Fae or Fae Knot (Providence Paranormal College Book 10)

by D. R. Perry

“Just need some Excedrin or something.”

  “Here.” Olivia shoved her open handbag at me.

  “Thanks.” I plucked the lone green and white bottle from among pens, books, and orange prescription bottles of stronger stuff. “You could run a pharmacy out of that bag.”

  “Meh.” She shrugged. “I only kept it for being diurnal when I visit home. My parents are on the older side, so they like their early-bird specials.”

  “Ha!” Kim Ichiro’s barking laugh had me wincing again. “Sorry, Al.” The tablet in her lap beeped.

  “I’m not the laugh police.” I dry-swallowed three of the white tablets. “Just a Sidhe with an aching head.” Faeries weren’t supposed to get monster headaches or need glasses, either, not even in the mortal realm, but I did anyway. Bad habits die hard.

  “Still. I laughed right up in your ear.” Kim shook her head. “And I’m trying to make more apologies than Lynn Frampton this month. LORA’s already recorded nine for me and ten for her, so I’m about to catch up.”

  “It’s nice to have goals.” One Excedrin stuck on the way down, making my voice raspier than a Goblin’s. I tried to clear it a few times and started hacking up a lung instead. This happened just as the room went silent, of course.

  “Woah there.” Tony slapped my back a few times, which did absolutely nothing to help.

  “Hmm.” Kim narrowed her eyes, then elbowed Tony out of the way and poked my left shoulder.

  The sense of unease I’d been lugging around with me since Fred Redford tithed Seelie lifted. It was almost like getting off a plane, how the cabin depressurizes and your ears and balance feel almost normal again. The Tanuki must have turned my luck. The pill went down finally and I stopped coughing but too late to avoid attracting an entire courtroom of attention.

  “If you’re quite finished, Mr. Dunstable.” Judge Fiori had me in the cross-hairs of her most withering side-eye.

  “Yes, Ma’am.” I served the respectful address with a side of nodding because that’s what the occasion called for. I should have mentioned that no one can expect a person choking on analgesic tablets to keep from coughing. Would I ever just stick up for myself and say the right thing and not the polite one? The room got pin-drop quiet.

  “Court is adjourned.” The judge tapped her gavel, and the silence reversed.

  The room bloomed with sound and the needle on my headache inched over into the red. Migraine territory. Fun. Leaning against the table, I managed standing, even if just to shuffle out from behind the table while making my movements look intentional. Two decades of practice does that to a person. After that, I straightened and paced away from the front of the courtroom with measured steps.

  Navigating the crowd was the easiest part. Most folks at night court were nocturnal or even Unseelie and wanted to avoid contact with me. Unseelies faced execution and the non-faerie nocturnal set feared anything that looked like it could bring on the sunshine. Even though I didn’t have Spectral magic at my disposal like my mother, I still looked the part. I thought that, if only I could make it out into the hall, I’d be okay.

  I thought wrong.

  Outside the courtroom, echoes increased exponentially and the flashes from mundane and magical cameras alike chewed holes in my field of vision like gypsy moth caterpillars with oak leaves. If it had been one or the other, I might have made it. But light and sound launched a concerted attack against my senses and overpowered me. It was all I could do just to keep on breathing without giving voice to my pain by shrieking in agony.

  By three steps, I tasted blood. By six, I saw red to go with it and had to close my eyes to keep the light out. The entire world coated my senses with a caustic slime that burned through my body as it besieged my mind, warring with sanity. A rush of air cooled my burning cheeks, and the sound damped down to tolerable levels, a phenomenon that hadn’t occurred in seven years.

  “Gemma?”

  “You’re a wreck again, Al.” Her voice came low and soft, carrying through the air barrier she’d made around me.

  “I’ve been walking wounded for a long time.” I wasn’t talking about the migraines. She knew it, too.

  “Not my fault or my problem.” The tap of leather-soled boots approached at my right.

  “You could just undo the hushing spell, leave me to suffer.” I rubbed my temples, both ready for this conversation and dreading it at the same time.

  “I’m angry, not cruel. That’s your game.”

  “Fate is cruel.” I opened my eyes but kept them on the floor, not daring to meet her gaze.

  “Don’t you dare put the blame on anyone but yourself. You promised to meet me, go together to tithe to His Majesty. You didn’t show. If you had, things would be completely different and you know it.”

  And she was right. I could have kept on arguing, make excuses about being unable to fight my parents but those had been hollower than my heart all these years. Living a lie caught up with me the night Hope picked up that feather. No, before that, when I heard Gemma fished Lane Meyer and his friends out of the Bay. The queen's orders since then only magnified my level of deceit.

  I’d abandoned the woman I’d promised to marry, build a family and future with. The worst part was that I went right on loving her. Seeing her again drove home the point in a much more primal way than most Seelie Sidhe were comfortable with. I still desired her. She deserved an honest answer, not the canned generalities Sidhe families raised their kids to use, and the queen reinforced.

  “Yes, our lives would have been different but we can’t live the might-have-beens. All we have is now and how things could be.” I opened my eyes, finally risked meeting hers. They shimmered in the pop and the flash of media and amateur cameras alike, the hazel awash with more amber than green. Gemma’s gaze stole my breath, as ever. I wondered for a moment whether our mingled regrets had given her the ability to turn me to stone where I stood.

  “Al, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I do. Thanks for remembering how I look while hiding a migraine. You rescued me tonight even though you had every reason to walk on by. You’re my hero, Gemma Tolland.”

  “Unseelie troll captains can’t be heroes for Seelie Sidhe knights.”

  “I know it’s forbidden, but that’s how I feel. Again, I thank you.”

  “Whatever. Don’t mention it or something.” She waved a hand.

  “There is no whatever and I will mention it. You have my gratitude, Captain.”

  The mention of her title along with the third insistence on thanks twined together between us like a rope across a chasm. A Tanuki had turned my luck earlier. Perhaps that’s why I took a step toward her instead of leaving the tenuous connection at that. My heart pounded in my chest and at my temples when I realized she hadn’t taken a step back to compensate.

  “You’re welcome, I guess.” She shrugged with one shoulder, the way she always used to. The motion tugged at some long-dormant thread connected to the very core of my being. Perhaps that’s why I made that third bold move.

  “Go out with me again.”

  “Go out? This isn’t Trout Prep, and we’re not untithed changelings anymore. We can’t even hold hands. You’re crazy, Al.”

  “Maybe. I still want to see you, sane or not.” I held her gaze. The queen couldn't execute me for that.

  “We’re on opposite sides in the coldest war ever waged.” She shuffled one of her feet.

  “I don’t care about that. I only ever cared about you, Gemma. And now there’s Hope. Please, one date.”

  “You sound like a quirky ‘90s movie protagonist, chasing some Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”

  “Your favorite.” The trace of a smile tugged at my mouth. I showed it mercy, let it live a little longer.

  "Yeah, I’m a sucker for Natalie Portman in Garden State. So yeah, okay. I’ll go. One date and that’s it, but just so I can tell you all about Hope." She put her hands on her hips. "Now get out of here before Headmistress Thurston comes back with the FBE Agents and that war
rant. I’m following them when they leave to investigate."

  “Wait, FBE Agents?”

  “Watch it Al, or you’ll be in my debt.”

  “You didn’t answer.” She had to, another part of faerie law.

  “Yeah, okay. Here’s the story.” She told me about how the Feds were getting ready to search the Providence Paranormal campus, how Newport PD had Blaine Harcourt in for questioning.

  “I’d better talk to these agents. There’s a development they need to know about.”

  And that’s how I ended up giving a formal statement to the mortal authorities about my Faerie monarch, my first step toward coming clean. At least I could say that I did it for love.

  Ed

  I woke up to the sound of something crackling like a huge fire. Pushing away from the big treehouse in the nursery was my first instinct, and I did that right away. But it wasn’t on fire like I’d feared. I looked around as I drifted through the air, trying to find what woke me up. But I saw nothing out of place.

  Hope peeped at me from her hammock above, wrinkling her nose. That meant I hadn’t imagined the burning-leaves smell. I remembered something Dad always told me when he talked about fire safety and headed to the hall door. It didn’t feel hot when I pressed my hand against it, so I tried the one that led to the bathroom. Nothing there, either.

  After catching Hope’s eye again, I shrugged. She shook her head, then pointed at the window. Lifting my feet so my sneakers wouldn’t squeak like mice from dragging on the floor, I had a look outside and found the source of the fire.

  The tithing tree in the courtyard blazed with autumn color in place of all the dark green high summer leaves it’d worn just the day before. I’d never seen it like that, not in any of the twenty-four weekends I’d spent visiting Fred.

  “What is it, Ed?” Hope tugged my sleeve, then didn’t let it go. Her voice sounded so tiny compared to how it had been earlier.

  “I only sort of know.” My arm twitched because I wanted to shrug it but if I did that then my shirt would pull right out of Hope’s hand. The last thing I wanted was to make a girl, littler than me, more scared than she already was. “It has something to do with tithing but I’ve never seen this when people pledge fealty to the queen before.”

  “The state of faerie education is appalling these days, honestly.” Hertha Harcourt yawned behind us. “That the son of a Redcap and the daughter of a Troll wouldn’t know how the queen’s Tithing Tree works is a dreadful thing to contemplate.”

  “It’d be nice if a wise dragon lady helped us learn something, then.” I glanced over my shoulder at Hertha. The corners of her mouth pointed at the floor and she shook her head.

  “Well, you have your egg. Maybe your baby would like to hear a story about the tree and a little boy and girl can learn something at the same time.” Hope held her hand close to her mouth, the fingers curled into a loose fist and her thumb pointing at her lower lip. I knew a valiant effort to keep from sucking your thumb when I saw it.

  “I’d prefer singing to my egg-bound child, but you’re the Alkonost now, child. You need to know this sooner rather than later.”

  “Okay.” Hope gave the dragon lady a nod that could have come straight out of a Shonen Anime.

  This time I did shrug. If Hope Tolland was channeling Wendy Marvell or Alphonse Elric, she didn’t need to treat my sleeve like a lifeline. I wanted it back already, like so many other things in my life.

  Hertha didn’t sound even a bit reluctant, spinning us a yarn about her old Goblin butler. Not old because of his age, but because she’d fired him after her husband got killed. Apparently, the butler had given the queen access codes to the Harcourt mansion while Richard was there. The dragon lady watched him tithe to the Sidhe Queen. The tree's leaves turned and then went up in flames the moment he pledged to follow and protect her laws, becoming a Lord in her court on his first day there.

  “But why didn’t that happen when my brother took his seat at her round table as a knight?”

  “Because, while Frederick might have skipped the ranks of page and squire, he didn’t come in with a noble’s title. You must start as a Lord or higher for that. And the tree's brighter the higher said rank will be. The Tithing Tree burns with the queen’s intention. From the looks of things, Her Majesty will start Richard Hopewell as a duke.”

  I fidgeted, not daring to open my mouth and let out all my thoughts. According to my brother, I had a talent for seeming calm even when most kids would freak out. I couldn’t look at Hertha though. It was like an elephant in the room stood between me and her, one she couldn’t or wouldn’t see. I wasn’t about to draw her attention to it either. But Hope walked right up to it and slapped it in the face.

  “Mrs. Harcourt, why are you talking about these guys like they’re heroes or something? I mean, the Goblin Lord and Mr. Hopewell got your husband killed.”

  Hertha’s eyes glittered. Her skin did, too. Even with a magipsychic amulet suppressing her dragon form, she’d started scaling over.

  “Um, Hope?” I stepped in front of her, not sure what good that would do. “You just pissed off a dragon. Don’t forget that we’re crunchy and good with ketchup.”

  “I don’t care because it’s just not right that those guys basically got away with putting Pharaoh’s Rats in a dragon’s house.” She peeked over my shoulder, resting her chin on it. I felt a gust behind me as she opened her wings, too. “Anyway, she won’t hurt us. Mrs. Harcourt’s a mom. Moms do the right thing for kids, always.”

  “No.” I tried shrugging her off but her grip was too tight. “Giving birth doesn’t make a good mom. I’m living proof of that. My mother got herself sent to jail because she couldn’t go without a ghostly partner.”

  “The young medium is right, Alkonost.” Hertha’s grin glittered with too-sharp teeth. “Some bonds and promises trump even motherhood. And besides, neither of you are my own children. The fact that I have a son and this egg gives you no immunity to my wrath. This is your final warning to stop provoking it. Storytime is over.”

  The dragon lady turned her back on us, crooning over the baby encased in its mottled shell. Heaven help us.

  Chapter Seven

  Gemma

  I stomped out of the courthouse even though Albert Dunstable wouldn’t hear anything loud for fifteen more minutes. I knew he followed along behind me, too. If Headmistress Thurston hadn’t also been there, I might have turned around and called the whole ridiculous attempt at a date off.

  Out in the chilly October air, my head cleared, which kicked it into high over-thinking gear. Why had I agreed to see him again? That pretty face, of course. The sight of him had my blood racing all over again. He’d barely changed at all and the little differences made him no less interesting. New wire-framed glasses replaced his old horn-rimmed clunkers which only made the dreamboat eyes more noticeable.

  But I couldn’t let myself get swept away again. Seelie and Unseelie faeries couldn’t touch each other. Our so-called date had to stay platonic, or we’d both get executed. At least this meant he wasn’t just looking for sex. Again.

  Back in High School, Al was rational, a cool and steady hand at the wheel in a sea of a turbulent adolescence. Troll changelings had it the hardest, even worse than the Redcaps. Our faerie magic ran our tempers hot and most of us made choices that got us into trouble with Detective Weaver and her colleagues. Hertha Harcourt called them on me plenty of times, too.

  I might have ended up in Juvie if it hadn’t been for Al’s calming influence. Dependable Dunstable, I used to call him, even though I didn't understand how he managed to be. He’d steered me out of worse trouble than he ultimately got me into. But when it came time for us to run off and tithe to the Goblin King, he stood me up. Forgetting that was impossible. Was I ready to forgive?

  If it hadn’t been for Hope, maybe I wouldn’t be. And she was the real reason I’d agreed to the date, anyway. Civil relations with my baby’s daddy couldn’t hurt now that he had faerie-dictated custody.
The fact that he’d been the man of my dreams since I’d been having them was only a fringe benefit.

  I closed my eyes, nearly stumbling over a cobblestone as I walked up the hill and toward the college. Campus was a series of old brownstones lined up along two city blocks that only existed on maps made after the big Reveal. The whole thing was built by magi of various types and hidden by alumni who’d tithed to a Monarch after graduation. At all six corners sat larger brick buildings used as dorms, five stories each and square.

  A quad ran along behind the brownstones, meaning nobody could park on campus, not even emergency vehicles. That’s why the magic labs moved to a new space near the Observatory. The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations had safety regulations that the outed magical community had to follow. I had to cross the street to get to campus proper, so I followed the Headmistress to a corner, complete with crosswalk, and waited for the light to turn green.

  Mortal laws were a cakewalk compared to the queen’s. That was why most Seelie families managed them well enough to make up the vast majority of extrahuman lawyers. I stepped into the street. Yoshi Ichiro was unique as a shifter in legal practice. Law enforcement and extrahuman medicine were another story and part of the reason PPC ended up opening admissions to anyone with the grades.

  I stopped walking. The open admissions had to be part of why Richard Hopewell turned against the school. He used to be a Professor here, used to be to Henrietta Thurston's husband, too, until the year before said change took effect.

  “Hey, get out of the road, you dumb broad!”

  A strident blast on a horn came with a free bird. I returned the favor by shooting one back at the angry driver. My light was still green but this piece of work wanted to turn right on red. That shifted my Troll temper up a notch higher than usual.

  “This dumb broad can total your car with one punch, asshole!” I brandished a fist and dropped my Glamour to give him a good view of my tusks.