The Faerie King

by Ash Fitzsimmons

Joey nodded at the two lumps beneath the blankets on his bed and couch. “First watch, second watch. I’ve been supervising. And the situation is?”

  I told him what had transpired as the Carvers woke, and then I repeated the news a few minutes later in my office when Meggy and Toula demanded answers. “And so no one is going anywhere,” I concluded to the assembled, “until they’re located. Any questions?”

  Helen raised her finger. “You can’t just keep us here.”

  “That wasn’t a question.”

  “And this isn’t a request,” she replied. “If there’s a potential scenario in which the Arcanum is at risk, my place is on the front lines.”

  “She’s got a point,” Toula added. “Lord knows Greg could use the help, and I’m not willing to hunker down and leave them hanging.”

  “I’m taking my daughter home,” said Meggy, her voice soft but firm. “She’s missed three days of school already.”

  I looked around my office at the faces ringing me, feeling rather like an asylum warden. “Did nothing I said make sense to anyone? They’re after me, they’re after Moyna, they’re on the loose—”

  “They’re just missing,” Meggy protested, “and you’re basing all of the rest off of something that bastard told Olive.”

  “She believes it.”

  “She’s sixteen and disturbed,” she retorted. “I wouldn’t make any snap decisions based on her best judgment.” Squaring her shoulders and pulling herself to her full five and half feet, she said, “I’ve been through hell since Friday night. I want my bed, I want my shop, and I’m pretty sure all the leftovers in my fridge have turned by now. We’re going home.”

  “Meggy,” I began, but caught the look in her eye and stopped. Do you remember our deal? she seemed to ask. We do this as equals, or we don’t do it at all.

  I gritted my teeth, knowing I wasn’t going to win this without a show of force. “If you go back,” I muttered, “I can’t protect you from here.”

  “And I’ll drag them back over at the first sign of trouble,” Toula offered. “Heck, Megs, I’ll even sleep over for a few nights if you want—just like the old days, huh? You, me, Lifetime Original Movies, our favorite men?”

  She flashed a wry smile. “Ben and Jerry.”

  “My main squeezes. Come on,” she said, taking Meggy’s hands, “let me crash with you until things settle down. Maybe he’ll stay out of your hair if he knows I’m lurking, eh?”

  “Possibly,” I allowed, realizing the gift she was offering us. “And if you go to Rigby,” I told Toula, “you’re bound to meet the incredible Stuart the White.”

  “Stuart the what?”

  “He fancies himself a white wizard. I’m sure you’ll have loads to talk about.”

  “Oh, hell,” she laughed, “I’m in. Okay, Megs?”

  Meggy nodded and squeezed Toula’s hands, and with a parting glance of understanding for me, Toula led her off to gather her things and break the news to Moyna. When the door had closed behind them, Helen cocked her thumb at the garden window and said, “My stuff’s still in the barn. I’ll be out of here shortly.” Aiden began to protest, but she cut him off with a raised hand. “You stay put, bud. And you,” she added, turning to Joey, “had better take care of him, got it?”

  “And who’s going to take care of you?” he countered.

  “I can manage myself. Help me pack?” she asked, opening a gate to the barn loft with a gesture.

  Joey followed her through, and I caught Aiden’s mistrustful look as the gate closed. “She doesn’t have anything out there, does she?” I murmured.

  “No,” he said stiffly, “she does not.”

  “Then, if I may offer a suggestion,” Valerius interjected, “give them a moment of peace. Nothing out there requires your presence.”

  Aiden scowled at the air where the gate had been, then rolled his eyes and headed for the door. “He’d better not be kissing my sister,” he muttered as he let himself out.

  When he’d stomped off to his room, Val cleared his throat and folded his arms. “Will you satisfy my curiosity, Coileán?”

  “If I can,” I replied, returning to my desk and the pile of neglected grievance petitions. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Meggy and Toula…”

  He left the question unasked, and I shrugged. “Toula says nothing ever came of it. I don’t think she’s Meggy’s preference. Why?”

  “Just checking,” he replied, showing himself out. “I’ve seen my share of jealousy-fueled fights in this realm, and I’d rather hoped to avoid one between the two of you.”

  I chuckled and plucked the first letter off the pile—anything to keep my mind off the immediate problem of my missing siblings. “You think it’d be a contest?”

  That gave him pause. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted, “and I don’t want to find out.”

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  The trouble with having an admittedly awesome level of power in Faerie was adjusting to the limitations of trying to wield it outside the realm. Within its bounds, there was little the realm wouldn’t do for me—if I’d wanted to watch random strangers bathing on a continual feed, the realm would have been happy to link me into its omniscient view, no questions asked. Finding someone hiding within Faerie was as simple as directing the realm to provide his coordinates. Once beyond the borders, however, I found myself somewhat hamstrung, as my continual mental companion was as clueless about the mortal realm as any tourist dumped in a foreign country without a guidebook. Power was great, but I needed information, and for that, I realized I’d have to consult a local.

  And so I found myself standing on the faded welcome mat outside Vivi Stowe’s apartment door in tiny Skipton Thursday morning, shivering in the November predawn and silently cursing the complex’s architect, who had designed her building as a perfect funnel for the northerly wind. A wrinkled neon green flyer for a pet-sitting service ripped free of her neighbor’s door and skittered off into oblivion, and I jabbed my gloved finger against the doorbell, halfway hoping the lady of the house was sleeping over at her boyfriend’s place.

  Two minutes later, after a muffled shout to wait just a second and the sleepy cursing of one ripped from the warmth of bed and thrust straight into a shin-targeting table, the door flew open, and Vivi squinted blearily up at me from the threshold. I wasn’t sure what was most striking about her—the way one side of her hair seemed to defy gravity as it rose from her scalp in a mess of black frizz, while the rest hung limply to her shoulders; her glasses, which perched on her upturned nose at a good twenty-degree pitch from horizontal; or her nightgown, an oversized gray T-shirt sporting a wash-faded picture of Daisy Duck, which had probably seen better decades. She blinked a few times as if trying to draw sense from the scene before her, then muttered, “The hell?”

  “May I come in?”

  “Sure. Whatever.” She slipped back a step, giving me room to squeeze past her, then latched the door and shook with the change in temperature. “You know it’s, like, five a.m., right? And I was up really late—”

  “Would coffee make you happier?”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” she grumped, plopping into a rattan basket chair. Her bare feet kicked out as she landed on the flat pink cushion, and she stared at me with deep suspicion. “Any leads on the dark magic situation?”

  I plied her with a trio of doppios, which she knocked back like a frat boy at happy hour, and told her what had transpired since the previous Friday night. As the caffeine began to take effect—I was mildly disturbed to witness how well she handled six shots of espresso—Vivi tucked her legs up beneath her, straightened her glasses, and drummed her fingers on the rim of the chair. “So you’re telling me we’ve got five rogue faeries to worry about, is that it?” she said. “Five rogue faeries who are probably running scared, ergo, who are more dangerous than usual? Well, shit.” Her fingertip percussion intensified as she considered the ramifications. “Any chance of getting help from Oberon?”


  “I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I replied, stacking her spent cups in a tiny pyramid on her coffee table, a wobbly IKEA special. “The Arcanum’s been notified—I assume I’ll hear from Greg if they come sniffing around. But I don’t have Mother’s old spy network in place, and I’ve got no idea where they might be hiding.”

  “And so you came to me,” she concluded, “because you need boots on the ground, and because if you’d gone to Rick at this hour, he’d have ripped you a new one with a broken longneck. Gotcha.” After a moment of rocking false starts, she managed to extricate herself from her chair and disappeared down the short hallway leading to her bedroom. “Back in a minute,” she called before she shut her door.

  “What’re you—”

  The door creaked open again as I spoke, and she interrupted, “If I’m going to be drafted into this nonsense, I’m damn well going to be drafted with my pants on. Now hold your horses. Sheesh,” she muttered, and the door slammed.

  And so I waited on the futon with my own cup of coffee while my unwilling hostess located a pair of trousers, and I began to see the wisdom in Mother’s absolute intolerance for disrespect.

  A few minutes later, sporting jeans and having thrown a moth-eaten brown sweater on over her nightshirt—and still having neglected her disastrous hair—Vivi reappeared with a slim laptop and slid onto the futon beside me. Without preamble, she lifted the lid, tapped out a series of passwords, and made a black box fill most of the screen. “What’s that?” I enquired.

  “Working,” she mumbled, typing a long string of gibberish. The black box began to fill with aqua-colored text in neat rows, then green text, and finally, after a bit of quiet profanity and an apparent do-over, red text. Vivi sat back, and the machine chirped, its picture dissolving into a full-screen video of her face. There was a camera somewhere in the screen’s casing, I realized, as Vivi finally noticed her coiffure and hastily finger-combed it into surrender. “All right,” she told me, looking up from her makeshift mirror, “just stay quiet while I log into the network, okay? I don’t want to spook anyone.”

  I nodded and scooted to the far side of the futon, and she made a few more taps. A red light illuminated at the top of the screen, and with a little ding, she was in. “This is Monkey, repeat, this is Monkey,” she said to the computer. “Who’s up?”

  A miniature picture popped up on the right-hand margin of Vivi’s screen, revealing a middle-aged woman with a fat, sweater-clad dachshund sprawled across her lap. “Good morning, Vivian,” she said in the perfectly polished tones of a BBC presenter. “Aren’t we up early today.”

  “Morning, Butterfly,” she replied, straightening her posture. “Still morning on your side of the pond, yeah?”

  “Unless my watch deceives me.” She paused as another pair of screens chimed in—two young men, one a pale Australian with a prominent eyebrow ring, the other a South African with close-cropped hair, sporting a pencil behind his ear. “Insomnia?” the Brit asked. “Or have we located Bigfoot yet and called it a night?”

  All four shared a laugh at that one, and another trio of headshots flashed onto Vivi’s computer. “Not this time, I’m afraid,” she said, sobering as her screen continued to fill. “We’ve been asked for a favor. More like a BOLO and report, really.”

  The South African pulled his pencil loose and tapped it against his desk. “Arcanum business?”

  “Court, actually,” she said, and paused as a few of her listeners muttered. “I wouldn’t bring it up if I hadn’t seen a dark magic spike here last week,” she continued over the susurrus. “Situation’s bad news. We’re not being asked to do anything active—just keep an ear to the ground and let me know if something seems off. And my contact would be most grateful,” she said, keeping her eyes firmly on the screen. “Is anyone willing? I can send the details around if I’ve got volunteers…”

  The others hesitated, and then, one by one, they began to nod and murmur assent—all but the Brit, who peered back at Vivi and asked, “Who’s your contact?”

  Without warning, she reached across the futon, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled as she turned the computer around. “Coileán, my posse. Posse, Coileán. Want to fill them in, or should I do the honors?”

  One of the little screens flickered to black, but the other Fringe members, perhaps too startled to leave, simply stared.

  “Uh…good morning,” I said, trying to think on my feet. “I’m…well, I’m pretty desperate right now,” I admitted. “I don’t know what your going rate is—”

  “We work pro bono…my lord,” said the Australian, flashing a set of extensive tattoos as he rolled up his sleeves. “Pro bono. For the greater good. Can’t be bought.”

  “I understand.”

  “And if we assist you,” the South African added, “then you would be in the Fringe’s debt, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  He slipped his pencil back into place and leaned toward his camera, his dark eyes boring into mine. “And what sort of guarantee would we have that you would honor that obligation?”

  Before I could say something stupid, Vivi pivoted the computer back to her. “His word’s good, I’ll vouch for him,” she said. “Slim trusts him.”

  This revelation gave the others pause, and a teenage blonde with a pronounced Parisian accent moved closer to the screen. “The Fatman?” she asked. “You mean the Fatman?”

  “I mean Slim’s had him down in the workshop and everywhere else. Coileán’s not going to weasel out of this one,” she said, then gave me a pointed look out of the corner of her eye. I nodded, and she relaxed. “So, who’s interested?”

  Ten minutes later, I’d produced pictures of my siblings from memory, and Vivi had scanned them into her computer. She was sending off a dossier to the rest of her people when I asked, “Fatman?”

  “Fatman Slim,” she replied, not looking up from her work. “We choose our own code names for the network. Rick said it was easy to remember—folks in the Fringe have been calling him Slim for years. Where did you think that nickname started?” she said, flashing a brief smirk. “There’s enough fae blood in this group to make assholery an expected work hazard. You know how it is.”

  Fae blood or not, there was also a degree of honor among the Fringe. For the next three days, I received a morning call from Vivian, who had insisted that I leave her with a direct-line phone of her own before I escaped her apartment. There was no useful information to relay, she told me, but the fact that this was the sum of twenty other reports was far more useful than she thought. The dearth of worldwide sightings didn’t tell me where my siblings were, but they did tell me where my siblings weren’t, which was curious.

  They weren’t in Rigby—or, in all probability, in coastal Virginia—that much was clear. Slim was a contact point and information clearinghouse, a hub for the East Coast Fringe community, and if someone had seen something amiss, he would have been among the first to know. This, at least, gave me some peace of mind: if they weren’t near Rigby, then Meggy and Moyna were probably safe for the time being, especially with Toula babysitting.

  They also weren’t near an Arcanum installation. I’d notified Greg, who, after offering a halfhearted apology for Helen’s behavior, had promised to pass along anything of note. The last thing the Arcanum needed was a firefight on its turf, after all. But the line had remained silent, giving me further pins to pull from my mental map.

  Nor, I assumed, had they gone to Oberon. He’d have nothing to gain by sheltering them, and I couldn’t very well see them switching court allegiance, which would mean renouncing the titles they so dearly prized. Surely Oberon would alert me if they were getting on his nerves, I reasoned, which left only a few places they might be.

  I’d gone to bed Sunday night, confident that the noose was tightening and that one of the five would slip up soon. Five faeries on the run, none of whom had spent any considerable time in the mortal realm—and certainly not in the last hundred years—could hardly stay hidden more than a
few days without leaving some telltale sign of their whereabouts. But as dawn broke, I woke in a cold sweat, having realized that I’d left one major variable out of my calculations: what if they’d run to the Gray Lands?

  The notion was silly, I told myself as I sat there in the twilight with a racing heart. They’d be defenseless in the Gray Lands. Even if they’d forged some pact with this Geheret, how much protection could he offer them? I had no inkling of who was running the court after Mab’s death—Geheret, for all I knew—but even if he were, and even if he’d promised them sanctuary, what good was his word? They’d have to be desperate to take that risk…

  Then again, given what I was considering doing to them when I found them, perhaps certain risks were worth taking. But the Gray Lands?

  Trying to put the matter from my mind, I rose, told Valerius through the door that I’d be in the bath if the end of the world commenced, and began to soak and steam away the nightmare thought. I’d almost dozed off again when an insistent pounding on the bathroom door made me jerk awake, and I unlatched it remotely, preparing to offer my guard clarification about what Armageddon and Ragnarök actually entailed.

  But it was Meggy who burst onto the marble floor and skidded to a stop against the long vanity, and I knew, even as the reprimand died on my lips, that I should listen to my subconscious more often.

  The few days since their return to Rigby had been tense, but they could have been worse. With Toula hanging around, Meggy reverted to her habits of years past and subsisted largely off of pizza and ice cream, augmented with occasional bags of veggie chips to mollify her nagging inner mother. Toula, who had no such hardwired matriarchal guilt, was only too happy to keep the pies and pints coming. The two of them binged in multiple senses, gorging themselves on junk food, polishing off a few bottles of wine, and entertaining themselves with bad, yet quotable, films. While they lounged in the main room, Moyna locked herself in her bedroom, emerging only to skulk into the kitchen for provisions. The girl was plainly unhappy, but she was in no mood to talk to Meggy, and Meggy, mindful of the precariousness of the situation, gave Moyna her space and left a box of pink-frosted cupcakes outside her bedroom door as a peace offering. The gesture hadn’t made Moyna any more sociable, but the cupcakes had disappeared into her room, and the empty plastic shell was later discovered in the kitchen garbage can.