by Ruth Vincent
“I’d love to dance,” I said, flushing a bit.
His black eyes sparkled. And before I could say anything more he took my hand and led me out onto the floor. All around us the dancers were swaying slowly with perfect grace. The nervousness rose in my stomach again. But then Obadiah clasped my hand in his and pressed the other against the small of my back.
For a second I could hardly think. His fingers were warm against mine, and I could feel the heat of his other hand through the thin material of the back of my dress. I was so close to him now, I could feel the palpable maleness he exuded, the quiet confidence. With a small shift of his palm against my skin, he directed our dance, and to my amazement, my movements fell in line with his—we were dancing as one. Without once thinking about the steps, we glided across the floor. I’d never had a great partner before. He made it easy. In his arms, suddenly, I could dance.
I noticed I was smiling, the tension slipping from my body as we moved together, though my heart still fluttered.
Remember what you’re here to do, I had to tell myself. You’re not here to dance. You’re here to find out information.
“I have to ask you.” I leaned in close to whisper in his ear. There was a gap between us and the other couples; it gave us a breath of privacy to talk. “I came here tonight because of one of my friends. Maybe you know her—Charlotte Mercado?” I said, trying to let the missing girl’s name roll off my tongue like I’d practiced with Eva. “I haven’t seen Charlotte in a while. The last time I talked to her, she mentioned she’d been coming here a lot. I just . . . I wondered if maybe you’d seen her around?”
His body froze for a second, and I saw him nod, but it was like a shadow passed over his face at the mention of the missing girl’s name. He let out a sigh.
“I wish I could help you, I really do. But I haven’t seen her lately either,” he said slowly. “I don’t think anyone has. I heard her parents filed a report with the police.”
“Yeah, I heard that too.”
A beat of quiet passed between us.
“I truly am afraid for her,” Obadiah said, breaking the silence.
There was genuine pain in his voice as he said it.
“What do you think happened?” I asked, beginning to feel scared myself.
“Well, if you were really friends with Charlotte, you would know she had a lot of problems.”
I didn’t like the way he’d said “if you were really friends”—as if some part of him doubted my story.
“Charlotte was pretty lost,” he said, his eyes far away, though his body still moved with perfect masculine grace to the music. “She was deeply in debt. She’d been unemployed for more than a year. Her love life was in shambles. She was estranged from her adopted family. The last time I talked to her, she told me she wanted to track down her birth mother in the Philippines. I guess she thought that would somehow bring her peace, but she didn’t know the location exactly, and she didn’t have the money to travel.”
There was a deep melancholy in his eyes. “So when she asked for my help—what was I supposed to say?”
“But why would she come to you for help?”
The song had ended. Everyone stopped dancing and began to clap as the musicians held hands and bowed.
“Because I help people,” Obadiah said mysteriously. “That’s what I do. When people feel they’re out of options, and they want someone to wave a magic wand and fix all their problems . . . they come to me.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and somehow I was afraid to ask. There was something ominous sounding about this altruism.
Before I could say a word, Obadiah spoke first, his eyes narrowing.
“You asked me a question; now I have a question for you.”
“Go on,” I answered, my heartbeat quickening. But the expression on his face had changed. His eyes were taking on that cold intensity again, like he had when I first saw him, and suddenly I was nervous.
“Do you know why you attracted my attention, when you walked through the door of my club?”
I shook my head, unsure what to say. Eva would have replied something like “Because I’m cute?” but she was the kind of girl who could get away with lines like that. I was not.
“For a moment I doubted it. I tried to convince myself that my eyes were playing tricks on me, that you were not what I thought you were. But now I am certain. So you can stop pretending.”
He looked me straight in the eye.
“I know what you are.”
I froze like a bug when the light is turned on. He knows, I thought, panicking. There was no doubt now. He definitely knows you’re a P.I. All around me, the people, the sounds, everything was too close and too loud. I wanted to run out of this place. My mind was awhir as I tried to think of something I could say to save myself, and couldn’t come up with anything.
But Obadiah spoke.
“You obviously didn’t know Charlotte. If you did, you’d know that she never used her legal name. Only her parents called her that. All her friends, even acquaintances, called her Charley.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he continued.
“I must say, you did disguise yourself very well. I am sure you convinced all of them,” he said, gesturing to the partygoers, who were starting to dance again. “I am sure they all thought you were just some ordinary girl, out for a bit of fun. You are very good, you know. For a moment, you almost had me fooled.”
“Thanks, I guess.” Well, at least I hadn’t been a complete failure—although that wasn’t going to be much consolation when Reggie found out I’d been recognized and fired me. My cheeks were smarting. I was so mad at myself. I’d just blown my one chance! But how had he figured it out? I hadn’t done anything or said anything that could have given me away, had I? I didn’t even know what mistake I’d made.
“How did you know?” I blurted out.
Obadiah chuckled. “It’s my business to know my customers. I couldn’t be what I am if I didn’t know who they were, what they were, what they wanted, from the moment they walked in this door. I have my ways of telling these things,” he said mysteriously. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Clearly he wasn’t willing to share his methods with me.
Would Obadiah still talk to me, even though he knew that I was a P.I.? Would he still tell me anything about the missing girl? Maybe Reggie would be less pissed at me if I managed to bring back some information, even though I’d been found out. Still, I’d been outed in my first hour on the job. I knew my chances of getting permanently hired now were slim. My heart sank.
But I had to try. For the sake of poor Charley, if not for myself. At this point, I had nothing to lose.
“So,” I said, trying to sound less devastated than I felt, “you figured out I’m working for a P.I. Congrats. Are you still going to talk to me?”
To my surprise, Obadiah started to laugh—a deep, hearty laugh. He shook his head, his eyes dancing merrily.
“You were worried I thought you were a private detective?” he said, still chuckling.
Unsure, I nodded.
“Oh, Mab.” He smiled darkly, his hand brushing against mine. “You have far bigger worries than that to contend with, love.”
The fear rose up in my stomach again.
“When I said ‘I know what you are,’ what I meant was, I know you’re a changeling.”
Chapter 3
I stared up at him, unable to breathe. The room, the crowd, the music, the whirl of dancers all disappeared, and all I could see was Obadiah’s eyes. How could he have recognized me as a changeling? Humans didn’t even know fairies existed. How would he have known?
Unless . . .
My heart began to pound as a hope I’d never dared let myself feel rose up in my chest.
What if I wasn’t the only one?
What
if Obadiah was a changeling too?
All around us the couples were dancing, but I could no longer move. I took in the slight smirk of his mouth, his brooding eyes, his strong, square jaw. Could he be a changeling like me? There was none of the opal fire of the Fey about him. Then again, I appeared perfectly ordinary. Maybe he was in human disguise, same as I was?
My breath was coming in short sharp heaves; I was beginning to hyperventilate. I’d given up hope of ever meeting another fairy again years ago—and yet here he was standing before me. Was the fact that I’d felt so strangely attracted to him when we danced because some part of me had known, instinctively, he was Fey like me? It just seemed too good to be true. But if he was a changeling, how had he gotten here? Had the Fairy Queen tricked him too?
So many questions buzzed through my brain. Somewhere in the distance, I heard the song change, and the people began to dance again, faster this time, but I barely saw them. The couples on the floor moved wildly, while we stood stock-still, staring at each other. They encircled us, whirling around us like a giant vortex in which we were the silent center, like the eye of a hurricane. It was like the whole world had narrowed down to Obadiah’s face.
“You must admit, you noticed there was something strange about this place . . . the dancers dance a little too perfectly,” he smiled, “the bouncer’s canine teeth are unusually big. And those tangoing ladies who wear far too much perfume—it’s masking something . . .”
I gasped. Suddenly everything in this strange club made sense. The bouncer who had spoken to me and the rowdy men on the dance floor—they were Wolfmen, werewolves—of course they were, how had I not known? And the tangoing ladies—only the vampires, the Sanguinari, wore that much perfume, to cover up the smell of death.
I could hardly breathe. They’d all disguised themselves as humans. But all of them were from my world—the Vale! My eyes could scarcely process what I was seeing.
“But how did they all get here?” I gasped.
Obadiah sighed. “Well, as the Elixir drought continues, the rifts in the Vale grow wider and wider, and more of them are able to pass through. The Sanguinari have always been coming back to the human world, to visit their graves and such. But now the wolf packs are wandering in. Sometimes I’ll have an Elf or a Goblin show up on my doorstep.”
I put my head in my hands. I could barely believe what he was saying. There were magical creatures in the human world?
I looked around the room in wonder.
“Are there fairies here?” I asked Obadiah.
His eyes darkened at the word. “No,” he said quickly, and didn’t say more.
I glanced back at the awkward kids, leaning up against the wall, not dancing.
“What are they?”
“Oh, they’re just humans,” he said, “the ones I help. I try to keep the vamps and Wolfmen off them.”
As he said it, I saw a scruffy werewolf trying to buy a drink for a pretty doe-eyed girl. Obadiah glared at him and the Wolfman slunk away.
I rubbed my eyes and took a ragged breath—I still couldn’t quite believe it. How could all of this have been here, and I had never known it existed?
“How long has it been like this?” I asked, stunned. “How did I not know?”
Obadiah regarded me almost pityingly.
“You’ve spent your whole life trying to fit in as a human, keeping your head down, trying to pass as normal, haven’t you?” he asked.
I nodded.
“When you spend all your time trying to pass, you never find out where you really belong,” he said.
My heart clenched at that. Had I not been so concerned with being normal, with not being found out as a changeling, maybe I could have found kindred spirits, an expat community of the Vale.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “This is all real. You really believe we’re real, that fairies are real, that magic is real?”
I’d hidden my fairy self for so long—to be able to share it and talk about it felt dizzyingly free. My whole body felt light.
In the distance, I heard the band’s song swelling to a crashing crescendo. Then they stopped. Everyone around us was cheering—the Wolfmen were whooping and whistling, the Sanguinari were shouting, “Bravo! Bravissimo!” and even the ethereal Elvin ladies gave rapturous finger claps as the musicians all held hands and bowed, over and over again.
The couples were slowly leaving the floor, some linked arm in arm, cozying up to each other at tables in the corner, while others parted ways on the dance floor with a nod. But Obadiah and I just stood there.
As the dance floor emptied, I turned to follow the crowd, but Obadiah held me back.
His hands encircled my waist, their grip hard and firm, like he’d held me in our dance. The expression in his eyes made my scalp tingle and my cheeks grow hot.
To my surprise, he moved his hand from my waist and took my own hand in his, our fingers interlacing. Then he raised my hand to his lips, kissing it.
It was such an old-fashioned, gentlemanly gesture that it surprised me at first. But it was not a gentlemanly kiss. There was a roughness to it, a heat, as his lips pressed against my skin, and I could feel the warm mark on the back of my hand for a long moment afterward, like the stamp of a wax seal.
When he let go of my hand, he seemed startled.
“I don’t understand it,” he started to say, and then paused, as if searching for the right word. “Your skin . . . it’s warm . . .”
He sounded astonished. “I thought, you being a fairy, your hand would shiver like mist when my lips touched it. I thought you’d taste like Elixir. But you don’t. You skin tastes like a woman . . . earthy and salty and sweet.”
I blushed, tingling to the roots of my hair.
“What did you expect?” I said, turning away. “I am a woman . . .”
“I meant a human woman.”
“But I am a . . .”
Obadiah looked at me, his gaze hard and penetrating.
“There’s something I need to ask you,” he said, “something I can’t figure out.”
He pointed over my shoulder to the row of colored lamps over the door.
“Do you see that?”
“I noticed it when I came in.”
“Do you know why the colors are different, depending on who is walking under it?” he asked me.
“I was wondering,” I said. “I thought maybe it was just random?”
“Nothing in life is random,” said Obadiah. “It’s how I know my customers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The lights go on depending on what they are. Everyone disguises themselves as human to come in here, and even I can’t always tell what’s underneath. So I rigged up this device to tell me, in case I’m ever fooled by their disguise. See that woman who just passed through and the purple light turned on . . .”
A tall lady with regal black curls and a long sensuous throat, was just now walking under the arch of lamps flashing purple over her head.
“Violet means vampire. Watch this fellow,” he said, as a scruffily bearded young man passed beneath. The white light illuminated.
“White is for wolf,” said Obadiah.
“But how does it work?” I asked.
He pointed to some pipes of liquid that wound round the outside of the lamps.
“I power my little invention with Elixir,” he said proudly.
My mouth was hanging open in shock. “But how is there Elixir in the human world? You can’t get magic here! I thought the Elixir streams only ran through the Vale.”
“They do,” said Obadiah, “but I brought some back.”
He smiled at me enigmatically.
My mind was whirling. My original mission, to find out what was causing the drought of Elixir that was killing the fairies—the mission I�
�d become a changeling to do—was I finally about to find answers?
My stomach was fluttering so badly with excitement I could hardly breathe. Maybe my original mission wasn’t hopeless after all—at last I could do what I came here to do. What if this man had the answers I’d been searching for all this time?
The musicians had finished packing up their instruments and were leaving the stage. There were only one or two more couples left, leaving us almost alone on the dance floor. But I was still swaying back and forth as my brain and body caught up with each other, trying to process the magnitude of what he had just said.
But Obadiah interrupted my thoughts.
“Do you know why I was staring at you like that, when you walked in the door of my club? I’m sure you noticed me staring.”
“Oh, I noticed,” I said, shifting uncomfortably.
“My manners are usually better than that,” said Obadiah, folding his arms over his chest, “but you see, I’ve never seen anything like you before. When you walked in, two lights turned on at the same time, the green light and the red.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“The lights for both ‘fairy’ and ‘human.’ ”
“Well, I suppose that makes sense,” I replied. “I’m a changeling. The human light must have turned on because that’s who I am on the outside, but the fairy light turned on because that’s who I still am in my heart.”
But Obadiah shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Mab, everyone who walks through that door is pretending to be something they’re not. The Sanguinari and the Wolfmen, the Elves and the Goblins—you know they don’t really look like that. Everyone is masquerading as human. The light shows your true nature, not who you’re disguised to be. If you’re a changeling, only the fairy lamp should illuminate—since that’s what you really are,” he said.
