He blinked, and turned slowly in place until he was facing the kitchen’s other occupant. “Okay. So, I get that I’m human and you’re Fae, and we still have a fairly significant cultural disconnect going on. But... why did you just drop a dead opossum on the counter where I’m trying to do meal prep?”
Albigard of the Unseelie wore an irritated expression not dissimilar to the unfortunate animal’s—right down to the curled lip baring sharp canines. The sneer didn’t quite succeed in covering the gaunt cast to the Fae’s features, though—or the haunted look in his forest-green eyes.
“You complained of the lack of meat for your meal. I acquired meat.” This, delivered in the impatient, you-are-obviously-an-idiot tone that Len had come to expect from the man in their relatively short, albeit eventful, acquaintance.
Len turned his attention back to the unlucky opossum. It had been pierced through the ribs by what looked like a short arrow, complete with fletching made of bird feathers.
“All I said was that there were a limited number of things I could make using only carrots and potatoes,” Len replied slowly. “Also, that was, like, fifteen minutes ago. You seriously went hunting in your back yard in Chicago and killed an opossum in fifteen minutes flat?”
Albigard was still looking at Len as if he were mentally deficient. “The creatures are plentiful in this area. They are also slow. Easy targets with a crossbow. Do you want the meat or not?”
Len pondered that question, mentally assessing the likelihood that the thing was harboring one or more dangerous zoonotic diseases. He then weighed the odds of succumbing to foodborne illness given that the Wild Hunt—a rampaging Fae archetype of death—was currently stalking them across dimensions. After a moment, he shrugged.
“Sure, why the hell not? I’ve never butchered one before, though—much less cooked one. You’ll have to give me some pointers.”
Some of the Fae’s bristling defensiveness drained away, as though he’d been prepared for Len to throw the opossum right back in his face—metaphorically, if not literally. Len rummaged in a drawer for a reasonably sharp boning knife. He handed it over, trailing after his companion as Albigard took the animal to the heavy butcher-block table and laid it out on the wooden surface. He removed the crossbow bolt from its body with a sharp tug. Len could see that it had already been bled via a neat slice across its throat.
“I thought you said you were trained in the culinary arts,” the Fae muttered. He began skinning the opossum efficiently as he spoke.
Len shot him an exasperated look. “I can break down a side of pork or beef into steaks and roasts. I once plucked and processed a fresh chicken on a dare, though the end result wasn’t what you’d call pretty. I worked at restaurants, Albigard. We didn’t serve roadkill.”
“I did not kill this animal near the road. Here—observe the musk glands. They must be removed before cooking.”
Len took a moment to remind himself forcefully that there was nothing charming about being given a dead opossum as a peace offering. Any softening of emotion he might be experiencing toward the Fae at this particular moment was a side effect of both of them having been put through the goddamned wringer over the past few weeks. That was all.
Two of their friends were dead, unless someone could miraculously come up with a way for a demon to retrieve their souls from the void and return them to their bodies. In other news, it was quite possible that the Earth was poised to once more play the role of battleground in a vicious war between Hell and the Fae realm of Dhuinne. Assuming, of course, that the Wild Hunt didn’t manage to burrow through another weak spot in the veil separating the worlds and lay waste to humanity in a cataclysmic orgy of death in the meantime.
So... no. Whatever bizarre emotional reaction Len felt in response to having a dead wild animal presented to him because he’d complained about limited dinner options was merely due to stress and grief.
He watched closely anyway as Albigard dressed the carcass with deft movements. For one thing, it was interesting. And for another, at this point in his life, Len couldn’t totally rule out opossum butchery as being a useful survival skill to acquire.
Guts spilled onto the table. “The heart and liver are edible,” Albigard said, freeing both organs from the tangle of intestines. He cut a small green mass free of the liver—Len recognized it as a bile sac from his earlier misadventure in do-it-yourself chicken processing.
“Huh,” he said a few moments later, when the headless, stripped down carcass lay spread-eagled on the tabletop. “Once it’s skinned, it looks kind of like rabbit. Which I have, in fact, cooked before.”
“The meat is more like pork, in terms of preparation,” Albigard told him. “This specimen is young, so it should be reasonably tender.”
“Good to know, I guess,” Len said. He scooped up the meat and moved it back to the counter where he’d been working. “I’ll take it from here. Give me about an hour and a half. And... thanks.” He paused, before adding, “I think.”
The Fae shrugged his indifference and crossed to wash his hands in the sink, not looking at Len. “As I said, they are easy quarry.”
Somewhat to Len’s surprise, he didn’t leave immediately afterward. Instead, he took a seat at the rickety dining table that had recently played host to both supernatural strategy sessions and bitter arguments. Silence settled over the room, broken only by the rhythmic thunk-thunk-thunk of Len’s knife as he returned to his work.
The familiar dance of dicing and slicing and measuring and stirring settled Len’s nerves somewhat, but nothing could truly distract him from how screwed they were in the broader sense. The Wild Hunt was after Albigard, and if it caught up to him, he’d be every bit as dead as Rans and Zorah currently were. Deader, even, since there was no immortal demon waiting in the wings to possibly stick Albigard’s soul back into his body and resurrect him if he got eaten.
Not that Len was placing too much faith in getting his two vampire friends back, but Albigard seemed convinced it might be possible for Nigellus to return them to life under the right circumstances. Mind you, the right circumstances apparently involved trapping the Hunt in the Fae realm of Dhuinne and somehow weakening it enough for Nigellus to overpower it and pull the vampires’ souls back from the Void.
There were several problems with this plan. For one thing, Nigellus wasn’t welcome anywhere near Dhuinne, since demons were the sworn enemies of the Fae. For another, the Wild Hunt had so far kicked their asses from here to Sunday, and no one even knew where the blasted thing was right now. In other words, things didn’t look great at the moment. And so, Len was cooking possum stew over an ancient gas range in a magically warded safehouse in the outskirts of Chicago, while an unhappy Fae sulked silently at the dining room table.
The stew simmered on the stovetop, and the ancient clock on the wall ticked away, marking the passage of time as the large hand swept around its circumference. This was apparently Len’s life now. He had become the poster child for what happened when you didn’t run away from the monsters that lived under your bed. Instead, he’d made friends with the monsters—the less irritating ones, anyway—and now he was stuck with a front-row seat to the potential destruction of the human race.
But on the positive side, at least the stew was ready to eat.
He ladled it into two bowls and grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge to wash it down. After setting everything on the table, he pulled out the chair across from the Fae and sank into it, raising an eyebrow at his taciturn dining companion.
“You first,” he said, resting his elbows on the table and tangling his fingers together.
Albigard picked up his spoon and began to shovel the stew into his mouth, his attention clearly not on the food. Len watched him patiently for a few moments. When the Fae didn’t collapse choking and retching in disgust, he lifted his own spoon and poked at one of the chunks of meat. It did, in fact, resemble pork, and when he finally ate a bite, it was fairly inoffensive. A bit tough, maybe, despite Albig
ard’s assurances.
All in all, not bad—and almost certainly preferable to eating a bowl of plain carrots and potatoes.
He worked his way through the bowl steadily, following it with seconds because he seriously hadn’t eaten in what felt like forever. The food helped with his lightheadedness, but not with the ache caused by his various bruises... or the dull throbbing emptiness of fresh grief.
The Hunt had attacked them while they were trying to patch the weak spot in the veil, where it had repeatedly forced its way through and caused chaos in the human realm. If Albigard was to be believed, it had shied away from Len because he possessed latent necromancy. An aura of death supposedly surrounded him like some kind of invisible suit of Wild Hunt-proof armor.
Too bad none of them had figured out that part before a bunch of other people died. At the moment, Len was busy drowning in a toxic stew of guilt for not having been standing in front of Zorah and Rans when the Hunt lashed out at them. All it had taken was a single touch from one of its greasy, intangible tentacles to end both vampires’ lives in the blink of an eye.
He let his spoon clatter into the empty bowl. Albigard glanced up, the sound startling him back to awareness of his surroundings.
“We need allies,” Len said. “You must realize that, right? I mean... you’ve got a target painted on your back, and I still have only the barest understanding of what the hell’s going on. I don’t think we can rely on Nigellus under the circumstances, and the sidhe have already returned to Dhuinne.”
“I should travel to Dhuinne as well,” Albigard retorted, grim-faced.
Len sighed. “No, you really shouldn’t.”
“If my presence draws the Hunt back where it belongs, I am willing to face death,” said the Fae. “Perhaps then the demon could retrieve the vampires’ souls and revive them.”
”Your head is so far up your own ass I’m surprised you don’t shit eyeballs,” Len told him.
Albigard scowled. “I beg your pardon.”
Len sighed and rubbed at his face. “Stop and think for a minute. You and the others sealed the hole in the veil, right?”
“Yes,” Albigard allowed cautiously.
“But the sidhe went back to Dhuinne afterward and confirmed that the Hunt wasn’t there,” he continued. “Which implies...?”
The Fae’s expression closed off. “Which implies that the Hunt already has access to other passages between the worlds.”
“So the idea that you’re somehow going to trap it in the Fae realm is a fantasy,” Len finished. “You’d go there, and it would probably pop in just long enough to eat your soul before heading on its merry way again.”
Albigard’s jaw clenched.
“You know I’m right,” Len pressed.
Uneasy silence reigned for the space of several heartbeats. Then, “Perhaps so.”
Len nodded. “So, once again—we need allies. Who can we call?”
More silence.
“There is no one powerful enough to make a difference. No one who doesn’t already wish me dead.”
Len closed his eyes and took a slow breath. “Fine. Set the bar lower, in that case. What about Guthrie Leonides and Vonnie Morgan? You saved her kid’s life recently. I guarantee she doesn’t want you dead.”
“You’d be surprised,” Albigard retorted.
“Look. I can’t speak for the Fae,” Len said, “but human beings can be pissed off at you without literally wanting you to die. Trust me on this one, okay?”
The answering nod he received was grudging.
“Awesome.” Len considered logistics for a moment. His phone was on the charger in the guest bedroom upstairs. There was a small crack in one corner of the screen, which had presumably happened when he’d been thrown to the ground after the tear in the veil closed. “My phone may still work—I’m not sure. Can you tamp down the tech-killing Fae aura thing long enough for me to go and check?”
Albigard waved a hand in a vaguely affirmative gesture. Len rose and dumped their bowls and silverware in the sink to soak before sticking the leftover stew in the fridge for later. His bruised hip twinged as he jogged up the stairs and entered the bedroom he’d been using, flipping on the light by the doorway. He was caught momentarily by his reflection in the mirror as he crossed the room. His face held the same pale, haunted look as Albigard’s, but with the addition of dark under-eye circles and lank, blue-dyed hair falling over his forehead.
He shook himself free of his momentary distraction and powered on the phone. It started up and responded to his touch, though there was an ominous bloom of darkened pixels on the screen beneath the broken corner.
Vonnie had texted him about a week ago. He hadn’t felt emotionally able to respond to her at the time, since his relationship with his former co-worker was on the rocks these days. Still, at least it meant that he had her current cell number. He pulled up the secure SemaFour messaging app and hesitated over what wording to use.
Hey, Red. My turn to need help. Text or email me when you get this, please. There’s trouble at the OK Corral.
Len made sure the text wasn’t set to delete itself automatically after a set time, and sent the same message to her email. Then he sent an email to Guthrie Leonides for good measure. After waiting around for a few minutes to see if there would be an immediate response—which there wasn’t—he powered the phone off and went downstairs.
“I left messages for both of them,” he said. “I’ll need to check for replies every couple of hours.”
“Check in the morning,” Albigard said, rising. “It’s the middle of the night, and you’re still exhausted.”
He was, but he also knew that any attempt at sleep was going to end up turning into Nightmare Central. “Yeah, so are you,” he pointed out. “So, we’ll reconvene in the morning and take a fresh look at things then?”
Albigard gave a single, reluctant nod. “Yes.”
“Give me your word you won’t do something crazy, like sneaking away to commit suicide by going to Dhuinne,” Len insisted.
“I just did,” the Fae said.
“Do it again. Explicitly.”
Albigard’s lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. “You have my word that I will not return to Dhuinne before speaking to you in the morning.”
Len took a moment to parse the words and make sure there were no loopholes in the phrasing. Fae allegedly couldn’t lie, but they were goddamned experts when it came to employing careful wording. Satisfied, he nodded. “Good. See you in a few hours, then.”
TWO
THE REST OF the night was exactly as bad as Len had assumed it would be. He dozed, only to jerk awake repeatedly from shadowy dreams of the Hunt, or of Zorah and Rans staring up at him with dead eyes. In the end, he spent a good chunk of the time doing the breathing and mindfulness exercises he’d learned in rehab.
They were supposed to help prevent his drug cravings from spiraling. Sometimes they worked. This time they at least kept him in his borrowed bed, rather than out roaming the streets of Chicago with no car, a phone that was on its last legs, and very little cash in his wallet. At the first hint of dawn lightening the sky outside the window, he was up—despite the fact that he felt like hell and was more exhausted now than when he’d gone to bed several hours ago.
Showering didn’t really help, but at least he was clean afterward. He put on his two-day-old clothes and did the best he could with his abused fauxhawk. His roots were growing out, and the sides needed a trim pretty badly. Good thing the Fae downstairs wouldn’t notice or care if he shaved himself bald and dyed his face green.
The Fae... was not downstairs. Len scrubbed at his face, reminding himself firmly that the irritating bastard had promised not to run away and commit suicide by going to Dhuinne before breakfast. Speaking of which...
He opened the fridge door, contemplated the prospect of leftover opossum stew for breakfast, and closed it a moment later. The stew hadn’t been bad, as such, but there were some lines Len simply wasn’t willin
g to cross. A quick rummage in the cabinet above the sink yielded two Pop-Tarts left over from his previous stay in the house. He ate them cold, then chugged another bottle of water because hydration was doubly important when the world was crashing down around your ears.
The house had an air of complete stillness about it that made Len feel confident no one else was inside. That wasn’t a huge shock—Albigard had a track record of escaping to the outdoors when he was stressing out about something. Len debated letting the Fae stew in his own juices until he was ready to come back inside on his own, but it was already getting light outside and Len was starting to feel antsy about the situation.
He was reasonably confident Albigard hadn’t bolted completely and gone off to do something stupid. That being said, ‘reasonably confident’ wasn’t quite the same as ‘totally confident.’ Len did take a few moments to check his phone for messages first, however. There was nothing from Vonnie or Guthrie, but there was a voice message from Kat, checking to see if he was all right. He made a mental note to contact her later, since he wasn’t honestly too sure how to answer that question at the moment. In other news, the dark patch of ruined pixels on the broken phone screen had grown a bit larger overnight, though it was still small enough that it didn’t interfere too much. He turned the phone off, hoping that would slow the thing’s inevitable demise.
For lack of any other useful options, Len went downstairs and headed out the back door to look for his reluctant host. Outside, there was a decided nip to the air. Summer was slipping away.
A lot of things were slipping away, he reflected morbidly.
Albigard wasn’t in the clearing where Len had found him the previous evening. Len wasn’t one hundred percent clear on where the boundaries lay when it came to the magical wards that made this place invisible to anyone who hadn’t been explicitly invited in, but he had the sense that it was a fairly large property.
It was also heavily wooded, crisscrossed by various trails and tracks. Len doubted he could get too badly lost in it, but finding someone in the confusion of trees and brush wasn’t a straightforward proposition if they didn’t want to be found.
Forsaken Fae: The Complete Series, Books 1-3 (Last Vampire World) Page 18