by Ruth Vincent
He gazed at me, long and steady.
“No one illuminates two lights at once, Mab. Nobody can be two things at once. You’re the only one who has ever done that.”
He paused, scrutinizing me.
“Well, not the only one,” he said quietly. “There is one other.”
“Who?” I asked.
He regarded me gravely.
“Me.”
There was a deep pain in his eyes as he said it. I wanted to speak, but the words faltered on my tongue.
“Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” I said at last. “I mean, aren’t you a changeling too?”
For a moment Obadiah was silent, as if lost in thought. He was standing quite close to me, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath tickling my skin, but at the same time it was like there was an unbridgeable gulf between us.
“But I’m not a changeling, Mab. That’s the problem.”
Chapter 4
“What do you mean you’re not a changeling?”
We were completely alone on the dance floor now, and I could feel everyone staring at us. But I didn’t care. My eyes were locked with Obadiah’s. “I thought you said both lights . . .”
“They do,” Obadiah whispered, tense. “But I’m not . . .” He cast a quick glance around him, and noticing all the looks we were getting, he frowned.
“Come with me,” he said. “We’re attracting too much attention here. I know somewhere we can speak alone. There are many things I need to ask you.”
“And I have things I want to ask you,” I said.
My heart was pounding in excitement. This man could have answers to questions I’d had for twenty-two years. I felt a little shivery thrill as he grabbed my hand and led me through the crowd, his calloused palm pressed against mine, the warmth of his touch guiding me through the sea of bodies. The partygoers parted to let us pass. Crowds had never made way for me, but they did for Obadiah, and holding his hand, I saw what it was like for people to step back in deference to you as you walked by.
We moved over to the far corner of the room, the bar at the edge of the stage, where I had first seen Obadiah staring at me. Of course it was his favorite spot to stand; it was directly opposite the door with the detection lamps, where he could see everyone coming and going. The large marble-topped bar looked antique, like most of the things in this place, the marble polished to a gleaming sheen, fitted with brass fixtures. The back of the bar was covered in wood paneling, the borders carved with little smiling gargoyles.
Obadiah walked behind the bar and I followed him. Bending down, his back to me, he shoved away some bottles, which clinked and threatened to fall over, exposing a panel in the back wall. Obadiah glanced over his shoulder, and seeing that no one was watching, he gave three rhythmic taps to the carved wood, then pushed on one of the gargoyles’ eyes.
The panel swung open into a door, leading to a steep wooden staircase.
“Follow me,” he said, ducking to enter.
I gaped slightly at the secret door. It was like something out of an old murder mystery. But secret staircases were nothing compared to all the revelations I had learned in the past hour, and I followed him inside.
Obadiah had to stoop to get through the small doorway; I could walk through just fine, though my hair brushed the wood panels of the passageway ceiling as I climbed the uneven steps. There was a door at the top of the stairs. He unlocked it.
As it swung open, the scent hit me before anything I saw.
The human odor of body heat and sweat was gone, replaced by something cool and moist and crackling with inner electricity, like the air just before a thunderstorm . . . It was the smell of magic. The smell of Elixir.
I nearly started crying as memories jolted me, triggered by the scent. I could almost taste Elixir in my mouth, feel its sweet pinpricks through my skin like dew. For a moment, it was as if I was back on the floor of that little girl’s nursery, my body writhing as I split apart into the Feydust I was made from, millions of tiny particles dancing in the air . . .
I hastily wiped a tear from my eye with my fist as I turned to Obadiah. He was watching me, his big, dark eyes taking in all my reactions. After twenty-two years, it still made my chest clench, how the Fairy Queen had betrayed me. Deep in my heart the rage still smoldered for the powers she’d taken away when I’d agreed to temporarily become a changeling—and she’d tricked me into getting stuck in human form forever. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to do a spell—but the smell of Elixir triggered all the memories to come back to me. It was a visceral longing, like hunger or thirst.
Too many questions buzzed through my brain. How had Elixir gotten into the human world? Did this girl Charlotte’s disappearance have something to do with magic?
“There’s Elixir here?” I sputtered.
“You can smell it, can’t you?” he said, a sadness in his eyes. “My human customers can’t smell it. They just have to take my word for it that magic is there.”
“How many humans know about this?” I gasped. Humans had no idea that magic existed. But what if some of them had seen Elixir?
“Not many humans know. I’m very selective about my customers. I only show this back room to those who truly need help,” he replied.
I wanted to ask him more, but my attention was stolen by the rest of the room in which I now found myself.
It was lined with shelves and nooks and cabinets. I heard a rumbling, like a mechanical whirring of wheels and gears. Everything around me was moving! Shelves were rising out of the floor, only to go back down again. Trapdoors popped up, only to slam shut. All along the wall, different cabinet doors opened and closed like a living Advent calendar. The whole room was in a state of chaos and confusion.
But the things on those shelves and behind those doors! This back room was like a general store for supernatural creatures. There were stacks of shiny witches’ spell pots, and familiars in cages—birds and bats with human-shaped eyes—the Animalia. There were refrigerated cases with vials of blood in snack sizes for the Sanguinari and the Wolfmen. On a revolving rack were stacks of paperback romance novels, their titles written in runes . . .
“The guilty pleasure of certain Elves,” said Obadiah with a little roll of his eyes.
I started to laugh.
“This can’t be real,” I said, smiling so big my face was starting to hurt. “Surely, I’m going to wake up tomorrow in my little Murphy bed and think ‘well, that was a crazy dream!’ ”
Obadiah smiled at me, but there was a storminess behind his eyes. “That’s what I used to think too,” he said, his gaze far away, “that I could wake up, and it would all be back to normal again.”
He drew a ragged breath before turning back to me, and I realized that we weren’t talking about the same kind of dream.
It was cold in this room, without all the dancing bodies to warm it, and I shivered. There was a small fireplace on the back wall, already stocked with logs and kindling. Obadiah walked over to it and struck a match. Bright orange flames leapt up. Everything about this place was kind of old-fashioned. Obadiah turned to me.
“I brought you here so we could talk alone,” he said, the golden light from the blaze reflecting off his cheekbones, gilding the line of stubble. “I have a lot of questions.”
“I have a lot of questions too!” I said. I wanted to find out how the heck he’d gotten Elixir here. The Elixir streams only flowed in the Vale. If he’d brought it back from there—did he know a way to get back home? He must!
But before I could speak, Obadiah went on.
“How did you end up here, anyway?” he asked me. “What would make a fairy want to become human?”
I looked up at him, startled. “I didn’t want to become human,” I said. “I was forced into it. I’d thought it was temporary. The Fairy Queen tricked me and I got stuck.” I
swallowed the lump in my throat.
He studied me. I could see the tension in his jaw, the uncertainty.
“So, you’re saying you couldn’t help becoming a changeling?”
I nodded.
He folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t know whether or not I believe you. But you’re definitely more than human—and you’re more than just a fairy in disguise. Even the shop knows that—it can’t figure out what you are either,” he added. “If a witch walks in here, the spell pots and herbs and familiars’ cages light up. If it’s a vamp or a Wolfman, the cases of blood rise to greet them. But you mess with my system. It doesn’t know what to do with you. That’s why the shelves and cabinets were bobbing up and down like that.”
“Because I’m both fairy and human?” I asked.
I looked over at the shelves. They had stopped moving—but they were frozen at different heights, neither fully raised nor fully lowered back into the floor.
“Exactly,” he said. “That should be impossible.” He walked closer to me and I could smell the woodsy scent of the fire on him. “Believe me,” he said as his hand closed over my fingers, the threatening expression back in his eyes, “you’re lucky I didn’t think you were just a fairy when you walked in here. If only the fairy light had illuminated, it would’ve triggered traps in the floor to kill you.”
I jerked my hand back from his, staring at him in shock.
“You kill fairies!”
Obadiah frowned. “Well, no, not yet. That light has never been illuminated before tonight. But I would, if one ever dared walk in here.”
“Why would you want to kill fairies?” I asked, fear springing up in my stomach. “I don’t understand. You told me both lights go off for you too. You’re part Fey yourself!”
Obadiah folded his arms across his chest and studied me as the firelight danced on his face. His brow furrowed, and I detected a slow-burning anger in his eyes.
“I may be part Fey, but that doesn’t mean I have to like fairies,” he said sullenly. “Not after what they did to me.”
“What are you talking about?” We were still standing quite close together, though his crossed arms told me to come no closer. I could see his chest rise and fall as he stared into the fire, old memories clouding his black eyes.
“You’ve probably noticed that everything in my club looks a bit . . . old,” he said, “like it came from a different time, a different era?”
I nodded. I had noticed it, since the moment I walked in the door, but I hadn’t given it much thought; I’d been too distracted.
“I figured you just had a penchant for vintage style,” I said.
“They’re not antiques,” he replied. “Or at least they weren’t when I first saw them.”
Obadiah reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pocket watch. The gold glinted in the flickering light. He held it up to me and I peered at it. The cover was decorated with intricate swirling patterns; on the face, a tiny zodiac of constellations moved behind the roman numerals of the hours. It was a remarkable bit of craftsmanship, the kind of artifact you’d see in a museum.
“My father gave this to me,” he said quietly.
“It’s quite a piece,” I said, admiring it.
“Yes, well, every gentleman had one back then.”
Something in his words gave me pause.
“My father is dead now. Everyone in my family is dead,” Obadiah continued.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to reach out to him, to put my hand on his shoulder in sympathy. But I didn’t know if he would want that. So instead I just stood there, awkwardly, with my hands in my pockets.
“Do you know why everyone in my family is dead?” he asked. The volume of his voice was slowly rising.
I shook my head. I felt afraid to know what he was about to say.
“Because when I finally escaped my captors and came back to New York City, two hundred years had passed.”
My mouth gaped open. It all made sense—his old-fashioned way of speaking, all the antiques in the club, the fireplace instead of modern heat . . .
“Walking through Times Square, I might as well have been back in Fairyland,” he said, his voice full of bitterness. “It was certainly no longer home . . .”
The gulf of the tragedy was too much to even comprehend. I reached my hands out towards him. It was all I knew to do. But his eyes were flashing warning signals that screamed “don’t touch me,” and I could only gaze at Obadiah, my heart aching for him. There was so much pain in his eyes as he looked at me—and yet, I was scared too, because I could tell he didn’t want comfort. He wanted revenge.
“Time is so strange down there,” he said. There was a faraway quality to his voice, as if he were talking to himself, not to me. “When you’re inside their enchanted cocoons, you don’t know if you’ve been there an hour or a week, a year or a hundred years. And even though it’s been decades since I escaped, still, time never sits quite right with me.”
“You were held captive in the Vale! But by who?”
Obadiah’s jaw tightened. “I think you know the answer to that.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t. Really, I don’t.”
“The fairies.”
The expression in Obadiah’s eyes as he said it was terrifying. It wasn’t anger. It was hate. Every muscle in his body, from the sinews of his shoulders to the smooth lines of his face, was taut with contained rage as he spoke of them. His fists were tight beneath his immaculate cuffs, as if at any moment he could slug someone.
But he didn’t. Instead, he proceeded to walk slowly and calmly through the aisles to the back of the room. There was another marble-topped bar back there, on the other side of the fireplace. It was of the same design as the bar on the dance floor, but this was bare and empty of bottles.
He ran his fingers slowly over the marble, then gripped it; his knuckles white.
“So now you know why there’s a trap in the floor, triggered by the green light that’ll kill any fairy that comes in here,” he said with icy quietness. “I will never fall for fairy tricks again.”
I was silent. I knew something about fairy tricks—my anger still burned white-hot when I thought of the Queen and the life she’d stolen from me.
“But you.” Obadiah turned to back to me. “You’re not quite a fairy, but you’re not quite human either. I don’t know what the hell you are. Believe me, I’ll find out. But I don’t think you’re one of us.”
One of us? What was he talking about?
“Oh my god, are you one of the Shadows?” I asked, breaking the heavy silence that had fallen between us. “Why did you come back? I’ve never heard of a Shadow child who wanted to return.”
It was the only explanation for why a human like Obadiah would have spent so much time in the Vale. He must have been one of the human children we rescued and replaced with a Fetch. We’d take the ones they were hurting, the ones they didn’t want—and give them for adoption to fairy families who’d lost a son or daughter in the Elixir drought. But Obadiah didn’t seem like those abused, neglected children—he was part Fey, and when he’d talked about family, it sounded like he missed them terribly. Then again, my own Shadow had been a happy little girl. But she’d been the exception . . .
“Yes, I was one of the Shadows,” he said.
“But Shadow children are adopted, not kidnapped. No one held you hostage . . .” I protested.
He frowned, his expression changing from surprise to disgust.
“You think the Shadows stay because they want to?”
“Why, of course, they’re free to leave at any time. Everyone knows that.”
He slowly shook his head in disbelief, gripping the bar top with hardened knuckles.
“Are you free to leave?” he asked me.
�
�Free to leave the human world? No, of course not.” A lump rose in my throat. “But that’s because the Fairy Queen . . .” My voice trailed off, the old anger flaring.
For a moment, Obadiah said nothing. He leaned back against the bar.
“Well, I think the Fairy Queen tricked you twice, Mab,” he said at last, his voice icy, “if you really don’t know the fate of those stolen children.”
“But, I thought . . .” The words died on my lips.
What had happened to the children we’d rescued? Weren’t they with the fairy families who’d adopted them? I felt afraid. If the Queen had lied to me about being able to return, what else had she lied to me about?
“What happens to the Shadow children?” I asked, the fear rising in my stomach.
He set the glass down with so hard a clink I feared that it would shatter.
“Do you truly not know?” he asked. “Are you really so ignorant? Or are you playing ignorant to make me like you?”
I turned away, my pride and heart smarting. I wasn’t going to let him speak to me like that, no matter who he was. Grabbing my coat and pocketbook from the bar stool, I began walking quickly towards the door.
“Good god, you really don’t know.”
I stopped, but I didn’t turn around.
That was when I heard him say, soft and low, from behind me:
“She kills them.”
Chapter 5
“That’s not true!” I said, whirling around to face him. “Why would you believe such a horrible rumor?”
“It’s not a rumor.” He looked at me coldly. “It’s a fact.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.
“But if it’s true, wouldn’t you be dead?” I shot back at him. “The Fairy Queen didn’t kill you. You came back. And the other children—they must still be with their adopted fairy families.”
