Chapter Twenty-Three Kion #2
Yeah, he does. James—uptight, calm, collected James—goes positively fucking feral in Rules after a couple of drinks.
It’s fascinating. They’ve named his alter ego Warble, on account of the drunken ballads James so often butchers at the top of his drunken lungs.
Mariah Carey. Celine Dion. Nobody is safe, not even lacker musicians.
Warble loves to, well, warble along with dramatically singing women.
“Merlin, James. Let old Warble out of the cage, did you?”
“Possibly.” It’s hard not to realize that their conversation is more stilted than it would have been before.
It’s obvious that James is still upset that half the team took a trip to Banallan without him.
It’s hanging in the air between them. Quickly, feeling the overwhelming urge to offer something else to James, some other opportunity to be involved in their rookie investigation, Kion says: “Listen, mate, have you heard from Jacks Clarke recently?”
James frowns. “The dullahan?” He blinks, looking even more ashen than before. Kion resists the urge to demand his friend go take a nap. “The one that lit the Keat Docks on fire and also a few magistrates?”
He points a finger at him. It wavers in the air as he jogs.
“That was an accident.” Jacks had been hunting a greenteeth; the docks and the magistrate unit had been causalities.
“And anyway, I’m thinking he might know something about the Sleeping Death or the Dark Well, but he hasn’t been answering my calls.
” If anybody would know what type of black powder turns into a bloody horse when tossed into a fireplace, it’s Jacks.
But the dullahan has sent him straight to voicemail the three times he’s rung today.
The Unseelie likely saw his calls, smirked, and declined with amusement.
Jacks is bloody wily like that, as faerie as ever.
Agitating people for no good reason except that he finds it hilarious.
Wanker.
“You know that Jacks tried to assassinate the prime minister, don’t you—”
“A misunderstanding.” Kion claps his hands together loudly, cutting James off mid-protest. “Huddle up!” he shouts to his players. Cato picks his way over to him.
“You smell different,” his bird notes as Kion glances inadvertently toward Taissa as she rolls her eyes at something her geriatric stymph seems to be telling her. Unprompted, Cato continues, “Your pheromones are…interesting.”
“Shut it, Cato.”
Cato cackles evilly, sounding eerily like his father.
Kion chooses to take the high ground and ignore this.
“Right,” he barks. The reserve players, lingering on the outskirts of the huddle, look bored.
He’s not sure what they do when they aren’t summoned for practice.
He doesn’t even know their names. They’re more like volunteers at this point, anyway.
And although he’s not sure whether the curse stretches to them, as well, they’re somehow even shittier than the Stymphs.
“We’re going to play a match. The magis is watching”—he glares at Knox and óríon—“so no funny business, yeah?”
“Yeah, of course, Cap,” drawls Knox, leaning against Robin, his stymph. “I would never, ever, engage in any of the aforementioned ‘funny business.’ ”
óríon mutters something unsavory in Icelandic, stroking Valsa’s beak.
Adriel and Mahina exchange sniggering looks.
Wearily, Kion glances toward the Nexitory.
Standing behind his office’s glass window, Bill Dodds meets his gaze, Niamh standing beside him.
A muscle in Kion’s jaw twitches. Bill hasn’t said it explicitly, but Kion knows in his gut that he’s still considering dissolution, especially if Magis Elder can’t find anything.
Starting over fresh, with a new club, a new name, and new players is one surefire way to beat the curse.
The only two things holding him back right now is the fact that the NCL is on pause due to the Sleeping Death, and the potential discoveries of Magis Elder’s investigation.
Emphasis on potential.
Dodds’s plan is a bullshit one, that’s what it is.
Kion mounts Cato with some anger, jerking his gaze away from Bill’s unsatisfied gaze.
The NCL Stymphs have a history, hells, centuries of victories.
The most iconic players in the sport—Henry Tegga, Russel Abdullahi, Annaliese Haven, Gavin Lee—came from this team.
Even if they’re cursed, Bill can’t just scrap it.
They take to the air, Kion flying over toward Taissa once she’s used the High Mount to get on her stubborn old stymph. Isla, Adriel, and Mahina are drifting into the inverted-triangle Vic Formation to protect their draconian jewels and the weapons stashed in the siege tower.
“This is going to be fantastically bad,” Taissa warns him as Cronus snaps his beak at his son. “Last time, I nearly beheaded óríon and you.”
“Well, Elder needs to see it for himself. Play like you’d normally play.”
“Impossible to do with this curse,” she grumbles.
He bloody well knows it.
“Let’s do the Gemini Formation,” Taissa blurts suddenly, gaze on the sparkling jewels.
Kion’s brows raise. It’s a hard formation, even without the interference of dark magic.
It involves the two Robbers shooting into the enemy’s field by horizontally spiraling around each other.
Tricky to pull off. “What? ‘Play like you’d normally play,’ ” she echoes pointedly back at him, a daring, devil-may-care gleam suddenly shining in her eyes.
“You’re right: We might as well go full-out, see if we can do it. You ready?”
Fuck it. There’s a medic below, anyway. And in her You ready?, he hears, Are you scared? Never one to back down from a challenge, is he, when Taissa Cho is involved. “Fine,” Kion mutters, and they lean forward on their stymphs, who pause in their squawking bickering.
Air rushes around Kion as they move into Gemini, the world spinning around him as he steers Cato around and around, looping over Taissa while she loops over him.
He squeezes his legs around Cato, refusing to fall off as an enemy Knocker attempts to rush them.
But the spinning motions of Gemini mean that the Knocker pulls back, unable to judge distance, and Taissa and Kion reach the tower, abruptly breaking apart.
Exhilarated, Kion swoops through the second level of the tower, grabbing a decent dagger that he holsters at his side.
As a Knocker swoops through after him, he shoots out before darting back into the third level, and grabs a much-better sword.
It’ll hold the weaponless Knocker off—they can only use weapons stolen from the opposite side.
Spinning the hilt in his hand, Kion points it at the reserve player, who has the brains to look wary.
Meanwhile, Taissa is riding Cronus in circles around the siege tower, chased by two other Knockers. She’s getting dizzy; he can tell. Luckily, óríon and Knox have broken onto the field’s side, and the Dozers are targeting Taissa’s tormentors, intent on shoving them out of her path.
Kion keeps his sword pointed at his Knocker as he rises higher, the draconian jewels glittering tauntingly under the sunlight.
The sharp blade is a piercing point that he uses as leverage to make it to the tower’s top.
óríon and Knox have succeeded in plowing the Knockers away, but the trouble is keeping them there.
“Cho!” calls Kion, and tosses her the dagger.
She snatches out of the air deftly and nods at him before her fingers close around one of the jewels.
She begins to race back, her plait flying behind her.
Biting back a smile, Kion hefts the second draconian jewel into his hand, the opal-like material shimmering and refracting underneath small rays of sun peeking out of the clouds.
Maybe he was right. Maybe you can beat a curse by playing hard enough—
Ah, fuck.
Various things happen at once for the looming disaster to take place.
One. The two Knockers that óríon and Knox have been herding suddenly drop meters in the air. óríon and Knox crash, sidelong, heavily into each other. Somehow, they’re knocked from their saddles, despite their Balance glyphs. Robin and Valsa shriek in alarm.
Two. Taissa, speeding toward their side of the field, loses her grip on the jewel.
It falls through the air. Taissa dives after it, only for the two loose Knockers to hurtle after her on their stymphalians.
Taissa, evidently trying to do an evasive maneuver—like her once-favored aileron roll—instead only succeeds in somehow pulling upward and knocking her head on the massive underbelly of one of the stymphs chasing her.
When her head snaps back, he sees that there are five razor-sharp feathers sticking out of her skull.
Three. Isla and Bronte are in the throes of an argument on the other side of the field.
Bronte isn’t even supposed to be on defense; she’s offense, a Dozer.
Tears glimmering in Isla’s gaze, she turns Jemmy from Bronte, just as Taissa—screeching in pain, her head looking like a porcupine—slams into both of them, sending Bronte rocking back toward the siege tower.
Four. Bronte crashes into the siege tower, impossibly hitting what must be a very specific fucking weak point in its build, because the whole thing teeters.
Kion barely has time to shout a warning before the giant wooden structure is falling down, not backward, but forward, onto Bronte, Isla, and Adriel.
Five. James is rushing toward the still-falling Knox and óríon. He collides with their stymphs and rockets backward, looking dazed.