“It’s not that bad,” said Isabel, my closest friend, as we prepared to face the music. Or rather, faeries.
“There are fifty piskies trapped in a garden shed,” I said. “It’s not ‘bad’. It’s a shitstorm of epic proportions.”
The overgrown back garden we stood in practically advertised itself as a haven for faeries, a warren of brambles and rotting trees. The people who lived here had let their pest problem spiral so far out of control, it was lucky they hadn’t woken up with all their hair missing and turned into piskie nest lining.
“Pity the Mage Lord can’t appear and displace them all to Antarctica.” Isabel might be second in line to the local witch coven, but even she hadn’t been able to devise a spell for extracting piskies from a shed.
“Very funny.” Mage Lord Vance Colton’s absence irritated me more than the oncoming horde of rabid piskies. He’d left on an ‘important mission’, according to his assistant, and to say I was pissed off that he hadn’t told me in person would be an understatement. That he’d been gone a week without so much as a call was just fuel on the fire of my anger.
That he’d asked me out on a date before he’d left and then stood me up? It was a wonder I hadn’t spontaneously combusted from sheer rage.
“Hey,” said Isabel, waving a hand in front of my face. “Now’s not a good time to be daydreaming.”
I shook off all thoughts of the Mage Lord. We had a horde of piskies to deal with, and while piskie eviction was the lowest of menial jobs, covering this month’s rent payment mattered more than dignity did. Since I no longer worked for Larsen, who ran the local mercenaries, I was forced to rely on independent clients.
For sixteen glorious hours, I’d owned more money than I’d ever owned in my life. Considering I’d nearly died to get it, the spoils had been more than welcome. Then the local council had swooped in and taken every penny to pay for damages on behalf of the Necromancers’ Guild, and I’d called Vance, only to be told he’d disappeared off the face of the earth. This after I’d walked away from Larsen, my old boss, thinking a steady job awaited me with the mages. So here we were, a week later, on the border of half-blood territory with nothing between us and a horde of piskies except an iron blade and a handful of homemade spells. Someone up there really didn’t like me.
Think of the money. I chanted the words in my head like a mantra while I helped Isabel set up a shielding spell in front of the shed doors to keep them from swarming out all at once. Piskies were among the weakest of Faerie’s creatures, but it didn’t mean fifty of them couldn’t do some serious damage. I always carried at least three daggers, but Irene, my sword, did all the heavy lifting. Iron was fatal to all faeries, and while piskies were a royal pain in the arse, I hoped waving my sword around would be sufficiently intimidating without needing to actually use it on them. I usually worked alone on jobs involving the fae. Even a witch as tough as Isabel might easily become ensnared in one of their traps, but I figured piskies were harmless enough.
The chilly early-autumn night wind whipped through my thin jacket, still stained with the most recent spillage of monster guts. I’d hoped to replace my threadbare and bloodstained clothes using the money from the Swanson case, but at this rate, I wouldn’t even scrape together this month’s rent payment unless Isabel and I managed to do the impossible and get those piskies out of the shed.
Isabel surveyed the shielding spell. “I’m not sure that’ll be enough to hold all of them back.”
“Pity you never perfected that sleeping potion.”
“No, we don’t need fifty drunken piskies on our hands.” Isabel had left a sample of the potion out on the coffee table in our flat and our own resident piskie, Erwin, had decided give it a test drive. While it was useful to know her concoction would have to be adapted to use on faeries, I’d been hoping we wouldn’t have to capture this bunch of nuisances while they were still conscious.
Behind the shrieking from the shed, yells and other indiscernible noises rang out from down the road, interspersed with the sound of faint music drifting over from half-blood territory. Probably a faerie house party. Or, knowing them, a public orgy. Luckily, the high hedges around their territory muted some of the racket.
Even the half-bloods would call pest control in this situation, but the unfortunate people who lived in this house weren’t home right now. Taking a steadying breath, I readied my sword and sliced through the chain sealing the shed door closed.
Immediately, the clamour from half-blood district disappeared under the screams of fifty enraged piskies. They swarmed straight into the shield outside the door, which began to smoke around the edges.
“Guess they must have some magic in them, after all.” Small fry like piskies had less magic than brains—and that was saying a lot—but with so many in a single place, they’d whipped up a storm. “Shit. We’d better move fast.”
“I thought so.” Isabel took out a trapping spell and set it up on the ground. Like most of Isabel’s handmade witch charms, this one was shaped like a rubber band, colour-coded to indicate its purpose. Red, in this case. Normally, we’d put sylvan leaves or another kind of bait inside the trap, but we didn’t need to lure the piskies out when they were already beating at the doors. Nor did we need to conceal the trap, which expanded into a wider circle at Isabel’s touch.
Isabel’s spells were better than anyone else’s I knew of, but we’d never tested one on fifty piskies at once, and they hadn’t broken through the shield yet. As the smoke at the edges intensified, I reached over and grabbed the nearest winged creature.
The piskie was surprisingly heavy for an eight-inch-tall creature built like a twig, and I nearly dropped it when sharp teeth bit into my finger. Wincing, I hauled it into the trap. One down. Forty-nine to go.
“We should strike ‘efficient’ off our ad,” said Isabel, grabbing a piskie of her own.
“And ‘reliable’,” I muttered, examining the shallow puncture marks on my finger. At least piskie bites weren’t venomous. “Two down.”
I reached into the shed, getting another bite on my arm for my trouble, and deposited the culprit into the trap. When we were up to ten winged creatures inside the circle, the shrieking was giving me a headache and the smoke billowing from the shed door had gained an alarmingly familiar blue sheen, which mirrored the shimmering around my own hands. My faerie magic.
That shouldn’t be there.
“Ivy?” Isabel dropped another squirming piskie into the trap. “Something wrong?”
“That glow.” I pointed. “I think the shed’s going to—”
The shed exploded.
One second, the piskies formed a solid mass battering against the shield. The next, a blast of dazzling blue light shot up from the shed, and the walls and door burst into a million wooden fragments. I threw myself to the ground as the piskies flew upwards in a shrieking horde, Isabel crouching at my side.
The shielding spell had vanished altogether, and while the trap had caught a dozen more piskies mid-flight, the darkening sky disappeared beneath fluttering wings and pointed faces. Piskies didn’t fly in formation but crashed into one another, fighting, clawing, screaming. A pair of needle-sharp teeth dug into my arm and I yelped, shaking my hand to dislodge the piskie. Isabel, still on her knees, had a piece of chalk in her hand and was frantically drawing out glyphs on the lawn. The trap expanded outward, but not fast enough. A good third of the piskies had already flown in the opposite direction and the rest were spiralling upward in a tornado of wings and sharp little teeth. How had the weakest denizens of Faerie blown up a shed and a witch’s ward to boot?
As I rose upright, Isabel kicked one of the piskies into the trap and joined me. Generally, she was as laid back as I was impulsive, a balm to my quick temper, but nothing pissed her off as much as one of her spells not working as it should have.
“Guess we have our answer about why Erwin keeps ignoring our wards.” I wiped my bloody hand on my jeans. “Didn’t know they packed that much of a magical punch.”
“The piskies used magic?” asked Isabel. “What did that look like to you? All I saw was a big explosion of blue light.”
“That was the magic.” Though she shouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. “It’s usually only visible to people with the Sight.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Is that what it always looks like? Blue light?”
“Yep. Or green.” In the past week since I’d told her my experiences as a captive of Lord Avalin of the Grey Vale, Isabel had far from exhausted her list of questions on the faeries. I was, after all, the only human any of us knew who was able to see and use faerie magic. Not to mention the only human who’d ever escaped the faerie realm alive. Trust didn’t come easily to me, and I suspected it’d be a long time before I grew used to the idea of even my best friend knowing my darkest secrets. “Depends on whether the fae belongs to Winter or Summer. Piskies… that’s weird. They’re from Summer, I thought.”
“Yeah, that didn’t look like Summer,” she said. “Well. I can’t say I remember it that clearly. I was pretty out of it.” She referred to the time she’d spent in a necromancer’s summoning circle while half-faerie ghosts ran amok outside. As we’d been on top of the Ley Line at the time, the magic had been visible to everyone within range, not just those of us unlucky enough to have the Sight.
“True.” I stared up at the sky. The piskies were long gone, though the yowls and screams of their siblings rang out from the trap, while the shed lay in splintered ruins. “Let’s see what kicked off that explosion.”
I climbed over bits of shredded wood and scanned for any clues. Isabel was the expert in magical explosive devices—several of which I carried in my pockets—but her expression told me she was just as clueless as I was about what caused the blast.
“Nothing.” Her gaze panned over the ruins of the shed and she shook her head. “No spells at all. Are you sure piskies weren’t responsible?”
“Pretty sure we’d already know if they were capable of a blast like that,” I said. “Look at Erwin. He can’t so much as conjure up a spark.”
“Maybe these ones can.” Isabel leaned over the trap, in which twenty-odd enraged piskies waited to be escorted back to the clean-up guild at Larsen’s place.
I sighed and joined her. “That could have gone better.”
Should have brought backup, I imagined Vance Colton saying, and found myself scowling in annoyance. His displacing ability would have come in handy, but I’d sworn from the outset not to let myself become dependent upon him, and a cynical part of me whispered that I should have known our brief allegiance was too good to be true. I’d been riding the high of being alive when I’d quit my job and put my future in his hands, but my impaired judgement had been bound to backfire in my face.
Despite my best instincts, I fished my phone out of my pocket and skimmed to his number. This was the kind of incident the Mage Lords needed to know about. Whatever history existed between Vance Colton and me was irrelevant. He was head of all the magical practitioners in the city. That alone should have been reason enough to avoid getting involved with him, but his rejection had hit my bank account as much as my pride. Vance’s sort, descended from rich English aristocrats, were a little out of touch with the cutthroat world the rest of us lived in.
I’d hoped to change that when I’d started working with him. Apparently not.
My hand hovered over the call button, and my phone buzzed so suddenly I nearly dropped it. The number calling me wasn’t the Mage Lord’s, but my ex-boss. Larsen.
My hand clenched around the phone. Regardless of how desperate for cash I might be, I’d sworn never to take a job from him again, and I intended to keep my word. I glared at the screen in disgust. Not getting the message, the buzzing continued.
Isabel lifted her head. “Who’s calling?”
“Larsen.” I spat out his name like a curse. “Maybe he found out I’m the one doing this job and wants a cut of the profits.” I pocketed my phone again. I’d forgotten Erwin the piskie had chewed holes inside my jacket, so the phone fell through and clattered on the ground.
“Ivy,” said Larsen’s voice. I picked up the phone, checked the screen for damage, and was about to hang up when he said, “Wait—don’t hang up.”
“Or what?” I growled. “I told you never to speak to me again.”
“I have a client who wishes to hire you.”
I laughed aloud. “Fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck you, Larsen.”
He took my abuse with uncharacteristic calmness. “This is urgent,” he said. “There’s been a murder in half-blood district. The Mage Lords are absent, and every half-faerie in town is calling for blood.”
Well, shit.
