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

by Leslie Claire Walker

  If the way Rude looked last night scared Kevin, things had plummeted to a whole other level.

  He not only had a set of industrial-sized luggage under his eyes, his face seemed hollowed out there—so much that Kevin could have sworn for a second he saw Rude’s skull. The corners of his mouth trembled like Kevin had seen his dad’s do last Christmas, when he’d barely held himself together. And he seemed smaller, like he’d wasted away some.

  A hundred questions dueled in Kevin’s head. When he opened his mouth, something completely different poured out. “You’re a dead man.”

  Rude’s voice had grown scratchy since last night. “Close, but not yet.”

  “You were supposed to let me know what happened. Whether you found Oscar.”

  “I promised if I got jammed up I’d call,” Rude said. “I’m fine.”

  “Have you taken a look in the mirror lately?”

  “That bad, huh?” Rude took a shaky drag on his smoke, pitched it, and smashed it out with the heel of his shoe.

  “What went down, man? I saw the article in the paper this morning.”

  Rude fumbled in his pocket for his portable ashtray tin. “I found Oscar on Simone’s bus.”

  That didn’t make any sense. “But the bus disappeared last night into Faery. I saw it go.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, what? You went to Faery to find Oscar?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kevin stared at him.

  “I had a little trouble bringing him back.” Rude finally dug the tin out of his pocket. He tried to open it, but his fingers didn’t do the job.

  Kevin took the thing from him and pried the lid open, getting a nose full of burnt tobacco and paper stink. “How much trouble?”

  Rude started to say one thing, but clearly changed his mind. “It’s a scary place, dude. I’ll tell you later.”

  In other words, not here. “How’s Oscar?”

  “He’ll live.” The look in Rude’s eyes testified that it’d been a close call.

  “Where’s he at?”

  “My house.”

  Kevin’s jaw dropped. “With your parents?”

  “In the pool house, Kev. Laying low.”

  And by himself. “And you left him to come here because why?”

  Rude sighed. “That girl I was talking to?”

  “Stacy.”

  “Yeah, her. She had some important information to give me about how to counter the magic that almost took me down today.”

  “She’d know that how?”

  “She’s a witch,” Rude said matter-of-factly.

  Kevin blinked at him. “A what?”

  “Never mind, Kev. Let’s go.”

  “Back to your house.” Of course that was where they’d go.

  “For as long as you can stay.”

  Right. He had his father to think about. And if he didn’t, Rude would do it for him.

  The big guy bent to pick up the butt from the ground. It took him two tries to get down there without toppling.

  “Keys, man.” Rude had no business driving.

  Kevin told him about the unmarked car on the way to explain why he took the scenic route. Rude not only didn’t argue, he asked Kevin to circle the block a couple of times to make sure no surprises lurked nearby.

  All the lights were off in the front room of the pool house, and Rude didn’t flip the switch when they went in. They followed the pathway through the wicker furniture maze by the late afternoon light that streamed in through the window blinds and by the glow that issued from the crack beneath the closed bedroom door in the back.

  Oscar slept like the dead on one of the made-up twin beds. If Kevin hadn’t watched him closely enough to pick up the very slight rise and fall of his chest, he’d have called the man a corpse.

  Someone had worked over his face the same way they’d done a number on Rude’s. A nasty gash started at the top of Oscar’s shoulder and vanished under the once-white fabric of his wife-beater. His jeans had been shredded below the knee, the skin there a mesh of scabbed scratches. His bare feet looked to be the only part of him untouched. Battered steel-toed work boots stuffed with balled-up socks lay at the foot of the bed.

  “Was he like this when you found him?” Kevin asked.

  “He was awake. He’s the one who got us out of Faery and back home. If it hadn’t been for him, it could’ve been a lot worse.”

  In other words, Rude had been lucky again. It scared Kevin to think what unlucky might’ve looked like. “You want to tell me about it now?”

  Rude settled on the empty bed. “Stacy helped me track Oscar last night. We followed the energy trail he took to get away from the soul sucker. It went straight into Faery.”

  “She’s the one who told me you weren’t at school this morning.”

  Rude nodded. “I told her you might come looking for me.”

  “You told her.”

  “Look, dude, we each have the stuff we have to do. I needed to go after Oscar. You needed to be in school.”

  “Sorry if school doesn’t seem all that big a deal when people’s lives are on the line.”

  “What did you do at school today, Kev?”

  He thought about it. “I got some information on the Faery Queen that we might be able to use.”

  “That’s important,” Rude said.

  “Other than that, I stayed out of trouble, just like I told Mr. Nance I would. Big deal.”

  “It is, Kev.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “When everything is said and done, your life’s not gonna be over. You’ll still have to live it.”

  Kevin couldn’t help looking at Rude like he was an alien. “Unless the Faery King takes me.”

  “I don’t plan on that happening,” Rude said. “Do you?”

  He guessed he didn’t. But he didn’t know how to stop it, either. Not yet. “Since when did you become my big brother?”

  “Since Oscar went down, and now I have to do his job. He wanted you protected.”

  “I didn’t ask you to protect me,” Kevin said. “Either of you.”

  “You need it, dumbass.”

  Kevin opened his mouth to reply, but Rude bowled right over him. “You’re only starting to get an idea of what you’re dealing with. I’m trying to help you, dude, but I don’t know a quarter of what Oscar does. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m flying on instinct and my stupid fucking luck. I’m as in over my head as you are.”

  And he was mad as hell about it. Kevin couldn’t blame him. He knew for real how Rude felt.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Rude shook his head. “It’s not fine.”

  “Okay, okay.” Kevin raised his hands. “Truce.”

  Some of the mad drained out of Rude, and the mattress sagged under his weight. “You wanted to know what happened to us in Faery. Near as I can tell from Oscar, he took refuge with Simone. It took everything he had to get there, to her bus, because he had to go into Faery. She said she only let him on because of how bad he was hurt. And because of you.”

  Kevin raised a brow.

  “Yeah, I know, dude. I told you already she likes you.”

  “Likes?” Kevin asked. “Or likes?”

  “Dumbass,” Rude said again, only this time it sounded like a term of endearment.

  Kevin felt a whole world of trouble land square on his shoulders. He didn’t want to deal with it now. “So what was it like, Faery?”

  “You know how I said before that it was scary?” Rude rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Everything you’ve ever been afraid of, everything you’re afraid you might find there or that might happen to you there—it’s in your face. Real ghosts from the past. Real monsters, Kev. The soul sucker? He was there. Ten feet tall and bulletproof. Much worse than he was when I ran into him at the restaurant.”

  Kevin shuddered.

  “No kidding,” Rude said. “You’d better be thinking about what you’ll run into and how you’re gonna handle it.”

  T
o free his father, he had to coax a tear out of the Faery King. Chances were, he’d end up having to do that in Faery. Which meant he’d have to run the same gauntlet.

  He’d have to face his own nightmares.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  KEVIN TOOK A SHORTCUT home and let himself in the back door, partly in case of the cops and partly in case his dad pulled in earlier than expected. The contents of the fridge told a sad story: no meat tonight. There was none to speak of except a couple of cans of tuna fish, and he didn’t feel like a casserole. He needed to throw out some stops to get what he wanted.

  While he boiled pasta, he threw some olive oil, onions, and garlic in a saucepan, the beginnings of a kickin’ sauce. He tossed a salad and saved some time with pre-packaged garlic bread from the grocery store. Into the oven it went.

  The spicy and savory scents wafted through the front of the house, sure to satisfy his father that he’d followed orders. A good thing, too, since his dad’s key turned in the lock just as he drained the pasta.

  Franklin hung his keys on the brass holder in the entryway and set his briefcase on the floor against the wall. “We having that Italian thing?”

  “That’s the one,” Kevin said.

  His dad took off his tie and washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “Feed the bear, son.”

  “Hungry, are you?”

  “It was a long day,” his dad said, and sat down at the table.

  Kevin gauged the sitch. His dad didn’t look any worse for wear today. If Oscar hadn’t told him how little time the man had, he’d have thought things were getting better. He might not have noticed that his father caressed the silverware and traced the edge of his plate over and over again, fit to wear a hole in his finger.

  Kevin served them both and squirmed through the awkward grace his father offered. After that, neither of them said much for the fifteen minutes it took to wolf down most of dinner. Kevin ate as much if not more than his dad. He’d had a long day himself, and since Rude had come home safe—or some reasonable facsimile thereof—his appetite returned, too.

  “Today at work the manager announced the company is taking bids,” his dad said. “We’ll be bought out. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Kevin tried to absorb the words. “What does that mean for you?”

  “Probably nothing. My department might be consolidated with the one at the company who ends up buying us. If they already have someone doing that job who they like better, or who they can get to work for less money than I make, I might need to start looking for another job.”

  Kevin picked at the remains of his salad. “When will you know?”

  “In the next month or so,” his dad said. “I don’t want you to worry about it. I don’t know why I even told you.”

  Because he couldn’t handle keeping it to himself, that was why. He didn’t have any friends that Kevin could tell; he’d let them all drift away—or in some cases, sent them away—after last Halloween. He neither needed nor wanted company to help him drown his sorrows.

  But he thought Kevin had some kind of superpowers (besides sarcasm) that enabled him to handle the house plus whatever trip his father laid on him. He could handle worrying for the both of them.

  Not that Kevin bothered to say any of that. He just got up from the table and started to scrape plates and load the dishwasher.

  “How was your day?” his dad asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine, he lied.” His dad flashed a wry grin that Kevin wanted to wipe off his face.

  What did the man want from him? “I’m having a hard time in some of my classes. People are still treating me like a super-freak and I’m still grounded. What else do you want to know?”

  “What’s for homework?”

  If he was going to ask outright to use the computer, now was the time. The lie rolled off his tongue easy, with (he hoped) the right level of annoyance. “We’re moving to some mythological stuff in English now that we’re done with Beowulf. Something called The Ballad of Thomas Rhymer. There’s, like, three different versions of the story, and I need to look them up, read them, and print them out for class tomorrow. Then Mrs. Cahill wants us to write all of them out the way we would say them today.”

  “The slave driver.”

  “Anyway, I need to be on the computer tonight.”

  His dad folded his napkin and set it on the table. “That’s all right. I can just watch the game in the living room for a while, while you do your thing.”

  Kevin cleared his dad’s dishes. “With the sound up so loud?”

  “What’s wrong with the sound?”

  “When you watch the game in your room, I can hear the announcers all the way down the hall,” Kevin said. “That’s loud.”

  “Point taken, Kev, but I like it like that.”

  “And I need to be able to hear myself think when I’m working.”

  “So what do you want?” his father asked.

  “I’m old enough to be online by myself. I don’t need you to watch me anymore. It’s not like I’m going to chat rooms or IMing with anyone. It’s for school.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  Just like Kevin wouldn’t allow himself the most obvious reply to that statement: You’re batshit crazy, and she’d be kicking your ass and finding ways to help me out, Dad.

  “She might’ve been okay with your watching the game in your room and coming in to check on me every once in a while,” he said.

  His dad mulled that over. “We’ll try it this once.”

  “I’m old enough to take care of myself, Dad.”

  “Not until I say you are,” his father said. “You don’t like it, you can deal with my loud TV in the same room.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” Kevin said.

  His dad set up shop in his room, the game announcer motor-mouthing loud enough Kevin could hear it in the kitchen, for crying out loud.

  When he got down to business, he saw that he’d been right. His father had bookmarks in the most interesting places, and he’d been to them not too long ago. If Kevin was going to use them, he’d have to do it in the same order as they appeared on most-recently-viewed list. And pray his dad didn’t get a hankering for checking the date and time they’d most recently been accessed.

  He figured his dad would give him half an hour alone, and an hour all-told. He searched Thomas Rhymer first so he’d have something to report right away.

  True Thomas lay on Huntlie banks . . .

  He discovered nothing in the story about the Faery King. But he did find out Thomas’s seven years in Faery transformed him into a man with magic. That the Faery Queen had offered him a token before she took him back to the human realm. She offered to make him a master harper or a prophet, and he chose prophecy. He foretold a lot of things, and all of them came true.

  He also came away with the tongue that couldn’t lie. He couldn’t tell a whopper even to save his own life. How screwed could you get?

  Kevin went off on his tangent, following in his father’s footsteps.

  First up, he found a story about Tam Lin, a mortal man who fell from his horse and was kidnapped by the Faery Queen. He had Faery magic, and he haunted a glade where Scottish legend held he seduced wayward women. One day he did that to a girl named Janet, who got pregnant and tried to abort the child by taking herbs she found in the forest. Tam Lin appeared and changed her mind. He told her he was afraid the Faeries would use him to pay their every-seven-years tithe to hell on Halloween night.

  He would ride that night with a company of knights, and Janet could recognize him because he’d be the only one riding a white horse. Janet had to catch him.

  He warned her that once she did, he would transform into all kinds of animals because the Faeries wouldn’t want to let him go. He swore he wouldn’t hurt her, but that when he finally turned into a hot coal, she should throw him into a well and he would emerge a mortal man, and he would be hers. The Faery Queen would be pissed, but she’
d have no choice but to let him go. And they lived happily ever after.

  Kevin could see the parallels, especially the part about the knights riding on Halloween. And he thought of Simone, having been prisoner of the Faeries for seven years.

  Next.

  He found the ballad of Sir Orfeo, a human king whose exceptionally beautiful wife was kidnapped from beneath an apple tree by the King of Faery. Orfeo fell into depression and wandered in the woods for ten years, until he spied the Faery host (also known as the Wild Hunt!) and followed them into Faery. There he entertained the Faery King by playing the harp.

  The King enjoyed his music so much that he granted Orfeo a gift, anything he wanted. Orfeo asked for his wife. The Faery King had no choice but to give her back. Orfeo took her back to the human realm and regained his throne. The End.

  The story told Kevin a lot—the Faery King liked exceptionally beautiful women, and maybe had something to do with apple trees. He liked harp music. And if he liked it enough, he went all magnanimous.

  Seeing as Kevin wasn’t willing to use Amy as bait under an apple tree, assuming he could fine one, and he didn’t know how to play the harp—or any instrument, for that matter—the Sir Orfeo blueprint didn’t look all that attractive.

  He clicked back over to the Thomas Rhymer site—just in time.

  His father padded up behind him, the only sound he made the clink of his beer bottle against the metal buckle of his belt. “How’s it going, Kev?”

  “It’s a weird story,” he said. “Did you know the guy is called True Thomas because he makes prophecies?”

  “And because he can’t lie.”

  Kevin glanced over his shoulder. His dad seemed to have deteriorated in the time since dinner. Some of the blank look that had suffused his face in the parking lot across from the restaurant was back. And the part of his father’s expression that didn’t have the blank? It had the suspicious expression.

  No way could his dad know what he was up to. Could he?

  Kevin said what he thought his dad would expect. “No lying—that would make life a lot harder.”

  His dad nodded. “Sometimes you need to lie. Little white lies, so you don’t hurt people’s feelings.”