by Helen Adams
Mel watched, expression shuttered, eyes hinting at secret amusement. Scheming bitch.
I drew the cloth back. I saw metal…
“You found her!”
“So you can find a needle in a haystack,” Raz said. Lorl, startled, jumped off my lap and hovered over my head.
Lukas had only gone and found my fucking sword! I’d thought that Baby was lost, melted to scrap or broken, but here she was. I ran reverent palms along her blade, cataloguing the new nicks, scuffs and dirty smudges. She’d survived a vaengrjarl inferno and come out with nothing more than a few scratches.
My fingers closed around the familiar hilt, gripped so hard that my hand turned white. I didn’t know what to say. My mouth worked, struggling for words, while my brain floundered. His eyes twinkled.
“For you to wield another weapon would be entirely unthinkable.” Lukas shook his head. “I find that you are eminently suited to each other. The similarities between you are startling.”
“You mean ugly and functional?” I gave him a lop-sided grin.
He let out a rolling laugh that made me long to reach out and touch him. I squeezed Baby’s hilt.
“I mean deadly. Relentless.”
“Stick an ‘unstoppable’ in there and I’ll blush.”
“No blade is unstoppable.” His grin was feral. “And no woman is unobtainable.” He flicked a challenging look at Lee. “Especially after she’s already been…obtained.”
I clenched my teeth and counted in my head. The tension in the room skyrocketed. If Lee kicked off now, if he so much as lifted a hand in Lukas’s direction, the vaengrjarl would cut him down. And I wasn’t at all sure which of them – if either – I’d support.
But Lee didn’t say anything. He knew that he was being played. He just watched Lukas, wary, and kept his mouth shut.
“I’ve got a plan,” I said into the charged atmosphere, lifting Baby free from the cloth. Her familiar, solid weight in my hand was so fucking good.
“Daphne,” Raz said, “be careful.” The tension began to dissipate. “Your plans tend to be a bit…”
“Gung ho?” I grinned. If I could get Baby back, anything was possible, and I was almost delirious with joy. I tamped it down. “You can’t beat a good old direct assault. Except when you can.”
“I don’t follow.”
“So far we’ve been doing everything that Mina expects,” I explained, studying my reflection in Baby’s battered metal. “She took Alice to get us in a place of her choosing, to take out two birds with one stone. Lukas came to the warehouse; she anticipated that. Now we do something that she hasn’t anticipated.” I put Baby on the cloth, fingers touching the blade, and leaned forward. “We start running the game.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Raz wasn’t quite sarcastic, but he was close.
“We create a diversion.”
“A diversion…”
“I’m talking about faeries, Raz.”
“Oh, fuck.”
TWENTY-TWO
“We’re not getting involved with faeries,” Raz growled. “They’re dangerous!”
“Because nothing we’ve faced so far has been dangerous,” I said, dead-pan.
“Faeries are vicious, manipulative –”
I glanced at Lukas.
“ – little more than animals!”
“While it’s true that they’re savage and unpredictable, they’re more civilised than people give them credit for. They make leighis, don’t forget.”
“Oh? They say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ after eating people?”
“They don’t eat people. They can’t keep them fresh. See? Civilised.”
“You’re not selling it!”
“Listen, remember when I did a favour for Queen Daisy of the Briar Clan? She gave me that high-quality leighis as a reward?”
Actually, I’d done more than a favour – I’d saved her life. During her last mating flight the young, powerful queen had drawn so far ahead of her potential suitors that they’d been unable to catch her. She’d stopped long enough to land on a thistle, and was busy grooming her fur when she’d been grabbed by a fox.
Now, faeries eat foxes. And badgers. Mice, rats, voles… you think the drop in the sparrow population is down to humans? You’ll find plenty of bird bones in Clan burrows. But the faerie hunting technique involves swarming. They kill by weight of numbers. One single faerie on her own makes fox chow.
I’d been out for a run that day. It was sheer chance that I’d stumbled on the fox. I’d tripped over the bloody thing while it was distracted (caught in its teeth, Daisy had been trying to pull its tongue out) and allowed the young queen to escape. Mr. Fox hadn’t been keen to lose his meal and had tried to take a lump out of my hand. I’d chased him away with a hearty kick to the arse, and gained Daisy’s friendship in the process.
Provided that I kept my mouth shut about the nature of our business, I’d keep my tongue in my mouth. I couldn’t say the same for Mr. Fox.
“Aren’t faeries like…” Lee frowned, thinking. “You know, nice little butterflies? Pretty girls in flower dresses?”
I snorted. “Here’s another lesson, Mr. SIU. Faeries are not nice.”
“This is a terrible idea!” Raz interrupted. “If you rope in Clan Briar, at best they’ll be unpredictable. At worst they’ll eat your face!”
I’d spoken to Daisy a few times since the Fox Incident. I knew her well enough – or as well as anyone can know a faerie.
“I want unpredictable. I want an army that’s going to cause so much chaos that I can sneak right up to Mina and punch her in the head.”
“I don’t think –”
“I listened to you about the fucking mermaids, and look where that got us,” I snarled, slamming my open palm on the table. “Now you listen to me!”
Raz listened.
They all listened.
“Hey,” he grunted when I’d finished. “That might actually work.”
“You don’t need me to win this fight,” Mel said as we prepared to leave. “You’ll have three berserkers and a faerie Clan. Anything more would be overkill.”
You might think its overkill, I thought. But Mina’s already pulled the wool over our eyes, more than once. At this point I’ll take any and all assistance.
“You sure you don’t want to stick around?” I asked. “We could really use the help.”
But Mel just shook her head, that annoying smile – as if she knew all the secrets, and we were struggling just to catch up – plastered over her face.
Lukas left with her, but he drew me back into the dining room before he went. He tilted my chin up; his touch made me want to step away and lean closer at the same time. I tried to hide how badly a single touch affected me.
His thumb eased a strand of hair off my forehead. My eyes closed. I wrenched them open a second later, but it was too late. Fuck! There was no way he could have missed that.
“Call me when it’s time,” was all he said.
“I will.” I had the Sowilo Stone in my pocket: - Lukas was the trump card I hoped I wouldn’t have to play.
He bent his head, the familiar green glitter rising in his eyes. I pulled back.
“You want a repeat of the last time you kissed me?” I threatened, trying to control my breathing.
He laughed, deep and throaty. I didn’t shiver in response. Nope, definitely not a shiver.
“I believe I might suffer through such punishment for the reward of a kiss,” he murmured.
Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy… ah, fuck it.
“You need me to teach you the lesson again?”
“Before long it will be me teaching you lessons,” he purred. “I knew that having you in my bed once was never going to be enough.” His grin was rakish.
My mouth dropped open, so incensed that I couldn’t even think of a put-down. He took advantage of that and kissed me.
My anger vanished as if it had never existed. His lips were hot and mobile, teasing, su
cking my lower lip into his mouth for a second before sending his tongue questing after mine. I moaned and pulled him closer, my hand reaching up to curl around the back of his head.
A billion years later I pushed him away. He let me go. His eyes were alive with hot green sparkles.
“I want you, Daphne McArthur.” His voice was a rough growl, making raw need pool between my legs, making my nipples hard and aching to be touched. “I want you as my lover, my wife, the mother of my children. My queen.”
I stared up at him, unable to voice a coherent reply. I didn’t want his kids, or his ring on my finger, and I sure as fuck didn’t want a crown on my head. But I did want him. Christ, how I wanted him.
Deciding that I wasn’t going to answer, his fingers stroked down my cheek – a fleeting caress – before he turned and strolled away, the picture of a modern, urbane city man. There was nothing in his walk or appearance that could give away that he was powerful enough to raze half the country, but I knew.
And this was the guy who wanted to marry me?
When I finally finished getting my shit together, we piled into Mel’s van. Raz drove. Briar was one of several local faerie Clans; they weren’t hard to find, if you knew what to look for. Briar was the biggest gig in town. Generally we took pains to avoid them, but I hadn’t been a berserker long when I’d run into Daisy. I hadn’t known any better.
“Let me do the talking,” I advised as we drove. “Daisy trusts me. They’re suspicious of outsiders.” While Raz was my mentor and had lived here for years, he didn’t have the connection with Briar that I’d been lucky enough to make.
As I spoke I cleaned Baby, removing the clotted goo, then wiping her down with a cloth. She needed sharpening. But she’d be more than adequate for the fight to come.
“Why does no one like berserkers?” Raz grumbled.
“We kill monsters,” I said, nodding at Lee. “Let’s not give the newbie the wrong impression, huh?”
“We’d hate for his Army overlords to think badly of us.”
“It’s not like that,” Lee grumbled, sullen.
“Hush,” I interrupted, not unkindly. “If you play your part you can tell your bosses how we work. Who knows,” I shrugged, “maybe they can be of use to us?”
“I fail to see how.” Raz was full of cynicism.
“Stronger swords, hi-tech duffels, body armour… I don’t know.”
Body armour would be great. Body armour would be fucking amazing, actually, even it broke with berserker tradition. Anything that stopped enchanted silk ripping through my insides was a good thing.
“I’d love to see a grenade land in a bunch of those trolls,” Lee growled.
“The blast will just tickle their balls.” I rolled my eyes. “Weapons like that won’t work against what’s beyond the aura – but ours do.”
“Why?”
“It’s something to do with the magical composition of metal worked in a particular way.”
“Yeah, but why?”
I gave him a look. He shut up.
Clan Briar lived in a massive burrow complex on the edge of town. They’d colonised both sides of the road that led up to a motorway roundabout. Beyond the narrow grass verge, there was a huge housing estate on one side and fields on the other. Daisy had told me – with considerable pride – that her tunnels ran everywhere under the field, and even into the small patch of woods beyond.
When we’d last spoken they were busy excavating under the housing estate. She was excited at the abundance of cats and dogs; she liked cats in particular. She’d been picking scraps of flesh out of her teeth as we’d talked.
We parked in the estate, just one white van among a stack of other vehicles. I wondered where Mel had bought it from. And the house, with all those clothes; the wall-mounted wide-screen TV, the coffee-maker. She wasn’t human, but like Lukas she could pass for one. She must use human money. Where did it come from? Who paid her? Was spying her only job?
Then I wondered what Lukas did for money. I knew that vaengrjarl had their own currency – the solid gold vaengrmark was good throughout the supernatural community – but I supposed he’d have to deal with dewdrops eventually. Expensive suits didn’t just grow on trees. There was no such thing as a magical tailor; that thing with elves and shoes was just a myth. If you asked an elf to make you a new pair of shoes, they probably would… with leather made from your own skin. And they’d make you watch while they peeled you, bit by bit.
So where did Lukas get his human cash? Where did Mel?
“Earth to Daphne, come in Daphne.”
“Hmm?”
Raz nudged me. “Stop wool gathering and get your game face on. Before a faerie eats it.”
“I’m too pretty to eat,” I grinned, climbing out of the van. “They’d go for you first.”
“Hey, I’m gorgeous.”
“They would totally eat you first. Good thing I’ll be there to keep you safe, right?” I pulled the sliding door shut.
I led the others away from the houses and across the road. Traffic this late in the morning was beginning to build for the lunchtime rush, so we had to wait for the lights to turn red.
We made it across in one piece and hopped a low fence into the field. It was rampant with scrubby grass and giant thistles, perfect cover for faeries. This was a prime location. If Clan Briar hadn’t fought any territory wars yet, they would, probably before the month was out. The burrows below would be warm and toasty come the first big chill.
“I don’t see any faeries,” Lee remarked, dubious.
“You won’t. Not until they want to be seen. Right now their guards will be working out if we’re a threat.”
I stepped away from the group and held my hands up.
“I’m Daphne McArthur,” I called, “friend of Queen Daisy. My companions are under my protection, and therefore hers.”
A certain amount of formality had to be established at the beginning of every human-faerie meeting. Just so that no one was accidentally eaten.
The tall grass in front of us rustled. I heard whispers – barely carried on the breeze – and a tiny figure flitted into view at eye level.
He was three inches tall with human appendages, but a third set of limbs – a pair of furry grey moth wings – protruded from below his shoulders. The wings looked fragile but, like taufrkyn, they were immensely strong for their size. As if reading my mind, Lorl let out a friendly chirp. Taufrkyn and faeries always got on well and I was fucked if I knew why.
“That’s a faerie?” Lee asked.
The one I saw (there’d be scores of others, hidden in the grass) was covered in short, dense brown fur. Brown meant foot soldier, the common Clan warrior. They could be male or female. There was no safe way to tell the sexes apart.
“This is a faerie,” the hoverer said, jamming a tiny thumb at its chest. Its voice was higher-pitched than a human’s, though not childishly so. They were fluffy and cute, it was true, but you cuddled them at your own mortal peril.
I jabbed my elbow at Lee’s chest.
“Stop staring. It’s rude.”
“Why d’you want to see the queen?” the faerie asked. It shoved a tiny fist into one fuzzy, bear-like ear, and got busy mining for gold.
“Because I do.” I didn’t have to explain myself to a foot soldier.
“What’s the password?”
“There is no password.” I let out a huff. “And if you don’t stop bullshitting, I’ll snatch you out of the air and yank your wings off.”
The faerie pulled its fist out of its ear. It was covered with orange-brown wax. It looked at me, rolling the wax around and around in its paws.
“Stay here,” it said, and flicked the miniscule projectile at me.
Eww. I ducked and the ball passed harmlessly overhead.
The faerie laughed, flicked its wings and was gone.
Raz’s face was tight with tension.
“That’s your idea of diplomacy, is it?”
“If they don’t try to
eat you, you know they’re being polite.”
“I can see how you would get on…”
“I don’t eat people!”
“Too many calories?”
“They give me terrible indigestion.”
The air filled with faeries, swirling around us in a dense cloud of brown fur. As one we moved so that we were standing back to back, facing outward. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a flash of fear right then; if Daisy changed her mind, we wouldn’t stand a chance against the Clan. No one could swing a sword fast enough to even get near a faerie, let alone take one out. And if you did, what then? He had a squillion brothers and sisters ready to take his place.
“If we get eaten,” Raz rasped in my ear, “I’m coming back to haunt you.”
The cloud around us parted and another faerie rose into the gap. Dark red fur, imposing stature (all four inches of her) and wings twice the size of her foot soldiers. This was Queen Daisy of Clan Briar.
“I hear you threatened to pull a warrior’s wings off,” Daisy said. “His name is Beetle. He has a mate and grubs.”
Her voice was surprisingly deep for a creature her size. I felt Raz shift against my back, uneasy, but I relaxed – if Daisy wanted us dead, we’d be nothing more than gristle and bone by now. This was just banter.
“He was being a dick,” I replied.
It went against the grain to call her ‘Your Majesty’, and with Daisy it wasn’t necessary. Nobody was brave enough to claim faerie friendship if it wasn’t true, and I’d saved her life. She cut me some slack. That was how our relationship worked.
“Fair enough.” Daisy’s nod was sharp and decisive. “I’ll eat him – I mean deal with him – later.”
I heard a whimper from the swirling crowd.
“May I introduce my friends?”
“I know who they are. I know why you’re here.”
I frowned. Who…?
“You spoke to Mel?” I guessed.