Fae

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  Crossroads and circles, people, right in the advertising. If you can’t find the Fae in that, I can’t help you.

  I made my way to the Steer & Beer, where Jimmy had an enormous fried pork tenderloin waiting for me. As I walked in, he removed the overturned plate keeping it warm and then mixed ice cream and Coke into a Black Cow, setting it on the counter. There’s no land like the Old Land, but there are certain advantages to the American Midwest.

  “What are we looking at?”

  Jimmy nodded toward the small television hanging at the far end of the room. “Not a lot of details yet, but it looks like she disappeared about an hour and a half ago. From the front of the apartments, like I said.”

  The screen showed a smiling black girl, her hair in braids and beads, a candid photograph scavenged from a phone or Facebook to get on the news as quickly as possible. Alexis Foster, read the footer text.

  “Cute kid,” I said, and stuffed the tenderloin into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say more. I’m not Fae enough to be swept away in pure and unbridled emotion, but I have enough fairy in me to get choked up over a snapshot of one of today’s two thousand kids.

  Jimmy left the counter and went to the rear wall of the Steer & Beer. The rest of the joint was decorated in typical drive-in style, old posters and unintentional retro, but the rear wall was papered in children’s drawings. Every kid who comes to the Steer & Beer for the first time is offered a free ice cream sundae in exchange for a signed work of art.

  There were four drawings signed “Alexis,” but Jimmy selected one. He had a digital photo frame of happy customers waving spoons or holding up tenderloins, and many of the photos included children. A light pencil notation on the back of each drawing, obliquely referencing the photo’s file number, made it easy for Jimmy to know which drawing belonged to which child’s image.

  It was the kind of thing that would make many parents paranoid, even though he had no family names or addresses, but to be fair that wouldn’t be hard with some facial recognition software and a credit card database or something. But Jimmy was one of the good guys. Only he and I knew the drawings were marked with anything more than the date, and we both hoped never to need them.

  When they were needed, though, they were awfully handy.

  Jimmy slid the drawing over the counter, and I studied it without touching. Alexis had drawn a pony with what I assumed were sparkles trailing from its mane and tail, and a wizard or college graduate or something to one side. Hey, I like kids, but I’m not good at following their art. At the lower right was her name in red block letters.

  I finished my tenderloin and drained the last of the Black Cow. Jimmy made another, this time in a foam cup to carry out, and called back into the kitchen that he was going out.

  I picked up the picture for the first time and carried it out with us.

  Jimmy drives an SUV of some sort. I’m not good with cars but it’s old, noisy, and solid. That comes with a lot of steel so I tend to ride leaning away from the door with my feet elevated on a couple of phone books he keeps for the purpose. He drove us to Monument Circle and wedged into a passenger unloading zone.

  The Circle is named for the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. It honors veterans of five wars, it has neat fountains and an underground Civil War museum, and it’s nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. And most importantly, it sits at the very heart of the city, in the center of the Circle and all those precisely-drawn streets.

  I got out of the car and went to the Monument. I paid the two dollars to ride the elevator. The stairs are free, but I was going to need all my energy.

  No one else was at the top, which was just as well. I don’t need a lot of theatrics, but it’s nice not to have to deal with distractions. I took Alexis’ drawing in both hands, pulled up the photo of the smiling, braided girl via the alert on my phone, and concentrated.

  Scrying a location is a really complicated thing, and trying to describe it is kind of like trying to describe seeing colors. It really only makes sense if you already know what you’re talking about. Having a face isn’t enough; you need something personal, something connected to a soul. Art is about as personal as it gets, and Jimmy’s ice cream exchange is brilliant.

  It doesn’t give me an address, of course, but I can get a sense of direction and distance. After that, a little work with the maps app on my phone can narrow it down to a few hundred yards, and that’s a pretty fair working prospect.

  There’s an obscene number of calories in a traditional fried tenderloin sandwich and Black Cow, but I stumbled out of the Monument with blurred vision and a racing heartbeat. I had to blink and concentrate to remember where Jimmy would be, and I hurried toward the car like an addict toward his stash.

  Jimmy opened the door as I neared—I can generally manage a door handle, even on a steel door, but it’s pushing it after a scrying—and handed me the foam cup. I sucked at the straw greedily and shoved the phone at him, in navigation mode, without speaking.

  Jimmy pulled two energy bars from his jacket pocket and dropped them in my lap. I threw him a grateful glance and stopped gulping long enough to say, “Bless you.” The shakes made it awkward to manage the wrappers, but the ice cream and Coke were kicking in and my hands soon steadied.

  So anyway, kids. Fairies like ‘em. Some like to play with them, like the Cottingley Fairies (not the cardboard and hatpin ones, the real thing). And some like to have them, like the Queen.

  For those of you who slept drooling through English Literature and woke up just long enough to giggle-snort at A Midsummer Night’s Dream because he said “ass,” you’re probably thinking of Titania. That would be fine—she’s had a lot of names, and she’s not particular about which get used—except that Shakespeare was a great writer but a lousy historian, and a chauvinist to boot. Have you ever actually paid attention to the fairy side of the story? Titania’s all like, I’m raising this little boy, I knew his mother, and Oberon’s all like, No, I want him, and they spat a bit, and then Oberon pranks Titania in the ugly shape of Nick Bottom—“ass,” hur hur—and so Titania’s like, Ooh, that was so embarrassing, I guess you can have the little boy and I love you, the end.

  Seriously, who would buy that, besides a bunch of rowdy men feeling rather threatened by a female monarch? Shakespeare knew his audience, I’ll say that for him, and none of them knew the Fairy Queen.

  Jimmy pulled into an empty parking lot and put the car in park. It was a business strip near middle-class neighborhoods, not exactly a part of town you’d associate with human trafficking—but you don’t get to be a thirty-two billion dollar industry without developing effective protocols and safeguards.

  Jimmy nodded toward a corporate accounting office at the end, adjoining a wholesale warehouse which sat behind the strip. “Everything else here is a boutique or retail, something anyone could walk into. But no one strolls into corporate accounting without an appointment. And they could have easy access to warehouse space.”

  I nodded. “Looks like a place to start, anyway.” I could scry again, if we got stuck, but that wouldn’t be such a good move right away if I wanted to be any use later. Better to use brains as well as magic.

  Jimmy didn’t bother to check the Sig Sauer P220 he wore under his flannel jacket; he’d loaded it right the first time. It wouldn’t come out unless something went very wrong. “I’m just going to go in and ask about some accounting then,” he said. “See if I spot any red flags.”

  I nodded. If the office were legit, no problem. If it were a front, they’d give him a polite brush-off and we’d call in an anonymous tip.

  It’d be a lot easier to call in a tip in the first place, but I think I mentioned that scrying a location can be inexact. Search warrants can be tricky to get, and the last thing you want is a police visit next door. By the time they can get a warrant for the right property, the stash house is empty and the kids are in another state, maybe. Better to pinpoint and nail them the first time.

  Jimmy looked at me.
“Stay in the car.”

  I smiled. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “That is so wrong, coming from you.” He shook his head and got out. Jimmy doesn’t have much of a sense of humor when things get serious. Me, I keep mine lively at all times. It’s my nature to be either flippant and playful or deadly cold, and the former is more comfortable.

  I’d finished the ice cream float and the energy bars, and I felt nearly normal again. I tipped my head back against the seat.

  It was only a few minutes before Jimmy came back, casual and calm. When he got into the SUV, however, he slammed the door too hard. “They took my name and number and offered to have someone call me Tuesday.”

  “But?”

  “But I could hear cartoons coming from a back room.”

  Candy and cartoons go a long way to keeping captive children quiet. The stuff you see on the news about tiny, filthy rooms and physical restraints is real, too, but cartoons are a cheap sedative in a holding area. I flexed my fingers deliberately to keep from clenching them into fists. “Drive. I’ll make the call.”

  I had my phone to my ear, ringing, when the bread truck pulled into the parking lot. Jimmy slowed the SUV, watching the truck in his mirror. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  The truck pulled alongside the accounting office, its painted bakery logo at odds with the cheap imported goods in the warehouse.

  “Bells and breadcrumbs,” I snarled.

  “Anonymous Crime Reporting Hotline,” said a voice from the phone.

  I gave her the address as Jimmy turned the SUV. “I saw Alexis, the Amber Alert kid.” I’d scried her, close enough, and that would get the fastest response. “I think it’s human trafficking. And they just brought in a truck, they’re going to move them now, so you need to hurry. I have to go.” I hung up on her questions; she had what she needed, she didn’t need to know more about me, and we had work to do.

  Exposure was what the traffickers would fear most right now, so the mere presence of a couple of outsiders might be enough to make them sit tight for a while. Jimmy pulled his SUV into the lot and angled across two parking spaces. He then held his phone up at eye level and gestured angrily at it. “How long do you think they’ll be?”

  I pointed with equal fervor at my own phone and then up the street. “Hard to say. Telling them they were moving the kids now bumps it to probable cause, I think, so they can act faster, but I wouldn’t want to bet anyone’s life on it.”

  Arguing over directions is a pretty good cover in a lot of places, but it was less convincing when Jimmy had just been asking about accounting a few minutes before. It wasn’t long before we noticed a face at the office window. “I think we’ve been spotted,” Jimmy said unnecessarily.

  I shifted my feet on the phone books and drew a pair of light leather gloves out of my jacket pocket. Three men came out of the office, and two walked to separate cars. The third came toward us with a friendly smile. “You guys lost?”

  Jimmy put the window down a few inches. “We were having something of a debate about the fastest way back to the interstate. But it looks like we’ve got some time to kill, anyway, before we meet my folks for dinner. Might sit here a bit.”

  The friendly smile faded. “I’m afraid you can’t loiter here.”

  Jimmy grinned in a good-old-boy way. “Aw, we won’t be any trouble.”

  “This is a private lot. If you don’t move on, I’ll have to call the police.”

  The bread truck began to back along the building, probably heading for a loading dock or door, and Jimmy’s grin faded too. “Well, if you feel you should.”

  There was a moment of silence. Jimmy had called his bluff, and it suggested we knew more than we should. It was a dangerous play, and Jimmy knew better, but like I said, no sense of humor, and the truck was right there.

  And then the man gestured, and the two cars pulled in on either end of the SUV, blocking us in.

  I yanked the handle and leapt out of the car, skimming around the obstructing car and bolting across the parking lot. I’m not quick like some of the Fae, but I can move pretty well, and I reached the warehouse before the guy who’d told us to move on or the guys from the cars could catch up. They all chased after me, leaving Jimmy alone except for one goon who somehow tripped as he passed Jimmy and went down hard on the asphalt. Humans can be so clumsy.

  The truck was backing into the warehouse area behind the accounting office, and I dove through the gap between truck and wall. Apparently the guy inside wasn’t expecting me because he went down under our impact. I wasn’t expecting him either, unfortunately, and our tangled limbs slowed us as we both tried to get up first.

  Children laughed. Not a lot of them, as they were across the warehouse and behind the office and most were still watching the cartoon screen, but a handful laughed at us. I stared. There were so many of them—maybe three dozen. This wasn’t a small-time pedo ring, this was major business, probably into resale.

  Looking at the kids had been a bad idea. The goon’s right hook staggered me and I hit the warehouse floor. The two chasing me through the parking lot arrived and kicked me hard in quick sequence.

  Fights aren’t like what you see in most movies. They’re nasty, brutal things, and once you’re on the ground and outnumbered you’re pretty much done. So I was glad when Jimmy leaned around the edge of the loading door and shouted, “Freeze!”

  They looked at him for a moment, and that was all I needed. I twisted off the ground despite my ringing head and dented kidney and I bolted. The warehouse was full of steel shelving and racks of plastic-bound pallets, and I skimmed up like a squirrel on meth.

  No, really, it’s one of the things we’re good at. Speed and grace are in all the old stories. Lots of the great parkour artists have a little Fae in them, and one of the world’s top rhythmic gymnasts actually dopes with fairy blood; there’s just no test for that yet.

  Oh, and the steel? Good thing I was wearing my gloves. My hands tingled a bit, but I’m used to that.

  Jimmy had retreated around the door again, and apparently the goons realized he hadn’t actually declared police or flashed a badge. They scattered, two heading for the kids while a third began circling the steel shelving, looking up.

  If you haven’t been in a warehouse like that, that shelving is pretty tall. I was probably twenty-five feet above the floor, crouching on a pallet of boxes marked “Hella Catty.” Cheap knockoffs don’t even try anymore. I stayed in the middle of the pallet, so it would be hard for him to see me unless he got me silhouetted against one of the overhead lights. A little glamour would have been really useful, but that genetic lottery is pretty hard to win.

  Another goon came in, a little scuffed, which meant Jimmy had gotten out of sight somewhere. With any luck he was calling 911, reporting an assault in progress and speeding up the police arrival a bit. On the other hand, the last time I called—to report what looked like a heart attack I’d spotted through a bus window on the highway—the dispatcher told me they’d get someone out when they got to it. So my hopes weren’t exactly pinned on the cavalry arriving.

  As long as I was up here, I might as well be doing something useful. I slid my phone from my pocket and took several pictures of the kids in their group around the television, the warehouse, and the creeps who were keeping them there. And then the office door opened, and I took a picture of a woman.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me; lots of women work in trafficking. Some of them were victims themselves once, and some are just twisted, perverted sickos. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awful when a man does it—but when a woman exchanges maternal instinct for predatory, it’s somehow worse. Maybe that’s not politically correct to say, but Fae feelings go back a lot further than the PC style guide.

  I took another picture of her, all neat department store clothing and smooth dark skin and middle class, and then I shoved my phone back into my pocket. She strode through the kids and pointed to the truck with a smile. “O
kay, it’s time for our ride! You get to ride in the back, and we’re going to all go get ice cream.”

  The kids cheered and got to their feet, mostly. A couple were slow to rise and didn’t look enthused, and my half-Fae heart squeezed in me. They acted like they’d been someplace bad for a long time. Easy victims, already broken.

  Sometimes, in the old days, the Fae stole children from homes that weren’t homes.

  If these guys got the kids into the truck, they could take them just about anywhere. We had to stop them here. I eyed the truck, but from this high angle I couldn’t see the license plate, or it was on one of the doors which hung open.

  The kids started moving in a cluster across the warehouse, a few looking over their shoulders at the cartoons still running. The floor was littered with empty chip bags, microwaved popcorn bags, cookie packages, pizza boxes. Cheap fodder for the livestock.

  Shakespeare did get a few things right, and one of them was that Titania (she’s fine with that name, really) took the orphaned boy for his mother’s sake and meant to raise him well. She’s like that. But she wouldn’t have given him up, not for Oberon or all the equine-headed peasants you might throw at her.

  Not clear yet? Imagine all the motherly tenderness and protectiveness you’ve ever seen in a human. Now refine that in whatever crucible you like until it is a pure elemental force of the Fae, raw power honed to maternal instinct. Getting the idea?

  Changlings are one thing, because they’re usually taken to be coddled and petted and raised as fairy’s own. But Titania is displeased when a human child is stolen by human predators.

  And so she deputized me.

  I slid to the edge of the pallet, looking down, and reflected that I hadn’t seen the driver yet. That meant he was still in the truck, and he could drive away with any kids who got in. I hoped Jimmy would do something about that—maybe a little carjacking for a cause—but I couldn’t count on it.