by Amy Sumida
“Curse you, Horus,” the man griped. “Watch where you’re flying.” He noticed the group of us staring at him finally and smiled brightly. “He can be such a birdbrain.”
A loud screech filled the room as the falcon launched himself at the man, who then dove for cover. The falcon stopped short and hovered with great flaps of his wings. Bird-form blurred and elongated until it was no longer a bird but a man dressed in a black, short-sleeved shirt and slacks.
“The falcon is one of the wisest winged creatures there is,” the ex-bird-now-man looked down his long nose at the other, who was climbing to his feet.
“Then why do they even have the term birdbrain?” Mr. Average stretched his neck up so he could poke his face impudently into the taller man’s. He was dressed more casually, in torn jeans and a yellow shirt which read Everyone panic, I’m here. They looked like two opposite sides of the social spectrum.
“It’s a ridiculous term made by humans who know nothing of the amazing avian mind.” The ex-bird was as regal looking as he sounded and I was back to staring again. His skin was the light gold of a falcon’s feathers and his nose was just a step away from the beak it previously was. There was more intelligence in his brown eyes than warmth and his bearing was so grand, my knees buckled with the urge to curtsy. Good thing I was still seated.
“No one knows the avian mind because they have no mind. Their brains are about the size of a pea.” The smaller man batted at his curly brown hair which kept falling into his eyes. It seemed to want to play as much as he did. It was kind of charming. In fact, the more you looked at him, the more charming he became. His lips seemed to be constantly on the verge of smiling, even when he was fighting with the bird. His hazel eyes held even more merriment than his lips and his face ended in a pointed chin like an elf. To top it all off, I caught a glimpse of little horns hiding in all those curls.
“Pan,” Thor’s voice rumbled out, making the name into a warning.
“Pan?” I couldn’t keep the disbelief from my voice. Both men turned to me, Horus with a frown and Pan with a radiant smile. “Pan, as in reed pipes and wood nymphs?”
“The one and only,” he bowed gallantly and left Horus sputtering behind him. “And you are Lady…?”
“Vervain,” I said as I smiled. Why was I smiling?
“Ah,” Pan's smile turned sensual, “I love flowers, they have such sweet nectar in their depths.”
“It's actually a herb,” I said but Thor spoke over me.
“Pan,” Thor’s voice was a low growl and the potted orchid on the table actually shook.
“My mistake,” Pan backed away still grinning. “I didn’t know this bloom was already plucked.”
“There's been no plucking,” I shot a nasty look at Thor, hoping he caught the message that I didn’t appreciate this type of protection. What; did he think it would make it easier if everyone thought we were an item? Not like he could be seriously into me or anything and not like I cared… much.
“Hmmm,” Pan moved forward again, this time he claimed a chair next to the Navajo goddess. “Which is it then, Thor, plucked or un-plucked?”
Tsohanoai moved his wife closer to him as he eyed Pan.
“She’s spoken for,” Thor leaned forward to glare at Pan.
“Hey now,” I shrugged Thor’s arm off. “There’s been no plucking or speaking of plucking and there will be no plucking period. Can we find another word for plucking, one that doesn’t rhyme with plucking?”
“Enough,” Horus walked stiffly to the table and sat in one of the end chairs like he was about to bring the meeting to order. Big surprise there. “We’re not here for you to play your silly games with a human, Pan. I would like to know what she’s doing here though.” He looked pointedly at Thor.
“I caught her stealing the same information I went to Valhalla to collect,” Thor leaned back and let that tidbit sink in before continuing. “When I realized who she was, I decided to ask her to join us. I think she’ll be valuable and besides, it’s the humans’ fight too.”
“And who is she? What makes her so valuable?” Horus crossed his muscular forearms and the short sleeves of his linen shirt rode up to expose a detailed tattoo of a falcon in flight. Too detailed in fact. I’d never seen ink like it. It was like a real bird had been miniaturized and pressed into his skin. Kinda creepy actually.
“She’s the only human who has ever managed to kill our kind,” Thor spoke very quietly but the words seemed to ring out.
Horus and Pan sat forward with a gasp. Evidently, I was known by sight to only some of the Gods. I felt like I had just had my superstar status revoked. Oh well, there goes my fifteen minutes. Fame can be so fickle.
“The Hunter?” Horus lifted his head and scanned me dubiously. “This is the Godhunter?”
“There’s no need to get nasty now,” I didn’t know what was worse, having a nickname among the Gods or not living up to it.
Horus narrowed his eyes. “You don’t look strong enough to kill Gods.”
“Well you don’t look like an asshole but there you go,” I almost clamped my hand to my mouth.
I had no filter; the words went straight from my brain and out my mouth. It made me a horrible liar and got me into heaps of trouble. I think the only thing that saved me was the immediate laughter of all the other Gods.
“Come on, Horus,” Thor clamped a large hand down on Horus’s shoulder and I saw him wince. “Admit it, that was funny… and you deserved it.”
Horus did no admitting and no laughing but the tension did seem to ease from his shoulders. He sat back, nodded, and that was that.
“Okay,” Thor said, “let’s get started then. Vervain, the documents please.”
I leaned back into the chair so I could reach down into my jeans, which also put me further into Thor’s side. His breath was in my hair, his scent suddenly stronger, and I quickly yanked the papers from my pants. He took them from me and smoothed them gently on the table. I watched his touch linger over the paper and had a brief moment of imagining those fingers somewhere else. What was it I said about amateurs falling for their prey? I was starting to feel like a supreme moron. Thor turned abruptly and stared at me, slowly raising an eyebrow.
“What?” It came out a little harsher than I intended. Nerves have a habit of turning me into a bitch.
“Did you want to look this over with me?” Thor’s eyebrows shot downward and I felt even worse for being paranoid. So, of course, I got snappier.
“Why, do you only read Old Norse?” As soon as the words came out, I felt like an ass. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I could hazard a guess,” Pan piped up from across the table but was shushed gently by Estsanatlehi.
“It's forgotten,” Thor hadn’t even glanced at Pan. He started to skim over the document. “The next strike will be in Washington DC; they’re going to instigate an attack on a peace rally through some al-Qaeda terrorists.”
“Well, that’ll put a damper on the party,” I leaned in closer to see it for myself.
“Even the protesters will back the war after being shot at,” Horus twisted his lips into a mockery of a smile. “Nothing like murder and mayhem to beget more murder and mayhem.”
“So what do we do about it?” I looked around the table and the whole thing took on a surreal quality for me. These weren’t just people I was talking shop with, they were Gods.
They all looked at me, the lone human in their midst, and I’m sure more than a few of them wondered how I could possibly help. Hell, I wondered it. I was more of a surprise ambush kinda girl and even then, I had to psych myself up every time I got ready to hunt. I guess all warriors have a battle cry to help bolster their spirits. Mine went something like: I don’t wanna diiiiiie! Well, it was more of an internal battle cry.
“So we go and we stop them,” Brahma looked bored. In fact, he was paying more attention to the minuscule pieces of dirt beneath his fingernails than he was to us. When he finally looked up and
saw our expressions, he huffed. “What? How hard could it possibly be?”
Fairy-Struck
Book 1 in The Twilight Court Series
You can get this book for FREE every 10th day of every month.
Chapter One
Once upon a time, isn't that how all fairy tales begin? Except this isn't your average fairy tale. There are no charming princes or wicked Witches within these pages and the fair maidens are more deadly than any big bad wolf. This is a fairy tale in the truest sense of the words; a story about fairies... the real story.
My name is Seren Sloane and I'm an Extinguisher. That will mean nothing to you, I'm sure, so let me go back a little further. No one knows the true origins of the fey, I don't think even the fey themselves remember, but theories abound. One has them evolving alongside us but where we advanced in groups, banding together to become stronger, the fey morphed out of those outcast predators who were too wild for a pack. Those who don't believe in evolution, think instead that the fey issue from divine creations, angels fallen from God's grace. Yet another tale insists they were Gods themselves, or demi-Gods, led by a mother goddess named Danu.
A final theory suggests they were not Gods or angels or outcasts, merely nomads from an advanced civilization. The Scythians or Sidheans, from which the word sidhe originates. Myths tell of these talented Sidhe coming to Ireland where they flung about their magic and generally wrecked havoc until the aggrieved locals fought back and forced the fey to retreat into their raths, holy shrines now known as fairy mounds. History has disguised the raths as burial mounds even though originally, they were thought to be royal palaces for portal guardians. Although I cannot validate the rest of the tale, I do know this; the fey don't live under mounds of dirt. The original descriptions strike closer to the truth. The raths shrouded portals not corpses. Hidden paths to the fairy world, a realm laid parallel to ours and not at all underground.
Anyway, we did just fine living side by side with them until humans started destroying the environment around those entrances to Fairy. Fairies don't like it when you mess with nature and when they stroll from their magical abodes to find that mess strewn all over their backyard, they get even more pissy. So they began to fling the mess back. All those old stories about fairies stealing babies and striking people with wasting diseases, stem from this time period. Things got real bad, so bad that those of us who had the gift of clairvoyance and could actually see fairies, joined together to defend the human race.
The first Human-Fey war erupted across Eire, now known as Ireland, and the losses on both sides were staggering. After the third war, a grudging truce was finally attained and councils were created to mediate between the races and support the truce with laws approved by both sides. A good start to be sure but laws flounder and fail if they can't be enforced. Both councils conceded jurisdiction over their people to the other, agreeing upon the penalties to be meted out should someone be found guilty of a crime. Rules for determining guilt and administering justice were set into place and military units were sanctioned to carry out the verdicts of the councils.
The fairies created the Wild Hunt. They gathered the fiercest, most terrifying of their people and trained them to stalk the shadows of our world, watching us like guardian angels until one of us breaks the law. Then the angels become devils who do much more than watch. Trust me when I say you don't want to ever meet a member of the Hunt.
To police the fey, we created the Extinguishers. Formed of the five great psychic families who originally defended humanity, the Extinguishers inspire a fair amount of fear as well. Armed with clairvoyance among other talents which varies by person but can include; telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, and psychometry, we also have some serious combat skills. Most humans don't have the ability to see a fairy unless that fairy wants to be seen, so both council members and Extinguishers must at least possess clairvoyance. The Council keeps an eye out for humans with exceptional psychic abilities so they can recruit more into their fold but Extinguishers are born into the job. I'm one of those lucky few.
Kavanaugh, Teagan, Sullivan, Murdock, and Sloane. The first five psychic families of Ireland. Over the centuries we've become a secret society so big it spans the globe, gaining strength by breeding only within the five. This has virtually guaranteed powerful psychic gifts in our children. I'm the product of a Sloane and a Kavanaugh. Over thirty generations of contrived breeding(not inbreeding, thank you very much) has given me abilities which rank me as one of the top ten Extinguishers of all time.
I was trained from childhood to become what I am; an Extinguisher, a hunter of fairies, remover of the light of the Shining Ones. Childhood wasn't horrible for me but it was definitely not what most would consider to be normal. Bedtime stories were non-fiction accounts of Extinguisher heroism and instead of receiving platitudes that monsters weren't real, I was told most emphatically that they were and that when checking beneath my bed at night, I should always have an iron blade in hand. My only friends were children from other Extinguisher families and every game or toy had an ulterior motive behind it. Like the dolls my mother made me which showed what each type of fairy looked like... and had their weaknesses written on their backs in red ink.
Still, I was a child and I knew nothing else. Life seemed magical to me, not just in the way that life is magical to all children but in a literally magic way. I was taught to move objects with my mind, create fire in the palm of my hand, and make things materialize anywhere I wanted them to(that's called apportation in case you're curious, not teleportation which is a thing of science fiction). When I got older, I was taught to fight and finally, to kill.
Despite all of that, I wasn't raised to hate fairies. Quite the contrary, I was taught to care for them and protect them if need be. The job of an Extinguisher exists first and foremost to protect the peace. We kill fairies only when they disrupt that peace and then we do it in the most efficient and merciful way possible... after we receive a warrant of execution approved by the Council. We are, essentially, peace keepers.
That changed for my family when my mother was torn to pieces by a pack of pukas. I know, it sounds funny, doesn't it? A pack of pukas. In reality a bunch of fairy dogs the size of ponies, with teeth sharper than a shark's, shredded the flesh from my mother, gobbled down every last bit of it, and then gnawed on her bones till they could suck out the marrow. That reality killed all the mercy in my father and a lot of the compassion in me as well.
We immersed ourselves in the job, taking every warrant issued for criminal fey we could get our hands on until the Head Extinguisher himself finally noticed and called us to heel. We were sent to a small territory where very little fey crime occurred and where we were supposed to get our shit together. Most humans would love to live where we do now and when I tell you where we were put, I'm sure you'll roll your eyes but let me assure you that this place becomes a slow death for an Extinguisher. Peace keepers need a certain amount of action to keep us sane and Hawaii has very little of that on the fey front.
Yes, I've been exiled to paradise and for someone with my fair Irish skin, Hawaii imitates Hell in so many ways. Sure beauty abounds and the people here embody that tropical temperament of almost Gaelic hospitality but when you're itching for a fight, you don't want to be scratching at your peeling, sunburned skin too. Plus, the only fey to be found, the little local variety called menehune, frolic about causing mischief but never mayhem. Yep, Hawaiian fairies exist. Does that shock you? It shouldn't, I've already mentioned how the Fairy Realm lies parallel to ours. Fairy Mounds connect more than merely Ireland to Fairyland, they form bridges between Fairy and places all over the world. The fairies who frequent these paths seem to be influenced by the culture they cross over into.
And the fairies don't just visit. Ever since the creation of the Councils, a lot of fey have moved into our world in an effort to support the peace. There was also the issue of the numerous entrances to Fairy which needed to be guarded. So several fey council members have very hu
man jobs with very powerful positions. I think you'd be pretty damn surprised if I told you which companies secretly belong to the fey.
We don't have any of those powerful companies here in Hawaii because, as I mentioned before, this place isn't all that important in the whole fey-human interrelations department. So my life has become a constant preparation for a battle it doesn't look like I'll ever be allowed to join, in a place whose beauty only feels like salt in my wounded heart. I will admit that my anger has lessened over my time here, as the memory of who my mother was slowly overshadows the memory of how she died, but for my father, this exile has only served to make him even more bitter, more vicious, and more intent on killing the entire fairy race.
Chapter Two
“No way,” I looked down at the fax in my hand with amazement. “This can't be right.”
“What is it?” My dad walked into our office, his sea blue eyes narrowing on the piece of paper in my hand like a hawk who's spied a mouse.
It was a small office with just a cheap particle board desk littered with all the necessary items; a computer, a phone, a fax machine, and a copier. There was an old desk chair in front of it, a cracking plastic mat beneath that to protect the boring beige carpet, and a beat up filing cabinet to the right. That was it and with us in the room, the tiny space was almost full. Still, it fit our needs. The office was purely for communication with the Council and for record keeping. The bulk of our work was done outside these bare walls.
“A warrant of execution,” I handed the fax to him. “From the Fairy Council.”
“The Fairy Council?” His narrowed gaze transformed into surprise which returned some vigor to his sorrow-lined face.