Fog had settled over London in a shivering haze, poised on the line between mist and rain. It was a quintessentially dreary English morning, and the city still slept in its pale hours. On main streets, lines of cars migrated to office buildings, the tops of which were lost in low-hanging clouds; people trudged inside, and they shook their umbrellas, and they vanished into their corporate hives. The side streets held a hush and a drizzling cold, only one car passing by the hooded girl who cut a path through trash bins and sodden cardboard boxes.

Her jacket, a size too loose, and draped in hunter’s green folds around her form, was not really hers. How peaceful he’d looked as he lay curled in bed, a mound of blankets piled upon him, a triskele-rune resting in his palm. That honey hair had fallen in a curtain across his forehead, soft strands pouring onto his pillow and ever-so-faintly waving with each breath.

How she’d wanted to snatch the rune and run.

How she’d forced herself not to.

A jacket would be all she’d take. Instinct decreed it.

Soiléireacht had served her well in opening his closet door without so much as a squeak -- each string pointing to dents in the hinges, or oil-bare places, or ridges in the wood that would have scraped each other had she not seen them. She’d not even dared to breathe, though the length of her effort was not of entire necessity. His breathing did not falter once, and as she slid from the ranks of his hanging clothing something she didn’t suspect he’d miss, she took one more pause. One more glance.

If she’d felt the anger he so feared, she would have asked his name.

That was the last thing she let herself think of him. She crept from his room, waved her hand, and the threads of Clarity set the bedroom door shut behind her.

Without anything to break them, they’d stayed, winding past seemingly random sections of floor. They lay there like a carpet of vines, their glow casting just enough light for her to see in the pre-dawn dark. She avoided the places that they avoided, and they wove ahead as she made her gradual advance, guiding her. They took her past bookshelves in the hallway, a cabinet of dishware at the corner between the hall and living room, around kitchen cabinets and a granite island.

She looked back. There was a notepad left on the island, and a pen. Impatient, the threads writhed, but she reached for both. The digital clock on the stove blinked, changing from 4:34 a.m. to 4:35. He’d not wake for hours, she was sure, and still, she did not have all the time in two worlds.

Three minutes dragged by. The threads licked up her calves, and with a gentle shake, she cast them off. At last, with no wise words or kind words or grateful words to write, she scrawled a single line. She tore the sheet from the pad, folded it, and placed it between two metal canisters that glinted in the light of Soiléireacht.

The mystery of how faeries -- supposedly -- took infants from their homes with no sign of entry had a simple answer. She left through the front door just like he would. It unlocked, and the threads slipped through to lock it behind her before fading away.

Not once did she look back again.

❦❦❦

She twisted behind a dumpster that blocked an alley, slim enough to slip through the gap. The chance of someone else being there was almost nonexistent, as the dumpster would be too heavy to move without machinery. Shelter was in order -- it was beginning to rain.

She took a long breath and leaned against the wall, head tilted upward to let the water sprinkle her skin. No harm in stopping to savor it.

What was next? The usual lying and tricking and swindling? At home, the way between safe point one and safe point two was littered with falsehoods like a mountain slope with stones. There, everyone from child to ageless adult knew that. It would be safer here, she supposed. With her people, the English had long since earned a reputation for ignoring things they didn’t understand.

They would ignore, then, how her face appeared real, yet lacked something. It was as though she’d been born from a dream, but not in a beautiful way: people who looked at her didn’t remember looking at her. Most humans bore reasonable similarities to others; she bore none. The difference was not enough to earn her praise, and the glamour was slight. Any stronger, and it would be too convincing, too different. People would look for too long, instead of making fleeting eye contact and ceasing it when something seemed off. If you stared into the abyss, after all, it stared back into you.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

She would just have to avoid the observant folk, and would have to steal her way to safety. Stealing food would be easy enough -- medical supplies, marginally more difficult. She hadn’t had the time to find where the young man kept his, and some tiny, stupid, irrational part of her brain told her that he’d know where she’d been in his house.

At least Clarity would help her evade the security cameras that dotted the city. There were times when she detested modern inventions, and this was one of those times -- at every turn, someone could be watching her. There were smartphones to look out for, and videos, and the Internet.

It hadn’t been nearly this bad the last time she’d been in London.

That thought, too, she slapped into the lake of Things She Could Not Think About, which was starting to feel more like an ocean, and if she tested the waters, she’d fall deeper and deeper until she drowned.

For now, she had to build a camp. Would the alley do? She cast a sweeping gaze around her, regaining her bearings. The path between buildings was a dead end; at its far wall, steeped in darkness still, she could discern bins and broken boxes. Grey metal plates lined the sides, perhaps openings to electrical panels and equipment closets and the like. Then -- there. One of the plates sat propped against the left building, leaving a yawning black square that it should have covered. She hesitated.

The space within was a cave of shadows and dust, brick and steel, a long rectangular area that extended both forward and up. It was as though the building contained its own hallway just inside the wall, and the hallway was filled with a staircase. The structure was wrought from the same metal as the door-plate, each step scored through with grooves and ridges to prevent a slip; after apparent years of neglect, combined grime and dust had layered on thick. Though the air did not strongly stink, odors wafted from every surface -- dirt, animals, plastic, grease. It was nothing that she could not get used to. As her sight adjusted, a pile of miniature bones appeared in the gloom beneath the bottom stair. She wrinkled her nose, not wanting to stare at a place where rats went to die. Above that, another stair had fallen, left somewhere on the ground below. Her eyes followed the railing up to the end, so dark that she could barely tell what was there, until the outline of a doorway materialized. It beckoned to her -- the urge to explore things she shouldn’t, to discover secrets that weren’t hers.

After another hesitation, another flicker of reason, she began to climb. They were bolted to the wall, so her momentary worry about her wound was for nothing. The higher she climbed, the mustier the smells became, and once she reached the top, she was breathing through her mouth but still tasting grease. Heart thumping, she tried the handle. It didn’t budge. She urged Clarity to come, and of course, it didn’t. She’d used so much of it only an hour ago.

With a huff, she descended, one careful step at a time. There wasn’t enough room to sleep without crawling under the staircase, which, possibly, she could. She knelt, favoring her uninjured foot, and reached her hand through.

Please, she willed. Please, I just need a little.

A single thread unraveled from nowhere and curled into a ball in her palm. She could have sighed in relief. It didn’t give a bright light, but it gave enough. The stairs hid more space, built upon smooth concrete; at the very back, glass shapes winked. She nudged herself further, grasping the inner edge of the bottom stair. They were beer bottles, which must have fallen and rolled, as it was too tight a squeeze for homeless or even teenagers.

For tonight, this was the best she could do.

She slid through, wincing at both her ankle throbbing and her jacket snagging on the ridges. It took several moments, and several tries to turn to the least painful angle, but she soon sat on the cool ground, catching her breath.

The thread disappeared, a barely-there candle extinguished, and she laid back with her hands behind her head. She did not notice when her eyes closed, or when the tides of sleep began to ebb at the edges of her mind.

Dawn was only just approaching, and she felt as though she’d been running for days. How many had it been since the hounds? Three? Six? How long had it taken the young man to reign her energy back into its bounds, keeping it from spilling out along with her lifeblood? Everything began to throb, her head included; her body ached against the concrete. She let her thoughts loose to stray -- wishing there was soil beneath her, and moss, and pebbles, and trees above, their browning leaves whispering hush-hush in the wind. She pictured birds flitting from the branches and following their migration path to warmer skies, squirrels digging for buried acorns before winter’s approach. There was a musk in her imaginary air, the scents of earth and wood, and a full moon among her imaginary clouds, pooling silver and power upon her.

The scene made her ache far more than the concrete did. She pulled her wandering thoughts back into range. A goal -- she needed a goal.

Think of a name. Using her real one would easily get her killed.

Ainsel.

She couldn’t keep the smirk from her lips. Mine own self, said the changeling children of folktale books when asked who they were. Time had shaped their answer into that name. Time would give her the energy to reach a forest. To recover. To earn vengeance.