Folks Of Fury (#1; Tales Of Elysia [COMPLETED])

twenty.

Ezra.

When Senoy had said he'd make tonight a date I'd never forget, I was expecting something a little less on digging through the embalmed corpse of a Fey.
Because Bacchus had been right. The second set of bodies which we'd thought had been human, were actually five of the Fair Folk.
They'd been glamoured into looking human.
"Magic this strong enough to fool even your father. It has to be Mab." Senoy mused as he went towards a steel tray of operating tools.
We'd snuck into the morgue of Beauvais Memorial Hospital, when we were sure it would be cleared out.
Though Senoy had to cast a geas on us both so we'd be invisible.
Geas and spells...the fuck is the difference.
Maybe I'd ask my too-inquisitive-for-his-own-good boyfriend when we're done.
"What are you doing?" I gaped openly as I saw him pick up a scalpel, looking at him like he'd grown a second head.
He might have fucking well have.
"I'm going to open him up. There's something in there." He pointed at the sternum of the acid green skinned Fey lying in the gurney.
Senoy rolled his eyes and gestured for my hand which I gave him.
He brought it to the spot and let me feel the calcified skin of the corpse.
He was right, there was something oblong underneath the skin.
I made a face which I heard him chuckle at in amusement.
"Who'd have thought that Ezra Khan was squeamish about dead people."
I rolled my eyes. "I'm not squeamish. Hounds are the most savage creatures of the Agnate, we don't get squeamish."
He snorted. "Whatever you say."
"Okay wise guy, if you're going to cut him open, do it."
Senoy brought the scalpel to the sternum area and pressed its sharp edge to cut.
But then the surgical blade snapped in two on contact.
"Hmm." Senoy mused as he dropped the broken scalpel.
He expertly flicked out a dagger from his belt, made a show of twirling it before stabbing down hard at the corpse.
The blade cut through as easy as knife through butter and Senoy dragged the dagger into a surgically neat X incision before wiping it clean of chlorophyll green blood.
"Shouldn't the blood have coagulated by now?" I found myself asking.
Senoy shook his head. "It's different for the Fey. This one's a dryad and he won't decompose till he's buried and he becomes part of nature."
Senoy had his head bent as he pried the flaps of skin open and pulled the lamplight closer for inspection.
"That's odd." He noted as he stuck his hand in, making a nauseating sloshing sound.
I clamped my mouth shut to keep from hauling as bile rose to my tongue.
"What is it?" I managed to ask.
Senoy pulled out a black agate stone, it was engraved with a single glyph. It looked like hieroglyphs except older.
"His heart's missing, no doubt taken by the killer and replaced with this."
And Senoy dropped the stone and moved to the next body, taking the dagger to the Fey body and cutting the same manner through its chest.
He went on to all five, a serious despairing expression on his face as performed a pseudo autopsy on his kind.
He looked up at me, a horrified look on his face. "All their hearts are missing, Ezra."
"How can it be missing? No one mentioned anything like that in the reports."
"The other bodies, were they without hearts?" He asked me because I should've known.
The copies of reports from the coroner had been sent to my father for his own evaluation and I'd had access to them as well.
I shook my head. "I don't know. It was never said in the reports."
Does this mean Eleanor was buried withiut her heart?
"Does it mean that the coroner could be the killer?"
Senoy shook his head. "Only if he's Fey. Which anyone would've noticed before now."
He took the stones he had gotten from the corpses and went to the stainless steel sinks to wash his hands and the stained stones.
"We should go." I implied as I heard the distant noise coming from somewhere in the floor.
"We're taking the bodies with us." Senoy was zipping them back into their black bags.
"What? We'd definitely be caught. Five bodies can't just go missing from the morgue, Senoy."
He steeled a glare at me. "I'm not leaving bodies of the Fair Folk here. They also deserve to be he laid to rest."
I held his gaze for a while. He was adamant and somehow perturbed by the reality of dead Fey.
It was a new look on him. To be this concerned about a people who were only half his heritage and hadn't acknowledged him.
But then the other half had proved to be far crueler to him.
"I can't carry them all."
And Senoy spread his hands facing the five gurneys holding the body bags and he shut his eyes in deep concentration.
A searing heat of light ignited and blazed around the bodies before in a flash they disappeared.
"Why can't you teleport us out of here?" I asked in curiosity after seeing him to that to his sword and now to corpses.
He shrugged. "I haven't tried doing it to anyone but myself. It's not exactly teleporting, I disintegrate things into its barest essence and shift it to a different space."
"So...teleport." I smirked as we left the morgue.
"You're so dumb." He grinned back. I was relieved that his humor was back after the tension back in the morgue.
"So where did you send them?"
"Does it matter?" He retorted back with a terse clipped tone. Whoa.
I cut a glance at him as the ding of the elevator rang and closed us inside.
I reached for him eagerly but he slumped back against the wall of the elevator, head tipped back and eyes closer in a haunted way.
"Hey, are you okay? Was it the bodies?"
Senoy sighed and answered. "I guess I was just hoping that Bacchus was lying, which should be absurd but one can hope, right?"
"Now we know why Queen Mab wants the killer in her power and not the Agnate's."
"You were right then. She's been using me."
I drew closer to him and took his hand in mine in a comforting clasp.
"Not when you wanted something from her in turn. But now I hope you don't still want it."
Senoy blinked his eyes open and looked at me. His eyes were steady and piercing. "You mean if I still want to be a Knight of Faery? I... It's the only thing I've ever wanted for a long time. I don't know."
Okay that stung a bit. He can't possible not know what he wants now...not after I told him I love him.
He must've seen the forlorn look on my face and he continued to speak.
"Ezra, it's the only way I can protect myself especially now that the covens have all but declared war on me and your father thinks I've stolen your soul or something. Mab's favor can..."
"Can nothing, Senoy. You have to see that she's almost as bad as the covens, denying you a place where you would be safe all that time and now using your deepest desire to entrap you. And it's like you don't have faith in me."
He blinked and took his hand from my grasp only to press his palm against my cheek.
"Of course I have faith in you."
I frowned down at him. "So where the fuck is all this coming from? I love you, Senoy. That means that no one and nothing will harm you without going through me."
"Is it wrong for me to not burden you with that? What if it's the Legion, it'd be cruel of me to make you fight against your family."
I took his hand away from me and glowered at him. I hated it when he talked like this.
"It's a good thing it isn't your choice then."
When the elevators opened into the ground floor of the hospital, there was a screeching noise ricocheting through the halls.
The fluorescent lights overhead filtered with static and I strained my auditory senses and frowned.
"What is it? What do you hear?" Senoy asked beside me, tensed as a stretched spring.
"Nothing." I was sure we had left the usual lively noise of activity especially on this floor, before heading to the morgue.
But there was no one. The nurses at the reception desks, the orderlies and doctors on the night shifts.
No one. Nothing.
The lights flickered and more screeching noises echoed but what made the hairs at the back of my neck rise was the flickering shadows.
"Ezra." Senoy had seen the shadows as they seeped and flickered from the corners of the walls, at our feet.
Power flooded through my veins voluntarily, fangs sharpened, muscles cording and thickening, claws stretched in my partial change.
And just then from the left hallway, a door barged open and a tall slim figure clad in sweeping blood red cloak stepped out.
The hood covered and shadowed his face, sleeves stained a deeper wet shade of crimson and from the heavy smell of metal and salt.
Blood. I growled, showing fangs and brandishing claws as I turned in a hunched attack against the creature that had killed many Redwood citizens.
Killed Eleanor. My vision was clouded with the red of rage and bloodthirst.
"Ezra Khan of the Legion. I've been expecting a meeting."
"Now you have and you're going to regret killing all those people. Killing my grandmother." 
"Ezra-" Senoy started in warning but I tore from his side, lunging and roaring at the serial killer.
There was an explosion of dark mist from his splayed outstretched hands. They were like tendrils of night but with a pungency of decaying corpse.
I pushed to the wall, evading the mists and digging my claws into the concrete wall I pivoted up to the ceilings.
I turned for a split second for Senoy and saw he was already in motion, the mists had coalesced into beasts as large as a car with pale white rows of fangs.
These were bigger and more twisted than the ones I'd encountered last time. I growled and came down upon the killer, slashing with claws.
But he stepped aside as quickly, with only a ripped scrap of his collar from where I'd struck.
I didn't falter as I engaged him. I smelled burning smoke but I didn't plan on getting distracted.
Not when I was sure it was coming from Senoy burning and killing the shadow creatures.
"There's no hope of defeating me, wolf boy. Or catching me...not till I've completed the Rite."
I spun, throwing a kick that hit him square in the chest and I swiped upward at his torso, ripping more of his cloak.
"A little cocky, aren't we?" Senoy called closer than he had been and pulsing with gamboge energy.
Behind him were the dying beasts, writhing and growling in agony as they burned. His face had a single scratch but he grinned with a senility that amused me.
"I should be. Tonight I'm one step closer, the blood of Agadir runs and links the ley lines in response to my sacrifice."
And as if to cement his claim, the entire hospital began to quake and rumble, the walls cracked and chips of the ceiling fell.
Senoy staggered but righted himself to share my look of dread as at our feet, the streaming blue familiar lines streaked out.
They were leading out of the ward which we'd seen him come out of.
He's killed again. The killer laughed at the looks our faces.
"Yes fear for yourselves. No power can match the Lord of the Rite's."
Senoy nodded at me and we attacked together, him bringing the brilliant dark blade of his sword down and me going for his jugular.
But then he waged his hand and sent us barrelling into the walls by a powerful surge of energy, and blasting us to the parking space outside the hospital.
I tried to gather myself in time as I saw him blurring out of vision in his approach for me.
Too slow or disoriented, he tackled and with lightning quick reflexes blocked my defenses and struck too fast for me to guard.
I heard Senoy yell my name but then a flare of burnished light exploded before my eyes but I could see that Senoy had cast a shield that blasted us apart.
The killer hissed out as if the shield had burned him but it might as well have because smoke was rising from his scorched hand.
A hand that held a dagger that if I had to guess would have been used to stab through my chest.
"No one else is going to die for your fucking ritual." I heard Senoy growl distastefully and he vaulted forward in a speed that I'd seen only when he dueled Aristyl.
It was like watching lightning dart and strike. He caught the killer by surprise, flashes of his sword as he slashed forward.
Blood gushed and I gasped as the dark blade severed off an arm, cutting through a wall of ley lines' magic which he had been thrown up in defense.
Even the killer was shocked more than he was in pain of losing an arm but he raised his other hand a flash of cobalt light formed a shortsword in his hand.
He clashed with Senoy and then continued to meet his every attack with just as much skill, if not more. He didn't seem hindered by his handicap.
"Ezra!" My head snapped to the other end of the lot and saw the familiar faces of Chris and Micah. And with a searching glance, behind them I found my father with three other Hounds in full change charging for us.
I tried to move but the Senoy's shield magic still held its place unrelenting and I growled out in frustration.
"Dad, it's him. The killer..." I called out instead directing his attention to the hooded figure battling Senoy.
And the battle wasn't going well for Senoy, he was bleeding in one arm and his speed was slowing as he went on the defense.
The Hounds gathered and prepared to attack but the killer didn't fail to notice.
I heard him mutter a string of words in a tongue I didn't recognize but realised he was spellcasting as the ley lines darting towards the Legion.
"Dad watch out!" But he and the other Hounds were too slow and the lines would've cracked the ground underneath, taking them underground.
But Senoy's voice rang out and a similar shield as mine flared out as a border to halt the magic of the ley lines.
But it was distraction enough. My heart pounded with foreboding anxiety as I could feel Senoy's danger like it was a chilled breeze on my skin.
He was disarmed instantly. Angurvadal spinning out of his grip for the first time since I'd seen him hold that blade.
"You cannot stop the Rite, Furyflame. I shall have what I desire even if it means making graves of you all." He wielded both Angurvadal and his weapon at Senoy.
Fuck! "Senoy let me out!" I could not move without having the spell burn me.
But Senoy didn't seem to hear me as he looked stonily and infinitely furious at the killer.
"I hate it when people tell me what I can and cannot do." He grinned with that illuminating fury in his eyes as he dropped his glamour.
I averted my eyes from the explosion of reddish gold light, one I could feel its scorching power even through the protective shield.
I heard gasps of horror and awe from the Legion behind me. When I opened my eyes I too let out a stunned breath.
Not because I haven't seen Senoy's Fey form and gotten used to it, but because he had turned the entire night sky into day.
It wasn't like the way his Aunt Henrietta had done at the Carnevale.
This was harsher and dazzling because Senoy had become the sun.
Burning sunset red light emanated from his skin, ears pinched to points, billowing feathers in his wild hair and his ravens circling about him.
But he was changed, not as he had been before- half of his face was now turned to a garish skeleton, a dot of ingot surrounded by blackness in the socket and pointy canines were revealed.
In his right hand, he held what I thought was a staff.
But on a closer look, it was a spear, a foot taller than him and rung into pale segments like a spinal column with a dark glassine blade at the top.
The killer hissed but staggered back in sudden dread. Senoy struck the butt of the spear to the ground.
It was like the clash of boulders, claps of thunderstorms and the crashing of ocean tides. All at once and yet still not compared to the sound.
The ley lines receded from where they'd been held off by the shield of gamboge light and surged for Senoy, as if he was recalling that untameable force to him.
And Senoy turned his eyes- one soft red gold and the other ingot surrounded by darkness- and slashed at the killer.
But he had already vanished into a gaping hole of darkness leaving us all gawping at what he'd been scared shitless of.