Wicked (A Wicked Saga #1)(2)
Author: J. Lynn

"Can take the girl out of the north but can’t take the north out of the girl."

I snorted at that. It was true. Having moved to New Orleans only three years ago from northern Virginia, I still hadn’t adapted to the weather. "Do you know what I’d do for a polar vortex right about now?"

"Not have sex, that’s for sure."

I flipped her off.  Truthfully, I didn’t even know why I didn’t miss a single day when it came to taking my birth control pills. I guessed it was habit from when it actually mattered.

She giggled as she leaned against the table, her dark brown eyes surveying my philosophy book. "I just do not get why you’re going to college."

"Why not?"

The look on her face suggested the heat had fried a few of my brain cells. "You already have a job—a job that pays extraordinarily well, and you don’t really need to get another one like some of the others do. We don’t have a lot of bennies, and we have probably the shortest lifespan of any job out there that doesn’t involve sky diving without a parachute, but that’s another reason to not waste your time on that crap."

My shrug was my response. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why I started going to Loyola a year ago. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was the weird need to do something most twenty-one-year-olds were doing. Or maybe it ran deeper than that, and whatever that was, was the reason behind taking sociology with a psychology minor. I toyed with the idea of being a social worker, because I knew I could do both things if I wanted to. Maybe it had to do with what happened to—

I cut those thoughts off. No reason to go there today, or any day. The past was in the past, dead and buried with the entirety of my family.

Despite the sweltering heat, I shivered. Val was right though. Our lifespan could be brutally short. Since May, we’d lost three Order members—Cora Howard, aged twenty-six. She was killed on Royal, neck snapped. Vincent Carmack, aged twenty-nine. He met the end on Bourbon, his neck torn open. And Shari Jordan, thirty-five, was killed just three weeks ago, her neck also snapped. She’d been found in the warehouse district. Deaths were common, but three in the last five months had all of us uneasy.

"You okay?" Val asked, head tilted to the side.

"Yeah." My gaze tracked the trolley as it rolled past. "You’re working tonight, right?"

"Yeppers peppers pots." Shifting back from the table, she clapped her hands and rubbed them together. "Want a friendly wager?"

"On?"

Her smile turned downright evil. "Most kills by one in the morning."

An elderly man shuffling past our table sent Val a strange look and then picked up his pace, but the truth was, people heard stranger crap on the streets of New Orleans, especially when you were only a handful of blocks from the French Quarter.

"It’s a deal." I finished off the coffee. "Wait. What do I get when I win?"

"If you win," she corrected. "I’ll bring you iced coffee for a week. And if I win, you do the . . ." She trailed off, eyes squinting. "Lookie. Lookie, artichokie." She lifted her chin.

Frowning, I twisted around and immediately saw what Val was talking about. I sucked in a shallow breath as I bent my right leg so my boot was closer to my hand. There was no missing the chick.

To most humans, like ninety-nine percent of them, the woman in the flowing maxi dress walking down Canal Street looked like the average person. Maybe a tourist. Or possibly a local out shopping on a Wednesday afternoon. But Val and I weren’t like most humans. At birth, a lot of mumbo jumbo was said, warding us against glamour. We saw what most did not.

Which was the monster behind the normal façade.

This creature was one of the most deadly things known to man and had been since the beginning of time.

Sunglasses shielded her eyes. For some reason, her race was sensitive to the sunlight. Their true eye color was the palest of blue, a shade leached of all color. But using glamour, a dark magic, their kind could choose what humans saw, so they came with a variety of physical traits, shapes, and sizes. This one was blonde, tall and willowy, almost frail looking, but her appearance was extremely deceptive.

Not a single human or animal in this world was stronger or faster, and their talents ran the gambit, anywhere from telekinesis to igniting the most violent of fires with a brush of their fingertips. But the most dangerous weapon was their ability to bend mortals to their will, enslaving them. Fae needed humans. Feeding off mortals was the only way the fae slowed their aging process down to a lifespan that rivaled immortality.

Without humans, they’d age and die just like us.

Sometimes they played around with their victims, feeding off them for months, if not years, until nothing was left but a dry husk of what used to be. When they did that, they poisoned the human’s body and mind, turning them into something just as dangerous and unpredictable as the fae. But sometimes they just outright slaughtered their victims. People like Val and I couldn’t be warded against the feeding and the effects at birth, but centuries ago, the simplest and smallest thing had been discovered to null their abilities to manipulate us.

Nothing was more unexpectedly badass like a four-leaf clover.

Each member of the Order wore one. Val had a clover encased in her bracelet. I wore mine inside my gemstone tiger-eye necklace. I even wore it at home when I showered and slept, having learned the hard way that no place was truly one hundred percent safe without one.

Seeing through the glamour that enabled them to blend in was how we were able to spot and hunt them. Their true forms were equally beautiful . . . and disturbing. Skin a silvery color, kind of like liquid nitrogen, and incredibly smooth. Their beauty was eerily flawless, with high angular cheekbones, full lips, and eyes that tilted up at the outer corners. Everything about their true form was creepily alluring, in a way that made it hard to look away. The only thing the fairytales and myths got correct was the slightly pointed ears.

"Fucking fae," muttered Val.

My sentiments exactly since they had taken everything from me. Not once, but twice, and I hated them with the passion of ten thousand blazing suns.

Other than the ears, the fae were nothing like Disney painted them, or the ones Shakespeare had spun tales about, and they, like all their distant relatives, did not belong in this realm. Long, long ago, the fae had discovered a way to breach the divide between the mortal realm and theirs, what was known as the Otherworld. The summer and winter courts, if they’d ever existed, had been dissolved, and there was just one ginormous group with one really scary, totally typical goal.