And tonight, they would be out and glammed up to the fullest extent of their gloriousness.
Wrenn buckled the top closures on her black boots, then zipped her black leather jacket. The fae of Oberon’s realms understood why a witch of unknown heritage had been allowed to live among them—her life with Victor Frankenstein had unlocked gifts of speed, strength, and stamina as well as her ability to see magic. She was also taller than most fae and mundanes alike, and remarkably durable.
When Robin had found her, he’d immediately recognized her potential, and Oberon had agreed.
It gave her a life in the Royal Guard, which in turn gave her training, access to a wealth of data for her searches, and worthwhile work.
Wrenn coiled her black hair into a knot and secured it with two sticks specially charmed to hold her thick, uncooperative locks up and out of her face. Like the rest of her body, her hair liked to stay ever-stalwart and unchanging, and would immediately return to its default cascade down her back the moment she set it free. Without access to fae hairdressers, she would have given up and shorn it off ages ago.
She fed her fish and placed her paladin star on her belt. Then she made her way into the Samhain celebrations gearing up all through Oberon’s Castle.
Some of the royals slapped their names on every single blade of grass and pebble in their territory—Titania’s Falls, for example, or the Titan River, which flowed through not just Titania’s lands, but pretty much every fae realm.
Maybe the King was mad his wife had named the river after herself. Maybe he wanted to outdo the intricately manifested shadows of Tokyo and Osaka built by the kami. Or maybe he was mad that the fae could not live in the real world alongside their mundanes the way the elves did. So he compensated.
King Oberon controlled the fae metropolis called Oberon’s Castle.
Goblins, brownies, pixies; gorgeous Seelie and terrifying Unseelie; changelings and every half-breed fae-born witch ever located by the Royal Guard—Oberon modernized his magicals and set them up adjacent to the mundane world in an interconnected, urbanized maze of interlocking realms.
Wrenn stepped across her building’s threshold into air thick with sparking fae magic. Pixies drew curlicue trails at eye level. A moose-antlered Unseelie hunter danced in the street despite his kind’s aversion to Oberon’s urbanization. Sprites twirled in dresses as gossamer as their wings. Satyrs pranced. The Seelie paraded in processions. And above it all, fireworks blazed and boomed.
And this was just Wrenn’s quiet, backwater home.
Tonight the world moved into the dark half of her year, the cold, dead part called winter. The entire planet crossed a threshold, and in doing so made all crossings easy. Anyone with enough fae blood could cross over into the mundane world with ease tonight if they so desired, and without paying a toll on the fae side.
Wrenn walked into the festivities. Crystalline laughter rose to her left. To her right, a tall, muscular male fae stripped off his shirt before lifting a smaller, curvy pink female into the air. A small band of drunken domestic hobgoblins, all carrying steins of sweet-smelling mead, sang out a well-harmonized chorus of “Ah great lady Queen, oh our divine comedy be seen,” as they stumbled by.
Wrenn pulled out her phone and checked the contacts list she’d transferred from the pixie vellum. The murdered sprite had been from a realm called Applebottom, an adorable place of twinkling bluebells, fluffy clouds, and talking squirrels in pantaloons whose entire purpose was to turn the realm into a civilization sized for rodents, from root to crown of the realm’s grand apple trees.
It also happened to be sized for sprites, and wasn’t a place the six-foot-tall Wrenn should be stomping around after dark. Especially Samhain evening.
But there was another option.
If Wrenn wanted to find leads, she needed to head into the heart of Oberon’s Castle—Oberon’s actual castle. Lords and ladies would be about, and other high-powered fae, which meant she’d have access to their many servants.
And the odds of her finding a talkative sprite were much higher.
She did a mental check on the slight tingling along the Celtic tattoos circling both forearms just above her wrists like a pair of wide, intricate silver cuffs. The tattoos acted as anchors—wallets, really—for any non-work-related enchantments and tokens she wished to carry.
She might be a witch, but her magicks were limited and mostly protective. She could shield herself from a lot of what was tossed at her, be it magic or a punch. She couldn’t enchant or enthrall, or even hit someone or something with much of a jolt.
So she had to buy enchantment tokens. Some were simple lidding magic she used so she didn’t spill her coffee. Some were tracers for situations where she didn’t want to use official enchantments from her star. But mostly they were tokens to pay for her Heartway use in a way that didn’t open her soul.
Even though the Heartway was a public transportation system, it was still fae, and it demanded an exchange. Most fae paid with a little bit of their magicks. Some witches did, also. But Wrenn didn’t want to deplete her inherent shielding magic any more than she wanted to allow the Heartway to take as it pleased from her psyche.
Letting others into her head—even if that other was a systemic magic and not a person—was not… comfortable. And after her little intrusive visitation from Victor earlier, the last thing she wanted tonight was to give the systemic magic of the fae more access to her deepest wounds.
She counted one tingle. One token. She had been planning on stopping yesterday on her way home but
