Authors: Shirin Dubbin
Ready, steady, slide!
Everything went swimmingly on the approach but she’d forgotten what a tall woman she was. Forgot it all the way up until her forehead slammed into the poor guy’s ’nads.
Oooh cushy,
she thought as the collision knocked her backward. The big guy yelped, fell forward and smashed into the floor. Ari scrambled from between his legs and kept trucking toward the door. A smattering of what sounded like a Russian prayer followed her.
“Dude! So sorry,” she shot back over one shoulder. Turning back toward the exit, she nearly bashed into a huge brown bear. She blinked at the animal for a nanosecond, dumbstruck.
“I think I hate you guys,” she said, loud enough for all to hear. Executing a back handspring she gave herself some thinking room and pulled her staff from her bag. The enchanted wooden weapon elongated to fighting length the moment it made contact with her skin.
Jeez, the Medveds were nuttier than a cashew dipped in peanut butter.
Everything was big, huge, ginormous and monstrous. She felt guilty of adjective abuse and…and forget about that. The brothers were impressive enough. They didn’t need the—well, she couldn’t call the animal anything else, adjective ahead—mammoth attack bear.
Jeezy winkies.
And also…why in all of the ten kingdoms did her nose itch?
A thought fought for attention at the edge of her consciousness; no time to coax it forward, though.
She blocked a vicious swipe of the bear’s claw with her staff, twirling it to slap the creature across the snout. The bear roared but she knew she hadn’t really hurt it. She checked her surroundings against the two brothers’ approach. The smaller one was too busy helping the injured one off the floor to bother with her.
The bear growled. She swiped her itchy nose with a forearm and turned back to face it. Intelligence gleamed within the depths of its turquoise eyes. What amazing eyes he had. What was she missing? Realization crystallized. This wasn’t strictly an animal, but a Faeble who also happened to be a bear—likely one of the descendants of Nikolai, Snow White’s second husband. Snow’s first husband, Charming, was a dic— Oh, of course. She’d read it in the dossier. The three Medveds were all bears. Ari would have struck herself on the forehead if she had a hand free. Who could forget that?
Sleep. She desperately needed some.
Focus, woman!
Ari mentally shook herself.
You haven’t had any rest, you’re facing off with a bear, and the fact he’s a Faeble makes those teeth and claws all the more dangerous… He does have really pretty eyes though. Kinda dreamy and…aw, c’mon!
Her lack of focus had given the bear the opportunity to rise onto hind legs. Ari threw her staff above her head and braced herself. The bear’s claws came down on her hands, the pressure painful. She looked up to find him smiling as he clamped his paws over her hands. He had her caught.
They struggled, forward and back, in an unwitting imitation of a waltz. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Perhaps it was the contact of skin to paw-pad that caused the magick to coalesce. Ari couldn’t be sure but she watched in awe as chaos magick swirled to life in a three-dimensional octagon-like
thing
between them. It hung in the air, bobbing in time to their impromptu dance. As suddenly as the magick formed it stopped and split into eight disks. The disks shot out, breaking into fractals—the pattern repeating—at varying distances before reversing. Sucking back into themselves, the disks imploded into nothingness.
Ari and the bear both sagged beneath the weight of relief.
BOOSH! The chaos magick exploded. A dizzying tumult of rose-colored particles surged in all directions. The force shattered the stained glass window above them in a rain of brown, red and green shards. Only the bear’s body and the thickness of his fur protected the pair.
Good riddance,
Ari thought as the last of the glass hit the stone floor. Seizing the moment, she pulled down on her staff for leverage, planted her right foot on the bear’s belly and ran up the front of his body. Reaching his head she kicked him in the chin. He released his hold on her hands as she swung over the top of her weapon and landed a few feet away with the staff held firmly in her grasp.
The creature charged but Ari used what she’d learned from her first failed attempt and slid between his hind legs, staying low.
Clear of the bear, she ran toward one of the statues gracing the foyer. Hoping she’d timed it right she slammed one end of her staff into the sculpture’s base. The wood extended in the effort, pole vaulting Ariana Golde, Triumphant Returner, through the opening left by the shattered stained glass and outside to freedom.
Only the prudence of holding on to her staff stopped Ari from giving the bear a mean ole one-finger salute in parting.
“We must go.” Maks growled at his brothers. He’d started to pace, rubbing his sore jaw as he moved. They were losing the girl while his elder brother, Dmitri, flailed on the floor.
“Toes,” Dmitri said, “I cannot feel my toes. Are they still where I left them, Kostya?”
Konstantin, the youngest of the three, stared at Dmitri for a moment, his brows drawn up into an inverted V. “Mitya, you think of toes when it is your balls you should worry over.”
Dmitri moaned again and continued to roll from this side to that, his hands firmly cupped over his groin. “I know my balls are here, Kostya.” He wheezed in Konstantin’s direction. “They are screaming at me. It is my toes I have lost all contact with.”
Konstantin looked at Maks in concern and Maks gave him a blank glare in return.
“Maks,” Dmitri said from a new angle on the floor. He’d folded himself into a fetal position, a comical pose for one so broad shouldered. Maks pressed his lips together. He would not scoff. He would not. His brother was in pain. He had never seen his, quite literally, bigger brother react to an injury in this manner. Dmitri was stoic in most situations—the apotheosis of masculinity. Why was he rolling around like his bike had been stolen and he’d taken a beatdown for it? Besides, they were losing the trail of the heirloom-stealing vixen who’d broken into their home this night.
“Maks. Maksim,” Dmitri continued, “please, brother, you must check to see that my toes are where they should be. I need them for balance.”
Dmitri suddenly sat up, clapped his hands over his ears and said, “I hear banjos. Do you not hear them? There is a bluegrass band playing in my head,” then promptly curled back into a ball and groaned.
That was it. They had no choice. Konstantin began laughing uncontrollably and Maks snorted, rubbing his eyes to conceal his amusement.
“Damn you, Mitya.” Maks walked over and leaned to slap his brother on the back. “We need to hunt the thief now. There is no time for such nonsensical nonsense.”
Konstantin laughed harder.
“Plus, the vixen barely bumped you. It cannot be so bad as this.” Maks indicated his brother’s fetal position with a sweeping hand. “We must go now.”
“You go, Maks. I will attend to the babe on the floor. Perhaps take him to a healer,” Konstantin said.
“Surely you are making the joke. I cannot go after this creature alone. Did you not sense the chaos magick within her? Did you not see what happened to that accursed stained glass?” Maks resumed his pacing.
Konstantin had to have gone mad, likely another consequence of Maks’s chaos magick blending with the vixen’s. If he went after the thief alone there would be destruction. He did not doubt.
Chaos magick was an unpredictably destructive force in the Faebled world. It made things go wrong in spectacular ways. Maks held his own chaos in check most of the time, but something in the thief’s magick called to his own and he had been unable to hold back. He considered himself a liability at the best of times but in proximity to the thief he was an unexploded grenade, pin pulled and ready to lower the boom.
Such was the way of things among the storied folk. He was not a babe to cry over hardship. Nor bear jealousy toward his brothers. He merely wished his nature fell more in line with theirs. They were born of order as their father had been. Maks’s mother imbued him alone with her gift for entropy and his brothers continued to pretend their mother’s predilection hadn’t sealed their parents’ fate.
Maks glanced behind him at the vigilant statues in the foyer. The marble faces of his parents remained unaffected by their middle son’s turmoil.
Dmitri looked to the statues, as well, but his gaze also slid to the remnants of the stained glass. He would soon start droning at Maks on how chaos was the tool of the tricksters and tricksters destroyed and remade the world so it would not stagnate and fall into decay.
“I have told you how badly you misinterpret your powers,” Dmitri said from the floor, hands still clasped over his jewels. “They are good.”
Clockwork.
Maks shook his head. “So says the man who sets things in their proper order.”
Dmitri held high ranking in a faction of Faebles equivalent to the CIA with FBI tendencies. He worked for the A2O, the Agents of Order, and did the job well.
Maks revered his elder brother in the classical sense—the way such fraternal bonds were written in fiction. He’d bet light actually shone in his eyes when he looked at Dmitri, but his ego shrugged off the emotion. Embarrassing.
“I agree with Mitya.” Konstantin chimed in.
“So says the man who foresees things as they should be.”
Konstantin didn’t get a say. As an Oracle of Order he couldn’t comprehend the affliction of chaos. Their youngest brother foresaw the best ways to maintain the
as-it-should-be
in the Faeble world and organized the A2O into action, protecting the outcome. If you slapped him Konstantin would bruise in an orderly fashion.
Most storied folk were unaware of the identities of Oracles of Order, yet the station was as beloved as the Pope or Dalai Lama. Maks’s affection for the cub trumped all. He did not begrudge either sibling their order. He wanted a piece of it for himself. To build, not to demolish.
For years he’d contented himself with managing the family business, utilizing a daring his brothers did not possess. He would not deny the pride their chains of dance and recording studios brought him. Chaos also meant he understood the fluctuations of investing and surfed the swells and wanes adeptly.
Konstantin crossed the room to face Maks. Their features and coloring were so alike, from the chiseled slash of high cheekbones to the strong Slavic jaw lines, on to the Gypsy brown skin and hair of ebon curls. While these were classic trademarks of the
Bolshebnukh Roma
, the magical sect of the Roma Ruska Gypsies, Maks had to note his brother’s slimmer build and much longer hair to be sure he wasn’t looking at his own reflection.
“Maks, as surely as I am an Oracle of Order I tell you it must be you who goes after that creature and brings her back.” Konstantin returned his gaze in earnest. Maks flexed his fingers and folded them into fists then released and repeated. He turned from his brother only to turn immediately back.
“I tell you our two energies will endanger any around us.”
“You will not.”
They waited out the impasse. Against his character, Maks relented first. “What do you see, Kostya?”
Konstantin’s head drooped a hair. “Too much.”
“You are being cryptic with me now?”
A chuckle as the younger brother looked up. “You want me to unravel fate for you?” Impatience met his question.
“Same as it ever was, Maks. There are threads coming together, intersections that must be made before the future can be woven. Just as other things must fall apart.” Konstantin turned his palms out to either side to show he hid nothing. “This is what I see. What I always see.”
Dmitri broke the silence that followed with a moan. “I also know the eldest desperately needs aid from a healer,” Konstantin said.
Maks shot him a doubtful look.
“Am I no longer to be trusted, Maksim?”
Maks considered his younger brother for long moments. Without a word he turned, bounded across the glass-strewn foyer and leapt impossibly high. At the apex of the leap he sailed through the mess of the accursed window, just as the thief had done before him.
Ari sipped her
hojicha
green tea. Placing the cup on the table, she paused, looked to see if anyone watched, and surreptitiously munched a stolen cookie.
Sweet baby Buddha.
Stardust, her favorite coffee shop, seethed with Faebles—as usual. The storied folks favored tea and coffee. The leaves and beans were the fruit of the earth and therefore imbued with the old magicks. Faebles also liked sugar. A lot. Pop up a vein and mainline the sweetness a lot. Stardust’s baked goods had been awarded five coffee cups and the title “Best in the Land” on Jack Horner’s blog. Little Jack had clearly never tasted the Medveds’ cookies. Er. Or better said, cookies made by the Medveds. The assertion any treat could top the café’s sounded ridiculous, even in Ari’s head, yet truth was tru—
“Each midday I must travel from one side of Fanaweigh’s Scar to the other so my cart spends equal time on both the ogre and goblin sides.” The ovoid man at the next table sighed and rested his eggshell against the wall.
“Have you not considered climbing the blasted wall and evoking a levitation spell to lift your cart over? T’would save you hours in a day,” said the gnome he shared a plate of scones with.
“Climb Fanaweigh’s Scar!” The ovoid was outraged. “By Humpty’s fall, have you tasted ambrosia? We eggs have no luck with walls or climbing. No sir, we do not.”
Ari stifled a snort so not to offend the ovoid. They were a pompous bunch and easily set off, yet she could sympathize. The wall at Fanaweigh had blighted that community. She remembered the day, decades ago, when the barrier had sprung from the earth and split families in two as they lounged in their homes. But she’d never understood why the separated members weren’t allowed to move out of the district or to join their loved ones on the opposite side. And there were other consequences. With all the misery the structure caused it had come naturally to dub it Fanaweigh’s Scar.
Ari huffed. All this grief because the ogre king, the Grand High Oni—she glanced heavenward—had come to blows with the late Lord Goblin-kin during a poker game, and subsequently raised the magical wall to separate ogre territory from the goblins’. To hear the grapevines tell it, the Grand High Oni had also led the Lord Goblin-kin to a horrible death. One too awful to think on let alone to name. According to her mother, the king of the ogres still wasn’t satisfied and continued to exact revenge from the Lady Goblin-kin—the late lord’s daughter and heir to his throne.
Fanaweigh’s Scar really ought to come tumbling down…
Ari’s phone rang and the fact she couldn’t help but answer meant only one person was calling.
“
Okaasan,
are you going through some strange kind of separation anxiety?”
Ari swiped at her nose with her knuckles. It had begun to itch, and the itching led to twitching. And the twitching reminded her of him…
“Yes, Kit, your father has gone out and although you are slim comfort, I do what I must to entertain myself,” her mother replied.
“Nice.” Ari’s gaze raked the coffee shop. She couldn’t tell whether she was giddy or nauseous. Probably both.
“You thought you’d learned acerbity from your
baba?
”
“I was confused.” Ari’s nose spasmed in pace with her plodding heart.
Don’t let it be him.
“Obviously,” Inari said dryly.
The “What do you want, crazy lady?” Ari murmured did not the match the
Let it be him. Don’t let it be him. Let it be him. Don’t let it be him
cart wheeling through her mind.
Inari’s robes rustled over the line and Ari imagined her mother resettling herself in exasperation as she so often did, her tiny feet curled beneath her on the chaise.
“Did you return the Grand High Oni’s necklace yet?”
“Not yet. Next stop.”
“It is important to note, the goblin-kin are often lonely.”
Ari quirked a brow. “What are you? A fortune cookie? Way to be stereotypical, Mommy. And he’s an ogre not a goblin.”
“I am Japanese, so no, not a fortune cookie. And yes, this is what I have said.”
Ari choked on a chuckle and dropped her forehead into the palm of the bent arm resting on the table. “Sure you did. Can I go now? I’m feeling funny again…”
Her mother didn’t get an opportunity to answer. Or if she did Ari didn’t hear it. She was too busy bolting to her feet as a man sat down in the chair across from her. The ungainly movement caused the front of her thighs to catch the underside of the table and it tumbled over. Teacup and pot, cookies, plates and all. Only the table survived the fall intact.
Ari clicked her Bluetooth off without another word to Inari.
The man looked from her to the floor, back to her, and down to the floor again before leaning over to right the fallen furnishing. There was nothing he could do for the other items except allow the busboys to do their jobs.
Ari didn’t care either way.
She slapped both hands over her nose, sat with a thud and slid down as far as remaining in her chair would allow.
It
was
him. The source of her twitchy nose. The beat her heart skipped. The purple prose in her diary.
It was like the first time she’d seen him all over again. She’d been a little one then, riding between her parents on the Orient Express out of Paris. They’d been on their way to Vienna…or Istanbul—she couldn’t remember which. The family traveled all of Europe and the Orient over and again in the 1800s. Her father avoided America in those days because appearing in his true West African aspect would have been dangerous. The deepest skin tone he could have affected without the threat of enslavement had been Arab royalty and the restriction made her
baba
uncomfortable.
America had been just as dangerous a prospect for her mother during the Second World War, with the peril of internment camps or bouts of suspicion-driven violence. Her parents hadn’t wanted to risk their glamour failing them in a country where the diminished perception of their worth would have sorely drained their powers, leaving them weakened enough to endanger their and their daughter’s lives. Even her
okaasan
and
baba
could perish, especially without the magick of human belief to strengthen them. Ari didn’t like to think on it, but death could find and claim the gods too—even if the search took longer than normal.
She had not forgotten her parents’ trepidation in that age of a very different United States. Nor could she forget the man. He was an indelible etching on her memory. The image of his lean muscular legs stretched into the aisle of the train car, his bearing and appearance caught somewhere between Russian aristocracy and Gypsy—odd, incongruent. Enthralling.
His seat within the car had placed him too far away to guess the color of his eyes, but his aura held gravitational pull and had set off uncontrollable facial tics. Ari had connected to his energy, to him. The sensation had been like the discovery of an unused limb, one that had atrophied but would soon become strong through use. She felt the man as a part of herself.
A hundred years or so later,
somewhen
during Reagan’s reign, she had seen him for the second time—
Rigoletto
at the San Francisco Opera. The lights in the gallery had begun to blink, signaling the audience to take their seats. Her twitching nose synced itself to the flickering lights as forewarning of a much more significant event, and the man had emerged from between a pair of arguing critics.
Black-tie Armani, before it had become passé, tailored impeccably with a red cravat to illustrate personal flare. The man was a thing of epic pulchritude.
Instant regression into that ole Orient Express shyness. Black magick indeed.
Ari hadn’t bothered to excuse herself. She’d stiffly strode to the bathroom and locked herself inside a water closet. No amount of pleading or compulsion from her mother drew her out of those
chichi
theater toilets that night. Only magick sufficed. She still had a burn mark on her booty as evidence of Inari’s ire.
“Am I to guess, from your silence, you did not expect to be found?”
Ari snapped out of her remembrance to meet aquamarine eyes. Their connection hadn’t faded. “Ahh, okay, you’re a Medved. Aren’t you?”
The man looked down at himself and back to her. “Could there be doubts?”
None at all. Ari cursed herself for relying on the dossier her client provided. She’d rested on her laurels because of her busy schedule rather than researching the Medveds herself. She wasn’t usually so careless. What a fine way to land in the pot, nose twitching and rear exposed.
After nearly a century of screwing up in the family business, before giving up and proving herself useful as a returner, Ari had finally grown up enough not to be intimidated by the man. She might’ve been bold enough to woo him. Unfortunately they’d been brought together on the night she’d retrieved something from his home…Hold on.
“Why did you follow me? I retrieved the statue fair as fey.”
“Stole,
vorovka.
” Off her puzzled look he clarified. “
Vorovka
means—” he rolled a hand in the air, “—thief. You stole our statue. Return it now.”
“Maks?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it. You had to be the middle Medved. You’re seriously surly. Everyone says.”
“Storied folk do not think I am surly.”
“Oh yeah they do, middleman. Mean and surly.” Ari laughed. “I’m only kidding about the mean.”
Crickets.
She shook her head and exhaled. “Take the truth like a big boy and pull up your underoos.”
“I do not wear superhero-themed underwear. I prefer the boxer briefs.”
It was bad enough beholding him in the upscale plaid shirt he wore—fitted through the waist with snapped shoulder tabs accentuating the breadth of his body, several buttons undone at the chest—the hair on his chin far from a beard but more than stubble, his dark hair windswept…
Breathe, girl.
Did he need to mention boxer briefs? Her nose twitched at a vision of him in his undies. Cutting off your nose to spite your face made so much sense now.
“I didn’t need to know that, Maksim.”
“I did not need to be called surly. We are even.” He relaxed in his chair. Mimicking her memory of his reclined pose on the train, he sprawled his legs beneath the table, one arm on top and the other thrown across the knee of his olive cargo pants.
A busboy carrying a tray bent to clean up the spilled dishes from the floor and Maks turned his attention away from the conversation. Picking a cookie from the aloft tray, he took a sniff and furrowed his brow at Ari.
“What kind of creature commandeers a man’s baked goods from his home?”
“One with good taste.” She impetuously swiped the cookie from his hand and chomped the treat like the cross-eyed blue monster from the famous children’s show.
Cripes, she needed a nap. Her mother would’ve died had she witnessed the “filthiness of eating food from the floor,” but Ari could flinch and possibly hurl later. Right now she needed to regain control.
Maks opened his mouth and a long feminine sigh came out. His brows drew together comically and he turned in his chair. Ari’s gaze shadowed his movement and found an ancient Faeble actually doing the sighing.
The female had the air of a Greek, from the jet waves of her hair and the warm cream of her complexion, right down to her modern one-shoulder top and its rows of ruffles, emulating draping. The Greek clearly hadn’t tasted her coffee but she stirred the cup in unceasing circuits, her eyes as empty as the cup was full. The pale blue of the skin beneath her lower lashes matched the top she wore in a sad show of fashion
fabulousity
.
The troubles of one so old were difficult to comprehend, yet Ari empathized with the longing the Faeble breathed out with each sigh. Ari couldn’t recall what the ancient one called herself. The word
forlorn
kept coming to mind in place of a name.
Maks turned back and started to speak again. Whatever he’d planned to say was lost to an escalating argument between the ovoid man and his gnome companion.
The pair stood up as though added elevation would lend validity to their viewpoints. The shouting blared incomprehensibly, enraging the gnome enough to headbutt the ovoid. The egg-man toppled. Sputtering with indignity, he waved his stumpy arms while the entire café held their breaths, waiting for the yolk to hit the fan. Tragedy lost out to back fat; rolls upon rolls of cushiony fat on the back of a corpulent Faeble broke the egg-man’s fall. The save and subsequent bounce averted a trip to the ER but kicked off another argument.
This time the gnome and the ovoid ganged up on the corpulent male for getting in the way. They gave him a piece of their now unified minds. The pair’s bullying didn’t sit well with the human woman at the corpulent Faeble’s table. She stood, letting loose a stream of litigious verbiage starting with “We’ll sue” and progressing with copious amounts of Latin. So much so the café bouncer—a pretty goblin maiden with shoulders like tree stumps—punched the woman smack in the mouth. Clearly the bouncer suspected spell casting was afoot.
Ari figured the punch was a necessary precaution. Legalese sounded a lot like ensorcelling. A serious no-no in public. Humans should be more careful. All Faeble establishments had bouncers. The concept of behaving properly was as ludicrous to the storied folk as dying of old age. The human woman clearly didn’t understand the bouncer had only done her duty. Resistance ensued in the form of more legalese, which earned the woman a black eye to go with her fat lip.
Ari’s eyes lit up with the sheer mayhem of it all. She looked to Maks to see if he enjoyed the shenanigans as much as she did.
She was sorely disappointed. The middle Medved’s expression remained serious. One might call him brooding and Ari didn’t have the kind of teenage girl fanaticism to appreciate brooding. No matter how ruggedly hot her crush happened to be.
Maks covered his face and breathed visibly. Seconds passed before he dropped the hand.
“Return the statue so I may go,” he said, projecting his voice over the cacophony.