Institute of the Shadow Fae Box Set

by C. N. Crawford

  He should die for his arrogance. He should kneel before me. They would all kneel before me in the end.

  I am the rattle in your throat.

  It had all been Ruadan’s fault. If he’d never come, I’d be ignorant and happy. I’d still be there in the woods, baking pies with my mum, probably married off to some handsome fae bloke.

  My gaze flicked to Ruadan’s perfect features. The moonlight gilded the masculine planes of his face and sparked in his pale, violet eyes. He was the true destroyer, and a buried lust for vengeance stirred in me.

  I could turn him purple, make his limbs rot. I could make the blood run from his beautiful lips.

  When you’re not looking, I enshroud you from the toes up.

  My shoulder blades wanted to unleash my power.

  Bow before me.

  Ruadan’s magic snaked over my skin, feeling strangely invasive. “What is wrong with you?” he whispered. “I can hear your heartbeat.”

  I whirled, my lip curling, rage carving through my belly like a knife.

  I’m a creature who should never walk the earth. A monstrosity. An abomination. I’m on your kill list.

  Ruadan had never seen my true monstrous side—nor I his. Would it come out now? Could I kill him before he killed me?

  “Thanatos! Thanatos! Thanatos!”

  The chanting grew louder, but my gaze was still locked on Ruadan, his on mine. Frigid wind swept past us, and the air seemed to darken around him.

  He leaned in again, his pine scent surrounding me. His magic licked at my skin, slow and dangerous. “Blend in, Arianna.” An unyielding command from the Grand Master.

  Not my real name, demon. My real name is Liora.

  The demonic general raised his hands to the night sky. “Without death, there is no pleasure!”

  “Oh, great Lord Gamigin!” the crowd chanted in unison. “Without death, there is no pleasure!”

  My heart was a wild beast. Thanatos! The chants roiled my blood.

  Ruadan’s eyes bored into me. “Get control of yourself,” he said in a low voice. The shadows around him sucked in all the light.

  I am death. I fought the impulse to clamp my hand around his throat and squeeze. “You need to stop messing with my mind.” My voice sounded strange even to myself. “You don’t know what you’re toying with, demon. There are powers even you can’t fight.”

  Night fell in his eyes, and he took a step closer, until I could feel his raw power thrumming over my skin. “You are here on a mission.”

  “And tonight,” the demon boomed, “we celebrate pleasure!”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed shifting cloaks, skin bared in the moonlight. It was the first time I realized the crowd wasn’t entirely made up of men. Women lurked among them, too—women who were opening up their cloaks, ready to celebrate pleasure with the men. Breasts and penises all over the place.

  The sight was so startling and ridiculous that it snapped me right out of my spiraling death rage. The instinct I’d been fighting—to clamp my hand around Ruadan’s throat—simply disappeared.

  I took a deep breath. I had a bad feeling it would come back, but I was in the clear for now. They wouldn’t get a death angel here tonight.

  I stared as a woman leaned up against a wall, her back to her partner. He grabbed her hips from behind, hands running over her breasts.

  Honestly. Some people.

  What had Melusine said about the Great Mortality? Half the people were flogging themselves, the other half banging in the shrubs.

  I guess we’d found the fun ones.

  We were supposed to blend in, weren’t we? I wasn’t about to take off my cloak, but maybe we could look a little fun.

  I took a step closer to Ruadan, then ran my hand up his chest. He stiffened. Then, I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my hips into him, my breasts brushing against him. I stood on my tiptoes.

  Pure black had slammed into his irises, and he stared at me with an intensity that rivaled my own. He gripped my waist hard with one hand, the other sliding into my hair. Then, he whispered, “We’ve blended in long enough.” Tension rippled off him, and he pulled away from me with what seemed to be a great deal of effort. “I’ll trap Lord Gamigin. You question him.”

  At the head of the churchyard, the demon lord still chanted in Angelic.

  I surveyed the revelers, the men and women writhing against each other. I couldn’t say I was shocked to see Uncle Darrell standing in a corner on his own, desecrating a shrub. Of course he was here. If there was a public trouser-dropping opportunity to be had in the great city of London, Uncle Darrell would find it.

  The Wraith took a step closer to Lord Gamigin, shadows billowing around him.

  My fingers twitched. I really wanted to hurt the people working for Baleros.

  The temperature around us plummeted, ice spreading over the ground and graves. My breath clouded in front of my face.

  Just as Lord Gamigin’s dark eyes landed on Ruadan, ropes of dark magic spun out from Ruadan’s hands, snaking around the demonic lord.

  The humans began screaming, already fleeing. With a dark smile curling my lips, I shadow-leapt over to Lord Gamigin and jumped down hard behind him. I whipped my iron knife from its sheath, and I plunged it into his shoulder blade.

  He grunted with pain, trying to rip himself free of the magical constraints.

  “You worship death, do you?” I began. “It could be your lucky night. A release from the torments of this world. Tonight, I saw my friend rip a man in two with just a flick of his wrist. Would you like that? Give your life a bit of meaning?”

  “What do you want?” he grunted.

  “I want to know where Baleros is,” I said. “And Queen Macha.”

  His own magic was working against Ruadan’s, but the iron in my dagger had already weakened him. “I don’t know where Baleros is,” he said through gritted teeth.

  I pulled the dagger from his shoulder and held it to his throat, nicking the skin just a little. “You’re one of his generals, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not telling you anything.”

  I pressed the blade in deeper. “You worship death because you fear it. Tell me what I need to know, and I might let you live.”

  “I don’t know where Baleros is. I’m the lowest-ranking general.”

  Godsdamn it. “Where do we find Queen Macha?”

  He shook his head, his horns glinting in the moonlight. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you do know, demon, or I’ll sacrifice you to Thanatos, since the goat didn’t work out.”

  “I don’t know where to find him, but there’s a fae king. He of the fiery hair. He keeps Macha underground. Under the water.”

  Pressing the blade a little deeper, I demanded, “Where underground?”

  “One of Baleros’s generals, King Locrinus, is guarding Queen Macha. Beneath the wolf’s grave. You’ll never get to Locrinus. He’s protected by the bean nighe and the Caoranach.”

  I had no idea what half of this meant.

  The demon looked around, frantically. “But I will never tell his name. I’ll die before I tell you his name!” he screamed valiantly into the skies.

  “You already said Baleros’s name, knob-end,” I said. “What else do you know?”

  “That’s all we need,” said Ruadan. “You might want to step away from the demon.”

  I jumped away from Lord Gamigin, and as I did, Ruadan’s magic constricted, slicing through the demon’s body. Just enough time for a final scream, then a gurgle. Ruadan had ripped him apart completely.

  My lip curled. “I could have just used the knife. I honestly didn’t know you had this brutal side.”

  Ruadan’s back was already turned as he strode for the exit.

  “Can you tell me where we’re going?” I called out. “What’s this about a wolf?”

  “Whitechapel.”

  Jack the Ripper, hipster bars, imprisoned fae queens. Did anything good ever happen in Whitechapel?<
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  My heart thumped in my chest like a war drum, and I stared at Ruadan, the man who’d destroyed my world, the one who wanted to kill me. My fingers twitched on my knife’s hilt.

  The day Ruadan had come into our world was the day everything had changed. We’d led a boring, domestic life, hidden in our own little realm with a small village of fae. We baked pies, played in the woods. I thought my dad was fae like the rest of us.

  Then, my whole world had ended. My father—god of death—had killed everyone but me. How was it that he’d spared me? Was I so similar to him, a death angel myself?

  I had a feeling Whitechapel’s grim history wasn’t about to get any rosier tonight.

  Chapter 75

  Our footsteps echoed off the pavement as we moved north through the city. Nineteen hours till death hit the city.

  Ruadan’s fear magic was still with me, and my mind flashed with images of my mother’s blood in the soil, droplets of crimson on the bluebells, red hair spread out—

  “I can still hear your heart,” said Ruadan.

  His heart might not be racing, but he looked just as tense as I felt, each of his muscles taut, shadows seeping into the air around him.

  I smiled sweetly. “How about I stop my heart from beating so it won’t bother you?”

  He shot me a sharp look.

  “I don’t suppose your heart ever beats too hard, does it?” I said. “You might as well not have one.”

  Ruadan, demigod of darkness, of icy control. So many things about him terrified me, and I couldn’t bring myself to actually voice any of the thoughts in my head.

  “What’s bothering you?” he asked at last.

  My heart sped up. You’ve healed me. You destroyed my world. You’ve saved my life. You want to kill me. Someday, the truth will come out, and one of us will have to draw blood first. One of us will die. Someday, the truth will come out, and I’ll have to face—

  Nausea welled in my gut, and I hunched over, dry heaving. There was nothing left in my stomach, and I retched over the gutter. Eventually, I mumbled, “Until death us do part.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, what’s a wood-poppet? Is that a real thing?”

  “No.”

  Ahhh. Ruadan’s sense of humor, then. I wiped my mouth, hand shaking. “Your magic doesn’t sit well with me. The spell you used back in the pub.”

  “Someday, you’ll have to face yourself.”

  I froze in my tracks. “Please tell me you can’t hear my thoughts.”

  “I can’t. But I know guilt when I see it.”

  “I don’t have anything to feel guilty about.” I said it a little too sharply. I stood tall, staring him in the eyes. “Do you ever lose control, Ruadan, or have you been perfecting your icy resolve for seven hundred years? Has it ever cracked?”

  “I’m half incubus. What do you think?”

  “Boradrion said something about what happens when an incubus loses control.” Incubi were rare. Apart from Ruadan and his half-brother, I’d never met any. “What happens then?”

  Ruadan was already walking again, pulling his favorite “not answering” move.

  I hurried after him. Scary as it would be, some part of me desperately wanted to see the incubus come out. The real Ruadan.

  “How does it come about, your incubus side?” I asked. “What happens when it does?”

  Baleros’s first law of power: Get in your enemy’s head. Knowledge gives you control over a person.

  After another beat, he finally answered. “Fear brings it out, sometimes sex. My primal side takes over and it’s hard for me to gain control again.”

  The way he answered so succinctly gave me the impression that he was answering with a mental bullet-point list rather than giving me insight into an ancient and terrifying psychological process. “Your primal side takes over?”

  More silence, a thickening of shadows.

  I couldn’t imagine Ruadan often found himself afraid, but the impending Black Death certainly had him a bit rattled.

  “So, do I need to know about what we’re about to face underground?” I asked.

  “When you saw King Locrinus in the hall, he was with a female. The one in the red dress made of human skin. That’s the Caoranach.”

  “The serpent woman. I see. She and I had a little run-in down by The Spread Eagle.”

  “A run-in?”

  “We tried to kill each other.”

  He stopped walking for a moment, then stared at me. The air thinned, a dangerous silence. “She tried to kill you, and you lived? How is that possible?”

  Panic flickered through my thoughts. I’d lived only because of my death powers. Maybe no other creature could have withstood her.

  “If she wanted to kill you,” he added, walking again, “you’d have died. You and me both need to stay as far away from her as possible.”

  I bit my lip. “I didn’t realize her dress was made of human skin.”

  “She lurks in underground rivers and transforms into a serpent. She’s four thousand years old. Some say she’s not even fae.”

  “What is she, then?”

  “One of the Old Gods, maybe. Grown from the earth itself. She drains her enemies, fills the rivers with their blood. She’s loyal to anyone who will feed her with pain. King Locrinus does just that. But we can avoid her if we stay quiet. She’s drawn by loud noises. As long as we’re quiet, we can slip past her unnoticed.”

  “That might be a bit difficult.” I frowned. I’d never met a bean nighe, but I knew mostly that they were demented washerwomen who screwed with your mind. “Am I right in thinking that bean nighe tend to scream?”

  “Only if someone is about to die. Or if they want to alert the Caoranach, in which case people definitely die.”

  “So how do we avoid death, exactly? How do we stop them from screaming?” I frowned. “If the bean nighe scream, we die because the Caoranach comes for us. But they also scream because we’re going to die…. I’m having a hard time working out the causal relationship when creatures can both predict and influence future events. Do you have any thoughts about this?”

  “Cakes.”

  Leave it to Ruadan to cryptically answer a very complex question by just throwing out a random baked good with no other explanation.

  “Did you just say cakes?”

  “The bean nighe are fomoire. They feed off death and agony. But they also feed off cakes. And legend says, once you satiate them with cakes, they are forever in your debt.”

  “Are you messing with me again?”

  “No.”

  I blinked. “I see. And you’re carrying cakes on you, are you?”

  “No.” A gust of wind rippled over us, and he seemed to be done talking. After another moment, he added, “You are.”

  I frowned. “Have you been rifling through my bag?”

  “I can smell the jam and sugar from here.”

  “Right.” With any luck, these primordial harbingers of death could be bribed with a half a packet of Jaffa Cakes and the fondant fancy I’d picked up at Costcutter in lieu of feeding off our misery. “Well, hopefully they’re not choosy.”

  Chapter 76

  When we reached the Aldgate pump, Ruadan stopped walking. It was an old, derelict water fountain. A silver wolf’s head gleamed over a grate in the pavement.

  “What is this, exactly?”

  “This is where the last wolf in the city of London died. The wolf’s head marks the spot. Once, Londoners drank this water.” Ruadan leaned over, pulling off the grate. “Until they realized the streams were fed by London’s cemeteries, poisoning their water with diseases.”

  “So King Locrinus, Carver of Enemies, Ruler of Elfame, is hiding out in corpse-water. Charming. What happens after we bribe the bean nighe and slip past the Caoranach?”

  He met my gaze. “We move silently—in the shadows. Our primary goal is to find Queen Macha. She’s likely to have information that can lead us to Baleros. It’s a rescue mission, not a
kill mission.” He gestured at the opened grate.

  I leapt in first, splashing down in the dark water. The river nearly reached my knees, the cold water chilling me. Ruadan jumped down next, silent as he landed. He flicked his wrist, calling up a ball of dim silver light to illuminate our path.

  I breathed in deeply, taking in a rich mineral scent in the air. It took me a moment to figure out that the chalky odor was calcium, and another second to put together that this smell came from human bones. Tonight’s missions were taking us to London’s grimmest locations, all those full of ancient bodies. I tried not to think about the bone particles rushing over my legs. I’d had enough of human bits this evening.

  We moved deeper into the tunnel, water rushing around my calves. I moved as quietly as I could, acutely aware that any noises would draw the Caoranach.

  As we moved in deeper, a heavier scent floated through the air—the smell of death.

  Most people said the bean nighe were simple harbingers of death. If they screamed, you could bet someone was going to die, and that it would probably be you. But there was more to it than that. They stirred up your darkest thoughts before they killed you, and they fed off the pain.

  Long ago, they had lingered unseen over childbirth beds, washing the rags of the dying women and babies, drinking up their agony. I imagined modern medicine had started to screw things up for them, but the world had more than enough pain to go around.

  A mournful, keening voice wended through the tunnel. Then, over the melody, the frantic sound of a flapping bird’s wings. The bean nighe’s song wasn’t the frantic screech that heralded death, but it set my teeth on edge anyway. Whatever the truth was about bean nighe, they tended to screw with people’s minds, and my mind had taken about all the screwing it could take tonight.

  I leaned in, grabbing Ruadan’s arm to pull him down and whisper, “Can you do your little body-ripping trick?”

  He shook his head, then whispered in my ear. “My powers don’t work on fomoire.”

  “They don’t? Why not?”

  No answer, but he was still standing close to me, not pulling his head away.