Rare as they were in Venice, I knew little about guns and could only identify it as a pistol made before the merge, sleek and black with a cartridge case you would shove up into the handle.
“Sit up!” the man holding the gun shouted. He pointed the weapon at the man cowering at his feet.
“Criminals use our islands as a dumping ground,” the dark fae told me. “Just because this place is uninhabited doesn’t mean no one sees what they do here.”
Here was yet another odd thing. The two of us stood about fifteen meters from the men, far enough that I couldn’t make out what they said unless it was shouted, but not so far they wouldn’t be able to see us. Twice now, I’d caught the man with the knife turning in our direction, yet his face gave no sign he’d spotted us.
“I said, sit up!” the man with the gun shouted again.
Arms and hands shielding his face, while the invisible-to-me thirgaithe continued to assault him, the man sat up on his haunches.
The two killers, and that’s what they were, killers who had brought the third man here to assassinate him, exchanged words in voices too low for me to make out.
“Lower your hands. Stop sniveling!” the gunman ordered his victim.
The man on his knees took his hands away from his face.
“Open your eyes.”
He pointed the gun at the man’s head.
“Per l’amor di Dio! For God’s sake, take it like a man.”
Squinting at first, the victim’s eyes soon went wide, whites showing. The gun pointed at him had little emotional impact on him, however. He was too terrified of the creatures he saw flying at him from all directions.
“You might want to look away,” the fae warned me.
I didn’t look away. Don’t ask me why I watched. I wasn’t thinking about what came next, only how strange all of this was.
The man behind the victim stepped up and slit his throat.
I gasped. I’d expected them to shoot him.
“Bullets are too precious,” the fae said.
Swearing at the blood that splashed him, the man with the gun jumped back and started arguing with the man holding a dripping knife.
“If you’ll excuse me,” the fae said. “Time to do my job.”
He left our spot in the trees and walked down to the waterline, stride easy, in no hurry at all.
They didn’t see him approach, not at first. It wasn’t until the fae was nearly within an arm’s length of the pair that the man with the knife looked up from the body in the sand and cried out. This prompted the man holding the gun to swing around toward the Fae, as well.
Too shaken to aim and fire in time, the gunman was paralyzed the moment the fae touched his gun hand. By now, the sun had cleared the eastern horizon and the day was bright. The magic that flowed from the fae’s hand outshone this.
How can darkness be bright?
His was. Dark as midnight in color, the light that flowed from his fingertips glowed brighter than the morning sun, a visual paradox my eyes saw but my brain didn’t want to process. Streamers of it rapidly grew into a vine-shaped spell that tore apart the gunman’s grip on his weapon, so that the hunk of metal dropped into the coarse sand below. Stems curled around and up the man’s wrist, intricate tendrils bearing leaves made from black daylight. They wove themselves into a sleeve that covered and moved up his arm and then shoulder and then throat, creating a living shroud of stunning complexity and deadly beauty. In seconds, the brilliant vine reached the man’s chin, its many runners sliding up and over to wrap around his face until a single, spear-tipped leaf pulled back, angled up, and pierced the man’s temple.
The world rippled.
I don’t know how else to explain the energy released when the man died. His energy blew outward from his body in waves that ripped through the sky and the dawn light, the beach and clouds, distorting them ever so briefly until the blast dissipated, and the energy fused with everything around it. Standing so close to the dark conflagration, not only was the fae hit full force by the blast, but a significant portion of it clung to him. Rather than evaporating, it sank into his skin, his body absorbing the energy.
Instantly, the fae stood taller, stronger than he had a moment before, not that he’d been in any way lacking in that department. Still, the change was noticeable, unsettling and, in its own way, mysteriously erotic.
It hardly mattered, but I took a step backward. I didn’t know what to do with what I’d just seen. Yes, I’d once watched a fae hunting, but I had never seen one kill.
Lifeless, the man collapsed to the sand next to his gun.
Meanwhile, the man with the knife, who stared open-mouthed like a dead bass in a market, finally stirred to action. Sprinting for the water, he evidently hoped to make it to the skiff—which had already drifted out to sea—and off island into the perceived safety of the lagoon.
A disturbance in the water directly in front of him halted him before he could dive under and make a swim for it. Sun sparkled and glared off the waves, so I couldn’t see what herded him back onshore toward the fae and death. More unworldly creatures? I only knew that he had no choice.
This time, I did look away. The spectacle created by the first death had been as wondrous as it was horrible and had left me on emotional overload.
I shook myself. What was I doing standing here?
Go. While he’s distracted and you have a chance.
I stared at the bodies in the sand, one bloody as hell, the other just…still.
Hurry. Do you want to end up like that?
I ached everywhere after the last day and a half. Worn out, my arm muscles struggled to flip over the dinghy with its heavy outboard motor. I managed, but awkwardly, cringing at the clank of the propeller hitting a large rock growing between tree roots.
I didn’t spare a moment to look toward the fae to see if he’d heard or noticed I was leaving. The shore curved around to the north at an abrupt angle on the other side of the trees. I could push off from there, provided I had enough strength left to drag the boat over several humped mounds of silt and through about ten meters of rushes standing in the way.
I scooped up my sleeping bag and the new gear from Sulla’s shop, my backpack with the fate cell inside, and threw them into the bottom of the dingy, took the bow in hand and swung it around to point it in the right direction. At the last moment, I grabbed for the collapsible container with my only supply of fresh water. Made of a shiny silver fabric, the bag was still almost full.
I paused when I saw my face reflected in its surface.
Something…
I didn’t look right.
What was wrong with my eyes?
I hadn’t yet picked up the container. It would have been easier to do that, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to bring the reflective surface closer. It felt less scary to bend down and gaze into it than hold it up to my face.
Green eyes didn’t look back at me as they had from mirrors my entire life.
My eyes were indigo blue.
9
I’d done the test.
Most kids in Ashia Hollow do it around fifteen or sixteen, when they start to wonder about their place in the universe and what possibilities life holds for them. They all want to know if they have fae blood. Their parents might forbid performing the ritual. Owning fae blood is no bonus; it’s a blemish leading to discrimination from both human and fae communities, rather than the path to immortal coolness they all hope it will be. Yet when do kids listen to anyone, let alone adults, at that age? I hadn’t, and I didn’t even have parents.
Determining fae blood is tricky, too. You can’t lick a DNA strip and expect to get results. Fae doesn’t just skip generations. It hides out for generations, completely untestable by science. Why? Because, duh, it’s magic. You don’t use science to find magic. They’re opposites, ones that repel instead of attract.
Without anyone to tell me no, I went ahead and recited the testing spell as soon as I could memorize the words, years befo
re I learned to read beyond a kindergarten level. By age ten, I knew definitively I didn’t have a drop of fae blood running through my veins.
How could I now be staring back at fae eyes in the tiny mirror I feverishly dug out of my pack? Worse, indigo eyes were dark fae eyes. Exactly like the fae who’d just killed one mobster on the beach and was likely, at this very moment, finishing off the other.
Or not exactly like his. Mine were only a shade darker than regular blue. Still, they weren’t any human color I’d ever seen. They shone with glints of onyx light no contact lens or magical surgery like that the Lost Girls purchased for themselves could imitate.
Magic eyes.
How could this be? How could I, verified human being, suddenly have fae eyes? I hadn’t performed any spells. Hadn’t interacted with any magic in the last twenty-four hours other than the fate cell, and those didn’t suddenly transform humans into an entirely different species. They powered technology, period. Yes, I’d caught the magic-infused disc barehanded before it had sailed overboard into the water, but if anything, I should have been badly burnt.
I hadn’t. Last night I’d been too drained to wonder about that, too. Now I did. How had I been able to handle the fate cell unharmed?
None of this made sense.
No. At least one thing did make sense: the reason the fae hunter hadn’t killed me yet.
He must have thought I was like him.
No wonder he’d given me those puzzled looks when I told him not to trash my fellow humans or when I mentioned not seeing the wind snakes.
Where was he now? Had he killed the other man?
Crouched next to my backpack, I couldn’t see over the slight rise in the land between me and the beach. I stuffed the mirror back in a zippered pocket, stood, and gazed toward where the killings had taken place.
Empty beach. No bodies, no weapons, nothing.
Approximately fifty meters from land, the skiff that had brought the three men to the island spun aimlessly in circles created by an offshore current.
I climbed over the low hillock, my feet crunching frost-hardened mud and sand with each step, and hiked down to the place where the first man’s throat had been slashed. Incoming tides hadn’t yet reached the spot, but it was devoid of blood. In fact, the beach was one long, smooth expanse, sand packed firm with no footprints other than the ones I’d left behind me walking here.
Was I alone? Had the hunter gone? I saw nothing snakelike, wind born or otherwise. Heard nothing but the gentle lapping of the waves and distant cries of terns from hundreds of meters off, squawking angrily at something that upset their nests. A fox probably, in search of eggs to munch on.
“Hello?” I called. “Are you still here?”
No one replied.
My hunter could have left, but he could also be hidden. I’d witnessed how easily he managed that. Acting on the assumption that he might still be around, I kept alert as I returned to the dinghy to decide my next move.
I’d already started to leave and that seemed the most sensible option, but I’d never been so exhausted in my life. I thought back to the night before last in my apartment. Fireheads massacring each other. My only friend slaughtered by them. None of it felt real yet. Intellectually I understood my life ahead would be short, but the primitive part of my nature wasn’t ready to give up. It demanded I keep going, keep running.
If only I didn’t feel like shit.
My waking dreams, whether they were caused by migraines, epileptic fits, or another type of physically-induced hallucination, always left me drained and weak, and the episode back at the apartment had eclipsed all dreams before it. To run, instead of curling up in a fetal ball in my old bedroom, had taken everything I’d had left. My thighs trembled with each step I climbed uphill away from the water. My balance was precarious, and more than once I almost plunged forward in a face plant. My body demanded more sleep than the couple hours I’d given it under the dinghy. I wanted food and a chance to calm down. I needed to recuperate.
Should I have been spooked by everything I’d just witnessed? I guess. Someone else might have dog-paddled screaming off the island. However, when you grow up in a world where magic and violence are part of everyday existence, and you spend your life scrounging for survival on the streets, you become numb to the fantastic and the moral gray areas. You tend to concentrate on whether or not you’re going to die in the next few minutes. My instincts said I wasn’t.
My dinghy was flat-bottomed and relatively stable sitting on land, so I climbed in, sat on the bench seat, and rooted around in the bag from Sulla’s place for something to eat, coming up with a cornetto. Good enough. Taking a bite of the croissant-like pastry, I studied what I could see of the island.
Like most islands in the Venetian Lagoon, it wasn’t very big, maybe half a kilometer in length and crescent-shaped. Right now, I was at the bottom point of the crescent. The three men had met their fates on the outer arc of the moon, while the inner side curved around to the northeast so that the upper most spit of land lay straight across from me separated by a shallow bay. I couldn’t see into the center of the island though. Early morning mist trailing through a surprisingly dense stand of trees, obscured the interior.
I saw no structures or other signs of habitation in the immediate vicinity, but the trees at the island’s center looked hopeful as possible shelter for another night’s stay. Where was the fae camping? Did he live here full time? He’d mentioned he had to go do “his job,” before leaving me. Was his job to protect exclusive fae lands from unwelcome human visitors? Killing anyone who mistakenly came to shore felt extreme, harsh, arbitrary, and cruel. As far as I knew, humans weren’t treated to an instant demise when they visited Isola Luminosa and Mare Scuro, two fae districts southeast of Venice, created where no land had existed prior to the merge. I’d never set foot in either myself, but I’d heard the fae there welcomed rich day-tripping human tourists and merchants willing to trade. This tiny isola in the middle of nowhere must have special meaning for the fae, thus the guard.
After breakfast, I brushed my teeth, combed out my hair, and resisted the urge to look at my eyes again in the mirror. I sorted through the clothing gathered from my bathroom floor back in Venice and changed into the cleanest pieces I could find. Then I divided my belongings into two piles according to necessity and value and reorganized my main pack. Everything I couldn’t live without went into that pack, which I stuffed to near bursting and wouldn’t let out of my sight. The supplies I’d traded for at Sulla’s also had to come with me. Other items that while desirable were not crucial for survival, I left stored under the bench seat. Done with that, I started out for the misty thicket at the center of the island. Time to discover if this island could serve as home for another day or longer.
Though I had the necessities, I worried about leaving the dinghy behind. I didn’t put much trust in Fate. The bitch hadn’t done me many favors. If I returned to find the boat gone, I was screwed, marooned here. But it wasn’t like I could sling it over my back and carry it along like a hermit crab. Some days you just had to let things go.
Snow would have been unusual for our Hollow, and last night’s flurries had amounted to nothing. Though the air had a bite to it, I’d found a chunky wool sweater in the pile of mismatched clothing from the bathroom and threw it on under my jacket, so I wasn’t freezing to death.
What appeared to be a normal landscape for the barene, part-mudflat, part-salt marsh, none of it inviting, underwent magical transformation the closer I came to the heart of the island. Back standing next to the dingy, the trees I’d seen in the middle of the island hadn’t impressed me much. From a distance, they’d looked scrubby and scraggly, none over a few meters tall. With every meter I covered, however, the mist cleared, the trees filled out, grew thicker, and reached higher. In minutes, I found myself gazing up at pines towering overhead.
I’d stumbled into woods that by natural law shouldn’t exist in the salt-drenched soil of the lagoon. A garden, w
ild, unplanned, and lush, surrounded me.
I marveled at the most gorgeous strawberry tree I’d ever seen, riotous with fruit. Ripe berries in December? Incredible. I plucked one as big as my closed fist from the nearest branch. Droplets flew off the leaves as the branch ricocheted back, water diamonds sparkling in a morning sunbeam. Each drop struck the mossy ground with a glassy sound, the droplets playing shimmering music in chords and single notes.
My fingers wrapped around it, the fruit in my hand was summer warm and smelled richly of fig. My mouth watered. I wanted to sink my teeth into the berry and taste. The cornetto had been nothing. I was hungry. This would feed me. It would fill me with everything I needed.
I raised the berry to my mouth. My lips touched the plump red fruit. Just the feel of it made my teeth ache with longing.
Wait.
Was this safe?
“Never eat the fruit of the fae.” Father Bartolo’s voice rose from the grave of lost memories. “That made by the fae is made by the devil.”
No. How could something so natural and beautiful as this be bad? All around me, trees and bushes flowered and fruited at the same time, bearing chestnuts and olives and plums and apricots, impossibly large, their skins and peels flawless as paintings. I couldn’t believe it. Sweet orange blossoms drugged the air. Grapes hung from vines in bunches that gave off the scents of merlot and sangiovese. If I ate one, instead of grape, would I taste wine?
My jacket grew too heavy. My sweater made me hot. I took them off, tied the arms around my waist and walked deeper into the trees wearing only the tank with spaghetti straps I had on underneath.
No wonder this island was protected from outsiders, no humans allowed. We’d only overrun and contaminate the place. The fae would be thankful to bigoted morons like Father B. spouting his fire and brimstone bullshit. It would help keep everyone away.
A few meters into the garden, forest, grove, whatever the fae meant this to be, I came to a pool. Reeds and cattails lined the far edge, and slabs of uncut stone formed a crude stairway down into the depths. Unlike a similar pond in the human world, the water wasn’t brown, green, or otherwise mixed with algae and dirt. I could see every rock and golden speck of sand on the bottom.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 8
