Tooth and Nail

by Jennifer Safrey

  I bent down to pick up my duffel, but Frederica grasped my wrist, her cool, smooth fingers sure and firm on my skin. I glanced up and was caught in an involuntary—on my part—staredown. Her bright green irises were flecked with gold and ringed with impossible gleaming silver. If eyes truly were the window to the soul, then she’d slammed the window hard on my hands, trapping me at the entrance, with nowhere to look but inside.

  When she spoke again, it was in a whisper, but her words echoed and multiplied in my ear until it became a reverent, hushed gospel chorus.

  “You’re fae, Gemma.”

  “It’s Gemma Fae,” I corrected in my own whisper.

  “You’re fae,” she repeated. “And so am I.”

  She must have interpreted my stunned silence as open-mindedness, because she added, “We, the morning fae, carry an ancient tradition in our shared blood. We have a responsibility to the future.”

  I tried, and failed, to blink. We stayed that way, gazes locked, for a long time.

  “Do you understand?” she eventually asked me.

  Did I understand?

  “Fae?” I choked out. “Fae. What, you mean like faeries? With wings and sparkles and shit?” I waited for a punch line, or at least the clarification of a poor metaphor, but got nothing. “So you’re a faerie. And I’m a faerie.”

  She frowned. There was no furrow between her brows, and the corners of her mouth didn’t drop. Her smooth face didn’t change in any way, but I saw the frown underneath it. “We don’t use the term faerie because that’s only a sliver of our ancestry…”

  “We’re both faeries. Oh, related faeries.”

  “All fae share—“

  “Right, same blood, ancient tradition. I got that part.” I sat back in my chair. At some point, Frederica had freed my wrist. She sat back as well.

  I watched her for a few moments, then said, “It’s funny, but you don’t give the overall impression of being crazy. You do it really well, actually. The last crazy person I ran into was a guy on the street hopped up on crack who threw an empty Jack Daniels bottle at me and screamed that he was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. He was pretty obvious. You’re more of a sneaky crazy person.”

  Frederica still said nothing. Maybe—maybe she wasn’t crazy? Maybe this was a setup. I examined a couple of corners in the café where the wall met the ceiling, looking for hidden cameras or microphones. I wasn’t anyone famous, but Avery was well known, and maybe someone figured they could get his dopey girlfriend with a reality TV practical joke.

  “It’s not a trick,” Frederica assured me as I peered over her shoulder for a video camera. “I’m not crazy. As far as I know, anyhow. Will you let me show you something, if it will help you believe me?”

  I sat back and sighed. So much for a job proposal and a little ego-stroking. “Sure, go ahead,” I said, gesturing to her and dropping my hand back on the table with a thump. “Blow my mind.”

  Frederica turned my hand over, palm up, and held it still. Again, her touch disconcerted me. It was like running your finger along the skin of an unusual animal, like a hairless cat, and finding it’s not what you expected at all. “I’ll give you a glimpse of it,” she said. “The best I can right now. Your fae senses have been dormant for so long and only a complete transformation can awaken them, but I still think the beautiful power of the Olde Way can reach you.”

  “That’s olde with an ‘e,’ isn’t it,” I said, and wasn’t surprised at her nod. The rational part of me demanded to leave this café right now, but the curious side of me won this round. Avery was going to love this later.

  “There’s a bond within morning fae,” she said after a pause. “An attraction, if you will, that goes beyond the molecular.”

  “You know I’m straight, right? I mean, you know about my boyfriend.”

  “I’m not talking about sexual attraction,” she said, the corner of her lips quirking up a bit. “It’s an acknowledgment of an invisible link, an instant recognition. But the first time you feel it, it can be laced with sexual confusion. You can catch the eye of the man across the street and you can see it in him, and he sees it in you. He’s merely leaning against a lamppost looking at you, and the mutual gaze can overwhelm your mind with attraction, the need to feel close to one like yourself in this unnatural world that’s sprung up around us.”

  I felt a rush through each ear and it slammed together in the center of my brain. My reason and logic shook and threatened to crumble. I didn’t want this weakness. If I hadn’t been frozen in shock, I would have put up my fists to ward off this... this…

  What was this?

  “Gemma,” Frederica said, “close your eyes.”

  I did. At that moment, I couldn’t disobey.

  She placed something tiny in the center of my palm. It tickled a bit and I instinctively curled my fingers in to probe it with my fingertips, but Frederica caught hold, folding my hand over the object so it was snug in my fist. She reached for my other hand and closed it over my first, then wrapped her own two hands around mine.

  My eyelids tightened as I tried to crack one open to peek. But the sound stopped me. It was indiscernible at first, fading in and out of my auditory consciousness, then the song began to wrap itself like a gossamer shroud around my mind, cradling my thoughts in its softness, relaxing them into inertia.

  Form and substance dissolved, melting into a gentle pool. The hard wooden seat beneath me, the sticky tabletop under my forearms, all fell away, and I felt nothing, nothing, until color and light began to wind around and up my body. Red warmth held me down while white coolness gently tugged at the crown of my head. In between I felt a rainbow of emotion until the white drew down and enveloped me in a radiant glow of peace.

  And the scent—like every flower in the world combined, and like crisp brook water, and like sunlight after a week of rain.

  The voice came from somewhere, and echoed through me. I heard it in my hands, in my stomach, in my legs. I lived here. We all came from here, this place of purity. This is where we exist in each other, and the light moves in and out of us. We create our own surprises. Every moment is free of the one preceding it, or the one following it, and every moment is full of genius and wonder, lasting an eternity. It’s the Olde Way. It’s not gone. It’s not gone…

  It was gone. It was yanked away and I fell back to here, back into seat. I couldn’t open my eyes. I wouldn’t, and perhaps I would return. But the song faded and the warm cushion peeled away from my mind. I heard Frederica, her words coaxing me out of the tunnel. “Come back. Come back.”

  I think I shook my head, but the motion was slow and cottony.

  “That was just a tiny part of it all,” she said. “You can pull away.”

  “I don’t want to,” I mumbled.

  “I know,” she said, her reply sounding like a lullaby. “I know. None of us did. We’re all going back there, but we can’t without your help. Come back, Gemma.”

  “What is it?” I slurred, then licked my lips and tried again. “What’s in my hand?”

  “Just one little piece of our growing collection. The innocence, it’s deep inside there, but it’s not enough to bring the Olde Way back. The morning fae have been extracting the essence for generations—hundreds of years—and storing it, nurturing it, and we’re closer than ever before to recreating what we lost when the human world took over.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. My words were clear and my consciousness had returned, but I was breathing hard and I was exhausted, bone-tired. I opened my eyes and stared at Frederica as I repeated my question. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What have you been dreaming about?” she whispered, and gently opened my hands. I looked down.

  A tooth.

  Small, smooth and pure white, it was the most frightening thing I had ever seen. And it was moving—but no, that was my cupped hand, trembling.

  “We just obtained it last night for the collection,” Frederica said. “If I was going to jol
t your fae senses, it needed to be fresh, to have as much of its innocence intact as possible.”

  They—the fae—just obtained it last night? Fresh. Innocence.

  Collection.

  “Tooth faeries?” I shouted.

  Frederica blinked.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, dropping the tooth on the table and abruptly pulling away. “Come on. You had me there, okay? You had me, with your hypnotic hocus-pocus whatever, but now I’m supposed to believe I’m a tooth faerie?”

  My hands were still shaking. Because honestly, she’d more than had me there. That—vision, or experience, was too much like a memory ingrained in my soul, and even now, I wanted to go back there.

  Frederica sighed, appearing far more disappointed than intimidated by my outburst. “This is a first for me,” she said.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Because,” she continued, as if I hadn’t interrupted, “the rest of us, we knew who we were from the beginning. They might have chosen to take their part in our quest or not, but we’ve never had to tell a rational, intelligent fae adult who she is.”

  “About that job offer,” I said then. “You’re not recruiting me to break into people’s houses in the middle of the night and take their kids’ teeth, are you?”

  In the silence that followed, I received the answer I’d feared.

  “O-kay, then,” I said. “I’m sorry to let you down, not to mention the rest of your winged buddies, but I think it’s time for me to leave now.”

  “I agree. We’ll talk again when you’ve had a chance to think things over.”

  “Um, no.” I picked up my duffel and stood.

  “There’s someone I would like you to speak with further, if you don’t mind,” Frederica said, stirring her chai around twice before reaching into her pants pocket for a slightly bent card. I noticed her pants were diaphanous ivory linen, belted with a filmy pink scarf. Her clothes, her manner, were all faerie.

  Okay, she probably could convince a stupid person into believing she was fae. But what kind of person could be convinced that they were born fae as well? Fae, for crying out loud. It was like some geek live-action roleplaying game gone way too far.

  But even my own mind was failing in its effort to be indignant. I was there just now, while I was holding the tooth. I was there.

  I’ll take her card, I thought. I’ll take it and get the hell out of here.

  Frederica produced a pen from her little handbag and wrote something on the card. Then she held it up. “My number’s on the front of this card, as well as information about our local community gatherings. There are three every month, and you should come, Gemma. We get together to reconnect, to re-experience our history. You’ll be welcomed, and you’ll get to know your family.”

  “I know my family.”

  “Do you?” she asked, and the challenge was genuine but not unkind. “You won’t be alone. I guide this particular gathering and I’ll be there tonight. I know it will help you understand. But your mind won’t open to it until you hear all this, all that I’ve told you, from someone you trust.”

  “How could you know who I trust?”

  “I believe I got this one right.” She held the card out to me, and I grabbed it so hard that it bent nearly in half, but my eyes didn’t leave her face. “Talk to her,” she said. “She’s our only hope to getting through to you, if she tells you the truth. I think now, she finally will. I didn’t write her number down. I assume you have it.”

  I glanced at the card, and what I read, what she’d written, caused a theatrical double-take before I dropped it on the floor. Then I looked back at Frederica. Her satisfied smile held only kindness and understanding. She reached down and retrieved the card, then slid it gently into the thumb crease of my now tightly fisted hand.

  “What?” I managed, shaking my head. The one word emerged as an ineffective squeak.

  “Like I said,” she said, “it’s a family business.”

  >=<

  For the first time in my life, I knocked on the door. After so many years of banging in and out, the entitlement had suddenly disintegrated. Perhaps I didn’t know this house—and the other person who’d lived in it—as well as I thought I did.

  When she opened the door and I saw her face, the first face I ever saw, I felt a flash of that moment when I held the tooth—that overwhelming strength of innocence and purity, that childhood sensory perfection—but it passed before I could hang on to it.

  “So, where do you hide your wings, Mom?” I asked.

  Please, my mind cried. Please, Mom, ask me what I’m talking about, look at me like I’m nuts, tell me I’m hungry and overtired, and that everything is the same as it’s been my whole life.

  “I think you should come in and sit down, Gemma,” she said.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t wait until there was a chair under me before I took her advice.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ignoring Mom’s offer of assistance, I somehow dragged my beaten self up onto the blue sofa. Mom watched me collapse against the cushions, then closed the door and stood in front of it. She fidgeted, then wrapped her arms across her chest—not defiantly, but defensively.

  Any other day, she’d be pushing a glass of wine into my hand, giving me a chunk of fresh bread from the bakery up the street, and chattering about the day’s antics of one of the naughtier children in her class.

  But this wasn’t any other normal day. At least, not normal as I’d always defined it. When normal changed this much this fast, what could be the meaning of strange?

  “I made a turkey,” my mother finally ventured in a small, weak voice.

  “Oh, you made a turkey, all right. About thirty years ago,” I said. “And here I am.”

  “Gemma, don’t…”

  “Do not ‘Gemma’ me that way. Don’t imply that I’m the unreasonable one. However,” I amended, “I’m okay with you saying my name as in, ‘Gemma, I can explain why for your entire life, I withheld a crucial and bizarre detail of your existence.’”

  Rather than taking the cue I provided, Mom remained silent. I regarded her the way a detached scientist might regard a newly impaled butterfly on a cardboard display. Women walked into the homes they grew up in and expected comfort and familiarity, but what I found in the living room this time was Bethany Fae Cross, a woman with a collection of secrets and complications so enormous, yet so invisible to me up until today.

  Perhaps not just because she was fae, but also because she was a mother.

  She moved to the sofa and sat beside me. I scooched a few stubborn inches away from her, but she reached her hand across those inches and brushed a few errant strands of hair off my cheek. I was almost surprised to notice it was the same hand I knew. It hadn’t suddenly morphed into Frederica’s dainty long-fingered hand. Mom’s fingers were short and strong. I’d more than once felt her grip on my upper arm to restrain me from crossing the street without looking both ways. The skin of her fingertips was tight and tough, cultivated in a dishwasher-free domicile. Her nails were ragged from scraping between bathroom tiles and digging deep and gloveless into the backyard garden.

  “What did Frederica Diamond tell you?” she asked softly.

  “Everything you didn’t.”

  She gracefully dodged the hurt I hurled, continuing, “How did she get you to believe?”

  I searched my mind for another surly-daughter comeback, but I’d depleted my usually bottomless arsenal. I was too tired to reload. So I went for the truth. “She showed me. She showed me the place, or time, or whatever it was…”

  “The Olde Way,” Mom said, and in her familiar, sure voice, it wasn’t crazy. It was a bedtime story under a pile of warm blankets.

  I wanted to weep.

  “Were you there?” I asked her. “Ever?”

  “I’ve glimpsed it, like you,” she said, looking past me at something in her mind.

  “Where is it? When is it?”

  “The Olde Way predates you, me, Christopher Columbus
, Moses, King Tut. The fae didn’t record our world. They didn’t feel the need to preserve their history because they never anticipated its extinction. They couldn’t predict an existence where it’s necessary to learn from mistakes. All that’s left is the memory, passing down through our lineage, but that memory weakens with each generation.”

  She sighed and refocused her gaze on my face. “My few glimpses were as brief as yours,” she said, “but they were a tiny bit more vivid. It’s harder for you to access the memory, but it’s still there.”

  “When you called me on my cell earlier,” I said, “did you know who Frederica was?”

  “Not right away. There aren’t just a few of us, Gemma. There are so many, everywhere.” She paused. “But when you told me you were meeting unexpectedly with a job recruiter, and when you told me her middle name was Fae, I knew. Some fae families, ours included, continued the tradition of giving children the name, even though we couldn’t any longer give them the valuable inheritance that went with it.”

  And here I’d thought it was just tradition on my mother’s side because it was a pretty name.

  “You didn’t want me to talk to her,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t want me to talk to any of them, and that’s why you never told me who—what—we are?”

  “I couldn’t stop this, Gemma. I did try, but it’s impossible to leave your destiny behind. I knew that. I’d just hoped that by now, you’d stayed under the radar long enough so that you wouldn’t be pressed into service.”

  “As a … “ I struggled to remember the words Frederica had used. “A collector? Were you a collector?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I collected because it helped me to continue the definition of who I am, who we were and what we had. The morning fae are split into lineages, and each lineage carries on a tradition and a specific role and responsibility in bringing back our world, our way. My lineage—our lineage—are collectors.”