Chapter Twenty-Nine Kion
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kion
The pounding music of the Shrieking Pumpkin isn’t helping Kion’s splitting headache as he pushes his way out of Banes’s office, breathing hard.
The club is a blur around him, smears of color and light and moving bodies.
Every breath he takes feels too shallow.
He turns, disoriented, enveloped by the chaos around him—
Until a hand, gentle and small, closes firmly around his elbow.
“You need to sit down. Right now,” Taissa says in his ear, all rolling r’s and soft burrs.
Kion blinks, hazily, and before he has the chance to pretend like he’s perfectly fine, Taissa is pushing him gently into a loveseat and sliding in across from him.
“Don’t faint, numpty. I’m not sure I can lug your giant body out of here. ”
His lips twitch. Just a bit.
“The way I see it,” Taissa shouts over the music, “this is a good thing. We figure out how to reverse a púca’s curse, and we kill two birds with one stone.”
Maybe she has a point. But, fuck. He should have come here two years ago. What kind of captain is he? He should have…
“Oi!” That’s geancánach Knox, dancing up to them, glamoured violet eyes bemused. “Where have the two of you been? Where did your glamours go?”
“We spoke to Banes,” Taissa replies, casting one more concerned look in his direction. “It’s time to leave.”
The lad is doing some absurd dance, shimmying like there are pixies in his pants. “Can’t we stay? Just for a bit, Cap? I’ve never been in an Unseelie club before!”
“No,” Kion snaps, standing. He’s done with this: the lights, the music, and everybody else’s happiness. “It’s back to the Nexitory for us, Tanaka—”
“What?” Knox, damn him, is slowly dancing away. “I can’t hear you!”
“Tanaka!” he growls, but the boy’s gone, joining the group of troll females and stealing the birthday girl’s tiara as the others howl in laughter.
Fucking hells. Kion glances around for the other Stymphs.
In the bedlam, it’s hard to focus, let alone pick out his disguised teammates.
Fine. He’ll hunt them down and drag them out of here himself if he needs to…
“Wait,” Taissa shouts, tugging him back. She points at somebody…a vampire-glamoured Isla, dancing with…
Not Bronte.
Huh. Interesting.
Kion’s brows raise. Isla is smiling underneath the lights as she dances with a beautiful leannán sídhe, an Unseelie fae with vampiric tendencies. Her head is thrown back, and she’s laughing in delight as the leannán sídhe slinks her hands around Isla’s narrow waist.
The sight takes him aback so much that he nearly misses Bronte, staring at Isla from a shadowed corner, eyes wide in disbelief.
Had she not believed that Isla would find someone else?
Besides, isn’t that what Bronte had wanted?
Kion shakes his head in exasperation, eyes sliding back toward his red-haired teammate.
Merlin’s mustache, how long has it been since he’s seen Isla like this?
Sparkling again, with none of the hurt disappointment of Bronte’s rejection clinging to her?
He blinks hard. It’s good to see Adaway dancing, grinning, back to her old cheerful self.
When the leannán sídhe draws Isla in for a kiss, Kion glances away, catching sight of banshee’d Adriel and Mahina.
Not far away, the two best mates are dancing some synchronized routine that has to have been pre-planned, much to the awe and cheers of the surrounding clubbers.
Mahina’s eyes are bright underneath the lights, and Adriel is staring at her like she’s the fucking sun and he’s an unfurling flower.
Kion grins.
Right, yeah. These morons have moved him to similes.
So maybe his teammates can stay a bit longer, Kion thinks as he watches the two idiots start flapping their elbows like chickens and also twirling around like drunken ballerinas.
It’s not like Rules in here, though. Already he and Taissa, unglamoured, are drawing infuriated looks from the Unseelie, catching sight of a warlock and a witch in their midst. He’s about to suggest to Taissa that they find a quiet spot to redraw their glyphs when he catches sight of James, sidling through the crowd, his eyes darting nervously back and forth.
Kion frowns. Even underneath the half-shifted werewolf glamour, James looks poorly: tired and pallid, with dark smudges under his eyes. Kion watches, brows lowered, as James slips toward Orla Banes’s door…and is allowed entry by the two scowling guards.
It’s like Kion’s been plunged underwater. The music of the club grows muted. Shit, shit, shit.
James can’t seriously think he can take on Banes by himself, can he?
Damn it, he’d told him to join up with óríon—Kion curses himself. He should have texted the group chat by now, letting them know that Orla Banes has been sorted with, that nobody else needs to track her down…
The world surrounds him again in a rush of sound as the door opens back up and James sidles back out, a hand in his pocket. Fucking hells, that had scared him. Banes must have turned him away, having already spoken to him and Taissa.
He watches as James stalks to the bar and snaps something to the bartender.
As his friend downs one, two, three, four, five shots of something light blue and shimmery that looks a hells of a lot like Vizzleworth’s Voddy, Kion grimaces, nodding his head toward his rapidly inebriated friend.
Vizzleworth’s is at least twice as potent as the average vodka, thrice as fast-acting, and James is a bloody lightweight at best.
“Oh, dear,” says Taissa over the thumping beat of a 50 Centaurs’ song, eyebrows raising. “Has he climbed onto the bar?”
With dread, Kion realizes he has. James is swaying as the bartender shouts for him to get down, now, his hands lifting into the air as if he’s about to deliver some divine message.
Merlin’s tits. Not now—
“That’s not James,” says a voice from behind them. She nearly jumps out of her skin as she sees the lumpy troll standing over them. But it’s just a glamoured óríon, watching the scene over at the bar with dread. “That is Warble.”
“Warble?” repeats Taissa with clear confusion.
“Warble,” óríon confirms.
“Warble,” Kion groans, and pushes his way through the pulsating crowd toward his very drunk, suddenly very theatrical best mate, who has begun to swivel his hips to the music.
The bartender looks disturbed as werewolf-glamoured James, drawing in a small crowd of cheering Unseelie, begins to belt a fucking off-key Celine Dion song that does not even have anything remotely to do with the club’s blaring beat.
Shouldering a giggling pair of single-eyed fachan aside, Kion tries to capture James’s—Warble’s—attention.
It’s no bloody use. He’s lost to the throes of Vizzleworth’s.
What follows is a performance the likes of which Pinion-upon-Keat has never before witnessed.
“I didn’t know anybody could gyrate so fast,” Taissa notes, sounding reluctantly impressed, at one point.
At another: “Does he know his fly is unzipped?” And, a moment before the bartender—having had enough—howls for security: “I wish he could always be this drunk. He’s much better this way, you know. ”
Kion grunts as he catches his best mate moments before he hits the ground, having been pushed by the seething bartender.
“Merlin, James,” he mutters, dragging him toward a loveseat booth and dumping him onto the upholstered vinyl.
óríon follows with a glass of water, shoving it into his teammate’s face.
“Drink,” says the Icelander. “Now.”
Taking the glass, James smiles angelically up at the three of them. “Oh, hello,” he says, eyes bleary. “Have you come for an encore?”
“I’d like an encore,” says Taissa, smirking.
“Not for you.” One wavering finger points at her. “You do not deserve my serenades, Tissa. Tassa. T…T…Twat.”
She swats his finger away.
Kion sighs, rubbing his forehead as James—with a look of utmost concentration—raises his glass to his lips and attempts to sip some of the water.
To nobody’s surprise, it spills all over his shirt instead.
Warble has horrible fucking aim. “Bollocks,” says James, staring confusedly down at his soaked shirt before attempting to stand and sliding sideways into óríon. “Must go,” slurs James. “Must make Orla help me. She was very rude.”
“No bloody use,” grunts Kion, watching as óríon holds on to the back of James’s shirt while the latter attempts to again make his way toward the office.
What results is James walking determinedly in place while óríon raises his eyes to the heavens and mutters something in his native tongue. “She’s no help, mate.”
James suddenly blinks fuzzily at him, a delirious smile spreading over his face.
“Kion? What are you doing here?” óríon allows him to stagger over, and Kion blinks as he’s enveloped in a massive hug.
“I’ve missed you,” mumbles James into his shoulder.
Possibly he’s drooling on him, but something warms Kion’s shriveled heart as James pats his back, where those bloody scars hide.
“You’re too busy doing pornography for little—hic—old me… ”
“Bloody hells,” mutters Kion, even as he awkwardly returns the embrace, “for the last time, it wasn’t porn—”
James is beginning the apparently complex process of disentangling himself from Kion. “If it looks like a bogle, smells like a bogle, and waddles like a bogle…it’s either a bogle or—hic—someone who shapeshifted into a bogle.” He nods sagely before his eyes go to something behind Kion.
“Oi.” A weathered hand lands on Kion’s back: He stiffens and twists to see that the bouncer from earlier has his grip on Taissa, too. “You lot. No Seelie allowed. That’s the rule.”