"Hello, cousin." A smooth voice purred into her ear through the phone.

"Ah, Green. Are you back to answering my calls again or did you accidentally answer and now you're deciding to go with it?"

"I'm not sure what you're talking about. I wasn't avoiding your calls on purpose. In fact, I've been dealing with your pesky little human issue for you, free of charge. It has been taking up a surprising amount of my time, but it has been so much fun."

"Human issue?"

"The ne'er-do-wells that attacked your shop. It was part of a larger conspiracy that I've just about wrapped up for your benefit, no thanks needed."

A feminine chuckle. "Why would I thank you for undoubtedly terrorizing a few felonious humans? I'm certain you do that for your own enjoyment and not for any justice I needed or asked for. My honor has remained unchanged."

"Oh, darling cousin. I've missed talking to you."

"I'm sure. I do have a question for you if you can spare the time for me to ask."

"I'll be right there."

"I mean... I can ask over the phone..." A dial tone was the only answer.

***

Not five minutes later, a knock sounded on the shop door. Max opened it --jingle, jingle-- and let in the notorious and much absent of late Mr. Green.

He stepped through the door and his smarmy human lawyer glamour fell away. Red eyebrows like moth antennae swept away from his face and above his head, matching the shade of long shock-red hair flowing down his back. He had pale skin and gangly arms, a slender torso, and long, lean legs. Glowing, happy emerald eyes. Alien angles and garish colors.

She was in wonder at his pretty abstractions.

It was the least human face he had shown her so far. He was beautiful-- like a joyously poisonous butterfly.

She had forgotten the passive but massive umph he packed and how it rolled around in her chest and wormed its way into her heart. She had to take a moment to bask in it-- even if it was class/spec/species/magic bullshit, it was wonderful. She could allow herself to enjoy it, if only for a moment.

Home, family, safety, warm fur, and nestmates. Warm nights dancing around a campfire in revelry with a victorious tribe, loud drums, and hard booze. Full bellies and coziness. A Pack of two. Of a long-lost yearning that has been filled. A silent epiphany that all that ever could be wanted was right there within reach, waiting. Contentment. Wanting her to want it back.

She blinked it away and cleared her throat. Dismissed it. It was wonderful, but as always, there was shit to do. What was supposed to be a quick phone call had turned into a social call. She didn't have time to ride the feel-good train to wherever it wanted her to go. She was fulfilling a [Bargain] with Flower, after all.

He was blinking hard, too. He looked the same -- like she had whammied him with her own umph.

Good.

Turnabout and all.

She looked up into his pretty face and smiled. She closed the door behind him --jingle jingle-- and locked it. "I appreciate you coming so quickly. You didn't have to interrupt your day, though. I could have asked over the phone."

"Nonsense. I've been meaning to swing by. I don't get good cell reception in my demesne and time passes me by without my notice." He reached for her hand and held it, raised it up to his lips, and kissed it. His eyes looked over her face and trailed down her much shorter body. "As beautiful as ever, cousin. New face?"

She was still in her aptly labeled dark lord body. She was barely five feet tall and stereotypically pale as if her skin was made out of bleached bone. Her cheekbones were sharp, her eyes were black (not including the sclera unless she was mad) and she had the bad guy blue-black veins running under her skin (that also became pronounced when she was pissed, and they were all over her face and body). Her coal-black hair was in an unruly, curly, frizzy bun that stuck out on all sides, untameable and unreasonable.

Stereotypically classic female necromancer. Almost textbook, even. Almost as if she were the template all others were derived from.

"Ha, ha! This old thing? I just threw it on in the spur of the moment. It was put away for a rainy day and I thought it would come in handy for a few of my current needs."

"Oh?" One of his whimsical eyebrows raised.

"Come in. I have safe tea and snacks. We can discuss happenings like civilized people and not in the door to my empty store, at least. You are welcome in my demesne."

He did a groan/grunt and coughed into his fist. "You want to welcome me inside your mound, dear?" His eyebrows wiggled.

She guffawed and laughed like she hadn't in days. It felt good. She put a hand on his forearm and she led him toward the back of what once looked like a greenhouse. It didn't look that way anymore once the threshold of the inner door from the shop was crossed.

"I thought I would have to beg for it?" She chuckled. "But really. Sure. You're welcome in my demesne for now. But if you have any thoughts of mischief later, just be aware that, say... should you sneak in without my say-so, or aren’t unaccompanied by someone who can give you permission, or don't have the right combination of blessings and magic, you might get ground down into hamburger and your bits will be blown all over the neighborhood. Or be cursed to puke up your intestines. Or become a vector of a fast-mutating, eyeball-melting, worm-filled pathogen. Or find that you can't remember who you are or where you're at. Or get cut in half and fed to an elven hometree. Or be accidentally eaten by Puppy -- to be fair, he's a bit punchy since the vampire and the ghosts."

"Vampire and ghosts?"

She stopped walking toward the back and stopped to look at him. "Oh, you don't know about the vampire. Did Hadrian not tell you about that? Or the shop?"

"Hadrian came by? No, she hasn't said anything. When was she here?"

"Oh, dear. I've lost track of days. Two days ago? Three? Or was it yesterday?" She quizzically looked into the distance and put a finger on her pale lip in ponderance. Dismissed the question by waving her hand as if shooing it away and shrugging. "Ah, well then. Yes, we will need lots of tea, then, to get you all caught up. Follow me." She held the fairytale fairy king's hand while they ambled through a primordial elven-flavored fairy forest.

They walked in silence and enjoyed the wildness of their sunlit wilderness stroll through a place that wasn't anything like the decaying real world. Birds, butterflies, bees, and squirrels all did as they do when in a healthy natural environment that has been put on magical steroids. Magic whirled and floated and breezed through their clothes, against their faces, buoyed their spirits, and kissed their cheeks.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The two saw a silent group of unruly, wild things, feathers in their hair and mud on their faces --and the half-metal-half-flesh man that was herding them-- sneak toward a copse-surrounded clearing with an unsuspecting deer eating grass in a sunbeam. Heard their warbled warcries when silence was disregarded and an attack was committed, followed by the deer's crashing, frantic hoofbeats, running to escape the children's feral hunting party.

She grinned. He giggled. They got to a large tree and followed the steps down that were hidden in its roots. Came to a room that had a glass ceiling showing the treetops and sunlight and glassed-in rough-hewn walls. There was a table with tea and finger sandwiches, and a golden spider sitting atop the third plate.

"Hadrian saw him, but it seemed wrong that anyone of your court met him before you did. So let me introduce you to my better half, Miles. Miles, you know Green. He is here about the thing we talked about earlier."

Miles ran over and touched Green's arm before he had a chance to run away. Green jumped into the air, screeched, and put his back to the wall. "Lost gods! Ahhh!"

Miles, uncharacteristically petty, sniffed and said, "I wouldn't hurt you unless you deserved it. Seriously, man. I just had to give you a minor blessing so you could hear me. Sheesh."

Max was confused and startled. ”You’ve tagged him? Why? I thought you just wanted to meet him!”

Miles turned to her and crossed his little golden legs in a sulk. ”If he’s a candidate to father our child, of course, I want to be able to talk to him!”

Max sighed and shook her head. ”No, Miles. The other thing we talked about. For Flower. Not fathering our children.”

Green crumpled. He looked like he had been punched in the gut. “I am not a candidate?”

”Of course, you’re one of the current candidates to sire any of my far-in-the-future, not immediate in any way, probably years down the line, potential children. We were going to discuss other stuff today, though.”

”Okay. Yes. Wonderful.” He half smiled and his face fell. He whispered. “One of the current candidates. Stupid elf king.”

”Ha, ha, no. He's not currently in the running. The slavery thing weirded me out. And I'm pretty sure he's busy making elflings with Cora and Ines. But that's beside the point." She poured them both tea and set little sandwiches on both of their plates. Miles, of course, abstained. "I need you to help me fulfill a [Bargain] with my youngest Scion. It is imperative he keeps his side of it. I hate to sound desperate, but... it is very important to me to be able to do this for him. I am willing to owe you a favor for it. But it has this whole story to it, and you need context so I don't seem evil, and then we can discuss parameters of any favors I might end up owing you."

"Okay. Do tell." He had a predator's smile and his eyes were drilling into hers.

"Do you want it fast or slow? Do you want all the information Hadrian thinks she got, or do you want the unvarnished truth of it with no obfuscation?"

He looked at her, questions and confusion written all over his face. "It's like you don't even know how to be kin."

Her body slumped. "I met you on the second day I was kin. I'm bad at it because I haven't been one for very long." She threw her arms in the air, exasperated. "I'm doing my best."

"What were you before?"

"Lots of stuff. But never kin." She sighed and looked into Green's eyes. "And I would never and probably will never offer another one of us the unobfuscated truth. I offered it to you because I trust you. And as I said on the first day that we met, I don't know what I'm doing. I just know what I want. So far, you're kinda one of those things so I'm testing the waters if I can trust you enough with me and all the things I love the most." He beamed a smile at her.

She breathed deeply. Closed her eyes to think. Kept them closed. Took a moment to question what she was about to say. Decided, that well, fuck it. Deal with a taste of my crazy, fairy king, and be doubly scared because you know I can't lie.

"Now for the scary threat of truth part... the things you were worried about when questioned me before? I'm more than capable of -- well, all of it. I could drown this world in fire and blood if I had to, without even turning on the system or summoning a hero or lord. It wouldn't even be that hard for me. I could do it in an afternoon." She paused, opened her eyes, and stared at the glass wall in this beautiful room, in the beautiful court, in the world that had given her more than she was expecting. "I haven't and probably won't ever need to. But my House, my Court, my Pack... they are the only things that I would destroy the world for. The only people I would save the world for, too, if they asked it of me." She looked at the table and reached a hand for Miles. He crawled up her arm and connected around her neck. She ran a finger across the golden necklace/war machine/world consciousness. "Everything else is tertiary nothingness. I would do the worst you could imagine if my court was in danger. And no one in this world, or most worlds, could stop me." She cleared her throat and looked back to his startled, concerned face, "So. No, no obfuscation. No word games. No hiding the meaning of sentences behind the double meanings of words within. Not from me. I'm not good at it, and I would rather not burn a world because I misunderstood something and then have to mourn it all later." She gave him a soft and broken, sad smile. "It sucks when it happens."

Green pulled himself back together from the horror she just painted for him. He leaned toward her and gently laid a finger, one finger, on her cheek, and asked, "Are you a monster, then?"

"Oh, yes." A tear slid down her cheek. "One of the worst." She closed her eyes and one last tear fell to land on the nail of his finger. "I'm glad you know now before you courted me for real. And if you decide you need to declare war on my court, we are ready."

He pulled his hand back. She silently sat with closed eyes, waiting for his condemnation. Instead, he said, "That was the most wild kin speech I've heard in an eon. Gave me chills like the ancient Dragons' Bane King used to. I stand corrected. Touche. Apparently, you know how to be kin just fine." She opened her eyes and looked at him. Green straightened his posture and adjusted his cufflinks. He shrugged and gave her a soft grin. "To be kin is to be a monster. We forget sometimes, even me, that we are the wild, hungry things in the old forests, giving the humans and others nightmares. Forgotten that some of us are just bigger monsters than others and don't have to rely on a trick or a flip of a word for safety." He nodded at her. "To be a Lord or a King, you must be as scary as the world calls for. To be kin, you must be a monster to get what you want, be it food, a promise of safety, or love. We forget and become docile, and then we become lost. That's why there's so few of us left." He stopped giving her the soft grin and sniffed. "And I am courting you 'for real'. I have been since you walked into my office and I felt the possibility of you."

She took a moment to absorb his words. They were the words she wasn't expecting at all. "So that feeling you give me. It's 'possibility'? I've been calling it your umph."

"Just our magics feeling each other out and deciding if they get along."

"Hmm." He handled that truth bomb well. Let's keep it going, then. Everything out.

She took a deep breath and word vomited everything he had missed, everything Hadrian could have sussed out if she was any good, and everything she wanted to tell him but was afraid to. Fuck it.

"Well, in that case, and in the spirit of our courtship: I may have accidentally made the Herald of Blood my and Puppy's vampire bride after I became a Sidhe King. It was by accident. Not the king thing, but the bride thing. And I'm not undoing it or letting him go because I caught him fair and square in a [Bitter Bargain], he threatened my court and stalked one of my elves home, and I enjoy fucking with him. I'm pretty sure he's courting me, too, in his fucked up vampire way." She paused and added, "And I need a few of your court members that have the possibility to become dark mages so I can train them to rend the world and then train them not to because Flower has a ghost infestation. And founded a mercantile house and declared a shadow war on the Mage's College because of Milton." She took a moment to think. What else? "Hadrian almost shit herself when I told her how big my demesnes are, and I rounded down by a significant amount. The brownie joined my house and is listening from the shadow in the corner-- pretty sure she's Hadrian's spy, but I don't mind her. Hugo's surgery went well and he can take on the whole army in the Bay by himself if needed. I can use the Ban Sidhe stone but am undecided on how I want to. I'm the one who caused the pack in Valleyview to implode. Puppy is now a well-fed devourer." She racked her brain and came up empty. "I think that's everything."

They were both silent for about ten minutes. He stared at his hands that were resting on the table, and she sweated and fidgeted. Waiting for the axe to fall. Waiting for him to say something.

After forever, he looked up and said, "You tricked the Herald into being your bride? After you trapped him in a [Bitter Bargain]?" He was looking out of the ceiling and grinning. It was a mean grin.

Her shoulders fell a little. "...yeah."

"And you're a secret King?" His grin got wider and less mean. More contemplative and a bit cruel.

"...yeah." Her shoulders fell by a lot.

He turned his face to her, looked deep into her eyes, and demanded, "I want a [Bargain]."

Her defeated sigh and from her sad posture she muttered, "What are the terms?"