Corinne deigned to reply frostily over her shoulder. “Not yet. Maybe. I’m a print reporter. I work for a small local newspaper. But like I said, I’m not the only one on the story. There are other papers snooping around, and my boss thinks the TV stations might be getting curious.”
The curses Luc let fly stretched the bounds of legality and creativity, but fortunately he retained enough presence of mind to utter them in his native tongue. This wasn’t good news.
“While I may not understand the sentiment, I’m afraid I likely agree with it,” Rafe said grimly, standing to thrust his hands in the pockets of his tailored trousers. “This is…distressing.”
“I’m guessing from your reactions that you haven’t heard about this before. Which means I was probably right to come here and warn you. Yay for me.” Corinne stood as well and shouldered the battered leather backpack she’d carried with her. “Anyway, I’m sorry if this is trouble for you guys, but at least you know. So, you know, good luck and everything. I hope you…do whatever you need to do with the…whatever it is.”
She turned toward the door but didn’t manage a single step. Instinctively, Luc reached out to stop her. She’d just given him his first lead in discovering Seoc’s whereabouts. Right now he needed her, and he didn’t intend to let her go until she gave him everything she had.
He just didn’t expect that to include a punch straight to his chest.
Not literally, of course. She didn’t raise a hand to him. She just arched one dark, curving eyebrow and let her gaze trail slowly from his face to the hand he had wrapped around her upper arm. She stared at it as if it were covered in leprous black spots.
“Excuse me?” Her voice sliced into him with excruciating politeness.
He made no move to release her. He doubted he’d be able to if he tried. Grabbing her arm had been like grabbing on to a live electrical cable; his entire body had clenched with the strange and powerful current that coursed through him. The hair on his arms and legs stood up and vibrated to an unheard frequency. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the hair on his head did the same. He was frozen, paralyzed by some force greater than himself, something he had never seen coming, and he couldn’t have chosen a less appropriate time for it if he’d charted the stars and consulted a damned oracle beforehand.
Shit, just when he’d thought her attitude had dampened that initial burst of attraction, he’d had to go and touch her. What the hell had he been thinking?
Corinne did not appear similarly moved. If she had been, he doubted she would have yanked her arm out of his grasp with such obvious ease. Not to mention relish.
“I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen, because if I didn’t, I’d feel obliged to deck you for it,” she said tightly, “and frankly, I’d rather just be on my way. So, toodles.”
Rafe stepped forward, holding his hands up near his shoulders, palms out, when she turned her snarl on him. Luc seized the opportunity to try to get control of himself.
“Please, Corinne. Don’t leave yet. We could use your help,” the head of the Council admitted. “I— we—certainly appreciate the favor you’ve done us by alerting us to this issue. Clearly, you were under no obligation to do so.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, but she stopped heading for the door. “Have you actually met Reggie and Missy?” she grumbled.
The Felix offered a wry smile. “You did it out of loyalty to your friends. I understand that, and I still owe you thanks, no matter your motivation. We knew that there was a…visitor to the city at present, but we were not aware before now that he’d been spotted by the human media. The information you’ve given us is not what one would call welcome news, but it isvaluable to us.”
“Valuable? Look, I’m definitely not asking anyone for some kind of reward—”
“I never thought you might be. I only mention it because we would find it equally valuable if you could stay a few more minutes and answer one or two questions for us.”
In other circumstances, Luc might have laughed at the expression of horror that suggestion evoked. Unfortunately, in the present circumstances, he couldn’t afford to be amused. Nor could he afford to be feeling the gut-deep, elemental attraction that had flared between them the moment he touched the bare skin beneath the arm of her short-sleeved top. Too bad no one had asked him about it first.
He cleared his throat and hoped he’d tamped down his reaction to her sufficiently for his words not to spew out like liquid idiocy before he spoke. “Rafe, I think we need to explain to her what’s going on before we ask her for any more help. It’s the least she deserves.”
She looked a bit surprised that he’d suggested such a thing, but she nodded at Rafe anyway. “I think that might be a good idea. Especially since my editor is determined to get this story. I suppose if I know what’s really going on, I can make sure the article I turn in is far enough from the actual truth to be safe.”
“You’re right.” Rafe nodded and waved her back to her seat. “It is senseless not to fill you in when you already know almost as much as we do.” He waited for her to sit, then settled himself back into his lazy pose, but his fingers beat restlessly against the arms of his chair. “The problem you’ve brought to us this evening is the very reason for Luc’s visit to our city.”
Corinne glanced at him. “You’re not from around here?”
Luc shook his head.
“Luc is Fae,” Rafe informed her.
Corinne just stared at him. Then she turned her head and stared at Luc. She looked back and forth between them at least half a dozen times, but her blank expression never changed.
“I’m Fae,” Luc repeated, then sighed. “As in Faerie.”
The blankness dissolved beneath a surprised laugh. “You’re a fairy? Sure, Tinker Bell. Pull the other leg while you’re at it.”
Luc scowled at Rafe. “You see? That’s the problem with mortals. We leave your world for a couple of thousand years and everyone either forgets all about us, or they reduce us to little glowing balls of tutu-clad good cheer.”
Corinne continued to chuckle. Even Rafe had caught the bug. He met Luc’s glare and shrugged. “You have to admit, the mental image of you in such a costume is amusing.”
“Fuck you.”
Corinne watched the interchange and managed to stifle her laughter, but she couldn’t quite wipe the grin off her face. Luc tried not to notice how it made her mouth look wide and mobile and wholly inviting.
“You’re serious?” she said, shaking her head. “You two honestly want me to believe Luc’s a fairy?”
“No, I want you to believe I’m Fae,” he said firmly. “Faerie is where I come from, but it was the most convenient word I could use to make you understand. Faerieis a place. Faemeans a being from Faerie. Calling someone a Faerie is like calling someone a France.”
Corinne nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again. Then she just sat there and looked confused. “So you’re trying to tell me that fairies are real. Does that make the elf a fairy?”
Rafe must have seen the irritation in Luc’s face, because he cleared his throat and jumped into the fray. “ Fairyis considered a bit of a derogatory term by the people of, erm, Faerie,” he explained. “They really prefer being called Fae.”
Her shock faded enough for her to roll her eyes. “Okay, so is this elf a Fae?”
“Seoc is not an elf, but yes”—Luc nodded—“he’s Fae, and he’s the reason why I’m here. I was sent to return him to Faerie.”
“Sent? By whom?”
“By the Queen of Faerie.”
FOUR
Corinne couldn’t quite figure out how it had happened, but at some point in the last hour she had obviously stepped off the train at the Crazyville station. Either that, or all those aspirin she’d swallowed had damaged her brain instead of her liver. How else could she explain how she’d gone from waking up in the world as she knew it, to sitting in the office of a werejaguar having a conversation with a fairy—sorry, a Fae—about
why he was worried that another Fae had been sighted around New York City?
There was no other explanation. She had clearly—and likely irrevocably—lost her mind.
“The Queen of Faerie,” she repeated slowly, feeling the words roll around in her mouth and deciding they really didn’t fit well at all. “The Queen of Faerie sent you to bring some guy named ‘Shock’ back to…Faerie with you. Do I have that right?”
The enormous man with the pointy ears nodded. “Close enough.”
It was too bad about the ears, really. In the instant when she’d first laid eyes on Lucifer call-me-Luc Macanaw, every cell in her body had sat up to attention and cried, Hello there, big boy!The man was just too gorgeous to be real. Which, of course, he’d turned out to be. Not really human, anyway. At least six-five or six-sex—er, six-six—the man towered over not only her, but also every other man she’d ever dated, including the oh-so-elegant Rafael De Santos and the six-foot-two construction worker Corinne had drooled over for most of last summer. This guy wasn’t just tall, though; he had brawn to back up his height, with the kind of muscle definition most men would kill for.
His skin had a luminous golden cast to it, and his eyelashes were thicker and darker than any man’s had a right to be. They made his crystal-green eyes stand out and emphasized the dark, rich coffee color of his hair, which was at least long enough to be clubbed back into a ponytail. She couldn’t see how long it was, but her fingers already itched to run through it.
Long hair on a man pushed all her buttons, especially when it was that particular shade, that brown so dark it looked black until the light hit it just right and pulled out those rich, chocolate highlights. She wanted to feel that hair wrapped around her while she climbed on top and rode him straight on till morning—
Holy shit! What is God’s name was she thinking? This man couldn’t possibly be her type; he wasn’t even her species!
She shook her head to clear out the unexpected and unwelcome fog of lust and drew a deep breath. “Okay,” she said, “but I still feel like I stepped into this movie twenty minutes past the opening credits. Can one of you maybe fill me in? From the beginning?”
The story wasn’t that long, but it still left Corinne with the same feeling she’d had after reading War and Peace—the one that went something like, Du-huh?She understood the part about Luc’s reasons for coming to…well, he kept calling it Ithir, but since she wasn’t quite ready to deal with any “alternate realities” stuff, she’d just stick to saying Manhattan. The part about him being a personal guard to the Faerie Queen made a sort of fantasy-novel sense, but after that, he lost her.
“Okay,” she said again, the word drawn out the way she might have said it if she’d been attempting to placate an ax-wielding maniac. “Um, I think I understand what you’re after, but I’m having a little bit of trouble with the why part.”
“The ‘why part’?” Luc repeated.
“Yeah. Why does everyone seem to assume he’ll need to be dragged back by his hair like a runaway cave-wife? Can’t you just call and tell him the Queen wants him home?”
Luc and Rafe exchanged what Corinne would have called a manly look, the kind that implied they were trying to be patient with her feeble feminine understanding.
“He didn’t exactly leave us an itinerary,” Luc said in that really annoying tone. “He’s not supposed to be here at all. He never received permission from the Queen.”
Corinne felt her eyes widen at that. “Permission? What, like a visa? Why would he need permission to leaveFaerie? I understand needing something like a passport to enter a place, but to leave? Is Faerie some kind of giant prison compound?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She glared at him. “Oh, you need permission from Mom to cross your own borders, but I’m the one who’s being ridiculous?”
Rafe shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “Moving between here and Faerie isn’t like driving across the Canadian border,” he said, almost apologetically. “Faerie occupies its own dimension, for lack of a better word, and the only way to travel between worlds like that is through the use of magic. In this case, magical portals, or doorways.”
“And the doors are tightly controlled,” Luc added. “For several reasons.”
“Such as?”
The Fae guardsman looked at her like he’d rather shake her than answer her question, but he managed to maintain his grip on sanity long enough to answer. And save himself a swift kick to the balls.
“First, because the Others here prefer it that way,” he said. “You mentioned it yourself earlier—the Others in this world work very hard to keep ordinary mortals from learning they exist.”
“Yeah, because they’re afraid of how we’d react, that’d we’d try to exterminate them or put them in a lab and study them or something,” Corinne agreed. “But how does that relate to visitors from Faerie?”
Rafe spoke up. “Right now, the Council of Others believes that humans are neither ready nor willing to acknowledge that what they think of as the supernatural—as magic—exists.”
Corinne had heard of the Council from Reggie, whose husband, Dmitri, once headed it; now, apparently, Rafe had that pleasure. “Yeah, I know. Because you think we’re primitive morons.”
Luc nodded. “Compared with most other species, you are. Primitive, not morons,” he hurried to add when she turned to glare at him. “Look at it from the Others’ point of view. Werefolk were around for millennia before humans evolved much past the Cro-Magnon stage on Ithir, and even though vampires were once human, they have a much deeper connection to magic than their human cousins ever did. And Fae…well, we left Ithirabout the same time humans started realizing that round things made nifty accessories for the bottoms of their sleds. In relative terms, humans are like infants to us.”
Corinne couldn’t decide if she should be confused or just insulted. Or maybe both. “Right. We’re the cosmic equivalent of amoebae. Great. But that doesn’t explain why it’s so important to interrupt this Seoc guy’s tour of Ithir.”
“Actually, it does,” Rafe said. “One of the primary reasons for the regulation of travel from Faerie into Ithiris to keep the Others’ secret safe. You’ve seen what happens when someone comes through the door with the wrong intentions, or with no intentions at all. If people in this city are catching sight of Seoc, the chances of his identity being discovered increase by the minute, and once people know who and what he is, the veil of secrecy that protects us from discovery gets that much thinner. Break the barrier of disbelief in supernatural beings by once acknowledging there’s a race of non-humans out there and people become much more likely to believe in all the races out there. In other words, it’s a short step from a Fae visitor to a resident pack of werewolves.”
“You’re right,” she acknowledged, pursing her lips. She might have to say it, but she didn’t have to like it. As a reporter, she had a core-deep antipathy toward secrets. “But you said there was another reason.”
“I’ll admit the second reason might sound a bit self-serving,” Luc said, and shifted uncomfortably. “By controlling the door into and out of Faerie, we can control who knows about our existence and who can find their way into our realm. Faerie can be a dangerous place for those who aren’t Fae, partly because it’s home to very powerful magic, but that magic can also be a powerful lure for those who think they can use it for themselves. The Fae left Ithirbecause humans either feared our magic or wanted it for themselves. Rather than hide in plain sight, like the Others, we removed ourselves from this world and closed the doors after us. But what do you think would happen if someone found the doors and showed everyone where they were?”
Put like that, the idea made Corinne pause. She could imagine what would happen—the same thing that would happen if the truth about the Others came out, only in this case human beings would take the show on the road. People would be either frightened or fascinated. The frightened ones would try to destroy what they didn’t understand, and the
fascinated ones would trample it in their eagerness to experience it for themselves. They’d pour through the doors like shoppers at a one-day sale.
“A person can learn to cope with a shift in his reality,” Rafe said gently, “but people, as a group, are a different story. If Seoc keeps this up, he’s going to open those doors. Then Ithirand Faerie will both suffer.”
Luc agreed. “Faerie would be overrun by humans. Some of them would be honestly curious, but some of them would be afraid or greedy or malicious and would destroy the world we’ve spent centuries building for ourselves.”
Yeah, she could see where that would suck. As much as she wanted to defend her fellow humans, people did tend to be a hell of a lot stupider and more selfish than individuals could ever be. As a reporter, she’d seen enough of the destruction people could create to know that.
“Then there’s the fact that if the balance between Ithirand Faerie shifts, all the creatures we took with us when we left would come pouring back into your world. When was the last time you saw a real live nightmare?”
“Do you count?” she muttered under her breath, then hurried to cover it up. “Point taken. If Faerie is full of all the fairy-tale bogeymen they talked about in the kids’ stories, then I agree that it would be better if they stayed there. So how do you plan to make that happen?”
The men exchanged glances again, and Corinne stifled the urge to smack them both upside the head. Did they think she couldn’t see their little moments of silent communication?
“I think we need to concentrate on finding Seoc,” Rafe finally said, nodding at Luc. “Not only is that the reason Luc came here, but if we remove him from the city, we remove the threat of anyone discovering his true identity. That is the ultimate goal.”
“What about the people who’ve already seen him?”
“Do you know who they are?”
She nodded. “I have names and contact info, since I’m supposed to start interviewing them.”
Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale Page 5
