by Stacey Jay
I drag myself into a seated position and find the cool hardwood floor with my toes, shivering in the blast of the window air-conditioner, feeling vaguely uncomfortable in my own skin. The air in the house is different this morning. Thicker, but lighter at the same time. I glance at the clock, see that it’s only five forty-five, and decide the hideously early hour must be to blame. Then I hear a low rumble in the kitchen and it all comes rushing back to me.
Cane. Me. The bed. The nookie. The lovey-dovey feelings and going to sleep certain the future was going to be brighter this morning.
But it’s not. The nightmare made sure of that. The fact that Cane isn’t snuggled up beside me right now isn’t helping. What’s he doing in the kitchen? And who is he talking to before six in the morning?
I stand, careful not to step on the squeaky place in the floor as I tiptoe on bare feet toward the kitchen. I stop when Cane’s rumble becomes words I can understand and stand perfectly still, straining my ears not to miss a single word. I know I’m doing a bad thing. I shouldn’t eavesdrop on my lover. I am violating his privacy and I feel bad about it.
Just not bad enough to alert him to the fact that I’m no longer asleep.
“I have the money,” he whispers. “In cash, all different serial numbers, like you said.”
Money. What the . . . ?
“Make sure you’ve got what you promised.” Cane’s voice takes on a razor edge I’ve never heard before. He sounds mean. Scary. I think about tiptoeing back to the bed and hiding under the covers, but before I can move he speaks again. “I’ll be in Gramercy at noon. I’ll be wearing my suit, and I will be armed.” He pauses. Grunts. “I don’t care what he said. I’ll be armed, and I’ll be able to see anyone else who’s armed from the old dock. You come alone, give me what I want, and you won’t have to worry about my gun.”
The docks. Oh god. Why is Cane going to the docks? With a gun? And a big batch of cash? Even wearing the DPD’s iron suit, he won’t be completely safe from fairy bite. Why risk his life like that? Why, unless he’s involved in something illegal?
Maybe it’s an undercover job. Maybe he’s trapping a bad guy.
But I know the hopeful thoughts are bullshit. Cane is a man of many talents, but he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag—even in the name of serving and protecting. I always know what Cane’s thinking and feeling and so does everyone else. He’s an open book, and right now that book is a story about an angry man with a gun who’s threatening to shoot whoever’s on the other end of the phone if they don’t deliver what they’ve promised to deliver.
“You leave right after, and don’t come back through—” He breaks off, and when he speaks again his voice is even harder. “I don’t give a shit about your deliveries. You take the money and disappear or I’ll make you disappear. I don’t have anything left to lose.”
He has nothing left to lose. What am I? What was last night?
“Noon,” Cane says again. The phone snaps shut. I spin, heart leaping as I tiptoe-dash to the bed. I ease back onto the covers and throw an arm over my eyes just in time. Cane is by my side a few seconds later, smoothing his hand over my hip.
For the first time, his gentle touch makes my skin crawl. “Lee-lee? You awake?”
I moan, but don’t move my arm. I can’t look at him right now. Not yet. I can’t let him see that anything’s changed. I don’t want him to suspect that I heard his conversation, not until I show up at that dock today and find out exactly what kind of shipment he and his gun are going to be collecting.
If he’d stopped before that last sentence, I’d be tempted to talk this through right now and do whatever I could to keep him from risking his life outside the iron gates. But I felt the truth in his words. He really believes he has nothing to lose, and I’m tired of feeling like nothing.
“Lee-lee?”
“Wha?” My sleepy voice is so convincing that Cane laughs beneath his breath. Laughs. How can he laugh at me? How can he pretend he finds my sleepy morning self adorable when he’s planning to put our future at risk?
Maybe he’s a better actor than I thought. I certainly never suspected he was involved in the alleged DPD corruption. But he must be in it up to his thick, weight-lifting and whey-protein-shake-guzzling neck. What other reason is there for him to be hanging out on the old dock with a bag of cash?
“I have to go, girl.” His hand smoothes up, sliding under my tank top, tracing the curve from my hip to my waist.
I barely resist the urge to bat his fingers away. How dare he? How dare he lie to me when I’d finally started to believe in Us? In me and Cane. Against the world. Filling up each other’s emptiness and being something better together and blah, blah, blah.
Ugh. I don’t have to fake my nauseous moan. “I feel . . . yucky.” I push up into a seated position and bring a hand to my forehead, figuring playing sick is the best way to avoid a mushy good-bye.
“You look beautiful.” He kisses the nape of my neck, making me shiver. His lips still feel good, even knowing they’re the lips of a traitor. “You were sweet in your sleep this morning. Like an angel.”
I snort. “An angel of death.”
“If death looks like you, it can come for me anytime.” He tries to pull me into his arms, but this time I can’t stop myself from shoving him away.
“Bathroom. I must go to it.” I stumble toward the bathroom, pretending I don’t notice the hurt on his face. “Call me?”
“We still on for later? Mama’s expecting you.”
I lean heavily against the bathroom door. “Right. Lunch. Noon, is it?” I ask innocently.
“No. We decided to have dinner instead. Around five. Abe has to work and I’ve got errands to get done before the week starts.”
Black-market-business-on-the-docks types of errands. Grrr. What a liar he is. It makes me want to punch him in the chest and demand the truth.
Instead I smile. “I’ll be there. I’m sure I’ll feel better after a shower.”
“Okay.” Cane rises and slips on the shoes he kicked to the floor last night. “You want to pick me up? I’d love to see your new ride in action.”
“What new ride?”
He smiles and motions toward the kitchen. “You realize you’ve got a Harley in your kitchen, right? When did you get that? And why—”
“I didn’t want to park it outside until I built a shed.” I cut his questions off at the pass, cursing Tucker and the Big Man and their stupid gift that I haven’t had time to figure out how to dispose of. “I know it’s a pain in the ass in there. I’ll figure something out.”
“I can build you something,” he says, making it even harder to pretend. How can he stand there and act like everything is hunky-dory, when he’s getting ready to risk his life? How can he look me in the eye and smile like he loves me when he’s got nothing left to lose?
“Thanks, but I know you’re busy.” My tone is more cutting than I would like. I cover with another smile. “See you at your mom’s. Five o’clock.”
He nods, obviously confused. “All right.” He turns toward the door, but turns back almost immediately, a softer look in his eyes. “Hey. I love you.”
“Love you, too.” I do. But that doesn’t keep me from glaring at his back as he walks to the door.
I love him, but he’s made that immaterial. The only thing that matters is what goes down at noon. If he gives me proof that he’s one of the bad guys, I’ll have no choice but to end things. Just because he’s the man I love doesn’t make it okay for him to be a criminal, any more than being my surrogate mom makes it okay for Marcy to traffic in black-market drugs.
Jesus. First Fernando, then Marcy, now Cane. Who’s next? Who else is going to prove to me that I’m a trusting idiot without the sense god gave intestinal bacteria?
Hm. Intestinal bacteria . . .
I really don’t feel well. My stomach gurgles sickly and the weak morning light feels like it’s stabbing me in the eyeballs. Shower. It needs to happen.
; I head into the bathroom and reach past the faded green shower curtain to turn on the water. I strip off my dirty tank top, throw it in the already overflowing wicker basket, and consider forcing myself into the water before it’s warm in the name of shocking myself awake. Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror.
Beautiful, my ass. I look like hell. My hair is sticking out in a thousand different directions, dark circles purple the skin beneath my eyes, and my pupils are as dilated as they were the morning after I was first bitten by fairies. I lean over the sink, getting as close as I dare to my troubling reflection.
I look like a creepy doll with black button eyes. Good thing it was dark in my bedroom and Cane was too preoccupied to bother looking too closely or I would have been on my way to the emergency room. I’m going to have to wear my sunglasses all day or risk seriously freaking people out. I grab my toothbrush with an angry grunt and set to vigorously brushing my teeth.
Shit! Why is this happening? Am I getting sick again? Is the shot wearing off a few days early? Should I give myself another? If I do, is it going to show up on my drug test at work? Is the shot what’s making me able to control the fairies? Are the Big Man and Tucker aware that we can do this kind of thing? Can they control them, too? And where the hell is Tucker and why hasn’t he moved the goddamned Harley out of my kitchen?!
“Argh!” I kick at the sink, groaning as my bare toes crunch against the cabinet. I spit out my toothpaste, stab my toothbrush back into the holder, and hop toward the shower, cussing beneath my breath, lamenting the state of my life, cursing all the gods human beings ever imagined into existence.
And then I pull back the shower curtain, forget my less pressing troubles, and scream like the heroine of a 1950s horror movie.
Because there is someone in my shower.
A small, paunchy someone with damp wings, and a very nasty—very toothy—little smile.
I stumble backward, covering my bare chest with my arms for a moment before I realize I don’t care if the old fairy bastard sees me naked. He’s practically an insect, for god’s sake.
Besides, he’s naked, and he doesn’t seem to care.
In fact, he appears pretty damned pleased with himself. He’s smiling like the cat that ate the sofa, sliding his ass back and forth across my damp bar of soap, leaving a trail of light green behind.
“That’s my soap!” I point a serious finger at his face. “Don’t poop on my soap!”
His grin grows another layer of fangs and more green oozes onto my Ivory. I glare at him, trying to focus over the jackhammer of my pulse drilling away in my head. There is a fairy in my bathroom. Somehow he got inside the iron gate, through the iron grid, and all the way to my house without shriveling into a fairy nugget from overexposure to deadly metal.
“Crap.” My heart works even faster. What if the gates are down? What if the town is filled with fairies? What if—
I spin to the tiny bathroom window and rip apart the blinds. Outside, the morning light is starting to turn pale yellow and the world is the picture of peace and quiet. Bernadette’s flowers nod in a gentle breeze and what I can see of the street is empty—of people and fairies.
Still, I have to be sure, and this thing obviously understands English.
I whip back around, pinning him with my toughest look. “How did you get here? Are you the only one, or are there others?” He responds with a screechy cackle and another wiggle of his bare ass. I step closer and turn off the water with a swift twist of my wrist. “Answer me,” I demand in the new silence. “Answer me, or I’ll do to you what I did to your friends.” Yesterday, I was focused on the fairies closest to the truck and missed this guy, but that’s a mistake that can be remedied. Quickly.
The fairy’s nasty grin falls away. His jaw unhinges and he bares his ancient teeth in a royally pissed-off hiss. His tiny hands fist at his sides and his skin glows a faint yellow, but he doesn’t attack, and when he’s done with his tantrum, he actually answers my question. “I come alone!”
English. He’s speaking English. It’s still blowing my mind.
“How did you get in?” I ask, trying not to lose my shit. Yesterday, I was protected by the suspicion that he was a figment of my imagination. Now, I know he’s real. As real as the iron gate that should have kept him in the bayou where he belongs. “Why isn’t the iron in the town killing you?”
“Slake are strong.” He flutters into the air, hovering a few inches above eye level. “Slake will have the town and all the food in it. When we want it, we will have it.”
I shiver, knowing he isn’t talking about the food on the shelves at Piggly Wiggly. He’s talking about my friends and neighbors. “You’re a liar. The gate keeps the fairies out. I’ve seen what happens when they get too close. They die.”
“The young ones. Not we who lived through the growing time.” His chest puffs up and his shoulders roll back, as if he’s expecting to start growing again any second. “We learned to drink your poisons and survive. We will learn to live in your metal towns and feed.”
He must be talking about the mutations. That the fairies that lived through the mutations aren’t as sensitive to iron. But that still doesn’t hold water. “It can’t be only the newborn fairies that can’t cross the gate. We’ve always used iron to keep from being attacked. Way before eggs had time to hatch we—”
“Second growing time.”
“Second growing time?” I squint at him. He doesn’t look any bigger than he did the other day, or any bigger than the average fairy. If anything he’s smaller, shrunken and pruned in the way of the very old.
“Nothing a human would know.” He smiles and scratches his stomach. There’s no belly button—fairies are hatched from eggs, so no umbilical cord. It makes it even stranger that, otherwise, his body could belong to a miniature geriatric. Fairies are remarkably humanoid in appearance, except for the wings and the shark teeth and the black, bulbous eyes.
With my eyes as dilated as they are today, all I need is a pair of wings and some fangs and I could be this dude’s much larger, much younger cousin. He even has a few wisps of red hair on his head that aren’t too far from my color.
I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly not as okay with continuing this discussion naked. This fairy isn’t an insect or even an animal. He’s a creature capable of thought and language and plotting things that will be bad for everyone I care about. I inch back to the dirty clothes basket, grab my discarded tank top, and jerk it over my head. Even with only panties on bottom, I feel better. “Why are you here?” I hope my tone lets Grandpa know I’m not going to be satisfied with vague answers.
“You know why.”
“You want me to leave town. If I don’t, you’re going to keep trying to kill me.”
He grins another mean grin. “Maybe not so stupid.”
He made a joke. Employed sarcasm. It makes it hard to swallow or think of what to say. Fairies having language is one thing; having a smart-ass sense of humor is another entirely. It makes them even more human. And more evil than I ever imagined.
They aren’t mindless killing machines driven by instinct. They are thinking, feeling, humor-possessing creatures, who have simply decided they should be at the top of the food chain. And that people are their preferred meat.
“I’m not leaving,” I whisper, the sick feeling in my gut worse than ever. “Especially not knowing you can get inside the gates. I’m going to stay here and I’m going to kill every single fairy who dares to flap a wing in Donaldsonville.”
“You can’t kill us all.” His eyes narrow. “You don’t have the strength.”
“I’m tougher than I look.”
“Not when your mind is gone.” He flutters closer, until our noses are only inches apart. “I will come to you every time you sleep. I will fill your mind with blood. You will wake one morning and never stop screaming.”
What small sense of victory I feel for my spot-on deduction is banished by the reality of his words. He really is coming to me i
n my dreams, filling them with horror. And he’ll keep doing it until I’m exhausted and sick and crazy, and, if for some reason that plan fails, I know he’ll move on to killing people, creating more loved ones that I’ve failed to protect. If he can sneak into my house, he could as easily sneak into Cane’s or Fernando’s. Or slip into Sweet Haven and find Deedee on her narrow cot. One bite and their lives will be over. Literally, if they’re among the severely allergic.
Which means there’s only one thing to do.
Grandpa must read the decision in my eyes. He flits away, darting back so quickly that his wings hit the tile with a soft thwph before he slides back down to the poo-streaked soap. “If you kill me, there will be others to take my place!”
I shrug and step closer, until my toes touch the cool claw foot of the tub. “Guess I’ll have to kill them, too.”
“If you kill me, the Slake will take this town.” He puffs up his chest again, trying to look fierce. But I can see the fear in him. Guess he didn’t expect me to fight back. Guess I really am smarter—or at least more murderous—than he gave me credit for. “They will not suffer the death of their king.”
“Like you won’t suffer Gentry.” This is it. My chance to get some real information. “What are Gentry?” He opens his mouth to hiss, but I stop him with a finger in the air. “Tell me, or I’ll kill you right now.” He closes his mouth, presses his lips together. I shrug again. “All right. I would say it was nice knowing you, but you’re a filthy, mean bastard who pooped on my last bar of soap. And you tried to kill me, so I figure it’s only—”
“The Gentry rule,” he says, arms beginning to tremble. I’m guessing with rage, but he could be cold. It’s cooler in the bathroom than the rest of the house and he is naked and wet. For a second I think about offering him a washcloth to wrap up in, but decide that would affect the credibility of my death threat and settle for another glare.
“And?”
“They are the most powerful Fey folk,” he says. “They lived long ago. We were their slaves.”