1: A Punk Rock Mugging

  Somehow, the paparazzi had not yet found them.

  Why, Katie wasn’t sure–they’d stayed at the back of the venue for the first couple of songs and Beri had kept his hood up, which obscured his features just a bit. If his glowing skin cast faint, silvery light against the cloth walls around his face, none of the middle-aged zaddies or the more youthful punk purists in attendance had been rude enough to mention it.

  Goddammit if Bad Religion didn’t go just as hard as they did in 1988. By the time “Fuck Armageddon” came on, Katie and Beri were in the middle of everything and he’d forgotten about the hood, or at least he’d dropped it so he could breathe, and they were dancing hard with a girl wearing a scene haircut and her mohawked boyfriend until all four of them were grinning, flushed and dripping with sweat.

  When the set ended and they’d finished screaming themselves deaf the girl took Katie’s hand, leaning in close. The house lights weren’t yet up, and the illumination from Beri’s skin gleamed in her facial piercings. Her eyes shone with the hot joy of adrenaline. She raised her voice to be heard over the crowd even though the band had left the stage. “I love your jacket!”

  “Yeah? Me too!” Katie did love her jacket; it was white vegan leather and cut mod. She’d thought it would be colder in Denver at this time of year, or she wouldn’t have bothered, but she’d never had the opportunity to wear it before and really wanted to. She knew how it looked on her. “I love your bangs!”

  The girl pretended to curtsy without releasing Katie’s hand. Her hair was half green and half bck, bisecting in the center at her part. Her ears were gauged and tattooed cherry blossoms twined up her neck. “Do you guys smoke? We have an extremely gorgeous sativa with your name on it!”

  With the hand that wasn’t still looped around Katie’s fingers, the girl took a step toward her. The movement closed nearly all the distance dancing had left between them, pcing her squarely in Katie’s personal space. She reached up to finger Katie’s pel. Beri chose that moment to ugh in his warm, musical way. He took Katie’s free hand to pull her away.

  “So sorry.” He spoke English with hardly any accent. Both of their dance partners shifted sweat-shiny faces with fascinated eyes up to him, but he only looked at Katie. “You’re flushed, love. Do you want to get some air?”

  Still wide-eyed, she nodded. He grinned at their erstwhile dance partners, all pearly teeth and mischief, then dragged her through the crowd to the nearest door.

  Katie gasped, “Holy shit, did you see that? I think that girl just made a pass at me!”

  He ughed again. “Oh, you finally caught that, did you? Better te than never, I suppose.”

  Katie spluttered as she followed him past a couple of meathead bouncers out the nearest door. She found herself in a surprisingly clean alley illuminated by a yellow streetmp. It was empty except for an industrial trash can and the brick side of the nearest building. The night air was cooler than she would have expected. Avalon’s climate was tropical and humid, so the way the temperature dropped after dark in the mountains was welcome after the close heat of dancing bodies. She twisted the back of her long, loose hair into a knot, allowing the breeze to dry her neck.

  Musing, Beri said, “Well, complete obliviousness is one way to accrue life experience. Should I have left you? Far be it from me to deny your first chance for group sex in a punk venue.”

  He ughed again at her expression. His beauty still hit her like a sp sometimes: the bone structure like a cssical sculpture, the long, pearly hair in complicated Sidhe braids he didn’t even try to hide. In this uncertain light, she couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but she could see the desire rising in them and the soft way his parted lips revealed his teeth.

  Katie shook her head, still disbelieving the brazenness of the woman inside. “That wasn’t about me. I was just the mashed potatoes in that attempted steak dinner.” She paused. “That chick was barking up the wrong tree, but she had definite style. I told you this jacket was fire.”

  “You did say that.” Beri smirked. She had just enough time to wonder if he did that because he knew it drove her crazy before he grasped the waistband of her jeans to pull her against him. “Not that you needed to. I can see it very clearly.”

  Heat slid up her neck and into her cheeks. She dropped her hair to take handfuls of his T-shirt, wondering if he was thinking about the selfie she'd taken the day she bought the jacket, the shirtless one with the zip hanging open. She hoped so. What was the point of sending your boyfriend nudes if it wasn't going to distract him from work vital to the three kingdoms?

  “Trust me, you are nobody's mashed potatoes.” Beri took a step, forcing her backward until her back thumped the door they'd just left through, and she found herself trapped between the hard line of his body and cold painted wood. She didn't have time to mention that people sometimes walked through doors just like this before he cimed her mouth with his own and she ceased to care.

  Beri kissed like she was the only thing he'd ever wanted and the only thing that existed, like he'd suffocate without her. She kissed him back so hard that his teeth threatened her lip. He was the only thing she'd ever wanted. His mouth was hot and insistent; he leveraged his knee between her thighs until she was pressed against him from groin to chest. God, it had been weeks since they’d been together; they'd been so busy trying to recover from the coronation and the subsequent shit storm that–his mouth moved to the edge of her jaw before he took her earlobe between his teeth. Katie's thoughts scattered. The hand he wasn’t using to support his weight against the door csped the swell of her ribs. Katie slid her right palm down the ft pnes of his belly, across the rough waistband of his jeans until she felt the bulge of his erection through the thick fabric.

  Beri gasped against her ear. “What are you doing?”

  She whispered back, “What does it feel like I’m doing?”

  “I don’t know.” He drew a ragged breath. “But I really love live music.” A hard thrum of bass vibrated the door behind her. Beri pulled back to meet her eyes. His pupils were bck holes against his bright face, and his lips were swollen shiny from kissing. “Should we–”

  Katie shook her head. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Beri blew out hard, puffing out his cheeks. His hips ground against her hand. “We’ll miss the show.”

  Katie nodded. “Sometimes, missing the show is a price you have to pay.”

  He nodded back, slowly. All the blood that usually occupied his brain was clearly elsewhere at the moment. When Katie smiled, Beri’s cheeks flushed. He said, “I’ve always hated this band.”

  He loved this band. It was the reason she’d bought the tickets in the first pce. This time, Katie smirked. “You should probably order an Uber.”

  “Why an Uber?”

  “Because if I part the Veils, somebody’s going to notice. Do you want people to wonder why I’m sneaking around the White Pace in the middle of the night?”

  Beri shook his head. His normally smooth movements were jerky. “I’ll order an Uber, shall I?”

  “Great idea,” Katie said.

  He drew his phone from his jacket pocket, moving as little as possible while he did it. He swiped and tapped for a second while the glow of his skin and the glow of the screen doubled the brightness around them, but then he frowned and pushed out a huffy little sigh. “No bars.”

  She rolled her eyes, which made him smile again. He held the phone level with his face as he backed away, then slightly above his head in the effort to get coverage. Katie sighed, too, moving away from the door to make room for people who might want to leave. She crossed her arms to wait.

  “It’s probably all the brick.” He’d almost reached the alley mouth.

  A pang of unease asked her to follow him. She might have, if she weren’t, as she had continually expined to her mother, a fucking adult with the ability to breathe on her own. But it was an alley, and she was a very small woman, and though it was a retively safe city and what seemed to be a good neighborhood, there was something to be said about the deterring presence of a six-ish foot tall man. “Do you want to walk instead?”

  Beri paused, looking up with a thoughtful expression on his face that belied the lustful young man behind the punk club. “You know, I’m not entirely sure where we’re going.”

  Katie ughed, shaking her head. “I love you.”

  The smile he gifted her lit his face in a way bioluminescence never could. “I love you.”

  Magic pulsed against Katie’s senses, and they both looked up with equal arm as a hard wind gusted down the narrow alleyway. She turned toward what she was already certain was a casting, drawing up her own magic to prepare for self-defense, and saw that the source of the disturbance was a swirling eddy of white light hovering in the air like an impossibly pced whirlpool. Within the length of a sharply indrawn breath the circle spun itself open wide, until it was roughly three feet across and just as tall. It was so perfectly round someone might have drawn it with a compass.

  “What the fuck?” Beri wondered, from his pce at the mouth of the alley.

  Surprised, Katie said, “It’s a Way. Don’t you recognize the wind?”

  He raised his eyebrows, doubtful. “Plenty of spells cause wind. They disrupt the patterns of the air particles–”

  Katie gred. Beri closed his mouth, then tried again: “You're the Veil expert, though. You'd know better than I would.”

  “Gd we agree.” But outside her instinctive knowledge that she was looking at a portable hole between two universes, Katie couldn't have said why she was so certain. None of her Ways had ever been this uniform, and even fewer had been white. A bck-cd leg extruded and a uniformed fey with pointed ears and a tablet computer stepped out. He was followed quickly by a big enough group of people to be a serious problem if it came to a fight.

  Katie took a backward step toward Beri and the mouth of the alley, just enough to pce her body between them and her king.

  There was something wrong here, though no one had made any aggressive movement. The intruders were both men and women, all cd in identical bck jumpsuits with combat boots and ribbons, along with stupid pointed hats no one would have chosen if they weren’t required for work. The men wore high-and-tight haircuts and the women sleek, professional knots at the bases of their necks. Silvery firearms hung from holsters at their sides, though what they were Katie had no idea.

  Not fey. No self-respecting Faerie Court would send their soldiers out looking like that.

  Katie was too taken aback to speak. One of the soldiers, a man positioned toward the front, stepped forward to separate himself from the group.

  “High King Beriani of Royal House Quintinar.” He spoke High Fey perfectly, but he had no accent to mark his Court of birth. He spoke it like he’d learned it from a textbook without ever having met a native. His voice sounded…normal. Perfectly normal. There was nothing to differentiate him from anyone Katie had ever met.

  Katie and Beri exchanged a gnce. There was no fear in Beri’s face, not yet, but a faint tension around his eyes indicated he was prepared for this to go south. She sent him questions with her expression. He shrugged.

  “Um,” Beri said. “Yes?”

  “Come with us and you won’t be harmed,” the man continued. “Resist, and you leave us no choice.”

  Beri scoffed, crossing his arms. “Is that a threat?”

  It was a threat. Flushing with arm, Katie took another step backward, trying to close the distance between them without drawing the newcomer’s attention. She’d let Beri stray too far from her. Even in the moment, her instincts had warned her against it. Dammit.

  The two soldiers at the front of the group exchanged a look of their own. The woman made a subtle gesture with her hand, and the group of people behind her fanned out down the sides of the alley. Katie stopped waiting. She ripped open her own Way, bck as space and twinkling with distant stars, then yanked free her sword. She chucked the scabbard back through the rip in everything and sealed it all back up with a thought. The whole procedure was so quick the advancing soldiers hadn’t moved another foot by the time her bronze bde was gleaming buttery in the yellow halogen light.

  She saluted them and dropped into defensive second position. “That’s quite far enough.”

  The man with the tablet tucked it under his arm. “It’ll be better for you both if he comes quietly, ma’am. Do you really think you’re going to win this fight with that primitive weapon?”

  Katie curled her top lip. “You bet your ass I do. When I say you want to stop where you are, trust me.”

  The soldiers smoothly pulled their weapons from their holsters. Katie counted eight, and they moved like fighters. Unless they were a lot faster than they looked, she didn’t expect them to be a problem. With a battle caster as competent as Beri at her back, they didn’t stand a chance.

  “I’m not going to tell you again,” Katie warned.

  Smooth and deadly with practice, the woman who had been at the front of the group drew her weapon and pointed what Katie could only assume was the business end at her face. It jerked out of her hand, whipped past Katie’s ear, and thudded against Beri’s outstretched hand. He cried out with pain and shock, then dropped it, cnging, onto the sidewalk. Curls of smoke rose from his hand as his face contorted with horror. The sharp smell of burning flesh stung Katie’s nose.

  Katie drew in a sharp breath. Cold Iron, she thought, horrified. The closest soldier was within bde range. She lunged, taking him through the throat, then spun to remove the next closest head. She dropped a third soldier before the next one had the chance to draw his weapon.

  A silent nce of green light sizzled past her face, burning through a chunk of her hair. When the beam dissolved into the brick side of the club, a bck sear bloomed outward from the contact point. A few curly strands drifted zily toward the ground.

  These motherfuckers had Cold Iron sers.

  Beri’s smooth, sweet tenor rose, seemingly unperturbed, from the mouth of the alley, singing a nursery rhyme about boats. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled. Oh, thank god. The iron burns hadn’t fucked his magic.

  On her left, the first soldier she’d downed stood, then cracked his neck with an audible pop. The third one pressed up to her hands and knees, shaking her head as if to clear it. She wore a glistening wet bib of blood from the arteries Katie had severed when she cut the woman’s throat. The one Katie had decapitated was still down, but a fourth soldier stopped to gather up the severed head. She’d seen that behavior when she’d fought the Wild Hunt during the Ogre War. Humans didn’t administer first aid to decapitated brethren. Ogres, either.

  These motherfuckers were immortal, too.

  “Shit!” Katie scuttled backward until she bumped into Beri, who steadied her with one hand and without losing breath control. “They’re immortal! Bless me now!”

  He grasped her sword and the whole bde erupted into blue fme. The Birthright cast eerie shadows in the dim alley, rendering the soldier’s strange faces into something shifting and unearthly. She didn’t take the time to experience her own fear before she waded back in.

  The enemy fighters were wary of her now, and they circled her slowly, just outside of sword range. Katie circled with them.

  One of the men called over his shoulder, “Should we kill her, Commander?”

  The man with the tablet, still standing near the white Way, said, “No. I scanned her. She’s viable, too. Take her alive.”

  What that meant, Katie didn’t know, but it didn’t sound like the way she wanted to spend her Saturday night. Magic sizzled down her senses, hot and bright. Muscle memory yanked her into a roll away from the other combatants as the first bolt of lightning roared through the air. It struck a woman on her left with pinpoint accuracy. When Katie’s eyes adjusted to the new status quo, she found the aliens stunned, ft on their backs, and burning fitfully. One was charred bck and curled around themself in crablike agony. The smell of ozone was thick enough to choke on.

  She turned to address Beri over her shoulder. “You know, stuff like this is the reason I still bring you to punk shows.”

  Without stopping his song, he smirked, a brief, sexy sneer Elvis couldn’t have pulled off on his best day, then pretended to tip an imaginary cowboy hat.

  Katie turned back to the task at hand. As she’d feared, the immortal attackers were already gathering themselves and regaining their feet. The woman who seemed to issue most of their orders drew her weapon from its holster and approached Katie with the thing fixed on her face.

  I wonder whether I'm fast enough to stop bster fire like a Jedi, Katie thought. Probably. But a ten-thousand-year-old bronze sword wasn't a light saber, and it would be crazy to try, right? Right.

  The woman called, “If you keep this up, you're going to get hurt. Your High King is going to get hurt. Is that what you want?”

  Who were these people? Whoever they were, they'd picked the wrong goddamn ransom. “I'm going to die fighting. It might not be here, and it might not be you, but it's going to be somebody, sometime.”

  “It doesn't have to be me.” The woman approached Katie with her weapon in a frighteningly competent shooter's stance. The air tingled as Beri built up a second charge. “It doesn't have to be today.”

  The woman didn't look much different from the others, but something about her gave Katie a frightening little pang of prophecy. It occurred to her this was a stupid fucking exercise, fortune favored people who weren't too dumb to run, and that speed worked for more things than just hand-to-hand combat. She fell back a step. Gncing behind herself to check on Beri, Katie found him charged with electricity, almost radiant in the instant before the lightning struck again, and–

  –and surrounded. He was so focused on magic he hadn't noticed more enemy soldiers sneaking up behind him. These were not normal kidnappers. They were too well-trained and way too well-organized. If this wasn't political, she'd eat the goddamn sword. What I wouldn't give for a few good paparazzi right now.

  Even if she opened a Way, she couldn't get anywhere near him. She could escape, but she'd rather die than leave him here alone and apparently, she would get the opportunity to prove it. Katie stepped backward, then again.

  The people he'd lit up with his first casting stirred. A man patted the fire on his jumpsuit with one hand as he stood. The charred unfortunate who'd taken the brunt of the lightning groaned and drew crackling limbs closer to their core.

  Calmly, so as not to arm a working magus at an inopportune moment, Katie said, “Beri.” He didn't respond. He probably couldn't even hear her over the sound of his own voice. “Beri!”

  The woman continued to advance.

  “Stop right there.” Katie's voice was grim. “I might not have a sci-fi bster, but I can do a whole lot of damage with this antique. You're looking at the Birthright and I assure you, you won't be the first immortal asshole I put down with this little combo.”

  A shadow fell hard over Katie. A grim, satisfied smile spread across the advancing woman's mouth.

  “Backup’s here.” Her eyes flicked upward. “You'll want to comply immediately, Princess.”

  Katie looked up. There was something between her and the moon–a floating object the size of a Buick, shaped like an egg, glossy and pristine white in the yellow illumination of the streetmp. There wasn't a crack or crevice anywhere that might indicate a door. It was completely silent–indeed, Katie hadn't heard it move into pce. It hovered above her, gleaming, impassive.

  Cold dread settled into her bones. Behind her, Beri finally stopped singing.

  ~*~

  There was something subtly wrong about the shadow that blotted out the moon, something unnatural and unfamiliar about its shape. Beri didn’t have time to worry about it before Katie screamed. His eyes snapped open and he discovered himself surrounded by still more of the point-eared, dull-skinned (fey? Aliens?) he'd privately taken to thinking of as Romuns.

  That cttering sound was her sword on concrete. She’d lost her grip on the Birthright. Heart thundering in his ears like the storm he'd summoned and as abruptly abandoned, Beri filled his hand with death magic. Someone nearby cried an arm. Beri killed him first, with the press of his bespelled hand against the man's broad chest. The soldier’s eyes went gssy before his knees buckled and he fell. The second died just as unceremoniously. He threw a hard elbow; blood spurted from a nose. That soldier was lucky enough to survive.

  Katie shrieked. There was pain in it. Beri shoulder-checked his way past the st obstacle between them, heart in his throat along with her name. “Katie!”

  She was on her knees, he could see now; the female commander had disarmed her and pressed one of those Cold Iron ray guns against the same exposed neck Beri had run his lips across ten minutes previously. The aliens came now in an endless swarm from behind him, staying just outside his reach. He'd let himself be completely surrounded while he cast. There was no way to her side through the heavy press of enemies.

  They closed on him again, filling the holes he'd opened with violence. Beri lifted the flickering blue fire in his hand toward them: “Stay back! We'll kill every one of you Motherless fucks if you like, and it'll be your own poor choices to bme.”

  A quiet part of his brain congratuted itself on remembering the royal speech even under pressure. Behind him, someone cried out in a voice like a terrified child: “They won't wake up, Commander! I can't get them to wake up!”

  Beri pushed his still bzing palm toward the closest soldiers. Showing fright on previously immobile faces, the closest fell back. Through a gap between them he saw Katie's small, prone form lying on the alley floor with her chaotic chestnut curls spread around her and her sword on the ground near her hand.

  Beri said, “And they never will. If the rest of you would like to learn the answer to that age-old question, by all means continue your advance.”

  The man with the tablet at the back of the group said, “The cost-benefit has officially tipped, Commander. We need to go. Now.”

  The woman growled in clear frustration; the smell of burning flesh joined the sound of Katie screaming again. She fell abruptly silent. Beri’s mind bnked with horror as his belly tipped with nausea. He darted toward the closest opening between attackers, but he wasn't fast enough to stop the woman they’d called ‘commander’ from gathering Katie into her arms and bundling her into their peculiar white Way.

  Was she alive? Dead? There was no way to know. Desperate, he threw himself against the line of fighters. They fell back and he made it through. He was just in time to watch the Way twist itself shut. He spun; surely one of the woman’s subordinates could be held over the coals until they told him where they'd taken Katie. But instead, a beam of white light was in the process of zapping them, one by one, out of the alley.

  With amazement, Beri visually followed the beam back to its originating point. An object twice as wide as a coffin, shining white and organic in structure, fired beam after beam of light, quick as thought. When it flickered on the bck-cd soldiers they disappeared. The corpses vanished st, just as efficiently and completely as the others.

  The bastards were tidy, at least.