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Kink Bingo: His (Marking/Possession)

Jul3

[community profile] kink_bingo – O-1 – possession/marking – from my card.

Fae Apoc, Addergoole, year Nine, the same characters as here. Fae Apoc’s landing page is here (Lj Link); Addergoole is here.

She tried to breathe, but found she was having trouble working around the panic. He’d seemed like a such a nice guy, before today. Before he and his friends had jumped her in the hallway. Even then, he’d hung back, trying to convince the rest of them to be gentle with her.

It hadn’t been his hand that had bruised her ribs, but it was his large, large hand around her throat now. Not choking, not at all, though his thumbs were pressing into the sides of her neck with nearly bruising force, but holding her while she struggled, holding her upright while she wanted to collapse to the ground and sob.

“Look at me,” he murmured. Terrifyingly, her body obeyed without asking her what she thought about the matter, she found herself looking into his dark brown eyes. He looked concerned, even now.

“What?” she whispered. She’d worn her voice out, earlier, shouting. “What do you want from me?”

“Time will tell,” he answered unhelpfully. “What I already have from you is what you need to understand. I’m going to let go of you for a moment, and I want you to sit down and try to pull yourself together, okay?”

Since sitting down was what she wanted to do anyway, she nodded, feeling his fingers catching her chin as she moved. Why didn’t he just let her go?

She didn’t want to leave right now, she reminded herself. The halls outside were dark and full of monsters. In here, it was light, and there was only the one monster, at least.

He released her, and she sagged to the floor, watching him with dull interest as he walked over to his desk and picked up a bag. “I know,” she breathed, “they told me words had power. Watch what I say. I didn’t think…” She hadn’t thought. That covered it.

“You can be caught even if you are thinking. It just takes more work. And I’m won’t be unkind. But you have to be very clear on this. You agreed to it, no matter what the duress. I own you. And until I graduate, or you do, you belong to me. You’re mine, Ceinwen. That is, after all, what you said.”

She nodded, afraid to repeat it, afraid something else would happen if she reinforced it. She was his. What did that mean? He couldn’t keep her a prisoner here, could he? In the middle of a school?

He returned to her, still holding the bag. “I will take very good care of you,” he murmured, as he knelt in front of her.

He placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. This close, now that she could breathe again, he smelled earthy, but not unpleasantly so. “I will protect you,” he continued, a bit louder. It sounded like a ritual. “I will guide you, and keep you safe, and warm, and fed.” The next kiss went on the top of her head, and then he tilted her chin up with one of his huge hands, and kissed her lips. “This is what I will do for you, Ceinwen, because you are mine.”

“I’m yours, Thornburn,” she echoed, moved by something she couldn’t put words to. The situation seemed to demand the words from her, but her pride demanded she add on to them. “Although I didn’t know what I was saying, although I came to you because I was scared, because you said you’d keep me safe.”

“And I did, and I will.” He reached into the bag, then, and pulled out… something. It glittered warmly in the artificial light. Some sort of necklace, it looked like, a series of amber plaques bordered and connected in gold. A choker? It had no closure, she noted, in a moment of rising panic. How was he going to put that on her? How was it going to come off?

He murmured words that made no sense, and the choker parted between two plaques. She shied back, and he moved forward more quickly than she could escape, holding the choker against her throat, around her neck, with one hand. He pressed the ends closed, murmuring again, and the necklace settled in to place against her skin.

“You are mine,” he repeated, “and I’ve marked you such. As long as you’re wearing my collar, no-one will mess with you. No-one will touch you, no-one will harm you.”

The collar was warm, a weight that seemed to encircle all of her the way his hands did, echoing her pulse back to her. She took a breath, and felt it remind her of its presence, pressing against her windpipe. She shifted, and it moved with her. He would be with her every moment she wore it, because she’d never be able to forget it was there.

Tears welled up in her eyes, but the panic was gone. She couldn’t escape this. “I’m yours,” she repeated. With his mark on her, wrapped around her, there was no way to deny it.

He brushed a thumb against the collar, looking pleased. “You wear it well,” he rumbled. “I will be proud to have you as mine.”

The pressure against her throat seemed unbearable, as his praise sent waves of pleasure through her. She was lost.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/68162.html. You can comment here or there.

30Daysmeme, On the Set

Jun30

Day 24 of 30 days of Fiction: “24) Write a scene on a movie set”

In FaeApoc setting, or, at least, meta about the faeapoc setting, specifically the web-serial Addergoole.

Fae Apoc has A Landing Page (LJ Link).

“So, wait, what’s supposed to be going on here? Isn’t this a little unbelievable? Instant lust at first sight?”

Arthur rolled his eyes at Mindy. The actress had the arrogance and the look to play Shahin, but she understood none of the subtlety, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t even bothered to read the script, much less the source material.

The girl they’d gotten to play Kailani was a brilliant actress, but that was the only way she could ever be called brilliant. She didn’t need to be, of course; her lines were all written for her. The guy playing Conrad had the smile down, and that was all he really needed. Olly, playing Jamian, on the other hand, was so impressive at the role that Arthur had yet to figure out if the actor was in actuality a guy or a girl.

And Arthur himself? He stepped up to Mindy, setting a hand on her bare back. “It’s not quite first sight,” he murmured; “they’ve been courting all week. And, of course, there’s the magic to contend with.”

“The magic,” she said flatly, thinking, clearly, that it was a come-on. Yeah, she hadn’t read the script.

“They are made for each other,” he smiled, without a touch of shame. “Almost literally. They are carried away with lust, not because they’re both so damn hot,” he allowed that to be a smirk; both he and Mindy knew they were good looking, after all, “but because the touch of bare skin sends something like electricity through them. They get carried away by the feedback from her power.”

She looked up at him through long eyelashes; they’d even gotten the height right in their casting. “You’re really into this, aren’t you?”

He pressed his hand against her. “I like to know where I stand.”

Yeah, he thought, grinning to himself, they’d cast Emrys right, too.

My current fund-raising goals:
art for the Rin & Girey Ebook
and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.

Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/66939.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysMeme: I Hate You

Jun27

Day 20 of 30 days of Fiction: “20) Write a scene with the opening line “I hate you; I just want you to know that.”

(Days 18 & 19 are waiting on [personal profile] kc_obrien to wake up)

Fae Apoc, Addergoole, year Nine, new characters. Fae Apoc’s landing page is here (Lj Link); Addergoole is here.

“I hate you; I just want you to know that!” She shouted the last words as she headed for his bedroom door. Somewhere, she could go somewhere and get away, think for a while, get away from his smug smiling face for a while.

“Sit down,” he said, without so much as a frown or a raised voice. Unwillingly, without any choice at all in the matter, she sat, her ass thumping on the squishy carpet.

“I hate you,” she muttered, scooting towards her escape on her ass. Unhurried, he walked past her and leaned against the door.

“And Friday you thought I was such a nice guy,” he teased.

“That was before yesterday,” she retorted. She wasn’t getting out that way, and the underground room had no other exit; she stopped moving. “I hate you.”

“You’ll get over it in time. At least enough to see that you made the right choice.”

He was so damn self-assured. He had seemed like the best choice, when he and his friends had been bullying her in the hallway Saturday night. “Just pick one of us and it will stop,” they’d kept saying. When the short one with the fangs bit her, she’d made her choice. Now, now she didn’t want anything to do with him, and she was stuck. At least she could still hate him.

“You can’t change the way I feel!” Could he?

“Actually, I could.” He sank down to the floor, so he ws only towering over her by a foot or so. “I could order you to love me. But I won’t.”

He sounded as if he thought he was being so very generous. “Thank you,” she muttered. “I still hate you.”

“That’s okay,” he replied, the smile finally gone. “I understand.”

My current fund-raising goals:
art for two upcoming e-books, and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.

Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/64564.html. You can comment here or there.

Interesting links re. ethnicity

Jun13

I find 2a in this post by [personal profile] recessional to be very interesting.

I confess, I rarely notice ethnicity in stories and tend to fill in my own coloration (I wish wish wish cover art matched author’s descriptions!); in Addergoole, when trying to get an ethnic mix that approximated the ethnic mix of the US (while not having quarters of students), I still ended up with some weird concentrations. Maybe I should do an ethnicity cloud for Ag. Hunh, that would probably look weird.

But anyway, I liked the link.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/56730.html. You can comment here or there.

Invisibles

May30

This is the first half of a semi-sequel to Discovery Channel

The supply trucks had stopped coming around the first of the year; the TV broadcasts had more or less stopped around Thanksgiving time, and the radio broadcasts were getting rarer and rarer, so the fae residents-slash-captives of the “voluntary relocation center” (internment camp) didn’t get an explanation as to why they were abandoned; the food just stopped coming.

At first, they assumed that the remnants of the human government were trying to quietly get them rid of, and shrugged philosophically. They’d been expecting that for a while, after all, and they had their gardens and their little farm already. They’d be a bit short on some more exotic foods for a while, but they were magic beings; they’d make do.

Weeks went on, though, and the mood of the guards that still patrolled the halls of their former-high-school prison shifted. They stopped eying their captives with belligerent fear and began eying the livestock in the courtyards and the greenhouse with the overwintered vegetables with obvious hunger. They talked, when they didn’t think any of the internees could hear them, about their hungry families and the paychecks that didn’t come anymore. They talked about how the monsters in here were safer than their own children were.

Finally, Dita, called the Riddle of the Sphinx, who had ended up being their leader by inevitability and force of will, pulled the guards aside and suggested they just move their families into the compound. “They’ll be safe here,” she assured them, “and we have food to spare.”

The guards hemmed and hawed – they were supposed to be guarding the internees, not fraternizing with them, not locking themselves in, too – but their so-very-friendly prisoners had the magic to make food grow faster and produce more than it ought to, and the walls around their internment camp were high and sturdy. In the end, hunger and a continually deteriorating situation outside won over fear. Their guards became their companions, and they locked the gates from the inside.

That had been mid-February. When the flowers started coming up in earnest, some time in early May, radio broadcasts had trickled down to maybe one a week, there was wheat growing on the rooftops, and something was horribly wrong in the halls of their camp.

At first, they thought one of them had gone stir-crazy. They’d been in this prison for over two years now, in conditions that, while not crowded, were nowhere near ideal. That none of them had gone off the deep end yet was more surprising than that someone had finally cracked.

It was a pretty bad crack, too; people went missing, first one, then two more, and then another three. By the time the three had gone missing, the first one to vanish had been discovered, so very very dead, the dismembered, desiccated, mummified parts spread over the playground. It was the sort of death only another one of them could pull off, at least that quickly, that efficiently. They started eyeing each other with distrust, travelling only in groups, and making locks for their doors and walls to put locks in. The barracks became a warren of tiny, dark, locked rooms… and still people vanished.

They had the magic, in their group, to read minds, too, three mind-readers. Dita set her foot down, and the mind-readers read each other’s minds, then set up a double-elimination queue to find their murderer.

Cynthia, the most junior of the mind-readers, tried hard not to think about some of the things she’d found her fellow inmates to be guilty of. Not this string of murders, no – she found not the slightest shred of evidence that anyone here had even witnessed anything related to these deaths. But there was a lot of untidiness in these minds. There were tiny peccadilloes and crimes that would be felonies, if human law still cared about them, guilty consciences and sordid desires. Some of it was really, really creepy.

By the time she reached the last person, her friend Aaron, she was ready to destroy large portions of her mind just to get rid of the slimy memories. The walls around their prison had never seemed so constraining. And she had never been less happy to see Aaron.

“How’s it going, Synthie?” He plopped down in the comfy, ratty armchair she was using as an interrogation seat and grinned at her, only the off-skew cant of one ear suggesting he was at all worried.

“Urgh.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t want to know what’s in your brain, Airhead. It had better be just air and stuffing…”

“Or what? You’re too good a person to cut out the parts you don’t like.”

“I swear, if I find anything in your mind that I don’t want to see, Aaron, I’m…”

He was out of his chair with his hand over her mouth before she could finish the sentence. “You know better, Synth… Cynthia,” he whispered urgently, his cobalt-blue eyes staring at her. “You’re tired, and they forgot to feed you, here,” he pressed a cookie into her hand while she stared in worried confusion at him. “You’re not going to like everything in my brain,” he explained quietly, and comprehension finally worked its way through her exhausted mind. She nodded, and he removed his hand.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and devoured the cookie. I swear were words one didn’t say casually; that she’d forgotten enough to slip was an indication of how worn out she was. “Well… let’s hope there’s not too much in there, okay? I really want to bleach my brain out.”

“That bad?” He sounded worried. That, in itself, was worrisome; Aaron never showed concern.

“That bad,” she agreed quietly. “Let me get this over with, please?” There, let him chew on that; she never said please.

“Okay,” he agreed quietly, and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. “Do your worst.”

It couldn’t be him. She shouldn’t even look. But what if it was? If she trusted friendship and doomed them all? She closed her eyes, too, pretended this was someone else, and murmured the Working that would let her read his mind.

Don’t let Synthie see what she doesn’t want to see was at the forefront of his mind, fences neatly lined up, pointing her towards hey, about those murders? I didn’t do them. He was anxious, little bits in the back of his mind dancing around. Her threat had worried him; more than that, the drawn, tired way she looked worried him. Is she okay? Is she going to forgive me for…

She knew better, but she poked a little bit, telling herself she needed to find out for certain that he wasn’t the murderer. …forgive me, no, not there, ack, PORN! His mind flashed naked cat-girls in improbable positions, and she reeled backwards, falling off her chair.

“Synth?” She was still far enough inside his consciousness that she could hear his worry and guilt as he scrambled onto the floor next to her. “Synth… Cynthia, damn, sorry, are you okay?” C’mon, be okay. Be okay and don’t poke anymore, please? Stupid murderer. Messing up our friendship.

She shook her head carefully. “Airhead, if you ever assault me with porn again…” She made sure to make the not-a-threat cheerful, and tried to stifle the headache that wanted to leak out.

He flushed. “It’s the mind-blanking technique they taught us, you know… pink horses.”

“Purple elephants,” she nodded, but this time, let the exasperation leak. “Airhead, you’re not supposed to be blocking my mind-reading. You’re supposed to be proving your innocence.”

“Synthie, if you don’t already know I’m innocent, you’re not going to find it in my brain. Look, this was a nice idea, but if it’s not any of us… doesn’t it occur to you that that’s even worse?”

“Worse?” She blinked at him. “Worse than being trapped in her with a monster?”

“That’s how the guards feel all the time, isn’t it? What I mean is… we know each other. We know our flaws and our powers and everything else, every one of us. We’re too close not to. But if something managed to sneak in here with us and remain hidden, except to pop out and kill us…”

“We’re dealing with a completely unknown, invisible enemy.” Cynthia gulped. “Okay. That is pretty bad.” She chewed on her cuticle, nevermind what her mother would say. “Aaron, what do we do about something we can’t see?” Why was she asking him?

“Well,” he mused, “we have to find a way to make the invisible visible.”

dailyprompt ‘making the invisible visible.’

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/47613.html. You can comment here or there.

Being Alone

May10

Sometime in September, I posted Two by Two, a fae apoc story set in a travelling show. clare_dragonfly asked:

“As usual though I want more context 😉 Why did Anaca allow herself to be caught? (Or if she didn’t want to, how did they catch her?)”

This is a partial answer to this, from Anaca’s point of view.

***

I’d gotten used to hiding, but I never really got used to being alone.

When my Change had come, I’d been just past my fourteenth birthday, and the world had been mad with wild gods in the skies. My bones had twisted, my thumbs vanished, my tail grew, while I hid in my closet and tried not to scream. When it was over, I looked something like a rabbit, and something like a deer, and only like a human in the silhouette.

A long time past, that, and, that time, my family and I had managed to flee before the lynch mob came to get me. Anything strange was suspect, and I was definitely strange.

I learned to Mask from a travelling biker gang not long afterwards, bikers who mostly didn’t bother, in that age, to hide their horns and tusks. That helped some; it helped hide me from the strangers who were afraid of all things fae. But it didn’t help the real problems. My parents were not fae, and neither were my siblings, and, though they tried to hide it, they were as afraid of the monster in their midst as the strangers we were hiding from were. I ran off in the middle of the night with the bikers, and tried to pretend it didn’t hurt.

So’jers like that had no real place for a teenaged girl who’d barely Changed, so I didn’t stay with them for very long. I bounced from group to group, hiding where I could, helping when I was able, and learning from those who would teach me.

It got harder and harder as time passed. Sometimes, the Mask, the glamour that hid my appearance from humankind, would flicker on me, and sometimes it failed completely. I couldn’t risk spending time in the company of humans, or at least not much time at once, so I found groups of fae that I could live or travel with. But, as the decades passed, those groups got rarer and rarer, and the so’jers were no better company for a fifty-year-old preybeast than they had been for a fourteen-year-old.

I had been living in the Appalachian forest for what I was pretty sure was ten or eleven years, in an area where humans rarely travelled. It was one of those places they called a “twisted zone,” where the magic thrown around during the God Wars had changed the landscape and the animals. Other fae would come through sometimes, but humans found the places scary, and their legends told them that they, too, could be changed, by the air or the water or just contact with the strange creatures there. It made for a lonely existence, but I’d grown a bit tired of running, and here, I’d been able to settle down.

I had a nice set-up, a cave that was dry all year round, with some scavenged furniture from a few falling-down houses. My Change had made me an herbivore, and so I had a nice garden, spread out enough that it didn’t look like a sign of habitation. The weather never got cold enough to really need clothes, and I never saw anyone, so I’d stopped bothering with clothes. It was a comfortable life, if wild, but it was lonely.

I guess I’m really not built for the solitude. When people came through, I’d hide in the trees and watch them, listening to their conversations, imagining talking to them, wondering what it would be like to travel with them. I’d follow them to the edge of my territory, sometimes sleeping nearby just to feel like I was near people again.

When the ringmaster came through, with his cart for catching strange creatures and his bright, chipper, twin companions, they didn’t even have to put forth any effort to catch me. I hate to admit it, but I fell right into their trap.

And sitting there, struggling with the net, hissing and spitting like a wild thing, I have to admit… somewhere in the back of my mind, I was relieved.

***

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/41847.html. You can comment here or there.

15 minute ficlet: Hey you Kids get off my lawn!

May9

Originally posted here in response (well, it was supposed to be in response) to the prompt: “The fight’s begun, but not yet won / And I won’t become one more casualty.”

Fae Apoc, Apoc era.

There was a wounded godling in Nila’s back yard. This close to the city, you got the fights overhead sometimes, the wild aerial battles that looked like something out of a pre-gods movie. Sometimes you got debris falling nearby, telephone poles in the road, the occasional falling corpse or near-corpse, so Nila always kept the kids inside, just like when they’d lived out in tornado country. The way she figured it, godling fights came somewhere between act-of-god and natural disaster. You didn’t get in the way, you just tried to ride it out and clean up the damages afterwards.

But now the damn thing was flopped over like a dying fish, half in her carefully-tended koi pond, half in the flower garden that bordered it. Its wing was torn half-off, and it was bleeding into the pond and twitching, making more damage with every spasm.

“Damnit,” she muttered, peeking out between the shutters at it. “Get up, move on. Get off my yard.” But it wasn’t getting up. If whoever it had been fighting came down here to finish it off, there was going to be a giant battle in her backyard, and her garden would be torn to shreds. She needed the damn godling out of there before it was found.

She grabbed her weapons from the cabinet, sheathed them all except the broom, and shrugged into the reinforced leather biker-jacket. It had been a gift on her eighteenth birthday (that and a Kevlar baby sling); it looked like bravado rather than armor and could stop a bullet and slow down a small godling. This monster looked down and out, but she’d learned before the gods came back never to think that a wounded animal wasn’t dangerous.

She strode out to the pond, ignoring the old ache in her left hip and walking like she owned the place (since, after all, she did). “You,” she said firmly, when she was within easy earshot. “Out of my pond.”

It twisted, its broken wing flapping pitifully, and stared at her, a skinny girl carrying a broom. “Human,” it hissed. He hissed; up close, the thing was clearly male, and, if the part of him not covered in blood was any indication, not all that bad looking.

“Close, but no cigar.” She poked him in an open wound with the rowan broomstick, and was gratified by its hiss of pain.

“What do you want, little human,” he grumbled, shying away from the wood that was poison to his kind. His left ankle was twisted badly, and there was a bone sticking out of his right leg.

“Get out of my pond,” she reiterated.

He barked a laugh at her. “You are in the presence of a god and you worry about your fish?”

“I am in the presence of a fucked-up elf-fairy-alien, and it’s my goddamned yard. Get out of my pond or I’ll move you.”

“Little human…” Whatever else he’d planned to say was cut off by a rowan broomstick to the mouth. Nila played baseball on the weekend to keep her swing in shape; he toppled back into the pool, grabbing at his jaw.

“I keep telling you…” She grabbed his less-injured leg above the twisted ankle and dragged him out of her pond, trying to damage the flower bed as little as possible. “I’m not human.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/41291.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute ficlet: Walking With Him

May9

Originally posted to 15-minute ficlets in response to the prompt “brand.”

*

Shuna held still while the tattoo artist worked the ink into her beck and back, ignoring, or trying to, her mother’s hovering disapproval.

“Shune-loon,” she began again, resorting to childish nicknames, “it’s a…”

“I know what it is,” she cut her off, the pain pricking along her spine making her shorter than was prudent with Mother Dearest.

Her mother plowed ahead anyway. “It’s a brand, Shuna. It’s marking you as his in permanent ink wrapped around your neck. It’s a collar you can’t take off. Couldn’t you just get a butterfly or something?”

“Hold still, please,” the tattooist murmured, cutting off her frustrated exclamation. She made herself relax, her forehead resting on the face pillow, and tried not to wonder what her mother was up to. She couldn’t even see her feet anymore.

It was the tattoo artist who spoke again, a few minutes later, sounding apologetic. “This glyph, miss, are you sure this is the one you want?”

She knew without looking which one was in question. “That’s his Name,” she murmured in response. “And that’s where it goes.”

“His Name?” The capital N suggested the concept wasn’t new. “That…”

“You see why I worry,” Shuna’s mother put in. “A Name like that and she wants to mark herself as his?”

“Mmmn. I see. But it’s her choice, isn’t it?” There was a challenge in the question that made Shuna smile.

“It is,” her mother agreed grudgingly. “But this isn’t how I brought her up.”

“I hear that a lot, here.” The needle was still working, avoiding the central glyph as the artist continued the pattern down her spine and around the sides of her neck.

“And what do you say, then?”

“I say…” Shuna fought not to jump as the needle hit the skin at the center of her neck, beginning the glyph, “that parents set children’s feet on a road, but it’s up to them where they walk it.”

“Even with him?” Her mother’s voice was getting hysterical as the inevitable was etched into her.

“Even with Death, yes.”

*

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/41186.html. You can comment here or there.

Drabble: Collateral Damage

Apr29

From dailyprompt: “Stunt Double.”

and

Three Word Wednesday,
foolish, mercy, relish.

Fae Apoc.

“Do you think we were unwise?” Jackie twisted to look at the unconscious man-boy in the back seat; shirtless, rain-drenched, unconscious, he looked even younger than he had cowering in the corner.

“That sort of mercy is always foolish,” Anne answered, but, seeing the expression on her sibling’s face, relented a little. “But I’m sure we can work something out for him. He’s kind of a nice little rabbit, isn’t he?”

“Mm, more of a ferret?” Jackie mused. “Or a mink.”

“He does have sharp teeth.” Anne rubbed her arm ruefully. “But I thought we weren’t going to skin him.”

“Otter, then.”

“Good, I’ll throw him in the water. So, basically, you think he’s a weasel. And yet you saved his life.”

“Well, he’s a cute weasel. Not quite a weasel. Marten. Like that pine marten we saw last week. And it wasn’t his fault, really.” She glanced back at their captive again. “Okay, the biting was his fault, and he really seemed to relish it when he kicked me in the shins, but I guess I can’t really blame him.”

“I can,” Anne muttered. She glanced in the rearview at the boy, and then further back. “Is that a tail?”

“No, they just pulled on at the last exit. Just an asshole.”

“Throw a blanket over the kid anyway, would you? I don’t want someone calling the cops.”

“I’m sure the cops are already looking for us.” She tucked the blanket around the unconscious boy anyway, trying to ignore the double twinge of maternal-like concern and assassin-like homicide. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that the target had had a stunt double. It probably wasn’t even his fault that he’d attacked them; he had a bit of a brainwashed look to him, conscious. But he did look exactly like the man they’d left dead in Detroit, down to the mole on his cheek and the way the dyed-red curl in the front hung enticingly over his forehead. Someone had to have shifted him at some point; even twins didn’t look that similar.

“We almost killed the wrong guy,” she muttered.

“We almost killed an extra guy,” her sister corrected. “Do you really think we would have failed to notice when he fell over with lead bullets and didn’t get back up?”

“If he did,” she countered. “Are you sure he’s human?”

“What makes you think he’s not?”

“The way he went catatonic when we killed his Keeper.”

“Keep… oh.” It was rare she got to see Anne taken aback; she relished it a little bit even while making sure the guy behind her was, indeed, just an asshole. “You think he’s an Owned halfbreed?”

“He certainly was acting like it. I mean, enough mind control could do it, too, so I guess we’ll have to wait until he wakes up.”

“Speaking of which, he’s not likely to do so before we get to a safe house, is he?”

“Nah.” She tapped the boy’s forehead lightly. “He’s out. Human or fae, he won’t be waking up until I want him to.”

 

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