by Jayne Hawke
"Well done, oh queen of magic."
"Bite me."
He returned to trying to get stone out of his hair. He was so precious about his hair.
"Alright, you can buy me me a nice big pizza, and we'll relax in front of the TV for an hour before we try and figure out what on Earth is going on here," I said.
"Fine. But I pick the TV channel."
I was going to regret agreeing to that.
"Fine. I want extra sausage and pepperoni on my pizza."
"Deal."
We were as settled as we could get on the couch, our thighs pressed against each other as we indulged in a pizza. We both needed the calories after that fight. Ash had put on some show about a cop going undercover in a cult in Australia.
"I can't picture Australia having cults," I said as I finished my last slice of pizza.
"I know what you mean. It's weird."
"It makes absolutely no sense. I mean why wouldn't they have cults?"
"And yet somehow I can't imagine it. They seem too sensible, somehow."
"Yes! That's exactly it. Like they'd just roll their eyes and give some snarky come back if someone tried to get them into a cult."
Ash put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.
"I am very proud of you for making the shifter change forms like that. It was really impressive and you might, possibly, have saved my ass."
I leaned into him and basked in the honesty of his words. It was nice to get a bit of praise now and again.
The show ended, and reality set in. We'd had a nice peaceful hour, now it was time to get back to work. Sighing, I picked up my laptop but remained curled slightly into Ash.
"What did the shifter say? The nightmares are haunting her and she just needs to taste the right blood to be free?"
"Yea, I think so," Ash said.
"So, we could be dealing with a nightmare, here," Ash said.
I thought about it for a moment. The horses invaded people's dreams and terrorised them with dark and dangerous nightmares. Sometimes they latched onto someone and haunted them during their waking hours until they finally died and the nightmare feasted on their life energy.
"It seems like a weird M.O. for a nightmare. They usually just make people have trouble sleeping, not send them looking for blood. What did she say about needing some specific blood?"
"I don't know. That bit sounded like raving to me."
"We can't dismiss some information like that. It could be the key."
"Ok, so what if it's actually a curse and if they find the right blood it'll free them of the curse? It could be some convoluted way for someone to take out an enemy."
I rolled the thought around in my mind. If it was someone high ranking and powerful, it could certainly be what we were looking at. This would allow them to keep their hands clean. No one would suspect them.
"Alright, we need to go and talk to the Shadow Hunt pack and Ben."
"We'll start with the Shadow guys," Ash said.
"Not ready to face Rhian yet?" I teased.
"I can face Rhian. I only asked for some cookies."
"You know we're going to have to buy something from their bakery before we leave the city now, right? Out of respect and to keep things calm and happy."
"Oh, the hardship..." Ash said melodramatically.
"We're not buying the entire bakery," I warned.
"I guess it'll come down to how well I do at pool later."
"Seriously? You're going to play pool to fund your cookie addiction?"
"It's not an addiction, and playing pool helps me think."
"Since when?"
"Since about five minutes ago."
He was incorrigible. I should have hated that about him, but I couldn't help but smile at him.
TWENTY-TWO
The Shadow Hunt pack weren't very happy to see us. They did however confirm that Rory had been suffering from unbearable nightmares for a few nights up until the incident. He was also a regular at the coffee shop Ben liked. So we had two connections. I was really hoping it wasn’t brownies that had gone dark side. They were such nice people.
Rhian greeted us at the door.
"You're here to speak to Ben," she said wearily.
"I'm afraid so."
"We heard about the most recent rogue. How you put her down."
"Did you know her?" I asked.
"No, not personally. She was one of the Blood Rose pack."
Rhian rubbed at her eyes. Deep shadows hung there, showing that she hadn't slept in a while.
"How is Ben?" I asked as we headed up the stairs.
Rhian sighed.
"He's not well. He's been fighting against whatever is in him, but he's slowly losing. I can't... I can't lose him. If we can't heal him soon, we'll have no choice but to end his suffering."
It was normal for packs to handle their own trouble like that, but I knew that it must have been incredibly hard. Rhian clearly cared about Ben.
"He is a gentle soul, and a talented artist. The world would be poorer without him."
"We're doing everything we can. We just need to confirm something with him," Ash said.
There were more padlocks on Ben's door now, and a guard sitting outside. The guard lowered his eyes to Rhian and made quick work of the padlocks.
Ben's room had been stripped bare leaving nothing but his bed. He paced around the middle of the room flexing his hands and growling to himself.
"Ben?" Rhian said gently.
His head shot up and he looked at her with brilliant amber eyes. His features softened as he looked at her, and his shoulders relaxed.
"Rhian," he said with a smile.
"The knights have some questions for you," she said softly.
Ben swallowed hard and refused to look at us.
"Ben, have you been having nightmares?" I asked.
"Yes. They're getting worse. There are voices telling me I just need something and it will be all be ok. I'm trying so hard to ignore the voices, but they're so insistent."
"It's ok, Ben. Hang in there. We're going to help you," Ash said.
Ben gave a short sharp nod.
"So now we need to figure out who harnessed a nightmare and how," I said.
It was supposed to be impossible to harness them. Nightmares were ethereal beasts that didn't really work in our plane of existence. I supposed a plane-walking witch might have been able to do it, but that bloodline had been eradicated a century or two ago. People were too scared of the magic they could wield, of the idea that they could pull magic from any plane of existence except the god plane. There was a miniscule chance that maybe those witches still existed, but why would one go to the effort of harnessing a nightmare to attack innocent shifters?
No, this was something far more personal. I was still thinking that it was the fae who wanted to hunt the shifters again. It was the best idea that we had in that moment.
"It could be one of those failed shifters," Ash said as he stopped for a red light.
"Where would they get this kind of magic?"
"Drugs. They might have enough influence that they get someone with magic to do it for them."
My mind flicked over to the asshole setting up the zoo for supernaturals. Why would someone like him go to these kind of lengths, though? He clearly had a lot of money. No, the fae wanting to hunt the shifters made far more sense.
"I still think it's these fae. They'd wield magic so have a chance to harness the nightmare. It could be a particularly gifted sidhe, or maybe an elf. They say elf magic is weird and works entirely different to other fae."
"They practically treat elves as demi-gods or myths, it's ridiculous," Ash said.
"It's because they come from the Wilds and are mostly hidden," I said with a shrug.
"One day we'll go and explore the Wilds. I'm telling you, they won't be as creepy or weird as people make them out to be. I bet they'll be a perfectly normal forest and the elves are laughing at everyone while they live normal happy
lives."
I laughed.
"You know, you could be right."
"Of course I am," he said with a grin.
"Maybe it's an elf with a weird grudge," I said.
"Or a puka. People forget that they're tricksters, and fae do have dark senses of humour."
I groaned. This was getting us further away from a solution, not closer. Ben was slowly losing his fight, and there we were making stupid jokes. It was a defence mechanism, but that didn't make me feel any better about it.
"In all seriousness, I think we need to start poking at these groups who want to hunt the shifters. Does Niall have any of those sorts of connections?"
"Maybe. He's involved in a lot of sketchy shit, and he's far older than he looks."
"Aren't all fae?"
"Yea, what is with that? Why do they stay so youthful and beautiful for centuries?"
I nudged him with an elbow.
"Are you saying you want to trade me in for a fae?"
He took my hands in his and looked earnestly into my eyes.
"I'm very happy to spend the next two centuries with you."
My stomach did a little backflip. He was so genuine about it.
"Shall we arrange a meeting with Niall, then?"
"Aw, is your allergy to feeling flaring up again?" Ash teased.
I sniffled.
"Yea, it's a bitch."
We both laughed.
The apartment building seemed to loom over us as the dark sky glittered overhead. The sound of kelpie hooves echoed around us. I instinctively pulled on whatever magic I could feel and prepared for another showdown. The hooves moved away from us, but I remained on alert.
"You know, I really don't have much sympathy for the victims of the kelpies. Or the morgen. Everyone knows what they are, what they eat. We all have it drilled into us as little kids," Ash said.
"The morgen are supposed to have incredibly strong magic."
"I think a lot of it comes down to arrogance and ego. They think they can tame the beautiful."
"No, darlings. We’re just that good."
We both turned to see a couple walking towards us. The woman was in a skimpy blue swimsuit that would likely have been near-transparent in the sun, the man in not much more. He was very obviously a kelpie, no doubt the one we’d heard not long before, his black eyes and green hair giving him away – not to mention his enormous frame. I supposed that made her a morgen, just to fill out the roster.
“Any chance you’re not here to devour the hearts of the innocent and we can just have you inside for drinks and a fourway?” Ash asked, deadpan.
“Tempting, but I like my men a bit... wetter.”
With that, whatever magic it was that she used to entrance her victims spread through the area like a deadly whisper at the edge of hearing. Not enough to make me follow her, but enough to make me wonder. Ash, on the other hand, was a lost cause. He was more than ready to walk to any body of water on earth for his customary drowning.
When it became clear that I wasn’t going to be swayed into taking a swim with the scantily-clad monster, her kelpie bodyguard – or whatever he was – stepped up to force the issue. I began to run through my magical options as he stalked closer and found the whole idea sounded exhausting after the day we’d had. I needed to recharge, and not just my magic.
Before the kelpie reached me in his oh-so-intimidating trundle I grabbed a hold of the somnolently stumbling Ash and, reaching into his jacket, grabbed a 1911 from its shoulder holster. I didn’t have his facility for the weapon, but I’d been trained.
Seeing what I was doing, the kelpie ran up to grab me from behind and pin my arms to my sides. It was looking like this was going to be a fight after all. I didn’t need to test his hold to know that I had no hope of overpowering him. Even if he’d been human, he had at least 100lbs of muscle on me. I still had the gun in hand, but I couldn’t move enough to do anything with it. Nonetheless, it was his first priority.
Running his hand down my arm, careful to keep it under control, he stooped to reach my wrist, his massive height a disadvantage for what I had to imagine was the first time in his life. Picking my moment, I dropped the weapon and, when he jerked down to catch it, drew the knife from the right side of my belt and stabbed blindly backwards. Whatever I caught, he was extremely unhappy to have a knife in it.
He roared like a bear and shoved me away, bending forward to clutch at the wound in what turned out to be his thigh, which was bleeding enough that I might have caught the femoral artery... assuming kelpies had one. I drew my other knife and feinted at his face. When he lurched backwards, still clutching the gushing wound, I bent for the gun, held it in a two-handed police grip, and squeezed off two rounds at centre mass.
I didn’t wait to see what became of him. It was a damned hard shot to miss, and the morgen had had far too much time to run free. Now that she saw her muscle was most definitely not going to take care of the rising threat of knightly gunplay, she would be drawing on that magic I’d mentioned so recently. As I turned, I saw her gesturing in the air in a pattern I didn’t recognize. No surprise, given that fae magic was as different from mine as I was from a shifter, but that meant it could be anything.
Before I had a chance to find out, I opened fire on her, focusing on the target and letting my training do the rest. The first shot went wide, the thirty-yard shot enough to make me wish I’d kept up my practice regimen, and the gleam in her eyes rose a few notches. I saw Ash approaching her out of the corner of my eye, his drunken stumble having taken him, mercifully, out of the path of fire for now. I didn’t want to know what she’d do when he reached her. Hopefully she’d still be focused on me and her spell.
Hopefully she’d be dead.
I fired another four rounds before I found my groove. The fourth would have made her regret her life choices, but the spell she was casting was apparently some sort of shield. I instinctively began to reach out to it to see what, exactly, it was, but I realized that it didn’t matter. The four rounds I had left were what they were. Their magic would be right to pass through or it wouldn’t. If they didn’t penetrate, I could focus on trying to win a witch’s duel against a faerie sorceress then.
She grinned viciously at me and began walking towards Ash. Her attention was still on me, her hand still facing me to maintain the shield. This wasn’t about Ash. She was toying with me. I hated that, and I crushed that emotion up into a little ball for the time it took me to empty the magazine.
The first shot sparked off her shield like it was nothing. She didn’t flinch.
The second turned it a brilliant blue, but it held and she continued to walk, only her eyes visible as the color slowly drained from the force field that was all that kept her alive.
The third set off a sonic boom far louder than the gun’s report. She clutched at her hand with a look like she’d just found out the dice were loaded. I didn’t know if it was injured by the broken spell, the bullet, or both, but I knew I had one more shot and she had nothing to stop it.
The fourth round hit her in the solar plexus, flame gouting out like a volcanic eruption before fading away to leave a steaming hole the size of a softball. Looked like we found her weakness, then. Something to add to the grimoire. She collapsed backwards with the force of the flame and landed on her back hard.
I was taking no risks. I sprinted across the space separating us, drawing my remaining knife with my left hand as I went. I had almost reached her when I heard a single report that didn’t match the sonic signature of the weapon still in my right hand. Looked like the kelpie wasn’t quite dead yet. No doubt one of the Colts’ many fabled chambers had the silver bullet waiting for just this moment. When I reached the morgen, I drove the blade into her neck, opening enough of a wound that I could be sure nothing short of a fallen god or a fae lord could live through it.
Turning around, I found Ash looking profoundly embarrassed. I smirked at him and walked towards the apartment, saying nothing. This was exactly wh
at I’d needed. Now if we could just make some progress on this case.
With that thought quickly taking over my mind, the walk up to the apartment seemed much further that night. I looked at the old stained paper and wondered what it all must have looked like when it was fresh and beautiful, before the kelpies and everything turned it into what it was. Once upon a time, Leith must have been stunning with views across the river.
"Everything ok?" Ash asked.
"Yea, I guess I'm just thinking about Ben. He's so close to losing his life. It'll break Rhian's heart, and what do we have? You know."
Ash squeezed my hand.
"We'll save the day. We always do."
"Have you texted Niall? We need to try and get a better handle on these fae clans, I really think they're our best bet here."
"Yea, I'm waiting for him to reply."
My communication disk got warm and shivered. I sighed. The black disk was about a third the size of my palm and was engraved with a simple sigil looking like an arrow cutting through three concentric circles. They were our private line of communication with the rest of the coven. No one but a knight could use them or get to the communications passed through them. The magic there was impenetrable.
"Did you get one too?" I asked as I pulled my disk out.
"Yea," Ash grumbled.
Pursing my lips, I pressed my thumb against the centre of the sigil and felt the small thorn dig in and check my magic. Satisfied, the cursed disk slowly pushed words into my mind.
Are you not done with the Edinburgh case yet? There have been two births.
"Your turn to reply," I said to Ash.
The message had come from one of the coven elders. They wanted us to return to the coven so they could remind us that we were supposed to be married and having babies of our own. It was a hard no from me.
TWENTY-THREE
Niall wanted to meet at four in the morning. That was when the city was mostly asleep. I really wished that I was asleep as we drove through the empty streets. Those who'd been out enjoying the bars and so on had headed home, and those who were going to normal jobs hadn't gotten up yet. There was a deep peace at that time of the morning, although it was pretty eerie when the fog rolled in.