Chapter Fourteen Kion
Chapter Fourteen
Kion
For a moment, all he does is stare at her.
At her wide brown eyes, the smattering of freckles across her nose as it scrunches in anticipation.
The way her feet are tucked under her jeans, newly healed from the shards of glass currently sticking out of her bunny slippers.
He stares at her in complete disbelief, watching as a smug, know-it-all look crosses her expression.
His team, cursed. What a novel idea. Somebody call the magistrates. He’s got a genius here.
“Of course I’ve bloody considered that,” Kion snaps, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
Taissa makes a small noise that suggests the answer to his question is a great, whooping fuck yeah. Merlin. His eyes flare open. She rolls her own at him. “Like I said,” she tells him sweetly, “sometimes I really think you were hit in the head too many times.”
Kion is pretty damn sure he’s going to crack a molar. “We checked for a curse.” It would have been better if they were cursed. That would give his team an excuse, at least, for being so suddenly bad. “There was nothing.”
“How did you check?”
He grimaces. Curses are tricky things in their world, and really fucking rare. There’s only so much wickedness to go around, thanks to the Great Depletion and the Wells subsequently running dry on dark magic.
Besides, the Department of Magical Regulation is on their shit.
They’re on so much shit it isn’t even funny.
After he’d used the simple Truth glyph in her cottage, Kion had received a very angry phone call from the DMR. After some embarrassing arse-kissing, they’d let his “mistake” slide.
Lionel Hawke is, after all, both a Stymphs fan and a friend.
He bought the story that Kion was just trying to confess his love to a disbelieving Cho.
That was the most humiliating call of his life, if he’s being honest.
It was Lionel that Kion had turned to two years ago when, out of the blue, the NCL Stymphs had begun playing like hungover rookies debilitated by a yearlong bender.
They knew each other solely because of the fire that had “accidentally” and “devastatingly” started in the Waywardly Home when Kion was fourteen.
Lionel had covered for him then, too, after seeing the scars on Kion’s back.
Lionel had only been six years older than Kion at the time, and couldn’t bring himself to turn the lad in.
More than fifteen years later, and Lionel was still soft on him.
Come to think of it, maybe one of his exes burning down his summer house was karma.
Point is, he’d had Lionel check the DMR logs tracking illegal glyph usage, concentrating on Summoning glyphs.
Lionel combed through the data, but apart from a warlock who summoned a crossroads demon to bargain away seven years from his life for a date with an elvish social media star, nothing turned up.
He tells Taissa this—well, a shortened version of it, anyway—and she looks unimpressed. “Are you sure he didn’t miss anything?” she questions. “And, by the way, other species can perform curse-work, too. It’s not just a witch/warlock thing.”
Kion scrubs at his face. “Yeah, Cho, I know that.”
The Wells are metaphysical pools of shared magic, which all magic-capable creatures can tap into, channeling the magic from them into the physical world in ways unique to their species.
While black magic is scarce in the Dark Well, there’s no shortage of gray magic in the regular Well, used for somewhat good things and somewhat bad things.
Normal magic. Yet even gray magic is enough to burn down an orphanage.
Kion winces. Dark magic…Well, that’s another substance entirely.
To draw from the Wells, witches and warlocks use qyls. Elves use elemental magic. Vampires use blood-magic, síceachs use the Sight, and hags use…Kion doesn’t want to know what hags use.
The list could go on. The point is, Lionel Hawke is his only contact in law enforcement. Unless you count Jacks Clarke, the bounty-hunting dullahan, and Kion sure as fuck doesn’t. Jacks is just as likely to commit a crime as he is to hunt down the people that did it.
“So there’s no real way to know if you’ve been cursed or not.” Taissa drums her fingers on the couch as Kion scowls in reluctant acknowledgment. “To curse a whole team, though—that takes real power. Cursing one person is hard enough, it is. I should know.” Her eyes cut toward him. “I’ve tried.”
Of course she has.
“Listen,” Taissa urges, nudging a shard of glass with her toe.
Kion fights back the desire to warn her not to do that, lest she cut herself again.
“Dropping to the bottom of the Major League was uncharacteristic enough. Dropping down to the bottom of the Minor League? I hate to admit it, but that’s the sign of dark magic, not the Blunduns.
Because you were…fine. I guess you were good.
If you really push me, I’ll say this team was one of the best. And I’ve spent a couple weeks here and I feel it.
Don’t you? I mean, look at Bronte crashing into the siege tower, my axe hitting óríon—”
“—and then me,” he snaps.
“—Knox hanging out of his saddle half our game, James crashing into the siege tower, you almost decapitating Adriel…It’s a trainwreck. When we play, it’s like we’re fighting to swim against the current, or drowning in old, congealing molasses.”
“Oddly specific, Cho.”
“And then there was today. The Cockatrices. That’s not an illness, and you know it.” Taissa pauses to catch her breath. “You know it, don’t you? It just doesn’t make sense. But what if we’re cursed, and somehow it bled onto the Cockatrices? Is that even possible? Can curses be contagious?”
Damn it. He closes his eyes, seeing it all again. The cockatrices, hurtling toward the ground, suddenly nothing more than dead weight in the sky. That smell, of blood and terror. His hand drifts toward his pocket, where Vance’s number is stored.
“Even if we are cursed, there’s fuck all we can do about it now,” he bites out. It’s true. Curses, at least the ones he knows about, can’t be undone so easily. Either the maker needs to undo them, or a higher power, some entity, needs to get involved. And entities have better shit to do.
“That’s not true,” Taissa bites back. Her eyes are shining, and for a moment Kion sees her on the field again, digging through the debris, dragging out the corpses. Something weird happens to his heart. It twists in his chest.
And he really doesn’t like it.
“Oh, yeah?” Kion gives her a disdainful look even as his mind swims. Cursed. He’s suspected it for a while, but sometimes—well, sometimes, it’s a lot fucking easier not to focus on things out of your control. Easier to chalk it up to a historically bad, clinical case of the Blunduns.
To repress shit, as James would say.
But Wingeds? Falling from the sky?
At some point, you can’t repress shit any longer.
“Yeah.” Taissa holds his gaze. “Tomorrow. After you finish running us ragged during practice. Niamh wants us to go to an ice-cream parlor on Lantern Street. Since we left Dunanaird early and didn’t have time to show everybody how in love we are.”
After everything that’s happened, the elf is still forcing them to go smile adoringly at each other in front of the cameras?
Sometimes he has no faith in the world.
“Fucking hells,” growls Kion, but Taissa holds up a finger.
“We’re not going to get ice cream,” she says. “We’re going to find answers.”
Trust Taissa Cho to leave on the most cryptic note possible.
With no idea what she has planned for tomorrow, Kion can only assume it’s some attempt to play detective. He’s envious of her optimism. He drowns in pits of pessimism on the daily.
Kion’s feet feel heavy as he trudges past Isla’s door to knock on James’s.
Everything that happened in Taste of Delhi had been a disaster.
He’d never seen James so…not calm. Not the serene, placid, posh tosser he knows.
And it had frightened him. Kion had seen their friendship, their fucking brotherhood, slipping through his fingers. He’d been terrified.
His knuckles rap against the door once, then twice. Heart pounding in his chest, Kion waits. Damn it.
From the start, he’d known he shouldn’t have lied to his team. Especially if he was only going to end up telling them later.
He hates deceit. It gives him a rash.
But Kion didn’t know how to do an Untold glyph, or know that Cho could do one. If he did, he would have let the other Stymphs in from the get-go; but that glyph was some advanced shit right there. Taissa Cho would have been the last person he expected to have that glyph down to a science.
Maybe, a small voice suggests in the back of his brain, there’s a lot you don’t know about Taissa Cho.
Although the others seemed to take his confession in stride—maybe because after the Dust Bite, his lie seemed like nothing to them—he’d hurt his best mate.
This damn lie created a rift between them. If Kion had told James in the beginning about Niamh’s plan, there was a chance that he would have even encouraged it. They all know how badly they need more good press. James might have put his personal dislike for Cho aside in order to abet them.
Might have. Probably not.
Kion clenches his jaw and knocks again. James isn’t answering, and he always answers. “Oi, James?” he calls through the door, and his throat is tight. No answer. Maybe he’s out. But Kion knows better.
His hand falls away from the door. So many emotions surge up in him at once that it’s hard, so fucking hard, to stomp them back down.
But he manages. Because that’s what Kion Locke has done his whole life. Manage.
By the time it’s done, anger is the only flame still burning bright in his chest. That’s the only one he ever lets himself feel. Anger.
“Like a wounded animal,” James had said once, in that calm, unjudgmental way of his. “Lashing out.”
His other words echo in Kion’s head. Not all of us are as deeply repressed as you.