5
Jase
Idid not like being made into a puppet. The mesmerizing thing freezing me was bad enough without me moved about like one of Molly’s Barbies. It wore off about halfway through that crazy-ass version of Uber and Lyft. I wasn’t dumb enough to try opening the carriage doors, no matter what the snarky driver thought. No, I stayed put. Then we landed only for me to almost have wished that we hadn’t.
We were in another part of the city, and this time, I could see signs of habitation. This did not make it look any less dystopian. Those damned vines were everywhere and it was still cold. It was also dark, a purple haze to the sky that made me wonder just how time flowed here. If it was late afternoon, going into dusk, when it had been in the early hours of the morning back home, then time did not sync.
My feet rooted to the spot as a memory from high school flitted through my brain. It was around Halloween and my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Boyd, had put on a movie for us to watch. Sleepy Hollow had been followed by an assigned reading of Rip van Winkle and the next day’s class discussion had brought up the fact that a lot of people correlated the beings who kept Rip with fairies. The following week we began a Midsomer’s Night Dream and I skipped school the whole week thanks to my dad. He’d caught me dancing to Whitney Houston as I worked clearing junk out of the old barn. That earned me a beating as he yelled about queers and boys only dancing if they were out with a girl on a fancy kind of date. He’d apologized once he was sober, asking me if I’d been practicing for a school dance. Then he began demanding to know who the girl was, to make sure she was from a good family. That was a joke, given who we were. Of course, there was no girl, and I didn’t want to just pull some innocent into my family drama, so I denied there was a girl. I claimed that I was planning to go stag to the next dance and had hoped to impress the girls there enough that one would approach me. So, I didn’t do the class study of the play, but I knew it was about fairies and that they were tricky as fuck.
I stood staring at the sky while this all went through my head. Of course, the gorgeous asshole took offense to that.
“Come on,” he hissed at me. “We have a bit further to walk. My building is in the middle of the no flying zone, which begins here.”
I turned my stare on him. “What time is it?” I made the mistake of asking.
“Questions later!” he snapped, his artic eyes blazing with fury. “I can’t stand out here pandering to you!”
I narrowed my eyes at him. What the ever-loving fuck? He brought me here, the least he could do was answer a simple question. Hell, he could have told me the time and explained the differences as we walked to our destination. But no, he had to keep the bratty act up.
He pursed his lips. “Fine. I hadn’t wanted to do this to you,” he said as he began making odd little gestures with his fingers. My foot lifted off the ground and jerked forward. He turned away. My body followed, stumbling along behind him drunkenly. That was how I now found myself shambling along getting stared at, all the while screaming at him in my head, because, yeah, he sealed my lips, too. It’s a damned good thing I don’t have a cold.
It’s humiliating to be so out of control. The worst part, though, is the children giggling as they spy me. Their mothers don’t even hush them. No, they glanced at me, lips twitching in harsh amusement. Fairies are all definitely a bunch of assholes as far as I could see. If he treats me like this, I’m not surprised that he has made enemies among his own kind and that they’re the sort he needed to hire an assassin for. I kind of felt like killing him myself, to be honest.
Then we were in front of a tall glass and chrome building, still covered in vines. The pavement had plant life pushing through here, too. The difference here was the vines were trained wisteria honeysuckle, the paving now slabs of decorative flagstone artfully arranged to give clumps of moss room to grow. I bet they had gardeners who kept the weeds at bay. This guy was rich, alright. I had known he must be as he could afford to hire someone like me, and I didn’t work cheap. I just hadn’t put together that he was wealthy enough that he could have afforded someone much higher up the food chain and wondered why he hadn’t. Time, maybe? Liked to save his money? Though didn’t fairies also make gold they’d give people and which would disappear?
He turned to face me. “If I release you, will you follow me like a reasonable person, or do I need to embarrass us both by making you?”
I couldn’t open my mouth to answer him, so I gave him a curt nod. I was going in there no matter what, so I might as well have a bit of dignity doing so. I’d get my revenge later, once I finished with this contract. He made another gesture, and I found myself free to move as I pleased. He didn’t wait for me to thank him or anything before whirling around and walking off across the courtyard. Good thing, because I wasn’t going to thank him. Jerk off should have never treated me like that, to begin with. Self-entitled shit. How does one take down a fairy, anyway? I assume bullets work. Or do they have to be magic ones? Was it silver that was their nemesis? Nah, that was just werewolves, wasn’t it? Oh, Christ. Were werewolves a real thing, too? I swallowed, knowing I needed a lot more information before I could make any kind of plan. Not just to take him down a peg or two, but to take out his enemies.
A shadow fell over me, and I glanced up, I’d been following him thinking so hard that my gaze was down towards the ground, mindlessly following his heels. I came to an abrupt stop, barely managing to not run into his back as he paused under the porch overhang in front of the large glass double doors. A doorman nodded obsequiously at him before reaching a white-gloved hand out to open the door.
I tried not to stare as I took him in. He was apple-cheeked with mud-brown hair and eyes, and his ears were pointed, but not as long and elf-like as Asshole’s. He cocked an eyebrow at me, giving me a cheeky grin as if he knew something that I don’t. It revealed his front teeth. They looked like a chipmunk’s. I turned my eyes away but not before I spotted a squirrel-like tail held up against his back reflected in the glass. I blinked, then hurried after my fae as he stops in front of an old-fashioned elevator.
Wait. My fae? Since when was he mine? We weren’t even friends. Okay, he’s hot as hell, but he’s also a massive self-righteous prick. I knew that much much already, even if I’d only just met the guy. And why did the building look so modern, only for the elevator to be one of those with a metal gate across it and have what looked like a man who was literally part tree operating it? Jerk Face stepped in the elevator, and I follow him in. Tree Guy closed the metal filigree gate and began hauling on a gold rope as soon as Jerk-Face told him to take us to the penthouse. I felt sorry for Tree Guy as this building had to be at least twenty stories tall. Did he have to haul us all the way up himself, or would we get off every few floors?
I studied Tree Guy as he worked, not even trying to disguise my curiosity. He stands close to seven and a half feet tall, and what at first I thought was a one-piece uniform is instead his skin. Or rather bark and leaves. Or maybe the bark and leaves are his clothes, given how they appear on his frame. His hair looks like pine needles, the long thin kind you find down South on the loblolly pines that grow everywhere. Hell, you can’t move a lot of places without seeing at least one of the damned trees and finding their pinecones all over the place. Girls practice braiding with them, even.
Some of his needles are braided together, too, I see, and it looks somewhat random, almost like a child was playing with his hair, and he left in a hurry without undoing them. I noticed this as we suddenly came to a jerking stop and he silently opened the filigree gate that’s the twin to the one downstairs. He followed us out and opened yet another barrier to a second elevator. Though I supposed given what his tree-trunk arms are doing to make it work, I guessed the British term lift is more appropriate.
“We have to go up or down five floors at a time,” Jerky McJerkoffson told me. “And don’t stare. It’s gauche.”
I glanced away. Twatwaffle still hadn’t loosened his hocus pocus hold on my mouth. We changed lifts a total of five times, making this building actually twenty-five stories tall. When we exited the lift this time, the only thing to be seen is a short hallway with two floor to ceiling windows and a glass skylight covering the entire ceiling, and a single, polished metal door with all kinds of fantastical beasts and beings in bas-relief on it.
If I had any lingering questions about just how rich this dude was, they were answered now. He was rich as all get out. When we sat down to negotiate that extra remittance he’d mentioned? Yeah, I was going to gouge him. This very well could be my last contract. I could take my money, go back to the ordinary world, and sit in my boxers while watching the Cartoon Network and ordering shit off the internet. Inbetween sending my sister money and occasionally showing up to watch her in person at a pageant, of course. It never hurt to let any creeps at those shows know to keep well away from her, or her big brother would rip their dick off and feed it to them.
“I’m a dryad,” Tree Guy calls out after us.
Huh. I thought those were all svelte females who had to remain in the tree they lived in. I guess I can’t rely on what I can recall from human stories. Damn.
