I waited for the last minute to firm.

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Previous Chapter
Chapter Eleven:
Walking into a dimly lit basement, I looked down at the cracked concrete floor. The room smelled of old drainage and expired cleaning products. I turned around to see the mirror I’d just crawled out of and caught sight of the Intrinsic Pathways chamber fading back into my reflection.
A simple white plastic border surrounded the glass surface. The thing was barely big enough for me to fit through. Barsilla didn’t have any trouble, though — the benefit of being a piskie and only a few inches tall.
She darted up to my shoulder and hid herself in my hair.
“I’m glad you’ve been growing your hair out,” she said.
A moment later, the piskie stuck her head out of my hair and added, “And I’m also glad you switched to the pineapple and raspberry shampoo.”
I rolled my eyes. Today I was playing carriage to the queen’s left-hand lady in the human world. And I could already tell it was going to be a test of my nerves. I’d never spent an extended time with Barsilla before, primarily because she was a bit scolding and judgmental.
But today came with an important mission before we left for Kilgara tomorrow. We needed to make contact with a powerful fae that lived in the human world.
“How can a fae live in the human world full-time? Wouldn’t that be a death sentence with all the iron and the lack of glamour?” I’d asked my queen.
“You’ll see,” was all she said before sending me here to accompany Barsilla. And by accompany, she meant carry.
The piskie looked around the little room we’d appeared in. It was a small space with concrete walls and floors. Against one wall a shelf of cleaning supplies stood, along with a mop and a janitor’s cart on wheels.
“Where are we?” I asked.
A grimy voice from the ceiling made me jump. I looked around to find the source.
“You’re in the basement of Ssorc Insurance Arena,” a masculine-presenting fae said. When I finally found him, my eyes widened.
In one of the ceiling corners hung a spider-like faery about a foot tall. When I got a closer look, I saw he had the body of a tiny man but a thorax and four narrow legs behind him that clung to the wall.
His front arms were crossed as he looked down at us. Eight brown and black eyes spread across his forehead kept a close watch on us.
“Hello there,” he said, waving a tiny hand. “Name’s Jello. Welcome to Portland.”
I raised a finger and opened my mouth to speak.
“Because he likes to eat Jell-O,” Barsilla said from inside my hair.
I lowered my finger and closed my mouth, nodding. That made plenty of sense. Maybe I could change my name to Chicken Nugget.
“You’re not going to come out and say hello to your old friend, Barsilla?” Jello called with a grin revealing two fangs and additional mandibles.
Her voice called out from in my hair.
“I’m quite good here, thanks.”
I raised an eyebrow. Barsilla sounded a little scared, which was a first for me. I’d always been put in my place by the tiny creature so long as we were in the palace. Here, her voice wavered, and she grabbed my hair a little more tightly than when we first arrived.
Truth be told, I was torn. Part of me wanted to rub it in, maybe jokingly hand her over to the spider dude. And the other half of me wanted to show mercy, because even when I get a chance to show vengeance. . . I’m not good at taking it. It took me years to destroy my abusive father, and he hurt me daily.
So, I decided not to push the issue.
“Alright, Jello. That’s enough,” I said, laughing.
To his credit, the spider didn’t exactly seem upset with me pushing back. He rubbed one of his mandibles and looked me up and down.
“You must be the queen’s new pet I’ve heard so much about,” he said.
“That’s me. Werewolf extraordinaire,” I said.
He nodded.
“It’s almost too difficult to believe. Your kind is so rare that for the queen to have ensnared one. . . I’m just left impressed,” he said.
My. . . kind, I thought. Aside from Mom, I’ve never met another like me. And does she even really count? She died when I was a kid.
All I could do was shrug. Maybe we were rare. But the fact that he wasn’t the first fae to mention such a thing did stick out in my mind. The queen had emotional attachments to me. Of that much, I was sure. But to other fae, ones I’d see at Kilgara. . . I’d be a token — no, a specimen.
It’d be like those videos of rich people who own tigers or lions and just let them roam around the house, lying on the couch and shit.
In that case, I’d just have to be all the more threatening to keep their minds off such imagery and more focused on preserving their own lives. Of course, that’d be up to my inner wolf. And I had no doubt she’d be up to the task. Unlike me, she didn’t take shit from anybody.
“Well, Jello. If you come by Featherstone when the Raven Queen holds court, you can see my more visceral self on full display,” I said. “But until then, I’ll ask where we’re supposed to go from here.”
The spider chuckled and looked into my hair, trying to find a certain piskie with his eyes alone. When he didn’t have any luck, Jello rolled his eyes and pointed to a filthy door covered in dust and mold.
“Out that door, up the cement stairs to your left, and outside by the garage. That’ll spit you out onto a path the humans call Free Street,” Jello said.
I thanked him, and we left without Barsilla saying a word. Once I’d started up the stairs, she poked her head out next to my ear and said, “Just for the record, in Faerie, his kind prey upon piskies. They find the best hiding spots in the forest and then drop on any little fae that happens to be hovering over the ground, looking for nuts or fruit.”
This was a tender confession from the tiny person who’d left me paralyzed on the floor during our first meeting. So I put all that aside before I spoke.
“I figured it was something like that. But it’s not like I would have let him do anything to you,” I said.
“Afraid of how your mistress might react?” Barsilla asked.
Shaking my head, I sighed.
“I just know what it’s like to be a tiny thing standing before a giant monster that wants nothing more than to hurt you. You try to shrink yourself down so that the monster doesn’t see you, but it’s never small enough. I always hoped someone would come along when I was trying to shrink myself and snatch me away. So I guess today I just wanted to be the person that would snatch you to safety,” I said, finally spotting a metal door with sunlight streaming in.
Varella’s left-hand lady didn’t say anything for a moment. But right before we got outside, she spoke.
“That’s actually how her majesty found me, you know? I was in the web of someone like Jello, crying out for help. Most faeries ignore such cries since the forest can be filled with them at times. And if you anger a spider, there’s always the chance they’ll scurry off to a Gohma to have her curse you.”
“A Gohma?” I asked.
Barsilla placed both hands on the back of my ear to steady herself as I climbed the last few steps.
“Queens among the spiderlings. Some of them are quite powerful, and once in a while, they’ll curse anyone who causes trouble with their underlings. That is, they’ll curse anyone. . . except for the ruler of a court. Varella happened to be flying by, heard my cries, and for reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, plucked me from the web. The spiderling that was savoring me was too frightened to say a word. He just hid under a bush, waiting for the Raven Queen to fly away. I’ve served her loyally ever since,” the piskie said.
Holy shit. Am I bonding with the piskie? I thought, again squashing the temptation to say something mocking of the little fae which could and would get revenge when we returned to Featherstone.
At that moment, Lady Bon-Hwa’s words came back to me. She said I craved legitimacy from beings that wore many masks.
Had Barsilla just dropped hers?
“How you felt when she plucked you from the web, Barsilla?” I started. She gripped my ear a little tighter. “That’s how I felt the day I struck the bargain with my mistress. Like she’d pulled me out of the jaws of death or something.”
I heard the piskie rub her chin.
“So when you submit to the queen, it’s about more than a simple pleasure for you. Immense gratitude is also mixed in there somewhere,” she said.
Clearing my throat, I felt heat rush to my cheeks. Barsilla was the last person I wanted to discuss submissiveness with. I’d talk about it with Ceras before her. And even they weren’t high on the list.
Walking outside, I heard the cries of gulls above us and heard a couple boys laughing as their mother walked by with a shopping bag that said “Remys” on it. Now that was a store I remembered. My father dragged me there more times than I could count. And it was always a long haul down to Bangor to visit.
The sky above us was cloudy, and a chilly wind gusted by occasionally, bringing with it smells of a harbor not too far away. A normal person wouldn’t smell it from this distance. But I could smell boat fuel and seafood.
“Do you remember the address?” I asked Barsilla.
“I remember the way from here. The last time I came to the human city of Portland it was through a different pathway. But if you walk down a block and turn left, it’ll spit you out on a path called Congress Street.”
Doing as I was told, I found myself on what appeared the be the busiest street in downtown Portland. Barsilla guided me with whispers to continue onward past the downtown square where a statue of a large woman stood overlooking dozens of people shopping or visiting restaurants or coming out of the public library.
I read a message on the side that said, “To her sons who died for the Union.”
Barsilla whispered, “I’ve never understood that message. What’s the Union? Some kind of human court?”
Sighing and shaking my head, I tried to figure out the easiest way to explain this particularly bloody piece of U.S. history.
“A couple centuries back, this country tore itself in two. There was the Confederacy and the Union. People from Maine, that’s where we are now, fought for the Union, which tried to put the country back together again.”
“Did the Union succeed?”
I nodded.
“They won the war, but a lot of shit happened afterward I don’t want to get into. And when I left this place to move into Featherstone — well, let’s just say I’d rather live in Faerie than any part of this world,” I said.
With the guidance of Varella’s left-hand lady, we continued walking down Congress Street for at least a mile before she told me to make a turn. We walked past an old Italian grocery store, turned again, and finally arrived at a dentist's office.
“Big Smiles? What kind of name is that?” I asked, looking inside.
“The name of a business where mortals go to get their teeth fixed because they don’t have glamour to do it for them. Consider yourself fortunate the palace healers make this place unnecessary in Faerie,” Barsilla said, tapping on my ear for me to go inside.
Sighing, I did as I was told. . . again.
Unlike most dentist’s offices I’d been in, this one was immaculately clean and polished. Behind two receptionists stood a wall covered entirely in ivy. And it was real. I smelled its vegetative scent from where I stood.
To my right stood a glass wall with a water feature running underneath the reflective surface.
A little transparent refrigerator sat next to some uncomfortable wooden chairs, and it was filled with bottled water.
“Hi there!” one of the receptionists said. He appeared to be freshly graduated from college and wore a button-down shirt and black pants. His nametag said “Jace,” and had “He/Him” pronouns listed underneath.
“Uh, hi,” I said, trying to remember the coded message my mistress taught me before leaving Featherstone. “I need to schedule an appointment as soon as possible. I’m trying to get the shinest teeth in all the land.”
I resisted the urge to slap my face in embarrassment. What kind of stupid code was that? This receptionist was just as likely to throw me out as he was to find me a nightmare fae by the name of Dramyra.
Jace snickered a little and said, “Well, who doesn’t love shiny teeth? And we’ve got a great new polishing technique our dentists just started using this month.”
An older woman’s voice spoke from behind me.
“That won’t be necessary, Jace. I’ll see her now.”
Jace looked surprised.
“Are you sure, Dr. Murphy? I think you’ve got an appointment in 15,” he said.
The voice behind me waved off his concern.
“Just have Melissa take care of that one. This is important.”
Jace scratched his wavy brown hair and nodded before punching something into his keyboard. I could only assume he was editing an appointment at the last minute.
When I turned to see who’d been giving orders to the receptionist, I spotted a woman who appeared to be in her early 50s leaning around a corner. She wore a long white jacket and had eyes the color of jasper. As I stared, she blinked horizontally instead of vertically like every other human I’d met.
As my eyes widened, she smiled, and I noticed an inhuman pointedness to her teeth. . . all four rows of them.
“Why don’t you come this way, and I’ll get you settled?” the fae said.
I gulped and nodded, suddenly getting the heebie-jeebies from this person I was going to follow into a private area.
Dr. Murphy led me past an X-ray room, a couple rooms with kid-sized dentist seats and small televisions mounted on the roof, and an employee bathroom.
At last, we came to her private office, and she opened the door, motioning for me to enter. When I hesitated, she said, “Oh come now. I wouldn’t be so foolish as to harm one hair on the Raven Queen’s pet. Few would be that dumb.”
Walking inside the surprisingly plain office, I was greeted by a tiny sofa, a mini fridge, a marker board, and a skylight. The walls were painted beige, and a desktop computer sat over in the corner on a screensaver with fish swimming by.
I took a seat on the sofa, and our faerie host closed the door behind us, locking it, which caused me to gulp again.
As soon as the door was closed, the fae dropped her glamor, and before me stood a five-foot-tall woman with pointed ears, turquoise skin, and a shaved head. When she smiled, I saw those four rows of razor teeth and two tongues, one purple, one red.
Her eyes now blinked vertically every few seconds, and they were the color of sand.
Black curled horns hung down from the back of the faerie’s skull, wrapping around her ears and ending in spiky white tips.
The faerie leaned against her door and stared down at her claws, which were painted a shade of crimson.
“Dramyra,” Barsilla said, flying out from my hair and bowing her head. “It’s been some time.”
The fae did not seem very impressed at the piskie’s sudden appearance.
“Well well. . . if it isn’t the Raven Queen’s left-hand lady. I don’t recall receiving a letter warning of your arrival.”
Now I spoke up, bowing my head.
“Apologies. The queen has been busy preparing for a trip to Kilgara. She didn’t mean to offend by sending us without an announced arrival,” I said.
I shivered when Dramyra’s sandy eyes looked me over. It felt like. . . like it wasn’t just her eyes watching me, but her shadow’s eyes as well. And I didn’t like that one bit. She smelled of vetiver and leather. It was a strange combination that seemed to whisper much more was hiding beneath the surface.
“First time seeing a nightara?” Dramyra asked, watching me shiver for the third time in the last hour. It wasn’t like the room was cold. Rather, it felt like her glamor kept brushing up against me and light scraping over my arms.
“What’s a—” I started, rather stupidly.
Barsilla cut me off.
“Dramyra is a nightmare faerie. Her sister rules the Nightmare Court.”
“Well just give her my life story, why don’t you, Barsilla?” Dramyra sassed, folding her arms and locking with my eyes.
The room fell silent.
I sure as hell didn’t know what to say, so I did what I always did in that situation. . . asked a dumb question.
“Excuse me, Dramyra?”
She smiled at me.
“Yes, royal pet?”
I do not like it when she calls me that, I thought. In fact, I don’t like it when she calls me anything.
Taking a deep breath as Barsilla turned to flash me a look that said, “Be careful, puppy,” I raised an eyebrow.
“My mistress said you lived here in the human world permanently. I was wondering. . . how you survived here in a world of iron and without any glamour?”
Dramyra ran a finger down one of her arms.
“Well, for starters, all of my tools here in the office aren’t made of iron. They’re custom designed from silver. Not an ounce of iron here. And I assure you, I have all the glamour I need.”
I must have looked like I had more questions because Dramyra pointed a finger at me.
“You must not have a solid grasp on how glamour works. Glamour isn’t something that just exists naturally in this world or Faerie. Rather, fae produce glamour by feeding. Different fae feed in different ways. Your queen feeds off your affections as well as the power of her throne itself. And I. . . well, I feed off the fear of others.”
That sounded pretty damn terrifying. . . which I’m sure was exactly the effect Dramyra must have intended because she just laughed when I slunk down into the couch.
“Oh relax. It’s not so bad. I learned a few decades ago that there are some things mortals fear collectively as a species. And one of them?”
It clicked in my head.
“The dentist! I fucking hated visiting the dentist. Growing up, there was no place more terrifying. With every visit, I was petrified that I needed yet another filling or maybe even a root canal.”
Dramyra looked pleased with my figuring it out.
“Exactly. So, knowing this, I disguised myself as a dentist, opened this business, and the mortals bring me their terrified children every single day. All I have to do is walk up and down the hall with a mask on my face, looking at paperwork, and nobody suspects a thing. The entire office fills with fear, which I devour, and then I can produce all the glamour I need.”
When I realized this, it was kind of ingenious. This was like. . . the ultimate business model for a nightmare fae like Dramyra. And if this place went belly up, she could always disguise herself as an IRS agent. Though that might get her more anger than fear.
Barsilla cleared her throat.
“Oh, yes. You were getting ready to explain why you showed up without warning. Well, go on, little piskie,” Dramyra said, her smile fading as she turned her attention back to Varella’s left-hand lady.
Pulling out her little clipboard and an even smaller pencil, the piskie looked over a few things as if she was steadying herself for what had to be said.
“Queen Varella is officially calling in her favor. Decades ago, she hid you—”
“I know why I owe her,” Dramyra snapped, her sandy eyes glowing orange. “You can skip that part.”
Barsilla quickly crossed something off on her papers.
“Right, well, she wants you to make a request to your sister, the Nightmare Queen. Her majesty informed me Queen Trylla will grant you anything you ask of her.”
The nightara rubbed her chin as she leaned against the wall even more.
“It’s true. My little sister adores me. Though I don’t know what the Raven Queen would want from her.”
I looked back and forth between the fae, finding myself wondering about how my mistress hid the nightmare fae before me. What were the circumstances? Was it a witness protection kind of thing? Did faeries even have need of that?
It’s not like they can call some vacuum store and vanish to Alaska, I thought, scratching the back of my head.
Barsilla looked down at her notes, not meeting Dramyra’s eyes when she relayed my mistress’ request.
“The Raven Queen wants you to ask your sister for her vote in Kilgara.”
Silence filled the room again as I heard Barsilla’s tiny heart beating like that of a hummingbird. She was sweating a little, too. But Dramyra’s mood changed almost instantly. She laughed louder than I’d heard before and threw her head back.
“Ahahahaha! So, Queen Varella is making a move for Bliss. How interesting! Not in a thousand years would I have guessed such a thing. That ought to make for a very interesting summit with the other courts.
Suddenly this mission of great importance made more sense. My mistress sent us to cash in a favor so she could try and stack the deck before we gathered with the other rulers of Faerie to decide who would host Bliss.
The nightara locked eyes with me, and I felt more gooseflesh crawling over my arms and thighs. I really wished she would stop doing that.
“Very well, piskie. I will do as the Raven Queen asks. It’s not like I have the power to refuse a favor when I’m in her debt. So you may scurry back with the young wolf here and tell her at least one vote is safely in her corner,” Dramyra said. “As for you, Sierra, I hope you're ready to meet folks even scarier than me. And I’d stick real close to that mistress of yours once you leave the halls of Featherstone. You have no idea just how many lords and ladies of Faerie would love to have themselves a pet werewolf. You’re quite—”
“Rare,” I finished for her. “I’ve heard it before.”
I sounded agitated, but I was just trying to mask my fear. I’d happily submit to my mistress a thousand times. But I was no fool. I knew there were cruel immortals all through Faerie that would find worse ways to hurt me than my father ever could have.
And we were off to a summit where they’d all be gathered.
As we left the dentist, I hoped and prayed my inner wolf had gotten at least a few memories of today and would understand she needed to carry the visage of an absolute killer.
I didn’t want to end up in the clutches of a nightara. . . or worse.