Changeling on the Job: A Changeling Wars Novella (2 page)

Four sprites through and away, one deceased. But there had been six…

I turned to find Anwynn with the last sprite in her mouth. She lifted her head, ready to toss the creature down her throat.

“No!” I said. “Bad! Drop it.”

Anwynn’s eyes narrowed.

“That’s an order.”

She opened her mouth and dropped the sodden beast onto the asphalt. “It’s past time for my dinner,” she said.

“And I don’t know enough about Fae politics to go around killing a bunch of them, left and right. What if they’re just doing this all at the bidding of one of the Sidhe families? I pissed off one Queen and I ended up having to fight her army. I don’t plan on doing that again anytime soon.” I leaned down and picked up the unconscious sprite. His quilted armor was torn and he would probably be bruised, but he would live. His wispy hair hung limp, no longer floating.

I lobbed him back through the doorway. And then, before any more mischief could come through, I closed my eyes, found the black, empty space where the doorway existed, and sealed it shut. I was the only one who could do that, too.

The danger seemed to have passed, so I transformed the sword back into a butter knife and dropped it into my pocket. “Well, there,” I said. “That’s done it.”

“Sprites move quickly,” Anwynn said. “Not that quickly.”

“What are you trying to say? Wait, no. There’s more than one group on the milk-souring warpath?” I wanted to throw the butter knife down in the street, but it was the only weapon I had. I almost cussed out the Arbiter, but he could be in more than one place at once; who knew if he was looking over my shoulder?

Anwynn huffed. “What, did you think this job would be easy?” She licked at her wounds.

“I didn’t think
this
was easy.” I flexed my hand, my palm aching. I’d have to ask Kailen how he did that healing thing. I was going to need it.  The cuts across my ribs and stomach stung as a night breeze passed over them. My gaze fell on the beat-up green car. “Why do you think they were so interested in the car? It’s not like sprites need cars to get around. They have wings.”

I strode over to it, and my grushound followed.

“Do you smell anything?” I asked her.

She sniffed the air around the car. “I smell human. Lots of human.”

I glared at her. “When has that ever
been helpful?”

Anwynn sat on her haunches and scratched at one ear—the dog equivalent of “I just don’t care that much, sorry.” She stopped, mid scratch, her hind leg settling slowly at her side. Her nose wrinkled. “There’s a hint of blood.”

Blood? And sprites? I didn’t know much about sprites, but something wasn’t adding up. I tried the car door. Locked. I peered in through the windows. All locked.

“You have magic, you know,” Anwynn said.

“And
you
have the ability to talk. Doesn’t mean you should go around talking all the time,” I muttered. But I put my hand to the lock, breathed in, and closed my eyes. If I had a delicate enough touch, I could transform the tumblers a little, move them so I could open the door.

I thought of my adoptive sister, my love for her, and breathed out. For a second, the tumblers moved a little, began to recede. And then I let the rest of my breath out, faster than I intended, my emotions riding on top. The lock melted, silver running down the car door in streams. I felt it happening and couldn’t stop it. My magic tended to be more flashy than subtle.

“That’s going to make a real interesting story for whoever owns the car,” Anwynn said.

“Mouth,” I said. “Maybe you don’t need it.”

That shut her up. Grushounds didn’t normally have eyes, but I’d given her a pair back when she’d been chasing me. I didn’t know if I could actually take away her mouth, but I could probably take away her eyes. The thought made me feel a bit ill, but then, Anwynn didn’t need to know that.

I opened the car door and I didn’t need to be a grushound to smell the difference between the air inside the car and outside of it. It smelled musty, like a room gone to cobwebs and dust. There was a faint scent of vanilla, and I spotted a faded yellow air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. I put my hands on the seat and leaned inside. There were a few receipts on the passenger seat. I shuffled through them—fast food places, mostly, and one for a repair garage. A few paper bags from hamburger joints were balled up in the back seat, grease stains marking the sides. Nothing unusual, though I couldn’t imagine keeping my car this much of a mess. I had to shove down the impulse to clean it all up.

I put a knee on the driver’s seat and pulled at the glove box latch. It stuck, so I pulled again, harder.

It fell open and I had to jerk back to stop from getting cut. A surfeit of knives fell out, clattering to the floor—at least ten of them, all shapes and sizes.

Anwynn had managed to squeeze part of the way in next to me, her shoulder digging into my hip. We both stared at the pile of knives on the carpeted floor. “Okay,” I said slowly, “that’s sort of creepy.”

A muffled
thump
came from the trunk. I drew back from the glove box, getting back into the fresh night air. “You hear that?”

My grushound gave me a quick, sharp nod.

I put one hand to the pocket where I kept the butter knife, then leaned over and found the switch to pop the trunk. It creaked as it opened slightly, and another
thump
sounded. “Right,” I said to Anwynn.

She circled around the hood of the car, keeping low to the ground, her ears pricked. I crept toward the trunk from my side. If the sprites had been interested in the car, then who knew what manner of creature lurked in the trunk?

As we reached the back, I eased my fingers around the lid of the trunk and lifted it, a little at a time.  The trunk light switched on; the lid lifted the rest of the way.

A balding man lay inside, his thin hands and feet bound with duct tape, his eyes panicked. His khaki pants and polo shirt were both stained with dirt from the floor of the trunk, rumpled as though he’d slept in them. A strip of tape wound around the back of his head and mouth. He kicked out, and his feet hit the side of the trunk, the hollow sound reverberating through the metal.

My grushound sniffed the air again, and that’s when I saw it.

Someone had drawn a symbol on the man’s forehead in a dark reddish-brown. It was circular and complex, an “X” through the center, swirls and dots marking inside and outside the circle. This was no hasty drawing, no silly claim of ownership. I peered more closely at it, the dizzying array of markings, some of them beginning to flake a little. The scent of copper wafted into my nostrils. It wasn’t paint that had created the symbol; it was blood.

Anwynn’s voice broke the silence. “Well, shit.”

CHAPTER TWO

“WHAT?” I SAID. A BAD FEELING HAD BEGUN
to creep up my spine, like the prickling you get when someone’s staring at you. I couldn’t shake it, no matter how hard I tried. Hadn’t I just sent five sprites back to the Fae world? By most measures, I’d done a good job today. I lowered the trunk briefly to check our surroundings and didn’t find anyone nearby. I lifted it again, and the poor guy blinked at the intrusion of the trunk light.

I reached for him and then hesitated. “Shouldn’t we just untie the guy and let him go home? No harm, no foul.” Except for the fact that Anwynn was talking in front of him. Sometimes that just couldn’t be avoided.

“You think sprites bound this guy and put him in a trunk all on their own? The symbol on his forehead—it marks him as a blood sacrifice.”

Ah, there it was. The prickling on my spine exploded outward into a sense of dread, settling finally as a knot in the pit of my stomach. I pulled my sleeve over my palm and rubbed at the mark on the man’s forehead, until the rest of it flaked away. He flinched as I did so, his gaze focusing on my rather intimidating Fae hound.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said.  This guy had probably just had the worst day of his life. I worked on unraveling the tape, getting his mouth first.

“This has been the worst day of my life,” he said.

Magic usually did that to mortals.

I got his hands free in short order, and he rubbed at his wrists while I worked on his feet. When I’d unwound the last bit, I felt him tense. He was going to run, and I couldn’t blame him. I might look normal enough, but I clearly had a giant, talking dog, and that tended to be enough to make people place me in the “decidedly-off” category. I thought about giving him the “I’m just a really good ventriloquist” line, but he’d seen too much already. I didn’t want to insult him.

“Hey,” I said, putting a hand on his arm. “I know this is weird, but I’m one of the good guys. I promise.”

The tension drained out of him. He rose to a sitting position and swung his feet over the edge of the trunk, just as an elderly couple walked past on the sidewalk. They glanced at the three of us but didn’t give us any lingering looks.

That was close. I was going to get caught doing something
really
weird someday in front of a huge crowd of people. I didn’t know what I’d do about that, but I supposed I’d have to deal with it when the time came. I had other things to worry about.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“I need to call the police,” the man sputtered. He ran a shaking hand through his frayed comb-over.

“And what would you tell them?”

The man quieted. I could almost see the gears working in his head. If he told them about a band of tiny fairies attacking him, what would the police say? I’d worked with some of the officers before, but the rest of the force would chuckle a little and then tell him to go home and get some rest.

His expression settled into one of despair and resignation, the stubble on his cheeks making the hollows appear deeper than they were. “I was working at the prison that night,” he said. “I was inside, but I saw out the window. I saw you. I saw what happened. I think everyone else just tried to forget.”

I gave his arm what I hoped was a comforting squeeze. “When it comes to the supernatural here in Oregon, I’m something of a police officer myself. You can tell me. What’s your name?”

He turned woeful blue eyes on me. “Chris,” he said. “I was at home when I was abducted. Just taking an easy Saturday evening. Reading a book on the couch with a tumbler of whiskey. My wife’s visiting her family in Missouri, so I was alone. I see a shadow pass across the page, and when I look up, there are six of these floating little men and women, with wings, Jesus! And they just stare at me and I think I’m having a goddamned heart attack. There’s this guy standing behind them—tall, cloaked in dark brown and blue, wearing a silver belt with a swirly insignia for the buckle.”

He paused for a moment, running his hands over his shirt, as if he suddenly realized what a mess he looked.

“And?” I prompted.

“And then this deep voice says, ‘Take him,’ and that’s the last thing I hear before the little beasts attack me. They get my hands behind my back and use my own duct tape to tie them up and cover my mouth. They use these needles to force me to march past the creepy guy, and I don’t know what the hell is going on or if I’m going to die. The beasts made me go out the door and over to this car.

“One of them blows a bunch of powder in my face and next thing I know, I’m waking up in the trunk of a car. So I started kicking it.”

“Sleeping powder,” Anwynn murmured. “There are plants in the Fae world—you can dry them out, grind them up, and well…” She trailed off because I was giving her a pointed look. This man, Chris, did
not
need to hear all of this right now, especially from the mouth of a grushound.

“I live right over there,” Chris said, pointing to a house across the street. “At least I didn’t go far.” He ran a hand over his hair again, wiping the sweat beading on his pate. He stared at his fingers, as if he hadn’t even realized he’d been sweating.

“The guy in the cloak,” I said. “Did you get a good look at him?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Never saw his face. But he was tall.” He lifted a hand to a little higher than my height. “And thin, real thin.”

“Thank you,” I told him. “You’ve been a real help.” I didn’t know how yet, because none of this made sense to me, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

He licked his lips. “So…are you going to get the other supernatural police and find the guy?”

The other police. As if the Fae Guardians would ever willingly help out mortals. As if the Arbiter would ever legalize more than one Changeling. Opening and closing doorways between worlds wasn’t my only unique talent. The only Fae that could undo a Changeling’s magic was another Changeling. So he kept a tight leash on me and the laws against creating Changelings remained.

“Uh, yeah. Sure.” I helped Chris to his feet. “Why don’t you just go home and sleep it off? It’s Sunday evening now.”

His eyes glazed a bit. “Grace will be back tomorrow.”

I watched him go, his steps a little unsteady. “Well, at least we got to him in time.”

“Not exactly,” Anwynn said. “He’s marked. So…it’s not really over for him.”

“What the hell, Anwynn?” I rounded on her. “And you didn’t think maybe you should tell this to me
before 
I reassured the guy and sent him home?”

“It didn’t seem like you wanted me to talk.”

Whoever said that dogs were a man’s best friend had clearly never met Anwynn. She’d pledged her bond to me during the stress of battle, when neither of us had had much choice.  “But I rubbed the symbol from his forehead.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s been marked. The damage is done. In five days, he’ll die, blood leaking from his nose and mouth. They were probably transporting him somewhere safe so they could keep an eye on him, finish the rites, and collect the blood. Blood gathered from a blood rite can power some pretty impressive magic.”

I sat on the curb. “Forget worst
day
—this guy is having the worst week of his life.”

“It could be the last week of his life.”

In the month since I’d been granted legal status, I’d sent a couple lingering hobgoblins to meet their maker, and I’d had to politely ask a dryad to move from Willamette Park and back into the Fae world. I hadn’t run into anything remotely like
this
. It seemed Grian wasn’t the only power-hungry and unstable Fae.