Faerie Blood: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Changeling Chronicles Book 1) (3 page)

A piskie flitted overhead. “Get out,” I told it. This specimen, who went by the name of Erwin, had been here almost since we had, and no amount of iron would deter the little bugger from flying around like he owned the place. The inside of the flat remained dark, aside from the faint glow of Isabel’s ever-burning candles around the pentagram chalk-drawn into the middle of the carpet. Very good job the landlord rarely came around to inspect.

The piskie buzzed into the kitchen and I closed the door on it, smothering a sigh. How the creature had managed to continuously fly past our iron wardings, I’d probably never know. It had the intelligence and attention span of a gnat.

Swanson looked a little alarmed at the display of potions on the coffee table and the five-pointed star on the carpet. Well, I didn’t have an office, and Larsen’s place was closed. “Sit down,” I said. “I’d offer you a drink, but I guess you’ve had a few already.”

He didn’t look angry. Just tired, eyes sunken with a despondent look I tried not to look to closely at. This was going to be rough. Maybe I needed another drink after all. “What happened?”

He cleared his throat. “Dustin didn’t come home last week after a night out. It’s not the first time, but… I got a bad feeling. He’s been in trouble before and the police won’t help. I’ve tried everything,” he said, his voice rough and scratchy. The desperate undertone clawed me somewhere deep inside. Because even if I could afford to be picky with the jobs I took on, I couldn’t quell the instinctive response. Missing children cases—missing children in a city teeming with magic and savage monsters—were my kryptonite.

“What’s your offer?” I asked.

“Ten thousand.”

My jaw hung loose, at least until I schooled my expression back into something resembling professionalism. Ten grand would more than make up for my erratic rent payments. I might even be able to rent a proper office.

Wait a second. The guy cast a shifty look over his shoulder. I’d chalk it up to not wanting to be overheard, except I’d sealed the door, and he’d seen me do it.

“What else?” I gave him my best
no bullshit s
tare. “What haven’t you told me? There’s got to be a reason you picked a fight with the head of the mages. And don’t tell me you wanted him to put a hex on the police. You know mages don’t deal with missing people.”

“No,” said the man, “but I thought they might deal with changelings.”

The word rang through my head. I stood rigid, a trickle of sweat running down the back of my neck. Cursing my body’s instinctive response to the word.

Changeling.

I was getting the hell off this case. Now.

“Sorry, I can’t help you,” I said crisply. “I’m strictly for human cases, or minor spellwork. Nothing faerie-related.”

The guy’s face went pasty. “Please.”

God damn you.
No. I couldn’t. Searching for missing kids? I took every case, even the ones with the worst outcome. But not if the Sidhe had taken them. Their realm and ours were severed. Changelings didn’t—shouldn’t—exist. Not anymore.

“Twenty thousand.”

“Fuck.” The curse escaped before I could stop it. “It’s not the money I care about. I don’t deal with—them.”

“Then why do you have a piskie living in your house?”

“Piskies are harmless household pests. Faerie lords are… not.” There were a hell of a lot of things I might say in place of ‘not’. Like sadistic dickheads with a penchant for torturing humans for kicks—but I couldn’t say it in front of him. That fact alone was reason enough to turn him down and walk away with my life and sanity intact. But the guilt would burrow deep inside me if I said no. I’d never be rid of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my tone softening. “I don’t think I can be much help. If it
is
a faerie… I wouldn’t even know where to start looking. You should talk to the mages again. They know more than I do.”

A lie. I didn’t know every corner of the city like the mages did, but I knew more about the faeries than a lifetime of therapy would erase. And I knew you only escaped their realm alive once.

“Please.” His voice cracked on the word.

Dammit. “Tell me what happened. If the faerie isn’t in our realm anymore, nobody can follow. I’m not refusing to help, I’m stating a fact. How do you know it’s a changeling?”

“He’s not acting like Dustin. He… he tried to kill our dog. There was blood everywhere. He’s thirteen and usually mature for his age, but I’ve seen him talking to the faeries before. I just got a horrible vibe. I found him surrounded by spells and… dead things.”

I shivered, trying to hide my reaction. “Have you tried iron wardings around the house?”

His blank look told me he hadn’t lied about his lack of knowledge, at least.

“Okay,” I said. “You probably need a crash course in all things Faerie. I can’t promise it’ll be pleasant. But for now, put an iron ward around your whole house. Here.” I leaned over to the coffee table, careful not to knock any of the candles over, and picked up a metallic-coloured band. If activated, it’d cover the immediate area in a faerie-proof ward. Isabel had a whole cupboard full of them. Our own flat had more powerful wards on the outside—the effect of this iron spell wouldn’t last more than a week. Which meant I needed to act fast to solve the case.

He took the band, wearing a sceptical expression. “So does this mean the faeries are coming… like the ones that came twenty years ago?”

“No,” I said, a little too sharply. “Those were Summer and Winter Sidhe lords, and it’s against their laws to steal human children. If it’s a changeling, we’re looking at someone who’s breaking the laws of both realms.”

“Jesus. Why would they pick us? We’re not magical.”

I opened my mouth then closed it. I never understood how faeries’ minds worked. I hadn’t been magical, either, when I was taken. It didn’t seem to matter. Some people just drew the shitty straw. “I’ll ask more questions tomorrow,” I said. “Once we’ve figured out what happened. If the faerie involved is still in this realm, I can help. If not…”

His eyes went wide. “The Faerie realm…”

“The realms run parallel,” I explained. “But only highly adept Sidhe lords can cross over. The one exception was the invasion.” Which I’d missed most of. “Sidhe lords operate on their own rules. If they wanted to cross between realms… I can’t pretend I understand how it works, but I know humans can’t do the same. Hell, most faeries living on this side can’t go back to their own realm. They’re stuck here.”

His eyes widened further with every word. Poor guy. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“If you give me your address, we can deal with it at yours,” I said. “I’ll bring my standard contract. Unless you’d like to sign now.”

“Yes,” he said immediately.

Huh. I sat in the shadows of a witch’s living room with the smell of blood and spell-disinfectant lingering around. Hardly the definition of professional. But he
was
desperate.

“Okay.” I crossed the room to the writing desk, which was also covered in witch paraphernalia. I shifted a stack of spell ingredient lists aside and found the form, which multiplied itself at my touch. Swanson gawped at me, his bloodshot eyes widening. Witches might not be into flashy magic, but they had a fair few party tricks of their own. I handed him the form copy, which already displayed my signature and my terms. His eyes roved over the page, but I knew he didn’t take in a word. He was desperate enough to trust a stranger with his son’s life.

Someday, maybe I’d feel pride, not guilt at the realisation. Isabel’s spells are the best in the region. I’ve no trouble tracking people within
this
realm.

Bring in the faeries, though, and all bets were off.

“That okay?” I asked, when he’d handed me the signed form. “Call me tomorrow morning and we’ll get started. I can’t make any promises. Faerie magic isn’t something most humans understand. I certainly don’t.”

More of a white lie this time, but I’d rather not get his hopes up any more than I had to. Swanson nodded, mumbling thanks, as I unlocked the door and let him outside.

I took some calming breaths and considered the facts. No Sidhe had entered our realm in over twenty years. No human had crossed between the realms in ten, as far as I knew. The other faeries left behind after the invasion, based on my shaky knowledge, had no way back.

Which meant there was a chance the person who’d taken Swanson’s child was still here, somewhere, in this realm. I’d need to see the fake ‘child’ to get to the bottom of how they’d created one in the first place.

I hadn’t seen a changeling in thirteen years. Tomorrow was
not
going to be fun.

I was lugging my ruined clothes from the bathtub when Isabel came in, the door clicking shut behind her. She waved at me, wearing one of her usual long flowery dresses and more shiny bangles on her slim brown arms than the inside of the troll’s nest. Despite her innocent appearance and general mild-mannered nature, she could hold her own in a fight. I’d once seen her kick a half-ogre twenty feet through a window. And she was five feet tall and probably weighed a hundred pounds, if that.

“Wow,” she said. “I take it the case didn’t go well?”

“It went.” I examined my jeans, wondering how many times I could stitch them back together before they came apart at the seams. Probably one less time than I’d done it. Looked like I was due for another shopping trip, with the money I didn’t have.

Yet.

Isabel moved to clear a bunch of odd spells off the living room sofa. To a non-magic user, the place looked like it belonged to a stationary fanatic. Most of her spells took the form of rubber bands, while her handmade point-and-shoot explosives looked like fancy pencils. Most witches were encouraged to make their spells look like household objects because it reassured clients the arcane forces witches used were relatively harmless. Or something. I didn’t blame Swanson for his alarmed reaction, considering the number of symbols drawn onto the ceiling in sharpie and the burn stains on the carpet from over-enthusiastic sessions testing her latest explosive spells. As a prominent member of one of the local witch covens, Isabel’s the best at both offensive and defensive witch magic. She also happens to be my closest friend.

“Someone was here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “A client?”

“New one, yeah.” I sank into an armchair. I had to sink, because the second-hand furniture had a tendency to collapse without warning.

“I wouldn’t tell the landlord,” said Isabel. “You know what he’s like about letting ‘weirdos’ into the flat.”

I snorted. “Has he ever met us?”

She grinned and shook her head. “Weirdos who don’t pay rent. Whichever.”

“We don’t always,” I reminded her. Witches earned a pittance, while my own payments depended on whether Larsen was feeling particularly generous. Jobs had been few and far between lately, and he only suffered to let me keep coming into the guild because I kept all the nasty faeries away. Like keeping a bad-tempered cat to get rid of a mouse infestation.

“This new case.” Isabel smiled at me. “You never go for the easy options, do you? What’s the catch?”

“It’s a tricky one,” I admitted, not wanting to go into specifics. There was still a chance Swanson had imagined the changeling part. Funny how those legends stuck around, when the last changeling case was so many years ago. I’d told Isabel the bare bones of what had happened—just enough that she didn’t question my eccentricities. Though she’d been a kid when her kind came out of hiding in the aftermath of the Sidhes’ arrival, she’d never seen one of them. They hid themselves well. Unless they wanted you to see them. Creepy fuckers.

“Tricky how?”

“Missing kid, suspected faerie involvement,” I said. “The mages refused to help, so I couldn’t say no.”

“Missing kid?” She studied me in such the way she always did when I brought up the missing child cases I’d been involved in. I tried not to give too much away, but there were only so many conclusions she could draw from my interest in those particular cases. She knew I was an orphan, but not the details. When it comes to my past, ‘complicated’ is an understatement.

“Yeah.” I always, without fail, took those cases. Even if the outcome was the worst. “We’ll need a detection charm, I think. But there might be complications. I need to visit the Swansons’ house first. Just in case he’s mistaken his own kid for an evil faerie. It can happen.”

Isabel gave me one of her
you’re bullshitting me
looks, but went over to the coffee table. “You gave him an iron spell?”

“Had to, really. He doesn’t know about faerie wards. The mages left him in the dark.” Or one guy in particular. I shoved away the image of the lethal blade appearing from nowhere. Whatever the Mage Lord had been doing in this part of town, I’d probably never see him again.

“I’ll prepare the base for the spell.” Isabel cleared a space on the coffee table. “I’ve always wanted to try this one again.”

“You’re the best, you know that?” She didn’t charge me for spells, even the complicated ones. I’d have hired her as my assistant if she’d wanted the job, but after seven years being flatmates, I’d given up trying to offer her money. Her argument was that she enjoyed what she did.

I wouldn’t say I
enjoyed
my job most of the time, but my skillset doesn’t leave many options open. Since I came back home, mundane jobs have felt as out of reach as the world before the faeries came. My CV consists of survival and stabbing things. I didn’t play nicely in a team, and had got fired from the one bar job I’d had after an argument with a half-faerie got out of hand.