Storykiller (36 page)

Robin watched Tessa cut through the trees and tried to be honest with himself.

The truth was this: from the moment he’d first seen her, Tessa had him in her thrall.

And, with that, he’d known a certain doom.

She sparked in him something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. More than a century. At least. The kindness buried beneath all that sarcasm. The brutality of her passion, even as she tried to dodge it.

Everything about her was palpable.

It reminded him of being new, of all he had felt when
he
was new. Watching her fight, he couldn't help but wonder if those things that she conveyed as naturally as breathing were part of her Scion "superhero package.” If they were part of the power she had been given—the power to enthrall, the power to enchant, the power to draw others to her side like a deadly siren song—she
was
part Story after all and many Stories had powers like that.

He wondered how anyone could look at her, be in her presence, see she what she was capable of, how hard she fought, and
not
fall in love with her, with everything she was. Like a bright shining star, destined to be great. Like a warrior and a king rolled into one magnificent package. At other times, times when she made him laugh with her sass and her entirely unique way of looking at things; the way she fought against her destiny while at the same time embracing it, he knew it had nothing to do with Tessa being The Scion, and had everything to do with her just being Tessa.

It was a funny thing to fall in love with someone new after centuries.

And so fast.

He wished he could deny it, but it was pointless. It lay there in his heart and mind as honestly as anything true that he'd ever felt or known. How could he have let it happen?

He blamed Fenris.

If not for The Wolf, he would have been whiling away his time somewhere far away from here, pointlessly, but safely. Instead he had come here to help her, to train her, to put someone just on the path of righteousness and give them the tools they'd need to not die, or at least not die right away. He hadn't wanted to hear about The Last Scion getting killed because she'd never been trained, let alone because Stories, his own people, were all gunning for her. And so he’d come.

And only now could he see that moment in his life as the point when everything changed.

When his life went veering insanely off course to become something else.

Forever.

It threw so much he’d always believed into question. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. But if he'd known he'd fall in love with her, he would have stayed far away. Love was a complicated thing for a Story, especially one like him. He and Marian were tied together in ways that both lifted them up and chained them down. Equal parts pleasure and damnation. Tessa couldn’t possibly
understand it. Hell, half the time he and Marian didn't understand it.

And why had Fenris sent him?

It pricked at him constantly, but he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. Whether Tessa wanted to deny it or not, The Wolf was the most clever of enemies and he played a long game. He was patient. He laid out pieces at a great distance and it required a mind that could take the long view to see his endgame. It was a particularly hard thing for Robin to do. He wasn’t dumb, but he was impatient, impulsive, reckless
. There was nothing reckless about The Wolf, and Robin could not see the why behind sending him to Tessa’s side. It kept him up nights.

Ahead of him, the faintest glimmer of a lake sparkled as Tessa broke through the edge of the trees. Despite the mist, the morning sunshine cut through the trees and glinted off of her skin—making her appear as if she was lit from the inside—she looked back at Robin, triumphant, smiling. She glowed. She was indescribably beautiful. His heart lurched.

He was in trouble.

Tessa pushed through the last rows of trees, and the lake didn’t pull a Houdini as she half-expected it to. There was no shore to speak of, the trees were nearly in the water they sat so close, as if they just happened to crawl up unto shore and then take root there, too tired to move further inland.

Robin was still a fair distance behind her, and from the lake's edge, she looked back at him and called out, half triumphant, half surprised. "It's here!” She covered her mouth, feeling as if her exclamation was breaking some unspoken peace of the magical place. Robin nodded and smiled at her. It was devastating to even look at him, like being punched in the stomach with rainbows or something. God, what was happening to her?

But as she watched him hike toward her, she suddenly had this very strong feeling, almost like a premonition, that she was going to get hurt, very very hurt. She supposed that was your punishment when you tried to break up a love story that had been going on for hundreds of years. Her smile faded as she watched him but she shook her head, trying to clear it, she couldn’t think about that now. Now was the time for work, now was a time for magical nonsense.

The mist was clearing quickly, burning off as the sun rose, lightening everything around them. The lake was not as large as she first thought but far more beautiful. The surface was still as glass and almost as reflective. At first it was dark, almost black, but as the sky grew lighter, it appeared green all around the edges where it reflected the trees, and a pristine blue in the center, reflecting the cloudless dawning sky above. It felt like a place nobody had ever been before. Untouched by Mortal or Story.
Tessa wondered for a moment if they were really in the right place. She saw no evidence of anyone else ever having been here at all.

Robin continued toward her. When he was close enough that she could speak to him without further disturbing the scene, she asked, "What now?"

He moved subtly and Tessa glanced over at him. He had out the short blade that he generally kept in a knife sheath on his belt. Tessa eyed the blade with a cocked eyebrow. "Something you want to discuss?"

He smiled at her and then tried to hide it. "Be serious," he said. "Your blood, in the water." He handed her the blade, grip first. She took it from him, sighing. 

"Why is it always blood? We're only doing this for a few weeks now and already I'm sick of blood." He tried not to look at her cutting into her arm. She did it casually and with barely a wince, though it surely hurt. Superhero powers didn’t mean no
pain, just quick healing.

"Get used to it," he said, trying hard to sound unaffected by the sight. Tessa held her arm out over the glassy lake and watched as dark drops of her blood collided with the water. Instead of just disappearing as she expected, the drops of blood overwhelmed the massive body of water. They spread, infecting the entire lake, taking it over and turning it an unnatural crimson from shore to shore and thus changing the entire feeling of things. The color shifted the scene from idyllic to something closer to what a lake in hell might look like. 

Tessa sucked in a breath. "Balls. That can't be good." 

Robin put a hand on her shoulder as she folded her arm back against herself to stem the bleeding. He took the knife and sheathed it but kept a hand on his bow, anxious. They were both thinking the same thing.
Fenris had screwed them
. Tessa cursed as something at the center of the lake began to bubble, sending gentle ripples through the entire lake. When the ripples increased and reached the shore before them, Robin’s hand pressed harder on Tessa’s shoulder. 

"Tessa," he began, but before he could finish she reached out her hand and shouted.

"La Colombe Noire!" The Black Dove materialized from the ether, or wherever it was that it lived whenever it wasn't in Tessa’s hand, and snapped powerfully into her grip. The now-familiar hilt had begun to feel like home to her, and Tessa set her feet and prepared herself for whatever non-delightful surprise might rise from the boiling, red lake. But then there was a flash of bright white light, hot and irregular like lightning. It spread out across the lake, bathing everything in a white so pure and powerful it was difficult to look directly at it. Tessa visored her eyes with her hand to protect against it, and Robin turned his head and squinted. The light then faded to a pale, soft white, easier on the eyes and more serene than the electric of the lightning. A woman stood before them, mere feet in front of them, in fact. She was currently submerged to the waist but continued rising up from the water, not walking, but
rising
. 

"Scion," she said, her voice somehow both warm and cool, her eyes still closed. Tessa lowered her axe without realizing it, and though Robin still had his hand on his bow at his shoulder, she could feel the tension leaving him. The woman in white opened her eyes, which were pure white, with no pupils or irises and looked at Tessa. "Ah, The Last." she said, unsurprised, her voice trailing off.  It was nice for once, Tessa thought, to have someone unsurprised that she was a chick. That particular brand of shock was wearing very thin. 

"Yeah. The Last," Tessa said, unsure if she should be talking at all. The woman smiled. 

"I am The Lady," she said. 

Tessa arched her brow. "’Kay."

"And what is it you seek?" The Lady asked.

“I’m—” Tessa began before faltering. She wasn’t sure what she should be asking, how much she should say or not. She tried again. "I'm Tessa Battle, and my Advocate, Bishop—he died, in a fight. It was my fault. Bluebeard killed him, but it was my fault."

"Bishop was destined to die, child, there is nothing you could have done to prevent it," The Lady said matter-of-factly, but not unkindly. Tessa steeled her shoulders and felt Robin stiffen beside her.

"No. I don't believe that," Tessa said. "I make my own destiny. I don't want to hear any more of that prophecy crap." Tessa winced as the words came out of her mouth. She'd just said "crap" to some kind of magical witch deity that rose out of a bloody lake in a flash of lightning, what the hell was she thinking? She’d also basically just told some all-powerful witch that probably bought her summer home off the proceeds of prophecies that she didn’t believe in them. But The Lady only smiled.

"Fair enough, Scion. Living one’s life by prophecy is not easy. Certainly The Scion, above so many, has reason to doubt
,” she said. “I can more than understand your resistance.”

Tessa softened. "So, someone told me, er, us, that there are other Advocates that could guide me, that in Bishop's place a new Advocate should have stepped forward, or whatever. But nobody has showed up and, I…I need help. I was told you might know who the Advocate is, where the Advocate is, or maybe why they haven't showed." Tessa stopped her rambling and waited uncomfortably for The Lady to respond.

The Lady closed her eyes, and her head rolled back as if she was feeling the whole world. Her eyelids fluttered so that Tessa saw inside them, beneath her papery lids as the same glowing white-hot light that they had seen upon her first arrival burned beneath them. Tessa silently hoped that she wasn't about to open her eyes and laser the two of them into ash. Her grip on The Black Dove tightened. The Lady looked back at them.

"Interesting," she said, pausing. "Your Advocate is under a spell. A powerful one. They have been cloaked not only from others but from themselves. It has been weaving for a long time now,” she paused, and closed her eyes again, her mouth flickered into a frown and then became neutral again. “And it is not just Story magic, it is Mortal magic as well. Stories and Mortals working together to keep you both from one another."

"Can it be undone?" Robin asked, speaking up at Tessa's side. The Lady fixed her gaze on him, as if seeing him for the first time. 

"Robin of the Hood," she said, smiling as she had when she first said ‘Scion.’ "Yes. The spell is simple to undo. The spell itself is doing all the work, hiding the truth. It takes much power to hide the truth, to keep things from being in their natural state. It requires an incredible amount of weaving and will to maintain a spell that intricate for that many years, which is one of the many reasons this is so interesting. Someone must want the two of you apart a great deal."

"Can you see who?"  Tessa asked.

"No. This I cannot see," The Lady said. 

“Can you tell me who The Advocate is?” Tessa pressed.

“No, Scion, the magic cloaks them from me as well.”

“Not even a hint?” Tessa prodded.

“I am sorry, Scion, it is not within my power. What I can do is to unweave the spell from your eyes, so that should you find The Advocate, you will be able to see the truth.”

Tessa chewed her lip, thinking that it was better than nothing. “But The Advocate still won’t know who it—he or she—is?”

“I can give you the necessary tools to remove the deception from The Advocate’s eyes as well, should you find them. It will not be difficult. It is as if simply removing a veil.”

"Okay, well, how do I remove the spell, I mean, if I want to?"

"If?" Robin asked quietly at her side, and she pressed her hand against him to stop his question.

"I will give you some words, that is all it will take. It will unravel easily, like thread pulled from a sweater," The Lady said.