Crystalline Cracks

      "Listen up." Kat turned to speak, her voice tinny and muffled through the mask. Her team of three stood spread out behind her, checking their various grappling hooks and boot straps. Each one a Lutari, painted Green. All of them, including Kat herself. Lin and Lu were next to each other, comparing their sharpened claws. The twins were Kat's martial arts experts, hailing from a temple in an obscure region of Shenkuu. Kat had found them when on a visit there, years ago. She had been on a contract to kidnap some pompous government fool, and had discovered the twins had caught wind of her deal and were trying to nab the geezer and the money for themselves. In exchange for their lives, the twins had agreed to join the team that Kat was building, the team that she hoped would eventually dominate the black contract market. Lin and Lu were small and light, and deadly in their skill and precision. As far as Kat knew, neither had ever been caught before she had came along.

      Jae was a little ways off from the duo, cleaning his goggles. The handsome man was Kat's breaking-and-entering virtuoso, and her childhood friend of almost three decades. He had done more contracts with her than she could count, and had had her back since Fyora had found her and left her at the Asylum-the madhouse that called itself an orphanage. Together, that they had survived the ordeals of the institution, and had been made all the harder for it. That was the place where Kat had learned that her heart was too heavy a burden to carry around. Jae had ripped it out for her.

      "Today's contract is a bit unusual, remember. We aren't hunting just any defenseless old biddy. So remember-"

      "Yeah, totally. Like, just Jhudora." Lin smoothed back her hair and picked an invisible speck of dust off her kimono. Her brown eyes were shining with barely concealed excitement. "But you know. No biggie."

      "Queen Bee of all the baddies." Lu was behind Lin, braiding her night-colored hair and using tiny knives to hold it in place as she worked. "Master of dark magic and, um, necromancy."

      "So remember," Kat interjected, tying back her bandana, "I don't want the rumors eating away at you." Long hair was too troublesome for Kat, who cut her hair as close to her scalp as possible with whatever happened to by lying around. Magic needed an open area to be worked properly, and hair falling in her face wouldn't do.

      "Oh, Kat, the girls aren't scared," Jae snapped his goggles to his head, sauntering over to her. "Can't you tell by now? They're excited."

      "Taking down Miss Boogeyman?" Lu finished braiding her sister's hair and wrapped her arms around Jae's shoulders, draping herself across his back and resting her chin on his shoulder. "We would absolutely kill for the chance."

      Kat frowned. They weren't taking this seriously enough. In the last month, her team had completed so many jobs so quickly that they had grown cocky and arrogant, and even sloppy. Today, they couldn't afford any slipups.

      "Sedation and capture only, boys and girls." Kat bent down and secured her hook to a solid looking crevice, and threw her rope over the cliff. Somewhere down there, she thought, Jhudora was on the run from Fyora. It was their job to bring her back to justice. "Get your hooks ready."

      "Aw, Kat, can't you just teleport us or something?" Lin fake whined, striding over to the cliff's edge, where she leaned out over thing air, the claws on her feet gripping the cliff side. The muscles on the backs of her legs stretched taught and thin, but held strong.

      "You know I can't, so don't ask." Kat swung herself over the side, ropes hissing as she dropped. "Now get going."

      Rocks rushed past, inches from Kat's face as she repelled down the crumbling gray rocks. A rush of to her left; the twins were climbing down by hand, like spyders, hands and feet finding new holds as soon as they left them. In perfect synchrony, they back flipped off the stone wall, freefalling the last fifty feet into the scrub below. Jae opted for repelling next to Kat, and he reached the bottom before she did. Kat stopped, unclipped herself from the ropes, and dropped.

      The forest swallowed them whole.

      Kat and her team had entered an entirely new world; where a sunny evening had been, trees and their dark leaves had eaten the sky. Twisting branches coiled over their heads, shading the soft and boggy ground that sucked at their boots. Creatures whistled and hollered, wooped and screamed in the heavy darkness all around them. Kat held out her gloved hand, and spoke a word.

      "Nÿansva."

      The syllables dissolved into the wet air, the power of them causing Kat's eardrums to ache. Where nothing been a moment before, a small blue flame whispered itself into being, dancing on a wind that wasn't there. The witchlight wasn't much, but it illuminated her and her companion's faces, elongating the wrinkles below their cheekbones, making their eyes seem opaque and hollowed out.

      "Lu, Lin, I want you two to fan out ahead. See what you can see." The twins, all joking gone, nodded in unison and sped off silently, one leaping into the tree canopy, the other taking the ground, never breaking a single twig or crunching a leaf.

      "Jae, stick with me." Dancing shadows flickered around Kat, and despite the environment, she felt exhilarated, alive. This was what she lived for. "Jhudora's here somewhere. Whatever we were... we're in her territory now."

      Kat and Jae walked for over an hour, Jae twirling a string with a heavy pouch attached to one end around and around his wrist. The simple contraption looked harmless enough, but Kat had seen it in action and it could break bones like a rock could break through weak ice on a pond. In her palm, the witchlight flickered. The spot behind her right eyeball throbbed from keeping one spell alive for so long. Any time, the twins would be returning with what they had found.

      "Something isn't right." Jae put a hand on Kat's shoulder, stopping her. "I thought you said your source knew her hideout was close to the bluffs."

      "She did say." Kat had been wondering the same thing. The dark faerie that had paid her had been quite adamant on the location of Jhudora's makeshift camp.

      "You're a magic user, you can find it easy enough," she had said, smiling sweetly. "When you do, send a scrying message back to the Tower, will you? She wants to see for herself."

      "She said Fyora was convinced of it."

      "Did you talk to her?"

      "Who?"

      "The Queen, who else?"

      Kat rounded on Jae, stopping his pouch's spinning arc.

      "You aren't serious, are you?"

      "Why?"

      "It's Fyora." Kat threw her hands up into the air, exasperated, and spun back around to keep walking. "She's too busy to talk with a lowlife like me, or you for that matter."

      "What's that supposed to mean?" Jae hurried to keep up, but Kat didn't meet his eyes.

      "It means where we grew up, what we... oh, forget it." She shoved Jae lightly, and remained silent. She told herself that she wasn't bothered by the Queen's behavior, but in truth, the fact that the dark faerie receptionist's telling her "the Queen wasn't seeing bounty hunters" had upset her. Fyora was supposed to be the one woman who was just among all others, who cared for you when no one, not even your parents or the orphanage where they left fate to carry you to, would.

      You were stupid to believe that, Kat told herself. Why should Fyora be any different? She has all the power in the world, after all. Just because you have some of her magic doesn't make you special. Just because the Queen found you and put you in that orphanage doesn't make you hers.

      "Hold up." Jae put his foot in front of hers, almost tripping her. "I feel something." Kat stopped, her eyes scanning the trees around them. Now that he said it, she could feel it too-a small, almost unnoticeable pulsation of power coming from an object, only a few hundred feet away. Jae probably felt it as a tingling in his fur, but she knew magic, she knew better.

      "Follow me." Kat bent low and stepped into a light jog, then a sprint, the witchlight floating to a position above her ear where she didn't have to care for it. It felt good to run, to stretch her tight legs and feel the energy course through her body. The good feeling, though, was mired by something that coiled around in her gut. A bad feeling. Worse than bad, tinged by magic.

      The trees stopped, and Kat found herself in a small clearing. Tall blue-green grass waved in the starry night sky, and a gigantic, towering stone that stood almost three times her height took solitary guard in the center of the glade. The thrum of magic was more potent there, making her fur stand up on end. The witchlight extinguished itself with a small hiss, and try as she might, Kat couldn't re-ignite it.

      "The other side of it." Jae had joined her, and as she strode through the grass, Kat readjusted her gas mask, glad that it hid her mouth from her partner. Glad that he couldn't see the fear that made her lips twist downward.

      They rounded the rock, and Kat let out a strangled cry, and she felt Jae's hand slip into hers. A small pool had formed at its base, no bigger than a beggar's shack. But that wasn't what had drawn the noise from her throat.

      Standing in the center of the pool was a tall, crystalline staff that was wrapped around a large pink globe that reflected the light of the stars, but refracted them too, as the globe was covered with a blanket of spider web cracks that extended down the length of the staff. It was from that that the pulsing magic radiated from, Kat knew. Below the staff lay two crumpled, black forms. One wore a long, silky kimono. Neither stirred.

      Finally, bound to the rock several feet off the ground with shadow-magic chains, was a tall figure in a dress that might once have been beautiful. A crown sat upon the figure's glistening hair, and Kat choked back a cry.

      "Fyora." Her hand slipped out of Jae's and she ran to the Queen, her blood pounding in her head. "Jae, check on the twins!" She touched the writhing chains, and white sparks sizzled when she got close; she couldn't touch them. "Who did this to you?"

      "Her..." Fyora croaked, her head lolling, barely conscious. Kat stepped back, confused, her head spinning. The sight of such a powerful faerie, the best faerie, in that state was abhorrent to what she had ever thought about her. In her heart of hearts, Kat had always known she had revered the Queen, thought that she was her friend from her childhood encounter. Evidentially, it had not been the case. Even so...

      "The twins are out cold." Jae appeared at her side, and he seemed shaken. "Something... someone... took them out. Hand to hand." His eyes fell on the ragged form of Fyora, and Kat watched as several expressions flitted across his face, which finally came to rest on a mixture of puzzlement and horror.

      "This doesn't make sense. This doesn't make any sense." Kat stepped away, holding her head. Why were they sent there? How had any of this happened?

      And then.

      "You're a magic user, you can find it easy enough," she had said, smiling sweetly. "When you do, send a scrying message back to the Tower, will you? She wants to see for herself."

      "The Dark Faerie," Kat whispered, drawing breath in through her mask, horror dawning over her like a sunrise that spread famine over the land it shone over. "Jhudora. She wants me to scry..." Slowly, she turned, and looked at the pool, still and with no ripples in the midnight calm. "She wants to watch this. That's why we were sent."

      "This is bad." Jae sucked air in through his teeth. "Very, very bad. What happens if you don't scry for her?"

      As if they heard him, the chains wrapped around the Queen tightened like coiled monsters, and a small amount of air escaped from her pink lips.

      "I don't think I have a choice." A deadly determination washed over Kat, one brought on by a sensory overload. Her emotions had run so fast that they had left only one: anger. She walked over to where Lin lay and picked a small knife out of her braid, then turned to face the pond.

      "Kat-"

      "Don't, Jae." Kat stared into the water, muttering words beneath her breath. A massive rumble shook the ground beneath her feet, and out of the corner of her eye, Kat could make out a wall of purple energy expanding from the direction of Faerieland, which lay only a few miles to the northeast.

      "Come on, Jhudora," she muttered, staring into the murky water. In it, the shape of a darkly beautiful woman began to appear, smiling wickedly with savage pleasure. "Come and get me."

The End