The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity

by Joshua Palmatier

  “Not all of him.” I closed my hand around the marble which hung from a gold chain around my neck. “Just a piece of his soul.”

  I spread my wings, catching the updraft from the chimney atop the apartment complex. Hot air from the boiler let me circle higher with little effort, until I could see the streets stretched out beneath me. The higher I flew, the more the grating in my bones eased.

  I felt it every time I entered a city, a metallic pain, like biting into a ball of tin foil. But the pain of all that iron wasn’t the scary part; far worse was when I started to grow accustomed to it, a process that came easier with every passing year.

  “Jessie, you’re an FBI agent. You can’t kidnap kids.”

  “You’d rather I waterboarded him, maybe?”

  Larry’s exasperated sigh was jumpy and distorted, like a radio signal in a thunderstorm. Years ago, I had tattooed a miniature ring on his palm, a twin to the one on my own. But a hastily scrawled ink circle was no substitute for the golden tattoo that bound me to my human partner and handler. “You wouldn’t have done this twenty years ago,” he said.

  Sometimes I wished fairy rings came with off switches. “If this works, I’ll restore the kid’s soul, wipe their memories, and everyone lives happily ever after. If not, there’s a good chance this city won’t be around long enough to care. Besides, you’re forgetting something important.”

  “What’s that?”

  My wings twitched, turning me eastward toward the tugging I felt from within the marble. “It’s working.”

  Larry was many things, but he was foremost a damn good agent. “I’ll let the team know. What’s the location?”

  “East. I don’t have a distance. Send someone to the apartment, too. Tell them to take care of the troll out back. Oh, and stitch up my leg.” Better to do it while I wasn’t there to feel the pain.

  Shia and the centerfold flanked me as we flew. We were high enough that the people on the street shouldn’t notice anything but a trio of birds. Maybe bats, if they squinted hard enough.

  “You’ve been working this case for months,” said Larry. “Fairies get annual leave too, you know. When was the last time you went home?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, mother.” What home? Most of the elder fae had retreated to Fairy centuries ago, before the hills were overrun. There were only a handful of fairy hills left, and none within a hundred miles of here. Even if I did go back, I had been too long among humans. I didn’t belong there any more than I did here. “Just shut up and let me do my job, all right?”

  “Jessie, I saw the MRI results.”

  I scowled. Magnetic resonance imaging devices could be calibrated to scan for iron. It was the best tool we had for checking iron toxicity in the bureau’s nonhuman agents. “So did I. I passed.”

  “Barely. And how much longer do you think that will last when every breath sucks particles of rust into your lungs? What if Isabel had cut you with that blade?”

  I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Before I could answer, a brown shadow tore past my right side, and one of my escorts vanished. I looked down to see paper and plastic fluttering to the ground as a large hawk flapped up toward me. “Scold me later, mom. I’ve got to go fight bad guys.”

  Fear sped my wings until my entire body hummed with my efforts to escape. It didn’t help. The hawk continued to gain. I darted to one side, trying to beat speed with maneuverability. “They must have left someone to watch the apartment. Shapeshifter, from the size of it.”

  “Can you end the spell? Jump back to your body?”

  “Not without abandoning the kid’s soul.” Truth be told, I wasn’t thinking about the kid. I was thinking about the hawk, and the cloud of twisted magic and toxic iron that clung to its feathers. It was unnatural, an ugly corruption of something once beautiful. “Come on, you bastard.”

  I dove for the buildings below. If I could find a small enough window or opening—Hell, I’d settle for a gutter I could crawl into. I dropped onto a restaurant rooftop and ducked behind a brick chimney, sending my remaining pixie to slow the hawk. Paper tore, and half a centerfold drifted down onto the hot roof. The hawk landed moments later. I drew my sword and peeked out.

  The hawk had vanished, replaced by a fairy who was close to my own true form in size and stature. But she was … twisted. Her veins were like blue steel, a stark contrast to her pale skin. Her eyes had a strange, shimmering film, like oil on a puddle. Old scars covered her exposed arms and legs, especially the hands. Hair the color of rust hung past her shoulders in filthy clumps. She wore torn-off black jeans and a ragged T-shirt, but it was the steel chain circling her waist that troubled me most. This was a fairy so far gone that she embraced the pain and corruption of iron.

  I searched the rooftop. Metal smokestacks huffed greasy steam into the air. Patches of black tar marked old repairs. A small satellite dish was mounted near the northeast corner.

  I flew toward the dish, making it there just before the fairy. I grabbed one of the metal legs to stop myself. I nearly tore my shoulder, but my pursuer stumbled past. A human would have fallen off the roof, but she managed to regain her balance at the edge. I stayed low and tugged at the electrical tape on the hilt of my sword until I exposed the end.

  “You’re different from your companions, little false pixie.” Her voice was raspy, conjuring images of poorly maintained factory machines. “There’s a true mind in there, and is that a human soul I smell?”

  I crouched at the base of the dish, grimacing at the exposed metal. The legs were aluminum, but the steel conduit covering the cables felt like a thousand static shocks jumping onto my skin. I wrinkled my nose at the faint smell of burning paper. Too long here, and my magic would unravel whether I wanted it to or not. “Tell me where you took T.J. Famosa.”

  Her smile grew. Her teeth had the same oily-metal sheen as her eyes. “Or else what? You’ll send another of your paper pixies for me?”

  Why couldn’t they have sent another troll, big and strong and stupid? I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Larry, I need you to press the barrel of your gun into the ring on your palm.”

  “What?” I winced and clenched my fist to muffle his words. “Are you insane?”

  “It’s a fairy ring. I can open it to allow objects to pass through as well as sound.” Probably. “For Mab’s sake, don’t fire until I say the word.” I brought my fist to my lips, whispering old words to expand the ring’s magic.

  The fairy didn’t give me the chance. Maybe she felt my spell, or maybe she simply lacked the patience of our kind. She lunged, nails like metal claws gleaming in the sunlight.

  I reversed my sword and stepped sideways to where the cable left the conduit and snaked up to the dish. I held the tip of my sword against my stomach. Her palm jabbed the blade through my stomach, directly into the exposed cable behind me. The other end of the sword pierced her skin, and she screamed as electricity ripped through her body.

  It shorted out within seconds, but it was enough. I pried the sword free. “Paper doesn’t conduct electricity, bitch.” I crawled over her spasming body and pressed my palm to her forehead. Before she could recover, I finished my spell and told Larry to fire.

  I had survived, but it hurt like hell. A blackened hole passed cleanly through my gut, and a spray of fairy blood covered my body. The sight made me want to vomit, but I managed to quell the urge. The last thing I needed was to start spewing confetti.

  “Are you all right?” Larry asked. “Did it work?”

  “It worked.” My sword was ruined. The remaining tape had melted, and the metal had shed its magic, reverting to a bent staple. I tossed it aside.

  Even in death, the fairy appeared angry. Feral. Her lips were drawn back, and her vacant eyes were narrow. How long had she been banished from home, unable to return? How long since the infection had taken her body and mind? Had she realized what was happening at the end, or had she been too far gone to care?

  I tested my wings. The steel conduit had melt
ed off the tip of the upper left wing when the fairy pressed me down, but I could still fly. “There’s a dead fairy on the roof of Pizza Palace. Corner of Walnut and Fourth. Send someone to clean that up.”

  “That’s two attacks,” Larry said.

  “Believe it or not, I can count too.” I flew higher, trying to concentrate over the pain and noise of the city.

  “Both in daylight, in the open? Whatever this is, it’s big.”

  “No shit.” I clutched the marble in both hands. Kareem continued to lead me east, toward the edge of the city. I flew in silence for a while, while Larry dispatched people to clean up my mess.

  “You didn’t even try to question her.”

  I sighed. “Do you reason with rats?”

  “You used to. I know your file, Jessie. Remember the dwarves you brought in back in eighty-six? You spent weeks trying to get through to them.”

  “And look where it got me.” Three dwarves, brothers, had sabotaged a coal mine out east, killing nineteen people. “It would have been quicker to just kill them.”

  “Execute them, you mean?”

  “Spare me. Do you want to save your world, or do you want to worry about procedure and fair trials and all of that human bullshit while they murder your people and mine?”

  “How long has it been since you laughed, Jessie?”

  My jaw tightened. “There’s something ahead.” I felt it before I smelled it, and smelled it before I saw it. “They’re at the landfill.”

  Before me stretched the epitome of all things human: a gaping pit, a scar in the earth which housed an ever-growing heap of filth and garbage. A miniature mountain of plastic and steel and decay. A small brick building sat to one side, processing some of the methane stink that filled the air.

  “Stay out of sight,” said Larry. “We’ll have a team there in fifteen minutes.”

  I ignored him, as he must have known I would. I circled the landfill, joining the seagulls, whose harsh cries made me want to tear off my ears. “There’s something strange about this place.”

  I spied a dozen humans walking entranced around the edge of the landfill, guided by two fairies so far gone I couldn’t tell what race they had once belonged to. They had actually incorporated scraps of metal into their bodies, like cyborgs from a bad movie. One might have been a faun, from the odd angles of his legs. The other was larger. An ogre, perhaps?

  The humans appeared blurry, almost ghostlike. Had they murdered the prisoners already? If not for the insistent tugging of the kid’s soul, I might have missed them entirely.

  “What’s going on?” Larry whispered.

  “They’re just walking.” Circling. Counterclockwise around a mountain—around a hill of human waste. “Impossible.”

  “What?”

  I could feel it now. Beneath the iron and the garbage, its magic warped but familiar. My fists clenched. “They’re building a fairy hill.”

  “Are you sure? I thought that was impossible.”

  “So did I.” But the magic below me was unmistakable. They were using mortals to open a path from this world to Fairy. What would such a hill do to my home? A hill born of steel and iron, its magic shaped by fallen fae. They would loose long-forgotten evils upon this world, and they would warp the beauty of Fairy just as they had done to themselves.

  “How long until they finish?”

  “I don’t know.” There were rituals to be followed … rituals that culminated with the deaths of those who opened the path. There was a reason humans had for so long mistaken our hills for burial mounds. It was those deaths that opened the way, the passage of their souls from this world to wherever their kind went next, but it had to be done at the proper time. How many laps had they completed? “When will those reinforcements arrive?”

  “Ten minutes, according to the GPS.”

  “That’s not soon enough, damn it.” I flexed my fingers, looking at the blackened fairy ring in my palm. I grabbed the marble which held Kareem’s soul and pressed it against my hand. The ring wasn’t big enough, and magic could only bend the rules so far. I felt paper tear as I forced the kid’s soul through. I clung to the pain, using it to focus my anger. “Hold on to that. If I don’t get back, have someone from the bureau take it to Kareem.”

  “What are you doing, Jessie?”

  “What I have to do.” My magic was little use. The lower I got, the more the iron would warp even the simplest of spells. I wasn’t even certain I could maintain this body if I landed. So much metal crushed into a single place, pulsing through my mind like static. “They don’t know I’m here. We should be able to get off four, maybe five shots before they spot me.”

  “What if there are others?”

  It didn’t matter. The metal jutting from the fairies’ flesh was both poison and protection, armor against attack. A perfect shot might kill one, but most likely the bullets from Larry’s gun would only piss them off. “Trust me.”

  Magic pulsed through me as I circled downward, stronger than anything I had felt in ages. It carried the scent of home, but … burnt. Like the aftermath of a forest fire, the seared-metal smell infused the very air of Fairy.

  I flexed my hand. The last two fingers were torn and unresponsive, but the ring still functioned. I gripped my forearm with my other hand to steady my aim.

  Larry would never forgive me, but I didn’t care. I could taste their magic. It burned my throat and chest. He could kill me, or they could, but I’d be damned before I let them do this.

  I studied the humans, wondering briefly which was Kareem’s father. Folding my wings back, I swooped toward the front of their line.

  I sat in the car, grimacing at the grinding of the engine. The bureau had a handful of vehicles specifically for their fairy agents, with plastic and fiberglass replacing every possible component, but some things required steel.

  Larry returned a short time later, sliding into the back seat with me. He was red with fury, his forehead glossed with sweat. “Get us out of here,” he said to the driver, his jaw clenched so tight I could barely understand him.

  “How’s the kid?” I asked.

  “Kareem is fine.” He wouldn’t look at me. “They won’t remember a thing about you or what happened.”

  “And yet you sound like a goblin took a dump in your favorite shoes.”

  “Five humans are dead,” he shouted. “Tell me the truth, Jessie. In the name of God, tell me the fucking truth. What did you do?”

  I matched his volume. “I stopped them from opening a hill of iron and unleashing devils you can’t imagine into this world, that’s what I did.”

  “You’re done, Jessie. When we get back, you’re turning in your gun and your badge, and going back to Fairy. If you ever set foot in this world again, I swear to God I’ll—”

  “No.”

  “You murdered those people! Do you feel anything for those dead men and women? T.J. wasn’t the only one with family, you know. Just because he survived—”

  “If I killed them—and I’m not admitting anything—it was because it was the only way to stop the fairies.” I knew I should feel something … would have felt something, twenty years ago. But they were only humans, and their deaths had prevented so many more.

  We both knew this wasn’t about the choice I had made. It was about the ease with which I had made it. That I had done so without telling him and without regret. That I had ordered Larry to fire again and again until the fairies spotted me and flew to attack me. I had barely managed to end the spell, returning to my injured body in the Famosas’ apartment.

  “I was the one pulling the trigger, Jessie.” His anger had receded for the moment, and I could hear the anguish in his words, even if I didn’t share it.

  “What did you expect, Larry?”

  “I expected you to find another way.”

  I shook my head. “You know damn well what this job does to us. The price we pay every time we follow our twisted cousins into their havens of rust and iron and death. You monitor our
fall, charting every speck of iron that infects our blood, writing your reports as we descend into the same madness we hunt.”

  “That’s why I’m sending you home.”

  “No,” I said again.

  “Jessie, if you return now, you might be able to recover. You’ll laugh again, and find what you’ve lost.”

  “And you’ll recruit another fairy to take my place,” I said, all but snarling. “You’ll destroy them the same way you did me. Maybe not you personally, but you know exactly what will happen to my replacement. So do we. And we do it anyway.”

  “I told you to get away.” Sadness had replaced the last of the anger.

  I shrugged. “I can still do this job. Not for much longer, maybe, but I’m not about to let this happen to another of my kin a second sooner than it has to. Someone has to stop them … and I trust you to stop me, when it comes to that.”

  Slowly, he nodded. “The next time you cross the line …”

  “I understand.” I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. The fairies had escaped, but I knew their faces. I knew their magic. Human agents were searching the landfill for clues. I might have lost laughter and beauty, but I had this. “Until then, we have a job to do.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Barbara Ashford seems to make a habit of cannibalizing her life for her art. She set “How to Be Human™” in the local Radisson Hotel and drew on her memories of acting in summer stock to create the world of the Crossroads Theatre for her first contemporary fantasy novel Spellcast. Barbara lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her husband whom she met while performing at the Southbury Playhouse. They have yet to spot any faeries lurking around New Roc City, but you never know. To find out about her latest projects—including the Spellcast sequel—visit her at www.barbara-ashford.com.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This has given her a predilection for mushrooms and speculative fiction. She lives in Connecticut with a ridiculous dog and a cat who is an internet celebrity.