tried not to stare as I took him in. He was apple-cheeked with mud-brown hair and eyes, and his ears were pointed, but not as long and elf-like as Asshole’s. He cocked an eyebrow at me, giving me a cheeky grin as if he knew something that I don’t. It revealed his front teeth. They looked like a chipmunk’s. I turned my eyes away but not before I spotted a squirrel-like tail held up against his back reflected in the glass. I blinked, then hurried after my fae as he stops in front of an old-fashioned elevator.

  Wait. My fae? Since when was he mine? We weren’t even friends. Okay, he’s hot as hell, but he’s also a massive self-righteous prick. I knew that much much already, even if I’d only just met the guy. And why did the building look so modern, only for the elevator to be one of those with a metal gate across it and have what looked like a man who was literally part tree operating it? Jerk Face stepped in the elevator, and I follow him in. Tree Guy closed the metal filigree gate and began hauling on a gold rope as soon as Jerk-Face told him to take us to the penthouse. I felt sorry for Tree Guy as this building had to be at least twenty stories tall. Did he have to haul us all the way up himself, or would we get off every few floors?

  I studied Tree Guy as he worked, not even trying to disgui
se my curiosity. He stands close to seven and a half feet tall, and what at first I thought was a one-piece uniform is instead his skin. Or rather bark and leaves. Or maybe the bark and leaves are his clothes, given how they appear on his frame. His hair looks like pine needles, the long thin kind you find down South on the loblolly pines that grow everywhere. Hell, you can’t move a lot of places without seeing at least one of the damned trees and finding their pinecones all over the place. Girls practice braiding with them, even.

  Some of his needles are braided together, too, I see, and it looks somewhat random, almost like a child was playing with his hair, and he left in a hurry without undoing them. I noticed this as we suddenly came to a jerking stop and he silently opened the filigree gate that’s the twin to the one downstairs. He followed us out and opened yet another barrier to a second elevator. Though I supposed given what his tree-trunk arms are doing to make it work, I guessed the British term lift is more appropriate.

  “We have to go up or down five floors at a time,” Jerky McJerkoffson told me. “And don’t stare. It’s gauche.”

  I glanced away. Twatwaffle still hadn’t loosened his hocus pocus hold on my mouth. We changed lifts a total of five times, making this building actually twenty-five stories tall. When we exited the lift this time, the only thing to be seen is a short hallway with two floor to ceiling windows and a glass skylight covering the entire ceiling, and a single, polished metal door with all kinds of fantastical beasts and beings in bas-relief on it.

  If I had any lingering questions about just how rich this dude was, they were answered now. He was rich as all get out. When we sat down to negotiate that extra remittance he’d mentioned? Yeah, I was going to gouge him. This very well could be my last contract. I could take my money, go back to the ordinary world, and sit in my boxers while watching the Cartoon Network and ordering shit off the internet. Inbetween sending my sister money and occasionally showing up to watch her in person at a pageant, of course. It never hurt to let any creeps at those shows know to keep well away from her, or her big brother would rip their dick off and feed it to them.