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To the lovers and the dreamers, keep making the world a better place.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Book two! I guess I have to admit at this point this isn’t a dream. At least, I haven’t shown up at any readings in my underwear. Yet.
I’m writing these acknowledgments in July 2015. I wrote Bigfootloose during 2014, which was hands down one of the busiest, insaniest, most emotional-rollercoastery years of my life, between serious Life Changes and the craziness of Writers of the Future and Finn Fancy. It was also a year of tragedies, controversies, and difficult conversations for many (and not just because of the How I Met Your Mother finale).
As such, my thanks go out to all those who tempered my angst and supported my dream.
To the readers and fans of Finn Fancy who came to my readings, wrote reviews, had me on your blog, invited me to your book club, got a FFN tattoo, built a small shrine to FFN, invented new ice cream flavors like Fudge Fancy Nutomancy, or named all your children after my characters: this adventure continues thanks to you, and for you, and I hope you enjoy the results. And if you read this and think Wow, I really missed some opportunities there to prove my love of Finn Fancy, well, now there’s Bigfootloose. Sasquatches and knitting = so much potential! Just remember, pictures or it didn’t happen.
To all the librarians and booksellers who recommended Finn Fancy Necromancy, and those who invited me or hosted me for readings, you all seriously rock (and, though I would never say it for fear of appearing immodest, people say you have excellent taste).
To my parents, Frank, Mary, and Elaine; my biggest fan, Dave Henderson; and the rest of my family: thank goodness you share blood ties with me, otherwise your level of support would be kind of creepy.
To my family most deeply affected during this time, who have offered me love and understanding and continued support: Shelly, Lucas, and Kylie, may every day bring you magic.
To Christy Varonfakis, without whom I really might have shown up at a reading in my underwear—and then realized it wasn’t even my reading. Or my underwear. I’m grateful for every bench and every nudge, and look forward to many more.
To everyone who critiqued Bigfootloose, or provided reassurances through the inevitable dark period of Imposter Syndrome, thank you. To name a few (alphabetically): Curtis Chen, Isis D’Shaun, Lauren Dixon, Spencer Ellsworth, Neile Graham, Lucas Johnson, Tod McCoy, Kat Richardson, Vicki Saunders, and Emily Skaftun. If your name should be here but isn’t, due to my terrible memory, I blame Infomancers for altering reality; but now you can make me feel bad every time I see you and I’ll buy you a drink out of guilt, so, you know, that’s not bad, right?
To everyone at Tor, especially my editor and Finn Fancy champion, Beth Meacham, without whom, again, Finn Fancy would not exist; the tireless Amy Stapp, who keeps the process moving along; my awesome publicist, Desirae Friesen, and the queen of publicity, Patty Garcia, for all their help in spreading the Finn Fancy love; the copyediting (and geek savvy) skills of Edwin Chapman; and everyone else who has contributed to the life of the Finn Fancy books—thank you, truly.
To Peter Lutjen, Irene Gallo, Tomislav, and the rest of the Tor art and design department, thank you for the look of the Finn Fancy series. The covers certainly stand out, and I’ve grown quite fond of them.
And, last but not least, to my agent, Cameron McClure, who has provided all the support and agentiness I could have hoped for, and to Katie Shea Boutillier and everyone else at Donald Maass Literary Agency, who have far more than earned that 15 percent: I hope I make a million dollars someday. You know, just for you.
1
Once Bitten Twice Shy
Imagine the sweetest-smelling perfume, something candy-like, perhaps worn by tweenaged girls. Now, pour a bottle of that into your eyes. Welcome to the joys of fairy embalming.
I stood beside a stainless-steel worktable on which a fairy’s parakeet-sized body rested, in the familiar chill and antiseptic smell of our family’s basement necrotorium—a mortuary for the magical.
And by fairy, I don’t mean a true Fey. Actually, I’m not even sure what a Fey smell might be. During the twenty-five years I spent exiled in the Fey Other Realm, I don’t think I smelled anything that didn’t come from my own imagination. No, by fairy I mean the little flitting Tinkerbells you see in gardens, especially in a charming little waterfront town like our own Port Townsend. Well, that you’d be able to see if you were a human arcana gifted with magic, or a feyblood creature like the fairies themselves.
The fun part of this job, or at least the creative part that I actually enjoyed sometimes, was hours away. I would reconstruct the fairy’s features using putty and cosmetics so that you’d never know she’d enjoyed a brief and shocking birdbrained attraction to the brightly colored insulators on an electric fence—and then been hit by a weed whacker before waking. I had, however, carefully glued the plastic wings on after the Department of Alchemical Administration came and collected the real ones, a donation for which the fairy’s family would receive generous payment.
My younger brother Pete stood opposite me, his huge body hunched over the table as he monitored the embalming tubes that ran into the fairy’s body. Petey had always been a big guy—not fat, or all muscle, just big like a grizzly. His round baby face scrunched up in a frown of concentration that better belonged on a child trying to eat Cream of Wheat with chopsticks, and fit his nature much more than his considerable size did.
My girlfriend, Dawn, sat on a stool in the corner strumming her guitar, the incandescent lighting glinting off the silver rings that covered her every finger. Her hair, a springy cloud of fading turquoise with black roots, masked her eyes as she leaned over her guitar, but she occasionally paused to lift up the decapitated head of my old Six Million Dollar Man doll that hung from a cord around her neck and look through his bionic eye at the fairy. The toy head had a crystal jutting out of the neck and a crown of rune-covered metal, an artifact my father created in one of his (more) lucid moments, that enabled mundanes to see the normally hidden world of magical energies and creatures. But Dawn’s mundy senses still made her impervious to the fairy odor.
For me, even the smells of embalming fluids and bleach couldn’t mask the cloying smell.
Pete removed the customized embalming tubes with the kind of delicateness one might expect from a Jedi manscaping his nethers with a lightsaber. Despite his size, Pete was one of the gentlest people I knew. Or at least, he used to be. Since being bitten by waerwolves three months ago, he’d cycled between reclusive and rabid as he struggled to control the Fey wolf spirit that now shared his body.
*I envy your brother,* a voice sounded in my head. *If a body must needs be shared, then a wolf seems a most desirable companion. At least a wolf spirit knows how to have fun.*
Alynon Infedriel, Fey knight of the Silver Court, former changeling for yours truly, and pain in my spiritual buttocks, gave a martyred sigh only I could hear, and fell silent. I wasn’t sure how a Fey spirit trapped inside my brain could sigh when he didn’t have actual lungs or breath of his own, but he did. A lot.
When I’d returned from exile in the Other Realm, I was supposed to inherit twenty-five years of catch-up memories from Alynon as he departed back to his own Fey body. Instead, an accident had caused me to be stuck with him in my head.
That had been a real lose-lose kind of day.
“Shut it,” I muttered at Alynon.
“I’m getting to it!” Pete said, the hint of a growl creeping into his voice.
“What? Oh, no, I didn’t mean shut the incisions,” I said. “I was talking to the royal Feyn in my Butt.”
“Oh.” Pete hunched in on himself a bit more and began stapling the incisions closed. Now it was my turn to sigh.
*Sincerely,* Alynon continued, *your nature could benefit from a touch of bestiality. I am certain Dawn would enjoy it.*
Dawn stopped her strumming. “What’d Aly say?”
“Nothing worth repeating,” I replied.
*Liar,* Alynon said. *You know I am right. Bright, but that I still had control of your body. Pax laws or no, I’d tear me off a piece of that.*
Really? I thought, focusing the thought on him so that he could hear it. “Tear me off a piece of that”? What does that even mean? I think you wasted your time in our world if that’s the kind of thing you filled your head with.
Dawn’s eyes narrowed slightly as she leaned toward me, exposing her cleavage.
*Mayhap,* Alynon said. *But speaking of my head, I know where I’d like to—*
Seriously?!
Dawn leaned back. “I can tell you’re still arguing with him about something.”
*Indeed, seriously!* Alynon responded. *I spent twenty-five years in this hormone factory you call a body, being bombarded with sexual images left and right, and I was forbidden by Pax Law to act on any—*
Wow, I really feel for you. That sounds so much worse than being without a real body and having your memories fed on by Fey.
*That’s not my point. I am merely saying, it may have made me a little sex-obsessed.*
Gee, you think?
*What I think is you’re crazy for not ripping her clothes off and—*
“There,” Dawn said. “Only Aly can make your eye twitch like that.”
I replied in a level tone, “We were just arguing about how the Fey keep pushing into areas where they don’t belong.”
“Uh huh.” Dawn resumed strumming. “You’ll tell me what he said when you’re ready.” She stated it as a matter of fact.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Declare what I will or won’t do.”
Dawn arched an eyebrow. “You can pretend you don’t like how I’m always right, but I know it just makes you like me more.”
“No. Mostly, I like you for your modesty.”
“Yeah, I am pretty perfect.” Dawn winked.
But she was right about always being right, damn it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she had a touch of clairvoyance. But really, she just knew me.
Or at least, she knew who I’d been before being exiled at age fifteen. I didn’t even know who I was now. Not in the sense that I had amnesia or anything—well, I had lost my previous memories of Dawn in exchange for knowledge from beyond the grave, but my memories were otherwise intact. It was more that I didn’t know who I was in the same sense that made people seek direction and identity through religion, or pyramid schemes, or by taking a passionate side in the cola wars. It was dangerous. It was the kind of path that led to Tammy Faye Bakker, secret societies, and New Coke.
*You’re not moping again, are you?* Alynon asked. *I can practically taste the ennui in your brain chemistry.*
I’m not moping! I’m trying to figure things out. I don’t want to just fall into—
*Bright, save me. If you’re going to play the sad philosopher again, can you at least pretend to be Kant? He knew how to party. I remember once—*
Remind me later to double my efforts on figuring out how to exorcise you.
*You already worked out how to exorcise me.*
You know what I mean. Without it lobotomizing me.
*Ah, fine.* Alynon was quiet a second. *Say, don’t forget to double your efforts—*
Hilarious, I replied.
I really did need to focus more on getting him out of my head. Not just for my own sake, but his. It was not his fault that my grandfather’s minions had attacked and disrupted the process that would have returned Alynon to the Other Realm. And it wasn’t until I’d died briefly, drowned while escaping my grandfather’s underwater lair, that I’d even been able to hear Alynon. But now that I knew he was in my head, able to experience everything I did but unable to exert any physical control, I could only imagine how difficult and frustrating that must be.
Well, I didn’t have to only imagine. He reminded me of it pretty regularly.
Someone knocked on the glass door behind me.
Our necrotorium filled the basement of my family’s old Victorian house. A wall with frosted glass windows divided it in half, with the traditional mundane mortuary equipment on this side, and the altars, protective circles, and other accoutrements of our family’s necromancy trade on the other. Through the frosted glass of the door, I could make out the blurry shape of a waifish sixteen-year-old girl a second before the door swung open and Mattie said, “Uncle Finn?”
“Yeah?” I replied, and coughed when I sucked in fairy stench.
“There’s a, uh, client here.”
“Where’s Mort?” I asked around my coughs. My older brother seemed to be easing up a bit on his paranoia that I was plotting against him to take charge of the family business. I wasn’t going to ruin that progress by greeting new clients without his permission.
“No, not for us. A client for you, for your dating service.”
Dawn stopped strumming and sat up straight, an excited smile on her face. I blinked.
I’d started a dating service for magicals three months ago, inspired by how good it felt to help Pete and his girlfriend, Vee, find happiness together. It certainly felt better than the thought of spending my life around death, trading bits of my own life energy to Talk with spirits. But not a single arcana or feyblood had come seeking my help in those three months. My sister Sammy had even made me a website, and still not a bite.
I’d pretty much given up on the idea, which really depressed me since I had few other immediate career options besides necromancy. My skills coding video games in BASIC were, I’d learned, a bit outdated.
“I’ll be right up!” I said. “Show … him? Her?”
“Him.”
“Show him to the parlor. Please.”
“I did. But your client? He’s … a sasquatch.”
Pete growled softly.
A sasquatch. Oh, shazbot.
Sweat sprung up along my arms. I didn’t have a great history with sasquatches. In fact, my only real history was with a sibling pair of sasquatch mercenaries who’d been hired by my grandfather in his bid to be voted Arch-Villain of the Year. They’d attacked pretty much everyone around me, and the female sasquatch had died at the hands of blood witches while defending my grandfather—blood witches I’d sent against him.
If my grandfather’s extremist Arcanite buddies ever hired that sasquatch for another job, it would probably be to kill me for upsetting their plans to start a race war. Either way, I hoped never to see that sasquatch, or any of his relatives, again.
“And Uncle Finn?” Mattie said.
“Yeah?”
“This sasquatch? He says he knows you.”
Double shazbot.
“Yes.”
Which meant she’d already let him inside the house’s protective wards. An understandable mistake, given the types of customers we’d had lately.
Dawn slid off her stool. “Awesome! I’ve always wanted to see Bigfoot.”
I shook my head. “Not awesome. Dangerous. I think he’s here to hurt me.”
Pete pulled off his apron and gloves, and strode toward the door. “Nobody hurts my brother.”
I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him to a stop—or more accurately, he stopped, preventing me from being dragged along behind him. “Hang on. Let’s play this smart and safe. We can’t afford to have the parlor rebuilt again after that troll incident.” And Pete couldn’t afford to give the Arcana Ruling Council any excuse to lock him up as a rogue waer. “Let’s gear up first, and then I’ll try to lure him outside.”
I turned to Dawn. “It might be best—”
“If I go home?” she said. “Let’s see, who has saved the lives of every man in this room, raise your hand.” Dawn raised her hand. She had helped to save Pete after both a witch curse and a waerwolf attack. And she’d given me CPR after I drowned while escaping Grandfather’s lair.
Dawn lowered her hand. “So, you can give me a weapon, or a healing potion, or both, but I’m sticking around.”
Alynon chuckled.
Frak.
“Okay. Fine. You keep Mattie safe down here,” I suggested. Dawn might do something crazy on her own, but she wouldn’t do anything too risky with Mattie’s safety on the line.
“I don’t—” Mattie began, but Dawn put a hand on her shoulder.
“Really?” Dawn said to me. “And what if Bigfoot comes down those stairs? We’d be trapped down here. Shouldn’t we at least come upstairs where there’s all kinds of ways to escape?”
*No one puts Baby in a corner!*
Stick it. “Fine. Come on, let’s not keep our guest waiting.”
I threw a cover over the fairy, and we all crossed to the small basement area set aside for Father’s thaumaturgy experiments. Most of the stuff in his lab was harmless—being possessed by Mother’s ghost had left Father mentally unstable, so it was best not to give him objects that might cut, burn, explode, or, as we had learned too late to prevent a reverse mohawk, could be used to animate an electric razor—but I grabbed a can of spray adhesive, which could be used like pepper spray in a pinch, and handed it to Mattie.
Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free Page 1
