The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

  It’s my turn to a pick a leaf and hold it close. “Yeah. I guess.”

  Ana’s quiet and I’m quiet and the crescent moon is the quietest of all, and the sweetest. It doesn’t say anything, just shines light down on us forever and ever and suddenly I get the feeling sometimes it’s not about what you say, but what you don’t say, because this moment is perfect without words. Even in the middle of struggling through seven months of a snooty European school, even in the middle of the strangest, most isolating part of my life, there are still some perfect moments. Ana hums then, and she starts to skip ahead. I trail after her, watching the way the golden tree leaves filter the white moonlight through them like little sheets of old sepia film.

  Von Arx was right. Plants really are the only still things in a busy world.

  Something red snags my eye like a fishhook, and I freeze. Whatever it is, it’s deep in the forest. Too deep. Not a red-leafed tree. Not berries. Something darker red than plants. And wetter. I squint. It’s a white mass - forty, maybe fifty feet away from me? I can see hooves, and antlers. Yellow, unblinking eyes as big as saucers.

  My heart spasms.

  It’s the white deer, lying on its side. So still it has to be dead. I just saw it the other night, alive and moving and majestic…

  The white deer bucking, diamond ice freezing moving roots.

  It’s just a flash of nonsensical memory, but it means everything, and I know for certain it happened. Last night. I saw the deer bucking last night, when Lionel drugged me.

  I lean closer to see it better, and something near it squirms. There are two shapes - the white deer, and something far bigger kneeling next to it. Something with two long arms, two long legs. Collapsed over itself like the ruin of a person, twisted like a blackened yarn. There’s so much forest shadow I can’t see details, but the fingers on the ends of the arms - they’re long. Impossibly long, impossibly sharp-nailed. It digs those nails into the white deer’s stomach, pulling up handfuls of wet red and…eating them.

  It’s eating.

  I can’t even whisper ‘fuck’. I can’t even swallow. If I make any noise, it’ll hear me, won’t it? I don’t even know what it is. I don’t even know if it’s real.

  But I know, with the creeping frostbite of certainty in my chest, that I’ve seen it before.

  In a picture, drawn by a little girl.

  “Hey Lilith! Lilith!” Ana’s voice. Ana crashing through the trees drunkenly. “Look who I found!”

  I whip my head around. Ana, followed by four people. Rafe. Maria. Alistair. And - my heart sinks - Ciel. No, no no. Not now.

  “Get back,” I hiss, my stiff arms struggling to signal. “Not here!”

  But Ana just marches on, blissfully happy to see me, blissfully ignorant, and they follow, and I whip my head around to the deer and the shadow thing and realize with a subzero terror that it’s standing up on two shadowy legs, now. It’s facing me. Staring right at me - two red-hot coal eyes staring right. At. Me.

  No paper. No colored pencils. Just fury. Fury like the man in the restaurant. In the church pew. Fury like a writhing whirlwind that eats everything in its path.

  It’s not a hallucination. It can’t be, not with the deer's blood around its mouth. It’s interacting with the world. It’s real. And it sees me.

  There’s a beat. Everything moves in molasses, in cold, bitter honey, and then it opens its jaw.

  A smile. Its smile taking up the whole world with bloodstained teeth. Sharp. Thin.

  Hungry.

  I’m too close, it’s too late. It’s too late for me, and I already know that. The thing in the picture Rose drew - this is it. In the flesh. Eating flesh right in front of me.

  I’m gone.

  Rose knew it, and she drew it, and I’m gone.

  The feeling I’ve had for so long - that feeling of looming end - comes crashing down on my head like a brutal iron blade. A guillotine block I’ve spent my life sleeping on. I was right all along, and this is it. I wasn’t meant to live. Broken. But the people behind me -

  I spin on my heel, and scream with every last drop of oxygen I have.

  “RUN!”

  I see their stunned faces, all of them going still, all of them staring at me with wide eyes, (Ana so confused, Rafe and Maria startled, Ciel so handsome even when he’s alarmed, and Alistair always suspicious, always glaring, a little worried?) and then there’s the sound of a song. An uneven but cheery thing.

  The song, months after that man in the restaurant pursed his lips. Finally, finally, I hear it from him, the echo long-delayed, and the words hissed and fragmented and cracked, like a smoker’s voice on the edge of death. Like someone who’s been choked and brought back to life, throat torn apart.

  The same song Alistair heard.

  The same song Julien heard, maybe.

  “Make new friends, but keep the old.”

  Something ice-cold crawls up my back, finger by finger.

  “One is silver and the other’s…”

  Eyes squeezed shut, muscles tensed into stone and waiting to die. Just waiting. Like I’ve always been.

  “…gold.”

  Death smells like roses.

  A rose-scent curls around my nose, blossoming through the forest’s pine; overwhelming and sweet and everywhere. I’m too afraid to look, but I hear Ana screaming, something giving a bristling yowl near my ear like a cat, a huge cat. It’s an inhuman sound, an almost-human sound, riddled with anger and fear and indignation, dripping with a ‘how dare you’. How dare who? All I know is something hot and sharp scrapes my shin, the sound of ripping cloth and the rough jolt as my jean’s leg slices open. Off. Cold wind, colder skin. Something’s tugging it. Something’s trying to drag me somewhere. I’m too scared to even shriek, to whimper, to open my damn eyes and run.

  Coward.

  A grunt, a human one, and then a massive force shatters into my side. Up is down, the trees spiral in the sky, the stars below me, my glasses fly off and instincts I forgot I had kick in - curl into a ball. Wet leaves and wet dirt seeping through my clothes. Just stay in a ball, my spine is harder than my flesh, my bones are harder, they’ll protect me, all of the soft parts that make up me, I have to protect them -

  “Behind you!” Ciel’s voice, and there’s another grunt near me and the sound of something - someone - hitting the ground hard. A scuffle? I can’t. I don’t want to look.

  One eye. Just one.

  You can’t run from what you can’t see but I saw it coming all along.

  I force an eye open just a slit. Everything’s a blur without glasses, but I can see movement. Something dark and indecipherable scuttles through the pine needles towards me on all fours - on all fucking fours - faster than anything has the right to move, its body snapping with unnatural jerks. It’s human, human-adjacent, but it moves like a panicked rat. It gets sharper the closer it gets, please don’t get sharper, stay blurry, and then it freezes right in front of me. Glowing ruby eyes bob listlessly up and down, socketed to a distorted face inches away from mine. Centimeters. No nose. That horrible mouth, lined with a thousand blade-sliver-teeth. It’s so close I can smell it - the rose smell and the forest smell and every other smell pushed out by its sickly reek of burnt paper.

  Ana’s screaming pivots full-blown hysterical. “Strickland - !”

  Rafe’s deep bellow; “Ali, don’t!”

  There’s the bone-crack of splintering wood, and the shadow thing looming above me gives a shudder, a stumble. And then it goes still. No more bobbing. No listless movement. A long, freakish hand rests next to mine, so close I can see the texture of its gray skin - hairless and lined with fine compact scales like a snake. It’s so close I can see exactly how its malnourished neck twists in a perfect, impossible 180 degrees to look at Alistair. An Alistair standing behind it, an Alistair I can barely see up through the monster’s tangle of long limbs.

  An Alistair holding a thick branch like a bat with shaking hands, and holding the thing’s hot-coal gaze with s
teady green eyes.

  “Fuck with Silvere and you fuck with me, you ugly bastard.” He digs into his stance. The monster moves off me (that’s what it is - not a shadow or a human or an animal, a monster) and towards him, one freakishly long arm lifting and swinging around like a whip, all the centrifugal force tipped with razor claws aimed right for Alistair’s torso, right for his soft organs -

  He’ll die.

  A heavy thud, and a dark shape comes between Alistair and the arm, two massive human hands pressing back against the sheer force of the monster’s long-fingered palm. A bald head glimmers in the moonlight, lifting slowly. Huge security man from the other night - one of the two who smelled like roses. No, not one of those two. But nearly the same. Same uniform, same smell. He grits his teeth, one lens of his sunglass lenses fractured, the other popped out and missing.

  I’m high on adrenaline, on pure terror. There should be an eye. He should have an eye. But there’s only a flesh-colored crater where a white rose blooms from the center of his socket, ivory petals spilling over his eyelids and blinking like eyelashes might blink.

  “If you want them, come and get them yourself -” The security grunts and gives a herculean heave, snapping the monster’s arm on itself. “- instead of sending your pathetic echoes!”

  Holy fuck. Holy fucking shit he just - why are his eyes made of rose petals? Who cares, Lilith, he’s beating the monster back, just be grateful. Just run.

  Run where?

  Black blood (not red?) flies as the security guard tears the monster’s arm all the way off as easily as I’ve seen the groundskeepers pull weeds. He holds it up like a javelin. The monster sees it coming, sees his intent, and, injured, it tries to get away through the pine needles with only three limbs, stumbling at top speed. So fast I can barely see it, so fast after two seconds I’ve lost it in the forest undergrowth.

  But the security guard hasn’t. The white rose petals that make up his exposed eye move and quiver like they’re alive. Like they’re…seeing. He pulls his massive arm back, the severed demonic limb poised straight, bone tip sticking out like a jagged arrowhead.

  I jump, another blur nearing me. But it’s got human skin, human hair. Alistair. He picks up my glasses and hands them to me, and helps my trembling body sit up.

  “L-Leave me alone,” I chatter, my teeth clacking and my vision needlessly a thousand times better.

  “And let my newly-minted archenemy be defeated by someone who isn’t me?” He pulls his leather jacket off and drapes it over my shoulders. “N-Not a chance in hell.”

  It comforts me, to hear the shake in his voice. To know I’m not the only one this crazy shit is happening to, or the only one who can see it. The jacket radiates warmth and the spiced smell of black tea. Not a flowery smell, or a light one, or even a pleasant one, really. But after all the roses and burnt paper, it’s a relief. It smells real, familiar, and that’s all I need right now. We watch as the security pulls his arm back, aims, and heaves the severed armbone like a javelin into the air. It cuts through the forest, never once hitting a single tree or stray branch, splatting black blood in a precise line as it goes. Like one of Soyon’s arrows, it sinks into the underbrush, the only indication it hit its target a miserable, inhuman, crackling wail, and a rustle in the bushes. Something that looks like a curl of thick black smoke rises up out of the foliage, or my glasses are smudged -

  “It’s over.” The guard looks down at us. “You will return to your dorm rooms immediately.”

  Alistair stands from my side. “Not without an explanation, first.”

  The security guard glares down at him and Alistair glares right back, either completely unfazed by the fact the guy has a rose for an eye, or just really good at ignoring it. A blonde streak suddenly cuts between their tension, smiling brightly. Ciel.

  “Did you see it, Alistair?” He asks, half-breathless and gesturing wildly at the bleeding deer corpse, pale and drastic on the dark forest floor. “It’s identical to the one we saw, all those years ago! The same horns, the same markings! It’s the same one!”

  Why is he so excited? Alistair doesn’t pull his stony glare from the security guard.

  “Why are you happy right now?” I manage to Ciel. “That thing was a monster - it almost -”

  His brilliant smile crystallizes on his face. “Shhh - quiet now, Lilith. The grown-ups are talking.”

  The words are affectionate, but the way he says them are laced with slivers of glass, porcelain, things that dig deep and stab. I feel small all of a sudden. Immature. Childish. He’s right. The time for my babbling was about ten train stops behind us. We have to discuss something as nuts as this like grown-ups - focused, dead serious - or we’ll never get anywhere.

  Suddenly, my ears ring and my head wobbles back. I’m gonna faint. Fucking hell, body. There’s not even any red! It’s all black smears of blood, black no matter which way the starlight hits it. What the fuck was that thing? What kind of animal bleeds black?

  But Ciel’s here. Gotta look impervious. Strong. I shove my hands in Alistair’s jacket pockets, trying to work warmth back into them, trying to hold on to something. Trying to anchor myself to this world. Like an adult. Bravery. My fingers hit metallic - a wad of foil. I pull it out of the pocket just an inch and squint at it. Focus. Try to breathe.

  Gold foil.

  Wait, I recognize this. It’s…a wrapper. From the buffet chocolates. But unlike all the foils I crumple up and throw away, this foil is smoothed out perfectly, folded carefully so the edges match and it makes a crisp square. Why is this in Alistair’s pocket? Why would he keep garbage? Who am I kidding, he’s sloppy. He probably just grabbed one from the bowl and forgot.

  Unless.

  This…this can’t be the chocolate I left outside his door that day, can it?

  I shake my head. I’m stuck in a nightmare - a whole-ass nightmare just happened and what I care about is this piece of trash Alistair keeps in his pocket? A shuffling of leaves, Rafe and Maria and Ana coming out of the shadows, and I startle, dropping the wrapper back in.

  “It was a bear, right?” Rafe’s nervous question has Ana clutching onto his arm like she’s afraid her knees will give from under her.

  “B-Bears are fast. But not that fast,” She whimpers. “Is it - Is it still out there?”

  Maria is clearly the bravest of us. While Alistair and the security guard and Ciel stare each other down, while I’m battling a fainting spell like a weak-ass, she walks towards the bushes where the smoke came from, peering into the leaves.

  “Report?” Alistair asks without looking at her. She returns, shaking her platinum head.

  “Gone.”

  He narrows his eyes at the guard. “You know who I am. You know I have security permissions from Von Arx. So tell me exactly what just happened.”

  “Ali, c’mon.” Ciel smiles gentler. “You saw it. We all did. That shadow - it wasn’t human. Or animal. It couldn’t have been. It moved too fast. It looked like a puppet. It looked more like someone made a man out of shadow, out of magic -”

  “Don’t.” Alistair’s eyes flash to him. “Don’t say that fucking word.”

  “Look at his eyes,” Ciel gestures to the security guard’s face. “Look. He has a rose for an eye. Either we’ve all been put under the same specific and impossible illusion at once, or he’s not human, either.”

  “Occam’s razor,” My whisper comes from not-me. Not-here. Ana squints, and when she finally sees the rose eye she chokes off a shriek. Rafe makes the cross over his chest, and Maria’s frown only deepens.

  “They're moving, they blink.” Ciel presses. “There’s no other explanation. He’s not human.”

  “Who cares what he is?” Rafe suddenly grumbles. “We gotta get inside and get a hot cup of coffee before we all keel over.”

  “Shock.” Maria agrees. She and Rafe flank Ana and help her limp up the lawn towards the chateaus. Ana looks back at me, frantic.

  “Lilith? This is…this is too crazy. Are you com
ing?”

  The splinters in my heart from Ciel’s words push themselves out, imaginary all along. Shock. He’s in shock. We all are. That explains it, explains everything. I breathe a little sigh of relief.

  “Yeah. Right behind you.”

  I stand on wobbly legs and approach the tense triangle, shrugging Alistair’s jacket off. My skin misses the warmth immediately, but I hold it out to him.

  “Here, Prickland. Take it before I abscond covetously away with it.”

  “Big words,” The security comments appraisingly. I look at every part of him but his eyes.

  “Thanks,” I mutter. “I read a lot when I was twelve and had no friends.”

  Is he human? He’s wearing a suit. His shoes are laced. He looks human, except how can a human have a flower for an eye? How can there be anything other than humans, here, on gray-ass concrete-ass Earth-ass? There are only humans. Animals too, duh. But animals don’t talk with words. They don’t have rose eyes or glowing red eyes. That shadow thing had to be human. It had to be the guy from the restaurant, the guy Alistair and Julien saw too.

  This security guard’s gotta be human.

  So how is that rose-eye moving like it’s alive?

  Ciel doesn’t move. Neither does Alistair. The guard heaves a breath, his attempt to lighten the mood clearly a failure.

  “You three will return to your dorms. This is not your concern.”

  Alistair doesn’t blink, doesn’t even look sideways at his jacket I’m offering, and then chuckles bitterly.

  “I’m sure my grandmother pays you well for your job. Would you like to keep it?”

  “Alistair,” Ciel puts his hand out on his shoulder. “You can’t blackmail him. He’s magic -”

  A vicious slap of flesh singes the air as Alistair smacks his hand away.

  “Say it one more time, Ciel, and we’re through.”

  It’s the same voice. The deadly-serious voice he used when talking about his sister, making me promise not to talk about her drawings. Ciel looks taken aback, a crack down his beautiful face. The petals of the guard’s eye twitch, fluttering like real eyelashes. The more I look at it, the sicker I feel. The dizzier I feel. But now that the guard’s close up, I can see the dark red in the center of the white petals. It’s distinctive and stunning, like a blood droplet spreading on snow.