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Theodore

 

 

 

Theodore Sidhe tossed back his whiskey and didn’t so much as grimace at the burn. As many years as he’d been walking this earth, the scorch of ripe alcohol no longer had that much of an effect on him.

If anything, it was no longer there at all, and at times like these, that saddened him greatly.

There were some days when that burn at the back of the throat was all that could get a man through to tomorrow, and Theo had lost such an ability a thousand or more years ago.

Truth was, he’d forgotten many things over the millennia.

A man that lived as long as he did, didn’t remember the inanities. Hell, it was hard enough remembering the good stuff and the downright evil stuff, but the petty nonsense?

No, that managed to bury itself in the past without a handful of help from him.

Still, he liked to think the whiskey soothed his gut at moments such as these. Times where a prophecy he’d never imagined being answered was in the throes of coming to fruition.

Major times like that.

Where worlds that had always lived seamlessly side by side suddenly collided, and only a handful of folk such as he were even aware of the quake that such a collision had caused.

Small shit, he thought wryly.

He rubbed his chin, hearing as well as feeling the scrape of stubble against his palm. The raspy sound wasn’t pleasant to the ear, but it was a reminder.

A reminder he’d have to shave.

He’d have to look his best, after all.

No daughter of a prophecy would accept a messenger looking as shoddy as he did at the moment.

Trouble was, Theo didn’t have a razor.

Hadn’t had a razor since Brian’s heart attack. Hadn’t shaved since the day before Brian had left him forever, and the beard he was sporting was the longest he’d ever let it grow. Down to his chest it was now. Full of shit and stinking to high heaven. Knotted and gnarled, just like him.

In fact, the beard was the only sign of Theo’s distress. It was his rebellion. Beneath the beard, his glamour worked as it always did. Made him look handsome, beautiful, even pretty . . . whatever the person looking upon him liked in a man, was what they saw. The light-green eyes, the pure gold of coloring.

Only the beard got in the way of the magic intrinsic to his kind. His hair, too, but he kept the long tangled mess in a bun, and for some stupid reason the women of today seemed to like this thing they called a ‘man bun.’

In fact, he’d had a few women approach him saying they liked his ‘lumberjack’ look.

His grief-stricken rebellion was apparently a trend now.

This feckin’ world is on its knees, Theo thought with a grimace, even as he kept his eyes trained on the screen.

Pouring himself another drink, he swilled the whiskey about his teeth. How he wished to feel the dull ache of nothingness. How he wished he could ignore what was happening right in front of him.

But, and he let out a bone-rattling sigh, he couldn’t.

Instead, the future was beckoning him in the form of a small lass, barely five feet of nothing, whooping some bastard’s ass.

The footage had gone live on the web an hour ago.

The Internet was a miraculous thing. And coming from a Fae, it was high praise, indeed.

He dealt in what humans considered magic. Could wield it himself, and yet the Internet was a human construct, and more magical than most things he’d imagined the mundanes capable of.

Because of it, there was the Supra Web. Criminals had the Dark Web, normal folk had sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, and supernaturals had the Supra Web.

A secure server for the billions of myriad supernaturals to log onto, to communicate, to connect.

Never before had there been such connectivity between the many species. And though normally he wouldn’t have approved, at that moment, as he watched the daughter of the leaders of the North American Pack kill a Beta in the name of justice, he was inordinately grateful.

She was the one he’d been sent to find. The one he’d forever doubted would arrive. The one who’d taken her sweet time to show up. Yet, here she was.

Thalia Lyndhoven.

His journey, so long in the making, was finally about to begin, and he’d found her because of the Internet.

Maybe the mundanes weren’t so stupid after all. 

Then he thought about global warming, believers of ‘Adam and Eve – not Adam and Steve,’ and the gazillion tons of plastic polluting the oceans. . . .

Yeah, they were still stupid.