Finding Fae

I felt like I was being torn apart from inside my head. It was excruciating and I fought back the scream.

“Oh dear, that’s not good,” Gloria said as she quickly painted a few more things on my body. The pain lessened, but only a little bit. “Better?”

“A little bit,” I sobbed and she tutted before drawing more.

“Now?” she asked.

“Not much,” I replied and she frowned. She hesitated for a second before she painted on both cheeks and my forehead, connecting the three drawings at my nose.

“Does that help?” she asked.

“It still hurts, but I can deal,” I sighed.

She hummed and put her fingers on my temples, covered in charcoal paint and started chanting something under her breath.

The room disappeared and I was back in New Hampshire in the house that we had lived in before coming to Texas. I was yelling at Gary about having to move as he shoved my things into a bag.

“What’s going on here?” Gloria asked as she watched with me.

“Gary is making us move again. Drop everything and go. Friends, dates, identities,” I said looking at myself across the room. “This is weird, looking at myself like this.”

“I get that a lot,” she smiled.

“I don’t know what happened. One minute, we’re eating dinner, the next he’s packing things up,” I shook my head. “I had the beginning of a normal life here. The closest I ever got. I had a date to a dance that was supposed to happen the week after this.”

“We’ll go a bit further, then,” she said and the bedroom in New Hampshire faded and was replaced with another memory. “Where is this? A grocery store?”

“Yeah,” I nodded as a younger me pushed a shopping cart down an aisle looking for some noodles to make spaghetti. “I was thirteen. We were going to make homemade sauce, because it always tastes better.”

Gary comes speed walking down the aisle and grabs my elbow, pulling me out of the store and to which ever vehicle we were in at that point. I shook my head.

“We didn’t even go back to pack,” I said. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened, either.”

“My guess is this was a very close call,” Gloria hummed a little. “It’s going to get a little more painful, the more we go back. Tell me if it hurts too much. Don’t try to be a hero, either. If you don’t tell me, I could give you severe brain damage.”

I nodded and the grocery store faded away.

“I was nine, I think,” I snorted at the ridiculous hair cut I had. “I had tried to cut my own hair and it didn’t go so well. Gary had to “fix” it, but it didn’t go over too well.”

“No kidding,” Gloria giggled.

“I used to love this park,” I looked around.

It was a clear day, bright and sunny and the air felt nice with a soft breeze. It was mid-Spring, I guess, because the green was bright and new, though there were few flowers about. I saw the swing set I used to pretend I was flying on, the jungle gym that was a castle, and the monkey bars that went over a river of lava.

I noticed Gary a little distance away and he looked like he was arguing with someone in a dark hoodie, which was super sketchy since it was the middle of summer in south Alabama. “I don’t remember that.”

“Our subconscious picks up on things that we miss in the moment,” she nodded. “Whatever we are doing takes the bulk of our mind, but it still keeps a lookout for other things. It’s a prey/predator thing.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a volume button, would you?” I asked and she chuckled as she shook her head.

“I’m pretty decent at reading lips though,” she said as we walked a little closer. “It seems that Gary is angry that this guy didn’t have his delivery that he paid for. I can’t see inside the hood, but whatever he said, Gary doesn’t like it. He said, “I don’t care how difficult it is to find or how hard it is to smuggle it where ever it needs to go. I paid for it, you deliver. That’s the deal.” There’s more from the guy, but then Gary demands his money back.”

The guy in the hoodie shakes his head and pulls out his phone. We watched as Gary’s face turned red then white before he jogged over to me and scooped me up, heading for the car and driving off.

“We ended up leaving right after we got back to the house we were squatting in,” I said and rubbed my temples a little bit. “I have a bit of a tweak, but it’s not too bad yet.”

The park faded away and another memory came. It was storming and dark in the house. It was cold, too. Gary was there, sitting beside a window and looking out into the darkness. I was next to a small fire with a woman.

“Ricca,” I said, recognizing the woman from the picture in Gary’s wallet.

“What’s going to happen?” Gloria asked.

“We’re attacked,” I say. “This is the night Ricca died.”

“She was important to you?” she asked.

“I thought she was,” I shrugged. “I thought she was my mother. But she’s the one that actually took me from my parents. Gary only went with it because she was his wife and he loved her. I was five or six maybe.”

Suddenly, the window was shattered and three men stormed in, shoving Gary into the center next to me and Ricca, trapping us in the room. They all wore black clothes from head to toe and there was an emblem I’ve never seen before stitched in black thread of their chests. It looked like a coat of arms only something in me said it wasn’t. I couldn’t see their faces aside from a narrow strip where their eyes were exposed, but even their skin was coated in black. There was no identity to them what so ever aside from height and weight, but even that was near enough the same.

“You’ve given us quite the run, trying to track you traitors down,” one of them said. “It didn’t matter, though, did it? In the end, we always find what we seek. You will die tonight and the girl will be returned to her family. All of this will be for nothing.”

“It is for everything,” Ricca hissed.

“You stole her from her cradle hours after she was born!” the man shouted and I covered my ears, muffling everything else out until the fighting started.

Ricca was impressive as she fought with Gary next to her. They held off the men in black from getting to me, though Gary ended up with a nasty cut to his forehead. I didn’t know if it was a blade that did it, or if it was split from taking a blunt object at high force. Whatever happened, Ricca got angry when she saw his blood.

“Get out!” she bellowed as her whole body started turning red.

Her eyes turned this terrifying yellow color and her face pinched, much like the one time I glanced Gary through his disguise.

“She’s a Demi,” Gloria gasped as Gary scooped me up and ran.

My head was splitting and I grabbed my head as the pain lanced through my brain. Gloria put her hands on my temples and the rain went away and the office came back.

“Hold on and I’ll do something about the headache,” she said and opened her bag, pulling out a bottle of something.

She wiped a few markings off my body and I was able to sit up as she opened the bottle and helped me drink a few small swallows.

“Well,” she said, putting the lid back on the bottle and putting it back in her bag. “We can narrow down who your parents are, I think.”

“How?” I croaked as she handed me a wet cloth to start wiping the marks off my skin.

“Those men were Elite Guards,” she said as she started putting things back in her bag. “They work for nobles and such. Which faction of nobility, I don’t know, but it’s a start. What concerns me, it the memory at the park.”

“Why does that worry you?” I asked.

“Gary was buying something hard to find that needed to be smuggled,” she sighed. “I can only speculate, but I think it was some sort of drug or an herb that’s regulated.”

“Would it be something to hide us better?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” she shook her head as I slowly got dressed again. “Suppress, maybe, but I was told this Gary is a Demi, like his wife. They are, mostly, immune to most suppressants.”

“Unless...Unless it was for me,” I said. “Every month, Gary would make this tea that tasted a little off. He said it was just tea that he enjoyed drinking and wanted to share it with me.”

“There are countless teas that could be made from things found in the Sidhe,” she said thoughtfully. “Most of them are toxic to the wrong species or if brewed incorrectly. He would had to have known at least what you are.”

“He refused to say,” I glowered. “He knows everything, but didn’t say a thing. I went to school and came back and he was long gone.”

“It’s unlike a Demi to be a coward or to give up on a mission,” she frowned. “Very unusual. I’ll speak to a few contacts and see if there’s something along the drug route.”

“Why were you so shocked that Ricca was a Demi?” I asked.

“Female Demi’s rarely leave the community,” she said. “They are, by far, the more dangerous. They are incredibly protective and are nearly unstoppable when they feel like their family is threatened. They’ll fight to the end.”

“If she was so great, why did she die?” I asked.

“Not even a Demi can stand against three of the Elite Guard,” she shook her head.

“Those men in black?” I asked and she nodded.

“They are practically mercenaries, but the only work for the noble families,” she said. “I would like to give you hope, but there are thousands of noble families all over the Sidhe. It narrows things down, but that’s taking into account the possibility of a noble family hiring the Guard for a friend.”

“It’s better than what we had before,” I smiled. “I do have one more question, though.”

“Your headache will go away soon,” she smiled. “Get some rest tonight and try not to over do it.”

“It’s not that,” I grimaced. “What’s the Sidhe?”