Pixie Noir (Pixie for Hire Book 1)

by Cedar Sanderson

  The enemies moving against her wouldn’t be seen by Bob and her cousins, unless some of them had the Sight. I did, but the prospect of going up against them for a girl I barely knew was not appetizing. Duty be damned, I didn’t relish dying. For one thing, that meant the family honor debt would pass onto someone who was not equipped to fulfill it. The family has been getting thinner with every generation, and little nephew Devon was barely fifteen. He wouldn’t even be as noticeable as a speed bump to the fairies who wanted Bella and my whole family dead.

  I switched my attention back to Bob. “So what do you want from me? I can assure you, I mean her no harm. As a matter of fact, the inheritance would give her more power.”

  He raised that eyebrow again. “Really. Power, is it?”

  I nodded. I was not at liberty to tell him what was in those papers that rested under my hand in my attache case. I wasn’t so melodramatic as to cuff it to myself, but anyone trying to take it away would get a nasty surprise. I could, however, give him a clue, if he was astute as I thought he was, and Lavandar had told him enough.

  “Well, then...” he mused out loud. The he nodded abruptly. “What did she say?”

  “She told me to get out or she would shoot me.” I told him drily.

  He burst into laughter. Dan even laughed quietly. I waited until he was done and had wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Don’t know why I expected any less from my girl,” he grinned. “Don’t give up, son, she’ll come around.”

  He nudged Dan. “Time to be getting home.”

  Before they walked away, he tossed a couple of bills on the table. May had invisibly delivered their order a while back. I was certain she had been listening as hard as she could, too. He delivered his parting shot.

  “I’ll talk t’ Bella, and tell her she should sign those papers.”

  I watched them walk out. I didn’t think he really understood what was in those papers, or he would be taking me someplace they would never find the body, about now. I was still going to have a hard time with this, and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to succeed in it.

  I added to the money on the table. He’d left enough, but I figured having May on my good side was worth it.

  I went straight back to the hotel. Time to think this through, and make a decision. I hadn’t been straight with Bella or Bob, but that wasn’t about them, it was about the depth of my involvement. Unless you were born to a destiny that you really didn’t want, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into, you won’t understand my dilemma. I was supposed to get her to sign the papers, but I wanted her to not sign them, ever.

  Back in the room I shed my outer layers onto the chair. I was grateful for them... Damn, it was cold outside... but they made me feel like a fat little man. Little was bad enough without being round. Then I flopped on the bed and closed my eyes. It had been a very long three days.

  Chapter 2 - Raven Wings

  I had started out in Underhill, of course, safe at home, my feet propped on the hearth, a good pipe going, and book in my hand. All was right with my world. Then the summons had come, and dragged me all the way out to the end of the world. I knew, lying on that musty bed in a cold hotel room, alone and with danger closing in, that I’d never get back there. It had the force of a Sight, and I sat up with a growl.

  “No, dammit. Not going to just lie down and let Fate walk all over me with her stiletto heels, the bitch!” I spoke a little louder than I’d planned, and someone banged on the wall.

  I stared at the wall. It was a vanilla hotel room wall, something I knew better than I wanted to. I hadn’t been entirely truthful with them. I wasn’t just a messenger boy, although that was how it had started. Just not with me, but with my great-great grandfather.

  The Pixie clans and the Fae who ruled Underhill had been at war since before humans started scratching down records on birch bark. We were peoples of a cold, wet land, scattered over islands, back then, even on the mainland of what would become France. There just weren’t enough resources for both of us, it was proclaimed, and the feud carried on cold and hot from generation to generation.

  The rise of humans gave us something. The Fae preferred to use humans as tools, the pixies used them as well, but more as refuges. The legends of the brownies, knockers, and coblyns (which gave rise to the word goblin) all came from my ancestors, for the Pixie clans had fragmented by then, into several discrete groups which had their own codes of honor. Fae had remained united, but two-faced, as High Court and Low, the light and dark of Fae. Only the Dark Hunt lay outside the Court’s rule, and they were a horror. I shuddered in the overly warm room as a touch of the cold hound’s breath lingered in my mind.

  They had almost had me, that once. I’d been young and foolish, trying to do something heroic, of course. I wouldn’t do that again anytime soon. Now, I worked for duty, but nothing more than was necessary to fulfill the family debt.

  My clan, a sept of the Brownies, had fallen on hard times somewhere around the reign of the human Queen Elizabeth. The Fae were in ascendance, and the feud had quietened. But my great-great had done the math and had seen the population of his people plunging. Pixies are shorter-lived than the near-immortal fairies, and neither group reproduces like humans. He had done the unthinkable, trying to keep his family going.

  I wondered what he’d been like, he had been long dead by the time I was born. The Family hated his guts, of course. With all our reverence for family and tradition, I had never seen the portrait of him that ought to be hanging in the tor along with the others. Rumor had that it existed, though. I had no sympathy for him, his bargain had cost me my life.

  There are things worse than being dead. Some days, I wondered what would have been wrong with letting that Direhound close his jaws over me. That would have ended it. Well, except that then wee Devon would have been on the hook for the Debt. I grunted, a soft sound in the heavy silence of the room. Time to get over myself and get the job done.

  It was lunchtime, but I wasn’t hungry after the hearty breakfast at the Northstar. I wondered if I dared venture back to her, if Bob had had the time to soften her up a little. Frankly, I was bored, sitting in an empty room. The television was a blank eye looking at me, but I didn’t feel up to that level of vapidity any more than sitting in silence.

  I had looked it up, it would be dark in a couple of hours. Maybe it was time to look around town a little, see what was here, and who was from out of town. Bob and Dan could probably do that far better than I, of course, but I might recognize one of the Folke. And it beat sitting here twiddling my thumbs.

  I was mostly bundled back up when there was a loud knock at the door. I unzipped the parka to give me more flexibility of motion and cursed the modern air travel security as I went to the door. There were no peepholes on the wood door, and I had no illusions about the chain keeping someone from entering, even though I had engaged it. Without a weapon, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  I popped the door open and peered out and up into Bella’s eyes. You could have knocked me over with a feather. She was smiling.

  “Er...” I really needed to regain some semblance of suave around this woman. “Hang on a sec.”

  I shut the door in her face and popped the chain, then swung it back open. “Sorry.”

  She chuckled. “I knew what you were doing. May I come in?”

  I stepped back, and she slid by me into the little room. I hesitated to shut the door, then shrugged. This wasn’t Court, where being alone with her would spawn whispers for a hundred years.

  She plopped into the only chair. I opted to stand, which put me eye to eye with her.

  We looked at each other for a long moment in silence. I was seeing her in better light, here. Her skin was a pale cream that looked shockingly pale contrasted with her black hair, and dark violet eyes. In appearance she was not a typical fairy, at all. I wondered what her father had looked like. The dossier had been more concerned with Lavendar and her mother Daisy. Fae bloodlines were matrilineal.r />
  She looked very relaxed. This concerned me. She had gotten pretty big news today, and it didn’t seem to have affected her. Perhaps she wasn’t aware of the import of it.

  “So, you came all this way to tell me that I am a fairy princess?”

  Well, she knew. So why was she so at ease?

  “Yes, sort of. I have a job to do, which was to bring you those papers, and get a signature.” I wanted to see how much she understood.

  She nodded. “And when I sign, I bind myself to a life at Court. I must never again leave Underhill. My family here, my house, my work, I abandon it all.”

  I nodded. She understood, all right.

  “Come with me for a drive?” She invited abruptly, standing. I looked up at her, trying to follow what she was thinking. I shrugged, there was no reason not to, and I wanted some more time with her. Wear her down, maybe.

  I followed her out to her little truck. She climbed in in silence and I got in the passenger side. At least it wasn’t so tall I needed a stepstool to get in. I noted the rifle case tucked behind the seat as I climbed in, and wondered what she was carrying. It didn’t surprise me to see the gun. Alaska has a certain reputation.

  “Where are we going?” I didn’t figure she was going to take me out and make me disappear, Alaska is not that lawless. But at twenty-five below zero, I would be in trouble fast should she decide I was walking back to town.

  “I thought I would show you my world, before I send you back with the bad news.” She turned her head briefly and grinned at me. My heart sank. She wasn’t going to make this easy.

  **************

  We hadn’t gone far when she pulled into a gravel parking lot. I looked around. A small store and a hotel even smaller than the one I was staying in. Everything was painted brown and what might have once been white, a decade or so ago. Bella hopped out. I decided that I’d follow her.

  A short woman with curly brown hair looked up from a book that she had laid flat on the counter and was bent over, reading. “Bella!”

  “Hi, Kathy.” My fairy princess met the older woman at the counter gate and hugged her briefly.

  “Could you watch...?” Kathy popped the gate open. Bella laughed.

  “Go, go. No kids today?”

  The brunette trotted toward the back of the store, tossing her reply over her shoulder. “No, they’re off on the trapline today.”

  Bella stepped behind the counter while I tried to figure out what had just happened. She looked at the book and chuckled. “Kathy must be bored if she’s reading this.”

  “Ah, do you...” I tried to phrase it properly. “Work here?”

  “What?” She looked across the counter at me, propping her elbows on it and nesting her chin in her hands. “Oh, no. It’s just that she can’t leave the front, there’s no one else here. When her kids come in they can help, so she can, ah...” Bella gestured toward the back and it dawned on me why Kathy had been so urgent. “Or stock shelves and such.”

  “Oh.” I looked around. There was a little of everything on those shelves. I stepped closer and saw the prices with shock. Two to three times what it would cost elsewhere in the First World.

  “Why don’t you find what we came in here for?” Bella suggested.

  I looked over my shoulder at her and she grinned. “We have to bribe someone to talk to you.”

  I looked back at the cluttered shelves. “Am I that bad?”

  “Nah, he’s just suspicious of anyone new. Grab some chocolate bars, beef stew, and jerky.”

  I explored the little store for the items, half-listening as Kathy came back and joined Bella behind the counter.

  “So how are the kids?” Bella asked her friend.

  “Good, can’t wait for spring.”

  I could hear the exasperation in the mother’s voice. I wondered what it would be like to have to stay mostly indoors for six months at a time. Poor lady, no wonder she read all the time. There were four brands of beef stew on the shelf. A popular item, it looked like. I picked out one of each. I’d have to be bribed to talk to me, too, some days.

  Back at the counter with the requested items, I waved off Bella’s offer to pay. “I’ll pay for information, more often than not it’s worth any amount.”

  She nodded and stepped back. I could feel her scrutiny. The plastic card Kathy swiped in the old-fashioned machine didn’t tell either woman what I had in the bank, unlike the old days of Fairy gold. A bag of gold coins would draw unwanted attention, then and now. But I didn’t think that was what she was thinking about.

  The bag of goodies rode by my feet as we headed south out of town. I wondered where we were headed; the next major landmark in this direction was the Canadian border, and I wasn’t carrying my passport. Bella didn’t seem to feel a need to chat, so I looked out the window.

  The world outside was a study in black and white today, with a heavy overcast sky. I wondered if it would snow. The trees that lined the highway were tiny, sticks of conifers that looked black in the low light, with their feet in the snow and clumps of it scattered over their branches. We’d driven out of town after just a couple of minutes, and now there was no sign of human habitation, except the snowmobile tracks next to the highway. I fully expected to see a sled dog team at any moment.

  “Quite a change from the merry Olde, isn’t it? You’re used to a lot more green, and wet, I’d think.” Her voice broke my reverie.

  I looked over at her profile. She was completely focussed on the road, and I thought I understood why. Her parents’ death had been covered in the dossier, with an article reporting that Daisy and Ben Traycroft had been traveling up the Alaska Highway when they’d struck a moose. They were both killed on impact. The article had gone on to speculate that Ben, a known alcoholic, had been drunk, and possibly driving at speeds of up to one hundred miles an hour at the time of impact.

  Small wonder that she had become a very self-sufficient young lady. I answered her slowly.

  “It’s beautiful, but frightening.”

  She nodded. “Yes, it’s deadly out there if you don’t know how to prepare for it.”

  “The same could be said of almost any situation, I suppose.”

  She flicked me an amused glance with those violet eyes that made me melt a little. “The people who have lived here for generations respect the land highly. They have to, because if you let down your guard it will kill you. Add to that immense tracts of land with very few people, and you could die out there with no chance of anyone finding your body, ever.”

  I grinned. This was my kind of woman. “Is that a threat?”

  “Nah.” She grinned as well. “See that bridge coming up?

  I did, it was an impressive old steel span.

  “That’s the Tanana River. Right now it’s frozen almost solid, and in the old days it was the highway.” She slowed as we crossed the bridge and I looked down at the rumpled ice surface with interest. It would not have been easy to travel on that, with sleds or on foot, and add the cold to it... travel in the modern era was so much more convenient. Bella went on. “In summer it’s full of silt, small rocks, the water looks more like soup. I am told - mind you, I’ve never put this to the proof, but I’d heard stories - that if you drop a body in the Tanana all that suspension will grind it up within a few miles.”

  She sped back up as we climbed out of the river valley. I pondered what she had been telling me between the lines of her stories. No overt threat to me, perhaps, but she had a lot of power here in her own right. With a large family that was very fond of her, and only two state troopers covering an area the size of my island kingdom home, I was vulnerable. If she felt threatened by me I was in trouble, not her. I was fine with that.

  She put on her turn signal and I looked around. A narrow break in the trees with a roughly plowed driveway that vanished into the depths of the forest was the only place we could possibly turn off.

  “He likes company, but prefers not to have people around all the time.” Bella grunted softl
y as the truck bounced over the berm and left the paved road.

  I was becoming very curious about this mystery man. Not only who he was to Bella, but why she wanted me to talk to him. I knew it had to do with my being a Pixie. I also knew there were no Folke living in the area beside Lavendar’s family, at least that were recorded. The Court kept very close track of the Folke. That was mostly self-protection. A rogue fairy, goblin, or pixie even, could do a lot of damage. And that was what my job really had been for a long time now. Tracking down strays.

  We jolted to a stop in front of a tiny cabin, even smaller than Bella’s place. It looked like something from a postcard of Alaska, with the cache on stilts just behind the cabin, and a truly magnificent rack of moose antlers suspended over the front door. There was no other vehicle there, but tracks to the porch led me to think someone with a snowmobile had been to visit recently.

  Bella took the bag of groceries so I could get my attache. Even out in the boonies I didn’t want to leave it unguarded. I had carried it into the little store earlier, to Bella’s unspoken amusement. At least now she knew what was in it, and yet she showed no real emotion toward it. We crunched through dry snow and the quickly falling darkness to the porch.

  Bella rapped on the door, which struck me as redundant. The inhabitant of this remote dwelling almost certainly knew we were coming as soon as we had turned off the highway. There was no immediate answer.

  “How do you know he’s home?”

  Another of her quick, amused glances. “Uncle is always home.”

  The door swung open with a creak, startling me. The wizened old man who stood there cackled slightly at my reaction.

  “Come in, come in, you’re letting the cold in.” He hopped back with an agility I would not have expected from his appearance.

  Bella handed him the bag as she went by him, headed for the battered couch that formed the living room quadrant of the one-room cabin. He peered into it. “Oh, goodies. What brought on this generosity?”