Ride the Moon: An Anthology (8 page)

Light?

Zerj bolted to his feet. The ship must have already blown—

“I wouldn't think of running if I were you.” The source of the muffled voice emerged from the surrounding bush. The strange garment it wore—a thin film of diamond-textured fabric—gave this person, this
woman
, the same glimmer as the statues.

Yet she still wore the mask. Where the eyes ought to have been—only an amber burning.

“How long—”

“About two minutes ago.” There was a strange depth to her voice, as if it were both inside his head and in the air at once.

“What? But it's daytime.”

“Not there.” She chuckled. “They told me you were well-educated. I'm beginning to wonder.”

She sashayed past a statue—one depicting a lithe female, masked, and with the same cords of hair.

Two minutes ago. That meant there was still time ... if he knew where he was, and could muster a speck of magical know-how. Nobody did anymore, because engines and gunpowder were more profitable, more socially acceptable. And more predictable.

So he reined in the desire to bring out his hand-cannon. For now.

“But how did you know I—”

“Move. The boss didn't expect that I'd bring you back with me. I can't wait to see the joy on their faces when I bring both the perfume and the head of Faulon Syndic.”

“Like I said before, I can offer you more than anyone could be paying you right now.”

The woman brandished the flame-sword, her footsteps strangely quiet. It could have been a hallucination, for all the noise she didn't make. Maybe she was?

What if the perfume had malfunctioned, what if they'd made a mistake in producing it, and instead of being ravished by feminine magic, he was imagining a female captor who would slice him into pieces?

She led him to a rocky beach. Fog clouded all but the shore.

Before he could ask whether or not she meant him to grow gills and continue into the water, the sound of oars broke the silence. Soon a rowboat pierced the mist. Once it stopped, a woman in knee-length boots hopped into the water and strode towards them.

“Really, I don't have time to wait for your employer's dramatic entry.” Behind the sarcasm was the thought of whether or not his yacht had exploded—

“Quiet. Your desperation is obvious. You're not as good as you think at hiding your restless mind.”

The woman glared, and a nervous heat crawled up his neck. Cold was not the right word for this person. Precise, active, fiery, logical.

“Mr. Faulon! This is a surprise!” said the other woman. “Leen, you can relax now.”

“So that thing does have a name. Do I know you?”

“Know me? Don't insult me even more, you lousy bastard.”

He threw his arms in desperation. The woman circled him.

“Parnella Fionketta Vijn Tradellia. Does this name mean nothing to you?”

He shrugged. The woman looked vaguely familiar ...

“Nothing?”

He needed more specifics. Someone from the office. Olive skin, eyes strangely set wide apart, broad forehead. Nice earrings, tailored skirt and jacket. Hair pinned back, glasses. This woman could have been any number of hangers-on linked to the boring high-society crowd in which he found himself.

“Sorry.”

“
Duchess
Parnella Fionketta Vijn Tradellia? Does that help?” Ms. Tradellia ceased her pacing and closed in on him. Her breath fluttered against his neck.

He kept still. Something squirmed in his chest.

“A sparkle of recognition. Is it your guilty conscience or your overindulgence clouding your mind?” With a flourish she swept the glasses from her face, then unpinned her hair. Brown locks gushed over her shoulders. A glow in her cheeks, a pained, yet somehow pleased curve at her lips ...

“Shit ... Ella ... Parnella. Of course.”

“A sudden change of heart, huh? You're good at those.”

“Look, Parnella. This isn't fair. You knew what you were getting into. Nobody who has ever heard of me would think that day could have been taken seriously—”

Parnella bit her lip. Oh, that same look ... “To think I left my private room at the horse races because I saw you mingling with the workers in the pit, obviously alone. At times I want to regret it.”

He smirked. “But you don't.”

She slapped him. “And you left the workers you so sympathize with in a heartbeat once I invited you to my room, isn't that so?”

“I don't know what you're getting at, but you approached me. All I recall is that you were working with one of my project managers. They all called you ‘Ella' for short and as much as you hated it, I figured you were used to it and that's what I assumed you were used to being called. So before you try to pull this bratty nonsense about me being a womanizer, consider that you didn't seem concerned about whether or not I knew your full title or significance in a society that bores me, and the only name you felt like repeating that night sure wasn't your own—”

Slap.

She turned to Leen. “The perfume?”

Leen tossed the bottle to Parnella. She lunged to catch it, and nearly tripped on the rocks.

Parnella clutched it to her chest and said, “Do you have any idea what this is worth, you stupid demon?”

“All the more reason for you to catch it,” Leen said.

They discussed compensation, which didn't particularly interest Zerj. Instead, he found himself ferreting through his memory for anyone who might have provided “services” to his company, was mentally unstable, and had the resources to pull off this kind of stunt.

“Now, enough of that. Let's refresh your memory. You contracted out the development of this perfume.”

“Agreed.”

“To whom?”

“A firm that specializes in blending magic and science. Looking back, yes, it was your firm. But after the initial meetings, I left it with the project manager and moved on. After that, I was more concerned with—”

“Drinking and trying to evade your guilty conscience with some whore from the gutter?”

“Probably. Why?”

Parnella circled behind him, and clapped her hands onto his chest. “I sent you flowers once, you know.”

“Maybe I didn't get them.”

She whispered, “I know you got them. You just didn't care.”

Zerj shrugged.

“Let's say your project manager, terrified that your brilliant idea to delve into the cosmetics industry was going to fail and that he would be on the receiving end of your wrath, did exactly what you told him to: find a source of the moon's power at any cost, and make my firm, which is basically just me, distort it into a consumer product.”

“Okay. Now we can talk. Listen, I—”

“Do you know the only way to actually do that?”

“No.”

Parnella eased in front of him. “You need to slaughter elves.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘You need to slaughter elves.' Then you distill their blood with my patented process, and extract the moon's essence. Beautiful, lean creatures they are ...”

Bile rose in his throat.

“Good. You're squirming. And of course they don't take kindly to being bled out of their alleged immortality and left back in their fairyland powerless. Before I was able to enlist Leen here, they destroyed my family's estate. Including its inhabitants. Don't you recall?”

“I don't pay attention to news that isn't political or business-related.”

“Of course you don't. Those moon elves are deadly things, Zerj. That's why the only way I could capture them was to enlist the help of this sun demon, you see. Honourable, proud, straightforward sun demons.”

She turned her back to him and stepped towards the shore.

Zerj smirked. “I find it hard to believe you'd go to such lengths for a lucrative contract. It's not like you need the money.”

“Does a privileged brat learn how to do the impossible? Does a privileged brat fashion a mask from the bones of those bloody moon elves in order to give a sun demon the power to transport themselves from this realm to wherever moonlight falls?” Parnella's voice faltered. “Does a privileged brat not still fall in love with ...”

Zerj's throat tightened. He'd heard that kind of crack in a woman's voice before.

“... with trash like you?”

He stepped towards her. “Listen, Duchess ... I'm sure you're smart. I'm a very busy man, you see. Love isn't exactly something I—”

Parnella's leather gloves squeaked with the clenching of her fists. “Are you that self-absorbed?”

He kept the answer to himself. But that didn't stop her from rushing to him and kicking him in the crotch.

First he reeled, then wondered that it actually didn't hurt as much as it should have. But a handful of heartbeats later, he crumpled to the ground, a sickness climbing his abdomen. He gasped and clawed the rocks.

“It's only fitting that you're the first victim of my handiwork.”

In a haze of pain and groaning, Zerj heard the hiss of a perfume spritz. Between breaths, he said, “Oranges, violet, and black pepper ...”

Parnella chuckled. “Those are just the opening notes, dear. The enchanted accord will hit you in a moment.” She paced. “And it only works if the wearer truly is attracted to the target. It pains me that for you to learn your lesson, I have to actually continue admiring you!”

A cough. “We don't always control these things ...”

“I did it all because I thought it would win you over! How stupid was I?”

A boot to the face.

“This is what he deserves. He's earned it. All that hard work ... all that hard work inheriting an empire, anyway.”

Another boot.

He spat a string of blood and stood. Only now when he looked at Parnella, gone was the shrill harpy in designer clothes. Instead, the bitch who had kicked him was something divine; a bucket of sunshine sparkling in some light issued from far beyond this foggy dimension, with ringlets swaying like fields of rye in the spring breeze, curves greater than the most celebrated goddess statue of antiquity, eyes like royal jewels or oceans or the sky—

Zerj shook his head, turned away from the woman. He reeled from a faltering, a weakness in his chest.

“Of course I'll never be yours, Mr. Faulon. Not now. But you can suffer like I did. Oh, how poetic that you landed here, how perfect.”

Those damned scents, clouding his brain like she had injected herself into him, replaced his blood with liquid images, sensations, memories of things that never happened, but oh how great it would be if they had—

“This is why your people will fall one day,” Leen said. “The way you use what little magic is left. It's like a toy to you.”

“Quiet.”

“Then perhaps you should compensate me so that I may leave you to your childish torture.”

Something wasn't right, but what? There was the perfume, yes, and this strange place far away from his yacht, then what?

This is why it's going to sell, you idiot. Think past the fog.

“I'm getting tired of your pedantry, Leen. I don't know what your people are, or what you do in this realm of moon people and sun demons, but you've outlived your usefulness.”

It seemed so wrong—that this perfect woman would threaten anyone. But that's what she was doing. If that's what she wanted, though, who was he to argue?

Think, idiot.

Once more, he went with a general mistrust of his upbringing. He jumped in front of Leen, tackled her. There was a boom. Another. Pain bloomed in his shoulder.

Zerj groaned and rolled. Then came the sounds of a scuffle, a short scream, and the sound of bone cracking. Then the eerie sigh of Leen's sword and searing flesh.

“Are you okay?”

Zerj rubbed his eyes. Leen was there, hand outstretched. He paused when he saw the mutilated body staining the rocks.

“I might be, if I can get this wound to stop. I'm a bit of a bleeder, Madam.” Then it hit him that this was the thief who had started the whole thing. He went for his hand-cannon. “Sorry, but I tend to hold grudges. Care to explain this?”

“You saved my life. So I owed you the same.”

“And my yacht? My employees, all those innocent lives?”

Leen removed the mask. Brown skin, dark eyes, and cheekbones quite like the gigantic statues. But she lacked the pointed ears and long face. “The moon is still out in that part of the world, yes?”

He lowered the weapon, if only slightly. “Is that some kind of cryptic offer?”

Leen sheathed the sword. She then sat cross-legged, back perfectly straight.

“So you go where the moon goes? You can just flick back and forth like that? Genius ... night raids, good tactics. No wonder you've become a hot commodity in these times.”

“I'm trying to concentrate, Sir.”

He pressed on his wound. “Sorry.” Blood now seeped from the fabric of his waistcoat and stained his hand.

And to believe that Leen had nearly killed him, and had killed his crew, all because that stupid woman had told her to, and now she seemed like some eternal feminine goodness.

“Listen, maybe it's just the perfume, but—”

“Shh.”

He would have apologized, had the same blue flash not stunned him again.

“Zerj?”

Zerj turned onto his side and vomited.

“We caught the intruder!”

Kheman helped him upright. All round stood the respectable, the rich, the powerful. Most of them were either pale or green. Hairstyles had fallen. Buttons were undone, comportment disintegrated in the face of that ticking menace at the front of the ballroom.

“It's okay,” Zerj said. He stood. “Let her go.”

“Are you mad?”

Leen surveyed the crowd. “Shall I just kill them all instead of waiting for you to explain?”

Zerj quickly explained the situation. The men released Leen.