Then there were the street fae—or the Free Folk, as they preferred to be called. The Free Folk were not part of any kingdom, swore allegiance to no faerie court, and made their own hard living in the very hearts of the most populated cities and towns. They scavenged for food and supplies from the land around them, living in the nooks and crannies of attics or the rafters of abandoned factories and repurposing human trash for their own treasure.
Free Folk like Remus and Ravene didn’t seem to care that Grit had only one wing. All of the street fae were outcasts, without court or kingdom, and any fae who could fend for themselves—in whatever way suited them best—were welcome to join them.
Ravene, Remus, and Grit rode on squirrelback through the streets of Skemantis, dodging the occasional human on his way home and teasing stray dogs too slow to catch them. But as Grit rode alongside her friends, she couldn’t help but notice they were quieter than usual. Remus’s brow was furrowed, and he checked over his shoulder so often it made Grit nervous. Had the street faeries felt the gaze of those glowing orange eyes as well?
Ravene stopped abruptly at a drainage grate in the street subtly engraved with a snake-haired woman. Her steel eyes opened at their approach, wide and gray and unseeing. Ravene flew off her squirrel’s back and tapped his rump, sending him off into the night; the animals could come no farther.
Apparently, they were going to the Green Goddess, a popular street faerie pub in the tunnels underneath a brewery. Grit was surprised. They hardly ever took her to the Green Goddess; it was where the Free Folk came to discuss serious business, and it was not uncommon for the occasional brawl to break out before the evening was over. The owner, the ancient and cross-eyed Abby Absinthe, never seemed to buy the story that Grit was Ravene’s cousin visiting from the border towns.
“Let’s go, Princess,” teased Remus, spreading his arms wide.
Ravene rolled her eyes as he lifted Grit off of her squirrel and into his arms with ease. “Why not just shout her name from the rooftops?” Ravene asked flatly, fluttering over the grate. Her wings moved faster and faster, like a purple and black hummingbird, until a fine cloud of golden dust rose into the air around her. Ravene slowed her wings and shook them over the grate, spilling more of the shining powder down into the hole. Only faerie dust was accepted as proof of identity to enter the Green Goddess—something Grit could never produce on her own, since she couldn’t fly.
A melodic three-tone whistle rose up from the darkness below and Ravene answered it with one of her own. Then she and Remus, Grit in his arms, began their flight down into the tunnel. They all switched their lights on, the soft golden glow from their bodies just enough to see by. Their tiny feet were still far from the damp floor when a hiss came out of the darkness.
“Foolish little faeries, with their lights on so bright,” a deep whisper scolded.
Grit looked down and saw the floor wasn’t just damp, as usual, but totally submerged in water. It lapped at the tunnel walls, inky black in the moonlight. The fire faerie that usually greeted them was nowhere to be seen.
Ravene and Remus slowed their descent.
“Just announcing our presence, friend,” said Remus lightly, though he dropped his voice as well. “How about you do us a courtesy and do the same?”
The deep voice chuckled—a sickly, wet sound like a mucus-choked cough. Grit gripped Remus a little tighter. The black water danced under their feet, little waves jumping up to lick their boots.
“Oh, I think I’ll stick to the shadows, mon ami, as should you. They’re a much safer place to be in times such as these.”
Ravene and Remus shared another look, and Grit suddenly wished for nothing more than to be on solid ground again. What could possibly be so threatening that the Free Folk had such an unscrupulous Unseelie fae guarding their local meeting place?
Grit’s friends shut off their lights, but she stayed aglow, still wary, and sat up as straight as she could in Remus’s arms. “Says who?” she demanded, not bothering to whisper.
Tendrils of black water snapped up quicker than lightning, lashing at their ankles, but Remus and Ravene darted out of the way just in time. The water churned and rose higher, frothing and angry.
“Says I,” croaked a gravelly voice behind them.
It was ancient Abby Absinthe, one of the toughest and oldest of the Free Folk in Skemantis. With scraggly gray-green hair, withering wings, and skin as leathery as a tanned rat hide, Abby was just about the ugliest faerie Grit had ever seen. Her faded blue dress hung loose on her frame; it was covered with spiderwebs (and the occasional spider) and was tattered and brown at the hem. Abby’s eyes were cloudy and crossed, but she hovered just inches over the water without a hint of fear.
The tip of Abby’s dandelion walking stick lit up with a dull greenish glow. She slammed the stem into the water, sending the waves rearing back. The kelpie let out a sound that was both a neigh and a scream, the waves sloshing and roiling until the vague shape of a horse’s head emerged at the far end of the tunnel. The kelpie’s dark eyes narrowed and he let out a sulky whinny, tossing his mossy black mane.
At another fierce look from Abby, Grit extinguished her light without question. Only the faint glow of Abby’s staff kept them from total darkness.
“Abby, ma chérie, what’s with all the fuss?” the water horse complained. “I was only . . . horsing around!”
His crackling chuckle was the only sound in the tunnel.
“Mind your methods, kelpie,” rasped Abby. She raised her staff again in warning, and the horse head shied away.
“Ah, you run a tight ship, old Abby Absinthe, ” said the kelpie, “but you should be glad of the extra security! Especially on a night like tonight!”
“Why a night like tonight?” prodded Grit. “What’s going on here?”
“A very good question, little lone-wing,” said the kelpie, beady eyes flashing. “And one I hope we learn the answer to soon enough. But I know when I’m not needed. So alas, back to the shadows I go. Au revoir, little faeries . . .”
The horse’s head shrank, becoming more and more indistinct as the waves retreated, until there was nothing left but a shallow stream of murky water winding its way along the grimy floor. Remus, Ravene, and Grit gave it a wide berth as they landed.
No one spoke until the last trickle wound around the bend and out of sight, though they knew the kelpie wouldn’t be far.
“I need a drink,” Ravene said finally, shaking a few water droplets off her wings. “Preferably one that doesn’t try to drown me.”
Abby nodded. Everyone seemed to agree that she was blind, but the old bat could still mix potions like nobody’s business. Abby beckoned them forward and they followed her along the tunnel in silence. Grit was bursting with questions, but the elderly faerie placed a finger to her lips and shook her head.
Around the next corner, the usually lively bar held a grim scene. Despite the excitement at the entrance, Grit had expected the normal evening crowd—street faeries swapping forage stories or dancing to the beat of the wooden tumbler drums in the corner, sipping Abby’s hair-curling concoctions all the while. Any occasion, however small, was usually cause enough for a party, and the faeries would sing and dance long into the night.
Yet what awaited them was not a celebration, but a tragedy.
A water faerie lay on the long middle table, half-conscious and shivering. Her seaweed hair was knotted and torn, bits of it ripped out at the roots. She was filthy, as if she’d been dragged through an oil slick, and her breathing was labored. A small crowd of street faeries were gathered around her, conversing in low voices.
“Her sister?” Ravene asked shakily. She did not look surprised to see the injured faerie.
“It came for the both of them,” growled old Abby. “She’s the first to get away.”
The first to get away? thought Grit. From what?
“Far’s we know,” Abby continued, “the other one wasn’t so lucky.”
The crowd parted to
let Abby through, some greeting Ravene and Remus with supportive embraces. They regarded Grit suspiciously, and she couldn’t blame them. She had no idea what kind of mess she’d gotten herself into, or what mysterious ill had befallen the poor faerie on the table.
“What’s going on?” Grit asked. “What’s happened to her?”
No one answered. Then the crowd backed away and Grit saw the full extent of the damage.
The water faerie’s right wing was torn nearly to shreds. Someone—or something—had snatched at it viciously, piercing the upper membrane. The faerie’s panicked struggles to free herself may have saved her life in the short term, but the resulting tears in her wing had likely done even more damage than the initial blow. Thin branches of cartilage were snapped clear through in several places. To Grit, who had studied wing anatomy religiously in hopes of understanding her own, it was clear that even faerie magic could not salvage what was left of the wing.
“We thought you’d know what to do,” said Ravene quietly.
Grit felt hot tears forming behind her eyes and angrily blinked them away. “Why?” she demanded. “Because I was born this way, so I should know everything about living without a wing? Or maybe you thought some royal faerie magic could save your friend. Well, I’ve got news for you. I don’t know everything, and I haven’t got any special magic!”
A stunned silence followed. Some of the Free Folk backed away, nudging each other and whispering. Grit glared at them.
The faerie on the table let out a long, keening cry that echoed eerily throughout the tunnel. Her breath came in short gasps, the ruined mess of her wing fluttering weakly.
Grit pushed Ravene and Remus out of the way and leaned closer to the wounded faerie, gently wiping her forehead with a wet sponge from beside the table.
“Shh, it’s all right,” Grit said softly. She looked into the faerie’s pained eyes. “What’s your name?”
Remus opened his mouth to answer, but Grit held up a hand to silence him. It would be better to keep the water faerie distracted while Grit examined her wing. The injured faerie whimpered and her eyes fluttered closed.
Grit gripped both sides of her face, forcing her to look up. “I need you to listen to me, sweet pea. Can you do that?”
A weak nod.
“Good. My name is Grit, and I’m going to help you.” Grit ran her fingers gently over the base of the faerie’s wing. It didn’t look good. “What can I call you?”
“Echo . . .” mumbled the water faerie. “Name’s . . . Echolaken.”
“Nice to meet you, Echolaken,” said Grit. She’d seen enough. Stroking Echo’s hair with one hand, Grit turned to Abby. “Can you give her something for the pain?”
The old faerie nodded, detached one of the many pouches and vials tied around her belt, and popped the cork with her teeth. She poured a cloudy powder into her palms, motioned for Grit to stand back, and blew the powder over Echo’s face. Almost instantly, the water faerie ceased shaking and fell into a deep but troubled sleep.
Abby rinsed her hands from a leaky pipe behind the bar.
Grit waited for her to return before breaking the rest of the news. “You’ll have to cut it off,” said Grit flatly, loud enough for some of the other faeries to hear. They gasped.
“As I thought,” replied Abby, hardly batting an eye.
“She’s . . .” Grit took a shaky breath. “She’s expending too much energy trying to heal herself, but the top membrane is all but severed at the shoulder.”
“There’s got to be another way!” protested a fire faerie. Several others murmured in agreement.
“She’ll never fly again. The stress on her body is too much. If you don’t get it over with and patch her up soon, she’ll die.”
Grit was surprised at the coldness in her own voice, the detached way she could speak of another faerie’s life or death. She was disappointed, though not surprised, at the awkward silence that followed her proclamation. The unspoken sentiment was clear: better off dead than unable to fly. She saw the thought on each face, replaced quickly by embarrassment.
“The girl is right,” Abby addressed the crowd, all traces of her usual addled air gone. “Pippalit,” she said to another fire faerie, “cauterize the wound once we’ve finished. Remus, you’ll need to hold her steady. This isn’t going to be pretty. Grit—”
But Grit was gone.
She ran blindly through the tunnels, unsure if she was running up or down, left or right. She was too distracted to care and unwilling to let herself feel anything more than her hair whipping at her face. Grit was thirteen summers old, and she’d seen more horrible things in one night than in her entire life.
Bressel had been right. She shouldn’t have gone with the street fae—not tonight, not when the lanterns were dark and the whole world was going mad.
A few minutes passed before Grit slowed down, breathing hard and blinking back tears. It was only then she heard the footsteps following her.
The soft pitter-patter stopped when Grit stopped, but not fast enough. Faeries have keen ears, and the tunnels amplified even the smallest drip of water. She started walking again, slower this time, fighting every instinct to turn around, and was unsurprised by the soft shuffling that moved with her.
Grit drew her hatpin sword in a flash and whipped around, but there was nothing there except darkness.
“Hello?”
Hello-ello-ello-lo-lo-lo, the words echoed back to her out of the gloom.
“If that’s you, kelpie,” Grit warned, “just know that I’m a very good swimmer.”
But no gurgling laugh or richly accented taunt responded.
Grit brandished her sword. “I know you’re there,” she said, taking a step toward the last corner she’d rounded. “So you might as well tell me . . .”
Another few steps . . .
“Why exactly it is . . .”
Almost there . . .
“That you’re following me!”
She ran the last few steps around the corner and caught a glimpse of small running feet clattering against the stone floor, just before they slipped away into another sprawling tunnel.
The hunter became the hunted. Grit took off in hot pursuit, following the click-clacking of the feet—was that the sound of wooden shoes?—through the winding tunnels, but her quarry remained infuriatingly out of sight. Small feet they may have been, but they were bigger than Grit’s by a considerable margin, and they outpaced her easily.
Grit needed more light, but she didn’t have the time to stop and concentrate on a proper spell—not to mention that she was surrounded by water—so she had no hope of conjuring a flame. She snapped her fingers as she ran instead, sending little clusters of bright sparks shooting out of her fingertips and toward the running figure. In the brief flashes of light she saw it was shaped like a human, curiously small but distinctly not childlike. It moved with the jerky motion of the metal machines the humans sometimes paraded down their streets, but Grit couldn’t detect a whiff of iron. Was the creature actually made of wood?
“Stop!” Grit yelled. “I just want to talk to you!”And possibly chop you up for kindling, if it comes to that, Grit thought, but kept that part to herself.
It was no use. The thing was much too fast and getting farther away by the second, and Grit was forced to stop running when she stumbled into a puddle of muck that nearly covered her knees. She doubled over, gasping for air. The sludge only grew deeper as she stepped forward, and she could hardly remember the way she’d come. She couldn’t hear even an echo of the running feet.
Grit thought of the kelpie’s control over the water in the tunnels, and small seeds of panic settled in her stomach. She was just about to turn back when a light illuminated the corridor.
Ravene hovered in the passageway behind Grit, a cloud of faerie dust in her wake. She too was out of breath.
“I thought I’d lost you,” Ravene said, wiping strands of hair from her eyes. “You run almost as fast as I can fly, Grit.”
&
nbsp; “Did you see it?!” demanded Grit.
Ravene’s head whipped around. “See what?”
“There was something in the tunnel with me,” said Grit. At Ravene’s alarmed look, she added, “It didn’t attack me or anything! But I couldn’t get a good look at it.”
The pounding of Grit’s heart was starting to slow, replaced swiftly by exhaustion. She felt like sinking down into the mud and never getting up.
“You need to be careful down here, Grit,” said Ravene. “Now more than ever. Now come out of there before some snake decides he has a taste for faeries.”
Grit sloshed out of the mud toward Ravene’s light. Furious as she was, the dark-haired faerie was her only way home.
“What did that to Echolaken?” asked Grit. “What isn’t everyone telling me?”
Ravene sighed and lowered herself onto a pile of loose bricks against the tunnel wall. Grit clambered up to join her.
“Free Folk have been going missing, Grit,” confessed Ravene. “It’s been happening for a few months now. At first, we didn’t notice anything out of order. The Free Folk move around a lot. It’s not unusual to see a traveler in the tunnels one day and hear they’ve flown on to bluer skies the next. But more and more of us started to disappear in the night, without warning. We were just about to appeal to your mother for help—”
Grit raised her eyebrows. The Free Folk and the Fair Folk did not mix. This was an unspoken rule of their coexistence. Grit couldn’t remember a time when the Free Folk had ever approached a royal court, Seelie or Unseelie.
“When we heard reports that she’d summoned in all the lamplighters, we knew the Wingsnatchers had come to you, too.”
“The Wingsnatchers?”
“It’s what we started calling them.” Ravene shrugged. “It seemed to fit.”
“But Echolaken got away. From these Wingsnatchers.”
Ravene nodded. “We think so. That’s all the fae who found her were able to understand before she went unconscious. That, and that whatever attacked her took her sister, too. It’s made everyone paranoid.”
The Wingsnatchers Page 3
