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Slayer: An Isabella Hush series story

Part three

It took generations to grow heart flowers. Like Ninth World lady slipper orchids that took years of energy gathering to produce that magical bloom, all that energy returned to the seed pod, where it would gather more and wait generations again before it produced another.

But while ninth world wild orchids took years to offer a bloom, heart flowers took ninety.

The fae warlord didn’t just have patience, he knew he would live those generations, and live in the same place for all of them.

He idled toward the nearest stalk and ran his thumb over its petal. It shriveled beneath his touch into a leathery pouch.

He held it out to me and let the stem seam its way through the leather tissues of the flower. It rattled inside when I took it from him.

“The seed,” he said. “You can grow your own now.”

I regarded him quietly but took the flower just the same.

He knew I had no garden. No home.

I would never have them.

I was the assassin for the Shadow Sidhe, at the bid and call of any who needed me, whenever they needed me. I slept when I could, where I could. Ate when time allowed it.

That their call came ever more frequently these last few centuries meant I hadn’t had a home since mortal men rode the breadth of the world to crusade for their god.

Sometimes it took a century to bring to justice the quarry I hunted. Sometimes, with the help of the Shadow Sidhe, mere moments.

But that depended on who or what I hunted. It depended on how badly they wanted the creature dead or whether they merely wanted information from the poor being.

They knew much, the Shadow Sidhe, but they didn’t know all. They were powerful, but not omnipotent. They could only command so much.

While that sort of magic might exist if all the worlds were to come together in one cluster of energy, it didn’t exist in any one of the nine worlds.

But the Shadow Sidhe could command me, and they did so frequently.

This one, a sidhe who had sold a precious Odin rune to a sorcerer from the eighth world, that of transient magic, had taken me three turns of the hourglass to find.

If I hadn’t dreaded the task, I might have done it in less than half that.

“You’ve always known it would come to this,” I said, feeling a grittiness in my eyes that wouldn’t blink away. “You knew it when you accepted me in. You’ve known it all these centuries.”

He shrugged.

“Knowing a thing doesn’t always mean you must avoid it, did I not teach you that, Kelliope?”

It was a ridiculous answer because it had nothing to do with what I’d asked.

He gazed at me from a canted head, all the better to make me feel at ease instead of his direct stare.

Oh, he was merciful, this dark fae, a creature natal to the fifth world of long sight who had connived his way onto the Shadow Sidhe with his magics and power and cunning.

No fae in all of history had managed to straddle the boundaries of existence in multiple planes using his own magics. Fae could move world to world, they could exist in one and move to another, but they could not pin their very existence to two worlds, let alone three. It had never been done until him.

That he’d managed to find a place in the fourth world with the Shadow Sidhe was an anomaly, that he could straddle those of the fourth and fifth too, that was nothing short of a miracle.

And it was knowing that all nine of the worlds would lose this great mind, his great magic, that made the bitter tang of nostalgia even worse.

I ached all over at the compassion in his gaze.

I clenched the last bit of the stem of the heart flower against my thigh. I’d been passed around a dozen times by Kindred who thought they owned me, finding a home here with the general until the Shadow Sidhe took possession of everything that I was and everything I knew.

It had been inevitable, and even I’d known it back then, but it didn’t make my time with the general less peaceful. Those years had been the only years I’d felt happiness at all.

A Kindred of my sort didn’t keep her freedom long, if at all.

If ever.