2. Thoren

Chapter two

Thoren

(That's not what we're doing)

U ncle Maxime pulls me into his train room after he takes the new butler to his apartment. The house doesn't have a lot of staff, but the few positions we do keep filled are necessary to keep this place from descending into chaos. The problem with Dec is that he looks like he's going to add to the chaos, not help with it. I don't know what it is about him. Blonds just seem like chaos engines. Butlers are supposed to have dark hair. They're supposed to be tall, not short like Dec, and they're supposed to have elegance and grace—Dec looks like he trips over air, and when Uncle led him away, he did.

"That human is all wrong for us," I start as soon as the door to the train room closes.

Uncle holds up his hand, cutting off my complaint. "You're wrong. He graduated top of his class from Cavenaugh's, and he spent time interning with them, proving himself more than capable of buttling. You're just mad because he's not Arcan. It's ok to miss your favorite butler, but don't take it out on Dec. He's wonderful." He gets a starry, far off look in his gray eyes, and his smile turns nostalgic. "He reminds me of someone I used to know. You remember that friend I spent a decade running around Europe with about fifty years ago? He was called home when his father passed, but I loved that man. Dec reminds me of him. They have the same earnestness. It's beautiful to see again."

Well, that seals it. Even if I don't think Dec is going to fit in with us, he's staying; Uncle is already attached.

"What do you want, Uncle? What's going on?" I question, dropping onto the guest sofa.

Uncle has filled this room with a multilayered table for his model trains, and all around the room, there are elevated tracks for the trains that don't fit on the table. It would be impressive if the room was small, but it's the mansion's ballroom that he's converted into his train room. It's the biggest room in the mansion, and the table at the center is six meters in diameter. There's only one safe place for visitors, and that's on this tiny, two-seater sofa.

Uncle pshaws me, hitting a button to start his trains moving. He ducks under the table and comes up in the center of it. "There's a situation in Phoenix that requires your attention. A shelak spawned in an empty house on the Gila River. There's been three murders in as many days. I sent Hawthorn, but I lost contact with him yesterday. Go save that idiot and kill the demon."

I sigh from the depths of my beleaguered soul, heaving myself up from the sofa.

Shelaks are insatiable spirits that spawn from emptiness. They possess the bodies of people with weak wills in order to use the body to fill the emptiness. They use sensation to fill the void, and that usually ends up killing the host, because the void is endless but a body is finite. Shelaks love to eat, but they can never eat enough, and a body can only consume so much before it becomes a problem. So the shelak eats. And eats. And eats more. They will eat everything until the body they're in dies. Or if their first sensation is pain, then they will hurt and hurt and hurt until they kill the body they're in. I've never known a shelak to exercise any kind of restraint because it has no comprehension of temperance.

"Why am I not surprised that Hawthorn ended up possessed?" I grumble, heading out the door.

Before I get the door closed, I hear Uncle shout, "We don't know for sure he's been possessed!"

I roll my eyes, shutting the door. If there are murders and he's gone incommunicado, that moron got himself possessed, no doubt about it. I love the guy, but this is the kind of thing he'd do just to be able to say he did it.

I stomp to the elevator and take it up to the roof access. I take the ten steps from the elevator up to the access door and squint as the eye-searing sunlight blinds me before my nictitating membrane slides into place to protect my eyes from the brightness. On the ledge of the roof, one of my brothers, Faulkes, rests in his stone form with a flock of chrylich cuddling him.

The chrylich are smaller versions of my species, the karkoyl. They're non-native to Earth but migrated here tens of thousands of years ago and consider themselves Earthlings. In their stone forms, they blend in with the grotesques that were inspired by them that humans use to decorate and ward off spirits in temples all over the world. Humans called some of the guardians "gargoyles" after the sound that the ones that function as gutter drains make, and the chrylich have adopted the word for themselves. They call my family "the big gargoyles" and we call them "the little gargoyles." We get along well and enjoy spending our days resting together like this.

I sigh as Ethan lands on the roof and takes his stone form. A group of chrylich surround him immediately. I'm a creature of darkness; I'm supposed to be asleep right now too. Unfortunately humans are not typically nocturnal, and they expect most people to be awake when the sun is in the sky. Even more unfortunately, as the eldest of seven, I've taken on the duty of maintaining the illusion of being human with the inhabitants of this planet.

I push off the facade of my human form, shedding it like an itchy, too tight sweater. I don't hate my human skin, but it's not my natural form, and I can only live in it for a few hours at a time before it becomes uncomfortable. I had to train my body to take on this form, and even after fifty years of expertise with the form shift, it still feels ill-fitting.

My wings unfold as soon as I'm free of the human skin, and I stretch them out, enjoying the freedom of movement again. I give them a few swings to loosen the cramped muscles up. I release the spell on my clothes that turns them into a believable costume that humans don't question too much and straighten the beaded bevalan leather loincloth that covers my modesty with a brush of my hand.

The bevalan from which this piece was made was my first kill. It's decorated in a traditional bead pattern of my people that tells others who see it that I'm one of the Trustworthy—warriors that fought in the War of Bathilde. We fought for and won the freedom of our people against the In'ai, the most brutal species of colonizers in the Andromeda Galaxy. For a thousand years my people were oppressed by the In'ai, and when my generation rose up, we selected warriors to face our oppressors. I was among those selected, and we won against the might of an empire.

We, a few thousand warriors, were absolute badasses against the millions of soldiers sent to stamp us out. We earned our title, The Trustworthy, and every gargoyle that sees my beading knows immediately what I am and that they're safe with me.

I reach into the pouch hanging off the belt of my loincloth and pull out a single card. It's The Fool, a gargoyle with a sui flower crown over his red horns standing in a sea of stars with one shining bright. He carries a rucksack with a small furry scidi following him in the void. The card is midnight blue with silver inlay outlining the picture, and it's worn around the edges from how often I pull the deck of tarot cards out.

I don't think I've pulled this card since the end of the war when my family was deciding whether we should pursue mercenary work or answer the summons from the Intergalactic Planetary Preservation Society that brought us here.

I'm not embarking on a life changing journey, but the cards aren't usually wrong, so I pull another card from the pouch: the Ace of Swords.

Ok, that's an omen. Not a bad one. It's an omen of success in the next thing in my life, but what the fuck do they mean pairing it with The Fool? I'm definitely not embarking on a new journey here.

"I'm going to save Hawthorn; this isn't a grand adventure." I speak directly to the pouch and pull another card.

When I lift my hand out of the pouch, two cards come out, and I almost gag at the sight of them. First the Ace of Cups on top and then the Two of Cups.

No. Nope. Absolutely not.

"Hawthorn is my brother," I hiss at the cards. "That's disgusting."

First of all, I am not in the market for a mate yet. I will eventually go back to Ukon to find a proper mate to spend my resting years with, but I am nowhere near old enough to settle down. Second, even if the cards don't mean Hawthorn specifically, there are only seven other karkoyl on this planet. They live in this house, and I am not fucking any of them. Gross .

I shove all the cards back into their pouch and give the deck a stern warning. "I will not be manipulated by you. You know that romance is off the table for me right now. I'm not interested in relationships at this time in my life, and I absolutely will not be looking at any of my brothers with those eyes. Someday when we return to Ukon, I will look for a mate, but until then, you keep your love cards to yourself." I reach in again, but this time I tell the deck what I want. "Give me the Seven of Swords."

When I pull the next card out, it's the one I requested. I slap it over the bloodstone rune on my thigh, activating a distortion spell that will hide me from human technology. It stays on my thigh as the activation key, and I start running. By the time I jump from the edge of the roof, I reach full speed, breaking the sound barrier with a clap of thunder. I spread my wings and catch my weight, flapping faster than the human eye could track if I was visible to them. I open the thread of connection I have with all my brothers, honing in on Hawthorn's location and orienting myself to him.

I could teleport, but I take every opportunity to use my wings because flying is superior to every other mode of transportation. This is the hill I will die on.

I fly faster than most airplanes and significantly lower, and the distortion spell keeps me from being caught on anyone's radar as I fly southwest. From where we live in Colorado it takes me about an hour to travel to Phoenix. I'm not too worried about getting there as quickly as possible, because gargoyles can take a lot of punishment before we worry about death creeping up on us, and hopefully Hawthorn had the decency to shift to stone before the shelak took over completely.

Who am I kidding, Hawthorn wouldn't have done that. He's probably in his gargoyle skin, without his distortion shield activated, and causing trouble, because that's the kind of shit that fucker would do. He makes me want to rearrange his face sometimes. Maybe I should fly full speed. It'd only shave off ten minutes, but a lot can happen in ten minutes when a gargoyle's involved.

Yeah.

I speed up, flying as fast as possible to Phoenix.

My connection to him leads me to a fucking restaurant in downtown Phoenix, and I land outside of it, pulling my human form back into place before deactivating my distortion spell. Humans can't see magic, so they ignore the appearance of a random man on the sidewalk; they literally would not be able to see me if I stayed in my gargoyle form, but I may need to talk to some of them, so I shift.

It's startling how unprepared for the wider universe the species on this planet is. The evolutionary lack in humans is such a strange and unique phenomenon that the Intergalactic Planetary Preservation Society declared Earth a protected planet and humans a protected species. The IPPS works in conjunction with the Council of Supernatural Species to keep Earthlings safe from hostile species that would take advantage of their inability to see magic. Some species have tried large scale invasions, but we've turned them all back without involving humans. As a group of karkoyl, we are well adapted and skilled at stopping invasion forces.

Slowly, other supernatural species are procreating with humans, and eventually there won't be any pure humans left and the species will be able to see magic, at which point they will have to catch up with the rest of us, but until then the IPPS has designated a budget to provide security for the planet. They have stationed my family here to protect humans from hostile species that would destroy humanity for any reason. Generally we're here to deal with large scale invasion forces (there have been five attempts since we arrived in 1949), but there are smaller problems that we take on between the larger issues.

Like shelaks. The problem with shelaks isn't that they can kill one human at a time; the problem is if left unchecked they will kill all the humans one at a time. That definitely falls under the purview of the IPPS.

I pull open the door to the upscale restaurant, garnering a sneer from the ma?tre d'. I ignore the man, scanning the restaurant to find my brother. He's not hard to spot. A commotion involving three of the staff catches my eyes right off. He's at a table that clearly doesn't belong to him, grabbing food off the plates of the patrons and shoving it indiscriminately into his face. In his gargoyle form but not his stone form. Fucker.

The staff can't see him, of course, they're just panicking about food lifting off the table and disappearing in a mess because shelaks are messy eaters. They want to get all the food in them all at once. It's as disgusting as it sounds.

I stomp over to Hawthorn and grab him into a chokehold, pulling him backwards away from the table. I weave through the tables with his body. He struggles for a moment but eventually realizes this is a new sensation (choking), and he goes limp in my arms, enjoying it with a deeply disturbing moan of pleasure.

Shudder. Ewwww.

"I hate you," I mutter to the gargoyle somewhere inside the shell who allowed the shelak to possess him.

Once I have him outside, I shed part of my human skin, revealing the gray skin and black claws of my left hand. I reach into my tarot pouch, pulling out a card. Without looking, I slap it over his heart. I press my claws into the tough gray skin around the card, activating the bloodstone magic that runs in my veins. Hawthorn suddenly tenses, a choked cry escapes him, and then with a burning flash of light, he goes completely limp again. I lay him out on the sidewalk, standing over the idiot, and I grab The World card off his chest. Black vapor pours out of him with each heave of his lungs, dissipating into nothing.

I kiss the card, thank it for helping fulfill the shelak's fate, and return it to my pouch. Now I just have to wait for this fucker to wake up so I can beat the life out of him for being so stupid as to get possessed.