Chapter Twenty-One Kion #2
Ever since, he hasn’t done well with unexpected noises.
He can steel himself against loud sounds so long as he’s expecting them—so long as it makes sense for his environment, like the roar of a carriwitchet crowd or the throbbing of a club’s bass, even the screams of fans on the street—but all bloody bets are off when he’s taken by surprise, or if it’s a storm.
A storm is the one thing he’s never been able to prepare himself for, even by watching for lightning, for counting the beats between each thunderclap.
The fear is seared into him like a brand, burned into his mind.
Mother Nature is forcing his hand. Kion climbs to his feet, feeling stiff and ashamed.
Either he can stay outside during the thunderstorm, where everything will be so much louder, or he can take refuge in Cho’s home and try to explain himself to his teammates and then try to scurry away before the thunderclaps start.
What great options. His stomach twists as he makes his way to her back door, careful not to step on her weed-filled vegetable patch lest she tackle him again.
They’re still in the sitting room, probably having cleaned it up with a Scouring glyph. Their voices are low murmurs in the air, and Kion hesitates, pressed against the wall, frightened that they’re talking about him. How weak he is, how pathetic and sniveling.
“Does anybody want to talk about the elephant in the room?” Knox is demanding, and Kion, flinching, holds his breath as the lad adds, “By which I mean the GIANT BLACK HORSE that was in your SITTING ROOM?”
Kion blinks. They aren’t talking about him.
They aren’t talking about him. Not laughing or speculating or calling him weak and sniveling. Surprised relief is a cool balm on his racing heart.
“Stop shouting.” óríon’s low, rumbling tone is at odds with Tanaka’s cries. “But yes. It was strange. I do not know how that happened. It is magic. But what sort, I do not know.”
“Probably the bad type,” says Bronte wryly. “From the Dark Well. Maybe.”
Hells, Kion is more nervous than he’s ever been before a game.
Trying to straighten his shoulders, he steps into the room, and acts like he’s not being ripped apart by humiliation on the inside.
“There’s a way to know for sure,” he offers, and his voice is rough with stress as his teammates turn to him, eyes wide.
Fuck. Kion clears his throat and continues on, “I know a dullahan. If Queen Pike or King Puck have detected anyone scraping from the Dark Well and there’s a bounty on their heads, Jacks would know.
” It could also help them track down the team’s curse: two birds with one stone.
If the DMR knows jack-shit and Lionel can only tab dark glyph usage for him (like Summoning glyphs), there’s no point in going back to them.
It’s becoming pretty fucking clear that they’re not directly dealing with a witch or a warlock, at least not for the team’s curse.
That goth síceach confirmed it, and Kion has a feeling that this illness—if it is foul play—also wasn’t done by a glyph.
He knows of none that can, one, create a disease-spreading dust, and two, create a horse out of that dust when it’s touched by fire.
It’s bloody weird, is what it is.
Very quickly, they’ve swum out of their depths.
And judging by James’s call, it doesn’t seem like Magis Elder has any leads.
He probably should have suggested paying Jacks Clarke a visit earlier, but until now, he didn’t think it was necessary.
And the magis would probably be reluctant to pay Clarke a visit without arresting him, or worse.
Bounty-hunting isn’t exactly legal in the UKHC.
Plus, the things Jacks does on the side are very, very illegal.
And he can be…difficult. Understatement of the century, that. So Kion didn’t want to see him unless he absolutely needed to.
It seems like he does.
“You know a dullahan?” blurts Taissa and he feels himself soften even as there’s a low, distant roll of thunder that likely only he can hear.
Kion knows he wasn’t kind to her earlier.
He’d seen her face, stricken, as he’d yanked his hand away.
And he’s been worried he hurt her when he crushed her against the floor.
But he’d seen the fire, and Quaid’s body, and he panicked.
“Jacks Clarke,” Kion replies gruffly, trying to think coherently. “Lives in Pinion, near the southern part of River Keat. I could ring him.”
Taissa blinks at him. “And how, exactly, do you know this dullahan?”
Er. He winces. “That’s not…important.”
“I think it is!” chimes in Bronte, eyes sparkling. Knox joins in, and Kion stares at them in surprise. They’re not treating him any differently. It’s like nothing has changed. Bewildered, he looks to óríon, who gives him a small smile and nods.
Something in his chest swells as Knox pats the seat next to him on the rug in clear invitation. “Come on, Cap,” he says, laughing. “Regale us, won’t you, with your exploits?”
Kion bites back something like a smile. The storm is getting closer, but the thunder is still far enough away, perhaps by a half hour or more. And Taissa is looking at him with eyes wide in curiosity.
Fuck it.
“I met Jacks Clarke at a pub,” he begins, sitting down next to Knox, “when he was fighting seven trolls at once, and flirting with another two.”
The air of the cottage is thick with the fast-approaching storm by the time that Kion lies in a surprisingly cushy sleeping bag in Taissa’s attic, óríon and Knox sleeping like, well, puppies next to him.
Puppies who spent a full hour arguing with each other about whether or not óríon’s hair is bleached before they fell asleep.
As electricity crackles through the air, Kion decides he can’t take it anymore and climbs out of the attic, his entire body itching as the storm looms overhead. His body thrums with nervous energy, tense and ready to run, not wanting to remain stationary.
Bronte is downstairs, dozing on the sitting room sofa. Kion is careful not to wake her as he creeps into the kitchen—and almost jumps out of his skin as Taissa looks sharply up at him from behind her glasses where she’s sitting at the table, her phone propped up against a cracked mug.
“That’s definitely not what she said,” an irritated—and familiar—voice crackles through her phone.
“Try again. She said…” There’s a brief silence as Taissa turns quickly back to the screen, where she squints at Adriel, who must be on video chat with her.
Kion blinks, puzzled, as Taissa chews on her nail.
“Er,” she says, “you said, ‘You’re a wank-job, Taissa.’ Right?”
“Yep,” replies Adriel, “and seeing how Mahina will probably say this to you again at many points, it’s a good phrase to know.
” Kion, shoulders slack with surprise, rounds the table to stand behind Taissa.
On her screen, Adriel sits next to Mahina, who’s signing another vulgar phrase for Taissa and looking extremely amused.
“Uh…‘You play like shite.’ ”
Mahina nods enthusiastically before her eyes flick to Kion, who hovers over Taissa’s shoulder. “Hi, Captain,” she signs, dragging a finger across her opposite biceps, where Kion’s purple armband typically rests during practice or a match.
“Mahina, Adriel,” Kion says, unable to mask the surprise in his voice.
Merlin. Taissa’s learned BSL, or some of it, anyway.
He hadn’t thought she was serious about it, thought she’d be like Niamh and the others, with their overly sympathetic preening and promises to learn right away.
Fuck, he’d told Taissa off, hadn’t he? His stomach twists, and not just because of the incoming storm.
Mahina lost her voice to a merrow’s trick when she was seven.
She’d wandered down to a beach in Woolmouth, where one of the Unseelie seapeople had cornered her into a bargain.
Mahina had just reluctantly moved to Wales from Honoka’a, Hawai’i, where the sparkling ocean was more friend than foe.
So when the merrow demanded a price in exchange for her dream—to make a professional carriwitchet team—she agreed, expecting the cost to be a few quid.
It was her voice.
The merrows watch too many sodding Disney movies.
“Taissa is learning the most important phrases in BSL,” Mahina tells him seriously. She lifts her pinky fingers to her mouth and then gestures outward a couple of times in slightly circular motions. “Swears. Along with, of course, other basic words.”
“I can see that,” he replies, mouth twitching.
But then a crack of thunder, louder than the others have been, has him white-knuckling the back of Taissa’s chair.
He blinks furiously, like that will stop him from sinking into memories he’d rather not look too closely at.
He’s vaguely aware of Taissa turning to him, then saying goodbye to Adriel and Mahina, and shutting off her phone as Kion’s mind begins to slip to another place and another time.
She stands, looking him levelly in the eye, and cocking her head like a curious bird.
As her hair falls to one side, his eyes snag on the hickey on the side of her neck in a strange fascination he’s powerless to stop.
The pressure in his mind recedes, just a bit, even as thunder booms up ahead.
“Sit down,” she says, and it doesn’t look like she hates him as much as she did the last time the two of them stood in this kitchen. “I’ll make you a hot toddy.”
Irritation has him jerking his eyes away from the love-bite. “I’m not a child, Cho,” he snaps, and wonders if this is it, if this is the part when everybody starts treating him differently.
Apparently not. Taissa puts her hands on her hips and glowers right back at him. “I’m trying to be nice, you absolute dobber.”
“Well, you’re doing a shit job of it.”
Her eyes gleam. “I’m making you a hot toddy, Locke, and you have zero choice in the matter. Now sit.”