The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (22 page)

The man himself still screamed in pain as he sat up clutching his chest, but it gave way to another sound—a joyous laughter. She looked up at his face. He gave another scream—mocking this time—then let go of his chest. Trickles of blood were still there but they were already fading.

Leannán pulled her fist close to her, the intense burning
growing as the bread fell from the palm of her hand. “Ginger cakes!” she hissed. She hadn't felt a sensation quite as painful as this since … she couldn't remember.

“I've never understood it,” the man said, standing up, composing himself as he brushed himself off and straightened out his clothes, “but bread always seems to do the trick. Maybe it's because baked goods are something unnatural, something you
make
by converting elements of the natural world, a symbol of home and hearth.”

Her eyes widened, the hint of panic at their corners. “How do you know of this? Who are you?”

He shrugged off his coat and a scratching sound rose from the back of his shirt, followed by a soft tearing of cloth. Wings rose up behind him, taller and pointer than hers, more angular. “You do not know me, but I know of you,
Leannán Sluagh
.”

She let out a pained hiss, weakening at the sound of her full name. She moved to stand, but couldn't quite get her feet under herself. “Who
are
you?”

“I was raised Alan O'Farrell, the name I told you,” he said, “but my true name is Cillian, once—and soon to be once again—of the Seelie Court. Your crimes against them have not been forgotten.” He looked around the room in disgust, eyeing the piles of bones. “I see you have added to them since your vanishing.”

She looked the man over. “I do not recall you,” she said.

“Nor would you,” he said. “For I was barely born of the court.”

He pulled a length of thin, black chain from within the edged lining of his coat. Leannán's eyes flew open, the coldness of the metal already reaching her from where he stood.

“Iron,” she shrieked, and then looked down at his bare hands. “How is it that you can handle such a thing?”

“My time among the Seelie Court was not long,” he said, moving toward her. “I was a mere infant. I am more than just of the fae. I was raised as a human child.”

“
Changeling …
” The word fell from her mouth dripping with venom. That explained the strange taste of his blood. Weak in humanity, but so rich with fae she hadn't been able to place it at first.

He held up his hand, the palm of it crisscrossed with red streaks from where the chain had touched it, but other than that, he seemed unharmed. “I was given to humans, raised by them because my fae parents were no longer among the living. They died in your struggle to escape from the punishment for your crimes against the mortal world and fairy folk alike.”

Her face calmed, her eyes shrinking to thin slits. “So
that
is what this is about …”

“Queen Nicnevin knew you were crafty, that you would run rather than face your crimes.”

She let out a dark, icy giggle. “Well, we fae
are
known for our mischief …”

“Mischief?” he laughed. He walked around the room. “Is that what you call all of this? My dear lady …” He bent down and lifted her head with his hand, looking her straight in the eyes, the light in his going dark. “This is pure abomination. Turning milk sour, making masters fall in love with their servants, twisting a mortal's hair into tangles, these things are mischief … but this?”

Leannán stared at the floor of the ruined cottage, her voice thick with disdain. “Well played,
changeling
,” she said. “Acting the common, lustful human to strike my fancy, to reel me in. I should feel more anger toward you
than I do, but the trickster in me cannot fault you for your well-planned snare. All the more foolish, me, for falling for it.” Her eyes darkened, becoming a more sinister shade. “Still, I will not have you judge me.”

The man stood, his hands still holding the loop of chain. “It is not my place to judge you. No, the Seelie Court will do that, and hopefully bringing you to them will secure my place there. I cannot take all the credit for ensnaring you, however. Nicnevin knew what she was doing, putting me amongst the humans. She thought you might have fled to the new world the humans had discovered but she knew the chances of finding you would be hard, given your mastery of deception. She also knew of your hunger for humanity and that it would take someone susceptible to your charms—a human, or at least someone raised as human—to eventually find you. And, well … here we are.”

He threw the loop of chain over her, pulling it tight. The cold iron burned against her flesh, her wings crumpling under its touch, turning a worn brown. Leannán could barely move, but found the strength to struggle toward the half-decayed remains of one of the men nearby. She wrapped one arm around its torso, and with the other grabbed its jaw in her other hand, staring into its hollow empty eye sockets, cocking her head back and forth. “How can you stand to have been raised by them? To live among them?”

“Actually,” he said, pulling the body away from her and laying it against the other remains. “I have found them quite delightful to live amongst. They really are remarkable creatures, full of imagination … hopes … dreams.” He laughed. “Do you know what they say of us? They call us the ‘middle nature between Man and Angel!' Isn't that delightful?”

Leannán held up the fringe of her tattered green dress. “And they make an amusement out of us,” she countered.

Cillian rose up
en pointe
, spinning in his human clothes. He stepped into a light dance with enough joy in it that Leannán could not help but feel the hint of tears rising at the corners of her eyes.

“My dear dark twisted soul,” he said, with a low, sweeping bow as he finished that was just as poetic, “what are we but creatures of mirth and magic?”

“So kill me then,” she said, thick with misery now, letting the tears fall. “End my life as I ended those of your parents.”

“As I mentioned, that is not for me to judge,” he said, walking over to the sideboard, which now looked rotten and worm-ridden with age, all save the decorative ball that sat atop it. He picked up it, rolling it back and forth across his hand. “The very ‘good' that drives my wish to once again be part of the Seelie Court is the same thing that prevents me from acting like the same monster that you are. I will not kill.”

He pulled the chain tighter, her wings browning and crumpling even further. She cried out but made little effort to resist as he forced her to stand.

“Come,” he said. “It pains me to see even you in this state for very long.”

“Where are you taking me?”

He held up the small orb from the sideboard, its insides glittering like a thousand stars. “I think you know.”

“The Court of the Unseelie will not stand for this!”

The man's face scrunched up. “The dark mischief makers? Even their kind frowns upon what you have done here. There is mischief, and then there is this.”

“I can pay you better than the Queen,” she pleaded, falling back on her knees, crawling away from him.

“Your liar's gold means nothing,” he said, pointing to the broken crumbs of bread scattered across the slab that had once been the bed.

“No,” she said. “Not gold!” Leannán changed direction, crawling back to the pile of bodies off to her left. Frantic, she picked through the dried out and not so dried out husks of corpses, pulling trinkets, wallets, and billfolds out of the remains of the clothes they had worn in life. “Cash, coin, jewelry … the currency of the modern world! I care not for it myself, but after many years living here in solitude, I have amassed quite a fortune from my visitors. Take it. Take
all
of it, but leave me be. Forget you ever found me. Surely your services can be bought, bounty hunter.”

Cillian shook his head. “You may call me a common bounty hunter, but I've been promised a place in the court for my service,” he said. “I cannot be bought.”

Leannán fell back to scrabbling among the bodies, turning from him, but he tugged at the chain, spinning her around as he forced her to her feet. As she turned, she raised her hand, blowing a handful of fairy dust into his face, willing her glamour over him.
Forget
, she thought as the dust settled.
Release.

His face remained stoic, unchanged, and then he began to brush himself off. “Your charlatan tricks hold no sway over someone of your own kind. Enough bandying of words.”

He jerked at the chain, the iron digging into her numbing flesh. He raised the orb high overhead, and brought it down hard against the stone slab of the bed. The glass erupted, the light of a thousand stars pouring
out, filling the room. The voices of countless souls cried out into the night, rising up through the structure as it shook, the night sky filling with them. The pulse of power from it shook through Leannán's body, and the interior of the building tore itself apart, collapsing in on itself, dust and debris raining down into the center of the main room. She raised her arms in a defensive posture as the great vaulted ceiling caved in on the main room.

By the time the rotting beams of the Scottish Cottage struck the ground, there was no sign of anyone other than the centuries-old accumulation of corpses, coming to a final rest beneath the fallen remains.

S.C. Butler

“Y
ou stole my trade!”

Janet resisted the urge to conk Schlegel over the head with the nearest handset as the man sighed patronizingly and swiveled his chair away from his desk to face her. Hundreds of bids and offers blinked on the computer screens behind him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. The euro trade was my idea.”

“Not my fault I found a buyer before you did.”

“I've been pushing that trade to Tiger all week. They'll never pull the trigger now someone else has done it.”

Schlegel shrugged, and turned back to his screens. The fact that he didn't think he'd done anything wrong infuriated Janet even more. The entire trading floor was staring at her, but she didn't care. She hadn't come to Wall Street to make friends. Just money.

She picked up the handset. Even if she smashed it
against Schlegel's desk instead of his head, it would still get his attention.

“Janet, can I see you for a moment?”

Halloran had come up quietly behind her. Barely five feet tall, he was hidden completely by the banks of computer screens whenever he prowled the floor, despite his shock of frighteningly red hair. He motioned toward his office.

No one had ever seen Halloran actually smoke, but the smell of nicotine in his office was overwhelming. His permanently flushed cheeks worked furiously as he chewed his anti-smoking gum.

He nodded to a chair. Janet crossed her legs as she sat. Halloran had been known to be distracted by her legs.

“I heard you all the way in here,” he said.

“Schlegel stole my trade.”

Halloran's bushy eyebrows twitched.

“We're a team here, Janet. You know that. We share our ideas.”

Janet clenched her jaw. These chats with Halloran were always the same. He loved to talk about how the trading floor was a team, but that only worked if you were a partner like he was. Everyone else at DBJ was compensated according to individual performance, not overall results. Janet hated the hypocrisy of it, but knew she had to play along. Someday she'd make a really big score and kiss the hypocrites goodbye.

She smoothed the hem of her skirt. “I understand, Mr. Halloran. It's just that the firm could have made a lot more money if Schlegel had waited to pitch the idea till after I'd sold it to Tiger.”

Halloran rubbed his enormous nose with a thumb. “Maybe. And maybe Tiger was stringing you along while
they put the trade on with someone else. It's the trades you make that matter, Janet, not the ones you think up. You have to be a salesman, too. And you can't be a salesman unless you're part of the team. If you aren't …”

Halloran shrugged. He knew, even better than Janet, that he held all the power.

She left his office angrier than when she'd gone in. What she really needed was a good Mega Millions jackpot. Or making the final table at the poker world series. Money cured everything. A lot of money. How she made it didn't matter. Just as long as she made it.

She made a little that afternoon when the market tanked, which calmed her down. The market had fallen sharply the last few days, and she'd set up a few shorts. It was March, the millennium had passed without incident, and most people believed stocks would go up forever. But not Janet. Greed was good, but you had to be lucky, too. And nimble. The guys on the wrong side of the day's big selloff had already lost enough in the last few hours to consider throwing themselves out a window.

After work, she hooked up with Buzz and several other friends, which calmed her down some more. They started the evening with dinner at the Union Square Café, then moved on to an artist's opening in Chelsea, bowling on West Street, and finished the night at a friend's band's CD release party in Tribeca. By the time that was over, it was five-thirty in the morning. Janet had to be at work by seven, but she'd pulled all-nighters before. Going home made no sense: she'd just have time to shower and dress before she had to come back downtown. Nights like this were why she kept a suit at the gym across the street from the office. She was a trader, wasn't she? If she couldn't stay out all night to unwind, what the hell was the point?

Convincing Buzz to come downtown with her was easy; Buzz worked only when he wanted. But it was raining hard and they couldn't find a cab, so, halfway to the gym, in order to get out of the rain, they ducked into a pub Janet knew on South Street that opened early for breakfast.