Chapter 4: Contracting a Killer
The humid, spice-thick air of the Dark Market shifted, charged with a new arrival. A portal irised open in a less-traveled aisle, its edges crackling with the familiar chill of Lake Michigan wind. Through it stepped Fatima, her dark eyes immediately scanning the chaotic scene with a predator’s wary grace. Behind her, Hank lumbered through, grunting under the weight of two massive, overstuffed suitcases.
“I told you we didn’t need half this shit,” Fatima hissed over her shoulder, adjusting the strap of her elegant leather satchel.
“Hey, you said ‘pack for anything,’” Hank shot back, hefting the bags. “I got tools, my lucky jersey, extra socks, the good skillet—”
“A skillet? Hank, we’re in a magical black market in London, not camping!”
“You never know! Might need to cook something. Or brain something.”
Fatima’s retort died on her lips as she felt it—a gaze like a sliver of ice pressed against her spine. She didn’t turn. She let her eyes continue their sweep, her posture relaxed, but every nerve was live wire. Someone was watching. Someone old and cold.
From his vantage beside a stall of whispering feathers, Lord Peter Harrington observed their entrance. The woman matched the description: sharp-faced, voluptuous, moving with a lethal awareness that belied her civilian clothes. The “deadliest motherfucker in Chicago.” And the oaf with her, hauling luggage like a bellhop. Amateurs. But the woman… she had a stain on her aura, a resonance of recent, potent magic. Green Moon magic. And something darker, a tang of spilled fey blood.
A slow, calculated smile touched Harrington’s lips. He knew just the instrument for this particular chord.
He melted away from the main thoroughfare, moving into the Market’s deeper recesses where the shadows clung thicker and the air grew heavy with the scent of damp moss and primal musk. The sounds of bartering faded, replaced by the drip of water and low, rhythmic cries that were not of pain, but of profound, twisting pleasure.
He found the Preeminence in a grotto formed of living, phosphorescent roots. The fey nobleman was tall and impossibly slender, his skin the pale silver of a winter moon, his long hair a waterfall of the same metallic hue. He was nude, his body androgynously perfect, and he was not alone.
A siren, her skin shimmering with iridescent scales, knelt before him, her mouth working hungrily on his cock. But it was not a human cock; under the influence of his own glamour, it had elongated, tapered, formed subtle ridges and pulsating nodes. The siren’s throat bulged as she took him deeper, her eyes rolled back in ecstatic surrender. Behind him, a wood nymph, her body all creamy skin and vine-like hair, was impaled on him from behind, riding the bizarre length with a frantic, jerking motion. The Preeminence’s hands were on both of them, one tangled in the siren’s seaweed hair, the other gripping the nymph’s hip, his fingers leaving faint, glowing prints on her flesh.
His alien eyes, like chips of polished mercury, were half-lidded, watching his own flesh vanish into the siren’s stretched lips, feeling the nymph’s tight, wet heat clench around the base. He was fucking both their throats and cunts simultaneously, a biological impossibility made real by will and glamour. The siren gagged, a wet, choking sound of bliss, as he thrust deeper into her gullet. The nymph wailed, her back arching, sap-like fluid slicking her inner thighs as she came around the grotesque shaft.
Harrington cleared his throat.
The Preeminence’s mercury eyes slid to him, uninterrupted. He did not stop moving, his hips pumping a slow, relentless rhythm. “You interrupt a sacrament, mortal,” he said, his voice like the chime of a crystal bell dipped in honey.
“I bring news of a death,” Harrington replied, his tone bland. “One I believe you have an interest in. Glory.”
The name hung in the musky air. The Preeminence’s movements ceased. He withdrew from both creatures with a soft, slick sound. The siren and nymph collapsed to the root-strewn floor, gasping and trembling, ignored. The glamour on his form dissolved, leaving him with a more conventional, though no less formidable, fey anatomy. He turned fully to Harrington.
“Speak.”
“The one responsible for your sister’s… termination… is here. In the Market. Fatima Abaza. The ‘deadliest motherfucker in Chicago.’ She just arrived through the Chicago gate.”
A silence followed, broken only by the heavy breathing of the spent nymph. The Preeminence’s beautiful face showed no rage. It showed a chilling, absolute stillness.
“You wish me to kill her,” the fey stated.
“I wish you to remove a problem. Her, and the oaf with her. The redheaded O’Connor witch is with them, and an Archimedes adept. They are becoming a knot. I prefer loose threads.”
The Preeminence stepped forward, the air around him shimmering with potential violence. “You ask me to perform a task for you, when you bring me this gift? This opportunity?” A cold, sharp smile touched his lips. “You misunderstand the economy of vengeance, little man. I may do this for free, if it ends with Fatima Abaza’s heart in my hand, and her last sight being my face.”
Harrington inclined his head. “A satisfactory arrangement. The oaf is irrelevant. The others… inconvenience them. But the Abaza woman is yours.”
“Where?” The word was a whip-crack.
“Near the Chicago portal, last I saw. Laden with unnecessary luggage. She cannot have gone far.”
The Preeminence looked past Harrington, towards the distant hum of the Market. His long, silver fingers flexed. “Good. I have wished to meet this… accident-prone mortal. I will show her that some deaths are not accidents. They are compositions. And hers will be my masterpiece.”
He gestured, and a cloak of shadow and starlight woven from pure glamour wrapped around his form. Without another glance at Harrington or his former companions, he glided away, a specter of retribution moving through the chaotic dark.
Harrington watched him go, then turned back the way he came. The knot was being untied, one brutal pull at a time. He allowed himself a moment of cold satisfaction before his thoughts turned to the next move. The Archimedes sister. She required a different, more precise tool.
But first, he would watch the feathers fly. He found a perch near a stall of obsidian mirrors, his presence dampened by a subtle perception filter, and observed the reunion.
Jan spotted the familiar head of dark hair first. “Fati! Over here!”
Fatima navigated the crowd with sharp efficiency, Hank trailing behind with his ridiculous luggage. “This better be a five-alarm magical fire, Jan,” Fatima said, embracing her friend quickly. “A midnight video call with a portal key attached is not a polite invitation.”
“You got my message, though,” Jan said, squeezing her back.
Hank dropped the bags with a theatrical groan. “Dude, my back. We couldn’t go back to sleep after your call and started gaming. We were in the middle of Streets of Rage when Fati said it was time to hustle to the Dark Market. I was winning.”
“You were not,” Fatima said without looking at him. “You were button-mashing.” She scanned the assembled group, her gaze lingering on Nora, then Cameron, assessing. “So. Who’s following you?”
Jan’s smile faded. “You feel it too? I can’t get a lock. It’s like a… cold draft on the back of my neck, but it moves.”
“I don’t feel anything,” Will offered, his arm around Sarah’s waist.
“You wouldn’t,” Brigid said quietly, her own senses casting out invisible, geometric nets. “The intent isn’t aimed at you. It’s slippery. Professional.”
Cameron had been studying Fatima since she arrived. He gave a slight, appreciative nod. “You know, I didn’t think the ‘deadliest motherfucker in Chicago’ would look like someone out of a James Bond film. The kind that outsmarts him and steals the prototype.”
Fatima sighed heavily, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I hate that nickname. I have no idea how it got out there, especially since none of the beings I… took out… were taken out deliberately. It was all panic, luck, and tragic misunderstanding.”
“What about the vampire?” Hank asked, pulling a bottle of water from a side pocket. “Lili Whatever. That was pretty deliberate.”
“Lili Bartos was psychotic,” Fatima snapped, her cheeks flushing. “She was choking the life out of me. I stabbed the stake in blindly. Her last words were to thank me for ending her madness.” She shook her head, a flicker of old pain in her eyes. “That’s not an assassination. That’s a mercy.”
Jan opened her mouth to reply, but the air in front of her shivered. It wasn’t a sound, but a sudden, violent compression of reality, a bending of light and intent. Cameron, reacting to the shift in pressure a half-second before anyone else, turned and saw the attack materialize.
The Preeminence fell upon them like a silver avalanche. He didn’t run; he simply reappeared, his form coalescing from a twist of shadow and market glare, his long fingers aimed like talons for Fatima’s throat. Cameron shoved Fatima hard to the side. She stumbled into a rack of clattering brass instruments. Cameron pivoted, leading with a brutal elbow strike aimed for the fey’s temple.
The Preeminence caught Cameron’s arm as if swatting a fly. A flick of his wrist, and a sound like a cracking branch echoed. Cameron was airborne, flung across the aisle to slam into a carpet-hung wall, breath blasted from his lungs. The fey’s mercury eyes never left Fatima.
Chaos erupted. Godfrey’s deep, furious bark split the air as the dog lunged, only to be tossed aside by an unseen force, yelping. Nora moved to intercept, her speed inhuman, but the Preeminence backhanded her without looking. The impact sent her crashing into Hank’s pile of suitcases with a sound of tearing fabric and splintering plastic.
Magic flared. Three different signatures ignited at once. Jan’s was a hot, pink wave of disorienting, lustful confusion, meant to scramble aggressive instinct. Brigid’s was a precise, sapphire-blue algorithm of force, a structured telekinetic punch aimed at his center of mass. Fatima’s, rising from where she knelt, was a emerald-green whip of pure Green Moon authority, a command to cease.
The spells hit the Preeminence in a discordant symphony of light. He staggered, a snarl of rage contorting his beautiful face. Jan’s magic made his limbs feel loose and heavy, a distracting, unwanted warmth flooding his groin. Brigid’s punch knocked the wind from him, a feeling he hadn’t experienced in centuries. Fatima’s command slammed against his will like a gong, demanding his surrender.
He shook his head, silver hair flying. Glamour rippled out from him in a visible, distorting haze. The telekinetic force shattered against it. The command to cease unraveled into meaningless noise. The lust magic, however, he absorbed and twisted, reflecting it back at them as a wave of nauseating, predatory hunger.
“You dare?” he hissed, his voice now the scrape of stone on stone. He took a step toward Fatima, who was scrambling back, green light sputtering at her fingertips.
Hank found his feet. He saw the silver-haired bastard advancing on Fatima, saw his friends strewn around like broken toys. Rage, simple and clean, washed over him. His hand closed around the handle of the cast-iron skillet protruding from his burst suitcase. He hefted it. It was solid, familiar weight.
“Hey, asshole!” Hank bellowed.
The Preeminence turned, a dismissive flick of his wrist already in motion. The glamour meant to break Hank’s mind and turn his bowels to water met the pure, nullifying presence of cold-wrought iron. The spell died with a sizzle. The fey’s eyes widened in genuine, startled shock a fraction of a second before the heavy skillet connected with the side of his head.
The clang was profoundly satisfying. It was the sound of a bell being rowed, not chimed. The Preeminence’s eyes rolled back. His legs folded. He dropped to the filthy market floor in a heap of shimmering cloth and limp limbs, out cold.
A stunned silence fell, broken only by Godfrey’s low growl and Hank’s heavy breathing. He stared at the skillet in his hand, then at the unconscious fey.
“Told you,” he panted, looking at Fatima. “You never know.”
“Move!” Jan’s voice was a whip-crack. The market’s ambient noise was returning, along with staring eyes from neighboring stalls. “Now! To the London exit, don’t look back!”
They gathered themselves, a battered, hurried procession. Cameron clutched his ribs but waved off help, falling into a defensive position at the rear. Nora extracted herself from the luggage, her synthetic skin torn at the cheek, revealing a glint of metal beneath. Brigid and Will helped Sarah up. Fatima kicked the Preeminence’s limp hand away from her foot as she passed, her face pale but set.
Hank shouldered one bag, the skillet still in his other hand. “Not leaving this,” he muttered.
Lord Peter Harrington watched them flee, his lips pressed into a thin line. The fey had failed. Crudely, embarrassingly. The iron skillet was an insult to the orchestrated vengeance he’d imagined. But the chaos served his purpose. As the group hurried past his concealed position, their auras flaring with adrenaline and panic, he acted.
His fingers twitched, weaving two threads of spellcraft so subtle they were mere whispers. One thread, a seed of deep-seated insecurity and jealousy, he sent towards Will. It burrowed into the young man’s subconscious, attaching itself to his latent fear of being the ordinary one in a magical triad, the one who couldn’t protect his lovers. The other thread, a seed of possessive anxiety and doubt, he sent towards Sarah. It intertwined with her empathetic nature, her fear of being an outsider in the bond, a third wheel made by accident.
The spells settled into their psyches, dormant, undetectable. They would need time to grow, to fester. Harrington watched Jan lead her wounded, bickering flock towards the shimmering London gate. She glanced around, her freckled face sharp with suspicion, but her gaze swept right over him. She knew she was being hunted. But she had no idea by whom, or how deeply the traps were already set.
He turned and vanished into a different shadow, the first moves of a longer, more intricate game already complete. The feathers had flown. Now it was time to salt the earth.
The cool, greasy stone of the market floor pressed against the Preeminence’s cheek. Pain was a distant, theoretical concept to his kind, but the throbbing in his skull was a vulgar, shouting exception. It pulsed in time with his rising fury, a drumbeat of humiliation. He pushed himself up on trembling arms, silver hair sticking to the damp filth. The taste of iron—not the metal, but his own ichor—coated his tongue.
The market aisle was quiet again, the brief spectacle already absorbed into the endless background murmur of deals and desires. His fingers traced the swollen, tender ridge along his temple. A concussion. From a mortal. From a skillet.
The soft shuffle of bare feet approached. The wood nymph and the siren hovered at the edge of the grotto, their faces a mix of concern and wary curiosity. The nymph’s eyes were wide, her voice a whisper of rustling leaves. “Master? Who… who was the mortal with the iron pan?”
The Preeminence turned his head slowly. The movement sent fresh nausea swimming through him. He looked at the nymph, then at the siren whose throat still showed faint, scaly bruises from his glamoured cock. His rage needed a conduit, a focus far sharper than the dull, annoying creatures before him.
“It was nobody,” he spat, the words dripping with venomous finality. He raised a hand, the gesture sluggish but still pulsing with terrible power. Glamour, dark and coercive, shot from his fingertips and wrapped around the nymph’s will. “You will make her,” he commanded, his gaze shifting to the siren, “scream. You will make her scream in delight until the memory of that mortal and his iron pan is scrubbed from her mind. Until it is scrubbed from your own. You will fuck the very thought of him out of existence.”
The nymph’s empathetic concern evaporated, replaced by a blank, compelled hunger. She turned to the siren, her hands already moving, no longer tender but possessive and desperate. She pushed the siren back against the mossy wall, her mouth crushing down on the siren’s in a kiss that was more devouring than affectionate. The siren, still addled from earlier and deeply susceptible to command, moaned into it, her scaled hands clutching at the nymph’s back.
The Preeminence watched, cold and unmoved, as the nymph’s fingers plunged between the siren’s thighs. She found her wet and ready, her body responding to the forced narrative of pleasure. The nymph fucked her with hard, urgent thrusts, her fingers curling inside the siren’s hot, clutching cunt. “Scream for him,” the nymph whispered, her voice hollow with magic. “Scream for the master.”
The siren’s back arched, her mouth falling open. A high, warbling cry tore from her throat, a sound of genuine, overwhelming sensation twisted into service. The nymph scissored her fingers, rubbing roughly against the siren’s g-spot, her thumb pressing hard on her clit. The siren’s screams became continuous, a desperate aria of forced ecstasy, her body convulsing against the wall. The nymph kept going, relentless, her own breath coming in grunts, her eyes glazed as she obeyed the compulsion to drown the memory in a flood of sensory overload.
The Preeminence turned away from the raw, grinding spectacle. He closed his eyes, not to the sounds of the siren’s vocal cords straining, but to focus inward. The pain in his head was a beacon now, a lighthouse guiding his hatred. Fatima Abaza. Jan O’Connor. They had brought this indignity upon him. They had introduced the blunt, profane weight of mortal ignorance into his world.
He would not just kill them. He would unravel them. He would find the seams of their little cohort and pull, starting with the threads Lord Harrington had so helpfully suggested were already loose. The mortal with the skillet would die last, watching everything he cared for turn to ash and discord around him.
The siren’s screams reached a fevered, sobbing pitch. The Preeminence stood, his form solidifying, his purpose crystallized. The salt was in the earth. Now he would watch what withered.