Chapter Twenty-Nine Kion #2
James, still disguised, flops a hand at them with a slightly mad smile.
“Toodles,” sings Warble/James before taking advantage of óríon’s momentary distraction and slipping—no, fucking skipping—off into the crowd.
Sober James will be humiliated. Drunk Warble is likely going off to find Knox.
Absolutely pissed, the two of them are quite the fucking pair and a danger to society.
óríon scowls. “I will find him.”
“Make sure he manages to get water into his mouth this time,” Kion grumbles as he’s hauled off unceremoniously by the telephone-pole-loving troll.
Ten seconds later, he and Taissa are being thrown out onto the street, the door of the Shrieking Pumpkin slamming closed with a pointed finality.
“Well,” says Taissa, glaring at the club behind them as the moon shines with a glowing luminescence above the empty street, “that was rude. I wanted to see more of Warble.”
Kion shakes his head, biting back a small smile. She cuts a picture like this, shaking a small fist at the closed doors of Shrieking Pumpkin, her eyes ablaze, and her tiny red dress all rumpled.
If his mind were a Polaroid, he’d take a snapshot of this moment right now and gaze at it for fucking hours.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he says instead, voice gruff with some thick emotion he can’t describe. “I know a place.”
Carrying a greasy box of takeaway pizza, Kion opens the doors to the stables, letting Taissa duck in before him. The stymphs, dozing in Yggdrasil, wake with curious squawks as the tantalizing smell of oily cheese and oregano waft toward them.
“Mine,” Cato demands, perking up in his nest near the middle of the looming tree.
“Give it to me. Now.” Cronus seems to be directing a similar line of thought toward Taissa.
The old Stymphalian swoops downward from his nest, beak open as he emits a bloodcurdling shriek, wizened tongue visible, talons out.
Fucking hells, thinks Kion, wincing, but Taissa is smiling at the crazy thing like he’s the cutest little puppy in the world. As they sit down on the grass in the stables, their stymphs join them, apparently putting aside their familial dispute for the chance of scoring some pizza.
Kion doesn’t even roll his eyes as he tosses Cato the biggest, cheesiest slice. All the other Wingeds are down for the count, even the notorious dragons. At any time, Cato could come down with the Sleeping Death. Unless they find a way to reverse the curse first.
So in the meantime, he can have as much pepperoni as his hungry heart desires.
Next to him, Taissa is leaning against Cronus, munching a slice of pizza while she scrolls on her phone. Her dress has ridden up slightly, giving Kion an eyeful—
“Gross,” says Cato, before squawking something to his father. “You’re panting like a smelly dog.”
Cronus cackles in clear agreement. The tip of his wing stretches out to touch Cato’s, and Kion bitterly wonders if this is the stymphalian equivalent to a high five.
“Shut up.”
“He-he-he. No.”
“The aethernet isn’t being very helpful on how to break a púca’s curse,” Taissa mutters.
“The Withers probably don’t want it getting out.
Maybe they censored it somehow.” She tosses her phone away in frustration, taking a large bite of pizza.
A half second later, Cronus steals it from her, nearly biting off her hand in the process.
The old menace looks very proud of himself.
Taissa rolls her eyes and fondly shoves his pizza-eating beak.
Kion frowns, pulling out his own phone. But she’s right. There’s nothing. Frustrated, he logs on to Cauldron, on the off chance that the hell-app might know something. Taissa peeks over his shoulder as Cronus and Cato begin squabbling over the last few pieces of pie.
The first photo on his feed, by an account he doesn’t even follow, has his eyes widening. It’s their boudoir shoot, because of course it is, but somebody—@dryadmama52—has drawn over Taissa’s face, giving her devil horns and angry red eyebrows.
Merlin’s tits. He jabs at the screen, jabs again, tries to scroll away from it, but the photo doesn’t move.
Next to him, Taissa stiffens. He feels her hurt gaze like a needle puncturing his skin. “Why did you like that?” she asks in a small, confused voice.
What? “I didn’t,” he says, frowning, looking at her. He wouldn’t do something as cruel as that.
It’s Taissa’s turn to frown up at him, her brows puckering together.
“Yes, you did…” When he stares at her, uncomprehendingly, something like sudden recognition sparks to life in her eyes.
“Oh,” she says, as if something finally makes sense.
“Oh. Oh, you terrible, terrible numpty,” she murmurs, but her lips are slowly turning upward into a smile of disbelief.
“What?” demands Kion, his skin prickling. He doesn’t like that he doesn’t know what this revelation is that she’s made. It’s making him feel nervous. Self-conscious.
“You,” announces Taissa, pointing a finger at him, “are bad at using Cauldron. I should have known from the start. ‘Save picture,’ ” she mimics, smirking. “ ‘Save picture.’ ”
Kion blinks at her. “What are you on about?”
She snatches the phone from his hands. “You ‘like’ something by tapping it twice,” she informs him.
“No—you press the cauldron symbol,” he argues, frowning.
“That’s another way to do it. But if you don’t want to ‘like’ something, you just scroll past it.
Comments, too.” And the way she’s looking at him with those sharp brown eyes has his stomach sinking.
Ah, fuck. What does she know that he doesn’t?
What did he do? “You like a lot of things by accident, don’t you? ”
Yeah. He has.
And it’s gotten him in trouble more than once with the tabloids.
One time—apparently, according to this new information—he “liked” a photograph of Chasca kissing her new beau.
Until today, he thought he’d been set up, that his account had been hacked—probably by Taissa Cho—and somebody else had liked it.
Apparently, it was him all along. Fucking hells. Why had nobody told him? He can’t keep up with all of these Cauldron updates.
“Maybe,” Kion hedges. Reluctantly.
“Interesting,” says Taissa. “So you didn’t mean to, a couple years ago, ‘like’ that comment telling me to summon Arawn and then let him kill me.”
Kion’s jaw goes so tight that it hurts. “Who wrote that?” he snarls.
Taissa shrugs, even though she’s scowling a bit. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is—”
“Who, Taissa?” His hands curl into fists. “Tell me who.”
“Some stupid, vapid, foul-smelling, sad little waste of life,” she replies curtly. “Don’t worry. I’m over it.”
She’s obviously lying. For the third time since the Banallan trip, he has an indistinguishable urge to commit a crime.
Waste of life, indeed. “Bloody hells, Taissa—I’d never—I wouldn’t—” He remembers, in those days after the scandal, how her account had been flooded with foul words.
He’d scrolled through them in a haze, unable to believe what he was seeing, how damn fast the world could turn on one of their most beloved athletes.
Kion had never thought the fallout would be so hellishly bad.
Had he “liked” one of those hateful comments by accident?
Had she thought, all of this time, that he’d meant to?
“I would never,” he growls, and her face softens.
“I know that now.”
Cronus has wrestled the final piece of pizza from his son and is chomping down with such fervor that crumbs spray into the air. Cato fills Kion’s head with complaints and insults about his father, but they sound more amused than anything.
Kion’s throat feels raw and red. If he could take these two years back, he would. “Taissa, I—”
The doors to the stables creak open.
In an instant, Kion and Taissa are on their feet, whirling around and whipping out their qyls.
Both of them, he knows, are expecting a púca to swagger in the door, here to finish the job.
Cronus cuts in front of Cato, standing protectively in front of his son, who’s shifting on his feet in anticipation as a shadowed figure steps into the light…
“What the hells are you doing here?” Taissa spits as Markus comes into view, dour face immediately tightening in surprise.
Cronus flinches.
Kion doesn’t think.
He just moves.
Markus tries to quickly wriggle his way out of the stables, but there’s no hope.
The former handler is weak, pudgy, and up against Kion’s near sixteen stone of pure muscle.
In less than a few seconds, Kion has crossed the stables, and is slamming Markus to the ground as Cato squawks in entertainment.
In Yggdrasil, the other stymphalians join the ruckus, flapping their wings and raising a din of triumphant cawing.
Cronus flaps over, shrieking, and by the way Taissa’s eyes widen as she stares down at the warlock’s body pinned underneath Kion’s knee, Cronus is spitting insults.
Bloody Markus.
“The fuck is this?” Kion snarls in the man’s ear.
Although his body acted first, his mind is quickly catching up.
Markus has always hated the stymphs. What is it he’d said to them in Tally Ho?
That the stymphs would be next? Combined with his behavior in the bar, this is fucking suspicious. “You don’t work here anymore.”
“Let me up!” he wheezes.
Kion presses down harder, fumbling for his qyl. “I’ll ink a Truth glyph onto you,” he growls.
“That’s illegal!”
“So’s breaking into the stables.”
“I-I forgot something, I forgot my coat…”
Bullshit.
“Did you hire a púca to create the Sleeping Death?” Taissa hisses, crouching down, her eyes ablaze with that fire. “Did you?”
“I…I…”
“Did you?” Kion’s voice is unfamiliar to even himself: dark and rolling, like a storm.
“YES!” wails Markus, breaking like an egg on a kitchen floor. “THEY—MADE ME—LET GO!”
As the ex-handler writhes like a worm beneath him, Kion meets Taissa’s shocked gaze. “Get the magis,” he pants. “Get him now.”