by Caleb James
Over ten years later and the nightmares still came. He’d wake shaking and sweating, convinced that someone he loved was trapped in a house on fire, or that he was. Only for the last month, his night terrors had the added feature of white monsters, the smell of cookies, and beautiful New Yorkers who weren’t exactly human.
He wanted to turn around. To not show up for this crazy-assed convocation with Liam, Charlie, and of course Gran. But no, that ship, the ship of pretending none of this was real, had sailed. Batshit crazy was the new reality. This wasn’t over.
He pulled up to the front of Gran’s brick building and parked behind Charlie’s brand-new candy-apple-red Ford F-150. He counted the burned-out holes around this picturesque square, which had been used as the set in countless period-drama movies. Four historic buildings had vanished. On either side, the remaining nineteenth-century structures were smeared with soot.
It fed the sick feel in his gut as he gazed into the iron-fenced park, where residents rolled baby carriages and walked dogs. These buildings would never be replaced. Instead, developers were chomping at the bit and playing on the fears of displaced owners and tenants. Money would change hands and well-disguised seven- and eight-digit bribes would take place. Where glorious townhouses once stood, needle-thin luxury condo complexes, twenty and thirty stories high, would appear.
At least Gran’s building had passed unscathed, as had Gran. The uniformed doorman, who had to be in his seventies, waved Finn through.
He headed toward the elevators. The doorman’s familiar face tripped memories: he and Rory running in the halls or using Gran’s spare bedroom as a safe spot for weekend adventures in Manhattan.
As the doors slid open, he caught the smells of cooking from different apartments, and the cabbage-rose carpet wrapped him deeper in a time warp. It didn’t take much to imagine Rory behind him. But he’s dead. He knocked on the door.
“Coming.” Charlie’s voice from inside, and then his blue-eyed smile, appeared as he cracked the door open. “Come in quick or we’ll be chasing cats up and down the halls.”
Used to Gran and Charlie taking in strays, Finn squeezed through, effectively blocking the escape of two boisterous tabbies. A Siamese whined from down the bookshelf-filled hall as Gran appeared from the kitchen. She greeted Finn with a hug and a kiss. She put her hands on either side of his face and shook her head. “You’ve lost weight. You can’t afford to do that. Come in.”
“I’m okay.”
“And I’m the queen of Sheba.”
“Who knew?” God, she is still so sharp. It was always impossible to put anything over on Flora. As teenagers, he and Rory would sneak into bars for some underage mayhem. Flora always knew and could tell how much each of them had to drink, down to the number of shots or beers. Though only once did she rat them out.
He took a seat in the familiar kitchen with its black-and-white tiled floor and glass-fronted cabinets filled with a hodgepodge of colorful dishes. Bacon crackled in a pan as pancakes browned and got flipped.
“Gran, tell Finn what you told us,” Charlie said.
She stacked Finn’s plate with butter-topped blueberry pancakes and a mountain of crisp bacon. She poured him black coffee and herself tea before she sat. “I don’t see how any of you could have missed this. Though to be fair, I didn’t see it at first. But Finn, you have a history with Queen May.”
Finn blew coffee up his nose. “Yeah, she tried to eat me, Liam… and Charlie’s truck.”
“That’s not what I meant. Now eat—all that’s on your plate—and let an old woman talk. Finn Hulain… you do know where your name comes from?”
“Not so much.”
“That’s a pity. Your name—and I suspect if you climb up your family tree, you’ll discover you’re not the first to own it—is an amalgam of two of Irish history and legends’ heroes: Finn McCool and Coohulain. As someone who’s spent a lifetime poring through books, I can tell you that when you lay the stories one on top of the other, they’re more alike than different.”
Liam added, “In Fey what is coincidence is fact. So to follow what Gran says, they may be two, but they can also be one.”
“Yes.” Gran cast Liam a look. “Thank you for clarifying. Which brings us to you, Finn Hulain. Your history… your ancestors’ history with May is significant. In fact, I think it’s at the heart—” She chuckled. “—of this nightmare.” She started to hum “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Finn looked from Gran to Charlie. “Has she lost it?”
“I haven’t,” Gran said. “But she has. You, or rather someone in your family’s past, was May’s lover.”
Finn had a weird sensation, like he was falling. He thought back to the night of the fires.
He, Gran, Charlie, Liam, and Alex Nevus, the kid who’d been on that singing show, had frantically looked through ancient manuscripts in a luxury high-rise owned by May’s sister, Katye Summer. The latter he’d not met, and according to her doorman, she’d left with a large frog in a carrying case the day before hell broke loose. “In those books, she was tricked by him… her lover. And there was some kind of pact between the fey and the humans, and in the end she got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”
“Correct.” Gran stared at him. “Finn Hulain, you carry the blood of the man who tricked her, not just of her land, but worse. You broke her heart.”
Charlie tried to lighten the mood. “Bastard.”
“No laughing matter, Charles Michael Fitzgerald. For humans a broken heart is a pain that can drive women and men to madness, to suicide even, though most of us move on.” She stared at Finn.
He nodded. She knows. She’s always known that I loved Rory. Maybe this is my karma.
Gran nodded.
Liam spoke. “It’s worse for us. We do not love readily, Finn. Our affections are hard-won. But once given, fey love is not taken lightly. It’s magic.” He glanced at Charlie. “When I fell in love with Charlie, I gave him a piece of me.”
Charlie laughed. “Yes, and when I fell in love with you, you were naked and holding a Chihuahua.”
Liam smiled. “You were glamoured. I was not, and this is truth.” He placed a hand on Charlie’s broad chest. “Inside, you carry a piece of me. It’s what allowed you to travel between the worlds without breaking. It’s a magic that humans still possess, albeit water-thin. If what Gran says is truth, and I can’t see otherwise, you, Finn Hulain, possess something May needs.”
“Wait a minute.” Finn’s thoughts swam. “I thought we were talking about a contract or something. There was a picture in one of those books, and May and this Hulain guy signed something. And we were thinking there’s two copies, and to undo the bad deal, she’s going to go on a paper hunt… or parchment hunt, or—”
Gran interrupted. “There was a contract, Finn. But the more I look at this and turn it in my head, it was not written on vellum but in flesh and blood. May gave your ancestor her heart, and if I’m reading things right… she wants it back.”
Six
REDMOND FELT sick as he descended into the bowels of the Center’s high-security hospital for the criminally insane. I should not have agreed. I have put everyone in horrible jeopardy.
As he passed specialized cells designed for their inhabitants, he ticked off the crimes that had landed them here. Each of these mental monsters, he had sat with and evaluated. Through the decades, and now centuries, he had become a connoisseur of the fey psyche. And no species or obscure disorder had escaped his laser-sharp dissection.
One called through the bars as he passed. “Doc.”
“Yes, Farlark.” He recognized the ferry-boat troll who had topped the news when he’d intentionally drowned a trip’s passengers. At the time, he’d said a voice in his head told him to do it. As Redmond later learned in sitting with the murderous troll, his motivations had been far more twisted.
“Tell me who they got down below.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Patient privacy.”
/> “Yes, just as you wouldn’t want me sharing your business.”
“It’s someone famous.”
“Fishing gets you nowhere.” Though he regretted his water metaphor. He looked in Farlark’s cell. It was meticulously clean, the bed pulled so taut a pixie could use it as a trampoline. While it was said cleanliness was next to godliness, for this patient it was the kissing cousin and true motivation for his crimes, as he had divulged in one particularly painful session. Farlark had revealed his mother’s obsession with tidiness, her cruelty to him as a child for even the smallest smear of dirt or speck of dust. It was the motivation for killing a boatload full of day-trippers. “They were dirty. I wanted to make them clean.” And yes, he had been hearing a voice, that of his mother, who he’d chopped to bits earlier that day. Redmond’s trained eye took it all in. It’s too clean. The therapy is not working. And then he spotted it. On the sink there was a definite, albeit faint, patch of soap scum. “Well done, Farlark.”
Without looking, the troll knew what Redmond had seen. “It makes me crazy.”
I think we passed that a while back. “Tell me your level of anxiety.”
“Ten out of ten, but it was only a five before you brought it to my attention.”
“Good work. And when it goes below a four, see if you can mess up something else.”
“It makes her mad.”
“She’s dead, Farlark. Remember that.”
“I know. I killed her, and she still won’t let me go.”
Redmond nodded. The normalcy of this interaction had calmed his fears. “It’s often how it works with murder. You killed your mother’s body, but she’d worked her way into your head long before.”
“I want her out.”
“It’s a process.”
“Yeah… a long one. That’s what you said. But I’m making progress.” His voice was like a little boy seeking a parent’s approval.
Redmond did not withhold. “You’re doing great.”
And he headed down farther, each footfall on the stone stairs like the tolling of a funeral bell. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to see her. He thought of Farlark and his dirt phobia.
The treatment was simple exposure: face the thing you fear, and in time, and with practice, it loosens its grip. Yes, but that’s when it’s an unreasonable fear. The soap scum on his sink won’t kill him. May could. And not just him… me, all of us.
The air chilled, and his anxiety spiked as he passed cell after cell on his way down.
When he could go no farther, he had arrived. Outside, at attention, stood two ogres. “Karnick, Glebe, tell me of our prisoner.”
Glebe, with his ridiculous bright orange Mohawk in the front and ponytail in the back, spoke. “She’s all wobbly.”
Redmond peered through the water window. “Good choice of words.” For Queen May, if in fact she still was whole enough to even call her that, had no solid form. What lay half on the bed and half on the carpet was of no recognizable species. “I will go in.”
“Of course, Doctor. We will follow.”
“No. Stay here, but keep a close watch. If I need you, come fast, call for others, and use all means necessary to restrain her.”
“As you wish.” Glebe inserted the key. But it wasn’t until Redmond drew a complex series of wispy sigils that it turned.
He held still and listened to the grinding of gears, both mechanical and magical. The water never stopped flowing through the iron-laced window as he was afforded a too-close and too-in-person glimpse of the once-powerful monarch in her lavishly appointed cell. His breath quickened and his pulse raced. She killed my mother and father. Distant memories flittered like pixies in his mind. Happy times with his professor parents and their friends. Glittering parties where he’d watch and listen from the bedroom stairs. She killed them all. And those she didn’t murder—all the teachers, the doctors, the theologians—had been sent to camps. And their children, like himself, were enrolled in a prisonlike school where all that was taught was the world according to Queen May. It was on the grounds of that school the Center now stood.
He stared and thought, not for the first time, that the easiest and smartest course would be to take a sword and separate her head from her body. Even as he had that thought, the healer in him took inventory. She is broken. And it’s from traveling unprotected between the realms. The queen’s obsession with obtaining hafflings to protect herself as she sought to reunite the realms—all under her rule, of course—was no secret. She failed in her last attempt.
He observed the bedridden creature, with the worst case of travel sickness he’d ever witnessed. Not just broken, but somehow an amalgam of creatures. Fascinated, he watched as a humanoid hand appeared and grasped a pillow, while a slipper-clad foot turned into the claw of a salamander. Her face had the jaw and flattened nostrils of a beast, but her eyes, which followed him, were gold like a cat’s, and her long blonde hair cascaded prettily over the embroidered bedspread. It seemed to have a life of its own as tendrils twisted on invisible breezes. A trio of tresses decided to form a braid as a length on the other side twirled in and out of a bun.
He replayed his discussion with her sister Lizbeta, who had all but admitted that the separation of the three realms had been her doing. In following that logic, Queen May’s current state was due to her sister. At least her diagnosis, the kind a first-year medical student could make, was clear.
The creature on the massive bed with its profusion of dainty pillows kept him fixed in her gaze. The eyes occasionally flickered from amber to red. Her white maw gaped open, and an expression of frustration twisted her cheeks as she tried to speak. What emerged were grunts.
She strained as a broad tail emerged and swished from side to side. Had the furniture not been fixed to the floor, it would have upended tables and chairs arranged to give the cell a look of luxury and normalcy.
“Hello, my queen. I’m Redmond Fall. I will be your doctor.”
No response.
“You are at the Center for Fey Development. I will come and chat with you each day. Perhaps I can help.”
The creature coughed.
He smelled fairy fire. Like gas on a hot stove, his brain sparked. If the other inmates catch a whiff of this… of her…. Not good. He made a mental note to further seal her cell. But more importantly, he’d need to guard himself. For what he’d shared with no one was that he’d spent the better part of three centuries under the thrall of fairy fire’s by-product… fairy dust. He’d been a dusthead and a slave to the drug. The false feelings of love and comfort it gave… for a while. Always leaving the user wanting and needing more. She reeks of it. Cautiously he leaned in. It was on her breath and in the snaking locks of her hair. As her form wavered, the smell was strongest when she was more amphibious. Which makes sense.
“My queen, tell me your pleasure.”
Her head twisted, first with the flat head and broad maw of the beast, and then, with obvious effort, she pulled her humanoid face together. She gasped and blew air through her lips as though testing them. “My pleasure….” She halted. Her mouth twisted. “My pleasure is to be free of this place. Do that for me. For your queen.” Her gaze, eyes first red and then amber, bore into his.
“That is not possible.” She tries to glamour me.
She inhaled. “Hmmm. I smell something tricky tricky. I’ve no use for an inquisitive jailor. Off with you, for no amount of tricky in your pockets or around your neck will keep you safe.” She attempted to rise, but her body couldn’t decide on a form that would let her do that. She sank back. “I am weak, and you take advantage of this. Bad doctor. Very bad. Clearly you’ve forgotten your… hypocrite’s oath.”
“That’s Hippocratic, my lady. And I am here to help.” He felt the ruby well hidden in the folds of his shirt. How could she know? What else does she know? Her discovery of his talisman deepened his dread. Even broken she is too powerful to contain.
“Yes, well, we’ll see. Do something about this,” she said
, as a human arm that ended in a salamander’s talon swept up and down her unstable form.
Redmond nodded. This is good. She has stated a goal that we can agree upon. “I will try. The cause we both know.”
“Yes.” Her mouth broadened and went flat at the corners.
He waited, as it appeared that speech was impossible with a salamander maw.
Her lips reformed. “Travel between worlds. I was unlucky. The vessel I’d chosen was ripped from me.”
“A haffling.”
“Yes, they do not break, as they have one foot in the See and the other in the Unsee.”
“They are rare,” Redmond replied, his curiosity now stronger than his fear.
“I am aware. Now leave me, you annoying little bug. I do not want you tip-tapping at my thoughts.”
“As you will….” He paused. “To help you maintain a stable form, you must focus. I can help you with that.”
“Yes, and so starts the tit for tat. I know this game, Doctor. Neither a borrower or a lender be; what you give, no doubt you’ll come and take from me.”
“As you wish.”
Not turning his back, he moved toward the door.
She spoke as he edged away. “Be careful, little bug, for when I return to myself, you will be the first down my throat, and no pretty bauble around your neck will stop me.”
He had nothing to say. Her words were truth. He watched her form grow more solid with each moment. And for someone who had spent his career helping the most incorrigible of unbalanced criminals, creatures who had committed acts of outrageous brutality, he’d never once had the kinds of thoughts she triggered. Fly to your chamber, grab your sword, and be done with it. One strike to separate her head from her body. Do it now.
Seven
SALAMANDER MAY, with Dorothea at her side, scoured the Unsee with a singular purpose.
Find the third haffling, Adam.
Come out, come out. You can run. You can hide, but I will find you. In her wake she laid blood, destruction, and the mouthwatering smell of cookies. It was insidious and deliberate. Craters filled with fairy dust, like an all-you-can-eat buffet for addicts. So while the populace fled from her advances, more and more hung back and fell upon her leavings with rabid abandon. Their ranks swelled, and those who wanted to “just try a taste” were enslaved by the drug’s false promises.
