Catfights in Faeland **Teaser**

'Fairy dust. The real stuff.'

MacAvoy O'Shea smelled his sister before he saw her.

Yeah, maybe that would sound gross to humans, but shifters had heightened senses of smell. And Cat? Well, she always reeked of motor oil.

"Fuck," he mumbled, eyeing the cards in his grip. This was a winning hand if he ever saw one. He couldn't leave now. But if Mac walked in and started raising hell, they'd both be kicked out of the Den. "Hit me," he spoke quickly, sweat beading on his brow and running tracks down his cheeks. His mind was a little fuzzy, the room around him fogged-up with fairy dust. The real stuff, minus the glitter—not the shit that sent him to the hospital last year, his whole body covered in pus-filled boils. Man, Cat had raked him over the coals for that one.

"How many?" The dealer's gruff voice rang in Mac's head, each syllable falling with a thud into his brain. Anvils of information he had to pick up slowly, just to have his drug-addled brain drop them again before he 'quite' got what was going on. When he'd first entered the Den, the drugs had hit him like a freight train—he'd felt confident, like a winner; he was going to take on the damn world. But after several hours, the exposure got to be too much. He wondered if they weren't pumping something more into the air—not just the confidence-boosting aerosol fae blood. Normally, he was still riding high, even if he stayed overnight playing.

He always felt like a winner.

Not the loser he was.

He should quit.

But he was holding cards.

A dynamite hand.

And the smell of grease and oil was getting stronger. That much was clear. He had to win something, anything, before Cat yanked his ass out of here.

"Two." Mac's hand shook as he tossed his discarded cards across the scratched table.

Fresh cards slid towards Mac seconds later. His vision blurred as he reached for them and his heart pounded in his chest. This was the play. He'd win this time, claim the whole damn pile of cash and coin and trinkets. He needed to... he'd bet his last thousand bucks on this game, plus the title to his Camaro.

"Bets. Last call." The dealer looked at the faces seated around the circular poker table. The people were a grab bag, as they always were. Confidence, badly disguised behind attempts at neutral expressions, fear, because there was a high probability that they were going to leave the Den with empty pockets to match their empty heads and souls. He knew how they felt right now. They'd given him a taste of the 'fairy' dust opium cocktail. If he weren't wearing the microscopic filters in his nostrils, he'd be right there with them.

Even so, he still tasted the air on his tongue.

Too sweet. Yet, beneath the surface, acrid and nauseating.

"All in," each of the players, except for one, said the same thing, pushing what was left of their stashes to join the heaping pot in the middle.

Only a slight figure, thin and reedy, shook her head and folded the cards in front of her.

"Well, that does me in, boys." She stood up, stretching her back which seemed to crackle and pop in an absurd way. But that was a tree spirit for you, full of knots and rings that didn't quite take to a human-esque form.

"Aww, don't leave, Willow. You've still got skin in it." Another player, bulbous and hairy, eyed her neat pile of coin and bills.

"One more bad bet and I'm not going to pay my land debt this month." Willow sighed. "It all used to be my forest. Now I struggle to hold onto an acre of it. Damned humans and their suburbia nightmares." She turned away, and as she walked a spray of thin spring green leaves filtered from her hunter-hued hair.

Mac thought she was a goddess. He was pretty sure she loathed him.

He pulled at his collar, sweat slipping down his chest now. One decent win. That was all he wanted. It would get Cat off his back. Maybe.

One by one, the players around him laid down their cards. At the Den, you played against the dealer's hand too—a one draw set of five that went untouched until the rest of the final cards had sprayed across the table in a show of winners and losers.

Mac already knew. Before the dealer flipped his five.

He'd lost.

And it wasn't just his money. He'd borrowed from the Black Fairies this time. And the Fairy Godmother, no longer the soft-handed Eleanor Kincaid, but instead her brutal son Shade, wasn't going to let him off. Not again. Not this time.

"Mac, what the hell?" Cat, her timing perfect as usual, came up behind him. Her feline gaze roved across the table, no doubt seeing his losing hand instantly. "How much did you lose? How much this time?" She slapped the table angrily. His cards bounced and shifted, as if mocking him for being such a waste of life.

He coughed, the drugs in the air finally taking complete hold of his brain. "Everything," he murmured, before passing out. 

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**Cat lands on her feet- June 4th, 2020. You'll love this spin-off to the Victoria Cage Necromancer series!**