Chapter Twelve Kion #2
The scene is swarmed by medics and magistrates soon enough.
The Department of Magical Creatures, too, has made an appearance, the DMC agents ashen-faced at the sight of the fallen cockatrices.
Wrapped in shock blankets, both carriwitchet teams are fielding questions from trauma-hungry reporters.
The rain has abated to a drizzle, a tiny sliver of watery gray sun leaking through the heavy clouds.
Kion watches his players. óríon has—twice—punched someone from Seelie Spectator in the face and is currently speaking tersely with a sharp-eyed magis while Knox, surprisingly, sticks by his side and explains with a furious expression and many hand gestures why óríon should absolutely not be charged with aggravated assault.
The lad seems to be winning. Isla is crying into the crook of Bronte’s neck, sobbing as if she’ll never stop, while Jemmy nudges her with her beak in an attempt of comfort.
Adriel and Mahina are speaking to Niamh, who miraculously escaped the slaughter, although there’s a deep cut on her forehead and dark dust covers her pink skirt in a thick film.
He doesn’t know what they’re saying: They’ve all nullified their Communication glyphs. There’s just too much noise already.
Sirens. The banshee’s weeping. Yells of alarm. Devastated curses.
But then there’s Taissa.
She’s not crying. She’s not yelling.
She’s…helping.
Helping the magistrates recover the bodies. Tugging the corpses out of the wreckage. She’s stronger than he is. He can’t—he can’t go over there again. He wants to, but he…can’t.
The smell of blood. It—well, it fucking triggers all the brokenness inside of him.
So Kion is leaning against Cato, who is just as shaken as he is. James stands next to him, vacant-eyed and pale, his shy stymphalian, Mabb, trembling next to him.
“I don’t understand,” Cato is saying over and over. “Why did they fall?”
“I don’t know,” Kion replies hollowly.
That’s the ugly truth of it. Kion doesn’t know.
Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the NCL.
Nothing even comes fucking close. Some part of him understands that this moment in time will be written down in the history books, a great tragedy of the UKHC, but a larger part of him understands nothing.
Shit-all nothing. He can’t fucking stand it.
He watches warily as Cronus, red eyes glittering, picks his way over to Cato and Mabb.
James’s Winged is shaking even worse than Cato, her beak chattering, her feet shifting from foot to foot, panicked little cries catching in her throat.
The small stymphalian has always been anxious during matches and this fuckup has probably caused the poor bird to completely spiral.
Even James’s soothing noises don’t seem to be helping. Nor does Cronus’s approach.
Mabb skitters backward as he approaches, and the old bird gives her a withering look that seems to say, Don’t be fucking ridiculous.
Squawking something acerbically, Taissa’s steed takes a few more ungainly steps and reluctantly lifts a sparse-feathered wing over Mabb’s head, gruffly shielding her from the icy rain as she shivers in fear and cold.
Huh, thinks Kion as Mabb hesitates before inching just a bit closer to her father. Cronus rolls his eyes when he catches Kion’s stare, but doesn’t lower his wing.
“He’s probably going to try to take a bite out of her when you’re not looking,” Cato says, but he sounds as surprised as Kion feels.
“Kion,” James says suddenly, pointing a finger toward someone, “who’s that?”
His eyes follow James’s hand toward a magis who looks like he might at least know one fucking thing. “Oi.” Kion pushes off Cato and strides toward him. “You. Wait.”
Dark violet eyes meet Kion’s own, and he feels a prickle of surprise. Unseelie magistrates aren’t not allowed, but they’re not common, either. This one is a geancánach, a succubus-like faerie with an infamous penchant for the seduction of women. He can tell by his unusual eyes.
Once a geancánach has a girl in his grasp, he lures them into an addiction. A frenzy. An unsatiable craving for his touch. For a geancánach to work as a magis means that he’s overcome his wicked desires. Kion can’t help but feel some respect for him.
“Magis Rowan Elder, DMR, CCB division,” the geancánach says, sticking out a slender hand.
With the other one, he removes a pipe from his lips.
So it seems he hasn’t given up all of his geancánach ways.
The faeries are constantly puffing away on the things.
With the pipe, his suit, and the distinguished streaks of gray in his dark hair, Rowan Elder looks more like Sherlock Holmes than a typical magis. “And you’re Kion Locke.”
Kion takes his hand and gives it a firm shake. “Yeah. What the fuck is going on?” Right, maybe he could have been more pleasant. But nothing about today is pleasant.
“It’s nice to meet you. Of course, I’d rather it be under different circumstances.” Magis Elder draws a notepad out of his pocket and ignores Kion’s question. Pointedly. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate a discussion with Taissa Cho. My colleagues and I at the CCB have some questions for her.”
“What kind of questions?” demands Kion before he can stop himself, confused by the sudden tightening in his chest. Because it feels like bloody protectiveness, of all things. “She didn’t see anything that the rest of us didn’t.”
Elder gives him a long look. “I am sure you are aware that Miss Cho has a history of doing things she shouldn’t, especially when it pertains to carriwitchet.
The Department of Magical Regulation has her on a certain watch list. Basic protocol decrees that, since she was at the scene today, we ask her some questions. I’m here as a…precaution.”
“You think she did this?” He stares at him. Could this somehow be foul play? The magis is from the CCB—the Curse Catching Bureau. What the hell is happening? “Explain to me right now how that makes any bloody sense.”
The magis looks like he wants to roll his eyes but is too professional to roll them all the way, so has settled for letting one of them twitch. “As I’ve said: It’s protocol. Would you show me the way, please?”
A sharp retort rises to Kion’s lips, but he bites down on it.
Telling a magis to go do completely unacceptable things with his mother isn’t his best idea by a long shot.
So instead, Kion lifts a shoulder in answer and stalks off toward Cho, who’s emerging from the wreckage and holding a handful of bloody wallets. Identification for the unidentifiable.
He closes his nose against the smell of it all, breathing in shallowly through his mouth. He doesn’t want Rowan Elder interrogating Taissa alone. She’s his player; he’s responsible for her. That’s all.
And besides. Nobody gets to torment Taissa except him.
Everybody knows that.
She sees them coming, her dark eyes widening fractionally as she takes in Magis Elder.
After handing off the wallets to a somber-faced witch, she approaches them, wiping her hands on her leather trousers.
As he leaves Mabb and walks toward his player, Cronus’s red glare narrows distrustfully on the geancánach and his head cocks warily.
“What,” Elder eloquently says out of the corner of his mouth to Kion, “is that?”
“He is Cronus,” Taissa says, pausing a few feet away from them. Her voice is hoarse. She’s not fidgeting like she usually does. She’s so…still. With a jolt, he realizes that she’s frightened. Of the magis. A deer in the headlights. “He tried to eat his babies, and he’ll eat you, too.”
Cronus nods and takes a step closer to the magis. He snaps his beak once, twice.
“Not the time, the two of you,” Kion grits out between his teeth. “Be nice.”
“I am being nice, numpty,” she bites back, unpleasantly.
At least with her anger comes a spark of life in her eyes.
Anything’s better than her shell-shocked stare.
Regardless, he’s shooting warning looks from his eyes but it doesn’t seem like she cares or even notices.
She’s covered in debris dust and she’s trembling.
Fuck. Kion’s hands spasm at his sides. He opens his mouth again but Magis Elder cuts him off.
Taissa’s eyes narrow as the geancánach interrupts.
“Miss Cho. Where were you when the cockatrices began to fall?”
Taissa stares at him and then at Kion. Is he serious? she seems to be asking. He gives a quick jerk of his head. “Cho. Answer the magis.”
With exaggerated slowness, Taissa replies: “I was in the air. Playing the game. We were nearing halftime. I take it you weren’t watching it on the telly. Pity, that. You would have seen this one”—she points at him—“yell at me to ‘get my head out of my arse.’ Marvelously good entertainment.”
Elder doesn’t even so much as blink. “Have you, recently, dabbled in the forbidden arts, entertained nefarious thoughts, utilized illegal glyphs, made bargains with an Unseelie, sold your soul to any unsavory types, made contact with a dark spirit, or sacrificed a lacker to a great and terrible god?” By the time he finishes all of this, he isn’t even slightly out of breath.
Kion stares at him. Again, the perennial question: What the fuck does this have to do with anything?
“If I did, which I didn’t, but if I did, why in Morgana’s name would I tell you? I would probably just say that I didn’t,” Taissa says and Cronus makes that awful laughing sound in the back of his throat.
Merlin’s balls.
Cho’s going to get herself arrested.
“She hasn’t done any of that,” he tells the magis firmly. He’s been with her too much recently what with practice and the PR stunt. Kion’s pretty damn sure he’d know if Taissa had “sacrificed a lacker to a great and terrible god.”
The geancánach looks unimpressed. “I was asking her. Since you are a witch, Miss Cho, if you would kindly use one of your Truth glyphs to confirm your original answer, I’d be much obliged.”