Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows)

by Aileen Harkwood

  Wayward Moon

  Dark Fae Hollow 6

  Aileen Harkwood

  Copyright © 2017 by Aileen Harkwood

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Aileen Harkwood

  About the Author

  Waning Moon

  (Luna calante)

  1

  From the moment I was born, I belonged to the night.

  The moon has been and will forever be my sun. I follow its path through the black heavens above Venice like a lemming with wings, helplessly drawn to its peculiar orbit, made inconsistent by the Fae more than a century ago when our world was joined to theirs to save us both.

  It’s not that the moon fails to revolve around the Earth as it should, to flood the city’s streets and canals at extreme high tide, or to drain the water out again at low, only that on rare nights, without any warning, la Luna suddenly reverses herself and travels backward through the sky.

  Nothing good ever happens on those nights.

  This was one of them.

  I’d heard the mob ransacking my apartment all the way from Calle Lunga, two streets over. It had sounded more like a wild party than the council-sanctioned destruction of someone’s life. My life. Afraid to get close, I climbed to the top of the attic of the votive chapel across the canal and concealed myself in shadow beneath its half-collapsed roof, watching from a distance. Crude laughter floated across the canal that separated me from those who invaded my home and enjoyed cogliere il pozzo, the decree that gave them access to all I owned and made it theirs for the taking.

  “They say she fucked an indigo,” a guttural male voice spoke loudly, using a racial slur employed by human Venetians to describe the dark fae.

  My pulse ballooned into my throat, pounding through my skin and beating against the damp Istrian stone where I huddled behind the chapel’s crumbling pediment. I squeezed myself as tightly as I could behind the wall to keep from being seen. Dread slithered up my back like the icy body of an asp looking for the most vulnerable place to strike. Everything I heard and saw wound me up tight as the enormity of what was happening sank in.

  This was real.

  I wasn’t being robbed.

  Out in front of the building that housed my second-floor flat stood the human council’s flag, orange to indicate my property was forfeit. Why had they done this to me? What crime had I committed?

  “They told me she did two of the blue eyes,” another voice shouted over the crashing and banging that suddenly erupted from deep within the apartment. Were they literally tearing out the walls to take with them? Would they leave nothing behind?

  “No, she fucked five,” a third one said and then added, with a verbal leer, “all at the same time.”

  “It could be fifty,” the first man said. “It doesn’t change things. Lunari is still a whore.”

  I couldn’t see their faces through my apartment’s only canal-facing window, recognized none of the voices; yet they used my name as if they knew me and everything about me, including that I was supposedly a prostitute who had violated cultural taboos and screwed one, two, five, or fifty of the dark fae, depending on who told the story.

  Except none of it was true. My name was Lunari, yes, but I wasn’t a prostitute. I scavenged for my living as I had since I was a child. I’d never had sex with one of the dark fae—not that this would have been the reason for the decree—and were any of the fae here, the men in my apartment wouldn’t have dared joke like that, not if they wanted to continue breathing. I didn’t know why this was happening. It had to be a mistake. I’d never had any dealings with the council, never even seen them in person when they met, though the public often attended. I’d purposely led a secret life, interacting with others only as a last resort when it couldn’t be avoided. Hiding was the only way to survive Venice when you didn’t have family. I was shocked the council knew I existed, let alone that I lived here in mostly-abandoned Santa Croce.

  My bed went out the door, carried by a dirty, ragged couple, who carted it along the fondamenta, stumbling on the occasional misaligned paving stone. They’d used my building’s main entrance on the narrow quay and broken down a set of doors that dated to the 1700s, centuries before Venice had changed, becoming Ashia Hollow, the isolated, hybrid world it was today, half-human, half-fae, half-magic, and half-not. Shattered pieces of exquisitely carved wood from the forests of northern Italy, a place no longer accessible to the residents of Venice, lay strewn on the pavement, as did the pair of brass salamander-shaped door handles that had resisted the sea’s corrosive salt mists since the days of Casanova.

  A middle-aged man trailed the couple, my dresser in his arms. My clothes spilled from the drawers, so frantic was the man to get out of the apartment with his prize before someone could fight him for it, that he didn’t bother to shut them.

  Shock rolled through my stomach when I realized what else the dresser contained; the small cardboard box in which I kept the tangible keepsakes that marked my twenty-one years. They weren’t valuable, and no one else would understand them, but they were my proof to myself I existed, that I had led a life. I had no one, no person in my life, no family, no friends with whom I would ever be able to share those things, yet they were still mine. Pieces of me flying out the door in a stranger’s arms. It wasn’t just the keepsake box he took from me, either. Concealed behind the drawers were journals, a total of three I’d kept since teaching myself to write at the age of thirteen, one taped to the back of each drawer. To think this person would discover them and be able to read my private thoughts, my worries, and fears, the pages where I’d documented the worst horrors of my life?

  My face flushed with humiliation. My eyes burned with outraged tears I swiped away faster than they could fall. There was nothing I could do to stop this. Nothing. Cogliere il pozzo—literally ‘seize the well,’ a phrase that found its origin in the vital wealth that was drinkable water in a city surrounded by the sea—meant absolute judgment. It didn’t matter why the council had called it down on me, whether it was a mistake or not. Once rendered, the decree could not be rescinded. By law, I coul
d no longer legally own anything, no matter how slight in value, for the rest of my life. I could no longer buy, sell, or trade items with my fellow humans. In essence, my right to survive had ended. I could not ask another person for help. No human from this day forward would be allowed to give me anything, food and water included. If I were to have crossed the canal at that very moment, run to the man with my dresser and begged him to give me my journals and keepsake box, he would have been in his legal rights to demand I empty my pockets and hand him every last coin. Had I refused, he could forcefully take them from me.

  Or try to.

  I looked up, startled to see clouds of blue ink injected into the waning moon’s white face.

  No. Not now.

  Recognizing the early warning sign, I instantly knew I was in trouble.

  As I gazed through the hole in the chapel’s pediment wall, the cityscape in front of me altered. Imagine squirting dye into a glass of water. At first, the tendrils are separate from the water, curling around on themselves like smoke, and then as the dye diffuses, every bit of the water in the glass is tinted that color. That was what it was like for me just before I’d lose control, falling into what I called my dream spells. Everything took on a blue aura.

  Lights at the eastern horizon smeared a hazy aquamarine. The moon crystallized into a sapphire crescent. Below me, the dark waters of the canal shimmered with lapis reflections.

  Seconds later, the expected headache exploded behind my forehead. I winced in agony, closing my eyes in a vain attempt to block out a flurry of incoherent phenomenon pressing in on the edges of my vision. Shutting my eyes was useless, it always was, because I didn’t need physical sight to see the ancient chapel around me warp and distort itself into a structure that would make sense only to the sleeping mind. Even with my ass firmly planted on the attic floor boards, I lost my balance. My head kept falling toward the floor, or that’s what it felt like. My fingers gripped the remnants of the nearby pediment. I was terrified I would tumble out the hole in the wall, plunging thirty feet below to the chapel steps. The floor shifted off-kilter below me, and I jerked to the side, only to bash my head into the wall when I discovered the floor hadn’t really moved, just my perception of it. Pain thudded through my skull, deep and disorienting.

  Please, not now. Of all times, not now.

  As it always did, the attack would leave me vulnerable, unaware of my true surroundings until it passed. I’d never known what caused these fits, only that I’d suffered from them as long as I could remember, and that they’d ruined any chance I might have had at a normal life. They typically struck in times of extreme stress, but over the past year, they’d occurred with greater and greater frequency until I’d spend one night out of four hiding in my bedroom, afraid this time the attack would never end, and I’d be trapped in the sickening, illusory world the seizures brought on, never able to find my way back to real and solid reality again.

  Luckily, the attacks usually happened when I was at home. However, each time I surfaced from one, something in the apartment had changed in some creepy way. A wooden chair had liquefied into a puddle in the middle of my kitchen floor. Every book in my small collection grew a coating of slimy, rancid fat that seeped through the covers and glued the pages together. Once, I’d found a lidless eye-embedded in my living room wall. It looked human, but I wasn’t absolutely sure. It stared at me—its expression hard and judgmental—for several minutes until it lost its apparent sentience, grew still, and the cornea turned milky, exactly the way it would if it belonged to a corpse. That time, I’d fled down to the street until the morning. Digging that grotesque object out of my wall had required more nerve than I could summon until I’d needed to use the bathroom at dawn and had no choice but to go back upstairs.

  I had to stop this current attack. I couldn’t afford to slide into that abnormal dream state. Who knew what I might do to draw attention to myself and my hiding place? I crab-walked backward, pressing myself into the corner. There wasn’t much of the wall left to protect me, but I was naturally small, a mess of awkward, distressingly pale angles that clothed hard bone won after a childhood on the streets. My hair, though a darker shade of strawberry Venetian blonde, was still too bright in the moonlight and hung in a roughly chopped curtain around my face. I shoved as much of it as I could manage with shaky hands under my jacket’s hood.

  Ultimately, the crash from the fondamenta below snapped me out of it. I blinked and the world steadied. Wooziness still churned in my stomach, but the blue cast veiling everything receded. I peered down at where the toilet from my bathroom had shattered on the paving stones. Two men, neither of them the ones who had taken the bed or dresser, tackled each other, feet scuffling in the powdery ceramic left at the point of impact where the toilet had been dropped. By now, a certain detachment had set in. After the loss of my journals and keepsakes, what was a toilet? I would never be able to use the apartment again anyway.

  One of the men grabbed the other, swung him around and shoved him. His adversary stumbled backward, tripped over pieces of white porcelain and splintered door, and went down, taking the council’s orange flag with him.

  Except the flag wasn’t orange. It was red. In the darkness, with the flag limply hanging from its pole, I’d mistaken the color. I gasped.

  Morte dal consiglio.

  Death ordered by the human council.

  I wasn’t just forbidden from living, I’d been sentenced to execution.

  2

  Unable to calm down, I paced in the chapel’s attic. I didn’t understand. My mind would not take it in. My body amped itself into pure flight mode. A death sentence and public execution in Piazza San Marco? This was surreal. It made no sense. I barely scraped along, living off the forgotten crumbs of pre-fae Venice, but I’d stolen nothing, hurt no one, broken no laws. I knew this absolutely. I had done nothing wrong.

  Why, why, why? The question looped over and over in my brain while I circled the edges of room, avoiding the spots in the center where floorboards had decayed or were missing. For several minutes, I clung to the hope the council had gotten the wrong address. It was a slim hope, though. As far as I could tell, no other house on my canal had been inhabited during the last seven years I’d lived here. I’d found the one residence still in marginally livable condition in this four-block section of Santa Croce.

  In my heart, I knew I was fooling myself to believe a wrong address could explain it all away. For whatever bizarre reason they’d chosen, I was the one they’d targeted with the decree. A sob escaped my throat at that instinctive knowledge, and my walking sped up until I was practically running my squared-off circuit within the attic to keep the panic at bay. Each time I came to the hole in the pediment wall, I turned around and went in the opposite direction, never allowing myself to cross into the open and be seen.

  The council’s reasons for the decree weren’t important. I could figure that out later. For now, escape was critical. I had no other alternative.

  On the next round, I made myself stop and look through the hole to study the activity across the canal. I couldn’t see the people inside my apartment, but shadows slid in front of the flat’s window. Lantern beams bobbed in the hands of intruders. I estimated there to be seven in my apartment at least. Perhaps if I waited until they left and I was fairly confident no one else was on the way for a few minutes, I could sneak in to retrieve the leftovers no one had wanted.

  Was I being stupid? Probably. Survival instincts screamed at me to make a break for it now, not hang around here and risk getting caught. I’d always been a practical person, though and the pack I had on me from my night’s scavenging was near empty. I doubted any food would remain in my kitchen, but if I was lucky, I might find one or two useful items in one of the other rooms. Without the ability to trade with others openly, I couldn’t count on replacing necessities when going underground.

  Another thing I’d learned from growing up on the streets, don’t run. Not at first. It’s too easy to get caugh
t if people are hunting you. No one is that skilled at evading searchers. When you’re in trouble, find the best place to hide until the hysteria dies down and people stop looking. That’s the time to come out of your hole and dash for safety.

  Blindsided by events, I hadn’t yet thought to look for the people who were looking for me. I had no doubt several members of the council guard were down there on the street somewhere, expecting me to return home so they could arrest me.

  The first one was obvious, fidgeting in the calètte, or alley, between doors down from mine. Another had taken up a post farther down the canal past my house at the opening of a dead-end, Ruga del Bonifati. With a start, I realized I hadn’t thought to look above street level for any watchers stationed where they could easily see into the votive chapel and spot me. Quickly, I scanned from left to right, pausing when I detected movement on the roofline of my own house.

  A flash of burnished silver in the moonlight caught me by surprise.

  The fae cat strolled along the overlapping red tiles above my apartment. Double the size of the extinct house cats of old Venice, her tabby coat glinted with each sinuous movement, her stripes resembling a row of dagger blades along her flanks. Pale grey-lavender fur was interspersed with the stripes and turned her rear legs into dusky lilac pantaloons. Her impossibly fluffy ruff was threaded with silver fur, as was the plume of a tail that swished back and forth as she confidently strode along, halting every few feet to delicately sniff a particular tile, or rub her face against a pipe sticking up out of the roof, marking her territory with the scent glands in her cheeks.