Page 100 of Contested Crown

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Farther,” the fairies said. We walked through the empty area of town, the sunset clearing out most of the facilities. A few worked all night long, their lights on, cars in parking lots.

After twenty minutes of walking, I asked, “How much farther? Should we get our car?”

The fairies let out an annoyed, sibilant sigh, as though serpentine scales were rubbing together. “Fine.”

Then they swirled around us, and I grabbed hold of Cade.

“What—”

“There are stories,” Cade said, his eyes wide, “that mages learned their teleportation spells from the fairies. I never believed that. But…”

The world around us moved, the fairies spinning closer and closer. I saw the similarities, the way that Cade’s tattoos would wrap around us tightly before moving us somewhere else.

We arrived deep in the heart of the city. Tall buildings surrounded us, their lights on even as the city moved from dusk to dark. I immediately knew where we were. This was the heart of the financial sector, called that to differentiate it from the touristy areas of town. Even here, though, the ground floors were taken over by expensive boutiques and chain retail stores.

Mannequins stood in the large plate glass windows, wearing costumes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the set of aMad Maxmovie.

“Come,” the fairies said, a hundred voices saying the same word at once, leading us further down the street, then into a narrow alleyway between buildings.

We ended up near the dumpsters for one of the buildings. I couldn’t name it on sight, but I knew it was one of the ones with expensive rents and views of the ocean and mountains.

In the darkness, at first it looked like nothing—garbage that had missed the dumpster. An open bag of beans that had spilled on the ground.

The fairies circled closer and closer, their bodies lighting it up, until they stilled, landing on the ground.

There were paintings of fairies, tiny creatures with beautiful, cherubic faces, their bodies no bigger than a thimble. There was an artist from the 1900s who famously drew entire books’ worth of portraits of individual fairies. Her work hung in museums; even today, her reprinted books sold by the thousands.

The fairies that had landed on the ground didn’t look anything like the innocent, charming creatures sitting on toadstools and drinking from the dew collected in blossoms.

They were the height of my thumbprint, their entire bodies suffused in glowing light that shifted color. Each had styled her hair differently—some plaited into braids, others windswept and knotted. A few of the fairies had cut their hair so short they almost looked bald.

Cade and I crouched low to see what they were lighting up and caught sight of their faces. They showed sharp, sharp teeth and eyes with enormous pupils like predators in the wild.

Frowning down at the ground, I saw what I had taken for dried beans were, in fact, small, collapsed fairies. Their bodies were desiccated, mummified either from the hot sun or whatever had killed them.

“What happened?” Cade frowned, glancing from the small corpses up to the building we were standing next to.

“Our kind consumes food, but also we consume the magic of the ley lines.” The fairies passed the words between them so that they each only said a single word of the sentence. “Something has been done to the ley lines.”

“If something has been done to the ley lines, why aren’t you dead?” I asked.

“We will be. Soon. Very soon.” They leapt into the air, spiraling around each other.

I reached out, picking up one of the dead fairies, bringing it closer. Cade turned his body toward mine, leaning in to examine the creature. His scent overwhelmed me, as though now that my wolf was back, it was ready to claim what it thought was its own.

“Are you sure it wasn’t something simpler? Rat poison or something of the like?” Cade gestured to the dumpster. “It isn’t uncommon for buildings to put poison in these in order to keep rats out.”

The fairies hissed. “No. No rat poison.”

One of the fairies landed on my fingertips, stalking toward the small corpse I held. She dropped to her knees, bringing the dead fairy’s head into her lap, stroking her hair gently.

“Something is hurting the ley lines.” She looked up at me, and it was strange hearing a single fairy speak rather than a swarm of fae echoing each other.

“We’ll figure out what’s going on. Are there any more bodies?” I asked.

“Yes.” The fairy leapt into the air, and then four of them darted down, picking up the body I held. They brought it back to the ground, then swirled around the rest of the dead fairies.