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Still panting from the adrenaline of the fight, warring against his own instinct and
desire to run, Joel turned around and looked.
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Too Many Fairy Princes
The kitchen doors of both houses on either side opened into the alleyway, and a litter
of bins cluttered the pavements. From behind them, hard against the wall on the right-
hand side, spilled those colours that were neither light nor darkness.
Something had been at the bins. Two lay on their sides, rolled out into the footpath,
their lids off and their contents spilled stinking into the street. The others had once stood
packed together and now leaned randomly apart. A space had been opened in the centre
of them, and the source of the ultraviolet light lay there. Joel s mind grasped for similes,
came up with the sight of the moon at its roundest, when its pale, lunatic light shone
bright enough to streak the clouds around it with dark peacock blue and spilled-petrol
greens. Not a bad comparison, actually between the dark shapes of the bins, he could
see stripes of something that shone silver blue as the moon.
His battle clarity had fallen away as soon as the threat ran from him. Now a
compensating sickness clawed at his throat, made his arms shiver and sensitised the little
hairs of his back where they brushed against his shirt. The snap of that elbow seemed to
echo in his head, and he wanted to throw up, or perhaps to cry, or to drink until it all went
away.
Instead, he edged closer to the luminous thing on the ground. Some kind of student
prank? An experiment by the psychology department of London University? A piece of
uranium gone missing from a power plant or some gang of terrorists? If so, what the hell
was it doing here in the back alley of nowhere street, in a part of London known for faded
elegance and fine houses now converted to civil service hostels and infinitely subdivided
flats?
He reached out to the nearest bin and grabbed the handle, paused before lifting it.
There was still time to walk away. Hadn t he got enough trouble of his own already?
Well yes, he did. A moment of sharp joy surprised him with its cutting edge. Did he
really have anything left to lose? No. That meant a certain freedom. Wherever he went
from here, it could hardly get worse. He grabbed the bin with the other hand too, lifted it
away, and stood for a long time looking down, sucker-punched into silence, even his
mind shutting down in the face of the impossible.
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Alex Beecroft
Because he was far too much of a Tolkien fan not to recognise what he saw. He was
just not enough of a dreamer to believe it. Oh yes, he d told himself, You never know.
The folklore had always been there, surprisingly consistent from country to country.
People in Iceland believed enough to still leave sacrifices for the creatures, but&
But Joel hadn t realised how firmly he disbelieved until this moment, when he found
himself looking down on what was unmistakably an elf.
Of themselves, his hands came up to cover his nose and mouth. He rebreathed his
own air, warm and reassuring, for a while, as his already queasy stomach curled and
turned over.
It was white, the creature. Whiter than paper, its face and outstretched hands
gleaming like snow under moonlight, and its hair behind it like a comet s trail, silver as a
falling star. The tunic and trousers it wore must once have been equally white even now
they glimmered with threads of silver. Its moonstone belt and baldric gleamed and
flickered as it breathed.
But the knees of the trousers were torn out, and spatters of blood showed stark
around them. Rips and long scuffs of dark London dirt cratered the radiance of the tunic,
and everywhere it touched the ground it had soaked up the decomposed brown liquid
from the bottom of the bins, sticky and stinking and wrong.
Nhn, said Joel at last and lurched closer as if tugged. He bent down, caught in
the middle of the reek a faint scent like primroses after spring rain. Saw the long,
twisting burn, raised and livid on the skin of the creature s hand and arm, and his face
with the brows still creased in pain and lashes like silver wire and lips as white as clouds.
Oh&
It didn t require belief to reach down and carefully, carefully in case his skin stung it,
or his strength crushed its spun-glass delicacy, to brush his fingertips along its cheek. A
little colder than human skin, a little sleeker, but the firmness was the same, as though
bones and muscles still filled it out from within. He curved his hand around the half-open
mouth and felt its breath like a cool breeze against his palm.
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Too Many Fairy Princes
All right, this is& this is officially not happening, he told it as he knelt down and
got a hand under one of its shoulders. Oh, not good. Where he couldn t see, his fingers
sunk into a wet mess of blood. He almost dropped it, shifted his grip clumsily, and hauled
the torso into his arms. I want you to know I don t believe any of this, but you re hurt
and I guess I can t take you to the hospital. And I can t leave you here. So&
With one arm around the creature s back, he wormed the other under its long,
slender legs, firmly told his trembling body to shape up, and lurched to his feet. It
weighed more than he d expected from something so ethereal less than a healthy young
man, but about the same as a slender young woman. At the jerk of the lift, its brows
pinched in further. It gave a little musical gasp of protest or pain.
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