Deception (Facets of Feyrie Book 3), page 21
I za
A MUTINY, what kind of idiots plan a mutiny in a house? I’m starting to think these earthbound Feyrie aren’t worth saving, then I think of Knox. Well, some of them are. The Sidhe is dealing with the current pains in the ass. A fact that I find very… amusing. The Sidhe doesn’t step in often. Typically it lets me deal with the issues. It shows its displeasure, like when it took all of Jameson’s furniture away, but it doesn’t outright punish like it is right now.
By the volume of their screams, that I can hear even at this distance, they act like they’re being tortured to death. The wusses, that’s not the case at all. A scream hits a high note and sounds out right nasty, well, maybe there’s a little torture going on. The Sidhe is in their heads, giving them visions of their worst fears. Some of which is rather unwise. The Sidhe is letting me eavesdrop into their minds. Whose worst fear is to be covered in peanut butter and licked by small fluffy dogs? Oh, wait, it’s Fred’s worst fear. I wonder if his mother ever shut his head in a door as a baby, slammed it a time or two on top of it. It would explain that fear, and maybe some of his other peculiarities. He shaves his toe hair, ONLY his toe hair. Not his face, or legs, or even his man bits. He’s obsessive about it, has sexual fantasies about shaving other people’s toe hair.
The Sidhe is singing the songs of laughter. The task amuses it, and my thoughts. Shining its bright light on the pieces of my fractured soul. Sighing, I lean my back against the rough bark of the tree and ignore the wetness from the melting snow under me. Bending my legs, I rest my elbows on my knees.
They’re not wrong, I have kept to myself and away from most of them. Looking at Ruthie reminds me of everything I’ve lost. Looking at the ones who want to “mutiny,” makes me angry about the losses.
The Sidhe warns me right before I feel the familiar, warm, and completely unexpected presence. “Ah, Dove. I’m so sorry,” my Dad says in a tired voice. I’m on my feet and running to him before I can think about it. He grabs me out of the air and the smell of cold and dark jerks at that door everything is hiding behind.
“You got out.”
“Yes, I think someone helped me, I’m not sure who. The shield disappeared, and I came here the second I realized it.” He squeezes me in a hard hug as he talks. I’m not in a hurry to let go, either.
“They took him from me, Dad.” The giant sob burns my throat and takes away any will to speak. Dad rocks me and murmurs as he rubs my hair and lets me cry it all out. When the sobs space out and become only those hiccupy things, and the faucet of tears has finally turned off, my Dad sets me away from him. With gentle hands, he lifts my chin to meet my eyes.
“Now, what else has been going on?” I look into his beloved face, the one I needed to see and felt I wouldn’t be able to. The dark circles under his eyes are new, and there are some scars on his face now, small ones, but the soft look in his eyes, the love shining so brightly there gives me much needed strength.
So, I tell him, all of it.
“The father in me wants to tell you that it gets better, that the pain eases with time and you can find that kind of happiness again. I don’t want to give you platitudes, Iza. Neither one of us accepts them.” He pats my leg as he says this.
Somehow, he ended up on the ground with me, sitting in the snow and mud, talking. Since being reunited, we’ve always had talks, but this one was a whole new level and shows me exactly how much our relationship has grown. Up until now, I didn’t realize how much I need him in my life.
“What are you planning on doing?” he asks, after both of us quietly contemplated the lake for a little while.
“I’m going to kill them.”
“I assumed as much. What’s your plan to do that, exactly?” I toss a handful of snow at him.
“First, I’m going to start taking out their outposts here.” He nods along with me as I talk. “Then I’m going to get strong enough to get that fucking necklace off of the Guide so that I can smash him into little bitty pieces.”
“And what about his master?”
Meeting his eyes, I shrug and say, “all I can do is fight until I can’t anymore, Dad.”
“I don’t want to see this kill you, dove. If they can hurt Phobe…”
“It’s okay Dad, I know that I’m not at that level, but giving up isn’t part of my nature. Since I got half of it from you, it’s your fault.” He smiles and pats my leg again.
His face grows serious. “Tell me what Phobe said to Light again?”
Staring at the ground, drawing circles in the snow, I swallow the lump in my throat. Verbatim, I repeat the words that pull at my heart. He nods in acceptance and turns to look back at the lake. “And you saw the One-God there?”
“Yes. I have no idea what he was doing, but it pisses me off he didn’t try to help. He stood there and let him die.”
I feel his mood turn more somber. “Are you going to execute her?” The seriousness of his tone makes me look at him.
“What would you do?”
“Betrayal cost you and me both your mother, and it also cost you Phobe. How many other lives has her selfishness cost or will?” Logic, I hate logic at times like this.
“What if I’m not sure I can do it?”
“There’s no shame in that, Iza. You love her. She’s family to you.” He pauses and grasps both of my shoulders. “Remember your mother’s soft heart, Iza.”
Her soft heart and what it cost her, is what he means. My mom refused to believe that Kael would betray her, which he did many times, and ultimately murdered her. I can’t lie to myself though. I don’t want to kill her. Killing her will take away something vital inside of me. Inspiration hits me, a way to have justice dealt, pacify the Feyrie, and not have to sell the last of my soul.
“I’ll put her to trial. The Feyrie can decide.” Then she can have her day in court that she keeps yelling about. They can decide her fate and deal with the consequences of it since they’re so keen on doing it.
“If it were anyone besides one of your kids, you’d kill them yourself.” He’s not wrong, so I say nothing. “I think that given the circumstances, you’re making the right decision.” He gives me one of those one arm hugs that Dads are famous for and then climbs to his feet. “Will you be okay?” he asks me softly, holding his hand out to pull me to my feet. I shake my head at his hand and shrug.
“I’m guessing that you’re being called?”
“Yes, I’ll return as soon as I can, he is sending constant attacks against me. Against the dead, I have to protect them.” I understand now, I didn’t used to, and I resented it a lot, but now that I have my shit job—I get it. “I love you, Dove,” he says as he’s fading out of existence.
“I love you too, Dad.”
Hugging myself, I lay my head back against the tree once again. Being around all of them is hard, it’s hard not to resent them, all of them. A small, petty part of me blames the Feyrie as a whole. Phobe was there for me. We didn’t ask anyone for anything. We survived on our merit. I came here, and it’s cost me everything.
These feelings have to be worked through before I can care enough to bother with them again. Grief is an odd duck, but it is possible to work through the negative bullshit it brings with it. I might still blame them, but I don’t want to kill them anymore.
If only Ruthie knew how hard it was not to kill her, she might sing a different tune. The fact that I want to keep that spark of goodness inside of me prevents me from giving into the dark, the monster. It wants to pull her apart and then pile her pieces up and dance on them while they burn. The dark part of me wants to burn them all.
Thankfully, it’s controllable and has lessened significantly over the last few weeks. The reason I come out here is to work through it, control it. The impulse was harder when the idiots were planning to toss me out. Even the Sidhe was quiet on that one, waiting simply for me to make a decision.
I can’t promise I will always be able to control the urges. The anger, the rawness of my emotions from losing Phobe are simmering in the background behind my control. The fire is getting hotter.
When I was a kid, I had issues with impulse control, much worse than I do now. One day I decided to stop allowing my baser instincts to control everything I did. This book talked about meditation and working things out in your head, finding control. Most of it was useless for a creature like me, but some parts helped me learn to have what is called controlled violence. I had to follow the exercises for someone with a mental illness, well, because I have it but also because of my nature.
It helps but doesn’t completely control it. Especially when things push me so hard emotionally or devastate me like losing him. For now, my will is strong enough to keep it contained, because I want to keep it so.
For now.
I za
THE MUTINEERS ARE NOW SITTING at a table isolated from the rest of them. The Sidhe has marked their table with one word. Backstabbers. I didn’t realize how smart the Sidhe was, not really. The idea of it was there but seeing this diabolical display confirms it. How refreshingly wonderful. Also, they’re all naked. No idea how they ended up that way, but no one is going to help them remedy the situation. Their clothes were taken by a more powerful force than anyone here.
Even if I could return them, I wouldn’t. Let the fuckers spend a few days naked and guilty of something. Might teach them some humility and gratefulness.
“Ha, it marked their table too?” Jameson asks his voice still holding that little nervous wobble he’s had since I brought him back here.
“Yep,” I answer, staring at him. His color is better today, but his eyes are the same. Reaching inside of myself I look for the sympathy that should be there and find a small spark. Less than before. In fact, every time I look at the empty chair beside me, it shrinks a little more. This is what I’m fighting, I can’t want to kill them, I can’t stop caring for any of them, but I can be angry.
No one can take that away from me, not even me.
“You hate us all, don’t you?” Jameson’s perceptiveness catches me off guard.
“Sometimes,” I say honestly.
“I can’t say I blame you.” I watch his maimed hand. “If I hadn’t have gone…”
“This would have played out another way, eventually. All of us will end up dead fighting this fight.” It’s nothing but the truth. War means death.
“Is this something you even want to do anymore?” Tilting my head, I think about it as I stare at him. I don’t want to, not really. I’m somewhere in the middle. “You know, I wanted to tell you about a saying I read.” He leans his elbows on the table and moves closer to me. “Darkness can’t die, everything started with darkness and will end with it.” Then he’s up and gone, moving to another table where they greet him in a friendlier way.
Well, Arista does. She likes him because she’s got horrible taste in men. He also gave me something to think about. It is entirely possible Phobe that isn’t dead-dead and is floating around out there in the worlds somewhere. In the scheme of things, technically if he were, he’s still dead to me. In that form, he’d have no idea who I am or care about knowing me. Darkness has no thoughts on such things. I know this because he told me what it was like for him before he became something else.
Before he was mine.
Climbing to my feet, I push the full plate of food away and leave the house. The lake is calling me again, and I think I need it right now. I need to think and to think I need quiet. I can’t keep being this way, not towards the innocent ones. I knew what I was signing up for, so I have to work through this hateful bullshit and get over it.
I just have to figure out how to do that.
L ife
IZA HAS ALWAYS BEEN a creature I love to watch. Whether it’s her quick smile or open-mindedness about how life works, or the way she leaps into every aspect of life, I’ll never know for sure. Something about her pulls me back to her, makes me help her when I can, made me break my own rules for the first time in creation. The result of that offense is looking at me with eyes full of nothing but chilling cold. A fire that freezes your very soul in place, while demanding their will to be met.
Even I’m affected by a stare like that, but that is not why I’m giving in to the demand.
Turning away from it, I watch the sad woman, who was once a vivacious child, stare off into a lake that melts for her because of this odd place… loves her. I was unaware of how alive, and sentient the Sidhe had become. Not that I created it, no one did. The Sidhe came to be all on its own, and there’s not another one like it in existence, anywhere. No Light equivalent, either. The Sidhe chooses its shape, its companion, and where and when it exists.
Iza’s influence on it is astounding and unprecedented. She has a way of making things, powerful dark things, adapt to her instead of her adapting to them. Like Phobe for example. She changed an ageless creature with no emotion, into someone who laughed at her terrible jokes. A creature that liked to watch her sleep and loved her with every cell of his being. That laughter inside of her pulled on him, changed him.
I sigh, there are many battles ahead for her, but the one inside of her I cannot help her with. Iza is the only one that can decide if she wants to remain the Shepherd for the Feyrie, or if she wants to wield the Dark Magiks to save them. Or even if she wants to walk away from it all. I’m pretty sure that if she does throw them all out, the Sidhe will remain with her, especially since it gave up part of its—soul is a good word for it—to keep her healthy when she is away from it.
Never has the Sidhe made such a sacrifice or a bond with another. The Magiks inside of her will not choose another while she lives either. I think they might agree with her rather low opinion of some of the Feyrie. Like the naked ones back at the house. Those Feyrie are loyal enough to the dark to survive the Magiks but dumb enough to perhaps not survive Iza.
I wonder if she realizes that she’s changing and that whatever she is to become is more than she was fated to be? Iza does like to break out of the molds and drive on the sidewalk when it comes to the road of life. She is what she is and makes no apologies for it, but she struggles, too. Much like she is now.
Iza has this light inside of her that, somehow, she protected and nurtured while growing up under terrible circumstances. It gives her compassion, sympathy, and makes her heart fill with laughter, even in the darkest times. The light is in danger, her grief—her feelings of guilt and anger, are smothering it. She’s fighting it, trying to protect it from all of this, but she is struggling with it.
If she loses it, she is a danger to everyone—but that isn’t what concerns me. It’s what it will do to her, to that light she held onto despite impossible odds. Therefore, the next step has to be taken to ensure that light remains and although, a bit more battered, Iza remains who she is.
The survival of this world, my favorite among them all, depends on it.
I za
A NEST OF vampires sprinkled with shifters brought me to the roof of this building. Looking down at the traffic and the people below is a bit surreal. If I had to guess, I’m probably close to six-hundred feet in the air. A fall like this would probably kill me because you can’t heal if your brain is soup spilled out on the concrete.
“Iza, what are you doing?” Adriem’s voice snaps me out of it.
Giving myself a good mental shake, I turn and walk away from the edge, but for the entire drive home, it haunts me. The uproar when I get to the Sidhe doesn’t help my mood, either.
When I walk into the dining room, everyone is talking at once and loudly.
“ENOUGH!” I yell. Immediately the noise stops. “What is going on?”
“Did you tell Jameson that Ruthie was to go on trial?” Someone demands, I look at the dragon and half-heartedly search for their name. Vernon.
“Yes, do you have a problem with that?”
“Don’t your Feyrie laws require her execution?” My Feyrie laws?
“Technically, they demand yours, too. Since you participated in the discussion about electing someone else.” He sits down and shuts up. I walk towards him and my Magiks that have been slumbering wake up. Roaring into existence they brush up against Vern and makes itself known.
The Dark is angry.
Frozen in place, with only his eyes moving frantically around, looking for help, he stands there while the Magiks invade his mind and soul. They’re searching for the real reason he’s doing this. Digging, digging… oh, there it is. The Magiks don’t hold back. It shows me everything.
The conclusion is, Vernon is a greedy moron.
“You think that I get paid for this job?” Throwing my head back I laugh. He’s treating it like a human job, like a mayor or something. In his head are dreams of riding in to be the hero and organizing the Feyrie, of sitting at his fancy mahogany desk while making executive decisions. With his attractive secretary who wears short, tight skirts. The worst part of it is the dream of hobnobbing with rich people.
The Magiks release him, and he sags in his chair. Weakly he says, “You have money.”
“That money is my own. Even if you “took” my job, you wouldn’t get it. You’d just get killed, dumbass.” I’m still chuckling. I can’t get the image of him sipping tea and laughing with what he determined the schoth to be. Rich businessmen who look like characters from a movie. Leaning down I put my face in front of his.
I let my glamour drop and let him see the way my face changes and how my hair moves and weaves on its own. I can see myself reflected in his widened eyes. Smiling, I laugh when his eyes widen even more.
“Today I killed a dozen of your kind, without breaking a sweat. I beheaded a dozen more vampires and enjoyed it. This would be your daily life, Vern. Killing, and fighting. There are no big desks and hot secretaries. You still want it?”
