- SEVENTEEN
Cece
Things moved fast even though the days stretched long.
I went to Corbin who actually did have all my crap in boxes in his spare room.
I grabbed what I could carry, which wasn't much, gave him a final fuck you, and tried to figure out my next move.
I dug out my IDs and went to the bank, taking out a hunk of cash.
It was leaving the bank when I swore, I swore down to my soul that I saw one.
One of the Dark fae from the woods, from my nightmares, my memories.
Everything in me went cold, my stomach clenching hard.
What the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn't go back into The Green alone and clueless.
But in the human world, I was helpless. If they were after me...
"Shit," I said, tucking my money into my old purse and doing the only thing I could think of. I went to the freaking new age store that Jade liked to go to to get more of her gemstones and smudge sticks and whatnot.
"That is one dark aura," the store owner, a thin-as-a-rake man in his late thirties with thinning brown hair, brown eyes, and oversize rasta hoodie and hemp pants, greeted me.
He was sweet, but I really didn't have time for his snail-paced speeches or his questions about when the last time I went to a moon circle was.
"I need every single book you have about the fae," I demanded and he started a moment at the sharpness in my tone but moved toward his bookshelves to fetch the books.
"Every last one. I want your whole stock," I added in case I hadn't been clear enough.
"Sure, sure thing," he said a little distractedly as he piled the tomes into his skinny arms.
"And jasper," I added, looking at the tiny crystal bowls of gemstones.
"What about jasper?"
"I want every last stone of jasper you have."
"Well we have some right out there. Red, leopard, blue snake..."
"I'm taking it all. Along with whatever stock of it you have out back. And crystal quartz too."
"Are you being spiritually attacked?" he asked, deadly serious.
I didn't know about spiritually, but there was definitely a chance of some kind of attack and I was a big believer of stacking my deck.
"Something like that," I said as he put the pile of books onto the counter and moved to bag the jasper.
And despite being a hippie, wiccan, pagan, tree-hugger, earthy guy whatever the hell he was, I was sure he was seeing dollar signs as he did so.
I grabbed the top book, looking into the table of contents and seeing a chapter called "repelling faeries".
I flipped to the page, seeing iron in big bold font.
That, at least, I did already know. Bells were another thing and I added the craft store to my list of stops.
Clutter. Apparently they were a tidy lot.
I could be a slob if it kept me safe. Offensive noises.
I had a dock in my box from my old apartment.
I could find some black metal or something to blare.
You couldn't get more offensive to the ears than that.
"Do you know of anywhere around here made of iron?" I asked as he dropped all the jasper from the front beside my books.
"Iron? No. Steel... maybe. There's the old steel mill down on Madison."
That was too big. I needed somewhere I could see every inch of. "Anything else?"
"Shipping containers," he suggested and I flashed back to the work camps, my stomach knotting at the memory of leaving Doyle and Jasper behind there. "Oh, the old train yard," he said, stopping on his way toward the back room.
"The train yard?" I repeated.
"Yeah, yeah. Way out on the outskirts over by the old car plant.
Back in the day, they would put the trains to rest out there.
Actually, some of them might be old enough to have been made mostly of iron before they switched to steel and aluminum.
If that helps," he said, disappearing into the back and I felt my hope swell.
A train car could work. I could make that temporarily livable until Jasper, Doyle, and Jade came back and could help me figure out what to do about the Dark fae.
So, my box, ten books, and about three-hundred pieces of jasper and a hundred or so of crystal quartz in hand, I paid the store owner a small fortune and hailed a taxi to bring me out to the train yard, making him wait with all my stuff in his trunk because even if I did find an iron train, I needed to head back into town for food, something to sleep on, bells, everything I would need to survive short-term.
It was about fifteen minutes of passing aluminum and steel trains before I came upon one, old, a little rusty, but with The Iron Way Rails written across the side.
"Home sweet train car," I said, kicking at the door until it pushed inward. It was about what you would expect, old and dirty with ripped leather seats and dirty windows. But it would do. There was nothing you could touch on the outside, aside from the windows, that wouldn't burn a fae.
With a new kind of determination, I went back to my taxi and finished my errands.
About the time night was about to fall, I took the last of my boxes and bags out of the taxi and holed myself up in my train car, pouring over the books in the glow of a reading light I wore around my neck.
It took me all of, say, three minutes to find the Dark fae that had been haunting my dreams as far as I could remember.
Redcaps. They were sadistic, evil creatures who enjoyed torture and murder, taking the blood of their victims and staining the tops of their heads with it.
They worked for Unseelie royalty. Unseelie, I learned, meant the Dark fae.
Seelie were the so-called good guys. Unseelie were the worst of the worst.
So it didn't take a huge stretch of imagination to figure that some kind of Dark fae big-guy was curious about me. He had been curious about me enough as a child to cut up and brutalize a baby me. Who knew what he would want to do to me as an adult.
I didn't sleep that night. Every creak of the train car, every whisper on the breeze, it all had my heart flying up into my throat, sure it was them.
At first light, I went outside and strung bells across the windows then took off back toward town to do something I had thought of the night before.
I grabbed a huge amount of jasper and some string and I made a path of the gemstones from the old apartment all across town and into the train yard, hanging the final few on metal wind-chimes I hung around my new home.
A week passed.
No Jasper. No Doyle. No Jade.
No sleep because the nightmares became like being inside a 3D video game.
I was there. I was hurt and hungry and being tormented.
I woke up and got sick three times in a row before I decided to give up on sleep.
So I studied instead. I read all the books I got on fae.
I went back to the new age store and got books on gemstones, healing plants, spells, and protection runes.
I bought a book on tiny houses and boondocking, figuring it seemed like I was going to be staying in the train yard for a while and needing basic home comforts.
So I installed a compost toilet and I brought in a tub that I filled to bathe in from a water catchment system I had set up outside that was kept pretty well stocked as the summer thunderstorms came hard and heavy over the next few weeks.
Yes, weeks.
Every day that passed had me more and more sure that something had happened.
No way would they not come looking for me.
One of them at least. If none of them came for me, something was seriously wrong.
My stomach clenched at the idea of Jade or Doyle hurt or dead.
I tried not to think of Jasper as either of those things because on the odd times a thought did slip through, I found myself positively crippled by it.
So I kept myself busy. I dug around the junkyard and the impound lot and found spare pieces of iron, using them to create a makeshift maze around the train car on all sides.
On the way back from the food store one afternoon, I didn't just swear I saw a redcap. I knew it. He didn't even try to hide. He stepped out from behind a car and stared at me as I froze then jumped in a cab and made him drive around for a while before bringing me back to the train yard.
After that, I saw one nearly every day. And every day it seemed to be closer and closer to the train yard.
By the second month, I bought enough imperishable goods to last me through fall and winter and I holed up in my car and didn't come out.
I was a sitting duck.
It was only a matter of time before they closed in. Angry or desperate or under so much pressure from their boss that they would bust right through all the iron and drag me out.
Need could make people and fae do crazy things. Doyle had scaled an iron fence and kept going. I was sure the redcaps would find their way in sooner or later.
And me, armed with my gemstones, some talismans, loud music, and a couple vials of poison I had mixed myself, yeah, I didn't stand a chance.
It was September first according to my calendar. Months. It had been three months since I got out of The Green.
Three freaking months.
I slept in spells. The chanting of the redcaps snatching what little comfort I had in my iron prison.
I barely ate, the knowledge of my impending future making me too queasy to keep anything down.
I worried. I fretted. I read. I tried to comfort myself.
I made plans- wild, stupid, grand plans that I knew I could never carry out.
In the daytime, the redcaps slipped away back, I hoped, into The Green. But I didn't take comfort in that. I didn't allow that to give me the confidence to leave my train car.
To put it pretty plainly, I was a wreck. I was crumbling. I chewed my nails to bloody stumps. My hair had started to fall out in stress. I lost weight. I got weak from exhaustion and hunger and lack of sunlight.
I had ventured out to grab bath water, taking a long soak, looking over a body that was almost foreign to me after so much change.
There were scars on my arms and legs and feet.
My bones poked through where they never had before.
I had no mirror, but I knew my cheeks were sinking, my eyes were swollen and unfocused.
I was wrapped in a towel, rolling a rose quartz sphere around the floor with my foot, entertainment being a foreign concept after being so dreadfully alone for so long.
It was then, right then, that my worst fear was realized.
The door wrenched open, making me kick the sphere across the floor as I gasped, my hand going to my heart as I looked frantically around for something, anything I could use to defend myself, to give me a fighting chance. But nothing was close.
The ball stopped rolling and I looked over to find it stopped beneath someone's foot.
"Honey..."