Changelings are the perfect victims in Faerie. We’re a born underclass, and very few of us have anyone to miss us if we disappear. I might never have heard about the problem at all, if I hadn’t been one of Devin’s kids, once upon a time. A few of my fellow survivors came to me to see if there was anything I could do. I agreed to try. I’d been out on the streets every night for a week doing just that. So far, I’d busted three goblin fruit dealers, stopped a mugging, and stopped for coffee at half the all-night diners in the city. But I hadn’t seen any of the missing changelings. I honestly wasn’t sure whether that was a blessing or a curse.
A raven cawed harshly from somewhere overhead. It would have been a perfectly normal sound in the daylight, but here and now, this late at night . . . I looked up, scanning the rooftops until I spotted the outline of a large raven perched on a broken streetlight. It cawed again and then took off, flying west. I swore under my breath and chased after it, trying not to let it out of my sight as I ran along the alley.
The uncharacteristically night-flying raven was the animal form of Jasmine Patel, my Fetch’s girlfriend. She’d been keeping lookout over the whole area. If she was calling for backup, she’d seen something—and whatever it was, it was pretty much guaranteed to be nothing good.
Jazz’s caws guided me through the maze of narrow streets, until I skidded around a corner and into a dead-end alley. There was a dumpster at the far end, so overstuffed with garbage that it had practically become a tiny, localized landfill. A figure I knew was standing at the edge of the mess, her head bowed in evident sorrow. She was my height, with colorless brown hair worn short and streaked with neon pink. Her clothes were almost shockingly bright in the dim alley—orange corduroy pants and an electric blue sweater—but somehow, that didn’t do anything to lessen the impact of the scene. May knew what death meant, maybe better than any of us. She was a Fetch, after all.
I stepped up next to her, releasing my don’t-look-here as I joined her in looking at the heaped-up trash. She put a hand on my shoulder, sniffling.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I know.”
There was a girl lying sprawled in the garbage. Her skin and hair were the ivory color of old bleached bones, with a faint waxy sheen: she was half Barrow Wight. Only half; her height, and the square lines of her jaw, came from her human parent. She was thin enough to look consumptive, and she wasn’t breathing.
I walked forward, kneeling to touch the girl’s wrist. Her skin was still warm. She’d been alive when we started prowling the streets. There was a faint, sickly-sweet smell to the garbage around her, too dilute to be tempting, but strong enough to make her cause of death plain. Goblin fruit. We’d finally found a changeling who had been killed by goblin fruit. Luck was with us.
Luck was nowhere in the picture.
“Toby?” May’s voice was very soft. “What do you want to do now?”
There was only one thing that we could do. I stayed crouched beside the girl, my fingers still resting lightly on her wrist. “We wait for the night-haunts.”
The soft scent of musk and pennyroyal tickled my nose. “Are you sure that is the wisest course of action?” asked a male voice, sounding faintly concerned.
“I promised not to summon them again. I didn’t promise not to hang around and say hello.” I straightened, turning to face him. I couldn’t quite conceal my relief at the sight of Tybalt, standing there in a wine-colored shirt and tight black pants. Unlike May and I, he hadn’t bothered trying to make himself look human: the black tabby stripes in his dark brown hair were clearly visible, and his eyes were banded malachite green, with vertical pupils. His expression, however, was as sorrowful as May’s.
If I hadn’t already loved him, I think I would have started to in that moment.
“The night-haunts aren’t friendly people, Toby,” said May. “I know. I used to be one.”
“Do you have a better idea?” I shook my head. “It’s not like we can break into the county morgue later and examine her body. Even if we had forensic training, it wouldn’t matter. This is the only way.” If the girl had died a violent death, I could have sampled her blood for clues. This was different. If I tried to do blood magic and ride her memories, I could wind up getting addicted to goblin fruit in the process. I cared about justice. I cared about cleaning up my streets. There were some risks I still wasn’t willing to take.
The night-haunts were a risk of a different variety, and one that I had taken before. They were one of the deep, dark secrets of Faerie, the shadows that came for the dead and carried them away, leaving perfect human replicas in their place. The work of the night-haunts allowed Faerie to exist without worrying that the bodies of our dead would betray us. The trouble was, they also made it impossible for me to know how many of the missing changelings had died and been replaced by human manikins. This changeling could be our first casualty. She could also be our twentieth. If the bodies couldn’t tell me, I was going to have to go for the next best thing, and ask the dead.
Wings rustled overhead as Jazz came in for a landing, shifting back into her semi-human form in the same motion. She was a tall, black-haired woman of clearly Indian descent, with raven-amber eyes. “I think Toby’s right,” she said, moving to take May’s arm. “That doesn’t mean we have to stay if you’re not comfortable.”
“No,” said May, shaking her head. “If Toby’s staying, so am I.” She hesitated before smiling, very slightly. “It’ll be nice to see my siblings again.”
Fetches are created when night-haunts consume the blood of the living. Sort of like caterpillars turning into butterflies, only gorier and a lot less likely to wind up on binders designed by Lisa Frank. I grimaced a little. “All right. Tybalt?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you even need to ask whether I intend to remain here while you engage in casual conversation with a group of merciless carrion-eaters who have little reason to be fond of you? I’m staying.”
“Not going to argue,” I said, and walked over to stand beside him.
“What do we do now?” asked Jazz.
In unison, May and I replied, “We wait.”
Tybalt snorted before casually looping his arm around my waist. I let him pull me a little closer, although I didn’t allow myself to relax. The night-haunts are nothing to relax around. The comforting smell of pennyroyal and musk rolled off him like my favorite cologne. All fae have their own distinctive magical odor. I’m more sensitive to them than most. It’s all part and parcel of being the first in a new race of blood-workers: the Dóchas Sidhe.
My mother, Amandine, is the daughter of Oberon himself, making her Firstborn and more powerful than anyone as . . . reality-challenged . . . as she is has any real need to be. I’m her daughter by a mortal man, making me a changeling with a rather unusual skill set, combined with the bleached-out coloring of a bad watercolor painting. The fact that I managed to get myself knighted for services to the Crown was practically a miracle. The fact that I had been dating the local King of Cats for three months without discovering that it was all an especially cruel dream sequence was definitely a miracle.
The four of us made a strange tableau as we stood there, looking at the body of a dead girl and waiting for her strange eternity to begin. It felt almost disrespectful. The dead should be alone when the night-haunts come. But I’d promised not to summon them, and there was no better way to find our answers than this. No; that wasn’t right.