Faeries- no title thus far!

The Prologue

Scarlett whisked between the trees like a shadow, white wings carrying her on the air. Her breath came quickly, but not because of the speed at which she flitted through the forest; fear kept her heart thumping like a trapped butterfly.

They were watching her; even now, they were watching her futile attempts at escape. They were always watching. Why couldn’t she be left alone?

She flitted effortlessly from tree to tree without disturbing so much as a leaf. She was born in the forest, knew every inch of it, right down to the petals on every new daisy. She had the reflexes and experience that only one of the Fey could possess.

The half- formed idea she’d had rushed to the surface of her mind, desperate to be considered. With all her logic she wanted to push it away, but it lingered, taunting her. It was the only solution, the only hope left.

She could run forever but they’d find her in the end. Just like they’d found all the others. No, as long as they chased her, she couldn’t escape. What she had to do was convince them not to follow her.

She had to die.

Her heart clenched at the thought of what she was about to do.

Don’t think about it, Scarlett. Don’t think about it, she told herself. She swooped quickly downwards and dropped silently onto a moss- cloaked tree branch. She closed her eyes. For a few moments she was silent while she slowed her heartbeat until she was so still she was almost one with her leafy surroundings. Then an impossible sound came from her; a shrill, high pitched chirrup. She repeated it again and again in a steady rhythm, the perfect replica of a squirrel call.

She lapsed into silence.

She didn’t have long to wait; only a few moments passed before her earlier chattering was echoed, not far away. She opened her eyes. A red squirrel with bright eyes darted along a tree branch opposite her. The creature viewed her with interest. Scarlett smiled encouragingly, prompting her forward with another series of chirps.

Then, from the corner of her eye, Scarlett Avilon saw a girl appear from nowhere, simply step out of the air. She was about the age of Scarlett herself, maybe fourteen or fifteen. She looked lost - astonished, almost. The human turned around, eyes huge in confusion and Scarlett took in the brown curly hair and outlandish pink and white clothing. She turned to face Scarlett and her mouth dropped open into an O shape; she said something, as though in shock, that Scarlett didn't hear. It seemed as though the human had recognised her, she mused. Odd.

And then the human vanished to wherever she'd come from.

Scarlett was unsettled. Humans didn’t appear from the air like that. Nobody did. Somehow she felt that whoever that girl was, she would be very important in the long run and she committed her face to memory. She would worry about that later. Nothing could disrupt what she had to do. Nothing.

Her stomach fluttered with apprehension. It was ridiculous to place everything on the balance of a theory, yet here she was. It would work. It had to.

Her mind cleared.

It was the strangest feeling, and yet hardly a feeling at all. She was a soul, drifting away into the air on some invisible level. She could see her body below her, pale and frozen, lifeless without a soul. It tilted backwards and thumped softly to the forest floor where it lay, splayed like a fallen angel.

But that didn’t matter now. She was nothing but a soul; she had no arms, no legs. Everything looked different without her body to hold her back. There was a white light above her, brighter and more brilliant than the sun itself. It promised her peace. She could forget everything- all of this. All she had to do was let it take her…

No! She wouldn’t go. She wasn’t ready to die just yet.

The willpower it took to pull herself away from that light was more than she knew she had, but she managed it. Maybe it was because it had been her choice to leave her body and it wasn’t really her time yet; maybe it was because she had something to live for, something that gave her the strength to see heaven and look the other way.

Either way, she was a disembodied soul for only a moment. She opened new eyes an instant later; small, bright eyes. The eyes of a squirrel.

Scarlett danced away from the scene and dashed up a tree. From her vantage point atop a tree branch, she stared fixedly down with an expression no squirrel had ever adopted before at the faerie body, pale and cold as porcelain as though in death.

Then she darted away, leaving the winged body she’d once occupied behind her.

The First Chapter

Kat's blue eyes were dark with concern, staring at something Hazel couldn't see.

"Hazel, listen", she whispered, and stepped forward once across the school bus park, her eyes trained on the cluster of purple wheelie bins and plastic green recycling bins in the corner opposite them. The students milled around Kat and Hazel like a hive of blue-uniformed bees, searching for their buses home from school.

"What, Kat?" Hazel said, tugging her friend's sleeve. "C'mon, you're standing in the middle of the road."

The sharp horn of a bus right behind them jolted Kat to the present. She waved the driver a cheery sorry, who responded with a stony glare as his bus rumbled past.

Kat let her schoolbag, purple to match her customary sunglasses perched on her head, slide from her shoulder and drop to the ground. Hazel dumped her bag beside her friend's.

"We'll miss our bus, Kat."

"We won't!" Kat insisted. "This is important- listen."

The bus park had quietened considerably in the last few minutes as the bulk of students eager to get home had already left. There were still a few stragglers left behind, and a group of boys at the other end, by the road, laughing and squirting each other with bottles of water.

Hazel strained her senses. All she could see were the dustbins covered in graffiti and faded litter warnings. She could see a cluster of four or five old shopping bags that had been dumped in a heap next to the overloaded bins. Filthy, ripped clothes trailed out of a hole in one, and milk leaked out of another.

"Eww" Hazel moaned, putting her hand to her nose to block out the foul stench. She listened carefully, wondering what Kat was talking about, when she heard it. A high-pitched whining, and a soft scrabbling and shuffling- and then the heap of plastic bags moved. It was just a slight twitch- she’d have missed it if she hadn’t been paying such close attention- but it was enough to tell Hazel that there was something alive under all that rubbish. Swallowing the bile that rose in her throat, she edged forward gingerly. Kat followed, even though her high-heeled silver gladiators were anything but suitable.

Hazel hesitated for a moment, thinking about what she was doing.

“Oh my God”, she sighed, and instantly regretted speaking as the stench hit her nostrils and made her retch.

The boys had stopped dousing each other with water. They started instead to watch curiously the two girls- one with purple sunglasses and shiny black hair, one with huge eyes and a cloud of brown curls. For some unapparent reason, they were searching through the rubbish bags.

Hazel moved a bag aside and knelt down, oblivious to the filth-strewn ground. There she saw a white drinks can holder, made up of six plastic rings. Caught in the rings was a small brown bundle of fur. He was hardly moving at all, though Hazel when she looked closely saw that his tiny ribcage moved up and down. He was breathing. The two other creatures yelped, their eyes mournful, pleading with Hazel to help their brother.

“Look, Kat”, she whispered, hazel eyes wide with horror. Hazel reached to stroke them; their fur was silken to the touch.

“Oh my God,” Kat breathed. “Do you think he’s dead?”

Hazel shook her head. “Don’t think so.”

It was tribute to how much she cared about the puppies that Kat offered her jacket as a blanket. She’d ordered it online at an exorbitant, arm-and-a-leg price. It was a collaboration piece between two of the world’s most renowned designers, and there were only twelve of them in the world. One puppy shivered and curled in the white material, while the other two were still, eyes closed. Hazel bundled them close to her chest.

“You okay?”

Hazel turned carefully, searching for the voice that had called. A woman leaned out of the window of a sleek black sports car. She’d pulled in outside the bus park, engine still running.

“Do you two need a lift home?”

“That’d be great,” Kat called back.

“Kat!” Hazel hissed.

“It’s okay. I know her-she lives near me.”

Hazel watched one of the boys who were sitting on the wall sling his schoolbag over his back, tug open the car door and sit in the front seat.

“That’s Matthew Kavanagh” Hazel suddenly recognised the tall, sandy-haired boy. “He lives near you.” The woman in the car looked to be in her twenties- not old enough to be Matthew’s mother.

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” Kat sighed, bouncing ahead while Hazel tried to keep up without jostling the puppies. “She’s his sister.”

“I didn’t know he had a sister.” Hazel cast her mind back to the rare occasions when she’d spoken to the Kavanaghs.

“His parents are divorced,” Kat reminded her, whispering now, as they were nearing the car. “I never knew he had a sister before either. Amber grew up with her mother in London. She’s twenty-five now- she got a job nearby and is staying with Matthew and her father for a while.”

Hazel wondered briefly how Kat managed to know everything about everyone.

“What have you got there?” Amber Kavanagh asked as Hazel clamoured awkwardly into the back seat after Kat. Hazel instantly noticed the London accent. Amber craned around in the driver’s seat to look curiously into the bundled-up designer jacket.

“Oh!” she said in surprise.

“Puppies. Someone must have abandoned them. This one is stuck.”

Amber shook her head sorrowfully, her blonde hair flicking from side to side. “Horrible what some people will do, isn’t it? Would you prefer if I dropped you off at the vet’s instead, then?” She threw a glance at the puppies in the rear-view mirror. “They don’t look great, she admitted, concern written on her stunning features.

“No” Hazel had to agree, stroking the puppies’ dirty foreheads. “Especially these two.” She touched the two smaller pups very lightly. It wasn’t obvious whether or not they were breathing.

It didn’t take long to get to the vet’s practise. The seaside village was too small to be called a town, and now that the after-school traffic had disappeared, the roads were almost empty. Hazel watched out the window at the familiar grey school building rushing past, at the pub with the stained glass in the windows and flower pots on the sills. She could see the familiar blue sparkle of the sea out the other window, a couple of hundred metres away. The car turned a corner and flew past a tarmac tennis court, and the children’s playground which had been installed last year. The red plastic swing now hung sadly by one rope, swaying uselessly in the breeze.

The sports car came to a smooth halt outside the veterinary clinic. Kat bounced out of the car and took the bundle in her arms while Hazel climbed out. Amber and Matthew both stepped out of the car. They were both tall, Hazel noticed, but all the same she wouldn’t have guessed tem to be siblings. Mathew’s height made him look lanky and awkward, whereas Amber was elegant and poised as a super model. They both had blonde hair, though Matthew’s was slightly darker, and straight as opposed to Amber’s waves. She had golden brown, amber eyes. Hazel wondered if she’d been named after her eye colour, just like Hazel herself had been.

The pink painted waiting room was empty, the television in the corner replaying old tapes of All Creatures Great and Small. The picture kept jittering. Now and then the characters would stutter and momentarily divide in half before coming together again. Hazel watched it for a moment, then let her eyes travel up the wall behind the television where a set of paw prints had been painted, as though a dog had run riot all over the wall.

The door to the surgery opened and the vet appeared. He guided them in, smiling, but the smile faltered when his eyes fell on the forlorn pups huddled in Kat’s arms. Kat jumped in quickly, explaining to the vet how they’d found the dogs. The man’s brow furrowed; his expression was grave. He inspected the pups as he listened, taking mental notes on their condition. “They’re in a very poor state,” he said earnestly in his deep voice. Kat wanted to say something like, ‘Really, you think so?’ in her best sarcastic voice but thought better of it.

Hazel understood the worry lines around his eyes and forehead; this can’t have been the first case like this.

“They’ll have to stay here- a few nights at the very least. I’ll call the pound, then. I’m sure they’ll find good homes for them.”

“No!”

Everyone turned to stare at Hazel. “I mean, I’ll take them.” She knew what happened to dogs in the pound. The vet eyed her sceptically. “And your parents would be agreeable?”

“Uhh…Yeah. Of course”, said Hazel, though she knew there was about as much chance of that as there was of Kat deciding purple sunglasses were unnecessary.

“You know the owner would be expected to cover the cost?”

“Oh,” Hazel said. She hadn’t thought about that. She thought meekly of the coins at the bottom of her money box.

“Not a problem” Kat said breezily, mentally calculating how much her jacket was worth. If the worst came to be worst (and it really would have to be bad), she could always sell it.

“Well, if you’re sure then.” the vet said. “I’m not sure how long it will be before you can collect these pups.” He reached down towards the dogs, smiling sadly. His tone turned serious again. “Or even if they’ll survive. They’re only weeks old, malnutritioned, and if there are bones broken…” He trailed off. Hazel nodded. She told him her phone number, and the vet scribbled it down. Hazel’s eyes kept straying towards the three soft bundles of fur until they were transferred to a wire cage and carried out of sight.