Korrigan (Secrets of the Fae Book 1) Read online

  KORRIGAN

  Secrets of the Fae - Book 1

  by Rebecca Kenney

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1— Monster

  Chapter 2— Raincheck

  Chapter 3— Breakaway

  Chapter 4— Everything

  Chapter 5— Legend

  Chapter 6— Thunder

  Chapter 7— Trouble

  Chapter 8— Life

  Chapter 9— Trickster

  Chapter 10— Believer

  Chapter 11— Immortals

  Chapter 12— Human

  Chapter 13— Secrets

  Chapter 14— Crazy

  Chapter 15— Demons

  Chapter 16— Dark

  Chapter 17— Style

  Chapter 18— Stay

  Chapter 19— Jealous

  Chapter 20— Liberty

  Chapter 21— Bad

  Chapter 22— Centuries

  Chapter 23— Magic

  Chapter 24— Paradise

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  1

  MONSTER

  Aislinn

  Just before dawn, when every other seventeen-year-old girl in my town is still sleeping, I turn off the TV, switch off the lamp beside the couch, and head for my prison. My waking hours are over, and I must be in my dungeon before the sun rises.

  I go down a steep flight of stairs to the basement of our house. It's a comfortable space, furnished with poufs and soft rugs and colorful art. A blond woman is waiting for me, tall and silent. She opens a concealed panel, punches in a code, and a section of the concrete floor descends a few inches, then slides seamlessly aside. There's a square black pit at my feet.

  She flips a switch, and the lights below snap on, harsh and white. With a whining, grinding sound, a metal ladder moves into place, extending down, and down.

  "I don't want to go down there again." The words slip out before I can stop them.

  "One more day," she says.

  One more, I promise myself. Then never again.

  I take off my jeans and shirt and lay them on one of the poufs. I'm wearing plain cotton underwear; it will be shredded when the change starts.

  Slowly, rung by rung, I climb down the ladder into my prison. It's a huge, white room, walls made of thick concrete. The floor is far, far below me, so that the Beast can't jump high enough to reach the trapdoor to the basement.

  I see the familiar cracks in the concrete, and marks of the Beast's claws scoring the walls and floor. There's nothing else. There used to be a sort of bed of thick cushions, but the Beast ripped it apart in a rage and it was never replaced.

  "Happy birthday," says the woman, and presses a button. The ladder withdraws, folding upward, and the trapdoor slides shut.

  The first day of April, my birthday. Other seventeen-year-olds might spend their birthdays going to school, having a party with friends, celebrating with family, getting gifts. I'll spend the day locked in the prison underneath our basement.

  Waiting for my demon to come.

  I can always feel the moment when the sun rises over the edge of the horizon, and the way is suddenly cleared for the Beast to cross over. I feel the magic in my veins, buzzing like a thousand unbearable insects, and I have to scream, every time. My body fights the change, every day. I try to relax into it, but I can't, or won't. I struggle, I scream, and then the Beast breaks out.

  Tendrils of dark matter explode from me, lashing and overlapping to form layers upon layers of dark tissue. They bind my body, and then they start wrapping my face.

  As I always do, I fear for a moment that I'll suffocate— but I'm the Beast's lifeline, its connection to this world, and it will not let me die. I'm crushed and compacted to a tiny iota of consciousness in a vast mass of muscles and tendons and bones— but I am alive. Barely.

  It's hard, even painful, to stay awake. Most days I let my conscious mind sink into sleep. Whatever power controls the Beast doesn't really need me— it's a primal magical force, driven by an instinct for death and destruction. It will score the walls of the dungeon again and again— leap at the ceiling and fall, again and again. So I try to sleep, and wait for the night so I can come alive.

  The hours pass slowly, because my Beast and I are more restless than usual. I can feels its panic, as if it knows that its time is short. I am seventeen now, and I can perform my first Life-Stealing. I will take days from a human, and as long as those stolen days last, I won't have to change form again. I won't have to spend my nights alone, awake in the big house, or pass my days in this dungeon. From now on, being Korrigan will be more bearable.

  The next thing I know, I'm awake, shrunken back to my human form. I'm bare and shivering on the floor under the fierce white lights. The trapdoor in the ceiling is open and the ladder is coming down. Sometimes I have to wait a while for my guardians to let me out, but tonight they are right on time.

  Usually, I'm lucky if the five other Korrigan spend a scant hour or two with me in the evening. Most of the time we eat on our own, whenever we're hungry; they do their work or go out for the evening, and I do my online classes or homework. Once in a long while, we go shopping or drive downtown to attend a concert. Then they go to bed, leaving me to amuse myself for the remaining hours till dawn; so I read novels, watch TV, play online games, try some recipes, or work on art projects that never end up looking very good.

  The Korrigan take it in turns to lock me in the dungeon before sunrise.

  But tonight is different. Tonight they will wait up with me, and I will leave alone at midnight for my first Life-Stealing.

  ◆◆◆

  Just past midnight, I am hunched in my hoodie, riding my bike along the road that connects our lane to a nearby subdivision. I've spent weeks spinning along this route on my bike, preparing for this night, watching my target.

  I chose a house without an alarm system; the family probably thought that their neighbor's alarm system signs were enough to keep intruders away, especially since the houses in this area are so close together.

  The moon is full and round; but enough clouds are scattered across the sky to give me some cover of darkness. I park my bike in the trees bordering the backyard and slip from the dark hedge to the shadow of the shed, till I reach the back door.

  I've practiced un-locking and re-locking it on previous nights, so it's no trouble to pick the lock tonight. As I enter, I whisper the charm for silent feet, an old one that the Korrigan have used since the days when they used to steal babies right from their cradles. In these more civilized times, we don't take the whole child— just a span of days.

  Soft as a kitten I walk through the living area on the ground floor. It's a modest, lower middle-class living space, nothing like my grand home. Tidy enough, but with baby gear, blankets, and toys tucked into unexpected corners. Quietly I creep up the steps, down the hall, and into the back bedroom where I know that a four-month-old baby girl is sleeping.

  There's a baby monitor— not the video kind, thank goodness. I carefully place a pillow in front of it to muffle any sounds. Then I step to the crib and look down at the baby.

  She is so tiny, sleeping there in the warm glow of her nightlight, her tiny arms outspread. She's wearing some sort of zippered blanket over her sleeper, and there's a little stuffed animal attached to the pacifier lying nearby. Her eyelids are smooth and pink above the dark lashes that brush her plump cheeks. I fight the urge to scoop her up and snuggle her.

  But I need
to hurry. She could wake up at any minute and cry, or her mother might shuffle in to check on her.

  I raise my hands and I whisper Gaelic words. The Old Tongue works magically only for the Fae and the Korrigan; when humans speak it, nothing happens. The spell sounds harsh on my lips, cruel as the thing I am about to do.

  And it appears before me, the baby's life force, twining up from her chest like a thread of gold. It spirals lazily in the air.

  Barely breathing, I reach out and grasp the curling end between the thumb and ring finger of my left hand. A shock thrills straight up through my arm to my heart, and I clamp my lips to keep in the gasp. I can sense the lunar cycles in this soul's Life-Stream, like pulses within the stream of energy, just as Maeve said. I can't tell how many there are, since only part of the Life-Stream is exposed, but I tell myself that it feels like a very long life.

  There are many years here— she won't miss one, surely.

  I focus on drawing a bit of the Life-Stream into myself, very slowly, very carefully. I don't want to take too much. The feeling is intense, overwhelming— my body is glowing, reverberating with it. It feels as if my very cells are changing on the spot. I've almost drawn in an entire lunar cycle.

  And then the baby stirs and whimpers loudly. I hear a soft thud from the next room. Quickly I whisper "deireadh" to end the spell, and the golden strand of light disappears into the baby's chest again. I step to the half-open closet and shrink into the dark space behind the closet door, just as a shadow enters the room.

  I hear the rustle of a robe, a murmur and a shushing sound. The baby settles, sinking into a deep sleep again. I can hear her quiet breathing. After a moment, the footsteps of the mother retreat back to the hallway.

  All is quiet, but I can't move. What if the baby's mother comes back? I can't risk drawing out the Life-Stream again. I have a month— that will have to do for now.

  I wait another twenty minutes, and then I slip quietly down the stairs and out of the house.

  This wasn't how it was supposed to go. My heart is pounding, my hands shaking. I get back on my bike and ride, silent and swift, out of the subdivision and down the long street. I have a twenty-minute ride back home, and it's a good thing, because I'm a mess. I need time to calm down, to review what happened.

  I was almost caught. On my first time.

  But I wasn't seen. I followed my training. I hid just in time. I'm okay— I'm safe.

  Still, I only have a month. I was supposed to take a year, or six months at the least. It's disappointing, for sure. It took weeks to find the perfect mark for my first Life-Stealing, and I won't have much time to find another before my scant thirty days of sunshine run out.

  Thirty days. In spite of my worry, I can't stop the smile from spreading over my face. I'm going to feel the warm April sunshine on my skin. I'll walk to the corner store in the sun for once and see the daytime customers instead of the pale, tired nighttime ones. I'm going to stay up for the rest of the night, and then I'll watch the sun rise for the first time ever.

  But first, I will have to face the Korrigan— the five women who have been my family, my mothers, my teachers, and my jailers for my entire life. I can picture their reactions to my news.

  Magnolia, curvy and red-headed and free with hugs, will squeeze my shoulders and tell me it's okay, and that it will all work out. She looks about the right age to be my mother, though of course she is far older than normal teens' mothers. Her fascination with terrifying things fueled my childhood; and she was always telling me frightening tales and warning me about one thing or another— everything from ghouls and ghosts in the cemeteries, to snakes and ticks in the forest. She also told me about the sharks and jellyfish and merrows in the ocean, and the brain-eating amoebas in the lakes— possibly trying to make me feel better that I can't visit those places. She understands fear; she will be the one most sympathetic to my story.

  Gillian and Gemma are dark-haired twins who could be in their early thirties. For fun, Gillian likes to find people's weak spots and pry at them; Gemma spends most of her time distracting herself with one fad or another. Both of them are completely man-crazy, and apparently have been, on and off, for centuries. They'll find some way to make a joke at my expense and then giggle together like teenagers. I wonder if I will still find things to laugh about after I've lived for several hundred years.

  Arden will frown from her favorite seat in the corner, where she works incessantly with her smartphone and laptop. She looks to be in her mid-twenties. Her hair is always changing colors, from midnight black to fierce red to nut-brown or platinum blonde, as the mood strikes her or fashion dictates. For her, making money is almost as important as Life-Stealing. She'll wonder why I didn't just suck it up and finish the job.

  The four of them can laugh at me, frown at me, hug me— but Maeve is the only one whose reaction I fear. She is the leader of the Korrigan, and although none of the others will tell me her history, I've overheard them calling her "my Lady" when they think I'm not around. She's tall, with short-cropped blond hair and aristocratic features and blue eyes that look ice-cold or scalding-hot depending on her mood. She's the only one of the Korrigan who hasn't changed her name at some point over the centuries.

  Maeve.

  What will she say to me?

  Too soon, I'm gliding off the main road onto the lane that leads to our house. When the Korrigan moved here eight years ago, they chose an isolated spot and had the place built brand-new to their very peculiar specifications. I'm not sure how they explained the gigantic cement-walled basement under the house. Most likely, they had to pay a significant sum of money to keep the builders quiet about that part; I was too young to care much about it at the time. For me, it was simply the changing of one prison for another.

  The house appears suddenly through the trees, gleaming silver and white and dark gray in the moonlight. I suppose it's beautiful, with its blend of Old-World architecture and Southern charm, all gables and stonework and pillars and porches. Five bedrooms, six bathrooms, several living spaces, and a four-car garage. Maybe I'll come to love this place, now that I won't be trapped here in the daytime.

  I swing left and ride the paved path to the back of the house, where I roll my bike into the shed. With my hand on the handle of the back door, I pause and close my eyes. Deep breaths, Aislinn. Tell them what happened. It'll be okay. I step inside, slip off my shoes, and hang my hoodie on its peg.

  There's no point putting it off any longer. I shuffle from the mud room into the great room, the living area where we all gather for anything of importance.

  As I expected, they are waiting for me there, all five of them. Magnolia stands when I enter. "How did it go, honey?"

  "Were you seen?" says Arden. She's all fierce eyes and chopped black hair and savage cheekbones— and her tone is equally sharp.

  "Almost," I say. "But I hid just in time."

  Gillian gasps. "What?"

  Maeve holds up her hand. "Calm down. These things don't always go perfectly. Aislinn, tell us exactly what happened."

  I don't want to talk about it, but they will keep questioning until they drag every detail out of me. So I tell them. About the baby and her sweet face, about the golden lifeline and what it felt like to draw it into myself, to take days from a helpless, tiny human. By the end of my story, the reality of what I've done has settled like a weight in my stomach. I feel my insides lurching.

  "Excuse— I'll be back— I— " I race down the hall to the bathroom, catch my long red hair in one hand, and vomit into the toilet. Cold sweat breaks out all over me. I want to tear that baby's stolen month out of myself. What right did I have to take that piece of her life?

  I'm crying, and the tears streaming from my eyes fall into the toilet bowl, into the vomit.

  I thought it would be Magnolia who came to me, but instead I hear the rustle of Arden's crisp pencil skirt as she kneels beside me. Her cool fingers untwist the hair from my clenched hand and pull it back from my face.

 
"Don't say it's all right," I tell her between gritted teeth. "It's not."

  "No, it isn't. But it's the way things are. The way we have to live."

  "We don't have to steal it. We could just—"

  "Just what?" she asks. "Go out only at night? Live in the dark, like vampires? What kind of a life is that?"

  Of course she is right. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the darkness.

  "It's not fair that we have to steal it," I say.

  "Life is cruel."

  "Why?"

  She sighs, wipes my mouth with a wad of toilet paper, and drops the soiled clump into the bowl. She presses the handle to flush everything away. If only I could get rid of my guilt as easily.

  "No one who saw the beginning of the world still lives," she says. "We have to piece together the truth as best we can from what we see— the cruelty, and the kindness." She tucks one hand under my chin. "For now, you need to let the guilt go. You have a month of days ahead of you, and the first day will begin in a few hours. Sleep! You have so much to look forward to."

  After she leaves, I stand up and wash my face in the sink. I stare at myself in the mirror— delicate white features, full lips, pale green eyes, an ample scattering of freckles. I know I'm pretty, but I still feel unremarkable most of the time— too pale, too fragile-looking.

  The most striking thing about me is my waterfall of curly red hair. Magnolia says that it's just like my mother's. In the few videos I've seen of her, it was always long, down to the middle of her back; and I keep mine that length too.

  I wish she could be here, for my First Day. But she died in a fire in the little apartment she shared with my father, far away in Texas.

  My guardians have no videos or photos of my father. I tried Googling him a few times, but the name Paul Byrne goes with a surprising number of people. All I could find was a scant mention of his and my mother's death from an online news service near where they lived. And all I know of my mother is what I've seen from a couple of VHS home videos and a few photos.