Troll Or Derby, A Fairy Wicked Tale

by Tash, Red

  “I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers,” I said. I knew it was risky, but I didn’t care. “I’m sick of being treated like a mushroom. You feed me shit and keep me in the dark, and I’m supposed to be happy about it? I saved your neck in there, Harlow. Start talking, or I’m going right back into the market and joining that roller derby team. I haven’t skated for a couple of days, anyway. I’m dying to get rolling.”

  He threw his hands into the air. “Fine. I give up. What do you want to know? I’m an open book.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me everything from the beginning?”

  “What do you mean ‘tell you everything’? Isn’t it enough I’m trying to protect you?”

  “From what?”

  “From this world—our world. From Dave, from Jag, for Pete’s sake. You wanna end up like Gennifer?”

  “What world? The … fairy world?” I felt stupid saying it. “And Gennifer’s not going to ‘end up’ anything! You’re supposed to help me save her!”

  “At this point, Deb, she’s going to have to get in line. You’re a loose cannon, you’ve added that miserable slave kid to the list—” He looked like he wanted to explode, his lower tusks jabbing into the air with every angry word.

  He took a deep breath, closing his eyes for just a second, and began again. “Yes. The fae realm. The world of trolls and goblins and gremlins and worse. But—I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re not like your sister. There won’t be any going back for you. You’re changing—and I should have known. Should have known you would!”

  “Going back to what? Going back to Cali?”

  He laughed. “I don’t think so, Deb.”

  It was no time for jokes, I knew, but I couldn’t stop myself from making it. And now I couldn’t help but question why. It was so hard to talk about, too hard to face, but I was going to have to try.

  “What am I, Harlow? What am I changing into? What am I becoming?”

  Chapter 22.5

  Ch-ch-ch-changes

  Harlow

  What a mess. I wished I’d never left the nice, orderly dump.

  There are so many good reasons to live in a dump. I’d tried other venues. I’d been one of the many street people of Bloomington, lived in a tent there with a gang of singers.

  There’s always the old “under the bridge” technique for home ownership, if you can find one that isn’t already inhabited by a crusty old-timer. Bridges provide a special sort of protection for trolls. They hold extra magic for us. Since our population explosion, though, something like 1% of trolls actually control all the bridges. You never know, one of these days there may be an uprising. The next time your local bridge is down, you might not want to believe the hype about bridge repairs—it could be occupied.

  I’d tried assuming ownership of a cabin in the woods once. Worst idea I ever had.

  The Coach and Zelda had emancipated me from their care about a year earlier, and I’d found my way to a one-room hunting shack in a parcel of private woods outside Bedrock, Indiana. I wasn’t far, actually, from the landfill where I’d eventually make my home. As scent-mapping goes, though, I was on the other side of the world.

  One night, I awoke to the sound of teenagers crashing through the woods. I couldn’t make out their voices at first, but I knew it was a gang of kids. It was a cold, damp November evening, and the only people stupid enough to be entertaining themselves by blindly marching through the woods at night were a bunch of drunk redneck teens with a bottle of whiskey and nothing else to do.

  “It’s up here!” someone called. Puny flashlights barely penetrated the thick layer of dirt on the windows.

  I was piled into a greasy, soggy mattress, on an ancient wood-and-rope-framed bed that looked straight out of the local historical society’s pioneer village. I was cold, and tired.

  Should I glamour myself? Or should I give them my true face and scare the crap out of them? Historically, trolls don’t fare so well when they do such things. They’re generally relocated against their will, via pitchforks and torches, if my parents’ stories were to be trusted. Only problem was, the English don’t really know how to kill a troll, once they’ve captured one, so there’s typically lots of torture, until the troll gets free and hurts people for realsies.

  Not that I had any reason to fear a bunch of kids. I could take them, easily. Did I want to, though? Was it worth it?

  Oh, I was lazy. I did put the glamour on, but only just a little bit. A middle-aged man with a shotgun and a barking dog oughtta do it.

  I imagined the sound of hungry Rottweilers, snarling and barking for a juicy steak. The trees around me shook, so quickly did the night owls and squirrels flee the vicinity. Still, the kids came closer.

  “D’you hear that dog?” a voice asked.

  “There’s no dog,” another answered.

  “Yeah, there is!” a third voice chimed.

  “If there were a dog, it would be out here barking at us in person,” the second voice responded. Male. Effeminate.

  I stepped into the threshold, my hands on my hips. Their pitiful flashlights went immediately to my face and I bellowed, “Get off my land, before I shoot ya dead!”

  Two of the kids turned tail and ran, immediately. I could smell the urine trail for a week.

  The other kid stayed.

  He looked to be about sixteen. He was tall and skinny, like a fashion model from the cover of Vogue. He wore a cream-colored sweater with a billowing cowl neck, and his hair was longish in front, short in the back—very fashionable, but not typical for rural Indiana culture. He wore skinny jeans and Doc Martens that looked like they’d never seen mud before this night.

  The worst thing he wore, though, was the smirk.

  “I see you,” he said.

  “I see you, too, you son of a bitch! Now get outta here afore I get my gun!” I growled in return.

  He erupted into peals of laughter. “What are you?” he said.

  “What do I look like, you silly trollop!” A troll never drops his glamour before the English unless he’s completely sure it’s the thing to do, and I wasn’t sure just yet. “Yer about to be one silly, dead little trollop, if’n you’re not careful,” I said.

  The bastard laughed even harder. “As if!” He shook his head. “You might as well drop the accent. I can see through your disguise, anyway. I just came here for some answers. You’ve been smelling up the county for days, and if you’re going to torment me with all that stink, you might as well be of service.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he was getting at, but I could see I wasn’t getting rid of him by asking nicely. I dropped my glamour and raged at him, full speed ahead. “You may have The Sight, child, but how about your friends? Did you bring them as an offering?”

  He quaked, for a moment, his lip trembling, as if to speak. He turned and ran almost silently.

  I heard a car start in the distance. Saw headlights, yards away, through the trees. I had just climbed back into my bed, when I heard the kid’s voice again.

  “Okay, they’re gone,” he said. I jumped. Somehow, he had entered my cabin without my noticing. Only a fairy is capable of something like that—a particularly gifted kind of fairy, under the right circumstances. Circumstances include but are not limited to: entering the new, under-scented mansa of a troll; approaching an adolescent troll before his powers are fully formed; waking up a very tired troll in the middle of the night.

  “Now, tell me what you are,” he said, calmly.

  I sat up in the bed, my turn to be frightened. As I scrambled to get my feet on the floor, he sat himself down against the opposite wall of the tiny shack. In retrospect, he didn’t seem threatening, but I was young, and so inexperienced.

  “I can see that you’re different,” he said. “I just want to know—”

  “So, you’ve got The Sight,” I said. “Big deal. You see trolls, goblins, what else? Witches? Fae?” I reached into my mojo bag and pulled out a fireblossom. I tossed it into the firepla
ce, and as its sprites lit into their flame dancing, the kid flinched—then smiled. A dazzling smile, with lots and lots of sharp, pointy teeth.

  “Oh, hell. You’re a fairy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You know—they call it ‘being gay’ nowadays, but sure, whatever.”

  “Uh …” I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Tell me more about this Sight,” he said. “What else can I do with it? Do I have other powers? I mean, I know I can smell things that others can’t, but what else?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “You’re a fairy! What are you? A changeling?” I’d heard of changelings before, but never really knew one in person—until now.

  He looked as though he were no longer breathing, and his eyes were wide as saucers. “What’s a changeling?” he said, so quietly I could barely hear.

  “Your folks, man,” I said. “They switched you with a human, I’m guessing. And two humans brought you up.” He looked stricken. “It’s actually a pretty cool thing to do,” I said. “Fairies aren’t very good parents, compared to humans.”

  And that was when he burst into tears. His beautiful sweater tore open from behind, and he gasped in what I took for surprise, and most likely pain, as enormous white wings erupted from his back. He looked at once panicked and at the same time joyous, like some country goth angel, as he knelt forward, his white, fragile fingers on the dirty floor of the shack, his wings scraping the walls of the log timbers on either side of us. He looked as though he would explode with power outward and blow the cabin apart, before soaring into the night sky, some skeletal angel, up, up, and away.

  But no. Face first into the dirt; passed out.

  I didn’t know what to do with him, so … Oh, there’s no easy way to say this. I ran. I left him there, in the dirt, before a roaring fire, on someone else’s land.

  But I was a young kid, myself—younger than him, I was sure. I followed my gut, because when everything breaks down, that’s what kids should do, right? Well, if I had kids someday that’s the advice I’d give ‘em.

  Anyway, it troubled me for months. How could someone not know he was magical, not know he was changing, and then presto, like a magic word, some child like myself could unwittingly be the catalyst for a transformation that was totally undoable.

  I never, ever learned what happened to him, and it haunts me still—but because of him, I vowed that if I ever, ever encountered another fairy in the process of changing, one who didn’t know what he/she was, I was not going to be the one to say those magic words.

  I didn’t want to see another beautiful creature in pain like that, so powerful and so vulnerable.

  Another great reason for living away from people, living in the dump. Life was so much simpler there, on my own.

  And now Deb was doing the same thing that other fairy had done. I didn’t want to see what would happen once she knew. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her. I didn’t know what to say.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Fleeing the Market

  Deb

  Harlow sighed. As long as we stood there, I couldn’t look away from the flea market building. I knew I was wasting precious getaway time throwing my tantrum there on the grounds, but I hadn’t honestly expected him to pause so long in response. A sensitive, reflective troll. Who knew such a creature existed?

  I expected him to pick me up and toss me through the drain pipe, like he’d pushed me into the fridge. Instead, he sighed again and sat down on top.

  He patted the spot next to him. “Come and sit by me,” he said. “We might have to make a break for it, and I want you near the portal, okay?”

  Next to him, I was small, but I knew I could bridge that size differential at any time, now. Our bodies were inches apart. I felt I could lean into him, fall into his arms, and be safer than I’d ever been in my life. I was equally sure I didn’t want him to know that. He was not, so to speak, my type.

  “Answers,” I said.

  “You’re changing,” he said. “Before, you were part fairy, part human. You smelled human, you looked human—you could have lived a human life for the rest of your days.”

  “What? So, I’m some kind of half-breed?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s not an issue of DNA, Deb—it’s magic. You’d be surprised how many descendants of fairies and trolls in our neck of the woods don’t even know about their background. As long as they live in peace and no one draws them out, they might even go to their graves thinking they’re no different than their human neighbors. Maybe, you know, they think they have a little ESP, or especially vivid dreams, or they’re just really good with their hands or something … but not you. You’re one of the unlucky ones, kid. You’ve got a destiny, and it’s coming true, no matter how hard I fight it.”

  Sounded kind of bullshitty to me. “What destiny? Why would you fight it? And what is this connection between us, anyway? I mean, I take it we are kind of … bonded or something, but what does that mean? Are we married? Why me? Why did you save me? Why don’t you want me to skate?”

  He laughed, taking his eyes off the flea market for a moment to look into mine. Such sadness there. “I do want you to skate, Deb—just not for McJagger. He eats the losers of his ‘matches.’ He uses the game to draw in humans to feed his court, Deb. Then, there are the drugs. If you do survive the games—which, I’m sure you would, if you’re what I think you are—the temptation to start faeth is way too strong.”

  “Drugs? He’s Dave’s supplier?” And what was he going to do with Gennifer? I was still terrified at the thought.

  “Most definitely,” Harlow said. “He supplies his own brand of methamphetamine to most of the Midwest. You could say he’s something of a crossover hit—he deals to both humans and the fae. And adds his own special ingredients.”

  “Ingredients?”

  “Fairy drugs. Effs up humans pretty badly, and it’s way more addictive than the crank recipe the English use.”

  “English?”

  “You know,” he said. “Humans.”

  “But that’s what the Amish call the non-Amish.”

  He smiled.

  “Never mind,” I said. “You’ll have to explain that to me later. Right now, I want to know more about Gennifer and me. Is she part fairy, as well? And when you say ‘fairy,’ does that also mean ‘troll’? I’m a little confused.”

  “Damn!” he yelled, smacking his face, as if squashing a mosquito. The pixies were back, and this time, they were angry.

  He shoved me off the drain pipe, and I crawled down into it as fast as I could. Harlow climbed in behind me, and I could hear him scratching on the aluminum.

  “Out! Out! I’ll smash you like a bug!”

  A rush of fog and the feeling of riding a roller coaster straight down, and then we were tumbling out of the old refrigerator, at the dump. I fell on my knees in the dirty soil, and Harlow came jumping out after me.

  “Fudge,” he said. “That was rough.”

  I sat back on my knees and laughed. “Fudge?”

  He tried to keep a straight face. “What?” he said, shrugging.

  “You sound like Ralphie in A Christmas Story,” I said. “Oh … Fudge …”

  That was it. We both lost it. I felt the giggles roll up through my body, and Harlow doubled over in laughter.

  “You—you—” I fought through a fit of laughter to speak. “You—were—swinging at—Tinkerbell!?” I lost it. I thought for a minute I would wet my pants, I was laughing so hard.

  We were probably so stressed out that it seemed way funnier than it actually was, but … naw, it WAS pretty funny.

  Okay, maybe you had to be there.

  “I’m going to die,” he said. He held his hand up, his palm toward me. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.”

  And then I heard it. The buzzing inside the fridge door, and the tiny tapping of miniature fists. I knew I should be serious—this was a big deal—but I lost it again.

  I fought through the l
aughter to ask, “Is it possible?” and I lost it again. He rolled on the ground, beside me, and I began to wonder if this weren’t some kind of magic, the way the laughter was so impossible to overcome.

  He looked at me through squinted, watering eyes, and I tried to point at the fridge, my stomach aching from the muscle spasms. My cheeks hurt from smiling, but I pressed through it best I could. “Could some of those pixies be in there?” As soon as I’d said it, I was overcome again.

  And then, a reprieve. As long as I didn’t look at him, I could sit up, look around, even start to catch my breath. I seriously needed to pee.

  “More than possible we were followed,” he said. “Highly probable. There’s only so much I could do with my bare hands.” I kept staring at my feet.

  He stomped off into the mansa, and came back out with a newspaper and a fly swatter. I lost it again.

  “Deb! Deb! C’mon!”

  I tried to keep a straight face when he handed me the rolled up the paper. “We’re going to—” I busted again. The giggles rolled through me like a fresh wave. “We’re going to swat them like flies?”

  He smiled, and nodded. He stuck out his index finger and twirled his flyswatter on it. “You ready?” he asked. When he smiled, his tusks glinted in the sunlight. Dazzling.

  I nodded, trying like hell to be serious. Killing pixies was no laughing matter.

  Harlow flicked open the fridge door, and the pixies streamed out.

  “I thought there’d only be a few!” I said, swinging at them with my newspaper. One flew into my mouth, and nearly choked me. I spit her out and stomped on her. Something inside me died a little.

  They were chanting, and it sounded like a “tick-tick-tock” noise. We will … we will … rock you, it sounded like, to me. One got in my face, pointing her tiny fist at my nose and shaking with anger. Harlow’s swatter whapped me right between the eyes, and her golden dust turned to goo. I wiped it off with my sleeve and kept going. The meaner those little fuckers got, the less sad I felt about it.