Pride Before the Fall

by Kaye Draper

  "How do we fix this?" Con said, going to slide the leftovers into the fridge as if my wanting to kill one of my mates was commonplace. Which—okay, with Oisin, that was true. I huffed but didn't move out of the little terror's space.

  "If your father can sense her magic, he'll be looking for her now, won’t he?" Con continued.

  I glared down at Oisin. If that fucker was looking for his daughter and she was here, she was going to lead him right to Oisin. "Fae?"

  He must have heard the pending panic in my voice, because his staying hand left my chest and he caressed my cheek instead. "Calm down, love."

  I took a deep breath. "Like hell. What do we do? Oisin, this isn't a fucking game. How do we fix her magic and keep the fucker from finding you?"

  The beautiful fae brushed his fiery hair out of his face and sighed. "The wards will hide us for a while longer. But he probably felt her before she got here, while she was traveling." He held up that hand again, commanding me to stand down. "He already knew where I was anyway, remember? White's protection will be good enough for now. But we need to get Evalyn out of here. The lure of both of us together will goad our sire to take rash action, even if he starts a clan war."

  I stepped back and tried to calm down. Jesus, Buddha and Odin, what was wrong with me. I was acting like a newly fledged alpha. But only asinine male shifters could be alphas.

  Mother fucker, why did I feel so out of control lately?

  Oisin didn't notice my new panic, probably because he was having a crisis of his own. Or because he already knew everything, like the asshole he was.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he looked haunted. "We need a mage to rework the spell."

  "The one from before?" Hisashi asked, somehow managing to keep the jealous rage to a minimum.

  Oisin laughed bitterly. "Not possible." His green eyes met mine. "I killed him the moment the spell was complete."

  Chapter 13

  So, family reunions were fun.

  I hoped I never had to participate in another one for as long as I lived. Between my family and Oisin's I was ready to move to the North Pole and live in an igloo just to avoid people in general.

  Instead, I sat in a molded plastic chair that was too small for my ass and tried to school my features into something cordial and nice while I waited for Oswald to hurry the fuck up and bring me a mage.

  Oisin paced around the entire conference room about three times before he took up his current station at the window overlooking the back alley. Even carrying all this weight on his shoulders, he was beautiful, poised and comfortable in his skin. The watery light from the chilly fall day lit up his profile so he looked like he was glowing with some sort of cold light.

  And the angry hum of magic in the air didn't hurt that frosty image any either.

  We all needed a vacation. I smiled to myself at the thought of taking my entire pride on another trip. This time somewhere warm. They'd probably still cause some kind of catastrophe. Maybe I could find time to take them all for a run in the forest, at least. I needed to shift and work off some energy, before I murdered someone.

  The door opened at that moment, so I probably didn't look too bitchy. I kept the slight smile of anticipation plastered on my face, hoping it would negate my usual resting-murder-face.

  I stood as our liaison, Oswald, came into the room leading another man. Oswald played his part as a policeman perfectly. He was medium height and build, blue eyes, brown hair trimmed to regulation length. His uniform neatly pressed and clean. No one would guess he was a banshee.

  But the mage...I'd bumped into him once before when I was here to see Oswald and I thought at the time he looked like steampunk Vanhelsing.

  That hadn't changed.

  "Hi," I said, holding out a hand. "I'm Gesa. This is Oisin. Thanks for meeting with us."

  The guy was taller than Oisin—who wasn't taller than Oisin?—but shorter than me, his forehead barely coming up to my chin. He was wide and blocky, with a short beard, and dishwater blond hair in a short ponytail that looked like it had a hat smashed over it not too long ago. He wore a long leather duster over a t-shirt and leather pants. All in non-descript tones somewhere between black and brown. Leather gloves covered his hands up past the wrists.

  He didn't take my outstretched hand.

  "Mages don't shake," he told me in a gruff voice that sounded like he smoked a couple cartons of cheap cigarettes a day. "You tryin' to get your fool head blasted off?" The good 'ol boy accent was just icing on the what-the-fuck cake.

  I gaped at him as he walked past me and slouched into a chair at the table, taking a moment to adjust his heavy belt full of charms and potions and Gods knew what all before he sat.

  Oisin turned from the window to observe him. "Forgive our gryphon," he said mildly, green eyes narrowed. "She isn't used to working with your kind."

  I rolled my eyes at how insulting he managed to make that sound. Sure, butter him up for us Oisin.

  Oswald shook his head. "You guys have fun. I have actual work to do." He closed the door behind him as he left. The coward.

  I heaved a sigh. "Okay, I'm not sure how much Oswald told you, but I do some work for the authorities here. I need some help, so Oswald was kind enough to get me a meeting with you. I hear you do some consultant work too, in addition to helping out here?"

  He stared at me. At least, I think he did. He was still wearing those weird-ass steampunk goggle things over his eyes. One lens was tinted a reflective purple. The other completely black. I fucking hated it when I couldn't look someone in the eye.

  "I have to run anything I do past my boss first," he drawled.

  Oisin paced over to stand behind my chair, his hands gripping the back of it. "Mages aren't free agents, Gesa. They all belong to someone. Usually the guild."

  I didn't like his tone of voice. He was speaking in that low tone that told me he'd rather be stabbing someone right now. But we needed this guy's help, so the fae princeling needed to calm the fuck down.

  "Thanks. Right," I muttered. I really didn't have too much interaction with other supe races until I came to New Paradise, and even then, it had pretty much been shifters or low-level mischief makers. Not heavy magic users. I had no idea how they operated. Oisin and Hisashi were schooling me daily. There were all these weird rules and complications and shit.

  I was glad I was a simple shifter. Punch things. Change shape and bite or scratch things. Problem solved.

  The mage heaved a sigh and leaned his elbows on the table, head tilted my way. Probably looking at me. I think. "What do you want, girlie? I've got work to do."

  Girlie? I took a deep breath. Do not kill the asshole we need to fix Oisin's sister and bolster our wards.

  Oisin slid into the chair beside me. "We require your assistance to rework a spell that has recently come unbound. It will require making a soul stone and connecting it to my aura." His voice was cordial, but Oisin's entire body was ramrod straight. Asking a mage to help him with saving his sister's life was a bitter pill for him to swallow. Let alone allowing another magic user to muck around in his aura.

  "We also need your help destroying an old soul stone and restoring its essence to the owner. The two things aren't related," I added. We had to get Kaimana's problem solved so she could be free. Even if it did make me sad to think of her leaving and returning to her ocean.

  The mage sat up, his posture shifting from simply irritated to pissed. "I don't do soul binding. Take that shit somewhere else."

  As he stood, Oisin shot back, "Because you can't? Or won't? I've yet to meet a mage incapable of ruining people's lives. For the right price."

  The mage headed for the door, but I blocked his way, hands up, pleading. "I'm sorry about the asshole fae. Look, he has a bad beef with mages. Long story. I know this sounds bad, so please let me explain." I glared over the guy's shoulder at Oisin. "And you stop being a suspicious fucknugget, will you? We need his help."

  I turned back to t
he mage, who had his thick leather-clad arms crossed over his chest, probably glaring up at me, though again, who knows. He could have been winking at me for all I knew.

  "The bond we need broken is for a sea-dweller who was being held captive by some old coot in town. We rescued her, and she just needs the damned soul stone thingy broken so she can have the rest of her magic and essence back—it took her voice." I shrugged, feeling so inadequate at explaining this. "And the new soul stone isn't to hurt anyone. It's to protect his sister so their psychopathic father can't find her and suck her soul out of her body to juice himself up with fucking mega fae power and rule the world with his evil or some shit."

  Oisin snorted.

  The mage probably rolled his eyes. I don't know.

  Finally, he shook his head and muttered something about not getting paid enough to deal with this shit. "Look, lady. I'm not promising you anything. I've got other work to do, and you two sound like you're off your fucking nut. I might be willing to destroy the soul stone, since that's just common sense. But I am not enslaving anyone."

  He made to brush past me, and I grabbed his upper arm. "Please. I'm not kidding. This is serious. Maybe if you met the women you'd be helping, you'd see they want this. No one is forcing them into anything. They're our fucking family, damn it."

  He grunted. "Family don't mean shit, cupcake." He wrenched his arm away from me, but he did call back over his shoulder as he left. "I'll ask the boss what he wants me to do. Probably just the stone destruction, though. Oh...and next time, put your pet deer on a leash. Maybe muzzle it, too."

  The door banged against the wall as he flung it open and left in a haze of leather and smoky herbs.

  Oisin started swearing in Gaelic.

  "How did he know you can shift into a stag?" I asked, steering the irate redhead out of the building before he could explode.

  Oisin's mouth twisted into a feral snarl. "His fucking eyes, most likely."

  I followed him down the steps and onto the frosty sidewalk. "What are you talking about? Those goggle things?"

  Oisin twined a purple scarf around his milky white throat and huddled further into his designer wool jacket. The crisp air was threatening snow. "Mages don't have as much innate magic as fae do. But they can take magic from other sources." He scoffed. "Basically, they're walking receptacles."

  "And..." I prompted. My fae was as livid as I had ever seen him. And lately he was pissed a lot.

  "They take magic from the environment around them. Even from others, Gesa. Some of the powerful mages take body parts from other supes and meld them into their own bodies to harness the magic. Money says the eyes under those goggles aren't his original model."

  I gagged. "Fucking seriously?"

  He nodded and kept walking. "Fucking seriously. And you wonder why I loathe mages."

  As if the whole soul-stealing-for-his-father thing wasn't enough reason. I shuddered. "Maybe it's a good thing he won't help us. There's got to be another way to figure this out."

  Oisin sighed, turning to stop me just outside our bookstore. "There isn't. We need a mage. But I'll probably murder this one when he's done, just like I did before. And I won't pretend I don't enjoy every minute of it."

  Chapter 14

  Evalyn's sunny energy was muted after we told her about our meeting with the mage.

  "He might still come around," Oisin said with forced calm. I could tell he was lying. He didn't believe that horse shit for one minute. But it did get Evalyn to stop moping.

  "I need to get out of this fucking apartment and shift," I announced to my dejected housemates. "And you are all coming with me." Before Oisin killed something or Hisashi started producing magic alcohol from thin air.

  Oisin arched a red brow at me. "I do so love when you get all bossy, gryphon. Shall I get my riding crop?"

  I shoved him and turned to Con. "You too, human." His bruises were fading, but he was still a little stiff. "It'll work out your kinks."

  I felt Oisin take a breath to comment on that obvious opening. "Shut up, fae."

  Hisashi laughed, his deep voice like a healing balm on my frayed nerves. "A run sounds amazing."

  Half an hour later, I was standing at the edge of the forest between the Porcupine Mountains and Lake Superior. Thank all the Gods, we'd left Oisin's perfect as fuck sister back home, safely warded and talking to his plants like they were real live people.

  I drew in a deep breath, my lungs filled with the scent of pine and earth, and the barest hint of fresh, cold water. Con drew up beside me, bundled in a wind-proof jacket and light gloves, carrying an oversized backpack that was half-full of food and drinks. And a towel. I had told Kaimana about the water, and she insisted she didn't care that it was forty-five degrees outside, she wanted to swim in something larger than a bathtub. To each their own.

  Oisin trailed a hand over the low-hanging branches of a nearby hemlock tree. "I thought we were here to shift," he commented with a smirk. "Why are you still wearing clothes, beautiful beast?"

  I rolled my eyes at him and started stripping, while Oisin merely shimmered and became a magnificent stag. Fae who had animal forms didn't shift the same way a normal shifter did. My shift was a transformation of my body. His was a transformation of his magical essence—somewhere between a physical shift and an illusion, a melding of everything he was with nature. Which meant he could keep his damned clothes.

  Hisashi, Kai, and I on the other hand would destroy anything we were wearing when we shifted. I handed my clothes to Con, who stuffed them in the backpack. Calling to my beast, I took a deep breath and let the change wash over me, reordering my large human-shaped body into an even larger mythical beast. My lion body and eagle head stretched to about eight feet long. I shook out my wings, flapping them once before settling them against my body.

  "I will never get tired of seeing that," Con sad with wonder. "You're amazing, Gesa."

  Kaimana, perched on a nearby fallen log, clapped her hands and smiled in agreement. She was still fully clothed, since she wasn't going to shift out of water.

  I turned to Hisashi. He had shucked his shirt and pants and tucked them into the bag Con held. I was impatient, ready to run and fly, feel the earth beneath my paws and the wind through my feathers. But Hisashi was moving like a snail, standing there in a pair of tight red boxer-briefs with a big hand over his impressive package.

  "Go on ahead," he said with a laugh. "I'll catch up."

  I pawed the ground and clacked my beak. Oisin's stag shook it's massive, twisted rack of antlers and pranced a few steps closer to nudge at Hisashi's bare chest with his soft nose, his long, shiny red pelt rippling with his movements.

  Hisashi laughed and pushed the deer away. "Stop it. That tickles." He shoved on an antler. "Go away."

  He cast pleading blue eyes my way and I noticed a bit of pink darkening his high cheekbones. "I'd rather...shift in private. Please."

  I huffed. We'd all seen him in his underwear on multiple occasions. But removing that thin scrap of fabric was a problem. What kind of shifter was self-conscious about his body? Especially when he looked like Hisashi?

  But if it made him happy, I'd humor him. I shoulder-checked Oisin, shoving the stag aside as I trotted along a hiking trail that led deeper into the woods, toward the water. Oisin followed. A few seconds later, a pure white fox the size of a large German Shepherd shot past us, nine fluffy tails whipping behind him.

  Oisin gave chase, shouldering the fox to the side and tussling with him in the underbrush. Hisashi's slender legs and delicate paws flashed as he darted between spaces in the trees where Oisin's massive rack of horns wouldn't fit.

  I dropped back as they goofed off, enjoying the pure thrill of being in nature. Glancing over my shoulder I saw that Con was making his way down the trail with ease, his muscles seeming to loosen up as he went. He was talking to Kaimana, waving his hands animatedly as she laughed at something he said. They were beautiful against the backdrop of shedding fall leaves.

  Ov
erwhelming love for my family—my pride—flowed over me and for a while I forgot all our problems.

  Kaimana and Con joined me, and the octopus stroked my feathers and fur in delight. Slender fingers explored my wing and I held it out for her, purring at the attention. My gryphon form was pretty damned awesome.

  Con laughed at her enthusiasm. "You should take her for a ride, Gesa." He turned to Kai. "It's amazing. Terrifying. But amazing."

  Kai threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him before turning to me, hands clasped and bouncing on the tips of her toes. I watched her jiggle for a second before I shook myself and bowed down to let her climb on my back, her legs draped on either side of my wings and her arms wrapped around my neck in a choke-hold.

  I shot Con a look, wondering if he would be okay on his own. But the human was grinning at the new view of Kaimana's jeans-clad ass. So, I figured he'd live. I trotted to a clearing and launched into the sky, wings pumping hard to get us in the air. Kaimana was heavy. Like, way heavier than she should be, even with all those pretty curves.

  I flew toward the water, while she vibrated with what probably would have been screams of delight if she had a voice. We landed a little hard on the rocky shore and she tumbled off, falling on her ass. Her dark blue eyes were sparkling, and her black hair was a wild wind-whipped tangle. She was beautiful. I needed to get her voice back so I could hear her laugh.

  I sat on a relatively flat rock and watched as she peeled off her shoes and dipped a toe in the water. She nodded happily, then started tearing off her clothes like she couldn't wait one minute longer to get in the water. I'm not gonna lie. I watched. She was fucking gorgeous. Nothing like me, with my excessive height and mannish muscle. She was all willowy limbs and round curves, huge breasts, full hips, smooth olive skin. I wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to make love to a woman. This woman.

  But I was not going to take advantage of her when she was dependent on us for food and shelter. When she couldn't even open her mouth and tell me what she wanted. I lay down and put my head on my forelegs with a huff. My thoughts were so unfiltered when I was a beast. It seemed so simple. So what if I wanted to fuck every one of my house mates? No big deal, according to the gryphon.