Just Believe

by Anne Manning

  Gaelen didn't care. The Council had to know this was a bad time to call a convocation. His paper was due next week at the editorial offices of Celtic Review, and he still had exams to grade from last semester.

  "But we can't take the time to check people's calendars. Oh, no. Just-" He raised his hand and snapped his fingers in front of his face. "And we're supposed to come flyin'!"

  Rounding the corner, he headed for the chamber at the end of the corridor. The reddish glow from the doorway froze him for a moment, giving him a chill of uncertainty. Had he missed something in Eochy's terse summons? No matter. Gaelen swept his uneasiness aside. So the better acoustics in this section of the tunnel could warn Eochy and the others of his sour mood, Gaelen raised his voice. Let them know what to expect before he entered.

  "I've got a life, unlike some people!" He shouted toward the open door.

  "Hurry up, Gaelen," came the reply from the chamber. "We've got lives, too, and they're wastin' away waitin' on you."

  A rumble of male laughter and a few well thought-out curses accompanied Eochy's words.

  Gaelen's mood soured.

  It didn't get any better when he entered the Council chamber.

  His feet froze on the stone floor of the cave. His voice froze in his throat.

  The circular table, nearly forty feet across, a cross-section cut from a single tree--no one knew how long ago--occupied the middle of the chamber. Seated around the table were ninety-nine members of the Council of One Hundred.

  "Take your seat, Gaelen."

  Though he heard the leader of the Council very clearly, Gaelen was still rooted to the spot where he'd stopped, staring until his eyes hurt.

  "Gaelen?" Eochy stood and came toward him with his bandy strut. "Why aren't you prepared?"

  "No one told me."

  "You've lost track of time out there in the Otherworld. You should call home more often." Eochy grabbed his elbow and pulled him to the only empty chair at the table. "Now, get 'em out."

  "No."

  "What?"

  "I'm not going to parade my private parts for the entire assembly," Gaelen insisted.

  "We've all got ours out," Eochy said.

  They did, indeed. Each and every person at the table had them out and the iridescence caught the light from the stones mounted in the smooth chiseled walls of the sidhe.

  "Gaelen, we can't begin the convocation until you get your wings out."

  There, somebody said the W-word. Damn. Damn.

  "Look," he pleaded, "I haven't had them out in years. They'll be all wrinkled and..."

  Eochy waved to the doorkeepers. Two strapping lads, selected for their brawn and lack of humor, came up behind Gaelen, each one taking a sleeve of his heather tweed jacket.

  R-r-r-i-i-i-i-p-p-p-p-p!

  "Hey! That's my favorite jacket," Gaelen protested.

  "It's ugly," one of the brutes muttered, with what might have been a smile on a less stony face.

  Then off came his shirt. His one hundred dollar, hand-made dress shirt. It wasn't fairy-tailored, so they had to pull harder, but off it came.

  Gaelen sat, humiliation bubbling with the stomach acid, and waited. It would only get worse.

  The chill of the room and the prickly feeling of all eyes on him made his wings pucker and swell. He thought he could control himself until...

  Oh, no. Not Carly. Anybody but her.

  Carly O'Malley smiled at him from the gallery, and her wings--Oh, Bridget, what wings the woman had--shimmered three shades each of red and gold. The snickering around the table had Gaelen's already rough temper near to boiling.

  "Ah, Gaelen, me boyo, you've a lass interested in seeing your wings."

  "I've seen 'em," Carly said, "and a sight worth waitin' for they are."

  Women tittered at Carly's words.

  A sharp snapping pain twisted in his shoulders. Biting his tongue, he winced as the thin skin unfolded, first on the left, then on the right.

  Not good to keep them packed away like that, his ol' da had said. Gotta shake 'em out and stretch 'em once in a while, boy.

  The men on the Council and in the audience grimaced in amused compassion. The women were not so kind.

  They watched, eyes widening, tongues flicking out to moisten their lips, their anticipation palpable.

  Gaelen was a tall man and he'd been told by women--most recently the exquisite Carly O'Malley--he was extremely well-formed. In all his parts. Of course, he'd kept his wings folded as he always did unless he'd had warning of some ceremonial occasion like this one, but everybody knew that a man's wing-span was precisely equitable to the size of his...

  "Ohhhh," he moaned, unable to control them as they spurted faster, fuller, taller.

  "Oooooh." The women echoed his moans with their own.

  "Just look at the coloring!"

  "Wouldn't you just love to see those things sprout over your head in the dark?"

  Sprout.

  "Aren't you finished yet?" Eochy asked. His own wings wagged impatiently, the fairy equivalent of a tapping toe.

  And just as irritating.

  Gaelen tried to relax, but he couldn't resist a quick comment. He was ticked and hoped Eochy knew it.

  "If you'd give people some notice, Eochy, and not spring these things."

  Eochy smiled. That was always a bad sign.

  "If you'd check your e-mail once in awhile you'd be better informed. I sent a reminder just a week ago, Otherworld time."

  Gaelen shook out his wings and tried to make himself comfortable with their unfamiliar weight on his shoulders.

  "E-mail? You sent it by e-mail?" He looked around then, scanning the crowd. "Where's Lucas?" When he didn't spot his little brother, he settled back in the chair and smirked at Eochy. "There, see? You must have left us off your e-mail alias, Eochy. Lucas checks the e-mail, and he isn't here either."

  Eochy smiled again.

  Double-damn.

  "That's right. And if you'll look at your agenda, you'll see Lucas is item number three."

  His mouth snapped shut and Gaelen jerked his eyes down to the single sheet of paper lying on the table in front of him. Spotting number three, he decided he'd keep his mouth shut for a bit longer.

  The ritual preliminaries passed without Gaelen even hearing them. He'd responded by rote, ignoring the meaning and depth of the words. Still seething, shoulder blades sore, deadlines and unfinished work weighing on his mind--it was all giving him a splitting headache.

  Not to mention having his brother waiting for him at number three.

  "Now," Eochy intoned, settling his spectacles on the tip of his nose. "Item one, the 'Fairy Controversy.' Without objection, since this relates to the matter of item three, we'll pass on to item two, 'Reclaiming Ireland for Her Indigenous Peoples.'" Eochy pulled off his specs and leaned on the table. "Phelan, I know you mean well," Eochy said, his eyes meeting those of the man on Gaelen's left, "but we made a deal with them. We can't back out after three thousand years."

  "But it was a bad deal. That Iberian con man took us, and we all know it."

  Eochy squashed a smile. Gaelen felt his own lips move with unwelcome amusement.

  "Well, Phelan, we can all agree that agreeing to splitting Ireland in half and accepting the half underground was not the most shrewd land transaction in the history of the world, but what's done is done. This Council has had this debate at least once a year for three thousand years, and I'm sure everyone is getting tired of it."

  "I make a motion to table the issue," one of the Hundred said.

  "I second," another said.

  Gaelen could predict the process.

  Phelan wasn't to be deterred. "I demand a recorded vote." He sneered at the assembly. "Just so we know who the weak-kneed fairies are."

  The chamber rocked with moans and expletives in various languages, some of them very interesting to a linguist like Gaelen in their imagination, and a variety of suggestions as to what Phelan could do with himself, various barnyard beas
ts, and sundry of his own female relatives.

  "Give him his vote, Eochy," Gaelen muttered, just wanting the whole thing over with. He glanced down again at the agenda and Lucas's name there. How long had it been since he'd seen his younger brother? He started to worry.

  Eochy grimaced. "All right, the motion has been made."

  Gaelen blocked out the droning voices and voting. He focused his mind and tried to find his brother.

  * * * *

  "Holy Bridget!" Lucas Riley struggled through the open window of Erin's house. His shirt stuck to the trickle of blood oozing from his torn wings.

  How could I have been so stupid? Acting like an untried schoolboy on his first outing, forgetting himself to the point of....

  Lucas scrambled over the sill and set one foot down on the floor inside the Tinkers' sprawling ranch house. It was dark still, but it would be daylight soon and he had to be gone before Mrs. Tinker was up and around.

  He had to check on Erin. The terror on her face just as he popped out was imprinted on his memory and made him heartsick that he'd caused her such anguish. Worse, he'd not been able to stop himself until somewhere near the Great Pyramid. When he'd gotten back to where they'd been parked, Erin was gone.

  "Oh, Bridget! What must she think?" A twisting, mangled ripping mutilated him deep inside. He laughed at himself as he recognized the signs of fairie sorrow. "Aye, boyo, and you've got it pretty bad, ha' you not?"

  Aye, I do, he admitted to himself as he struggled to his feet and headed down the long hallway between the bedrooms at the end of the house, peeking around the doorways, not making a sound, not even breathing. The last thing he needed was for Mrs. Tinker to hear him. He didn't think he could face her yet.

  But no danger was terrifying enough to keep him from his love's side.

  "This one, I think," he whispered, his voice inaudible even to his own ears. He eased around the doorframe and adjusted to the darkness inside the room. "Erin."

  The gray outline of a bed faced him.

  She isn't here. "Erin," he whispered more loudly.

  There was no answer, no uneasy shifting of a sleeping body on the bed.

  "Erin!" he said aloud. "Where are you?"

  * * * *

  There you are, you little punk!

  "Have you located him, Gaelen?"

  Gaelen jerked his eyes from the polished surface of the table to meet Eochy's.

  So, the old bantam was watching me. Gaelen smiled, but didn't answer.

  Eochy studied him for a moment, then bent his gray head over his papers.

  "All right, now that Phelan's nonsense is over for another year, can we please move on to item three?" He perched his specs on the edge of his nose and peered over them at Gaelen. "This is the most egregious case of miscegenation we've ever had to deal with."

  Gaelen hated that word--miscegenation--and wondered how his people had chosen it to describe relations between fairies and others. To him, it smacked of evil hiding beneath white sheets, a word born of fear and irrational hatred.

  "Lucas Riley has taken up with a non-fairy woman," Eochy announced.

  There was no exhaled gasp of surprise. This was really not a big deal.

  "So what, Eochy? Lots of us take up with non-fairies," Gaelen put in.

  "Of course, but we're not talking about pixies or sprites or the unfortunate attraction some of us have for..." Eochy pulled off his specs and grimaced. "Trolls. I, for one, could never understand that, but to each his own, I say."

  "So, Lucas's own is a non-fairy," Gaelen repeated.

  "She is a human."

  The gasp of surprise finally rolled over the assembly.

  "Human?" Gaelen sat forward and stared. "I don't believe it. Lucas isn't stupid. He knows the laws."

  "Know the laws he may, still, he is consorting with a human and he has had relations with her. Not only that, Gaelen, but he allowed her to see his true nature, and she's going to spread the news around that college town like pixie dust at Christmas." Eochy tossed a tabloid newspaper across the table. It slid the last two feet and stopped right in front of Gaelen.

  "Read that." Eochy leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers over his belly. "That's the headline that will appear once the reporters get wind of this."

  Gaelen lowered his eyes, his stomach already churning. The words on the page jumped out at him, putting his acid pump into overdrive.

  Co-ed's Sad Tale: My Boyfriend was Abducted by Aliens!

  Gaelen swallowed a mouthful of sour spit, then looked for the subheading.

  Ripped from His Lover's Arms.

  He couldn't read any more.

  "How do you know this is about Lucas? These tabloids make all this stuff up," Gaelen said.

  "Do they?" Eochy relaxed, absently twirling the tip of his wing around his meaty fingers. "What about the face on Mars? Hmmm? And I suppose they just made up the story about Elvis Presley working at a gas station in Kalamazoo? No, Gaelen, these guys are the most tenacious investigators on the planet. I just thank the Lord there are aliens. Otherwise, we would have already been found out and either disbelieved out of existence or the Council of Elders in Ireland would have our heads mounted in the empty places at Newgrange."

  "Come on, Eochy, they don't take heads anymore." Even as Gaelen said it, his smile faded. The expressions he saw on the faces around him had him wondering.

  Eochy wasn't smiling at all.

  "The reason the Fairy Controversy was put on the agenda is this. We've received a directive from the Council in Ireland to cease all contact with mortals. It's just too dangerous."

  "What!" The word echoed all around the chamber.

  Gaelen stared in disbelief. "Eochy, that's unreasonable. We all," he motioned around the chamber, "have careers, lives out there. We can't just drop them." He paused, not even having the words to continue. "To do what? To go where?"

  "I suspect we'll all be ordered back to Ireland."

  The grumble of discontent grew louder.

  "Look, people, I didn't do this. Irresponsibility like that practiced by Lucas Riley did." Eochy leaned back in his big chair. "Don't you remember the stories in Britain in the twenties? A bunch of fairies thought it would be fun to reveal themselves to some schoolgirls. These schoolgirls got their little Brownie camera out and, voila! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gets on the case and our pictures are all over the London papers." He sighed. "I understand, believe me I do, but times have changed. Revealing ourselves only results in mortal folk going out of their way to disprove our existence. Do you know how many fairies faded to nothing, just because a number of our group couldn't keep their wings folded up?"

  Eochy's voice rumbled off the walls, rattling the magic stones in their brass mountings. The last time Eochy had gotten this worked up, he'd shattered a couple of stones and, until they could get some shipped in from Ireland, the North American Council of Fairies had held their meetings in the dark.

  "So, what happened, Eochy?" someone asked.

  "As far as I can tell, Lucas and this young lady, this--" Eochy referred to his notes. "Erin Tinker. Yes, she's a nursing student at the University. They were...well, anyway, when he..." Eochy yanked his specs off. "His wings popped up, and she screamed, and he squooshed."

  "He squooshed with his wings extended?" another fairy asked.

  "Ouch!" said one compassionate listener. "Didn't you explain the facts of life to your brother, Gaelen?"

  "My father did," Gaelen replied, angry his family was the center of such a scandal. When Gaelen got his hands on his little brother, Lucas would have more to think about than a pair of sore wings.

  But such a mishap would explain the pain Gaelen sensed when he'd had contact with Lucas earlier. He felt Lucas's injury in the right wing, the torn connective tissue underneath the shoulder blade. A sympathetic twinge reminded Gaelen of a similar injury he himself had sustained in similar circumstances.

  But not with a human, for Bridget's sake!

  "He's hurt, Eochy."

/>   "All the more reason to handle this matter right here. He must be brought before the Council. He must be dealt with. The girl, too."

  Gaelen shuddered. "What are you saying?"

  Eochy's wise old black eyes fixed on him. "We might be able to handle this ourselves. But we must not be discovered. If we can contain this, prevent the tabloids from spreading the story, maybe I can convince the Elders to rescind their order. But we can't risk our literal lives for the sake of our lives in the Otherworld. If the humans find out about us..." Eochy spread his hands. "Well, you know how quick they are to disbelieve."

  "Some of them believe," Gaelen said.

  Eochy nodded. "Some of them will believe anything. But humans as a race cling to the belief they have a clue about what's going on in the universe. When the scientists get started..."

  A murmur arose in the assembly followed by a wave of fear.

  "We'll all end up on ice at Area 51 with the aliens," came a gruff prediction from the gallery.

  The idea of being a scientific curiosity appealed no more to Gaelen than it did to anybody else. If this story was true, then Lucas had committed a major felony.

  "So, what do you want me to do?" he finally ground out.

  "Find him. Bring him to us so we can handle this, or the Elders will."

  "What will you do to him?" Gaelen asked, his belly twisting as he waited for the answer.

  "You know the penalty for consorting with a human and revealing the fairy nature."

  Bile filled Gaelen's throat. He gulped it down and tried to keep his wings from trembling. "Eochy, you can't be serious."

  Eochy closed his eyes and nodded gravely. "Banishment to Tir-Nan-Og."

  Oh, Bridget. Eternal life with no responsibility might sound good in theory, but the lack of challenge made a man soft, useless. After a few thousand years of constant partying, one would plead for the rigors of Hell out of sheer boredom.

  Personally, he'd rather be disbelieved to death. At least then he'd see what was on the other side.

  "And the human girl?"

  Eochy wouldn't meet Gaelen's eyes. "We will not be discovered, Gaelen."

  Gaelen's sick stomach flipped over.