Sunlight streamed in through the Dal's windows, flecked with motes of dust kicked up by every rug and every drape. Shapes, dappled in sunlight and shadow, scurried under the smoky beams, busily preparing for the most publicized Light event of the year: the new Ash's Inauguration. Though none of the furnishings had changed in the Dal's main dining room, it didn't look remotely familiar. Tables and chairs and couches had been rearranged to create an enormous space in the middle of the chamber, where a second stage had been set up for the ceremony itself. The chairs usually arranged around long, communal wooden trestles and smaller, more intimate tables were lined around the sides of the room, even the pool table that dominated the only clear portion of the pub had been removed to make space. It looked smaller, somehow, with all its furniture cleared and moved to the sides, less intimate, less like the second home Bo had come to recognize it as.
Bo swept past the legion of Fae and Fae-owned humans that scuttled and hurried to clean and prepare the Dal for the momentous occasion. The way the Dal had changed within a few short hours from bar to political hall was disturbing, but there were far more pressing matters to tend to. And there were still a few areas of the sprawling pub that hadn't, and wouldn't be, touched. Fae scattered around her as she charged through the Dal's main floor and barreled into the little private chamber and slammed the door behind her.
"Tamsin?!"
"Not so loud!" Tamsin hissed sharply from behind her. Her footsteps tapped quietly on the waxed wooden floors as she slipped across the closed door and locked it, "do you want the Light to have me executed for gatecrashing one of their parties?!"
"Did you find her?" Bo's voice hushed, but didn't lose its urgency. It was much dimmer in this windowless room, and half the Dal's furniture had been shoved in to make space in the main chamber. They lay haphazardly and disorganized, jumbled together amongst the private room's own couches and tables, like hulking monsters crouched and snarling in the semi darkness. The electric lamps ranged along the walls were on their dimmest setting, and emanated a stingy, mean orange light that set every unfamiliar line in threatening relief. Bo's face, tight and tense and worried, looked strangely alien in it.
Tamsin pressed her lips together in a thin line. Her eyebrows drew together and her jaw clenched, and she took a few steps closer to Bo. Her sandals tapped against the wooden floorboards quietly as she walked.
"No," her voice fell to a whisper, colored with regret, "I searched her apartment again, there's nothing. She left enough food in the cat's bowl for a month."
"Lauren doesn't have a cat," Bo snapped back irritably. Lauren had been missing for the past three days, she hadn't answered a single text, a single call. Hale had answered when Bo confronted him that he'd given Lauren the weekend off, but it was Monday evening, and Lauren still hadn't returned. And Bo was worried.
"I know that," Tamsin's voice sharpened a little, and her expression turned from regretful to sour, "I'm just saying…" she trailed off, her tone softening ever so slightly, "she's gone."
Silence rippled between the two women, taut and fraught with tension. Bo stared pale-faced at the Valkyrie that stood apologetically before her. She wasn't angry at Tamsin, it hadn't been Tamsin's fault that Lauren had disappeared. But Tamsin twitched uncomfortably and glared back at the Succubus whose attention was fixed wholly on her.
"She can't be gone," Bo murmured finally, her features trembled on her face for an instant, lost somewhere between worried and furious, before the corners of her mouth fell and she dropped her gaze, "I need her, she can't be gone."
Tamsin took a cautious step forward, and hesitantly raised a hand to drift along Bo's shoulder. "We all need her. I'm not exactly suited to fixing limbs, just breaking them." Tamsin's voice was soft, and heavy and somber, "Maia's been looking for her too. But she's gone completely off the grid. It's like she suddenly decided to not exist."
"She has to be somewhere, Tamsin," Bo spun on her heel and twisted away from the hand poised hesitantly over her shoulder. She was anxious, irritated. The question of who her father was still hung menacingly in the air, and Bo needed, now more than ever, to know that the people she cared about were safe. That Lauren, whom she'd left with mean, angry words, was safe. "You've checked the Dark compound? The Morrigan's dungeons?"
Tamsin made a frustrated sound, and when Bo turned again to look at her, found that her hands were crossed tightly, defensively over her chest and her expression was twisted into one of resentment and offended exasperation. "I'm not exactly Dark Fae of the frikkin' year, Bo. I snooped. I didn't find anything. She's gone, okay?!"
"Yeah, 'never heard 'expulsion' sound so threatening before', I know," Bo mumbled under her breath. The bright sunshine of the school's courtyard from her Dawning flashed briefly in her mind's eye; though Bo had passed through her Dawning, succeeded in evolving, she still dreamt about the things she'd seen in it, every restless night.
"Excuse me?" Tamsin drew forward, her brow creasing with consternation. She looked like she didn't know whether to be offended, worried, or amused.
"Nothing, never mind," Bo shrugged off the remnants of the flashback with a wave of her hand and forced herself to calm, for her body to relax. Tamsin was trying to help, she'd been a stauncher ally than Bo had ever given her credit for, and a harsher critic than her friends had ever dared to be, and Bo truly appreciated it. But Tamsin's snarky attitude had made it hard for Bo to voice her gratitude. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap, I'm just worried," she added as an afterthought.
"Yeah, I get that," Tamsin mumbled back. She hugged her arms around her and glanced from left to right, increasingly paranoid about getting caught sneaking around the Dal during such a prestigious Light Fae event. "I'll keep looking. Maia's about as stubborn as it gets, we'll find her."
It didn't escape Bo's notice that Tamsin had already mentioned Maia twice during their short conversation, nor that she'd alluded to needing to care for the stringy human's broken arm. Bo let out a long, heavy sigh and stepped forward, nearly closing the distance between them. It was odd, seeing Tamsin care so much about another creature, a human no less, but somehow didn't seem so strange after the realizations she'd made about the bitchy Valkyrie in her Dawning.
"Tamsin, there's something I need to know," Bo spoke softly, her words drifted across Tamsin's face and brushed through long, light strands of blond hair. Tamsin looked down at the Succubus, even in heels, Bo was shorter than Tamsin in flats. Tamsin's expression was guarded, and a little suspicious. Bo took a deep breath and braced herself, "what happened to that guy from the alleyway," Bo swallowed, her words sounded so small, "the one I fed from?"
"You mean the guy you drained almost dry and left for dead?" Tamsin responded in a harsh, dry whisper. She looked incredulous for a moment, surprised that Bo was finally owning up to the assault Tamsin had been after her about for weeks. Then her expression softened, turned sad, and Tamsin's eyes fell to the narrow space of floor between their feet. "He's dead," she mumbled, "he ID'd you, then he… died."
Shock drained Bo's face of blood. She looked almost sickly under the Dal's dim lights' orange glare. Had his death been at her hands? Had she killed another innocent, even after she'd sworn to herself three years ago that she never would again? Tamsin looked at her, saw the horrified expression on Bo's face, and to Bo's complete and utter surprise, put her arms around Bo and pulled her into a hug.
"No… not you," Tamsin's words rasped in Bo's ear, strangely comforting, oddly sympathetic, "I shouldn't have pulled him out of his coma. He was in pain, he wanted to die, so I let him."
Tamsin wasn't a hypocrite. Of all the many things she was, this was not one of them. It didn't surprise Bo, but she didn't feel any relief wash through her at Tamsin's confession. "You may have let him die, but I was the one that killed him," Bo murmured into Tamsin's hair, her words choked by guilt. Gently, she pulled away from the Valkyrie, unwilling to break the odd moment of compassion by the otherwise seemingly cold and ruthless warrior, but still needing to know one thing more.
"If he ID'd me, why didn't you tell the Morrigan?"
Tamsin stared at her, and Bo could see the hard veneer she tried so hard to keep together crack and splinter. Green eyes stared into dark brown, swirling with complexity and guarded even now. All Tamsin had ever claimed to have wanted was to bring Bo into the custody of the Dark, to make her pay for the crimes she'd committed against one of her own clan. But given the chance, she hadn't. Why?
"Why did you admit to attacking him in the first place?" Tamsin answered with a short, rhetorical question of her own. Bo took a step back, her arms crossed over her chest defensively, and she stared at the Valkyrie, assessing and reassessing her own behavior from before and after her Dawning, for the umpteenth time since she'd returned from it. Tamsin stared back at her, then gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod, before leaning away, as if satisfied with the answer she saw lurking in Bo's eyes.
"Back at Brazenwood…" Bo started again, as another memory occurred to her, "at the Land Lady's trailer. I pulled a Tarot card. The Wanderer." Bo frowned at Tamsin, watched her eyes first widen then narrow at the mention of the Tarot card. Tamsin's reaction to it had been intense, almost frightened, entirely incredulous. The Land Lady had been terrified. Even now, Tamsin looked nervous and uncomfortable. "What was that?"
Tamsin shrugged uneasily, her mouth twisted into a wry grin that looked more like a grimace, and her eyes darkened with her discomfort, with a shadow of fear. But she gave Bo a last awkward pat on the arm and slid backward to the locked door. Bo hadn't noticed before, but Tamsin was dressed in the same uniform as the workers in the main hall, black dress-pants, black bowtie, black jacket, and if she kept her head down and didn't make eye contact, no one that didn't already know she was here would realize she didn't actually seem to be working. "You tell me, Succu-babe," she murmured quietly as she crept past, "I might have let you off with a warning this time," Tamsin continued in a more confident tone, her voice just a little louder this time, "but he was one of mine. You pull shit like that again, on Light or Dark, you can bet your cute little ass I'm coming after you."
Their eyes met, somber brown eyes with sharp, bright green, and Bo knew Tamsin meant every word. A smile cracked the corners of Tamsin's mouth, and Bo felt a small smile tug on her lips in response. It sounded like a threat, but Bo felt it was the truest expression of friendship she'd heard in a long time. It was odd, but she somehow felt safer knowing there was someone who cared enough to keep her in line.
And then Tamsin turned the knob and dropped her chin, and long waves of blonde fell over her face and hid it from sight, and she swept out the door with a purpose, camouflaging herself easily amongst the other Fae workers laboring over the preparations of Hale's Swearing-In ceremony.
Author's Note: So, we're going to take a short break from the two-a-week posting pattern I've fallen into for the past month. Next week, we'll have only one post on Tuesday, but for two weeks after that, I'll be posting the last chapters twice a week again. We're officially wrapping up Where the Fae Sun Rises.
Gogobolo: I like that Bo too. Things are going to get a little nuts again now, poor Bo never gets to just enjoy life anymore, does she? And I wonder where Lauren's gone?! The chapters you're reading now and for the next three weeks will be chapters I hadn't originally intended on putting in this part of the story. They're a bridge between this part and the next part, which I'm currently writing. But I felt they fit more here than they did at the beginning of the next story, so I hope you enjoy them. Unfortunately for Bo, that complete clarity didn't last for very long – it's difficult realizing that what you feel is real and what actually is real are two separate things. But at least she has some idea now of what's going wrong, and is going about fixing it, right? We're coming upon the end here, and it's going to have some parallel occurrences to the finale of season 3. But part 3 and season 4 really won't be very much alike.
Leader: I think Tamsin distrusts Bo more than she dislikes her. Perhaps she started out disliking her, but I think that quickly changed to the kind of respect you find for worthy nemeses and a particular wariness. Bo is something of a wildcard, and behavior like the kind she's shown tends to breed that sort of wariness in people who are already naturally distrustful. Tamsin had always seemed to me like someone who's both betrayed and been betrayed a lot, and after season 4, I think that's been somewhat reinforced. As for Trick's hands: he might be short, but I think they'd be quite large, and he was a warrior for at least some part of his life, so they'd have to be calloused to some degree. I just can't imagine them being small or soft, his character being what it is. I won't tell you what Hale was up to, those would be spoilers of the very worst kind. You'll get an idea in the next few chapters to come though, I won't leave you completely hanging for too long.
