Chapter Nineteen Kion
Chapter Nineteen
Kion
Taissa’s small cottage can barely hold the five of them. As Kion waits in the cramped kitchen, he paces the uneven floorboards, glancing outside the small smudged window to her tiny vegetable patch. In the couple of weeks since he last visited, weeds have somehow engulfed the entire little plot.
Bronte is running a hand over the cracked kitchen counter thoughtfully.
“This place is tiny,” she says in that blunt Bronte way of hers.
Kion looks at her in warning. Taissa’s in her room, changing, but Rihowl doesn’t exactly have a quiet voice.
“What? Not in a bad way. Cozy, like. I just meant, it’s not what I was expecting from the Taissa Cho. ”
Kion grimaces as “the” Taissa Cho herself pads into the room, still clad in his shirt, but this time also wearing a pair of gray joggers she must have scrounged up somewhere.
There’s even less in the cottage than the last time Kion was here.
He grits his teeth against the memory of all her belongings fitting in only two suitcases.
“I blew my money on bribes that didn’t even work,” Cho says, hopping to sit on the counter.
Bronte’s brows rise. “Bribes?”
Her answering smile is bitter. “Hush money,” she explains, kicking a slippered foot. One of the bunny’s ears is now bent. Both baffies look like they’ve seen war. “For the journalists, you know? I tried paying them off. They took the money and then ran the stories, anyway.”
The feeling unfurling in Kion’s chest is a dangerous one.
He suddenly wants to track down these fucking journalists and punch them right in their solar plexuses.
Gritting his teeth, he glances back out the window, concentrating on the faint Unseelie shapes lurking in the woodlands rather than on the clusterfuck that is his head right now.
Knox, sitting at the kitchen table with óríon, makes an outraged sound in his throat. “That’s illegal, though, innit? Taking your money like that?”
“I mean,” replies Taissa, sounding like she’s ready to be done with the conversation, “I couldn’t really call the magistrate since the bribes were illegal in the first place.
” She clears her throat, and Kion turns back around.
Unfortunately, his eyes go straight to the love bite he left on her neck, bared to him by the hair she’s pulled back into a ponytail.
It’s like a blooming flower, the shades of purple and red almost like a smudge of paint across a ready canvas, beautiful in its vibrancy.
Bloody hells. Since when did he become a poet?
And why the fuck can’t he stop staring at it?
Apparently he’s not the only one. Knox’s gasp—a theatrical gasp, at that—cuts through whatever Taissa’s about to say. “Your neck!” he exclaims. “Were you bitten by a vampire?”
Confusion swims in Taissa’s eyes before it’s quickly replaced by dread. Flushing, she lets her hair down, snapping the elastic back around her wrist, but it’s too late. Bronte is smirking at him, and óríon is tapping his chin thoughtfully.
“I do not think it was a vampire. I think it was Kion.”
Knox looks disproportionately annoyed. “That was literally the joke.”
“Haltu kjafti,” seethes óríon. “Your jokes, they are not good. They are not amusing.”
Bronte is winking at Kion now. Dramatically.
“It looks like you’re going to have a stroke,” he snaps at her.
Bronte’s winking turns even more exaggerated, and Kion questions all of his life decisions that led him up to this point.
“Anyway,” says Taissa, and she gets no points for subtlety at all, “because we don’t know if the disease can use humans as vectors, we should—”
“Get hazmat suits,” suggests Knox.
“—use Decontagion glyphs.” Kion nods as Taissa meets his eye. Those are the glyphs being etched onto their stymphs right now by the handlers as a precaution. Taissa hesitates, breaking his gaze to look at the other three players. “But you don’t need to come. It’ll be risky.”
óríon shrugs. “Without me, I think you will get caught. I have infiltrated many places. Some where nobody would dare to go.”
Bronte and Knox exchange wary looks. Kion nods. This is exactly why he called him in the first place.
“Your old stable, it will have wards, yes?” óríon presses.
“Yeah,” croaks Taissa, looking momentarily queasy.
He shrugs, unbothered. “I can break them. So I am coming.”
“And I, personally, want some answers about this illness,” adds Bronte, folding her arms. “We saw the cockatrices fall from the sky, but still, nobody’s told us anything except that it’s some sort of disease.
This could kill the entire sport. Carriwitchet could die, and it’s the one thing I’ve never gotten bored of. So, count me in.”
“Personally, I just needed something to do,” Knox chimes in, but it seems good enough for Taissa. A corner of her mouth is twitching.
Have her lips always been so pink?
A moment later, Kion realizes that they’re all waiting for him to say something.
Shit. He grimaces. “It’s your wyvern,” he manages to say, grateful his voice sounds gruff and not fucking wishy-washy.
What is happening to him? Why is he staring at Cho’s lips?
“You deserve to see her.” One last time, he refrains from adding.
But he sees it in Taissa’s eyes: She knows the unspoken part.
“Right.” She swallows and he watches her throat bob. “Shall we get on with it, then?”
Five Unseen glyphs, five Level Three Decontagion glyphs, and one car ride in a sputtering Dacia later, the team stands in front of the looming Banallan Nexitory.
It’s fucking disconcerting—he can see himself, but he can’t see the other four, thanks to the Unseens.
He can only hear their voices as Taissa whispers a nervous curse under her breath, standing somewhere to the right of him.
Whereas the Pinion Nexitory is a glass mammoth, the Banallan one resembles a Jenga tower: large and wooden and slightly slanted.
He knows it won’t topple over, that the slant was probably some prick’s idea of architectural genius, but something in his gut still twists as he stares up at it.
He’s never broken and entered before. Yeah, he’s done questionable shit—arson, and possible accidental murder from that arson—but he’s reformed.
Well, as much as he can be.
Sleek siren-ed SUVs—magistrate vehicles—surround the Nexitory, along with a few cars from what must be the DMC.
Taissa parked about a mile away. He’d had a hard time following her here, since he literally cannot see her.
They’d had to make a human chain. Kion’s still holding Taissa’s hand in his right one, and Knox’s in his left one.
óríon has been complaining this whole time that Knox is holding his hand “too tightly.” Knox has been vehemently denying it.
Bronte, meanwhile, has been snorting under her breath and egging both of them on.
Only after Kion threatened Knox and óríon with laps and suicide drills did they shut up for a while.
And by a while, Kion means only four and a half minutes. Yeah. He counted.
None of the players are outside, and there are only a few magistrates milling about, which is a small fucking mercy.
But still, Taissa’s voice is quiet, hardly audible, as she says: “The stables are connected to the back of the Nexitory. There’s an entrance that will probably be open.
But there will be wards.” Magistrates can easily bypass a good number of wardings, but for the Stymphs, it will prove trickier. At least they have Magnússon.
Kion feels like a child as they, all holding hands, make their way around the Nexitory.
The building is right next to the Wyverns’ pitch, and the grass tickles Kion’s ankles as they skirt the edges of it.
Ironically, it’s a beautiful afternoon. The sun is dazzling from up above, and the air smells fresh and sharp, like the woodlands bordering the pitch.
It’s only in the distance that there are a few gray clouds.
He tries not to think about whether or not that means an incoming storm.
His head doesn’t do well with storms. Any sudden or unexpected noises, really, but thunderclaps are something different. His heart pounds just thinking about it.
The stable, an attachment to the back of the Nexitory, comes into view. It resembles a cheerful barn, red with a sloping slate roof. Not the type of building you’d expect dangerous wyverns to be housed in. The type friendly cows and sheep might be in.
Taissa’s hand tightens around his own as they spot the entrance, the barn doors slid open to allow DMC agents to hurry to and fro, along with puzzled-looking magistrates.
Glyphs are carved onto the right side of the barn, and Kion feels óríon depart to do whatever it is he has planned to grant them access.
It won’t surprise him if somehow, óríon knows a Level Five Unlocking glyph.
Kion can feel Taissa’s pulse through how hard she’s gripping his hand.
It’s going wild, like a herd of stampeding horses.
Beating even harder than it was when she was sat atop him, kissing him for the cameras.
“Keep focused, Cho,” he mutters to her. It’s the same advice he gives her during practice, when she gets sloppy from frustration.
It’s probably the same advice he needs to give himself.
That boudoir shoot messed with his head. Did a number on him.
“I am focused,” she snaps back, her voice anything but.
He scowls, even though she can’t see him. He has the feeling that she’s scowling right back up at him. She definitely is.
When óríon’s disembodied voice speaks directly into his ear, Kion almost jumps a full foot in the fucking air. “It’s ready,” says Magnússon. “We can enter now.”
Taissa squeezes his hand so tightly that he feels a bone crack.
He hears her breaths, coming fast, too fast. “Cho,” he says gruffly, and even though he’s holding back a wheeze of pain, he doesn’t jerk his hand away from her.
“Breathe. You’re going to make yourself hyperventilate.
” Damn it, he wishes that he could see her face.
She whispers something back, but he can’t hear it.
Knox is tugging impatiently on his hand; Kion shakes it out of his grip.
“You three,” he snaps. “Head in. Poke around.” He wants a moment alone with Taissa.
Only when they hear the sound of the others’ steps retreating does Taissa speak.
And, Merlin, he’s never heard her voice so weak.
Feeble. That’s not the Taissa Cho he knows, but it’s the Taissa that now mumbles something he still can’t make out.
“Louder, sweetheart,” he says gently, and then wants to kick himself because it’s the second time he’s said sweetheart today and meant it.
Merlin save him. He’s losing his already-lost mind.
This, this is what happens when you’re so bloody touch-starved as a child.
Someone snogs you or plays with your hair or holds your hand and your brain goes absolutely haywire.
It gets confused. So many women hated how “clingy” Kion Locke became after a shag.
It didn’t exactly line up with their image of him: a strong, formidable, and foulmouthed player on the pitch.
It’s embarrassing, honestly, the way he aches inside.
The way he has since he was a child, for a touch that wasn’t violent, for a touch that was warm and sweet and soft.
So he doesn’t enjoy this phenomenon, either.
And now it’s happening again, but with Taissa.
He doesn’t even like her.
She’s the worst.
Taissa doesn’t seem to notice his excessive use of sweetheart, thank fuck. Her words waver as she raises her voice only slightly. “I said, I think…Coach Frasier might be in there. I hear his voice.”
Fear. That’s what’s making her so damn quiet. Kion bites the inside of his cheek hard enough that it hurts.
He can understand not wanting to see her coach again.
Everybody knows that she was chewed out by him, that he ran his mouth all over the tabloids, calling her names that no respectable journalist should have let run in the first place.
He remembers her face after reading the new Complete Carriwitchet article, the way it crumpled.
And he suddenly wants to punch something.
But why is she so damn frightened of Colum Frasier? This goes past the nervous reluctance he expected. He’s still holding her hand. He can feel how clammy her skin is. He’s never seen her like this before, not even during the Dust Bite.
“I don’t think I can go in,” says Taissa, voice beginning to wobble, and that’s when Kion knows something is really wrong.
This woman raced here in nothing but uncomfortable lingerie to see her old wyvern, who’s probably on the brink of death.
A wyvern that, if her ability to somehow still communicate with the Winged without a full Bonding glyph and from hundreds of miles away, she loved more than life itself.
Those kinds of bonds are legends from Ye Olden Days. And she actually has one.
Had one.
Yet even the thought of running into a pouch-bellied man has Cho wanting to flee.
And she’s…crying. He can hear her soft sobs and he doesn’t know what to do.
Not once, in years of rivalry, has he heard Taissa cry.
Not even after she was expelled from her team and paparazzi hounded her daily, shouting insults to her face.
“Cho.” His voice is so rough that it scrapes his throat. He doesn’t know what to say, because he doesn’t know what’s wrong. Fucking hells. He doesn’t know what’s wrong and it’s killing him. It’s a bewildered agony that pierces him from all directions.
“I’m sorry, Locke.” She hiccups softly. All of her armor, her crabbiness and sharp tongue, have crumbled away and it’s terrifying. Wrong. It’s like the sky has suddenly turned black instead of blue. “I know we came all this way—”
“Don’t apologize,” he hisses, and this time he’s the one squeezing her hand.
“You’re really going to let some arsehat of a coach stop you from seeing Sansa?
We’re going in there. Shoulders back. Head high.
” He can’t see her but he hopes her tears are slowing as he says, “You’re invisible.
You want to kick that old bastard in the balls, you do it. Yeah?”
Her answering laugh is shaky. “Yeah.”
As they walk toward the entrance of the stables, Kion might just take his own advice.
Because this bastard made Taissa cry.