Once Upon a Changeling Page 9

  “Well,” said Keiler, “I’m not your kid.”

  “Yeah.” Yeah, I knew that. If I had a kid, though, I’d be a good father. The way my father had been a good father to me before I’d disappointed him. And if my son screwed up royally, I wouldn’t stop loving him because of it. I wouldn’t back out of our father-son activities because of it. I meant it. My kid could do anything. He could get caught selling drugs. He could knock some girl up. Hell, he could murder some guy. It wouldn’t matter to me. I wouldn’t abandon him.

  Puck was right. The real kid was being held somewhere in the Korrigan Queen’s stronghold, and that kid was somebody’s son. Whoever it was had abandoned him there. I might not really be that kid’s father, but that didn’t mean he deserved to be abandoned. If we never found the real father, and there was any way that we could get the baby away from the Fey, I’d make sure that nothing bad happened to him. I’d take care of him. I’d be his dad.

  I looked at the changeling, who wasn’t speaking right now and wasn’t doing anything creepy, so he looked really like a real kid, and I thought about my dad, who wasn’t there, but should be there, and I felt a staggering rush of emotion. I gasped. Maybe this was what my parents meant when they said I should care about the kid. Maybe this was how parents felt about their kids.

  But if that was true, why wasn’t my dad here? I’d never do what he was doing to me to someone who I felt like this about.

  I picked up the kid’s car seat and started for the door. There was no reason for me to be here. I should just go home. I looked over my shoulder, remembering previous years, my dad and I shooting hoops and laughing together. Not anymore. Now the court was as silent as a tomb. The kid looked up at me, as if to say, “What’s the hold up?” and I leaned into the door. We were out of here. He didn’t have to worry.

  I almost pushed the door right into Puck, who was standing right outside of the gym.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  She slid by me and into the gym. “I’m here to play basketball. That’s why you came right?” She smiled at me, and for the first time, her blue hair and weird piercings didn’t strike me as oddly attractive. Instead, she just looked exquisitely beautiful. This gorgeous girl, who was some kind of magical being, had come here to hang out with me.

  If it were possible, the rush of emotion I’d felt before swelled even further. I nodded. “Thanks,” I said softly.

  The vampire bar was relatively empty that evening around seven. Puck and I had decided to go early, considering I needed to be back home. Technically, I was still grounded, even though my mother had felt sorry for me since my dad hadn’t come to play basketball with me. I think she was touched that I brought the kid with me. That was another reason that Puck and I went early. We still had the kid, and even though we knew he was actually a changeling who was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, no one else knew that. So we’d left him alone in the car while we ran into the bar, but we couldn’t do that indefinitely. We’d have to be back as soon as possible.

  We hoped that even though we were early, we’d be able to find this Robin guy. The first time they’d told us that he usually was there for happy hour if he was going to show up, so we figured that he usually showed up in the early evening if he was going to show up at all, and we’d just have to take our chances. I was a little nervous, but Puck assured me I’d be okay as long as she was with me.

  It was a little more difficult getting back into the lounge than the last time I’d come to the bar, because it wasn’t crowded this time. The staff was all over us. Where did we think we were going? What made us think we could go back there anyway? Didn’t we realize that only special people could go—?

  Around that point, Puck pulled out her pixie dust.

  They let us go back to the lounge then.

  It was our lucky day. Robin was there.

  Robin was a fat man with a bald head and a fringe of long silver hair that reached half-way down his back. He was smoking a pipe and drinking beer in the lounge and when we asked if anyone knew Robin, he raised his hand and said in a very grandfatherly voice, “I’m Robin.”

  Puck and I rushed to him.

  “Finally,” I said.

  “We need to know about changelings,” said Puck.

  Robin took a puff on his pipe. “Well, I do know quite a bit about that particular subject. Did Otho direct you to me?”

  “Yes,” said Puck. “Otho.”

  “So you must be Delia’s girl,” said Robin.

  Jesus Christ! Did every Fey in Sarasota know Puck’s mother?

  Puck nodded. “Yeah. You know my mom?”

  “Indeed I do,” said Robin. “Since she was a little girl, like you.”

  “I’m not a little girl,” said Puck. “I am an adolescent.”

  “Of course,” said Robin. “I apologize.”

  I found it disturbing that these guys treated Puck like their granddaughter, but trapped me in the lounge for five hours. It was like they had absolutely no respect for human life. Which I guess is what Puck wanted to change about her people. That was why she was so passionate about this whole thing. Puck was truly a really good person. So was Marcos. I was lucky they were my friends. Last year, I’d thought that I had a lot of friends, but I hadn’t known what friends were. I had real friends now. I was glad.

  “So,” said Robin. “What is that I can help you with?”

  Puck explained the situation to Robin. He made little “hmmm” and “ah” noises while she was explaining. For some reason, his little noises bothered me. I didn’t really like this Robin guy. He was deceptively harmless looking. In reality, I’m sure the guy was dangerous as hell. I wondered what he would do to me if Puck weren’t here.

  “So,” said Robin. “You want to get the real baby back now, before the Solstice?”

  “Yes,” said Puck. “Exactly.”

  “But you don’t know who the real father of the baby is?” asked Robin.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well,” said Robin. “My advice would be giving up. It’s impossible to get the baby back without the real parent, and even if you do find the real parent, it’s extremely difficult and dangerous, and it’s not the kind of thing you children should be doing in the first place.”

  “Can’t we just do the reveal ritual again if we find the real parent?” I asked. “You know, with the egg shell.”

  “No, that only works once. After the changeling has been revealed, it gets much more complicated,” said Robin. “And it’s not something you’d want to get mixed up in.”

  “Well, but what if we want to anyway?” said Puck.

  “Does your mother know you’re doing this?” Robin questioned.

  “Yes, of course she does,” said Puck. “Now just tell me what it is that we would have to do in order to get the real baby back.”

  “Listen to me, Gabriella,” said Robin, “this is a human baby. It’s not important to get it back. If it dies, it dies. And I have to say I’m concerned to see you with this human boy now. Why is it that you are helping him? I heard rumors that you were choosing to attend a human school, and I must say that I don’t think that the influence it’s having on you is at all positive. Really, I wonder if I should even be having a conversation like this with you.”

  “Robin, I thank you for your concern,” said Puck, “and I promise that I will think deeply on everything you’ve said before doing anything rash, but I would just like to know all of my options. If it is truly as dangerous as you say to get back the human child, then I’m sure I will come to the same conclusion as you have and give up. But please allow me to make that decision for myself. After all, how am I going to learn to make the right decisions if I never get the chance to make decisions on my own?”

  She had a good point, but if Fey adults were anything like human adults, it wouldn’t make any difference. Adults never listen to teenagers, and it seems as though when we make good points in arguments, they listen to us even less. I th
ink it frightens them when we seem mature. Maybe it makes them realize how old they are or something. Or maybe they realize that in a few short years, we’ll be the ones running the world, and our thought process disturbs them. I watched Robin to see how he’d react.

  But he just sighed. “I suppose you’re right, Gabriella,” he said. “It is quite simple, really. The child’s parent must go to the Hill where the Korrigan Queen resides, present the changeling child to her, and ask for the human one back.”

  “Okay, so I’ll go do that,” said Puck. “What’s the big deal? Why did you say it was so dangerous?”

  “You cannot go,” said Robin. “The Korrigan Queen will not honor the request of a Fey. Instead, the human must gain entry to the Hill himself.”

  “Oh,” breathed Puck in understanding. She looked at me, deep concern in her eyes. Then she looked back at Robin. “Is it even possible?”

  “It is possible,” said Robin. “But it is not easy. First, the human must get a key from the Ancient Tree. The Tree is guarded by a water nymph. He must best the water nymph, and then pass whatever test the Tree sets for him. But even with a key to the Hill, he will not be able to enter it, because he will not be able to find the keyhole. So he must go to the Garden of Marie and retrieve from there a golden pear, which will glow when he comes close to the keyhole and will illuminate it for him. He will also need pixie dust to come close to the Hill. The pixie dust will disguise his humanity from Faerie, and he will be impervious to its tricks.”

  I felt like I should have been taking notes or something.

  When Puck and I got back in the car to drive home, she got in and slammed her door shut. “It’s hopeless.”

  “It’s not hopeless,” I said. “I can do that stuff.”

  She shook her head. “No. I can’t ask you to do that. It’s too dangerous. This isn’t your fight.”

  “This is so my fight,” I said. “This whole fight is because of me and the kid. I’m doing it, and you can’t stop me.”

  She looked at me from beneath her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “You know, you’re really brave, Russ. If the Fey I knew were as brave as you … .”

  I snorted. “I’m a teenage boy. I’m not brave. I’m stupid.”

  She looked away. “Right,” she said. She laughed.

  Wait. Why did I feel like I’d just said the complete wrong thing?

  Marcos thrust a stack of computer paper printouts into my hands at lunch. I hadn’t even made it through the line to get my tray, but he found me and gave it to me. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Cindi’s emails,” said Marcos. “I figured out her password.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Great.” I looked down at them. There was a lot of email here. “Have you read through any of these?”

  “Some,” said Marcos. “A lot of it isn’t really that interesting or doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re after.”

  I nodded. “Look, find us a table, and I’ll meet you there in a minute.” I handed the stack of email back to him.

  That day for lunch we were having pizza. Hence, the line was very long. It took me a few minutes to get my tray and get to Marcos, but when I did, I was ready to start going through that email.

  “So, did you sort these in any way?” I asked him.

  “Not really,” he said. “They were in the computer from most recent to least recent, so that’s how I printed them out.”

  “Cool.” I realized I hadn’t thanked him yet. “Hey, um, this is really awesome of you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Marcos. “Believe me. Here, why don’t we just divide the stack in half? You take one half and I’ll take the other, and we’ll start going through them.”

  Sounded like a good idea. I took the bottom half of the stack. Puck arrived at our table around that point. After greetings and explanations, she took a stack of email as well, and the three of us poured over them while eating. My stack was from two springs ago, so the messages were ridiculously outdated. There were several from me, and they were embarrassing. A few from Kara mentioned Cindi having “an affair” in a joking tone (I thought, but tone is difficult to detect in email messages), but other than that, they didn’t have any helpful messages or clues.

  Puck apparently had the jackpot, because she ran into messages from last August and September. When it became clear that both Marcos and I had irrelevant email messages, we split up Puck’s stack and started reading.

  I read the first email at the top of my list:

  From: Kara Reese kara-girl69@yahoo.com

  To: cindilicious@hotmail.com

  Subject: RE: duh!

  hey gurl its kara waz up?

  i saw u w/muscle boy today. hmm, gurl, waz going on w/ that? hes pretty but u already have a boyfriend. are u being naughty, cindi? bad gurl!!!

  come find me after gym tomorrow and well skip 4th, k?

  luv u,

  kara

  “Okay,” I said. “Who’s muscle boy?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Puck.

  “You’ve got stuff about muscle boy too?” asked Marcos.

  We all nodded.

  “Goddamn Cindi,” I said. “She always had to write everything in code. Why couldn’t she just put the name of this guy in writing somewhere?”

  “She didn’t want anyone to know she was sleeping with him,” said Marcos.

  “Well, obviously,” I said. “It was really more of a rhetorical question.”

  I went back to the messages.

  From: Mila George cute_chica_11077@aol.com

  To: cindilicious@hotmail.com

  Subject: Who’s the hottie?

  hey Cindi-lish,

  soooo … who was that guy you were with at the mall last night in the little white tank top? i am telling u that guy was beautiful. puh-leeze tell me he is just a friend b/c i would be very very interested in trying to find some time to get to know him better if u know what i mean.

  u didnt break up with russ, did u?

  ttyl,

  Mila

  “These are all from her hotmail account,” I said. “Did you get into her school account?”

  Marcos nodded. “There was nothing in there except some junk mail and stuff from teachers. She didn’t use it for social messages. At least it didn’t look like it to me.”

  He was right. Cindi never gave out her school email and only used it for class assignments and other official stuff.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, this muscle boy sounds like our best contender, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marcos, “it doesn’t say that she’s actually sleeping with him.”

  “But it sure as hell sounds like it,” said Puck.

  I had to agree with Puck.

  “So,” I said, “what kinds of guys are most likely to have muscles?”

  “Ones that lift weights,” said Puck.

  “We check out the weight-lifting class, then,” I said. “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Absolutely,” said Puck.

  I flipped over to another message. It was one from me.

  From: Russell Knight rknight@access.k12.fl.us

  To: cindilicious@hotmail.com

  Subject: RE: Friday night

  Cindi,

  I need to know whether you’re going to come on Friday or not. If you aren’t, that’s cool, but I’m trying to buy tickets, so I need to know by this evening. Call me.

  Love,

  Russ

  I’d signed it love. How messed up was that? And who knew what exactly she’d been planning to do that Friday instead of hanging out with me. Making babies with “M,” muscle boy, whoever the hell he was? I didn’t want to be angry with Cindi, but she made it so easy.

  Until we could find out who the baby’s real father was, Puck and I had both decided that it made the most sense for me to act as the father would and to complete as many of the tasks Robin had talked about as I could. Once we found the guy, we’d try to convince him to complete wh
at I hadn’t gotten to. That was our main worry, really. We worried that once we found the real father, he wouldn’t want to cooperate. After all, he had to know that he was probably the baby’s father, or at least, that he was a contender, and he hadn’t said anything so far. He probably didn’t want to say anything, because he wanted to be left out of the whole thing. The guy was probably a colossal jerk and unworthy of the baby that we were saving for him.

  For a little bit, Puck and I toyed with the idea of trying to break Cindi out of the institution and getting her to do this stuff, but we honestly weren’t sure about Cindi’s mental state. She seemed to be actually crazy, even though she hadn’t been wrong about the changeling thing. Or maybe she was just way too drugged up. Either way, it amounted to the same thing. She wasn’t reliable, and there was no way we could put that kind of pressure on her. She just wasn’t strong enough. So, we were going to have to find a way to get the baby’s father on board. Surely, he’d have some kind of feeling for the baby. At the very least, he wouldn’t want him to die.

  Before we got to the tough stuff—wrestling water nymphs and retrieving golden pears—we needed to get me some pixie dust. I’d thought this would be easy, since Puck had so much of it. I thought she could just give me some. But it turned out that I couldn’t use Puck’s pixie dust, since it was in her possession and she’d “claimed” it. I had to have unclaimed pixie dust and then whoever used it to approach the Hill would have to claim it before he approached.

  Pixies actually made pixie dust, and they sold it, believe it or not. Apparently, it was pretty neat stuff, and all manner of Fey used it for all manner of different purposes. Of course, pixies didn’t have nice little corner shops where they took MasterCard and Visa and sold pixie dust in little glass bottles or velvet pouches. And of course, it wasn’t safe for me to go buy pixie dust alone.

  I told my parents I was working late, and Puck and I went searching for pixies. According to Puck, pixies liked to hang out near the ocean, so we went over to Lido Beach and walked along the shore. It was early evening, and the sun was edging towards the horizon. One of the things that was nice about living on the west coast of Florida was that the sun set over the water, something you couldn’t see anywhere else in America except on the Pacific coast.