The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity

by Joshua Palmatier

  “If you leave him with me, he will live practically forever, never aging, surrounded by marvels and delights. With you, he will grow old and die. Are you so selfish?”

  Marisol looked at the baby in her arms. It was hard to imagine him as an old man, frail and sickly, but she knew it would happen someday. She had watched her grandfather waste away after her abuelita died, and had grieved for his death most of her life. Then she looked up, meeting Corrigan’s calculating gaze. “We die eventually. But sometimes we find someone to love and have children with—children who carry the best part of us into the future. That’s how humans become immortal. A child of mine will value that, for I will teach him.”

  Corrigan shrugged, as if Marisol’s victory meant nothing to her but her lips were pressed thin. “Thrice I have asked and thrice you have refused. May your lying eye … no, actually—” her angry expression grew satisfied. “When your son looks away from your face, I want you to know who was able to make him laugh when you could not. I want you never to be able to forget that he spent the first hours of his life with me. Some part of him will always be mine.”

  A grue ran down Marisol’s spine. This was a truer curse than the infection that took Bridget’s eye, but she could not keep silent. In a low voice, she said, “Some part, yes, but not the greatest part. Tell yourself whatever stories you like, Xana. But he is mine.” Marisol felt the ache in her heart ease as her son pushed his damp head under her jaw. My son! She took a deep breath, anticipating Corrigan’s next offer or curse. She was ready.

  Instead, Corrigan’s face softened. “He might be yours, but now that you have seen us, you will be forever caught between our worlds, too. Unless—” From a small drawer in the sideboard she withdrew a tiny round tin, no larger than a wedding ring. Delicately, with the tips of her fingers, she opened it, showing Marisol the faintly shimmering ointment inside. Marisol recognized the smell of flowers and blood but did not reach for it. “Someday, if you wish it, if your world proves to be too much—or too little—for either of you, we would welcome you among us. We can always use more heroes, and despite my current annoyance, young lady, you do qualify. You would be welcome with or without your son.”

  Marisol shook her head, holding tight to Tomás, savoring the human smell and warmth of him as she continued backing toward the door. “He is human, like me. We need to live in our own world.”

  “So you say. But remember my invitation.” Marisol took one last look around the room that reminded her so strongly of her grandfather, of her life before she came to this country that promised so much and had, thus far, given her so little. Life with the fairies might be nothing more exotic than living in the best place she could imagine. It might be entirely outside of her reality, but it might also feel like she was finally coming home. She took a deep breath, put her hand on the closed door, and then she closed her eye.

  A screen of ivy and thorn barred her way. She hunched her shoulder to shield her son and her own face; but at a word from the queen, it fell away and the sun blazed in, streaming through the trees in a fall of golden light. Tomás screwed up his eyes when the sunlight hit his face, and opened his mouth to protest. But Marisol soothed him, stroking his cheek, which felt as soft and insubstantial as a memory. In her mind, a voice whispered, “Remember,” but she did not answer, nor did she turn back.

  Bridget waited at the iron gate and pulled Marisol through. “You have him. Oh, dear saints and little fishes—you did it!”

  Marisol looked down at her son’s face. To both her eyes, he looked the same, human and beautifully imperfect. His brow wrinkled as he stared past her, then he buried his face in her shoulder, searching for the nourishment he needed.

  Bridget led them to the nearest bench, and Marisol opened her blouse. She winced as his mouth clamped over her tender breast, then relaxed as his suckling began to ease the terrible pressure that had been building since his birth. While he nursed, his eyes remained fixed on something over her right shoulder, but she did not turn to look, just as she did not reach into her pocket to see if the lump against her hipbone was a tiny jar of ointment she could not recall taking from Corrigan. Instead she watched her son’s face, so pure in his intent, so angry in his hunger, so human.

  Bridget said, “I’ll write you a new birth certificate in the morning. In the meantime, we should celebrate—it’s not every day you beat the Queen of the Fae at her own game.”

  Carefully cradling her son in the crook of one elbow while he nursed, gulping audibly, Marisol glanced up at Bridget and shook her head. “I haven’t beaten her. Not yet. But I will.”

  “What do you mean? He’s here. You did it, Mari. What more do you want?”

  “I still have to prove her wrong. I have to make sure he learns what’s best in the world, and that he knows how much he’s loved, knows I would do anything for him, knows I’ll never let him go, never leave him. No matter what.”

  Bridget grinned. “Sounds like you’re saying you have to learn how to be a mother.”

  More slowly, Marisol said, “I have to make this world worth living in. For both of us.” Stroking her son’s cheek she whispered in his ear, “Come on, mi hijo, let’s go home.” She refused to look over her shoulder to see what still held her son’s interest. She would not open the jar of ointment. She would not look for Queen Corrigan every time her son smiled or laughed in an empty room. She would make a life for them in this world—as good a life as she could create, for as long as Tomás had need of her.

  She would not look back.

  WATER-CALLED

  Kari Sperring

  Jenny peered through the eyes of the dead man where he floated in the canal. His body hung just below the surface of the water, entirely submerged save for the bagging fabric of his dirty cargo pants above his knees. His hands drifted on either side, palms upwards in silent exhortation. Her waters had already begun to bloat his body, plumping out the dead tissues, filling all his secret cavities, revealing to her all his petty daily secrets. Last meal: a greasy pasty from a corner shop. Last drink: the cheapest cider. Last sight: nothing. Her long fingers, her filaments and streams could run as they wished through his flesh, but his mind, his memories, were all already fled, poured away with the blood that seeped from the narrow punctures that marred his neck. He lay cradled in her waters and gave her nothing, no fear, no glimpse of soul, no sweet last breath to feed on.

  There had always been bodies. Since the first settlement of humans in her territory, men and women had run and walked, staggered and slipped and hiccupped their way into oblivion in her rocking embrace. Of course, in the old days, her range—of control, of weapons, of human compliance—had been much, much greater. Humans were easily lured to wander from the known paths into the softer, hungry areas of her marsh, even in daylight, drawn by the silver flash of fish scales or the green promise of edible weeds. At night, cloud often sucked all light from the low moist East Anglian skies. Sometimes, others amongst the old denizens of the fens would help her, leading victims to her marshes for a share of the spoils in flesh and bone. For long years, she had eaten as she willed, and the humans had feared and honored her, offering to her the first fruits of their harvests (of more interest to the waterfowl than to Jenny herself). She liked their darker festivals better by far, when they offered to her not their planting but the firm flesh and smooth skin of their youngest adults or the trussed bodies of their enemies. She drew them close, wrapped them in her tightest embrace, and savored the desperate sweetness of their final breaths. Good days, rich days, days of regular meals and human respect. Better days by far than these, when her waters were trammeled by concrete walls, the only offerings she received bent bicycles and rusting shopping trolleys and the occasional careless drunk. Their last memories were thin and sour—the haze of alcohol and nausea with only the dimmest film of surprise at their fall. Many lost consciousness before they drowned, cheating her of even that small pleasure. And this man … This man held nothing, dead before he ever hit the canal. She
had swum up to meet him, hungry for her meal, and found only emptiness and the sour taste of stale booze. Footsteps walked briskly away from her banks: peering from behind the body, she caught sight of a hunched figure in jeans and a long dark coat. Another human had done this, had slain one of their own kind and used her waters as a midden. She snarled, sending waves lashing the sides of the canal.

  This was her place. Her territory. She would not tolerate another hunter in the lands about her waters.

  The New Canal ran through the northeast corner of Fenborough, separating the crush of low-rent red-brick Victorian terraces from the richer tree-lined curves of the streets around Miller’s Park, the proud Gothic edifices of the university, and the glossy buildings of the city center. Its banks were mean and muddy, brambles warring with litter for supremacy behind the twisted hanks of barbed wire that the council strung here and there in the vain hope of keeping people away from the towpath. Toward the east end, where it came closest to the park, attempts had been made to tidy the path up with woodchips and rustic benches, in the hope of luring cyclists and walkers. But there was nothing to see, save the flat waters and the graffitied ends of the red-brick terraces on the other side. The woodchips clumped, harboring earwigs and black beetles and sticking to the wheels of any bicycle or pushchair that tried its surface. Homeless drunks colonized the benches, pitching their empty bottles and cans into the canal when they were finished. Sometimes, these days, Jenny joined them, pitching herself down on one of the benches and snagging a can of precious cider with a skinny hand. They respected her, these booze-worn men and women. They remembered the old folk-learning, living as they did close to the edge of things. They knew death all too well, whatever shape it wore, and they treated it with caution, even while they courted it. They might throw their empties into her waters, but they knew better than to get too close themselves. “I’ll drink with you, Jenny,” Other Tom would say, “but I’ll not dance. Not on your dance floor.” Then he’d salute her with his bottle or blow her a kiss and go back to his drinking. Tom knew his limits—and hers, too—and he headed off through the park when the last bottle was emptied to find himself a place to sleep in the warm smelly stairwell of the multi-story car park, in some dark corner in the loading bays at the back of the Alderman Center, or the empty stairwells of the university lecture blocks. They respected her, but they took care never to lie in her arms. It took the casual drinkers, the careless young, to come close to her by night these days.

  Yet now, in the cool gray hour that summoned dawn, here after all was Other Tom, floating on the surface of the canal, right on the bend where it turned east toward the lock. She circled him, slowly, watched as the ripples she made played through the ends of his gray hair. He weighed heavy on her, body dense and greasy in her embrace, his taste sour and old. When she ran a hand over his cold face, she felt nothing. His eyes were closed, his husk empty: no last memories, no fear or surprise or regret. Like the last body, his life had been drained from him before he ever entered the water. He had wandered away from the canal shortly before the pubs emptied out, shambling off to one of his dens. Most of the other drinkers had already been gone by then, off somewhere into the concrete and tarmac floors of the city where Jenny could not find them. Other Tom had stayed to finish off his last bottle, and then …

  She had not felt him come back. The cement sides of the canal muted her senses. She had withdrawn to the heart of her territory, deep amidst the mud and the weeds, where the first body rested, weighted down by the end of one of the bedsteads. She did not readily give up what was hers, however empty or useless.

  Other Tom was hers now, though the taste of his blood was foul in the water. She wrapped herself about him and began to draw him down.

  A movement distracted her. In the shadows under the road bridge, something stirred. A waft of stale sweat and rotting fabric and musk, and Martin Jack squatted on the towpath, his ears flat to his skull and his tail pressed low against his side. He alone dared to sleep on her banks. He was of her kind, after all, his black dog shape as wound into human myth as her own haunting of the waters. He gave her a yellow grin and said, “Good eating, Jenny-love?”

  “No eating at all, and you know it.” Jenny bared her teeth back at him.

  “Ah.” Martin Jack scratched his belly with a back foot thoughtfully, then twisted to try and reach the small of his back. “Not like it used to be. Men don’t know how to make the offerings, these days.”

  “They don’t make offerings at all.” She pulled herself up onto the bank beside him and sat, dangling her legs into the canal. “They don’t remember.”

  “They think they chained you, Jenny-love. They built their dykes and their drains and their sluices, and they wrapped you up tight.”

  “Not so tight I can’t catch you.” But she did not mean it. They were the last of their kind, her and Martin Jack, the last holdouts against the tide of human indifference. She’d never thought to make a friend out of such as he, but in these hungry days, the fae made common cause where they could. “Not that you’d be more’n a mouthful of bone and hair.”

  He nodded. “I’d choke you, Jenny-love, take you with me to wherever we go.” He sighed, looked at the body. “Somewhere other than him, I’ll bet you. I hope he went to the good place. He’d earned it.”

  Jenny shrugged. She wasn’t sentimental about the drunks. They were her things, like the ducks and the waterweed. There were always more, if one or two of them wandered. She wasn’t made to care for humans, not as anything more than prey. Whereas Martin Jack … It was the shape of him, she sometimes thought, that rangy hound form, which bound him to men. Oh, he’d lead them into trouble if he could, but over the centuries his canine heart had learnt to love them. The men and women washed up by life to drink on the canal banks were his flock, his charge, his chosen few. Now, he slumped, brows knitting.

  Jenny didn’t care for him either. It wasn’t her way. Yet, somehow, she found herself asking anyway. “Did you see what happened?”

  He shook his head. “Couldn’t. There was a wrong smell.” His head drooped even lower. “I should’ve been watching.”

  She sniffed, experimentally. Dank water and tar, a drift of yeast from the city brewery. The faintest trace of something else, something sharp and metallic, perhaps wafting from one of the old cars parked along the other side of the road. She wrinkled her nose. The new ways that had drained her fens and concreted them over worked to dim all her senses. Nothing smelled good to her any more. She pointed at the body with her toe. “Something emptied him. Cheated me.”

  “Men have always killed men.”

  “Not like this. No memories left. Same as the last one.”

  “He was a kind man. He shared his sausage rolls with me.”

  That was of no use to Jenny. She stretched her skinny arms over her head. “Better sink him before some human sees him and starts prying.”

  “Don’t want to lose your treasures?” But Martin Jack’s heart was not in it and the taunt fell flat.

  She began to sink back down into the canal. As the waters reached her neck, he said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted …” He shifted, uncomfortable. “Let me smell him, Jenny-love. See if that wrong smell’s there, too.”

  Water was the enemy of scent. Martin Jack knew that as well as she did. And she owed him nothing. But she wound herself about the body, let her waves wash it to the edge just below him. He shook himself, craned out to sniff at the wet form. She caught the scent of him, warm and ashy. Where he touched the body, dry dark patches formed, sent hot shocks through her. She shuddered, setting the body jouncing and water splashing up onto the towpath. Martin Jack started backward, spitting and shaking droplets from his face and head. “Not fair, Jenny.”

  “You burned me.”

  “Not me.”

  The two fae stared at one another. Jenny wrapped her long thin fingers into Other Tom’s gray hair. She said, “Wasn’t this one. He was just a man.
”

  “He smells wrong too. Hot wrong.”

  She couldn’t sense that. But the emptiness … She said, slowly, “Men always kill each other. Throw each other away. But they don’t … they don’t drain memories. They don’t leave a trace, not like this.”

  “There was a human …” Martin Jack frowned. “Sort of a human. Smelled … smelled different.”

  Different was bad. Jenny closed her arms about Other Tom’s body and pulled him down to her heart without another word.

  The first men who strived to steal land from the marshes had labored with wooden shovels and buckets and small smelters to carve out ditches and to bend strips of iron to bind the edges of sluices. It had been easier by far in those days for Jenny to stretch herself out through the soft earth beneath their withy-built huts, to poke and push and insinuate a way for her waters into the shallow foundations, to overflow and undermine the manmade banks. Her reach extended for mile on mile, dictating the path of roads and the shape of settlements. Once, her hold had run underneath every square inch of Fenborough, from the stones of the old fort to the undercrofts of the oldest university buildings, from the muddy pastures where men kept their goats to the edge of the chalk ridge that sloped away to the south. But men always had new tricks, new skills with which to outmaneuver her. Inch by inch, they pushed at her, and, inch by inch she retreated. Yet the ground on which the city rested remained porous: every other year, the canal overflowed its banks somewhere and had to be resisted with sandbags. Out in the fields surrounding the canal, pumps and sluices still labored to keep the soil dry enough to farm. In her bed of silt and mud, Jenny could hear them working. And in the streets of the city itself, waters lifted from her hoard and cleansed somewhere to the east flowed in earthenware pipes under the tarmac and cobbles to feed the faucets and valves of the buildings. Its flow was a distant tingle under her skin. If she listened really hard, she could hear its voice trickling through the layers of stone. Everywhere humans chattered and clattered, thumped and thrummed and thrashed through their short lives, scattering pieces of themselves as they went in snatches of conversations. She could not get a grasp on them; they slipped away from her too fast to hold. There was a wrong smell… . She reached out through her waters for a sense of that wrongness, of that hunger that had ripped all the memories from Other Tom and the first victim. Something in this town hunted where she should. Something in this town had cheated her of her rightful harvest of memories.