Shade Cursed: A Druidverse Urban Fantasy Novel (The Shadow Changeling Series Book 1)

by M. D. Massey

  “See, there you go again speaking in that creepy tone,” Monty said with a shake of his head. “I mean, look at me—I’m completely helpless, and that’s not something I’m used to. If you needed to intimidate me, consider me intimidated, and I’ll happily tell you everything you want to know…”

  His voice trailed off in a manner that indicated there would be some conditions to his cooperation. I rubbed my temples as I considered whether I should just kill him and forget about the whole affair. Fortunately for Monty, my curiosity proved greater than my impatience.

  “I’m getting the distinct impression there’s a qualifying condition accompanying that offer.”

  “Hey, you know I can’t go back to the people I was working for, not after spilling my guts to you. Hell, even if I didn’t spill my guts, they’d assume I did, and torture the crap out of me until I admitted all kinds of things, most of which wouldn’t be true.” He licked his lips in a nervous and decidedly un-vampire-like manner. “So, you help me, and I’ll help you.”

  “I take it you want me to either hide you or help you escape after I’m through with you.” I maintained a calm, detached tone as I continued. “But what’s to say that I won’t dispose of you after I get the information I need?”

  He shrugged as much as he possibly could, considering how tightly he was wrapped in my magic. “Well, I suppose you could. But then again, you don’t know what you don’t know right now. It may be that I tell you some things that I think will be useful to you, but then those things lead you to other questions that I don’t know how to answer right now.”

  “In other words, you think you’ll be of worth to me down the road, correct?”

  “Absolutely,” he said with a nod. “I’ve been a courier for the Council for half a century. I’ve seen a lot, and I know how they operate. I’ll be happy to share that information with you as soon as you agree there’ll be no torture or killing.”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed in a put-upon manner. “Fine. But I’m not going to loosen your bonds just yet.”

  “Hey, man, all I want to do is stretch my legs, and maybe snack on a blood bag or two.” He winced at the harsh stare I gave him. “I-if that’s not too much to ask.”

  In response, I sprouted a couple of shadow limbs and lifted him off the ground. “First, let’s get you inside and securely strapped to my dissection table. Then we’ll see how useful this information is that you’re about to share, and we can determine what comes after.”

  As I carried the vampire through the front door of my tower, Nameless swooped in behind me, fluttering around Monty’s head squawking and cawing like a thing possessed.

  “Prisoner! Caught again! No escape! No escape!”

  “Nameless,” I said, “that will be quite enough. The vampire and I are about to come to an agreement, and he knows full well the chances of him escaping this time are quite slim.”

  “Yes, Master,” the bird squawked. He fluttered past the vampire’s head one last time, whispering at a volume that he likely thought I couldn’t hear. “Fool—vampire fool!”

  I ignored the bird’s final outburst, as it was often an exercise in futility to get him to do exactly what I wished. The killing I’d done had gotten my shade aroused as well, and soon it would be begging me to feed. I was tired and desperately needed a few hours of meditation and a shot of my elixir. So, I carried Monty up the stairs, laying him on my dissection table where I secured him with all due care.

  After that, I activated some very special wards around the room to prevent him from being magically located and portalled away a second time. Finally, I searched him in the magical spectrum until I found the weaves of enchantment that had allowed that recall spell to rescue him previously. The spell was spent, but I wasn’t willing to risk an assassin team tracking him to my farm. So, I removed the charm that had carried the spell, immolating it to dispose of it permanently.

  Pulling up a stool, I sat and stared at the vampire for several long moments. “Now, vampire—let us speak of how you came to be involved in the changeling trade of Underhill.”

  11

  “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that the vampires have been acquiring humans for the fae for years,” I remarked as I casually rearranged the surgical instruments on my workbench nearby.

  “Yeah, for decades actually,” he replied as his fingers drummed a staccato rhythm on the dissection table. “I started off doing low-level work for the Vampyri Council—running errands, rustling cattle, that sort of thing. When they saw how good I was at getting humans to volunteer for feeding, they bumped me up. Before I knew it, I was delivering bodies to the fae.”

  I cross my arms and leaned against my workbench. “You expect me to believe that you only acquired willing subjects?”

  “Well, at first, yeah,” he stuttered. “I mean, of course not every person that a vampire feeds on is willing. Let’s face it—we’re predators, and humans are our prey. But I was fairly idealistic back then, and I tried to keep everything aboveboard.”

  “But, eventually, you did what all supernatural species do—you succumbed to your lesser nature.”

  Monty chewed his lower lip as he averted his gaze. “You may not believe me, but I can remember a time when I was still human. I still recall what it was like to be afraid, and I remember being taken by my master against my will. After a while, though, you start to realize that everyone and everything in this world has a role to play. Some of us are meat-eaters; others are steak. It’s just the way things are.”

  I tapped an index finger on my arm as I stared the vampire down. “You can spare me the ethical and moral justifications for the choices you’ve made. I was raised by the fae—I’ve heard it already. In fact, it would be in your best interests if you simply skip ahead to the part where you started acquiring slaves for the changeling trade in Underhill.”

  “Right, right—I was just getting to that. So, the vampire who turned me, her master was a Council member. I inherited some pretty interesting talents from their bloodline. Once my powers developed, they tapped me for courier work.”

  “And as a courier, I suspect you delivered much more than messages.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yeah, for sure. Gold, money, artwork, drugs—you name it, I was responsible for getting it from place to place. And before you ask, I did deliver humans as well. Sometimes it was just a matter of keeping a council member’s favorite calf alive while they were traveling away from their master. But a lot of the time it was making sure that cattle got from one council member’s demesne to another.”

  “They traded humans back and forth,” I said, stating the obvious. “Much as the fae royalty trade slaves, like children trading playing cards.”

  “Ah, I see you’re familiar with the practice.” He briefly made eye contact with me, then his gaze skittered away. “At first, that’s all it was, just transporting goods from place to place. But then they started having me acquire humans, but not for the vampires. That’s when it got weird.”

  “How so?” I asked, genuinely curious about what Monty would qualify as weird.

  “Well, you seem to be a smart guy. I’m sure you’ve done the math on how much blood it takes to feed the Vampire Nations.”

  “Indeed I have,” I replied. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can’t feed 100,000 vampires using just volunteer blood.”

  “Nope. So, when the Council started having me abduct humans and deliver them to the fae, it made me curious. But not curious enough to ask questions. In my line of work, you start asking questions, and pretty soon you’re the one who’s disappearing.”

  “But you kept your eyes open,” I said. “And with that memory of yours, you must’ve gained quite a bit of intelligence and information regarding this arrangement between the Vampire Nations and the fae.”

  He shook his head. “Oh, sure. I did pick up quite a bit of information. But that arrangement wasn’t between the Vampire Nations and the fae—it was between the
Council and certain fae that are not of this earth.”

  He referred to Mother, of course, not knowing the difference between fae and the Tuath Dé. Were there others, perhaps? I kept my face blank as I continued the interrogation.

  “And how did you determine you were dealing with fae from Underhill?”

  “Because they were having me deliver my, er, acquisitions to fae that didn’t work for the local courts. Take this job I was on when you captured me, for example,” he said, giving me a knowing look. “This guy I’m working with, Griff? He ain’t never worked for Maeve. Heck, he ain’t even from around here. And if Maeve knew he was fucking around in her backyard? She’d have his balls for mountain oysters, for sure.”

  “Oh, she would, most certainly,” I said. “But what I don’t understand is how you’ve been operating this long right under her nose.”

  “See, that’s where the Vampyri Council comes in. With our contacts and resources, we’re able to move merchandise through Maeve’s territory without her ever being the wiser.”

  It was a relief to know Maeve wasn’t directly involved. But I wondered, was she completely ignorant of this arrangement? I set such questions aside to address later, after I’d concluded this discussion.

  “And with the fae’s help, hide your activities from the local coven leader as well. That is a very dangerous game to play,” I remarked. “You could potentially start a war between the fae and the Vampire Nations—if you were ever caught.”

  “True, but we’ve been operating this way for decades. And until you caught me, no one suspected a thing.”

  “I understand now what the fae are getting out of this arrangement—a steady supply of human subjects.” And, perhaps, assistance in invading Underhill. “What I don’t understand is what the vampires get in kind. It seems you’re giving up your most precious resource, and I struggle to see what the Vampyri might possibly want in return.”

  Monty shrugged, at least as much as he could while strapped to my exam table. “That’s way above my pay grade, man. They don’t tell me shit like that. But what I can tell you is this—I’ve never made an even exchange of humans for something else when dealing with the fae.”

  I absently rubbed the fading scars on my face as I considered his words. “In other words, you have only ever delivered humans to the fae—without receiving payment for those deliveries.”

  “Yep,” he said with an eager nod. “So, whatever it is they’re getting in return, they’re either getting it on the sly, or they’re being paid in something other than money and goods.”

  I sat still for several seconds as I considered the implications of the information Monty had just shared. Something didn’t sit right with me about this whole arrangement, not at all. Vampires tended to be shrewd negotiators. Like the fae, they tended to negotiate agreements that benefited them over the long haul due to their long lives.

  While it was possible that the fae were paying the vampires through wire transfers and the like, it wasn’t like the fae to deal in digital currency. They were an old race, and neither trusted nor liked using modern fiat currency systems. Instead, they preferred to keep their wealth in things they could touch and see—gold, jewels, artwork, and the like.

  “Tell me what you know about my family,” I said in a neutral tone.

  “Honestly, there’s not a lot to tell,” Monty said sheepishly. “I mean, it was three decades ago. I can give you an address, and names, but I don’t know how much good they’ll be to you now.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” I growled. “Tell me everything you remember about the night I was taken from my family—and leave nothing out.”

  A few hours later, I had wrung every last bit of information I could from the vampire courier. I now had a name and an address in a small town that strangely was not too far from Austin. I also had the names of the vampires who were involved in my abduction, including Monty himself, as well as those individuals who had actually taken me from my home.

  In addition, Monty had given me the date and time of my abduction, as well as the means by which they had delivered me to the fae. I remembered none of that night and little of my life before I was taken. That was likely due to a mind wipe performed by Fuamnach herself, or some other fae magic-user skilled enough to delete years of a young human’s memory without frying their brain.

  Truthfully, I was torn about what I might do with this information. I felt no connection to my human family, and I saw little reason to dredge up the past simply to satisfy my own curiosity regarding my former life. However, I felt a great deal of hate toward my former slave masters, and I certainly did not want any other humans to have to go through what I had.

  Sadly, I was one of the lucky ones, a human chosen for purposes that made me somewhat valuable to my captors. Had I not been singled out to become Fuamnach’s pet, I might’ve ended up like so many other changelings I had known during my time in Underhill. Most of them were used up and discarded like so much trash by fae royalty, who saw their human slaves as a disposable resource.

  For that reason alone, I determined to find out more, and to verify Monty’s story. He was a vampire, after all, and the supernatural races simply could not be trusted. Considering the position he was in, he might say anything to preserve his life. Therefore, I needed to make certain he was telling the truth before I acted on any of the information he had given me.

  I left Monty locked up in a portal-proof room with a half-dozen lab rats, cable television, and a bag of marijuana. I’d have to secure some human blood for him later, and depending on the length of time I kept him around, I’d need to secure a steady source of same. But those complications could wait. Right now, I had to contact my primary source of information for news of Underhill—Queen Maeve.

  Maeve tolerated my presence in her demesne, but only barely, as she did not trust me fully after the escapade involving my theft of a very precious magical artifact from her dungeon vault. She had thought it virtually impossible for someone to break into the most secure area in her home—and she certainly never expected a human to be able to do so. However, I’d learned to be very resourceful during the time that I served my adoptive mother as her Hound.

  Besides that, I had also learned the vulnerabilities of the fae over many long years of being Fuamnach’s pet. Their chief weakness was their extreme arrogance and sense of superiority over humans. That, of course, led to their being sloppy when it came to protecting themselves from magical attacks… especially those of non-fae origin.

  It was one thing to learn how to fight your own kind. Similarly, it was relatively easy to subjugate those who did not possess the resources and technology of your own people. However, it was quite another thing to defend yourself against an enemy after that enemy had been privy to your ways for decades. And I had learned everything I possibly could about the fae and their magic from my adoptive mother, who was more than eager to teach me how to carry out her will in the most brutal ways imaginable.

  Ironically, had Mother not trained me to be her favorite assassin, I might not be alive today. That said, I was an experiment gone awry, and she was not likely to make the same mistake twice. Fortunate for me that she had, and how unfortunate for her that she might very well have devised the means of her own destruction.

  But revenge could wait, as my next step was to request an audience with Maeve. I preferred to avoid using electronic communications in my dealings with her, as I was most certain that such missives were monitored by the powers that be in Underhill. That was likely why she never spoke over the phone herself, but instead used a menagerie of underlings to handle communications for her.

  It wasn’t just that she saw it as too mundane of a task to be bothered with—it was a matter of personal security and safety that she not communicate with others except by proxy or in-person. Thus, I would need to drive into town and locate one of her personal assistants in order to inform her of my impending visit. In this manner, I would ensure that neither of us would be place
d at risk. One could never be too paranoid when dealing with the fae.

  I was in my car and headed out the gate when Belladonna pulled up on her motorcycle. The convertible roof was down on my vehicle, so I placed the car in park and waited for her to approach. Trying my best to look nonchalant, I observed her out of the corner of my eye as she pulled her helmet off and shook out her long, dark hair.

  “Looks like I got here just in time,” she said with a smile as she sashayed over to the driver’s side of my Jaguar. “Where you headed?”

  I shrugged noncommittally. “I have some business to attend in town—some people I need to speak with. However, that business can wait. I’m rather curious to discover why I’ve been graced with the captivating presence of Ms. Belladonna Becerra.”

  Belladonna tongued a molar and gave me a sideways smirk. “See there? You can be charming when you want to be.” Crossing her arms, she leaned her hip against the car, wedging her body next to the mirror and the windshield. “Anyway, I came out here to see if you’re free for the night.”

  “Oh really? Is there some new development in the case you’ve been working on?”

  She slapped my arm playfully. “No, silly. Unlike you, not everyone thinks about work all the time. I was actually going to invite you out for a little R&R.”

  Typically, I had a dreadful time reading the intentions of others in social situations. I was an expert at predicting violence, especially when it was directed toward me. But when it came to determining the undercurrents of casual conversation, I often found myself at a loss, which was why I thought it best to tease more information from my friend.

  “And when you say R&R, I take it you mean rest and relaxation, not ‘rapine and rampage,’” I said, a smile teasing at the corners of my mouth.