Wings

by E. D. Baker

  WiNGS

  A FAIRY TALE

  E. D. BAKER

  Content

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART THREE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  E. D. BAKER

  Books By E. D. Baker

  Imprint

  This book is dedicated to Ellie for being my sounding board and

  my first reader through all the versions I’ve written over the last

  three years, to Victoria for believing in me and for her clarity of

  vision, and to Kim and Andy for helping around the house

  while my mind was in another world.

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Tamisin Warner first saw real goblins the Halloween she was eleven. She had gone trick-or-treating with her mother, her little brother, Petey, and her best friend, Heather. The evening had begun ordinarily enough, but it didn’t stay that way for long.

  “I can’t believe my mother made me wear this stupid costume,” Heather had complained as one of her paper leaves fluttered to the ground. After rearranging the trash bag so her neck was centered in the hole, she frowned and tried to smooth another loose leaf. “Who ever heard of dressing up as Autumn for Halloween? I wish I had a costume like yours. I’ve never seen such a pretty fairy princess costume before.”

  Tamisin glanced down at the blue petal dress her mother had helped her make. Even with all the sewing, the dress had taken less time than the silvery wings, which drooped no matter what Tamisin did with pins and duct tape. “Thanks. I tried to make it look real.”

  The girls started toward the next house while Petey and his mother trailed behind. “It’s getting dark,” said Heather, hitching up one side of her trash bag to reach into her jacket pocket. Pulling out a slim flashlight, she aimed the beam at the porch, letting the light rest on the carved pumpkins and bundled cornstalks by the door.

  “We can’t go there,” said Tamisin, aiming her own flashlight at the front of the house. “They don’t have their lights on. It looks like nobody’s home.”

  “I’ll race you to the blue house then!” Heather announced as she took off down the street.

  Tamisin was following her friend when something moved in the beam of her flashlight. She paused in the front yard of the empty house, letting the light play across the space between the two houses. There it was—a small figure no bigger than Petey emptying a trash can onto the lawn. When it laughed, it sounded like a child, but its body was more like an animal’s with a hunched back, a long, puffy tail, and legs that bent the wrong way. The creature was laughing when it reached into the garbage and flung banana peels and eggshells over its shoulder. It was laughing when it climbed into the trash can and rolled across the yard until it banged into a tree. It was still laughing when it crawled out of the can shedding coffee grounds and scraps of greasy paper towels. But when it stood up and turned around only to have Tamisin’s light fall full on its masked face, the little creature shrieked like a siren and flung its furred hands into the air, its mouth wide open in surprise.

  And then it was gone, leaving Tamisin unable to believe what she had seen.

  “Are you coming or what?” Heather called from the front steps of the blue house.

  “Did you see … No, I guess you wouldn’t … Yeah, I’ll be right there,” Tamisin answered, torn between going after the little creature to see if it was real and joining her friend.

  They visited a few more houses before meeting up with Tamisin’s mother and Petey across from the school. While her mother tried to persuade Petey to wait to eat his candy, Tamisin watched the passing trick-or-treaters. Children dressed as superheros, pirates, and ghosts ran from house to house, leaving their parents standing on the sidewalk. She heard her older brother Kyle’s voice when he ran by with two of his friends, but he pretended that he didn’t know her. All three of the boys were dressed as aliens with rubbery masks and blue coveralls. A child dressed as a fire hydrant and another dressed as a candy bar hurried past with a little girl in a pink dress following only a few feet behind. Tamisin caught a glimpse of her face, which looked much older than her size suggested. Even stranger were her little twitchy nose and mouselike ears.

  “Did you see the girl with the mouse nose?” Tamisin whispered to Heather. “Did you see the way it moved? It had to be real!”

  Heather laughed. “You’re so funny, Tamisin!”

  Tamisin sighed. She should have known not to try to tell Heather what she had seen. Heather had been her best friend since kindergarten. She was someone Tamisin could tell the really important things to, like when she got a bad grade on a test or how she felt about having a baby brother, but there were certain things Heather didn’t understand.

  A group of children passed them on the sidewalk. Tamisin and Heather hurried after them, while Petey and her mother tried to keep up. One of the boys in the group was dressed as a cowboy with a ten-gallon hat and boots that looked two sizes too big. He was clomping along, talking excitedly with his friends, when an impossibly long arm reached out from under a car and tripped him. His friends immediately gathered around, teasing him about his oversized shoes. No one except Tamisin seemed to have noticed the arm and the six-fingered hand that grabbed some of the candy that had spilled from the boy’s plastic pumpkin when he dropped it. Only Tamisin seemed to hear a deep voice laughing under the car as the boy scowled and got back on his feet.

  “Watch your step, kids,” said Tamisin’s mother. “The sidewalk is uneven.”

  Tamisin was wary now; creatures that no one else could see were playing pranks on people. If she hadn’t seen the arm trip the boy, she might think that she’d imagined it, but it had suddenly become more real. Although she’d been trick-or-treating on Halloween for as long as she could remember, she’d never seen anything like this before.

  With Heather at her side, Tamisin climbed the steps to the next house. Neither the smiling face of the woman at the door nor the piece of candy dropped in Tamisin’s bag made any impression on her. There were things in the dark, things that she’d never seen before, except … maybe she had. The creature with the legs that bent the wrong way, the long skinny arm that looked more like a hose than the limb of a body … Both reminded her of creatures she’d seen in a nightmare—the nightmare—the one she’d had for as long as she could remember. It was enough to wake her up at night. It was enough to make her afraid to step off the porch.

  She was about to tell Heather that she wanted to go home when Petey shrieked and began to cry. Tamisin felt safer inside the crowd, but if her little brother needed her … Moving against the current of children, the girls found Petey seated on the ground, his chubby legs splayed out in front of him. He was hiccupping around the two fingers crammed in his mouth, his face tear-streaked and flushed. Their mother was kneeling beside him, inspecting his bloodied knee. Glancing up at the girls, she said, “He’ll be fine. He tripped on the sidewalk. I knew it was uneven, but he insisted on walking.”

  Alarmed, Tamisin looked up in time to see something shiny glint in the shrubs, then suddenly disappear. The sound of voices made her turn.
A group of children stood under the street lamp on the opposite corner. She would have given them no more than a quick glance if she hadn’t been struck by the costume that the tallest child was wearing. He looked like a lion with a furry ruff around his head and what looked like fur on his face, but after a moment’s study, she began to wonder if it was a costume at all. And as for the rest of the children—the longer she looked, the less they looked like children. One had droopy ears that dangled below his collar. The boy standing beside him had small rounded ears on top of his head. A third had teeth that curled over her lower lip when she closed her mouth. There were others with too many joints in their arms or a sheen to their skins that made Tamisin think of scales.

  A skinny almost-boy with a pointed face and dark, tiny eyes like a rodent seemed to be in charge. His movements were quick and furtive as he took eggs and rolls of toilet paper from an enormous sack and passed them to the others. When those ran out, he gave them buckets into which he poured liquid, gloppy mud.

  Heather had crouched down beside Petey and was trying to distract him with the candy in her bag. “What are you looking at?” she asked when Tamisin didn’t join her.

  “Nothing,” said Tamisin, not wanting to be laughed at again.

  The rodent boy looked up at the sound of her voice. His eyes met Tamisin’s in an unblinking gaze that made her heart start to pound and her mouth go dry. Turning his head to the side, the rodent boy said something to his friends. In an instant they all stopped what they were doing to stare at Tamisin. They didn’t look at her the way ordinary children did, as if seeing what she looked like or what she was wearing; they looked at her the way a cat might a mouse or a fox a hen in an appraising, “I’m hungry” sort of way. If she’d been frightened before, Tamisin was terrified now.

  While her mother fussed over Petey, Tamisin backed away one slow step at a time. The eyes of the not-quite-children stayed on her even when Petey whined and fretted. “Run!” her mind shouted, yet she couldn’t just abandon her family. As she moved farther away and the strange children didn’t look at anyone but her, Tamisin realized that her family wasn’t in danger. She was.

  Tamisin ran, clutching her bag to her chest where her fist could feel her heart racing. She heard her mother calling to her, but the creatures were so close that she didn’t dare stop. Over the tap-tap-tap of her shoes on the sidewalk, she heard the slap of bare feet, and a thud-thud, thud-thud that might have been hooves. She had a painful stitch in her side when she slowed to glance behind her. Her pursuers were spread across the street, some loping on all fours, others scurrying on two, but none of them running quite the way humans do. When she saw a girl’s fangs glistening in the glow of a streetlight, Tamisin ran faster, barely clearing the back bumper of a passing car.

  Too frightened to think, she ran past the library, a store, a gas station, and a small park with a playground, and still she could hear them behind her. Then they began to call out, sounding like wild animals, cackling and hooting, growling and bellowing. She couldn’t stop now. If she did, she knew that something horrible would happen.

  The wind began to blow, slowing her down and whipping twigs and leaves at her and her pursuers. It had grown late; most of the trick-or-treaters had gone home. And still Tamisin ran with aching legs and lungs that felt as if they were on fire. When she stumbled on a curb and fell to her knees, her pursuers howled with delight. Then suddenly, out of the clear night sky, a bolt of lightning struck a tree behind her while thunder shook the ground. The tree burst into flames and Tamisin clapped her hands to her ears, only vaguely realizing that she’d dropped her bag somewhere along the road. In the light of the fire she could see her hunters; they were so close that she was sure they could have caught her if they’d wanted to.

  It occurred to Tamisin that they were toying with her. Rather than frightening her even more, the knowledge made her angry. She ignored the sting of her scraped knees as she turned to face them. They gabbled and snickered at her, padding closer on their inhuman feet. The closest ones were almost near enough to touch her when another bolt of lightning hit the street in their midst, and the air boomed with thunder. Temporarily deafened, she could no longer hear them, but she saw the look of terror in their eyes as they scattered, fleeing back the way they had come.

  Wishing that the odd, rainless storm would go away, Tamisin waited for the next bolt of lightning to strike. When it didn’t, she ran down the cross street, not wanting to see if the almost-children would come looking for her again. Finally, exhausted and footsore, she was relieved to see a familiar street sign. As she turned down the street and began the long trudge home, Tamisin vowed never to go trick-or-treating again.

  Chapter 2

  Four years later…

  Tamisin swiped her tongue over her teeth as she lowered the rearview mirror. She hated visiting the dentist’s office, but she had to admit that her teeth felt and looked a lot cleaner. Turning away from the mirror, she glanced out the window of her mother’s minivan while she thought about her upcoming audition. Normally she would have used an afternoon dentist appointment as an excuse to skip school for the rest of the day, but the auditions for the school dance group were slated to start right after the last class period and she definitely did not want to miss them. The group was hard to get into and …

  Her mother slammed on the brakes, narrowly missing a large animal that had darted across the street and into the hedge on the other side. “Did you see that?” Janice Warner asked, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel. “That dog came out of nowhere. I don’t understand people who let their pets run loose. I could have killed it!”

  Tamisin’s heart was racing as she studied the still rustling shrubs. She had seen enough of the creature before it disappeared to know that it hadn’t been a dog. True, it had been running on all fours, but its face was human, or nearly so, and it had been wearing brown pants and a baggy shirt. As her mother stepped on the gas pedal, the face reappeared framed in the leaves of the hedge and watched the car as it moved off. The slightly bulbous nose and close-set eyes looked human, although the long, flopping ears would have looked more appropriate on a cocker spaniel. Another face appeared beside it, smaller than the first, with curly white fur covering its human cheeks and chin. It too was watching the passing cars and was turning toward her when Tamisin forced herself to look away. They were the same kinds of creatures she’d seen before, only this time she knew better than to let them know it.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” her mother said as they waited at a stoplight. “You’re being awfully quiet. If you’re worried about your audition, you shouldn’t be. I’m sure you’ll do just great. You’re a wonderful dancer.”

  “Hmm? Oh, sorry,” said Tamisin. “I’m not worried.”

  At least not about the audition, she thought. Four years before, the creatures had chased her down this very same street. She hadn’t seen them since then. If they were back, why now and why had they been gone for so long? All the fear of that long-ago night had come back, leaving her unable to think about anything else.

  At the dance audition, as she stood in line waiting for her turn, she hardly noticed the girls around her chattering about the butterflies in their stomachs and how much they wanted to get in the group. Tamisin took deep, even breaths, hoping to slow the racing of her heart. Her nervousness had nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with what she might see once she walked out the school door. Why were they back now?

  At least Heather was with her, more to support Tamisin than because she really wanted to dance. The audition wasn’t very long; each girl would get only a few minutes to show what she could do. Even so, the line seemed to be taking forever to move. Then it was Tamisin’s turn to go into the room and stand in front of Miss Rigby and the senior members of the dance group. Once the music she had selected began to play, Tamisin forgot all about the creatures and what she would do if she saw them again, letting her desire to dance take over.

  Although T
amisin had never taken any formal lessons, she had always enjoyed dancing. Years earlier her family had gone camping in a state park not far from their home. She had been asleep in the tent with her parents and brothers when she woke to the sound of music. Whatever was creating it didn’t sound like anything she had heard before, but it was enough to make her wriggle out of her sleeping bag and crawl out of the tent.

  The music drew her to the lake, where the silvered reflection of the moon rippled on the surface. Shivering in the crisp night air of autumn, she stood at the edge of the lake with the cold water lapping at her bare toes. The music was soft and sweet with a hypnotic quality that made her take one tentative step, then another. Before she knew it she was dancing, her feet keeping time to the melody, her arms swaying, reaching to the perfect circle of the moon overhead. She twirled, so light on her feet that she felt as if she were floating, the music carrying her in ever more intricate steps.

  And then they came, a few at first, bright sparks that darted around her in an imitation of her dance. Anyone else might have thought they were fireflies, but she saw their tiny faces, dresses the colors of flowers, wings so bright that they hurt her eyes, and arms that gestured just as hers were doing.

  The music grew louder, carrying Tamisin with it, filling her ears and her mind and leaving no room for questions. She danced with the moonlight shining on her face as the little creatures gathered around her, dancing as she danced, moving as she moved. Some broke away long enough to brush her cheeks with their feather-light wings and touch her nightgown as if she, and not they, were something special and worthy of awe. Entranced, Tamisin would have danced all night if a beam of light hadn’t swept across the campground to center on her. As the light touched her face, the music faded and the sparks of light fled into the night, leaving Tamisin alone and shivering.

  “There she is,” announced her big brother, Kyle. “Dad, Tam is being weird.”