A Dangerous Deceit in Faerywood Falls

by Blythe Baker

“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s very important that I find out who my parents were.”

  The clerk’s brow furrowed. “You don’t even know if these entries that are missing involve your parents,” she said.

  “That’s true,” I said with some reluctance. “But if they do, then I need to get those answers.”

  “Suit yourself,” the clerk said heavily. She gave me Ruth Cunningham’s address, as well as her phone number. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you. And if she asks who gave you the information, don’t point her in my direction,” she said.

  I knew the clerk was right about there not being any guarantee the files that had been ripped out were for either of my parents. But too much had happened in this town, and the darkness that had been seeping into the lives of the Gifted and non-Gifted always seemed to connect one event with another. Whenever I felt like I was closer to figuring out who my parents were, the answers would slip away just before I discovered them.

  This felt like the same thing.

  And what was the harm in asking this woman what she knew? If she couldn’t tell me anything, then maybe she could help me find someone who could.

  Regardless, it was the best lead I had at the moment. And I wasn’t afraid of a cranky old woman.

  Not after everything else I’d seen in Faerywood Falls.

  2

  I wasn’t sure that my trip to city hall had been a complete waste of time. True, I’d spent an entire afternoon in a stuffy, musty room without finding out anything about my heritage, but I had the number of someone who might help put me one step closer to the answers I sought.

  A number, and a home address.

  I still hadn’t decided how I was going to explain my sudden appearance at this Ruth Cunningham’s house, as I drove through the tree-lined roads heading home. The clerk at city hall had made it very clear that she wasn’t exactly a people person, and didn’t like to be disturbed. I had to find a way to not upset this woman and still get the information I wanted.

  “Should I call first?” I asked. “I mean, she could just hang up on me, and then what?”

  Well, showing up at her front door might end with a call to the police, Athena said inside my mind, not even bothering to open her eyes from her place on the passenger seat of my SUV. The fox was curled up on the seat, her tail wrapping around the tip of her nose.

  “Yes, you’re right…” I said. My fingers were tight around the steering wheel as I slowed down at a stop sign.

  I glanced back and forth across the street.

  “But maybe she wouldn’t really have a choice but to listen to me if I went to her house?” I asked. The clock on the dash said it was half past five. “Traffic around the lake might be a little congested right now. Should we just take the back road?”

  Might save us a few minutes, Athena said indifferently. I am rather hungry.

  I smirked as I turned on the signal toward the right, and pulled down the dirt road leading through the denser parts of the forest toward our cabin.

  I turned on the radio, which Athena didn’t seem bothered with, and hummed along with the tune as the forest seemed to close in around us.

  The woods didn’t bother me.

  The forest had become like an old friend that I’d forgotten I had. Where other people may have seen dark shadows and creepy hiding places for spooky things, I saw the opposite.

  I saw the light streaming through the leaves. I felt the ancient bark of the trees, and heard the gentle whisper of the wind dancing with the branches. It was like the giant living oaks and spruce and birch had thrown their arms wide open, and would be watching me as I moved among them.

  I knew it was the magic in my blood that was starting to awaken in the place of my birth. I didn’t know much about faeries, but I knew that they were somehow tied to the forest.

  The winding road bent toward the left, and we crested a hill.

  At the bottom of the hill, flashing blue and red lights drew my attention to the side of the road.

  Slowing to a stop, I stared out the window at three police cars that were pulled off the road. Several people were standing just outside the tree line, and a glint of yellow caution tape stood out in great contrast from the dark green of the forest behind it.

  My stomach flipped over. What happened here?

  There was a tap on the window of my passenger seat, making me jump and let out a tiny squeak.

  I whirled around to see the face of Sheriff Garland peering in through the window at me, his forehead wrinkled into a hard line.

  My heart skipped, and I smiled nervously at him as I reached down to press the window button. The glass slowly slid down into the door.

  “Well, Marianne Huffler…why am I not particularly surprised to see you here?” Sheriff Garland asked.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “Honest, I was just on my way home from town.”

  His eyes narrowed and his hands went to his belt, adjusting it. “I’m sorry to give you a hard time, Miss Huffler. I know you didn’t mean to stumble on all this. It’s been a long day, and I’m about ready to pull what little hair I have left out.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, peering out the window, trying to see beyond the other police officers standing in front of the caution tape.

  “It’s nothing,” Sheriff Garland said hastily, and then his face screwed up like he immediately regretted what he’d said. “Well, it’s not nothing, exactly. But it’s nothing that you need to be involved with. You’re a civilian. And with your track record – ”

  My stomach lurched and my eyes widened. “Wait, is that a body? – ”

  “No, no,” Sheriff Garland said. “I mean it, don’t you go nosing around in this. It doesn’t concern you – ”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Sheriff Garland sighed, rolling his eyes. “I don’t understand what it is about you. You’re like a magnet to – ”

  “Sheriff, is everything alright?” came the voice of one of the deputies near the tree-line.

  Sheriff Garland gave me a pointed glare as he started around the front of my SUV, the headlights making his golden badge on his chest glow. “What is it, Peters?”

  I pulled the car off to the side of the road, my heart pounding in my chest. Another death in Faerywood Falls. Sheriff Garland was right; I really was like a magnet when it came to finding dead bodies.

  And if this one was anything like the others I’d found…

  “Athena, hop in,” I said, putting the SUV in park and pulling open my backpack.

  Why must I always hide in such a tight space? she asked, but she hopped in anyway.

  “We’ll get you something bigger,” I said. “I promise.”

  A tiny growl emanated from Athena’s chest as she dove into the bag in my hands.

  I quickly zipped it up and tossed it over my shoulder. Then I clambered out of the car and glanced both directions down the vacant street, before hurrying across.

  Sheriff Garland turned and saw me, his eyes widening. But his cell phone was pressed up to his ear, and all he could do was glare at me.

  I peered over the hood of a police car, staring into the darkening forest.

  The deep green and muddy browns of the trees faded away as the bright orange of a hunter’s vest practically glowed from its place on the forest floor. A man in his late forties or early fifties was sprawled out across the mossy ground, clothed in camouflaged pants, dark boots, and a vibrant orange hat to match his vest.

  Dark stains covered his arms and legs, and there was a metallic tang to the air the longer I stood there.

  My stomach recoiled inside me. Blood.

  There was no sign of a gun or a crossbow or anything that the man might’ve been using to hunt with, but something hanging around his neck caught my attention. It was a thick, leather cord, and dangling off the end of it was a wooden medallion. It was hard to tell from this distance, but I could have sworn it looked like a –

  “I’m sorry, Miss, but th
is is a crime scene,” said a deputy, blocking my view of the dead body in the forest. He held out an arm, as if I were trying to fight against him. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Miss Huffler,” came a hiss behind me.

  I turned and saw Sheriff Garland glaring at me.

  “You need to leave,” he said, moving the receiver away from his mouth. “Now.”

  It wasn’t in my nature to be a rule breaker. Not at all. But he didn’t understand, not fully. These deaths that kept happening. The fact that I continued to show up when they happened, or soon after. The Gifted ties to every one of them that Sheriff Garland would never be able to know about.

  That’s why I had to look, even for just a second.

  “Alright,” I said, turning on my heel and walking back toward my car. “I’m sorry, Sheriff.”

  His gaze softened somewhat as he looked at me, but then he turned his face away as he started to speak to whoever was on the other end of the line.

  I climbed into the front seat of the car and set my backpack down on the seat.

  That was awfully fast…Athena said, shaking herself off as she climbed out of the backpack. What did you see?

  “A body,” I said. “A man. Dead. He was a hunter or something…”

  I steered the SUV back onto the road, glancing briefly out my rearview mirror. Sheriff Garland’s face was turned toward my car, no doubt making sure that I was actually driving away.

  I didn’t want to step on his toes. All things considered, I liked the sheriff. He was nice, and he obviously cared deeply about Faerywood Falls.

  There was just a whole undercurrent permeating everything that he didn’t know about.

  “What was weird, though, was what was hanging around the hunter’s neck…” I said, looking down at Athena, who was hunched over on the seat, leaning with the car as the road made a gradual turn. “It was some kind of medallion with a wolf’s head on it.”

  A wolf’s head…Athena said. She rubbed her nose with her paw. That’s interesting. Do you think the dead man has ties to the werewolves somehow?

  “That would be the most obvious guess, yeah,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like that, not even at the antique shop.”

  Magical artifacts and talismans aren’t all that uncommon among the more superstitious people living in Faerywood Falls, both the Gifted and un-Gifted, Athena said.

  “So it’s not some kind of clue as to who he is?” I asked.

  I’ve never heard of one like that, Athena said. I’ve seen more in the shape of trees or flowers. Even the sun and moon. But animals…perhaps the man was indeed a shapeshifter?

  “I don’t know…” I said. “But I bet I know someone who could give me some answers.”

  You aren’t insinuating you’re going to visit Lucan Valerio, are you? Athena asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  Athena made a rasping sound in her throat. I realized a second or two later that it was the fox version of a laugh.

  “What?” I asked, glaring briefly down at her. “Why is that funny?”

  You’d try to find any excuse to see him, Athena said.

  My cheeks flushed pink. “That’s not true,” I said.

  I beg to differ…she said.

  I ignored her as we wove our way through the winding forest. My mind kept flashing to the image of that man, dead, in the forest. “That poor guy…” I said. “He looked almost like he’d been torn up by something out there.”

  He wouldn’t be the first, Athena said. There’s been talk about people winding up dead in the forest for the last few months. Wild beasts of some sort.

  “What could kill a human like that, though?” I asked. A chill ran down my spine to think of it. In a place filled with magic, who knew what might be lurking in the trees, ready to attack an unsuspecting human?

  Something vicious, for certain, Athena said.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  “I’ve gotta say…” I said, goosebumps appearing on my arms. “I don’t understand why I’m the one who keeps running across these dead bodies, but they’re definitely not doing anything for me.”

  I wouldn’t imagine you’d be thrilled about it, no, Athena said.

  I sighed as we drove on.

  I just told myself the same thing every time something like this happened.

  This is the last time.

  But something in me knew that the magic in this place wouldn’t let me go that easily.

  3

  The most pressing matter on my mind was the missing records from city hall, or the lack thereof. I hadn’t found what I was looking for, and dead body or not, that problem wasn’t going to be changing anytime soon.

  The reality was that I was trying very hard not to think about the dead body. More than the gruesomeness of it, I found myself actually wanting to learn more. I wrote it off as the twisted part inside everyone that made people crane their necks to look at the results of a car accident, or find themselves unable to turn away when witnessing an attack or something equally traumatizing. We humans always knew that those sorts of images were the ones that stuck with us in our brains, so why did we insist on watching, wide-eyed and curious?

  It’s more than that, you know, Athena said to me. The magical circumstances surrounding all these recent deaths has got you thinking that this one is the same way.

  “You may be right, but I have no way of proving that this one isn’t just an ordinary death,” I said. “Along with the other hunters that have died. It could just be a wild animal of some sort.”

  Possibly…Athena said. But things aren’t usually quite that simple, are they?

  I pushed it out of my mind. “Well, I’m not going to be able to understand anything else about the magical things going on around me if I can’t figure out who I am in relation to it all,” I said. “Which is why I need to go talk to this Ruth Cunningham and ask her if she knows anything about those records.”

  Athena agreed to stay home that morning; it wasn’t really much of a fight, though, as she was curled up on a plush pet bed that I’d purchased for her. She’d dragged it underneath the window so it would pick up the morning sun. Whenever she was snoozing there, it was hard to convince her to do anything.

  That was probably best. There were only a few people who knew I owned a pet fox, and I didn’t really feel like answering the questions of those who didn’t.

  I grabbed the address from the counter near the door and headed out to the SUV.

  I waved at Mrs. Bickford who was working in the planter boxes out in front of her cabin. She’d spent almost an hour the day before telling me all about her sunflowers, and she’d very nearly made me late to work.

  She’d forgiven me for temporarily stealing her ghost speaking ability awhile back, and there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings. That sort of surprised me, because she seemed like the kind of woman who might feel inclined to hold a grudge.

  I plugged Ruth’s address into my GPS. It informed me that the destination was only a few miles from the lake. Maybe I was just getting used to living in this area, but it seemed like I hadn’t been much further than a couple of miles from my cabin since moving into town. It wasn’t like I really needed anything. I didn’t even really miss big shopping centers or a huge variety of restaurants. Considering where I’d come from back before I moved to Colorado, I was used to living the small town life.

  And there was certainly enough happening to keep me entertained.

  I turned onto a narrow, one lane road almost fifteen minutes later. In the far distance, at the foot of the mountains, the first glimmer of red and gold leaves were starting to appear at the tops of the trees in the forest.

  The road was lined with pretty, ordinary homes. They weren’t enormous, but they were situated on cul-de-sacs and short roads that ran perpendicular to the one I was following. I saw a little boy playing fetch in the front yard with his dog, and just a few houses down, a father was pushing his daughter on a swing in their
backyard. At the end of the street, a woman was outside spraying down her soapy car with the crystal clear water from the hose in her hands, a blue bucket resting on the ground beside her.

  A comfortable, cozy place to live.

  I imagined that a lot of these people were not Gifted. All the Gifted people I’d met lived in elaborate homes or off the beaten path. These people seemed ordinary, with simple homes, simple cars, and simple lives.

  They probably had no idea about the vampires or werewolves or faeries.

  I followed my GPS down another street and saw the houses were a little more spread out than the ones on the other streets. Trees separated the yards, giving the homes more privacy than a fence could offer. Behind them, too, the forest spread out in every direction.

  The house I was looking for was at the very end. It was nestled a ways back from the road, down a winding driveway that followed alongside a stream. I’d driven over a small bridge that the creek flowed underneath. New trees had been planted on the rolling front lawn, and a gazebo was situated in the yard off to the side of the house.

  I knew that a lot of government jobs paid pretty well, but this home was the nicest one in the neighborhood by far. It looked as if it had been plucked from the Mediterranean Sea; white washed walls, tiled roof, beautiful archways and many tall windows. It was lovely to look at.

  I parked my car and turned off the engine. My heart was starting to beat quickly; had I been silly not to call before coming? I knew that I hated when people just showed up at my door. Why would I expect this woman to be any different?

  I was just about to turn the car back on and drive away while I just called her, but a sound pricked my ears.

  It was distant at first, and I wondered if I’d actually turned the car off. Seeing that my keys were clutched in my hand, I ruled that possibility out.

  I sat perfectly still, looking all around for the source of the sound. I opened my purse and pulled out my cell phone. The screen was off. No one was calling me.

  “That’s definitely music, though, isn’t it?” I asked myself. The radio was off, and I hadn’t accidentally turned on a music app on my phone.