“I…” he started, and had to swallow again before continuing “I believe you now. Can you…Can you please get back to normal?” The man frowned at his words and spoke in a voice that sounded like the trill of a songbird.
“This is my normal. But I understand what you mean. I’ll conceal my light if that’s what you wish, but you have to swear to me that you believe me, and that you will help me find my brother. I can’t waste any more time looking for some other private investigator. I need you. Will you help me?” Even with a frown, the man was unearthly beautiful. Dominic felt the need to promise him anything, but he forced himself to think it over. He had nothing better to do anyway, and this new world might be worth discovering. He felt his sense of adventure stirring back to life. He made his decision.
“Yes.” He nodded his head and added, “I’ll help you find your brother.”
* * * *
Jim was relieved as he concentrated on concealing his inner light. He never liked the process. While being in his human form didn’t feel much different than being in his true one, the process of concealing his magic always felt uncomfortable, like putting cold, damp clothing on a sweaty body. He did it anyway and opened his eyes to see Dominic Sawyer’s outstretched hand with the borrowed shirt in it.
“Right,” said Jim. “No wings anywhere near you,” he reminded himself. He looked at Dominic’s pinched expression and sighed lightly. “Can we now speak freely about what brought me here? Or do you have any other questions about…” He waved in the air, not really knowing how to phrase it.
“About fey, werewolves, shape-shifters and paranormals? About you glowing? Your wings? About the human plane and yours? About what else is there?” Dominic fired rapidly, falling into his chair, and Jim grimaced as he followed him in his previous seat.
“No,” the man said in a tired voice, wiping his hand down his face. “I see how very desperate you are to find out what happened to your brother,” he continued as he lifted his gaze and looked Jiminy straight in the eye. “I think discovering all about this other paranormal world that is apparently intermingled with ours can wait until we actually start working on your case. So now, can you please give me more details about your brother’s disappearance and the following investigation? Let’s see where we need to start.”
Jim felt instantly grateful for the man’s consideration. Once he concealed his light, it came to him that Sawyer could have only agreed to help him because he was under the influence of his true form. He couldn’t have been more relieved with the man’s answer. He started again and told the man everything he knew about his brother’s kidnappers
* * * *
“So, let me get this straight. Your brother has been kidnapped by a human and paranormal trafficking gang. Your friend got caught by them as well when he went searching for Timiny, and they put him in a cage as a tiger and then tried to starve him. He got rescued by somebody who also killed the leader and freed another captive and then somehow convinced the thugs to turn themselves in to the police. The other captive met Timiny and knew the man who bought him. He pointed you to the area where they used to meet and do business with the dead vampire. Then your tiger friend—Tyler, is it?—found a paranormal investigator working in the area. You went to see him, but he couldn’t take your case as he was already entangled in something else. Instead, he gave you the name of my uncle’s agency and that’s how you found me. Did I get it right?”
“Yep, that about summarizes it,” said Jim, visibly nervous. “Do you think you can help me find Timmy? I really need to bring him back home. He’s the only family I’ve got in this world. And without him, I won’t even be able to go home and get help. He was the one who remembered all the spells and such to cross the veil. I simply followed his lead.”
Dom looked at the little fey and couldn’t help the feeling of sympathy welling within his heart. Dom was never a very emotional man, but since meeting Jim, he felt as if he had fallen victim to an emotional maelstrom raging in the other man’s vicinity. He could only feel sorry for the other man’s suffering.
“Yes, I will help you. Let’s get a lunch on the way to check that meeting spot your friend told you about. I’m afraid you’ll need to accompany me in this investigation, as I’ve got no idea about paranormals. I wouldn’t know if we encountered one and that could put our mission in jeopardy. So let’s grab you some proper clothing before we go and do some investigating. What do you say?”
“Sounds good,” Jiminy agreed with a smile.
* * * *
They went for lunch to a local Subway, and that was where it hit Dominic.
“Why do you keep calling me a werewolf?” he fired suddenly to an unsuspecting Jim over a sandwich.
Jiminy stopped chewing, and frowned before swallowing what he had in his mouth and asking back, “What?”
“I asked why you keep calling me a werewolf. I know you’re a”—he lowered his voice and looked around at the empty tables surrounding them before finishing—“fey or whatever, but I’m just a human. Why did you insist I was something else?”
“Um…” Jiminy was now visibly uncomfortable. “Because you are?” His answer sounded more like a question to Dominic.
“No, I’m not. Don’t you think I’d know more about paranormal world”—he lowered his voice at the last words even though they were alone in the restaurant—“if I were one myself?”
His answer made Jim frown even harder. He leant forward, putting most of his weight on his forearms resting on the table between them. He lowered his voice as well before answering.
“Listen, I don’t know why you don’t think you’re a werewolf, but you are one, of that I’m sure.” He sat back after that and took a bite of his sandwich, seeming to think his answer over before he spoke. Finally, he swallowed and said still in the same lowered voice, “As I told you, I’m a fey, pixie to be exact. We pixies are quite unique when it comes to our mating rituals, even among other paranormals. As we aren’t very strong and our magic is quite erratic, we are designed to seek the strongest mate possible so that he can protect us. That’s why we produce mating dust. It is supposed to ensure that the one we choose for ourselves will be willing to mate with us. It also makes our chosen mate even stronger than he already was once the mating ceremony is finished.
“Unfortunately, it has its negatives. As you so unluckily discovered, the dust is a very potent drug as well as an aphrodisiac. If given to a paranormal it induces any kind of side effects as an addition to arousing them sexually. It is supposed to make them susceptible to a mating ritual that is supposed to follow. Anyway, our mating habits aside, the point I’m trying to make is that it has different effect depending on a paranormal’s race. It has no effects on humans, though, besides arousing them. It makes men hard and women wet, to use crude words. But it doesn’t make them high in the way it makes paranormals. That’s because humans aren’t strong enough to be considered a proper mate for a pixie.
“So, as you see, there is no way you’re human. You wouldn’t react in a way you did if you were one. You’d get hard when you touched my wings, but it wouldn’t be anything as out-of-control as you were. And from what I remember from my lessons on mating dust’s effects on different paranormals, there is only one kind that reacts in such an extreme way and goes into a heat.”
“And it’s werewolves?” asked Dominic, knowing where it was going.
“Yeah, but the politically correct name is wolf shifters. Calling wolf shifters werewolves is like calling a fey a fairy or a tiger shifter a pussycat. It’s insulting,” finished Jim, and he went back to eating, not sure what else to say. There was no way around that. Dominic Sawyer had to be a wolf shifter. The question was, how comes he didn’t know about it?
Dominic seemed to mull it over in his head before he finally changed the topic.
“So, you and your brother, you came here from”—he looked back at the lone worker taking care of the only other customer at the counter before he finished in a lowered voice�
�“another world?”
Jim snorted and answered, “You don’t have to make it sound like we’re in some B-rated fantasy movie. I bet even if people heard us, they’d simply assume we were talking about a game or a play or something.” He smiled at Dominic’s surprised face and continued. “But you’re right. In a way. We did come here from another plane. It’s like parallel reality or something like that. I don’t really know the science behind it. The thing is, yes, we did cross the veil that separates our two worlds. And we’ve been here for the last five or so years.”
“What made you decide to come here?” Dom was truly curious and fascinated by the facts he’d just learned.
“Well”—Jim twisted his mouth in a little grimace—“it was primarily my idea. Tim agreed with me. He usually does if I insist hard enough. But then, after a while, he thought it a great idea. We had several reasons. One, as pixies, we weren’t really valued that much. We aren’t powerful, and people felt the need to treat us like we were spun glass. Our family was especially infuriating. Not only were we the only pixies in the family, we were also twins, which is extremely rare in fey. There isn’t much that is known about twins, but they were constantly worried something would happen to us. On top of all that, we are also the youngest of all siblings. So even though we’re over a hundred and twenty-five years old they treated us like babies.” Jim huffed, and then noticed Dominic’s jaw hanging wide open. “Ups,” He said and did the face palm. “Sorry, forgot to mention the whole different lifespan thing. For fey, a hundred and twenty-five is like twenty-five for humans. No biggie.”
“Riiight.” Dominic still looked shell-shocked. “No biggie.” Jim cleared his throat to stop himself from laughing at Dominic’s reaction and continued his story.
“So, anyway we also had another reason. I thought that maybe, just maybe, we could find our soul mates in this plane. I mean, we’re fey. We’re not like shifters who have their prospective mates and can recognize them right away. Tim and I are pixies. It’s in our nature to choose the best suited to be our mates. We can be with whomever we decide is best for us. But I had this weird feeling like maybe the loves of our lives were waiting here for us.” Jim’s eyes were dreamy for just a moment before he smiled again and said in a lighter voice “Or maybe I was simply bored with seeing all the same faces all the time. We didn’t have much of a love life with our family breathing down our necks and scaring away any lovers they deemed not worthy. And believe me”—Jim grimaced—“not one of either mine or Tim’s lovers was ever deemed worthy.”
“I guess it comes with being the baby of the family. They want to protect you.”
“Yeah…” Jim was deep in thought for just a moment. “So we decided to come here.” He went back to his story with renewed enthusiasm. From what Dom could tell, the little fey had a really enthusiastic nature. “And we nearly had to run away, so hard it was to convince our parents to allow us to move. Finally, our oldest brother took our side. He said in this time and age, humans didn’t believe in the paranormal world anymore, and other paranormals forgot all about fey wars and their cause. So, he reasoned, as long as we kept our true identity hidden, we should be all right to live here on our own. And we were.” The smile disappeared from his face, replaced by a scowl. “Until Timmy’s disappearance.”
The young pixie looked Dominic straight in the eye and spoke with such desperation that Dom felt his heart clenching “We need to find him, Mr. Sawyer. We need to find him soon.”
Dominic cleared his throat and answered in a steady voice, trying to convey as much confidence as he could by the tone of his voice and words. “And we will find him. We’ll find him and save him. I assure you of that.” Jim gave him a long, searching look and apparently found in his face whatever he was looking for, because he nodded, and after a small sigh, he went back to his meal. Dominic did the same, wondering silently why this slim young man awoke so many new and tender feelings within him. It couldn’t be just because he was fey.
From what Jiminy told him, he did have a kind of charm over those that saw him in his true form, but it disappeared along with that form. And yet every time Dominic looked at the man, he felt as if he knew him on some level. As if the man was truly a part of him. It was weird, it was creepy, and Dominic wished the feeling would disappear. And yet at the same time, he wanted to explore it. To get to the bottom of it. It was almost as if there was another part of him. Something hidden really, really deep that recognized the man and wanted him for its own.
Dominic frowned at that thought and decided to dismiss it for now. Right then, he didn’t need to investigate his feelings. What he did need to investigate was Timiny Jones’s disappearance as well as where and by whom the man could be kept. That was what Dominic had to focus on, and that was exactly what he decided to do.
Chapter Five
The whole investigating business was far less exciting than Jiminy thought. He gave Dominic the address he got from Tyler and they went to check it out. They learned it was some kind of office building, and the place they were looking for was an office of some small investment firm. After that, Dominic checked it out online and learned the whole firm belonged to a rich guy called Bradford Manning. From then on it was one hell of a lot of paperwork, or should it be called computer work?
They went back to Dominic’s apartment and spent the next week finding out all they could about that Manning guy. Or rather, Dominic spent all this time doing his online research and Jim spent it being alternately bored out of his mind and worried sick for his brother.
Two weeks has passed from Tyler’s phone call to Jim spying on Dominic Sawyer. They spent another one doing the whole research-investigating thing, and after all this time Jim felt through his twin-bond that Tim didn’t have much more time left. He had no idea what was happening to his brother, but there was this sense of urgency before something irreversible happened. Suffice to say Jim wasn’t the best companion to the detective.
And yet Dominic seemed happy to have him over for the most of the day. Jim would leave his hotel room at eight in the morning and come to Dom’s apartment at nine, then they would have some breakfast together, and Jim tried to tend to his online business while Dominic busied himself with investigative work. They took lunch breaks together and then finished work in time for some dinner, after which Jim would go back to his hotel room.
The whole week passed in a blur, but finally, they got some results. Dominic managed to find a list of Bradford Manning’s properties, and from there, they narrowed the possible places where Jim’s brother could be kept to three. Unfortunately, they also discovered one big obstacle. During his research, Dominic discovered a disturbing connection between Manning and the local police chief. He also found out Manning was seemingly an upstanding citizen and well-liked by the police. As they didn’t have any proof it was him who was keeping Timiny prisoner, they also had no way of getting the police involved.
Almost another week has passed on both Dominic and Jim trying to find a solution to their problem. They couldn’t involve police, even more so since they could not reveal to them the whole paranormal thing. They had no way of knowing which of the three places Tim was being kept in. Jim started panicking. The sense of urgency grew in him until he almost couldn’t stand it. He was a nervous wreck.
Impossibly, he and Dominic grew really close over the two weeks of working together. Jim couldn’t really tell how it happened, but in those scarce moments they weren’t working, they started talking. They shared their life stories with each other. Dominic told Jim all about his time in the military and how it affected him. Jim shared his feelings about being a pixie in a family full of powerful fey and about having a real twin bond with his brother. He also told Dom some more about fey customs and the fey wars that had caused all the fey to retreat behind the veil separating their words. Jim haven’t even realized when they became friends, it happened so fast. And yet there was something…different about this friendship than the one he had with Tyler, for example. Ji
m almost felt as if he could really fall for Dominic Sawyer. And it scared him witless.
Dominic didn’t give off any vibes of being attracted to him, though, and Jim felt simultaneously disappointed and grateful about it. He was torn, and had no idea how to deal with it all. So he did what he usually did when something felt too complicated to deal with. He pushed it aside and concentrated on something else, namely finding his brother. After a week of not being able to find any solution to their predicament Jim was panicked. He felt his brother couldn’t wait any longer. He did not know what it meant, but he had a horrible suspicion. If the people who’d kidnapped Tim discovered he was a pixie, and it was unavoidable that they did at some point, it was almost certain they would use him to harvest his dust. And that made Jim petrified.
Since fey had retreated behind the veil, there was no real danger of pixie dust being forcibly taken from them, so what he knew about it came from other people’s tales. Yet in his studies, he learned what would happen to the pixies who were taken by the enemies during fey wars and whose dust had been harvested from them over a long course of time. It wasn’t pleasant.
As pixie dust was designed to create and strengthen their mate bond, the mating ritual had to be completed so that their bodies recognized the person destined to be theirs. As it happened, only their rightful mate could take their dust from them as often as they pleased without harming the fey in question. If a pixie was forced to give away their dust to somebody with whom they hadn’t mated, they would say a spell to remove any possibility of mating them by accident. It was all nice and good, but the whole mating thing wasn’t as easy as that.
Pixies were truly unique among other fey in that they weren’t quite as promiscuous. Fey were creatures of large sexual appetites and didn’t fear finding release with as many partners and as often as possible. Pixies, however, couldn’t do that. It all came to the mating dust. If a pixie’s body was forced to produce large amounts of dust over a longer period of time without being mated to the person the dust was harvested by, their bodies went through a kind of change. It was as if their bodies got used to producing vast amounts of dust and when they finally stopped giving it away, they felt sick. In cases of pixies rescued from those harvesting their dust, they would even sometimes go into shock.
Reality Check Page 4
