Karhi Emelyn

“I think she’s the Queen of Ravens,” Onyx said as she sat down on Karhi’s couch. She flashed a too-bright smile as she took a sip of her bloody martini.

Karhi rolled his eyes, sitting on the loveseat adjacent to the couch. The couch and loveseat were a matching blue suede set.

Carry sat next to Karhi instead of Onyx, and Karhi scowled at her.

“What?” Carry challenged.

“Please sit next to your wife,” Karhi told her.

Carry narrowed her eyes at him before pointedly turning to face him and putting her feet up on his lap. “Can’t I sit next to my brother?”

Karhi sighed, giving the ceiling a long-suffering look. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been listening to Onyx talk about Sloane’s friend being the Queen of Ravens for two days, and you can listen now while I watch.”

Karhi rolled his eyes, but he didn’t push Carry off.

“I’m not crazy!” Onyx protested, setting her martini down on the coffee table. At Karhi’s glare, she moved the martini to a coaster. “Picky,” she muttered.

“That’s an eighteenth-century piece from Switzerland made of a type of wood that doesn’t even exist anymore!” Karhi shot back.

“You could get a replica of it online for like four thousand dollars. It’s not that special.” Karhi glared at her as she continued. “You can’t even . . .” she trailed off, looking confused. “Wait . . . what?”

Carry smacked Karhi hard enough on the arm to hurt down to the bone. He cursed. “Carry!”

“No using powers to win fights!” Carry reprimanded him.

Onyx, realizing what had happened, levelled a nasty scowl at Karhi. She pointedly pushed the martini back onto the bare wood.

Karhi glared at her, but Carry was right. “Sorry,” he said grudgingly.

“Next time I’ll fucking flood the room with ravens,” Onyx snapped back. “See how you like it.”

Carry sighed. “Onyx, he said sorry. Karhi, drop it.”

Karhi closed his mouth before he could retort.

Onyx and Karhi each sat in silence. Karhi could make people forget things by looking them in the eyes; Onyx could craft illusions.

They stewed in annoyance before Karhi finally held out the olive branch. “Okay, why do you think Sloane’s friend from the bar is the Queen of Ravens?”

Onyx eyed him for a moment before taking the offering. “She spoke of kingdoms,” she said. “This woman that Sloane spoke to. I couldn’t hear it, but I can read lips a little. And Sloane engaged with her. Knew what she was talking about.”

Onyx hadn’t told him about that. “Oh?”

“This woman responded negatively to Sloane’s use of the word ‘Nevermore’.”

Karhi had wondered when she would say something about that. Onyx was the lost Lenore. “You were so cruel to Edgar.” He shook his head. “Playing with him because you wanted his wife.”

“Virginia didn’t even last as a vampire,” Carry groaned, stretching her legs further out on his lap, sinking down into the couch. “She died of consumption, and then she died again because she couldn’t handle the blood lust.”

“Yes, and then Onyx drove Edgar to insanity,” Karhi replied, giving Onyx a look.

Onyx waved him off. “The point here is the poem. Corvine means ‘of or like a raven’. Nevermore. Glamours. Strong magic. Kingdoms.”

Karhi raised an eyebrow.

“She’s one of the bestia,” Onyx declared with certainty only she felt. Karhi could see Carry didn’t seem to share Onyx’s enthusiasm.

“You’re saying she’s a queen.”

“Or a minion of the bestia,” Onyx nodded. “I think it’s a valid assumption.”

“Or she could be a shapeshifter, and her animal is a raven.”

Onyx shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Too old.”

Karhi didn’t have a reply for that. Shifters lived maybe to four centuries, if they were smaller animals.

Onyx continued to shake her head. “Trust me, guys, she’s going to wind up being one of the bestia.”

Karhi raised an eyebrow at Carry, who responded with a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t think so, but I’m not going to argue about it. It doesn’t hurt anyone for her to believe it.”

Karhi wasn’t even surprised at Carry’s lack of commitment. She would never ague with Onyx. She was eternally supportive.

“You’ll see,” Onyx said, picking up her martini and pointing a finger at each of them. “And when it’s true, I’m going to rub it in your faces.”

Karhi’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he grabbed it, immediately grateful for a distraction.

That gratitude disappeared when he saw the caller ID. He tapped his teeth on the ball on his tongue.

“Oh no,” Carry said when she saw his face. “That’s not good.”

Karhi answered the phone and did everything in his power to speak evenly. “Hello?”

“Samhain is at the end of the week, and we are attending the festival this year. You and your sisters will be here for it. I have booked a plane for you leaving in six hours. Bring your fledgling.”

“Hello to you, too, Carrick,” Karhi said, keeping his voice as casual as possible.

“I will e-mail you the tickets. Please alert your sisters.” He hung up.

Karhi started to squeeze the hand holding the phone but Carry plucked it out of his hand before he could destroy it. She gave him a look. “Taking out your anger on inanimate objects is unhealthy and sad. Get your shit together.” Vampire hearing meant she had heard the whole conversation. So had Onyx.

Karhi clenched his fists for a moment before lacing his fingers together and setting them in his lap. He smiled a thin smile, showing a lot of teeth. “Our lovely blood sibling would like us to please pack up for a flight he has booked for us to come visit him and our sire. He would be oh so appreciative if we could go to the Samhain festival this year.”

Carry handed him his phone back. “Never mind, destroy the phone. This is worse.”

Karhi continued the thin, slightly deranged smile. “Oh no, sister. You asked me to ‘get my shit together’ so I will be as kind as I can about our dear blood sibling.”

“Stop calling him thaaaaat. It’s gross.”

“But it’s true, dear sister.”

Carry stood up, rolling her eyes. “He’s related to us through Ilona only. I’ll never call that creep my brother.”

“I think that’s why he’s saying, ‘blood sibling’,” Onyx said, getting up to stand by her wife. “Even he can’t call that psycho our brother.”

Karhi stood up, too. He finally dropped the smile and teeth. “You would think, considering I’m over a century older than him, he would show the respect that vampire hierarchy dictates, but here we are.”

“He takes the idea of vampire lovers too seriously,” Carry shrugged as she and Onyx made their way to his front door. “Even though Ilona frequently sleeps with other people just to spite him and sets any lovers he takes outside of her on literal fire.”

Karhi sneered. There was a lot of other things Ilona did outside of Carrick that neither Onyx nor Carry knew about, but they didn’t need to. Instead he said, “I’ll email you whatever I get from him, and I’ll have a car pick us all up, and take us to the airport.” He assumed it would be a private jet out of Minneapolis.

“You going to go pick up Sloane from work?” Onyx asked.

“Yeah. It won’t be a pleasant discussion.”

“Nope,” she chirped.

Karhi grabbed his keys and left with Onyx and Carry. Their car would have been parked in the visitors’ spots, not far from where he parked.

“Wait, I thought Sloane had your car?” Onyx said as they entered the garage and headed towards their cars.

Karhi glanced at her. “Why?”

She looked from him and then back out to the parking lot and slowed. “Because, when we pulled in earlier . . .”

He followed her gaze to where his car was supposed to be parked, in the same designated parking spot as always.

The operative phrase was “supposed to”.

“What the fuck?”

His parking spot was empty. His car was gone. But he was holding the key that operated it. The key was always by the front door. The only other—

He hadn’t thought to check the basket on top of the fridge with his spare key before he left. But why would he have?

“Intriguing,” Carry said. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride to Swanskin’s.”

Karhi nodded slowly, following them to their car.

They got in Onyx’s blue Audi. As Onyx started the car, Karhi pulled out his phone. He thought about calling Sloane but instead decided to call the centre that handled his car’s GPS.

“Good evening, Mister Emelyn,” a cool female voice answered the phone. “You are speaking with Regina; how may I help you?”

“I have reason to believe my car may have been stolen. Could you turn on the tracking in it and tell me where it is?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “Would you like me to alert the authorities?”

“Tell me where the car is first and then I’ll let you know.”

“Of course, sir. Give me one moment.”

He waited, listening to silence.

After a minute, she came back, her cool tone a little more muted. “I’m sorry, sir, but it appears the GPS in your car was disabled. I can’t connect, and I can’t find it anywhere.”

“How is that even possible?” he asked.

“Well—you said you believe it may be stolen. Certain car thieves know how to cut the wires in a car that enable the GPS. Cutting those wires stops the GPS from being triggered, even remotely by the company in charge, because the hardware has been destroyed. I’m going to call the authorities.”

“Thank you, Regina.”

“My pleasure, sir. I’m sorry about your car.”

“Thank you.” He hung up.

“You think Sloane stole your car?” Carry asked, glancing back from the front seat.

“Someone did.” He hadn’t even known Sloane knew how to steal a car.

But then again . . . what did he really know about Sloane?

They rode in silence to Swanskin’s. It was only six. Not many people were out for the night yet.

Swanskin’s was pretty empty when he walked in. A man sat in one corner nursing a lonely drink while an awkward couple sat in a booth, hiding behind menus to avoid talking to each other.

Niqui sat on a stool behind the bar, checking a stack of receipts against a ledger. She glanced up when they walked in and when she saw Karhi, she glanced at her watch. “Took you longer to get here than I expected,” she said, setting down the red pencil she had in her hand.

Karhi stopped in front of the bar. “What do you mean?” Onyx and Carry stood behind him.

“Are you here looking for Sloane?”

“Yes. Is she here?”

“No.”

“Where is she?”

“Not a clue,” she shrugged. “She quit yesterday.”

Karhi blinked. “What?”

“She called me and told me she had some personal things to take care of, and she quit. Said she wasn’t sure if she would ever be back.”

Karhi stared at her.

Niqui raised an eyebrow. “Karhi. Are you really that dense?”

He bristled. “What the hell does that mean?”

“She didn’t stay with you because it’s some ‘vampire law’. She stayed with you because she had nowhere else to go. I always knew she’d leave one day to go back to wherever she came from. She was just too afraid that she’d be rejected for being a vampire.” She cocked her head to the side. “I hired her before she was a vampire. Didn’t you ever wonder about that? Me hiring a human?”

Karhi had never put any real thought to it before, but he wouldn’t tell her that. He had a lot more on his mind when he first met Sloane than why she’d work at Swanskin’s. And the months since then hadn’t done anything to make him curious. As far as he knew, Sloane was pretty boring.

“You’re here with those two . . . so, did she steal your car?” When he didn’t answer, she waved a dismissive hand at him. “If you’re not here to order, go away. I need to balance these before month end.”

“Niqui,” he said through gritted teeth. “Where. Did. She. Go?”

“Home, I’m assuming. Wherever that is. I never asked, and she never volunteered that information. So, I let it be.”

“Karhi,” Carry said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

He turned from Niqui, stalking away.

“You won’t find her,” Niqui called after him. “She flies under the radar too well.”

That was an understatement.

“That tongue piercing was the worst fucking thing you ever got,” Carry complained. “Quick clicking it against your teeth.”

Over the years, it had become habit to run the ball on his tongue against his teeth, a clacking sound that helped calm him. He stopped but didn’t look at Carry.

He stared out of the airplane window into darkness. Lights twinkled from the towns below as they passed over. Occasionally, a thin cloud would dampen the brightness.

Karhi was doing everything to look for Sloane. There was a countrywide search for his plates, but his car hadn’t turned up anywhere. She had either dumped it or somehow procured new plates.

He had tried to call her and track her cell phone, but her cell phone didn’t have GPS, and she hadn’t used it since she had left. She had either tossed it or modified it. She had stolen all of his cash, but even before that, she hadn’t had a bank account so tracking that would’ve been out anyway.

She was completely off the grid, and she had gotten over a day’s head start on him before he even knew she was gone.

He had never made it much of a priority to get to know Sloane past the arguments they would have. Sometimes, when they were on particularly neutral terms, she would sit with him on the couch to watch reality TV, but outside of that, they had never discussed anything.

But even so, he was completely unprepared when he realized that one of the only things that he knew about her was that she liked cooking shows and that she knew how to soothe someone on a heroin comedown. He had turned her in mid-December the previous year, meaning they had been living together for just over ten months. He had just . . . taken for granted that she had been a vanilla human before he turned her, and she had continued to be uninteresting beyond her death.

But now, he was realizing that there were so many subtle bits he had missed. She had once admitted to knowing he was a vampire before he turned her. She was sensitive to magics and what they were, even being able to differentiate types of shapeshifters into categories of different dogs, cats, and any others she came across. She could sometimes even guess what type of magic a mage specialized in.

Niqui had made a good point, though he was too angry to admit it to anyone but himself, about how Sloane had even been employed before she was turned. Swanskin’s was a bar for anyone entrenched in the Underground and all of the magic it encompassed. People hired to work there had to be able to work with magics and be able to either bounce out unruly customers or call someone who could.

He was angry he hadn’t asked Niqui what made her hire Sloane, but he also doubted she would have given him a straight answer.

And Sloane had stolen his car and disabled the GPS and disappeared without a trace. And what almost pissed him off more than anything else . . .

“She found the false fucking wall and stole all of my cash,” he snarled at the window.

“Like that was even a large chunk of change for you,” Carry said as she held out her wine glass to the flight attendant to top her off.

Karhi looked over to Carry and Onyx. They sat in front of him on a tan vinyl couch against the side of the plane, watching a TV mounted from the ceiling. Karhi sat in a matching vinyl seat against the back of the plane, by the bathroom and flight attendant station.

“How did she even know there was a false wall in there?” he asked, barely keeping the frustration from turning his question into a shout.

“How did she know how to disable the GPS in your car?” Carry replied. “I think it’s pretty apparent at this point that she’s a thief.”

“I wish I’d asked Niqui why she hired her.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Onyx asked.

Carry and Karhi looked over at her in confusion. Her eyes were on the TV—some children’s cartoon.

“Care to elucidate, askım?” Carry asked her.

Onyx furrowed her brow, looking at Carry. “Sloane’s a really good fighter. Don’t you remember?”

Carry shook her head slowly. “What are you talking about?”

Onyx pursed her lips in confusion. “Wait . . . maybe it was only me that was there. Huh, could’ve sworn I told you.”

“Told us what, Onyx?” Karhi just barely kept a growl out of his voice.

“I remember her before you turned her. We didn’t go to Swanskin’s a lot, but we went there often enough before you moved to Minnesota. A shifter got rowdy, and she didn’t hesitate to kick him when he tried to get behind the bar. She followed up on the kick with another kick and knocked him down. She had her foot on his throat before he could figure out what was going on. Granted, he was drunk as hell. But she wasn’t hesitating. I doubt she could have killed him, but she would have done everything up to killing him. She definitely knew what she was doing. It made me assume she had some sort of martial arts training or something.” She shrugged, reaching for her wine on the small bolted-in coffee table in front of her.

Carry tilted her head to the side. “You never told me about that.”

She shrugged again, taking a sip of her wine. “Thought I did. I think it was just before Karhi moved here, so I just lost track of it during the whole moving thing.” She pursed her lips again, pensively swirling her wine in her glass. “I guess I just always assumed you guys kind of knew she wasn’t as clueless as she played. She worked at Swanskin’s before you turned her, and she and Niqui always got along. Niqui even let her hire someone. I just thought it was a game we all played for some reason.”

Karhi remembered the first time he met Sloane. She had broken a bottle over a shifter’s head and stabbed him with it before spraying him with wolfsbane to get him out of the bar. He had assumed she had some level of basic self-defence, but it never occurred to her that she may be much more capable than just that.

“So . . .” Carry said. Her tone of voice was hesitant, and it made Karhi look at her. She looked uncomfortable, looking anywhere but Karhi. “Um . . . how is Ilona going to handle it when she finds out you lost her?”

Karhi’s heart plummeted into his stomach. He had been carefully avoiding thinking about that.

“Didn’t Carrick say that you needed to bring her?”

He nodded, reaching for the whiskey on the table in front of him and downing the rest of it. It scorched his throat, but he needed the feeling of something other than the cold fear that was creeping up his spine. It didn’t help—gave him a strange mix of cold fire.

“Maybe she’ll . . .” Carry was lost for words. There was nothing comforting she could say that would make this any better.

“She’s not going to be pleasant,” Karhi said, holding out his whiskey glass to the attendant that had come to refill it. “Leave the bottle,” he murmured to her.

“Of course, sir,” she replied, setting the bottle down on the table.

“Do you have people searching for her?” Carry asked.

He nodded. “Yes, but so far, nothing. She doesn’t have any living family outside of the woman who adopted her when she was a teenager, and Sloane didn’t go back to them. I had someone check. I have someone looking into her foster care records, but those are spotty at best. From what I’ve gathered, she was a chronic runaway.”

“That would explain where she learned to be a thief.” She grimaced, motioning for Karhi to pass her the whiskey. He leaned over and handed it to her.

“Yeah. But it doesn’t explain anything else.” He looked out the window. The whiskey had helped dampen the fear that Ilona’s name had spurred inside of him, but he could still feel it festering.

What would tomorrow bring?