Masks We Hide

Kismet wasn't known for being the most positive of people. It was something of a fact for her as she'd gotten older. At eighteen, she already had a dark humor, and no hope it would get better. After getting in hot water with the press at a red-carpet event, Kismet's uncle, who the model had been living with since her mother passed away ten years ago, had sent her to the happy little town of Halvet to try and improve her temper. Kismet actually preferred the peace and quiet of Halvet, where no one knew the famous English model. But it wasn't making her any less fiery.

She pulled her silver umbrella from her purse, careful to click the button to open it. A person looked at her strangely. The sky was cloudy, but it didn't seem to be stormy weather.

Kismet ignored him.

Good that she had, as the moment Kismet had her umbrella safely overhead, it started to rain.

The rain was only a sprinkle now, but Kismet knew it would get worse as the night got on. She walked down main street of Halvet, her open-toed sandals giving her about three inches of height over the forming puddles.

People scurried from the rain as she strolled leisurely to her apartment, an old brick building that had been renovated in the years before. The previous owner had sold it cheap because his first wife had scratched up the wood floor. He didn't tell her, but he didn't need to.

Being a psychic, Kismet already knew.

"Kis!" Henry Balvon ran up to her, sheltering under her umbrella. "There you are." Kismet looked at him, slowly turning her head. She was often at the coffee shop that Henry's mother owned, so she knew him well. They'd become tentative friends, even though he was years younger than her.

"I didn't know you were looking for me." She responded. Henry smiled, not put off at all by the way she talked, her words short and always biting.

"At first, I wasn't, but I saw you, and had to say hi. It's only polite." He tipped his head, the strictly regulated schoolboy haircut turning dark by the rain. Kismet snorted, looking ahead once again.

Everyone in this town was so polite, it was almost upsetting. Sometimes, she wished these people had the ability to get mad. Next to her, she could feel Henry frowning, his thoughts reflecting his annoyance. "Are you good, Kis?"

"When am I ever?" She questioned. Henry's frown deepened.

"No, like are you really okay?"

"I just told you, Henry." Kismet deftly avoided a puddle and the question, as she walked up to her front door. "I'm fine."

Henry opened his mouth, about to object, but Kismet was already in the house, and had shut the door.



"This," Kismet's mother, Arah, said, holding up the ornate cup to the fluorescent light. It was a glass cup, but shining metal, either silver or platinum, had melded to it. Kismet stretched her stubby fingers up, but Arah lifted it out of reach. "This," she repeated, although with her accent it sounded like 'tis'. "Is very important to us. We must protect it. Do you understand, Kismet?"

A young, chubby-cheeked Kismet, her olive skin glowing in the same light as the cup, looked at her mother in wonder. "Yes, mama." She responded in awe. "I understand."

"Good." Arah smiled, kissing Kismet's baby-soft forehead. "That's very good." And Kismet knew it was good, because her mama's thoughts were glowing with happiness, even if Kismet didn't understand all the words that flooded through her mother's mind.

Kismet was psychic, just like her mama, but hadn't learned how to fully control it yet. Luckily, Arah knew enough to keep most of her thoughts concealed.

Arah folded the velvet cloth around the cup, placing it delicately in the wooden box. The old box always smelled slightly like nutmeg, and Kismet loved pushing her face to the smooth wood, just for the nutmeg smell. It was something Arah chuckled at, a little thing a five-year-old did, nothing more.

Humming a song familiar to Kismet, but also a strange, unorthodox tune, Arah walked to the tall cabinets. Kismet giggled, though she felt more confused than happy. Arah smiled down at her daughter, putting the box up on a high shelf.



It was the issue of being psychic that had Kismet painting on the walls of her apartment. Risky if she didn't do it, riskier if anyone found out. Uncle had reminded her a million times that if it ever got out they were real psychics; his modeling company and her career would be over.

Scrawled over the walls were archaic symbols that could have been Enochian or Alchemic, but said protection a thousand different ways. They'd all been painted in white paint that had a rusty undertone, mostly from the blood that had been mixed in with it.

This is how Kismet lived in Halvet, in fear of being found by the people that had chased her as a child.

She kicked off her sandals and suddenly missed the extra height the block heels gave her. Not that she needed the extra height to her frame, she was quite tall, but height had always made her feel safe.

But the rules, the ones she'd kept since childhood, were clear. No outside shoes in the house. Instead, Kismet slid her narrow feet into a pair of moccasins that needed to be replaced two years ago, but hadn't. Padding gracefully into the kitchen, she pulled out a shallow glazed bowl, made from Babylonian clay. It was old, older than Kismet's own bloodline, and the age made it powerful.

She poured oil into it, just enough to coat the bottom and then emptied a vial of Dragon-Blood sap as well. Kismet had just enough to pull it off, and she was lucky. There was no way she was getting anymore tree sap anytime soon.

Stirring the concoction with her pinky, it swirled in the bowl, refusing to mix. That was normal.

"The worst part." Kismet muttered, and lifted the bowl to her lips. She drank the whole thing, and grimaced. It was bitter, but she knew she had to do it.

Flipping open the old books, she carefully turned the pages. "These have to last." She murmured, tracing a symbol with her finger. The last wards she'd done hadn't lasted long enough, and it had scared her badly when it wore off.

The rain, she knew, wasn't just rain. It was a warning, like her mother had always said. A warning that something wasn't right.

Kismet Savv was the most powerful in the bloodline that had existed for generations. A bloodline of powerful psychics and hedge witches, that had advised kings, cured the sick, and been hunted for it.

And the hunters were coming for her. Not now, but soon. There was a stink on the air, something less noxious than blood, but not rain. It wasn't very strong, but she knew, in her gut, it would get worse.

She grabbed a second bowl already filled with an orange-brown substance. Kismet had had the good sense to start mixing the henna and oils a few days before.

"Ku'sulka." She muttered to the mixture, and it hissed happily. She didn't know what the words meant, as they were in no language she knew. It started smoking, so she dipped the hard, slightly pointed brush in the henna-like substance.

It burned fiercely as it touched her skin, but protection was worth the pain, no matter how temporary. She painted it on her legs, making sure that the henna sunk into her skin. With each stroke, she hissed. What she did to keep running.



The Savv blood line was one that had existed under many different names. It didn't matter what name, only if they had the blood. However, for years, the family lived apart from one another, until Kismet's uncle all gave them a place to hide in plain sight. It had saved them.

Kismet called him Uncle, but he wasn't a psychic like the her. He was a druid, one of the very last before the Romans destroyed the temples. His ancestor, trusted with protecting the Savv's, had fought the Romans back, but was only able to save some precious object from their rage.

The Romans had divided the family into sects. The druids and the psychics. But they were still family, and it showed in the way they playfully argued in the kitchen, or how they would pass each other books without any verbatim.

It was family, in the only way that Kismet had known.

The hedge witch was from Ireland, although her descendance were destined to have olive-skinned beauty. Not that Aoife Mac Craith was opposed, as her pale skin often burned in the harsh sun. Her freckles paled on her face as she chanted some words under her breath, her throat raw.

She shouldn't be doing this. It was forbidden, and for good reason. Her hands trembling, Aoife held up what she'd made.

It was beautiful. The most singularly beautiful thing she'd ever made. And that was saying something. At thirty five, the witch had had ten children, all of whom she'd never see again, but that didn't matter. What mattered was this.

Outside, the pale moon was beginning to rise, and the light of the forge was growing weaker, just as Aoife felt herself dim. This was the beginning of her end, and that was fine.

The marble had taken months to craft. It was the finest she could have gotten, and that too, was saying something. The hedge witch was notorious for being rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. But still, marble from the mines in Connemara was also notoriously expensive.

No matter. This was important to her. This was what the future needed.

Aoife turned the marble mask in her hands, the polished stone slick in her grasp. This was her legacy, she realized. The only thing she could leave behind, that she wanted left. She pulled the billowing emerald-green hood of her cloak up around the druidess circlet planted firmly in her wavy locks.

This had to please them, she thought. It just had to.



Kismet didn't know when the cup had been lost. One day it had existed, and the next, it hadn't. It took only hours for Arah to figure it out.

"Where is it, Kis? Tell me!" she'd yelled, and Kismet had whimpered, even though she could see it was fear and not anger in her mother's eyes. Kismet didn't know, and Arah realized quickly.

Later that night, Arah had painted the whole house with wards against evil, symbols of trapping, and even taken the oldest of the leather-bound books from its place behind the swinging book shelf. Kismet had only seen it once, on accident, when her mother had taken it out to check a recipe, for what, she never told Kismet.

"This belonged to your oldest ancestor we know of." Arah had told her, the dark eyes bloodshot and half lidded. "Aoife of Ireland."

"Ee-fa?" Kismet repeated.

"Yes, exactly. She was a very rich hedge witch with lots of recipes for spells and potions." Arah tapped a long, manicured nail on a symbol. "But we cannot use some of them."

"Was she not a nice hedge witch?" Kismet had asked her mother. Arah nodded gravely.

"Very not nice." Her tone carried a warning. "She was greedy and vain, and all she wanted to do was to be the richest woman in the world. But she was a bad mother and died alone."

Kismet had wanted to ask, if Aoife had died alone, then how did they have the book, but felt that this was a lesson time, and not a time to talk.

"You have to understand me, Kismet Savv. Under no circumstances, even if your very life is at stake, even if people with bad thoughts are trying to hurt you, never ever use these spells." Arah told her sternly.

"Why not, mama?"

"Because they will turn your soul blacker than pitch and night. They will make you evil." Arah warned.

As a young child, being evil had been a horrible fate for Kismet, and she'd sworn to her mother to never use the spells. Arah knew that she wouldn't disobey them, at least not in the future that Arah could see.

Yet, Arah should have known that when you look so far to see something so unpredictable, it's almost impossible that it will stay the same.

The second to last of the olive-skinned Savv line, Arah Savv saw for eleven years.

And for eleven years, Kismet had listened.



The dawn of Kismet Savv's nineteenth birthday was clear skied and beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky, not a wisp of wind.

Suspiciously pretty.

Kismet didn't trust it. She was the last of her bloodline, and that made her naturally paranoid. There was something strange about this morning, Kismet noted as padded to her closet cautiously, making sure to look where she stepped. When she glanced at herself in the mirror, she sighed. She looked ridiculous.

Giving herself a good shake, Kismet ignored the burning sensation in the pit of her stomach. Being psychic was sometimes more trouble that it was worth, and reacting to her instincts often landed her in trouble.

Snatching jeans, a tee-shirt and a sweater, she made herself a cup of coffee and ate a pastry.

Kismet pulled on her heels, and walked carefully out of her apartment, only looking back to make sure she had been completely alone.



When Kismet got back from the café where she'd spent a few hours reading, she kicked off her heeled sandals and dragged herself to her bedroom.

Before she could get to the bedroom, she stopped. On the island in her kitchen, sat a mask. It was a Venetian mask, with gold glitter over the green base. Kismet brows furrowed in confusion. That had defiantly not been there that morning.

She'd never seen a mask like that before. She stretched a hand out towards it, stretching a tiny bit of magic along with it. Psychometry, her cousin had called it. The ability to obtain information from an object. It was an ability that Kismet had developed with the help of her family, and one that drove them crazy.

The warm caress of magic danced around it, and it drew her in closer. She wanted to know what it was.

Kismet could tell there was a name, faintly written on the mask. When Kismet went over to pick it up, it nearly slipped from her hands. It was heavy, so heavy that she placed it back on the countertop. She ran her fingers over the letters, only to find divots in the mask.

It was engraved. These words were engraved into the surface of it. That meant power.

"Ay-oi-fe?" she tried to pronounce the name. "What is that, Runic?" Kismet put a hand on it again, hoping to feel something else.

She gasped, opening her eyes, but she couldn't see. Scrabbling with the countertop, Kismet tried to get away from the magical item. The mask burned into her mind, however, along with a woman. There was only one thought in Kismet's mind: she had to get out.

As Kismet tried to relax, thinking maybe the vision would recede if she was calm, the woman turned to face her.

It was clear, whoever she had been, she was beautiful. Her flawlessly pale skin shone under a deep emerald green cloak, her freckles making her look younger than she must have been. Thick, golden rings decorated her fingers and a gold, pointed circlet dipped down from her warm, brassy locks.

A druidic priestess, Kismet realized. A real one. She's seen fakes over the years, many fakes, in fact, but this one was real, like her family. The druidess seemed to look at the young woman, her steel blue eyes meeting Kismet's dark hazel ones.

The druidess glanced down, and Kismet followed her gaze, to see in her hands, held tight, was the mask. The mask was slightly different, without the golden glitter, but defiantly the same one that was currently in her house. The druidess looked up again.

"A gift!" she shouted, and it surprised Kismet. Visions never spoke, not to anyone. Unless it was a memory, deeply woven into the mask, part of itself just as much as the weight or the magic around it. "The Sídhe owe me a gift! I've come to collect!"

Desperately, Kismet tried to rip herself out of the memory, but it wasn't working. She didn't want to be here. This was dangerous.

A light, blue and tiny, like a spark thrown from a fire, swirled towards the druidess. In a flash, a teenaged boy appeared, floating in the air.

He reminded Kismet of Peter Pan, because he floated without wings. His auburn hair didn't cover the tips of his pointed ears, or disguise the cruelty of his cheekbones. He had a smooth, artistic curve of his lips as they twisted into a smile.

This creature wasn't human. How had the word been pronounced? The Shee? That sounded right. But most likely, it was spelled so complexly you'd never be able to tell.

"Aoife." The voice was childish, but too ancient to be young. "Ee-fa." It sounded out slowly.

Kismet flinched so hard she slammed into the counter top. Blinking, the young women stood up, finally free of the memory that was not hers.

Aoife. Where had she heard that name before?

Then, Kismet remembered. Running to the book shelf, she yanked out a book on the top shelf. Unlike her mother, Kismet had never had the time to build a secret compartment in a wall, so the old book was just on the shelf. She flipped to the cover page and the first name in the book was: Aoife Mac Craith.

The hedge witch. The bad one. An Irish druidess, apparently, who was appeasing a fairy-like people.

She turned on her heel, and went back to her room, grabbing her laptop. Sitting back down at the island, Kismet thought about what to search. Aoife was Irish, meaning her spells where in Gaelic, so...

Kismet typed Gaelic Fairies into her search engine, and hit enter. Wikipedia popped up first and Kismet clicked on it.

"Aos Sí." She tried to say, most likely butchering it. "Sídhe?"

Kismet clicked on more links, and finally came up with a satisfactory answer. The Sídhe, a type of fairy that lived in mounds of dirt, and are tricky creatures. Other than that, Kismet couldn't find anything reliable. Not that her sources were reliable to begin with. She flipped open the book to the back, where she was hoping Aoife documented something about these creatures.

Finally, her finger landed on a picture. It was an illustration of a boy, who looked very much like the boy that Kismet had seen in the memory.

Sídhe- fey like people

Very helpful, Kismet thought. She read on, but the script was now in runic. The translation only encompassed what was the least helpful part. Kismet knew a little bit of Runic script, but not enough for it to be helpful in this situation. Slowly, she started to translate the letters, writing them down on a separate piece of paper.

Once Kismet got through a few lines, she noticed something she hadn't in the book earlier. In a corner, like a second thought or a trivial fact, the word Orion? was written in scrawling, loopy letters. This time it was in English, not Runic. Purposefully different.

Kismet frowned, then studied it closer, because... she was right.

That was her mother's handwriting. Kismet hadn't seen it since she was nine years old. But what was Orion?

When it hit her, Kismet knocked over her chair, scrabbling away from the book and the mask.

Orion. The giant son of the Earth, in Greek myths.

Orion. The Hunter.

As Kismet packed her bags, stuffing what she could into a carry-on, she mulled over the new found information in her mind.

It explained so much, now that she thought about it in context to her life. The way the heavy rains always seemed to come before they arrived. How the trees sometimes bent away from her when she walked. How they had always been signs that her wards were failing, or her tattoos hadn't worked.

Sídhe were nature spirits, just as old as fairies, and deadlier. They knew how to pull the strings of fate because they'd been around to see everything. Kismet stuffed a silver hairbrush in her bag, and picked up her cell phone. If she was going on the run, she'd have to stay with someone.

Her finger hovered over Berylan, and she clicked on the call icon.

Berylan picked up on the first ring. "Who's this?" she said. She spoke the same way Kismet did, sharp and cool.

"Ber, it's me." She said. Berylan gave an annoyed grunt.

"Kis, I won't have any more Dragon Tree sap for a month, so you're gon-"

"I don't care about tree sap, Berylan, I need your help. I know what killed Mother, and I can't stay here." Kismet told her.

"Kis, you're my cousin and I love you and I loved Auntie, but I can't just drop everything to help you." Berylan seemed to be eating something, most likely pretzels. Forever hungry, that one.

"If they finish off the main line of the family, they'll come for the secondary line next, Ber."

Berylan seemed to paused, and there was a defining crunch as she chewed her food. "Where are you? If this thing is real, I'm not taking any chances."

Kismet sighed in relief. If there was one this she could always count on, it was the self-preservation that drove her redheaded cousin. "Halvet. Like always."

"I'll be there in a few hours." Berylan said. "I'll grab Adrien and Maxi."

"Wait, why them? They don't like me very much." Maxi and Adrien were just a few of the cousins she'd left on a bad note.
"Kis, like I said, love, the world doesn't revolve around you. Maxi and Adrien are my best ward breakers."

"Ber." Kismet said before the other one could hang up.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for this. It means a lot that you would do this for me."

"Well... Self-preservation and all..." Berylan sounded awkward and guilty over the phone. "Just pack what you need. And get ready to leave."



The bench outside the train station of Halvet was usually unoccupied, as almost no one came to Halvet, not without a greeting just short of a parade.

Today, however, a young man perched on the front of the bench, his left leg tapping restlessly. There was a graceful energy about him, but also dangerous. No one was at the train station, but if there had been, perhaps they would have noticed something strange about him.

Maybe it was the way that clouds seemed to hover above him, or the way the gentle breeze didn't stir his auburn hair, or how his fingers seemed too long and delicate, bending in too many places. He hummed something, and checked his wrist, where there was no watch. He was so out of place, it was almost amusing, like a three-piece suit in a jungle.

But he didn't care. He could feel everything.

He knew a Hummer was hurtling down a road, but it was two hours away. It wouldn't make it in time, that was just a fact. It certainly wouldn't help that a tree had fallen on the road.

A smile touched his lips, twisting them into a bloodthirsty sneer. The Hunt was exciting. When the Druidess had proposed the idea, it was exciting. The man tapped his leg faster, his anticipation mounting.

He took a deep breath, relaxing his tense muscles, controlling the adrenaline that pumped through his veins.

It had been ten long years since he'd last spilled blood. He could wait a little longer.



Kismet opened the door without checking. She should have checked. She should have used the psychic powers she was gifted with, and made sure the person behind the door was her cousin.

It wasn't.

Instead, a young man, maybe a few years older than her, with perfect auburn hair and high cheekbones, stood in her doorway. His soft mouth smiled, but Kismet didn't smile back.

"You." She whispered. His grin widened, like a child who'd been complemented. His teeth were sharp and small, like a shark's, ready to rend flesh from bone.

"Me." He agreed.

"You killed my mother." Kismet breathed, every nerve in her body tight and scared.

"It was my right to. Your ancestor gave me the right." He said. It was so casual, the way he said it, Kismet almost though he was lying. "If you want to blame anyone, blame Aoife." He stretched out the name, like a taunt. Eee-faa. So this was her fault.

"What do you want?" Kismet finally asked. "I'll do whatever to make sure that you don't hurt anyone else."

The fairy looked surprised, like he'd never heard it before. "I want..." he looked pensive as he considered. "I want... a legacy. Something that will outlast me and anything else I know."

His causal nature made Kismet's blood boil. "Is destroying innocents the way you do that?" she snapped out, before clamping down on her tongue. She shouldn't have done that, but she was angry.

Yet, instead of striking her down, the man looked merely confused, like he'd never heard of that before. "No." He said simply, looking away from her. "I once wished for something else. But I was a different thing then." The melancholy in his voice was so intense that Kismet could feel it. Her heart, something that wasn't known for making an appearance, went out to him.

No. You can't trust him. He killed your mother.

"What deal did you make with Aoife?" She demanded instead, still making sure he couldn't get in. The Sidhe looked surprised, as she amused him. Then he smiled, and this time, his teeth looked normal.

A glamor, no doubt, Kismet thought. He was still hungry.

"Invite me in, little psychic. I'm getting cold standing out here." He looked around. "Plus, this looks strange."

Kismet looked past him, and reached out, touching the minds of everyone near the house, weaving an intricate web with pure energy. "They won't be able to see you now. Not unless I want them to."

The fairy looked impressed. "Keeping their minds busy, bold psychic?"

"The human mind likes to filter out what it can't understand. It's not hard to give them tunnel vision."

"You make it sound as if they are different from you." He tutted. "Are they really?"

"Answer my question first." Kismet replied. He smirked slightly, and Kismet shifted her weight, making sure he knew she wasn't leaving.

"The deal I made with Aoife. That was a long time ago." He mused. "She wanted something for her descendants to remember her by, but mostly she wanted to win the coming battle. Well, coming for her. It's ancient history now."

"So, she made the mask." Kismet said. The fairy shrugged, as if this was of no importance to him.

"It's not really a mask. It's a piece of power from a god."

The 'god' part didn't really surprise Kismet. She'd grown up with her Uncle, who had volumes upon volumes of stories about gods. Small gods, ones forgotten by the world, often stalked their old homelands. Once, as a child, Kismet had nearly drowned due to Oceanus

But a piece of a god's power? That was rare and coveted.

"What did she bargain to get that?" Kismet inquired, almost afraid to ask. She suspected she knew the answer. The fairy looked at her, and shook his head.

"Her very blood. She condemned you all." He replied, pityingly. Kismet

"Yeah, she was a bad hedge witch. I'm not surprised." Kismet said without emotion. "Why did she do it?"

"To make her more powerful. The Romans approached, killing and slaughtering. She knew if her people were to survive, she would have to possess immense power."

Kismet though on his for a moment, her dark eyes far away. "Can I make a counter offer?" She asked. That caught the Sidhé's attention. "To stop hunting my family and to protect us."

"That's two, Kismet." He said. She didn't want to know how her knew her name.

"Leave my family alone." She demanded.

"A bargain goes both ways." He mused, and she wanted to strangle him.

"Then, what do you want?" she asked, her chin held high. His eyes met hers once again, and she shivered. His eyes had turned the color of the mask, and they sparkled with the madness of gods.

"Make me a bargain, Kismet Savv, last of the line of Aoife Mac Craith. Make me a bargain I can't refuse."

So, yeah.

That happened.

Yes, it's very dark and kinda creepy. For some reason, whenever I write happy things, it's always cheesy and I don't like it. That is why I only write angst.

This was something I wrote and then edited (read: very little editing, next to none) and decided, in honor of NaNoWriMo tomorrow, I'm just gonna publish this. It's not at all connected to anything, it's just a short story.

If you are a new reader, hello, my name is C.J and I know this makes me looked like I have depression, but I don't.

I am participating in NaNoWriMo this year! Tell me in the comments if you are!

Don't be a Silent Reader! Comment, Vote, and share this with other people if you want them to be scared for my mental well-being with you!

Peace! C.J.

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