The King's Leash (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 7) (2 page)

“Can I help you?” Lila asked, bounding toward him with a broad grin. Though she was seven feet tall and a lovely hue of blue, she wore a masking spell that would make her appear normal to all people unused to magic.

The man shuddered away from her and gasped. He clenched his eyes shut, like a small child, as though not seeing her would protect him.

Lila stepped back. “Sorry, are you… okay?”

He wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head. “No blue lady, I am not. I am most certainly not.”

Well then and so, he wasn’t a normal customer. “Can I help you?” I asked, stepping up beside Lila. I knew most of Seattle’s unders and magic users, but didn’t recognize him. His aura told me nothing in particular, nor did his scent or clothes.

“Yes,” he stammered. “I beseech you, we need help.” His jaw clenched shut and he held out a fisted hand toward me where a corner of a piece of paper jutted out.

I tried to take the paper from him, but he pulled it away and clutched it to his heart.

Adam crossed the room and stood beside Lila, facing the man uncertainly. As though he knew he should be some kind of authority, but had no idea what to do. “I can help,” he said.

The man made a strangled sound. He looked around the room and then darted between my row of books on healing and herblore. He ran to the back of the row and sank down to the ground, clutching his knees and trying to make himself as small as possible. I slowly followed him, stopping before I got too close.

“Breathe,” I told him. “You are safe here. What help do you need?” I took a step closer to him.

Lila called out from behind me. “And I can help, too. I’m not a demon, by the way, if that’s why you’re scared off. I’m a djinn, a Marid. And well sure, my Dad lived in Hell for a long time and I should maybe be there too because I’m so powerful, but that doesn’t make me a demon, technically, I—”

“Lila,” I barked. I’d been schooling her on keeping her powers secret. It hadn’t sunk in yet.

“Oh, right. Sorry, boss,” she said.

I watched the man. He sweated profusely and reminded me of a cornered dog. Terrified. Readying to bite.

“It’s okay. You’re safe here. It will all be okay.” I darted forward and snatched the piece of paper he held tight in his hand.

I moved away from him and smoothed open the wrinkled paper. I saw, scrawled upon it with a shaky and jagged penmanship:
Under the hill. Trouble trouble.

Chapter 2

Secret History

“Oh,” I said, looking at him anew. I understood now what he was. “You’re—”

He nodded quickly. He wore oil-cloth pants creased and nearly thread-bare at the knees. His linen shirt, tucked into his pants, bore stitches across it from the many times it had been torn and mended.

“Lila, lock the door.” I crouched so that I would be on the same level as the man. “You’re safe here. Are they searching for you? I can offer you a safe harbor. Or I can get you far away, or help you as you come down from—”

His eyes went wide and he shook his head. “No, you've misunderstood, miss. I'm going back to the hill. Tis all I have. I will return as soon as I can.”

“Why did you leave then?”

“They need h-h-help.”

I nodded. “And you left to get help, even though they do not seek it. Even though they would hunt you down if they knew you were gone.”

His jaw tightened. His eyes widened. He nodded slowly.

“They do not deserve so loyal a man,” I whispered.

“What’s going on?” Lila asked.

“Make some coffee, Lila, as strong as you can. He needs something to ground him. He’ll be going into withdrawals soon,” I said.

“Heroin?” Lila cast him an unhappy look. She’d seen more than a few of her gothic friends get addicted to opiates.

I shook my head. “Worse. Faerie dust, an addiction that has lasted many decades, if I'm not mistaken. And Adam, will you leave now to make your rounds and seek any stories of faeries who may have emerged from their hill? They may be hunting for this man. Call us immediately if you hear of anything.”

“Sure. I'll do my best,” he said. He left the store quickly.

I was glad to get him out of my hair. I didn’t trust him anymore. Not until I knew who he served.

I turned my attention back to the man. His eyes roved around the room, unable to keep still. I kept my gaze on him, but spoke to Lila. “Have you ever heard stories of people, young men usually, who meet beautiful faerie girls and follow them into their hills, only to emerge decades or centuries later, befuddled and sure that no time at all has passed?”

“Faeries,” Lila said with a wistful sigh.

It seemed I had failed in this aspect of her education if she found them anything but dangerous.

“Faeries,” the man repeated and closed his eyes, as though that would take him back to his hill.

“Faeries,” I echoed. “They take young and attractive humans who are seeking adventure, and lure them into their glens and hills and rivers to enslave them. They make them slaves to their every whim.”

The man cast me a wild look. “I’ll be returning. Soon enough. I’ll go back after….” He tried to say more, but seemed unable to make another sound.

“Even though you were their willing servant, even though you adored it, think, man. Was it truly voluntary? What would you do for a hit of faerie dust?”

“Anything,” he whispered and closed his eyes.

I gestured to Lila, who brought him a mug of coffee that read
Keep Calm and Wicca On
.

“Drink,” I ordered. “Begin to take care of yourself, and I will consider helping your faeries.”

He took a sip and scowled. More sweat rolled down his face. He grew white as paper. “They speak of you at times, Morgan le Fay. The witch of Seattle who knows of the old ways. They fear none, and yet you they speak of in whispers. They need you but cannot bear to ask you for aid.”

“Where is this faerie hill in Seattle?” I asked lightly. It was impressive that they’d kept the location hidden from me.

He opened his mouth and closed it with a snapping motion. He made the same odd gesture again, and then shook all over. His eyes rolled upward and sweat streamed down his face.

Of all the drugs this world had ever produced, faerie dust was the nastiest. The first stages hitting him were delirium tremors: anxiety, faerie hallucinations, seizures and disorientation. The next stage, which might come hours or days later, would feel like being flayed alive. It typically lasted for a week. And then came a depression so dark that the only recourse was to tie the person down until it passed. I’d once helped a friend come off faerie dust, and at times I had wondered if it would have been more of a mercy to let her perish.

I watched the man and thought about my own… well, I
should
name it an addiction, though it had always felt more complicated than that. My addiction to Grail water. I breathed, licked my lips, and did my best to pretend that I did not sear with desire at the thought of one drop, one taste of it. All that was over. Gone forever.

“Where is this faerie hill?” I repeated. “I will need to visit it, if it needs my help.”

He opened his mouth but it snapped shut again.

I had the sense that he wanted to tell me, but couldn’t.

I watched him for another long moment. “Do you truly not mind being so controlled by them?” I asked. “Do you not mind this spell they put upon you that makes it so you can't even speak, not truly, of the life you lead with them? See how they do not trust you. How they fear you should ever escape,” I said.

He gave me a glowering stare, blinked, and then drew his legs closer to him, on the edge of passing out. He pressed himself against the wall, as though wishing to push through it and run away.

“I have something that may help, though I am not sure your masters deserve it,” I said. I was plenty annoyed at helping any unders who had made this man their pet. The only thing that kept me interested was learning where a fae population might be living and hiding in my city.

I stood and walked to the back of my store, to a shelf that kept odds and curios. I sifted through a couple of boxes until I found it: an old Ouija board from the 1800’s. It was made of leather and waxed papyrus. Though I'd never had any luck using it to contact the dead (ghosts were terrible spellers), the board had other uses. I unfolded it on top of my card table and beckoned the cowering man to come and sit beside me.

“How will that help?” Lila asked, peering over my shoulder. She ran her fingers across the alphabet and then the yes and no written in the corner. She held the weighted crystal planchette that was used to slide easily over the surface of the board, and then put it down.

“Any guesses?” I asked.

She thought for a long moment, and then said, “By doing what he does not want?”

“Indeed,” I murmured.

The faerie-dust-addled man walked step by cautious step toward us, looking as though each motion might fell him. I held out a length of hempen rope toward him. “Come. This won't be easy for any of us, but it will work.”

He glanced backwards at my door, but then sat down. Lila put her hands on his shoulders as I tied him firmly to the chair. He did not struggle, but relaxed once he was bound and the option of fleeing had been taken from him. Had he always been so gutless?

“Tell me, how did you become a man of the faeries?” I asked, starting with an easy question to ease him into this interrogation. I slid the crystal piece over the letters of the alphabet written with an artful hand. I watched and moved the piece where he seemed the most uncomfortable. Spelling out words and using yes and no questions, slowly we learned his truth.

There are secret histories everywhere. Some are forgotten. Some are poorly-recorded. And some are kept hidden on purpose. A faerie tale, a true one, is rarely found and rarely told, for the fae folk have little reason to have contact with humans, and many reasons to stay away.

This group of faeries had lived peaceably, hidden from the local tribes for thousands of years, but when white people began to settle in the 1850s, the faeries soon found that the land they had once roamed freely through was filling up with roads, cleared land, and many more people. The faeries decided they need a human to teach them about all the humans populating Seattle. So this man, an early settler of the city, had been taken under their hill. He’d been beguiled, tricked, and dusted so that he might serve them.

Faeries were ever and always casually cruel, and though I did not ask him about it, I imagined the long years of being half-starved by fae who would forget to procure him human food, or being left shackled to a tree for days after some bacchanalian excess. Faeries were not evil, but like many humans, they could not imagine another creature being as important as themselves.

And so this man had lived below for a century and a half, surrounded and beguiled by faeries.

“And why are you here now?” I asked. “What has happened?”

The man rocked back and forth in the chair and shook his head. Waves of fear rolled off him.

“You are here to help your faeries,” I reminded him. “They will thank you for your help.”

“Will they?” he asked with a ragged voice.

I slid the piece across my Ouija board, watching him and moving the planchette in the direction that produced the most protestations and whimpers. I spelled out,
An attack. Rotting within
.

“A what now?” Lila asked.

It puzzled me as well. An attack on a faerie hill was rare: they were generally wrapped tight with a dozen forms of faerie magic that made the place unappetizing for anyone not of their ilk. And any hunters? A faerie did not make a good meal, in flesh or magics. And though faeries waged war against each other, that was a common thing. This man would not be here if it was that kind of attack.

“It emerges,” he stuttered. His whole body shook and his jaw clenched.

“Steady on,” I murmured, “We are almost done. All I need to know is where the hill is.” I moved the planchette across the Ouija board and moved it down to the row of symbols across the bottom of the board. The man flinched and shivered as I rolled it across the symbol for a woman, and then started rocking back and forth as I put it over the crown.

“A woman's crown?”

“The base of a hill,” he managed to say as his legs kicked him backward and he hit the ground. His head thumped hard against the concrete and his eyes shut.

Lila rushed to him, blue magic gathering in her arms. She righted the chair, with the man in it. He stayed unconscious.

I sighed. “Don’t wake him. Leave him tied up,” I ordered. I went to the back of the store and grabbed a bundle of dried heather and a couple of dusty marbles. I put a marble in each of the man’s hands and crumpled heather through his hair. “
Gwella. Amddiffyn,”
I said. My spells sparked to life, and would act as protection and healing. “That should keep him safe but not conscious for a day or two,” I told Lila. It was a mercy that would help him through his withdrawals.

“You know I could have done that for you,” Lila said. “I mean the sleep and feel better spells. Easy.” She poked the man’s chest and then tried to pry open one of his eyes.

“Stop that. And just because you could have done it, does not mean I’m incapable.”

“I know, it’s just that you had to make the spells you used. They took hours to make. And I, I can just do whatever.”

“I know,” I muttered.

Lila pushed the man’s head from side to side. “Remind me never to get addicted to anything,” she said. “Not that I probably could. I mean one, I just wouldn’t. Dumb. And oh, I mean… I mean, I take it back,” she said, casting me a look and purpling with a blush. “I know it can happen to anyone.”

“My addiction
was
dumb,” I told her. “Now, this woman’s crown, a queen perhaps?” I said. “Any thoughts on what it might mean?”

“Hello, hello,” someone called out as the door jangled open.

Luckily, it was not some Wiccan tourist coming in to see me sitting beside a trussed and unconscious man, but Merlin.