Unveiled

by Ruth Vincent

  “Eva, how have you felt since that night with Cory?” I asked her. “Did you notice any changes in how you’re feeling physically, mentally, emotionally?”

  “I’ve felt fine. I mean, I felt disappointed. But it’s not the kind of depression this girl Quinn seems to be suffering from.”

  “So it doesn’t seem like this fairy did anything to you that way?”

  “No. I don’t think I’m any worse off, that I can tell.”

  It was strange. Did he only prey on certain girls he slept with and not others? And what was the rational for the difference? Was there something within Eva that made her able to withstand whatever it was he did?

  I didn’t know. But a disturbing possibility was occurring to me. If this rogue fairy “Cory” was trying to fix the Elixir drought by stealing human X-factor through sex, he needed a lot. How many human girls had he slept with? It could be dozens. Hundreds. There would be no way to know, because most of victims’ families and friends wouldn’t have called a private detective. They’d merely think that their loved one was suddenly, severely depressed, and blame it on the breakup or some quirk of brain chemistry, because who could ever guess that the source of their joy had been literally, maliciously, stolen from them?

  “Eva, I have to find out who this is and stop him,” I said, our eyes meeting across the table.

  “How the hell are you going to find him, though? I mean, he can make himself look like anyone, that’s the thing I could never wrap my head around. We can’t just go up and question all the hot guys in New York. The only thing all his disguises have in common is that he never made himself resemble anyone ugly. But that still leaves a pretty large sample size.”

  He disguised himself as pretty boys so he could seduce all these girls, I thought glumly. What girl would say no to an out-of-this-world night with a supernatural man who looked like a movie star? Cory was going to find a lot more victims, if I couldn’t figure out how to stop him. I still didn’t know how he was doing it. But if he’d figured out a way to steal dopamine, he could do a lot of damage. And even if he wasn’t killing his victims, they were suffering so much. And they might end up dead. Quinn was a serious suicide risk. I had to stop him.

  “I know of someone who might be able to find him.”

  Eva’s eyebrows raised. “Who?”

  The Fairy Queen. She seemed to know everything in the Vale, and certainly knew what everyone was up to, with her ever larger network of spies. I sighed. All the more reason I was going to have to go home.

  “I might need to go away for a little while.”

  “If you go anywhere, I’m coming too,” said Eva. Her eyes lit up. She was looking at this as a great adventure.

  “No, I can’t risk your safety. You remember what happened last time.”

  She pinched her lip. “Some of it?”

  “Well, okay, maybe you don’t remember everything, but you almost got killed. I can’t risk that again.”

  She frowned. “Look, this is all so new to me. It rips open everything I thought I knew was true. But if there’s anything I can do, I want to help.”

  “I appreciate that, but I may have to figure out this one on my own. I need to go home.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I need to go back to the Vale.”

  “Oh, your other home.” There was a sadness in Eva’s eyes as she seemed to realize that there was a part of my life I could never fully share with her, a place she could never fully go with me, even if I let her come. It was the tiniest wedge slipped into our friendship.

  “Well, since I don’t remember much of what happened last time, I’d be happy to take the risk and come with you again.”

  “I’d never forgive myself if you got hurt again. Plus, you just started your new job. Do you think Tamira would let you take that much time off from work?”

  Eva frowned. “Probably not. And I wouldn’t want to leave, with us right in the middle of such important experiments.”

  She was quiet for a while.

  “Are you bringing Obadiah?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to. I mean, I do want to.” I sighed. “But he’d be risking his life too, and I can’t allow that.”

  Eva raised an eyebrow at me. “You know he’s never going to be okay with you doing something risky without him being there to protect you. He loves you, Mab.”

  I flushed, feeling the throb of my heart in ears. “I know,” I said softly.

  I changed the subject because talking about Obadiah made me think of his hands trembling, and the way he tried to hide them in his pockets, and it made me too sad.

  “Thanks for inviting me to your group,” I said. “It’s the best lead I have to figure out Cory’s real identity and figure out what he did to Quinn and maybe others.”

  “Of course, no problem.” Eva smiled at me, but I detected a slight hint of wariness in her eyes.

  “You seem nervous. Do you not want me to come?”

  “No, I do, it’s just”—Eva twisted her hands—“maybe it’s my own damage, but I guess I just feel intimidated about bringing you to our group. I mean, now that I know what you really are, that you’re a fairy.” She said the last word in a hushed, awed whisper. “Which I can still barely wrap my head around, by the way. I guess I thought maybe you’d be insulted by our group, that you’d think it’s silly or something. That you’d judge me. I mean, sometimes I worry that we’re all just playacting, and now I know that you . . . you’re the real thing.”

  I slid my hand across the countertop and held hers.

  “You guys are the real thing too, though,” I said.

  Eva blinked her long, dark lashed eyes, not seeming to understand.

  “I mean, you summoned a fairy.”

  Eva laughed nervously. “Yeah. I guess we did.” She paused. “There were times I questioned if my own spiritual beliefs, practices, whatever you want to call them, were bullshit. I believed, but I didn’t really believe. And then this man appeared in our circle. This not a man. I guess it makes me believe that anything is possible.” Eva shook her head. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  I wished I had something comforting to say to her. Her understanding of the world was being ripped apart, and all I could do was stand there in awkward sympathy and then offer her a hug.

  “Do you think the members of your group would be willing to let me interview them?” I asked at last. “I’m afraid there might be a lot more girls like Quinn out there, given how many people Cory may have dated. I’d like to try to track his network, find out how many people might be at risk.”

  “I think they’ll talk, if you tell them why you’re there. A lot of them are understandably leery of opening up to an outsider. We’ve had a few reporters approach Tiffany. They were all trying to run some lurid tabloid story, like ‘Oooh, black magic!’” She made a face. “But they’ll see that your intentions are to help. And they’re scared too. We’ve noticed there’ve been a few absences from the group lately, long-standing members who suddenly stopped showing up. It’s possible they’re Cory’s victims. And Tiffany said one of the girls has been really depressed. She tried to kill herself. Before tonight, I thought it was all coincidence. I never thought to trace it back to Cory. But now that we know”—she shivered—“we’ve got to alert everyone, and stop whoever is behind this.”

  “Do you think they’ll believe me, if I tell them not to trust Cory? If I tell them I’m a fairy too?”

  Eva nodded. “A few months ago I would have said no. But after what we all saw in that ritual, I think they’d believe just about anything now.”

  Chapter 5

  I was lucky that the full moon, and hence Eva’s group’s next ritual, was only a few days away. We took the subway to a part of Brooklyn I wasn’t familiar with, near the canal—an ugly, forgotten wasteland of shipyards and warehouses, perfumed by an ever present sewage-stench that now was slowly metamorphosing into Brooklyn’s next trendy neighborhood. It had a way to go before its t
ransformation was complete, however, and it was still more pupa than butterfly. Eva and I walked for a long time down an unnervingly dark street past boarded-up warehouses, chain-link fences and empty lots, with the occasional loft or trendy bar like fireflies blinking out of the dark.

  I kept looking behind me as we walked down the poorly lit and empty street, our footfalls echoing against the concrete. There were too few people out. I didn’t feel safe here. We continued walking, down a steep hill, the pungent odor of the canal growing stronger, till Eva pointed to a warehouse that appeared to be no different from any of the others. In fact, it seemed to be abandoned.

  “This is it,” she said, then saw the dubious look on my face. She shrugged. “The space was cheap,” she said by way of explanation, and I nodded; it was an explanation all New Yorkers understood. We’d all live in shipping crates if the rent was reasonable.

  She buzzed the door.

  “Hello?” a female voice answered.

  Eva leaned in close to the dirty speaker. “The grain is reaped in silence,” she whispered. Then she turned to me. “It’s the pass phrase.”

  “You guys have a secret pass phrase?”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s kind of dorky, but . . .”

  “No, I think it’s cool.” I felt slightly giddy, as if I was about to be inducted into a secret society. For a moment I wondered if we’d open up the door to this seemingly abandoned warehouse and it would turn out to be an opulent villa on the inside where everyone was wearing masks and was either in long robes or totally naked, like in that movie. But something in my gut told me the warehouse would just be a warehouse, filled with a couple of twenty-somethings cobbling together bits of different old traditions, seeking some kind of meaning in a meaningless age.

  A female voice spoke through the tinny buzzer again. There was nothing mystical about her tone.

  “Come right up,” she called cheerfully.

  She buzzed the door and we entered, walking gingerly up an old, rickety flight of stairs.

  Eva led me to the top floor. It was warm up here, and not terribly well ventilated, the building being one of those barely legal residentials that had never really earned their C of O.

  At the top of the stairs was an enormous green velvet curtain, like the kind that would be strung across a stage. Eva pulled the heavy, tasseled rope, and it slowly swung open, revealing the loft space behind.

  It didn’t resemble anything out of a movie, but it was beautiful in its own way, because a couple of kids, with no budget and no skills but boundless enthusiasm, had obviously put a lot of time and care into making it so. The walls had been painted a deep sky blue, and there was a paper moon hung up in one corner that made me think of the old Tin Pan Alley ballad. Someone had brought in some secondhand sofas and armchairs. There were low coffee tables scattered with little tea-light candles, and the whole room smelled thickly of incense, Florida water and sage.

  A girl approached us: twenty-something, tall and striking, with natural coal-black hair and eerily pale skin. She was wearing a purple velvet dress that looked like something one might wear to a Renaissance festival. She held herself with a grace and confidence that one usually didn’t see in girls our age. If her luminous skin didn’t make her appear so young, she had the presence of someone middle-aged or beyond. There was something hypnotic about her bright green eyes that made me want to keep staring at her.

  “Tiffany,” Eva called out, and the two girls embraced each other. Tiffany greeted me with a cheerful grin that dispelled her mysterious allure but made me feel welcome.

  “You must be Mab,” she said, going to shake my hand, and then deciding midshake to envelope me in a hearty bear hug. “I’ve heard so much about you. All good things.” She winked at me.

  “Eva tells me wonderful things about you guys. Thank you for letting me come.”

  “Of course,” she said magnanimously. “Our doors are always open. Sorry about the password. It’s just . . . we were having a lot of gawkers—guys who thought all we do is dance naked around a bonfire. I mean, not that we don’t do that too—” She threw back her head and laughed, a warm, genuine cackle that made me instantly like her. “They were terribly disappointed when I treated them to a two-hour lecture on the epigraphic evidence of the Eleusinian Mysteries instead.” She laughed again. “I don’t think they’ll be bothering us anymore.”

  She led us over to another girl, a heavyset blonde who was greeting the people entering the large room with a smoldering bundle of silvery dried sage leaves in her hand.

  “Get yourself saged first—we can talk later,” said Tiffany, and she returned to the crowd to welcome the other guests.

  The girl with the smoking sage bundle approached me.

  I smiled at her hesitantly.

  “Um, I’m sorry. I don’t really know what to do here.”

  “Nothing to do. Just be,” she said cheerfully. “Close your eyes, and let go of all the stress you walked in here with.”

  I closed my eyes as I was bid, and took a long slow inhale, breathing in the smoke that smelled of memories of summer bonfires and Eva’s little bedroom altar. I tried to shake off all the worry that was clinging to me: Obadiah’s trembling hands, Quinn’s soulless eyes, all those children trapped in a sleep of death in their cocoons and the weight of trying to fix it all. I let out a long exhale as I felt rather than saw the girl slowly waving the warm wand of smoking sage inches over my body. When I opened my eyes again, I realized I did feel more relaxed.

  “Blessed be.” She smiled at me.

  “Um, yeah, you too.” I smiled back. I had no idea what I was doing here, but these people seemed nice. It touched me how warmly and openly they’d welcomed me, an outsider, into their group. They were trusting me, or rather, they were trusting Eva, and she was trusting me. I didn’t want to let them down.

  Once she was finished, we rejoined Tiffany. The loft space was filling up. People were milling around, sitting on the sofas in groups of twos or threes and chatting. Clearly there was a social aspect as well as a spiritual one to this group.

  Tiffany motioned us over to a well-worn love seat in the corner.

  “Eva told me you work for a private detective,” she said to me, and I nodded. “We’d appreciate your help. I’m really concerned about what’s been going on recently, and, well, we can’t exactly go to the NYPD about it. They’d never believe us.” She looked from me over to Eva. “You told her already? About the ritual where Cory appeared?”

  Eva nodded.

  Tiffany’s warm, green eyes were suddenly so focused and intent it made my breath catch in my throat.

  “Do you really believe all this?” she asked me. “About Cory?”

  Looking her right in the eye, I nodded.

  Her brow pinched. I didn’t think she was convinced.

  I took a deep breath. Should I tell her the truth? Eva trusted her. And if these people really believed in magic, maybe they would believe me? “I believe what Eva told me about Cory because let’s just say where Cory came from, that’s where I come from too.”

  Tiffany’s eyes widened. She exhaled in a slow whoosh.

  “Wow,” she said at last. “Well. We are honored by your presence.”

  Her voice had changed in character, and I realized she was talking to me as a fairy, as if she was greeting some kind of deity. I figured I needed to put a stop to that before she offered me oaten cakes, a bowl of cream and a place by the hearth.

  I put up my hand. “Look,” I said, “for all intents and purposes, I’m as human as any of you are. I’m a changeling. A fairy is something I used to be, not something I am anymore. I lost all those powers years ago. So you don’t have to talk to me like that.”

  “Got it,” she said. And she was back to her warm, grinning self.

  “But to answer your question, yes,” I said. “I believe. I believe because I’ve experienced.”

  Tiffany’s eyes were serious. “I feel you there. I realize now maybe I never really believed
, until I saw what I witnessed that night.”

  Eva, who had been silent all this time, her feet propped up on the coffee table, spoke up. “I thought as the High Priestess, if any of us really believed, you did?”

  Tiffany shook her head. “I tried,” she said. “I did the rituals, I chanted the chants, but I guess at the end of the day, I thought all our summoning and songs were just lovely metaphors. It’s not that I didn’t believe in some kind of spiritual something. It’s just I didn’t think a being would literally appear in our circle.”

  I studied Tiffany’s face. Her eyes held an inner light, shining in the twinkle from the dozens of flickering candles from the coffee table, and I could see how much all of this meant to her. Here she’d been invoking the names of spirits and deities for years, and then one night it had worked: one had shown up. It was the confirmation of her faith. But she was in danger. All the people here tonight were. Fairies weren’t necessarily good. They weren’t even usually good.

  “This being you summoned, that calls himself ‘Cory’—I’m afraid he’s dangerous,” I said to her. “I wouldn’t trust him.”

  Tiffany looked up at me and I could see in her eyes that she’d had the same fears.

  “I understand that now. I didn’t realize it then, when he first came.”

  Her eyes were far away as she recalled the memory, her hands twisting through the green fringe of the sofa. “We were in shock, ecstatic, when he appeared. People were screaming, fainting. No one had ever dreamed it would really happen. But there he was. One moment the circle was empty and the next moment he just appeared out of the incense smoke, this beautiful, beautiful man . . .”

  “I’m sure it must have been incredible,” I said. “But I’ve known a lot of the Fey; I’ve lived amongst them. You can’t trust them.”