Chapter Twenty-Three

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That asshole had been right on top of me the entire time. When Alistair gave me the address, I nearly spat. I don’t know how he got access to a house in Woodland Hills or if he had to hurt someone to get it, but he had been less than half a mile away from day one. It wasn’t even necessary for him to do that, this was merely a power play. A way to let me know he’d been in control the whole time.

I collected Ann from the motel and laid her in the backseat. She was still in her induced state of slumber and thankfully still had both remaining petals around her neck. The plan was working as well as I could have hoped. All the same, I rushed back to Alistair, not willing to waste another second in case things took a turn.

Alistair had made a note to come to the backyard when I arrived, and I found him outside under a rather sizable pergola gazebo, relaxing in a hammock. Between the linen clothes, the bar, and lush surroundings, he almost looked like he was on vacation. Oddly conspicuous amidst all of this was a ring of red tape surrounding his outdoor relaxation center.

Alistair lazily got to his feet as he watched my approach. “Ah, Chalsarda! Good of you to make it. You know, if anyone was going to get this job done, I knew it’d be you. Care for a drink?”

“No, I don’t want a drink,” I monotoned.

“Suit yourself, though I wouldn’t cross that tape if I were you, it’s there for your benefit,” he remarked, moving to pour himself a drink. “And drop the merchandise, yeah? I imagine that’s going to get quite heavy.”

He was referring to the fact that I’d been carrying the body of Debbie slumped across my shoulders. I did as he asked and made a gesture for him to inspect her. “No, I don’t think I’ll be coming out there. You got a knife on you, I expect? Right, well just give her a poke then, make sure she doesn’t flinch.”

“No more demands,” I proclaimed. “We had a deal. How do I cure Ann?”

“Take it easy old girl, you’ll get what you want,” he replied. “First the poking, then the cure. Just want to be sure I’m getting what I paid for.”

My temper was flaring, and it showed, but I still did as he asked. I removed a small dagger from my belt and stuck it deep into her leg and removed it. The body of Debbie remained still, and blood only seeped to the surface rather than pumping out. “Are you satisfied?”

Alistair offered a discerning glance in her direction and gave a nod of approval. “Good enough. How’d you do it?”

“No more questions, you promised—!”

“Yeah, I know what I said, but you can’t lie, and that’s the best way of me knowing this isn’t some sort of trick,” he interrupted. “Come on, love; this is fair play.”

“Fine,” I said hotly. “I tracked her to a small town in Arizona. She’d been weakened somehow, and that gave me an advantage in our fight. It was a long and bloody battle, but in the end, I managed to choke the life from her until she died. Even a Battle Born has to breathe.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that tracks. Heard all about the trail of bodies you left. You two look like shit, by the way, but at least you’re walking about.” Alistair took a sip of his drink with a mock toast in my direction.

“Enough!” I shouted. “I want—”

“Ann’s cure, I know, I heard you the first time. Just take the amulet off of her before she runs out of petals, and well, Bob’s your uncle.”

I was stunned. I must not have heard him correctly. “But the poison...”

“You know, one of my favorite things about you has always been how gullible you are. Fall for anything, you will.” Alistair stared at me a moment longer before sighing in frustration. “The poison was in the amulet, you prat! I gave her an itty-bitty curse, mostly some nausea and gas. You’re the one who went and poisoned her.”

“So you lied to me,” I said aloud to myself.

“Obviously. I’ve made a career out of it; you just make it look easy.”

“And Skip knew about this from the start,” I said to myself.

“Course he did, where do you think I got the amulet?”

I was livid. A small part of me had been ready to believe that maybe someone over there had been reasonable and perhaps even felt guilty about what that organization was responsible for. But as it turned out, Skip was just as much of a monster as any of them. Skip had made me a slave hunter and tried to make me feel grateful for it in the process, all the while the whole thing was part of the plan.

“I need to see to Ann. She’s outside, but we are not done.”

“Well you’re absolutely spot on there,” Alistair agreed. “Do what you must, I need to arrange a pickup for this... thing... before it attracts ants to my lawn.”

I looked down at Debbie, then to Alistair, before dashing to the car outside. I threw open the backdoor and ripped off Ann’s amulet. She gasped a deep breath in response and color flooded into her cheeks a second before she retched; the putrid black phlegm mixed with bile exited her mouth in a single hurl. She looked healthier immediately, but she remained asleep. I dropped the remainder of the amulet and crushed it under my heel, furious with both myself and Alistair, not sure who to be more upset with at the moment.

With my heart pumping harder than it had in recent memory, I grabbed my bow and arrows and marched into the backyard, nocking an arrow the second Alistair was in sight; I let it fly. It sunk like a stone the second it passed over the tape.

“Welcome back,” Alistair said, leaning down to pick up the arrow. He gave it an underhanded toss to my side of the tape, next to Debbie’s body. “Is that out of your system, then? If we’re going to have that talk, we ought to do it before my company arrives.”

I marched up to the edge of the tape, close enough that I could reach out and grab him. “We are done, do you understand me? You were warned what would happen to you if you stayed.”

Alistair wagged a finger at me. “Yeah, I thought about that, and I believe that I’m going to call your bluff. Right scary stuff you proposed, real wrath of the gods, but here’s the way I see it. By the time any of that hits my doorstep, I could do unspeakable things to any one of your pets. Any time, any place, and there’s not a single one of them that’s safe from me. And I don’t think you’re willing to risk that, which means that you and I are going to maintain a nice, healthy working relationship.”

“Unless I kill you right here and now.”

“Two problems with that, love,” he said gesturing to the tape and walking back to the center of the gazebo. “The first of which being that you’re not going to take a step past this line, and would you like to know why?”

“Given that you’re a wizard I’d assume you warded the area. Likely you’ve enough magical traps to kill me, and the tape is for show. For control.”

“You are so very close, and yet you are so very off on one important point. You see, the traps I have set to go off won’t kill you, I’ve seen to that. But it will undoubtedly incapacitate you. It will hurt worse than anything has ever hurt you in your life.”

“No,” I fumed. “It won’t.”

Alistair paused and gave me a grin. “You’re still carrying that around with you? Christ alive, move on. Heaven knows I have.”

We were on a timer here before Skip and his crew arrived, so for as much as I wanted to yell and curse, I had to compose myself. “And what is the second thing?”

“The second thing is that you already said it yourself. You’re not going to put a hand on me. Remember our deal? You agreed, for such time as we are working together, you will bring no harm to me. You Fae love your deals, and you can’t lie. Face it, Chalsarda. I have always been smarter than you, I have always had the control and I always will. I defeated you six different ways before you even saw me and I’m ahead of you right now. You have nothing. No moves I haven’t seen coming a mile away. You bore me, but a tool doesn’t have to be exciting, now, does it?”

I pulled my knife from my belt and took in a breath. “Actually, Alistair, I believe I have not one, but two surprises for you. You see, you claimed you knew about me. That I’d been set free. But words matter, and when I was set free it was from more than Abarta. I don’t even think Elana knew what she was doing; she was just trying to do the right thing. So, you see, you’re not the only one who can lie.”

“Impossible,” Alistair said incredulously. “It’s against the rules.”

As if on cue, Debbie stood up to the amazement of Alistair, who couldn’t hide his disbelief. “Since when have you cared about the rules?” I asked, and then, looking at Debbie, I continued, “I said I’d killed her, didn’t I?”

“But she was dead!” Alistair argued. “No pulse!”

“Heart’s just a muscle,” Debbie added. “I have excellent muscle control.”

“Fine then. You can lie, somehow. And your new bestie is the Battle Born. Maybe you’re the first elf ever to learn that trick, it doesn’t make a difference. Everything I said stands. Unless you somehow don’t believe me when I tell you that I can destroy everyone you love, you will do as I say!”

“That’s just it, Alistair,” I breathed, playing with the knife between my fingers. “I do believe you. And I told you I had two surprises for you.”

I wasn’t eager for this next bit, and not because it was going to hurt like hell. What I was about to do was my birthright and something I’d managed to keep hidden from everyone, and I did that by so rarely calling upon it. The last time I had, it was when Elana lost control and nearly killed me by encasing me in a wall of permafrost. So call upon it or die. And before that, it had been at least thirty years. But desperate times and all that.

If you’ve met enough elves and of different varieties, you might eventually learn about an inherent ability or two that they’re born with. My mother as an example, with her snow-white hair, pupil-less eyes like perfect amethyst, and skin like pale periwinkles would be a dead giveaway for anyone in the know. But inheriting my father’s features allowed me to hide my birthright. Over short distances I could move from one location to another, the way a hummingbird appears to hoover in one location and a split second later is hoovering elsewhere. Blink and you miss it. But what I could do had nothing to do with speed, it wasn’t even explainable. It just was.

I saw where I wanted to be, and I stepped between the shadows of the tree leaves and the next moment I was standing beside him, my knife in and out of his femoral artery several times in the blink of an eye.

And I paid for it. Dearly.

I was assaulted with electricity and concussive force and mildew and heat and more than I could make myself aware of. I was right. It hurt, but I’d been prepared for worse. The cacophonous chorus of so much magic exploding around us at once drowned out both of our screams, and as quickly as it began, it was over.

Alistair and I lay together on our sides in the gazebo facing each other; his expression was a portrait of agony that mirrored my own. His breaths were labored, his skin pale and clammy. I had to wonder how much of that was from the blood loss and how much of his own magic he took as blowback.

“You...! You’re a...”

“Yeah,” I agreed weakly. “And you’re never going to tell anyone.”

Alistair laughed at that. Or he sobbed. It was difficult to tell, but it didn’t matter either way. He would never hurt anyone ever again.

* * *

Skip and two of his men entered into the backyard with an air of entitlement that suggested they owned the place, one of them carrying two briefcases. When Skip saw me, his eyes widened in surprise ever-so slightly. “You know, not for nothing, but I’m honestly a little surprised to see you as we wrap this up.”

“Yeah, sure, this must be a big day for you,” I mocked. “I’m sure you’ll tell all your friends later about how you got to meet the one and only Alistair. Would you like an autograph? Make it out to my biggest fan?”

“No need to be a dick about it, I just meant you technically didn’t—”

“Right, right, I know what you meant. You want the bloody corpse or don’t you?”

Skip stiffened. “Of course. We’ll have to examine the body first.”

He made a motion, and one of the men moved to the body of Debbie and felt for a pulse.

“I will say though, great work on that amulet, it did the trick all right,” I said, calling his attention back to me. “Kept the elf properly motivated, they never saw it coming.”

“Well, you were certainly the... firm negotiator,” Skip replied. “Though I suppose it is difficult to argue with results. How is Chalsarda, by the way? And Ann Bancroft, if you’ve heard anything?”

“Your concern is downright touching,” I snarled. “What? You got a crush or something? What’s it to you?”

“Come on; there’s no need to be like this! It’s my job to know, quit busting my balls.”

“And what’d you expect from me? A freebie?” I asked with a hint of disdain.

“Maybe a little goddamn professional courtesy, all things considered?” Skip shot back.

“Look, mate, a job’s a job.” I shrugged. “There is a reason I’m not inviting you lot to stay for tea, and there’s a reason you wouldn’t accept if I did. Liking each other doesn’t have to be part of the deal.”

“No, no I guess it doesn’t,” Skip said glumly. He sat quietly in a lawn chair waiting on his man to finish their examination. “You know, attitude aside, you did good work on this.”

“Is that right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’d call this whole thing one colossal mess, but you? You found a way to keep yourself clean. The Abbot betrayed us, the harpy went on a killing spree, and the gunslinger just downright failed to get the job done. Those maniacs caused more of a mess than they were worth, and between you and me, good riddance. But this right here, these are the kind of results I can work with. Even if you are a prick.”

The man doing the examination took several pictures with his phone before he gave the all clear, and Skip stood up and adjusted his blazer. “Good. Send the shots in, let management know it’s been handled,” he remarked to his man before turning back to me. “Well then, I suppose all that’s left is to discuss payment. Have you made a decision on whether you’d like the dagger or the cash?”

I gave the three men surrounding me a careful look, taking into account their relative distance from me, and said, “I was actually thinking it should be both. Call it an incentive for all this new work you’re promising.”

Skip straightened himself up at that. “Wizard or no, you’d do well not to shake us down here. The whole organization knows where we are. Half a mill is not worth making an enemy that size, believe me.”

I put both hands up in surrender. “Fair enough, you win. I had to try, right? Well, let’s see the dagger then, I can see why that might prove useful.”

The man with the briefcases opened one of them up and presented the contents to Skip. He removed an ornate dagger from the case and gave it to me with both hands. I accepted it, and the illusion of Alistair faded away, revealing myself to them for the first time.

I removed the now worthless, tiny glamour scroll I’d been hiding under my tongue. “Surprise.”

Skip, to his credit, didn’t show the surprise that was just under the surface for him. “Chalsarda. You idiot. God damn it, you think this is funny? That this is going to work out for you in the long run? Where the hell is Alistair?”

I flicked the dagger into the corpse of Debbie, and immediately the illusion of the dead Battle Born gave way to reveal the blood drained dead body of Alistair.

Skip wasn’t able to hide his emotions any longer. In fact, now, he looked sick.

An empty mini liquor bottle, covered in masking tape and marked with the word ‘Ox,’ fell harmlessly from the hanging tree branches overhead. The three men looked at it in wonder for a moment, unsure of what to make of it. Even if they’d known what it was, it was already too late for them.

That potion is designed to amplify your strength and endurance. ‘Strong as an ox’ as the old saying goes. They’re quite popular with the less physically inclined in the supernatural world. Wizards, occultists, researchers; anyone who has trouble doing a pull-up. But the way it works on a more fundamental level, it takes the strength you already possess and increases it exponentially. Even weakened, I don’t know that anyone as strong as Debbie had ever drunk one before. The effect could only be described as overkill.

Debbie crashed into the earth, grabbing the medical examiner by the leg and swinging him into the man with the briefcases. What was left of the two of them would be difficult to describe as people.

For my part, I wasn’t prepared for a fight. I was barely standing. But Debbie stood tall and strong. Skip looked to be preparing some kind of spell in a panic. He didn’t stand a chance.

“Are you sure you don’t need me here for this?” I asked Debbie. I certainly didn’t want to be, but it felt polite to ask all the same.

“I’m sure. I know what to do. Go,” she said flatly, menacing Skip, who had now fallen onto his back in his panic.

I began to stumble my way out of the yard when Debbie called to me. “Hey! Before you go. I need you to know something.”

“Yes?”

Debbie put a foot into Skip’s chest to keep him from squirming, but the gentle tone of her voice didn’t match her demeanor. “You didn’t let me down. We were wrong about each other, but I’m glad I trusted you. Thank you.”

I gave her a small wave and turned to leave. “Take care of yourself, Debbie. I’ll see you soon.”

I wasn’t lying.

***