Two
- Evangeline
“So...Aurelia,” I said, stressing her name just slightly as I dabbed the spicy burger sauce off my lips. My eyes light, I asked, “I’m assuming you’re not here to tell me all your secrets and then come with me down to HQ?” I paused to see if she’d say, “Oh, yeah, actually, that’s exactly it.”
She did not.
Shrugging, I took another bite of my burger as I subtly started tearing up the serviette in my fist. Little bitty pieces the size of dust. I’d bet Cunt Face’s soldiers were fast. I’d bet she was faster. But few people trained blind.
“So let me guess, this is an ambush and you’re not planning on taking me alive?”
She laughed easily, her head tilting back, her eyes off me, and if I hadn’t already known I was surrounded by soldiers, I would now. You kept your eyes on predators. You protected the soft area of your neck in their presence. The fact that she hadn’t was a clear message she thought I was prey.
The runes on my body hummed as the ‘patrons’ around me all shifted in expectation. Ready to launch forward on their mistress’ signal.
They’d get a signal all right, but it wouldn’t be the one they were waiting for.
“Oh, no,” Cunt Face chuckled as she looked back at me. I shifted my burger around in my hand, making sure I got the sauce all over my palm and fingers as I smiled at her.
“This isn’t an ambush at all. An ambush requires one not to know they’re about to get attacked, but you already know that, don’t you, Evangeline?”
For fuck’s sake.
Technically correct people were the worst. I was going to enjoy taking her head to whatever family she hailed from. Granted, they might not recognise her and the point would be lost given disguise magic didn’t fade upon death. It was permanent until it was changed – hence the high skill of magic required to pull it off. But, eh, I’d take my chances.
Throwing heads at people was always fun, and Cunt Face had long golden hair that would make an amazing handle.
I nodded. “I clocked your soldiers as soon as I opened the door.” A lie. Had I realised this was a full on wasp hive, I sure as hel wouldn’t have entered alone. And I definitely wouldn’t have brazenly revealed my identity rather than sneakily killing them one by one. I was crazy and liked to test myself, but I wasn’t suicidal. And there were twenty-three extremely well-trained hostiles now surrounding me…
Fuck.
I needed to make a flash bomb and bail. The front door was now unlocked thanks to Richard’s goons, but they would expect me to go for it, so I’d have to go out the –
My magic hummed as the little girl shifted behind me, her aura growing stronger. More prominent as she moved her hands at her sides… Of course she’s a fucking witch.
Evangeline, no… She’s just a child. Brainwashed. You have to –
I cut Aurelia off, shoved her down into a dark cupboard of my mind, and slammed the door shut. The key was swallowed.
There was no saving the little girl. You couldn’t fight a witch and expect to live if you were pulling punches. I would have to kill her first.
At least she won’t see me kill her mum…
Evangeline…
“And I’m not planning on killing you,” Cunt Face said, thankfully interrupting whatever guilt trip Aurelia had been planning, her smile as fake as her disguise. “You have a very high bounty on your head – one I plan on collecting.”
I snorted. “Yeah, good luck with that.”
Her smile didn’t waver in the slightest.
I snagged a heavily salted chip and licked the salt off before dipping the chip back into the basket to wipe up more of the yummy white crystals.
She still just stared at me, that knowing smile making me a tad uncomfortable because holy fucking shit, I might have fucked up in an even bigger way than by just walking into a den of hostiles.
Because if she did manage to capture me and “take me” to “Dorothea the Deranged” (aka: alias number seven), which would literally only require her to know I was Dorothea and be all, “Hey, Dorothea, I’m collecting on your ad”, I would be forced to pay out the three million pebs I’d listed on it. A fairy could not make a deal, promise, sleepy agreement, half-drunken pact, or tripping-out-of-your-vagina bet without honouring it. Else, they’d be publicly executed, which was a weeks’ to months’ long ordeal that even I thought was a bit excessive.
I mean, fair enough, smothering someone in honey and then releasing a colony of ants on them to eat all their skin off. As was force-feeding them omini after so wasps would be attracted to them and want to lay their eggs inside them. But when the larvae started eating their way out, the victim’s bones were broken into multiple pieces, and their ears and tongue were removed, well, by then, it got a bit boring. Like, the point of determent had been made three steps ago. Why continue?
And it didn’t even stop there!
The torture just went on and on and on, like a new mother with all her baby pictures, ending with the person’s intestines being ripped out through their anus and then used to strangle them. Seriously, whoever had thought up that ‘tradition’ needed therapy.
And I need three million pebs if Cunt Face here has figured out –
Leaning forward, she said, “King Ethiria–”
Thank gods. He was the king of the Alzans and had put a bounty on my head years ago after I’d killed his son while he’d been taking a shit. “Honour” was strong in the snake-people of our southern neighbours, but “honour” was nothing but a bullshit concept made to make people feel better about having zero street smarts.
“–requests your delivery before he accepts our deal.” She leaned in even further, her smile a brilliant white that matched the colour of her fancy jumpsuit. The sauce on my hand itched, beckoning me too lean in too so I could smear my palm all down her front.
Patience, Ev, patience.
“And I assure you, Evangeline Sinclair, that I will deliver you to him myself.” Her eyes held mine, a silent vow within their hard dark depths. Hers was the look of a killer, an assassin, a dangerously-driven mafia queen.
Snagging another chip, I popped it into my mouth as I continued to tear up the serviette, keeping the pieces in my palm, in my other hand. “I’ll tell you what. You tell me what Family you’re from,” I said gracefully, “and I won’t desecrate your bodies after I kill you all.”
A lie. I might be bailing in this instance, but I would come back to hunt each and every one of them down. Cunt Face here might be able to afford disguise magic, but I highly doubted her soldiers could. And after I killed them all, each one was going to be strung up with their pants around their ankles and their hearts hanging out of their chests as a message to the rest of her gang. Fucking Raza over from the inside was one thing. But to make a deal with her greatest enemy…
I might not know what the specifics of Cunt Face and King Ethiria’s deal were, but it didn’t take a genius to know that Raza would suffer greatly for it. Already, the three old Families – the Lav Nera ruling the drug world, the Raveni running the dens of dark entertainment (gambling, underground fighting, fairy hunting, illegal prostitution), and the Zefii Alel Zaluska (ZAZ) controlling the banks of the underworld – carved death into the streets of Raza as they warred for new territory while trying to hold on to their fragile dominance.
Throw in Alzan soldiers attacking the capital in an attempt to kill our king and queen, and Raza was about to get fucked in every hole she had. And given our kingdom was situated across the branches of thousands of trees, our cities carved into and around its trunks, our suburbs running out along its branches, that was a lot of holes to brutally plug.
Cunt Face laughed at me, and I smiled back, tearing up the last few pieces of the serviette. My magic snuck out to the little girl behind me.
Evangeline…
I blocked Aurelia’s sorrow for me out. I was doing this for her kingdom, for the people she’d sacrificed her life to save twenty years ago. I would not let Cunt Face destroy Aurelia’s legacy, would not let Aurelia’s queenly sacrifice be for nothing. And I would not let Aurelia stop me from sacrificing my own morality to uphold hers. The girl had to die for Raza to live.
Only, Aurelia would have tried to save her anyways.
And I was going to kill her immediately.
You always were better than me.
Turning my attention back to the girl, I tried to discern what spell she was casting and how far along it was to being completed. I needed her close enough she wouldn’t dare stop out of fear the magic would become explosively uncontrollable but not close enough that whatever spell she was weaving would be allowed to finish. Because she was creating an immobilisation spell and once that got me, I would be fucked.
But there was something wrong with it.
Something…
“I suppose it won’t matter, me telling you,” Cunt Face said.
My brows perked up, but my runes stayed focused on the girl. An uncomfortable heat started to fill me even as I latched excitedly onto the woman’s mouth, trying to read her words before the sounds even kissed the air.
She leaned forward.
The rune on my back heated sharply.
The girl started to chant beneath her breath, “heard” only through my magic.
The fucker.
If I hadn’t planned on killing her before, I would now considering she was about to interrupt my discovery of the information I’d been trying to discern for months.
“We’re the…” Her eyes jerked over my shoulder to the little girl.
Snapping my leg out before she could give a signal, I slammed my foot into Cunt Face’s crotch. She fell forward even as her magic shot up my leg, the protection rune she had somewhere on her body activating automatically. It shoved me back, my chair rocking up on two legs.
The temperature in the room blazed into a full day’s sun as I tossed the pieces of the serviette into her face as I fell, my magic wrapped around them. Like little stars, they burned bright and hot as they exploded into a galaxy of intensity, melting her face before spreading across the room.
I twisted in my chair as it rocked past the tipping point, going down with it instead of spreading my wings and flying up. Everyone would expect that, and I needed to be unpredictable if I wanted to survive longer than two seconds.
The room became brighter.
The immobilisation spell strengthened behind me, near completion.
Unsheathing one of my throwing knives, I twisted further to face the girl just as my chair was about to hit the floor.
In my squinted peripherals, fairies screamed in pain as the light burned their eyes, melting them inside their skulls. Yet, still the majority of them took aim at me with knives and combat wands. But thank the gods, the wands were all premades and not customs. Everyone could use a premade, but pure witches would never, and fighting two powerful witches at once was already going to tax me. I would be lucky if I got out alive.
Throwing a hand out, the little girl locked on to my blade, sharp red light wrapping around it midair. My eyes widened. Fucking seriously?
A knife from one of the other soldiers was tossed at me, disintegrating as it touched my flesh, the protection rune tattooed across my skin flaring, but my attention stayed on the girl.
She’d fucking changed her spell partway through.
Prodigy or not, that took decades to master with such smoothness, years of figuring out the sequences of spells so they could branch off into various others at any point. The skill it took to craft that… The experience it took to change a word halfway through speaking it without any hesitation or blunder…to reshape and redirect the volatile magic of a half-cast spell…
Looks be damned, that wasn’t a little girl.
My chair slammed into the floor, thudding beneath me as the serviette particles reached the “little girl”. She shattered my knife with her magic, reshaping the particles to become a ball of darkness that consumed the light of my own spell, snuffing it out before it blinded her.
But just her, no one else. She didn’t even try to save her “mother” beside her.
Why not? She clearly has enough power...
Stop thinking. Just fight! Aurelia screamed as power flared behind me.
Fucking Cunt Face! Ugh!
“Do you mind? I’m trying to have a conversation!” I yelled as I rolled away from the chair and started to rise, but her blast of magic shattered across my back, fizzling against the runes protecting me.
I sank back to the floor with a grunt. Gods, I could not take many hits like that. The protection spell tattooed on me, although finely tuned, was still a generic spell at the end of the day. Magic needed to be specifically crafted to hold much power. I could fend off two, maybe three more attacks before the rune became nothing more than paint under my skin and I would have to actively protect myself. And magic wasn’t infinite. Eventually, I would run out just like my muscles would eventually require rest. Worse, the more magic was used, the more volatile it became until it was more likely to kill me rather than my target.
Fuck.
Flipping myself over, I grabbed the sides of my chair and rolled away from the table, using my chair as a shield. Something knocked the table over, making it crash onto the floor beside me. Aw. My heart broke as I noticed the burn marks where Richard’s eyes had been. I’d forgotten to protect them from my own spell.
I winced as I suddenly realised I hadn’t protected Eve’s eyes either.
Though really, who am I kidding? She’s not making it out of here alive…
As if in agreement, blades slammed into the chair I was holding, embedding into the wood but not far enough to cut me. A blast of magic hit it; another almost hit my legs but I managed to spread them in time, the mark scorching the floor as adrenaline pulsed hard in my veins.
Six soldiers –four women, two men– rushed me from various directions. Although blind, half managed to jump over and avoid the obstacles in their way to me. It seemed at least a few of them had trained blind.
Double fuck.
A flash of white above me had me jerking my head back to Cunt Face as she launched across the floor, her face half melted, her hands reaching out for my neck, glowing red.
I tossed the chair away, hitting one of the soldiers aiming for me, and curled my legs up, catching Cunt Face on my feet with a grunt. As I started to fling her over my head, she hissed and raked her nails across my chest. My protection rune heated like a furnace, then quickly cooled, her nails burning with a magic that left me bare.
As her claws dug ditches across my face, I turned my head to the side and finished throwing her off me. She was quickly replaced by the heavy body of one of her soldiers. A knife slammed into my side, stabbing to the hilt. Blocking out the pain, I placed my palm on the man’s chest and pushed out with my magic, burning a hole right into his heart.
Annoyance filled me at the waste of the burger sauce on my palm staining his clothes rather than Cunt Face’s. Giving her a bloodstain just wouldn’t be the same; people would just assume she was a good fighter. Dammit.
My eyes skidded to a bottle of mustard. It was a bit far, but if I –
Evangeline!
Okay, okay. Killjoy. Although to be fair to Aurelia, only thirteen seconds had passed, and I had already lost my shielding and been wounded. I really needed to get out of here before I couldn’t.
Holding the man’s body on top of me as it collapsed, I used him as a human shield. Magic blasts exploded across his back, their heat burning the thin hairs on my arms. Launching him at the soldier on my left, I pulled two knives out and sent them into the soldier on my right. As they both started to fall to the ground, I twisted my head to find the “little girl” again. She was close to finishing her spe–
“Aleveshti!” The word cracked around the room as a wave of magic shot out to every corner.
Instantly, everything froze.
The two soldiers beside me mid-fall, their faces a mixture of shock and pain. Cunt Face halfway to her feet again, her nails now as long as her hands and glistening like metal. All the soldiers surrounding me. And fuck it, me, twisted on the floor, looking up at the girl as she strode towards me, her face one of triumph.
And I finally realised what had been so “wrong” with her spell. She’d crafted it to target everyone.
Fucking duh, Aurelia said.
Shut up. Like you figured it out.
Which meant “the little girl” wasn’t really a part of whatever Family this was. She was just here for me, on some personal vendetta or another.
Unfortunately, that did not help me narrow down her real identity in the slightest. I’d pissed off so many people over the years, I couldn’t begin to guess what I’d done to warrant the level of fury in her brilliant green eyes.
Without a word, the little witch reached down and grabbed my arm. She tried to lift me, but her tiny frame wasn’t strong enough. Scowling, she glared down at me with her hands on her hips, and I could see her warring over what to do. Sweat beaded beneath her blonde locks as she struggled to keep us all immobile. If she used any more magic, she’d risk losing control.
Cunt Face over there was fighting her magic just as strongly as I was if the rage in her eyes was anything to go by, and although I wasn’t capable of moving even my tiniest toe, I could feel the girl’s spell cracking under the focused assault of my magic. I smiled at her with my eyes, daring her to use a spell to lift me. I would only need a second. One moment before I could spring up and slice her throat.
Her eyes flicked over my back to my legs.
A lethal chill settled in my spine.
Don’t you fucking do it.
I tried to scowl, but my face wouldn’t move.
The little girl started to walk around me.
Aurelia started laughing.
I cursed inside my head and slammed my magic against her spell. My toes twitched, but then they locked tight again, her magic holding strong. As the bitch rolled up my trousers leg, baring my prosthesis, I kept up a constant stream of energy pushing against her. The air crackled, electrifying like right before a thunderstorm.
But it didn’t erupt.
Dammit.
And the bitch removed my leg.
Oooh! I’m so going to kill you.
Coming back around to face me, she grabbed my arm once more. This time, with one leg gone, I lifted easily.
“I have waited decades for this,” she seethed, fury and glee dripping off her every word as she carried me to the door, slung across her bony shoulders. She stepped out onto a branch. A bloody male corpse was splattered across the street, making the whole place look like a pad during a very clotted period.
I giggled. That’s totally going in the report.
Jerry in Oversight would have to read it, and Jerry was a malelitist dick.
“Don’t laugh!” the little witch snapped. “I’m going to enjoy killing you, Evangeline Sinclair, for all the pain you have given me, for every moment I have been trapped in this godsforsaken body due to your curse. When King Ethiria told us he wanted you before he would agree to a deal, I knew I’d finally have my revenge with all these resources coming together to find you.”
Ugh. She’s a fucking monologuer.
I groaned as loud as I could just for her.
Not only was I going to be forced to listen to her droll on and on, but the amount of times she’d say something stupid and I wouldn’t be able to respond was going to kill me.
That’s what you get for killing Mr Clot back there, Aurelia piped in, ever the karma counter.
It’s not my fault he wasn’t smart enough to duck. One less idiot in the world isn’t a bad thing.
Aurelia, unsurprisingly, disagreed.
Ugh.
And then I had two monologuers mad at me.