by Abbie Lyons
Including, tonight, my eighteenth birthday party.
“Did you think of anyone else to invite beyond the usual suspects?” I prodded. April fluttered her eyelashes.
“Well, naturally.”
I laughed, feeling happy and loose. “As long as they’re cute.”
“You sex goddess.”
“That’s sassy sex Fae to you,” I teased. “No, seriously seriously! I can tell when you have a secret.”
April shrugged, grinning. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”
“Ugh.” I sighed, fake-angry, and pushed a stray lock of pink hair behind my ear. “You’re inscrutable, girl.”
“Whatever you say, sass-pants.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “Alls I’m saying is that you’d better be ready tonight, okay? As soon as you turn eighteen officially, I need you right here.” She pointed to the cushion next to her.
“On the couch?”
“No! Next to me.” She heaved a sigh, stretched her arms overhead, and with a soft flutter and sheen in the air, her wings unfurled behind her. She gave them a few gentle flaps, the magic illuminating her from within. “Deal?”
“Show-off,” I said. “But yeah, of course it’s a deal.” I stood up. “Is that everything?”
“You’re dismissed,” April said, pushing a gentle puff of air my way with her wings. “But I want you looking drop-dead gorgeous, okay?”
“Got it,” I said. “Drop dead.”
The last thing I saw before I went upstairs was that big, broad smile of hers.
MUSIC BLASTED FROM every side, pressing into my sweat-slicked skin. That was a nice trick of Fae magic; no speakers needed to get the surround sound going. It was something a little downtempo, throbbing a bit like a heartbeat, and I closed my eyes to relish it.
I was alive here. We were alive.
The Invisible Cities were almost too perfect. I think that’s what ultimately set us off. We couldn’t do anything we wanted—or maybe we could do too much of what we wanted, without any effort. Fae could be so boring, so dull. And April and I had needed adventure. My family hadn’t understood how permanent this move would be; they expected me to do a little running around, probably assuming that one day I’d return back to the realm and become the proper little Fae daughter they’d raised.
That, I wasn’t so sure about.
April, though...she was like a caged bird. Fluttering around in the Invisible Cities, dying for escape. Bored of hanging out with Fae like Gia and the other frenemies she’d collected over the years. April and I wanted the same things, but for different reasons. And even though we shared so much with each other, we didn’t need to spell out what those reasons were.
We were friends, and friends meant trust.
I wound my body around on the dance floor, letting the cool air wash over me. I’d done like April had instructed—I think—dressing up in my very best birthday girl finery: a form-fitting bandage dress in gold that hopefully set off my hair, and the highest heels I could manage. I loved human fashion, the way it changed constantly, updated itself, reinvented looks instead of staying stagnant and elegant for millennium after millennium. And shopping—shopping! Browsing through a store instead of just snapping your fingers to change clothes. It was all I’d ever wanted.
I lowered my arms to bring my glass to my lips. Human cocktails—now there was something else I appreciated. The sweet-sour sting of alcohol flooded over my tongue as I tipped my face to the starry sky above us, a little Fae magic clearing the light pollution so that we could enjoy some quality astronomy. Better still, no matter how much I drank I’d be able to use an enchantment to immediately cure any pesky hangovers.
Behind me, someone put hands to my hips—male hands, I could sense instantly. I leaned into them, warmed by the touch, and not unpleasantly. I loved dancing like this—again, human style. Fae dances were so courtly, so dull. Humans touched, and I loved that about them. This guy was a good dancer, too, one I’d seen at a few of our parties. Caleb or Kaden or something. I didn’t really care—not in a harsh way, just that, well, when your lifespan is over five hundred years, it’s kind of hard to get attached to someone who’d be lucky to make it to ninety.
Caleb/Kaden breathed a hot jet of mint-flavored vape smoke against my neck.
Okay, maybe lucky to make it to sixty, with all the nicotine.
I downed the rest of my drink and subtly vanished the glass from my hand—who had time to find a place to park it?—so that I could spin around and face him. I was hours—maybe minutes—away from being eighteen, and no better way to celebrate it than by kissing a near-stranger.
As I looked up at him, Caleb/Kaden’s face twisted a bit in surprise, even with his eyes at a sleepy half-mast. “Oh—what?”
“What yourself?” I said coyly. There’s that sassy birthday girl for you.
“I, uh...” His low voice was hard to hear over the music, so I blinked twice, lowering the surround sound just for the two of us by magic.
“You uh what?” I said, flirtily close to his ear. Just kiss me. Let’s not waste time on words, okay, handsome?
“I thought you were the other one.”
I backed away like he’d hit me with a lightning bolt. The other one. Meaning April.
“You mean me?”
I whirled around to see April, hands on hips below the hem of her crop top, her head cocked in a tiny bit of aggression. I bit my lip, knowing that Caleb/Kaden was in for it.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Hey.”
“Sorry,” April said, “but I’m not interested in anyone who treats my bestie like trash.” She looped her arm through my elbow and pulled me gently. “Shall we, babe?”
“Yuuup.” I gave my would-have-been suitor a wink and let April thread us off the mass of bodies on the dance floor and to one of the walls bordering our patio.
“Rude much?” she said, flicking hair out of her eyes.
“Eh.” I didn’t really care much. There were worse things to be in life than “April Aetheria’s best friend.” “There are plenty more humans in the sea.”
She snorted. “Yeah, thank goddess.” She clicked her fingers, and back on the dance floor, the broad-shouldered, dark-haired guy who’d been dancing moments before puffed away, like a cloud of vape smoke. April widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Oops. Did I do that?”
“Oh my goddess, Ape!” I cried, calling her by the nickname I knew she hated.
She shrugged. “So he’ll wake up at the LA County Dump. Probably a typical morning after for him anyway. But hey!” She nodded up at the sky. “It’s almost time.”
“Time for what?” I said—not like I didn’t know.
“Your birthday surprise!” she said. “C’mon. I was looking for you everywhere.”
She grabbed me by the wrist this time, leading me towards the platform at the other side of the dance floor where the DJ—some guy we’d brought in time and again—was blasting.
“I just have to get everyone’s attention,” she said. “We’ve only got like two minutes. Wait here.”
I did as I said, grinning as she dashed away into the crowd for whatever surprise it was.
I had no idea what it was, but I guess that was the thing about surprises. Or about April.
As a breeze teased itself over my shoulders, I looked up at the sky again. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Can life just always be like this? Please?
Wishes were pointless if you were a Fae. Almost anything could be conjured, rendered, made manifest with little effort, even if you were a pretty typical Fae like we were. But I still liked the ritual, the very human tendency to pine for something un-haveable, to think of the future as though it were truly veiled in mystery.
“Ten!”
I looked back at the dance floor. The crowd had slowed its dancing and was cheering. Counting down.
“Nine!”
I grinned. This was definitely part of April’s surprise. I craned my neck, looking for her.
“Eight!”
/>
She’d just gone inside, I thought?
“Seven!”
“April?” I called, not that anyone could hear me over the crowd.
“Six!”
“Five!”
“Four!”
Was this part of the surprise? Where was she?
My grin faltered just a tiny bit.
“Three!”
I stepped forward, looking, looking—
“Two!”
Had she left me?
“One!”
Crack.
WHEN I WOKE, I WAS flat on my back. Gravity pressed on me with crushing force; I could barely see even after blinking away the haze.
Patio. I was on the patio. I pushed to sitting, my throat dry, my head aching.
Where did everyone—
In front of me, the dance floor. Or what had been. Empty now.
Empty but for a single figure. Crumpled on the flagstones. Hair spread around her, limbs lying still.
Too still.
“April!”
My voice ripped itself from my throat unbidden, and I lurched forward, almost falling onto her.
“April!” I grabbed her shoulders, rolling her over. She was cold. Cold as marble.
Her eyes were open, but unseeing.
I choked, dropped her, pushed away.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
My best friend was dead.
April was dead.
Chapter Three
NOW
I wasn’t even sure exactly where the Enchanted Penitentiary was. After my trial I’d been loaded into a skyship, which flew for about three hours before we arrived at our final destination. From the brief glimpses I was able to make outside the window, it seemed to be located on some sort of island—but I hadn’t the faintest idea if it was in the Atlantic, Pacific, or some altogether random body of water.
But the prison itself was nowhere to be seen. When the skyship landed on the otherwise normal island—palm trees, sand, you know the drill—I was escorted down into what looked like a bomb shelter. The kind that humans built when they were like totally sure that there was going to be a nuclear war. That staircase led directly to central booking.
And central booking, to put it mildly, was a madhouse.
Around me, all kinds of creatures milled, shuffled, flitted, and shimmered about. If my head weren’t so dizzy from the whiplash of the trial, I’d probably be staring. It had been admittedly forever since I’d been around supernatural folk. You think the DMV is bad? Two minutes in booking at a prison for magical types will have you positively longing for the paradise of renewing your driver’s license.
Fae society is basically divided into two categories. There are the “regular” Fae—for lack of a better word—like me. Kind of like the fairies of stories and legends, except human-sized. But then there are also what are called the Lesser Fae—an obviously shitty, derogatory term. These are made up of magical beings that Fae society at large sees as, well...lesser than themselves: wood sprites, dwarves, elves, and most unbelievably of all, leprechauns (and, yeah, they tend to hail from Ireland). These beings are all much smaller in stature than Fae like me, which is probably one of the reasons they tend to be so damn oppressed.
This is all to say that central booking was staffed by many of these so-called Lesser Fae. They were stuck with the crappy jobs.
“Name, please?” asked the gnome—yes, just like the little statues humans put in their gardens for some reason—manning the front desk. He looked old, what with his long white beard and all, but that was deceiving seeing as male gnomes started growing facial hair sometime around their tenth birthday. He was standing on a stool, but still wasn’t quite eye level with me. The pointy red hat he was wearing added at least a few measly inches to his height.
“Emerald Jones,” I told him. “Most people call me Em.”
“I don’t care what they call you,” he said, simultaneously running one hand through his beard while the other hand flipped through a binder in front of him. “Here it is! Emerald Jones. Sentenced to ten years in the Enchanted Penitentiary for...” He looked back up at me, his eyes growing wide. “Murder?”
“Yes, murder,” I confirmed, before quickly racing to defend myself. “I’m innocent, though! Like, one-hundred percent not actually guilty.”
A look of concern washed over his face. “Oh, dearest me! Innocent, you say? Then you don’t belong here!”
“Thank you! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody!”
He burst into laughter, rolling his head back and putting a hand on his belly. “If I had a coin for every time somebody told me they’re innocent, I’d be bathing in gold every night!”
I sighed. “Whatever. Just tell me where I’m supposed to go next.
“I hope you’re camera ready!” He chuckled again. What a creep. “You can go right through that door on your left for your portrait. Enjoy your stay at the Enchanted Penitentiary!”
My portrait AKA my mugshot. I really hoped the picture wouldn’t make the rounds, because I definitely wasn’t looking my best right about now. They had put me in a holding cell right after the trial, and I hadn’t gotten a single decent night’s sleep since the party. There’d been no time to put on something nice—not that I had access to my wardrobe anymore—and all enchantments were strictly forbidden, lest I wanted to receive an even harsher sentence. My life was already taking a nosedive quickly enough—at this point a mugshot where I looked like a garbage fire was just the rotten cherry on top of a very shitty sundae.
I marched on in through the door the gnome had directed me to, only to find myself in what was probably the world’s weirdest photo studio. I’d done a bit of modeling during my time in Los Angeles—but, I mean, who hasn’t?—and this was unlike any setup I’d ever seen.
Standing on a counter next to an old-timey-looking camera was a lady gnome who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else in the world right now.
“Kindly take your place in front of the backdrop,” she instructed me in a raspy voice that made her sound like she’d been smoking a few packs of cigarettes a day since she was an infant.
The backdrop was simple enough—plain egg-shell white, not all that different than what a human might stand in front of when they were getting their photo taken before they went to normal jail.
But Fae stuff was never as simple as it first seemed. As I stood before the backdrop, I knew it was magically changing in response to my presence. My full name would be listed above my head, along with some sort of prisoner number and a few short biographical details. If only they could also magically touch up my face just a little.
“Okay, honey, remember not to smile,” the lady gnome told me.
Because I have so much to smile about right now, I stopped myself from saying. Being sassy wasn’t going to get me anywhere these days. Better to just play the part of the good girl.
No sooner had the camera flashed than Mrs. Gnome was pointing me toward another hallway to continue the process.
I found myself standing in what I can only describe as the world’s shittiest clothing store. Littering the racks were two items only: white tank tops and orange bottoms of all different sizes. That’s what I’d be wearing for the next ten terrible years. On the bright side, they weren’t as ghastly as those garish jumpsuits they wore in human prisons. The tops even came complete with two slits in the back so that our wings could get a little breathing room from time to time—though I doubted they’d actually let us fly in the penitentiary.
An older Fae man who didn’t look like he knew the first thing about fashion—what with the horrid barf-green sweater he was wearing—gave me a long look up and down that managed to make me feel super uncomfortable.
“Slightly taller than the average young Fae woman,” he muttered, seemingly mostly to himself. “And skinny. She could do with a heftier diet. Not sure that’ll be in the cards for her any time soon.”
I couldn’t help myself. “
Um, excuse me,” I chastised him, but if he heard me he didn’t seem to care. He was already flipping through the racks looking for the perfect clothes.
“No, no, no,” he’d say to himself as he examined each one. He might be an objectifying jerk, but at least he was thorough. After what felt like five minutes, he pulled a uniform off the rack and wordlessly handed it over to me.
“Is there a place I can go try this on or something?” I asked.
“It fits,” he said, leaving it at that.
He didn’t explicitly instruct me to go into the next room, but at this point the whole process was getting predictable. I stepped through the doorway on the opposite end of the room from where I’d come in, making a special point not to give the creepy dude so much as a “thanks.”
I found myself in a tiny room containing a small metal table with two chairs on either side of it. Seated in one of those chairs was a troll.
Here’s the thing about trolls. They get a bad rap. Sure, their beauty standards are totally different from those of the Fae, but by all accounts trolls found Fae to be pretty damn ugly themselves. Different strokes for different folks! And beneath their rough exterior and demeanor, I’d always found them to be hiding hearts of gold. I had a weird fondness for them, literal warts and all.
The most striking thing in the room, though, was the pale white crystal ball on the table.
I know exactly what this is.
“Take a seat,” the troll said in a deep growl. “This is gonna be the last chance ya get to talk to anybody on the outside. Who’d ya like to speak with?”
It was the equivalent of that final phone call humans get before getting thrown into jail.
“My parents,” I told the troll.
I really didn’t have all that much of a choice. Most of my friends were humans and as much as I’d like to tell them I was okay—they knew nothing about who I actually was and had no idea where I’d gone off to—contacting them was definitely off limits.