Chapter Twelve Kion #3
Taissa blinks, looking surprised. “You—you’d let me use a Truth glyph?”
Kion’s brows inch together. Why does she sound so shocked? Truth glyphs can be used in the presence of a magis. Hadn’t she used one during the whole investigation after her scandal?
Magis Elder also looks somewhat confused. “Yes, madame, I would. Would you please…”
Taissa nods, rolling up a sleeve to expose her left wrist and uses her qyl to draw the required Level Two Truth. Kion notices that her drawing is uncertain. Hasn’t she used this glyph before? “Okay,” she tells the magis. “Ask me again.”
As Elder repeats his question, Taissa shakes her head. “No. I haven’t.”
“Thank you,” the magis says, writing something down.
“Did you ask the others this?”
Something in Kion’s stomach twists as Elder says no. “Only you, I am afraid.”
Taissa’s eyes flicker with hurt, but then brighten. “Wait. Wait, since I have Truth on, I want to—”
“Right.” Elder puffs away on his pipe again. “That’s all, then. Miss Cho, if you would kindly nullify your glyph?”
For a moment, she hesitates. A funny expression crosses her face, like there’s something more she wants to say, before there’s a weird flicker in her eyes.
A flicker that almost looks like fear. Kion doesn’t know what to make of it as Cho nullifies the glyph with a trembling hand.
His own hands spasm with the inane urge to reach for her.
“Thank you. That’ll be all.” Elder abruptly closes his notebook and Kion’s confusing concern for Taissa quickly turns into frustration.
“Wait. Hold on a minute. She did this for you, now you do this for us, yeah? Tell us what the fuck is going on.”
Magis Elder’s smile is bland. “I’m afraid that’s magistrate business.”
“Magistrate business?” repeats Taissa, her expression abruptly growing furious rather than hurt. “Magistrate business?” Kion suppresses a groan as she jabs a finger into Elder’s face and stomps forward, her face flushed. “Listen here, you posh little detective brat—”
Balls. Taissa Cho has balls bigger than the bloody sun.
Kion futilely tries not to feel impressed as he grabs her hand, yanking it away from Elder’s face. Fucking hells. He’ll carry her away on his shoulder if he needs to. She’s on the verge of being carted off to prison, and he’s not amused. He’s gone through all this trouble to recruit her.
Merlin. She hasn’t stopped.
“I don’t care who you work for, or how big your pipe is. All I care about is why nine Wingeds died today. Is it a disease? Some sort of curse? You suspect foul play, don’t you? That’s why you questioned me. Morgana, do you have me on some sort of watch list?”
“They’re not dead.”
This doesn’t come from Elder, but from a petite woman with tomboy-ish black hair who’s come up beside them.
A DMC agent, by the looks of her uniform: sleek and black, with a silver dragon embroidered on the chest. Underneath her sleeves, there are hints of swirling tattoos on her golden-beige skin.
Not glyphs, but delicate, decorative patterns.
She carries a briefcase. Kion saw another DMC agent open theirs: inside were heaps of medical supplies.
This seems to take the magis aback. “What did you just say?”
Kion and Taissa’s eyes meet. How are they not dead? she mouths.
Fuck me if I know.
Don’t tempt me.
What? he mouths back.
She reddens. I didn’t mean it like that.
He shakes his head to clear it. The DMC agent is giving Magis Elder a completely unimpressed look. “I said, they’re not dead. They’re—”
Elder jumps back in. “We ask that you share any important information with the magistrate before providing it to the general public.”
“—comatose,” the woman finishes in her American accent, pointedly ignoring Elder. Kion decides she’s all right. “The impact broke some bones, yes, but the creatures are alive. They are not, however, well. We’re unsure what caused this, but it looks like some kind of—”
“Curse?” breathes Taissa.
“Sickness,” corrects the agent.
“Is it contagious?” Kion asks, glancing over his shoulder toward Cato, who looks fascinated by a reporter’s camera as he takes photos of him. Cato, the vain thing, is preening and posing, momentarily distracted from his confusion and grief. Kion fights back a small smile.
“Stop laughing at me.”
“It’s too early to tell, but we’ve ordered the evacuation of all stymphalians from the scene.
I’d get on that, if I were you. We’ll be giving them mandatory checkups later this evening.
” She digs around in her pocket and passes the two of them a card each.
It reads, Felicity Vance, Department of Magical Creatures.
“In the meantime, congrats on the win,” she adds, with a bit of dark irony.
The…
What?
The win? Kion’s stomach lurches. Judging by the greenish tinge to Taissa’s skin, she’s feeling the same. With all the horror of the last few hours, winning has been the furthest thing from his mind, even though this morning, it was the most important thing in his world.
And now they’ve “won,” but only because the cockatrices somehow became comatose.
This is no victory.
Magis Elder clears his throat. “May I, ah, also have a card, madame?”
Felicity Vance skewers him with a glare. “Oh? Why, Rowan? Have you suddenly lost my number? Is it nowhere to be seen? Come to think of it, that might just explain the months of ghosting.”
Kion watches in disbelief as the geancánach winces. “Ah. Well. You know modern technology confuses me…”
“Oh, fine.” Not sounding convinced, Felicity digs back around in her pocket and gives the magis a slightly more crumpled one before nodding to Kion and Taissa and returning to the other DMC agents.
“Cho,” Kion says before the magis can ask her any more inane questions, “let’s go.
” They have to get their stymphs out of here.
And the scent of blood is threatening to seep into his nose.
A flashback is only minutes away at this point.
Not waiting to see if she follows, he turns on his heel and strides away.
“I just don’t understand,” Taissa says, catching up to him. “We shouldn’t have won.”
“The rulebook of carriwitchet can be ridiculous,” he grits out, walking faster, away from the stench. “Remember, Cho, this whole game is based on war. If your enemy goes belly-up on a battlefield, well, you win. Technically.”
“Something isn’t right about this—”
“No shit.” Yeah, maybe he could have said that more nicely. But they’re surrounded by dead bodies. It’s hard for him to be nice to anybody on an average day, and this isn’t even an average day.
Taissa makes an annoyed sound in the back of her throat, almost like a growl. “If it’s an illness, how did the cockatrices get it? I didn’t see them looking poorly throughout the entire match until they started, well, falling. They looked fine. I mean, they were beating us, weren’t they?”
“I don’t know.” Kion runs a hand down his face. “Damn it, Cho, I honestly don’t know.”
“That magis clearly suspected that somebody—well, he thought I cursed them.”
“That was a ‘formality.’ You heard Vance. It’s just some weird illness.” Right?
Wingeds get ill, he tells himself.
Logic argues back. Usually they just come down with featherpox and colds and maybe sometimes a nasty worm. None of those do what he just saw.
None of them make Wingeds fall from the sky like rocks. Or lull them into comas.
“Locke, wait.” Taissa stops mid-stride and catches his arm, forcing him to stop. Her eyes are wide and frightened. He hates it. “We both know we’ve never seen an ‘illness’ like this. There’s got to be more going on. My point is that the magis obviously thought so, too.”
Kion’s neck itches. He’s not far away enough from all the blood. With difficulty, he grinds out, “Cho. I agree, okay? But it’s not our job to play detective right now. It’s our job to get our Wingeds the fuck out of here. Yeah?”
“Locke, for once in your life, just listen—”
Before she can force out any more protests, a journalist shoves a large camera in their faces and snaps a photograph. “Thank Oberon! The holy couple of carriwitchet has survived!” the faerie crows, and that’s the final straw.
It’s a reflex. Honest.
He can’t help it.
Kion punches the ridiculous camera right in the lens and watches as it shatters.