No illusions, p.1
No Illusions, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Author’s Note
Up Next
About the Author
No Illusions
Iron Bound: Book 2
Z.J. Cannon
© 2021 Z.J. Cannon
https://www.zjcannon.com
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. No fae were harmed in the making of this book.
Chapter 1
As the muck and grime of the concrete stairs did its best to glue my feet in place, I made a mental note to dunk my shoes in a bleach bath when I got home. The dirt tracked in from the parking lot was the least of it. The steps were dotted with bloodstains, both human red and fae blue, alongside dark and gleaming liquids I didn’t recognize. The stairwell smelled like blood and urine, with the indefinable but distinct odor of fear underneath. As the man at my back shoved me forward and down, with the barrel of his gun jammed between my shoulder blades, an intrusion of cockroaches—yes, that’s the technical term—sauntered across the step below us. They didn’t scurry, even when I came within inches of crushing one under my toe. These roaches had seen worse than the likes of us.
On the outside, the building advertised itself as a dentist’s office. And upstairs, on the ground floor, that was exactly what it was. It catered to patients without insurance, which meant everyone upstairs was probably desperate enough to make their own pain stop that they were willing to ignore the screams coming from down below. I had found, in the three months I had spent on the hunt for Arkanica, that there were two types of humans: the ones willing to commit atrocities, and the ones merely willing to turn a blind eye.
Not that there was anyone upstairs now to hear me scream, if I were to give it a go. This late at night, the dentist’s doors were locked, and even the outdoor light had flicked out an hour ago.
But the lab downstairs was open for business.
The man behind me reached past me with his free hand to unlock the door. The lab didn’t use one of those fancy keypads one might have expected from a place devoted to the cutting edge of science. Instead, my captor shoved a rusted key into the equally rusted lock, and jiggled it until the door popped open with a groan of complaint. The first time I had seen one of Arkanica’s new hideouts, I had taken a certain grim satisfaction in the fact that they had gone from their futuristic sterile lab to squalor and rust. Three months later, though, the novelty of seeing them brought low had worn off. Like those roaches, they might have been living in filth, but that was small consolation if I couldn’t exterminate them.
The man pushed me through the door. Instantly, the smell of blood doubled. But the stink of fear rolling out from the room was almost strong enough to drown it out.
The fear wasn’t coming from the woman on the operating table, though. She was past that. I could tell by the way she didn’t scream, or even flinch, as the human woman bent over her, lowered her scalpel, and opened her carefully from collarbone to belly button. She just kept staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.
I didn’t need to check to confirm that she was fae. Only one kind of prisoner ever made it down to one of these places. But I swept my gaze over her anyway, noting the proof: the delicate points at the tips of her ears, the alien angularity of her features. Not to mention the dark blue blood staining the scalpel.
In theory, Faerie had sealed itself off from the human world two hundred years ago. But Mab, queen of the Winter Court, kept sending her agents through for her own unknown purposes. It looked like Arkanica had found another one.
Or rather, another two. One wall of the room was taken up by three prison cells. The bars must have been made of pure iron, judging by the way my bones ached when the man with the gun shoved me toward them. Two of the cells were empty, but in the corner cell, a fae man crouched. His hair was the non-color of moonlight, his eyes a pale and piercing blue. His captors had left him naked, which meant I could see exactly how emaciated he was. If I had been willing to take my attention off the other two occupants of the room for long enough, I could have counted his individual ribs. He had been down here for weeks, at minimum.
And yet I had only found out about this place three days ago. One step behind, as usual.
The woman bent over the body was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t look up as we passed. Not until the man with the gun opened the door to the nearest cell, eliciting a screeching creak worthy of a horror movie. He motioned me inside, and punctuated the gesture with a jab of encouragement from the gun.
Finally, the woman looked up. She did a classic double take at the sight of me. Her scalpel slipped, and made a swerving diagonal cut along the fae woman’s flesh.
She eyed my captor as if she were imagining him on the operating table in the fae woman’s place. “What are you doing?”
“What you told me to.” I couldn’t see the man’s unfazed shrug, but the shifting of the gun barrel gave me the general idea. “He was outside taking pictures. Drunk as a skunk. I tried to get him to hand over his phone, and he took a swing at me. You told me, if it looks like someone might have seen something they shouldn’t, bring them down here to you and you’ll find a use for them.”
I gave the woman a carefully-calibrated drunken wave. “Hey,” I said, with a good-natured smile. “Nice place you got here.”
The fingers of my other hand stretched up toward my wrist. I strained until my fingertips caught the clasp of my watch.
Needless to say, the woman ignored my contribution. “Just what I needed,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Now I’m going to have to figure out how to make him disappear without drawing suspicion. With a tenth of the resources we used to have. It’s not just a matter of cutting a deal with the local police anymore.”
The man answered with another shrug. “Hey, I just did what you’re paying me to do. And speaking of payment, you promised me an extra fifty bucks every time I have to break the law for you. I forged a signature for a package the other day to get the delivery guy to stop sniffing around. Pretty sure that’s a federal crime. And now, well, I just drew a weapon on someone and forced him down here against his will. That’s two separate crimes right there. Which means another hundred.”
While the two of them were distracted, I mouthed a message to the prisoner. Be ready. I might as well not have bothered. He wasn’t looking at me. He was curled in a tight ball, and wasn’t paying attention to much of anything but the body on the operating table.
The woman’s glare doubled in intensity. “Watch yourself. Unless you’d like me to find another use for you.”
“Yeah, see, I don’t think that’s an option for you. How many other people are going to turn a blind eye to the weird shit you’ve got going on down here, and for so cheap, too? The way I see it, an extra two hundred is a bargain.”
The hatred in the woman’s eyes doubled again. Probably because the man was right. “You listed three instances. That’s only a hundred and…” Her voice trailed off as she frowned at me.
“Ignoring whatever it is you’re up to is also a crime. A good citizen would—”
“Shut up.” The woman squinted at me.
I knew exactly when the recognition hit. Her eyes went from narrowed concentration to shock all at once. Fear followed a second later. She dropped the scalpel and shoved the operating table at me, body and all. My guess was, she was hoping it would slam into me and shove me into the cell.
The table rolled toward me. I pushed it aside easily. The body tipped onto the ground, leaking blue fae blood and a mess of slithery organs. The pressure on my back eased as the man behind me leapt out of the way with a startled cry.
I unclasped the watch. It hit the floor, next to something wet and clumpy that had never been meant to see the light of day.
“Shoot him!” the woman barked. “Now!”
The man held up his hands, one of them still holding the gun. “Hey, that wasn’t part of the deal. You said all I had to do was bring them down—”
The woman was already running for the door. “Shoot him, you idiot, before he—”
“Too late,” I said quietly as her hand found the doorknob.
And my magic surged to life.
Nuclear fire filled my veins. It purified me, burning the stink of this place from my nose, cleansing the grime—both physical and ps ychic—from my skin. Heat rolled off me in waves of translucent liquid fire.
But the scientist and her hired security didn’t burn.
They melted.
The flesh sloughed off their bodies, turning them into shapeless quivering masses of red. They slowly collapsed in on themselves to reveal blackened bones underneath. The smell in the air had been bad before; now it was indescribable. The closest analogue was burned flesh, even if the bodies hadn’t exactly burned. At least that was a smell I was used to—although normally, it was my own flesh burning. It had been one of the more popular ways for humans to try to kill me, over the centuries.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have regretted killing the hired gun. He might have had a dubious moral code, but he clearly wasn’t part of Arkanica. But I had left that part of me behind four or five labs ago. The man might not have known all of what was going on down here, but he had seen enough to get the general idea. And he had decided it was worth an extra fifty bucks in his pocket to look the other way.
The body of the fae woman burned, too. But the operating table didn’t. It was steel—with their resources so depleted, Arkanica no longer had access to the alternate material they preferred to use to avoid damaging their fae test subjects. The problem with steel, of course, was that it contained iron. And iron blocked fae magic. It was the same reason I could use my steel watch to hold back my magic. I couldn’t control the magic in my blood the way a full-blooded fae could, so I couldn’t afford not to keep it locked away.
I stopped paying attention to the two human bodies once I was sure they were in no danger of getting back up again. But I watched the fae woman’s body burn until she was reduced to ash. I gave a single nod of satisfaction. I couldn’t give her whatever ceremony the Winter Court held to honor their dead, but this was a better end for her remains than being cut apart by the humans. I hoped she would have approved.
The iron bars of the cells resisted the flames even more easily than the operating table, which meant the prisoner was safe. But he was finally paying attention. As the heat faded, and the waves of fire grew dimmer, he stared up at me in horror and disgust. If he was at all grateful for his impending rescue, he didn’t show it.
I bent down and slipped the watch back onto my wrist. The heat died, as if I had flicked a switch. The last of the flames wreathing my body vanished, leaving the room in darkness. The fluorescent bulb over our heads must have burst in the first few seconds.
The warmth in my veins was gone, too, replaced by the sharp icy bite of the watch around my wrist. I gritted my teeth until it faded into the dull ache I was used to. I wasn’t as sensitive to iron as a full-blooded fae, but that didn’t mean it didn’t do physical damage. Or that it didn’t hurt.
The price of keeping my magic under control.
I held my breath and dug through the mess of hot flesh that had been the human woman. The remnants of her body were crisp in some places, liquid in others. Viscous fluids clung to my fingers, and hot blood threatened to scald my hands. But I had seen worse damage done to my own flesh.
The key glowed hot as I pulled it free. The iron in it, on the other hand, burned cold, like touching a frozen pipe. I didn’t know which was responsible for the blisters that rose on my hands as I jammed it, as quickly as possible, into the keyhole on the cell door.
As the lock clicked open, the prisoner kept on staring. His horror changed to sick fascination. “You’re Kieran Thorne,” he breathed.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he recognized me. I had a reputation, after all. On this side of the veil, I was known only in the shadowy circles the Arkanica Corporation ran in, and only as the half-fae working to bring them down. In Faerie, though, where “half-fae” meant a lot more than it did here, I was the one who got away. The only one of my kind they hadn’t managed to kill. Oberon’s bastard son, who had evaded the assassins of both the Summer and Winter Courts for centuries—and while acting as protector to the human vermin, no less.
Of course, these days, I was half-ready to agree with them about the humans, if not about the death sentence they had placed on my head for the crime of existing.
I stepped into the cell, ignoring the tightness in my chest as the iron pressed in on me, and held out a hand to the prisoner. He didn’t take it.
Not that I had expected him to. Not really.
I stepped back out of the cell again, and swung the stairwell door wide for him. I motioned him forward. “Get out of here. Go through the portal, and never come back. You have the chance to get away from the humans before they find you again and do worse to you. You should take it.”
I didn’t have that option. Not unless I wanted to step through a Faerie portal and straight into the hands of the people who had been trying to kill me since I was born. But just because I was stuck here, that didn’t mean this man had to be.
He crept out of the cell, one pained step at a time. He kept his eyes on me the whole way.
“Before you go, I have a favor to ask,” I said as he made his slow way toward the stairs. “Think of it as a thank-you for the rescue, if you like. Tell me—why are you here? What are Mab’s plans for the human world?”
The wariness in his eyes turned to outright distrust. “What interest do you have in the Winter Court?”
“Me? None at all,” I answered truthfully. “I’m asking for a friend.” If that was the right word for someone who had saved my life mere days after torturing me and threatening my life. I still wasn’t sure what Vicantha and I were to each other.
Instead of answering, the prisoner ran. But not out the door and up the stairs. Instead, he darted sharply to the right, further into the room. He scanned the floor, and grabbed one of the only things that wasn’t melted. The scalpel. I didn’t know what it was made of, but it must not have been iron if he was touching it without pain. It looked like Arkanica hadn’t left all their specialized tools behind.
The prisoner turned to face me. He trembled from some mixture of fear and weakness, but neither of those did anything to dim the raw hatred on his face. “Oberon’s son. The abomination. Your veins hold the sacred fire, but your blood is the sludge of the primordial ooze the first humans crawled from. I can’t allow you to live. I may have been weak enough to let the humans capture me, but Mab will forgive me when I return with your body.”
Inside my head, I gave a weary sigh. “You can’t fight me,” I told him. “You don’t have the strength, and there’s too much iron in here for any full-blooded fae to use their magic. If you start this fight, you’ll lose. So I’m giving you a chance to reconsider. Leave. Now.” I stepped to the side, giving him a clear path to the door.
He didn’t move. He gripped his makeshift weapon tighter, and trembled harder.
“Don’t make me do this.” The words came out as a soft plea. But even as I spoke them, I knew he would give me no choice. If it was Mab he was afraid of, I could hardly expect to inspire the same level of fear in him. However impressive my reputation, it was nothing compared to the queen of the Winter Court.
So I wasn’t surprised when the prisoner lunged at me.
The thought of slipping the watch from my wrist again, to destroy the same prisoner I had come here to save, made me unbearably tired. So I didn’t. I sidestepped his slash, and hooked my arm around his chest to draw him against me. His captivity had left him weak and slow. He didn’t see the counterattack coming in time to stop it. And he didn’t have the strength to resist before I snapped his neck.
I let him fall.
I searched the room until I found a pair of steel handcuffs. I knew they had to have a pair around there somewhere—they couldn’t keep their prisoners in their cages all day, after all, not if they wanted to get anywhere with their experiments. It didn’t take me long to find them, seeing as nothing in the lab that didn’t contain iron had survived. I fastened the cuffs around the prisoner’s wrists before he had a chance to heal the spinal damage. He looked dead enough at the moment, but I knew if I took his pulse, I would feel his heart lazily beating.
The only sure ways to kill one of the fae were with iron or by ripping out their magic, and the latter was a trick only the fae knew. In practice, destroying vital parts of their bodies also did the trick, as I had learned from my many encounters with fae assassins. There was a limit to how much they could regenerate, and it was hard for someone to get back up again after losing their head, whether their blood was human red or fae blue. But even if I had been willing to slip off my watch again, I doubted I would have been able to coax my magic to so much as give him a paper cut. My magic only responded to my deepest desires, and I had no desire to kill him.
