First Chapter - Friend or Fae

I am giving up on running my own website at the moment - too much other stuff to deal with for now with work, home and publishing commitments. Instead you can find the first preview chapter of my book Friend or Fae here:



Chapter 1

I had come back to the place I started from, back to the memory of when things were bright and the future stretched before me like some great and glorious adventure.

Back to when things made sense, when badness was just an idea, a nightmare dispelled with the coming dawn. Home had been for the longest time a vision in my head, one of simple goodness, proof against everything that went to bad and then worse. I could go on, no matter what as long as it was there waiting for me. My strength, my salvation.

As always I got it all so hopelessly wrong.
The house was still there, the rooms barely changed. The trees down the drive just a little bit taller, thicker. The house was still there all right, but not the home.

That had been the dream all along, dying at last with my mother.

Still it made no difference in the end though, either way. Some things you could not run away from, some troubles too deep.

Lessons learnt the hard way, the bad way that never faded, images that stuck in your mind but it might as well have been your throat the way they rose up and choked you.

Your world, my world it made no difference, the past was a story you could tell however you liked, but never change.

Some days were good days, when I could lie to myself that things would be okay. When I could almost feel normal, as if I had never left this grand old place and things had never had to change. What came to me later in those dark, dreaming hours put paid to that though and as always my mind led me treacherously back to the bleak and inescapable truth.

There was no cure for what one had seen or done.

Standing here in the place of my childhood it seemed as if the countryside around me was the only true thing. That the memories of my time in the city were nothing but phantasms, sent by a vindictive sleep god to torment and destroy me.

In this age city folk feared the open land, tainted and made truly wild by fall out from too many years of war and weirdness.

But to me the countryside was a harsh but beautiful mistress, her rolling curves gowned in the brightest greens, the deepest browns. Her glory was in her ability to change and shake off the seasons, striding forward in the great circle and never staying still. In the city, where creatures that had lived for centuries wiled away their long days change was stifled, feared, as those that claimed immortally hoarded the precious minutes like treasures to be taken out and admired but never used.

For a mortal time and change pushed life along, made it seem real and without it everything was merely stale and flat. Empty. That was how my life had been in the city, as bright and dazzling as any jewel, and as hollow and barren as a fae folk’s promise.

Here in the village in which I had been born change was real and immediate and every time you looked the wild moor had crept even closer, gradually swallowing more and more of the remote farm buildings and houses on the far edges of the village.

Far back in my great great grandmother’s day the wild moor had been two national parks separated by vast towns and cities with the Exe in the north and the Dart in the south.

Now they were both just one long stretch of wild land that curled down in a horseshoe shape from the north coast of the old Shire, down to the point where the southern towns had fallen into the sea and everyone just called it the moors.

You had to cross its wide expanse to leave the West Country on either side, not that there was much point going down to Kingdoms End. They didn’t like strangers down there and small wonder.

There were roads that led across the moors to other places, small towns and outposts along the route to the city, but these were rough and ready and they were certainly not very safe, not even in the daylight.

Anyone who had to travel across the land here carried a shotgun, loaded and ready to use, and nobody with any sense went out after dusk. Since the land had been steeped in magic following the wars, there was some very weird stuff about.

The main problem down here was of course the Wers. In a funny way that was actually a good thing, as it had kept the really nasty Supes away, protected the land from the constant hunger of the city for people and resources.

It started out on the moors with wild rodents; you know rabbits, rats and the like. It was pretty painful to get bitten by a Wer animal and the contagion in their saliva could burn through your veins in minutes.

If you didn’t get help quickly it was usually fatal from animals to humans, you either died from the pain of the venomous bite or the horrible infections that set in later. Some did survive though and that was when the trouble started as from human to human it was not fatal at all, just very infectious.

A Wer human didn’t change into an animal every full moon or anything, that was just a dumb old myth. The reality was in fact much worse as the poor bastards changed totally, irreversibly into something quite awful. Their genes went all haywire and started eating themselves up, mutating in something at once more than human and also less. The first time I had seen infected humans up close was in a zoo in the city.

Some of them looked all hairy and stooped, lab geeks said they reverted to some prehistoric version of man, and others went all runny like a walking corpse. Perhaps that was also where the whole zombie myth came from, which was also untrue because dead was dead and no magic could reverse that ultimate process.

The info plaque on the enclosure wall had said the initial Wer infection killed all the thinking parts of the brain, basically all that made you ‘you’, so despite the fact they said human Wers could live for decades in captivity it was basically a death sentence.

If you were bitten there were anti-Wer shots you could take, but they only worked if you caught it quick, and there was no known cure for Werism once it had set in, though they were probably hard at work in their little labs on it in the city I don’t doubt.

I had tried not to think of the city too much since I had come back home, although it was difficult as in reality I had spent most of my life there. My mum sent me there early, when I was just about ten. I had done really well at our little school and I guess she thought I deserved a chance at the big time.

No one from my village had any real idea what the city was like though. They thought it was some fabulous place full of wealth and luxury, a real chance to live a decent, struggle free life. In some ways of course that was true, but for the majority the glamour of the city was a lie, a terrible lie gilded with worthless faeren gold.

There were only twelve cities left in the world, one of the leading ones in this small Kingdom I called home. Technology and magic pretty much took care of everything, and there were hospitals, libraries, universities – the works. Carefree people wandered along the high streets buying expensive clothes and going to restaurants for amazing, decadent food. Oh yeah, there was that side of it.

At some point in the past, some clever geeks had constructed a huge energy barrier around the cityscape that served two impressive purposes. One was that it kept out all of the undesirables and regulated the come and go of people and trade, and two it filtered out all of the inconvenient bits from sunlight that tended to make some Supes go poof.

All the cities had them now, but New Kingdom had been the first, and from a distance it looked like a gigantic snow globe, those ones you shook up to set the little flakes dancing.

You needed a pass to get into the city, papers that said who you were and where you were allowed to go and there were only a couple of ways of obtaining one if you had not been born there.

I got one for being a smarty-pants and passing all the 9+ exams that my mum had set me up for, in fact I still had it. You could only lose a pass if you did something real bad and got caught. I could go back anytime I wanted. I just didn’t want to. I expect everyone here thought I was nuts.

Anyways I did pretty well at first. The schools there were amazing, a brainy kid’s wet dreams. I lapped up the attention, studied hard and got selected for one of the special grants for the next year. Up until then my mum had been paying for it gods know how, so I was chuffed to monkeys and so was she. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why they didn’t let you go home ever. I didn’t realise most of them thought people from outside the city were less than savages.

Students graduated from city schools at thirteen, then there was this sort of jobs fair and people came to look over the students and pick out the ones that they wanted to sponsor. You couldn’t get into college without a sponsor, and without college points no city university would take you.

I nearly died of pride when a bidding war started over me. Happy old me, with my head stuck right up my arse.

The city was rich for a reason. It survived the Supe Wars for a reason. It sometimes shook me that my mother could have sent me to such a place, exposed me to such otherness.

I should have been shocked I suppose when I found out what it was like there, but I wasn’t, just merely surprised and kind of excited. I was buzzed up on my own importance and nothing mattered but that.

They told me I was clever, pretty and so special, and gods know I lapped it up. I had tried to tell myself over and over that I was just a kid then, that I didn’t know any better. Tried to tell myself I was led astray. But I just couldn’t make myself believe that, not deep down inside where it counted. Some things were just wrong, no matter what spin you tried to put on it and any decent human being would know that.

It didn’t make any difference that I left, that I chose to leave it all and come home. Some of my worst nightmares were not about fear at all but desire.

Deep, gut wrenching, unbearable desire that I knew was barely under control. I was like a druggie on rehab, watching how long I could go before I broke. And boy, when I went alarms were going to start screaming all over the city.

I may have been naive and just a little bit dumb, but I was not stupid enough to think they would really let me off the leash.

One false move and the Supe Containment Forces would be down on this place in minutes blazing merry hells out of anything that moved. The worse thing was they wouldn’t kill me, just make me go back.

And I knew, knew it as I sure as I knew anything about myself, that next time I wouldn’t be strong enough to leave.