by Ruth Vincent
“No, that’s not it at all.”
She was silent, biting her lip, and suddenly she looked almost as if she would cry. She turned away from me, towards the window.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, extending my hand across the table and placing it gently on her arm.
When she looked back up at me, I could see in her eyes that there was a lot she hadn’t told me. Eva was always so transparent, so willing and ready to share. I’d never seen this secretive part of her before, and it frightened me. I’d glibly assumed, since we were such good friends, and roommates for goodness’ sake, that she told me everything. And I could see plainly in her eyes that assumption had been wrong.
“What is it?” I asked.
She pressed her hands to her face. When she slowly lowered her fingers from her eyes, she opened her mouth, and then closed it, a few times in quick succession, as if she wasn’t sure how to begin.
“Mab,” she started uncertainly. “I didn’t tell you everything about Cory. I mean, I may have left out the most essential thing.”
I waited breathlessly for her to tell me more.
She had turned her face back towards the window. A pigeon was strutting up and down on the fire escape, head bobbing, making a trilling coo; for a moment I wondered if it was one of Obadiah’s messenger pigeons, but I didn’t see any tag on its leg.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Eva muttered, turning back to me.
“Have I ever thought you were crazy?” I said, and she must have heard the sincerity in my voice, because her face relaxed.
“When we were talking in the lab,” she began, “and I told you about the crazy results of our experiments, how the lab rats levitated, you believed me then. So maybe you’ll believe this . . .”
“It’s not about belief,” I said. “It’s just the facts. As unbelievable as it may seem to people, that’s what happened. You know it, I know it. So I’m not believing; I’m just accepting what’s true,” I said.
“And you accept that I really was flying that night over Obadiah’s club, that it wasn’t just a hallucination.”
I nodded. “I do, because I saw it.”
Eva pressed her fingers together tightly, as if summoning up the courage for what she was about to say.
“So you understand that there’s more going on in the world than meets the eye.”
“Where are you going with this?” I asked.
“Something happened in my group,” Eva said. “It started about eight months ago. I didn’t say anything to you because I didn’t know how to explain it. And I was afraid you’d think I was crazy.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but she went on. “When I tell you, you’ll understand why I didn’t mention it before. It wasn’t just that I was afraid you’d think I was nuts. I thought I was nuts. That’s why I didn’t say anything. If there hadn’t been so many other witnesses there that night, I would have thought it was all a dream. It’s that unbelievable. But as you say, when you see something with your own eyes, it’s not about belief anymore, just accepting what’s there.”
“Go on,” I said, my voice so quiet as to be almost inaudible. I was afraid of what she was going to tell me next.
“May I see your phone again?” she asked. “May I see the pictures of the other four guys Quinn sent you?”
I handed my phone to her and she scrolled through them. Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes growing wider and wider.
“Eva, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I knew it,” she whispered. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it. And there’s the proof.”
“Eva, what’s going on?”
She turned to me, her face grave.
“Mab,” she began, fear in her eyes, “what if I told you that all five of these guys were the same guy?”
Chapter 4
“Wait, what?”
I grabbed the phone back from Eva and scrolled through the five photos again. They couldn’t all be the same guy. They were totally different people. The only thing they had in common was that they were all conventionally attractive. But it wasn’t just that one was blond, one was dark haired, one’s eyes were blue and the other’s brown. The structures of their faces were different. There was no way, even with the best disguise and hefty theatrical makeup, that they could all be the same person. It just couldn’t be.
“Eva, I don’t think so. Look at the shapes of their brows, their jawlines, their ears. You couldn’t do that good of a job even with silicone. They’re not disguises.”
“It’s not a disguise like that,” Eva whispered softly.
I stared at her, not understanding.
She put her head in her hands.
“I’ve been afraid to tell you.”
I gently touched her arm across the kitchen table, trying to get her to stop covering her eyes and look at me.
“We’ve always said we could tell each other anything,” I said.
She sighed. “There are some things you can’t explain.”
I understood about that better than she knew. My own guilt still twinged that I hadn’t been honest with Eva about being a fairy. Or rather, I had been honest, but then she’d lost all those memories in her accident in the Vale. I wanted to tell her the truth again, but I didn’t know how. I felt like I’d lost that opportunity, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
Eva got up from the table. She began to walk restlessly around the room. She resumed her cooking, gathering a bunch of cilantro that was balanced in a glass of water and beginning to chop the mess of green leaves. I wanted to stop her; everything she was doing was just a distraction from what she really wanted to say.
“When I told you that the memories are starting to come back to me from the time of the accident,” she said, looking over at me at last, “I didn’t just mean that night of being able to fly at Obadiah’s club.”
I stared at her, fear and hope battling it out within me. What if Eva suddenly remembered her trip to the Vale, remembered me telling her I was really a fairy? What would happen; how would she react?
“Things have been coming back to me in bits and pieces,” she continued, beginning to chop again. “But the things I’m remembering—if you could call it that—they can’t be memories, because they don’t make sense. They’re more like dreams. They couldn’t be.”
Oh god, Eva was remembering the Vale. I had to tell her the truth or she’d believe she really was losing her mind.
“Eva, what if I told you that you really are remembering. Everything you saw, everything you experienced, is true.”
Eva stared at me, her eyes moist and glistening. She set down the knife and wiped at her eyes.
“That would mean there really is a whole other world. Is that what you’re saying?”
I took a deep breath. I could almost hear my mother the Fairy Queen screaming in my ears, begging me not to tell our secrets to a human. “Yes, there is.”
Eva looked at me. I could tell she wanted so badly to believe what I was saying, but she was having such trouble letting herself. Her rational mind just couldn’t let go, even though she’d seen it with her own eyes. But she spoke.
“Remember I told you about my group?”
“Your coven?” I said.
Blushing, she nodded.
“We do a ritual every full moon,” she said, beginning to chop up a red bell pepper. She threw her other chopped ingredients in the blender. They made a pretty mélange of red and green. I realized she was making a sofrito, and when she turned the blender on, the piquant smell wafted up, making my mouth water. She stopped, turning to me. “We call upon the spirits of nature: the four directions, the sun and the moon. We invoke different nature deities.” She scraped down the bowl. “I know it probably sounds really tree-huggery.”
“Nothing wrong with hugging trees,” I said. I used to live in one, I thought, suddenly homesick.
“Well, Tiffany led a ritual where we did a summoning. Don’t worry, we didn’t summon demons, or
anything like that. It wasn’t anything scary. The ritual was about connecting with nature and the natural world, which is important in New York City, I guess. So we summoned nature spirits. You know, fairies.”
Oh no, they didn’t. I felt like I was going to faint. This was bad; this was really, really bad.
“Please don’t try to summon fairies,” I said, my voice quiet with fear. “You’d honestly be better off with a demon.”
But Eva went on. “I thought it was just a metaphor, though, right? I mean, it wasn’t like we were really going to ‘summon fairies.’” She made air quotes around the words, with her hands. “Because that’s ridiculous. Summoning fairies was just a metaphor for connecting with nature. We were just symbolically summoning fairies. Or so I thought.”
My stomach felt leaden. Oh god, what had they done? Who had they summoned?
Eva’s voice was full of fear as she spoke. Her eyes had taken on a faraway quality as she leaned up against the kitchen counter, staring at nothing. I knew she was seeing it all clearly in her mind. “We were all arranged in a circle,” she said. “Tiffany was leading us in the chants. She kept saying, ‘Come into our midst, come into our midst . . . spirit of nature, we welcome you here,’ and then . . . If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, just like those lab rats levitating . . .”
“What happened?”
“This guy, I guess you could call him a guy. He looked like a man, but so beautiful. His skin, his body, everything was just perfect. He was like one of those Greek statues in the Met come to life. He appeared in the middle of our circle. One moment he wasn’t there. And then the next moment he was there. I know you probably think I’ve lost my mind but . . .”
“No,” I said, breathing hard. “No, I don’t.” But I was terrified. Who had they summoned?
“Well, we were all screaming, of course. People were falling to their knees. A couple of the girls and even some of the guys fainted. I almost did too. And this man told us he was from the fairy realm. That he couldn’t tell us his real name, but we could call him ‘Cory.’ And that he was here to help us, if we would help him.”
My throat went dry, my stomach a ball of weight. I had a dreadful feeling about this “Cory.” I didn’t know who he really was. He could have been anyone, given fairies’ infinite capacity for disguise. But the whole “help” thing scared me. A fairy’s bargain was always a dangerous thing, especially to a bunch of idealistic young twenty-somethings who had no idea what they were messing with.
“You didn’t agree to help him, did you?”
Eva was silent, wiping her hands on the dishrag. For a moment she didn’t meet my eye.
“Well, yeah, of course we agreed to help him. I mean, we were all so flabbergasted that he’d come into our circle. When a freakin’ fairy shows up and asks for your help, I mean, you say yes.”
I put my head in my hands. “This is bad,” I whispered.
Eva leaned down so she could look at me over the gaps of my fingers, “So, wait, you believe me? You believe all this?”
I lowered my hands and sighed.
“I believe you.”
Eva looked at me skeptically.
“I really do believe you.”
“I wouldn’t believe me if I was you.”
I sighed. “I believe you because . . .” I took a deep breath. “Come on, sit down. The stew can wait. Do you want a cup of coffee?” I didn’t even know how to begin what I had to say. Eva shook her head, but she sat down with me at the kitchen table.
“I told you this once, but your injury made you forget.” I squinted my eyes for a moment, and then blurted it out. “I’m from that other world.”
Eva clutched her hands to her face. She stared at me over the tops of her fingertips, her dark eyes huge with fear and something else I couldn’t name. I waited breathlessly for how she would respond.
I wasn’t prepared for what she would say next.
“So it’s true, what I remembered?”
“You remember me telling you I was a fairy?”
Eva nodded around her fingers. “I thought I’d dreamed it.”
“You didn’t.”
“Everything I remember: waking up in that cocoon, you rescuing me and then you telling me that you were a . . . I didn’t dream that?”
“No,” I whispered.
Eva began to laugh and cry at the same time, until she was almost choking. “It’s all true?”
“It’s all true.”
All she could do was shake her head over and over, squeezing my hand across the table. She couldn’t form words.
“I know this is a lot for you to process all at once. But promise me one thing. Whatever you do, tell everyone in your group to stay away from this ‘Cory.’ I don’t know who he is or what he wants. But fairies are dangerous. We’re not innocent little nature spirits. Fairies are powerful. And you can’t trust them.”
“But you just said you were a . . . and I can trust you,” she gasped.
“I’m different.” I sighed. “I’m a changeling. So I’m human too, as well as fairy. And that mellows it out, I guess. Really, fairies are terrifying. Their minds, their motives, they’re not comprehensible to us. Just stay away from him. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want anyone else in your group to get hurt either.”
Eva bit her lip. “I think it may be too late for that,” she whispered.
“Eva?” I asked, afraid to know the answer.
She hung her head. “Cory came back after the initial summoning. He came back multiple times. He became a member of our group. I think we were all a little in love with him. I mean, here we were, saying we believed in magic, and then all of a sudden magic was real and standing in front of us in the form of this gorgeous man. Every time he came to our group he looked different—different faces, different features—but always flawlessly beautiful. That’s what I meant when I said all of Quinn’s pictures are all the same guy. I recognized four out of the five. He took on all those disguises in our group.”
My stomach clenched. They really were all the same “man.”
This was what Quinn had meant when she said, “You wouldn’t understand. No one would understand. It’s too unbelievable.” This poor girl. It didn’t matter what kind of professionals her parents took her to, no one would believe her if she told them what had really happened. Everyone would think she was nuts. And she knew it. I resolved to call her. I had to tell her the truth. I had to tell her that I knew.
“Well,” Eva continued, “he came up to some of the girls in the group. He told them he wanted to be their lover.”
“No, no, no.” I put my head in my hands, shaking my head. This was going to end badly.
“You don’t say no to a gorgeous supernatural deity.”
“And then he came to you,” I said. “And you . . .”
She blushed.
“How could I not? I mean . . .”
“Listen, I get it. I get why you’d want to. But he’s dangerous. If he’s a fairy, he’s inherently dangerous.”
“I didn’t think so at the time. We only spent that one night together. Like I said, it was magical. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I really am afraid he may have ruined me for human men.” She laughed, but there was a tinge of fear in it. “But then like I told you, the next morning he ran off while I was getting ready. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t know if any of the other girls in the group have seen him. I’m far from the only one who he was with. I heard that for some of the girls he wasn’t just a one-night stand, that he dated them for weeks, months even.”
Quinn, I thought. Was it the duration of time she’d seen Cory that had made all the difference, that had made him so much more destructive to her than he had been to Eva?
“So wait, Quinn must be or have been a member of your group,” I said. “Unless she met him elsewhere?”
“It’s very possible. We have our long-standing members, like Tiffany and, well, me, kind of at this point,
” she said with a modicum of pride in her eyes. “But we get a ton of drop-ins, people who show up a few times and never come back. It’s very possible she’s been there. Do you have a picture of her?”
I went to the bedroom and got my laptop, opening the file with the picture Reggie had gotten from Brenda when we started the case. It was an old picture, from before whatever unshakable gloom had descended over Quinn. She was wearing her college sweatshirt and grinning.
Eva scrunched up her face. “She does look familiar. I know I’ve seen her before but I’m not sure where. I think she may have come to our Beltane ritual a few months back. I didn’t get to know her; we probably just chatted for a few minutes.” Eva looked up at me, a shadow of sympathy crossing her face. “So you think this girl is not okay? You think Cory hurt her?”
“I don’t know.” I frowned. “At first I thought it was abuse or rape or domestic violence. But now that we know he’s a fairy, what if the crime was something magical?”
I could hear Tamira’s voice in my mind, talking about the human dopamine that was one part of the Elixir she studied. Children might have more dopamine receptors. But adults produced dopamine too. And they produced more after sex. A terrifying idea was occurring to me.
“Oh my god,” I said, my hands going to my mouth.
“What is it?” said Eva. “What’s wrong?”
The Queen put humans in her cocoons, forcing them into a death-like sleep to steal their “life energy” as she called it to make Elixir, until the process actually killed them. Quinn wasn’t dead. Yet she was like dead: catatonic, listless, malaised. I could hear her voice, flat and monotone, in my mind: It’s like all the joy got sucked right out of me. But what if it had? What if it literally had? What if this Cory, whoever he was, had found a way to steal Elixir’s “X-factor” from human women, through sex? I looked up at Eva. She’d slept with Cory too, but didn’t have any of Quinn’s symptoms. Then again, Eva had only slept with him once, not many times over the course of months. Maybe it was the prolonged exposure that depleted Cory’s victims of their dopamine? Or maybe, for whatever reason, he’d decided not to prey on Eva like he had on the others? Maybe Eva was truly just a lover to Cory, and not a means to an end? Maybe despite all her protestations to the contrary, Eva might have truly been special to Cory, and so he hadn’t stolen her joy like he had with Quinn.
