“I already told you, I don’t understand you,” I snapped, digging my feet into the ground and crossing my arms. I knew it was immature, but I didn’t care. I wanted out of there, and what she was saying probably meant that I had to take a bath in a freezing cold creek in front of everyone. I would not. I liked my baths hot, boiling even. Whatever was going to happen, I wasn’t about to take a dip.
The woman shook her head and turned to the other women. She said something to them in their language before stomping off toward another woman who stood up and approached me. She looked just like everyone else except her eyes were kinder, and she gave me a tiny smile as she approached, speaking in her native tongue.
“Didn’t I just say I can’t—” I stopped talking, my eyes widening. She was still speaking, her voice sending shivers down my spine. It was filled with magic. I took a step backward, feeling afraid without any good reason. She was different from the others, but I wasn’t sure why. What I felt told me there was more than just magic being expelled from her lips. It crawled along my skin like it was searching me for something, inching its way toward my heart and up to my throat. It settled there, wrapping its tendrils around my voice box. I clutched my throat, gasping from the heavy sensation locking up my voice.
It was weird. Too weird. I wasn’t used to feeling magic that intense, and it was nauseating and sucking away my breath. I bent over, holding my stomach as the wave of sickness packed a punch right into my center.
“What are you doing to me?” I croaked.
She began speaking more words like she was asking me a question, and I shook my head. “I just don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t… understand you.”
The choking feeling lessened, and I heaved large, hungry breaths of air into my lungs as though there’d be none left if I didn’t hurry.
For some reason, when the king had spoken in my head I had understood him perfectly, but now there was no logic to a damn thing anyone said out loud. The woman frowned as I finally straightened, feeling the wave of dizziness receding. She reached out, holding a jewel up to my head.
She placed it across my forehead, dragging it as she closed her eyes. The jewel began to heat up. I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t move. Was I glued in place? A panic rose inside me as I gasped for air again, my chest seizing and my throat on fire as the jewel started pouring out an intense, cooling power which ran down along my face, past my cheeks and wrapped around my neck and shoulders until I couldn’t breathe anymore.
I screamed, but only silence escaped my lips.
I was going to die, I knew it. But the woman shook her head and smiled as the jewel turned frigid right before she plucked it away.
“You understand me now, don’t you?”
I nodded, afraid to speak as I sucked in a breath. My knees buckled, and I hit the mulchy earth hard, twigs digging into my flesh as the ground felt like it wanted to suck me in to fertilize another massive tree.
“What did you do to me?” I huffed the air, swallowing mouthfuls of it and feeling even more exhausted and sick. Magic wasn’t meant to be used on humans, even specially gifted ones like me. It disorientated mortals to the point of illness. I could feel the strain on my body grow with each spell they chanted at me.
“The speaking gem can change your thoughts to understand other languages. Now you understand the words of the faery folk.”
“It almost killed me.”
She smiled but didn’t apologize.
“Come along. We must see the king.”
“What? I can’t.” I crawled back to my feet, pushing off the dirt and straightening, the odd sway of the world lessening as her magic faded. Dusting off the earth, I glared at her. I felt much better now, but that was beside the point. “That felt like you were crushing my chest. I need a moment.”
“Don’t be haughty.”
I lifted an eyebrow as she turned away and waved me forward. “What’s your name?” I wanted to make sure I said it before I killed her.
“Nioka.”
“I’m—I’m….” I couldn’t say what my name was; it wasn’t there to speak out loud anymore, like it didn’t even exist. “My name….”
“Your faery folk name is now Ura. Come now. We mustn’t keep His Majesty waiting.”
Ura? That was my name now? It felt wrong, and I refused to acknowledge it. This had insanity written all over it, and I wasn’t going to take any part in it.
“No. That’s not right.”
“Nothing is right in the land of the faery folk. You must get used to it. Don’t fight. It will only make things worse for you.”
I shook my head, grumbling beneath my breath as she led me farther into the vast, swallowing forest.
Never, I thought to myself. I’ll never get used to it.
Chapter Five
* * *
Jay
I shook my head as I scrutinized the stack of folders which contained information about possible members for the team we were assembling to find Amy. It grated on my nerves to go through the piles because no one was good enough to replace Amy, and I only trusted my two siblings. I’d worked with others in the Agency before, but I wasn’t in a hurry to repeat the experience.
Craig might have been more adept at working with others, but not me. At least the pile was now stacked into smaller ones separated by gender, experience, and specialty. Craig leaned forward, eyeing them while he scratched the stubble on his chin. We were both bored out of our minds, sitting in a meeting organized by Ridley, our senior officer and commander. Red tape and all, but did it have to be a royal pain in the rear?
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Amy wasn’t out there lost, needing our help. Ridley appeared bored to tears which made it all worse. Shaking my head again, my lips tightened. This was my least favorite task. Now that we needed backup, choosing who was going to help us was harder than I’d thought it’d be. No one was good enough. Not nearly enough.
Craig picked at his nails. He’d left much of the organization up to me, but there was one team member we’d already agreed on. Ridley. She was in the room, pacing back and forth, dictating what was going to happen from this moment on. We’d been at it for hours and almost had our team rounded out, but we’d yet to meet most of them. A couple of them we’d known for a while, but a couple of them neither of us recognized at all. Replacing Amy was harder than we cared to admit.
She was always there, the perfect specialist agent. Not only in weapons, but in martial arts, decoy, and tracking expertise. I was more of a weaponry specialist from the military experience I’d received prior to being recruited for this sector of the U.S. government. I was more than relieved to be back in Wicked Grove after a year abroad, but it had helped me more than I could repay. Not a lot surprised me anymore. At the tender age of eighteen, I’d already been involved in intense undercover operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had even spent some time in Korea. In my short life, I’d been more places than either of my siblings.
Craig was more of a tactical specialist and even though he hadn’t served in the military like me, he was just as good with guerrilla tactics and cyber operations. He’d served as a mercenary from the age of sixteen, mostly hacking into corporations; an expert at decrypting firewalled servers with sensitive information about the preternatural world. I wasn’t as savvy on the computers, but Craig and Amy both were more than adept at it.
We were considered the three most lethal weapons of the Agency. No one challenged our scores on any given test, and no one could beat our record of six successful supernatural exterminations. We were the best at what we did. The S.R.A. couldn’t deny it. The entire group counted on us as their main team and losing Amy was like taking off a limb, bleeding chaos where there had once been pure order.
“Come on, guys,” Ridley said. “Let’s go over the final choices. I need to approve this team like yesterday.” She halted her pacing at the head of the table and leaned forward to frown at the untouched pile of operatives waiting to be sifted throug
h. I was done checking resumes; we’d already narrowed the choices down to around a dozen. What else did she want us to do?
“All right, I get what you’re saying, Ridley,” Craig sighed, leaning forward.
“I just don’t know if I agree with the choices left on the table. They all seem kind of mismatched somehow. Perhaps if we go back and—”
“For the love of all that is holy,” I cursed, “just approve a team already. I’m done checking the wet recruits. If they’re not good enough, we’ll find out soon enough when they become fodder for faery cannons.”
God, let this end soon. I rubbed my temples, my head still aching something fierce from getting smacked silly by that infernal faery clan. I snapped my eyes open and glared at Ridley as she pondered our words. She was a seasoned warrior and often did backup for the three of us, but she’d done her time in the field and now preferred devising tactical plans and arranging itineraries for other operatives. She and Craig were rumored to be an item, but both denied the relationship, especially since Ridley was older than Craig by nearly a decade.
Luckily, no one dared call her a cougar. She was often put in charge of seasoned fighters, but she was more of a drill sergeant than a mother hen and didn’t take crap from anyone. If anyone tried anything on her, they would regret it before they hit the ground.
Ridley shook her head. “Craig, I know you trust my instincts. Mismatched or not, these are the best operatives we have right now. We’ve lost a few in the faery extermination attempts of the last six months. This is an ongoing war we’re not winning.” Her frown lines deepened as she paced the room once more, rubbing her chin, her long blond hair hanging over her shoulder in a taut ponytail. “The obvious solution is to not kill them but to drive them off the human lands. Maybe corral them somewhere, like a reservation?”
“I’m pretty sure the other supernaturals would freak at that idea,” Craig said. “It’s called segregation, and we’ve gone through that already. Look at history. The supernatural leagues would just assume we’d do it to them all.”
“Agreed, but unfortunately, the faerie folk do not think like humans or any of the friendlier magicals. They don’t think like anyone normal. They see a forest, they think they can live there. They need more people, they take them. That’s all they can see. It’s a hive mind. How do we fight a queen bee when she’s constantly surrounded by a thousand obedient drones?”
“It was a king bee who took Amy.”
“You know what I mean.” Ridley groaned as she slid into one of the uncomfortable metal chairs around the conference table and kicked her feet up. Her heavy combat boots clanged against the wood, but no one paid any mind. We all sat in our chairs like that occasionally. No big deal. The good thing about this job was that we didn’t have to spend too much time in rooms like this.
“They really have no control over their own actions at all?” I asked. “Can’t some of them think for themselves? They have farmers, masonry workers, and even weapons makers. How could they all be autonomous yet obligated to answer to one mind? They must be connected but also able to make independent decisions.”
“The faeries do behave autonomously when engaged in individual tasks, but overall they’re like one single mind following the whims of their little queen… err… king. We’re not winning this war against them. They’re adapting to everything we throw their way. We need to think differently. This isn’t a linear problem, so I’m proposing a team with a variety of specialties. Quick thinkers who work well under pressure regardless of whether they get along.” Ridley dug her eyes into me, challenging me to argue. I dropped my gaze to the table, unwilling to even go there.
I took a deep breath and placed my hands on the table. I threw Ridley an unconvinced look. “Look, you have all my respect, but we don’t need specialists, we need overwhelming brute force. And I don’t think letting these faeries live is the right thing to do. They keep pushing our boundaries. Soon they’ll be walking right into the city and snatching anyone they want. Their kidnapping of innocent people to assimilate is getting out of control. This is the real-life Borg we’re talking about. Woodland faeries can be stopped. They retreat with one spray of aerosolized iron pesticide. These ones don’t retreat. They aren’t normal.”
“No.” Ridley shook her head. “This isn’t Star Trek, and we’re not in deep space, nor are we some federation making peace with every supernatural species we encounter. They get out of hand, we exterminate them. But we have Amy in there, and we must get her out first. Then maybe we’ll think about extermination, even though studying this anomaly would be more useful.”
Craig jumped to his feet, his face turning a purple I’d rarely seen. “You’re insinuating we capture the faery clan? No. I won’t allow you to experiment on them like you did that one pack of goblins. We’re not scientists, for God’s sake, Ridley. That’s like totalitarianism kind of stuff.”
“I’m just saying we barely know anything about them and their magic. If we could figure it out, contain it, learn to use it as a weapon, we could gain so much and keep any future infestations at bay.”
“Absolutely not. You know what happens when we get in over our heads with faeries. They can’t be controlled. It’s either drive them farther into the forest by laying down iron barriers every five miles or we exterminate. I vote for the barriers. The fae can’t cross them, and we can drive them in the direction we need to. After we save Amy, of course. But I won’t be a part of any death-camp-mad-science crap.”
Ridley frowned at his words, shutting her eyes tightly. I knew they would agree to disagree, but despite my emotional outburst, I knew Craig was right. We were a regulatory agency, and exterminating a race of supernaturals wasn’t a light matter. Experimenting on them like lab rats was downright insanity. I wouldn’t be a part of it either.
“They’ve put us in this position. Don’t think I haven’t looked at alternatives first. We take a few of them, like the king, and contain them, sedated so they don’t feel anything. Extract what we need and exterminate the rest.”
“Can’t we reintroduce them to the human world?” I suggested. “There have to be many who were once human.”
“We can’t be sure who was human and who wasn’t. It’d take too long to even try. Regardless, most can’t be returned anyway. They would die if we tried.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because we’ve tried before. After two weeks, the change is irreversible.”
“Then we need to move. Amy’s already been there three days. That’s three days too long.” I jumped to my feet, desperate to act. This planning stage was already taking too long, and the longer we sat sitting on our thumbs, the more Amy became one of them.
“I know, but sometimes in the name of science and advancement, things need to be done that we don’t want to do. How do you think we have any effective weapons against other supernaturals? We cultivate them.”
“Disgusting,” I snapped. I was starting to wonder what kind of agency we truly worked for. Maybe we didn’t know what we were getting into, and the picture was growing dimmer and dimmer as time went on. Amy would not approve.
“Look,” Ridley sighed, dropping her legs off the table and jumping to her feet, “some of our weapons don’t work against them, but if we’re not here to just exterminate the clan, we need a plan to rescue Amy first. That’s our priority. We’re losing at this. Let’s figure out a way to get through their barriers. We’ll use our best weapons and agents to get in and out of there. Then we can worry about extermination or not.”
She sucked in a breath and leaned on the table. “Craig, I understand your sister means everything to you and Jay; she means a lot to me too. I trained her myself. We’ll get her back even if we have to exterminate this clan immediately. I just want us to be reasonable and have the best plan in place. We need more information on how this particular tribe works, and the only way to get it is to capture one of them. I don’t want to die out there, and I don’t want anyone else to be assim
ilated like Amy.”
“We won’t be,” Craig said. “There’s one thing I know for sure, and it’s that they don’t want siblings for some odd reason.”
Ridley looked up, surprised. “What did you say?”
“They had us hogtied when they took Amy. They could’ve easily taken us too, but they didn’t. Something about that doesn’t smell right. Maybe we could use it against them.”
“Interesting. We can definitely use that. Who else in the Agency has had a family member or ancestor taken by faeries before?”
I nodded, pointing at our stacks of operatives. “I separated them out already.”
Ridley nodded, grabbing the pile of folders. “All right. So… first one is Norstrom. He’s an older agent. He works with gadgets, but he hates fieldwork. Hates the outdoors even more. Still, he’s a strong guy in the muscle department. He can do double duty. I trust him with my life.” She held up Norstrom’s photo, and everybody nodded in agreement. She set his folder down by itself. “Good. This is now the GO pile.”
Ridley eyed another file but shook her head. “Why is there a note written on Becca’s file? It says, ‘Ancestor taken but no.’”
“She’s tiny. A stick,” Craig offered, not looking up from Norstrom’s file. He slapped it down before flicking his eyes up at Ridley.
“Look,”—Ridley waved the folder in the air— “you might not think it’s a good idea, but I think Becca is a genius. Hard-working. Strong. Perfect in a pinch. I recruited her at ten-years-old when she was living on the streets, an orphan, surviving completely on her own. She’s tough, self-sufficient, and maybe a little feral, but like Amy, she has a knack for tracking and a great sense of direction. You’ll need that in the forest. She’s a skinny little thing who can fit anywhere, and that might help us. We need someone who can be invisible, and she’s the one.”