My dad and I waited to greet the company of fairies as they approached the town, moving down the grassy hill in a close-knit unit. There were three of them, a husband and wife with a daughter of around ten, all with the long hair and pointed ears that painted them as fairies. If that didn’t give enough of a clue, they all flew on gossamer wings instead of walking, while glitter streamed in their wake.
At my feet sat Sky, my sort-of-familiar—he objected to the term ‘pet,’ but fairy cats were more independent than your regular witch’s cat. He resembled a regular feline, but his eyes—one blue, one grey—gleamed with almost human intelligence. While he was indifferent to most humans, he’d insisted on tagging along to meet every new batch of fairies who’d shown up in town, and there’d been quite a few lately. I could credit that to Conor, my dad’s old friend, who’d been gradually contacting all the other fairies he was acquainted with and seeing if they’d be interested in moving here to Fairy Falls.
The three newcomers wore wary expressions that relaxed a little when they saw I’d put on my own fairy appearance to greet them, complete with the glittering wings behind my back. They didn’t know I was half human, half fairy, with a foot in both worlds, because in fairy mode, I resembled my dad almost exactly. He and I shared the same long dark hair, while his pointed ears contrasted with the human ones I usually wore as part of a glamour that had been put on me from childhood to enable me to blend in among the ordinary humans I’d grown up alongside. Now I was free to switch back and forth between fairy and human to my heart’s content.
“Hey,” I said to the newcomers as they halted in front of us. “I’m Blair Wilkes. Welcome to Fairy Falls.”
“I am Braden Eventide,” my dad said, and a murmur of recognition travelled among their group.
“My prince,” murmured the man, bowing his head so his hair hung on either side of his face in long curtains. I hovered awkwardly in the background as they took in the sight of the once-fairy prince standing beside his half-human daughter.
Yeah. My dad was a fairy prince. It’d taken some getting used to, that was for sure.
“There’s no need for that,” said my dad. “I am a prince no longer. I live here now.”
To my eternal surprise, prince or not, he’d elected to live in our sleepy town in the middle of nowhere and had already made the forest his home. Literally, because I suspected he’d used fairy glamour to create the new house that had appeared in the woods shortly after his arrival in town. More houses had soon popped up to join it as more fairies moved to town, since so far, most of the newcomers had opted to live in the same part of the woods.
My dad and I led the newcomers along the path that led to the section of the woods he’d picked out as his home—donated by the witches, at Madame Grey’s request, to make up for their predecessors’ decision to drive the fairies out of town hundreds of years ago. Conor had also had to get permission from the Elf King and Chief Donovan of the local werewolf pack to create a shortcut to the fairies’ part of the woods in the form of a path that was invisible to the regular eye. If I hadn’t had the ability to see through glamour, I’d have simply walked straight through the bright, twisting path without noticing it existed. As it was, my dad and I took the lead and stepped onto the winding road, which had once been part of Whitethorn Street, where Conor’s house lay under a glamoured illusion he’d created so that nobody would be able to find him.
At the time, I’d been floored to realise any other fairies lived in the town at all, but I never would have imagined my dad and I would soon be leading the effort to help create a space for the descendants of the exiled fairies to return to their former home. Then again, until recently, I’d given up hope of ever seeing my dad in person at all. He’d been serving a lifelong sentence in jail for stealing the Seeing Stone from the regional witch council in order to hide it from the leader of the paranormal hunters. The hunters’ leader, who happened to be a fairy himself, had wanted to use the stone to further his own ambitions, but I’d exposed him as a fairy and a fraud to his fellow hunters. While my dad had been freed from prison, the Inquisitor had gone on the run and hadn’t been seen by anyone since.
Regardless, a lot of fairies were understandably wary of moving to a town that had been fairy free for longer than most of the town’s inhabitants could remember. For that reason, Conor had expanded the illusion around his house to create an entirely new section of the woods for the fairies in the same way that the werewolves, vampires, and witches had their own regions. As I’d learned the hard way when I’d brought my particular brand of chaos to town, most fairies felt like outsiders even among other paranormals.
The bright path, dappled with sunlight, soon led us to a clearing in which a number of neat cottages lay. All except one were occupied.
“We’re going to need to expand this area at this rate,” I commented. “Or else we’ll run out of space.”
“It’s a glamour,” said my dad. “It’ll be fine. We can make as much space as necessary without needing to intrude on the witches’ part of the forest.”
“Ah.” I still didn’t quite get how the weird bubble universe worked, but it’d enabled the fairies to have somewhere to live where they weren’t surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers. It’d take a while for the novelty factor to wear off for some of the locals, but here, the peaceful sound of the falls filled the background along with the chatter of birds in the trees, while a soft breeze barely stirred the tranquil scene before us. Spring was in progress, and summer would follow fast on its heels, evident in the wildflowers growing at every corner and the clouds of insects in the air.
Conor strode out of one of the houses to greet the new family, his long hair flowing in the breeze and his wings out.
“Welcome,” he said to the newcomers. “You’re moving to Number 16, right?”
“Correct,” said the male fairy. “I’m Alden. This is Chrys, my wife, and Sparrow, our daughter.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I am Conor Underwood.”
He beckoned for them to follow him towards a neat cottage surrounded by wildflowers. Like its neighbours, the house gleamed lightly with a sheen of glamour, and Conor wasted no time in giving them a rundown of its features, all creations of his seemingly infinite talent for glamour. I had to admit it warmed my heart to see the fairy making friends with the newcomers. He’d been alone for years before I’d found him.
Then again, my dad had also been alone during his imprisonment. We’d been catching up on the missing years during the last couple of months, but he’d been out of touch with the rest of his relatives since long before he’d been jailed. I got the impression they hadn’t approved of his union with my mother, a witch who also happened to be descended from the very coven who’d banished the fairies from the Falls and who hated exiles like my dad. He hadn’t been back to the fairies’ realm since.
‘Complicated’ was a mild way to describe my family history, but since most of my witch relatives were long gone, with the exception of Blythe and her mother, I felt zero kinship with the people who’d banished the fairies from town. Didn’t make the other fairies less wary around the witches—even my dad, who admittedly had good reason to avoid the regional witch coven, since it’d been his theft of their Seeing Stone that had seen to his long imprisonment. I’d heard from more than one source that the Stone had once belonged to the fairies before the witches, but it wasn’t as if anyone had proof. Besides, I was more concerned with keeping it out of the hands of Inquisitor Hare than anything else.
My dad smiled as the fairies entered their home behind Conor. “Let’s leave them to it.”
We continued past the large house my dad had chosen as his own until we came to the place where the path emerged into the main part of the forest. The sound of voices came from nearby, and when we emerged from the woods near a road lined with cosy cottages, a group of large, grey-skinned people blocked the way down the road. Gargoyles. Sky let out a low hiss, and his fur stood on end, while I came to an abrupt halt.
“Is that the police?” asked my dad.
“Yes.” While they weren’t currently in their winged and grey forms, the gargoyles were all tall and intimidating, especially since they comprised the town’s entire police force. A slightly more welcome sight among them was my boyfriend, Nathan, an ex-hunter who now worked for the town’s security force.
Nathan’s expression tightened with worry when he spotted me, but he managed a smile. “Hey, Blair.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, walking over to him.
“There’s been an incident,” he said. “A girl has disappeared somewhere in the woods.”
“A human girl?” asked my dad.
The gargoyles all eyed his wings in a way I didn’t like. Not everyone was pleased about Fairy Falls’s new inhabitants, and Steve and his fellow gargoyles already hadn’t been my biggest fans.
“Yes,” said the gargoyle I usually referred to as Ink Face. He’d earned the nickname when he’d barged into my place of work and been attacked by the office printer, and even now, the faint traces of inky blots remained on his craggy face. “A human girl called Laurel Hansen has disappeared in the fairies’ part of the forest.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “The fairies’ part of the forest is hard to get into if you can’t see through glamour. It’s not easy to wander into it by accident.”
To be honest, it was a surprise that people didn’t go missing in the forest more often, considering that its confusing paths seemed to look different every time I came in here… but the fairies’ glamour wasn’t to blame for that.
“Well, she’s not here,” Steve said. “We’ve searched thoroughly.”
“Who was she with when she disappeared?” I asked. “Was she alone?”
“She was playing in her back garden the last time she was seen,” Nathan said. “Her family’s back garden is right in front of the woods.”
My heart gave a stutter of unease. The woods weren’t exactly a safe place for a child to play, mostly because of how easy it was to get lost and end up in trouble, but the fairies were the least of the dangers one might run into.
“Have you told the werewolves?”
“Not yet,” said Nathan. “There’s also the elves, whose territories are closer.”
“They’d never harm a human child,” said my dad. “I have no doubt the elves would return her home if they stumbled upon her. The fairies would do the same.”
Steve didn’t look convinced, but I knew the elves were trustworthy. They’d helped my dad escape the hunters once, after all.
“Whatever the case, she’s missing,” said the gargoyle. “Which means we have to speak to everyone who was present in the area, including you.”
“Me?” Should have seen that one coming. “We haven’t seen any humans. We were just helping a new fairy family move to their new home.”
“Then they ought to check they don’t have a stowaway.”
Typical. “I guess we can look around their part of the forest, but I’m pretty sure they’d have noticed a human wandering around.”
Sky meowed at my feet, while Dad nodded. “Of course. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far.”
I retraced my steps down the forest path, worry beginning to rise inside me. A girl had disappeared near the fairies’ new territory? This wasn’t a good omen.
“You don’t think she ran into trouble, do you?” I asked my dad.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Not in this part of the forest, I wouldn’t have thought. Conor and I worked hard to make this place safe.”
“Yeah.” Safe for fairies didn’t necessarily mean safe for humans, though. The aggressive flowers in Conor’s garden came to mind, as did the goblin fruit my foster parents had once fallen victim to. Magic as a whole was unpredictable, and when you put multiple paranormals in the same place, it became even more so.
Yet I didn’t believe for an instant that the fairies would have done anything to intentionally harm the humans who shared their forest, not when they’d waited years to be able to move back to their former home. I kept my fingers crossed that the missing girl would safely turn up as soon as possible.
