Loose Changeling: A Changeling Wars Novel

by A. G. Stewart

  LOOSE CHANGELING

  A Changeling Wars Novel: Book 1

  A.G. Stewart

  Copyright © 2015 by A.G. Stewart

  All rights reserved.

  Publisher’s Note: No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder except for brief passages quoted by reviewers or in connection with critical analysis.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Igneous Books

  Roseville, CA

  www.igneousbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ever have your life turn upside down in the span of a few days? And not upside down in the just-had-a-baby or just-bought-a-house or even the my-brother-joined-the-circus-and-just-got-arrested-for-being-a-little-too-close-to-the-zebras sort of way.

  I mean the sort of way where you find out you’re not actually human.

  The mysteriously missing staple remover should have been my first clue that my week was about to get much, much worse. My mom liked to say that trouble didn’t just come in threes—it began with something small, almost unnoticeable, and then snowballed from there unless you did something to stop it. In her case, that meant drawing a circle on the ground to keep out unwanted spirits.

  I just wasn’t that superstitious. Living in the real world does that to you.

  I cradled my phone between shoulder and ear, swiveling from side to side in my cubicle, a packet of papers in my hand. “It’s not happening, Owen,” I said into the phone. I scanned my desk again. Stacks of papers sat in labeled piles, my color-coded calendar was pinned to one wall, and my scissors, staplers, and pens lay lined up by my computer, perfectly parallel to one another.

  A blank spot existed where my staple remover always was.

  “I’m lonely, Nicole. Come on, please?” My husband’s voice lifted at least three octaves on the last word.

  I sighed but held my ground against the auditory onslaught. He’d been acting odd lately—at times clingy and at other times distant. He seemed always preoccupied with his phone. “We’re not getting a dog.” Dogs were hairy, they smelled like death, and there was no way in hell or high water I was letting one into our house.

  A breathy, high-pitched giggle sounded to my right. I whirled and could have sworn I saw something—a tiny brown blur and my papers ruffling. I blinked. An afterimage stayed on in my mind, as though I’d captured a photo of the scene. A tiny, naked body, heels kicked up, wild brown hair like a thorn bush about its face. I shook my head, and the image disappeared. I’d started hearing the giggling about a week ago but hadn’t placed the source. “Did you just laugh at me, Brent?”

  Brent, the accountant, grunted from behind the cubicle partition. “Have you ever heard me laugh?”

  “Point taken.”

  “It would be fun,” Owen was saying into the phone.

  I flipped the contract in my hand, slammed it on the desk, and started peeling off the staple with my fingernails. “And who’s going to take care of a dog? You?”

  A pause, and then, “Well, why not?”

  I had a mental picture of Owen on the other end of the line—lying amongst the myriad pillows he’d insisted were necessary for a grown-up bed, curly hair a mess, stubble covering his chin like a light covering of fur, and his breath smelling faintly of alcohol. Six months ago, he’d been placed on administrative leave and then fired for showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show to his sixth-grade students the day before winter break.

  Typical Owen. He just didn’t think before he did things.

  I flipped the contract back over and then froze, one nail beneath the staple, the metal digging into my skin, a sudden thought occurring to me. “Oh my God, you already got one, didn’t you?”

  “He was just wandering the streets,” Owen said. “He’s little—you won’t even notice him.”

  I bit back a scream of frustration and checked the clock. “I’ve got sales to log and emails to reply to. I’ll be home at eight tonight. The dog needs to be gone by then. Owen, he probably belongs to someone. Take him to the Multnomah County shelter.”

  And get a job, I added mentally. Please, just get a job. This prolonged period of unemployment was taking its toll. On both of us.

  “Okay, fine,” he said, and then added under his breath, “At least the dog likes me.” Click.

  I finished removing the staple and tossed it into the trash can. When I stood, the sea of cubicles at Frank Gibbons, Inc. greeted me. “Did someone borrow my staple remover?” I called out. I’d returned just yesterday from a sales trip to Milwaukee and had four more contracts to process.

  Super-slinger of complex daily planners (“life planners” we called them)—that’s me. I fell into the job after college. It was in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, it paid well, and it was eminently practical.

  Replies trickled from cubes. “No.” “Not me.” “Mine’s missing.” “Mine too; that’s weird.”

  “So no one has one I can borrow?”

  Silence.

  I dropped back into my seat with a sigh. My office phone rang again. I seized it from its cradle, trying to unwind the tangled cord. “Owen, for the last time, no dogs!”

  “Is this Nicole Philbin?” a voice said hesitantly.

  “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.” Heat crept up the back of my neck. “This is she.”

  “This is Mariann, from yesterday? In Milwaukee?” She spoke each sentence like a question. “I wanted to cancel my order?”

  Mariann, at Bright Futures, LLC. I remembered her—short, quiet woman. Thirty-two planners, one instructional video, no training classes. Small order, but not insignificant.

  “Sure, I’ll get that started for you right away. May I ask why you’re canceling?”

  “Well, I’m just not sure we really need them?”

  A dog. There was a dog in my pristine house, and it was probably peeing on my carpet right now. I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them again, trying to stay in the game. “Frank Gibbons daily planners have been proven to increase the average worker’s productivity by fifty percent,” I said smoothly. “If you’re happy with the productivity of the workers in your company, then the planner is not something that you need.”

  I pulled her contract from my pile. “Thirty-two planners, one instructional video, all at the spring forward discount?”

  “That’s the one.” She hesitated. “Discount?”

  “Yes,” I said. The dog was probably on my couch now, rubbing its hair and its dog-ness all over the cushions. I’d bought that couch just last year with my bonus. “Spring forward. Twe
nty percent off all products for three days. Ends tonight.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I remind you that Frank Gibbons offers a ninety-day guarantee. If you’re unhappy with the product, we’ll refund you half your money.”

  “Can I have a couple days to think about it?” she said.

  If someone starts trying to bargain with you, you’ve already made a sale. I moved in for the kill. “You can, but the discount ends tonight. If I cancel your order, and you decide you do want our products, they’ll be at full price.”

  Owen had probably seated that stupid dog on my countertop, all four of its dirt-encrusted paws flaking onto the granite, as my husband hand-fed it the leftover salmon I’d planned to take for lunch tomorrow.

  I couldn’t think about that. I had this sale; I knew I did. A short crackling breath, and Mariann spoke again. “I think I’ll—”

  The phone cord pulled free of its base. Bemused, I took the cord, clicked it back in, and gave it a tug. It stayed firm. I picked up the phone and didn’t get a tone. Just silence.

  Another breathy giggle from behind me. I whirled. Nothing. “Is someone using a kid’s laughter for their ringtone?” I called out.

  No answer except the faint tap of fingers on keyboards and mouse clicks. Someone, several cubicles down, mumbled into his phone. I couldn’t discern the words.

  Right at this moment, Owen was probably carrying the dirty pooch upstairs to our room, tucking it beneath the covers in our bed, petting it so that its wiry hair fell all over my pillow, and laughing as it opened its mouth to pant and to drool…

  I checked the clock. Five minutes to 5:00 p.m. I was allowed to leave at five, though I almost never did. I stuffed the contracts into my bag, slung it over my shoulder, and headed for the elevator, promising myself I’d call Mariann back as soon as I got home. Trusting Owen to get something done in the time I asked it of him was like expecting a toddler to neatly eat a plate of spaghetti.

  And the giggling in my cubicle that no one else could hear? It was starting to creep me out, to the point I was actually considering asking my mom to spiritually cleanse my office cubicle, and to hell with what my coworkers would say.

  I was going to nail down the next staple remover I got.

  OWEN’S CAR WAS STILL in the driveway when I pulled up to my gray, two-story townhome. He hadn’t left to take the dog to the shelter yet, and somehow I wasn’t surprised. But the dog should have been the least of my worries. Yes, it was there when I opened the door, sitting on my carpet, but it was a little thing, with a pink collar and a nametag clearly dangling from the center. It didn’t bark or yap when I entered my home; its tail thumped a few times against the floor and then stilled.

  Something about the entire house didn’t feel right. It was too quiet, like the odd stillness just before a hurricane. I stopped on the threshold and held my breath, listening. For a moment, I heard only my own breathing.

  And then from somewhere upstairs, a giggle sounded—not the sort that had been plaguing my cubicle—but the deeper, throaty kind. The kind that comes from the mouth of a woman. A woman who had no business being in my house.

  I’m not sure how I got up the stairs. I might have actually flown up there. The next thing I knew, I was throwing open the door to the guest bedroom.

  I caught a momentary glimpse of my husband clasped in the embrace of someone I didn’t know, before they broke apart, drawing the covers over their naked bodies, horror rising on their faces as surely as a sunrise.

  All the air went out of me, sucked out, as if I’d put a vacuum cleaner to my lips.

  “This isn’t—” Owen stopped, his mouth gaping like a baby bird waiting to have a worm stuffed into its beak. I wanted to stuff something into his mouth, and my fist seemed the best option. But the woman let out a squeak, and my attention flitted to her.

  My first thought was, She’s not even attractive. It was shallow but true. She had ashy brown hair, which, at that moment, stood in wild disarray. Her eyes—brown. Her face had a pinched look to it, and the lines around her mouth indicated that she frowned often. A faint shadow of hair lay on her upper lip.

  She looked so very much like a mouse.

  I turned to my husband, all my breath coming back in a rush of heat and anger. “You!” He scrambled back in the bed, pale arms flailing among the blankets as if he could somehow launch himself away from me. “You’re cheating on me?”

  “Jane is just a friend,” he blurted out.

  I think I actually, literally saw red. “How stupid do you think I am?” I seized one of the throw pillows from the floor, where they’d been knocked by Owen and Jane’s…activities. “Oh, wait. You must think I’m pretty goddamned stupid, because you’ve been sleeping with someone else. Right. Under. My. Nose!” I punctuated each word with a thrown pillow.

  Each pillow found its mark and exploded into a shower of feathers. That should have clued me in to something. I never bought feather pillows because of Owen’s allergies. And I wasn’t throwing hard enough to rupture them.

  I picked up the last three. “You’re a horrible. Lying filthy. Excuse for a human being!” I ran out of things to throw and things to say. I stood there, panting, as my vision began to clear. Owen had never looked more pathetic to me. Naked, slight paunch exposed, arms upheld, dark brown hair covered in feathers.

  I stalked to the bedside. Every step made Owen cringe. “What are you still doing in here?” I said to him. “Get out.”

  He moved to gather his clothes and then stopped. “Where’s Jane?”

  The heat rose to my cheeks again. “Why should I care where your girlfriend is? Get out of my house.”

  Owen peered over the side of the bed. “Her clothes are still here. And her purse.”

  My head cleared enough for me to notice a few things. The pillowcases had disappeared into thin air, the edges of Owen’s hair were singed, the room smelled faintly of smoke, and I hadn’t actually seen Jane leave. I went over to the other side of the bed. A pile of clothes, homely as the woman herself, lay crumpled on the floor—khaki pants, camel-colored boots, and a sweater the same brown as a swath of carpet from the seventies. A black leather purse lay on its side next to the clothes.

  Attached to the purse’s handle, tugging frantically at the strap with its mouth, was a tiny brown mouse. Both Owen and I watched its futile struggles.

  “Why is there a mouse in the guest room?” I asked Owen. Anything I didn’t like at that moment was his fault. He didn’t answer. The mouse looked up at me, squeaked, and ran off. It turned the corner outside the bedroom door and disappeared.

  Owen turned to me, his expression bewildered. “I don’t know what just happened here.”

  “I know what just happened here,” I said. “Faithful, hardworking wife comes home to find her bastard of a husband in bed with someone else. Now get out before I put my boot up your bare ass!” I began marching over to his side of the bed. I was wearing heels.

  That did it. He pulled his clothes on faster than I’d ever seen him move. I’m pretty sure he put his pants on inside out. Finally, he left, closing the door quietly behind him. “Take the dog!” I yelled, and then I let out all my breath at once.

  I wish I could say I didn’t waste time lamenting the beginning of the end. I’d always thought that if I caught Owen cheating on me, I would immediately burn the bed sheets, cross out his name on everything that said “Nicole and Owen Philbin,” and cut his face out of all our conjoint photographs—all this while rocking out to Alanis Morissette on the stereo. I got as far as pulling the sheets off the bed before I started to cry. When you really think you’re going to spend the rest of your life with someone, realizing that there are some twists in the road to happily ever after (in this case, a gaping chasm) tends to bring a person down.

  I think I would have stayed there all night, curled pathetically on the floor, if Jane’s purse hadn’t begun to secrete the scent of dark chocolate. I might not have noticed except that dark ch
ocolate isn’t exactly known for its strong aroma. The smell built from there into a crescendo of cocoa, rich and deep as a cup of coffee. Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I reached for the black leather handle. As soon as I touched it, the scent disappeared, as quickly as Jane herself had.

  Mousy Jane. What kind of woman ran off without her clothes, and even more strangely, her purse? The mystery lingered, a backseat note in the tumult of my emotions. Some people in my situation might have jumped to far-fetched conclusions when faced with Jane’s disappearance. “Magic!” “A curse!” Or “Epic karma smackdown!” Fortunately for society, there are very few of those people running about, and I’m not one of them.

  So I did the next most reasonable thing—I rifled through her bag. Nothing unusual. A tube of ChapStick, a cell phone, a wallet, a few safety pins, Band-Aids, a package of tissues, some stray receipts, and a couple pens. No bars of chocolate, not so much as a Hershey Kiss. I put the purse aside, closed my eyes, and leaned my back against the dresser. My throat hurt, my head hurt, my heart hurt.

  I really thought, in that moment, that my world was ending. Funny how retrospection can make past problems seem petty. Back then I hadn’t the slightest clue what world-ending moments actually looked like, not like I do now. Senseless murder, impending war, the Void—these were along the right lines, not two naked people rubbing their parts on one another.

  Before I knew it, I’d dozed off.

  I woke up to a mouse sitting on my knees.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We looked at one another for a long while, the mouse and I. It sat up on its hind legs, paws held in front of its chest, nose and whiskers twitching. If I didn’t know any better, I would have said it had been waiting for me to wake up. It rubbed its paws together, one on top of the other, a gesture not unlike the wringing of hands. Its head turned to the side, eyes averted. Then it launched into a tirade of squeaking.