Habian smirked, mischief dancing in his eyes, the color of raven wings. “Now that sounds like some actual fun.”
A loud clacking from the other end of the hall made both fae perk up.
“Oops!” Tuatha alighted the air with a flap, the wind from her wings blowing back Lorelei’s hair. Then she was suddenly around the back of her, hands slipping under her armpits. “Let’s go!”
“I still gotta carry this one?” Habian grumbled, also taking to the sky.
Lorelei’s feet left the ground, but her stomach seemed to stay exactly where it had been as the rest of her soared upward at an alarming rate. The floor, the side table, the rabbit statue all fell away, and there was Ziah walking toward them from the end of the hall, her head turned down into her planner. The woman didn’t notice either faery flying off, and for a moment Lorelei thought to yell out to her, but they were so high so quickly that she couldn’t even muster the words, and then everything was gone as they were enveloped in darkness.
Lorelei’s eyes adjusted as she felt ground beneath her feet again. She blinked, her senses filling up with dim light and the smell of something woody like cedar, perhaps a bit of must, but also a clean and bright something she couldn’t quite place. Grier groaned as he was dropped again at her side, Habian letting go a few seconds too soon so that the lycan stumbled onto his knees.
Lorelei’s mouth hung open. The way ahead went on forever into darkness, a narrow cavern so tall it disappeared above as well, but she’d been placed down onto what she could only call a road. Not of asphalt or gravel but a woody, chipped up substance like mulch, serpentining pleasantly down the center of the space. At each side of it there was a deep green sprawl of something grass-like but softer, folded over on itself.
Beyond the grass on either side were doors and windows, all to scale with her current height and set into a flat wall. Some had signs hanging above them and there were even little mail slots on the doors, and when Lorelei glanced up, there were more doors and windows set at seemingly random intervals as the entries went on forever high above, a platform jutting out from each doorway and a tiny light set above them, each a small glow in the ascending darkness.
One of the overhead doors opened and out stepped another faery onto the short platform, beat her wings once, and with a flash took off down the long narrow way ahead.
Lorelei looked at Grier, shocked. “They really do live in the walls.”
“Well, yeah,” droned Habian, “what did you think we did?”
CHAPTER 29
PEEK
It seemed obvious now, staring at their suburban street built into the walls of Moonlit Shores Manor, but Lorelei had never really considered what the faeries’ lives were like outside of popping in and out of the cracks in the crown molding when they were needed. It was humbling, but also disconcerting—how many were there really?
“Okay, let’s get going, it’s a long way to that one’s room when you don’t have wings.”
“That one?” Lorelei hurried to keep up with Tuatha and Habian’s long strides, impressed they were walking along with them. “You know where we want to go already?”
“I saw you with your key trying to get in,” Habian said, but Lorelei couldn’t remember any orbs hovering around when she had done that. In fact, she had double and triple checked that she’d been alone.
“What else do you guys see?”
Habian only snorted and kept walking.
Tuatha skipped up between her and Grier. “Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”
When they reached the end of the long, chipped path, they came to a sort of crossroads. Before them, studs and insulation made passing impossible, but to the left and right were sets of stairs tucked in beside the last houses of the makeshift lane. On the wooden beam directly across from them was what looked to be an old business card that had been painted over with arrows pointing up, left, right, and down, but the words alongside them were totally illegible to Lorelei. Habian led them to the left, and she hoped he wasn’t taking them somewhere they had fashioned little prison cells out of something adorable but menacing when you were only four inches tall.
The stairs actually opened up into a much bigger expanse than she could have imagined, but this time they could see the ceiling, perhaps twice Habian’s height with thick beams running across it. Strung up along the beams were lights, a mishmash of strings that could have covered Christmas trees, illuminating specific spots like bright stars and color coding the huge expanse.
The place was like a garden, the ground covered in more of that deep green, rolling grass, and when she stepped on it, Lorelei discovered it was soft and spongy underfoot like moss. Mushrooms sprouted up here and there, but at this height they were trees, their stalks thick and lined like white bark, and the tops spreading out like leaves, some red and spiky, some blue and ribbed, and others were full of holes, the top spiderwebbing outward. More roads were laid out with the mulchy wood, pathways snaking all over. Standalone buildings were here and there, running from the floor to ceiling and breaking up the landscape, but the place was largely flat, to be taken all in with one glance save for the farthest out, darkest spots. It was, in so many ways, just like the park in the center of Bexley only shrouded in an eternal night by the ceiling overhead.
Here, there were more faeries, most walking as the airspace wasn’t high enough to fly. They chatted with each other and went about their business as normally as any of the people in Moonlit Shores. Then there was a rumbling like thunder, far off, but it came on them quickly until it was directly overhead, shaking everything and rattling Lorelei’s brain. She gasped as did Grier, surveying the ceiling for where the culprit would surely break through and crush them all, but then the noise fell away just as it came, and none of the faeries even acknowledged it.
Tuatha giggled. “Footsteps,” she said. “You get used to them.”
Only a few faeries gave them odd looks as they crossed the expanse of moss, most either ignoring them completely or just whispering to each other, their wide eyes following as they went. Lorelei supposed she should recognize them, but up close it was hard to tell, and most of them never spoke to her anyway. One ran up to Tuatha, pointing at Lorelei and Grier, and spoke in a thickly accented language that Lorelei thought she recognized Bur using hundreds of years prior. Tuatha answered in the same language, though breathy as always, and looked a little appalled then laughed. When she ran off, Grier asked what it had been about.
“She wanted to know what we were going to do with the two of you and if we’d share.”
Lorelei bit her lip. “You are going to turn us back when we’re done, right?”
Before Tuatha could answer, Habian snickered. “If we feel like it.” And he went off ahead of them.
At the center of the mossy park was a structure of sorts, an odd gathering of things that, if it had been in a pile on a table, would likely have been swept into the trash. The once discarded things sat against one another with something like a purpose, an old lipstick tube, a toothpaste cap, a threadless spool, but they had all been polished up and adorned with paints. In the middle of the sculpture, stood a frame. It was a bit taller than Habian, the right fit for a wallet-sized photo, and behind the glass a torn bit of paper was displayed prominently.
Lorelei stopped to admire it, the paper inside yellowed, ripped along one edge from its origin, but featuring only some scroll work and a bit of a single scripted letter. “What’s this?”
“The great contract,” said Tuatha looking up at it with loving eyes. She clasped her hands together and sighed.
Even Habian stopped to look on it with something like adoration.
“It’s just the ripped-up corner of an old piece of paper and a stack of trash,” said Grier, face screwed up. “These guys are nuts.”
“Quiet.” Lorelei smiled at Habian when he glowered down at them in his mopey, constantly begrudged way. “It’s art.” She surveyed the trash stack, reaching up to their floorboard ceiling and q
uite wide across. The painted and adorned castoff things were set against one another in a pleasing enough way, though there was a pen cap that jutted out a little oddly as if misplaced. Lorelei shook her head—she may have appreciated modern art, but understanding it was a whole other thing. It was like magic in that way, and also in the same way, the stack emanated a vaguely enchanted aura.
“It’s the reason we can come here and be safe in this realm. A physical manifestation of the Big Trade, made many years ago.” Tuatha gently touched the edge of the frame then crinkled up her nose. “All right, let’s take care of your favor now, hmm? Just across the way and up through the Cantilever Passage. We can cut over the stairwell and skip Exurbia Way if Habian has another lift in him.”
Habian scoffed and said of course he did.
“Is it possible to go anywhere from here?” Grier asked before they started off again.
Tuatha nodded with a pleasant sort of hum to her voice, but Habian complained that whatever he was about to ask wasn’t part of the deal.
Grier shuffled in place, ignoring him. “We could even go to the staff quarters?”
“Sure,” said Tuatha as Habian groaned.
“Could we look into Hana’s room?”
“Grier!” Lorelei slapped his arm, and he recoiled from her in surprise. “You said she’s your best friend! You don’t peep on your best friend while she’s changing!”
Grier grumbled, “I didn’t say I wanted to watch her do that.”
“That is sort of what it sounded like,” said Tuatha, and Habian even agreed.
“Well, I don’t want to spy on her!” He clutched fists and snarled, almost too much of a protest. “It’s just that she’s been weird lately—like, sad—and she won’t tell me why. I mean, I can’t get her to come out of her room hardly at all between shifts, and I…I really need someone to play Federation of Fables against to keep my skills up, ya know?” He mocked holding up a game controller, trying to convince them.
Lorelei eyed him then relaxed. He was right, Hana still hadn’t shaken off what happened with Collier, but Lorelei hadn’t realized it was as bad as he said. “He has a point. Can we check in on Hana?”
Tuatha beamed and told them, “Sure!” as Habian gave them a definitive, “No!” which was promptly ignored. Tuatha went on, “Though sometimes we can’t find the exits to your rooms at all if the manor really thinks we ought not be there, so your Hana might actually be hard to see. But if we’ve got good enough intentions, I think it’ll be all right.”
The faeries brought them to another set of stairs built just for the fae and then another narrow passage. They were again flown up and deposited on a ledge that jutted out near the very top of the passage.
Only wide enough to walk on two by two, Lorelei scooted as close to the wall as possible with Tuatha on her other side against the edge that fell off into a drop about ten feet down, bad enough at Lorelei’s normal height, and horrifying now. Flying, she thought, might have been preferable to this.
They passed a notch in the wall where light poured out, and she stopped short, Grier bumping into her. The hole was only wide and tall enough for one to squeeze through at an angle in what looked to be the corner of the crown molding of her own room. “Hey, that’s where I sleep and get dressed and…do all sorts of private stuff.”
“We know,” said Habian, nudging her.
Tuatha giggled wickedly. “We don’t peek.”
After all her own practice, Lorelei knew a lie when she heard one.
They walked a bit farther and came upon the next crevice where they could see into Hana’s room. Lorelei knelt down, feeling safer on her knees as the exit bowed out with the pitch of the molding; it was a long way down even if she would likely land on one of the many fuzzy pillows and stuffed animals strewn about. Beside her, Grier shoved himself in to see too.
Hana was laying on her stomach, flopped onto the bed. A book with a fiery looking woman and a shirtless man on its cover was abandoned at her side. She was writing in a journal, but the words weren’t legible from this height and in her loopy handwriting. Photographs were laid out beside her, older and faded, of people with Hana’s features, a woman with black, straight hair, and a man wearing a topknot and holding a baby.
Hana’s hand moved across the page, and she sighed, picking up the photo and tucking it into the journal. Beneath it, there were other photos, a landscape of snowcapped mountains rising above the mist, and a temple built into it with streaming, colorful banners hanging from the roof. Hana grabbed the water sprite plushie she’d won at the harvest festival and squeezed it, rolling onto her back. Lorelei and Grier pulled away from the opening, but Hana didn’t notice their tiny figures in the crevice of her ceiling. She was instead staring straight up, eyes rimmed red as she hugged the water droplet to her chest.
“Aw, she’s real sad,” Tuatha whispered.
Lorelei sat back, away from the hole. “She misses her family.”
Grier was still watching her, his forehead wrinkled and lips drawn downward. “They’re dead though.” He swallowed, and even with such indelicate words, he wasn’t insincere. “We can’t go get them for her. What do we do?” He looked to Lorelei for the answer, and the light from the room reflected in his white eye, his scar painful looking in how it was highlighted.
“We’ll think of something.” She touched his shoulder, and he just glanced back out the opening at Hana.
“You want into that guy’s room or what?” asked Habian, arms crossed and looking extra annoyed at the whole thing.
They were lifted again and taken down the length of the interior wall to be deposited on another street. The faeries led them to an exit in a baseboard, and they came out in the hall just outside room 210 and a half.
Looking up at the door from the ground, it seemed to go on forever, the knob impossibly high, yet the crack at the bottom was still too small to squeeze through. Tuatha and Habian grabbed them once again and raised them upward just as Lorelei saw Aly sprint down the hall at full speed. She jumped, gave her wings a flap and hung in the air, barely missing the lot of them with a swipe.
“Aly, no!” Lorelei squeaked as Tuatha pulled her just out of claw’s range. The alalynx glided back down to land safely in the hall, muzzle chittering with a confused look like she wasn’t sure how she got where she was or how she was hearing her person’s voice.
“That thing’s a menace,” shouted Habian as they reached the ceiling and an entrance there.
“She just wants to play,” Lorelei insisted as she was deposited again, but admitted silently it would probably be a death sentence to engage with the alalynx when she was the same size as a salamander.
The interior corridor had arches carved into the studs and room numbers drawn above them so the faeries could pass through, presumably to get from room to room, but the space here was even narrower and the ceiling lower. Thankfully there were plenty of exits where light poured in, and they soon came upon the opening to Mr. Carr’s room.
It was still empty, even after their detour, and Lorelei immediately eyed the envelope on the room’s desk. She pointed, and Tuatha, suddenly giddy, scooped her up and flew across the room.
The desk’s top was glossy, and when Lorelei took a step on it, she slid. It wasn’t made for walking on, she supposed, and she took a moment to get her bearings and glance about. The room was the same as when she’d seen it upon check-in, the paisley maroon wallpaper, the modern headboard, the sleek side tables. But the desk was perhaps new, or at least different. It appeared antique though free of wear, a rich, deep mahogany.
Habian landed with Grier beside her, and when Lorelei got her bearings, she scurried up to the giant, padded envelope from that morning. It was torn open with little care, and she tried to lift it to fully look into its dark insides, but it was heavy in her tiny form and awkward. Habian fluttered above her and grabbed the top, raising it so Lorelei could actually walk inside. She felt for her phone in her back pocket, thrilled it was there and had
been shrunk along with her, and she stepped in after her light.
The top of the envelope came crashing down at her head and knocked her forward, her phone bouncing out of her hand across the bubble-wrap floor. Its light still shone, wedged into the narrow, closed end of the parcel. Well, this was one way to get into the package, but it would have been a lot easier if Conrad had just magicked the damn thing open when she asked. It also would have been full then, but as she glanced around, she realized to her chagrin the thing was empty.
She could hear Habian snorting with a dry laughter from outside, and Tuatha chastising him even as she too giggled, but then there was a much louder sound. Lorelei froze, the clink familiar if grossly enhanced. A door had opened.
She crawled forward between the folds of the envelope and snatched her phone, fingers just reaching it and killing the light. She turned herself around in time to see the three’s feet take off, Tuatha’s tiny voice whispering for her to stay put.
Lorelei tightened every muscle in her body, her breathing shallow, the top of the envelope resting against her back. Every movement made the padded thing crinkle, and she tried to hold still, listening. Shuffling, footsteps, a pause, more footsteps, and then a slam into the desk and a gust of wind as something came down hard on the other end. The edge of the envelope blew back at her and lifted the top just enough to make out Mr. Carr’s tablet as he set it on the desk.
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from yelping, eyes wide, a cold dread coursing through her at the possibility of being squashed if he casually dropped something atop her or, perhaps even worse, totally discarded the envelope itself. She had a moment of panic where she considered running, but then Mr. Carr let out a sigh, and she saw his hand trail the desktop.
His fingernails were clean if bitten and worried, the skin around them torn, but there was also that mark on his palm, the one she’d seen when he checked in. With this magnification, it looked as if he had been burned, and even though she knew he had the wound months ago, it still seemed angry and new. She watched his fingers drum, feeling the vibration across the desk, and then he dragged his hand down to the edge and pulled open the desk’s shallow drawer.
The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2) Page 29