Chapter Sixteen Kion #2
“KION LOCKE AND TAISSA CHO!” Feedback shrieks through the air, and the stymphs begin cawing in distress, flapping their wings as if to escape the terrible noise.
Cronus in particular starts squawking his head off, but Kion thinks it’s more to contribute to the chaos than anything else. “THE MEDIA ROOM. NOW.”
“Cursed?” wails Knox, draped mournfully and dramatically over a row of seats in the Nexitory’s media room, where reporters usually gather after a home game to grill Kion on why the fuck his team played so badly.
At the conference table before the chairs, Bill Dodds sits with his arms crossed, his shadow dark on the purple-and-silver wall behind him.
“Cursed?” Knox laments again. “Prithee, I beg you, say it’s not so!”
Right now, Kion’s more concerned about Knox Tanaka than about the curse.
Who the fuck says prithee?
“Nobody gets actually cursed anymore,” Adriel argues from where he’s sitting next to a bewildered Mahina.
“Cursing is, like, from Ye Olden Days. It’s basically the same as saying we still try to treat hay fever with cocaine, or wee into a chamber pot and then toss it all out the window onto people’s heads. ”
What a great description. Kion feels slightly nauseous.
“Besides…” Isla’s soft eyes are wide and frightened. “Cursing takes dark magic, right? And the Well hardly has any left.”
“Nei,” óríon jumps in, his voice cold and hard.
“You can scrape from the Well. It is hard, and there are consequences, but it is not impossible.” His hand drifts to the pocket of his leather duster, where Kion suspects he stores the worn Polaroid of the mysterious girl he left behind.
“But it takes trickiness to do so. You need to be…”
“Cunning,” supplies James. He sounds tired, stressed.
Although it’s probably just a trick of the light, on the back of his head some strands of his curly hair seem to be silvered.
He’s not the only one: Mahina’s brown eyes, usually bright and expressive, were dull with shadows underneath when she twisted around earlier to greet him. “One must be cunning.”
“Are the magistrates looking into this bullshit?” demands Bronte. “We have a match coming up—”
Kion grimaces as his team falls into panicked, outraged chaos.
Sitting next to Taissa in the back row, Kion meets her eye.
She shakes her head minutely as Bill slaps a hand against the table.
“QUIET!” the club’s owner roars. He looks about half ready to start tearing out his white hair. Chastised, the NCL Stymphs settle down.
Except Tanaka, who’s still lamenting like a bad Shakespearean actor.
In the seat behind Knox, óríon kicks the legs of his chair. Knox startles, and Kion inwardly groans as the lad jerks around to give óríon a universally rude gesture.
“OI!” Kion snaps, unable to take it anymore. He points to Bill as Knox pales slightly. “Listen the fuck up, yeah?”
Although he can’t see óríon’s face, he seems to be smirking.
Dodds clears his throat. “Thank you, Kion,” he says as Knox reluctantly turns back around, murder sparking in his gaze.
“Now, if the board allows it, I’m going to request for the match against the Cilbrith Pegases to be postponed until further notice.
To answer your question, Rihowl, yes: A DMR agent is being assigned to the case.
Magis Rowan Elder. He’s flying in from Dunanaird. I hear he’s quite good.”
“Fucking great,” mutters Taissa. Bill skewers her with a look.
“Something you wanted to say, my dear?”
“Yeah, actually.” Kion winces as Taissa hops to her feet. The team twists, looking at her curiously. “If any of you can think of anyone in particular who might have wanted to curse this team, you should let Magis Elder know immediately—”
“Well, obviously,” James says frostily, arching both brows. “Although come to think of it, this curse started around the time you were kicked off your old team, did it not?”
“Well, yes—” Taissa looks alarmed while James’s otherwise cool expression has a ripple of…something underneath it. He’s stressed, Kion realizes, and that potent mixture of anger and hurt swirls in his own chest as he sees the lines bracketing James’s face.
If James would just talk to him…
Look. Kion freely admits that he fucked up. But it’s his only fuckup in years of friendship. Is James seriously going to torture him forever over one mistake?
Apparently so. And he’ll torture Cho, too.
“Well, then—who’s to say that it wasn’t you, Taissa?”
Oh, for Merlin’s sake. Kion silently mutters a curse as the media room falls very silent.
“The timeline matches up,” continues James, oblivious to the way Kion is glowering at him in warning. “And you have quite a convincing motive. On top of that, you also have a history of dark magic…”
“Luck glyphs aren’t dark magic,” Taissa fires back, as quick as a striking snake. “They’re gray magic, middle magic, like everything else we use. You know that. Unless you’re not as smart as you take pains to look.”
James spreads his hands, as if they stand in a courtroom and he’s letting the jury decide.
He certainly looks the part of a lawyer today, having changed out of his leathers into a high-collared shirt and pressed slacks.
His Rolex glints on his wrist. “Or they’re a gateway drug into worse things. Perhaps curses.”
“James,” Kion mutters, half a warning, half a plea.
His friend doesn’t even turn to look at him. How long will it be like this?
Helpless. That’s how Kion feels as Taissa’s throat works, caught under the stares of the Stymphs.
He can see her floundering, but not for one fucking moment does he think that she did this.
Not when she was the one who dragged them to a síceach in the first place.
Not when she was the only member of the team helping collect the bodies from the wreck in Dunanaird.
But nobody else seems to be remembering that. They’re all staring at her with obvious suspicion, even kindhearted Isla. Kion opens his mouth to defend her, but she beats him to it.
“If that were the case, why would I join this team? Why wouldn’t I reverse the curse? If any of you are so stupid as to believe that I’d waste this much time on a ruse like that, you don’t know me at all. I’m here to play. To win. So”—she smiles unpleasantly at James—“fuck off.”
The others, at least, have enough grace to look embarrassed. Each one of her words rings with conviction. And they all know that she’s Taissa fucking Cho. That girl lives and breathes for winning.
James’s stare is hard. For a moment, it darts to Kion, and he sees something flicker in the cool green depths. Jealousy? He’s never been good at reading emotions. He doesn’t know. “Well,” says James brusquely, “we’ll let the magis decide.”
Fuck. Kion can’t take how Cho flinches, like she’s been struck. He’s had enough of this fucking shit show. He shoves back his chair, points to James. “James,” he snaps, every semblance of his prior plea gone from his voice. “Outside. Now.”
His friend’s face turns, for a second, almost ashen—but then James is languidly coming to his feet and giving him an unimpressed look. He adjusts that ridiculous watch before idly following Kion out into the corridor. The door of the media room slams shut with a bang as Kion releases it.
Folding his arms across his chest, he gives James a good, hard look as the other man leans against the wall, underneath a framed photograph of Yggdrasil. “You know damn well that Taissa Cho didn’t curse this team. The way you’re acting, mate, it’s not like you.”
The James he knows would be hurt, yeah, that Kion lied to him—but the James he knows also would want to talk it through. Merlin. James and his love for “talking things through.” In another life, he would have been a therapist. Kion’s certain of it.
Although he appears coldly placid, James’s left eye is twitching like a dying rat and he’s glaring at his finger’s invisible Untold glyph with great withering disdain. “I simply find it important that we cover all of our bases.”
“You’re being a prat and you know it. You’re shitting on my player at every chance you get.”