Drawing herself closer to him, she inched her way towards his hairy mole-covered cheek and kissed him gently.
“You are so dear to me, Sluagh. You’re the only one I can trust.”
He smiled widely, his milky eyes casting themselves upward towards her face in awe.
“You can always trust me, my queen. I will always be at your side. And I will bring you your little lord. I will go now. I have planned my route.”
He grinned again, putting all his broken teeth on display.
“And of course I have this,” he said, peeling back his sleeve.
Through the fog emerged the eerie blue light of his flaming blue arm. I’d seen it in my dreams, in my own damn living room, and felt it around my body. But seeing it here, attached to that face made it all the more terrifying.
“What a gift you have,” Solana said to Sluagh. “The flaming blue hand that can turn any adult who sees it into a babbling, insane mess. What a charm.”
“It has its uses . . . ”
“Go now,” Solana ordered. “You must not waste a single second more. I need that baby.”
Sluagh covered up his flaming hand as he made his way to the door.
“I will return soon,” he assured her. “And I will have the boy.”
The flames from the hearth danced in his milky white eyes, and then he was gone, leaving Solana alone in her stinking, festering little shack. Except she wasn’t alone. I was still there, watching her.
“Logan?” came a voice through the house. “Logan, can you hear us?”
“Elena?”
“Logan!”
“Wake up on the count of three,” came Patrick’s voice, suddenly entering the tiny little hovel. “Can you hear me, Logan? Wake up on the count of three. One, two, three!”
I was jolted out of the room so fast that I couldn’t see or breathe. All I could feel was a sucking, whooshing noise in my ears as I was torn from the tiny, floating baby body and deposited back in my own. I felt my mind land back inside my adult head as if someone had poured my soul into my skull. With a scream, I jumped up to my feet and glanced around the room.
Elena looked close to tears. Meanwhile, Patrick was still sitting near the side of the bed, a film of sweat across his forehead.
“Whatthefuckjusthappened?” I blurted out.
“Dude—you went completely radio silent,” said Elena. “You said you heard voices but then you wouldn’t tell us what they were saying.”
As my senses came back to me and I regained my bearings, I struggled to breathe. Sucking in air, I bent over and leaned on my thighs.
“Fuck,” I gasped, panting like a hot, thirsty dog. “It was . . . It was . . . ”
I didn’t even know to describe what I’d just heard and seen. I focused on my breathing and tried to fight the urge to pass out.
“Logan,” said Elena, rushing to my side and holding me. “What did you see?”
“Solana and her henchman Sluagh,” I panted. “They were talking about me. I’m Lord Niklas.”
“No, you’re Logan Hawthorne.”
“No . . . Logan was the kid I replaced,” I said, coming to the realization as I said the words out loud and straightened myself up. “I’m Lord Niklas. The real Logan . . . I have no idea what happened to him.”
Elena’s already wide eyes opened even further. Fear was all over her pretty face.
“No . . . ” she breathed, shaking her head in disbelief. “If you replaced someone . . . that means you’re a changeling.”
“A changeling? What’s that?”
Her panicked eyes darted over to Patrick, then back to me.
“Elena? What’s a changeling?”
She rubbed her face and shook her head.
“I’m gonna need another Mountain Dew before I get into this. How do you guys feel about moving this party to the hotel bar?”
Twenty minutes later, Elena was nursing a mammoth-sized soda while I sipped on a perfectly made Americano. Patrick had ordered a beer . . . I sensed that he wanted something stronger but had reconsidered given that it was only three in the afternoon and he was with new clients.
“Alright, so let’s talk about changelings,” Elena said, anchoring herself in the corner of the booth so she could keep a closer eye on me and Patrick. “You must have heard of them in your line of work.”
Patrick shook his head.
“I thought that’s what you called a baby vampire,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“No, you’re thinking of fledglings,” I clarified. “They’re called that because a family of vampires is called a nest.”
“I thought it was a coven.”
I shook my head.
“No, a coven is a group of vampires that aren’t all related. A nest is a group that’s all blood-related.”
“Fascinating,” Patrick said. “You learn something new every day.”
Elena sat up a little straighter, clapped her hands, then rubbed them together in anticipation.
“Alright. So let’s learn about changelings. I’ll start with some history. During the medieval times, when the Dark Ages were spreading across Europe, people started to notice things happening to their kids. Really fucked up things.”
She paused and took another large gulp of her soda.
“Actually, this was happening waaaayyyy before the Dark Ages, but we don’t have any records from before that time. But the point is, parents would wake up and find their baby wasn’t quite like the one they’d put to bed.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t the same?” I asked.
“It just wasn’t,” she said. “Somehow they’d been transformed overnight. Parents would put their babies to bed and wake up to find them hideous and disfigured in the morning. Or maybe they’d look the same but something would be totally off.”
“Off,” said Patrick. “Like a sense that something wasn’t quite right?”
“Exactly. They couldn’t prove it, but they just knew that something was different about their kid.”
I gave my coffee a little swirl and leaned closer from my side of the booth. I cast a sideways glance at Patrick, trying to make sense of the strange visions he’d helped me discover, but it was almost too much to process.
“As the reports of switched babies started to increase,” Elena continued, “so did the reports of encounters with fae.”
“Fae? You mean fairies?” scoffed Patrick.
“All faeries are fae, but not all fae are faeries,” Elena coolly replied. “You said it yourself, that you don’t think Logan is human.”
I felt a flush run over me as she said this out loud, followed by frosty goosebumps. I kept waiting for her to start laughing and say it was all an elaborate joke, that this was just residual effects from my Valium latte, but she was stone cold serious.
“After hearing your second opinion, I know he’s fae,” Elena continued. “Actually, I thought he was fae before that, but now I’m willing to bet my 401k that he is.”
“Um, hello? When did you decide I was fae?” I asked, to which Elena raised a stern eyebrow at me.
“Ohhh . . . right.”
“Yeah,” Elena said, looking straight into my eyes. “I figured it out sometime after dessert.”
Great. Another round of the nervous sweats. I’d been through interrogation training at Quantico and nothing was supposed to rattle me. I guess I missed the lesson in what to do if you drank a little too much and nailed your smoking-hot co-worker and then she told you the next day that she didn’t think you were human. What did that even mean? How did she arrive at that conclusion? Was it something about my dick? I thought it looked like a normal dick, but what did I know? On second thought, what did she know? Had she slept with a bunch of fae guys before me? Did she have a fae fuck buddy that I didn’t know about?
How could she not?
I mean . . . that ass.
She’d told me that she didn’t really date, but dating was different than a casual hookup. And she liked to play those kind
of games where she didn’t say the whole truth. Yeah, I bet she had someone on the side that I didn’t know about. How else could she know I was fae just from sleeping with me?
I didn’t know who he was, but I suddenly wanted to back over him with the Tahoe. The guy was bad news. I just knew it. Elena didn’t need him anymore.
If Patrick hadn’t sensed the tension between us earlier, I had no doubt that he’d picked up on it now.
“Look, I pride myself on being open-minded, but I thought faeries were nothing but characters out of fairy tales.”
I could tell that Elena wanted nothing more than to school this guy on the existence of fairies, but right now we didn’t have time to think about her and her background. We needed to figure out mine.
“Believe it or not, faeries have been part of history for centuries,” I told Patrick. “Just about every culture has some version of them. The Arabic jinns, the slavic veela, the Chinese ancestral spirits . . . they’re all part of the supernatural fae realm.”
Elena beamed at me from across the table. She knew I always did my homework.
“Exactly,” she agreed. “And they all have stories of the fae messing with them, pretending to be someone they weren’t, swapping babies, kids, that kind of thing. ”
Patrick leaned back in his seat, troubled at hearing this.
“So you’re basically saying that Solana, as a fae, stole baby Niklas who is apparently Logan, and swapped him for a human child?”
“It’s what fae have done for a long, long time.”
“Why?” he asked, aghast.
I gave a little shrug.
“I guess when you’re immortal, you get a little bored.”
“That’s one of the reasons,” Elena said, reaching into her purse for a bag of Skittles. “Another is that a faerie might have been screwed over by a human, so they swap their child as a form of revenge. Or sometimes really old faeries approaching death will ask to be swapped into the shape of a human baby so they can be taken up to the human realm and cared for by parents who love them and coddle them until they die.”
“Apologies if I sound skeptical,” said Patrick. “I like to keep an open mind but I’m finding all of this very hard to believe.”
“Well, there are hundreds of these reports,” she told him. “Lots of people over the years thought their kid was a changeling. And not just in the Dark Ages. The latest report of a changeling-related death was only in eighteen-ninety-five.”
“What?” gasped Logan.
“I’m sorry,” said Patrick. “I just think there are probably more rational explanations for these poor babies dying or suddenly becoming disfigured or . . . off, as you put it. They could’ve been sick, had some rare disease, or a genetic anomaly, not to mention mental illnesses. And in the Dark Ages of course, they didn’t have the science to understand what was wrong with them, let alone treat them. So maybe that’s how the faerie changeling myth came about.”
“Respectfully, Patrick, I understand your opinion, and you’re not wrong, but neither am I. Changelings are real.”
“Elena . . . ” I began. “You said there were three reasons they could exist. What’s the third reason?”
“The third reason is the same reason I think you were brought up to the human realm. Some faeries send children up to infiltrate the human world to act as a spy or servant.”
“Or a sleeper,” I said, looking down into my coffee.
“Yeah, like a sleeper. You could live your whole life without knowing you were fae and one day out of the blue you’d be activated. Maybe with a spell of some sort.”
“Or a dream.”
We all fell silent contemplating this until Patrick looked at his gold Rolex and stood up.
“I’m so sorry. This is all fascinating but I really must get to my next appointment. It’s not nearly as exciting as this. A woman wants to find out what the past life of her cat was.”
“Her name isn’t Sylvia, is it?” I asked. Elena almost spit out her mouthful of Mountain Dew.
“No, why?”
“No reason,” I snickered to myself. “You have a good day now, Patrick, and thank you so much for what you did today.”
He scooted out of the booth and shook both our hands.
“I know you’re not in town for long,” he said. “But I really hope we run into each other again. I think there’s a lot you can teach me, Elena. You too, Logan. I’ll be reading up on changelings as soon as I get home.”
18
Elena
“So that was interesting,” I said, leaning back in the corner of the booth while gulping the last of my Mountain Dew.
“You’re telling me,” Logan groaned. He was resting his elbows on the table and had buried his face in his hands. “Obviously I’m having the craziest dreams, and I can’t ignore the conversation I just overheard with Solana and Sluagh, but I still don’t understand how I can be fae. I don’t feel any different.”
“Well, it’s not like you just turned into one of those arrogant, conceited, moody-as-fuck, high-born elves overnight,” I said, trying to sound rational. “You’ve been one your whole life.”
“I’m not moody!” he snapped.
“Dude—” I laughed, “you are literally snapping at me and pouting into your coffee!”
“Yeah, maybe ‘cause you and some hypnotherapist just told me I’m not human, and you keep saying I’m some conceited asshole! How’s that supposed to be helpful?”
I rolled my eyes and sat up in my seat beside him.
“What I’m saying, is that there’s a reason why you are the way you are. I just assumed it was your white male privilege. It also looks a lot like how elves and other high fae act.”
“And how do these high fae act?” Logan practically growled.
“Entitled as fuck. They all think they’re hot shit because they’re super strong, smart as hell, and drop dead gorgeous—and they know it. So yeah, it comes off as conceited, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing you’re a total badass. You couldn’t help it even if you wanted to. Those traits are more concentrated in the families with ancient bloodlines.”
Logan’s mouth became a flat line as he stewed in his seat.
“That’s why Solana said she chose me,” he said quietly. “My family’s bloodline.”
I swallowed hard. That sure sounded like something Solana would care about.
“That makes a lot of sense if you’re the son of the Marquess and Marchioness of Tierstand. Their family tree goes back just as far as mine.”
Logan kept staring into his coffee cup. There was about a quarter left in the bottom, but it had gone cold. I knew he wouldn’t drink it.
“I just thought if it was true, that I’d have some kind of superpowers,” he said, lifting his head and turning to me. All I could do was shrug.
“Did you ever get hurt playing football? Ever fall off your bike and break your arm? Anything like that?”
“No. I’ve never broken a bone in my life. Never been seriously hurt, either. I just figured it’s because I was a really good athlete.”
I couldn’t help smirking.
“Of course you’d think that. But the truth is that you’re stronger than a human. That’s a superpower.”
“I thought my powers would be cooler shit than being good at sports and not getting hurt,” he said, getting frustrated with me. “You brought back Lafayette from the brink of death! Your healing powers seemed to lodge the stick out of Johnson’s ass. I know what you’re capable of, Elena. But I’m just a normal, typical guy.”
“Pfft . . . There’s nothing normal or typical about you,” I laughed. Logan’s face lit up in an incredulous scowl. Damn, it was irresistible.
“The first time we worked together, you called me a fucking meathead! You thought I was a dumb jock because I played football in college.”
“And you thought I was the girl that delivered sandwiches. You were such a dick.”
He opened his mouth to argue, then hesitated for a brie
f moment.
“Hey . . . that reminds me . . . why did you say you knew I was fae after . . . after we went back to your room last night? Was there, um . . . something specific that gave it away?”
I tipped my glass to my mouth until a lone ice cube fell onto my tongue. I needed something to chew on while I thought of how best to phrase what I’d felt when I was with him. Did I tiptoe around the obvious, or did I put it all out there?
Oh, who was I kidding? Logan was the one who said we had to stop this from happening again . . . not me. I felt zero obligation to pussyfoot around his ego.
“I don’t think there was anything specific that gave it away,” I admitted. “It was all of it. All of you. The way you look . . . the way you smell . . . the way you taste . . . the way you feel . . . ”
He licked his lips, nodding faintly as if he was on the right track, but needed help getting to the bottom of this wondrous mystery.
“What do I feel like?”
I snickered under my breath.
“That sounds an awful lot like high fae for, ‘Tell me more about myself.’ Why does it matter what you felt like?” I asked, crunching another ice cube. “You told me last night wasn’t gonna happen again.”
A smug smile spread across Logan’s face.
“I thought my dad was having a heart attack. I was under duress.”
My pulse started to thump a little harder. I glanced into the bottom of my cup. Damn. I was all out of ice cubes.
I pinned my gaze to his pool blue eyes, wanting to dive into them to escape the rising heat.
“Maybe you were under duress, but you don’t get to tell me what this is or isn’t gonna be,” I argued, waving my finger at him.
“Oh, I already know what this is going to be, because it’s going to happen again,” he said, leaning closer to give me a sultry grin. It seemed the more outraged I appeared, the more it turned him on. “It’s going to be complicated. It’s not going to be something I want anyone else in the bureau knowing about. And if I’m going to be fucking you . . . there isn’t going to be anyone else fucking you. That’s what it’s going to be.”
Catnip & Curses (The Faerie Files Book 2) Page 18