Run, Kat, Run and Encantado Dreams (Mortality Bites: Publisher's Pack Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

  Take you wonder by wonder

  Over sideways and under

  On a magic carpet ride

  People shagged on carpets long before there were shag carpets. And as for the unbelievable sights, the indescribable feeling … and all that soaring, tumbling, and freewheeling promised in the song? Well, you get the picture.

  (If I just ruined Aladdin for you, my apologies. But let’s be honest, Disney was filled with double entendres, subtext and read-between-the-lines adult content. I mean … “Hakuna Matata,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” … “For the First Time in Forever?” Masturbation, losing your virginity and, oh yeah, losing your virginity. There’s a theme here, people … Then again, it might just be me.)

  ↔

  Disney’s outlet for adolescent exploration of sex aside, the point is that Aldie was my first, and him being an immortal fae, he was one hell of a first.

  “Milady. Milady.”

  “Huh?” I looked up dreamily from the poster.

  “You are singing,” Deirdre said with genuine concern. “In all the time I have known you, you have never once spontaneously broken into song. And yet you have done it twice in the last five minutes.”

  “Was I?” I said hazily.

  “Indeed. Something about going from wonder to wonder, dazzling places and shooting stars. Despite your propensity for airing your thoughts, I have never known you to sing them. Are you possessed? Has Enoch enchanted you? Are you going to sing everything now?”

  Deirdre was in full warrior mode, scanning the crowd for any sign of Enoch. Egya, on the other hand, was chuckling as he gave me knowing looks. I had told him about my dark elf ex, and the hyena was no dummy. He knew exactly who this guy was. Damn hyenas.

  “That’s from Aladdin,” I said to Deirdre.

  “The mongrel who enslaved one of the jinn?”

  “No, the olive-skinned guy from the movies.”

  Deirdre’s eyes narrowed in obvious confusion.

  “Disney, Deirdre. Disney. Come on, if we survive this, I’m going to show you a whole new world, and I need you to interpret that with a PG-rating in mind.”

  “Milady?”

  “Never mind … Let’s go.”

  ↔

  I explained everything to Deirdre and Egya as we walked to Naha’s conference center, where the event was taking place. The event that Aldie had organized. The event he was throwing in Okinawa tonight. As we approached, I saw huge posters of the dark elf standing with confidence and the biggest, most inviting smile on his face.

  Giant screens outside the venue played snippets of the event on repeat: Aldie ziplining over the audience and onto stage as fireworks went off; Aldie walking through the aisles, talking with the audience; Aldie triumphantly pumping his fist in the air.

  And interlaced throughout the ad, slogans flashed. Slogans like: Embrace your Destiny. Awaken the Sleeping Giant Within. Find Your Inner Banshee.

  My ex-boyfriend was a self-help guru, and judging from the crowd of Others eagerly standing in line, he was more than just a wannabe.

  Aldie was the Tony Robbins of mythical self-help. And just as I thought that, a picture of Aldie standing next to Tony Robbins popped up on the screen.

  “Finally embracing your destiny, Aldie?” I muttered as Egya snickered.

  You Need to Take a Swim in Lake YOU

  Getting in was easier than I’d thought. Given that the event was obviously sold out, I was sure I’d have to bribe some attendant or sneak in through a back door. But as soon as we entered the ticketing area, one bright-eyed sphinx wearing a hat that read Make Your Mortal Life Immortal said, “Hurry up, the exotic animals need to be backstage and ready immediately.”

  Humph, a smiling sphinx who didn’t speak in riddles … I knew Aldie could change a person, but that was something else.

  I glanced down at Egya. He was still wearing his pink hat and his kariyushi shirt … and looking positively depressed about it.

  “Hold on,” I whispered to him. “This is just to get us inside. Then we’ll free you from your kawaii adornments.”

  He gave a snort as we walked through the doors. Evidently he didn’t believe me.

  The sphinx led us backstage, where a whole bunch of what should be wild animals mulled about with their various trainers. There was a tiger, a llama, three puffins, a white-faced capuchin, an ocelot … and now a hyena, all backstage.

  The sphinx pointed to the back. “Who’s his handler?”

  “Handler?”

  “Which one of you is going to take him on stage?”

  I lifted an unsure hand.

  The sphinx eyed Deirdre. “And who are you?”

  “I am Deirdre of the clan—”

  “She’s security,” I said before she could give the sphinx her entire lineage dating back to the dawn of time. Never ask a fae who they are unless you have about a day and a half to waste … They make Biblical genealogy seem reasonable.

  “I see.” The sphinx gave Egya a look. “A bit of a handful?”

  I grinned. Egya groaned. And Deirdre, who wasn’t very big on subterfuge, nodded with total sincerity.

  “Fine … just be ready,” the sphinx said, walking away.

  ↔

  Egya and I stood backstage as the show commenced … Or rather, I should say the spectacle commenced, because that was exactly what it was. It started with the thumping base of “We Are the Champions,” except instead of Freddie Mercury crying out “the world,” the speakers (and audience) cried out, “our world.”

  Small distinction, but so very self-helpish, and Aldieish, too. Then the stage before us erupted with fire, but not the typical blasts of fire you’d see at a rock concert. These were fireballs that manifested like exploding stars on the stage.

  Someone was burning time to create that effect. Someone was losing valuable minutes of their life just for this audience’s amusement. And from the reaction of the crowd, I knew that was part of the point. The audience was mostly Others … Others who limited their expressions of magic in this godless world because it cost them life.

  I thought back to the fireballs that had manifested out of thin air, just like they had been conjured by magic. To use magic was to burn time. Aldie implied that he was sacrificing a bit of himself for them. That he was giving his life for them.

  Then I thought back to Aldie’s picture. A bit of gray in his goatee, slight wrinkles on his face. He had aged far more than an elf should in four years.

  I don’t know what infuriated me more … that he manipulated their emotions, or that I understood exactly why he did. In a world where they had been abandoned by their gods, discarded as worthless and unworthy, Aldie gave a piece of himself to them.

  It is no understatement that to a once immortal being, death is terrifying. It is terrifying to humans, but at least we’re born knowing that we will one day die. For Others, their birth came with the promise of forever. And now that their forever was gone, the threat of something they hadn’t yet come to accept as a given was crushing. Others rarely burn time, even a second of it, unless they are trying to escape immediate death.

  For them to burn time otherwise is out of great personal cost. And should they do so for you, then you must understand the gift they bestow on you. For you.

  To burn a second is to invite death. And as I thought back on all the times Others had burned time for someone else, it humbled me.

  ‘Deirdre, Mergen, Cassandra, Aelfric and Remi … they’ve all burned time to help others. We do not deserve them.’

  Egya grunted in agreement.

  Another fireball, followed by three more. Aldie wasn’t just burning a bit of time—he was giving a lot of it. His message was clear: You are worth it. You are worthy.

  The cynical part of me wanted to temper such offerings with the fact that they were paying him to make all this. But that was tempered by the realization that Aldie could have created a spectacle without burning any time, and it would have been just as grand.

 
He was giving up a part of himself on purpose. This wasn’t the selfish narcissist I remembered.

  To see it done here and now, and so blatantly, too—the sacrifice for the spectacle—well, even I was moved. And I was just about as cynical toward Aldie as humanly possible.

  A black arrow big enough to slay a dragon flew from the back of the audience, striking the stump of a massive oak tree that probably took a couple of giants to hoist on stage. The arrow was tethered to a rope that hung taut from the back of the stage.

  As soon as the arrow embedded itself in the hard wood, Aldie ziplined over the sea of adoring fans, landing on the stage with a superhero tumble that would have made Black Panther cringe with CGI envy.

  GoneGodDamn! I forgot how graceful elves were.

  And just when I thought Aldie’s entrance couldn’t be any more over the top, he did a black flip before landing not on his feet like a normal acrobat, but rather—no friggin’ way—his pinky finger.

  Boy oh boy, Aldie had learned some new tricks.

  OK, maybe not as selfish as he once was, but still the planet-sized narcissist, I see.

  Pushing off with his one finger, Aldie finally got to his feet, turning around and around with arms outstretched as he soaked up the audience’s adulation.

  Seeing his face for the first time, I saw that the impossibly youthful face he’d once had was replaced with one that possessed not worry lines, but wrinkles that screamed wisdom. Just like the pictures, he had little flecks of gray in his beard, far grayer than four years of mortal aging should have given him. A small part of me had doubted that Aldie was the one actually burning time to create those fireballs, but finally seeing him here, I knew for sure.

  It wasn’t someone else burning magic … it was Aldie.

  He was literally giving a little bit of himself with every show.

  ↔

  Aldie stood perfectly still on the stage in that way I’ve only known the fae to be able to do. So still that they basically become statues. If his energy had been infectious, then so was his complete stillness.

  The audience slowly began to mirror him, their cries of adulation quieting under the weight of Aldie’s tranquility. Mutterings turned to whispers that blossomed into complete silence. The sea of moving bodies bore the tension of undisturbed water.

  But it was more than silence and stillness. There were no soft murmurs typical of such a large space—no creeks, gusts of wind, those indefinable sounds you’d hear in a full auditorium. In the absolute silence, I listened for breathing and heard none, and I wondered if everyone truly held their breath or if this was more time being burnt to give the illusion of perfect nothingness.

  I honestly could not tell, but sensing my own held breath, I wondered how long we all would stay like this until some of us started passing out from lack of oxygen.

  A part of me wanted to start laughing, to pierce the overblown grandeur with my mockery. But another, more evolved part of me knew that was just my discomfort at being connected to so many all at once. It was unnatural for thousands of lost souls to be united like this.

  And this foreign feeling both gave me the peace of belonging and discomfort of being a part of something that I ... what? … shouldn’t be a part of? Didn’t deserve?

  No. Part of something I wasn’t doing enough for …

  That last thought hit me in a way that only suddenly realized truth could, but before I could explore that feeling, I shook my head, chasing away the severity of my thoughts. This was a self-help seminar. It was fifty shades of self-affirmation bullshit, and just because I was thrown off-kilter by Aldie’s presence, I wasn’t about to let myself spiral into whatever self-loathing crap was swimming around in my head.

  Now I really was going to laugh, to pierce this facade with a chuckle. But before I could, Aldie beat me to it with four simple words that, instead of being uplifting, only pulled me further down into the depths.

  “We do not belong.”

  A strange beginning to a self-help pep talk.

  Aldie took a step forward, his hands outstretched like he was trying to embrace the entire auditorium.

  “We do not belong,” he repeated.

  Doubling down, eh?

  “We are the alien invaders, the barbarian hordes at the gate, the unwanted masses at the doorstep of a world that is not ready or capable of having us. It’s in our name: Others. As in, not them.”

  OK, now I’m getting depressed. I thought these things were all ‘Live your potential,’ ‘Awaken the giant within,’ ‘Love yourself and the world will, too.’

  “So let me say it again: We do not belong. Not a single one of us. I need you to understand this, because that is the truth. We do not belong. And the moment you truly understand that will be the moment you stop feeling sorry for yourself …”

  Here we go.

  “… stop expecting this GoneGod World to help you out and …”

  Give it to us, Aldie.

  “… start getting off your ass and doing something about it.”

  There we go! Hold on, folks, we’re going full self-help now.

  “Did you ever expect humans—humans!—to welcome us with open arms? Come on, Others! You knew better than that. Humans do not even like their own kind, so why would they embrace ones such as us? Look at my funny ears.” He pretended to prick his pointy ear with an “Ouch.” The audience chuckled.

  “Or your ridiculous eye.” He pointed at a cyclops. “Do you save extra at Spec-savers because you only need one lens?”

  Lame, but the audience chuckled their approval.

  “And what about you?” He pointed to the middle of the audience, and the giant jumbotron screens focused on a kappa. “You look like an extra in Super Mario Bros.”

  The bipedal turtle slapped his shell with chortles of laughter.

  “None of us belong, because we don’t look like them … and they don’t like anything or anyone that doesn’t look like them. I mean, look at their most popular version of God. He made them in his image. Or perhaps they made Him in their image.” He rubbed his chin in mocking reflection. “So I guess Anubis, Ganesh, Raijin and Baron Samedi didn’t get the memo. Then again, they all left, so …”

  He let those last words hang in the air.

  “We may be different, but that doesn’t make us less. It doesn’t make us unworthy. But it does mean we have to work twice as hard, twice as long and twice as diligently before they’ll finally accept us …

  “So, my fellow Others of the GoneGod World, are you ready to embrace your destiny?”

  If the audience was energized before, they became positively electric after that little gem. It took every ounce of my willpower to not roll my eyes, and even then I didn’t have the strength to hold in the give-me-a-break sigh that escaped my judgmental lips.

  Aldie was always a showman, but this was over the top, even for him. Then again, he was burning time to make these extravaganzas extravangadizize.

  And as for genuine, I wasn’t sure. Aldie had always been the over-the-top optimist who could get a death row inmate excited about tomorrow while they strapped him to the chair. His gregarious nature made Bacchus look shy. He was an extroverts’ Superman.

  But being so out there also meant that he lost interest in things just when you thought it was getting good. I mean, the bastard lost interest in me after only eighty years.

  I know eighty years might sound like a long time, especially now that we’re all mortal, but eighty years to someone who lives forever is barely a summer fling.

  Of course, back then there was a lot of pressure for us to break up. The entire UnSeelie Court was literally against us. A half-breed like me and a prince of the fae was a big no-no. Fae are many things, and arrogant is probably at the top of that list. They saw my human nature as disgusting and my demonic nature as animalistic. To them, I was no better than a chimpanzee.

  So imagine a human and a chimpanzee rocking up to city hall, demanding a marriage certificate, and you’ll start to get a
sense of how they viewed us.

  Not that Aldie cared. He defied his realm, relishing in the scandal. At first I saw it as romantic. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was part of his narcissistic nature. Better to be talked about and reviled than ignored.

  And Aldie hated being ignored.

  Of course, it didn’t help that his parents were overachieving, domineering crusaders who were credited with negotiating peace between the Seelie and UnSeelie courts. I mean, there were history books written about them.

  But it was more than that. Fae, like most Others, cannot have children on their own. They must petition their gods for a child. As a reward for brokering peace, Danu—goddess of fertility, wisdom, wind and the Celtic people—granted them Aldie, the only child to be born in the UnSeelie Court in a millennium. A lot of expectations were pinned to him.

  Because of his intelligence, grace and charisma, those expectations weren’t just from the world outside him. Aldie had those expectations of himself.

  Trouble was, when the expectation is that of general greatness, and there’s nothing defining what that greatness could be … it becomes impossible to fulfill.

  And seeing him prance around the stage, inspiring hope in these hopeless Others, I wondered if he had finally found the greatness he so desperately desired.

  I watched Aldie prance around the stage, hugging chupacabras, slapping the backs of banshees, high-fiving carbuncles, and I couldn’t help but wonder when he’d lose interest in this crowd.

  Given how they hung on his every word, I hoped he wouldn’t. Those Others looked up to him, full of something very rare in the GoneGod World … hope.

  I felt a hand push my shoulder. It was the sphinx, gesturing for me to get on stage. The other animal handlers were already entering the stage, and I heard Aldie say, “We are different. But there is so much difference already on this planet. Take a look at the eagle, the llama, the platypus.” As he spoke, me and Egya were being pushed out onto the stage. “And it’s not just them. Join me in welcoming the zoo of the bizarre and—”