Fae, Flames & Fedoras Read online

  Talus left the car then opened the trunk and passed out the Thompson sub-machine guns that the Keeper had given them, along with the drums of ammo. The guns were in webbed carrying harnesses designed to hold the spare ammunition drums.

  A bitter wind coming in off of the Atlantic made Talus grateful for the trench coat he was wearing, but he had to admit that the heavy coats did nothing to conceal the heavy guns on any of the six Fae Nobles. Abraham looked askance at the lot of them.

  “How are you planning to get through the streets like that, let alone the worksite?” the man asked.

  Talus grinned at the man and wordlessly wrapped a glamour of invisibility around himself, disappearing from even supernatural eyes that weren’t looking in the right way. Abraham looked at the apparently empty space where he’d been standing, blinking for a moment.

  “You can all do that?” he asked slowly.

  “We are Fae Nobles,” Talus replied, dropping the glamour and checking that the webbing was cinched properly. “If we could not summon glamours—of invisibility and the archetypes of man’s mind—we would not be Fae Nobles.”

  Even the Unseelie nodded agreement with that, and Talus flashed the lesser Fae another brilliant grin. Invisibility was among the easiest glamours, on a par with calling on “archetypes”—images so woven into the human subconscious that they came easily to even Fae minds. A White Knight of the old Arthurian tales, clad in steel upon a mighty steed, would be a glamour easily woven around himself by any Fae raised in Europe.

  “Indeed,” Morgan rumbled, the big Unseelie Noble coming closest of them all to successfully hiding the three-foot-long weapon under his trench coat. “This is why your master sends us to hunt this creature in the sewers. Only Lords and Powers are greater than we.”

  That wasn’t strictly true, Talus knew, but the other creatures in the world to equal a Fae Noble were few and far between.

  With the tommy gun and its webbing firmly cinched into place, he glanced around the others. The two Seelie Nobles were both ready, eyeing the Unseelie impatiently. He raised an eyebrow at Celia, who was watching the two male Unseelie to make sure they were ready.

  She gave him a wink and a nod as she met his gaze.

  “Let’s go,” he said. A suggestion, not an instruction. Among Nobles, you always had to be careful how you phrased such things.

  The others nodded, and a moment later, Abraham and Isaac stood alone in the bitter wind.

  It was always disconcerting to walk down a street veiled from sight by glamours. While the streets weren’t filled with the packed crowds of downtown, there were still enough people walking through the autumn afternoon to force the six Nobles to continually dodge around mundanes who didn’t know the heavily armed Fae were even there.

  Fortunately for the oblivious mundanes, Nobles had superhuman reflexes to go along with more unusual abilities. Dodging around the shifting pedestrians was only amusing for the first half dozen or so, but it was hardly difficult for any of them.

  As they approached the worksite, the tenor of the people around them notably changed. The trench coats and fedoras of the middle class petered out in favor of the heavy coveralls and hard hats of men on shift. By the time they reached the fenced-off area around the excavation, the group of Nobles would have looked out of place if not concealed from view.

  A tiny bit of Power allowed Talus to see the other Nobles, mostly because they weren’t trying to hide from him. Even against other Nobles, this glamour would be effective unless they were looking for it, and he could have concealed himself from them if he chose to.

  The worksite was fenced off, but no one had bothered to close the gate. Workers streamed in and out of it almost constantly, starting and ending shifts, moving to different worksites, and loading and unloading the trucks of materials that were arriving and leaving almost as constantly.

  Talus and the others slipped through a momentary gap in the crowd following the entrance of a truck full of smooth stone blocks. He stopped just inside the fence, stepping out of the way of the crowds, to survey the site.

  There were multiple open manholes around the excavation, and several tunnels of various sizes heading off in different directions from the excavation itself. Two were in the process of being fitted with pipes to seal them off, and one tunnel, at the very bottom of the excavation, dwarfed the rest.

  “I think that’s our storm drain,” Celia observed drily, joining him in the quiet spot he’d found. “It’s the only one big enough and deep enough.”

  “I’m guessing we can’t hope that our beastie is too big to sneak out,” Talus observed, eyeing the gaping hole in the earth. The big storm drain was wide enough to drive a small truck through. “Let’s check it out.”

  As they began to climb down the side of the excavation, as carefully as possible so as not to disturb debris to call attention to themselves, they slowly began to overhear an argument at the bottom of the pit.

  “Joe said there was some kind of monster down there,” someone with a thick Eastern European accent exclaimed loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I’m not going in there!”

  “Joe is an idjit who blew up five men,” the foreman snapped back. “His brain gone and snapped when he realized what he’d done! And you lot of fools went and believed his ravings?”

  “’e don’t screw up like that,” another worker replied. “Joe’s the best. He wouldna blown up his guys.”

  Reaching the bottom of the pit, Talus saw the foreman, distinguishable from the workers only by the clipboard he was carrying, glaring at a clot of eight workers who were obviously refusing to enter the looming dark of the storm drain.

  “Well, someone’s gotta check and see what damage Joe did,” the foreman told his workers angrily. He grabbed a handlamp from the cart. “I’ve gotta go in. You bunch of old women can wait out here if you’re so scared!”

  After a moment’s hesitation, two of the hard-hatted workers blocked the foreman’s path, shaking their heads.

  “Nah, nah boss,” said one of them, the heavily accented Romanian Talus had first overhead. “We ain’t letting you get et either!”

  With a shake of his head and a momentary shiver at the impenetrable dark of the sewer, Talus slipped past the arguing workers and into the darkness under the earth.

  Fae vision was far better than that of ordinary humans, so Talus and the other Nobles didn’t need to reveal their presence to the men gathered around the entrance of the tunnel as they walked deeper under the earth.

  The light behind them grew fainter even to their eyes and eventually disappeared. Around him, Talus could tell as the other Nobles dropped their glamours of invisibility. In the utter darkness, only the faint glow of their body heat allowed him to see them regardless.

  After another dozen or so steps, Celia cursed under her breath as she stumbled, then she conjured a tiny blue faerie flame to light their way.

  Talus blinked against the sudden glow. He quickly realized the light was far too faint to be seen from outside but was enough light for them to see where they were putting their feet on a floor that had been carved by dynamite and pickaxes and never really smoothed afterwards.

  “Douse that bloody light,” Andre snapped. “Do ye want to bring the beastie down on our heads?”

  “It’s barely light enough for me to see my feet with it, you Irish twit,” Celia snapped back. “We won’t be able to do much if we break our necks on this floor.”

  “Quiet,” Talus hissed. “We need the light, Andre,” he told the Irish Fae. “And we need to be quiet, or the humans will hear us before our ‘beastie’ does,” he finished, glaring at them both.

  Both of them glared back. Celia opened her mouth to bark back, but Morgan stepped between her and Talus, fixing his gaze down on the tiny Noble.

  “He’s right,” the big Unseelie rumbled. “Anything down here is more likely to hear us than see that little light, so let’s keep it down.”

  With Talus staring down Andre and Morgan stari
ng down Celia, the argument quieted. The dark around them seemed to press in, and Talus could understand the tempers fraying in the dark.

  As they continued to move down the massive tunnel, which seemed to stretch on forever, he carefully unclipped the strap holding his Thompson in the harness, stretching his hearing for the slightest hint of movement.

  They walked for what felt like an eternity, and the only sound Talus could hear was the soft tromp of his companions’ feet and the shifting sounds of cloth as, one by one, the darkness drew each Noble into drawing their weapons.

  The sound, when it came, was thunderous to hyper-attuned Noble ears. Something shifted, a leathery slithering sound up ahead. Rocks fell, clattering across the ground in a rattle quickly buried by gunfire.

  Talus was never sure who fired first or last, but he was shouting for them to stop after the first few bullets flew out.

  The cacophony of multiple machine guns spitting .45 caliber bullets down the tunnel buried any remnant of the sound they’d all heard, and when the gunfire finally ceased, the silence was deafening.

  “Did you see something?” he demanded. Silence answered him. “Whatever the hell it was, it wasn’t close enough for us to shoot,” he told the other Nobles, “so we just wasted bullets and lost any chance of tracking it by sound.”

  “You are not in charge here,” Celia snapped back. “Who do you think you are to be telling us what to do?”

  “The only one with a damn brain,” Talus snarled, the darkness pressing on his nerves and his impatience with the Unseelie in the group.

  Celia lunged at him in a blur mortal eyes would have completely missed. He caught her dagger-wielding fist in his free hand and bashed aside the butt of her Thompson with his own weapon. Fractions of a second later, she twisted out of his grip, swinging her gun in a heavy slam towards his skull.

  Calling on his Power, he flung her away from him, overwhelming her physical strength and shields with a burst of kinetic force.

  “This is not helping,” Morgan told Celia, stepping in to block a repeat of her charge. “Talus speaks sense,” he continued, turning a flat glare on the younger Noble. “Let’s hunt this thing as a team—not try to kill each other.”

  The big Unseelie helped Celia to her feet. Her gaze remained locked on Talus as she nodded slowly, wiping a speck of blood away from an already-healed split lip. Her eyes, barely visible in the dim light from her faerie flame, were unreadable.

  “Let’s kill this thing, then, so I don’t have to keep looking at these stinking Seelie,” she spat and stormed forward into the darkness.

  Celia’s unthinking rush forward into the darkness killed Andre. The group spread out in a long line, barely able to see each other even with Fae eyes, and none of them saw the tripwire across the tunnel until Celia broke it.

  Fae Nobles were faster than humans. They were faster than any mortal creature that ever lived and many supernatural creatures too. They were not faster than electricity.

  The explosives the tripwire detonated were fifty feet back from it. Chunks of the wall shattered, spraying stone debris across the immense sewer drain. Talus dove to the ground as a larger chunk shot through where his head had been.

  For a single half second, he thought that was it. Andre had been hit by more debris than the rest, but mere stone wouldn’t do enough damage to kill a Noble.

  Then the tunnel collapsed.

  It came down in slabs the size of tanks, stones heavy enough to crush elephants, and smashed Andre, Noble of the Teutha Courts, into dust even he could not survive.

  The tunnel was somehow darker in the following moments, until Talus threw up a faerie light of his own to mirror Celia’s. Moments passed, and then three more faerie lights lit up, and the five surviving Nobles, shaken and bruised by the explosion, gathered in the flickering light of their magic.

  “That was no beast,” Caleb finally said, speaking what they were all thinking.

  “That was demolitions work,” Morgan agreed. “The same explosives they’ve been using to dig the tunnel, at a guess.”

  “Did one of the workers set a trap?” Michael demanded. “Is all of this… a trick to lure someone like us down here?”

  “The mortals wouldn’t bother,” Celia snapped at the three men. “Even those in the know would be more worried about vampires from what the Keeper said. No… this was our beast.”

  “There are creatures the mortals would describe as monsters that could do that,” Talus reminded the others. “They are… the deadlier ones we could face. Gryphons. Minotaurs.” He paused and swallowed. “Dragons,” he finished.

  Dragons were the deadliest of the supernatural “beasts” of the world. Immensely intelligent, with a limited kind of omniscience, true Power of a kind few supernaturals could match, fiery breath, and deadly wills, they were terrifying to anyone. Only their strange life cycles that kept them asleep for decades or even centuries kept them from being a greater threat—but their powers of knowledge meant that they were well aware of what happened while they slept.

  “This city has been here for centuries,” Morgan said slowly. “A dragon sleeping under us would have awoken and devastated it years ago.”

  Talus released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding as he realized the big Unseelie was right.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Caleb said quietly, the Seelie Fae effortlessly gathering their attention to him. “Something a hell of a lot smarter than we thought is down here—and we’re trapped in with it.”

  All five Nobles turned to face the tunnel out and saw the truth of Caleb’s words. The blocks that had crushed Andre to death had blocked the tunnel completely. Even their Power could not move enough of the stones to clear a way back.

  “Whatever it is, it has to have a way out of its own,” Talus reminded them. “And the smarter it is, the more dangerous it is—our duty to the Race means it must die. And going through it may be our only way out.”

  The five Fae stared at the cave-in behind them for several moments, and then they set off down the tunnel again.

  For the first time since Owen had asked them to take on the task, Talus began to truly feel afraid.

  The only light in the now-sealed tunnel came from the faerie lights that the five Fae had conjured to light their way. The mingling of five lights caused shadows to jump and flicker across the walls, and each flicker hit already twitchy nerves.

  No more shots were fired into the dark, but Talus knew he’d come close a few times, and he doubted the others were any calmer.

  “Douse your lights,” Celia suddenly snapped from the front of the line. Talus started to snarl back at her but controlled himself.

  Dousing his own light, he also poked Caleb with a tiny spike of telekinetic force. The London Seelie turned to glare at him, diverting his attention from Celia for long enough for the Fae to draw a deep breath and calm down. Caleb nodded carefully at Talus and then doused his light.

  “What did you see?” Michael asked in the sudden darkness, barely penetrable to the vision of the Fae Nobles.

  “I’m not sure, but I think we’re getting close to where the workers found the beast,” Celia answered. The vague silhouette Talus could see of her was studying the floor. “Can one of you just light the floor?”

  Theoretically, Talus knew, any of them could have done it—if they had that level of control of their power, which most Nobles at their young age wouldn’t have. Celia clearly couldn’t. After a few moments of silence from the others, Talus stepped forward. His uncle was a Fae Lord, his father the disappointment—a Noble born to a family of Lords. Oberis had made sure that his nephew was skilled enough with what power he had to not shame his family.

  He stood at Celia’s shoulder and focused his power carefully. A faint glow began to illuminate the floor, invisible from more than a few feet away but showing the ground.

  The trail of running footprints leading back the way they’d come appeared first, and then the two Fae continued down the corridor. H
e focused on maintaining the light, letting her follow the path to where it led.

  “Detonator,” she said shortly, stopping and pointing. Talus looked down and saw the wires leading away to the side of the cave. A tendril of the faint illumination followed the wire, rising and lighting up the equipment.

  “That would only be left down here if they were in the middle of blasting when the beast attacked,” Morgan observed.

  “Exactly,” Celia murmured, following the trails forward with Talus still at her shoulder, providing light.

  “Blast hole,” Michael told them as they reached a rough ridge in the floor, uneven and marked with scattered debris. “This should have been smoothed with pickaxes and smaller blasts.”

  “They must have blasted through into something,” Talus said. “Let’s keep moving forward.”

  The blast gave way to a sloping path downwards and a slight breeze. The new space seemed to be large enough to have air moving around inside it, which helped reduce the stuffiness Talus had been noticing.

  “Blood,” Celia suddenly snapped, pointing to the edge of the pool of illumination Talus was spreading.

  Talus focused his faerie lights around it and then swallowed hard. There wasn’t a lot of blood, just spots scattered in an area a yard or so wide around a pair of feet that ended at just about the ankles. Gobbets of ragged flesh still clung to bones sheared through in perfectly straight lines.

  “What. The. Fuck.” Caleb uttered, his voice low.

  “He was eaten,” Michael told him, his voice flat. “Almost whole.”

  “Can you spread the light out without it being seen?” Celia asked Talus.

  “A bit farther,” Talus told her. He wove a veil over the light so that only those inside the glamour could see it, and then spread both workings out thirty feet down the slope.

  The ankles belonged to the worker who’d made it farthest. The slope beneath them was churned to dust by running feet, and gobbets of flesh were scattered across it, marking the places where the other workers had died.