Such murders were a dime a dozen in the fae realms that made up Oberon’s Castle. Every magical group had their malevolent entities. The kami had their evil yōkai, and the elves had their Loki aspects. But the fae had entire breeds who specialized in terrorizing not only mundanes, but also other fae—ogres who ate children, kelpie who stalked and murdered women, boggarts who were snot-eating cowards who harassed strangers on both the mundane and fae internets. Plus at least fifteen other types of fae whose entire reason for being was maliciousness.
So no one in Oberon’s Royal Guard even batted a sweet eyelash when the sprite washed onto the shore hacked up and exsanguinated.
Wrenn did, though.
The sprite had made the harassment report detailed on the vellum a year—almost to the exact date—before she washed up. There was nothing particularly magically special about the number of days, or weeks, or hours for that matter, so the investigators chalked it up to chance.
Wrenn set the vellum on top of the pile of case files spread out across her kitchen table. Magic wafted off the report in waves and tightly woven curlicues. No jagged breaks or unharmonious colors distorted the account.
The witness definitely had believed what she reported.
The sprite’s big-eyed photo shimmered on the top left of the sheet. Next to it, her name and home realm. Under that, a sigil that unlocked a spell replaying the sprite’s interview.
Wrenn’s inherent magic was neither intricate nor powerful enough to replay a record spell, so she tapped her paladin star to call up a replay token. The star—a rosy, seven-pointed shield made of a lovely champagne-colored fae silver-and-gold steel—was standard issue for the Royal Guard. Like most law officers’ identification, it was about the size of her palm.
As an official Paladin to the King—the Royal Guard equivalent to a mundane detective—she never pinned it onto her jacket but instead carried it in a flip wallet much like mundane FBI agents. Her star had an enchanted clip that would hold it to her belt no matter what hits she took.
Wrenn’s star also carried the enchantment tokens issued to her by the Royal Guard.
She absently ran her finger over the surface of the star to pick up an unlock spell, then touched it to the vellum’s written documentation to bring up the transcript of the sprite’s complaint.
There’d been a party—there were always parties, with the fae lords—and the sprite had been employed to serve wine and mead. Drunkenness happened. Unsurprising gropings occurred. The fae were not particularly modern in their understanding of consent or bodily autonomy, and boundaries had not been respected.
Again, Wrenn was not surprised. She continued to read.
And there, buried deep in the debauchery, the words for which she’d been hunting: There were… (witness pauses) I don’t remember, witness says.
Sprites remembered everything. Not remembering suggested an enthralling.
I feel so tired…. (pauses again)
The sprite had been pale when the Guard arrived that night.
I don’t think they were fae.
Wrenn tapped her kitchen table and sat back in her chair.
Two hundred years in Oberon’s Castle had taught her one thing: Dark magicals would work together if a sufficient nexus of power pulled them into its orbit. A nexus such as a powerful vampire.
Only a handful of Guard knew the truth: No magical was more cancerous than a vampire—so cancerous that their presence inflicted damage on the realms. When the black void of death magic that was the demon at the heart of a vampire corrupted enough, it changed a realm physically, structurally, and magically.
A strong enough vampiric presence would destroy a realm if left unchecked, literally breaking down the spellwork that held the realm in place.
So Wrenn watched the Eastern European vampires for signs of organization, something that signaled the rise of power among their kind. She watched the Japanese vampires for the same reason, though most of those vamps were born from a different process than their European counterparts, and did not tolerate outsiders. She watched the American Gulf Coast clans, and consumed every scrap of information she could about the North American elves who, for some bizarre reason, were harboring low-powered vamps. She kept tabs on the Peruvian vampire hives. She knew of small gatherings in several African nations, and of one or two in Australia and New Zealand.
Even though her personal magic was close to nonexistent, she was the King’s best vampire hunter. Keeping vampires out of Oberon’s Castle, and out of all fae business both Seelie and Unseelie, light and dark, inside the realms and out-, was why she held Paladin status within the Royal Guard.
The dead sprite was the eleventh incident in the last month.
Exsanguination. Often mutilation. Always a low-powered magical whose blood would at least give a vampire a high, and at most act like super-soldier serum.
And now the King had vampires inside his Castle. At least one of the bloodsuckers had found a way to get across one of the many veils between the mundane world and the fae realms.
Which meant a dark magical somewhere figured the central realms under the King’s control were robust enough to invite a vampire into the house.
Probably. She had no actual proof that a vampire had gotten into Oberon’s Castle. The sprite could have been trafficked into the mundane world and then dumped here.
Still, operating directly under the King’s nose would not bode well for any vampire or hive. Unless something big had happened, disrupting the power hierarchies among all the vampires, and they were out of control.
She had no idea what, or how, or where, which strongly suggested the involvement of other magicals. Powerful ones capable of hiding their tracks.
And there was another truth here. One the Royal Guard needed to deal with now.
The fae had a blood trafficking syndicate on their hands. A syndicate that, until recently, had been operating on a low enough level that it had been able to hide. Or the King
