Matt Gilisson’s problem with being the mission partner of a law-abiding mage of a fairy was that fairies of such an ilk were easily spooked by mundane concepts like speed limits. When time was of the essence, speed mattered.
Teachers’ pets, unfortunately, were perhaps a bit too neutral on the concept of “emergencies.” After all, they didn’t want to create new ones while addressing the old ones.
Matt Gilisson was no teacher’s pet and no mage. He was a Nevada-born quarter-fairy brute with a frontal cortex his step-cousin had said was “resistant to creating tranquility.” He was a mercenary, at best. At worst, he was a ham-fisted thug. He couldn’t work like a surgeon.
“This is why everyone takes your food,” he muttered into his helmet. “You make people wait too long.”
As soon as he caught the flash of his partner’s bike rounding the curve in his rearview mirror, he signaled and pulled to the side of the highway.
With his usual unhurried vigilance, Perry Geer navigated onto the shoulder, being careful not to kick up any rocks or silt or gravel or any small particle that might be dear and precious to Mother Nature.
Matt lifted his visor and called out over the sick growl of his motorcycle’s engine, “Your bike has enough power to tow an elephant across a football field of wet sand. What’s the issue?”
“Don’t want to get a ticket,” Perry shouted.
Matt laughed, and the sound definitely wasn’t indicative of good humor. He’d done his what-the-fuck? laugh, and he’d noticed as of late that he made the sound frequently when in Perry’s company. Given that they were roommates, he could no longer keep track of what triggered them. There were too many things.
Perry, a Sídhe man of around seventy-two fairy years old, was six-foot three, owned a flamethrower, and could enchant a crowd of eighty people into believing they were auditioning for a revival of A Chorus Line if he had enough calories in him before making the attempt. He could have a room full of soldiers performing a little shuffle-ball-change action while Matt and the rest of their crew disarmed the opponents and identified and extracted the fugitives they sought.
None of the fairies in their group, a ragtag bunch of derelicts operating under the oversight of Matt’s cousin Heath—Prince Heath, formally—would even ask questions like, “When did you see A Chorus Line, Per? That’s some pretty niche shit,” anymore. They just let Perry be Perry and left the weird shit for Matt to query since they lived together.
Everyone in Heath’s crew had a partner or two. Since Perry had been the youngest when Matt was unceremoniously thrust into service by Heath’s mother, the malevolent queen—Matt’s great-great-aunt, technically—Heath figured they’d be the most compatible.
Matt may have been barely into his twenties, but he was more ruthless and practical than Perry by constitution. He was descended from Vikings of a witchy sort and being aggressive was simply wired into his DNA. He got that defender attribute from his father. And that was how Matt ended up with a chaos-beckoning, pain-hurling telepath as a stepmother.
Tess was so cute. He was glad they got along.
He didn’t know what the fuck had gone wrong in Perry’s DNA encoding, though. Or what the fuck the fairy queen, Rhiannon, had been thinking ordering Perry into a period of royal servitude with Heath. Perry should have been an accountant, not an assassin…or even an assassin’s associate.
Perry finally lifted his visor. He blinked several times, likely to clear the film of exhaust from his reddish-brown eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ll go faster. If we get pulled over, I’ll use magic.”
Matt gritted his teeth to slow his return volley of words. That would save him the time of having to insist to Perry later that Matt wasn’t mad at him. Unlike most everyone else in the crew, Perry cared what people thought about him.
“Magic isn’t a last resort, man,” Matt said. “Sometimes, you gotta see it as a first resort. Stop being so tentative about using your gifts. You’re not hurting anyone.”
Perry’s left eye twitched. The tic wasn’t new. His eyelid always spasmed when he didn’t believe something but was being too polite to say so. Matt was probably the only person who’d figured that out. Perry wasn’t much for socializing with the others. He was in their clique, but apart from it.
For fuck’s sake, Per.
As frustrated as he got with Perry’s tentativeness, Matt wasn’t going to press him. He’d give him a good stare later and his usual what the fuck, man? pep talk when they got back to their apartment. That was Matt’s routine as of late—going home to knock beach sand out of his leathers and ass-crack before what-the-fucking Perry.
“Last ten miles, really gun it, okay?” Matt said. “Or when we get home, I’m telling Heath you’re trading your bike in for a moped.”
Perry chose to say nothing as he pressed his visor back down. He gestured for Matt to continue ahead of him, so Matt did.
True to his promise, Perry kept up with Matt’s ninety-mile-per-hour race up the coast, and not a single patrol car got anywhere near them. Whether that was due to magic or luck, Matt couldn’t say, and he didn’t really care.
They maintained silence as they parked their bikes in a parking lot already crowded with motorcycles. They remained quiet as they curved around the bungalow housing Reefer’s Bar and Grille. They kept their helmets on and hands hidden as they walked the boardwalk toward the restaurant’s large pier. There were no boats docked there, just tables where the worst of the worst could dine on fresh seafood while making plans no one else could hear.
It’s too cold for this shit, Matt thought as Perry discreetly snaked a hand up the back of Matt’s shirt. Perry’s hands were always ice blocks, but like everything else having to do with the mage, Matt had gotten used to the inconveniencing.
The three men at the table looked up as they approached, but none had a chance to say anything. One by one, their heads hit the table. The last head belonged to a fairy who Matt’s father, Ollie, had told him to take special caution with. He ranked high in Rhiannon’s retinue. The other two men were typical, as evidenced by the missing crackle of fae essence that would have been around them. He’d always had a hard time explaining the phenomenon to less sensitive supernaturals, but to Matt, observing fae energy gave him the same feeling as standing too close to the blades of a fan that had no cover over them. They could be dangerous if he tried to touch, but mere proximity wouldn’t harm him.
Dad had told Matt to always doublecheck his magic’s work through manual means, so Matt lifted the fairy’s head by the back of his hair and studied his face.
The fairy’s eyes were rolled back in his head and his tongue dangled from his mouth like a surrender flag. His friends weren’t much better off. They were experiencing a temporary paralysis caused by the combination of Matt and Perry’s various magics. Matt could short-circuit people and, occasionally, pull their magic off them. Perry could extend the diameter of Matt’s magic. Sometimes, they didn’t even have to get close.
Matt cut his gaze over to Perry.
Perry emitted a soft grunt.
“That’s him, yeah?” Matt asked his friend.
“Yes.”
“Got anything you want me to do to him while he’s knocked out?”
Matt had spoken the question half in jest, but Perry’s silence suggested that there probably was, and he was simply too good to say so.
That was the problem with Perry. He was too good. He really should have grown out of that by seventy-two, but fairy maturity was an unpredictable thing. Dad had given Matt a crash course on fairies after Matt turned eighteen and learned his father had been keeping that aspect of their heritage secret his whole life. He’d explained to Matt that fairies didn’t age the same way as humans. Matt reconfirmed that truth almost daily. Rhiannon was around a thousand, and she sure didn’t look her age. He would have guessed forty or forty-five. Heath looked thirty-five, at most. Perry looked about Matt’s age. Matt’s father’s appearance was a little less impacted by his heritage because of how his mother’s family had ended up living among humans. He looked approximately his actual age of forty-something, but because of recent events having to do with old magic, meddling gods, and the unpredictable witch queen he was married to, he likely wouldn’t age at the same rate going forward. For all intents and purposes, he was as long-lived as his cousin Heath.
“What’d he do to you?” Matt asked Perry.
Perry’s helmeted head turned slowly toward the bar behind them. He was still making skin contact with Matt’s back, which meant he was either actively editing the magic around them or preparing to spin some kind of enchantment to keep the people in that restaurant from concerning themselves with the activity by the water. He didn’t really need Matt’s magic for that. He could do a lot of dangerous shit by himself when he was inclined to. But he’d once commented that the magic had “better DNA” if he used Matt as a vector. Matt had asked him to please not elaborate. Matt didn’t have the bandwidth for that level of technical jargon.
“What’d he do, Per?” Matt dropped the fairy’s head back on the table, only to tug the limp courtier up to his feet. He was going to be taking a nice ride down the Virginia and North Carolina coasts in Matt’s temporary sidecar, and when he got to Heath, he was probably going to wish he hadn’t woken up. Heath wasn’t a huge fan of magic harvesters, and certainly not the ones in employ of his mother.
The Horan family was fractured precisely in two halves with the queen and king on one side of the dividing line and Heath and his sister Siobhan on the other. The siblings had fallen afoul of their parents by self-ejecting from the fairy realm and taking the conscripted crew with them. For the better part of three years, they’d been trying to stymy Rhiannon’s efforts to emerge in the human realm and raise the same sort of hell outside that she did inside the realm. The crew and their allies had been using their own personal magics, as well as some discreet assistance from their patron gods, to keep inside the bubble-like encasement that surrounded the Sídhe’s longtime dimension. The petty gods who’d originally confined the fairies into the realm had recently chosen to collapse it and force the denizens out and back into the world they’d been meant to serve, but the crew were using every trick at their disposal to keep the place from fully compressing. There were people trapped there with Rhiannon who didn’t deserve to be, but until they had a way to eliminate her without her taking down innocents in the process, they were erring on the side of carefulness.
And that meant getting the drop on her agents on the outside of the bubble, like the one whose hair Matt had in his fist.
Perry turned just as slowly back to the scene as he’d turned away from it. He dropped his hand from Matt’s back and lifted the first human’s head. With his other hand, he swiped his palm down the man’s face. Then he moved and did the same thing to the other man.
They would wake with no memory of the event or of the fairy who’d asked them to dine with him. In fact, they’d probably want to get out of the murder-for-hire business altogether.
Rhiannon had done some piss-poor calculus in trying that shit, knowing that Heath’s crew would never let anyone get close to him, his wife, his sister, or anyone he cared about. She was running out of ideas—and “technicians”—to eliminate the threat her children were to her power, and that made her desperate.
“Had my parents humiliated and dragged before the queen because they refused to hand me over to him,” Perry said after what had seemed to be becoming an interminable pause.
“Hand you over for what?” Matt asked.
Perry shrugged. “Alcindor said apprenticing. I didn’t see the sense in that.”
“You weren’t looking for a mentor?”
“No. In fact, when I was in my teen years, I hoped no one would believe I had any magic worth noticing. He may not have actually known that I did. He may have been hedging his bets because my granny had some of our heritable abilities. There was a time when nearly every castle in Europe had a magician of my line in it. Everyone wanted to have their own sort of Merlin back then.”
As was typical of Perry, he told the story with matter-of-fact, intellectual intonation, attaching no emotion to events a more hot-natured fairy might have considered traumatizing.
It wasn’t that Perry wasn’t capable of expressing strong emotions. He was. However, his grandmother had helped his parents raise him, and she’d taught him to be discreet about his feelings. He wasn’t the kind of fairy who had fair odds of winning a fight. Quick thinker though he was, he tended to be slow in conflict, and thus Heath did all he could to keep Perry out of brawls.
“My mother suggested that Alcindor wanted to keep me on ice for whenever his daughter came of age,” Perry said. “I don’t think he liked the accusation.”
“Likely because he wasn’t waiting for her at all, but for himself,” Matt said in a cynical growl. “How old were you?”
“For him—” Perry furrowed his brow, groaned softly at the obviously delayed revelation, then straightened his spine.
Matt had never met a fairy who forgot as much as Perry that a person could desire him. The potential for attraction was always his last thought.
“Nineteen, I think,” Perry said.
“Nineteen.” Matt scoffed and started maneuvering the unconscious fairy toward the boardwalk. He was having to push magic out to him to make him want to walk of his own accord, but at the moment, Matt had plenty of energy to spare. Anger tended to make his fuel more efficient.
Besides, if he didn’t move Alcindor away from the pier with some urgency, that fairy was never going to have a chance to wake up. That wouldn’t be good. Heath had always stressed to Matt that he should be discreet in his mission activities. That meant allowing a dead fairy to wash up on shore where human authorities would find him was out of the question. Apparently, fairy bodies didn’t rot quite the same way as human ones. Matt’s brother Lyman would say, “It’d be sus.”
Bearer of accountant energy or not, like most fae creatures, Perry was more attractive than anyone deserved to be, and therefore Matt had a strong hunch that Perry would have been that motherfucker’s toy, and that annoyed Matt because Perry was defensively inept, too naive for his own good, and too decent for Earth in general.
Matt squashed the fairy into the sidecar, gave the underside of his chin the gentlest of kicks, and patted his head softly against the rim until a bruise formed.
Perry traded Matt’s keys for his own. “I’ll drive him.”
“But he might wake up.” Matt figured he might need to pat Alcindor’s head again.
“I’ll drive fast.” Perry looked at his watch, then gestured to his neighboring motorcycle. “We might make it down to Rodanthe before they’ve put away dinner. We can be there in two hours if there’s no traffic. I’ll let Princess Simone know we’re on the way.” Perry’s visor was down, but Matt could tell Perry was peering at him in his patient doormat way.
The only reason Matt got on Perry’s bike was because they were wasting time. If that fairy woke up and tried to start some shit with Perry, Matt was going to make him a speed bump on I-64. Then Heath would have to find some other fairy of Rhiannon’s to interrogate about her emergence efforts. He’d be angry with Matt, but he’d understand, because like Heath, Matt took people targeting his friends personally.
Especially the kind of friends who didn’t flinch when Matt padded naked into his room at six a.m. with a greeting of, “Forgot the laundry. You got dry towels somewhere?”