Bloodfever

“Oh, God, you think I—No, Dani, I don’t get off on torturing them! I didn’t know it was out there.” It bothered me immensely that something big and bad enough to eat Unseelie had been nearby, and I’d not even known it. It bothered me more that Dani thought I was so twisted. Who was this kid’s role model? Where did she get her ideas? TV? Video games? Kids these days seem both dangerously impressionable and dangerously desensitized, as if their lives have somehow assumed comic book proportions, ergo, comic book relevance—or a complete lack thereof. If I had to read about one more group of teenage boys killing a homeless person and saying, “I don’t know why we did it, it was like…hey, you know…that Internet game we play,” I was going to start stabbing humans with my spear, golden rule be damned. “Did you kill it?” I asked.

“With what?” She poked out a slim hip. “You see a sword tucked into this uniform? Strapped on my bike somewhere?”

“A sword?” I blinked. Surely she didn’t mean the sword. “You mean the Seelie Hallow, the sword of light?” I’d read about it in my research; it was the only other weapon capable of killing Fae. “That’s what you’ve been getting your forty-seven kills with? You have it?”

She gave me a smug look.

“How on earth did you get it?” According to the last book I’d read, it had been in the custody of the Seelie Queen herself!

The smug look faded a little.

I narrowed my eyes. “Rowena gave it to you.” From her crestfallen expression, I continued guessing, “And she keeps it, and doesn’t let you carry it much, does she?”

Dani scowled and propped her bike against the wall. “She thinks I’m too fecking young. I’ve killed more Fae than all her other little kiss-ass acolytes she sends out combined, and still she treats me like a child!” She stomped over to the counter, and looked me up and down. “I bet you can’t kill the Grug. I bet Rowena’s wrong about you. What kind of special powers do you have? I don’t see anything special about you.”

Without another word I skirted the cashier counter, pushed through the connecting doors, and headed for the rear of the store.

What was eating Unseelie outside my bedroom window? I didn’t like it one bit. It was bad enough that I had to worry about Shades and whatever was beneath the garage but now I had to worry about a monster-muncher, too. Nor did I like that such a thing had happened twice now, with me in the immediate vicinity. Were such macabre feasts taking place across the city and I just didn’t know it because I wasn’t getting out much? Or was it happening specifically around me? Was it coincidence, or something more?

I pushed open the back door and scanned the alley, left and right.

It took me a few moments to spot it. Nearly two-thirds of it was gone and what remained—the head, shoulders, and stump of a torso—had been tossed into an overflowing Dumpster. Like the mangled Fae in the graveyard, it was in obvious agony.

I hurried down the stairs, scrambled up the small mountain of trash, and crouched over it. “What did this to you?” I demanded. No mercy killing this time. I wanted information in exchange.

It opened its mouth, made a wordless, whimpering sound, and I turned away. In addition to having no hands or arms left, it had no tongue. Whatever had stopped short of devouring it meant for it to suffer, and had left it unable to speak or communicate in any way.

I removed the spear from the holster I’d rigged beneath my jacket this morning, and stabbed it. It died with a rank gust of icy breath.

When I clambered back down the pile of refuse, Dani was waiting for me, wide-eyed. “You have the spear,” she said reverently. “And what an awesome holster! It’s so compact I could carry it around all the time, everywhere. I could kill them twenty-four/seven! Are you superfast?” she demanded. “If not, I should probably have that spear.” She reached for it.

I put it behind my back. “Kid, you try to touch my spear, I’ll do worse things to you than you’ve ever seen done.” I had no idea what I was talking about, but I suspected if anyone tried to take the spear from me, that savage Mac inside, the one that hated pink and hadn’t particularly minded watching the Rhino-boy flail in eternal pain, might do something we’d both regret. Well, at least one of us would regret. I was becoming too complicated for my own peace of mind. Would Dani try to take it with her superspeed? Would I find something in that hot, alien place in my skull to fight her with?

“I’m not a kid. When are you fecking grown-ups going to see that?” Dani snapped, turning away.

“When you stop acting like one. Why did you come here?”

“You’re in trouble,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Rowena wants to see you.”

Turned out PHI was not the twenty-third letter in the Greek alphabet but Post Haste, Inc. Courier Services, and Dani a delivery girl, explaining the uniform and bike.

It was two in the afternoon on Thursday, when I hung my Closed Early placard on the bookstore door and locked up. “Shouldn’t you be in school, Dani?”

“I’m home-schooled. Most of us are.”

“What does your mom think about you running around killing Fae?” I couldn’t imagine the mother of any young child being okay with it. But I guess when there’s a war on and you’re born a soldier, there’s not much choice.

“She’s dead,” she said nonchalantly. “Died six years ago.”

I didn’t say I was sorry. I didn’t mouth any of the platitudes people resort to in times of grief. They don’t help. In fact, they chafe. I commiserated on her level. “It fecking sucks, doesn’t it?” I said vehemently.

She flashed me a look of surprise and the nonchalance melted. “Yeah, it does. I hate it.”

“What happened?”

Her rosebud mouth twisted. “One of them got her. One day I’ll find out which one, and kill the fecker.”

Sisters in vengeance. I touched her shoulder and smiled. She looked startled, unaccustomed to sympathy. Six years ago, Dani would have been seven or eight. “I didn’t know they’d been around that long,” I said, meaning the Unseelie. “I thought they’d only recently been freed.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t an Un that got her.”

“But I thought the…other ones”—I spoke vaguely, mindful of the wind—“didn’t kill us because of the…you know.”