Fae by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

Author:Laura VanArendonk Baugh
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: occult, urban, magic, Horror, fairies, Dark, Fantasy, fairy tale, folklore, disturbing, fae
ISBN: 9780692207918
Publisher: World Weaver Press
Published: 2014-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

And Only the Eyes of Children

Laura VanArendonk Baugh

You’ve probably heard of the survival of the fittest? It’s where things first broke down. An immortal doesn’t have to be fit for anything; he’s going to survive anyway. Immortality was evolution’s biggest screw-up, and any ecosphere worth its salt is going to do its best to make sure an immortal never breeds.

But they try.

Oh, how they try. And sometimes they succeed, after a fashion, and they spawn things. And those things become stories, because they’re too horrid to be real, so they must be stories, they must, and thus we have fairy tales and horror films and unconfirmed internet stories of shocking infants in third-world countries, with photos quickly taken down after human rights advocates protest that no one should be gawking at tragedy like some sort of modern day freak show.

“Human” rights. Heh.

But though the immortals try to breed, they generally can’t. And thus, the Fae fascination with children.

It even hits me sometimes. Right this moment, for example, I was completing a perimeter check of a park playground and settling on a bench. I pretended to check email on my phone, but I wasn’t really seeing anything on the screen because I was too busy sneaking peeks at the kids playing on the slide and swings. There were five of them, three girls and two boys, and most were strangers to one another until the game of tag started through the autumn leaves. It was all I could do to stay on the bench instead of jumping up to join in.

I didn’t, though. A hundred years ago, a stranger could stop a stroll and play a few minutes with kids and everyone would have a good time. Nowadays people start calling police and shouting “Stranger danger!” if you so much as wave at a kid or give him a high five, forget chasing him giggling around a park.

And that’s kind of a bad thing. Not only for all the little kids who grow up paranoid and nature-deprived and utterly dependent, but because all those jonesing Fae can’t get their tiny little hits of child through frequent, harmless interaction, and some of them finally snap and just take one.

Almost two thousand kids a day go missing in this country. Think about that a second, okay? Every forty seconds. If you’re reading this at average speed, that’s six kids since you started. (Sorry; Fae personalities also tend to obsessive counting.) About half of those are family abductions, and half of what’s left are acquaintance abductions. We don’t have anything to do with those; that’s your own mess, humans.

But about twenty-four percent of kidnappings are stranger abductions, and a very few—okay, three percent if we’re counting, and I always am—are Fae-related. Most of the time, those children are found a few days later, unharmed and a little confused (or assumed to be). Most of the Fae who like kids—really like them, I mean, and not just to eat—are pretty good about returning them nowadays.

But the other stranger abductions are entirely human in nature, and that’s where I come in.

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