Slayer: An Isabella Hush series story

part one

I found the fae warlord in his garden. He sat with his back to me, watching a nymph thread a hammock with gossamer and spider silk. The sun was setting and sweeping a luscious shade of crimson across the tops of his acacia trees. The air smelled of perfume.

All in all, it was the perfect place for an execution.

I let my boots scuff the gravel a little too loudly, just enough that he would know I was there.

He didn’t turn around at the small mercy I offered him. That was disconcerting, since he had always been a polite, mannered fae for all the dark deeds he’d undertaken throughout his lifetime.

I soon realized he was the one being merciful to me, not the other way around. We both knew my subtle announcement that I had arrived was a courtesy borne of familiarity and respect, and we both knew he didn’t need it.

His natal magics gave him 360 degree eyesight as well as long sight. He would have known I was coming long before I stepped into his garden.

He would know exactly why I was there.

“Took you long enough,” he said without turning around.

His hands were clasped behind his back and he lifted his head so that it appeared as though he was staring off into the horizon ahead of him, studying the tree line that bordered his garden.

He wasn’t.

He was looking directly at me.

It made me shiver inside my flight jacket, a leather vanity I’d taken from my last target: a human man with too much information on the world of the fae.

A man this warlord and his council had sent me to kill but whom I’d let live.

The jacket was a reminder of why I did so and I wore it with purpose.
It was my first act of defiance in three thousand years.

If I lived beyond three thousand, I’d want to remember why I defied the fae masters and put my life in jeopardy.

He’d had children, the human. Twins under the human age of three. One of them had been wearing his coat when I’d crept upon them. She’d stood very still with her tiny feet stuffed into his size twelve combat boots, the arms of the jacket hanging down to the floor of their plain and unremarkable human kitchen.

I remember the way the puddle of sleeve looked against the fake tiles, the way her fingers made a tiny knot of protrusion in the sleeve.

Her doe eyes took me in as though she’d seen plenty of my kind. Maybe she had.

Her mother was Kindred. It was the reason the human man knew too much and why the dark fae had sent me.

His knowledge was the reason he needed to be exterminated.