Page 1 of Magpies & Mayhem
Prologue
Jordan
Themanhanginglimplyacross my shoulders stank of drugs and body odor. There were many things I despised about becoming a vampire, but the heightened sense of smell was a constant annoyance. Another was my unreasonable desire to rip the throat out of the grim reaper who was currently towing me along in a loose headlock. I’d laughed a few seconds ago when he first grabbed me. I understood my roommate’s roughhousing for the comfortable affection it was, but I couldn’t stop the bristling defensiveness from surging through me. Thankfully, Grim was incredibly observant and released me as soon as he felt my muscles tense—before I had time to act on the violent impulses demanding I defend myself from anything that came too close.
I took a deep breath as I straightened and adjusted the body on my shoulders, using the cold, damp night air to clear his stink from my lungs. The body odor was his own fault. The drugs… hm, yes and no.
“This is far enough. I’ll take it from here,” Grim said, his quiet voice reaching me after we’d put a few blocks between us and the place we’d picked the men up. I looked back at Grim, watching him continue to grip the second unconscious man by the front of his collar with one hand, the man’s arms swinging like a rag doll and legs dragging along the road behind him. At six feet tall, I was on the taller side—especially considering my Chinese ancestry—but Grim was easily head and shoulders taller than me, and even without vampire strength, he hefted the man’s weight effortlessly.
Dark shadows swirled around Grim’s body, clinging to his shoulders and spilling out around his feet like a cloak. He reached into the shadows with his free hand, pulling out a staff with a lantern hanging from a crook at the top and planting it on the wet pavement of the abandoned alleyway. To his left, a flash of light rent the air in a vertical streak, swirling purples and blues before widening into what I recognized as a Gate between worlds. I’d never seen a Gate this small before—or a portable one. In the North Seattle neighborhood where I lived with Grim and our other roommate, Levi, we had three permanent Gates into the Boundlands—a place which humans often referred to as Faery, where magic still lived. They were wide enough to fit several men abreast, and just as tall, with big stone arches around them. Very permanent.
I stiffened as this Gate, about six feet wide and tall and starting two feet off the ground, settled into focus. The view through the shimmering opening wasn’t anywhere I’d ever seen before. It was a dimly lit cavern with a dirt path leading to a slow-moving river. A wooden boat floated by the near shore, a cloaked person holding another lantern-staff sitting on one end. The foreboding magic pouring out of the portal filled me with an odd kind of creeping fear, an existential dread that reminded me of the type of nightmares one wakes from where you aren’t even sure what was chasing you. The person in the boat turned their head to face us, and I forced myself to ignore the dump of adrenaline and the uncomfortable feeling of my skin prickling. Nothing but shadow could be seen inside the hood.
Grim stepped toward the Gate and nonchalantly tossed the body he was carrying through it. It landed on the other side with a muffled ‘whump’, and Grim turned to look at me expectantly, his normally human-looking blue eyes overtaken by white as his power surged in him. He stared at me for a beat before shifting his weight awkwardly—an easy tell for when he felt confused, considering he usually possessed a preternatural stillness. “You can’t… follow me through here,” he said.
I blinked at him. As if I would want to follow him into whatever underworld hellscape he’d just ripped a portal open into—the hair on the back of my neck was already standing on end and I still had both feet firmly planted in the land of the living.
Hard pass.
I reached up and hauled the man I was carrying off my shoulders, gripping him by his upper arm and studying his slumbering form. Wiry build, average height, clearly part human. I eyed the windrose tattooed on his hand that signified he was part of the Phantoms, a mafia group from the Boundlands. “I’m not going to get to haveanyfun tonight, am I?” I muttered.
Grim didn’t respond.
“What did these Phantoms want with Levi’s girl, anyway?” I finally asked, now that we were out of hearing range of our other roommate, Levi, and his girlfriend, Elara.
I’d been demolishing Levi in a late-night game of ‘Super Smash Bros.’ when he’d gotten a text from Elara that men were trying to break into her shop with her inside. Grim and I had beat him down the street to her shop, only to find the two men drugged and unconscious on the street in front of her store, with tiny little Elara standing over them, going to pieces and hyperventilating. I don’t know why I’d been surprised that she’d already taken them down. The first time I’d met her, she’d nearly choked me out with her magic, and it hadn’t even been on purpose. These guys clearly hadn’t known who they were messing with.
Grim stared at the man in my grip for a beat, his lip pulling up in an uncharacteristic sneer. “These men accosted her at the corner of 9thand Meridian in Dry Gulch last week.”
“Why?”
It didn’t seem like he was going to answer at first as he studied me, until he finally said, “The fairies have requested she build them some weapons. The Phantoms want the same thing, only it seems they aren’t requesting.”
I eyed the small duffle bag draped over my shoulder—full of zip ties, lighters, and hunting knives—that we’d found with the men. I didn’t even want to think about what they’d had in store for Elara.
I handed over the man I’d carried to Grim, and he tossed him through the Gate the way someone might toss a rolled-up rug. He turned and reached his hand out for the bag.
I was half tempted to see what would happen if I beaned the creepy guy in the boat with the bag instead. Vampire strength meant I could totally hit him from here.
I passed the bag to Grim. He took it gingerly, as if it were dirty, and held it away from his body. After stepping through the portal, he cast me a glance, gave me a nod, and bumped his staff against the ground again. The Gate immediately collapsed in on itself, flashing with a burst of blue and purple light before disappearing as if it had never been. I hadn’t even known that was possible.
I stood in the empty alleyway for a long moment, until the sounds of a car turning onto a nearby street finally made me return from my thoughts. What was it Grim had said about the Phantoms accosting Elara last week in Dry Gulch? 9thand Meridian… I pushed heat into my palms and conjured a ball of flame to pass back and forth between my hands, careful to keep it away from my sleeves.
Maybe I can still have some fun tonight, after all.
Chapter 1
Sidney
Humansalwaysmakeabig fuss about PMS, but you know what else sucks? Molting. Imagine being an angry, hormonal hot mess, losing most of your feathers, and then the prickly, itchy, bruising, painful process of growing them back.For weeks.Not to mention, the entire time you look like the bird equivalent of a hobo. That was me, folks.
At least I could escape some of it for a bit when I was in my ‘human’ form. I was still an angry, hormonal hot mess, and my brain felt a little bit like it was on fire, but I could hide away the pin feathers and most of the desire to peck out the eyes of anyone who got too close. Somewhat.
Stomping up the stairwell to the nondescript third-floor apartment wasn’t enough to blow off my steam—I acknowledge that—but even though I probably wasn’t fit for company, I still wanted to be there. For one, I hadn’t spent any quality time with my best friend, Elara, in over a month. She’d been busy with an important project, which could literally save lives, and was newly married to a siren with an annoyingly seductive voice.
I liked her husband, Levi, but I couldn’t help begrudging him all the time and attention he’d been stealing from me. I was working on it, okay? Maturity wasn’t something that came naturally to me—I had to fight for every ounce of it, tooth and claw.
Which brought me to the other reason I’d accepted Elara’s invitation for a movie night at his old apartment: curiosity. Levi lived with a grim reaper, and no one could have possibly expected me to be mature enough to pass up an opportunity to see a guy like that in his natural habitat, no matter how grumpy or irritable I felt.
