Eight

 

I caught the amusement dancing in Alasdair’s eyes as I walked up the hallway to meet them by the front door. A guy similar in age to me with short blond hair and startling turquoise eyes was watching over them, his mouth pressed into a thin line. I assumed he was the coven mutt until the house mistress touched his elbow. No high-ranking witch would make contact with the mutt.

“Did you get your answers?” Alasdair asked as we stepped out into the grey morning.

“Not all of them,” I said, aware that the witches were listening.

I hoped that Jack wouldn’t be beaten for the information he’d given me. You’d have thought the coven would do whatever it took to get the witchlings back, but given they were low-magic I suspected they wouldn’t do much more than go through the motions.

Grayson had only just driven out through the front gate when I spotted what had to be a made fae. Alasdair shot out of the car before Gray had pulled it to a stop, me hot on his heels. The fae had painfully sharp cheekbones, electric blue eyes, and no clothes. His scrawny battered body was covered in scars, old and new. Some of them looked suspiciously like sigils. He ran back and forth across the short-manicured lawn between the gates of the coven mansion and the main road.

We couldn’t allow a non-magical person to see him. Alasdair started to circle right to corral him towards me. Grayson came up around the other side to block off his potential escape as we closed in around him. His eyes were wild, his pointed teeth were bared, and his fingernails looked almost clawed. Surely, he wasn’t a redcap made? The born redcaps were plenty vicious enough, we didn’t need made versions of those running around.

Seeing that he was trapped, the man hunched his shoulders and ran at me. I unsheathed my knife and prepared for a fight. Alasdair and Grayson closed in around him, making sure he didn’t try and slip away at the last second. The fae let out a blood-curdling hunting cry, a high-pitched keening sound that made me bare my teeth. I was not prey.

He was barely ten feet away when his hands took on a green glow and I felt the soft hum of magic. Made didn’t have magic, and they sure as fuck didn’t have whatever type of magic that was. My instincts said it was linked into decay, which made it a nature-fae-based magic. Something that redcaps certainly weren’t. They were blood-thirsty killers, predators.

“What is that around his hands?” Grayson called out.

“Magic,” Alasdair snarled.

I ducked to one side and grabbed a handful of the fae’s thin hair as he went past me, having been unable to slow his momentum or turn. I wrenched his head back and went to kick his legs out from under him, but he pivoted and tried to drive the green magic into my stomach. I fought to keep a grip on his hair while twisting away from the magic that my wolf was sure was very deadly.

Grayson hit him in the back of the head. I dropped him and shot backwards, not allowing him to touch me. Who knew if the leather jacket would be enough to protect me from that magic? The fae lay on the floor, face down and groaning as the blood slowly seeped through his hair and down the back of his neck. We all stood over him in silence.

“I’ve never seen a made with sigils carved into them before,” Alasdair finally growled.

Grayson crouched down and pointed at a sickle shape in between his shoulder-blades.

“That’s to cut his essence, his soul, from his body,” he said.

“I thought the making was supposed to bring out our true supernatural state,” I said.

“It is. This is different,” Alasdair said.

The fae pushed himself up onto his knees.

“What do we do with him?” Grayson asked.

Alasdair stepped back and closed his eyes, his head tilted back and a vacant expression on his face. The fae started trying to push himself up onto his feet, only for Grayson to press down hard between his shoulder blades and force him back to the ground.

“Now really isn’t the time for meditation,” I growled as I eyed the green glow that began to reform around the fae’s hands.

“He’s asking the goddess for guidance,” Grayson said softly.

I tensed. I still wasn’t sure I wanted that sort of connection with the goddess. It felt like a gilt cage.

“We knock him out and take him to Saoirse. She’ll alert the council,” Alasdair said.

Grayson hit the fae over the back of the head again, causing him to go limp. I raised an eyebrow before I cautiously checked he still had a pulse. Grayson shrugged.

“No one said it had to be elegant,” he said with the familiar bright smile creeping across his face.

“You made him bloody, you can carry him,” Alasdair said.

Grayson wrinkled his nose before he hauled the fae up and slung him over his shoulder. The fae was deposited in the boot of the car. It wasn’t the most dignified mode of transport, but we couldn’t risk his waking up and causing trouble while we were driving. If he was in the boot, he was contained.

“You think the witches made him?” Grayson asked.

“Yes,” Alasdair and I said in union.