by Rhys Ford
“She could have just been homophobic,” Conri said.
“Sure,” Finn said with an exaggerated roll of spring-leaf-green eyes as he flopped back into his seat. “One look at you and what jumped out at her was that you were gay. Not the rest of it.”
Conri glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror and snorted his admission that Finn was right. The piebald hair and mismatched eyes might pass for human, at a quick glance, but the pricked, tufted ears that poked through his hair were less so. Some changelings used glamours to hide what they were, but he rarely bothered. There were many ways to see through it, and once people did, they assumed that you had something else to hide too.
Besides, he’d already lost one face. The one he wore as a boy was long since forgotten, so he didn’t want to let this one slip. It might not be what he started with, but he’d had it the longest.
“So there’s a few bigots,” he admitted as he checked for pedestrians before he rolled the car forward. “Maybe that’s why they brought the camp here this year—so you kids learn to deal with them. It’s not like you can depend on always living in LA.”
“Yeah, because no one ever calls me Oberon there,” Finn said, with the ripe contempt for a parent who didn’t understand the microaggressions only a fourteen-year-old could muster.
Conri shrugged.
He’d been one of the last waves of changelings handed back—the fourth? fifth?—and for humanity, the joy of their return had worn off to reveal the suspicion underneath. “Oberon” was a helluva lot better than what he’d been called back then. The West Coast might love the idea of the fey more than the reality—who didn’t?—but it treated them well. But as far as Conri could tell, progress was surviving long enough that your kids could be angry about the stuff you’d had to shrug off.
“It’s three weeks,” he said. “You’ll survive.”
“You hope.”
“Yeah, sometimes,” Conri said.
He ignored Finn’s aggrieved snort and followed the GPS’s directions, which brought him back to the first street, three blocks back. The camp staff had turned the scramblers on early—again—though nobody was going to have a clue how to get there. Every year. Conri swore they did it to agitate people.
“Da,” Finn said abruptly. He poked Conri’s arm with a bony finger and then pointed down the street. “There they are.”
A convoy of jet-black SUVs with blacked-out windows and no license plates pulled out of a gas station and headed north along Main Street, out of town. The Federal and Otherworld Bureau, or the Templars, if you wanted to be crude. FOBs if you were cocky.
“Tell you what,” Conri said as he turned into a diner parking lot. “You want to get lunch first?”
For once Finn didn’t have a smart remark. He sighed in relief and nodded as he unsnapped his seat belt.
The FOBs weren’t necessarily bad news, but they were news. If you could, it was best to stay out of their way and off everyone’s radar. Besides, Conri could always eat.
Well, he supposed as he got out of the car and squinted at the aggressively mom-and-pop frontage, if they’d serve the likes of him here.
THREE DAYS later Conri sprawled naked on the balcony of the nicest hotel in the nearest big city he could find. He still received suspicious squints occasionally, as if they needed to check the human under the elf-gift, but so far no one had caused trouble. It hadn’t put off anyone at the clubs either.
He stretched, long and lazy and sated in the sun, and reached for the glass of wine. It wasn’t as if he didn’t date or fuck around with Finn at home, but there were… constraints. Even before he’d spent all those years in the Otherworld, he’d bristled at any attempt to control him.
That independent streak had never actually done him any favors, he supposed as he took a draft of wine and tilted his head back, but he seemed to be stuck with it.
His phone trilled a sharp, barely audible whine that made Conri’s ears twitch. It was Finn’s ringtone, the only one in his phone guaranteed to poke through the haze of whatever Conri was doing and grab his attention. A dog whistle, basically.
He scrambled up off the lounger and loped back into the hotel room. His clothes were tossed haphazardly over the furniture, but he finally found his phone shoved into the toe of his trainer.
“What is it?” he barked as he swiped to answer the call. It was something. Finn wouldn’t have called him otherwise. “What happened?”
Someone sniffed wetly on the other end of the line. For a second, Conri thought someone else had Finn’s phone. Finn was fourteen and aggressively aware of his own dignity. He didn’t cry in front of—for—Conri.
“Da,” Finn said. He exhaled raggedly, and Conri heard fabric slide down a wall until the lanky teen wearing it thumped onto the floor. He sniffed again. “I’m sorry I was a jerk, Da. I was lucky my father gave me to you and… and it’s okay you never got me a dog. It would have been weird.”
He swallowed hard and wiped his nose on something—his sleeve, from experience.
“Finn, enough,” Conri said, his voice flat and impatient. He pinned the phone against his ear with one shoulder as he grabbed a pair of jeans that were more or less clean. “What happened?”
There was a pause, and then Finn admitted in a tight voice. “I don’t know. Not exactly. The Templars have closed the camp. I tried to find out why, but they wouldn’t tell me. I’m the son of—”
Conri snapped his teeth together, a sharp click that shut Finn up midword. It gave Conri notice that his temper had started to slip too. He licked the back of his teeth smooth again.
“You’re fourteen,” he said. “You’re better off if you don’t know some things. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You think you’re safe?”
He listened to Finn’s breathing, ragged and frightened in his ear for a long moment. There was no blood relation between them, not even a common ancestor six hundred years back, and one day Finn’s real father would come to take him back. Once all the hard work was done. That mattered, and it didn’t. Right now, Conri was all Finn had in the world, and he needed to get to him.
“Finnigan,” he said. “You’re not safe?”
“No. Maybe? I don’t know,” Finn’s voice was quiet now, a muffled whisper as though he’d cupped his hand over his mouth. “They took some of the older kids to talk to them. I haven’t seen any of them come back. Da, what if they’re going to take us all away?”
Conri buttoned his jeans and grabbed a T-shirt. It tangled around his hands, the simple task of arm and head holes suddenly impossible to surmount. His head felt narrow with the slow thud of anxiety. After they were sent back, there had been a few choke points where it seemed something like this was bound to happen. There had been plans—fragile lines of communication between people divided by courts and gifts and stuff the humans would never understand.
That had passed. Things had gotten better. It had been years since Conri worried about what he’d do if armed soldiers came for Finn.
“They won’t,” he said and hoped it wasn’t a lie. “Did something happen to kick this off?”
“… we snuck out of camp last night,” Finn admitted. “We—a bunch of us—were going to go to a party. Da, I didn’t know…. The Templars met us at the gate when we got back. It was a bit of fun.”
Conri felt like he needed to sit down and put his head between his knees as relief hit him like a brick. He doubted that Finn would appreciate it, under the circumstances, but that was good news. Whatever had happened sounded like it was local, a reaction to some bone-headed kids feeling their oats, not the first step in a nationwide countdown.
He hoped.
“Did anything happen? Anyone get out of hand? Or get their hands caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t know. I got drunk and passed out. I only woke up when we got back here and they turned the floodlights on us. It could have? The locals have been assholes, so when some of the older kids found out about th
e party, they decided to crash it. Play Stranger at the Feast. I just tagged along, Da. I didn’t do—”
He stopped, and his breath hitched raggedly in his throat. In the background Conri could hear a door handle rattle and the sound of heavy, human boots against linoleum and cheap creaky joists. Finn’s hand tightened around his phone so much that his knuckles creaked. Or that could be Conri’s own fingers. He loosened his grip as he grabbed what he needed from the suitcase and the car fob from the nightstand and headed for the door.
The rest he could get when he came back.
Finn swallowed hard—a wet click in his throat—and took a shallow breath. “I don’t think they want parents to know what’s going on. They won’t let any of the other kids use the camp phone to call home, and the counselors took our phones and everything when we arrived. But you told me I should keep my burner in case. Da, what if they come for me? Or for the little kids? Should we try and get out?”
“No. Do what you’re told,” Conri told him. “You haven’t done anything wrong, so you don’t have anything to hide. Even if you did do something wrong, that’s the story you stick to.”
“That doesn’t sound like what a hero would do,” Finn said. “Or a lord.”
“Yeah, well, you’d be surprised what gets left out once something turns into a story.” Conri ducked into the elevator and pretended he didn’t see the middle-aged couple’s agitated jab at the Close button. “And you aren’t either yet, Finn. Now keep your head down and a polite tongue in your head. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“When?”
“Soon,” Conri promised grimly. “I’m taking the long way round.”
OLD WIVES knew that time passed faster in the Otherworld. Conri was too much of a gentleman to argue with them, but they were only close. Time didn’t pass at all in the Otherworld. It’s why the fey liked mortals. They brought time with them. It stirred the waters.
Sometimes boys joined the fairy ring to dance a reel with a handsome fey, only to wake in the morning well used, with a purse of coin and half a century frittered away. Others the youngest daughter finished their quest and found themselves back home the same night they left, those sixty years squashed back into sixteen-year-old skin.
If someone knew how to read the tides, then they could use the silted-up shallows of the Otherworld as a rat run from somewhere to somewhen.
Conri knew how to do it.
As far as the odometer was concerned, they’d covered the same amount of miles as the trip would take in the real world. More, since the Otherworld’s topography hadn’t caught up with the human world yet. It was still based on the potholed highways and cracked back roads of the 1950s. Conri’s ass ached and his throat was parched despite the bottle of water he’d stolen from the creepy, kudzu-buried gas station he passed a few miles back. It had been too long since he’d lived on Otherworld fare. His body had forgotten how to make do with the thinness of it.
A hitchhiker paused on the side of the road to watch him go by, shabby jeans and a denim jacket under a faded backpack. Ragged blond hair hung still around their face despite the wind that kicked up dust and ragged bits of stick. It didn’t bother to try and wave Conri down, it could tell he was meant to be there.
Sometimes Conri could too. Still.
He brushed that thought away like a cobweb and leaned forward to squint out the bug-covered window for the turnoff to Elwood. If he missed it, he’d be stuck on the road for another day maybe. Despite the empty road, there were no U-turns in the Otherworld. Or more accurately, no take-backs. If someone regretted something—a missed turn, a missed opportunity, a murder—they could find a work-around, but it couldn’t be undone.
And the GPS was no help. It had spent an hour trying to direct him to the second level of Hell—head straight for Gehenna and turn left at Limbo—before it eroded into static and eerie whispers that made fractured promises and threats. So he wasn’t going to depend on it.
The turnoff appeared out of nowhere, disguised by dust and the angle of the road. Conri yanked the wheel and felt the weight of the car as it swerved under him. The front tire slipped off the crumbled tarmac into the dirt with a jolt—and a sudden sense of something along the road that waited for people who left it—and then bumped back up again.
He was nearly back. Conri could feel the weight of the mortal world pull at his human bones as he got closer to the boundary. Not far now. He reached over to check the map he’d tossed onto the passenger side and took his eyes off the road for a second.
When he looked back up, the man was already halfway into the road. Conri caught a snapshot of dark hair and torn black clothes—was that a sword in his hand?—and the bumper of the car clipped the man and flipped him up into the air. He landed on the hood with a crack that made Conri wince and then grabbed blindly at the top of it. His knuckles showed white through abraded skin as he grabbed at the lip.
“Go,” the stranger yelled roughly as he waved his free hand at the road. “Move now.”
That’s when Conri saw the hounds. They were lean and white, built of mist and bone, with red ears where their bloody-handed masters had ruffled them in approval. The road was new to them, and it gave them pause, paws raised prissily as they poked at the concrete, but only for a second. Then they lunged out into the road after their prey in long, ground-devouring leaps.
“Shit.”
Conri hit the gas and plowed through them. The hounds shrieked as they bounced off the metal and rolled into the road, long red grazes on their haunches and shoulders. It wouldn’t kill them, but they might remember it.
One managed to grab hold of the rearview mirror. Sharp, yellow teeth punched through the fiberglass like tinfoil and the glass shattered. The hound snarled around the mouthful and glared at Conri out of a mad, yellow eye.
“I’ll remember you,” that glare said.
Then they hit the border. The hound’s long body stretched out like a ribbon in the wind, bone ribs sharp as they tore through mist-made skin. It tried to keep up, but hounds weren’t one of the things that could pass through the borders. Not alone.
It unspooled, and the car smashed back into the real world, heat like a slap and the stink of hot concrete and wet, boiled earth thick in the air. Conri hit the brakes hard, and the car fishtailed under him. His passenger lost his grip and was thrown off the car. He hit the road hard and rolled.
Conri sat for a second and panted as he waited to reacclimate. He could have left—he considered it. Some black-clad stranger who was stupid enough to wander into the Otherland wasn’t his problem.
Then the man propped himself up on one elbow and wiped blood from his mouth. Dark hair hung in front of his face, and that seemed as far as he could go. Conri tapped his fingers nervously on the wheel and then swore to himself as he scrambled out of the car.
The hounds couldn’t cross the border on their own, but plenty of things could bring them over.
Chapter Two
IT WASN’T the first time that Special Agent Dylan Bellamy had been unceremoniously thrown out of faerie, and he doubted it would be the last. The fey might have put their mark on the Accords and bound themselves, but the place had made no such promises. It still wanted to have its fun, and it didn’t appreciate any mortal interference.
But it was the first time he had gone face-to-face with a Toyota.
Bell swallowed a mouthful of blood, slick and salty in his throat, and appreciated the bright, midmorning sun as it stabbed into his aching eyes. It was always dusk or dawn in the Otherworld, never in-between. Once he was fully reassured he was home, he took a quick inventory of his state. Nothing was broken, and all his extremities were there. But the thicket of tightly woven branches and thorny runners he’d had to fight his way through had taken its toll on his skin before the hounds had their pound of flesh.
He had to get up, but there was nothing about to kill him right this minute, and the hot gut sickness of the border twisted his stomach like a rag. A minute, he swore as he p
ressed his knuckles against his forehead, and then he’d get back to work.
Hounds. Bell wiped his mouth on his sleeve and managed to drag himself onto his knees. What the fuck were hounds doing out here, in the most mundane hollow of the States the Agency could find?
“Come on,” someone said as they put a lean warm arm around his waist and dragged him to his feet. “I’ll get you to town, find somewhere to get you patched up.”
Cars, Bell reminded himself scathingly as he stiffened his knees, tended to be driven.
Pride did what the threat of death hadn’t, and Bell squashed the sickness and the pain down into the box in his head where it belonged. He’d deal with it later. Or not. He got his feet under him and took his weight off his rescuer’s shoulders.
“Thanks for the help,” he said, his voice clipped and cold. “But I can take it from here, Mr.….”
He limped a step back and paused as he took in the fact that his Good Samaritan wasn’t human. Not entirely. Not anymore.
Pointed ears stuck up through his shaggy, roughly cut hair that was blotched with gray and white over the ginger base. His too-bright, mismatched eyes looked starkly inhuman in his broad, handsome, and casually human face.
Cute, huh, a stupid little voice whispered in the back of his head. Bell smothered it impatiently to shut it up. It wasn’t wrong, but this wasn’t the time.
The changeling, having given Bell the same once-over, looked vaguely stricken.
“Fuck,” he said. “You’re Iron Door.”
Bell glanced down at himself. The muddy Kevlar vest that spelled out his affiliation in stark white letters did kind of give that away. The changeling was also dressed like someone from his decade. Other than the stamp of the elf-gift on his face, he looked like any other guy buying hipster veg at the farmer’s market. His jeans were faded by design, not work, and his old green T-shirt had a quote from a Dua Lipa song on it.
