by Jon Etter
“Yep,” Shade agreed. Ginch and the Professor nodded as well.
Yax sighed. “The boss is really sensitive aboot her feet,” he whispered to them.
The skriker bent over a little so that her face was on a level with Shade, Ginch, and the Professor. “Truth now—was it a slight squish or a loud squish? Like, how easy did yez hear it?”
“It was-a the pretty loud squoosh,” Ginch said.
“Bloody cobbler elves!” she shouted, her voice becoming so shrill that everyone in the room’s ears hurt. “I paid good money for these shoes, right? They said they’d keep me feet as silent as a cat what’s had sneakin’ lessons, they did. And do they work?”
“No,” Shade said.
“NO, THEY BLOODY DO NOT!”
“Um, boss . . . ” Yaxley said tentatively. “I think we got a situation moor important than yez shoes.”
“Really? Well, maybe yez think that because yez don’t get called a ‘trash fairy’ because yez have feet what make squishin’ noises when yez walk!”
“Boss.” Ront gently placed a hand on the blue fairy’s shoulder as if he feared it might get bitten off. “These three said they’re friends o’ Ronnie.”
“Noboody’s friends with me sis except oos and Thornburgh, which these three ain’t.”
“Your sister?” Shade asked. “So you’re Ginnie Bowser?”
“That she is,” Ront replied.
“Best crime boss in all Elfame,” Yax added.
“Boys even got me a moog what says so.” Ginnie smiled and nodded toward a nearby end table where there sat a white coffee mug that read “World’s Greatest Crime Boss.”
“And boss—this pixie here?” Yaxley nodded at the Professor. “He’s the hardest hardcase I’ve ever seen, boss. Me and Tickler couldn’t get a peep oot o’ him.”
Ginnie Bowser walked over to the Professor and pointed a well-manicured black fingernail in his face. “I know this bloke.” The Professor craned his neck and gave the finger a little kiss. The fur-suited fairy flicked him hard on the nose.
“Of course you do,” Shade said, beginning to believe that everybody other than her somehow knew of the Professor’s academic achievements. “Writer of Pick a Pocket, University of Streüseldorff lecturer, expert on intra-spatial studies and pure and applied pocketry . . . ”
“Intra-pocket-what’s-it? Never heard o’ any o’ that roobbish,” the blue fairy said. “Nah, this bloke here? This is Loocky Pinky.”
“Lucky Pinky?” Shade asked.
“Loocky bloody Pinky, the greatest smuggler in all Elfame.”
The Professor blushed and batted his eyelashes.
“And he’s the fairy what I paid quite handsomely to find and bring to me the Manx Cat ten soommer ago, and I ain’t seen him since.” Ginnie Bowser put her hands on her hips and glared at the Professor.
“The Manx Cat?” Shade asked. “I read about that in Tearling’s Believe It or Don’t Because I Really Can’t Be That Concerned with Every Reader’s Credulity, Now Can I? Isn’t it one of the rarest treasures ever, and haven’t hundreds of fairies died trying to possess it?”
“It is and they have,” the boss fairy agreed.
“But I thought it was lost.”
“Yeah, it was, boot Loocky here were supposed to make it not lost. So where is it, Loocky?”
The Professor looked thoughtful and somehow casually slipped a hand out of the ropes they were tied with and rubbed his chin. After a moment, he held up a finger and then plunged his hand deep into his pants pocket, the tip of his tongue sticking out as he fished around. After a moment, he pulled out a small obsidian statue of a tailless cat and handed it to the fairy, who lifted it up and smiled.
“Now that is beautiful, that is! Hang on.” Ginnie walked over to the elegant oak desk in the center of the wood-paneled, bookshelf-lined room and put it on one corner. She took a step back, looked at it appraisingly, moved it to the opposite corner, considered it again, moved it an inch over, and gave it a quarter-turn. After another moment gazing at it, she finally raised up her hands. “There. What yez think, boys? I think it really ties the whole room together.”
“Is right, boss,” Yaxley agreed. “Gives it a whole new feel.”
“Dead posh, that,” Ront added. “Dead posh.”
The boss fairy basked in her henchmen’s compliments and then shook the Professor’s free hand. “Right then, lads—how aboot you untie ’em. And what’s all this rot about them bein’ spies? Loocky here, he’s a right lad if ever there was one.”
“To be fair, boss,” Ront said as he untied Shade, “that brownie did say ’e was friends wiv Ronnie.”
“Oh, that was just the bluff,” Ginch said, rubbing his freed wrists.
“And how did that work out for us?” Shade asked. The Professor held his nose, made a rude noise, and pretended to wave away a stinky odor. “Exactly. We don’t know you or your sister—well, I guess ‘Lucky’ there does—but we know you’re both part of G.L.U.G.”
Ginnie Bowser’s eyes narrowed. “And how do you know that?”
“Because I’m a member too. My great-grandfather worked with Máire Bowser in the Great Library.”
“Granny Máire?” Ginnie asked.
“Yes. And we know that you and your sister have one of the codebooks that will reveal the hidden location of the library’s lost books. We’re trying to get all the book guardians together and bring Alexandria’s books back to the world.”
“Shoot the door, Ront,” Ginnie ordered. As soon as it was closed, Ginnie let out a long breath and smiled. “A fellow G.L.U.G.er? That’s brilliant! Boys, we can finally drop the act.”
Yaxley and Ront smiled and gave each other a high five. “Looks loike we’re out o’ the villain game, Yax,” Ront said.
“What act?” Shade had no idea what was going on.
“And what happen to you accent?” Ginch asked
“Oh, my sister and I adopted fake Bilgewater accents just to sound tough,” Ginnie said, all trace of her former accent gone. “One loses a tad bit of credibility as a fake crime boss when one sounds too genteel.”
“You use the fake accent?” Ginch shook his head. “Oh, the world, what do she come to?”
Shade rolled her eyes. “Hers was better than yours, you old fraud.” The Professor nodded and pulled out a blue ribbon that he handed to Ginnie while Ginch pouted. “And what’s this about being a fake crime boss?”
“Just what I said. Ronnie and I created S.H.U.S.H. as a front to hide the fact that we were in a secret society dedicated to protecting books and to try to get word of where the rest of you were. Kind of got the idea from our codebook.”
“S.H.U.S.H.?” Shade said.
“Yes, S.H.U.S.H.—the Surreptitiously Honorable Undercover Society.”
“What about the second ‘h’?” Shade asked. “What’s that stand for?”
“It doesn’t stand for anything,” Ginnie admitted. “But what kind of acronym would S.H.U.S. be?”
“Not a good one, that’s for shoor,” Yaxley said.
“S.H.U.S.? Bleh.” Ront made a face.
“Exactly my point,” Ginnie said. “I mean—”
“Look, I don’t care about dingle-dangle acronyms,” Shade interjected. “Somebody is trying to hunt us all down, so get your codebook and come with us.”
“It’s not here,” Ginnie said.
“Then where the donkle is it?”
“Ee, lass! You kiss your ma with that mooth?” Yaxley asked.
“Shut it, goon! Where’s the book?”
“Relax,” Ginnie said, patting Shade on the back, which Shade did not at all care for. “We’ve got it secured in a secret safe house a few blocks away. Let me just take care of a few things here and then we can go get it and finally fulfill Gran’s dream. Oh, she’d be so proud!”
Suddenly, loud crashes and shouts came from outside. Someone pounded on the office’s metal door. “Ms. Bowser! Yez
gotta get oot, boss! We’s bein’ raided!”
In which a safe house turns out
not to be all that safe . . .
The instant the word “raided” was shouted, Ront hustled to the bookcase on the wall opposite the metal door and pulled on a book entitled A History of Secret Passages and Hidden Exits. The bookcase swung out to reveal a dark, windowless passageway.
“Raided?” Ginnie’s face darkened and a vein bulged on her forehead. “We’re being raided? We control the police in Bilgewater!”
Yaxley put a hand on Ginnie’s shoulder. “Boss, that don’t matter right now. We just gotta get yez oot of here before the bizzies snatch yez.”
“The human bean’s right,” Ginch agreed. “We gots to—”
“Skeedeedle?” Shade finished.
“’Ey, how you know what I’m-a gonna say before I say it?”
“I must be psychic,” Shade said. “Now let’s skeedeedle!”
Shade, Ginch, and the Professor (who paused a moment to grab the cat statue off the desk and stuff it in his coat) dashed into the dark passage. Yaxley followed, his hands massaging Ginnie Bowser’s shoulders as he urged her onward, with Ront bringing up the rear. He pushed one of the bricks and the bookcase swung back into place, plunging them all into darkness that was quickly illuminated by a lit candle the Professor pulled out of one of his pants pockets. Ront pushed his way to the front and led them down a long, winding, cobweb-filled passageway that abruptly terminated in a brick wall.
“Knox,” Ront said, and the bricks withdrew themselves one by one from the wall and formed a neat square pile. Shade, followed by everyone else, stepped out into a narrow alleyway. The moon was a blurry glow up in the foggy night sky, and the air was filled with shouts and cries and the sounds of breaking wood and metal clashing against metal.
“Wait here,” Shade said before flying up into the air and over the roof of the tannery. One end of the alley led to the front of the building where the long-bearded lutin, Monsieur Légal, the tipsy clurichaun, and other fairies from Ginnie Bowser’s warehouse were being hauled off by elves, dwarves, and goblins wearing bronze armor and green tabards with white roses. Shade flew to the other side of the building to find a series of alleyways branching off from the one on the side of the old tannery, all of which seemed to be empty aside from the occasional rat.
“This way,” Shade said when she landed next to the others. “Seelie soldiers are arresting everyone they can grab on the other side.”
Ginnie Bowser clenched her fists. Ront and Yaxley put their hands on her shoulders. “Boss, we need to—”
“I know what we need to do,” Ginnie growled through gritted teeth. “But it boils my blood that there’s a rat out there somewhere that won’t be getting its comeuppance. Now let’s get to that safe house. We’ll get the book, lie low a bit, and then find my sister.”
The six wound their way through shadow-shrouded, puddle-filled alleyways, down grimy half-deserted streets where a few stray fairies wandered muttering to themselves, past one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with piles of smashed oyster shells littering the sidewalks, until they came to an especially dark, run-down street whose signpost read “Prufrock Lane.” Ginnie led them to a small house that looked to be the worst house in what seemed likely to be the worst neighborhood in town. Its sagging roof was green with moss, its dingy gray walls on the verge of collapse, and all its windows and front door were boarded up. “Here we are,” Ginnie said, leading them around to the back.
The house’s back door, unlike the rest of the building, looked new, solid, and strong. Ginnie took a key out of her coat pocket and put it in the lock. She started to turn it, then stopped, leaned forward, and put her ear against the door. “It’s unlocked and someone’s in there,” she whispered.
Ront and Yaxley signaled the others to stand back. Yaxley took a pair of iron knuckles out of one of his pockets and slid them on while Ront put his hand on the doorknob. They nodded at each other and then threw open the door. From between the two bruisers, Shade could see a troll on the other side of the door.
Now at this point, good Reader, the author of these dreadful fairy books has no doubt warped your impression of trolls by presenting you with that dandy gentletroll Chauncey X. Trogswollop in our previous book. Well, I’m happy to report that what Shade spied in the Bowsers’ safe house was, in fact, a proper troll: his mane of coarse black hair wild and uncoifed; his green-gray skin rough and unmoisturized; his long fingernails jagged and unmanicured; his boar-like tusks, one of which was broken to half the length of the other, grimy and unbrushed. As for his attire—tattered brown breeches and a filthy leather vest topped with a necklace made of bones—well, Chauncey might very well faint dead away at the sight of it. In one of his hands he held a long wooden club, the end of which was barbed with rusty nails.
Shade gave a startled yelp as the Professor and Ginch cowered behind her. Their escorts, however, all relaxed. “Gave oos a bit of a fright there, la,” Yaxley said, taking off his iron knuckles.
“What are you doing here, Thornburgh?” Ginnie Bowser asked, pushing past the troll.
“Uh . . . well . . . ” Thornburgh the troll looked back over his shoulder. “We were just . . . ”
“Come on,” Ginnie said to Shade, Ginch, and the Professor, who all dutifully followed her past the smelly troll into a cozy sitting room with high-backed chairs, a red velvet chaise lounge, and an elegant marble fireplace where a fire crackled.
In one of the high-backed chairs sat a skriker who looked almost identical to Ginnie except this one wore her hair bobbed and her long fur coat had white pinstripes and no fuzzy collar. In her hands, she held a book: The Fairy Godfather by Puzo di Corleone. She started at the sight of them.
“Ginnie, what are yez doin’ . . . ” She trailed off and her eyes widened. She leapt up and squishily stormed over to them. “Loocky Pinky! Yez got a lot o’ nerve showin’ oop after takin’ me money and—”
The Professor held up a finger, then reached into his jacket and pulled out the Manx Cat. Ronnie Bowser snatched the statue from his hands, admired it for a moment, then placed it on a nearby end table. After shifting it around a couple of times, she stood back and gave a satisfied smile. “There. What yez think? I think it really ties the whole room together.”
Shade groaned. “Look, we don’t have time to dink around debating interior decorating.”
Ronnie’s face flushed. She stepped in front of Shade and glared at her, so angry that she didn’t seem to notice the Professor pocketing the statue again. “And who do yez think yez is, coomin’ in here and—”
Ginnie pulled Ronnie back gently. “It’s okay, sis. She’s a fellow G.L.U.G.er and she’s getting us all together to find Gran’s books. We can stop pretending to be gangsters . . . and you can finally drop the accent.”
“Boot I like the accent.”
“You know what? Speak with whatever accent you like,” Shade snapped. “Tap everything out in code. I really don’t give a dingle or a dangle how anyone here communicates—”
The Professor gave a thumbs-up, licked his palm, shoved it into his armpit, and began flapping his arm and making sounds so disgusting that I absolutely refuse to describe them.
Shade swatted the Professor on the arm. “Okay, fine, I give a dangle about communicating that way. The point is, we need to get your codebook—”
“Which we’ve got,” Ginnie said, grabbing The Fairy Godfather from Ronnie, who objected with a sharp “Hey!”
“—and get out of here. As I told your sister, someone’s trying to hunt us all down.”
“And there’s them Seelie troops what raided our ware’ouse,” Ront added. “Oi bet they’s on the lookout fer us now too. Yax, best go check the door, mate.”
“Hang on a tick,” Ronnie said. She pointed at Shade. “You’ve got one of the codebooks?”
“Yeah, I’ve got one. In fact, we’ve collected three.”
“Three?” Ronnie arched an eyebrow at this and studied Shade’s face closely. “Where yez keepin’ ’em? And where’s—”
“Bosses, we gotta move and it’s gonna get oogly,” Yaxley declared as he put iron knuckles on both hands and balled up his fists. “We got coompany.”
“How the dangle did the Seelie troops track us here?” Ginnie demanded. Shade saw Ronnie and Thornburgh exchange a concerned look.
“T’ain’t Seelie, boss. It’s a red cap gang, toof-lookin’ blokes with soom real hard lads, probably lookin’ for a hostile takeover of our rackets. Blue-haired elf looks to be callin’ the shots.”
Shade dashed to the door and peeked through its peephole to see around twenty assorted red cap-wearing fairies, all of them with hard, mean faces, gathered in the backyard. In the lead was the same elf who had chased them in Cottinghamtownshireborough. “How the donkle did she get to Bilgewater so fast?” Shade muttered under her breath before rushing back to the others. “It’s them—the ones hunting the book guardians. Are there any other ways out of here?”
Ront shook his head. “Yeah, but don’t make no difference. If these geezers is worth their salt, they’ll ’ave already covered every way out of ’ere.”
Ginnie nodded grimly. “Our best bet is to charge out that door, fight our way past, and run for it.”
Ront and Yaxley rolled their shoulders and cracked their knuckles. “Ront, Thornburgh, and I’ll go oot first, crack soom skulls, and smash through their line,” Yaxley said. “The rest of yez make a break for it.”
The troll looked toward Ronnie, who gave him a slight nod. The three bruisers crowded around the door. Shade, Ginch, the Professor, and the Bowser twins got behind them. “Good lads,” Ginnie said, giving Thornburgh, the nearest to her, a pat on the back. “Go!”
Thornburgh, Yaxley, and Ront charged out the door, swinging fists and clubs right and left. Shade followed in their wake as goblins, hobgoblins, dwarves, trows, several spriggans, and an ogre threw themselves at the Bowsers’ bodyguards. Bodies fell as the three cut a swath through the crowd of combatants until at last they made it to the edge. There they parted, Thornburgh shifting to the right and Yaxley and Ront to the left to make a path between them.