The Lillim Callina Chronicles: Volumes 1-3

by J. A. Cipriano

  The moment I stepped across the literal line in the sand, it was like walking into a brick wall of heat. Sticky sweat exploded across my body as my breath whooshed out of me. I took another step, but it was nearly impossible since it felt like someone had wrapped me in one of those warm towels you find in steam rooms.

  “Maybe… that wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” I squawked through the choking dryness of my lips. I wasn’t quite sure how, but it felt like someone stuffed my mouth with cotton. “I’m pretty sure I read something about that somewhere…”

  Beside me Kishi was on her knees. Horror flashed through her eyes as she glanced from me to the hem of her sweatshirt. Then, in one quick movement, she tore it off. There was a dull throbbing in the air, like the buzz of an insect that died away as her clothing hit the sand.

  “Well,” she hissed, kicking off her shoes, “I certainly feel much better.”

  “I don’t think it would be unreasonable to suggest that we maybe leave this part out of our report at the end,” I muttered a few minutes later. The absolute last thing I needed was some pervy clerk imagining this particular scenario.

  “Why? The whole purpose of those reports is to better prepare future Dioscuri for the perils they might face. We aren’t supposed to leave anything out.” She wore a look of resolution on her face that threw me for a loop. Especially since it was coming from a girl who, for all practical purposes, was walking through a desert in her bra and panties.

  “Because I don’t really want to write about how we stripped down to our underwear so the sweltering heat of the Summer Court didn’t kill us.” I said, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “I don’t particularly care to have future generations reading about it.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone about your granny panties.” She raised an eyebrow, and I barely resisted the urge to throttle her. I mean not all of us could be clad in black lace undergarments that really brought out the whiteness of our skin.

  No, it was absolutely perfect that Kishi was wearing the prettiest things I’ve ever seen, and they made her look absolutely radiant, while I was walking along in granny panties and a bra so old, it was actually fraying at the edges. This was exactly what I hoped for deep down. Not.

  “Besides,” Kishi continued, “the moment I took off my clothes I felt worlds better. I bet it has to do with some magical enchantment.”

  I stared at her mouth agape. That was actually completely plausible. I just wasn’t sure why. What would be the purpose to making us strip down to our underwear? If we’d have been wearing body armor, it’d have made more sense, but then again, maybe the spell that had forced us to strip wasn’t able to discern what we were wearing?

  Part of me hoped that wasn’t the case. If it was, well, that meant the fairies wanted us lacking body armor. There was no way that could be good.

  The ease with which Kishi sauntered through the blazing desert in her near-nakedness shocked me. I, on the other hand, was not thrilled and could barely keep my mind on what we were doing. Every sound made me reach to cover myself so that someone wouldn’t see.

  Which was ridiculous. Anyone looking at us would instantly tune me out and focus on Kishi. Vibrant tattoos ran up the length of her body depicting fantastic battles with dragons and monsters so masterfully that they could have been displayed on the walls of a museum. It accented her skin in such a way that she damn near bristled with beauty.

  I, however, felt sticky and grimy, and was pretty sure I already had sand in places I’d rather sand not be. Still, I did feel better not wearing clothes in that I could breathe without gasping.

  We had shoved all of our belongings into my spirit pouch. Well, almost everything. I was still wearing the twin blades of Shirajirashii slung low on my hips. Part of me was embarrassed because I felt like some kind of anime girl dressed up for fan service, while the rest of me was glad for Kishi. I would never have confidence like that, so it was almost awe-inspiring to see how she carried herself.

  “The only thing that really bugs me is that there are vultures overhead, and we’ve been walking for at least an hour. I can’t see anything but sand and bleached bones,” Kishi said, anxiety etched on her face.

  “Yeah, well every journey begins with a single step,” I said with a shake of my head. “Besides, all adventures can’t be gumdrops and candy canes.”

  “It could have been in the other Court. Maybe I chose wrong?” she asked with a glance overhead at the vultures. Their numbers were clearly increasing, but I tried not to focus on it.

  “Maybe we’d be stripped nude in a blizzard?” I smiled at her and put on my best confident face. “That’s not my idea of a good time.”

  Kishi turned bright red at my comment and looked away from me like she’d actually had that happen before. “Being naked in a snowstorm isn’t really that bad. You use body heat to keep warm.”

  “Uh, huh,” I said, trying my best to keep my thoughts away from what she said and not respond. Really, I did, but the silence between us was becoming so thick, I could have cut it with a knife.

  “If that happens,” I said after a moment that felt so long, it must have been two eternities, “we leave that out of the report too.”

  “Agreed.”

  The scenery changed so abruptly, I wouldn’t have noticed it if the change wasn’t so drastic. One moment we were trudging through the desert with the sun beating down on us. The next we found ourselves in the midst of a musky swamp.

  Why we were suddenly in a swamp, I wasn’t quite sure, but I was quite ready for a change. The air was now so heavy with moisture, it was like being swathed in a thick wet blanket. Beside me, Kishi coughed and swatted at a cloud of things buzzing in the air next to her. They swarmed around her body, landing on her skin mere seconds after she batted them away again. I was suddenly thankful that even though the air throbbed with the sounds of insects and birds, the majority of the indigenous insect life made a beeline for Kishi. Yes, that made me feel a bit guilty.

  I know it wasn’t exactly right of me to be glad for her discomfort, but I was glad she didn’t have those Cinderella powers that would make mosquitos attack me instead. Small victories.

  “Goddammit!” she squealed and slapped her hand against the back of her neck. When she pulled it away, a thin line of sticky green goop clung to her hands. I turned away so I wouldn’t be physically sick and was greeted with the flitting wings of effervescent bugs as they buzzed back and forth between the pink-purple petals of flowers that dotted the jungle floor.

  It was a welcome change from the endless sands of the desert since that scenery was mostly dotted with buzzards and the pale bones of creatures less fortunate than us. The jungle by contrast was beautiful.

  “It’s certainly pretty,” I mumbled as I bent down to examine some kind of fruit. Thick yellow sap oozed from its flesh, and it gave off a sickly-sweet scent that was a cross between honey and rotting meat.

  “Don’t touch that!” Kishi screamed and lunged toward me. I yanked my hand back as I spun toward her. She took another step and slipped in the mud. Her feet flew out from under her in a spray that covered me in reddish-brown slime.

  I wiped the goop from my eyes and tried to glare at Kishi, only I couldn’t find her. There was nothing but a large bubble where she had been standing. My heart hammered in my chest as I raced toward the spot. Where had she gone? The last thing I needed was to lose her this early on in the adventure.

  “Kishi!” I called frantically. I was nearly there when one of her hands burst from the surface of the mud. I leapt for her hand and gripped it by the wrist.

  I yanked backward. It was like trying to pull a particularly stubborn fish from the depths of the ocean. I closed my eyes and braced my feet against the ground and pulled. My muscles bulged and strained as, very slowly, Kishi’s arm came out of the muck.

  The air around me was suddenly dense and syrupy. I swallowed, and it didn’t help. That’s when I remembered something I should never have forgotten. I
knew magic. I tried to focus on my power, but even as I did, Kishi started to slip back down into the mud.

  “No!” I shouted and for a brief second my power flared. It flowed out of me like a wave crashing down on a beach, and just like that, I was falling backward with Kishi’s muddy body on top of me.

  She started to flail, covering my flesh in mud. “You saved me,” she gasped between great gulps of air.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said, trying to push her muddy body off of mine, but my hands just slipped away from her skin. “No… seriously. Don’t mention that we basically mud wrestled in a sticky jungle in our underwear.”

  Kishi glanced down at our intertwined bodies and a tremor ran through her form. She started squirming around like an eel on top of me. I’m assuming she was trying to get off of me, but all she managed to do was entangle our bodies further. Mud squelched between our flesh as I finally managed to roll us over so I was on top. Yep, there was no way any part of this adventure was going in the report.

  “Stop squirming,” Kishi snapped, glaring at me. “You’re just making this more difficult. If you just stop struggling—”

  “Is that what she said?” The voice that cut off Kishi mid-sentence cut through me like a dull knife. I froze. Someone had seen us, no, was watching us, roll around in the mud like some teenage fantasy? My heart began to thud in my chest, and my cheeks turned bright red.

  Very slowly, I glanced over my shoulder, and I’m fairly certain my eyes got as big as saucers. Standing there was a blue man no bigger than a marmot, which is to say not very big. He was blue from head to toe, with blue pants and a blue hat.

  Something shoved against my abdomen hard, and I tumbled head over heels. Kishi stood and brushed herself off, which did little more than smear mud around on her otherwise flawless skin. Maybe I had really needed to stop squirming in order for her to get free? Or maybe she was just more proficient when someone else pinned her down?

  She glanced back at me with a mischievous glint in her eye before turning back to the blue elf. “We come in peace,” she said extending her muddy palm toward it.

  He glanced curiously at her hand, his large blue nose sniffing at the air like a rodent. Very carefully, he shook his head once and scampered back over the log he had been sitting on. Kishi dashed after him without a care that she was virtually naked and mud-covered. Also, there was that whole chasing a strange indigenous creature through an enchanted forest thing too.

  That was exactly how grim fairy tales began.

  3

  “I can’t believe we lost him,” Kishi said for perhaps the fifteenth time.

  “I can’t believe you think you’d be able to catch him. I’ve tried to catch rabbits before and those don’t live in enchanted forests. Let me tell you, rabbits are damned hard to catch,” I responded, frustration leaking into my voice. Thanks to her little trek through the jungle, we were now hopelessly lost.

  “Why would you chase rabbits?” Kishi asked, glancing at me and raising an eyebrow.

  “Mom made me do it.” I sighed and shook my head to dismiss the memory of me chasing field bunnies through werewolf country. To be fair, it’d been one of her less extreme training methods, but I didn’t really like to think about any of them. If I did, memories of the more horrible sessions would start to creep into my brain, and since I was trying to desperately keep the rising fear at being lost in fairy squelched down, now seemed a particularly bad time to dwell on the horror of my childhood.

  We had been walking for what I think was an hour, but for all I knew it was much longer. Now, we were coming to some kind of village. Huts made almost entirely out of branches latticed together with fungus filled my view. It was as though someone made a frame out of sticks, and actually grew some kind of bright purple moss to fill in the gaps.

  “Well, if those creatures do live here, at least we know his house isn’t blue with a blue little window.” I smirked at Kishi who looked at me as though I was the dumbest person on the planet.

  “Doesn’t seem like anyone’s here,” she said, evidently choosing to ignore my reference. “Though since we’re on the edge of a lake, this is the perfect place for a village. Maybe it got all fished out or something, and it was abandoned.”

  “You don’t know it’s abandoned. It could be filled with blue elves,” I said, waving my hand toward the village.

  “Why do they have to be blue? They could be green elves,” Kishi said with a sidelong glance at me.

  “Actually, they couldn’t. Those went extinct about fifteen years ago. It was in that report…” I paused, trying to think of the name.

  Kishi stared at me, eyes wide and mouth agape. “Did you, Lillim ‘I’ve never even opened a book’ Callina, just shut me down with lore?”

  Heat spread across my cheeks, and I turned away from her, trying to hide my face. Truth be told, I hadn’t been much for studying. That was true. However, since a dragon decided to huff and puff and blow my apartment down, I’d taken to studying. I was done being caught off guard because I didn’t read a mission briefing or a tactical report. Still, it wasn’t something I went around advertising because well, I have an image to keep up.

  “Anyway. I just don’t think blue elves the size of a thimble are going to live in houses built for people our size. That doesn’t seem logical,” Kishi said as she gestured at the village again. “Besides, there’s no one here. I haven’t seen one person, not even one speck of movement.”

  That was true. I hadn’t seen anyone either. I was hoping it was just because we were too far away from the place to really see what was going on.

  “Maybe they’re just hiding because we’re big and scary. Or there’s a meeting. The Fae love meetings,” I said, though my heart wasn’t really in it.

  “You can’t even say that without a look of total dejection. We both know there’s probably some creepy monster that lives in the middle of town. It probably ate everyone.”

  “Nah,” I said and shrugged. “If I was it, I’d be in the lake. Why don’t you go down there and scout around?”

  “So you want me to go down to the lake by myself and splash around in the water in my underwear looking for some kind of imaginary monster while you… what?” Kishi’s eyes narrowed, and she placed one hand on her hip.

  I smiled as big as I could. “I’m going to the center of town because we both ‘know there’s some creepy monster that lives in the middle of town,’ don’t we?”

  Kishi’s lips tightened into a thin smile as she turned and stormed down to the water’s edge. She bent down and touched the water with one long, graceful finger.

  “It’s warm,” she said before pulling a small blue pill from god knows where and popping it in her mouth. Unconsciously, she touched her cheeks, tracing her fingers along the gills that magically manifested on her flesh. A moment later, she dove into the water.

  The gill pill would allow her to breathe underwater for a half-hour at a time, which was more than enough time to scout out the perimeter of the lake.

  “I guess I’ll make myself useful then,” I said to no one in particular and began walking into huts. Every single one was pretty much the same. They were all composed of single rooms that were so small they reminded me of prison cells. There was little furniture to be found: one small, crudely-made chair and table, one bed that made my cot back in the barracks look luxurious, and one soup pot. I didn’t even see spoons, knives, or forks, let alone napkin holders.

  I ran my finger over the last table, and it came away black with dust. Kishi was right, there was no one here. Not only was no one here, but no one had been here for a long time.

  I sighed and sat down on the tiny wooden chair to wait for Kishi and drummed my fingers along the table’s surface. That’s when I heard it. A soft tap, tap, tapping in the distance. I turned my head toward the sound and concentrated.

  Tap. Tap. Tap, tap, tap.

  My fingers stopped drumming on the table and still I heard the same tapping. I vaulted to my feet sen
ding the tiny chair clattering to the floor and sprinted out the door. Once I was outside, the noise vanished.

  I took a step backward, halfway into the door frame.

  Sound.

  Step forward.

  Silence.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I grumbled.

  “Shh, I hear something.” Hisen Mattoc’s voice nearly made me leap out of my skin.

  I turned and glared at him, narrowing my eyes for effect. “Haven’t seen you in a while, how are things?”

  Mattoc was a ghost that was soulbound to me. Unfortunately, he didn’t like to show himself around other people, even Dioscuri, so most of the time I pretty much forgot he was there. It made the moments when he suddenly appeared… irksome.

  “What part of ‘shh’ don’t you understand?” Mattoc’s face was drawn into an unreadable mask as he waved one hand at me, urging me to be quiet. “Okay… take three steps to your left.”

  “What?” I asked even as I followed his directions. Evidently, Mattoc was onto something, and I didn’t really know what that something was. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Yes,” he said and made a hurry up gesture with his hands. “We don’t have a lot of time until Kishi comes back. You need to find them before she returns, or I won’t be able to help you anymore.”

  “You know you don’t have to hide when people are around. Besides, I doubt Kishi will mind,” I said, taking the last step and finding myself standing under a huge oak tree I hadn’t noticed before. It stood at least a couple hundred feet tall with gnarled, leafless branches that stretched out from here till eternity. Roots jutted up out of the soft earth around my feet, and I nudged one with my toe. It didn’t move, not even a little.

  I glanced back toward the village and couldn’t see it anymore. A shiver slithered down my spine. I could see nothing but trees with leaves like rainbows crowded around me.

  “This isn’t good,” I said, unable to keep the tremor out of my voice.

  “Nope, nope.” I whirled around and found myself face to face with the tiny blue elf Kishi had chased earlier. “You shouldn’t follow Boppy,” he added. “That was bad. Very, very bad!”