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

by Aileen Harkwood

  She halted to thrust an investigative paw into the hollow beneath one curved roof tile, drew out something and pounced on it. A bug. It had to be a bug. She loved bugs.

  “Whisper.”

  Not tonight. How could the fae cat have chosen tonight to visit?

  Go, Whisper. Don’t. Go home.

  But she didn’t leave. Bored with her tiny prey, she moved on, winding around and around the old roof vent she used as her entrance to my building. She sat and gazed out at the night, blinking, sanguine, happy in herself. She was old. She needed to rest more often than she had when I’d first met her.

  Leave, Whisper. Don’t go in. Please don’t go in.

  Humans hated Fae cats, which they considered an obscenity. They feared them, just as they did the dark fae living amongst them. Humans spoke reverently of the old cats, the ones from before the worlds merged and the magic had transformed their pets into beings with more intelligence and even more autonomy than the originals. Those before-cats were long dead, though, and the fae version had all gone feral. No one kept them as pets. Fae cats were no one’s pets.

  Whisper was different. Whisper was mine to know. Mine to love.

  She sat for so long I thought she might take a nap, but she remained watchful. Finally, she stood and stretched, her forelegs flat on the roof, back curving down, butt in the air. Then, after a huge yawn, she began to stalk away from the vent. I held my breath, praying she would keep going. Whisper didn’t visit me every night. At times, she merely made her rounds. She took one, two, three steps, and then she found something new to entertain herself, a leaf or a feather. I couldn’t tell which. She batted it about until the wind carried it back toward the vent, where she gradually lost interest, the object blew away, and she made her decision.

  “Whisper, no!” I shouted across the canal.

  But, of course, she was deaf. She couldn’t hear me or anything else, having lost her hearing to age. She dropped down into the cat-sized entrance to my apartment, disappearing from sight.

  My instinctual need to shout a warning cost me. Together, the two council guards down on the quay broke from the shadows, along with a third I hadn’t yet spotted because he’d been inside my building, and looked up at where I leaned through the hole in the pediment wall.

  “It’s her!” the one hurrying down from my apartment entrance said. “Get her!”

  I shrank back from the hole, turned, and snatched up my pack, then sprinted for the trap door at the back of the attic. Springing the mechanism that released a set of folding stairs, I didn’t bother with the individual treads but used the vertical rails to slide straight to the chapel’s elevated stage between the main chapel and its domed nave. Splinters from the rotting wood speared my palms and fingers. I didn’t feel them. Too much adrenaline pumped through my body. I pounded down a set of stairs to a door that opened into a small room located beneath the nave and altar.

  My hand about to turn the doorknob, I froze at the feline yowl of outrage that reached me from across the canal. A second later, the yowl was followed by an unmistakable cry of pain that was cut off abruptly. My heart seized up. Tears welled automatically.

  Whisper.

  They were hurting her.

  I quickly checked the floor behind me for dust, in case I was leaving footprints. None that I could see. Because the chapel was the main entrance to my home across the canal, it made sense to sweep this place on a regular basis. I never used the front doors the mob had just demolished across the canal, which would have drawn attention to my living there.

  Up on the altar, I’d set up a crudely made cross, added stand-ins for a paten and chalice, and found some mismatched candle holders to replace the reliquary and other treasures plundered by vandals long ago. If someone decided to venture into the chapel, they’d think some lonely religious soul kept up the place and never suspect it was my front door.

  Ducking inside the little room under the stairs, I shut the door, raced toward an ancient sarcophagus at the back, and slid sideways into a narrow space between the stone coffin and the chapel’s rear wall. My fingers found the lever hidden under the lip of the ornately carved pedestal on which the sarcophagus rested. With the faint grating of stone against stone, a rectangular section of the pedestal slowly dropped away to reveal steps leading down into pitch black. I descended into the claustrophobic chamber and then triggered the lever that closed the entrance.

  I might be safe from the council’s guards now, but getting to Whisper was all I cared about. I didn’t dare waste a second and plowed head-first into complete darkness. I knew every turn and irregularity of the passage by rote and luckily didn’t crash into a wall before I could fumble in my pack for my pen light. I increased my speed, running flat out to where this forgotten tunnel intersected with a larger one under the fondamenta on the chapel side of the canal. Instead of turning off into the wider passage, I continued on, following the first tunnel down a steep incline as it burrowed beneath the canal.

  Toward the bottom, the earthen floor suddenly shifted under my feet and slammed me into the tunnel wall. For the second time in minutes, my head collided with a rock-hard surface. My feet lurched along. I gazed down at the beam from my pen light.

  It was blue.

  Everything was blue.

  I should have known. Once an attack started, there was no getting rid of it until it played itself out.

  I kept going, staggering and wobbling while the world slid off kilter, changing second by second. Stones in the walls and the tunnel’s arched ceiling bubbled and bulged. Vertigo assaulted me if I dared glance at them in my peripheral vision.

  Don’t look. Eyes straight ahead. Straight ahead.

  I had to get to Whisper before the seizure went full blown. Lost in a dream fit, I’d be useless and could do nothing for her.

  A few yards later, the passage leveled out and dead-ended at a narrow stone staircase heavily worn by the centuries. I rushed up the steps. Rather than the clear passage upward I knew was there, my misfiring brain showed me web after gooey blue web barring my way. I head-butted through them. They squished underfoot, making the stairs slick and slippery. I crashed to my knees.

  They aren’t there. Don’t you get it? None of it’s real.

  I couldn’t make myself believe. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t walk. I crawled.

  Hurry.

  Finally, I reached the true entrance to my home, the back wall of a closet that straddled my kitchen and bedroom.

  A sulfurous stench assaulted my nose as I released the latch that locked the faux terra cotta wall in place. What should I expect? They’d ripped out my toilet. With nothing to cover the hole and the pipes sinking down into the bowels of the city’s sewage system, gas would rise and escape. I stepped off the staircase into the closet. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only noxious scent. I also detected cat pee and shit in the mix and had a horrible intuition what I’d see when I inched open the closet door. I didn’t want to look. For maybe half a minute, cowardice won out. I wouldn’t look. I just wouldn’t.

  “I said kill it, not make it angry,” shouted a man with a ponytail who blocked my view into my kitchen. The apartment was dim, lit by three disposable lights brought by the council guard. My solar lamps were gone, already taken.

  “No,” said another man whose face I couldn’t see. “Not yet. I’ve been waiting for the chance to play with one of these things.” His voice slurred. He had trouble breathing and coughed, but he also laughed. “Look at it trying to get up.”

  “You don’t know what it can do,” said a third man, whom I guessed to be standing near the front door to the apartment. “Maybe more than slicing your arm.”

  “No one does,” the second man said. He chuckled under his breath and wheezed. “I say we find out. Here. That rod.”

  “No,” said a third voice. “Me first. Disgusting indigo vermin.”

  I rammed my body into the cupboard door. It banged outward toward the man standing in front of it. The door’s edge
nailed him in the back of the head. He flew forward and down, his face landing inches from Whisper.

  My sweet baby girl—it didn’t matter she wasn’t a kitten, she would always be my baby girl—lay sprawled in the center of the kitchen floor in a pool of her own piss. So violently had her back been broken, it was snapped back on itself. Her hind quarters lay motionless behind her at an obscene angle. She’d lost control of her bowels. Feces were smeared and ground into the fur around her once fluffy bottom, which was also sopping wet with urine. She cried. She kept crying and trying to get up, over and over, but she couldn’t and never would again and each attempt was weaker than the one before it.

  She spotted me. Her huge eyes gazed up at me with such joy and hope. And confidence. Oh, my God. Confidence. In me. To do the impossible.

  Save me, her eyes said. I’m so happy you’re here now because I know you’ll save me.

  She hissed at the man I’d knocked down and who’d skidded to a stop in front of her. He jerked away from her like she was a cobra, and rolled hastily to the side while another man raised my iron curtain rod, torn from the wall, ready to bring it down on Whisper’s head.

  I didn’t know exactly how it happened. What changed in me.

  Maybe it was because other people were here and I had something to focus on, hurting them before they could hurt Whisper, but the seizure that held me in its grip took over. I flung out my arm toward the man raising the iron rod to bring it down in another vicious blow, and my bizarre reality extended to encompass him. He felt me touch him without my touching him. He became part of the dream.

  Turning toward me, his jaw dropped. His eyes went wide. He backed away.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  I didn’t know what he saw when he looked at me.

  I also didn’t give a crap. I was angry. Livid. He had to be stopped. I wanted him to pay.

  I studied him through the weird, alternate vision my seizure gave me. He was about five or six years older than me and judging by the cosmetic slashes to his right earlobe, a member of the Risurrezione or Resurrection. They lived to hate. Fae were their target; dark or bright, they hated both types equally. They blamed the fae for what they saw as an invasion of pure Venice, the city that had existed before the merging of our worlds.

  While living on the streets, I’d learned from an early age to avoid La Risurrezione. The fae were more than capable of fending for themselves, and you didn’t publicly disrespect them unless you were stupid beyond comprehension, had a death wish, or were the most violent breed of person our species produced. That was La Risurrezione, a truly fucked-up set of humans whose number-one wet dream was to come across an isolated fae they could outnumber, surround, and torture until dead.

  Fortunately, for the fae, that was more of a fantasy than realistic scenario.

  Unfortunately, for the rest of us, the inability of these haters to take out their personal insecurities on their preferred target meant it was most often redirected at humans they suspected of having dealings with the fae, or who professed a liking for them.

  The man holding my iron curtain rod gripped it tighter and drew it back in preparation for a swing at my head. In addition to the meaty fringe replacing most of his right ear, his hair was black at the roots, lava red everywhere else. Every time he moved, it went up in flames, or so it was meant to appear, flickering angrily with sparks flying off the ends. Nicknamed fireheads, many of the Risurrezione wore the look, ironic because it took fae magic to create the perpetual flames that never actually burned anything.

  His hair wasn’t the only thing on fire.

  My dream vision showed me a spherical glob inside his head at the back near his spinal column. It glowed red and squirmed with activity, the mass writhing on itself.

  What is that?

  Movement on my right from my bathroom startled me. My focus split away from the man threatening me to include another man entering the living room with a dirty pair of my panties bunched in his hand. In the midst of taking a deep sniff of the crotch, he saw me, froze, and the same bug-eyed look animated his face as the first man. Rather than backing away, however, his expression relaxed seconds later into a nasty grin. Yet another firehead with a shredded ear. In fact, unlike the first wave of looters I’d watched from the chapel, clearing out my apartment, all five men in my living room right now were Risurrezione. The man sniffing my underwear was the oldest, in his mid-thirties, and his attitude told me he was the leader among the five.

  “Beh, beh, beh,” he said in Italian. Well, well, well. “It’s her. The scum-girl who owned this place.” He tossed aside my panties.

  Reflexively, I swept my hand toward him and the others. My body was on autopilot, not telling me what to do, but rather doing it without asking. The second I included them in my altered reality, every one of their heads lit up in my sight with the same pulsing ball of worms I’d seen inside the first firehead.

  What the hell?

  Finally, it dawned on me. That was the place where their dreams lived. I was looking at the stuff nightmares were made of.

  “The council isn’t going to get mad if we take her out,” the man holding the iron rod said.

  “Hell, no,” Panty Perv said. “They’ll probably thank us for doing their job for them.”

  The five closed ranks, their fun with Whisper forgotten. Attacking me was their new priority.

  I backed up, taking a step into the closet. My heart skittered in my chest. Blood roared in my ears.

  My current dream seizure was unlike any other I’d ever experienced in my life, deeper, more complex. My eyes showed me two different versions of my apartment and the people in it. Dream overlay everyday reality, the blue vibrating and rippling and seething with chaotic energy. I could feel it inside me, waiting for permission. A part of me I didn’t know belonged to me had gained sentience. It was awake and wanted out. I could feel its untapped potential sizzling just beneath my skin. It wanted action. It wasn’t going to sit meekly and accept a fatal beating. It begged for revenge for Whisper.

  Do it. Be yourself. Be you.

  I took a deep breath. Planted my feet and steadied myself.

  See it. See what you can do.

  I imagined I wasn’t lost in the blue world but lived confidently in it. I was at home here. I wasn’t dizzy. I wouldn’t fall down. My mind could understand this place if I’d stop fighting and let it.

  I expected the idiot with the rod to rush me first, but it was Pervert, standing an arm’s length away, who surprised me, striking out before Iron Rod could reach me.

  My arm shot up to ward off the blow. His hand bounced off and he cried out.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “She’s got a fake arm. It’s made of steel!”

  What? He thought I had a metal arm?

  No. Oh, my God. It’s the dream.

  Perv was in my dream with me and believed he’d just hit solid steel. That was what waited inside me, begging to get out. Control. I wasn’t a helpless victim to the dreams. I had control. At least a bit of it, and I could exert that control over others, maybe not their actions, but I could influence what they dreamed when they were inside with me.

  Use it.

  I stared at the man who’d tried to hit me, and the pulsing ball of nightmare in his brain. What fear or person populated his bad dreams? What would he do if he was confronted by that?

  Fae. He loathed and probably feared the fae. All of these fireheads did.

  Reaching out, I mentally saw my fingers pluck at one of the wriggling red strands at the back of Panty Perv’s brain and pull it away from the others. Yanked out a second strand and twisted it into the first. Grabbed another and another, weaving the stretched and contorted strands rapidly into a blazing Gordian knot of energy. Then I took the pulsing, ugly ass monstrosity and threw it across the living room at the man with the curtain rod. In the real world, nothing happened. Inside the dream, Iron Rod transformed the moment the knot hit him. I saw what Perv would see, his fellow firehead morph
ing into a dark fae.

  Iron Rod gained six inches in height immediately, shoulders widened, hips narrowed. The man’s stubby fingers lengthened. He lost weight, his bones experienced an overall refinement, and his stance took on the lethal readiness of his kind. His skin paled, while paradoxically taking on the shadowed visage of fae who’d forsaken the light. That stupid flaming hair was replaced by dark silver. Not the silver of human age, because the fae typically appeared ageless, but something closer to the precious metal. Curiously, Iron Rod’s expression didn’t change that much. It remained feral, but humanly so. I guess the dream could only do so much. He blinked, and his brown eyes turned a deep indigo blue.

  It was the blue that set off Perv. With an inarticulate bellow, he launched himself at his sworn nemesis.

  I didn’t stop with those two or else I’d never get out of there with Whisper. Thrusting my will into Iron Rod’s source of nightmares, I replicated the same one for him I had for Perv and then duplicated the nightmare for the other men until each firehead saw himself as the only human in a room full of dark fae.

  In fiction and films, fights always drag on way past the point of reasonable human endurance. In the real world, the street-oriented life I was familiar with at least, physical confrontations were brutal and bloody and, most often, short. When people get stabbed or shot or punched witless, they don’t miraculously pop up a second later like nothing ever happened. They tend to go down and stay down. Guns were rare in Venice. The men in my apartment had knives, and they fought the worst kind of dirty. Arterial spray splashed the window with Iron Rod’s blood as Perv knocked aside the metal bar in his hands and hacked into the firehead’s neck with a machete. Iron Rod’s momentum, however, kept him going long enough to collapse against Perv and spin Perv off balance straight into the sharper than razor sharp Japanese tantō in the hands of a third man.