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

by Leslie Claire Walker

  Everything stopped when Kevin’s dad stormed out the front door and slammed it behind him.

  He stomped into the driveway, his stained shirt and mussed hair backlit by the halogen over the garage. The hems of his pants were torn. His bare feet were dirty. He didn’t act like himself. He could’ve been a stranger.

  Kevin couldn’t stand to look at him. He needed to be anywhere but here. He prayed to be anywhere else. No one answered.

  Instead, his dad got as close as he could. Yelled in Kevin’s face. Spit flew from his lips. Just three words, each one louder. Until his dad’s voice cracked under the strain. “You’re. Not. Going!”

  Kevin came back quietly―with the most infuriating response he could think of. “You can’t stop me.”

  His dad tried. He grabbed hold of Kevin’s sleeve. Kevin tried to pull free but couldn’t.

  Scott got out of the car and moved to help, but he froze trying to figure out what to do.

  The whole neighborhood stared.

  “It doesn’t matter what I do,” Kevin said. “It’s never right anymore. It doesn’t matter what I say. You hate me. Just admit it. Mom died and you hate yourself for it. And now you hate me, too.”

  His dad pulled back his fist―all the warning Kevin got before the punch flew.

  Kevin ducked. His dad’s fist whizzed past―missed him by an inch.

  He pushed forward. Wrapped his arms around his dad. Tried to hold him still. But his father flailed. Got loose. Grabbed for his neck and got a hold of the leather cord around it that held the one thing in the whole world Kevin had to hold onto and ripped it away. The sand dollar fell in slow motion, like in a movie, end over end.

  Kevin grabbed for it. Missed.

  It struck the concrete exactly the wrong way. And shattered.

  That had been the end. Not all there was by any means. But that moment in the driveway when the last thing his mother had meant to give him had gone to pieces? His legs had refused to hold him. He’d gone down just like the night she died.

  Remembering it now, Kevin knew in his marrow that had been the day his father had come back from Faery just as broken.

  That thought brought Kevin back from his memory, stuffed up all over again and crying in the Faery King’s court.

  He didn’t want to see everyone staring at him, judging him about things they had no right to, but he had to know what the King thought. What he felt.

  The fucker hadn’t shed a tear. Why? There was only one reason Kevin could think of.

  Because he’d never intended to.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  KEVIN ALMOST LOOKED at the King then. He pictured the smug expression the King had to be wearing, the glint of amusement in his eyes. Because tricking Kevin into cutting his own heart out? That had to be hilarious. Not to mention the wads of information about his life the King just gathered in one fell swoop—or the possibility of using it against him. Oh, yeah. The thrill of victory.

  He wondered, did Faeries have parents? Or did they just show up one day, fully grown and ready to rumble? Did the King have a mother? Did he have a kid?

  Supposedly the worst thing that could happen to a parent was to lose a child. Like that little girl the King had kidnapped—what about her mom and dad? How would they feel when she didn’t come home? When they’d searched everywhere for her? When the police came out and looked hard at them as suspects and their little girl’s face ended up on some website for missing children and they never, ever knew what happened to her?

  If Kevin could find a way, he’d take her back with them. Whatever it took, he’d do it. Her face flashed in his mind.

  And captured the King’s attention, utterly.

  Whatever the connection between Kevin and the King, that thing that allowed the King to share his memory, it was still active. The King could not only hear Kevin’s thoughts, he could see the images in Kevin’s mind, feel his feelings. Kevin had been too focused on his own misery to notice that he could hear and see and feel what was in the King’s mind as well.

  Kevin seized on the image of the little girl’s face in the King’s mind and followed the trail of thought and memory.

  The King felt him do it. He threw roadblocks in Kevin’s path. Nightmares full of blood and rent flesh and insanity.

  His mother moaning in the wreckage of her car.

  Kevin could hardly breathe. He’d imagined that same thing so many times. It wasn’t true because she died instantly. That’s what the cops said. Even if he sometimes wondered whether they’d lied to spare him. Please, God, it wasn’t true.

  Rude paying the price for Oscar’s escape from Faery, ripped to pieces just outside the bus, his soul sucked out.

  Oscar was alive and mostly well. With Rude inside the bus. He’d beaten the soul-sucker once before. He could do it again. Please, God, he could.

  His father collapsed and dying in the Faery woods, wearing shredded, stained clothes, his eyes not seeing anyone or anything.

  It could happen. If Kevin gave up, it would.

  He kept the King’s thought and memory in his sights, in his grasp. The King’s defenses shredded his heart. But he kept on, not knowing exactly what he was looking for.

  He knew it when he found it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  FLAMES BURNED cheerfully in the fireplace, warming the room with a golden glow. Thick rugs in moss green and dark red covered the packed earth floor. Not a single chair in the place, just a groove as long as the room worn from pacing.

  The only furniture was a wide stone table plastered with maps that bore no resemblance to the kind Kevin had seen at the gas station. These showed elevations instead of roads, and notches in red marked gateways between the realm of Faery and the human world. One particular note commanded absolute attention. An X had been drawn in by hand beside a picture of a house. The King stared hard at it.

  All of his careful planning came down to that place and the child he would find there. Tomorrow night, the Hunt would ride, and they would scoop up that little girl, take her back to Faery. Bring her home.

  He remembered the day he’d first seen her. He’d been out and about, wandering among the humans. Noticing the mind-numbing juxtaposition of plastic six-pack rings and empty cigarette wrappers and aluminum cans to the finely formed grapevines, their leaves gilded in the orange wash of the setting sun.

  Filth and beauty. Trash and treasure. All of it glowed from the inside with the deep blue light of magic. Not as strongly as it should. Not even close.

  He came upon a stone house with a tin roof and ambled past open windows without a soul noticing. No one saw him unless he wished it.

  The woman inside had just put up a pot of homemade tomato sauce. Any minute now, the scent would waft into the evening air. In the meantime she tried to puzzle out the lyrics to a song from her childhood and checked the clock to note the hour and a half until her husband came home.

  The little girl ran from around the far corner of the house in a blur of blue and white and blond, shrieking with delight, half-tumbling over her own feet and half-bowled over by a grizzled yellow dog. She shot to her feet, the heels of her hands and the knees of her white jeans and the front of her blue shirt grass-stained.

  She looked right at him—or at where he stood. It was just a grazing glance. It didn’t register anyone or anything. Not until he took in her face. The dark eyes more than human, the set of her pink mouth, the deep dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.

  His daughter, made flesh and bone.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  GET OUT OF MY MIND, the King said.

  Kevin shook his head. Not until you tell me about her.

  This is not permitted.

  They were so beyond permission. If the King could dig deep into Kevin’s mind, payback was hell. He’d make the bastard cry.

  The King gathered his power, surrounding both of them with electricity so sharp and thick all Kevin’s hair stood on end. The King could fry him right there. But he wouldn’t. No
t if he expected Kevin to do the magical liaison thing.

  The King reacted to his thought by hurling an electric punch so hard it knocked the air from Kevin’s lungs.

  That’s the kind of thinking that killed her, the King said.

  Now they were getting somewhere.

  Kevin caught a glimpse of memory—a Faery girl with a body of light who looked exactly like the one made of breath and skin. Not one difference between them—not a hair on her head nor a freckle on her nose. Same age, about seven. This girl, the one made of light, was fading. Literally.

  She lay on a bed surrounded by the King and Queen and a bunch of other folks Kevin took to be doctors. No one knew what to do, how to help her. She had minutes to live.

  In those minutes, the Queen told her daughter over and over how much she loved her. The King held her hand and thought about how much she loved to run with the hounds, and about all the trees she’d climbed, and how she’d wandered through a gate that shouldn’t have been left open, into the human world and straight into hell.

  Seeming like any regular kid (if any human child could possibly have been that beautiful), she’d walked into the private street party of a couple of drunk men, neither of whom had lived beyond the twenty crucial minutes it’d taken the King to realize where she’d gone.

  Kevin saw them the way the King had seen them. Dirty and wasted and dressed old-fashioned, like from a historical movie—with their hands all over his child. The one with the black hair who played sidekick and kept his mouth shut died immediately when the King stepped forward and cursed him dead.

  The other one with the scraggly brown beard and the flannel shirt that passed for green, he said, “One step further and I’ll cut her throat.” He had a knife, all right. “You do not want to risk that.”

  “Don’t hurt her.” The King raised a hand. That was all. Let’s be reasonable. Let’s talk. Calm down. Just lower the knife.

  He waited for some sign that the human understood him. But he couldn’t read the human’s thoughts. That meant only one thing: the man’s mind wasn’t right. He had to get his little girl out of there. Now.

  He never got the chance.

  Brown Beard sliced with the blade. The girl’s throat exploded in a spray of light.

  The knife man exploded in a spray of blood.

  After that, the King could do nothing for his daughter except bring her home. And hold her hand as she faded.

  If only he’d acted a heartbeat sooner. If only he’d ignored the bastard’s blade against the delicate skin of his little girl’s throat. If only he’d killed the sonofabitch.

  He had ordered the execution of the hapless Fae who’d left the gate open. He took no pleasure in it, though it had to be done.

  What was her name? Kevin asked.

  Wrong question in Faery. Still, he couldn’t help but ask it. If the girl had been human, he would have wanted to know. To remember her by her name.

  He braced himself for the King to lash out again. But nothing like that happened. He read the girl’s name in the King’s thoughts: Brook. No E. Brook like the stream she’d liked to swim in when she was small. A thousand years ago.

  The tears he shed beside her death bed had been the last he’d cried.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  UNTIL NOW.

  Kevin opened his eyes to find himself in the vise grip of the King, unable to even squirm.

  The King’s cheeks shone wet. “I should kill you for that, Mr. Landon.”

  Kevin bit back the cheap, easy response. After what he’d just seen through the King’s eyes, he didn’t want to go there. He couldn’t.

  He also didn’t want to know the info that flooded his mind. That the King hadn’t cried in so long because he’d been afraid he’d fall apart. He’d held it all in, just like Kevin had. And like the tears he kept in check, he kept everyone and everything he’d ever taken, unable to release them. Simone, Kevin’s father, the little girl—all of them and God only knew how many more.

  Kevin didn’t know how he knew those things. Or the other things that seemed to have mysteriously appeared in his brain.

  Including the King’s name. Whatever magic the King intended to pass to him for him to take on his new mission, it appeared to have already transferred.

  Simone left her seat and strode over to him. “Time to go, Kevin.”

  He tried to pull himself together without much success, then gave up. Letting it all hang out hadn’t killed him so far, and he didn’t care who saw. “One second.”

  “We might not have it to spare,” she said.

  He got that. But he still had a question to ask, and now was the time. He addressed the King. “Can we take that little girl back with us, too? And the men the Hunt picked up?”

  The King thinned his lips. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “But you can let us go now. Why not them?”

  “Because there are rules,” the King said. “Laws.”

  More with the rulebook, even after everything that had happened. “You’re royalty. You can’t blow them off?”

  The King shook his head. “They make us what we are, and that we can’t change.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Kevin said. If he could change, anyone could.

  “Believe what you will,” the King replied. “And expect us to be in touch.”

  Stubborn bastard. Kevin couldn’t hate him all the way, though. No matter how hard he tried.

  “But that girl isn’t yours,” he said.

  The expression in the King’s eyes chilled. “She is now.”

  Maybe now, but not forever.

  The King heard him. Kevin was sure.

  Simone took him by the arm. “Now, Kevin.”

  He wrapped his arms around her. And his dad held on tight to him. Light enveloped them. And the world turned upside down.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  SIMONE LEFT THEM in front of the bus at one minute before midnight by the clock in Scott’s car. She didn’t hug Kevin goodbye, nor did she say when she’d see him again. But he’d lay odds it would be soon. The King had business with him, and the King didn’t mess around. Neither did he.

  His dad leaned against the Mustang for support, looking as wrung out as Kevin felt. But his eyes sparkled. The scary wildness was gone. He seemed like his whole self again.

  “Never thought I’d see this place again,” he said.

  Kevin agreed. “Same goes.”

  “Are we okay?” his dad asked.

  They still had so much to talk about, a lot to work through, AA meetings to attend. But Kevin figured they could do it. If they could keep talking to each other, that’d be a good start.

  “I think we will be,” he said.

  His father nodded.

  Kevin savored the night air, the feel of the alley under his feet, the scrape of the empty pizza box the wind blew across the sidewalk. If he could be sure he’d be able to get up again, he’d kiss the ground.

  Or, seeing as the ground was mostly a leaked motor oil and transmission fluid paradise, he might not.

  Instead he allowed himself to relax a little, only a little surprised at the sudden knowledge that his friends had spotted them already. And that the door to the bus would open in five, four, three, two—

  Amy burst out the bus and flew into his arms. He breathed in her scent until he couldn’t breathe anymore—because she held him so hard, and he was so tired.

  She spoke low, in his ear. “I was so worried.”

  He knew exactly how she felt. “I won’t leave like that again.”

  “Better not,” she said. “Because I love you.”

  He kissed her, loving the way she tasted, taking his sweet time. He had all the time in the world now.

  He didn’t want to let her go. Even when he pulled away, finally, he kept hold of her hand. And found himself encircled by Rude and Stacy and Scott.

  One person missing. “Where’s Oscar?”

  Rude pointed. The seer stood beside Kevin
’s dad.

  “What happened?” Scott asked. “You did it, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I’m here.” He couldn’t begin to tell them everything. Not without a ton of shut-eye. It seemed like his friends could use some, too. Rude and Scott had serious five o’clock shadow. And greasy hair. “Y’all look like shit.”

  “And you look like you just came from the Renaissance Fair.” Rude poked his arm. The crisp white shirt? Still crisp.

  “Faery duds,” Kevin said.

  “Wish someone had brought us a change of clothes, dude. We’ve been here a while.”

  “Two days,” Stacy said.

  Kevin blinked. “It’s Sunday?”

  But Simone had told him he had to be back in his human world, in human time, within twenty-four hours. Otherwise, he’d be stuck in Faery for another whole year. He knew that was true. She couldn’t lie.

  That could only mean someone had made an exception in his case. He aimed to find out who. But later, much later.

  “It’s Sunday,” he said again.

  Rude nodded. “Sucks, dude, doesn’t it?”

  “Out loud,” Kevin said. “We have school tomorrow.”

  “Unfair, I know.” Amy squeezed his hand. “We could take the day off.”

  Kevin loved the sound of that. And the way her voice sounded like music to his ears.

  Turn the page to read Chapter One of the next book in The Faery Chronicles, DEMON.

  CHAPTER ONE

  STICKY SEPTEMBER SATURDAY NIGHT in Houston, Texas, on a sidewalk outside of The Rollins Pub, where Johnny Rocket played his thunder bass. People in various stages of inebriation mingled and the stink of stale beer lingered. Not the normal hangout spot for a sober dude without a fake ID. But, hey, I had responsibilities and a mostly secret identity.

  My name? Rudolph Diamond Davies III. Rude, to my friends. Unofficially, the class clown. The party guy. The one with the uncanny luck. Always ready to be a friend or help out a dude in need. My official assignment: Save life. Prevent death. And other bad things.