Hunt: An Urban Faery Tale (The Faery Chronicles Book 1)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  It took them a while to stand up and brush themselves off. Rude made four attempts at running his mouth, fifth time the charm. “You okay, dude?”

  Kevin nodded. “Where’d the bus go?”

  “To Faery. That’s where it always goes when it disappears, according to Oscar. Always before dawn.”

  “You’re joking, man.”

  “It’s no weirder than anything else that happened tonight,” Rude said.

  Kevin gave him the point.

  “So what did she tell you?” Rude asked.

  “A name,” Kevin said. “Doesn’t seem like much compared to a whole night of my life.”

  “Some people figure it’s worth its weight in gold,” Rude said. “Or more, definitely more.”

  “Who’s some people?”

  Rude studied his shoes. “Guys who work with the Fae their whole lives and still never hear a name.”

  That sounded personal. “Like you?”

  “Maybe.” Yes.

  And it made Kevin feel like a dick for having something his friend didn’t. Especially since Rude had stuck his neck out so far to help him. “Why do you think I got so lucky?”

  “She likes you, man.”

  What kind of answer was that? “She probably likes lots of people.”

  “No, man,” Rude said. “She likes you.”

  He didn’t even know how to take that. “No way.”

  “Dude, she doesn’t smile at everybody.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Kevin said.

  “Maybe.”

  They laughed, long and hard. Kevin had never needed to laugh so badly—if for no other reason than to camouflage the heavy case of the shakes he felt coming on. It exhausted him so much he didn’t think he had any energy left to freak out. It took him a while to catch his breath.

  “I need to ask you something,” he said, finally.

  “Shoot, dude.”

  “What did those cops or whatever they are ever tell you about the girl who died at your house?”

  “That she was in her mid-twenties, no I.D., blah blah. Why?”

  “Because I think the Faery on the bus is that girl.”

  “Come again, Kev?”

  “Gut feeling,” he said. “Too many coincidences.”

  “You gotta give me more than that,” Rude said.

  “I can’t, man.” Not when it involved Simone’s name. But if he couldn’t tell Rude about that one conclusive coincidence, would Rude believe him?

  “How are we going to know for sure?” Rude asked.

  Kevin could only think of one way. “My bet is on the cops-who-aren’t. They have to be connected.” And they were the whole reason they’d come out here to begin with. “I can’t believe I didn’t ask her about them.”

  Not that she’d given him a chance, because she’d been so strange. And beautiful. And scary. And overwhelming.

  “Sad, man. It’s too late now.”

  “How?” Kevin asked. “I’ve got her name. I can just call and ask.”

  “No, you can’t,” Rude said. “I mean, you shouldn’t. That kind of thing is only for if you absolutely need her. And this isn’t like that—at least not yet.”

  “If I call her anyway?”

  “You’d be crying wolf,” Rude said. “It’s not that she wouldn’t come. But she wouldn’t like it. And then where would you be when you need her fast? Up shit creek, that’s where.”

  Mighty rich coming from a guy who’d worked so hard—with no joy—to get what the Fae had given Kevin at first sight. Jealous much?

  It was an ugly thought. Kevin hated it, and he clamped his mouth shut before it could worm its way out. He had very few friends left. He wanted to keep them.

  So he could start by taking Rude at his word. After all, Rude knew more than he did. Without Rude, he wouldn’t have known what to do.

  He smelled water in the air. Fast-moving clouds obscured the sky. Lightning lit them from behind, like a photo-negative. Far-off thunder rumbled. He and Rude put themselves in the car for the drive home.

  Rude turned the key in the ignition. The dash clock glowed to life. 3:17.

  Kevin whistled. “We couldn’t have been in that bus more than half an hour. We must’ve been passed out in the street a helluva long time.”

  “It was the bus,” Rude said. “Bus keeps Faery time.”

  “So if we’d stayed in there, say, all night?” Kevin asked.

  “Earliest we’d have come out? Probably dinner time tomorrow. Not that it’s an exact calculation. It’s kind of muzzy.”

  Muzzy. Good word for how his head felt. He buckled up nice and slow. The first drops of rain sprinkled the windshield. “So that thing about human time you were thinking at me? And why could I hear you think, anyway? Was there immiment mortal danger?”

  “You want to end up like some of those guys in the fairy tales? Fall asleep in Faery and wake up in a hundred years?” Rude gave Kevin a minute to let that sink in. Then he turned up the tunes and peeled out, leaving a trail of rubber on the road.

  CHAPTER TEN

  KEVIN WOKE IN THE MORNING without any memory of the rest of the drive home, or of falling into bed with his clothes still on. He stunk of Mexican food and Rude’s cigarettes and rotting school bus and whatever had been on the street by the car where he and Rude had passed out.

  Another smell crept beneath all those things: something warm and dark. It reminded him of Simone with the gossamer wings. Of the power that had crackled around her. Magic.

  Which made no sense. How could you smell magic?

  He didn’t have a lot of time to get ready for school, where he so did not want to be today. Yesterday’s awfulness aside, two hours’ sleep would have him face-down on his desk by second period. Now it just made for an unbalanced walk to the shower and a slightly less groggy march to the kitchen.

  Where his dad sat at the breakfast table, normal as you please, reading the paper. By the looks of it, having chowed down on fruit, yogurt, and toast.

  “Morning,” Kevin said, normally. He waited for his dad to return the greeting. Or to launch into some explanation about his disappearing act. To apologize.

  With the way things had been going, he should’ve known better. Long wait, standing in line for those skates at the ice rink in hell.

  His father cleared his throat to say something, all right. And forget frogs, the man sounded like he had a freight train in there. The question that came out didn’t have anything to do with how are you? Or how was school yesterday? Or even where were you when I got home? All of those, Kevin could have answered and not ended up in more of a mess.

  Instead, he got: “I looked for you in your room last night, after ten. I wanted to check on you, tell you good night. Where were you, Kevin?”

  “I left a note.”

  “I didn’t believe it.”

  He was so busted. And pissed. “Am I a habitual liar?”

  “You’re acting funny, Kevin.”

  “And you’d notice that how?”

  His father ignored that. He took a breath and started again. “Where were you?”

  “Rude’s. Like the note said.” He needed coffee. Lots of coffee. He chose the largest mug in the cabinet and tried to pour without spilling all over the pristine, white-tiled counter.

  “I called his house, Kevin. His parents don’t remember seeing you. Or him, for that matter.”

  Kevin’s hand bobbled, splattering liquid all over the counter. So much for the perfect pour. He grabbed the sponge from over by the sink and tried to clear the cobwebs from his synapses while he mopped up the spill.

  There was nothing he could say to fix this. He could only tell his dad the truth—no, as close to the truth as he could come.

  “We went out, Dad.”

  His father folded the paper and set it on the table. “And the part where you’re grounded and not supposed to do that? Did you think about that?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “And you chose to disregard it,” h
is dad said.

  Kevin shook his head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “You want to tell me what it was like?”

  Kevin guzzled coffee and burned the crap out of his tongue. “School sucked. Everyone thinks I had something to do with that girl at Rude’s house. Even Scott blew me off.”

  “I’m sorry about Scott,” his dad said. Not a word about the other stuff. What, did he think Kevin deserved all that?

  “I just needed to blow off some steam.” Not that he would’ve done that with his dad, but he couldn’t have if he’d wanted to, could he? Because his father had flat-out abandoned him for a couple of days.

  “You’re still grounded. Doesn’t change that fact.”

  Kevin nodded.

  “I’ll be picking you up from school today.” His father pushed away from the table. “And tomorrow, and the day after that.”

  Things were bad enough. Now this? Of all the mortifying things he’d never live down. “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Obviously, I do.”

  “C’mon, Dad. Don’t do this to me.”

  “You did it to yourself, Kevin.”

  Because he hadn’t followed the letter of the law. Well, it was a stupid law. “Can’t you cut me some slack?”

  “You want slack?” his father asked. “Next time, don’t get caught.”

  In what universe did a father say something like that? His mother would never have even considered it. It would’ve been about The Principle of the Thing, her words. Not about doing what you could get away with.

  God, he missed her. Everything would be different if she was here. If she hadn’t gone and died. He took a deep breath and blew it out slow, measured. Controlled.

  Sometimes his dad went on about how he was doing the best he could. What else did Kevin expect? What did Kevin want from him?

  He wanted his father back the way he’d been before.

  None of this would be happening if his mom were alive. Kevin wished she’d never gone out that night.

  Might as well wish for the Easter bunny to be real. Or the monster under the bed. Or Faeries. A hysterical laugh clawed up the back of his throat. He held it in and rubbed his temples. Any minute now his head would explode.

  He shut down that whole train of thought. Period. End of thinking. Never to come up again, please and thanks.

  “Is that it?” he asked, finally. “You gonna drive me to school, too?”

  “I have to go to work. I trust you can get yourself there.” With that, his dad walked away.

  He topped off his half-empty mug, even though there couldn’t be enough coffee in the entire world to wake him up from this nightmare.

  He threw on a sweatshirt over his tee and slipped into his sneakers, shoved his English assignment into his backpack. Grendel the outcast. He tried not to see parallels and metaphors and all that kind of crap. He wasn’t an outcast. If he told himself that enough times, maybe it would turn out to be true.

  On his way out the door, he noticed he’d turned his cell off—probably sometime last night, though he didn’t remember it. Or maybe something about the magic had fried it. He was just glad it powered up normally. And showed him he had three messages.

  Hi, this is Amy, calling for Kevin. Kevin, call me. Followed by a garbled number.

  Hey, Kevin. Amy. Britt told me something today I wanted to check out with you. Can you call me? Anytime before midnight is okay. Thanks.

  The words “Britt told me something” had his hackles up. He remembered the way Britt and Zoe walked behind them on the way to class. The sideways looks they gave him. He tried not to worry about what the “something” might be.

  The next message? His heart sank. All the goodwill had bled out of Amy’s voice.

  Hi, Kevin. I need to talk to you about our plans for Friday. See you tomorrow, okay?

  The walk seemed to take forever. The houses on either side watched him, their empty windows like dark eyes. Hedges of red-tipped photinia and azaleas walled off yards like prison bars. He passed the four-way stop where the block split without seeing a soul.

  With a quarter block left to go, he checked out the busy four lanes of traffic on Rice Boulevard he’d have to cross, and the front of the school.

  Buses filled the driveway, none of them rusted and full of chimes and strange tattooed Faery girls. People sat on the lawn, doing last-minute homework and eating snack-machine breakfasts and passing rumors.

  Sometimes Amy hung out there on the grass. He didn’t see her this morning, though. Not that he didn’t want to. He just didn’t want her to treat him like something she scraped off the bottom of her shoe—or worse, like she felt sorry for him. Then again, if she’d wanted to do that, she could have just blown him off over the phone. Left him a sorry-something’s-come-up-don’t-ever-talk-to-me-again message on his voice mail.

  He noticed Rude at the corner, on the neighborhood side of Rice. Resplendent in today’s green Hawaiian shirt, no backpack. In fact, nothing at all that would indicate he planned on going into that building across the way.

  “Got a proposition for you, man,” Rude said with a glint in his eye.

  Kevin needed more trouble like he needed to be grounded some more, with new and improved restrictions.

  Rude didn’t beat around the bush. “We’d have to ditch.”

  When he didn’t show up for classes, someone in the administration office might call his father. If by some miracle they didn’t do that, then he’d still have to write an excuse and forge his dad’s signature. Too many pitfalls.

  Worse than what his dad might do to him if he got caught? Losing his chance at a scholarship.

  He sighed. “You know I can’t do that, man.”

  “I know. A-student and all that. But there’s something I’ve got to show you.”

  Kevin didn’t like the way that sounded. “What do you mean ‘got to?’”

  “Got a call from Oscar,” Rude said.

  “At eight o’clock in the morning?”

  “Five, actually. Fucker woke me up.” Disturbed him, too, by the looks of it.

  People only called at times like that when they had to. When they needed bailing out. Or when someone had died. “So, what’s the emergency?”

  “It’s about your dad,” Rude said.

  As if. “You mean the guy who knew I sneaked out last night? That guy?”

  “That sucks, Kev.”

  “No shit. Didn’t you get in trouble?”

  “Nope.”

  “But my dad said he called your house. He busted you with your folks.”

  “They were up when I got home, waiting for me. Five minutes later, they’d gone to bed and forgotten all about my being gone—and about my being with you—just like that.” Rude snapped his fingers.

  Kevin heard the awe in his own voice. “How?”

  “It’s a charm Oscar gave me. Keeps the parents off my back when I can. When it’s important.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I can only use it when there’s not a lot of people involved. That’s why I couldn’t use it when the cops raided the party. Too many of us, too many of them. I can’t work on that many memories at once. Also, I don’t use it unless I have to. It has a big price. All magic has a price.”

  “Like what you’re set to pay Oscar tonight? Whatever that is?” He wanted to know.

  “Chop wood, carry water,” Rude said. “Chores and crap. At least it has an upside. The good luck rubs off on me, or at least it seems to stick around a while.”

  A light bulb went off. Kevin couldn’t help grinning. “That have anything to do with why you can get away with smoking at school?”

  “Maybe so.” Rude changed the subject. “But seriously, dude. About your dad.”

  Kevin shifted the weight of his backpack. “Oscar doesn’t know my dad.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Rude said. “Remember that stuff he talked about? He’s a seer. He just knows things.”

  Because the Faeries t
old him. Faeries like Simone.

  “What exactly did he tell you about my father?” Kevin asked.

  “He gave me a time and a place and said be there. Around ten. We should see something important.”

  And for something that vague he’d skip class and risk screwing up his life? Oscar and Rude, they had to be crazy to think that. He would have to be crazy to think it.

  “Is it bad?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, man.”

  Yeah, but with Oscar and the Faeries, how could it be good?

  “My ride’s one block over,” Rude said. “We’ll be back before anyone misses us.”

  That was outright bullshit. “If they call our parents because I’m not in class?”

  “They won’t,” Rude said.

  “Your famous luck?”

  “Maybe.”

  Again with the bullshit. But whatever, he was going.

  Kevin gave the front lawn of the school one last look and saw Amy with her girlfriends. She had on a dark green cardigan with a lacy something underneath, a long black skirt with rivets at the hem, her boots. And she’d braided her hair today. She looked amazing.

  “We’ve gotta move now,” Rude said.

  Meaning he didn’t have time to go over and talk to her. Kevin didn’t like it. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and texted her.

  Got yr messages. Tied up last nite. Xplain later.

  He watched her receive and read. She looked up and met his gaze. After a moment, she texted back. QT.

  Anyone asked her, she’d deny having seen them. That would have to be good enough for now.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THEY DROVE WEST. Until they made it out of the immediate vicinity, beyond the crossing guards and the cops aiming their radar guns at unsuspecting school zone speeders, Kevin felt sure someone with authority would flag them down. He fidgeted as inconspicuously as possible for almost a mile, not wanting it to be obvious that he never did anything like this. Or course, Rude knew that. But still, he didn’t want to look like a spaz.

  Once they were out of any danger he could see, he expected Rude to turn around. After all, his dad worked downtown. East. But no.

  Rude hadn’t exactly said they’d be going there. Kevin had just assumed.