The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

  I squeeze between the bedazzled and be-Gucci’d crowd and bottleneck into the bathroom. Fancy school, fancy bathrooms, which means there’s only three stalls max, all of them perfectly clean and perfectly picturesque and perfectly not-out-of-toilet-paper at all times.

  “Bonjour,” I start. There’s a pause as her recognition of my voice goes through, and then Bianca sighs.

  “It’s afternoon.”

  “Time is an illusion,” I chime, bending down a little to see where her feet are. Middle stall. I situate myself on the wall opposite it. “I’m here to listen to you pee.”

  “No.” Bianca says.

  “Yes.” I assert. “And, ask you a very important life-or-death question.”

  A tinny classical orchestra swells as Bianca immediately turns a song up on her phone.

  “Life-or-death!” I insist, appalled. She heartlessly turns the volume to max, violins screeching around the enamel walls. I decide to perch on the plush waiting chair by the door. Bianca takes a good ten minutes, but I stubbornly refuse to give up, perusing a nice little webcomic on my phone to the tune of ten million clarinets and French horns. Finally the music stops, and I hear the toilet flush and the door unlock. Bianca comes over to the sink without looking in the mirror or anywhere near my reflection.

  “Was it a big one?” I ask, nonchalantly. Bianca has at least two ballerinas worth of poise, so the way she jumps out of her skin just looks like her twitching slightly.

  “Do you ever leave?” She hisses, indigo-velvet eyes glaring up at me in the mirror.

  “My body? Great question. And the answer is; not if I can help it.”

  She washes her hands and dries them slowly, finger-by-finger, all while piercing through me with her stare. We might be eating breakfast together everyday, and we might’ve texted once, and I might look at her Snapchat every morning of whatever boring-ass highlight out of whatever boring-ass book she stayed up until two to read, but I’m learning in Silvere that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re friends.

  “What do you want?” She asks.

  “From you? Friendship. And any information about fairies you have thus far.”

  “Fairies,” She deadpans. “I thought you wanted to know about blood promises?”

  “They’re basically the same thing, right?”

  “Not at all,” She wrinkles her nose. “The reference materials are completely different, the monastic coptic is much harder to read in one than the other, and -”

  “Okay, well.” I heave a sigh. “Have you found anything about anything?”

  “Of course I have.” Bianca fires back, leaning on the immaculate tile wall and folding her arms over her perfect chest. “This part of Switzerland is rife with old druidic superstitions.”

  “And?”

  “And.” She starts. “The superstition goes, if you share the same blood as the person who breaks the blood promise, you’re all punished by the fairies equally.”

  “Wait - the whole family? Even if you did nothing wrong?”

  She nods. My legs bolt up from the chair. The blood promise me and Alistair made -

  “Oh, shit. That’s why! That’s why Von Arx - it’s gotta be real, then.”

  “‘Gotta be real’?” Bianca raises one thin eyebrow. “It’s a five hundred year old superstition, Pierce. Not fact.”

  If Von Arx is actually afraid of blood promises…then that means she thinks fairies are real.

  Fairies. Right. Because when I think about allllll the possible explanations for the weird shit going on, fairies is the first thing I think of. Not clones. Not aliens. Wait, shit. Aliens are more plausible than fairies, actually. Fairies. The image brings up kids’ books with butterfly-winged little sprites, jumping on amanita and drinking dewdrops from upside down flowers. It’s LSD, the 60’s, and/or the toy section for four-year-old girls who love sparkly things. It’s not reality. And it’s definitely not high-rolling, high-society, Maserati-and-Moschino Silvere reality. I’m way more ready to yank on my tinfoil hat and shout ‘FAR REACHING INTER-GOVERNMENTAL CONSPIRACY!’ than to even whisper ‘fairies’ with any sort of seriousness.

  So, not great. It’s impossible. But we’ll roll with it. We’ll roll with anything if it means we figure out who our ugly-ass red-eyed stalker is.

  “Have you found anything specifically about fairies?” I press, opening my notes app. “Anything at all?”

  Bianca looks thoroughly weirded-out, but she’s an expert at not showing it. The only indication she thinks I’m crazy is the slightest twist of her glossed lip.

  “There are…passing references. Something about their names being very important. You can attract a fairy by using their real name, or repel them by brandishing raw iron at them. They hate ash wood, jet, and goat’s milk. If you have a brown cat it will drive them off because they think it’s dirt, but a yellow cat will attract them because they think it’s made of gold.”

  “Gold.” I repeat, hard. “Do they like gold?”

  Bianca gives me a withering look. “Everyone likes gold.”

  One is silver and the other’s gold.

  I shake the creepy song off. “Okay. But what about liquid gold?”

  “Liquid - ” She stops. “You mean molten gold?”

  “No, I mean the liquid stuff. Not hot. Just…watery.”

  “Gold doesn’t liquify without being heated, Pierce.”

  “Fine, yeah. What else do you got?”

  “Too much. There are books upon books of what to do to keep fairies away, all of it pseudo-religious nonsense fueled by fear.”

  There’s a silence in the bathroom, the rushing of the pipes next door a quiet slither that might as well be deafening. My fingers click wildly on the keyboard. Yellow cats, goat’s milk, real name attracts them, raw iron. Bianca narrows her eyes at me.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on right now, or are you going to ask me to look that up, too?”

  “So,” I ignore her. “Blood promises. Can a person get out of them?”

  “No.” Bianca’s word is automatic.

  “What if they run away? Like, far away?”

  “You can’t escape; you can only condemn someone else to it. And according to the superstitions around here, that would mean condemning your next of kin - those who share your blood. You’d have to live with that for the rest of your life.”

  The air presses out of my lungs like they’ve been punctured. Alistair and I shared blood. Von Arx is worried about the blood promise backfiring onto him, somehow. Because of a fairy curse? Those aren’t real. Fairies aren’t - but the red-eyed man, and the deer, and the gold-beaked mask person -

  “You realize this is all conjecture, right?” Bianca frowns. “These are superstitions. Rumors. Myths. Things that aren’t real.”

  “I know,” I start. “I know that.”

  “Then why do you have this look on your face like you’re taking it seriously?”

  I close my phone and heft my backpack on my shoulders again. When I turn to leave, I feel a tug on my sleeve and look down to see perfect manicured nails leading up to Bianca’s heart-shaped, worried face. Clearly worried. Not hidden anymore.

  “I’ve spent hours in the library looking things up for you,” She says. “The least you could do is tell me what’s going on.”

  The shadow’s red eyes. The man’s mouth, beginning to sing. The gold dripping, and the gold mask. Durand lit up. The fear. All of it, dangerous. A reality that has to stay unreal for everyone else. I make a smile.

  “Oh, you know. Just girly things.”

  31

  The Family (Or, how to be satisfied with just the trees, with just the rain)

  At seventeen and two months old, Alistair Strickland makes sure to call his sister every day.

  He tries to, anyway. She’s eleven, now, and that means she’s started to get annoyed. But he tries. Texts work better - him in full sentences and her in just emojis. Six years isn’t a huge generational gap, but it isn’t small, either. A thumbs
up from her means a good day, a fish means an okay day, and a Christmas tree means a bad day. She’s never liked Christmas. It was a Christmas Eve when Grandmother’s car came to get him and he left the Brussels house for good. Left Rose alone, in that cold mansion, with that cold woman, on the coldest day of the year. He still remembers the sound of his own crying in the car, the driver rolling up the window to drown him out. It was only much later, years later, that he realized it might’ve been to give him privacy, but with some chagrin he’d wondered what good leaving a crying child alone ever did.

  Today, Alistair calls her from the relative peace of the rose maze. On a Sunday, with everyone else last-minute scrambling inside to finish the homework they put off in favor of weekend dabbling, the maze is deader than an old grave. The roman fountains situated in every open juncture tinkle water merrily, the sound quickly swallowed up by the lush hedges. He kicks aside a stray cigarette butt, reminded of Ciel keenly, and sits on a stone bench. A rose so red it looks black bobs back at him, eye-level, as he dials Rose’s number. The irony isn’t lost on him.

  It rarely is.

  He remembers running through the maze when he was barely taller than the bench he sits on. He liked to play a game with himself, alone as he was on campus while the students studied and Von Arx made important conference calls to important people. He liked to pretend there was a monster deep in the maze - strong and fast and chaotically full of claws and teeth in that cartoon-villain way. An obvious villain. One who wasn’t kind to him sometimes, sweet to him sometimes. One who didn’t know he liked cherry danishes and sleeping on his stomach and the color sky blue.

  He liked to pretend the monster was chasing after him. It was faster than him, and so he pushed himself to his little limit, legs pumping and lungs searing, darting around groundskeepers and pretending they were on the monster’s side.

  Training, in a childish way. The beginnings of it.

  The phone rings empty in his ear and brings him back to the present.

  Today, Rose doesn’t pick up. If she really is in Chamonix with Father, then she’s safe, and she isn’t answering because she’s busy sledding down some snowy slope and inhaling as much baked brie as humanly possible. It’s a comforting thought, but Alistair knows better than to hold onto it for too long. When Father’s done in Chamonix, Rose’ll be going back to Brussels. And Father’s lawyers have only been half-succeeding against that woman’s for over three years, now. She doesn’t hit Rose, after all. For some twisted reason that woman’s decided the bruises are to be more emotional than physical for her daughter, which makes extraction more difficult than it was in Alistair’s case.

  So, today, Alistair leaves a voicemail for his sister. He knows she never listens to them, and never will. But they’re not really for her, and they both know that.

  “Hey, it’s me. Don’t ask how, but I know you’re in Chamonix. With Father, right?”

  He pauses, watching the wind brisk fingers through the dark rose’s petals for a moment.

  “There’s a new girl at my school. You’ve met her. The airplane girl - the one you drew the picture for. And that’s…” He massages his brow. “That’s fine. But I told you to be careful. You can’t go around giving random people those things. I know you don’t think it’s a problem, or dangerous, but it is, okay? I need you to trust me on that.”

  The fountain of a stone deer to his left laughs an especially loud, bubbling laugh. Like mockery. Like joy. He leans back.

  “Is your new academy interesting, at least? Are you eating well? Knowing you, you’ve made a crowd of friends already. Silvere’s the same as ever - Ciel says hi, by the way. And to stay out of trouble.” His chuckle is more of a soft sigh. “Yeah, okay. I made that last one up.”

  There’s more he wants to say. There always is. But right now, he wants to say everything. To tell her - tell someone - about what he’s feeling, about the irritating whirlwind of thoughts and sensations Pierce has brought to this school. To his life.

  To him.

  She’s brought the red-eyed man with her. But, when he stops to think about it - really and truly think about it - the red-eyed man and his empty song are far less terrifying than what lurks below every trenchant little interaction he has with her. Her. Lilith. That’s her real name. If they were anywhere else - anywhere but Silvere and its entrenched generational traditions - he’d call her by her real name, wouldn’t he?

  Lilith. It rolls off his mind-tongue and the syllables are simple and clean, like fresh cotton. Like flowers.

  It would be easy, to say her name.

  He brushes himself off and remembers where he is. Who he is. What his duty is - what blood runs in his veins, and who he shares it with.

  He reminds himself of what awaits him beyond this last year of his life.

  “If there’s something you need, Rose, you call me. I don’t care if it’s a splinter, or a headache, or if you lost your charger again for the billionth time. Call me. Whenever.”

  He hangs up, the wind ruffling his thoughts.

  32

  The Fairy Ring (Or, How none of it feels real when it’s happening, because only in the quiet dark does reality hurt)

  At sixteen years and five months old, Ciel Lautrec now knows magic is real.

  It isn’t wishful thinking anymore. It’s real.

  The white deer and the black shadow. He’s survived on rumor, on baseless conjuncture by the faculty and the students, chasing the tail end of invisible winds for years and feeding on the exhausting exhaust.

  Now, he has evidence.

  Well, he doesn’t have it. Lilith has it, in an empty makeup case tucked away in her backpack. But he’s seen it with his own two eyes - each strand bright white. She’s seen it, too, alive; roaming the halls of the chateaus as no wild thing ever would. It didn’t show on the footage, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was close. Closer than he’s ever seen it.

  She calls it weird. He calls it magical.

  The difference between them, he supposes.

  Ciel idly skips a stone on the surface of the school’s Monet-inspired lily pond. Why her? It couldn’t have been coincidence. Why did the deer choose to appear before her? As far as girls go, she’s unremarkable - no striking features, no real hint of beauty. Ciel's seen beauty in all it’s forms, dressed to the nines and undressed to the tens, and Lilith doesn’t fit a single category. She’s lengthy, he’ll give her that, but it does nothing for her composure - always a little hunched, a little too round in the face. Tragically, her hair hangs in such a way that it looks oily no matter how often she washes it. Her eyes are an interesting color of washed-out-blue, to be sure, but a little too small to have any impact.

  Always just a little off. A bit not enough. That’s Lilith Pierce.

  Her grades are miserable, according to Alistair. And if the way she acts around him is any indication, Ciel knows she can’t be all that sharp, either. Her mother married into money, and not quite legally - she had her missing first husband declared dead only three years ago. He only knows that because the world of William Cunningham is extremely small - and also Ciel’s. Technically, if her husband showed up again alive she’d be committing bigamy, and Ciel’d be surprised if anyone stayed around for that, let alone strictly-by-the-book Cunningham.

  By all accounts, Lilith Pierce shouldn’t be at Silvere.

  A fluke.

  So, why? Why would a beautiful, magical creature choose to appear before someone like her?

  He doesn’t know. Maybe he’ll never know. Maybe the knowing doesn’t matter. What matters is the white fur in Lilith’s hands. Proof. His one connection, one piece of evidence that all of this is real. That all of that, so many years ago in the forest with Alistair, was real.

  That he’s been holding out for something real, all this time.

  It takes him barely any effort to pull the starstruck girl who lives next to Lilith into a forbidden moment in her room. When it’s done he feigns surprise at the time - is it really al
most fourth period? - and she bolts up from the bed, buttoning her shirt and wildly pulling on her skirt again. He makes a show of pulling his pants on, too.

  “I -” She looks back at him with a fiercely red face. “Can I text you? Later?”

  “Sure.” He smiles, handing over his number easily. Why not? A small price to pay. And if she leaks it to the internet for bragging rights as they usually do, he has two other numbers for just such an occasion.

  Ciel assures her he’s right behind her, just needs a minute to lace his shoes. When she’s gone out the door, he waits. Thirty seconds, forty. Two minutes. He can practically hear the cogs churning in her head; she wants to wait for him, but her parents will find out if she’s late. She weighs it all - impatient to tell her friends what just happened, and then he hears her shoes clip down the hall at a half-run.

  Finally.

  But he can’t leave just yet. He’s waiting for the sound of wheels - the cleaning cart. He knows Silvere. Not as well as Alistair, but well enough. The cleaning ladies always come to Knight Lyon halfway through the second period of the day. He hears them laughing, sponging, clattering. Slowly, they make their way down the hall, until he hears them right next door. Lilith’s room.

  He slips out when the lady’s footsteps pass, moving to empty the trash at the other end of the hall.

  Lilith Pierce isn’t a total fool. But people who aren’t total fools are usually the easiest to read. The most predictable. She wouldn’t take the fur with her. She wouldn’t hand it over to him, even for a generous sum. It’s too important to her to carry around everywhere she goes - what if someone goes through her backpack when she isn’t looking? Or at exercise in the lockers? No. She’d keep it somewhere safe. Somewhere only she can, presumably, get in.

  He sidles up to her doorframe, the cleaning cart lodged halfway out of it. His eyes dart around her room - the same arrangement as all the others. Bed in the same place, dresser in the same place.