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“She started to act funny at dinner,” Felix said, volunteering the information I couldn’t bring myself to share.
“Funny how?” the female inquired.
“Quiet, didn’t eat. Then when we danced, she seemed to lose all inhibitions.”
“What - did she start stripping naked something?” the other male in the room asked. I would think it a joke had his voice not remained inflectionless, as if he was bored by the conversation already.
“Not exactly, she was dancing. Carefree, like the world wasn’t even there. And then she started shooting out her power like sparks.”
“God, it sounds like the brownie incident of 2018.” The female’s exasperated tone held a touch of humor.
“The what?” Felix asked.
The female waved off the question. “Nothing, not really. Long story involving brownies, pot legalization in Canada, and a lot of way too much experimentation for one weekend.”
I felt Felix’s amusement despite the severity of the situation, his desire to dig into that story a tangible thing. But we had bigger issues than his desire for later blackmail material. Chances are he would use this story to create an extremely inappropriate ringtone, just like he had for all the emissaries, once I replaced that piece of shit she carried around with her.
“Any chance she was drugged?” Zane asked, returning all attention to the matter at hand.
“I couldn’t find any trace of physical abnormality. If she was, it wasn’t a physical drug.”
“Mental then,” the female said, her flippancy all but gone. She rushed from the room, returning moments later with a large tome in hand. She plopped on the floor next to the now damaged coffee table, slamming the book down before tearing through the pages. Felix watched over her shoulder as she flipped.
Book is Faien.Felix explained as he continued scanning with her.
Surprising.I responded back.
Aye. I thought the Fae had given up on their creations before even you came to Earth.
Apparently not.I replied, clutching my Thief’s clammy hand in one of my own.
The flipping stopped for moments at a time before it continued. Finally, she stopped altogether, jabbing her pointer finger down harshly against the page she was reading.
“Did she seem agitated? Rubbing at any spots?”
“Yes, and one behind her right ear,” Felix replied.
“And no real appetite. Lost inhibitions. No signs of drugs,” The woman breathed heavily, as if fighting back an anxiety attack. She pulled away from her book, pushing beside me and roughly pulling open one of my Thief’s eyelids. I growled, watching Aeryn’s eyes move back and forth in a rhythmic Z like pattern.
“What did she do today? Did she connect with anyone?”
“Connect?”
“Heal. She doesn’t do it normally, you know, she… uses her mind. Whatever, it’s hard to explain,” she waved her hands frantically, trying to articulate her thoughts as quickly as they were coming. “Did she heal anyone?”
“She had her trial earlier today,” Felix replied. “She had to heal a victim of the faehawk venom. She failed.”
“Failed?” The woman was as incredulous as I had been watching my Thief’s efforts earlier. Originally, I had thought she had intentionally failed, but when she lost consciousness, I knew it hadn’t been an act.
I should have known then something was terribly wrong.
“Tell me about this venom,” the woman’s no-nonsense tone brooked no argument. Felix quickly ran through the symptoms and the effects, leaving out no details of how it impacted the body and how it spread. The woman’s eyes grew wide as he explained, her hand lifting to her chest.
“Some of it sounds like that hericous venom,” she turned back to her book, pointing to the lines of Faein text before her. “Hericous venom is a literal cluster fuck. It’s a contagious mental venom created from the anguish of a dying tylwyth teg fairy. It leaks from host to host when psychic connections are forged and held. With the way she heals, she would have forged more than a strong enough connection for the venom to spread. It isn’t like physical venom; it doesn’t need to leave any chemicals in the body. And its Gods awful. It works by forcing the soul to relive its most tortured memories repeatedly until the soul wants nothing more than to escape the host.”
“But she isn’t showing any of the physical signs that the human she healed earlier did.” Felix replied. “The human went through all the typical physical symptoms of the faehawk venom - purpling skin, fingernails falling off…”
“A smokescreen,” the woman interjected. “They probably gave the victim something like faehawk venom to cover the symptoms of the hericous as the faehawk would have killed the victim too quickly for the hericous to spread. Either way, someone would have had to infect her target very shortly before the event. Victims of this don’t usually last for long.” The woman looked back and forth between Felix and I, her expression grave.
