Curse of Iron

by D. D. Miers

  I shook the fantasies out of my head and frowned at her. “Tonight’s going to be hard enough without you trying to glamor me into thinking I’m the princess from a fairytale.”

  She laid the dresses across my arms with a sigh and put her hands on her hips. “Well, Morgana Silk, Daughter of the Storm King and High Priestess of the Green Woman, where on earth did you think all those stories came from, anyway?"

  The truth was, I didn’t know. I’d taken college courses about the Fae, only to come away with more questions than answers. The few Fae I knew and recognized were only part Fae. It was a common occurrence among the lesser Fae partly due to the worship of fertility deity, and partly to the natural curiosity of fairies about other people, even those they felt were beneath the immortality of the "hidden people".

  “Why on earth do you want to make me into a princess, though?” Her eyes shifted to the side as she thought of a way to answer without telling me the truth, but without outright lying.

  “You are the daughter of the ‘Bringer of Storms’. I have not forgotten, and if you spend more time with the Fae, you will find many more like me.”

  Thirteen

  Dress, corset, shoes, and sexy panties—still in the package, thank goodness—in my arms, my fairy godmother kicked me out, after looking around to be sure no one else could see me leave. I understood. In the gym, we were surrounded by humans, big strong men and women who were clueless about the dangers and the rules of the hidden world all around them. There was no one to rat us out. Though, I had to wonder with all the magic being shared among the fighters if spying was ever part of the bargain.

  I also knew Sylvie could not be trusted. But she’d softened a little and shown me a kindness very few people had. She was getting something out of being nice to me, and I’d been foolish not to ask her for a direct answer. Being disarming and distracting me from my goals was not only her goal, it was her natural gift.

  No wonder so many men are willing to pay her for her time. She’s the perfect escape from reality. I hung the dress in the back seat and headed back to the office, before Orson decided to call and chew me out for being gone.

  Everyone was in when I got back, Cole and Puck just finishing their shift and leaving, Penelope and Orson still in the breakroom getting coffee and gossiping. They stopped talking when I walked in for a cup of tea, so I knew who they were gossiping about.

  “Puck said you were out on a skip,” Orson stated, but it was understood he expected an answer.

  I held up the file. “I went to check on Sylvie. I know you two have a good relationship, so I figured I’d just ask her to come in and keep her off the bounty pile for a few more days.”

  “Is she coming in?” His voice was carefully neutral, but even Pen raised her eyebrows as she looked at me over the rim of her gigantic coffee mug. I’d given it to her for her birthday as a gag gift because of her caffeine addiction. I’d never seen her at the office without it since. It mattered to me more than I’d ever tell her that she loved it so much.

  I shrugged and held the file out to him. “I didn’t catch her, it turned out today was her day off at the spa and she wasn’t home.” He coughed and took it from me, looking through it. “You checked every address on the list?”

  I shook my head, grateful I didn’t have to lie. “No, just the spa and the home address they verified. When I got there, no one was home.”

  He gave me a long look, but finally nodded and went to his office, tapping the file in one hand. Pen snorted, and I shrugged at her. “Girl, you cut it close there. He knows you ain’t telling the whole truth." “Who does Pen? You find me one person who tells the whole truth and leaves nothing out and I’ll show you someone who has all the power and nothing to lose.”

  She refilled the giant cup with coffee and the sweet Italian cream I kept stocked for all the sweet-toothed demi-Fae coming through the office. “I get why you’re cynical, Mo, but I think you should remember you’re safe here.”

  “Pen, I feel safe here.” I was confused, but she shook her head at me again.

  “You have people here, Mo. People who depend on you and you can depend on, too.”

  I knew she was right, but I got the same, queasy feeling in my stomach I’d gotten at Sylvie’s. How was I supposed to rely on anyone to keep me safe or make me happy when every person in my life, from children to adults, had made my misery and even my potential death the definition of their relationships with me?

  I grabbed my Lady Grey tea and sequestered myself behind my desk, avoiding anything that would require me to talk to clients or my coworkers. Between files, I wrote down what little I knew about Gideon Masters’ murder, which took even less time than I’d first thought and left me depressed.

  Basically, no one could say how Masters had died, so pending a tox report, everyone—including me—was assuming a magical cause. Not all, or even most of the shifters knew I was involved in any way, but all the witches seemed to know. The Fae hadn’t said anything, I assumed they were either feigning disinterest in the whole affair until the results were in, or truly didn’t care.

  But the humans and the witches both wanted to pin the death on me. I understood why the witches wanted to, but I’d lived peacefully with humans. They should have had no reason to hunt me with such single-minded hate. But that’s where the witches had stuck their noses right back in it. Detective Mills was barely older than I was. I had hoped when she interrogated me she might have been uncovenanted or at least part of the Mystic's Coven. The mystics, who were the most liberal and accepting of the three most powerful covens in the country.

  “You working, or pondering your existence and place in the great vastness of the universe?” Orson perched on the edge of my desk and straightened out the carefully ironed-in-crease of his jeans. I looked at him again, really looked at him, like I hadn’t for a long time. If you weren’t paying attention, he looked perfectly human— just tall, broad, and delightfully muscular.

  It took a second glance, and one with the ability to ignore glamor or the right tincture of herbs to negate it, to see the grey cast to his skin and the multi-faceted color to his irises, always spinning, hypnotic rings of green and blue.

  “I was thinking about how much simpler life would be if I had glamor, like you, or was just a plain old, boring human.”

  He chuckled, “I dunno, you’re pretty boring as it is. I mean, you’re what, twenty-five, and you’ve only woken up to one dead body?”

  “Well, he was an alpha shifter, do I get points for a high-profile framing?” I replied, my voice dripping sarcasm. I groaned and rested my head on my desk, pillowed by my forearms. “Why the hell can’t the world just leave me to work and live in peace?”

  He moved the piles of work aside, so he could see me. “You’ve got to be careful. The Fae are more interested in you than they appear. The witches are more bloodthirsty than even you’ve seen, and something has been moving behind the scenes, power exchanged the way it always is. I’m as close to the pulse of the demi-Fae as one can be, and the magic isn’t coming from them.

  I raised my head, “And the shifters just want revenge for their alpha’s death. It seems unfair they’re involved in the power struggle at all.”

  His mouth twitched upward as he watched me silently until my face got hot and I knew I was blushing. “Is your concern for all the shifters, or just one in particular?”

  “Oy, is there any gossip you don’t know?” I huffed. “Yes, it’s for all the shifters, with maybe a little extra concern for an especially hot were-cat.”

  He stood and brushed himself off like he’d been kneeling in the dirt instead of barely sitting on the edge of my relatively clean desk. “Go home. You got an early start according to the boys, so cutting out early for your date isn’t a big deal. Just get your head on straight, no bitching about your bad luck, or slacking on your work.”

  “Thanks, Boss. I’ll just finish these paid invoices and get out of your hair.” I glanced at the time. “Which means I�
�ll have put in a full eight and a half hours, taking out my breakfast break.”

  He rolled his eyes and strode back to his office with a, “Just be on task tomorrow,” thrown over his shoulder. But I knew the first thing he’d do would be to log into the computer and check my times, too. Invoices were entered, Pen was on her third twenty-ounce cup of coffee, and I was dying to change into my costume and feel like a princess, completely removed from the monotony of work and the shit-show of my life.

  The doorman congratulated me on my apartment being cleared for living when I arrived back home. I hid my surprise until I got upstairs, and Mrs. McMurphy greeted me the same way. “Thank goodness that horrible tape is gone missy,” she croaked at me the second she heard my key in the door. “I knew they had the wrong place. But my goodness, what a fright it must have been. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “My…” It took me a moment to catch up to her run-on sentence. “Oh, thank you, it was really scary, and it’s been a rough couple of days.”

  “I don’t remember you dating anyone, was he special to you?”

  “Uh, no. Not like that.” I stumbled over my words. “We hadn’t, uh, he was a friend of my mother’s.”

  She gasped and clutched her rope tighter around her. “Well, thank God for small miracles. I won’t tell you what the man guarding the door was saying.”

  “Thank you for keeping it from me, Mrs. McMurphy. There is a function in his honor tonight. Don’t worry if you hear me come in late. I’ll, uh,” I laughed at myself, reporting to my aging neighbor like I was accountable to her. “I’ll be alone.”

  She tittered and winked at me before closing the door. I didn’t know if it meant she thought I was lying, or if she just sympathized with my exasperation. The old bat was crazy, and her apartment smelled like the small herd of Maltese dogs she called her babies, but she was sweet, a bit of a pervert, and I loved her to death.

  I crossed the threshold of my apartment with only a tingle from my wards, grateful they were active. The dress got hung in the closet, the corset draped over the hangar with it, and I walked out to the kitchen to grab a snack, hoping I had something left in the fridge not taken by crime scene investigators looking for poisons.

  There was a flash of light from the living room as I crossed over to the kitchen and my training kicked in before I had the time for thought. I rolled to my left behind the kitchen island. I slid the knife from my ankle sheath and listened, but there was no sound from the doorway. I hadn’t even heard the door beep when it opened.

  Either my wards are shit, or there’s no one there. I crab-walked around the edge of the island and peered around the corner. Reaching out to the magic I’d drawn onto the floor, the symbols glowed a soft green, the color of new shoots, reassuring me my magic hadn’t been tampered with.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed. “You need to find a new apartment, this is ridiculous.” I stood, knife in hand, and surveyed my living space. The tile top table I’d picked up at a swap meet was in its place with all four chairs. The gigantic sectional I’d bought during a social phase sat mocking me. By the time it was delivered, I was back to feeling antisocial. Only Penelope and I had ever sat on it.

  I need to get a dog. They love you unconditionally and have no idea what ‘weird’ is. A dog would be protection, too. I couldn’t walk past McMurphy’s place without a chorus of yipping from inside. But I’d need something intimidating, answered to me, and recognized magic. A felhound could do the trick, maybe. They’re big and ugly as fuck, and the Fae use them to protect the mounds. Orson had clients who illegally bred the dogs, which had demi-Fae blood. Some said they came from the wild hunt itself.

  My stomach was still lurching a little. I grabbed an underripe apple from the fridge and held it as I coaxed it to ripen and sliced it, tossing the pieces in a bowl to eat as I got ready. The sun was going down, so I flipped the light on in the bedroom and set the apple slices down as I went into the bathroom to start a hot shower.

  A chill ran down my back as I leaned over the tub to start the water. My knife was still on the kitchen counter. The gun Orson made me buy when I started working for him was in a box in the top of the closet, never opened.

  Fuck. I started the shower like there was nothing wrong, after all, at best, the one to witness me overreacting was myself. I felt the build of magic, and I hit the floor, just before a blast seared my shoulder as it blew a hole in my shower curtain and the tile wall behind it. I glanced back, but whoever was in my bedroom had turned out the light, forcing me to stare into a black abyss darker than it should have been at sunset.

  The only weapon I had was the bamboo loofah scrubber I used for my back. I rolled and launched it through the doorway like a javelin and aimed my magic at the sound of a hand slapping it away. I followed the scrubber and landed a solid kick to their midsection, which was higher than my waist, but couldn’t get a better idea of their size before they danced away again.

  I began building for a storm spell, reaching for energy I seldom used, and urged the plants in the bedroom to grow. I missed with my vines, but my attacker landed hard behind the bed when they jumped away.

  He cursed, his voice muffled by the mask that covered his mouth, but I was sure I’d heard him before.

  “Okay, big boy. You managed to sneak into a witch’s house. The big question is, how are you gonna get out, since I’m not asleep this time?” The greenery whispered like speech in the dark, and I smelled their panic like a sweet perfume. The Fae side was taking over, like it had when I was young, instinctive magic winning over the careful control of my Wiccan training.

  He ducked out of the bedroom into the living area, and I bolted after him, electrical energy shooting after him as he leaped over the couch. I winced as the smell of burnt leather filled my nose. “Fucker,” I hissed, and rolled to catch him, but he fired back at me again, sending me skidding back behind the counter. I felt around on the counter top for my athame, the wooden handle sliding into my palm like it was magnetic.

  He hissed in the darkness and I lashed out with the energy I’d been building, flashing electrical energy like lightning inside. I saw a silver glow across the room, and knew it was my own eyes glowing back at me in the mirror. The gift of nature filled me up until my body couldn’t hold it anymore and power leaked out of me, crackling through the room. It was enough to override whatever spell had been cast, and the lights came back on.

  We were facing each other, me with my knife in hand, eyes glowing with Fae magic. I feinted to my right and he countered, letting my vines creep up behind him. I clenched my left hand and they sprang at him but sizzled and burned away before they could touch him.

  “Who are you?” I growled. He was covered head to toe in black, like a human thief who’d watched too many spy movies. I felt magic emanating from him, and under the black cloth, it looked almost like snakes shifted and writhed on his arms and torso. “Who are you?” I shouted, forgetting the humans living all around me as I wracked my brain for a spell to bring him down.

  He threw something at me and I dove under my dining room table as a flash bang went off where I’d just been standing. The smell of burnt furniture and the pain in my shoulder combined with the rage of another violation of my home pushed my control to the very brink.

  “However you managed to get in here,” my voice was gravely and low from the pain and the sheer power straining against my hold, “get the fuck out, or die." Unable to hold on any longer, I released the raw magic into the room, enough to kill any human in its path, or gravely injure a witch.

  As the power spread through the room, shadows lengthened and swallowed him whole, devoured him like a black hole. Fuck me to Avalon… Warlock magic. Dark and slippery, just like the men who renounced their vows to the Wiccan Laws in exchange for the power they hoarded or shared with humans in exchange for pieces of their souls.

  Could Portia have lost her mind so fully she would give a warlock access to her sister’s only daughter?

  Fourteen<
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  Shower forgotten, I lit a smudge and cleansed the entire apartment, and washed the windows, walls, and door clearing all magical wards of protection. There was only one kind of magic I knew would protect from the invasion of a power as corrupted as a warlock. Cursing loudly to myself, I split my arm from wrist to elbow and let my blood spill into my chalice, praying I got enough before it healed. I didn’t want to have to reopen my arm a second time.

  The regular wards wouldn’t do either, so I double checked my memory to the one restricted book I’d managed to rescue from the coven vaults for my mother’s spells. She had been one hell of a witch, and her notes were the only way I’d gotten to know her growing up. It lasted until Portia caught me practicing a stone skin spell after a particularly brutal beating I took from my cousin and her friends.

  I drew the sigils exactly as my mother had laid them out in her book, a symbol for protection, a symbol for purity, the symbol for infinity, and the knotted heart of unbreakable love. I sealed it with the incantation written in the margins in her graceful script and prayed to Dana to keep the magic of my mother safe inside the walls of my home.

  Belatedly, it occurred to me I should’ve called the lawyer Orson had gotten for me, but his magic was as different from the guy who had attacked me as it was from my own. Warlocks were like witches, in that as much as their magic was a corruption of my upbringing, they could be decent people, or really, deeply terrible, and the magic showed what was inside, eventually.

  I turned my attention to getting ready as quickly as possible. I needed to talk to Grayson about my suspicions.

  The dress was too gorgeous laid out on my old, second hand quilt. It made me feel like an imposter as I used an incantation to lace up my own corset and slip the gown over my head and smooth it down my body.