18

Mor Trisencor and the Path that Led to Nowhere

By the time Mor reached the alley filled with his secretary’s scent, Violet was already gone. A feral ache he didn’t know he could feel blistered over his hardened heart, and he braced a palm against the brick wall to support himself. She was only his secretary. Truly, he hardly knew the human, and death was not a new thing to him.

But.

Seeing the pink sweater lying abandoned at the foot of the wall in the alley empty of life, hope, and promises... Queensbane, it was over.

He’d gotten a human killed.

A human who had trusted that he wasn’t the monster tearing through the city. A human who had spent her last months writing articles about that same monster, knowing her work could put her in danger.

Mor’s fist pounded once over his furious heart as he tried to dull the unwelcomed feeling, bringing himself back to his senses even though death had caught up with him—again.

Perhaps Violet was right to call him ‘Doom.’

Since the moment she’d shown up at Mor’s cathedral door looking for a job and was mistakenly marked as his lover, death had been following Violet the same way it had always followed him. Only, he’d been able to dodge it—had been dodging it for quite some time. But it had caught Violet in its snares.

Mor bit his lower lip until he punctured the flesh and tasted his own sweet fairy blood. He imagined Violet becoming one of the many victims lost to the forest, a body Luc left for Mor to find, leaving behind thoughts meant to torture him every morning to come.

Why hadn’t Violet stayed at the café like she was told? Why didn’t his secretary listen when he instructed her not to go to her human home? Why did she take off her faeborn-cursed sweater?!

He lifted the sweater from the ground, running his thumb over the soft material. It was torn clean down the middle, hanging open and mangled. A smell lifted from it; the sharp, fruity smell of fairy blood. Mor furrowed his brows as he turned the garment over, but he couldn’t spot the blood. It took him a moment to realize that what he was smelling wasn’t on the sweater at all.

A drying puddle lay at his feet. He sprang back a step, searching for traces of Shadow Fairy in it. But it wasn’t Luc’s blood—it smelled nothing of the Shadows. In fact, it smelled of…

Yarn.

“Queensbane,” he cursed. The blood smeared into a trail that led out of the alley. He followed it, drawing one of his fairsabers, skin tingling with the sensation of pins and needles even before he reached the front door of the Yarn Stitch minutes later.

He barged in, and angry female eyes fired all sorts of silent insults and horrific curses in his direction.

“Where is my secretary?” he demanded. “Is she here?”

Freida rose from her seat on the couch. The coffee table had been swept of yarn projects, and upon it lay Gretchen, bleeding all the way to the carpet, eyes closed, a gaping hole in her stomach.

Freida grabbed a needle from the pile on the end table. The female’s heels clapped over the floor, her gemstone earrings glistening in the storefront lights. It appeared she’d rushed here straight from her day job. “You dragged us into your war, Assassin!” Her shout was magnified by magic, booming over the yarn-filled shelves and far out into the street. “You nearly got one of my sisters killed!”

Mor took a step back as the old woman reached him, her fist tightly wound around her needle. He glanced at Gretchen on the table again as the story in Freida’s tone came together. He shifted his approach, allowing his shoulders to lose their ice-hard rigidness.

“I did not know that would happen,” he promised.

“What did you think would happen, you fool?! Gretchen had to intervene on your human’s behalf! Now she may die here on my table!” Freida barked. “Stay out of our way now—we will go deal with the Shadow Fairy ourselves!”

Mor’s shoulders hardened again and he wobbled a little, feeling his own faeborn blood leaking down his leg from the deep wound in his side. “He will take you all down,” he warned in a low growl. “You are out of practice, Sisterhood, and you are no match for someone of that Shadow Fairy’s bloodline. He’s no ordinary fairy!”

“Then why don’t you tell your Prince to stop him? If Alabastian’s reputation has any morsel of truth to it—which I know it does—he should be able to put an end to all this.” Freida’s words were cold, cutting, and clear, and Mor’s face fell. He staggered a step, only to realize he’d lost feeling down the right side of his body, all the way to his toes.

“I cannot ask him to do that,” he said in a quieter voice. “That Shadow came here for me. I will deal with him. Do not get involved, and don’t you dare make a suggestion to Cress.”

Freida pointed in his face. “No, you foolish male. That Shadow is mine to deal with now. You stay out of my way!”

Mor inhaled an aggravated breath. “I apologize for Gretchen, and I will make it right if it’s the last thing I ever do, but…” The room teetered and Mor tried to blink away the hallucination of moving shelves and couches. “But you can’t…”

He noticed Freida’s gaze sweep down him to the widening puddle of fairy blood at his feet. He tried to take a step, but everything around him tilted fast. Before he knew it, he was being caught by several sets of treacherous female hands before his face hit the floor.

“Pearl,” he heard Frieda snap as darkness painted itself over his mind, blotting out his thoughts. “Get him out of here.”

For the first time in a long while, Mor dreamt in colour and taste. He dreamt of cool green water, tasted thin grains of salt, and listened to a herd of navy water dragons tell him a story beneath the sea where no one could find him.

It had been years since he’d visited the dragons. He was surprised they still remembered him, still spoke his real name with fondness. They invited him into their circle amidst silver reefs and pale stone statues, where the undersea light glimmered off their deep blue scales.

The story they told was of a young fae male who carried a blessing of the sea inside of him for the sacrifices he had made, and the evil he had stood against. A blessing kept secret for numerous faeborn seasons, that not even the stars or the sky deities would whisper about for its preciousness.

One that had kept him alive when the shadows of the air had come knocking. It was the first time Mor knew for certain that the water dragons had been looking out for him all these years by imparting the gift of never being able to forget.

If it could still be called a gift at all.

In the middle of his slumber, he asked them, “Why can I not just forget the bad memories and keep the good ones? Wouldn’t that make things easier?”

An old dragon laughed, a booming echo through the water. “I think you will soon find that you need the bad memories, too. They can tell you things. They can give you answers, and sometimes they can solve problems. You must allow yourself to think of them every now and then, Son of Pane.”

Mor’s salty tears mixed with the sea water.

“But it’s hard to think of those memories. It hurts,” he admitted.

The dragon’s long tail swished behind him as it leaned forward, coming eye-to-eye with Mor like Mor was still just a childling of the village, and hadn’t left and grown up. “The hurt is why we need those memories. The hurt is what makes us understand others who are hurting, dear Son. If we grow numb to the hurt, we become shells with no hearts. And your heart is what has saved you,” the dragon said. “Don’t despise your hurt, and most importantly, don’t despise your heart.”