Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale (3 page)

A woman could only take so much, Corinne D’Alessandro decided as she looked down at the assignment sheet her editor had just handed to her.
In the past year or so, she’d taken a lot: learning about the existence of vampires, watching her best friend become a vampire; learning about the existence of werewolves, watching her other best friend marry a werewolf.
All in all, an eventful few months had just passed.
Corinne figured it was a testament to her inner strength and resilience that she’d taken all this news without ending up in a padded room at Bellevue, contemplating her navel and holding conversations with her big toes.

But this, she thought, staring at the black print on the page before her, this just might be the last straw.

“Elves,” she said with admirable calm.

“Well, maybe pixies.
Reports vary.”

Corinne couldn’t decide if she wanted to run screaming from the office, past her curious colleagues and out onto the streets of Manhattan, or if she wanted to bang her head against the wall a few times before she buried it in her hands and whimpered.
What in God’s name had she done to deserve this?
What sin could she possibly have committed that would justify this sort of vengeance from an angry deity?
Was it the premarital-sex thing?
Because a lifetime of Catholicism aside, she’d long ago come to the conclusion that Jesus had better things to worry about than her active social life.
So how in the name of all that was holy had hell found a way to drag her into the fiery pit of fucktardedness that was the only way to describe being caught between her job’s rock and the hard place of her unspoken promise to keep the Others’ secret?

To say nothing of her very firm desire to keep herself from looking like a flaming lunatic to everyday outside observers.

A bluff.
Maybe she could bluff.
After all, no one knew that she knew what she knew, so maybe she could just pretend not to know.

Struggling to appear the way she would have just six months earlier, Corinne pushed her chair back from her paper-strewn desk and summoned up a baleful stare for her editor’s benefit.
“Elf or pixie, it doesn’t matter, Hank.
I can tell you right now that I don’t need to do an investigation.
Because mythical creatures don’t exist,” she lied, practically biting her own tongue.
“That’s why they call them myths.”

Hank Buckley shifted the toothpick he was chewing from one side of his mouth to the other and shrugged.
“People say UFOs are a myth, too, and I got a whole file cabinet full of statements from people who’ve seen ’em.”

Corinne felt herself blanch and hoped like hell that Hank, with the typical male’s lack of perception, wouldn’t notice.
Christ on a cracker, she’d barely gotten over finding out about the Others; if she had to start believing aliens were real, too, she was finished.
She’d stab herself in the heart with a blue pencil, just see if she didn’t.

“The difference between UFOs and elves is that we don’t know what’s out there in the rest of the universe.
We know what’s here on earth,” she argued, thinking at least that much was true.
She, for instance, knew more about what was on earth than she’d ever wanted to.
“I think if there were elves running around the globe, someone would have stumbled over one before now.
The only file you should put this in is the circular file.
The one the janitors empty out every evening.”

Hank shook his head.
“No can do, toots.
This one’s hot.
Even the TV stations are starting to pick it up.
Don’t want us to get left in the dust.”

Creamed Christ on toast.
The TV stations?
The Others whom Corinne had gotten to know recently weren’t going to like that one bit.
Her friends’ husbands, Dmitri Vidâme and Graham Winters, had impressed upon her from the very beginning the importance of keeping the existence of the Others a secret.
Given the many pitchfork-, wooden-stake-, funeral-pyre-, and silver-bullet-wielding examples dotting human history when it came to supernatural creatures, Corinne couldn’t say she blamed them.
If she were a werewolf, she doubted she’d want anyone to know, either.
Misha and Graham had told her the Others worked pretty damned hard to stay under the radar of their human neighbors, but if the TV stations started reporting on a story about elf sightings in Manhattan, secrecy would go right out a thirty-story window.

Provided, of course, that the thing being sighted was actually an elf, and Corinne had no idea if elves existed in the Others community.
At the moment, she’d have preferred it if she didn’t know about the Other community, period.

Her head began to pound and she wished for once that she was the sort of hard-bitten, steely-eyed reporter from an old film noir.
She could use a bottle of bourbon in her bottom desk drawer right about now.

“C’mon, D,” Hank cajoled, taking her silence for continued protest, which she supposed it sort of was.
“You’ll want to get on this before some other print outlet beats you to it.
You want this going under someone else’s byline?”

Corinne wished, she really wished, she could just tell Hank to go to hell and take his damned story lead with him, but there were two obstacles standing in her way.
First, she needed her job.
The
New York Chronicle
might not have been a Pulitzer-winning operation, but it paid steadily and it had hired Corinne when all the more respectable papers in town had told her she lacked experience, didn’t have the right connections, and wrote with a  shade too much dramatic flair.
Even the
Daily News
had suggested she ought to go into fiction.
The
Chronicle
had told her to use spell-check and to start in the morning.
She had.
Seven years ago.

The second obstacle had to do with the most misguided sense of loyalty a woman could possibly experience.
A part of her wished—a really, really big part with a very fervent wish—that she could just turn her back on the Others and let them cover their own damned asses.
After all, it was no skin off her butt if the Others made the front page.
She was human.
No one would be coming after her with a sharpened stick or a silver bullet.
She could go on her merry little way with no interference and the added bonus of not having to keep a secret bigger than anything the CIA might have tucked up in the attic.
She’d be footloose and fancy free.

But three of her closest friends would not.

That was where her rebellious little fantasy hit a brick wall.
Corinne might not be bothered by the world discovering the existence of the Others, but Reggie certainly would.
Not only had Regina McNeill, one of Corinne’s closest friends, married a vampire earlier that year, she’d let him turn her into one herself.
Somehow Corinne didn’t think the folks with the crucifixes and stakes would make much of a distinction between Misha, who’d been a vampire for around a thousand years, and Reggie, who hadn’t even been one for that many days.
Bloodsuckers, Corinne was guessing, would be bloodsuckers as far as they were concerned.

And would Missy or Danice really fare any better?
They might both still be human, but each of  them had married a man who wasn’t.
Missy Roper Winters, kindergarten teacher, had married a frickin’ werewolf, for God’s sake.
The chief werewolf in the city.
She had a little baby werewolf bun in her oven right this minute.
And as for Danice…hell, Danice was still off somewhere on her honeymoon with a half-human, half-Faerie private investigator.
Would anyone care that the two woman had stayed human, or would they be tarred and feathered like Union sympathizers in 1863 Atlanta?
Either way, was Corinne willing to take that risk?

Of course, if she wasn’t, what the hell was she supposed to do about it?

“I’d like it under someone else’s zip code,” Corinne said as she reached up to rub her temple in ineffectively soothing circles.
“Besides, what does it matter if someone else gets it?
It’s a non-story.
It’s fiction.
And it’s not like we’re scooping the
Times
on a regular basis here.”

“Maybe not, but we gotta give it a shot, right?
Prove we’re not some sort of fly-by-night tabloid operation.”

She raised an eyebrow.
“And doing a story the worst rag in print would think twice about running is supposed to boost our credibility factor?
What’d they put in your coffee this morning?
’Cause you’re seriously high.”

“Only on the excitement of actually talking to you, instead of sending yet another email for you to ignore, sweetie.
It’s the kind of thing that goes to my head.”

“Your sarcasm fails to make me laugh.
As does this stupid-ass story.
What are you thinking?”
Reason didn’t appear to be swaying her boss, so maybe it was time to pull out a little righteous indignation.
She waved the note he’d handed her under his bulbous nose and upped her stare to a glare.
“I’m a reporter, not a sci-fi novelist, and I’m supposed to do a story on elf sightings in Manhattan?
For a Christmas season spoof, I might just down enough rum-spiked eggnog to play along, but it’s August, Hank!
You don’t even have the Macy’s parade and Salvation Army Santas on every corner to tie in to.
You’re a freak.”

“Actually, I’m the boss, but I can see where the similarities could get confusing for you.”
Hank rocked back on his heels and drummed his hands in his pockets, making his loose change jingle.
“Maybe you can do a write-up on the rise of insanity among the editors of small, urban newspapers.
Right after you turn in the elf story.”

Okay, so much for the indignation angle.
Corinne was starting to get the feeling she wasn’t going to be able to bury this story, but that didn’t mean she wanted to write it.
She knew too damned much.
She couldn’t take the chance that she might slip up and put something in the article that actually gave the thing some credibility.
If she couldn’t bury it, then, she could at least see that it got the lowest amount of traction possible.

Corinne ran a hand through her dark hair and gave a pained sigh.
“Look, Hank, if we’re slow for news, and you really want to run with this one, why don’t you hand it to Shawn?
You know what a geek he is.
I think he still plays D and D with his buddies every weekend.
He’d probably eat this shit up.”
And since he had about as much skill at uncovering facts as your average tub of mayonnaise, he was pretty damned unlikely to make it interesting enough for anyone to pay attention to the finished article.
“That way, you’ll get your story and I can get to go back to my feature on the student protest arrests at Columbia.”

Hank shook his head.
“No can do.
Shawn is already on the tech show over at the Javits.
It’s gotta be you, kid.
Besides”—he grinned, his toothpick bobbing—“you’re the one who went to all those Goth clubs a few months ago.
I figured this supernatural crap would be right up your alley.”

“Well, you figured wrong.
Supernatural, my ass.
There are no such things as elves.
Just like there are no such things as flying reindeer, or men who break into houses to
leave
stuff under the Christmas tree.
Now give the damned story to someone else.”

She was going to have to spend a month on her knees saying rosaries to make up for all the whopping lies coming out of her mouth.
But maybe God gave credit for extenuating circumstances?

“I gave it to you.”
Hank gave a pointed look to the assignment sheet.
“Ironically enough, that means I want you to have it.
Now, do you want me to fill you in on the particulars, or do you want to go it alone and get me ticked when you come back with a lousy article?”

Closing her eyes on a sigh, Corinne laid the sheet down on top of a teetering pile of manila folders, yanked open her desk drawer, and dug out a bottle of extra-strength aspirin.
Shaking three little white tablets onto her palm, she slammed them into the back of her throat and washed them down with a few gulps of cold coffee.
Then she turned back to the man standing beside her desk and picked up a pencil.

“All right.
Fine.
Fill me in.
But I won’t pretend to be happy about it.”
She also wouldn’t pretend to do more than a half-assed job.
Quarter-assed, if she could get away with it.

“I don’t need you to be happy.
Besides, they say hardship builds character.”
Hitching up his battered khaki trousers, Hank perched one hip on the edge of her desk and folded his arms across his chest.
“Okay, first off, you got the first sighting back in May.
Sort of an isolated incident, that one.
Easy to write off.
But then around the second week in June, you start to hear stories from sources all over Manhattan that pretty much corroborate one another.
All witnesses saw the same thing, and none of them knew one another before they made their reports.”