Kyro and the Lemonade Mage

When The Sky Opened Up

The job had gone badly in the way most jobs did lately—things got too loud and people got comfortably stupid.

A grimy city like this one swallowed any shred of light effortlessly.

Electronic signs flickered over slick pavement. Wind dragged discarded party flyers and cigarette ash through the alleyways.

Somewhere in the distance, boisterous music throbbed from a nightclub Kyro had no interest in entering but did so anyway.

Inside, a man prayed under his breath over a debt he would never be able to pay.

Minutes later, Kyro stepped out of the back entrance of the nightclub with blood drying beneath one cuff and a fresh ache pulling tight between his ribs.

The pathetic man had tried to put a knife in Kyro’s side. He hadn’t succeeded, but he had annoyed him enough to die for it.

Kyro lit a cigarette, took one drag, and decided he hated the taste of everything tonight.

He crushed it beneath his heel.

Above him, large clouds dragged low over the skyline, heavy and unnatural, but he barely noticed until the air changed.

It happened all at once.

The alley brightened with a strange glow.

A tear opened overhead with a sound like paper being ripped in half.

Kyro’s hand moved on instinct to his pistol.

The rift widened into a jagged oval of blinding gold and pale green, throwing fractured, iridescent color across brick walls and puddled asphalt.

Wind kicked down the alley hard enough to rattle the metal fire escapes.

For one second the city smelled pleasantly wrong—like fresh rainwater, crushed citrus, and flowers blooming.

Then something fell out of the sky.

Kyro stepped back as a girl dropped straight through the opening and crashed into a pile of broken cardboard boxes beside the dumpster.

The rift snapped shut above them.

Kyro stared at the sky in disbelief.

The girl sat up slowly, blinking as if she’d merely tripped in a garden rather than fallen out of nowhere into the dirtiest part of his territory.

Her hair was a pale, luminous gold—not the ordinary light brown kind, but something almost angelic, touched by brightness itself.

Her dress was strange, layered and soft, made of fabric that shimmered faintly when she moved.

One sleeve had slipped off her shoulder. She pushed it back up with absentminded dignity.

Then she looked around the alley, wrinkled her nose, and said,

“Oh. These are definitely not the golden gardens.”

Kyro said nothing, taking in her appearance.

She turned and noticed him at last.

Her expression brightened.

“Oh,” she said. “A person.”

His stare hardened with suspicion.

She climbed to her feet, and brushed the dirt off her dress.

Then she smiled at him like he wasn’t a man standing in a dark alley with bloodstains on his button up shirt.

“Hello.”

The Girl from the Sky

Kyro paused at her incredulousness.

“Who the hell sent you?”

Her smile faltered. “Sent me?”

He stepped closer. “You dropped through a spatial rupture into the middle of my district. You smell like oranges. Start talking.”

She blinked twice, then tilted her head. “You’re very intense.”

His shadows flicked at the ground, restless as blades.

“I said start talking.”

She seemed to notice the darkness gathering around him then, and rather than react with the appropriate amount of fear, she leaned slightly to one side as if trying to get a better look.

“Fascinating,” she said.

Kyro’s expression tightened.

“Your name, girl.”

She sighed, as though he were the difficult one here. “Maisie.”

“Ok, and?” he said. “Why did you fall out of the damn sky? Where the hell did you come from?”

Maisie glanced up at the place where the rift had vanished. “Somewhere else.”

Kyro’s patience, already thin, tore completely.

In one movement he crossed the alley, caught her wrist, and pinned her back against the brick wall.

“Do not play stupid games with me.”

The moment his hand closed around her skin, the world lurched. A bursting ray of light shot through his arm and straight into his chest—warm and violent at the same time.

Kyro staggered back like he’d been struck by a dagger.

Maisie gasped at the same time, pressing a hand to the center of her chest.

For a second he felt a warmth he hadn't felt in years, but then it was gone.

The alley snapped back into focus.

Kyro stared at her with a scowl on his face.

Maisie stared at him.

“Oh,” she said softly.

“What was that?! How the hell....”

She looked down at her own fingers, flexing them. “That’s… not supposed to happen.”

Kyro’s voice dropped lower and he reached for his pistol. “Explain, before it's lights out for you.”

Maisie looked up at him with wide, clear eyes. “I think the rift tangled.”

“What do you mean the rift tangled.” He gritted his teeth, hand still on his weapon.

“It means,” she said carefully, “when I came through, my magic may have attached itself to something in this world.”

Kyro folded his arms.

“Someone, probably.” She stated.

He was silent for a beat.

Then, whispered: “It's you.”

Maisie pointed at him. “It's definitely you.”

Kyro laughed once under his breath. There was no humor in it.

“You stupid, lunatic girl. Go back wherever you came from, you won't last an hour here.”

He left her in the alley. At least, he tried to.

Kyro turned without another word and walked toward the main street. He made it half a block before he heard a soft pop. He looked to his left.

Maisie stood beside a newspaper box, clutching the side of it with startled dignity.

“Oh,” she said. “You move fast.”

Kyro shut his eyes for a moment.

When he opened them, she was still there.

“How did you catch up so fast?”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I was trying to stay where you left me.”

“Try harder.”

He kept walking.

Another pop sounded behind him.

Maisie reappeared three paces away, this time with a glass bottle in her hand.

Kyro stopped dead. “Where did that come from?”

She looked down at the bottle.

“Lemonade.”

“That's not what I asked you.”

“I know.” She took a sip. “But it seemed important to clarify.”

Kyro stared at her as if violence alone might solve the problem.

The bottle was clear glass, beaded with cold. She drank from it playfully while standing under a flickering streetlight in the territory of two violent crime families, as if none of those facts were contradictory.

“You are either very stupid,” he said, “or very powerful.”

Maisie smiled over the rim of the bottle.

“Would it upset you if I was both?”

He should have killed her as soon as she fell from the sky.

That was the obvious solution.

A magical anomaly dropped into his district was exactly the sort of thing that grew into a headache if left unattended. His superiors would want answers for the girl's existence and her abilities. If rivals sensed an unstable source of power in the city, they’d swarm.

But he still remembered the shock of that beam that struck his chest. It was the only thing that had scared him in a long time. He wasn’t sure how to read Maisie.

And he hated unknowns.

The Courtyard

So instead of killing her, Kyro took her somewhere where no one would interrupt.

He took her to an abandoned courtyard hidden between old apartment blocks and a collapsed chapel. Moss grew between cracked stones. A dry, wrecked fountain crouched in the center, its angel long ago broken at the waist. Its stone basin was split down one side, No one came here without permission from the family.

Maisie twirled slowly, looking around.

“This place is sad,” she announced.

“It’s private.”

“It’s sad and private.”

Kyro ignored that. “Sit.”

She sat on the edge of the dead fountain at once, crossing her ankles. “What now?”

“Now you answer questions.”

Maisie lifted her lemonade. “Ok but first can I drink while being interrogated?” She sipped loudly.

“What's your name? Is it something scary? You look like a Draco or perhaps a Damian.” Another sip. “Why is your city so dirty?”

His stare flattened at the barrage of questions.

“It's Kyro. And the people in this city are despicable. This place suits them just right.”

“Kyro, huh? Ok, I’m going to assume that means yes on the lemonade.”

He leaned against a pillar, arms folded. “Shut up about the stupid lemonade and start with the rift in the damn sky.”

Maisie nodded. “All right. Sometimes the walls between worlds thin. Where I’m from, there are places where crossing these barriers are easier. Usually it’s small things that slip through. Beams of light, insects, and sometimes dreams.”

Kyro arched a brow. “Dreams.”

“Yes.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“It doesn’t stop being true because you frown at it.”

He did not appreciate the accuracy of that.

Maisie went on, “I was traveling near a path where the connection is fragile. There was a flare, a pull, and then I was here. That part was accidental, but the bond wasn’t.”

Kyro’s face scrunched up on itself.

“In my world, magic looks for energetic anchors. Something strong enough to catch on.”

“And let me guess, it chose me.” He rolled his eyes.

Maisie studied him for a moment, oddly serious now. “I think it chose the loudest soul nearby.”

Kyro stared at her.

Then, slowly: “Did you just call my soul loud?”

“A little,” she said. “In a wounded sort of way.”

He looked away before she could see the moment that landed somewhere uncomfortably deep.

“Can you undo it? You’re a pain in my ass.”

“Probably.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have right now.”

He exhaled through his nose. “Useless girl.”

Maisie brightened. “I can make your courtyard less sad while I’m here.”

“Don’t bother.”

She looked mildly offended. “But you haven’t even seen my ideas.”

“I already hate them.”

That made her laugh. Her sound was soft and bright and completely wrong for this place.

Kyro pushed off the pillar. “Stay here.”

“Or what?”

He gave her a long look. “Try me.”

She leaned her cheek into her palm and watched him. “You know, for someone so dramatic, you’re surprisingly handsome.”

Kyro went still. Then he turned and walked out of the courtyard before she could see the exact moment her words disrupted something in him.

This time there was no popping sound to be heard. She stayed put and he heard her giggling in the background.

Flowers in the Courtyard

He returned twenty minutes later with bandages, black coffee and the intention of finding her gone.

Instead he found flowers growing out of the cracked fountain.

White and pale gold blossoms spilled from broken stone, luminous in the dark. Tiny floating lights drifted lazily above them like captive stars. The courtyard smelled faintly of citrus and summer rain.

Maisie sat in the middle of it all, humming to herself while she lined the edge of the fountain with glass bottles of lemonade in different shades—honey-yellow, pale pink, something sparkling silver.

She adjusted one of them slightly, as if its exact position mattered.

Kyro stopped at the threshold.

“What,” he said flatly, “the hell did you do?”

She turned, delighted. “You came back.”

“Answer me.”

“You said it was sad.”

“I did not ask you to fix it.”

She looked around, as if seeing it again through his eyes.

“Well,” she said simply, “no one else was going to.”

Kyro looked at the flowers. At the dead courtyard transformed into something glamorous and alive. Something low in his chest pulled tight. He hated that he noticed the difference immediately and despised that part of him that understood why she had done it.

Maisie held up a bottle of lemonade.

“This one is a little sweeter than the others.”

He set the bandages and coffee down on the stone ledge with more force than necessary.

“You are not staying.”

She blinked. “It's only a matter of time that I will be able to return.”

“Good,” he replied. “Then figure it out faster. How do we get you home?”

“Mm.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Mm?”

“Mm,” she repeated, taking another small sip as she studied him over the rim of the bottle. “I don’t think you want me to leave as much as you’re pretending.”

Kyro barked out a humorless laugh.

“You know nothing about what I want.”

Maisie’s face softened in a way he did not trust.

“No,” she said. “But I think you know less than you pretend.”

He should have walked away again.

Instead, against his better judgment, he sat on the opposite side of the fountain and began wrapping his ribs.

Maisie’s gaze dropped at once. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s irrelevant. I had an issue with a fool before you decided to fall out of the sky.”

“It’s bleeding through.”

“It’s still irrelevant.”

She slid off the fountain and crossed to him before he could stop her. Kyro caught her wrist on instinct, but this time the pulse between them was smaller—just a brief flare of warmth, less startling than before and somehow more intimate for it.

Maisie looked down at the blood seeping through his shirt.

“May I?”

“No.”

She looked up. “Please.”

Kyro should have refused again. He knew better than to let strangers touch him, better than to expose weakness, better than to hand any part of himself to someone he couldn’t read.

But Maisie was already too close, smelling like sugar, lemons and rain and something floral he didn’t know by name. Her expression held no fear and no calculation.

Only what seemed like a deep concern.

Uncomplicated, pure and therefore deeply suspicious.

And yet.

He loosened his grip. Her fingers hovered over his side. Pale gold light gathered beneath her palm, thin as breath. Warmth seeped through cloth and skin and muscle, easing pain he had already decided to ignore.

Kyro went rigid anyway.

Maisie glanced up. “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“Yes.”

“That’s better.”

The wound closed beneath her hand. When she stepped back, the world between them felt altered.

Kyro looked down at his healed side, then at her, with exasperated eyes.

“Why did you help me?”

Maisie seemed surprised by the question. “Because you were injured.”

“That’s all?”

She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. “Shouldn’t it be enough?”

He had no answer for that. As the sun began to rise, he remembered that the answer, in his world, had always been no.

Protecting Maisie

By noon, three men were dead.

Kyro heard them before he saw them—boots scuffing stone outside the courtyard gate, voices kept low with the false confidence of men who thought numbers made them dangerous. Rival syndicate, most likely. Maybe drawn by the rupture in the sky.

Maisie was asleep in the fountain bowl beneath a nest of conjured flowers, curled on her side like she trusted the people of earth to leave her alone.

Kyro did not wake her. He rose soundlessly and stepped into the gate’s shadow just as the first man pushed through.

“You’re far from your own streets,” Kyro said.

The man froze as two more behind him reached for weapons.

Their eyes shifted past Kyro into the courtyard and widened at the sight of the strange glow, the flowers, the sleeping girl.

One of them grinned.

Kyro saw that grin and felt something in himself go cold.

“Ah,” the man said. “So the rumors were true.”

“Leave now or I'll put bullets to your foreheads.”

“I don’t think so.”

The first blade came fast, but Kyro was faster.

He retaliated with a blade of his own, and struck the first target in the stomach. A wet sound followed, then a scream cut short. The second man tried to run and lost his throat for the effort. The third got one shot off before Kyro reached him, and the bullet grazed Kyro’s shoulder with a burst of hot pain.

Then it was over. Three bodies, their blood coating the stone. The old familiar space of silence that always followed.

Kyro stood in the gate breathing hard. He looked down at his shoulder once, dismissively, then back toward the courtyard.

Maisie was awake. She stood at the fountain’s edge in her bare feet, hair sleep-tousled, eyes fixed on him.

She crossed the courtyard slowly until she stood in front of him.

“You got shot.”

“It missed anything important.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

Kyro looked away first.

“Aren't you frightened now, seeing the truth that lives here?” he asked.

Her brows drew together. “Of you?”

He said nothing.

The city woke up around them in the distance—sirens, traffic, voices rising with dawn—but the courtyard still felt suspended, sealed off from time and reason.

Maisie reached up very gently and touched his uninjured shoulder.

“No,” she said.

Kyro laughed once, bitterly. “You should be.”

“You keep acting like the this world only ever gave you knives,” she said softly.

Something in his chest stuttered. He stared at her.

Maisie’s hand slipped down to his arm. “No wonder you don’t know what to do with anything that doesn’t involve maiming.”

He almost stepped back, but chose to stay very still while the day painted weak rays of light across the flowers and bloodstains and ruined stone.

Finally he said, rougher than he meant to, “In my circle, soft things get broken and killed without second thought.”

Maisie tilted her head. “Then maybe your world is the problem.”

He should have had an answer for that too but he didn’t.

She healed his shoulder the way she had his ribs, light soaking quietly into torn flesh.

This time Kyro watched her face instead of the wound. The concentration in her expression. The kindness she held in every crevice of her body like glimmering cells. The absurd, impossible existence of her here at all.

When she was finished, she let her hand linger for a second longer than necessary.

Kyro swallowed.

“Can you go home?” he asked.

Maisie looked down. “Eventually.”

“How?”

Her mouth curved faintly. “I think the bond is stabilizing me here. If I force a crossing too soon, it could tear worse than the first rift.”

“So you stay.”

“For now.”

Lovely Maisie

His gaze dropped to the lemonade bottles lined neatly on the fountain.

One caught the light.

He picked it up before he could think better of it.

Maisie’s eyes widened. “Do you like lem—”

“Do not make this worse.”

Her smile grew so radiant he nearly put the bottle back down out of spite.

Kyro twisted off the cap and took a cautious sip. The beverage was sweet, citrusy and with a tinge of something floral hidden underneath.

Maisie clasped her hands under her chin. “Well?”

He looked at her over the bottle.

“…It’s not terrible.”

Her entire face lit up as though he had handed her a jewel instead of the most reluctant approval in recorded history.

And that—

That was when it happened. It happened in a broken courtyard full of blood and flowers and weak afternoon light, while she beamed at him because he had taken one sip of her stupid lemonade.

Kyro looked at her and realized, with a kind of dread, that he was already lost.

He loved her strangeness and her nonsense. Her ridiculous number of bottles of conjured lemonade. The repairs on his body and the way she kept planting softness in places meant for death. He loved that she treated him like a man instead of a weapon.

Kyro was enamored that she looked at his darkness and answered it with flowers out of sheer irritation.

He loved her. The realization struck hard and clean. Kyro, who trusted almost nothing, knew it instantly. Maisie was still smiling at him.

“What?” she asked.

He leaned one shoulder against the cracked gate and studied her. “You’re hopelessly insane.”

She gasped. “That’s rude.”

“You invaded my territory.”

“By accident.”

“You bedazzled my courtyard.”

“It was depressing.”

“You attached yourself to my soul.”

She pressed a hand to her chest. “Now that one truly was not on purpose.”

Kyro almost smiled and Maisie noticed. Her eyes widened slightly, as if she had glimpsed something rare and half-feral in the dark.

“Oh,” she said softly.

He straightened. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Start looking pleased.”

“But I am pleased.”

He sighed and crossed back into the courtyard.

The flowers brushed his boots. The light had reached the tops of the old walls now and painted Maisie’s hair a brighter hue. She stood in the center of the courtyard as though she had always belonged there.

As though she might continue to.

Kyro stopped in front of her.

The city would become a problem soon. His superiors would ask questions. More armed men would come sniffing. The bond remained unstable and the rift unresolved. Nothing about this was simple and it frustrated the hell out of him.

Maisie looked up at him with that open, impossible expression.

“So,” she said, “what happens now?”

Kyro considered lying.

He considered telling her he would figure out how to send her back, that this was temporary, that he felt nothing, that the pulse in his chest was only magic and not the terrifyingly human thing it had become.

Instead he reached out, curled one hand around the side of her neck, and pulled her gently closer.

Maisie went still.

His thumb brushed the soft skin just below her ear.

“For now,” he said, voice low, “you stay where I can see you.”

Her lips parted. “That sounds flirty.”

“It is.”

“Are you always this romantic?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame.”

He looked at her for one long second. At the laughter hovering in her mouth. At the sunlight in her eyes. At the stubborn softness she carried like a weapon no one else knew how to defend against.

Then he kissed her and it was not gentle.

Kyro didn’t know how to do gentle without resistance. His hand tightened, his mouth slanted over hers with too much hunger and not enough restraint, and Maisie made the softest startled sound against his lips.

Then she kissed him back.

And the whole impossible world seemed to tilt.

Warmth rushed through the bond between them, bright and deep and laughing. Flowers climbed higher up the fountain wall. The dead angel in the center cracked cleanly apart and spilled a drift of golden petals instead of stone.

Kyro pulled back just enough to stare at her.

Maisie blinked up at him, dazed and glowing and entirely too pleased.

“You kissed me.”

His hand remained at her throat. “No shit, sunshine.”

A delighted smile broke over her face.

Kyro felt himself go utterly, helplessly doomed.

Celebrations

“Don’t get smug.”

“I’m going to get extremely smug.”

He exhaled slowly. “Maisie.”

“Yes?”

“If you conjure celebratory lemonade right now, I may reconsider all of this.”

She gasped in mock offense.

Then, with a tiny pop of magic, two cold glass bottles appeared in her hands.

Kyro closed his eyes.

When he opened them, she was grinning.

“One for you,” she said. “Since you’re in love with me now.”

His gaze sharpened.

Maisie’s smile turned wickedly bright.

“Oh,” she said. “You are.”

Kyro took the bottle from her hand and, because there was nothing left to gain by denying it, leaned down to murmur against her mouth—

“You are never going to let me live this down, are you?”

“No,” Maisie said happily. “Absolutely not.”

For the first time in longer than he could remember, Kyro laughed.

Maisie looked delighted by that too, as if she planned to collect every rare thing he gave her and turn it into another garden.

He looked around the courtyard—the flowers, the blood that had already begun to fade beneath creeping vines—and then back at the strange girl who had fallen through a tear in the sky and made herself at home in a dark corner of his life.

Kyro lifted the lemonade bottle slightly in a gesture that was not quite surrender and not quite defeat.

Maisie clinked her bottle against his. To his horror, he found that he didn’t mind.

The city beyond the walls was still cruel. His life was still dangerous. Whatever came next would almost certainly be violent, inconvenient, and full of complications he had no desire to untangle before noon.

But Maisie was smiling at him with sunlight in her hair and mischief in her eyes, and Kyro knew with absolute certainty that he would kill anyone who tried to take that from him.

She leaned into his side as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Your soul feels quieter now,” she said.

Kyro looked down at her. “Everything you say sounds made up.”

“It isn’t.”

“What does that even mean?”

Maisie shrugged and handed him another bottle she absolutely had not been holding a second earlier.

“It means,” she said, “I think it likes me.”

Kyro stared at the bottle and then at her. Then, despite every instinct he had ever trusted, Kyro took the lemonade and pulled her close.

You’ve reached the end of this story.

But not the end of the world it belongs to.

New stories appear regularly.

Stay curious.

© Petalstorm Press — Original Fiction
This story is part of the Petalstorm Press library.
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