Covert Fae_A Spy Among the Fallen

by C. N. Crawford

  With a quick turn, I flung it at our pursuers. The blade found its mark in Dickhead’s shoulder. He screamed, grinding to a halt. Already, I was reaching for another blade as the rest of his gang pounded closer to us.

  “Faster,” Alex gasped.

  Wildly, we veered across Whitechapel High Street. It was only a matter of seconds before we were careening through the doors into the old hospital building.

  The gang, of course, ran in after us—right into the trip wire. I didn’t stop to watch the wooden spears pierce their flesh, but I heard the thuds, the screams.

  I sent a silent, grim thanks to my parents.

  Without the old fae ways, I’d be dead right now.

  Chapter 4

  On the rooftop of our rookery, safe from the trip wires and traps, I turned the makeshift spit over our fireplace, a piece of metal speared through the rabbit. The flames warmed the winter air around us. Smoke from the roasting meat curled into the air, and my mouth watered. Tonight, no clouds darkened the sky, and a canopy of stars twinkled above us.

  Years ago, you could hardly see the stars in big cities like this, but now they burned bright, gleaming sequins on a midnight fabric. In the old days, the fae had claimed they were windows into the worlds of the gods.

  Across from me, Lucy twirled her blond hair around a fingertip, the firelight wavering over her skin. Before dragons had scorched the Earth, she’d been a bartender. During the long days in the rookery, she regaled us with stories of drunken brawls in the Duke of York—the men who fought with broken bottles, the women pulling hair. Sometimes she told us about her exes—a charming collection of men who’d cheated on her and complained about the size of her thighs.

  Lucy licked her lips, staring at the rabbit. “I miss pies. How hard do you think it would be to make a rabbit pie? How do you make pie, anyway? You need flour for pies. Can you make a pie without flour?”

  Katie, a thin woman with a smattering of freckles over her nose and dirt caked in her hair, sat by her side. “Are you going to keep saying the word ‘pie’? We can’t make them. Forget it.”

  I knew very little about Katie’s prior life. She was a bit… off. When she told stories, they were not about her life. They were weird fantasy tales about talking arctic foxes and royal polar bears ruling Nordic kingdoms. Pure nonsense, really, but it was a nice escape from her usual ill-tempered grumbling.

  Alex’s stories were my favorite, of course. I didn’t think I’d ever get sick of hearing about one-hundred-fifty-dollar wagyu steaks or hot tubs on hotel roofs.

  And me—I could tell stories of life as a fae burlesque dancer in New York City. Angela Death, my alter ego. I tried to leave the tragedies out of it. In fact, I mostly kept it on the glitter and feathers, the backstage drama. Or that time I had to fill in for my friend’s oddly kinky “cake smooshing” routine.

  That wasn’t me anymore—I didn’t want the glitter or the attention, didn’t want men’s eyes on me. But people liked those stories. Even if I could hardly bring myself to detail such a flagrantly wasteful use of cake anymore.

  Lucy tapped my shoulder. “Tell us about the angel again. Not the one from yesterday. The blond one in New York.”

  I swallowed hard. Like I said, no one wanted to hear about the tragedies, and that meant this story had to be edited. Heavily.

  I stared into the jumping flames. “I was dancing in Madame Francine’s. I had all kinds of routines—stripping Salem witch judges, a lonely satyr with troublesome hooves, a slightly terrifying clown routine. The seductive angel was one of my few purely sexy shows. I mean, it was back before we knew angels were terrifying, when I thought they just floated in the heavens like pretty spirits.”

  Alex hugged his knees to his chest. “Are you telling me the fae were just as clueless about angels as we humans were?”

  I shrugged. “We knew about dragons, definitely. But not angels, even though we evolved from them. After the rebellious angels were cast from the heavens, some became demons of darkness. Some became demons of fire. And the fae—we’re unaligned. We lost our wings over time, transformed. Got obsessed with the food, the clothes, the dancing—all the fun stuff you get on Earth. We’ve all been fighting each other for millennia, dragging in the humans sometimes. But you have to understand that the fall happened a hundred thousand years ago. None of us had seen a real angel since. It’s like expecting you to know what a Neanderthal might be like, except without scientists to explain it all.”

  Lucy nudged my arm. “Less of the history. Get back to the sexy angel costume.”

  I smiled. “Fine. I had a silver dress, feathered wings, lacy stockings, the whole nine yards. Pretty and delicate. Just like an angel.”

  Alex snorted.

  “But that wasn’t the whole costume. I glamoured myself like a succubus,” I continued. “If any demons came in, the succubus touches always intrigued them—the dark swirls of magic, the faintly gold skin. They couldn’t get enough of the whole demonic-angel thing.” I swallowed hard. “Little did I know, that night an actual angel came in. He didn’t have his wings on display or anything like that. They can hide them, I guess. I just thought he was an ordinary demon, a powerful one, with a golden glow of magic.”

  Lucy gripped my arm. “Handsome, right?”

  I nodded. “Very. While I danced, his eyes were locked on me. I could tell he really liked the whole routine. I could just see his rapt expression, like he was drinking me up with his eyes. After my performance, he came up to talk to me. I thought he was flirty, totally full of himself, used to getting what he wanted. I brushed him off. I had no idea what he really was.”

  A harbinger of death.

  Firelight sparked in Alex’s eyes. “But you saw him again. The golden angel.”

  A few days after my angel show, when I was picnicking in the park, I learned what the handsome, glowing stranger really was. He flew down from the heavens with his wings blazing copper, his head gleaming like a golden crown, with dragons surrounding him.

  A lump rose in my throat. “Yeah. You all remember that day, I’m sure.” The day the world ended for everyone. I straightened. “But none of us want to talk about that, do we?”

  My chest ached, but I tried to keep my expression neutral. Don’t tell them what happened, Ruby. Leave out all the death. Put on a good show. “The angels had come back to Earth. The blond angel told me his name was Kratos, and he invited me to join him in London. I declined his offer.”

  Lucy shook her head scornfully. “You could be in a palace right now.”

  I left out the rest—the part about dragons abducting my little sister in the midst of an orgy of destruction and flying off with her into the skies. I didn’t tell them what it had felt like to watch the reptilian shifters slaughter my boyfriend, Marcus, the gorgeous vampire who’d been the love of my life. I didn’t tell them that my decision to turn down Kratos had been one of the worst of my life—that without his help, I had no hope of finding my sister again. They had their own traumas. On that same day, everyone here had watched people die.

  Stories were a performance, and I aimed to make people happy.

  Alex rubbed his chin. “My theory is that the angels lured the dragons to kill us all, just like another weapon. They spread diseases and death throughout the world just for the hell of it, and dragons did the job pretty quick.”

  I glanced at Alex, eager to distract myself. “You’re ruining story time with this misery. Tell us about the good stuff, will you?”

  “Right. Sorry.” Now it was Alex’s turn to regale us. He leaned into the fire, the flames dancing over his dark skin.

  He took a deep breath. “One night a few years ago—I’m not even kidding you—I woke up under a table in the Forge Bar, covered in a pile of fifty-pound notes, empty bottles of Cristal, and two pairs of rubber gloves. I’m still not sure what happened. Had to show up to work an hour late, reeking like the bottom of a pub trash bin, and close a deal with Goldman Sachs.”

  Katie blinked thoughtfully
. “Sometimes I put on gloves and touch my own face and pretend it’s someone else’s hand.”

  Her comments tended to hang in the air awkwardly while people tried to figure out how to respond, and that one was no different. Katie was often the first to break the silence, making it worse.

  “Sometimes I feel so cooped up in here,” she continued. “Like I’m being buried alive in the hospital walls. Never wanted to die in hospital, now I live in a hospital, and I’ll probably die here too.” Wide-eyed, she stroked her cheeks. “Freckles, I say. Everything will be okay.” She snapped out of her reverie, scowling again. “People call me Freckles. No idea why.”

  “Maybe because of…” I cleared my throat. “Never mind.”

  Lucy touched Alex’s arm. “Did you close the deal with Goldman Sachs, Alex?”

  Alex smirked. “Of course I did.”

  Katie scooted forward, taking her turn at the spit.

  I leaned back on my hands, smiling at Alex. “In those days, Alex, you had buckets of champagne and probably some expensive prostitutes—”

  “I had no such thing,” Alex interrupted.

  “—Cheap prostitutes, whatever. I’m not judging. But how often did you get to sit under the stars with a roaring fire pit, three beautiful women, and a roasting rabbit? This is the good life, Alex. Even if we’re on top of a ruined hospital building in a city full of scorched trash.”

  He nodded. “Of course. The post-apocalyptic hell is a significant improvement on my former life of luxury, as long as I never need to see a doctor or any of my loved ones ever again.”

  “Well that’s just being greedy, Alex. We can’t have everything.”

  Lucy bit her lip. “What do you think the chances are any of this will get fixed? I’ve heard there are people working against the angels, you know. A resistance, like, in the Tower of London.”

  Lucy was talking about the Order of the Watchers—the secretive group my parents had once served, dedicated to preventing the apocalypse. Hadn’t really worked out the way they’d planned, apparently.

  “I went to see them once,” I said. I surprised myself by the admission.

  “What happened?” asked Alex.

  “I wanted to exchange information.” Not the whole truth. I wanted to spy for them, but they wouldn’t give me the time of day. “One of their wardens turned me away. Apparently, they weren’t willing to even talk to me unless I could tell them something they didn’t already know. And they already knew about Kratos.”

  “Bastards,” muttered Alex.

  Would my encounter yesterday be enough to get me past their gates? I didn’t think so. I needed something more, and I planned to get it—if I could survive long enough.

  I shimmied over to the edge of the roof, peering down at the night-cloaked streets. In the moonlight, a few sentinels drifted along the main street like phantoms. One of them turned, gaze locked on me, and my heart skipped a beat.

  The sentinels saw everything.

  I scooted back toward the fire, relishing its warmth. The Hunt hadn’t yet begun tonight. At the first sign of the howling hounds, we’d be inside, lightning-fast. Rabbit or no rabbit.

  I leaned back on the roof, gazing up at the stars.

  As Katie launched into a story about a sparrow king, I reached into my pocket, pulling out a copper feather—Kratos’s feather. Moonlight streamed through the downy filaments, tingeing them with silver.

  This was the true reason I’d come all the way to London, stowing away on the private jet of an apocalypse profiteer. I’d wanted to find Kratos. Dragons hoarded beautiful women like treasures. Kratos had been there on the worst day of my life, perhaps controlling the dragons that had taken my sister. Maybe he knew where to find Hazel.

  Crazy as it sounded, my ambitions didn’t stop there. Maybe, with a little help, I could worm my way into Kratos’s life until I learned the angels’ secrets, their vulnerabilities. Surely even angels had weaknesses. If I was careful enough and clever enough, maybe I could exploit them.

  As I stroked my fingertip up the soft side of the feather, a hound’s bark bellowed through London’s streets, and horror slid through my bones.

  The Hunt was nearby.

  Chapter 5

  As the sounds of the Hunt raged outside, I curled up in my makeshift bed—a collection of blankets and rags. I didn’t sleep with the others.

  After we’d come inside, I’d eaten my portion of rabbit and potatoes by myself in my little room, a ramshackle Victorian outpost where I stayed on my own. This was what I was used to—living among humans, while never quite being one of them. Always a little bit separate, always holding back my true nature just a little.

  My parents had left the fae realm centuries ago. The fae kingdoms were kind of backward, sexist as hell. My mom was supposed to be some sort of sex slave to a fae lordling, but she and my father had fallen in love. So they’d left and started working among the humans.

  Most fae considered us traitors. Most humans would consider us dangerous if they knew the truth. I’d been lucky to find people as open-minded as Alex and my other rookery friends.

  I pulled a blanket around myself tightly, surveying my familiar space. Truth be told, I was pretty sure that my corner of the rookery had once been a VD clinic. The poster on the wall when I’d first arrived, reading No Glove, No Love, had made that clear. But believe it or not, I’d managed to clean the place up, even decorate a little.

  I had everything I needed here in the cozy little VD clinic I called home: a candle, a bottle of whisky I’d looted from the Sainsbury’s, and helpful reminders about the dangers of chlamydia. I’d decorated the walls with the help of a glue gun and pieces of broken glass and aluminum that glinted like jewels in the candlelight. (You could take the girl out of the burlesque club…)

  And most precious of all, tucked under a plastic waiting room chair, stood my collection of books. The dragons had destroyed half of London, but mercifully, the Whitechapel Library remained standing. Some lucky survivors had claimed the library as their rookery, but through charm and flattery, I’d wangled my own reading material from them. I now boasted a small collection of paranormal romances, a few biographies, and stacks of history books.

  Apart from finding my sister again, what more could I ask for in the world of the Great Nightmare?

  Maybe a bit of company at night, I supposed.

  Only I couldn’t sleep with the others—not with the candle burning. Katie, Lucy, and Alex slept in a part of the hospital with windows, where a flickering light would give away our presence.

  I hadn’t always been scared of the dark, but ever since the dragons had descended, it freaked me out. In the shadows, I saw things I didn’t want to see. Lucky for me, VD clinics didn’t tend to have windows, so I could keep my candles burning.

  As far as the others knew, Alex’s snoring had driven me to another building.

  Outside, I heard the hounds barking as the Hunt tore through the nearby streets, and a chill rippled over my skin. Did the sentinels ever tell the hounds where they could find people, huddled in the rookeries?

  No one really knew much about the hounds, only that they were supposed to be the size of horses, with bone-white fur. Oh, and they had the charming habit of tearing people to pieces and eating them. Worst of all, anyone caught harming a hound would be found hanging from a lamppost the next day, so you couldn’t fight back without dying.

  Not a single one of us knew why the Great Nightmare had begun at all, even though theories abounded. We’d sinned, and we deserved it. We were destroying the Earth and hurting each other. God was angry with us.

  If you asked me, the gods were insane. Best not to worry too much about their motives.

  I opened a book, trying to block out the human screams that wound through the streets. I flipped the pages, trying to read about medieval England, long before the angels had come—when people lived among living things, when they could hear the sound of rain pattering on trees or walk in the woods.

 
; Before long, I closed my eyes, envisioning an ancient forest, sunlight streaming through verdant yew branches. Warm light dappled my skin, the earth, until sleep claimed my mind.

  Barefoot, I walked through the woods. I had the sense that I was supposed to be hunting, but I hadn’t brought my bow with me.

  My hair whipped around my head in the forest breeze. My stomach growled, reminding me of my hunger. I needed to find a sapling, one I could carve into a bow and arrow. Then I could catch a stag.

  But as I reached a clearing, my heart began to race.

  I wasn’t in the woods anymore. I was in New York, on the day the dragons came. On the day my soul began to wither.

  We’d been in the middle of a picnic when the first dragon shadows had darkened the skies, fire streaming from their mouths. Dragons had killed my parents years ago. Now they’d come for us.

  I stared at the grassy earth, unwilling to lift my eyes. Blood stained the blades of grass, splattered over my shoes. Here, in this memory, there were things I didn’t want to see. Marcus lay dead nearby, ripped to shreds. By the wild panic in my chest and the shaking in my hands, I knew Hazel had already been snatched from the Earth, taken from me. I’d never felt so alone, so desperate. With a shaking hand, I plucked a single, copper feather from the grass. Death is coming for me.

  My chest aching, I forced myself to look up at the skies, where the golden-haired angel swooped lower, filling me with a terrible sense of awe.

  The dragons seemed to sense him, their necks craning up to look at him as he headed for me. My mouth went dry, and I swallowed hard. He wore black military clothes, with a silver bow slung over his back. Not a demon, like I’d thought. An angel. A harbinger of death.

  If I hadn’t been halfway dead, the sight of him would have sent a cold shiver of fear up my spine. As it was, I just hoped he’d end my life quickly.

  I stared at him as he swooped down, and my fingers found their way to my side. As he landed, I clutched my battered ribs protectively.