Loose Changeling: A Changeling Wars Novel

by A. G. Stewart

  He still stared at me, examining my face, the eggs still on his fork. “Strong instincts. It must be tied to your emerging Fae nature.”

  “Which is...?” I trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the blank. He still hadn't explained who was trying to kill me.

  He set down his fork, the eggs forgotten. “I know I owe you a lot of answers. I just keep feeling like it's the Aranhods’ duty to tell you everything. They're your biological family after all. But things have gotten really hairy, really fast. Each of the Sidhe, the greater Fae, has their own Talents, some random, some inherited. The lesser Fae have magic as well, but not the way we do. Theirs is much more specific—as you see with the hobgoblins. For you, since you're a Changeling, I'd guess...” His gaze focused back on the face of his watch. “Shit.”

  “What?” If there was anything I hated, it was not knowing things, being left out of the loop.

  “It's not over.” He grabbed my hand, his other hand at his sword. “The hobgoblins were a distraction. Damn it, it's been too long since I've been truly involved with the Fae world. We have to get out of here. Now. Something's headed this way, and it's not small.”

  Something worse than hobgoblins? What could possibly be worse? I gripped my steak knife again, taking it with me as we fled for the door. We'd made it halfway there when I received my answer.

  The door dissolved into splinters. A hound, tall as a pony, bounded into the dining room. Its build was somewhere between Irish wolfhound and leopard, shaggy black hair covering it from head to toe. But where eyes should have looked at me lay only hair and unmarked flesh. It raised its nose and sniffed the air.

  “Great,” Kailen muttered, “a grushound.”

  The hound's ears pricked toward us; its lips curled back over its teeth.

  “Well, get rid of it,” I whispered.

  It stalked closer, a low growl starting in its throat. Claws, long and sharp as a cat's, sank into the maroon carpet.

  “Can't,” Kailen said. “This is no hobgoblin. There's nothing else for it.” He reached a hand over and shoved me back. “Run!” He snapped out the folded sword just as the hound pounced.

  Teeth and claws met metal.

  Despite its lack of eyes, the hound moved with the fluid motion of a striking snake. It snapped at Kailen's arms, claws trying to find his legs. He moved out of the way of each strike, bringing his sword up just in time to block another bite. The hound bit down on the blade of the sword. For a moment I thought it might break, but Kailen jerked his arm, pulling it free and scoring a gash across the hound’s snout.

  It yelped and began its attack anew. I stood in the middle of the dining room, frozen, unable to move in one direction or another. I’d always thought I handled pressure well. When my boss had told me I needed to sell six hundred more planners by the end of the month so our branch would meet its goals, I hadn’t even broken a sweat. I’d flipped through our Rolodex of our best clients and convinced each that they needed extras. When Owen and I had hosted our first Christmas dinner at our house, with both sides of our family attending, I hadn’t blinked an eye when Owen dropped the apple pie on its way out of the oven. I’d simply used my phone to hunt down a twenty-four-hour grocer, slapped a twenty in Owen’s hand, and had him pick up another. Pop quizzes in college, interviews, public speaking—all things I had handled with aplomb. But here I was, my gray ballet flats glued to the plush carpet of the dining room. My fingers had gone numb; the steak knife had fallen to the floor.

  Kailen moved in a dizzying display of swordplay. The hound kept trying to get past him to where I stood.

  The kitchen door opened, and the elderly woman who had served us let out a little scream before collapsing to the floor. The sound broke my dazed panic. I turned and dashed for the middle window on the wall opposite the door. It didn't look like the owner had ever replaced or updated it. I would have thought the swinging brass lock charming, the heavy-framed single-paned windows quaint, if I'd been able to admire them from the breakfast table. “Shit, shit, shit,” I swore beneath my breath as I bruised my fingers pushing on the lock. Behind me, the hound’s teeth clicked each time it closed its jaws.

  The window stuck as I pushed it up. As much as I shoved, it wouldn’t move past the halfway point. I set my dignity aside, ducked my head, and began to wriggle through the opening. I dropped onto the porch, hands first, and pulled myself forward until I could bring a leg out.

  As soon as I had, someone touched my other leg. “Move!” Kailen said. He slipped out the window after me, landing unceremoniously on top of me. My foot caught for a moment on the windowsill, making me wince. He rolled off, sword still in hand, and gripped the bottom of my sleeve. Before I had time to even gasp, he'd used the tip of his blade to separate the top of my sleeve from my blouse. He jerked down hard, the remaining bit of fabric ripping as it pulled free.

  With the air of a soldier throwing a grenade, he balled it up and tossed it into the dining room. “Go!” he whispered in my ear, his hand coming to rest on my upper arm.

  “The owner,” I gasped out.

  “It won't bother her. Go!”

  I didn't need to be told again. I scrambled to my feet and let Kailen guide me as we ran down the steps of the porch. My shoes pounded against the black asphalt of the parking lot, each footstep jolting my limbs and riding up my spine.

  The sound of breaking glass sounded from behind us. Instinct took over. I separated from Kailen as we reached the car, swinging around the hood with more speed than I thought myself capable of. A beep sounded and the locks clicked open.

  And then I made the mistake of looking up. The hound bounded over the pavement toward us, each stride seeming to cover ten of ours.

  “Nicole!” Kailen yelled out. He already sat behind the wheel. The engine roared to life.

  I jerked the passenger door open and stepped inside. As soon as both my feet had left asphalt, the car surged forward. The momentum threw me into a sitting position, the car door still half-opened. Jane's squeaking filled the cabin.

  Kailen jerked the steering wheel, launching me toward him. My hand, still on the door, spasmed, and the door slammed shut. We pulled out of the parking lot, the trees passing overhead in a blur. A screech sounded, the harsh sound of grinding metal. I looked at the rear window and saw the hound, clinging to the trunk, claws scrabbling against the smooth surface.

  “It's on the car!” I screamed.

  Kailen jerked the wheel again, and I slammed against the passenger door. How the hell did he manage to get his seatbelt on?

  I shoved myself away from the passenger door and looked back again. The hound rolled on the street behind us. It had left its mark, ten jagged silver lines, across the back of Kailen's car. Before he could swerve again, I pulled my seatbelt on and clicked it.

  For a moment, the only sounds that filled the car were the sounds of our heavy breathing. Jane had stopped squeaking, clinging to the edge of Kailen's pocket. If I had to hazard a guess, she felt a little like I did. The eggs and toast and sausage—all of which I'd relished only a moment before—now churned in my stomach. If Kailen told me indigestion was a side effect of manifesting my Fae nature, I was going to punch him.

  He roared down the streets, applying his foot to the gas pedal liberally, and hit the on-ramp to the I-84 going sixty-five. We left both the hound and the inn behind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I cleared my throat as the trees and buildings passed on either side. “I'm not even sure where I should ask you to begin,” I said. “Back at where you were saying every Fae has Talents, or where you said ‘grushound’?”

  Kailen slammed his hands on the steering wheel. “This was supposed to be easy,” he said. “I respect Faolan. I admire him. When he came to me with this job, I wasn't going to turn him down. I was supposed to be like a courier—fetch package, bring package back, get paid. Instead”—he took one hand off the steering wheel and began to gesticulate—“I'm killing hobgoblins, running from a grushound, and trying to tea
ch the most stubborn woman I have ever met how to use her magic.”

  “I'm right here, you know,” I said, crossing my arms. I felt ridiculous, one sleeve missing, the other untouched.

  Kailen ran his free hand through his hair. “I said before you were like a gun in a game of Russian roulette. Forget that. You're more like a loose electrical wire, swinging about in a storm. No one gets to decide whether they want to play. What were the Aranhods thinking?”

  I closed my eyes and put my hands on the dashboard, pressing against it, as if I could physically push my problems away. “Stop the car.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a very large, very dangerous hound on our tail.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, you said you’d tell me what’s going on. Tell me, or stop the goddamned car!”

  He breathed out a long sigh. “Changelings aren't just dangerous; they've been outlawed for hundreds of years.”

  My mind went blank. I couldn't think of any retort, only, “What?”

  “No one is allowed to create a Changeling. It's against the Fae laws.”

  “I...why?”

  “It’s the Aranhods’ duty to explain your heritage, not mine. It’s complicated. But what this means is that most other Fae have it out for you.”

  “Well then, why don't you just drop me off at the Aranhods right now? Why are we driving around town? I don't like this any more than you do. Believe me, I don't.” I would have run out the door at the first stoplight if I weren’t sure that Kailen was the only thing standing between me and certain death.

  “You're forgetting something very important,” Kailen said. He cupped his hand next to his breast pocket. Jane crawled onto his palm. He held her out to me. “You can't leave this unfinished. You have to change her back. Every day she remains a mouse, the worse things get.”

  I took her, though my skin crawled from the feel of her tiny little feet against my hands and from the memory of catching her and Owen in bed together. “Okay, fine. Tell me what to do.”

  “Remember what I told you before—form the concept in your mind and then pack an emotional punch behind it. You've been doing it already, though unconsciously. Think about Jane as a human.”

  “And the emotional punch?”

  “It has to be strong, as strong as the one that turned her into a mouse.”

  Great. I didn't just have the visual memory seared into my brain, I remembered how I'd felt upon finding Owen in bed with Jane. Shocked, angry, hurt, each emotion hitting one after another, then blending together into a big ball of shocked-angry-hurt in my chest. How could I match that? I breathed in deep and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the climbing indigestion and the feel of Jane in my hand.

  I pieced together my memory of Jane—mousy brown hair, brown eyes, the thin covering of hair on her upper lip. I added the clothes I'd seen discarded at the side of the bed. She still looked too much like a mouse in my mind. I wasn't sure why it was so hard for me to think of her as human. Owen had. Owen had seen her as a woman, one attractive enough to take to bed. Before I'd burst in, he'd sounded like he'd been having fun with her. When was the last time Owen and I had had that sort of fun? I couldn't even remember.

  The grushound invaded my thoughts, lurking behind my image of Jane, nose lifted in the air, black ears pricked forward. My heart kicked at my ribs. A shower of pillows hit the hound, each dissolving into feathers as they did. The Jane in my imagination crouched, her hands covering her head. Before I could stop myself, she'd turned into a mouse in my mind, paws over her ears. I banished the grushound, the feathers, and tried to bring back the image of Jane as a human.

  I couldn't.

  “I can't do this!” I cried out finally. I opened my eyes, a colossal headache starting at the base of my skull. Jane stared back up at me, nose and whiskers twitching. “I can't concentrate. Every time I try, something else pops up in my head. It's either the grushound, or Owen, or feathers.”

  Kailen raised an eyebrow at the last item on my list but didn't comment.

  I leaned my head against the window, waiting as the pain dissipated. “This isn’t my life. I get up, I go to work, I relax at home. I like having a schedule, a routine. Turning a mouse back into a human? That’s so far outside my routine that it’s in another galaxy.”

  Kailen pursed his lips, his brow drawn low. He glanced over at me, and when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I’m sorry. I know this all must be a shock to you. For what it’s worth, you’re dealing with it better than I would have.”

  We exchanged brief, tight-lipped smiles—and then a thought occurred to me. “Maybe you should take me in to work.”

  The smile faded from his face. “We’ve been over this already—”

  “Remember when I asked you about quick, small Fae that like to giggle? I’ve been hearing and seeing things in my office for a week. If someone’s trying to kill me, maybe what I’ve been seeing in my cubicle has something to do with that. Maybe I can find some clues. Besides, work always calms me down and makes me feel better.”

  He raised his eyebrow, as if he didn’t believe my story about the Fae in my cubicle, but then he nodded. “Not a bad idea. Only for a couple of hours. Then we leave again.” He pulled the car over into the left-turn lane. I'd stopped paying attention to where we were or where we were headed. After a few more turns, we came out onto a street I definitely recognized, and we pulled into the parking lot of a three-story office building downtown. A large, silver “FG” was emblazoned on the side of the building, next to the logos of two other companies. “If you think it will help your concentration.”

  “Definitely.” I found the rhythms of daily work soothing. Though the kitchen at home was my favorite spot there, I still had to share it with Owen and his perpetually messy ways. My desk at work was my very own space—always neat, organized, and quintessentially me.

  “I’ll be here in the parking lot,” Kailen said. “Two hours. Be back down here by eleven thirty or I’ll have to come up and get you. And that would be awkward for all parties involved.”

  “I can say I have a doctor’s appointment,” I said. “It won’t be a problem.” I practically jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped, my mind already on my checklist of tasks, rearranging items until I found the best fit for the largest number of things I could complete in two hours, in order of highest priority to lowest. The sooner I could find my concentration, the sooner I could turn Jane back into a person, meet the Aranhods, find out what they wanted with me, and hopefully return to life as normal.

  I breezed through the front doors, swiped my card at the elevator, and rode up to the second floor. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the elevator that I remembered my torn sleeve. I didn’t have another change of clothes. Maybe if I hurried past Anne, the office secretary, no one would notice.

  I’d had a few brilliant ideas in my day. This, however, wasn’t one of them. Anne looked up as soon as I opened the door, auburn curls brushing over her shoulders. “Oh, Nicole!” she said, blue eyes wide. “I thought you were sick.” She sat behind a low counter, head and shoulders above the monitor of her computer.

  I didn’t hate Anne. She’d always greeted me in a cheery manner, did her work serviceably well, and made sympathetic noises at all the right places in a conversation. But she had a tendency to pry, and the last thing I wanted to encounter this morning was a busybody.

  “Sick,” I said. “Yes, well…”

  “You look great,” Anne said. “Are you wearing heels? You look like you’ve been somewhere sunny. Got a bit of a glow to your complexion. Sick seems to suit you, if that’s what it is.” She fired off each sentence, one after another, as valiantly as a soldier at a cannon.

  I had my ballet flats on, and I certainly hadn’t spent any time in the sun recently. Were these the changes Kailen had referred to, and if so, had they made me so different that Anne hadn’t even noticed my torn sleeve?

  Anne took in a sharp breath. “Oh, what’s happened to your sleeve?”


  There it was. I opened my mouth to tell her that I felt better than I had that morning and stopped myself. What was the point? “You know what?” I said slowly, the words tipping from my mouth. “I wasn’t sick at all. This morning I didn’t feel like coming in, so I made my husband call you.”

  “You didn’t!” Anne said, her eyes bright. Her face said “shock,” but her eyes said “please tell me more.” So I did.

  “I’ve never done it before,” I said. I hadn’t. “I wanted to see what it would be like. But you know what?”

  “What?” She leaned forward in her chair.

  “I’m sorry I did. Leaving everyone else to do my work is not something I pride myself on.” Anne seemed to deflate before my eyes. “I hope you weren't put upon by my absence.”

  “No, not at all,” Anne said. She let out a little huff of breath and turned back to her computer. I looked up and saw the door to my boss's office, slightly open. Well, let's just hope he didn't hear that.

  “I caught my sleeve in the car door on my way in,” I told her. She nodded despondently.

  Our conversation apparently over, I headed to my cubicle. As I did, I passed the small and vacant office for head salesperson. I couldn't help myself; I turned my head to look at it, as I did every time I came to work. The desk and chair lay empty, dust gathering on their surfaces. Behind it, a floor-to-ceiling window exposed a view of the neighboring building's wall. Not the best view, but a view nonetheless.

  “Still eyeing that? I hear you stop every time on your way to your cubicle,” said one of my coworkers. I peered over the partition and saw Brent hunched over his keyboard, his back turned to me, thinning black hair gelled back. “Landon will never fill the position, you know. He likes to micromanage.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, it is so, Miss Perfect Prissy Pants.”

  “Well that's kind of rude, don't you think?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so.” His hands kept tapping at the keyboard.