Fae Hunter (Tangled Fae Book 1) Read online

  The door banged as it hit the wall. Strange that someone was entering in the dark.

  “Have you found her?” my mother’s voice sounded desperate, worn to tatters.

  “Nowhere.” My father sounded exhausted. “We combed everything again. All the woods for miles around. Down the river. Fisher dived the pond at the bottom of the falls. Just in case.”

  “And there was nothing? No scrap of her dress or ... or anything.”

  It hadn’t been a dream at all. Hulanna had really stepped through the circle and been taken by the Shining Ones and when morning came, I would have to tell my parents. I felt a stab of fear shoot through me and I bit my lip. The house felt strange without her there. Even at night, I could usually hear her breathing in her nearby cot.

  “Nothing.” Now my father was the one who sounded anguished. “They knew not to go up there. They knew it’s forbidden.”

  “They’re young. Young people never believe it when you tell them that something is dangerous. They always think they’ll be the exception. Or they don’t believe it’s dangerous at all.”

  I hadn’t thought it was dangerous. I’d thought it was just legends and superstitions. Kings and Queens were real – though their reigns hardly touched us so far into the mountains. Knights and paladins fought great clashing battles on the plains and even mages were sometimes whispered about. Sometimes tales of those things drifted up to us with traders and merchants. But the Shining Ones – everyone knew that was just superstition. Everyone knew they couldn’t actually hurt us. And Hulanna had thought she would be the exception. Mother was right on both counts.

  “Sit down, Hunter,” she said.

  Why were they talking in the dark instead of kindling a light?

  “Eat some breakfast. You’ve been out all night and the sun’s already high. You need something to eat.”

  Wait.

  The sun was high?

  My breath caught in my throat.

  The sun was high, and I couldn’t see.

  “Mother?” I tried to keep the fear out of my voice, but it was there anyway. It trembled through my voice and shot through my body with bowel-loosening fear.

  “Allie!” The relief in my mother’s voice was palpable. I heard her rushing toward me, and I thought that maybe I saw an outline of her like a glowing spirit – but she was still all I could see – and I could hardly even see her. What was wrong with my eyes?

  She gathered me up in a tight hug and I began to cry, as if the warmth and softness of her embrace had opened up the river of my fear.

  “Where’s your sister?” My father’s voice was tight. Was that him I was seeing, too? Glowing faintly blue and looking strange as if he had been painted on a rock and then smudged with an idle sleeve. “Where’s Hulanna?”

  “He took her,” I said, choking over my own tears. “She asked me to go up to the circle with her and I did, and we danced –”

  “No!” My mother’s gasp was all horror and loss.

  “And then he appeared, and she went with him.”

  “She went with him? A Shining One?” my father asked, his voice still tight. “Willingly?”

  “Yes.” My voice trembled as I spoke.

  My mother was crying now, too, holding me so tight that it hurt – as if she could make up for losing one girl by holding the other one tighter.

  “Your eyes look strange,” my father said tightly.

  “I ... I can’t see a thing,” I said, as my mother’s sobs came harder.

  But I could see – sort of. I could see my parents – they looked like themselves, only pale and bright at the same time and they seemed to jitter when they moved. It gave me a headache to try to focus on them. And I was beginning to see some details of our house. And over top of all of it, I was seeing things I’d never seen before. Tracks on the floor of creatures I’d never seen or heard tell of. Long silver and gold trails in the air that I was certain led to something. And there was something in the attic glowing bright as the sun, calling to me.

  What in the world could that be?

  Chapter Three

  A goat was chewing loudly beside me as I ran a hand idly through its hair. Unsurprisingly, it smelled like goat. If I’d been able to see at all, it would have looked like goat, too. I could see only the faintest image of it – a dull blue that flickered in for only long enough to make me dizzy before it was gone again.

  All these faint almost-sights were making my head throb like someone was jamming my mother’s sewing scissors into it. I gritted my teeth against a new flare of pain and shut my eyes to try to dull it.

  Inside the house, mother was talking with Goodie Fisher and Goodie Thatcher – two village wives who had “stopped in” to help her cope with her grief. If they were anything like their daughters, then they weren’t being much help.

  I’d tried to avoid them, finding a seat on the bench halfway between the house and the shed, built to look out from where the road turned into our walkway to the house. But I hadn’t been able to avoid their daughters.

  “My mother says that your mother should have had more children,” Heldra Thatcher – Goodie Thatcher’s daughter – said from nearby. I couldn’t see her long brown braids or her coy smile, but I didn’t have to. I’d been seeing Heldra for all my seventeen years, and her smug smile never changed. “You’re supposed to have nine or ten in case some die or go crazy, or run off, or are taken by strange magic, or are just plain disappointing.”

  “Lucky that your mother had twelve then, isn’t it?” I said drily. If Heldra was my child, I’d jump into the river. She was just like the Shining Folk. Beautiful to look at, but quick to attack.

  The funny thing about my new “sight” was that I could still see the two of them – sort of. But they didn’t really look the same. Edrina Fisher looked even more big-eyed and vulnerable than I remembered, and she flickered in and out of sight even more than my parents did, disappearing for minutes at a time as if she wasn’t stable enough to be seen. Heldra, on the other hand, was ghostlike but there all the time and she wasn’t so beautiful here. Hair that was long and luscious in reality appeared dull and brittle here. And her rounded, lovely face looked narrow and peaked here when it could be seen at all. Strangely, it seemed to suit her better.

  “Are you really blind now?” Edrina asked with a sigh. She sighed a lot. And she was so thin and pale in my new “sight” that I wondered if those sighs might blow her off into the distance.

  “I seem to be,” I acknowledged. Any fear or grief I was feeling – and by the heavens was there a lot of that! – I was stuffing down as far as I could get it. The last thing I wanted was pity. Especially from these two. They were Hulanna’s friends, not mine.

  The only other blind person in the village was Goodie Halfacres and she was nearly eighty. She hadn’t gone blind until last year. But me? I was still just seventeen – just starting out. What would I do now that I couldn’t see? How was I going to hunt? Or start a family? Or keep a house?

  None of the boys would even look at me now. Not that I wanted that. Not at all. I was perfectly fine with living with my parents and hunting with my father and tending goats and I didn’t need silly things like romance or dancing in moonlight. I wasn’t Hulanna.

  My heart ached at the thought of her name. I pushed that away, too.

  How was I going to convince them all that I wasn’t useless now? How was I going to be fierce and independent if I needed them to tell me where everything was? That was the frustrating part. Not the loss – I didn’t want to think of the loss – but the part where I was chained now to other people.

  “My mother says you’ll never find a man now,” Heldra said.

  “Yes, it’s harder when you can’t see them,” I agreed. “They can hide in plain sight.”

  Edrina laughed at my joke but then she lowered her voice secretively. “Did you really see one of the Fair Folk?”

  Just hearing their name sent a chill through me all over again. They’d taken her. They’d t
aken my sister, my best friend, my twin. And I’d never see her again. I’d heard my parents whispering all night in their room. They thought I was asleep, but who could sleep with such loss?

  “No one’s gone into the circle since that girl did when I was just a baby,” my father had said. “What was her name?”

  “Junan,” my mother replied. “Remember her mother? Old Goodie Calver? She was never the same.”

  “And the girl never came back,” my father said with dull finality.

  “I should have been watching them,” my mother said. Her voice was wracked with guilt and I flinched at her words. This wasn’t her fault, it was mine.

  “They’re seventeen. You can’t watch them like babies forever, Genda.”

  “I could have prevented it.” Her voice broke with a sob.

  And I’d tried to block out their shared tears and guilt after that. Because it wasn’t my mother or my father’s fault. It was mine.

  I grabbed a stone from the ground in front of me and tossed it toward what I thought was the shed. Buildings, trees, rocks – things – were harder to see with this new “sight” than people were. They weren’t there at all most of the time, and when they were, they were nothing but faint shadows – which made walking nearly impossible. To make matters worse, there were trails everywhere. Glowing trails that were bright or faint. Faint glowing auras. Ghostly things that I knew weren’t really there but looked like they were.

  I was starting to suspect that what I could “see” was another plane. A spiritual realm instead of a physical one.

  “My mother says that if your mother raised you right, you never would have been up near the stones at all,” Heldra said.

  “But Olen goes up to the stones every day,” Edrina said.

  “Because it’s his job,” Heldra said. “Not because he’s a bad seed.”

  “They were beautiful,” I said abruptly to Edrina. Because I wanted people to stop calling Hulanna a bad seed. Because I wanted to shut people up who didn’t know what they were talking about. “The most beautiful creatures you’d ever seen. And they had rainbow wings like dragonflies. And one of them told Hulanna that he’d dreamed of her and that they were fated mates.”

  Edrina sighed. “That’s so romantic.”

  Her aura seemed to shiver and blush pink.

  “It’s made up,” Heldra said, tossing her lank hair. “No Fair Folk would pay the Hunter girls any mind. Not when the village is full of girls prettier than them.”

  She meant herself, of course, and she was very pretty, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. I was seeing someone – actually seeing them! – for the first time since I lost my sight. And it was him – the Fae who had chased me out of the circle. He was bright with color and detail and what I saw was beauty in fine-planed perfection. The world near him seemed to light up like he was holding a lantern, letting me see it, too. He strolled past us as if he did this every day, scooped up one of the goats in his arms, winked at me, and then disappeared into the ghostly trees.

  Coldness filled me, searing through to my core at the same time that my mouth went dry as sawdust.

  Should I say something? Should I tell someone that I thought I’d just seen a Fae here? They’d think I was crazy.

  “Hunter?” Heldra was saying, “Allie Hunter, did you hear me?”

  “Hmmm?” I asked.

  “You should know that we are determined to remain your friends,” Heldra said as I looked after the Fae. He was here. He was walking through our village. If they could steal my sister through the circle, and pick up goats without anyone seeing them, what else could they steal? “We aren’t going to shun you just because you’re blind now. We will find little jobs for you and maybe take you on a little outing now and then, right Edrina?”

  “Yes,” Edrina agreed. “My mother says that charity is a comely trait in a woman.”

  “My mother says that common sense is better,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  “Fat lot of good it did you and Hulanna. Neither of you had the sense you were born with when you went up to those rocks.” Heldra’s tone was smug.

  That Fae was the only thing I’d seen clearly in days. That and whatever was glowing up in the attic. And that meant that I might actually be dependant on girls like Heldra and Edrina for the rest of my life – desperate for their attention and charity to take me out of my loneliness.

  Maybe.

  But I’d seen that Fae creeping past my home. And Heldra and Edrina hadn’t seen that.

  “You’ll have to tame that tongue,” Heldra scolded. “The infirm should be brave, hopeful, positive spirits of light. No one likes a whiner. Or a cynic.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said gravely. No one liked a smug goat, either and yet Heldra was still alive.

  “Allie?” my mother called from inside the house. “Allie Hunter, wait there a moment after our guests leave. I want to show you something.”

  “Your poor mother,” Heldra said with feigned sympathy in her tone. “She still thinks you can see.”

  She clucked her tongue as her mother and Goodie Fisher swept past, picking up the girls in their wake. They walked with the firm assurance of women who still had their daughters. Women who had come and done their duty to a fallen friend and definitely not taken a little delight in seeing Genda Hunter brought down a peg or two by her daughters’ twin disgraces. Was that how they looked in the real world, or only with my new ‘sight’?

  Strangely, my hearing seemed more acute than ever. And as I waited for my mother, I heard Olen arriving before I would have been able to catch sight of him.

  He walked with a limp like he always did. The sound of his left foot dragging just a bit made it distinctive enough to pick him out easily. Add the fact that his father was already talking to mine over by the goat pen and it was definitely Olen who was easing himself down beside me on the bench. He smelled like the bracken of the mountain plains. He smelled like the circle where I’d lost Hulanna.

  “We need to talk, Hunter,” I heard Olen’s father saying. His voice was faint, carrying from the goat pen where my father had just emerged from the forest, a stag slung over his shoulders. He’d gone hunting this morning – like always. It was his job, after all, to hunt for the village, and that didn’t stop with the loss of a daughter.

  “I’m missing a goat,” my father said.

  Of course, he was. I’d seen it stolen. Would he believe me if I told him?

  “More than goats are missing. And that’s only the beginning.”

  Chapter Four

  “How about I guess your secrets, and you only have to tell them to me if I’m right,” Olen said softly. He strummed his mandolin quietly, but the noise was enough to drown out my father’s conversation. Right when it was getting good. Typical boys. They ruined everything. But you couldn’t say, ‘Quiet, I’m eavesdropping!’ Could you?

  I turned to him, surprised at how clear he was to me. My expression must have shown my surprise.

  “Let me guess, I look better now that you can’t see.” He snickered.

  But the funny thing was that he did. Olen wasn’t much to look at normally. He was taller than most in the village and his muscles hadn’t filled out because he was barely older than me. That made him gawky. Especially when you added the limp and the ever-present mandolin.

  The last time I’d seen him he had a normal oval-shaped face with the typical blemishes of someone who wasn’t fully a man yet. I knew more about them than I wanted to since Goodie Chanter had been by the house to ask mother if she had any cures for bad skin in her grandmother’s box in the attic. Grandmother had been a Traveler and Travelers were known for magic cures and tinctures and charms – even if I was pretty sure that was just something they let people believe so that they’d leave them alone.

  Travelers aside, I would only have described Olen as pretty average – although he was also my only friend so that made him better than average to me. But he looked different now. Better. The blem
ishes were gone, for starters. And he radiated a kind of pure light that made everything seem simpler – clearer.

  “Well, now you know my secret,” I teased. “Guessed it in one.”

  But I didn’t want to poke at him too much. I liked the feeling of simplicity my new “sight” gave me around him. And I liked being visited by Olen.

  “Your mom doesn’t have any Traveler cures for blindness?” he asked.

  “If she does, she’s been awfully stingy with them. Is that you still guessing my secrets?”

  He cleared his throat. “Here’s a guess. It wasn’t your idea to go up to the Star Stones.”

  “Anyone could guess that. Hulanna is the dreamy one, not me. But don’t start talking about how Hulanna was a bad seed or blind or not, I’ll whack you with this stick!” I felt for the stick. It had been there a minute ago.

  “It’s four more inches to your right,” he said helpfully.

  I grabbed the stick. “Right. This stick.”

  “I’m trembling with fear of your big stick.”

  I snickered. This was why I liked Olen. Why we sat on the edges of most village gatherings together in happy silence or simple talk. He didn’t play games or cause drama. He was just Olen.

  “Here’s another guess. You saw the ones who took her.”

  “One,” I admitted, my face coloring. “There was one who took her.”

  “And he was beautiful.” Olen sounded like he knew.

  “Were you watching from the bushes? I don’t remember seeing you there.”

  “It’s called glamor – they have it and they use it. They can make themselves look like the most beautiful creatures on the planet, but in the morning, it’s all gone, and you’re left with what they really are.”

  “Kind of like marrying Heldra.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Oh, Heldra’s not so bad.”

  Of course, he thought that. He was male and she was beautiful. I worked hard not to let a sour expression come over my face.

  “How do you know so much about the Shining Ones?” I demanded.