Fell Beasts and Fair

by C. J. Brightley

  Kill the kid and you can come back. That’s what the writing on my card said. Well, this was the only kid in the area; long-legged and long-haired, it had a hopeful sort of expression to its face. I mean, it was still ugly, but it was ugly in a nice sort of way. It looked like you could pat it on the head without being bitten. Not that I could reach, but still.

  “You appeared out of nowhere,” it said to me. It sounded thoughtful but not surprised. “I don’t know what kind you are.”

  I glared at it. It knew a bit too much for a human, didn’t it? Or was it just confused? I said, “Kind? What do you mean?”

  “You know—Behinder.” It tilted its head. “I know you are one, just can’t tell what kind. You’re not tall enough for fae or pouty enough to be a vampire. Are you a troll?”

  “Who do you think you’re calling a troll!” I demanded, sitting up straight in outrage. The wooden duck wobbled and threatened to dump me in the brown, crackly grass.

  “Oh, sorry,” it said. “Didn’t mean to offend you. I know a troll and she’s really nice.”

  “That’s because they’re eager-to-please little nubkinses!” I snarled, clinging with both hands to the wobbling duck’s wooden handles. “They should just accept that they’re ugly and no one loves them.”

  “Oh,” said the kid. It didn’t try to say anything else; just sat there as if it was waiting for me to notice something.

  I ignored it. “Red for Deport,” I muttered to myself. “Who has that clout and who would do it? Who am I? Just a little government lep’ looking for his next pay stream. No need to mark me Red for Deport, was there? Who’s the sorry beetle that sent me off into the human world without a trial?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said the kid, “but I don’t think we’re actually in the human world.”

  “’Course we are,” I said, without paying too much attention. “Where else would we be? You’re a human. The place feels human—gives me a nasty shiver.”

  “Ye-es,” said the kid uneasily. “But—”

  “And I’m a leprechaun. Don’t go calling me a troll.”

  That distracted it. “Oh. There are leprechauns Behind! What’s your name?”

  “Five-Four-One.”

  The kid giggled. “Really?”

  I scowled at it. “That’s my batch number. What else would it be? Wipe that smirk off your face.”

  “Sorry,” the kid said, but it was still grinning. “But around here there’s a saying that goes I’d rather have a number than a name like that, and you’ve already got a number, so—!”

  Maybe this one wasn’t as intelligent as I’d thought it was. At least it wasn’t as stupid as the human cows had been.

  It was clever enough to notice my scowl growing. It managed to smother its grin a bit, and asked, “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “Curious, aren’t you?” I said sourly. I sneaked a peek at my card, but it was still red and black, the writing still jumping out at me. Kill the kid and you can come back. That was all well and good, but why should I? Who was this mysterious shanghai-er to tell me to kill someone for them? Even a human kid. That’s the sort of thing I don’t approve of.

  But if I didn’t, how would I get home? I couldn’t live here. I needed my gold. I needed a place to recharge. Without those, I would die even sooner than a human in this human world.

  I looked at the kid meditatively, which seemed to make it nervous. “What?” it asked.

  “You,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you,” it said, a bit more cheerfully.

  “What?” Did it have a card, too? Death matches were illegal Behind, but the governing powers could be stretchy when it came to applying Behind laws to fae in the human world.

  “I just appeared, like you,” said the kid. “Well, I think so, anyway. Right in the middle of making dinner, too. They’re gonna be annoyed—’s’pecially JinYeong. Stuff always happens when I’m cooking his choice.”

  “Cooking?” I glared at it. “What the everlasting gold are you chuntering about? Nobody cares about whether or not your dinner gets cooked.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the thing,” the kid argued. “JinYeong cares, and that means he’s gonna be stroppy as all heck when he finds me.”

  “I don’t care if JinYeong is stroppy as all heck!” I snapped. I didn’t even know what stroppy as all heck meant. “What is this place, and why have you dragged me here? You’ve no business marking me Red for Deport!”

  The kid looked indignant. “I just said! I didn’t have anything to do with it; I was in the kitchen and then I was here. I mean, I think I know where I am, but when I tried to start walking home I couldn’t get out.”

  “Out?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird; I can usually get in and out of Between without any problems, but whenever I try to walk past the picnic table to go home, I find myself walking back past the treehouse again.”

  “This isn’t Between,” I said, very slowly and loudly. “It’s the human world.” For all that was gold! It was a human! Why didn’t it know its own world?

  The kid looked like it was trying not to grin again. “Yeah,” it said. “But you try walking out and see how you go.”

  I didn’t like the way it was grinning, but I had to try now. I stumped toward the picnic table, my wooden leg sinking too deeply into the brown grass, and found myself walking past the treehouse instead.

  “Flamin’ weird, isn’t it?” said the kid, in a chummy sort of way. “What d’you reckon’s happened?”

  I glared at it. Was it stupid or senseless? No one in their right mind should be that comfortable and trusting when they had been thrown into a closed circle with someone who, for all they knew, could have been ordered to kill them.

  “Maybe we should see if we can get over it,” the kid suggested. “I reckon its fae magic, and fae don’t think about loopholes as much as I thought they would. Well, not when it comes to humans, anyway. They think we’re as dumb as cows over here, so they don’t usually make things too hard for us.”

  I coughed and tapped my wooden leg against the ground. “That right?”

  The kid grinned again. “Yeah. Oi. If you give me a leg up, I reckon I can climb over the top of whatever spell they’re using.”

  “A leg up?” Was that meant to be a joke?

  “Or I’ll give you one, but I think I might be lighter than you.”

  Oh. It wanted a boost. “I can get you to the first branch of that tree,” I said. On the side that wasn’t road and gravel, the trees surrounded the playground and overhung it; at least one of those branches should be caught in the same bubble as us. And if the kid was right—who was I kidding? Of course it was right. There’s nothing so snooty and self-confident as an intelligent fae. And they all think they’re intelligent.

  “Should I climb on your shoulders, or—”

  “No!”

  “Oh. Well, how am I going to—”

  “Turn arou—” I snapped, slapping at the containment spell to see exactly where it was. And that was as far as I got. Something raw and strong and magical threw me across the playground the instant I touched fae magic. I hit the tree house, though it felt more like the tree house hit me, and for a very long, dusty, grassy time, I whimpered up at the sky.

  There was the sound of running footsteps, and a voice yelled, “Five! Five, are you okay?”

  I considered whimpering again, but the kid might have heard me. “No, I’m not okay!”

  “Right,” said the kid. Its face appeared above me, then wiry arms tugged at me until I could sit up. “Yeah. Um, can you stand up?”

  “No!” I snarled, and stood up a bit hazily. I’d been winded, and that was as bad as it was, but there was no way I was going say that after the fuss I’d made. “If I’ve broken anything—!”

  The kid was grinning again. Guess I’d underestimated how much it knew about injuries. “Look on the bright side,” it said. “At least your peg leg isn’t broken.”

  “Wi
th all this gold-perishing sunlight there’s no other way to look at things,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah, the hole in the ozone layer is right above us,” the kid said cheerfully. “Wanna try again?”

  “No!” There was a pause before I said grudgingly, “Yes. But I have to pee first. Another impact like that and the grass’ll think the rains have come to this gold-perishingly barren place.”

  There was a barely stifled laugh from the kid, but it said, “Wouldn’t do that f’I were you.”

  “What? Why can’t I pee?”

  “It’s not that you can’t,” the kid said, “but there was a redback on the toilet seat in the loo yesterday, and I don’t know where it went.”

  “What’s a redback?”

  “Spider. Pretty deadly.”

  “Either it’s deadly or it isn’t.”

  The kid considered that. “Then I s’pose it depends on how quickly you get to the hospital, and if they have the stuff to treat it.”

  “I don’t have to sit.”

  “I didn’t say it lives under the loo seat; that’s just where I saw it last. I was moving pretty quick then, so I didn’t see where it went after that. And I think it got touched by Between a bit, so it might be bigger than usual.”

  “Is everything here trying to kill me?”

  “Not everything,” said the kid. Its eyes, which had been looking around curiously at something I hadn’t seen, widened. “Oh. But those might be.”

  There were so many trees out there, all green and brown from the heat, that I didn’t see them until the kid pointed them out. About four or five very big bears, their greyish pelts blending into the branches they clung to with long sharp claws, their eyes black and glittering in the shadowy foliage. They were each the size of a decently grown polar bear, surrounding the playground from every direction that contained trees, and now the tree branches began to shake as they made their way toward us.

  “What are those? What are those!?” My voice cracked. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what happened.

  “I think they’re dropbears,” the kid said thoughtfully. “It’s weird. They shouldn’t exist.”

  “Dropbears?” I said feebly. “What are dropbears?” Whatever else they were, they were definitely Between creatures; chimeras made of possibility, magic, and malice.

  “Kind of like really mean koalas,” the kid said. It was looking less thoughtful and more alarmed as the dropbears shuddered closer through the trees. “They drop from trees and tear you to bloody pieces. They weren’t—I mean, they don’t exist. They’re a thing that was made up for TV ads. They’re not a thing that properly comes from Between.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped desperately that when I opened them, the dropbears would have disappeared. They didn’t.

  I said, “They do now.”

  But wait. We weren’t Between—we were firmly in the human world. How in the woody green were Between-magicked dropbears approaching from the human world?

  “How?” I panted, mopping more sweat from my brow than I’d thought possible for my body to contain in its entirety. “We’re not Between! They shouldn’t be here!”

  “Yeah,” said the kid. “That’s what I thought. That’s why I said we’re Between, even though it doesn’t feel quite the same. Zero isn’t here, so I thought I’d wait and see what happened, but then you arrived so I s’pose we should try to do something about it.”

  “They been there all along!?”

  “Mostly,” the kid said. “They didn’t start coming closer until you started flying around, though.”

  “I wasn’t flying around! I was suffering blowback from your stupid—”

  “I don’t think you can really blame that on me,” the kid said seriously. “It was the containment thingie. I’m not magical or anything.”

  “It’s Other. You say you’re not Other.”

  “Yeah. So you can’t blame that on me, can you?”

  “Well, it was your idea!” I said nastily. “I don’t go around getting close to Other spells for no reason. I suppose you think I just threw myself in the air for the fun of it!”

  “I thought it was pretty funny,” the kid muttered, but when I snarled “What?” at it, it cleared its throat and tried to look innocent. “Nothing.”

  “See how funny you find it all when the dropbears get to us,” I told it.

  “Wait, though,” said the kid uncertainly. “The spell should stop them too, shouldn’t it?”

  “Wouldn’t count on it,” I said sourly. Of all the ways to go! I’d survived the Third War, even if my right leg hadn’t, and now I was about to be sent off by a pack of dropbears. Mind you, the dropbears were in the trees; they were still approaching, but it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think they might not be clever enough to try and go over the spell.

  Only they never did drop from the trees; they kept lumbering through the foliage in a storm of shaking until they were well past the tree we’d been trying to boost each other into.

  “Oh,” said the kid. “Reckon they figured out the spell, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We should try to get out again,” said the kid.

  It was clearer toward the front of the playground that faced the road, so we legged it toward that part. There was only one tree there, but before we got to its trunk the spell set us hurrying back toward the treehouse again.

  “Reckon the treehouse is the centre of the spell,” the kid panted, when we’d righted ourselves again. “Look, we can reach that branch, though. You ready to try again?”

  I wasn’t, but I said, “Yeah,” anyway. What else could we do?

  “Maybe I should try boosting you this time,” the kid said.

  “Yeah.” I wouldn’t have suggested it myself because I’m not a coward, but since it had suggested the idea itself… “That’ll work.”

  And it worked. Oh boy, did it work. The idea had been to give me a gentle boost and circumvent whatever gold-perished magic some Other had put on the inside of the spell.

  It gave me a boost, all right. We couldn’t make sure exactly where the Other magic was without touching it, but it sure knew where we were. The kid boosted, I hit the Other magic, and with the Other magic behind it, that boost sent me sailing further into the air than the first jolt had done. I flew back over the playground, grass and trees a brown and green blur around me. There was a bigger blur of brown for just long enough for me to realise that I was going to hit the tree house headfirst this time, then I was stuck like a cork in a bottle.

  And there I was, somewhere in Australia, human world side, head and shoulders in a tree with my rear exposed to the elements and the dropbears thudding to the grass all around me.

  “Better wriggle!” yelled the kid. “They’re in!”

  I wriggled. I wriggled harder than I’d done since I was hatched, a crawling feeling running up and down the leg I didn’t have any more, warning that my other leg was about to be bitten off. A scratching lower in the tree house made me stop short, unsure whether it was safer in or out, but then the kid popped up from a small hole in the floor and grabbed my arms.

  There was another brief moment where I felt like a cork in a bottle before I exploded inward. The kid yelped as I head-butted its stomach but hauled me to my feet without retaliating.

  “Couldn’t wedge the door shut,” it gasped. “It’s too small for them to get in that way, anyway. Wouldn’t count on the treehouse being strong enough to stop ’em if they really want us, though.”

  I poked my head out of the round window for another look at the dropbears. “They want us,” I said grimly. All five of them were sniffing around the base of the treehouse. They didn’t look too bright, but they didn’t have to be to get us.

  “I reckon it’s a trap,” the kid said. “They were out there, but they didn’t get interested until you got here.”

  “It’s not a trap,” I said. “It’s insurance.”

  “Insurance for what?”

  “Mind your own bu
siness.”

  “It is my business! They want to eat me! Well, I suppose it’s you they want to eat, actually, but I don’t think they’ll stop at you.”

  “No, it’s you they want,” I said, without thinking.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” said the kid, “but that doesn’t make much sense. They only tried to come in after you got here.”

  “It can’t be me they’re after,” I said. “I’ve been given a task to do and I can’t do it if I’m dead.”

  “Then what am I here for?”

  “To die,” I said, and it wasn’t wrong.

  “I wonder if Zero and Athelas know about this?” the kid said.

  It looked pretty comfortable for someone who was about to be eaten by dropbears. Was it expecting me to do something, or was it still waiting for that Zero it kept talking about? Trustful didn’t even cover this kid.

  “We came here a couple days ago because the locals have been hearing weird stuff and seeing lights at night; that sort of thing.”

  “So I’m not the first to arrive here,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but there was something about the kid’s trustful face that made it easy to talk more than I should. “There have been other Behinders sent here.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I reckon. And people have been disappearing.”

  “People disappearing?”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah. A fair few of ’em, too. Locals, tourists, seasonal workers; doesn’t seem to matter who. I reckon the dropbears must have been getting ’em, but why are there Between dropbears here?”

  Humans disappearing in a particular spot? Now that was a pattern I was familiar with, and it was a pattern that didn’t involve dropbears. The dropbears were part of something else altogether; this—this place was a human resources source. Not human-made or human-sourced resources like coffee; human resources. A stock supply of humans.

  And that meant that Allied Traders was a human stock mill.

  I grinned. “Now I’m getting somewhere!” I said, satisfaction thick in my voice. It’s not like a human stock mill is illegal, so to speak. But there are some very specific rules about how the humans can be used, consent, and the safe disposal of them once they’re through their indentures. Behind likes to stay a secret.