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Vitae
I’d barely pulled into my parking space when Scurith rushed up to my door, ears pitched forward. I rolled the window down. “Yes?”
“Master, we have intelligence of a Sidhe battle not far to the west.”
My lips curled. I stepped out of the car, pushing the tome I’d acquired from the willful and misinformed angel into Scurith’s paws. I drew my fighting batons from behind my seat. “Excellent. Fetch me a half dozen enforcers. Perhaps I can finally reclaim my swords.”
Scurith took the book. His eyes widened and his ears twitched, but both returned to their former position. He scurried into the hotel without another word.
I strode west, hands tightening and relaxing around my fighting batons. Anticipation hurried my pace until I was two blocks from the hotel when my black-painted trollmen enforcers jogged up to bracket me.
“I want prisoners, but if you glimpse the Champion swords, you are to ignore all others combatants until you’ve reclaimed my blades.”
The once dead bodyguards didn’t so much as grunt.
I pushed essence into my hilts as the press of taint prickled hair along my arms and legs. Part of me wanted to connect the bladed batons into a lajatang, but twin weapons offered more flexible assault options.
My pace slowed to allow a confident swagger in my swaying hips. I stepped into the mouth of an alley only to find two forces watching me enter from walls against opposite buildings.
“I told you,” a Seelie knight said.
His Unseelie opposite sneered. “I guess we won’t get to shed your blood after all.”
“By the Undying Light—”
Both groups screamed battle cries and charged me.
My trollmen drove bodily into the enemy, taking up the entire alley’s width lined up shoulder-to-shoulder. Gnolls and grendling, goblins and orcs slammed into my defenders. Meaty greenish fists crushed bones as faerie blades hacked away chunks of enforcer.
Movement along the back of their combined mob drew my eyes skyward. Something combining one part woman and two parts humming bird buzzed into the air. Three long, mosquito-like noses pointed my way and led a diving assault.
Hergies
I spun side to side, dodging thrusting beaks. Following through on my evasive spin, I launched crescent blades of essence in the hergies’ wake. I missed one, but my second strike sheered a wing from one of the hergies.
Another trio dove at me.
I sidestepped and spun, axe blade coming down to cleave a hergy in half. An elven Unseelie knight bisected one of my trollmen and rushed through the subsequent gap. Blade to baton, our weapons flashed through elaborate cuts and parries, feints and ripostes.
Hergies dove at me again. I dodged in a way meant to move my elven opponent into their strafing assault, but the flying fey rolled around the elf’s head without upsetting a single hair.
A trollman snatched up his severed arm and hurled it at a passing hergy only to lose his other arm to a grendling’s troll blade. The grendling darted in to take advantage of his success, only to have the baby-sized arm regrowing from the sliced side of the downed trollman seize his ankle. The trollman’s still full-sized arm grabbed the grendling’s other leg and made a wish.
“I want prisoners!”
The Unseelie elven knight renewed his onslaught, driving me back toward the alley’s entrance. I couldn’t allow our altercation to enter mortal view, so I kicked off a loafer and hamstrung him with a foot transmogrified back into a talon.
His blade drove through my sternum.
For a moment, red-gold filled my vision. Desire to thrust a hand into his chest and tear away his life force blinded my reason for an instant. The sudden agony of an iron spike in my shoulder snapped me out of my rage.
I yanked a rubber band wrapped three-inch nail from my skin, brought the flat of my bladed baton down on the elf and glanced up to a whirl of blazing pixie lights.
A beefy-looking pixie blazed acid green as he spun like an airborne top. Each arm held the ankle of a smaller sprite clutching an iron nail partially wrapped in a rubber band. Three other muscled sprites flew into view, each with two nail-toting helpers.
The concussed elf sliced a curved dagger across the back of my leg. Severed hamstrings released me to tumble. Nails rocketed away from careful grips in a haphazard barrage, peppering my sprawled form.
I transmogrified, rebalanced and launched myself into the air.
Pixies squeaked and darted in every direction.
A hergy drove its rapier-like beak into my back.
Another dove past me only to angle up sharply through my wing.
I transmogrified again, hitting the ground hard enough to twist my newly-repaired ankle.
Gnolls tackled me, driving me to the ground by sheer weight. Teeth shook and tore at my flesh. Trollmen seized the canid faeries. Pained yelps escaped the gnolls’ and my own lips as my enforcers ripped locked jaws away.
My palms shoved away the canid faeries, failing to dislodge them until great gouts of fire escaped my hands to set the gnolls alight like furry roman candles.
The elven Seelie Knight appeared, bloodied and disheveled, to drive a thrust at my heart. A bolt of violet power drove through his face, exploding brains in all directions.
I climbed to my feet, eldritch power pulsing around me in time with my seething breath. “By the Undying Light, you will lay down your arms and surrender.”
Power washed out of me.
The lesser faeries stopped fighting, weapons tumbling from their hands even as trollmen punched them.
The Unseelie knight cursed me and thrust a blade up toward my groin. I transmogrified my lower half just ahead of the dastardly blow, shifting one leg into a talon and wrapping it around his throat.
Hatred snarled from my lips laced with power. “Surrender or your punishment will eclipse your worst nightmares.”
A trollman kicked him in the head before he could answer.
Hergies and pixies took advantage of my distraction to bolt.
It took all of my will not to assume my true form and rip the little vermin out of my sky.
Instead, I turned to my seven trollmen. “Collect the fey and take them to the cages.” I gestured to a body regrowing from the shoulder of a severed arm. “Don’t forget your body parts.”
The Sidhe had banded together to ambush me. They’d used iron against me despite the danger to themselves. I had to answer their ingenuity with cunning.
I must expand my trollmen into the air.
Quayla
Grynnberry was holding a cocktail party when I arrived. Entertaining a strange faerie wasn’t really a cocktail party, but he was doing it in what was supposed to be my semi super-secret hide out.
I growled his name by way of greeting. “Grynnberry—”
He exploded to full human size, hands raised. “Whoa, slow your boil, Quayla. This isn’t what you think it is.”
I drew a Karambit hilt.
Grynnberry gestured. “This is Cember. I’m not real fond of Unseelie, but this one’s working for your boy Ignis.”
“No one is supposed to know I’m hiding here, Grynn.”
Cember exploded into human form too, though his was less playgirl model and more noir detective. “Shield Aquaylae, Grynnberry did not reveal your location. I sleuth'd it out on my own as far as the building, then came over to this apartment when I sensed the nymph. He’s kept me from leaving for the last several hours.” Cember shot Grynnberry a nasty look. “I’ve already missed one meeting with a new client, so I’d like to get this out of the way while I can.”
“Get what out of the way?”
“Shield Ignis hired me to...,” Cember shot Grynnberry a sideways glance. “...to find the culprit who stole your Shield’s eggs.”
I rolled my eyes. “Great, thanks, considering Dunham’s already captured most of my Shield and used the eggs to enslave them, that’s real helpful information, or would have been a week ago.”
Cember pushed a hand into his trench coat pocket, drew out a pixie-sized scroll, handed it over and tucked his hand in the pocket once more. “Even so, I’m required to deliver this information to complete my deal with Shield Ignis.”
“Yeah, right,” I unrolled the scroll.
A shift in Grynnberry’s weight caught my peripheral vision. I looked up from the still-unread scroll and narrowed my eyes. “Grynn? Something wrong?”
“Well, yeah, I’ve gotten word about your boy toy getting captured and we’re wasting time on information you already have.”
My gaze sharpened. “You know where they took Dylan?”
“I got word right before Cember showed up. I was about to come looking for you, but I had to keep him from leaving and telling anyone your whereabouts.”
A few hours ago. I’ve known less than an hour.
I glanced at Cember.
His eyes met mine, shot to the scroll and then darted nervously toward Grynnberry. I rubbed the parchment between my fingers, stopping a moment later lest I smear the ink. It was possible Grynnberry had learned of the abduction before I’d been approached. He’d offered me good information on several occasions over the time I’d known him, but usually he had to go to the Courts for information.
“I thought you were laying low here, Grynn.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Don’t you normally eavesdrop to get information?”
Grynnberry stiffened, clearly affronted. “I have other contacts.”
“So, you’re not just a conniving sneak thief?” Cember asked.
“Weren’t you in a hurry?” Grynnberry asked.
Something wasn’t right.
Grynnberry’s claims weren’t impossible, but they felt askew somehow. Cember had said he was in a hurry, but he seemed unwilling to leave before I read the scroll.
Some kind of inter-Court politics?
I dropped my eyes back toward the scroll. Grynnberry stopped breathing, going fully still. I dropped the scroll, whipped forward and brought my newly-extruded Karambit to his throat.
“Hey, what the hell?” Grynnberry spluttered.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I am really not in the mood for faerie bullshit. Where is Dylan?”
“I’m not going to tell you with a knife to my throat. That’s not how friends treat one another.”
I put all of my anger and hurt, fear and frustration into my gaze. “We’re not friends, Grynnberry. You’ve been a huge nuisance that I’ve put up with because of occasional tidbits of good information. Problem is, I suddenly wonder if the trouble I had at all the tip locations had something to do with you.”
“Quayla, babe, I’m a nymph, not one of the movers and shakers in the Courts. You said it yourself. Most of my tips were from information I overheard, but I gave you the best I had.”
On a hunch, I blew into Grynnberry’s face.
He didn’t fall unconscious, but rather drove a fist into my gut and kicked backward. My slice still drew a bloody line across his throat, but not deep enough to be fatal. Grynnberry reached over his shoulders, grabbing his wings and tearing them away from his body. As he did so, the glamour disguising the twin blades vanished.
“You’re going to die for this, Unseelie,” Grynnberry snarled.
“You first, Anseelie.” Cember drew a pistol from his pocket. “Don’t move, Sir Jahriss.”
“Sir?” I said over my shoulder.
“Shield Aquaylae, allow me to introduce Sir Jahriss, Knight of the Anseelie Court, Champion of the exiled Wyldfae queen.”
Grynnberry launched an assault at me, golden cutlasses hacking through the space my head had been a moment before. My splits dropped me under his cut. I thrust both Karambits into his torso in an upward cut. Cember shot Grynn in the face three times for good measure. Before Grynnberry could react, I swept his legs, dropping him onto the ground. I used the sweep momentum to come up onto my feet and drive both knives into a sideways sweep across his chest and throat.
Cember shot him again, but Grynnberry was already dead.
I whipped around to face Cember.
The Unseelie dropped the gun unceremoniously to the floor and raised his hands. “Not your enemy.”
“You’re a Sidhe,” I growled. “That makes you my enemy.”
He rolled his eyes. “World’s not black and white, girlie.”
I read the scroll he provided, confirming Cember’s accusations. “Blight, he was my only lead on Dylan.”
“Hey, I’ve kept my end of the bargain. Can I go?”
I glared at him. “In the name of the Undying Light, in accordance with—”
“Whoa, have a look.” Cember held out a stone.
A work visa grant scrolled across the tablet in fiery phoenix essence. For whatever reason, Ignis had granted this Unseelie the right to live in Creation—explaining his insistence in completing his side of his bargain with Ignis.
An idea struck me. “Can you find where they’re keeping Dylan?”
The grizzled face he offered the world smirked. “Sure. Tell me what you know, what you need to know and I’ll explain my rates.”
Vitae
I folded the ancient scroll along long-ingrained creases and closed an ancient leather cover around it. I’d read the tome delivered by the angelic messenger three times.
No wonder He replaced them with us.
Reading the instructions thrice might have been overly thorough, but collecting the ingredient offered enough challenge without being forced to gather them more than once due to ignorance or poor planning.
Scurith bowed into the room. “Pardon, Mist-Master, but—”
“Good, Scurith, I have tasks for you.”
Scurith’s brows rose. “Yes, Master?”
“We will need several rare components to complete the oracle, some we may be forced to obtain from Faery or the Goblin Market.”
Scurith cleared his throat. “Master, after what happened—”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” I let menace enter my voice. “Surely, you’d rather avoid repeating your predecessor’s disappointing performance. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Scurith squeaked, eyeing me sullenly through his lashes. “Yes, Master. Give me the list. I will see it done.”
“Good boy. My thrall has run into trouble acquiring us more bodies to make enforcers. My recent battle worked out a solution on that count, but illuminated a new need for deceased wafers. We’re going to need to raid the graveyards for more forces. Start with Oakland Cemetery. You’re to focus your collections on obtaining children’s corpses.”
“Did you say children, Master? You wish us to kidnap waf—”
“No, not kidnap, dig up. Child wafers will be more pliable once reborn. Their smaller bodies will also make flight easier to obtain.”
“Flight, Master? I don’t understand.”
“I must have winged enforcers. Airborne minions will serve me well in the battle ahead.”
“I shall see your commands obeyed,” Scurith said.
I dismissed Scurith with a gesture. “Be about it.”
“Master, begging your pardon, but I bring news you may wish to hear.”
I raised my brows. “Go on.”
“Word has come to us that a mortal has been captured by one of the Anseelie.”
“What is that to me?”
“To you, perhaps nothing, but to the mortal’s lover, Shield Aquaylae, the mortal’s whereabouts seems of dire consequence.”
Anger flashed through me at the sound of my shield’s name. The heat of my blossoming temper rose to twice the firestorm as my predictions of the future became reality.
“Do you know where the wafer is being kept?”
“I do, Master. What is your will?”
“Fetch my armor, I shall see about wrenching Aquaylae’s paramour from the just dessert delivered on them both.”
“You are ever a magnanimous leader, Master.”
Scurith scurried from my sight. I rose, setting the precious book gently atop another of my mentor’s old Homer manuscripts with a frustrated sigh.
At least rescuing her paramour will bring Aquaylae back into the fold in time to serve my purposes assembling the oracle.
I descended toward the lower depths to collect a few enforcers and make my will regarding aerial forces known to my thrall.
Bradley
Bradley woke, pulling his phone to shed light inside the body drawer. He yawned, shaking off the last vestiges of a nightmare. He always had nightmares sleeping in the drawer, but he’d also dreamed up some of his best ideas sleeping like the dead.
His Master needed to create some sort of sensor grid, connecting small motes of essence in ways that kept tampering and destruction to a minimum. He hadn’t charged Bradley to deploy the things—not that it mattered. The hotel he’d found his Master housed enough bowing and scraping fantasy creatures to see the task done.
He checked his bank account. Enough money remained in his account to purchase the items his subconscious had come up with, but he also needed to see about his rent.
I’ll need to ask Master about some money to cover my expenses.
He could steal some of what he needed from the morgue’s supplies, but he’d been ordered to keep his job. The order gladdened Bradley. He adored his job despite all the bureaucratic bullshit. Instead of steal, he stopped in to visit the office of the biggest prick the coroners had.
Ashley looked up from her desk outside Mercer’s office.
Bradley hadn’t expected the attractive blond to be at work so late. Her expression flickered before her professional smile rose to the occasion.
Bradley stared at her.
Something wasn’t right. She seemed flush and flustered, which wasn’t something he’d come to expect from her. One of the buttons on her blouse was in the wrong hole.
“Doctor Mercer is unavailable, Doctor Sky, is there something I can do for you?”
Talking to her had never been easy. Pretty and confident, she was the exact type of woman that glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He checked the time on his phone. It was almost seven. Mercer seldom left later than two in the afternoon.
Does he come back after his golf game and work some kind of split shift I didn’t know about?
Ashley pushed a hand through her blond bob, fingers tangling a moment. His eyes narrowed at the odd clumping of her hair. It took him a moment for a theory to form. If what Bradley thought he saw was real, then Mercer deserved what Bradley’d planned for him and more.
Master Vitae provided rationed amounts of the blood formula used to create the enforcers. He’s been very specific about its use, but he’s also insisted Bradley experiment to improve Master Vitae’s options. Bradley had brought a small vial of the blood with him to analyze in his office’s quiet—though he hadn’t gotten the chance.
The formula allowed greater control over the reborn human-trollman—a good thing since Whiskers—Bradley’s reanimated roadkill—refused Bradley’s commands to attack Master Vitae. Creating the trollmen presented an even greater peril. Sure, the humans had more complex brains than the cat and thus could understand and adopt training better, but they were also more dangerous for the same reason.
Master Vitae’s formula somehow forced unquestioned control onto the trollmen, not only for his orders, but orders Bradley gave on his behalf.
“Doctor Sky?”
Bradley braced himself for what was to come, less concerned about having an actual conversation with the woman than what he intended to do to her. He tucked a hand in his lab coat and worked the top of his serum vial open with finger and thumb. “Good evening, Ashley. I was going to leave Doctor Mercer a message, but if he’s in, I can wait.”
She paled, blinking at Bradley as if he were the victim of a new and unusual murder. “It would be better if you left a message.”
“All right.” He strode forward. “I wanted his opinion on this sampl—”
Bradley tripped, splashing her with the bloody serum. Ashley shrieked, trying but failing to jump clear. There wasn’t a lot, but almost half of it hit her skin above the misaligned collar.
She shrieked. “You weird, horrible little bastard!”
The intercom keyed on, Doctor Mercer sounding out of breath. “Ashley, is there a problem?”
“Tell him everything is fine,” Bradley whispered.
A nasty comment perched on her lips but failed to exit. She looked at the phone. “Everything is fine, Doctor.”
“Then keep the noise down. I don’t want to draw any undue attention,” Mercer’s voice became pointed. “Do you?”
She looked at Bradley.
He shrugged.
“No, Doctor.” Ashley disconnected the line.
“Obviously something is going on out here and in there, spill.”
The words tumbled out of Ashley’s mouth and tears followed. Mercer was blackmailing her and at least one other assistant for sexual favors. He’d forced them to do degrading things, recording them without their knowledge and then had doubled down on the extortion.
Bradley listened, heat building in his gut. Mercer was controlling the women, forcing them to do things they didn’t want to do. In the clear moments of thought, guilt stabbed Bradley in the nads. He’d used the serum to do the exact same thing.
“You don’t have to tell me, but is Mercer doing anything else illegal?” Bradley asked.
“Prescription fraud. Filing insurance claims for procedures he’s claiming happened before the patients died.”
Bradley checked the serum vial. There wasn’t much left.
How much does it take?
“Are you interested in helping me put him away?”
“I am,” Ashley chewed a lock of hair. “But I don’t want the things he made me do becoming public.”
“I think I can do both, but I’ll have to ask you to pretend like we never had this conversation. Would you be willing to do that?”
Ashely nodded.
“I’m sorry about your blouse.”
She looked away. “He’d already ruined it.”
Bradley offered his best smile. “Don’t worry, I’m going to ruin him much worse.”
He headed up to his car, leaving Ashley to clean herself up. The further he got from the situation, the more his anger waned and the less important Ashley’s situation became. He had to work out the new seed network.
My growing apathy is related to my waning anger. I have to stay angry about this so I can help.
He focused on the horrible things she’d told Bradley. Ashley hadn’t been graphic, but he had little trouble filling in the gaps. Mercer had always struck him as an insufferable asshole with delusions of godhood. Bradley just hadn’t known how much Mercer had turned delusions into reality.
He pictured the things Mercer made Ashley do, trying to stay angry enough to keep on mission. Ashley’s harsh words about Bradley flashed back to mind and in an instant, he pictured her on her knees doing to him what she’d done for Mercer. He was already planning to enslave Mercer with a dose of serum, but another small dose would make her his slave.
Bradley shook the selfish thought away, anger and self-loathing helped clear his mind even more.
How could I think such a thing? Forcing people into things is wrong.
Guilt returned.
Bradley was planning to force Mercer to destroy the blackmail evidence, write the prescriptions Bradley needed and then turn himself in with proof of his other crimes.
That’s not the same as making some girl into an object. This is justice.
Bradley got back to the hotel, collected the samples he needed and returned to the morgue. He dealt with Mercer, picked up the boxes of hypodermic needles Mercer prescribed, and headed for the craft store with only a bruised conscience.
He had given Ashely one last order—to forget Bradley’s actions—and even though it had been best for everyone, he still felt badly about it.
The cash Mercer surrendered financed a trip to the craft store, buying thousands of self-adhesive googly eyes. Mercer’s ill-gotten gains also paid for dollar store roach baits, ant baits and cheap cat collars.
Bradley returned to the hotel, obtained essence from Master Vitae and went to work injecting the essence into eyes and traps with the needles. He adhered some of the filled eyes on the collars. When he’d completed enough to perfect the operation, he enlisted faerie help.
There was a time when seeing all these fantasy creatures was so cool.
Once all of the essence had been exhausted, he sent them out into Atlanta with eyes and traps and dirty needles. “Put the collars on rats and pigeons and the mangiest alley cats you can find. Stick the eyes on those ‘we buy cash houses’ signs and political signs and street signs.”
When the first wave left, Bradley returned to Master Vitae for more essence. At first, Vitae refused, doing something that let Bradley’s Master reach out to the seeds. Whatever Vitae found met with his approval. He granted Bradley direct access to the back lab where the essence was kept.
Master Vitae led Bradley to a stone basin marked with runes like some kind of Dungeons and Dragons artifact. “You will never empty essence from this basin, but you may utilize my reserve for the various projects you’re assigned.”