First, though, she needed to make herself look more presentable, and an open alley was hardly the best place for a wardrobe change. She pushed off the wall and headed deeper into the alley. The far end of the alley opened onto another busy street, but she could see a break in the wall to her left that might be an alcove or a side passage. Either might give her a little more privacy. She was a few steps away from the opening when sounds brought her up short.
The sounds were soft, but distinct. At first, she thought it was the hissing and yowling of an angry cat, but as she listened, she realized that there were words in the sound.
“Hsss… tassssty little treat. So far from its safe home. Will crunch and munch and suck the juices.” The low, growly voice blended with the threatening yowls of a cat in a way that sent a cold shudder down Lanie’s spine.
It was followed by high-pitched squeaks that resolved into a terror-filled high-pitched voice with a definite British accent, “Stay back, beast, or… or this splinter will find your eye.”
Lanie couldn’t see what was going on around the corner, but the fear and defiance in that squeaky little voice struck a chord in her. Once again, she felt old, rotten memories trying to push up from the muck, but this time, she wasn’t helpless. Flushed with anger, she picked up a broken brick and stalked around the corner into the alcove.
The space was a narrower cross-alley that had been fenced off, forming a small dead-end that had been used for storing barrels and pallets. At first glance, Lanie thought there were two large, mangy alley-cats about to eat a brown-furred mouse, but then she saw the dapper little blue vest and brown trousers the mouse was wearing, and the bowler hat at its feet, and the too-large heads on the cats, and their too-wide mouths filled with way too many teeth. The ‘cats’ stood oddly, not like quadrupeds, but like primates on all fours, their front limbs too long.
The mousy little creature held a sliver of wood pulled from one of the pallets. It was about four inches long and wickedly sharp. He brandished it before himself with both hands, like a sword. His back was against the wall, and his hands shook, but he stood tall as he faced his tormentors.
Lanie didn’t know what any of them were, but she knew bullies when she saw them. She threw her brick at one of the cat-beasts, hitting it in the rump and knocking it from the barrel it was perched on. “Get away from him. Go on, shoo!”
She’d expected the cat-beasts to act like stray cats, fleeing in the face of a human’s wrath, but the world didn’t work the way she expected it to. Not anymore. The second cat-thing leapt at her, looking even more like a pissed-off monster monkey once it was airborne. She flung her arm up to protect her face, and the monster latched onto it, claws and teeth puncturing deep into her flesh.
Lanie shrieked with pain and slammed her arm against the side of a steel drum. The impact dazed the monster and made it drop free. She lashed out with her foot and kicked the creature, bouncing it off the drum a second time. This impact did more than daze the beast. Lanie heard a crunch, and when the toothy horror hit the ground again, it started to sublimate into oily black smoke. A sliver of silvery light split off from the smoke and came to her, slipping into her center before she could react.
Foe defeated: Gremlin (Lesser Fae)
1 Sakti gained
“What the fu…”
Her exclamation was cut off as the other gremlin landed on her back, simultaneously with a cry of, “Watch out!” from the mouse-man. Lances of pain tore through her back as the monster drove its teeth into her right shoulder. With a growl, Lanie spun and slammed her back into the alley wall, crushing the monster. It didn’t let go, and the violent motion only tore her flesh further. She reached back and was able to get hold of a handful of fur and scruff.
The pain was awful, but Lanie was no stranger to pain. She pulled, ripping the gremlin’s teeth from her back, and flung it into the chain-link fence that divided the alley. The monster screeched as it hit the steel fence. Fueled by pain and anger, Lanie followed it across the small space and stomped down on it, bringing her foot down again and again until the fae creature turned to oily smoke. Once again, some of the smoke turned to silver light and vanished into her abdomen. The message appeared again:
Foe defeated: Gremlin (Lesser Fae)
1 Sakti gained
Lanie stopped stomping and stood with her fingers gripping the chain links, her head bowed, struggling to slow her breathing. Her back and left arm felt like they were on fire. Rage still swirled through her brain like a red haze, but it receded as she breathed. The mouse creature was silent, but she could feel his eyes on her. She wasn’t proud of what she’d just done. She knew all too well what sort of damage rage like that could cause, and she’d promised herself a long time ago that she wouldn’t let it out. It had helped her win this fight, but it wasn’t a tool she’d ever wanted to use.
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Eventually, her ragged breath slowed, and she released her death-grip on the fence. She lifted her right arm, shrugging her shoulder in a circle to test the damage. The wounds hurt, but the muscles still functioned.
“Thank you,” said a timid, high-pitched voice.
Lanie glanced toward the sound to see the little mouse-man bend down and pick up his hat. He didn’t look that much like a mouse, she realized. His size and his brown fur were a little mouse-like, but his face was more human. His eyes were relatively large black orbs, and his ears tapered to points, but he was otherwise just a furry little man, a bit on the portly side. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, brown trousers, a matching brown bow-tie, and a sky blue waistcoat.
“Those nasty beasties would have torn me apart. I owe you a debt,” he said, his hands busy dusting off the little bowler hat. His accent was that of a proper English butler, but it sounded odd at such a high pitch.
“No, I just…”
“Stop,” he cut her off with a raised hand, his tone serious, “I know it’s the modern fashion to shrug off such things and pretend that altruism is the norm, but it really isn’t. And to my folk, a debt is a serious thing.” He paused, considering her for a moment. “You’re new to all this, aren’t you?”
“Am I that obvious?” she asked.
“You’ve got a bit of a wide-eyed, ‘what the hell is going on’ look to you. The vast majority of people would have been fooled by the glamour and only seen a couple of cats about to eat a mouse, but you saw the truth of things. You’re Awakened, but I’ll wager you haven’t been Awakened for very long, have you?”
“Um, awakened?” Lanie raised an eyebrow, completely confused.
“Enlightened. Empowered. Initiated into the arcane. Taking a walk on the weird side. Opened your third eye. There are a thousand ways to say it, but they boil down to the same thing.” He plopped the bowler onto his head and watched her face.
Lanie snorted in amusement, “Walking on the weird side? Yeah, you could say that. This has been the strangest day of my life.”
“And yet you still found it in you to come to my aid.”
She shrugged. “I don’t like bullies.”
“To my great relief.”
“Um… please don’t take this the wrong way, but… what are you?” Lanie asked.
The little man lifted his hat and bobbed forward in a jaunty half-bow, “I am a Brownie. You can call me Nips. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Lanie. Pleasure to meet you,” the words spilled out on autopilot. Too much had happened in such a short time, and her mind was reeling with all of the changes and emotions. The utter absurdity of the mundane introduction amid all the craziness struck her, and she started to laugh. Her knees went weak, and she sat down on a stack of pallets, trying to hold back the unhinged laughter. It took her a few minutes, and the guffaws nearly turned to sobs before she got herself under control. She took some deep breaths, and when she could trust herself not to burst out in giggles again, she whispered, “Please tell me I’m not going insane.”
“Oh. Dear girl. You must have had a very hard day, indeed,” Nips said, his little voice soft with concern. “No. You aren’t going insane. You’re just seeing more of what was always here.”
Lanie shifted, and the pain in her arm and back reminded her of her injuries. She winced. “Well, if I’m not losing my mind, I guess I’d better do something about this.” She started peeling what was left of her shredded sweater away from the wounds in her arm, gritting her teeth against the pain. “Please tell me those things didn’t have rabies or anything.”
Nips chuckled, “No, no rabies. Those were gremlins. They’re of the fae, like me. Creatures of magic. They can’t carry mortal diseases.” The corner of his mouth quirked upward as if he found some inner joke amusing. “If you stay on the path long enough, you won’t need to worry about such things yourself. For now, though, we should probably see to those wounds.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a small silver flask. Though the flask was tiny by Lanie’s standards, it looked like a normal-sized flask in Nips’ hands. It was far too large to have been in the little watch-pocket of the waistcoat.
Even with all that had gone on that day, the pain of her wounds, the confusion and fear, Lanie’s mind locked onto that detail; that tiny impossibility. A line from a TV show she used to watch ran through her head. The waistcoat was even blue, if a lighter shade than that wondrous box. As a child trapped in a world of violence and fear, of quiet desperation and helplessness, she’d dreamed about that box materializing on a street corner, and the kind, silly man inside whisking her off to adventures through space and time.
And now, here she was, talking to a strange little being with a pocket that was bigger on the inside. So, when Nips asked her to hold out her finger, she did. The woman who thought all the trust had been beaten out of her took a chance and trusted.
Nips took a look at the grimy state of her finger, crusted with dust and blood, and tsked. He pulled a cloth from his miraculous pocket. With a single swipe, the accumulated filth of a difficult day was whisked away, leaving only clean, pink skin on the tip of her index finger. Then he tilted the flask and poured out a single drop of a thick, golden liquid.
“Put that on your tongue,” he said. “It’s not very strong, as these things go, but it should help a bit.”
Lanie lifted her finger and examined the drop. It gleamed like liquid amber. She hesitated for a moment, but reminded herself that she’d decided to trust this strange little man-mouse. This would be the test of that trust. She touched the drop to her tongue.
It was sweet and thick, like honey, and it tasted like sunshine through a window on a hot summer afternoon—not direct, overpowering heat, but a filtered echo of it. That heat spread through her from her mouth to her toes. It burned away fatigue and dampened the pain of her wounds. It didn’t heal her—not completely. The tears in her arm and shoulder stopped bleeding and started to scab and knit, but the effects of the tiny drop lasted only a moment. Dirt and fibers had been pushed out of the wounds as she watched. The pain wasn’t entirely gone, but it was muted. Two days' worth of healing had happened in a matter of seconds.