Chapter 2
The drive to the office was something I’d done for decades.
I could do it in my sleep. But I couldn’t help reminiscing about the past and how we got to this point.
Much like the other beings in St. Louis, I couldn’t imagine feeling any safer than I had here.
It took a lot of work to get us to this point.
The Catervae Pax was established about sixty-five years ago, which was not that long ago considering most of us were close to immortal.
When we started the Pax, we were concerned that it would not take off as we had hoped.
The Beatles were singing about peace on Earth while humans waged countless wars against one another.
Meanwhile, magical beings across the factions were once again battling for dominance against each other throughout the rest of the universes.
Power struggles had always been something all beings had in common, but some of the strongest among us were working toward peace—true, radical peace.
The courts in our realms no longer met our needs, and we were more interested in leaving in search of something better than burning everything down to start all over.
After the last Great War that came to an end in a truce because no side was strong enough to defeat the other, I connected with Ma’at, Athena, and Gon to help form a council with every imaginable faction.
On this council, no one would have more sway than the next.
There was no hierarchy, only representatives to speak on behalf of each of the thirteen factions.
Many of us spent decades researching policies and political climates.
We’d read everyone from the human philosophers like Marx, Foucault, hooks, Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir, to the unearthly ones like Luranoms, Raefeather, and Urubay.
We needed to find a system that worked for all beings, not just humans, but we needed to understand human history and how Earth functioned to create a society in St. Louis that would work for everyone.
Any of our citizens were welcome to come converse with us without fear of retribution. We weren’t leaders because we helped establish the Pax, but rather because none of us wanted to lead. Each faction had as much say as the next, even if their numbers were smaller than other factions.
I hopped onto I70, turning the volume up as the morning show host said, “It’s a clear day out today, St. Louis.
Highs will be in the mid-fifties.” I passed a car going too slow in the left lane before taking the express lanes downtown, changing the channel to an early 2000s emo playlist as I zoned out.
While humans were aware of our existence, we weren’t exactly welcome outside of St. Louis or in our home realms anymore—and that included the Gods and Goddesses humans supposedly worshipped.
The humans feared us and what we represented to their social contracts.
It was a full-time job to work with the human governments to make sure that all of us could live here amicably.
Our goal was to never have to fight for our right to exist again, and we didn’t want the next generations to do that either.
The magic was special in St. Louis. We had strong ley lines, strong believers, and many of the buildings and architecture here were made up of brick instead of steel.
This made St. Louis the ideal place for us to make a home, since modern technology and architecture was hard on some species, but it still came with its issues.
The United States government used St. Louis as a testing facility for its war games across the globe during the 20th century.
These atrocious experiments destroyed a lot of the land and a significant number of communities of color in the city—so much that the city became unlivable.
The red lining, the racist and sexist history, and the loss of Indigenous land due to colonialization were abhorrent.
We had asked the communities who already lived here what we could do to help and worked on gaining their trust as we made sure they had what they needed to thrive.
We dedicated the land back to the Indigenous tribes like the Osage, Sioux, and Iroquois.
It had taken longer than we anticipated to bring it back to livable conditions, even for supernatural communities.
While this town had its ups and downs, and often wildly swung one way or another depending on the humidity, we worked together to keep this city as open as we possibly could to both humans and the supernatural.
It was a lot of long days and nights where we thought we’d end up starting our own wars, but in the end, we made it work, and we were forced to learn about each other in the process.
I was reluctantly made the head of the Unseelie faction.
This was in part due to my abilities, but mostly because I was the strongest Fae outside of Underhill as the heir to the Autumn Court.
I also had a fiery mean streak when provoked, but I’d worked hard to circumvent the training I’d been subjected to back home.
While I was comfortable with my own powers, I did not enjoy leading.
I was someone who was good with ideas, not the execution of those ideas.
Like most Fae, I loved a game where I could continue philosophizing, but I wasn’t a decision-maker.
I wanted to speak my piece and let others make the decisions.
The remainder of the thirteen were great at the parts I wasn’t.
They were leaders, but they’d been doing it for so long that I questioned if they knew how to rest. They spent their time making decisions, while I spent most of my time finding patterns and making recommendations before a problem arose.
I wondered, not for the first time, if I should read The Prince again, since most of my colleagues loved Machiavelli.
They weren’t fans of his work, but they were interested in the politics that made up this world, and it was rumored that many leaders on Earth slept with a copy of The Prince by their bedsides.
The idea of a broken human system where we debated on whether it was better to be feared than loved didn’t sit right with me, and it never had.
I believed that people would love and respect leaders if their needs were met, and I didn’t believe in the construct of currency in exchange for goods.
Machiavelli was not what the humans needed, but we still debated The Prince’s merit to this day, even if I had gotten my way in the end.
Obviously, I wasn’t a fan. I’d memorized the text from front to back, but I also met Machiavelli when he was alive. I’d never met a bigger ass kisser in my life, and that was saying something, considering I grew up in the courts of the Autumn king.
I adored my colleagues—mostly. They wanted what was best for their people, and the city was thriving.
We worked hard to make sure that it stayed peaceful, and that the inhabitants of our little city had what they needed.
While we didn’t all agree on everything, we did agree that this was the most important part about starting the Pax.
I was screaming along to Saosin when I turned my head and noticed a young human kid staring from the car next to me. My car’s stereo was loud enough, Vampires half a mile away could probably hear “Seven Years” clear as day.
I stared back at the kid, twisting my face as I activated my glamour.
I adjusted my features to seem like a grotesque monster while I waited for the light to turn green.
The kid turned around toward their mother and screamed as her car started to move forward.
I gunned it. Might’ve gone a little too far there.
I giggled to the point of tears. Maybe it was from a lack of sleep?
It was just part of being Unseelie. Maybe it was a bit of immaturity as well. Nah.
The building was unassuming to the naked eye, but each floor was elaborately built to the specifications of each faction.
The Unseelie floor was a forested oasis.
It almost perfectly mimicked Underhill, the Fae’s realm.
There were vast fields of greenery in some spots, with a mountainous region at the back of the building that hosted some of our creatures of the night.
The floor had its own creation magic, made by me, that mimicked sunlight and the moon equally based on the flow of time in Underhill.
The forests gave the creatures of the court ample space to run in the middle of downtown St. Louis, with the convenience of parking in the building.
I entered my office, stepping back as a raven flew out.
I never knew what I’d see here, and I loved that.
My office was a tomb of antiquity with everything I was able to bring with me from the Unseelie court.
Most of the pieces were relics that had made their way to Earth in one way or another.
Hello, Pandora’s Box. Not a box like a lot of people believed, but an unassuming jar that resembled an urn.
My office might’ve been the most secure place on Earth, even tighter than Fort Knox, but I still did inventory every time I entered. While the Pax knew what I held in my possession, I could never be too careful.
“Ah, what do you have for me today, Aibell?” I asked as I sat down behind my desk, making room to start up my laptop. Aibell was my main enforcer. She was a badass banshee who often stepped in when I needed a push.
“Princess óDubhlaoich—” she started.
“Please, Aibell,” I cut her off, “I’ve asked you for a hundred years now to just call me Adaela.”
She stared at me deadpan, pushing her short brown hair behind her ear. “Sorry, ma’am. The floor is secure and is business as usual, but we have one of our own who could use a little extra help.”
I glanced up from my laptop, where I was going over my calendar for the day, “And that is?”
“Well, Angus and Bride are near the mountains, and they need help reinforcing their boundaries against Beira,” Aibell said.