1:1 A Bad Luck Cat, Xoxo Nyx

Chapter 1:1 A Bad Luck Cat, Xoxo Nyx

Hi there, Kinsley Nyx Knight at your service.

Well, I was in the service, but I’m not anymore. It’s just an expression.

Sorry, I’m a very literal person. That’s because beyond every other slight God laid against me, the newest is finding out that I’m an Aspie.

A person with ASD Autism Spectrum Disorder, with the addition of Asperger’s. Both are lifelong conditions. While they’re often linked, they are not exclusive to one another. Things I’d always had, but didn’t find out about until the ripe age of thirty-six.

Regardless of our good Lord never giving anyone more than they can handle, there are times I wish he were far less generous, if not confident in my capability to overcome.

It feels more like a low blow, than faith at this juncture. I mean, what deity would choose the moment I clawed myself out of a two-year physical rehab, earning a medical discharge from the military to reveal that they wired me wrong on top of the rest?

Situs Inversus, Anxiety, Panic Disorder, OCD, and PTSD weren’t enough?

I guess it could be worse. After all, I only got a free pass to civilian life after being listed as disabled. Even if I’m only a level one on a one to three scale, Autism is still a disability. The rest were just side effects of spending six months in a POW, prisoner of war, camp.

I shouldn’t complain. Just be grateful Alex found me in time.

It just goes to show that the worst things can be for a reason. I mean, who knew a bombing during my first tour, turning me into Wolverine, would be the thing that saved me?

Obviously, my skull and other bones weren’t coated in the fictional adamantium. Just some safe mix of hard alloys that stopped two bullets from sinking into my brain. The plate used to meld my fractured noggin did not, however, stop the swelling.

Swelling that made me forget whatever turned me from an X-Man soldier into Humpty Dumpty. The poor egg that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put back together again.

I have my moments, but all in all, I try to remember that the life I have left is a gift. A precious thing I refuse to waste or spend dwelling on a past I can’t change.

With two hundred years to go, I do my best to learn from it, though.

A couple years shy of forty, one would assume that age and experience would have done something to improve my horrible luck, but no such luck for the catastrophe cat.

I’m healed, yes. More physically than emotionally, though.

Free from the AF, and barely three months into civilian life, when my abysmal luck strikes again. Needless to say, finding a new career path hasn’t been easy.

Unfortunately, this is one instance I can can’t blame on the Witch who cursed me.

Even if my orphan brother is not a real Witch, I swear the imp has manifested things since I met him at age ten.

I also know that the association of the tweedle twap jerk, bringing the comedy of errors that is my life to full bore is not real magic.

Haven may be a city of Fey, but the whole reason that the King chose to cross-breed with humans, was because Elves were more or less the same as them. Well, other than life span.

Our semi hidden realm of Lumeria, was founded thousands of years ago. When Elves were hunted to near extinction. Now the Australian sized continent that looks like a dime on a world map is the last Sanctuary for anyone with safe genes.

Sorry. Let me explain that.

First, no matter how ‘hidden’ the realm, all veils that house supernatural beings are in some way connected to the human world. Meaning that part of the linked worlds that supernatural beings hide in are visible by satellite.

Lumeria looks like an island of the coast of Greece, but is actually a large continent with numerous countries, cities, and districts.

Only people with S.A.F.E genes can get citizenship. Our military likes acronyms as much as the rest of the world’s.

Safe has dual meanings, I guess. Only Supes, Aliens, Fairies, and Elves. IE Fey; folks who don’t feed on blood, raw flesh, or spirit energy are allowed in the Vale.

Simple version is that Mystics require the life force of others to maintain their long lives. Fey and humans don’t.

It’s only a theory on my part, but it seems like if Fey did consume the bad things that ban people from our shores, that Elvans might have the advanced type healing, and other superior senses that make Mystics so dangerous.

Honestly, no matter how mad some people get about it, I think Fey and humans were a perfect pairing. I mean it could be because I’m a low-born, but Elvans, elf human hybrids, are every bit as fragile as ‘mortals’.

Not that I knew anything about it immigrating to Lumeria at age ten.

After many years of successful procreation, the King decided to mirror Lumeria to the human world, and invite tourists in. I guess that’s when high borns got mad. It’s not like his Majesty Eldon could ignore the fact that so many humans had the E gene required.

Apparently, a lot of old lines the Elves believed were dead survived.

Meaning that even someone like me had full-blooded Elves in their family tree at one time. A fact that allowed me and a dozen other orphans from Romania to get citizenship when our convent burned down.

I’m not a nun, but was raised by them.

Abandoned as a baby on the steps of a crumbling church ‘to save my soul’. Accepting as Lumeria is to all types of religions and cultures, I never could completely stray from my rudimentary teachings. No matter how antiquated.

I’m much better now than when I came, but that could also be due to the fact that I didn’t even know things like televisions, cell phones, running water or even electricity existed. Let alone science. Not until another church answered our plea for harbor.

That church being the Sisters of Mercy of Haven.

A place as forward as Transylvania was backwards.

The Carpathian Mountains is a truly wild, if not superstitious place. Near every Romanian believes that they are cursed, and knows the saying, este în sânge în engleză. It’s in the blood.

That’s not my excuse though.

Not entirely. See, I was the only blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby to ever be born on the outskirts of Dracula’s home. When abandoned complete with a baby blanket and the afterbirth, my strange appearance caused a fair amount of disruption.

Science may have had a perfectly logical reason for it, but the kids I grew up with swore I was a demon or worse, the devil’s bride reincarnated. I mean, what Transylvanian names their daughter after the suicidal wife of a mass murderer?

One that locals, to this day, believe will come back from the grave and slaughter everyone in the country.

My argument against it, was in no way helped by the fact that if anything smashed, crashed, cracked or broke, I was always right in the middle of said kerfuffle. Me and or the stray kitten I fed, Nyx.

Her black fur earned her the name of the primordial goddess of night. I, on the other hand, didn’t get landed with the namesake until thirteen.

Obviously, I was short on friends.

That didn’t change coming to a country that felt like a different planet, on what I swore at the time was a rocket ship. I also took no comfort in the fact that the kids who bullied me to a point of selective mutism, were in turn harassed mercilessly.

Just because we couldn’t speak the language, didn’t mean we couldn’t read or write it.

Half of our time, and the base of our education, was transcribing religious texts into every known language to man. The other part of our day was either walking an hour to fish water out of a well, or training with pointy objects.

What?

It’s not like we had anything else to do a thousand miles from nowhere. Besides, I’m sure that the nuns wouldn’t have been so adamant or merciless in our training if they didn’t believe that vampires, demons, and every other entity with pointy teeth was going to eat us in our sleep.

To this day, I still can’t find or show my childhood home to show Nicky on Google Maps.

Most of the roads are too narrow for cars.

Anytime we ever left the church for a supply run, we were on a donkey led cart.

Anyway, those outings were where I met the Gypsies. The ones who told me that every ‘wanderer’ had a birth name and a true name. One that was given to them by their families when they turned thirteen. For some reason, the most unlucky number, signaled adulthood to many cultures.

Regardless, even I knew better than to question, let alone defy actual witches.

So when the singular friend I ever made turned thirteen, I gave him the best name I could think of. Nikolai. As in Nikolai Vlademyre. The unofficial King in our region.

So sure that when it came my time to be named I’d get full reciprocity. Ending my bad luck for good. While all names have power, true names can work for you rather than against you. So when the day came, I couldn’t have been more excited.

The Witch truly could have chosen anything. Someone powerful, brave, graceful, beautiful, but NO! Instead, he names me after the cataclysmic kitten!

More infuriating was that one of the locals must have blabbed to him because when I tried to take his back. Name him after a toad instead, Nicky just laughed. Said that once given a name couldn’t be undone.

Even so, he’s a witch king.

Anything Nicky decides he’s made happen since we were kids. So if I make it through my current predicament. No way I don’t ride the broomstick he gave me for Wonderlight all the way back to Crest and beat him with it, until he uncurses me!

“Clear!,” I holler, wondering if I said it in Romani or English. If either word was even translatable with sweat dripping out of orifices I never knew I had. I swear I might as well be outside in the pouring rain, for the puddle I’ll likely slip in if I try to get to my feet.

“Kinsley Nyx Knight!” Nicky’s voice is as welcome as it is annoying in the moment. A sound half of me clings to, believing I’d never hear it again, versus it being him that got me in this mess.

Indirectly, at least and a story I might actually be able to laugh at after this. “Gray hairs at sixteen wasn’t bad enough? Now you see fit to give me palpitations?”

You? I’m the one who just disarmed the most demented science project in the history of time! Stopping the only job you haven’t gotten me fired from since waking up, from being blown to bits!

It’s what I think, but all that comes out is the same complaint I’ve made since thirteen, “gee whizz, almost like naming me the bad luck cat was a bad idea, Nicky.”