Bloodfever

“Feck you,” she retorted.

“Real mature there,” I said, without looking up. “Trying on adulthood by cussing. You and a gazillion other teens. Do something original.” Back home, I’d rarely read anything other than the Sunday paper, specifically the lifestyle and fashion sections. Had crimes like these always been going on, and I’d just never noticed? Had I been so criminally oblivious?

Dani wheeled her bike in the door. “I don’t have to do something original, I am original.” She hesitated. “So, what’s going on out back?”

I shrugged. “You mean the cars? No clue.” I wasn’t about to admit to someone who was plugged into the sidhe-seer community that I’d stolen a Fae Hallow and in the process gotten sixteen humans killed. I’d been reading up on the paranormal and it appeared there was a golden rule: Harm no innocents, and humans somehow seemed to unilaterally get accorded that status, an irony heavily underscored by the newspaper I was reading.

“No. I meant the half-wiped Grug.”

“Grug?”

She described it, what was left of it. “I call them Rhino-boys.” I dropped the paper. “There’s one out back, half eaten?”

She nodded and her lips quirked. “Rhino-boys, I get that. They’re gray and lumpy and make that funny noise in the back of their throats.”

“Is Grug their Unseelie caste name?” Was this true sidhe-seer lore? I was starving for it. I wanted explanations, rules. I wanted someone to take my life and make sense out of it. I wanted a Sidhe-Seer Compendium.

She shrugged. “We don’t know squat about the Unseelie. It’s just what we call them. I like your name better. So, you gonna finish it off, or do you get off on torturing ’em? What do you do with the other parts? Keep ’em in a jar or something?” She glanced around, looking for those jars with an expression that said simultaneously “I’m so bored” and “Hey, way cool.”

“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?