Once upon a time, a three-way fight between a Fae, my boyfriend, and myself would have officially registered as weird. Lately, it had become just another night at the office.
Another tiring night.
Which wasn’t what I needed. It had been around eleven when Lizzie and Zee left after dinner. I’d gone straight to bed, but Damon had woken early, and I’d tagged along with him to Riley and worked from there for the day. Mitch delivered his background briefing on the British Cestis but it matched up with what Lizzie and Zee had told us already, though Mitch had more detail. Callum arrived just after Damon and I had finished eating an early dinner in his office, and I was beginning to regret choosing a burger instead of salad as I sparred with them.
I panted as I backed away from the fight, trying to catch my breath. Callum and Damon didn’t notice, both of them gleefully intent on defeating the other.
Technically, Callum came to the Riley campus to help Damon, who was still trying to figure out how Callum was able to escape from a game that had been deadlocked—one that had been hacked so that only someone outside the game could free the player from the VR.
So far, no matter what Damon did to the combination of programming and technology, Callum managed to free himself fairly easily.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to do it again without the impetus of sheer instinct and fear that I’d managed fighting the bruadhsiu. Callum kept trying to explain to me what he was doing. I understood some of it, but I couldn’t replicate it. We hadn’t yet worked out whether it was a lack of power on my part, or just a difference between Fae and witch magic.
So we kept trying. I wasn’t sure if it was helping Damon—who needed a solution for humans, not Fae, to find a mechanism that would prevent people like Jack from turning a VR environment into a virtual prison—but Callum’s patience with the process was growing shorter as the novelty wore off. Lately it had taken less and less time each session before he got bored and demanded to actually do something in the game rather than just trying to escape.
Something about the virtual reality environment seemed to fascinate him, and we had played through several games in Riley’s back catalog already. It was probably just as well that human technology didn’t work reliably in the Fae realm, or Callum might have been the first Fae to turn into a true game head.
Plenty of tanai were gamers and Cerridwen’s theory was it appealed because it gave them some semblance of the powers the Fae had over their realm. But the true Fae had no need of that. They could change the realm—or the parts of it they had control over—to suit them and had access to magic beyond anything a game developer could dream up.
So whatever Callum’s fascination was with Damon’s games, it wasn’t the magic. In fact, he seemed to prefer historical games rather than fantastical ones. But tonight we were playing something that combined both. Coeur d’Acier was set in a medieval-meets-steampunk version of a Europe ruled by France. With bonus dragons. It was an earlier Righteous game but still fun, with plenty of scenarios and locations to explore.
As usual, Callum had taken the first opportunity to turn our quest into a combat session. He called it training and claimed it was to benefit me, but I got the feeling the sessions were mostly a way for him and Damon to test their skills against each other.
They had become friends of a kind, despite the debt that lay between them, but that friendship involved a very healthy dose of male competitiveness. Which I usually found entertaining, when it didn’t go on too long. It had the added bonus of me getting to watch them sparring in whatever ridiculous outfits the game world required. I’d developed a fondness for the ones where they went at it in breeches and floppy white shirts, wielding swords.
One day I might even get Damon to wear a costume like that in real life. So far none of his billionaire events had involved a costume ball, and he’d vetoed the idea for Halloween the previous year. Though he had ravished me in a thoroughly rakish fashion after we’d gotten home from the Riley Halloween party.
Tonight we were having a three-way duel on a spectacular rocky plateau somewhere in the dragon-infested, not-quite-Swiss Alps. Personally, I would have rather flown on the dragons, but at least fighting in VR was somewhat easier on my body than my real-world training sessions with Callum and Cerridwen. Still, even in virtual form, the guys were bigger than me and when they started focusing on each other, I often took the opportunity to back away and play spectator while saving my strength for sneaky attacks later on.
Damon ducked behind a large group of boulders, and I held back an impressed whistle when Callum, hot on his heels, ran up the side of the biggest one and vaulted over it, throwing in a showy sort of flip that was probably only feasible in virtual reality. Well, at least for a human, it would be. I wouldn’t put it past the Fae to defy gravity in real life. On second thoughts, I decided not to ask if he could. He might expect Pinky and me to learn how to do it, and I really didn’t want to add acrobatic training to my schedule.
I backed up a few more paces, wiped sweat off my forehead, tossed my sword to my left hand so I could wipe the right one against the heavy woolen trousers my avatar wore, and then tossed it back, waiting to see if the boys were going to head my way again.
The sound of clashing swords came from behind the rock, followed by a protesting “oof” that suggested someone had thrown a sneaky elbow or worse. Damon rounded the rock at a flat-out sprint, headed in my direction. Callum, predictably, appeared on the top of the rock. He leaped into the air, trying to pull off the flip again. His body twisted elegantly, but he landed with his right foot on a smaller rock, which promptly shifted underneath his weight and dumped him on his butt. A rare mishap for him. And one that the game mechanics apparently decided was bad enough that he was injured, because when he tried to climb to his feet, he flinched as he put his weight on his right ankle.
He started swearing—something low and guttural that didn’t sound anything like the few Fae curse words he’d taught me.
“Language,” I said playfully, and he shot me a glare, his irritation turning his gold-green eyes distinctly more wolfish.
“This game is ridiculous,” he said. “I would not be so injured from a minor mishap in the real world.”
“Yeah, well, sucks to be you,” I said, not feeling sorry for him. He pushed me to my limits pretty regularly. Even with some healing assistance from Cerridwen and Lizzie, I still spent most of my time with bruises on at least one limb and muscle aches in places I didn’t know you could ache. “You’ve got to remember that in here you’re human.” To keep things fair, we tended to play games where the characters were evenly matched. In this world, that meant human and only minimal magic. Nothing to give Callum an unfair advantage.
Callum took a step, wincing again. His face pulled into a scowl, which deepened as he tried another step before coming to a stop.
“Had enough?” Damon asked.
Callum’s scowl deepened. “Your virtual body is faulty.”
Damon twirled his sword, smirking. “Nothing wrong with my programming. You just got cocky.”
Callum looked confused. “Cocky?”
By Fae standards he’d spent a lot of time in our world, but sometimes slang still tripped him up. Of course, he spoke at least four human languages that I knew of, and however many Fae ones on top of that, so in his place I probably wouldn’t remember all the slang either.
“Overly confident,” I said. “Gravity is a bitch.” I pulled up his stats display, pointed to the medical data, where an amber symbol flashed a warning of the injury. “It’s just a sprain, it’ll heal in a few rounds of game play.”
“I think your stats are wrong,” Callum huffed.
“This is just how it feels when you get injured as a human,” I pointed out. “It’s why we invented painkillers.”
“Humans are too fragile.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Despite advances in medical science, ultimately we were still pretty breakable. “Sometimes.”
Callum sheathed his sword, huffing out another irritated breath. “If this will take time to heal, then I feel I must retire from the game for tonight.”
“I thought the point of training was sometimes to push through the pain, so you know how to deal with it,” I said.
Annoyed green-gold flashed at me again. “Quoting my own advice back to me isn’t helpful.”
I laughed. “Maybe not. But it feels good. Besides, you need to remember that how you feel now is how Pinky and I feel a lot of the time.”
His expression turned offended. “I do not make you train when you have—what do you call this again?” he asked, scowling at his foot as he took another limping step forward.
“A sprained ankle,” Damon said. “Damage to one of the ligaments in your foot.”
Callum looked unenlightened.
Damon summoned another holoscreen, this one displaying the anatomy of Callum’s injury. He peered at it. “No, wait, it’s a minor fracture as well. Congratulations, you’ve just become dragon food unless you can find a healer. Or retire.”
“Exactly,” Callum said, “See, Maggie. I would not make you train with an injury like this. I would heal you. Or make you go see one of your human healers like Meredith.”
“But you’d want me to keep fighting if we’re in a real fight,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, I would expect that if we were in a real fight, you would want to keep fighting, too. If the choice is between a little temporary pain and death, choose temporary pain.”
Couldn’t argue with that logic. “Sure. But that’s the difference between fighting and training, and you sometimes forget that what we are mostly doing is training.”
I’d made this point to him before, the fact that when he was in the game, he got to experience things as humans did and that he should remember how it felt when he was teaching Pinky and me. Usually he agreed and promised to remember and then failed utterly to modify his approach. So I was just going to keep making the point and see whether it ever stuck.
I did feel some sympathy for him. Part of the fun for humans playing virtual reality is they got to do things that they couldn’t do in the real world. Callum, so far, hadn’t gotten to do much of that. Other than dragon riding. Though I was too scared to ask him if dragons existed in the realm. That was one of the things I could live with not knowing.
“We could switch to tourist mode,” I suggested. “Visit one of the cities.” He usually enjoyed that kind of thing. Though sometimes he looked a little wistful, making me wonder how he’d spent all those centuries stepping in and out of human lives.
Callum’s expression didn’t lighten. “No. I’m not in the mood. Perhaps we should just bring things to a close.”
“Do you have somewhere to be?” Damon asked.
“Almost always,” Callum replied. He smiled smugly, suddenly cheerful.
I didn’t think I wanted to know exactly what that meant. Callum was a habitual flirt and not above sleeping with human women, though he assured me he was careful not to do anything that might leave them infatuated. Or impregnated. When he stayed in the city, he enjoyed himself. But I didn’t need to hear about his conquests and if he was in the city on Fae business, well, ignorance was bliss.
Damon clicked his fingers, and we blinked back into the blank white space of the game’s foyer, still wearing our avatars, though our outfits had morphed back to the default black and gray skinsuits that most avatars sported outside of a game. Damon had built Callum a custom avatar and even in just the skin, he was unfairly handsome. As was Damon in his. Damon had built my avatar, too, but, to my eyes, it looked mostly just like me. An average gal on the tall side with nice green eyes and these days, more muscle than I used to have.
Callum flexed his foot, looking relieved when it moved easily, but still not happy.
“Is something else wrong?” I asked. “You seem distracted tonight.”
His strange eyes fixed on me. “Nothing to concern yourself with, just yet.”
Just yet? Well, that was ominous. “Can you be a little less cryptic, please?”
“Just that there are things happening in the realm.”
“Cassandra asked Cerridwen about meeting with Aubrey, didn’t she?” I asked. I hadn’t raised the topic earlier because Callum hadn’t said anything, but from his disgruntled expression, something had to be happening.
“The request has been made, yes.”
“And that is upsetting you? Or someone in the realm? Is there a problem with the English Cestis?” Damon asked.
Callum frowned, running a hand through his dark hair. “No. Not precisely. And it is not upsetting, precisely, merely disruptive. It gives those troublemakers amongst us cause to be difficult once more. Things were just settling down after the door and the walker.”
“They were?” I asked. “Does that mean you've learned something about who let the bruadhsiu out?”
“No, sadly. But that incident and the impact here in your world allowed those of us who wish things to remain calm sufficient weight to press our point against those grumbling in the background about the door being difficult and that we should perhaps move it again. They had gone quiet for a time, but now between the afrit and wanting to meet with a strange human, things are bubbling up again.”
Great. Hopefully the Fae politics wouldn’t spill out into our world again. “The afrit was Cerridwen’s fault, not mine,” I pointed out.
“That may be true,” Callum said, “but the fact that one has been discovered so soon is giving those who were not sure about the decision to reopen the door here some fuel. Where there are afrit, there are other demonkind.”
“Yes, but nothing active or the Cestis would know about it. Afrits don’t always come with their larger friends.”
He waved a hand in an annoyed gesture. “I understand that. But it is also true that sometimes they do.”
“Not this one, as far as we can tell,” I said. “We killed it. We haven’t found any others.”
Cassandra, Lizzie, and Zee had gone over the building and the immediate surrounds and did whatever else the Cestis did to try to find traces of demon-related activity, but so far they’d been unsuccessful in locating any more live afrits. Which, from my point of view, was better than the alternative.
“Be that as it may,” Callum said, “things are unsettled. Amongst our kind, unsettled does not always end well. The Lady is…displeased.”
I shot him a sympathetic look. I wouldn’t want to be around Cerridwen in a mood, so I couldn’t blame Callum for not wanting to either. Luckily, I wouldn’t have to see her for a few more days, because our next training session wasn’t scheduled until next week when Pinky and I were meant to be going into the realm for a magic lesson. I stopped at that thought. “Is it safe for me and Pinky to continue with our usual schedule?”
Callum nodded. “The Lady hasn’t told me to tell you otherwise,” he said. “I’m sure she will keep you informed if she changes her mind.”
Occasionally, Cerridwen came to the physical training sessions that we had with Callum. Once it was clear that the lessons were going to continue for some time, Damon had purchased a warehouse in Berkeley and converted it into a training arena far bigger than Sal’s Gym, where we used to train. It seemed like overkill, but it meant that he could be happy with the security in place while I was there with Callum. It made life easier for the Cestis, too, because they could add their own layers of wards. Plus, it had better air-conditioning and didn’t smell of twenty years of sweaty bodybuilder workouts like Sal’s, so I wasn’t complaining.
“Would Cerridwen prefer to have a session in Berkeley?” I suggested.
Callum looked at me. “I think, for the moment, it is probably better if she stays within the realm. If the factions are restive, then she needs to be close at hand in case she needs to…intervene.”
Crap. I hadn’t thought of that. Cerridwen had been locked out of the realm once already. It wouldn’t be any good if it happened again, particularly not when Aubrey was here. Having other Cestis involved would only complicate the politics even more.
“Besides,” Callum continued, “you cannot properly learn Fae magic outside the realm.”
“Not learn it, no,” I said, “But I can practice.” The magic that Cerridwen taught me was always easier within the realm, which was so saturated with the energy that witches called magic, that it was almost like breathing it in. Or maybe standing in the eye of a hurricane, feeling the immense pressure all around me. The magic flowed easily, but felt overwhelming, as though it might swamp me entirely. I could adapt the techniques that Cerridwen had shown me when I was working magic here, but I couldn’t do most of the things I could do in the realm outside of it.
Callum and Cerridwen herself said their magic was more limited in the human realm, but I hadn’t seen any evidence of how that actually affected what they were able to do. Callum still changed form and used illusions and other tricks like he had used on Beanie Guy without thinking about it. None of which I would be able to do even with a hundred more years of training. Not that I would get a hundred years’ more training unless there were some breakthroughs in life extension in the next few decades.
“Very well,” I said, after a pause. “I guess we’ll wait and see what she says next week. Does the fact that this is unsettling mean Aubrey’s request will be refused?”
Callum shook his head. “I think that unlikely. Our far kin have ties with the English Cestis. It would be impolite to refuse to meet without good reason.” He cocked his head at me as though asking if I knew of just such a reason.
I spread my hands, apologetic. “If you’re asking for dirt on Aubrey, I don’t have any, sorry.” Mitch was digging around, but having to proceed carefully. And so far, what he’d told us about Aubrey and the other Brits had been all aboveboard.
“Very well. Until next week, then,” Callum said.
“Wait,” I said, before he could blink himself out of the game. “Aren’t we having a session with Pinky on Sunday?”
He shrugged. “I think perhaps we can skip that one. An acknowledgment of the week you’ve had.”
That seemed unlike him. Was the real reason for him putting us off that he thought it would be better if, like Cerridwen, he stayed close to home for a time? That made my stomach go cold. What exactly was happening if both of them were sticking close to home? Could one small afrit really cause so much chaos or indeed one not quite as small foreign Cestis member? I guessed I would have to wait and see.