Dreams and Shadows

chapter TEN

THE YOUNG CHANGELING KNOCKS

Nixie Knocks the Changeling was born in the rain under a starless black sky. The moment he opened his eyes he saw her. His mother. Caitlin. She was beautiful, her eyes big and brown, her hair henna red. The very first thing he could remember was the patter of raindrops on his face. The rain was cold but her tears were warm; that’s how he could tell the difference. After three days of sobbing over her stillborn child, rocking and cradling him, praying for him to stir, he’d awakened. He looked up for the first time and saw her, his hunger hollow and angry, crying out for his mother to feed him. He loved her so much it hurt; he loved her so much he fought his way to the land of the living. And when she quickly bared her breast to suckle him, he bit down with all of his might.

She screamed. It was then that Caitlin knew exactly what he was. And she hated him; she hated him with every fiber of her being. Knocks knew hatred’s flavor better than anyone. He could eat pain, he could live indefinitely on fear, but he couldn’t eat hate. His stomach couldn’t take it.

She threw him to the ground, screaming, “Aodhan!”

It was then that Knocks first met his father. Tall, muscular, handsome. He rushed to his wife’s side, placing a caring hand on her delicate exposed shoulder. “What is it, my love?”

She pointed at Knocks, refusing to look at him. “Fetch the Bendith.”

“But, Caitlin . . .”

“Fetch him,” she demanded with a choked sob. “That is not your son.”

Knocks writhed on the ground, drinking his mother’s pain. It was the only thing she would ever give him.

Dithers wasted no time. He took one look, nodded knowingly, and threw him over his shoulder. “What should I bring you?” he asked Caitlin.

“Bring me a son. One strong and noble and deserving. One worthy of Sidhe parents.”

Dithers nodded silently, carrying Knocks off into the night. But as he made his way to the edge of the forest, he found it blocked by a massive stone of a man: Meinrad the Limestone King, Green Man and Leshii of the Balcones Canyonlands.

Possessing no skin or flesh, he was head to toe tan and yellow limestone instead, beset with flecks of gray and clear quartz, sprouting green flowering bushes where a man’s beard and hair might be. He stood seven feet tall, but walked with a crook in his back from years of his weathered stone settling in. His eyes and mouth were recesses in the rock, his nose a knobby pecan branch with green budding leaves growing into the bush of his beard. Meinrad shook his head, wagging a protesting finger. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“To fetch Caitlin a new child,” said Dithers.

“That is not Caitlin’s child. Her child was poisoned by its mother’s vanity and died in her womb. This is a changeling. This child belongs to the court. It belongs to the Limestone Kingdom. And you know what must be done with it.”

Dithers shook his head. “I don’t know, King.”

“It is time you did your duty for the court, as many Bendith have done before you. You must fetch us a child. A child we can raise as one of our own. Do you understand?”

Dithers nodded.

“You know what is being asked of you?”

“I do.”

“And you know what will happen if you fail?”

Dithers gulped silently. “Yes.”

“No one must know. No one.”

NIXIES DON’T WRITE. They’ve never had a need for it. So when the other fairies heard them speak of the changeling—Nox, meaning “night,” named for the night he first came to the nixies—they heard it as Knocks. The changeling, who knew not the difference, wouldn’t protest until he was far older. Sometimes names just happen. Such was the case of Nixie Knocks the Changeling.

“Mama, I’m hungry,” said Knocks, all of four years old.

“I know, baby,” said Laila. “Mama’s gonna get dinner for you.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Mama knows. Stay here and don’t let anyone see you.”

Laila was the eldest of four sisters. And while her younger siblings Annalise, Elke, and Rebekka had all agreed to adopt Knocks as a group, Laila was the only one he called Mama. To him they were all his mothers, but there was only one Mama. And Laila took that honor very seriously. So it was she who took charge of his feeding. While he wasn’t hungry often, Knocks was a handful when he was. Downright dangerous even.

Nixies don’t look like ordinary women. Their skin is a pallid green, smooth and scaly, their smiles lined with razor-sharp, needle teeth with which they feed upon fresh fish. Instead of legs they have large, powerful tails that pound them through the water at incredible speeds. And much like Knocks, they possess the ability to shroud themselves in glamour and walk amongst the city dwellers unnoticed.

Laila stepped away from the tall grass along the shore, putting a stiff finger against her lips to remind Knocks to keep quiet and hidden, then slipped silently into the water. Her skin grew pale, then rosy, her hair shimmering a golden blond; her breasts swelled, stiff nipples poking out through the thin pink fabric of her bathing suit. Her eyes grew large, her lashes long. She smiled big and bright, treading water in the lake just beside a biking trail, lying in wait.

Within moments a biker happened upon her. He was fit, tattooed, straddling an expensive, showy mountain bike. Skidding to a stop by the water, he looked out, giving her a flirty smile. “Swimming alone?”

“Unfortunately,” said Laila with a hint of disappointment.

“Boyfriend a no-show?”

“No,” she giggled. “I don’t have one. My friends. They canceled.”

“That’s a bummer. A pretty girl like you shouldn’t have to swim alone. I’d join you, but I don’t have a suit.”

Laila smiled. She reached back with a single hand, undoing the tie on her bikini top and flicking it off in one fluid motion. Without missing a beat, she shimmied out of her bottoms, tossing the wadded-up suit onto the shore with a wet SLOP. “There. Now neither do I.”

The biker managed a single kiss and a hand swept up the inside of her thigh before he found himself drowning beneath the waves. Knocks crouched on shore, his hands balled into white-knuckled fists, savoring the agony of each gasp for air. The man thrashed beneath the surface. He was strong and a good swimmer, but Laila was stronger.

The fear. The pain. The desperation. Knocks’s hunger began to subside.

When the man had finally given up and the lake was allowed to claim him, Laila secured his body to the bottom with a tangle of lakeweed and swam back to shore. She stood over Knocks, dripping wet and smiling, stroking his cheek. “There, there. Is that better?”

Knocks nodded.

“Good. Now, let’s get his wallet and go shopping. Mama wants a new dress.”

BY THE TIME he turned six, the nixies realized that they could no longer keep their adopted son around the lake. Stories cropped up about a ghostly child lingering around the spots where people had drowned. Other tales whispered of an ethereal, disembodied giggle heard as grown men flailed for their lives. And while the authorities never took any of these claims seriously, the nixies had noticed an uptick in interlopers searching for the Ghost Child of Ladybird Lake; that was attention they could no longer ignore. So by a vote of three to one the nixies decided to leave Knocks in the Limestone Kingdom—which was where he now resided. Laila, the only sister to vote against abandoning him, followed him out to the court, raising him among the fae of the Hill Country.

And he hated it there.

The Limestone Kingdom was far from the hustle and bustle of the big city; far from the traffic snarls, the hulking stone buildings, the excess of weekend nights. There were no shootings, no stabbings, no drunken date rapes. No homeless lay suffering on the corner, no despondent teens slit their wrists over self-centered teenage crushes. No children were beaten, abused, or humiliated in any way. There was almost no one around at all. You could walk for miles before seeing a living, breathing human being—and even then all they wanted was to live quietly, as far away from the beautiful chaos of the big city as possible.

There wasn’t a drop of delicious dread anywhere to be found. It was like living in a world without oxygen, and Knocks was desperate for a single breath of misery. He knew what drowning felt like; he knew better than almost anybody. And that’s what this was. They were slowly drowning him in a lake of emptiness.

His only respite was his nightly swim with Laila. Together they lay there—floating in the middle of a spring-fed lake—staring up at a field of stars so vast it strained the eye. When those stars reflected off the lake’s crystal sheen, it was like floating deep in the murky void of space—stars everywhere, swallowing them whole, an inky, airless vacuum with only Laila’s comfort staving off suffocation. Only the thin ring of trees surrounding the horizon served in any way to dissolve the illusion.

“Mama, I saw them today,” he said one night.

“Saw who, sweetie?”

“Aodhan and Caitlin. My parents.”

“You can’t be sure it was them.”

Knocks furrowed his brow, giving his mother a stern look, as if she should know better. “It was them.” She stroked his head, nodding, acknowledging her mistake. “I hate them. I hate them so much.”

“Oh, honey, you shouldn’t hate them.”

“They threw me out like the trash and asked for him instead.”

“You know the rule. We don’t talk about him.”

“But, Mama—”

“But nothing,” she said, squeezing him tight. “You are not him. You are Knocks. And if those self-centered prats hadn’t tried to trade you in, I would never have gotten the son I always wanted.”

“I still hate him.”

“You have to control that, Knocks. We don’t survive by letting our instincts take over. We only survive by being smart. He’s not smart like you. He has his own cross to bear. You remember that. One day you’ll look back and be thankful that you’re not him.”

“Okay, Mama.”

“Don’t okay, Mama me. You say yes, ma’am.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s better. We should be heading in. The sun’s coming up.”

The two swam to the edge of the lake, making their way to shore. In the breaking rays of the morning light he looked down, glimpsing his own reflection. Though it was clearly him, all he saw was a bent, broken picture of Ewan. His eyes were mismatched, one clearly larger than the other; one of them tilted forty-five degrees to the side. His hair grew out in patches, the same brown color as Ewan’s, but shaggy and worn, split ends fraying over spots of scabby, balding skin. The front of his skull was larger, with a bulbous, elliptical tumor of flesh growing out of the side. Both ears were ragged and tattered, chewed up, gnawed down like a cat that had been in too many fights. Worst of all were his teeth—crooked, rotten, and worn—the incisors tilted at a forty-five-degree angle opposite his eyes, creating a discordant symmetry.

Perfect, special little Ewan. With his perfect tangle of brown hair and his perfectly aligned eyes and his perfect, perfect, perfect smile. Knocks simmered quietly, but Laila glowed, putting a loving hand on his shoulder.

“See what I mean? You’re so handsome. You don’t look anything like him.”

AT FIRST HE thought little about his appearance; after all, his mothers had always held him close, stroking his hair, telling him how beautiful he was. But the fairies of the court of the Limestone Kingdom were very different creatures. From far off, they offered a wave or a smile, shouting a stout, “Ho, Ewan,” before getting close enough to realize their mistake. For a moment Knocks would drink in their heady confusion, the stomach-turning angst generated by the changeling’s visage. But as revulsion gave way to pity, his hatred for these creatures only grew.

He was nothing to pity; he was not a monster. And if only he had been born to Laila rather than the hollow, loveless womb of that stuck-up Sidhe, he would never know what any of this was like. Instead, he lived near a walking reflection of what his life could have, should have, been. Any other court in the world, and his life would have been different. But Laila wanted to be close to her sisters. And for that he almost detested her too.

THE SUN WAS already high in the sky. It was perfect out, and no matter how many times his mother told him, he couldn’t stay away. Knocks couldn’t help himself. He skulked near the pair as they hunted rabbits out on the outer fringes of the kingdom. And when he heard them talk of the night’s plans, he giggled silently, giddy at the prospect. Ewan would be given the chance to prove himself in front of a pack of watching adults. Knocks could not let an opening like that pass without incident.

It would be glorious. He would humiliate him, lay in wait for just the right moment to spring a trap that would prove once and for all that while Ewan was the prettier, Knocks was by far the craftier, the more dedicated, the most worthy of celebration. Ewan might be the shining star of the day, but the night belonged to Knocks. And as he thought about his chance, a familiar fire sparked, smoldered, and finally blazed within his belly. Tonight he would satisfy that blaze; tonight Knocks would feel the last of the lingering pity that belittled him in front of the others. Tonight.

There was only one way it could be any better.

Mallaidh.