The whole notion of dying to become something useful to the humans made Alastor want to vomit.
“This way, this way, this way,” Nightlock said, scampering ahead on all four limbs. Alastor forced the boy’s body into a run to keep up with him, choosing to ignore the strange decorations and sights that had baffled him the night before. It seemed that they were heading straight for the section of the village that the little witch had called some sort of trap—a tourist trap?
Worse yet, Alastor had seen grown men and women who were dressed in ridiculous imitations of witches and monsters that did not, in fact, exist. For the life of him, he could not figure out why a village that had once prided itself on hunting and killing witches should now display their image everywhere.
If this elf was here now, Alastor could only imagine the green sprouting from his head, and the scratchy skin, and the creaking joints that slowly were stiffening into timber. His brain would likely be just as useless.
Alastor slowed his pace as he rounded a corner, darting through the flickering streetlight’s orange glow. Nightlock had all but faded into the shadows. Every now and then the light would catch his eyes and set them ablaze.
“Who is this elf,” Alastor whispered, “and what business does he have with the humans?”
“Oh, Master”—the hob said the word like a sigh—“he is an elf of rare talent, oh yes. He sells his jewelry wares on the street—the likes of which will never be duplicated. He has promised this hob a crown worthy of you when you are rid of the human boy’s skin!”
A crown made by elf hands? Why would an elf ever agree to such a thing when their kind loathed fiends as much as they adored humans? Alastor would rather melt the gold down and fling the boiling liquid at his own face than wear a crown that came from such disrespectful, disgraceful, disgusting—
He heard their mindless chattering only moments before the boy’s dull nose picked up on their rancid, sweet scent.
“Faeries,” he warned the hob. “Step lightly, man—it seems as though there’s a cloud of them.”
Their smell was…different, somehow. It had been several hundred years, but Alastor was sure he would have remembered a stench so sweet, touched by a hint of sourness. Already, he could feel the boy’s stomach churning.
Downstairs, the faeries fed on other small creatures—like three-headed lizards or fire-horned beetles. Pests controlling the population of other pests. When the faerie infestations became too large, they began seeking larger prey. They gnawed on the bones fiends used to build their houses and shops. They left their droppings all over the streets and on the fine hats of lordly fiends. Really, they were flying rodents, and they reproduced with the same ease as hay catching fire.
Nightlock brought him down one final backstreet, toward the rear entrance of what looked to be some sort of shop filled with sweet confections, frozen and baked. He looked at the hob for confirmation.
“Oh yes, it is what the humans be calling ‘ice cream.’ Much milk. Much sugar. Blegh!”
Alastor had to agree—there were few things more poisonous to his delicate, refined innards than sweets. The only thing he liked iced were the guts of dragons—but only with a hearty side of nymph blood, and served from a bowl carved from the skull of an imp.
The faeries, however, did not share his refined taste. A cloud of them clung to the clear sacks of garbage. If it hadn’t been for the rapid fluttering of their wings, they might have looked to the human eye like a skin of thick moss. Their paper-thin black wings were coated with white dust and splotches of sticky drips of brown and gold. Each had a gray body that normally had a velvet sheen, two sets of stick-thin arms, and frail, spidery legs.
They were no bigger than the boy’s hand—or, at least, they should not have been. These faeries were twice as wide as they were long. They slurped and sucked loudly with their whiplike tongues. Their faces, closely resembling those of miniature cats, were as bloated as their bellies.
“By the realms…” Alastor breathed out, horrified. The rodents could hardly fly. He watched as they bobbed under their own weight, crashing to the ground with loud splats, wheezing farts, and deep-bellied burps.
“Choco-cho-cho-choco-coco-chocolate—”
“Flavor, special flavor. Tuesday pumpkin, spicy pumpkin—”
“Orange-ysicle, creamsicle, orange-y dreamsicle—”
The faeries had brains as small as specks of dust. Unfortunately, they were capable of speech. Perhaps even more unfortunately, they were limited to repeating back only what they had overheard. Many secrets plots and devious schemes that had been passed in whispers in the Dark Palace had been regrettably announced to the entire realm by the unseen faeries clinging to nearby rocks and statues.
Nightlock had clearly visited this place before and had come prepared. He reached into the pocket of his drooping, brightly patterned shorts. He whipped out a half-eaten bar of chocolate the little witch had abandoned the night before. It was as though he had cast a spell of his own. The chattering fell silent and each and every tiny head swiveled toward the hob.
Alastor found himself taking a step back. Their eyes were huge with hunger and shot through with red. Nightlock threw the candy as far as he could down the alley, grunting with the effort. The cloud of faeries crawled, fluttered, and buzzed their way over to it.
“Shame,” Nightlock said. “They have become addicted to the humans’ evil sweets. Evil, evil, evil. It gnaws at their minds, poisons them, makes them hungrier.”
With the swarm of faeries occupied, Nightlock turned toward the metal garbage container. Alastor stepped aside, allowing the hob to pass. He watched as the little fiend knocked once, twice, thrice, against the side of the bin. The sound was like thunder.
“Elf, His Highness is here—make haste,” Nightlock said. He knocked again, this time harder and faster. “Do not keep my lord and master waiting. It is a school night, and he has a bedtime.”
“Silence,” Alastor hissed, feeling his face flood with heat. Princes of the Third Realm did not have bedtimes. If he hadn’t been trapped in the boy’s body—
The wind shifted, cutting a path straight up the alley. It lifted the boy’s dark mop of hair off his forehead. Just for that moment, the sickening syrupy smell lifted away; now he smelled iron. Sticky, hot iron with the faintest touch of damp earth.
Nightlock, though an inferior creature, must have scented it too. His huge eyes seemed in danger of popping from his skull.
“Open it, servant,” Alastor managed to squeeze out around the lump in the boy’s throat.