Chapter Eighteen Kion
Chapter Eighteen
Kion
Kion Locke has chased after a lot of things in his life. Fame. Glory. Chasca’s escaped, rabid Chihuahua across a royal flower garden.
Chasing Taissa Cho as she rushes out onto the busy Foxchester street—with her clad in nothing but pink lace—is a first.
“CHO!” he shouts, grabbing her hand and yanking her back from an approaching double-decker bus.
In his other hand, he holds his shirt, their qyls and their holsters, her phone, purse, and ridiculous bunny slippers.
Breathing hard—she nearly just fucking died, there—he wrestles her into his own black tee, which hangs like a dress on her.
He hadn’t been able to find her own clothes in the chaos of the set, with the Wily Witch staff yelling at him in confused rage.
It covers her arse, thank Merlin. He doesn’t like the idea of anyone but him gawking at her.
Wait. What?
He didn’t mean that.
Kion grimaces. A group of passing pixies are snapping photos on their tiny phones as they flit by.
He bares his teeth at them and they hurry off.
“What’s going on?” he demands, trying not to show how panicked he is. Did he hurt her? Probably. Kion Locke hurts, ruins, destroys, every little thing he touches.
He tries to ignore how he can still taste her on his lips. The hickey forming on her neck. The way he called her “sweetheart,” and meant it, this time, with every single ounce of his being.
Kion had gotten caught up in the moment. That’s all.
That’s all it fucking is.
Now, the eyes that she turns onto him are wide with tears. “I felt her,” she croaks as he presses her qyl into her hands. Her fingers shake as she straps the holster around her thigh.
“Felt who?” To say he’s bewildered would be a massive fucking understatement.
“Sansa.” She sniffles, and fuck it, part of him must still be caught up in their playacting because he wants to fold her into his arms. “My…my old wyvern. Kion, she’s sick. Like the others. I have to go to her.”
Kion bites down on the urge to tell her that it’s impossible.
She’s speaking like she still has the Bonding glyph, but everybody who even remotely follows carriwitchet knows that it was seared off her.
His throat feels, momentarily, like it’s closing and he tries to keep his mind off how much pain she must have gone through.
“Cho, listen—”
“Cabbie!” she cries, sticking her hand into the street and frantically waving it as a cab approaches.
Is she about to go all the way back to Banallan?
“Cho,” he tries again, but then Niamh is bursting from the Wily Witch HQ as the cab pulls up onto the curb.
“WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING?” their publicist cries, stomping over on her massive pink heels. The flowers in her hair quiver furiously. “YOU NEED TO GET BACK INSIDE RIGHT NOW—”
Unfortunately for her, Taissa is already ducking into the cab, and Niamh is far too late to stop her. Kion stares helplessly at Taissa as she disappears from sight, but then her head pops back out impatiently. Maybe even desperately. “Aren’t you coming, Locke?”
Fuck it. Of course he is.
As Niamh pins him with a furious glare, Kion jumps into the cab with Taissa, slamming the door behind him.
Twenty minutes later, Taissa is a mess of frenetic energy as they board the train headed to Banallan.
She practically barrels past the other passengers into a compartment, and as Kion closes the door behind him, scrolls furiously on her phone.
“I took a photo of Vance’s card,” she explains in a breathless mutter.
“The agent from the DMC. I should ring her…”
Kion, wearing a shirt he purchased from the train station reading I Heart Foxchester, tries to choose his words carefully. “If Sansa called out to you—and I’m not saying she didn’t, don’t look at me like that—if she called out to you, how would she have done that without the Bonding glyph?”
“The wanker who burned it off me missed a spot,” Taissa replies, still swiping through her phone. “It’s under the new glyph you put on me. Didn’t you see it?”
He’d glimpsed her burn that night—it had twisted something deep inside of his stomach to see it—but he hadn’t seen a remnant of her old Bonding glyph. But then again, he’d been—distracted. Her skin had been so warm. He’d felt the beating of her heart underneath his hands. He’d felt—unsteady.
“Missed…a spot?” he repeats slowly, blinking.
“That’s what I said.”
That still doesn’t make sense. Usually, Bonding glyphs only allow communication between Wingeds and riders within a certain distance. With Cato, Kion can only speak with him if they’re nearby, the same amount of closeness required for any sort of conversation.
For Sansa to have successfully reached out to Taissa from leagues away? Without a full Bonding glyph?
If that’s possible…
Well, that means their bond must have been closer, more powerful, than Kion ever knew.
He doesn’t like the emotion swarming in his stomach like a horde of angry wasps. Guilt. He’s been feeling so much of it lately. Kion opens his mouth to ask another question, but Taissa’s punching a number into her phone and giving him a please be quiet look.
So much for how he was just fucking nuzzling her neck.
His own phone has been ringing nonstop with about twelve calls from Niamh. He’s shut it off completely. Now, Kion stares fixedly out the window as the train rises into the air, and as Taissa inhales sharply.
“Is this Felicity Vance? From the Department of Magical Creatures?”
A muted reply in the affirmative.
“This is Taissa Cho…”
As she launches into a breathless explanation, Kion drags a hand down his face.
What the fuck are they doing? Although a part of him is maybe, possibly, relieved that it wasn’t their kiss that sent Taissa running out of WW like a dullahan was on her heels, a larger part of him is disoriented by how quickly his day changed.
One moment, he was doing a boudoir shoot with Cho, and the next he’s crammed in a train headed for Scotland.
Without meaning to, he touches his lips. He can still feel her there, molded against him, her touch killing him slowly. She’d…kissed him. Had the lead photographer told her to? Kion must have missed it.
It’s not like Cho would ever kiss him of her own free will.
And it’s not like he enjoyed it.
It’s not like her skin, hot against his, and her mouth, sweet like honey, had filled that gaping hunger inside him that’s existed since he was a boy: a hunger to be touched, gently, not in violence. It’s not like he drank it in like a man dying of thirst.
Merlin’s arse, he’s become such a fucking liar.
Taissa ends the call, looking even more distressed than before. For some inane reason, he wants to take his thumb and smooth out the worried crease between her brows. He’s gotten all disoriented. It’s awful. “What did Vance say?” he rasps.
“She confirmed that the wyverns are sick, too,” rasps Taissa, looking small and lost. “But not just them: the hippogriffs in Pluenn, the rarins in Glascolm, and the pegases in Cilbrith. The DMC has been getting calls all day.” He feels utterly helpless as a small tear leaks out of the corner of her eye.
He watches as she furiously scrubs it away.
“Vance is visiting all the sites, and they’re all ill, Locke. No glyphs will wake them up.”
He swears under his breath. “So whatever this illness is—it’s contagious.” Kion turns his phone back on, intent on warning the others to keep an eye on their stymphs.
“I didn’t know.” Taissa is hugging her knees to her chest, and in any other circumstance, he’s pretty fucking sure he’d be staring at her bare legs like some kind of Victorian man with an ankle fetish.
She’d angrily shucked off her giant pink trainers in the station, hissing that they hurt her feet—along with something about bricks—and now she’s back in those ridiculous slippers.
“I didn’t know Sansa was still with me. I would have…
” Her bottom lip trembles. “I would have told her so many things.”
As he types out a quick text to the group, he glances back up at her.
She’s staring at the clouds through the window, her gaze unnaturally bright.
Pocketing his phone after sending off the text, Kion hesitates.
He wants to say that Sansa will be okay, because clearly that’s what Taissa needs to hear right now, but he’s not a liar—not out loud, at least. He doesn’t know if her little wyvern will survive.
Taking in the tormented planes of Taissa’s face, Kion can tell that she loves her old wyvern with every inch of her heart.
A part of him that catalogues everything he knows about Taissa quietly notes that when Taissa loves, she loves strongly.
Not every player would rush out of a lucrative boudoir shoot in nothing but lingerie because their old Winged was ill.
Not every player would hop on the soonest train to…
To do what?
“Oi,” Kion says, and even he can tell that his voice is gentler than usual. “What’s the plan?” Originally, he’d thought she wanted to confirm what she’d seen, but with Vance’s call, they don’t need to travel all the way to Banallan to do that.
“I need to see her. Sansa.” Taissa’s throat works, and Kion realizes that she thinks that today’s the day she’ll need to say…goodbye.
Kion tries not to narrow his eyes. “I heard,” he says slowly, “that you were banned from the Banallan Nexitory. By a ten-mile radius.”
“Yeah.” Hells, she doesn’t even try to deny it. She meets his gaze evenly. “That’s why we’re sneaking in.”
Merlin’s balls.
Kion knows he should, as her coach and captain—even just as her teammate, or her fake boyfriend, or just as someone who cares even a jot about her well-being—be trying to talk her out of this.
But there’s no dissuading Taissa once she’s set her mind on something.
Kion can understand that. He’s the same.
James is constantly trying to have him think with his fucked-up head, not his angry heart, but his efforts don’t get either of them anywhere.
She’s clearly waiting for him to argue with her. Instead, Kion gives her a long, hard look. “If you get caught, I’m not bailing you out of jail.” His neck itches.
“Fair enough.”
“And if we’re sneaking in somewhere,” Kion adds, turning back to his phone, “there’s probably someone else who should come along, too.”
“What the fuck is this?” demands Kion as he and Taissa rise from the hard station bench where they’ve been waiting for the last thirty minutes, and stare at the three NCL Stymphs walking toward them.
Bronte, Knox, and óríon. Out of the trio, Magnússon was the only one Kion demanded get on the train to Banallan.
He’s pretty fucking certain that óríon has done some breaking and entering in his old life in Vesturbaer.
The Icelandic warlock is basically, in Kion’s humble opinion, a walking almanac of how to do bad shit and get away with it.
Why else would the Icelandic government be chasing him? They hardly go after anybody.
But Bronte?
Knox?
Bronte Rihowl is more likely to lose interest in the said breaking and entering before they’re even halfway done. And Knox Tanaka, the cheerful and loudmouthed wanker, is not the type to recruit for a stealth mission.
As óríon shakes his head in annoyance, Bronte spreads her hands apologetically. “I wanted out of the Nexitory. Some space,” she adds, and Kion takes this to mean a break from Isla’s heartbroken eyes. He fights a grimace as Bronte winks at Taissa, and then him. “Nice outfits.”
The i heart Foxchester shirt is itching his skin. Part of him wants to demand that Taissa give him back his own shirt, but he doesn’t hate that she’s wearing it as much as he probably should. Kion compensates for this disgusting thought by sending Bronte a dark look. The woman just snickers.
“I, personally, only tagged along to annoy Magnússon,” says Knox, and it looks like it’s working. óríon is clearly ready to punch the younger player into orbit.
Meanwhile, Taissa has edged closer to Kion. When he glances sideways at her, he sees something he rarely ever sees on her: uncertainty. She suddenly looks so small in his too-large shirt, making his heart twist funnily in his chest.
If he had to guess, she’s probably remembering James’s accusation and how everybody in the room had stared at her in suspicion.
He knows she hasn’t exactly made friends with the others.
Nothing happens in the team that he’s not aware of, not as coach and captain: Kion knows that Knox has invited her out to drinks multiple times, as has Bronte.
She’s turned them down repeatedly. Apparently, Cho has some trust issues from all the shit that went down between her and her old teammates.
Again, that strange feeling swarms in his stomach. Guilt.
Fucking hells. He’s turning soft. A few fake snogs and he’s a wuss.
“Oi,” he says gruffly, giving her a nudge. “Let’s get on with it, yeah? Maybe find you some real clothes?” He can’t have her walking around in only his T-shirt any longer. It’s doing things to him. Things that he doesn’t want to look too closely at.
“Right, yeah.” Taissa swallows, evidently not seeing how Knox is grinning at her, or how Bronte still looks faintly approving of her ragtag outfit. Even the fact that óríon’s here means something. He gets the sense that Magnússon has begun to like Taissa more than he lets on.
Maybe he’s not the only one.
Irrelevant.
Cho would have three fiercely loyal friends, if only she could get out of her own damn head. But Kion’s one to talk. He’s stuck in his head every single day. That place is a prison.
“We’ll stop by my house. And then…” Taissa trails off, looking abruptly tired now that her impulsive scheme has become a reality.
“And then we do strategy, já?” asks óríon.
“Já,” agrees Taissa, and her eyes are as hard as he’s ever seen them.