Woe for a Faerie Read online

  Frank scowled. “Just lying on the dirt? A fallen angel? Nobody else saw her?”

  He didn’t believe me. He hadn’t believed me since I got here. He’d been seated, waiting for me when I walked into the interrogation room.

  “Yeah.” It was the only answer I had.

  Frank didn’t need to know a Fae had brought Woe to the church. That was need-to-know only. And he didn’t need to know my priesthood was a façade. My belief was real, but my church hid something else in the belly of the parish. He didn’t need to know about my team in the Cavern or our crime-fighting in the paranormal underbelly of New Haven City. There was so much Frank didn’t need to know.

  A naked female. A sexy one, at that.

  How had my androgynous messenger turned into a beautiful woman and wound up in my bed? She’d been sexy enough before. Now she reminded me that I was a man. That really liked women.

  Shifting in my seat, I massaged my temples and grimaced. At least I didn’t have to pretend that I had a headache. That part was real. “We’ve been here before, Frank. Why would I lie?”

  “It’s hard to believe.” The blue-uniformed man scrubbed a hand across his stubble. “Wouldn’t be the first time a priest lied.”

  “I don’t make this stuff up.” I shrugged, palms up, and dropped my arms back to the table. “How’s your son? Did he get into seminary?”

  “Sure did. Funny story about that…” Frank’s eyes narrowed. “Listen, enough chit chat, we both know that you know something.”

  He dropped his hands to his lap. When he lifted them again, he held a black, iridescent feather, about three feet long. He set it on the table between us.

  I schooled my face. That feather unnerved me. It meant that Frank knew, and he knew that I knew. But Frank didn’t know what I knew, and he couldn’t prove my involvement.

  Vic and Lev saw to that. I had to keep the list safe. We’d lost so many keeping it safe. We were down to just the three of us―me, Vic, and Lev. And Woe. We needed Woe, and we needed Woe to stay safe until we figured out what the Boss wanted with her.

  Time to bluff.

  “That’s a big bird,” I said with a downward glance.

  “Bird, huh? Funny way to talk about your girl.” Frank smirked.

  My girl. That’s what he’d said. The words struck a nerve.

  Images of her thrashing in my bed rolled through my thoughts. But Woe wasn’t my girl. I wanted her. Painfully. Yet she was in no condition to be anyone’s girl.

  “There is a big bird in the park. She’s not black though.”

  I met his gaze. He was trying to tell me something about a bird in the park, but all I could think of was the feather on the table in front of me.

  My fingers twitched. God, I wanted to touch it almost as much as I wanted to touch her. The blues and purples shimmered from quill to vane like a kind of magic. I cleared my throat and looked up. “It would make a nice ink pen.”

  Frank grunted. “We found this at a murder scene of a real bad dude, beaten to a bloody pulp, though. It’s almost a crime to prosecute.” He waved at the feather and shifted in his seat. “Do you know anything about any after-dark vigilante activities?”

  “There’s a new gang in the city?” I tugged on my beard to keep from grinning. If Frank had any idea.... “I’ve never met an after-dark vigilante.”

  “Funny man.” Frank rearranged his papers, read over the top sheet, and then folded the top half down to read the paper behind. A Masonic ring on his wrinkled pinky caught the light. “So where’d she go?”

  “I told you I don’t know. Did you find the last one alive after he disappeared from his cell?” Silence met my question. I sighed before murmuring prayer words. This needed to be over. I had work to do. This city didn’t save itself. When I opened my eyes, Frank’s eyebrows had climbed.

  At the look, I shrugged again. “Priests pray,” I said.

  “Off timing is all.” His response held no irritation.

  “Random prayers are some of the best.”

  “Finished?”

  I nodded. “Listen, I need to get back.”

  When I stood, my chair scraped loudly across the floor. I walked past the questioner and to the door.

  Frank leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You sure you have nothing to add?”

  My hand was already on the doorknob. My black robes belted in the middle, my clerical collar dug into my neck. I was every part the priest, maybe a few pounds heavier than last year, but officially just the same.

  I reflected on the right words to say. I didn’t need Frank involved, but I might need his help someday. “I have a long history of cooperation. I want to find her as much as you do.”

  And then Frank was behind me, his hand on my shoulder. Too loud, he asked, “Are we still on for chess on Tuesday?”

  Then, he added, “Be careful out there, Jason. There’ve been some weird goings-on in New Haven City Park. It’s imperative that you keep the list safe.”

  “Chess as usual,” I said, matching the unnatural volume. He knew about the list. That was news. Did he know about balance? How New Haven City balanced on the razor’s edge?

  Frank reached around me with the feather in his hand. “Take it. They don’t know I found it.”

  I grasped the quill and tucked it between my torso and my arm. It was too long and the end of the shaft stuck out farther than my fingers, but maybe nobody would notice anything amiss as I made a hasty exit.

  Frank stepped back. With a hand smack to my back, he announced, “All right, Father.” He continued, “Let us know if you find another one.”

  I stiffened. When I glanced over my shoulder, he gave a small nod. I pulled the door open, and my robes swirled around my boots, already moving down the corridor. My right boot squeaked with each stride. I must’ve stepped in something.

  I needed to find Woe before they did. Frank meant well, but I couldn’t say the same about his bosses at the precinct. And if Frank knew about the list, then the other boss might, too. I’d better get the feather to Vic. Maybe she could figure out why the Fae was hunting Woe.

  My pace did not slow, and I burst into the night, nearly knocking into a leather-jacketed man with tiger tattoos that crawled up his shaved head.

  “Hey, watch it,” came the gruff reply. His outraged eyebrow moved the tigers back and forth.

  I tilted my head to the side, knowing the street lamp would catch the thin line of white circling my neck.

  The stranger’s indignation drained away. “Oh, sorry, Father. Have a nice night.”

  Still meant something. Less than it used to, but something. I turned toward my parish, the gothic cross just visible over the roof lines. A train whistle sounded from far away.

  Woe needed me. And I needed her.

  We navigated a collision course, and I had no idea what to expect.

  7

  Wake Up

  Woe

  New Haven City

  Mute gargoyles sat on either side of me. Now that I was mortal, they never made any noise. Jason said they never did there. There was so much that was different about this flat world of mortals. I was a defector from a three-dimensional world, living in a two-dimensional picture. Jason never did anything but hover, and nobody ever came by.

  Beyond boring.

  I guess I expected too much from humanity. They were too busy trying to stay alive.

  Perched on the stone parapet on top of the church, I waited for the change. The sunset blazed overhead. During the day in the mortal world, the light would be harsh and glaring.

  In my realm, the sun had been soft and muted, the rays never quite touching my skin. It had taken me days to get rid of my semi-permanent squint.

  The city stretched below my toes. I still preferred the openness of the rooftops, but for a different reason now. I never felt closed in up here.

  The change had made me prone to claustrophobia and other anxieties that I had never had before. It was hard to figure out which end was up sometime
s.

  I peered into the statues’ open mouths. If I listened, maybe I could hear something familiar. Funnels for hundreds of years of prayers, the gargoyles used to whisper things I could hear, but now the teeth were fixed in the grotesque stone mouths. The tongues refused to move.

  Nothing.

  For two weeks, Jason’s voice had been my only companion. He hadn’t offered anything else, despite my curiosity. My savior hadn’t even been back to check on me.

  I’d traded a galaxy of knowledge, saturated with a spiritual fullness gleaned throughout a millennium, for the limited history of a struggle towards pinpricks of physical sensations and smallness. I’d relocated from the wide lens of the telescope to the narrow eyepiece.

  Vengeance was a funny thing. In one way, it freed me. In another, it bound me to the simplicity of mortals.

  A wind gust buffeted me on the concrete pedestal and turned my hair into a blindfold. Terror warred with the thrill until fear won. Unfamiliar instincts bent my knees, and I clutched at the roof edge, unable to see until I slid down from the elevated position.

  The crunch of my boot soles in the gravel of the rooftop garden dissolved the fright, and, as it faded, an emptiness yawned in my stomach. I shifted from side to side and hoped the movement would ease the uncomfortable feeling. Paper crinkled underfoot.

  The edge of the brown paper bag was caught beneath my boot. A tiny dirt devil stirred the gravel, and a yeasty perfume wafted upward. My hollow stomach growled.

  I opened the bag, and the second whiff of the nuns’ skilled cooking made my mouth water. I pulled a roll from the bag. The bun had been scored into equal quadrants, and the whiteness of the cross on the bun burned my thoughts.

  It would be delicious, even tainted with that mark, and I was famished. I broke each roll into four parts. No more offensive mark, only food to satisfy my hunger.

  I ate as the sun set, and within the architectural silhouettes, lights flicked on one by one. The illuminated rectangles each added their own fluorescent hum to the cacophony of the urban nightlife.

  When the sunset colors faded, I strolled to the opposite side of the building. Night stole down the street, crept through the old cemetery, and up the spires of Jason’s church.

  Across the way, the pale moon ascended. It hung just above the horizon. More at home in the nighttime glow, weight slid from my shoulders. I discarded my dinner wrappings carefully in the trashcan inside the rooftop access door. Then I sank into a chair some gardener had left behind after tending the rows of soil in the nearby raised boxes.

  Without a purpose, mortality proved tedious, and I had none. I used to know exactly what to do and when. Before, there was never any question about what came next. Never any way to impact the balance of the city. There was never any choice.

  And then I made one.

  It changed everything that came next.

  Justice burned away my wings, took away the only purpose I had ever known, and only the mercy of a stranger spared me the ultimate consequence.

  I used to know exactly what came next at all times. Now I had no idea.

  The pavement opened up. Arms pulled me in until the asphalt folded in on itself and squeezed me like a vice, pressing me down into a crypt. The vault’s perimeter was built from thousands of glowing eyes. Each one was a reckoning star that lit my tomb.

  As one, the eyeballs blinked.

  My gasp woke me. Always waking up. Healing was an exhausting sort of work.

  Disoriented, I leapt into the air, but gravity overcame my wings.

  The landing twisted my ankle and cleared my mind.

  No wings.

  I limped forward to study the shadows. Prickles still danced on the nape of my neck. Something… someone was watching. Had it been peering into my nightmare?

  A flash of white moved on the roof of the next building. A large figure ducked behind a water-storage tank as a flock of blackbirds took flight en masse. The form disappeared in the cloud of feathery wings.

  I ran toward the retreating shape, ignoring the twinge in my ankle at each crunch of my boot heel on the gravel. My pulse thudded in my ear. I gasped as I ran across the building. My muscles were tired already.

  I had to catch up, but I skidded to a stop at the edge of the parapet. I leaned over and studied the road several stories below. Cars honked at one another. This fall really would kill me. I already survived one. Maybe if I got a running start…

  I glanced up in time for another flash of eye-shine in the darkness. Two circles blinked at me, no longer moving away. In the dimness, the dark figure launched itself from the far end of the adjacent building. The distance muffled the whistle of wing bones pounding through the air as the two arcs beat up and down, until the figure was out of sight behind the structure.

  My mouth fell open. Two things swirled in my mind.

  The mortal realm didn’t only hold humans. Because, whatever that was, it wasn’t human, and…

  Wings. It had wings.

  Envy burned through my curiosity.

  “I need a purse, Jason.” My voice sounded loud in the quiet cathedral, my footsteps echoed as I made my way down the center aisle.

  Jason sat on a pew near the front. He shifted side to side to try to cover the violent jerk of his shoulders. He fumbled with something in his lap.

  Finally still, he pronounced my name in a low voice. “Woe.”

  Hearing my name in his voice did something to my knees, and his gravelly tone sent an unexpected tingle through me.

  More sensations. Always distracting me from my intent.

  He turned and hooked his elbow over the back of his pew, his smile tight. “Why do you want a purse?”

  “I want to get a job, and a purse carries all the things I might need to take with me.” I couldn’t depend on Jason’s goodwill forever. Independence would be a good thing, and potential employers would probably expect a handbag.

  “You can’t possibly get a job,” he said. “You have no ID. You aren’t trained. You don’t have what it…” His words trailed away when I stiffened.

  I would. I’d show him. If nobody would hire me as is, maybe I’d give the “oldest profession” a shot. I had something somebody wanted. Scowling, I lifted my chin.

  To him, I said, “Yeah, a job. Everyone needs one.” I had to find a way to feed myself for myself by myself.

  He repeated. “A job though?” His mouth turned down, and he crossed his arms. “The church can care for―”

  I pursed my lips. “No, I want a job. That’s what people do.” And I am bored out of my mind.

  I’d be my own person, in charge of my own destiny. I’d earned freedom with the gouges in my back, and I’d earn my own way, too. I already owed Jason too much.

  Grasping the back of the pew in front of me with both hands, I bit my lip. “I also need a flashlight. I like to walk around at night.”

  While it wasn’t quite the truth, I hoped he would accept the explanation and not guess the real reason for the flashlight. I wanted to find the winged beast from the roof top.

  Jason studied me through narrowed eyes. My heartbeat pulsed so loud I was sure Jason could hear it in the silent church.

  It was a first for him.

  Since my change, every other time Jason had helped, it had been his idea. I wanted to find the other him in my life, too. The guy that saved me. I wanted to tell him thanks. With no job, no money, and no friends, Jason was the only way I could think of to get what I needed.

  He stroked his beard. He took forever to make decisions.

  Under his scrutiny, I wanted to sink between the pews and out of sight. “I don’t see well at night. Before…” So many things were different. “Before, light and darkness made no difference. The sun did not determine my ability to see.”

  He tapped his index finger against his lips, and nodded as though it made sense to him. “Ladies sometimes leave purses in the donation box. There might be one or two.”

  Jason scooted sideways until he reach
ed the end of his row. When he stood, I followed him to the large box kept inside a closet at the back of the church, by the entrance. He opened the door, and the hinges squeaked. A musty saltwater smell drifted out.

  Split logs boasted a hand-hewn texture and fashioned the box. Big enough that I could lie down inside it, in either direction, if I wanted. Tar lined the interior. Out-of-style multi-patterned items and moth-eaten clothes filled it to overflowing.

  “In here.” Jason waved. “Some of these clothes have been in here for thirty years or longer. Won’t be long before they’re back in style.”

  He held up a crumpled, mustard yellow waitress uniform. The white polyester collar was polka-dotted with stains. He shook his head and tossed it back in.

  “The box was donated by a sailor back in 1851. It’s been used ever since.” The word Lev was carved into the wood on one side like old-school graffiti. Jason smoothed his fingers over the chisel marks.

  I tried to remember if I’d ever seen the sailor with the box as I crouched on the threshold of the closet and rummaged through the clothes. I’d been messenger to the priests of this church for a long time.

  Jason cleared his throat. “No. Here.”

  He reached into the muddle and pulled out a battered brown leather rectangle that I had moved from one side of the box to the other three times.

  “Guess I’m a little preoccupied.” I took it from him and held it up to myself. It had a small handle but nothing else. I couldn’t chase anything with it. “I don’t think this will work. I don’t want to carry it by hand.”

  Jason chuckled. He lifted the flap and pulled a cord from the inside pocket. It was attached to the rectangle at either end. He placed the loop over my shoulder. I knocked his hand away and ducked. The purse fell to the marble floor.

  He raised his eyebrows. “I won’t hurt you.”