The problem with faeries is that we love them. We know all the sharp and cruel ways they twist us apart and we love them with a helpless, hopeless foolishness that never fades until it destroys us.
Bree was very familiar with the sensation. That was probably why faeries had never scared her, not the way they should have.
Valesport was full of people who weren’t scared of faeries the way they should have been. They lasted approximately the same amount of time as the people who weren’t scared of vampires the way they should have been. Short and cursed and blessed lives full of pain and terror and sweet, sweet pleasure. Bree wasn’t like that.
As with all things Valesport, Bree—not a native but a long-time resident now—acted with appropriate caution. Respect that hinged on avoidance, as much as anyone could avoid anything in a city like this. A bit more respect and caution for the faeries, perhaps, because they moved in familiar ways… and, if she was being honest, probably because she’d never seen the devil that had taken up residence in her heart tangle with one of them just to enjoy what it would do to her. Inexperience made her more cautious, but her baseline of caution had admittedly become a lot lower than it had been when she had started college.
Inexperience and caution were the only reasons she hesitated when she saw a man of stunning beauty towering over a dirty figure huddled in filthy rags that had once been a jacket. The standing figure had that magnetic beauty, the kind that made you want to fall to your knees. The kind you stared at like it was a swaying snake. Bree knew a lot about men who were more beautiful than they had any right to be. But Jean Cernunnos didn’t pull her eye with the force of unearthly magnetism like this. She had no one to blame for her loathsome adoration of him but herself.
This, however, she recognized as a force outside herself and her own bad taste in men, and she knew what kinds of things did that. That was the only reason she hesitated. In any other circumstances, a beautiful man in a bespoke suit taunting what was clearly one of the city’s many homeless folk would have spurred her into instantaneous, thoughtless action.
The dirty man’s hands were roughly bandaged, in such a way that it must have been difficult for him to grasp anything at all. Bree watched as though hypnotized as the man in the suit slowly stepped down on one of those bandaged hands, exerting increasing pressure, digging in the heel of his perfect leather loafer until red began to seep into the concrete.
In the grand scheme of things, Bree didn’t hesitate very much at all.
“Hey,” she snapped, storming over towards the pair of them. She didn’t lay hands on the man, because angry did not have to mean suicidal. “Stop that.”
The man in the suit eyed her with mildest surprise, tinged slightly with boredom. He glanced slowly back down at the man who still remained hunched over on the ground, and then back at her. Something akin to curiosity was forming behind his eyes. Bree didn’t like it at all.
“Why?” he asked simply.
Bree briefly considered her answer. Pointing out the man was hurt would be useless. Clearly that was the point. ‘Because I said so’ didn’t have much of a ring to it outside a mother’s kitchen.
“Because if you don’t,” her traitorous mouth explained, “I’ll have to make you.”
The man’s face split into a horrible grin, horrible because it was so beautifully perfect. Whereas he had too many teeth that were all the wrong shape, pointed and terrible, this man smiled like a movie star. “Will you now.”
“Yes,” she replied evenly, with a confidence she did not know how to back up, although plans were rapidly forming in her mind. “So it would be much easier if you just stopped on your own.”
“Oh, but why? When this promises to be so much more interesting. How will you make me, cute, cursed little thing?”
Bree couldn’t keep the irritation off of her face. She would never grow accustomed to people knowing, no matter how many things here could smell it on her. “Tell me,” she asked, reaching down her shirt to hook the thin chain Jean’s ring was on, pulling it out from her shirt to dangle in front of her. “Does this mean anything to you?”
The faerie eyed the ring with detached bemusement. “Your owner is not here to hold your leash, nor, I think, would he choose to defend a creature yapping so loudly at its betters.”
Dog puns. Always the fucking dog puns. There was no more sure-fire way to piss Bree off.
“Oh, he doesn’t need to,” she said, voice beginning to frost over with the same cold fury that was burning in her eyes. Common sense had left a while ago, or perhaps never existed in Bree to begin with, but any sense whatsoever had fled in its wake. “I just wanted to make sure you were being stupid on purpose.”
With that, her fist collided with his face.
Whether through surprise or arrogance, the faerie in the suit didn’t even try to move away or block the blow in some way. Likely, he was unused to violence from humans, who would be too distracted by his enthralling nature. More likely, it shouldn’t have hurt him at all.
This human, however, was mostly irritated by magic of any nature, and moreover, knew better than to wander the streets of Valesport without supernatural solutions, such as the cold iron brass knuckles she had slipped from her pocket onto her hand. The blow did the kind of damage a blow from her should, and then some. She heard the satisfying crack of his jaw; admittedly the sizzling burn of flesh was a pleasant surprise.
The faerie stumbled backwards but didn’t fall, and Bree took great satisfaction in taking steps forward as he did so, putting herself between the faerie and the man he’d been tormenting. She had precious little power in the world, and there was nothing quite like having it over something that should have been in all ways superior. The look in the faerie’s eyes told her that he knew this just as well as her, and hated it just as much as she loved it. Bree smiled.
The faerie tried to speak, and realized he could not through a broken jaw. Not with any dignity, anyway. The glare in his eyes promised vengeance enough, in Bree’s personal opinion. He didn’t have to threaten her; she knew how this shit went. The last time she’d picked a fight with a supernatural to save some innocent bystander, she’d wound up on the wrong side of a werewolf mafia, for pity’s sake. His eyes said she would regret this, and he probably believed she would. He’d also believed, however, that she’d been powerless to stop him in the first place, and look how that had worked into him.
And then, the faerie was simply gone. Bree blinked, glancing up and down the street. She was unaccustomed to things just… vanishing on her. She waved her brass knuckled hand in front of her, in the air where he’d been, wondering if he’d just turned invisible. There was nothing there, but she probably shouldn’t let her guard down entirely.
She reached forward, slightly, and the man recoiled backwards, bandaged hands up as if to ward her away. She could see his face now, bearded and dirty and rough… with storm-gray eyes so striking and beautiful that they almost hurt to behold. Bree paled slightly, realizing her mistake at once.
“Hey, sorry, I’m not gonna hurt you,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’m helping.”
“Don’t touch me with that thing,” the man hissed, gesturing towards the hand she’d reached towards him, which still had cold iron knuckles on it. “It hurts just to look at.”
“Right, shit, sorry.” Bree was off-balance—although it admittedly didn’t take much to throw her off balance to begin with. She pulled the slightly bloodied knuckles off her hand and shoved them back in her pocket. “I didn’t know you were… That is, I thought you were…”
“Mortal, like you?” the man suggested. “Would you have stepped in, had you realized it was a squabble between pixies?”
His voice was lilting, and strangely accented. Bree thought that maybe she could listen to him talk for a very long time. She’d need to keep an eye on that.
“Yes,” she said, a little annoyed to be asked.
“Why?” the man asked, and she was already tired of being asked that.
“Because I’m obnoxious, rude, and incapable of minding my own business. Give me your hand.”
“I will not,” the man said, sounding indignant.
Bree rolled her eyes. Fae. “Not to keep, and not in marriage. Let me fix it.” She pulled out of her backpack a little first aid kit, kept on hand for inevitable injuries she got when running around the city.
“I assure you, it is far beyond your means to fix.”
“You’re pissy because I’m helping you,” Bree observed. “But if you don’t let me re-bandage your hand, I’m going to say please, and then where will you be?”
Immediately, the man offered his hand to her, and Bree smiled a little smugly. “There, was that so hard?”
“You were right. You are obnoxious.”
“You’re in good company if you think so,” Bree said dryly as she carefully began unbandaging his hands. The bandages were dirty and soaked with dried blood. She winced as she unwound them, trying to pull carefully and touch his hands as little as possible, even though the man made no real show of being in pain. “Fuck,” she murmured. “What happened to you…? You don’t need to answer that,” she added quickly.
“Afraid I will pay off my debt with knowledge you do not need?”
Bree rolled her eyes. “Look, I kind of know it won’t help, but I need you to know I’m not expecting you to repay me. This neosporin is given of my own free will and not… shit, how did it go?”
“You are right; it does not help.”
Bree shrugged. “I tried. I don’t need your favor. I don’t want your favor. Faerie favors are more trouble than they’re worth.”
“Then why are you here? Why not leave, once you learned of my nature?”
“Because you’re bleeding,” Bree said, shifting a bit in discomfort as they edged along the side of one of the many things she disliked about herself. Bree could—and had, and would again—break a man’s arm for pawing at a classmate on the bus, but let her see a random person with a broken finger and she’d be a frantic wreck until she could get them medical attention. It was very stupid, but she’d never been able to stop. “I don’t like it. So, if you think about it, I’m actually doing this out of selfishness, not as a favor.”
To her surprise, the faerie laughed. It sounded like wind chimes in autumn. “Oh, is that so?”
“Yes,” she said firmly, focusing on his hands and not on any of the quite literally charming things about him. She finally peeled off the last layer of bandage. All she could see was black and red. “How old were those bandages?” she asked, her stomach churning at the stench of old blood. “I can’t… Ugh. Hold on.” She dug into her backpack again, this time pulling out a water bottle. She unscrewed the top and then began carefully pouring it over his hand, trying to rinse away as much of the old blood as she could. She rubbed her thumb as gently as possible over his hand to help. The water ran red and red and red and red, but she could see his hand a bit better.
Bree drew in a sharp hiss of a breath. His hand was covered in brutal, thick red cuts. All over his hand, some of them so deep she could swear she saw the white of bone. Her stomach churned again, threatening to unleash her lunch onto the sidewalk to follow bloody water down the gutter.
“Whoever did this to you is sick,” she said, instead of any useless inquiries as to how it had happened. “Is it really okay to leave it like this? All I have are bandages and stuff…”
“They will not heal, no matter what you have,” the faerie said with a shrug.
“They?” she asked, her eyes falling on his other hand, also covered in dirty bandages. “Fuck. Both of them?”
“Yes,” he replied simply. Bree shook her head.
“That’s fucked.” Sometimes she saw things in this town that were so fucked up that it made her almost grateful her own situation wasn’t worse. This was one of them. She was suddenly glad her mom had just pissed off a petty witch and not whatever vengeful thing had done this. “Well, I can at least try to bandage them better than you managed on your own.” And small wonder, trying to bandage one’s own hands when they were already so injured… She pulled a roll of gauze out of her first aid kit and got to work.
Bandaging both his hands took every bit of gauze she had in her first aid kit, and she still wished she could have done more. She covered the gauze with a thin layer of self-adhering bandages, some of which she cut into thinner strips for his fingers. She was hoping to still give him some flexibility, though how much he could stand to move his fingers with his hand cut up like that, she didn’t know. She was focused, biting her lip in concentration and working in silence as she squatted next to him on the ground. Finally, she pinned the last bit of bandage in place and rolled back onto her heels with a sigh.
“There. Christ.” She let out a long breath. Her back was sore and her legs were cramping from squatting for so long. She straightened, stood, and stretched, wincing at the stiffness that had crept into her muscles. She glanced up, and frowned at the position of the sun in the sky. She hadn’t realized how long she’d been working for. She must have been at it for half an hour at least. She was going to have to run home, very quickly. Or maybe she could swing by Jean’s house, not far from here, take a risk on him being there and wanting to let her in…
The man stood as well, looking at his hands and flexing one. Bree let out a startled, pained noise at the motion. “You probably shouldn’t!” she began, but didn’t quite know how to finish. He knew his body better than she did.
“This is much better than before,” he announced, sounding almost grudgingly admiring. “I will repay you.”
“Please don’t,” she said without thinking, and he glared up at her. She held her hands up in surrender. “Right, making it worse,” she said with a sigh. Don’t say please, don’t say thank you. But be polite, which always seemed like a contradiction to her. Not that it mattered. She was never polite. She’d largely given up on trying; the best anyone ever got was ‘not actively insulting’ and even that was a work in progress.
“I will give you a gift,” he decided, and Bree took a physical step backwards, hands up.
“No way. I’m already cursed, don’t even think about it.”
The faerie let out a long, drawn-out sigh. “Come to this place, three days hence. Before sunset.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his coat. It probably hadn’t been there earlier.
“I can’t be out after sunset,” she replied, not taking it.
“In three days, you can.”
Her eyebrows rose, and she took the paper from him curiously. She unfolded it, frowning. It was a… map? A hand-drawn map? Who even still used these?
“I have no idea where…” She glanced up. She was standing alone in the street. “…This… is. …Fuck.”