Orphaned Follies: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Mortality Bites Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

  A zombie groaned to accentuate my point.

  “What should we expect out there?”

  “I don’t know, but when Ester and I would do our little haunted house trick, it was always the same: start with something like zombies or giant spiders or whatever the group most feared, then send them on an impossible quest or mission where we teased out their greatest fears while giving the illusion of the hope that if they succeeded, they’d live. That’s how she feeds. Fear. And she used to say that the sweetest fear springs from fading hope.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  “Me? I’m a vegetarian.”

  The dark elf pursed his lips in a that’s not what I meant and you know it kind of way.

  “Adrenaline. Pump human blood full of it and it tastes like Drambuie. Funny note: put some blood in Drambuie and you get the same results,” I said, realizing that my funny note was more of a note that shouldn’t have been made.

  “Very well,” King Aelfric said as he tried to work through a problem with no solution. “How about hiding from her?”

  “You can’t. Not unless you can suppress every ounce of fear you now feel. I don’t know about you, but I’m terrified. And from the looks of you,”—I stared at each of them—“you all looked scared. Even Mr. Reaper here.”

  Ankou nodded, and everyone in the darkened room gasped. Never before had a fae reaper done anything but watch. To nod, to acknowledge something said or felt, was unheard of in the fae world.

  “We all have fears. Mine are the voices of the lives I took as a vampire. The voices I heard were them coming back from the dead to torment me. King Aelfric already told us he heard Orfeo’s soldiers, and we know who Jack and Sonia heard … Heurodis. You all heard someone, and I can see how shaken up you are. Tell me, is that a fear you can put away? Because that’s what you need to do if you want to hide from the dybbuk.

  “In other words,” I said, turning to Aelfric, “unless you have a fear switch for each of us, or a fear cloaking device, we’re doomed.”

  King Aelfric smiled. “Fear cannot be dismissed, but it can be masked.”

  We’re off to See the Wizard … Ahh, I Mean Witch

  “I will not let you go without me,” Sonia said, and something iridescent glimmered in her grasp. I looked more closely, and realized it was the abatwas’ thistle blade. “Wherever you go, I go.”

  “But Sonia, you are being unreasonable,” Remi said. “The plan is a simple one: the warriors hunt this witch down as the rest of you hide in—”

  “Fear?”

  “As a distraction. We are going to fight, and you are—”

  “Blind?”

  Remi looked at King Aelfric for support, but in response, the dark elf lifted his hands in surrender. “I have long learned only to fight battles I have a chance at winning. She is as stubborn as her mother, and this is one battle I cannot win.”

  Remi groaned in frustration and turned to Sonia. “Please, my love, you are the only one who can sing with enough fear to draw them away.”

  “And I am blind,” Sonia spat. “Do not lie to me. Not when death is so close.”

  “Very well, my love,” Remi said, taking her hands in his. “I shan’t, then. You are blind, but that is not why I do not wish you to join us. You are my heart, my everything. I cannot fight what nightmares may come if I am always looking over my shoulder to see that you are unharmed.”

  “And I cannot sit here praying to gods that are no longer here that you will return. Nor can I do nothing while my father faces real death—again.”

  “Sonia, my love, I swear your father will return to you.”

  “And you? Do you swear that you will return to me as well?”

  Remi said nothing.

  “No, you don’t,” Sonia said, reading his silence for what it was. The fae took oaths and promises very seriously. If the ly erg soldier swore his return, then it meant he would have to hold himself back in battle. He’d have to take the safest route and avoid battles that weren’t a guaranteed success.

  In other words, swearing he’d return would hobble him. And Remi was too experienced a warrior to do that. He knew what lay before us and he wasn’t about to make a promise he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he could keep.

  “My love,” he said, “when we came up with this plan to kill Archimago and avenge your father, we swore that we would do whatever it took. We succeeded in our plan, but because of this vampire—”

  “Human,” I interjected.

  “—human vampire, a malevolent spirit threatens us with death. I made an oath a long, long time ago to protect you. We all did, swearing it on your father’s name. Please, let me fulfill my oath. Stay here, sing your song and draw them to you.”

  Sonia’s unseeing eyes dripped with tears. “But should you die …”

  “Then you will go on. I would die a thousand times if it meant your survival, gladly go into the endless darkness if it granted you one more day. If I die, you live. But I do not wish to die. I wish to spend a million breaths by your side. I swear this: I will do whatever I can to return, but I do not swear to do so if it means there is a chance you will be harmed. Agreed?”

  Remi clasped Sonia’s unblemished hands in his own blood-stained ones. “That has to be enough,” he said.

  Sonia shook her head before nodding. “Everything you can.”

  “Everything I can,” he repeated.

  “Very well,” she said, “then I will stay here.”

  “And sing?”

  “And sing,” she said, using the sound of his last words to find his lips and draw them to her own.

  ↔

  “Remember,” King Aelfric said, kissing his daughter’s forehead, “you have to express enough fear that the hag cannot help but pursue you. That will clear our way.”

  “You and my betrothed are leaving to face an unimaginable evil. Do not worry, Father, I have plenty of fear within me.”

  “You are so much like your mother,” he said.

  We cracked the lock on the door and walked into the hall. Behind us, we heard the fae barricading the door with anything they could find. With them as safe as our circumstances would allow, I led the way as we started down the—thankfully empty—hall.

  “You have a way with her,” King Aelfric said.

  Remi nodded, allowing a smile to brighten his face. “I love her. Why did you hide her? If she had remained in the castle, I would have protected her with—”

  “I couldn’t trust anyone with her. King Orfeo entered our kingdom not by Archimago’s magic, but through one of our own.”

  I stopped and turned. “What do you mean it wasn’t Archimago?”

  “I mean that one of us betrayed me to the human king. One who did not approve of my human wife.”

  “Redcap?” Remi said, his eyes flashing with a mixture of fear and anger.

  “Calm yourself, soldier,” Aelfric said. “I do not know who. My spies only confirmed that one amongst our ranks did so. But that is something we will deal with later … should we live.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You killed a human who had nothing to do with your whole revenge plot. Do you still object to me turning you in?”

  Remi pursed his lips and said nothing.

  “Let us live this night, and then let your conscience guide you,” King Aelfric said. “Where is the hag hidden?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I don’t think she’s changed all that much over the centuries, and when we used to work together, she always liked a room with a view.”

  Ester and the Looking Mirror

  Sonia’s song was perfect, at least for us. Anyone who had to sit through it would probably be reduced to a bubbling mess of fear, but as a distraction for us to move about unnoticed … well, I guess one lady’s ‘perfect’ is another’s nightmare (specifically, a goblin, trow, reaper and abatwa’s nightmare).

  As for our own fear, we were all thinking happy thoughts. I was replaying Legally Blonde in my head for the umpteenth tim
e. I suspected that Remi and Aelfric both thought about the same person when masking their fears: Sonia. And as for Deirdre …

  “Penny for your thoughts,” I whispered to the changeling as we made our way to the upper floors of the building and the rooms with the best views.

  Deirdre held out her hand.

  “What do you need?”

  “A penny,” she said, “for my thoughts.” She gave me a solemn look as her hand remained outstretched, waiting for a penny.

  Since pennies were out of circulation, I couldn’t give her one even if I wanted to. Besides, I had left my purse behind. I didn’t have any money on me at all. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m fresh out.”

  We were in A-House now, and there were only two apartments here. Remi took the left and Aelfric the right.

  She pulled her fingers into a fist and gave me a disappointed look. “Did I do that wrong?”

  Deirdre and I waited on the landing, ready. We had already checked the other apartments and this was the last place they could be. The two fae warriors were going to scout the apartments—hopefully undetected—and return with a lay of the land. That was the plan, at least.

  “What?” I asked, regretting asking her anything in the first place.

  “My joke. I know you weren’t being literal in offering me a penny. I thought by pretending to take your words at face value, I’d be achieving what you humans refer to as humor.”

  I chuckled. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  Deirdre nodded. “You appreciate my attempt, but not my execution. Understood.” She blinked rapidly several times, as if the action would somehow help her file the information away. “I assume your question refers to what I’m thinking about to keep my fears at bay.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Ryan Reynolds, and how one day we’ll be united. Ester tried to strike me down with Ryan’s angelic voice crying out that we will never be together. But a love like ours is so complete that I dismissed her evil glamor for what it was … a lie.”

  “Ahh, I see,” I said. I did, too: Deirdre had several of the actor’s posters on her walls because she was in love. And I don’t mean a child’s infatuation. Fae love is forever, and when they give you their hearts, they mean it. Deirdre loved Ryan Reynolds, and it didn’t matter to the changeling that all she knew of him were his movies and pictures she’d seen online or on posters.

  Fae love, the strongest bond in the known universe. With Remi and Aelfric returned, I saw that bond tethering them to Sonia, she the link now irrevocably connecting these two fae.

  “She’s not in any of the rooms,” Aelfric said.

  “I thought you said she liked a room with a view,” Remi spat without any attempt at hiding his anger.

  “That’s what she liked back then,” I growled back. “I mean, she’s a spirit trapped in a box the size of a Rubik’s Cube. Wouldn’t you want a room with a view if you were cooped up in something like that?”

  “Aye, but with all this snow there is no room here with any view of worth,” Aelfric said.

  “True,” I said, “but you take what you can get, after all—”

  “Milady,” Deirdre interrupted in a way very unlike her, “when did you say you last frolicked with the spirit?”

  “I’d hardly call it ‘frolicking.’ ”

  “You mentioned that you two played together … in an evil way.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” I was starting to hate Deirdre’s literal interpretations. Who was I kidding? I always hated Deirdre’s literal interpretations. “A century ago, at least.”

  “And has she ahh … played with anyone else?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, no. When we parted ways, she bounced around from owner to owner for a while before eventually winding up in a museum.”

  “Then I think I know where she is,” Deirdre said.

  ↔

  Deirdre led us to the common room with the big screen T.V. “What amazed me most about the GoneGod World was the humans’ magic window. The one that let you see the world without actually moving,” she said.

  Of course, I thought, a room with a view.

  As we drew closer to the room, we could hear music blaring as an ominous voice said, “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to …”

  “Who is that?” King Aelfric said.

  “Patrick Stewart. Well, Captain Picard. Actually, Patrick Stewart playing Captain Picard,” I said, and now it was the fae’s turn to give me a confused look.

  Payback’s sweet, I thought as I placed a finger over my lips. “She’s in there.”

  Remi and Aelfric both pulled out their improvised kitchen weapons and said, “We’ll flank her from the left and right. You two attack head on. Let’s end this curse once and for all.”

  “And no hurting Justin.”

  “Who?”

  “The human holding the box. The mission is to get the box away from him and carry it as far from this place as possible.”

  Remi nodded. “I know exactly where to take it.”

  I’m an Idiot … Seriously, I Am

  The plan was simple enough, and given the kind of muscle we had between a dark elf, a ly erg, a changeling and moi (I might be small, but I’m mighty!), it should have been an easy win. Attack, get the box, make a run for it.

  Simple-calafragalisticexpialidocious. It was a plan with a lot of potential, a lot of hope. And given that Justin stood inches away from the T.V., his back facing the open door, we should have been a shoo-in.

  I’m an idiot, I thought way too late to abort. Because just as the four of us were about to coordinate our strikes, Justin’s neck snapped around Exorcist style, his eyes neon orange. A blinding energy burst out of his body.

  The blinding light engulfed us, pushing us together into one ball before Justin walked backward, pushing us out the door we’d entered by. Once we were outside, the strange energy let us go.

  Remi and Aelfric landed on their feet, lunging at my poor, possessed boyfriend.

  “No!” I cried out, but it was too late. They both crashed into an invisible wall filling the doorway.

  “Shield’s up,” a voice that was both Ester and Justin said, before casually walking back to the T.V.

  “An impossible mission with a lot of hope—just to ripen us up,” I said, helping Remi to his feet. “That’s the kind of fear she likes to feed on.”

  “Fear after hope is dessert, dearie,” Ester and Justin’s dual voice said. “But despair after all is lost … that is the main course.”

  Justin took a step to the side, showing us the T.V. screen. It no longer played Star Trek. Instead, it showed the storage room we had left the others behind in. On the screen, we watched as zombie after zombie crawled into the room from the hole we had made, the barricade long gone.

  That might have been all right, except that the hole was getting larger as dead hands dug at the sides to widen it. In a few minutes, it would be large enough for them to walk through.

  Not that they were waiting until then. Two zombies crawled through and their heads were promptly bashed by Krelis’s rolling pins. But a third managed to get through when the two zombie bodies were dragged from the hole, and two more clambered through. The zombie that got through was dispatched by Ankou, who used the kitchen knife I gave him to gut the undead creature from Adam’s apple to navel.

  Way to go, Mr. I-Only-Observe!

  Even the abatwas were doing their part by stuffing the hole with items from the storage room, slowing the zombies’ progress.

  And all the while, Sonia drew them in with her song. Her face was strained, but I saw a resolve there I’ve seen on the faces of mothers guarding their young, of soldiers fighting to save their squad, of truly selfless beings protecting their loved ones.

  She would sing until her family was safe, or she was dead. Whichever came first.

  “No, no!” Remi said, banging his fists against the unseen window.

  I turn
ed to Deirdre and yelled, “Go—help them!”

  Deirdre dashed away. Remi started to follow her when Aelfric’s regal voice cried out, “Stop!”

  “I have to save her. I have to—”

  “Stand here with us and fight.”

  Remi turned to the door, his tainted fists balled up in frustration.

  “Are you sure you should be listening to your once king, ly erg?” the dual voice said. The screen’s focus shifted to Sonia as a zombie reached out for her. Ankou pulled the zombie back, but unless we stopped Ester soon, they were doomed. “Run. If you can’t save them all, maybe you can save her.”

  The ly erg shook his head. “I stand with my king.”

  “Interesting,” they said. “Then perhaps we should ask a more pertinent question: does the king wish for you to stand with him?”

  “On my honor,” Aelfric said, placing a fist over his chest.

  “On your honor,” the voices cackled. Justin lifted a hand and the T.V. displayed not a storage room filled with zombies, but a brook in the middle of a field.

  There Remi stood, his hands relatively clean compared to what they were now. He placed a hand with only a bit of green in the water and dragged his fingers against the stream.

  It was daytime where Remi stood, but the line he drew revealed a world sunk into night. And through that portal stepped a lone man.

  Orfeo.

  ↔

  “It was you?” Aelfric said, his voice no longer imbued with regal authority; he sounded like he was begging for his murderer to stop. “You? You are the reason Heurodis was killed? The reason my Sonia is blind?”

  “Lies!” Remi cried out.

  “No lies,” the dual voice said. “I never lie. Ask Katrina—she knows.”

  I nodded, my gaze passing from Aelfric to Remi. Before me stood two seasoned warriors on the brink of finding some corner to curl up in and die. I thought about lying to them, using that lie to patch them up enough to stay in the fight.