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

by Leslie Claire Walker

  “Isn’t that called tact?” Kevin asked.

  “Funny man.” But his dad didn’t laugh. “How long do you think you’ll need here?”

  “Long enough to find the other couple of versions and print them out.”

  “When you’re done, shut it down and go on ahead to your room.”

  “Because I’m still grounded.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  His dad walked back to his room. Clink, clink went the beer bottle against his belt buckle. Click went the door to his father’s room. The sound of the game came back with a vengeance.

  Except Kevin never heard it turn off—or the volume go down—in the first place. He’d never heard his dad open the door. It was almost like his dad had tried to sneak up on him. His dad who, like Rude, couldn’t stealth his way out of a paper bag.

  Why? Garden-variety parental snooping? Or something gun-on-the-front-seat sinister?

  Kevin hadn’t heard his father think. That was something. On the other hand, by the time he did, he’d be in imminent mortal danger. It might be too late to get out.

  A guy could go crazy thinking about that. Or he could finish his (ahem) homework.

  His father’s links didn’t give him much more on the Faery King, but he did find something very informative about the Wild Hunt and Halloween.

  Legend had it that on that night, the veil that separated the human realm and the realm of the Faeries was thin enough to break through. And on that night, too, for certain humans who had been marked by the Faeries, the veil between their normal, everyday human selves and any innate magical abilities grew thin enough that those abilities could manifest.

  For those humans, the days leading up to Halloween were often marked by strange occurrences. Prophetic dreams. Foreknowledge, knowing ahead of time what would happen a few minutes or a day later. Second sight, the ability to see ghosts and Faeries, who traditionally stayed invisible to the human eye.

  On Halloween, the Wild Hunt with the Faery King riding point came for those humans and stole them away to Faery. Some of the humans reappeared days or weeks or months—or years—later, often not in their right minds. The rest of the humans the Faeries took? Never seen again.

  Jesus.

  All the things that had been happening to him over the last few days, the way he could hear thoughts—it started to make the kind of sense he didn’t want to think about.

  He caught one other thing that seemed important: the Hunt was made up of the King and the ghosts of the dead. Nobody living—at least, no one human.

  He did the best he could to cover his trail and called it a night, closing and locking his bedroom door. He eyed the baseball bat beside his bed, the one he’d set there last night. And lay down in his clothes and stocking feet, same as last night. He left the lights on, too. Just in case.

  The soft mattress seduced his bones. He so badly needed to shut down—to rest his body, to take his mind off everything for a few hours. If he could reboot, maybe he could wake up with some idea of what to do.

  He closed his eyes, thinking about Rude’s story of monsters that started out as fears and ended up solid and real in the realm of Faery.

  And snapped awake at 3:34 AM by the glowing red display on his alarm clock. The lights he’d left on burned his sleep-deprived eyes.

  The ceiling fan whirred. The house creaked and settled. Outside, the wind rattled dead leaves on their branches.

  His breath came fast and hard—he didn’t know why. He didn’t remember having a nightmare. But every muscle in his body tensed. Every cell balanced on edge. He wrapped his fingers around the bat’s handle. And waited, as still as possible.

  Time stretched. The minutes passed. With. Perfect. Agony.

  But nothing happened. Gradually, his breathing began to settle. He relaxed his legs. Wiggled his fingers. Loosened his grip on the bat.

  Adrenaline seeped away. He started to drift again, exhaustion taking over. His dreams reached out to drag him under. He succumbed.

  And felt grass beneath him, manicured to obsessive perfection—he was sitting on a lawn, the lush scent of roses on the autumn wind that lifted his hair from his forehead and cooled his skin. The branches of the great live oak to his right rustled, the shadows of its leaves dappling the afternoon sun. He caught sight of a blackbird and watched it pick at the ground with its beak. It tilted its head at him. He thought maybe it looked at him the way another human person would. Its eyes seemed too wise for a bird’s.

  It made him nervous, but he didn’t want to turn away. The only other thing to see around here happened to be his mother’s grave, and he didn’t want to acknowledge that the grass he perched on had grown thick and rich over the hole where the cemetery workers had buried her. But the crow flew off and left him alone with that undeniable fact.

  The headstone that should’ve been a couple of feet away had migrated at least twice that far. His mother settled across from him. She looked just the way she had when he’d seen her last, the night she’d left to go meet her girlfriends at the movies.

  She’d ruffled his hair back then, which he hated because for crying out loud he wasn’t a little boy anymore. And she wore the silver filigree earrings he’d given her for her birthday.

  “You don’t have a lot of time, Kevin, so pay attention.”

  “It’s a couple of hours before the alarm goes off.”

  “Oh, you know better than that.”

  He supposed he did, but he was afraid to ask himself why. “How come you’re here?”

  “Because you wouldn’t listen to your friends. They’re right, you know. You’re not safe. Can’t you hear him?”

  “Who?”

  “Your father. Thinking about those craptastic cop wannabes in his sleep.”

  He didn’t want to think about that, and the danger it might mean. Not with his mom sitting close enough to touch. “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  She shook her head. “Kevin Xavier Landon, you listen to me. You wake up now or you won’t hear them in time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  KEVIN BOLTED UPRIGHT, his heart clawing at his throat. He was alone in his room, thank God. But he wasn’t the only one awake in the house.

  Ordinary noises issued from the general vicinity of the kitchen. The fridge opened. The plastic top of the milk container popped. The burner switch on the gas stove click-click-clicked and whoomfed to flame. All normal sounds. Except the cadence of them felt all wrong. It took him precious time to figure out that his father didn’t walk or even lift and place the tea kettle on the stove with that rhythm. And he sure didn’t hum, let alone sing.

  Either his dad had become completely possessed or that was someone completely else making a late-night snack.

  He grabbed hold of the bat again and snicked open his door a crack. His father’s door? Closed, and the room behind it dark. But soft light poured from the front of the house, illuminated a circle of hardwood at the hall door. The singing had more body to it now that he could hear it better. The timbre of the voice struck a chord of longing in him.

  It wasn’t the kind of longing where you daydream about things (a vacation from your life a pocket full of money a brand new drop-top with a banging sound system so you didn’t have to walk every-damned-where) or people (Amy) and imagine you can reach out and touch them. This desire started at the soles of his feet and worked its way up inside his veins, pumping so fast and hot his heart almost couldn’t handle it. The kind of wanting that could make him fall in love at first sight—or brutally kill. The kind that could make him give up his life.

  It reminded him of Simone.

  And it grabbed him by the throat and dragged him into the kitchen, the ball bat brushing the floor behind him. His fingers kept wanting to let go of it. The only shred of will he held onto saved the thunk and clatter on the floor that would deprive him of what little protection he’d mustered. And wake up his father.

  The man standing in front of the counter—and it was a man, near
as Kevin could tell—hadn’t turned on any of the lights, unless you counted the burner on the stove. He glowed all by himself.

  That glow reminded Kevin of a weekend camping trip his parents had taken him on. He couldn’t have been more than twelve. The full moon shone bright in the sky, and so far out of the city without interference from the streetlights and halogens and giant, come-hither spotlights you could see an entire sea of stars overhead. The whole Milky Way.

  The Milky Way Man standing in his kitchen wore a brown leather vest and pants. Not biker leather or rocker leather. This stuff seemed soft and way more expensive than anything Kevin had ever seen on a trip to the mall. His shirt wasn’t just white. It looked like fresh cream. And his feet? Kevin couldn’t get a fix on them. One moment, he saw boots. Another, he saw paws. Gray and black, like a wolf’s.

  The guy twirled a soup spoon from the silverware drawer in one hand. He’d assembled a mug with a handful of bags from the Super Secret Dad Tea Stash, where no one else dared to tread. Who didn’t love a cuppa in the wee hours of the morning?

  The water in the kettle started to cavitate, not quite boiling. And the crazy powerful song faded out, leaving Kevin to get his feet under him as quickly as he could.

  “There’s enough for two if you’d care to join me,” the man said. His voice sounded like leaves shimmering in the wind.

  Kevin cleared his throat. His voice tentatively decided to obey him. He intended to say something menacing, but he couldn’t. Literally. “Actually, there’s just enough for my dad’s breakfast the next couple of days.”

  “He won’t need it where he’s going.” The man turned around and showed his face.

  His golden brown hair fell to just past his shoulders. His lips curved in a smile that sent a chill to Kevin’s marrow, with the same too-sharp teeth Simone showed when she grinned. He had an aristocratic nose. And those eyes, they pinned Kevin to the spot. They could see every thought in his head, every feeling, every spark in every nerve cell as it fired. There would be no holding back under that gaze.

  He was different—much more powerful—than Simone. Or “Officer” Burns or his partner. None of them could do that—that he knew of. And Simone had said only the Faery King could read minds.

  Kevin’s knees buckled. Not from shock, but because his first instinct was to kneel. He knew who this guy had to be.

  “Are you him?” Kevin asked.

  The Milky Way Man nodded. “I thought it was high time we met.”

  “You mean since my dad’s going crazy and you’ve been sending your thugs to ruin my life?”

  He wouldn’t have chosen those words. You didn’t say that kind of thing if you were at a complete disadvantage. You know, with a magical Faery being who could probably kick your ass from here to Sunday and whom you couldn’t stop from taking you to Faery on Halloween.

  But he’d thought the words. He’d wanted in his heart of hearts to spit them out with as much venom as he could muster.

  He saw how it would be. He really wouldn’t be able to hide anything from the Faery King. Well, fine. At least he could be sure the guy knew how he really felt.

  The Faery King’s smile turned colder.

  “Hey,” Kevin said. “You don’t want to hear it, don’t ask.”

  “Point taken.”

  Great. But that grin still sent ice his way. His body started to fold in on itself for warmth. Any second, his teeth would start to chatter. “Do you mind?”

  The King laughed and obliged. The kettle began to whistle. He whisked it off the heat and poured without spilling a drop. Turning off the burner? An afterthought.

  The Faery King, in his kitchen. Making a cup of tea.

  “Why are you really here?” he asked. “What do you want with me?”

  “You have potential,” the King said. “I want to develop it.”

  Unvarnished truth? It would have to be, since Faeries couldn’t lie. That put them on the same level while they talked, no illusions about any other level. “Because I hear thoughts.”

  “Because you can,” the King said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I said it before, Kevin: Potential. Do you have any idea how rare your gift is?”

  Kevin folded his arms across his chest. “Seeing as I know someone else who has it—and he’s in bad shape right now, by the way, thanks to one of your people—I guess not.”

  “Oscar is very talented for a human. He does one thing, he does it well, and it’s all he’ll ever do.”

  “Yeah, he’s a seer. Super sight and everything.”

  “One thing,” the King said again.

  Kevin didn’t think so. “Or maybe just a thing that bores you.”

  The King’s grin widened.

  It made Kevin’s skin crawl so bad he wanted to shake. He fought it. Fought it hard. “And the almost-dead thing he’s got going on?”

  “Unfortunate,” the King said. “He shouldn’t have interfered.”

  “Funny you don’t apply that to yourself.”

  “There are few who do, Kevin.”

  People wanted what they wanted, and they did what they had to do to get it. The law of the jungle, or whatever you wanted to call it. But that didn’t make it all right. “How am I different from Oscar?”

  “Oscar—and your friend Rude, for that matter—they have limited abilities. It’s not enough and it never will be. That new ability of yours is just the tip of what you’re capable of. When I’m finished with you, you’ll be able to do so much more.”

  “Such as?”

  “You’ll be able to hear us,” the King said. “To see us. All the time, everywhere we are, everywhere we go. You will help to bridge our world and yours.”

  That sounded like a prescription for insanity. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because without us, the magic in your world will die.” The King scooped the tea bags out of his mug with the spoon and wrung them out. Then he poured the milk.

  “From what I’ve seen so far of magic, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing,” Kevin said.

  “Really?” The King pulled up a chair at the table. “How did you feel, watching Simone perform?”

  The King knew that, the same as he knew everything else Kevin felt, so why ask? To embarrass him? If so, it worked. “Her show? Definitely magic. Also, too hot to handle. Is that what magic is?”

  “When was the last time you walked out your front door and wondered at the way the wind felt on your skin or the slow fall of leaves from the trees?”

  This morning, as it turned out.

  “Have you ever played in the snow? Have you ever seen a report about a miracle on television—a prayer that averted a little girl’s death, or someone lifted more weight than the human body could possibly sustain to free a loved one from a wreck? Have you ever fallen in love?”

  Kevin thought of Amy. He didn’t know if he could call it love. Really, it seemed more like lust. And—he was fooling himself. The King knew it was love, just looking at him. The King knew, and he did, too.

  “Have you ever had a dream in the middle of the night where your mother came to you and it wasn’t some figment of your imagination or wild firing of your synapses, but really and truly her?”

  Kevin shook his head. “That’s not fair.”

  “I guess it’s not,” the King said. “But it’s true, and I have a case to make to you. Do you believe me?”

  Even if he didn’t want to, how could he not? “All those things are magic.”

  “And many more, Kevin. Do you want them to die away from your world?”

  He thought about living without those things, what it would be like. In his imagination, the color leached out of the world and left it cold and gray. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “We need an ambassador, Kevin. Someone like you to not only see and hear and feel the magic, but be the magic.”

  Kevin didn’t get it. “How?”

  The King blew on his tea to cool it. “It wou
ld run in your veins, like blood. It would live in your very skin, so that everything you touched would be infused with it. Why wouldn’t you want that?”

  He could think of a few reasons. Number one being the future sudden, permanent nature of his superfreak-ness. Number two? “Would it make me a target, like Oscar?”

  “People already talk about you when they think you’re not listening,” the King said. “They form opinions without asking questions. That’s normal, isn’t it?”

  “They pull the opinions out of their asses,” Kevin said. “The words hurt, sure. But sticks and stones?” Or soul-sucking creatures or arsonists?

  The King shrugged. “The size of the target on your back will always be directly proportional to the amount of power you wield, whether that power comes from Faery or whether its intellectual, physical, or political. If you step up, people will always want to take you down.”

  “So why step up, then? Why take the chance?”

  “Do you want to be small for the rest of your life?” the King asked.

  “Beats being shoved off a pedestal any day.”

  “What if nothing you do from this moment forward makes any difference to anyone?”

  What would be the use of living?

  The King answered Kevin’s silent question. “You’d be safe.”

  But that wouldn’t matter. Would it?

  “It’s perfectly possible,” the King said, “that things will turn out that way regardless of what you do. After all, the earth is ancient. Ashes to ashes, as your priests are fond to say.”

  As the King went on, every word leached the life out of the room. And the hope out of Kevin.

  “The age of the dinosaurs went by in a blink of the cosmic eye. The age of humans has been shorter still. And when we’re all of us dead and gone, the stars will still remain. Eventually, even they won’t remember us. Against that, what do any of our actions mean?”

  “Nothing,” Kevin said. “Less than that.”

  “Why live, then? Why not give up the moment you emerge from the womb?”

  “Because of all the things you talked about before. The magic.” If for nothing else, then for the warmth of the sun on his face, the butterflies that filled his belly ascending the first hill of a roller coaster, the roar of the crowd at an arena concert. For love.