A Stroke of Brilliance: Chapter 1
Another bead of sweat trickled down my nape, slipping all the way down my back to disappear somewhere past the waistband of my jeans. The sun was blazing in our part of Japan, the heat blistering. Good thing I was working in a glade full of pine trees, where the air was just a little bit cooler. But if I was feeling hot, then Xander Wright was probably boiling on the inside.
He was glistening in the midday sun, perspiration lining every last inch of his bare torso. I’d warned him to dress light for the job, but would a fancy Grayhaven boy ever listen to a lowly artificer? Oh, no. So he was paying for it in sweat, his olive skin somehow even more lustrous with its tantalizing sheen, his black and white hair clinging to the damp of his forehead. I shouldn’t have been complaining, to be honest. Xander was looking like a damn snack.
But I couldn’t come over and run my fingers along his body like I wanted to. Look, I’m not the least bit ashamed of who I am and what I love, but you still need to behave in public situations, especially when you’re surrounded by other people. It isn’t polite to grab your boyfriend by the dick when you’ve got company.
“You’re working so hard, Jackson,” said a wizened old woman, one of a dozen or so of the hazy humanoid shapes who had gathered around us in the glade. She shuffled up to me with a huge smile. The happiness deepened every line in her face, the wrinkles and creases reminding me of the bark on an ancient, noble tree.
I dragged a hand across my forehead, wiping away my sweat as I grinned. “It’s really not a big deal, Oboro. I’m always happy to help.”
Oboro winked. “I can tell that you’re happier these days. I wonder if it has anything to do with new changes in your life. Hmm? New people? New friends?”
Her eyes flitted knowingly to the left, over to the huffing, puffing slab of skin, sweat, and muscle I called my boyfriend.
I stiffened, feigning offense. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She laughed, reaching for my head with one shaking hand.
“You don’t have to,” I said, pretending perhaps unconvincingly that I didn’t want a little bit of grandmotherly affection. “I’m all sweaty.”
She ruffled my hair, and I grinned at the strange, tingly sensation. It felt like a grandmother’s touch, something odd to think of because I never knew my own grandparents, and because Oboro couldn’t possibly ever be my grandmother. She wasn’t even human, for one thing.
Oboro was one of the kodama, a kind of tree spirit. You can find plenty of them throughout the forests of Japan, and I happened to meet her and her family on one of those times when the Black Market happened to tunnel to Osaka.
I’d actually hopped on a tour of some local hot springs. The bus had stopped for refreshments, and I happened to notice Oboro watching us from between the trees. It isn’t every day you catch a glimpse of a transparent old lady staring at you, so I dropped everything and came over to say hello. See? You can’t say that Jackson Pryde is totally profit-driven. Sometimes I just want to make friends with ghostly grandmas.
That our friendship happened to turn out to be a profitable one was totally circumstantial. Pure luck.
Long story short, the tour guide and bus driver ended up being pretty pissed about having to track down the one missing idiot who had wandered off from the group. It was worth it in the end, though. Oboro and her family found a strapping young gentleman to help them do a little gardening every now and again. And now that Xander and I were a thing, she got two strapping young hunks for the price of one.
“Whatever it is,” Oboro said, “you seem a bit happier than you used to.” She waggled her eyebrows, then winked, then waggled again. I burst out laughing.
The funny thing about the spirits and cryptids and mythical creatures I met was how communication wasn’t ever really a problem. Some didn’t speak at all, but you’d be surprised at how much someone can really convey through body language. Others, like Oboro, and quite a few of the undead, found their long or endless lives a little droll and actually made an effort to learn one or two new languages. Her excuse was that we happened to be near a popular tourist spot. She’d clearly needed to help more than a few foreign tourists out of the woods.
Oboro and her family were extremely hospitable, too. Not uncommon for kodama, I’d found, but definitely not something you’d expect of most supernatural creatures. I wasn’t sure where they kept all their supplies, but every time I visited, Oboro would have her grandchildren offer me some lunch. I knelt to collect my meal from the cutest ghostly little kids you ever did see. They presented me with a wooden bowl of fresh water and a tray of onigiri – delicious rice balls.
“Thank you so much,” I said, accepting with both hands and smiling.
The kids laughed and ran off, which was when I noticed Xander receiving his own lunch from his own set of transparent toddlers. He accepted gratefully and came over.
“Looks delicious,” Xander said, holding up his bowl and tray. He nodded at Oboro, grinning. “Domo arigato gozaimasu, obaachan.” Oboro grinned hugely back.
I cocked an eyebrow. I guess it wasn’t unusual for a Grayhaven graduate to be familiar with multiple languages. To be honest, I found it ridiculously hot. I sat in the grass to eat my lunch, and Xander strolled over to join me, folding his legs underneath him. The heat of his body sitting so close was almost unbearable. I stared down at my rice balls, channeling my appetite towards actual hunger. Again, it would be inappropriate. I had to focus on putting my mouth on food, instead of putting my mouth on Xander’s –
“Oh,” he said, the sound muffled as he bit off a piece of his first rice ball. “Obaachan, this is delicious.”
She laughed, then winked. “Secret family recipe. You boys did so much for us today. You deserve a long, hard break. Enjoy yourselves.” She strolled off, then vanished among the trees, like the rest of her family.
I focused on my meal, studiously ignoring the little moans of pleasure Xander kept making.
“This one’s got salmon in it,” he cooed. “Wow. Seriously, best onigiri I’ve ever tasted.”
He wasn’t wrong, first of all. Those rice balls were amazing. I liked the kind with pickles in them, too, but the salmon-stuffed one was a treat on its own. I chewed, swallowed, then took a sip of my water. Fresh, cool, and crisp, like it was drawn out of the world’s sweetest, most secret little stream.
“So you speak Japanese too, huh?” I said.
Xander reddened slightly. “It was nothing. I was just thanking her, that’s all.”
“That word you keep calling her, though. What does that mean again?”
He stopped chewing for a moment. “Oh. Obaachan. You use it to show respect for a woman who’s older than you, but in this case I guess it means grandma.”
I took another sip of water, smiling, oddly proud. “You know a lot of random things, Xander. It’s pretty cute.”
He shrugged and turned back to his rice balls. “That’s because I’m pretty cute. It’s all part of the package. Smart and sexy, you know?”
I laughed, elbowing him in the ribs. Maybe my cockiness was starting to rub off on him.
See, Oboro wasn’t wrong at all. I was definitely in a happier place since Xander and I patched things up and, you know, took things another step further. It was especially nice to be able to drag Xander along on my little excursions. The Gauntlet still wasn’t in a place to make me a ton of money, its inconsistent performance constantly making me second guess myself. It meant that Jackson Pryde would have to continue resorting to hunting supernatural creatures for their reagents, to be sold to the highest bidder he could find at the Black Market. Gotta keep giving to the Keep Jackson Alive fund.
Hunting in this case really just meant hanging out with cool grannies and doing some gardening. In all the time I’d spent gathering and harvesting rare resources for the Black Market’s craftsmen, I’d never really had to kill or actively injure anything or anyone. I liked being able to maintain my side hustle of selling supernatural ingredients while keeping things sustainable. And now it meant quality time with my “pretty cute” boyfriend, too. Who could complain?
I glanced around the glade as I wolfed down the last of my onigiri. We hadn’t really done all that much, but it seemed to count a lot for Oboro and her family. Most of the work involved cleaning up the premises, like moving away some fallen branches and raking up leaves that had blown onto the grounds. None of it served any real practical purpose for the kodama, as far as I could tell, but it made Oboro a true blue grandma, in a sense. This particular granny just really wanted a nice garden to look at.
Xander finished his meal, gulped down his water, then paused halfway through his bowl. He set it down, looking around at the surrounding trees.
“Jack, do you hear that?”
I pushed myself up off the ground, one hand already reaching for my backpack, where the Gauntlet was waiting.
“Hear what, exactly?” I asked, completely unsure of what we were looking for.
“That,” Xander said, pointing towards the other end of the clearing. “Heads up.”
A tree shook, leaves fell, and a fawn burst out of the undergrowth, eyes huge. It bleated and shrieked in fear, stamping its hooves and bucking.
“Whoa,” I said, holding my hands up in front of me, using my body to shield Xander. “Whoa, now.”
Like the poor thing could even understand me. I wasn’t a zoologist by any means, but I’d spent enough time around wild animals to know that this wasn’t normal. The little guy was scared half to death.
“It’s injured,” Xander said, keeping his voice low. “Right there on its flank.”
I wasn’t sure how I’d missed that, but that was why Xander was up for Incandescence and I spent my nights jerking off about him in the shower. A trail of blood was leaking down the fawn’s hind leg. I couldn’t make out the source of the wound from all of the frantic movement, but the creature was clearly in pain. Couldn’t have been from a gunshot. No way anybody hunted in these parts.
“I know this sounds nuts,” I said, “but I think we should help him. We weren’t exactly making any effort to keep quiet. He heard us here, and there’s a reason he came.”
“Fine,” Xander said. “I’m with you. But be careful. He’s still a wild animal, Jack.”
“Agreed. You whip up some healing magic. I’ll help calm him down.”
Xander fiddled with the shirt tied around his waist, redoing its knot to reinforce it. “Don’t be a big damn hero, now. It’s pretty sexy, not gonna lie, but I don’t want you getting kicked in the head.”
I frowned. I wasn’t doing this to show off or anything. The whole point was to help the deer. Xander was right. It was still a wild animal. But if the fawn was afraid of us, why did he come to the glade? I hated that I knew the answer.
He was running away from whatever had hurt him.
“Come here, little guy,” I said, approaching slowly. “Come here, little buddy. I won’t hurt you.”
The fawn snorted, stamped with one hoof, then bleated again, his eyes searching my face. He was terrified, but I had a keen sense that he really wanted whatever was hurting him to stop. He stepped up closer, enough to sniff at the back of my knuckles, then reared back and screamed again.
“There’s no way I smell quite that bad,” I told the fawn accusingly.
“Damn it, Jack, stop messing around already.”
“Right. Here, boy. Good boy. We’re gonna take care of you, all right? No more stomping and screaming.”
“Jackson,” a voice said from among the trees. It was Oboro. She and the rest of the kodama had materialized again, watching us with dark eyes, worried faces. “Be careful. He is afraid, but not angry.”
The fawn sniffed once, then made a break for the trees. I did the stupid thing, throwing myself at him, somehow dodging his hooves as they flailed and stamped at thin air. The both of us went down, his muscles taut as he raised his head and raised hell.
“You’re okay, little buddy,” I said, grunting and holding on for dear life. “I’m just keeping you down so you don’t hurt yourself, okay? Uncle Xander’s going to look you over and make it all better.”
“Okay, I’m ready.” Xander hurried over, muttered, then placed his hand on the fawn’s hind leg.
The fawn stopped struggling. It made a noise that sounded very much like a sigh of relief. Xander was looking over his leg, one hand cupping his wooden bowl of water, the other holding a ripped piece of his shirt. He dabbed the damp cloth along what used to be a puncture wound, clearing away most of the blood.
“Found it,” Xander said. “Plucked it out.”
I let myself go loose, rubbing the fawn’s back as I pushed myself up to sit in the grass. “What was it? A thorn? A splinter?”
Xander opened his mouth to answer when the kodama rushed us, gathering around us in a loose semicircle.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen,” Oboro said.
I patted the fawn as he went up on his legs. He tested his balance unsteadily, then made an excited leap. Cute little guy.
“We’ve been noticing more and more of these incidents with the local wildlife,” Oboro said, her expression grave. “Not so many to cause so much alarm, mind you, but enough to take notice. Twice this month alone.”
The other kodama nodded in agreement, whispering among themselves. One of the children pointed towards the part of the clearing where the fawn had come from. Waiting there was an older buck, his antlers fully grown, and fully ready to gore my internal organs right out of my beautiful body.
“Okay, whoa,” I said, standing up, holding my hands out.
“’Whoa’ can only get you so far, Jack,” Xander said through gritted teeth.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned,” Oboro said, her spectral hand stroking gently across the fawn’s back. “That must be the father. I suspect he encouraged his child to come to you for help. It is not usually in the way of wild creatures to trust mankind, but perhaps they had no other choice.”
The fawn nudged me in the stomach with his muzzle, then licked at the back of Xander’s wrist. Xander giggled, tickled. I patted the fawn on the head, then watched as he trotted off to join his deer dad. I thought that was the end of it, but the buck approached, his head lowered. I held a hand out in front of Xander defensively, but he pushed my arm down.
“It’s okay. He’s not trying to attack us. He’s – wait. I need to see this.”
Oboro nodded. “Xander is correct. The deer means you no harm. He wants – something else, but I cannot say what, precisely.”
It almost seemed as if the buck was offering his antlers for inspection. I walked abreast of Xander as he stepped up to the creature. He held out one hand, offering his knuckles. The buck sniffed, then lowered his head again. Something was caught on one of the antlers closer to the middle of his head. I squinted as I looked closer. My heart clenched.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I breathed.
Xander retrieved the shimmering shard from the buck’s antlers, then unwrapped the piece of cloth he’d used to dab away the fawn’s blood. There, sitting in the middle of his ripped shirt, was a gleaming crystal sliver to match the one pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He held them both up, the crystals sparkling as sunlight struck their many facets.
“Do they look familiar to you?” Xander asked, his expression grim, his tone bordering on sarcastic.
“For sure,” I said. “Those look just like the pieces of a Chrysanthemyst.”
He was glistening in the midday sun, perspiration lining every last inch of his bare torso. I’d warned him to dress light for the job, but would a fancy Grayhaven boy ever listen to a lowly artificer? Oh, no. So he was paying for it in sweat, his olive skin somehow even more lustrous with its tantalizing sheen, his black and white hair clinging to the damp of his forehead. I shouldn’t have been complaining, to be honest. Xander was looking like a damn snack.
But I couldn’t come over and run my fingers along his body like I wanted to. Look, I’m not the least bit ashamed of who I am and what I love, but you still need to behave in public situations, especially when you’re surrounded by other people. It isn’t polite to grab your boyfriend by the dick when you’ve got company.
“You’re working so hard, Jackson,” said a wizened old woman, one of a dozen or so of the hazy humanoid shapes who had gathered around us in the glade. She shuffled up to me with a huge smile. The happiness deepened every line in her face, the wrinkles and creases reminding me of the bark on an ancient, noble tree.
I dragged a hand across my forehead, wiping away my sweat as I grinned. “It’s really not a big deal, Oboro. I’m always happy to help.”
Oboro winked. “I can tell that you’re happier these days. I wonder if it has anything to do with new changes in your life. Hmm? New people? New friends?”
Her eyes flitted knowingly to the left, over to the huffing, puffing slab of skin, sweat, and muscle I called my boyfriend.
I stiffened, feigning offense. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She laughed, reaching for my head with one shaking hand.
“You don’t have to,” I said, pretending perhaps unconvincingly that I didn’t want a little bit of grandmotherly affection. “I’m all sweaty.”
She ruffled my hair, and I grinned at the strange, tingly sensation. It felt like a grandmother’s touch, something odd to think of because I never knew my own grandparents, and because Oboro couldn’t possibly ever be my grandmother. She wasn’t even human, for one thing.
Oboro was one of the kodama, a kind of tree spirit. You can find plenty of them throughout the forests of Japan, and I happened to meet her and her family on one of those times when the Black Market happened to tunnel to Osaka.
I’d actually hopped on a tour of some local hot springs. The bus had stopped for refreshments, and I happened to notice Oboro watching us from between the trees. It isn’t every day you catch a glimpse of a transparent old lady staring at you, so I dropped everything and came over to say hello. See? You can’t say that Jackson Pryde is totally profit-driven. Sometimes I just want to make friends with ghostly grandmas.
That our friendship happened to turn out to be a profitable one was totally circumstantial. Pure luck.
Long story short, the tour guide and bus driver ended up being pretty pissed about having to track down the one missing idiot who had wandered off from the group. It was worth it in the end, though. Oboro and her family found a strapping young gentleman to help them do a little gardening every now and again. And now that Xander and I were a thing, she got two strapping young hunks for the price of one.
“Whatever it is,” Oboro said, “you seem a bit happier than you used to.” She waggled her eyebrows, then winked, then waggled again. I burst out laughing.
The funny thing about the spirits and cryptids and mythical creatures I met was how communication wasn’t ever really a problem. Some didn’t speak at all, but you’d be surprised at how much someone can really convey through body language. Others, like Oboro, and quite a few of the undead, found their long or endless lives a little droll and actually made an effort to learn one or two new languages. Her excuse was that we happened to be near a popular tourist spot. She’d clearly needed to help more than a few foreign tourists out of the woods.
Oboro and her family were extremely hospitable, too. Not uncommon for kodama, I’d found, but definitely not something you’d expect of most supernatural creatures. I wasn’t sure where they kept all their supplies, but every time I visited, Oboro would have her grandchildren offer me some lunch. I knelt to collect my meal from the cutest ghostly little kids you ever did see. They presented me with a wooden bowl of fresh water and a tray of onigiri – delicious rice balls.
“Thank you so much,” I said, accepting with both hands and smiling.
The kids laughed and ran off, which was when I noticed Xander receiving his own lunch from his own set of transparent toddlers. He accepted gratefully and came over.
“Looks delicious,” Xander said, holding up his bowl and tray. He nodded at Oboro, grinning. “Domo arigato gozaimasu, obaachan.” Oboro grinned hugely back.
I cocked an eyebrow. I guess it wasn’t unusual for a Grayhaven graduate to be familiar with multiple languages. To be honest, I found it ridiculously hot. I sat in the grass to eat my lunch, and Xander strolled over to join me, folding his legs underneath him. The heat of his body sitting so close was almost unbearable. I stared down at my rice balls, channeling my appetite towards actual hunger. Again, it would be inappropriate. I had to focus on putting my mouth on food, instead of putting my mouth on Xander’s –
“Oh,” he said, the sound muffled as he bit off a piece of his first rice ball. “Obaachan, this is delicious.”
She laughed, then winked. “Secret family recipe. You boys did so much for us today. You deserve a long, hard break. Enjoy yourselves.” She strolled off, then vanished among the trees, like the rest of her family.
I focused on my meal, studiously ignoring the little moans of pleasure Xander kept making.
“This one’s got salmon in it,” he cooed. “Wow. Seriously, best onigiri I’ve ever tasted.”
He wasn’t wrong, first of all. Those rice balls were amazing. I liked the kind with pickles in them, too, but the salmon-stuffed one was a treat on its own. I chewed, swallowed, then took a sip of my water. Fresh, cool, and crisp, like it was drawn out of the world’s sweetest, most secret little stream.
“So you speak Japanese too, huh?” I said.
Xander reddened slightly. “It was nothing. I was just thanking her, that’s all.”
“That word you keep calling her, though. What does that mean again?”
He stopped chewing for a moment. “Oh. Obaachan. You use it to show respect for a woman who’s older than you, but in this case I guess it means grandma.”
I took another sip of water, smiling, oddly proud. “You know a lot of random things, Xander. It’s pretty cute.”
He shrugged and turned back to his rice balls. “That’s because I’m pretty cute. It’s all part of the package. Smart and sexy, you know?”
I laughed, elbowing him in the ribs. Maybe my cockiness was starting to rub off on him.
See, Oboro wasn’t wrong at all. I was definitely in a happier place since Xander and I patched things up and, you know, took things another step further. It was especially nice to be able to drag Xander along on my little excursions. The Gauntlet still wasn’t in a place to make me a ton of money, its inconsistent performance constantly making me second guess myself. It meant that Jackson Pryde would have to continue resorting to hunting supernatural creatures for their reagents, to be sold to the highest bidder he could find at the Black Market. Gotta keep giving to the Keep Jackson Alive fund.
Hunting in this case really just meant hanging out with cool grannies and doing some gardening. In all the time I’d spent gathering and harvesting rare resources for the Black Market’s craftsmen, I’d never really had to kill or actively injure anything or anyone. I liked being able to maintain my side hustle of selling supernatural ingredients while keeping things sustainable. And now it meant quality time with my “pretty cute” boyfriend, too. Who could complain?
I glanced around the glade as I wolfed down the last of my onigiri. We hadn’t really done all that much, but it seemed to count a lot for Oboro and her family. Most of the work involved cleaning up the premises, like moving away some fallen branches and raking up leaves that had blown onto the grounds. None of it served any real practical purpose for the kodama, as far as I could tell, but it made Oboro a true blue grandma, in a sense. This particular granny just really wanted a nice garden to look at.
Xander finished his meal, gulped down his water, then paused halfway through his bowl. He set it down, looking around at the surrounding trees.
“Jack, do you hear that?”
I pushed myself up off the ground, one hand already reaching for my backpack, where the Gauntlet was waiting.
“Hear what, exactly?” I asked, completely unsure of what we were looking for.
“That,” Xander said, pointing towards the other end of the clearing. “Heads up.”
A tree shook, leaves fell, and a fawn burst out of the undergrowth, eyes huge. It bleated and shrieked in fear, stamping its hooves and bucking.
“Whoa,” I said, holding my hands up in front of me, using my body to shield Xander. “Whoa, now.”
Like the poor thing could even understand me. I wasn’t a zoologist by any means, but I’d spent enough time around wild animals to know that this wasn’t normal. The little guy was scared half to death.
“It’s injured,” Xander said, keeping his voice low. “Right there on its flank.”
I wasn’t sure how I’d missed that, but that was why Xander was up for Incandescence and I spent my nights jerking off about him in the shower. A trail of blood was leaking down the fawn’s hind leg. I couldn’t make out the source of the wound from all of the frantic movement, but the creature was clearly in pain. Couldn’t have been from a gunshot. No way anybody hunted in these parts.
“I know this sounds nuts,” I said, “but I think we should help him. We weren’t exactly making any effort to keep quiet. He heard us here, and there’s a reason he came.”
“Fine,” Xander said. “I’m with you. But be careful. He’s still a wild animal, Jack.”
“Agreed. You whip up some healing magic. I’ll help calm him down.”
Xander fiddled with the shirt tied around his waist, redoing its knot to reinforce it. “Don’t be a big damn hero, now. It’s pretty sexy, not gonna lie, but I don’t want you getting kicked in the head.”
I frowned. I wasn’t doing this to show off or anything. The whole point was to help the deer. Xander was right. It was still a wild animal. But if the fawn was afraid of us, why did he come to the glade? I hated that I knew the answer.
He was running away from whatever had hurt him.
“Come here, little guy,” I said, approaching slowly. “Come here, little buddy. I won’t hurt you.”
The fawn snorted, stamped with one hoof, then bleated again, his eyes searching my face. He was terrified, but I had a keen sense that he really wanted whatever was hurting him to stop. He stepped up closer, enough to sniff at the back of my knuckles, then reared back and screamed again.
“There’s no way I smell quite that bad,” I told the fawn accusingly.
“Damn it, Jack, stop messing around already.”
“Right. Here, boy. Good boy. We’re gonna take care of you, all right? No more stomping and screaming.”
“Jackson,” a voice said from among the trees. It was Oboro. She and the rest of the kodama had materialized again, watching us with dark eyes, worried faces. “Be careful. He is afraid, but not angry.”
The fawn sniffed once, then made a break for the trees. I did the stupid thing, throwing myself at him, somehow dodging his hooves as they flailed and stamped at thin air. The both of us went down, his muscles taut as he raised his head and raised hell.
“You’re okay, little buddy,” I said, grunting and holding on for dear life. “I’m just keeping you down so you don’t hurt yourself, okay? Uncle Xander’s going to look you over and make it all better.”
“Okay, I’m ready.” Xander hurried over, muttered, then placed his hand on the fawn’s hind leg.
The fawn stopped struggling. It made a noise that sounded very much like a sigh of relief. Xander was looking over his leg, one hand cupping his wooden bowl of water, the other holding a ripped piece of his shirt. He dabbed the damp cloth along what used to be a puncture wound, clearing away most of the blood.
“Found it,” Xander said. “Plucked it out.”
I let myself go loose, rubbing the fawn’s back as I pushed myself up to sit in the grass. “What was it? A thorn? A splinter?”
Xander opened his mouth to answer when the kodama rushed us, gathering around us in a loose semicircle.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen,” Oboro said.
I patted the fawn as he went up on his legs. He tested his balance unsteadily, then made an excited leap. Cute little guy.
“We’ve been noticing more and more of these incidents with the local wildlife,” Oboro said, her expression grave. “Not so many to cause so much alarm, mind you, but enough to take notice. Twice this month alone.”
The other kodama nodded in agreement, whispering among themselves. One of the children pointed towards the part of the clearing where the fawn had come from. Waiting there was an older buck, his antlers fully grown, and fully ready to gore my internal organs right out of my beautiful body.
“Okay, whoa,” I said, standing up, holding my hands out.
“’Whoa’ can only get you so far, Jack,” Xander said through gritted teeth.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned,” Oboro said, her spectral hand stroking gently across the fawn’s back. “That must be the father. I suspect he encouraged his child to come to you for help. It is not usually in the way of wild creatures to trust mankind, but perhaps they had no other choice.”
The fawn nudged me in the stomach with his muzzle, then licked at the back of Xander’s wrist. Xander giggled, tickled. I patted the fawn on the head, then watched as he trotted off to join his deer dad. I thought that was the end of it, but the buck approached, his head lowered. I held a hand out in front of Xander defensively, but he pushed my arm down.
“It’s okay. He’s not trying to attack us. He’s – wait. I need to see this.”
Oboro nodded. “Xander is correct. The deer means you no harm. He wants – something else, but I cannot say what, precisely.”
It almost seemed as if the buck was offering his antlers for inspection. I walked abreast of Xander as he stepped up to the creature. He held out one hand, offering his knuckles. The buck sniffed, then lowered his head again. Something was caught on one of the antlers closer to the middle of his head. I squinted as I looked closer. My heart clenched.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I breathed.
Xander retrieved the shimmering shard from the buck’s antlers, then unwrapped the piece of cloth he’d used to dab away the fawn’s blood. There, sitting in the middle of his ripped shirt, was a gleaming crystal sliver to match the one pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He held them both up, the crystals sparkling as sunlight struck their many facets.
“Do they look familiar to you?” Xander asked, his expression grim, his tone bordering on sarcastic.
“For sure,” I said. “Those look just like the pieces of a Chrysanthemyst.”
|
The fragrance of chaos. The flavor of terror. The color of madness.
Jackson Pryde and Xander Wright are loving a life of hunting and harvesting rare reagents wherever the Black Market travels. But a routine trip to visit Japanese tree spirits turns up something sinister: two crystal shards, embedded in the bodies of wild animals. They’re familiar, glimmering, violet… like splinters of amethyst. But that’s not all. Two rival guilds are in strife, Jack and Xander caught in a crossfire of spells and slander. SEER and its hundred eyes are still watching their every move. And then there’s the matter of meeting Xander’s parents, perhaps Jackson’s deadliest challenge to date. The Chrysanthemyst’s return is the least of their problems. A Stroke of Brilliance is a 76,000-word M/M urban fantasy romance with a HFN ending. Join a fast-talking artificer and a snarky sorcerer, childhood friends who become bitter enemies, then lovers, as they explore a world filled with strange flora, mythical fauna, and magical murders. If you like your urban fantasy with humor, horror, and a whole lot of heart, you’ve come to the right place. Experience A Stroke of Brilliance today. |