“Wait, what?”
I grabbed the phone back from Eva and scrolled through the five photos again. They couldn’t all be the same guy. They were totally different people. The only thing they had in common was that they were all conventionally attractive. But it wasn’t just that one was blond, one was dark haired, one’s eyes were blue and the other’s brown. The structures of their faces were different. There was no way, even with the best disguise and hefty theatrical makeup, that they could all be the same person. It just couldn’t be.
“Eva, I don’t think so. Look at the shapes of their brows, their jawlines, their ears. You couldn’t do that good of a job even with silicone. They’re not disguises.”
“It’s not a disguise like that,” Eva whispered softly.
I stared at her, not understanding.
She put her head in her hands.
“I’ve been afraid to tell you.”
I gently touched her arm across the kitchen table, trying to get her to stop covering her eyes and look at me.
“We’ve always said we could tell each other anything,” I said.
She sighed. “There are some things you can’t explain.”
I understood about that better than she knew. My own guilt still twinged that I hadn’t been honest with Eva about being a fairy. Or rather, I had been honest, but then she’d lost all those memories in her accident in the Vale. I wanted to tell her the truth again, but I didn’t know how. I felt like I’d lost that opportunity, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
Eva got up from the table. She began to walk restlessly around the room. She resumed her cooking, gathering a bunch of cilantro that was balanced in a glass of water and beginning to chop the mess of green leaves. I wanted to stop her; everything she was doing was just a distraction from what she really wanted to say.
“When I told you that the memories are starting to come back to me from the time of the accident,” she said, looking over at me at last, “I didn’t just mean that night of being able to fly at Obadiah’s club.”
I stared at her, fear and hope battling it out within me. What if Eva suddenly remembered her trip to the Vale, remembered me telling her I was really a fairy? What would happen; how would she react?
“Things have been coming back to me in bits and pieces,” she continued, beginning to chop again. “But the things I’m remembering—if you could call it that—they can’t be memories, because they don’t make sense. They’re more like dreams. They couldn’t be.”
Oh god, Eva was remembering the Vale. I had to tell her the truth or she’d believe she really was losing her mind.
“Eva, what if I told you that you really are remembering. Everything you saw, everything you experienced, is true.”
Eva stared at me, her eyes moist and glistening. She set down the knife and wiped at her eyes.
“That would mean there really is a whole other world. Is that what you’re saying?”
I took a deep breath. I could almost hear my mother the Fairy Queen screaming in my ears, begging me not to tell our secrets to a human. “Yes, there is.”
Eva looked at me. I could tell she wanted so badly to believe what I was saying, but she was having such trouble letting herself. Her rational mind just couldn’t let go, even though she’d seen it with her own eyes. But she spoke.
“Remember I told you about my group?”
“Your coven?” I said.
Blushing, she nodded.
“We do a ritual every full moon,” she said, beginning to chop up a red bell pepper. She threw her other chopped ingredients in the blender. They made a pretty mélange of red and green. I realized she was making a sofrito, and when she turned the blender on, the piquant smell wafted up, making my mouth water. She stopped, turning to me. “We call upon the spirits of nature: the four directions, the sun and the moon. We invoke different nature deities.” She scraped down the bowl. “I know it probably sounds really tree-huggery.”
“Nothing wrong with hugging trees,” I said. I used to live in one, I thought, suddenly homesick.
“Well, Tiffany led a ritual where we did a summoning. Don’t worry, we didn’t summon demons, or anything like that. It wasn’t anything scary. The ritual was about connecting with nature and the natural world, which is important in New York City, I guess. So we summoned nature spirits. You know, fairies.”
Oh no, they didn’t. I felt like I was going to faint. This was bad; this was really, really bad.
“Please don’t try to summon fairies,” I said, my voice quiet with fear. “You’d honestly be better off with a demon.”
But Eva went on. “I thought it was just a metaphor, though, right? I mean, it wasn’t like we were really going to ‘summon fairies.’” She made air quotes around the words, with her hands. “Because that’s ridiculous. Summoning fairies was just a metaphor for connecting with nature. We were just symbolically summoning fairies. Or so I thought.”
My stomach felt leaden. Oh god, what had they done? Who had they summoned?
Eva’s voice was full of fear as she spoke. Her eyes had taken on a faraway quality as she leaned up against the kitchen counter, staring at nothing. I knew she was seeing it all clearly in her mind. “We were all arranged in a circle,” she said. “Tiffany was leading us in the chants. She kept saying, ‘Come into our midst, come into our midst . . . spirit of nature, we welcome you here,’ and then . . . If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, just like those lab rats levitating . . .”
“What happened?”
“This guy, I guess you could call him a guy. He looked like a man, but so beautiful. His skin, his body, everything was just perfect. He was like one of those Greek statues in the Met come to life. He appeared in the middle of our circle. One moment he wasn’t there. And then the next moment he was there. I know you probably think I’ve lost my mind but . . .”
“No,” I said, breathing hard. “No, I don’t.” But I was terrified. Who had they summoned?
“Well, we were all screaming, of course. People were falling to their knees. A couple of the girls and even some of the guys fainted. I almost did too. And this man told us he was from the fairy realm. That he couldn’t tell us his real name, but we could call him ‘Cory.’ And that he was here to help us, if we would help him.”
My throat went dry, my stomach a ball of weight. I had a dreadful feeling about this “Cory.” I didn’t know who he really was. He could have been anyone, given fairies’ infinite capacity for disguise. But the whole “help” thing scared me. A fairy’s bargain was always a dangerous thing, especially to a bunch of idealistic young twenty-somethings who had no idea what they were messing with.
“You didn’t agree to help him, did you?”
Eva was silent, wiping her hands on the dishrag. For a moment she didn’t meet my eye.
“Well, yeah, of course we agreed to help him. I mean, we were all so flabbergasted that he’d come into our circle. When a freakin’ fairy shows up and asks for your help, I mean, you say yes.”
I put my head in my hands. “This is bad,” I whispered.
Eva leaned down so she could look at me over the gaps of my fingers, “So, wait, you believe me? You believe all this?”
I lowered my hands and sighed.
“I believe you.”
Eva looked at me skeptically.
“I really do believe you.”
“I wouldn’t believe me if I was you.”
I sighed. “I believe you because . . .” I took a deep breath. “Come on, sit down. The stew can wait. Do you want a cup of coffee?” I didn’t even know how to begin what I had to say. Eva shook her head, but she sat down with me at the kitchen table.
“I told you this once, but your injury made you forget.” I squinted my eyes for a moment, and then blurted it out. “I’m from that other world.”
Eva clutched her hands to her face. She stared at me over the tops of her fingertips, her dark eyes huge with fear and something else I couldn’t name. I waited breathlessly for how she would respond.
I wasn’t prepared for what she would say next.
“So it’s true, what I remembered?”
“You remember me telling you I was a fairy?”
Eva nodded around her fingers. “I thought I’d dreamed it.”
“You didn’t.”
“Everything I remember: waking up in that cocoon, you rescuing me and then you telling me that you were a . . . I didn’t dream that?”
“No,” I whispered.
Eva began to laugh and cry at the same time, until she was almost choking. “It’s all true?”
“It’s all true.”
All she could do was shake her head over and over, squeezing my hand across the table. She couldn’t form words.
“I know this is a lot for you to process all at once. But promise me one thing. Whatever you do, tell everyone in your group to stay away from this ‘Cory.’ I don’t know who he is or what he wants. But fairies are dangerous. We’re not innocent little nature spirits. Fairies are powerful. And you can’t trust them.”
“But you just said you were a . . . and I can trust you,” she gasped.
“I’m different.” I sighed. “I’m a changeling. So I’m human too, as well as fairy. And that mellows it out, I guess. Really, fairies are terrifying. Their minds, their motives, they’re not comprehensible to us. Just stay away from him. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want anyone else in your group to get hurt either.”
Eva bit her lip. “I think it may be too late for that,” she whispered.
“Eva?” I asked, afraid to know the answer.
She hung her head. “Cory came back after the initial summoning. He came back multiple times. He became a member of our group. I think we were all a little in love with him. I mean, here we were, saying we believed in magic, and then all of a sudden magic was real and standing in front of us in the form of this gorgeous man. Every time he came to our group he looked different—different faces, different features—but always flawlessly beautiful. That’s what I meant when I said all of Quinn’s pictures are all the same guy. I recognized four out of the five. He took on all those disguises in our group.”
My stomach clenched. They really were all the same “man.”
This was what Quinn had meant when she said, “You wouldn’t understand. No one would understand. It’s too unbelievable.” This poor girl. It didn’t matter what kind of professionals her parents took her to, no one would believe her if she told them what had really happened. Everyone would think she was nuts. And she knew it. I resolved to call her. I had to tell her the truth. I had to tell her that I knew.
“Well,” Eva continued, “he came up to some of the girls in the group. He told them he wanted to be their lover.”
“No, no, no.” I put my head in my hands, shaking my head. This was going to end badly.
“You don’t say no to a gorgeous supernatural deity.”
“And then he came to you,” I said. “And you . . .”
She blushed.
“How could I not? I mean . . .”
“Listen, I get it. I get why you’d want to. But he’s dangerous. If he’s a fairy, he’s inherently dangerous.”
“I didn’t think so at the time. We only spent that one night together. Like I said, it was magical. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I really am afraid he may have ruined me for human men.” She laughed, but there was a tinge of fear in it. “But then like I told you, the next morning he ran off while I was getting ready. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t know if any of the other girls in the group have seen him. I’m far from the only one who he was with. I heard that for some of the girls he wasn’t just a one-night stand, that he dated them for weeks, months even.”
Quinn, I thought. Was it the duration of time she’d seen Cory that had made all the difference, that had made him so much more destructive to her than he had been to Eva?
“So wait, Quinn must be or have been a member of your group,” I said. “Unless she met him elsewhere?”
“It’s very possible. We have our long-standing members, like Tiffany and, well, me, kind of at this point,” she said with a modicum of pride in her eyes. “But we get a ton of drop-ins, people who show up a few times and never come back. It’s very possible she’s been there. Do you have a picture of her?”
I went to the bedroom and got my laptop, opening the file with the picture Reggie had gotten from Brenda when we started the case. It was an old picture, from before whatever unshakable gloom had descended over Quinn. She was wearing her college sweatshirt and grinning.
Eva scrunched up her face. “She does look familiar. I know I’ve seen her before but I’m not sure where. I think she may have come to our Beltane ritual a few months back. I didn’t get to know her; we probably just chatted for a few minutes.” Eva looked up at me, a shadow of sympathy crossing her face. “So you think this girl is not okay? You think Cory hurt her?”
“I don’t know.” I frowned. “At first I thought it was abuse or rape or domestic violence. But now that we know he’s a fairy, what if the crime was something magical?”
I could hear Tamira’s voice in my mind, talking about the human dopamine that was one part of the Elixir she studied. Children might have more dopamine receptors. But adults produced dopamine too. And they produced more after sex. A terrifying idea was occurring to me.
“Oh my god,” I said, my hands going to my mouth.
“What is it?” said Eva. “What’s wrong?”
The Queen put humans in her cocoons, forcing them into a death-like sleep to steal their “life energy” as she called it to make Elixir, until the process actually killed them. Quinn wasn’t dead. Yet she was like dead: catatonic, listless, malaised. I could hear her voice, flat and monotone, in my mind: It’s like all the joy got sucked right out of me. But what if it had? What if it literally had? What if this Cory, whoever he was, had found a way to steal Elixir’s “X-factor” from human women, through sex? I looked up at Eva. She’d slept with Cory too, but didn’t have any of Quinn’s symptoms. Then again, Eva had only slept with him once, not many times over the course of months. Maybe it was the prolonged exposure that depleted Cory’s victims of their dopamine? Or maybe, for whatever reason, he’d decided not to prey on Eva like he had on the others? Maybe Eva was truly just a lover to Cory, and not a means to an end? Maybe despite all her protestations to the contrary, Eva might have truly been special to Cory, and so he hadn’t stolen her joy like he had with Quinn.
“Eva, how have you felt since that night with Cory?” I asked her. “Did you notice any changes in how you’re feeling physically, mentally, emotionally?”
“I’ve felt fine. I mean, I felt disappointed. But it’s not the kind of depression this girl Quinn seems to be suffering from.”
“So it doesn’t seem like this fairy did anything to you that way?”
“No. I don’t think I’m any worse off, that I can tell.”
It was strange. Did he only prey on certain girls he slept with and not others? And what was the rational for the difference? Was there something within Eva that made her able to withstand whatever it was he did?
I didn’t know. But a disturbing possibility was occurring to me. If this rogue fairy “Cory” was trying to fix the Elixir drought by stealing human X-factor through sex, he needed a lot. How many human girls had he slept with? It could be dozens. Hundreds. There would be no way to know, because most of victims’ families and friends wouldn’t have called a private detective. They’d merely think that their loved one was suddenly, severely depressed, and blame it on the breakup or some quirk of brain chemistry, because who could ever guess that the source of their joy had been literally, maliciously, stolen from them?
“Eva, I have to find out who this is and stop him,” I said, our eyes meeting across the table.
“How the hell are you going to find him, though? I mean, he can make himself look like anyone, that’s the thing I could never wrap my head around. We can’t just go up and question all the hot guys in New York. The only thing all his disguises have in common is that he never made himself resemble anyone ugly. But that still leaves a pretty large sample size.”
He disguised himself as pretty boys so he could seduce all these girls, I thought glumly. What girl would say no to an out-of-this-world night with a supernatural man who looked like a movie star? Cory was going to find a lot more victims, if I couldn’t figure out how to stop him. I still didn’t know how he was doing it. But if he’d figured out a way to steal dopamine, he could do a lot of damage. And even if he wasn’t killing his victims, they were suffering so much. And they might end up dead. Quinn was a serious suicide risk. I had to stop him.
“I know of someone who might be able to find him.”
Eva’s eyebrows raised. “Who?”
The Fairy Queen. She seemed to know everything in the Vale, and certainly knew what everyone was up to, with her ever larger network of spies. I sighed. All the more reason I was going to have to go home.
“I might need to go away for a little while.”
“If you go anywhere, I’m coming too,” said Eva. Her eyes lit up. She was looking at this as a great adventure.
“No, I can’t risk your safety. You remember what happened last time.”
She pinched her lip. “Some of it?”
“Well, okay, maybe you don’t remember everything, but you almost got killed. I can’t risk that again.”
She frowned. “Look, this is all so new to me. It rips open everything I thought I knew was true. But if there’s anything I can do, I want to help.”
“I appreciate that, but I may have to figure out this one on my own. I need to go home.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I need to go back to the Vale.”
“Oh, your other home.” There was a sadness in Eva’s eyes as she seemed to realize that there was a part of my life I could never fully share with her, a place she could never fully go with me, even if I let her come. It was the tiniest wedge slipped into our friendship.
“Well, since I don’t remember much of what happened last time, I’d be happy to take the risk and come with you again.”
“I’d never forgive myself if you got hurt again. Plus, you just started your new job. Do you think Tamira would let you take that much time off from work?”
Eva frowned. “Probably not. And I wouldn’t want to leave, with us right in the middle of such important experiments.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Are you bringing Obadiah?” she asked.
“I don’t want to. I mean, I do want to.” I sighed. “But he’d be risking his life too, and I can’t allow that.”
Eva raised an eyebrow at me. “You know he’s never going to be okay with you doing something risky without him being there to protect you. He loves you, Mab.”
I flushed, feeling the throb of my heart in ears. “I know,” I said softly.
I changed the subject because talking about Obadiah made me think of his hands trembling, and the way he tried to hide them in his pockets, and it made me too sad.
“Thanks for inviting me to your group,” I said. “It’s the best lead I have to figure out Cory’s real identity and figure out what he did to Quinn and maybe others.”
“Of course, no problem.” Eva smiled at me, but I detected a slight hint of wariness in her eyes.
“You seem nervous. Do you not want me to come?”
“No, I do, it’s just”—Eva twisted her hands—“maybe it’s my own damage, but I guess I just feel intimidated about bringing you to our group. I mean, now that I know what you really are, that you’re a fairy.” She said the last word in a hushed, awed whisper. “Which I can still barely wrap my head around, by the way. I guess I thought maybe you’d be insulted by our group, that you’d think it’s silly or something. That you’d judge me. I mean, sometimes I worry that we’re all just playacting, and now I know that you . . . you’re the real thing.”
I slid my hand across the countertop and held hers.
“You guys are the real thing too, though,” I said.
Eva blinked her long, dark lashed eyes, not seeming to understand.
“I mean, you summoned a fairy.”
Eva laughed nervously. “Yeah. I guess we did.” She paused. “There were times I questioned if my own spiritual beliefs, practices, whatever you want to call them, were bullshit. I believed, but I didn’t really believe. And then this man appeared in our circle. This not a man. I guess it makes me believe that anything is possible.” Eva shook her head. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
I wished I had something comforting to say to her. Her understanding of the world was being ripped apart, and all I could do was stand there in awkward sympathy and then offer her a hug.
“Do you think the members of your group would be willing to let me interview them?” I asked at last. “I’m afraid there might be a lot more girls like Quinn out there, given how many people Cory may have dated. I’d like to try to track his network, find out how many people might be at risk.”
“I think they’ll talk, if you tell them why you’re there. A lot of them are understandably leery of opening up to an outsider. We’ve had a few reporters approach Tiffany. They were all trying to run some lurid tabloid story, like ‘Oooh, black magic!’” She made a face. “But they’ll see that your intentions are to help. And they’re scared too. We’ve noticed there’ve been a few absences from the group lately, long-standing members who suddenly stopped showing up. It’s possible they’re Cory’s victims. And Tiffany said one of the girls has been really depressed. She tried to kill herself. Before tonight, I thought it was all coincidence. I never thought to trace it back to Cory. But now that we know”—she shivered—“we’ve got to alert everyone, and stop whoever is behind this.”
“Do you think they’ll believe me, if I tell them not to trust Cory? If I tell them I’m a fairy too?”
Eva nodded. “A few months ago I would have said no. But after what we all saw in that ritual, I think they’d believe just about anything now.”