IAN NOGURI'S HEAD hung from the city's high gates for several days. A scroll writing was hammered into place beside his head by the Gold Cloaks who had strung up the head. The message was clear enough that one didn't need to rise up on tiptoes to read it.
[Do not fuck with Her Majesty!]
It was a disturbing deterrent against other revolutions, and even the Templar Abbot who usually called down rain and hail 'pon the sinners of the Capital tempered his preaching. No one wanted to be the bodyless head peering out with fly-infested blue lips at the carts of traders rolling in and out of the city.
Even those who weren't at the Amphitheater now knew of the story. It was a good story, complete with the tragic Nordic end. Nothing incited a legend more than a great man matyred for the cause. Rafel got his wish. Ian Noguri's few remaining loyalists made him into a sculpture.
They buried what they could find of his body which had been tossed down the Helmsley cliffdrop. Nowadays, they met secretly with little air signs as markers.
To hang a General's decapitated head off the city's walls was the cruelest shame. The rot was slow as the first fingers of winter was just showing. But somehow, when people lifted their eyes to it, it was their flare in the storm—at least to the Nonmagicals.
Rafel, on his return to Emberfall collapsed into his byzantine chambers often always shrouded in darkness.
"Aya Naamah. Bring our whore in!" He invited loudly.
And some ten minutes later, his lovely slave sauntered in pulling behind her a taller, enhanced gypsy. Mary Atwell only had a pair of tight boy shorts covering her pronounced hips. Her long tail wrapped her body from her flat belly upward to the generous swell of her breasts. Aya dragged her in by her new collar.
Throughout the night, Rafel and Aya took turns dominating the reptilian beauty. She sucked his cock. She rode him. Aya fisted her. Aya sat on her face. And once, Rafel tied her up to the antichrist St.
Andrew's cross he had in a corner of his gothic suite. By the time he moved to touch her an hour later, good Mary's shorts were soaked.
Sometime at midnight, Rafel turned in the large bed to find Aya and Mary curled naked into each other, Aya's head resting in her sumptuous cleavage. Her fair skin was a lively contrast to Mary's milk complexion. Her crocodile scales glinted in the mild light.
Rafel did admit seeing a bunch of shadows traveling by his window that night. Like ninjas. Only curvier and semi-nude. But whether it was the feeling of being loved up by two of the hottest females alive, or the satiation of empty balls, Rafel chalked up the silhouettes now tiptoeing behind his long crimson drapes as sexy figures his mind had conjured up to lull him back to sleep.
Rafel soon heard eerie singing. And he did fall asleep.
He felt one of the female shadows fall over his face and something prick his neck. Between the brief opening and closing of his eyelids, he made out the starry vision of four women and a man. All of them were ethereally beautiful. Underwater beautiful. And it was actually one of them who was singing.
A siren.
Their clothes constituted just strips of beach wear one might wear to go for a dip. Their long hair was wet. Their eyes shimmered in blue water magic.
Mermaids!
His sexy ninjas were mermaids.
Why can't I fucking move? Rafel's senses were dulled, both by the singing woman and the injection of wolfsbane into his system—the kind specifically bottled in syringes for whales.
Rafel tried to turn on the bed, to reach out for Aya, to scream for Mary who'd rip these fish people apart with her crocodilian ferocity on awakening. But he couldn't move. He was immobilized. The single merman in the stealthy group bundled Rafel up in the immense white blanket of his own sleep, hefting Rafel up to his broad shoulders.
The merman was built powerfully. With the girl singing to keep Rafel hypnotized, the mermaids started out the same way they had come; silently through the curtains and out the window. They were kidnapping him.
Rafel blinked and blinked and tried to focus his system to engage, but it was really impossible under the voice of a siren.
"—I don't think His Grace went jogging," Ravenna finished, her sweet green eyes on the colossal dressed bed.
Aya tried to move forward but Cora stopped her.
"Wait!" She put out her hand, slowly kneeling to the floors as her blue eyes caught on something. Cora's irises were sharp as ice. If anyone hurt Rafel, she would grind them all to ash.
"Are those footprints?" Aya leaned down also, zooming in on Cora's line of sight.
"Yes." Cora replied. "Bare foot prints."
"The cleaner must've missed a spot then?" Ravenna peered in too. She left her words as a question.
"Nón, dear. Elena doesn't miss spots." Cora intelligently replied. As a former pro wrestler, her tracker senses were acute. She put her hand out to touch the glittery imprints left on the cadwold gray floors. There was no dust. Cora spoke again thus,
"These footprints are not human. Else, Elena's vacuum cleaner would've seen it cleaned. See how they're watery at the sides? Every magical creature leaves an imprint of their passage. Ghosts; shifts in the wind. Wild Shapes; paw and claw marks.
Hellions; the smell of ash and sulphur. Fae; fuckin' flowers. These watery marks around the footprints are. . ."
"Mermaids." Ravenna finished for her.
Cora lifted her blue eyes, nodding. At that instant, righteous fury filled all three women at the same time. They had dared, the slippery water folk!
"Yes, love. Mermaids." Cora replied, rising to her feet in calm wrath. Her eyes were melting glaciers in her face—an avalanche waiting to happen. "They must have snuck in through the wards at some auspicious moment in the night. They have taken His Grace."
Ravenna tutted. "Such a grave mistake on their part."
Aya Naamah smiled darkly, her fangs shimmering down. Cora squeezed her fingers into a fist, just as she did in the ring before delivering her killer southpaw.
"We'll need the Hounds," she said. "—we are out to gut some fish."
Meanwhile, Rafel was just waking up about a thousand miles away from Emberfall and the bunch of loyal furious femme fatales preparing to come save him.
Where am I?
He was still strapped to the merman's Atlantian back. As he looked up, he caught sight of brown sands, exotic palms and coconut trees that stretched out as far as the calm blue sea beyond it. He was on a beach. A lonely one. The merman and his group were walking, walking into the water.
The tide was up to their ankles.
...their knees now.
In broad daylight, Rafel gulped at the model shapes on the mermaids. Their light bikinis were in warm summer colors and it seemed winter never reached this part of the world. The swish-swish of their hips were even lovelier than this new paradise. If they hadn't kidnapped him from his bed, Rafel had half the mind to spare their lives.
He blinked away his daydreaming when the woman with the purple flood of hair, in the front of the group instructed, the water up to her orange bra straps and lapping at her surreal glistening skin.
"Toss him in."