The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (34 page)

I reversed my sword and stepped sideways to where the cable left the conduit and snaked up to the dish. I held the tip of my sword against my stomach. Her palm
jabbed the blade through my stomach, directly into the exposed cable behind me. The other end of the sword pierced her skin, and she screamed as electricity ripped through her body.

It shorted out within seconds, but it was enough. I pried the sword free. “Paper doesn't conduct electricity, bitch.” I crawled over her spasming body and pressed my palm to her forehead. Before she could recover, I finished my spell and told Larry to fire.

I had survived, but it hurt like hell. A blackened hole passed cleanly through my gut, and a spray of fairy blood covered my body. The sight made me want to vomit, but I managed to quell the urge. The last thing I needed was to start spewing confetti.

“Are you all right?” Larry asked. “Did it work?”

“It worked.” My sword was ruined. The remaining tape had melted, and the metal had shed its magic, reverting to a bent staple. I tossed it aside.

Even in death, the fairy appeared angry. Feral. Her lips were drawn back, and her vacant eyes were narrow. How long had she been banished from home, unable to return? How long since the infection had taken her body and mind? Had she realized what was happening at the end, or had she been too far gone to care?

I tested my wings. The steel conduit had melted off the tip of the upper left wing when the fairy pressed me down, but I could still fly. “There's a dead fairy on the roof of Pizza Palace. Corner of Walnut and Fourth. Send someone to clean that up.”

“That's two attacks,” Larry said.

“Believe it or not, I can count too.” I flew higher, trying to concentrate over the pain and noise of the city.

“Both in daylight, in the open? Whatever this is, it's big.”

“No shit.” I clutched the marble in both hands. Kareem continued to lead me east, toward the edge of the city. I flew in silence for a while, while Larry dispatched people to clean up my mess.

“You didn't even try to question her.”

I sighed. “Do you reason with rats?”

“You used to. I know your file, Jessie. Remember the dwarves you brought in back in eighty-six? You spent weeks trying to get through to them.”

“And look where it got me.” Three dwarves, brothers, had sabotaged a coal mine out east, killing nineteen people. “It would have been quicker to just kill them.”

“Execute them, you mean?”

“Spare me. Do you want to save your world, or do you want to worry about procedure and fair trials and all of that human bullshit while they murder your people and mine?”

“How long has it been since you laughed, Jessie?”

My jaw tightened. “There's something ahead.” I felt it before I smelled it, and smelled it before I saw it. “They're at the landfill.”

Before me stretched the epitome of all things human: a gaping pit, a scar in the earth which housed an ever-growing heap of filth and garbage. A miniature mountain of plastic and steel and decay. A small brick building sat to one side, processing some of the methane stink that filled the air.

“Stay out of sight,” said Larry. “We'll have a team there in fifteen minutes.”

I ignored him, as he must have known I would. I circled the landfill, joining the seagulls, whose harsh cries
made me want to tear off my ears. “There's something strange about this place.”

I spied a dozen humans walking entranced around the edge of the landfill, guided by two fairies so far gone I couldn't tell what race they had once belonged to. They had actually incorporated scraps of metal into their bodies, like cyborgs from a bad movie. One might have been a faun, from the odd angles of his legs. The other was larger. An ogre, perhaps?

The humans appeared blurry, almost ghostlike. Had they murdered the prisoners already? If not for the insistent tugging of the kid's soul, I might have missed them entirely.

“What's going on?” Larry whispered.

“They're just walking.” Circling. Counterclockwise around a mountain—around a
hill
of human waste. “Impossible.”

“What?”

I could feel it now. Beneath the iron and the garbage, its magic warped but familiar. My fists clenched. “They're building a fairy hill.”

“Are you sure? I thought that was impossible.”

“So did I.” But the magic below me was unmistakable. They were using mortals to open a path from this world to Fairy. What would such a hill do to my home? A hill born of steel and iron, its magic shaped by fallen fae. They would loose long-forgotten evils upon this world, and they would warp the beauty of Fairy just as they had done to themselves.

“How long until they finish?”

“I don't know.” There were rituals to be followed … rituals that culminated with the deaths of those who opened the path. There was a reason humans had for so
long mistaken our hills for burial mounds. It was those deaths that opened the way, the passage of their souls from this world to wherever their kind went next, but it had to be done at the proper time. How many laps had they completed? “When will those reinforcements arrive?”

“Ten minutes, according to the GPS.”

“That's not soon enough, damn it.” I flexed my fingers, looking at the blackened fairy ring in my palm. I grabbed the marble which held Kareem's soul and pressed it against my hand. The ring wasn't big enough, and magic could only bend the rules so far. I felt paper tear as I forced the kid's soul through. I clung to the pain, using it to focus my anger. “Hold on to that. If I don't get back, have someone from the bureau take it to Kareem.”

“What are you doing, Jessie?”

“What I have to do.” My magic was little use. The lower I got, the more the iron would warp even the simplest of spells. I wasn't even certain I could maintain this body if I landed. So much metal crushed into a single place, pulsing through my mind like static. “They don't know I'm here. We should be able to get off four, maybe five shots before they spot me.”

“What if there are others?”

It didn't matter. The metal jutting from the fairies' flesh was both poison and protection, armor against attack. A perfect shot might kill one, but most likely the bullets from Larry's gun would only piss them off. “Trust me.”

Magic pulsed through me as I circled downward, stronger than anything I had felt in ages. It carried the scent of home, but … burnt. Like the aftermath of a forest fire, the seared-metal smell infused the very air of Fairy.

I flexed my hand. The last two fingers were torn and unresponsive, but the ring still functioned. I gripped my forearm with my other hand to steady my aim.

Larry would never forgive me, but I didn't care. I could taste their magic. It burned my throat and chest. He could kill me, or they could, but I'd be damned before I let them do this.

I studied the humans, wondering briefly which was Kareem's father. Folding my wings back, I swooped toward the front of their line.

I sat in the car, grimacing at the grinding of the engine. The bureau had a handful of vehicles specifically for their fairy agents, with plastic and fiberglass replacing every possible component, but some things required steel.

Larry returned a short time later, sliding into the back seat with me. He was red with fury, his forehead glossed with sweat. “Get us out of here,” he said to the driver, his jaw clenched so tight I could barely understand him.

“How's the kid?” I asked.

“Kareem is fine.” He wouldn't look at me. “They won't remember a thing about you or what happened.”

“And yet you sound like a goblin took a dump in your favorite shoes.”

“Five humans are dead,” he shouted. “Tell me the truth, Jessie. In the name of God, tell me the fucking truth. What did you do?”

I matched his volume. “I stopped them from opening a hill of iron and unleashing devils you can't imagine into this world, that's what I did.”

“You're done, Jessie. When we get back, you're turning in your gun and your badge, and going back to Fairy.
If you ever set foot in this world again, I swear to God I'll—”

“No.”

“You murdered those people! Do you feel anything for those dead men and women? T.J. wasn't the only one with family, you know. Just because he survived—”

“
If
I killed them—and I'm not admitting anything—it was because it was the only way to stop the fairies.” I knew I should feel something …
would
have felt something, twenty years ago. But they were only humans, and their deaths had prevented so many more.

We both knew this wasn't about the choice I had made. It was about the ease with which I had made it. That I had done so without telling him and without regret. That I had ordered Larry to fire again and again until the fairies spotted me and flew to attack me. I had barely managed to end the spell, returning to my injured body in the Famosas' apartment.

“I was the one pulling the trigger, Jessie.” His anger had receded for the moment, and I could hear the anguish in his words, even if I didn't share it.

“What did you expect, Larry?”

“I expected you to find another way.”

I shook my head. “You know damn well what this job does to us. The price we pay every time we follow our twisted cousins into their havens of rust and iron and death. You monitor our fall, charting every speck of iron that infects our blood, writing your reports as we descend into the same madness we hunt.”

“That's why I'm sending you home.”

“No,” I said again.

“Jessie, if you return now, you might be able to recover. You'll laugh again, and find what you've lost.”

“And you'll recruit another fairy to take my place,” I said, all but snarling. “You'll destroy them the same way you did me. Maybe not you personally, but you know exactly what will happen to my replacement. So do we. And we do it anyway.”

“I told you to get away.” Sadness had replaced the last of the anger.

I shrugged. “I can still do this job. Not for much longer, maybe, but I'm not about to let this happen to another of my kin a second sooner than it has to. Someone has to stop them … and I trust you to stop me, when it comes to that.”

Slowly, he nodded. “The next time you cross the line …”

“I understand.” I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. The fairies had escaped, but I knew their faces. I knew their magic. Human agents were searching the landfill for clues. I might have lost laughter and beauty, but I had this. “Until then, we have a job to do.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Barbara Ashford
seems to make a habit of cannibalizing her life for her art. She set “How to Be Human™” in the local Radisson Hotel and drew on her memories of acting in summer stock to create the world of the Crossroads Theatre for her first contemporary fantasy novel
Spellcast.
Barbara lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her husband whom she met while performing at the Southbury Playhouse. They have yet to spot any faeries lurking around New Roc City, but you never know. To find out about her latest projects—including the
Spellcast
sequel—visit her at
www.barbara-ashford.com
.

Elizabeth Bear
was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This has given her a predilection for mushrooms and speculative fiction. She lives in Connecticut with a ridiculous dog and a cat who is an internet celebrity.

S.C. Butler
is a former Wall Street bond trader who has never met any leprechauns, urban or otherwise, and, as far as he knows, never caused a stock market crash. He is the author of the Stoneways trilogy:
Reiffen's Choice
,
Queen Ferris
, and
The Magicians' Daughter
; and lives in New Hampshire with his wife and son.

Jim C. Hines'
latest book is
The Snow Queen's Shadow
, the final book in his series about butt-kicking fairy tale heroines (because Sleeping Beauty was always meant to be a ninja, and Snow White makes a bad-ass witch). He's also the author of the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, as well as more than forty published short stories in markets such as
Realms of Fantasy
,
Sword & Sorceress
, and a number of DAW anthologies. He lives in Michigan with his wife, two children, and half an ark's worth of pets. You can find his web site and blog at
www.jimchines.com
.

Susan Jett
is a graduate of Clarion West and has been writing stories since she could hold a pencil. She's lived and worked all over the world, but most recently, she worked as a teen librarian while living in Brooklyn. She currently lives in an old farmhouse in New Hampshire with her husband Sam, her son Henry, and Nellie-the-wonder-whippet. She is hard at work on her first novel and hopes to publish it before her son learns to read.

Jay Lake
lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2011 books are
Endurance
and
Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh
, along with paperback releases of two of his other titles. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a past winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and is a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

Seanan McGuire
is a native Californian, and grew up in a town where the annual tarantula migration is a fact of life. This explains a lot. She is the author of two urban
fantasy series—the October Daye adventures and InCryptid—as well as writing science fiction under the name Mira Grant. She was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. It came with a tiara. Seanan lives with three enormous blue cats, a lot of books and horror movies, and the tarantula migration. She doesn't sleep very much.