Chapter Two Taissa
Chapter Two
Taissa
It isn’t her mum. It can’t be. Estee is in a French Hidden City for the week, set on eating every croissant in sight, meaning that Taissa has a lovely respite from the motherly nitpicking (“yes, Mum, I’ve been eating my fruits”) and unless little Abigail Williams has suddenly become brave enough to trespass all the way into her backyard, this “visitor” is nobody friendly.
Her stalker fan from a few years back, intent on stealing more than just her knickers? The elven male from the shop, offended by her insults? Her brain tartly suggests that no, it is actually an assassin, a murderer, who likes to kill twenty-four-year-old women as they angrily garden.
The shadow clears its throat. Again.
(An impatient murderer. Oh, great.)
In one swift movement, Taissa is grabbing her qyl from its holster and leaping to her feet. As quickly as she can, she scratches a Level Two Combat glyph onto her exposed forearm just as her eyes began to raise toward the intruder.
She looks up.
It’s worse.
Oh, it’s so, so much worse.
She looks at him, and it’s like she’s back in the stadium, her blood thrumming with that potent mix of joy and anger as she swoops and soars upon Sansa, the wind whipping through her hair.
She looks at him and it’s like she’s eighteen again, locking eyes with him for the first time across the gala’s ballroom after loving him from afar for two whole infatuated years.
That unapproachable, unsmiling face is the same as it has always been, even back when she had his posters on her wall.
Like his features were carved from unforgiving stone by a sculptor with bitter hands, an artist who wished to carve a violent tempest of a man.
His eyes are dark slashes glaring at her above his aquiline nose, his mouth—the bottom lip slightly and perpetually bee-stung in a way that’s incongruous with the scowl it’s currently twisted into—set above a sharp chin and a neck that she has imagined wringing many, many times.
“Hello, Cho,” says Kion Locke in that gruff, cold voice.
She’s heard it cussing her out, shouting in frustration across the pitch to his teammates, roaring at the refs…
but never, ever greeting her. She’s staggered by confusion—literally.
Taissa stumbles back, feeling the world shake beneath her feet.
She’d wanted, so badly, to know him.
He’d made sure that never happened.
Confusion replaces fear. And now, he’s…
In Banallan.
In her garden.
Saying hello.
After ruining her life, after ripping it apart and setting it afire.
Standing over her patch of greens, the sun shining behind his head like some kind of ridiculous halo, his arms folded, his formidable brows slashed downward like he’s the one who’s been ambushed in the midst of his cathartic gardening therapy.
The audacity.
It’s like she’s been rammed by a Knocker, the way the breath rushes out of her, the way she feels like she’s falling, falling through thin air.
Does he know how completely he broke her?
Does he even care?
“You didn’t answer your front door,” Kion is saying rather accusatorily in that thick South London accent, but by now, the Combat glyph is darkening to black on Taissa’s dirt-smeared skin.
It floods her body with adrenaline and a burning desire to see Kion Locke fall straight onto his arse (although, admittedly, that’s probably not completely the glyph’s doing).
Violence thrums through her like a song.
Kion’s features slowly sharpen in wariness as somewhere in the woods, a group of gruagachs giggle.
A few have drifted into the yard—the hob-like faeries are of the Seelie court, and the Protection glyphs don’t dispel the small beings in their traditional green and red finery, although Taissa does very much wish that the glyphs had kept Kion Locke out.
Kion’s eyes finally snap to the glyph. “What the—Are you bloody kidding me? Don’t you dare use that,” he warns, low and menacingly, but Taissa doesn’t much feel like hearing him out just now. “At least listen to why I’m here—”
Here. In her garden. In the one space that’s been safe since he ruined her life.
Is he here to take this away from her, too?
“You have five seconds to tell me what you’re doing here,” she rasps. “And if I don’t like the answer, I will use the glyph.”
“Five fucking seconds isn’t enough—”
“You have two left.”
“Merlin’s sagging balls,” hisses Kion, “you’re counting too fucking fast.”
“Aaaand that’s five.”
“For fuck’s sake, Cho.”
Taissa hates the way he’s looking at her, like she’s the one being unreasonable. “You ruined everything for me, Locke,” she chokes out. “Excuse me if I don’t want to listen to your half-arsed apology.”
Because that’s surely why he’s here. It’s the only reason Taissa can think of for his sudden, bizarre appearance. His guilty conscience (which she’s surprised he even has) is catching up to him. Well, she’s not interested in hearing it. Apologies fix nothing.
Unless his I’m sorry comes with a fat wad of cash, she’s got no time to spare for him.
But Kion snorts in disbelief, though there’s no trace of amusement on his face.
Just cold, hard anger. “You think that’s why I’m here?
To say ‘sorry’?” His eyes narrow and he continues, heedless of the rage boiling within her.
Growing and growing. “I didn’t ruin your life. You did. Single-handedly.”
“Go fuck yourself, Locke,” she hisses, beginning to tremble. “Go fuck yourself with a big, bulky broomstick. You’re the reason I have to sell Irn-Bru to foul Wintertides elves—you’re the reason I can’t even see Sansa anymore—”
“Come off it. You want to know why your life is a sad disaster, Cho? Look in the bloody mirror.”
For a moment, the silence between them is so thick that it could suffocate fifty grown men. All Taissa can hear is a high-pitched screaming in her mind, much like the angry whistle of a burning teakettle.
Right. That’s it.
Later, Taissa will reflect that she should have risen above this little moment of gaslighting like a beautiful angel. Alas, she is instead prone to fits of violence more befitting a devil.
(Sansa really would be proud of her today.)
As the enraged screaming in her head grows louder, Taissa launches herself at him with all the fury, all the crazed rage, of a wounded wildcat.
Kion shouts, reaching for his own qyl in his own holster, but Taissa tackles him before he has a chance to arm himself, hurtling over her beloved vegetables with a speed and strength made possible only through the ancient symbol burning on her arm.
For her, it happens in slow motion—her palms smacking straight into his shoulders as his eyes widen in disbelief, the way the wind generated by her attack stirs his dark, wavy hair, the way his stupidly, ridiculously high cheekbones have begun to flush with a deep, dark sort of anger underneath his five o’clock shadow in a way that would be frightening to anybody but Taissa.
She’s faced him on the field.
She’s beaten him.
And in her mind, this vegetable patch is the final, ultimate war zone. He’s crossed into her territory. Isn’t it enough that he’s trampled her heart? Does he need to trample her vegetables, too?
There’s also the part of her that’s convinced this is all some bizarre dream, that she fell asleep in the dirt while wading through those vivid fantasies of revenge. Best to live it up before she wakes, and murdering Kion Locke is entirely inaccessible to her again.
Yet any notion that this isn’t real quickly dissolves as the rest of her body collides with his, slamming into him like a wrecking ball, her forehead knocking against his so hard that she doesn’t see stars, but galaxies.
With a roar of rage, Kion is toppling backward, his arms pinwheeling in a frantic and humiliating motion that is the most beautiful thing Taissa’s ever seen. He hits the ground.
Hard.
Taissa lands on top of him, forehead banging against his again. She wheezes as his elbow digs into her stomach—wheezes directly in his face. As the cosmos fades from Taissa’s vision, Kion’s expression is one she’d love to have framed: shock mixed with great disgust, fury, and bewilderment.
Straining to maintain the upper hand, Taissa straddles his waist and rips her qyl back out of her holster. She presses the feather’s sharp metal tip onto the hint of clavicle visible underneath his tight black shirt.
“I could draw a Level Four Pain glyph onto you,” she pants.
She took the time to perfect that Level Four specifically for this reason.
And her skill with glyphs made it easy. “Or perhaps you’d prefer a simple Pixie Pox glyph?
I think the symptoms would be a most cruel and unusual punishment.
” Boking pink glitter, for one, if she uses the Level Two iteration. “Some might even say karmic.”
Oh, she’d just love to see him boke that shite.
Both glyphs are forbidden, of course, by the UKHC Department of Magical Regulation, but she’s long past caring. No magic will ever deliver to him the pain he inflicted on her.
A vein is pulsing rather pugnaciously on Kion’s sweat-dampened forehead. His cheeks are even more flushed than they were before. “Yes, you do like forbidden glyphs, don’t you, Cho? You haven’t changed at all,” he sneers up at her.
She flinches but compensates by pressing her qyl into his forehead and, with gusto, begins to draw the Pixie Pox glyph.
It has a rather complicated series of loops speckled with small diamonds—
“Oh, piss off,” growls Kion, and with a heave of strength, shoves her off him before she can truly begin.
Tumbling away from his hard body, Taissa rolls onto the grass and leaps to her feet just as Kion rises to his.
His black jeans are streaked with grass stains, she notes with immense satisfaction.
And he’s breathing hard, his chest rising and falling unevenly.
His eyes are flashing with something that looks like hatred but has somehow surpassed all that hatred can be.
Impressive.