by S L Mason
Tom laughs dry under his breath. “Well, he’s got you there, Jakey.” Tom’s fingers dance over the trigger guard of his carbine.
I take a deep breath, pushing the quivering in my chest back. “Nick, he’s right. I can’t wake them all. Puca might not notice one. If Arty was here, I would take him and go. But he’s not, so we take Brad and go.” That’s my compromise, the choice I can live with—the needs of the few.
Nick looks around. “You know this guy?” then points at Brad.
I nod, yes, “Yeah, he is in my church group, my frenemy’s boyfriend.” I make my rounds of the rest of the stalls, desperate for a glimpse of Arty’s black hair or the reflection off his glasses, but he isn’t there.
I know he isn’t gonna be here. They have him somewhere more secure. They want me bad enough to kidnap Olive so they definitely have Arty. I think maybe together with Olive somewhere. As bait for me.
“He’s not here, let’s go.” I approach Brad’s stall and unlatch the door. Brad puts his hands down to his sides as it swings open. He steps out as if it’s the most natural, normal thing in the world for him, to be exiting a horse stall as a piece of chattel himself. His stall mate stands up in preparation to leave as well.
“Not you. Sit back down!” I order.
He freezes and then turns around. He walks back to the far corner and sits back on his hay pile as if nothing happened. He registered the command in my voice, but that is it.
Brad’s hand is warm and moist as I lead him out. “I can’t wake him up here, or it’ll affect everyone,” I inform no one in particular.
Brad’s appearance isn’t dirty, but he isn’t clean. He probably could use a shower, but he doesn’t smell bad. The only thing about him I find odd is the giant leather belt over his jeans. I could be a weight belt. There are two rings on either side, just above his hips. I don’t think much of it. It’s odd, but this is Fae. Everything’s a little odd here.
I pull him along behind me, exiting the barn through the illusion. I place his hand on the horses as the blue horse moves forward. So does Brad, giving me the ability to stop leading him around like an infant. I’m not anybody’s mommy, and I’m not ready to be one.
“Where to now, boss lady?” Tom’s nickname irritates me.
I roll my eyes and give Tom a hard stare. He really is a dick. I liked him better when we were still on the surface. “We follow this road this way. You guys want to get up on a horse?”
I exit the barn, and everything falls into place. I’m standing in the same spot where only a few weeks ago I watched Arty’s vacant stare disappear over a hill. It could have been a lifetime ago, but it picks at me. I turn to face the barn and envision Arty standing obediently next to the door. Now, I know exactly how to get to Deston’s castle from here.
Following the road, I wait until the barn is out of sight, and then I sing the notes to awaken Brad.
Jake and Tom shift on their feet, eyes darting around on watch but avoiding me. I make them uncomfortable. As the last note rings from my lips, Brad’s eyes clear away the milky white enchantment.
“Where am I? Where’s Camille?” His head whips left and right, only to settle on me. “I know you…Sarah?” His face contorts in pain and confusion.
“I don’t know where Camille is. Do you remember anything at all?” I ask. Hope and dread fill me. Hope that he’s seen Arty and knows where he is. Dread that he remembers the carnage at the church all of it rolls in my belly.
“You are, Sarah, aren’t you?” His eyes squint, focusing on me. I realize I look different, but he seems know who I am.
“Yes, it’s me, Sarah. You remember we went to summer camp together every year for the last twelve years.” I hope he remembers me. He’s the first boy I ever kissed. It was a dare.
“It is you. You look different for some reason. Did you to dye your hair?”
I heave a sigh. “I did dye my hair, but it’s not important. Do you remember anything?” I prod.
Brad rushes into his story, but he never stops glancing around. “Yeah, we were at the church and ready to leave. You left a little while before. Then there were all these announcements on TV about these creatures coming down out of the sky. Pastor Rollins locked all the doors and turned the light off. We hunkered down for the night. The next morning Arty took off to your house. Camille and I stayed. Both our parents were out of town. When the sun set, Javen, Steve, and Ross ran outside. They wanted to see the creatures, Pastor Rollins tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen to him. I followed Camille. She wanted to see them too. She really is a pain sometimes.” He scratches his head. “Anyway, I went to pull her back inside, and there they were. Pointy ears, shiny eyes, tall.” His words are slow as it dawns on him what I look like. He steps back, raising his hand to his mouth.
“Are you sure you’re Sarah? I mean you look like Sarah, but you look like one of them. Where’s Camille? They took her. They started singing, and I don’t remember anything else except for Camille screaming in the background.” He looks down at his hands.
“There was blood. A lot of blood. Steve, they killed him. They killed Steve, they killed my best friend.” His eyes redden, and a film of sweat covers his face. He leans over, holding his mouth. His body convulses, and he spits.
“Aw man, he’s gonna yak. Five bucks says he yaks.” Tom’s need to jeer at everyone while making a buck goes beyond the pale.
I roll my eyes and turn to shoot Tom a dirty look. “Shut up!” I bark.
Tom shrugs his shoulders. The heat in my chest is crushing me. I wasn’t there; I’d only seen the aftermath.
Brad stares at me, unblinking. “The creatures looked, they looked like you. But a guy, he was tall. He started singing. He had blue-green ocean-colored eyes with orange irises. I remember staring into them thinking, ‘Wow, what fucking drug did I do to see that shit?’” his voice trails off.
“Okay, so where’d the blood come from?” Jake demands.
Brad shakes his head as he puts his hands over his face. His body crumples to the ground wailing.
“It came from Steve. He had a big arrow sticking through him as his blood sprayed all over me. It was like a hose or something. It was awful.” Brad pulls his hands away from his face. He looks up at me, heavy with tears running down and his cheeks. His eyes are bloodshot. I’d never seen Brad in so much anguish. “He’s dead, isn’t he? I know he’s dead. There was blood coming out of his mouth.” Brad moans.
I can’t lie to him or give him false hope; it’d be more of a killer.
“Yes, he’s dead. I saw him.” I confirm, then close my eyes to shut out the vision of Steve and all the other kids at the church.
“How are you alive? Where’s Arty? Is he here? Who are these guys?” Brad points at Nick and the guys. I put my hand on his shoulder, patting him and swallow back the lump in my throat, and the tears stinging the back of my eyes.
Brad would be like Nick. All I have to do is help him save Camille or get him back to the surface.
“They took Arty. These guys are here to help me get Arty, Nick’s sister, and a little girl named Olive. We can help you find Camille.” I choke on the last word. I never liked Camille. She’s always such a bitch, but I can’t leave her down here. I don’t want to leave anyone down here.
“You’ll help me find Camille?” Brad asks, on his knees, grasping at my hands.
I nod my head.
“Really? But you guys hate each other. You’d still help me find her?” he replies. The ridge of muscles crinkles between his eyes in disbelief.
“Of course, Brad. I don’t like Camille, but she doesn’t deserve to be down here or be treated like one of their playthings.” I shake with anger, images flash through my mind of Zoe and I, running away from the fire in the maze. The eyes of the girl I watched vines eat alive. The Fae had been watching. They had stadium seating outside the garden maze. For all I know, they ate popcorn. Rage shoots through my veins at the thought they were laughing while I watched that girl get t
orn apart by pixies.
“What do they want us for?” Brad’s eyes fill with terror.
I shake my head.
Jake cuts in. “A workforce. They always take the young and strong. Women for breeding, men for labor. It’s pretty standard practice in Africa and the Middle East.”
“Thanks for the vivid detail, Jake. I’m pretty sure I’ll have nightmares about it.” I retort.
Nick demands. “Did they try to touch you? Do you think they touched Nikki?” Nick’s fear is palpable; the worry he carries for his sister is sweet.
I puff my lip up a little bit and shake my head. “No, as a matter of fact not one person tried to touch me. They fed me and dressed me up like Fae Barbie and then forced me to go run through a weird maze while other girls died.” My hands clench, as my nails dig into my palms.
“They had you running through a maze?” Jake scratches his chin.
“Yes, I’m a contender. They didn’t say what for, and I really don’t care. They said the prize was everything, the world. I’m competitive. I want to win.” I shrug it off.
Brad starts laughing. “Sarah, competitive. That has to be the understatement of the year. If there was a competition, you joined it and won. You like to win.”
I bristle at his words. Am I that transparent? “I always won fair and square. It’s not like I was running around cheating, like Camille.” I retort.
“Yeah, that’s the funny part. She would cheat to win. You would play by all the rules and just magically take the brass ring. She hated you for that… hates you.” The muscles between Brad’s eyes bunch up again. He realizes he spoke about Camille in the past tense.
I pat him on the shoulder. “You need to get up. We have to move. Staying in one spot is dangerous. We need to keep moving.” I offer Brad a hand up, and he takes it.
Jake announces, “I came down here to kill Fae. Said I’d help as long as I felt like it. You only have Tom and me until we’re tired. If you want to find your friends, do it quickly.”
Somehow, I’m pretty sure Jake isn’t going to abandon us. It’s this feeling I have. He always puts that ‘I’m leaving’ on the tail end. Like ‘I’ll kill ye in the morning’ crap to look like a badass. He would cave and become a softy; I can feel it. Tom, on the other hand, I believe he’ll bail in a heartbeat.
The horses are still following us, but I haven’t seen anybody touch one of them except for Nick and myself. Brad cringes away from the horses. They come up to rub their noses on him, but he swats them away. His absolute abhorrence of the horses is bizarre.
“Are you afraid of horses?” Nick asks.
“No. I don’t know. They give me the heebie-jeebies,” Brad says. “No, I like horses. I just can’t stand to be near them now.” Something about Brad strikes me as odd, and the farther we walk along, the more there is something not right about him. If someone comes up from behind, he flinches a leg like he’s going to kick. Instead of turning his eyes from the right to left like most humans would, he turns his head from side to side.
“Hey, Brad, when as last time you had your haircut?” I ask.
“Like three days ago why.”
Three days ago is really three weeks ago, but Brad wouldn’t know that. He always wears his hair high and tight. It hangs over his shoulders. There’s no way his hair would grow that much in three weeks. I’d seen Brad without a shirt on lots of times at summer camp since the guys always took their shirts off to go swimming. Sometimes they’d wrestle or lift weights too. It was always fun to watch him. Brad had been one of those guys that didn’t have a lot of chest hair, just a smattering at the top between his pecs. Okay, why do I remember these things?
Brad’s hot, I mean, hot guy, no shirt on, lots of bulging muscles—hot. Sorry, I remember. It’s like Nick. I know Nick has a fair bit of chest hair for an eighteen-year-old; he’s pretty hairy. But he isn’t like out of control. Something about Brad isn’t normal. He isn’t a hairy dude. He has long dark brown hair. I know his great-grandmother was Native American. We always teased him because he couldn’t grow a full beard. Even if he wanted to, it was all patchy. The guy I am looking at now almost has a full beard.
“Have you seen yourself in a mirror?” I ask.
Brad turns his head to the side to look at me. “No. Do I look bad?” he inquires.
Jake taps his ring on his carbine. “Hey, Tom, toss me a mirror.” Jake catches it with one hand and hands it over. Brad’s eyes grow wide as his hand reaches up, running his fingers through the thick beard growing on his face.
“How long was I there? Where is here?” His head turns to the side to look up at the Fae sky.
“About three weeks, here in the Hallowed Hills. This is the land of Fae, the fairies, fair folk.” I tilt my head forward so I look up at him with my green eyes.
“I thought they were elves with the pointy ears.” His side glace unnerves me.
“Yeah, no elves. Fairies, the Fae.” I sigh.
“Three weeks and I grow a beard?” The hair on the back of his neck is as thick as on his face. The only difference is it’s the same length as the hair on his head. The closer I examine him, the more I realize all of his hair is that dark brunette like on his head. And he’s walking funny.
“You don’t remember anything else?” I inquire.
“No, nothing.” He shakes his head loosely.
“Is that your belt?” I point at the leather strap covering his midriff.
“No.” His hands reach down to remove it, but his fingers don’t seem to have the dexterity necessary to take it off. He paws at it. His fingernails had thickened in different places, giving them a blocky look. The wakes coming off of Brad go from frightened to absolutely terrified. They wiggle and squiggle before spiraling up and away. They slam into anything they can, creating even more chaos. The belt isn’t giving off wakes towards me; they move inward toward Brad. It’s doing something to him.
Nick reaches out to touch the belt, but he yelps, snatching his hand back.
Nick blurts out, “I don’t think you should touch that, Sarah. There’s something wrong with it.” He informs me.
I nod my head. We have to get it off of him. Whatever it’s doing, it’s changing him. It’s working some kind of magical spell on him. I stretch my fingers out, tentatively poking the belt with one hand. It singes just a smidge. While throwing out a shock, I pull my hand back. It’s like touching an electric fence. I move my fingers over the tail of the belt. Maybe I can push it through the buckle and loosen it enough to slide off. The singeing becomes a burning, and I suck air through my teeth as it cuts into my flesh.
“I think you should let go,” Nick says, his voice is filled with worry. A whisper of smoke rises up from my fingers.
I release it only to look down at the black and crackled flesh still attached to the end of my digits. “We have to get it off of him,” I reply, then bite my lip.
Brad’s eyes stare up at me. They’re still blue, but they’ve changed somehow, larger, more almond-shaped, and less round.
“Get it off of me! Whatever it’s doing, it’s doing it faster. My eyes are funny I can’t see right,” Brad yells, as his hands paw at me.
“Give me your knife!” I demand of Jake. He hands me a Kbar. I take the tip of the knife and begin sawing into the leather. It hardly makes a dent.
“Maybe you should sing something,” Nick suggests.
I give him a pinched smile. “Every song costs me. I want to try everything else first.”
Nick presses his lips together tight and nod his head. He’d seen how high the price is. He’s scared, we all are.
Brad’s eyes roll around in his head, and he kicks his feet to the ground several times, pawing at it.
CHAPTER 13
“You know what it costs me every time I sing.” I retort.
A gurgling sound rises from Brad’s throat. I look from Nick to Brad. The Adam’s apple in Brad’s neck works up and down. He swallows his words away.
“I don’t know wha
t’s happening to him, Sarah, but if you can stop it, you have to try. Look at him!” Nick waves his hand over Brad’s twitching form.
What I see will soon no longer be human. His eyes roll around in his head, and the shoes on his feet split open—if you can call them feet any more. His legs start to turn as the bones snap and reform, changing position.
“Pppllllleaaaase hellllppp!” A bloodcurdling scream wrenches from Brad’s throat as he falls to the ground. His back rounds with raised muscles. The horses surround Brad, nuzzling him. His arms elongate, and his fingers curl up, hardening and reshaping themselves.
“There’s nothing you can do for him, Sarah,” Janice says.
I whirl around at the sound of his voice, but I don’t need to look. I already know who it is. My eyes narrow as I take in Janice.
“You did this to him. You took him. This is all your fault.” I raise the tip of Jake’s sidearm to take aim.
“I didn’t say he couldn’t be saved.” Janice returns.
I feel myself wavering as I look into his violet eyes and grind my teeth.
“You did this to him, Janice. You better fix it. If you know how to stop whatever is happening to him, do it!” Dragging my eyes from him, down to the withering form that was once Brad.
“I can’t stop what’s happening to him either,” Janice announces. “There’s only one way to help him.”
The sound of three guns being cocked and pointed at your head can change your point of view and how you do things. Most people freeze in terror, but Fae apparently don’t have emotions like humans.
“I think you better do what our little boss lady here wants you to do. Before I blow your pointy-eared fucking and head off.” Jake growls his threat out between clenched teeth.
Janice never breaks a sweat. He doesn’t even take a breath. His chest rises as I put my hand up, waving the guys back.
“Do it or I will let them kill you. Or I’ll kill you myself. I will find a way. I don’t know how you found me or what you want from me. But if you hurt anyone here and you don’t help Brad, I will spend the rest of my days finding a way to fight you and kill you. Even if I have to cut you apart piece by piece and the only sharp object, I have are my teeth. I’ll do it.” I move in nose to nose with him. His height is no longer such a difference. I burn with my bravado. The heat under my skin stains my face. His face blocks my view. He too moves closer as every gun leans into him.