It’s no secret among humans that fairies are unhinged—some more than others. It is, however, a secret that most humans hate fairies. You just don’t go around telling off magical beings who could turn you into a toad, or worse. Even when they show up at your son’s or daughter’s birth to “bless” them with whatever magical gift the fairy might fancy. Years ago they tended to only bless the unfortunate wealthy or noble children. But as modern times progressed and moderate wealth abounded, the lines between the upper class and the rest of the citizenry blurred. Then too, there was the matter of technology. Humans developed all kinds of scientific and technological marvels, and the fairies, vain species that they are, felt they needed to keep up. So now it was the rare child who didn’t receive some kind of blessing on the day of their birth, or shortly thereafter.

  Of course, with the changing ideals of society, the fairies’ gifts also changed. At one time they might have gifted the small princess with uncommon beauty and grace, or the baby prince with a brave heart and great hair. Now, competing not only against marvelous modern technology, but against one another, their gifts had gotten far more flashy. There were, of course, still children graced with beauty or kindness or the very bluest eyes. Not every fairy was capable of performing powerful magic. But among the stronger fairies, for the last several decades, granting superpowers had come into vogue.

  Chapter 1

  In an interview with Crown Prince Tyrell Andersen, reporters from the Cape Horn Chronicle asked the prince whether he believes the recent string of murders and disappearances could be connected with his sister, the Princess Eirwen’s, disappearance three years ago. While he declined to speculate, the prince did express concern over the horrific killing spree and assurance that he as well as King Everett and other authorities are doing all within their power to uncover the mysterious villain, dubbed The Huntsman, whom they believe responsible.

  In his own words: “While we are devastated that this is happening, and grieving with those who’ve lost loved ones, we’re especially concerned with the number of healers who are missing or confirmed dead at this time. Without our nation’s healers, the death toll could rise even higher, and that’s something we can’t allow to happen. So to all of our people, and to our healers in particular, I’ll say this—please follow safety guidelines. Don’t go out alone. Don’t take chances. Stay safe. We need all of you.”

  Once again, the prince refused to comment on what his plans for catching the serial kidnapper might be, but with the disappearances happening more and more frequently since the beginning of the year, we can only hope he and his team do something soon.

  —Article from the Cape Horn Chronicle, several days ago.

  Will Lark stepped through the sliding glass door of the Cape Horn Children’s Hospital, wrestling a cloud of squeaking, rustling, bouncing helium balloons inside with him. They crowded around his face, painting him in bright splotches of color that filled out his disguise. Sometimes he came in full superhero gear—always different, always ambiguous and unconnected with any popular hero. Sometimes he wore a suit and tie with sunglasses. Sometimes he came in work clothes and a billed cap to shade his face. Other times, it was scrubs and a surgical mask. Today, it was balloons, patchwork pants, and a glaring plaid shirt with an oversized bowtie. Instead of the traditional clown wig, he wore a bowler hat, and an old, ugly pair of glasses with thick blue frames.

  Smiles turned in his direction as he sailed through the waiting area and past the nurse’s station. Anything that would brighten up the eyes of the children was typically welcomed with enthusiasm and few questions. He’d done this so many times he didn’t even flinch when he had to share an elevator with a security guard, though he did make sure to get off at a different floor. Once free, he wandered the hallways, surreptitiously peeking into each room.

  Today, he ventured into the trauma wing. The children's hospital was a strange place, where the taint of despair mingled with the raw brilliance of courage in a cocktail that pinged his senses like detonating fireworks. The air was so full of it he could feel it like smog lingering in the hallways, even while his magic was dormant.

  He stopped outside the door of a small girl, perhaps five or six, who appeared to be asleep, laying far too still with her arms and face mummified in bandages. Burn victim, he guessed. An oxygen tube snaked across her face, and the merest slits of her eyes were visible between the wrappings. Her father sat beside the bed, reading to her.

  Will knocked softly at the open door and then peeled off a balloon, presenting it like a peace offering as he stepped into the room. The father smiled wearily as he took it, setting aside the book. He gave the girl’s leg a squeeze.

  “We have a visitor, Sarah.”

  Her eyes flashed open, blue as the balloon her father tied to the bed rail. She gazed up at Will with bright, glazed eyes.

  Will smiled. “Hey, Sarah. Nice to meet you. Are you up for a little magic?”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Thank you,” said her father. “Anything to cheer her up at this point. Take her mind off… We’ve been trying to get a gifted healer for her, but ever since the kidnappings began, they’ve become hard to find, and even more in demand.”

  “Can’t blame them. It’s hard to heal people when you’re dead.” Will smoothly drew out the deck of cards and launched into a silly routine that was a favorite of the kids. He only needed to hold her attention for a few minutes. Enough to look legit. So he chatted and cracked dumb jokes and made his cards dance and disappear and reappear as gold-foiled chocolate coins from behind her ears, which he stacked on the tray at her elbow. “Those are for later. When you’re up to it.” He winked.

  Finally, he tucked the cards away into his pocket and reached out as though to gather his balloons. Instead, he put his hand over hers, feather-light on top of the layers of gauze. With his other hand he reached up and took off his glasses, smiling. Totally natural.

  “You get better Sarah, okay?”

  “I’ll try,” she whispered.

  Will braced himself as their eyes met. His magic sparked to life instantly, and for a brief instant he was staring into her soul like an open well, murky and troubled with pain, yet still fresh and innocent and hopeful. Like a flare tossed into the well, his magic lit the depth of her eyes with a blue sparkle. And then his vision bloomed with a whole new sight, and he blinked to steady himself against the sudden deluge of light and color and information. He could see Sarah’s body now as a kind of heat signature, a glowing map of colors and shapes and patterns that all fit together so beautifully. He could see her energy coursing through her along its channels, the intricate system of blood vessels, the throb of organs. It was a breathtaking view.

  Except for the burns. They covered far too much of her face, arms, and upper body, fiery, angry red, devastated black, like wastelands of death and still-raging fire.

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get out of here?” he asked, trying to keep it natural. He could see his magic flow into her through his hand on hers, unbothered by the gauze between them—really, he didn’t have to touch her at all, but it was faster and easier if he did. The magic flashed through her in streams of cool blue light that clashed against the fires and quenched them.

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  “Daddy said we could get ice cream.” The girl gave an audible gasp as her pain snuffed out.

  “Awesome. Let me guess, you’re a chocolate girl, right?” He tried to distract her as his magic went to work repairing the damage, cleansing dead tissue, rebuilding, restoring, soothing.

  She giggled, her voice clearer than it had been a moment ago. “Bubble gum.”

  “Bubble gum ice cream.” Will made a face. “Oh man, you just ruined it, kid.”

  The girl’s father laughed. Probably because she laughed.

  “Okay, well, I hope you get your weird bubble gum ice cream soon.” Will withdrew his hand and winked at her. Then he replaced his glasses, gathered his balloons, and was out into the hall in a blink, leaving Sarah’s excited voice behind him, suddenly strong and clear like a child’s voice should be. He put some hustle into his step and ducked into a nearby restroom to avoid the inevitable frantic search by the father. He waited a good fifteen minutes, then strolled out and continued on his way.

  He repeated this process over a dozen times before he felt his steps lagging and his magic growing sluggish. With his feet dragging, he tied off the last few balloons to an abandoned cart and ducked into the nearest bathroom to get rid of his disguise. It would be no good to risk being spotted by an eager parent or nurse on the lookout for a ratty clown. He stuffed the bowler hat and plaid shirt into the garbage bin, along with his patchwork pants. Underneath, he wore a plain white T-shirt and black gym shorts. Pulling his contacts case out of his pocket, he swapped his glasses for them. For all his healing ability, he’d never managed to do anything for his own nearsightedness. It was tied to his magic itself, and remained a bitter reminder of the gifting he’d never wanted.

  Where a raggedy clown had stepped into the bathroom, an unremarkable young man stepped out. His eyes were an unusual shade of green, but otherwise completely normal behind the safety of his contact lenses. His tousled, dirty-blond hair made him look like one of the beach bums that frequented Cape Horn during surfing season. And his medium height and build wouldn’t stand out in any crowd. He slunk out of the hospital without receiving a single glance.

  He’d reached the visitor parking lot and was already thinking about what to grab for dinner on the way home, when someone hailed him.

  “Hey! Wait!”

  Will turned with a groan, recognizing the voice at once.

  Sarah’s father jogged up to him, still exclaiming “Wait, please!”

  Will eyed him. The man wore pressed slacks and a polo shirt that looked and smelled like it had just come from the dry-cleaner. Now that they were out in the sunlight and he didn’t have balloons floating around his head, he spotted a couple of glittering rings on the man’s fingers. A class ring from a high-powered law school, and a jeweled wedding band that shouted big money.

  Big trouble, Will said to himself, and considered making a run for it. But the other man was already extending his hand, either for a handshake or to grab him if he tried to get away.

  “Wait, please. I’d like a word with you.”

  “About what?”

  “Please. Please tell me that wasn’t a trick. Tell me Sarah is really healed.”

  “Of course she is,” said Will, taken aback. “You didn’t look at her?”

  “But you’re not from the hospital. You’re... who are you, please?”

  With a sigh, Will pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to display his healer ID badge. “I’m a certified healer. Your daughter is going to be fine. I promise. Was that all?”

  “But you’re not with the hospital,” said the man again. “Why? I would have paid anything. I’ll still pay you... But they told us there was only one healer working the Cape Horn area now, and that she was maxed out. Same with the whole country. All the healers…”

  “Are going missing and washing ashore dead,” Will filled in. “Yeah, no kidding. I’m an endangered species. Between serial killings and Healer’s Guild nonsense, it’s better to stay incognito, trust me. And if you want to show your appreciation, you can shut up.”

  The other man’s eyes sharpened, going from frazzled father to shrewd businessman in a blink. “The Guild is giving you grief?”

  Will shrugged. “Not much they can do as long as I don’t take any jobs in the medical field.”

  “But why don’t you?” The man seemed to remember himself. “Alex Smith, by the way. I’m an attorney. Healers are the highest paid supers in most parts of the world, yet you just wander around, healing people incognito—for free? Help me understand. I know there’s dissatisfaction within the guilds.”

  Will groaned out a sigh. “Look, do you know how many patients I’d be allowed to heal in a day if I was part of the Guild? Six. Mandatory cutoff for any given shift is six people.” He pointed back at the hospital. “But I just healed fourteen. That’s more than twice what the guild allows, and I barely broke a sweat. So I ask myself, is the Guild really trying to protect its members—or its greed? Even if the average healer could only do eight or ten a day, that’s still a lot more than they’re allowed. Spread the healings thin, make sure we’re always in demand by desperate, rich people. Guild members are only allowed to heal the people selected by the hospital, or maybe ones who get directly through the Guild with bribes and extortion. Do you think Sarah would have been at the top of the list today? What about tomorrow? Would they keep pushing her back because she wasn’t ‘critical’, until the trauma got her, or she developed PTSD? The guild doesn’t care about pain, or scars.”

  Alex had gone pale. “We always dealt with the insurance, or the hospital itself. And with so few healers left in the whole country, I thought that was the reason it was so bad.”

  “If I wait long enough, there won’t be any Guild left to worry about,” Will quipped. “If I don’t get murdered myself.”

  The Guild was run by politicians, for the most part, rather than actual healers, so the chances of that really happening were slim. But it was an amusing thought. More darkly, he wondered what his own chances were of escaping the mysterious serial killer targeting Anderia’s healers.

  “I’d be willing to take your case. I’m even reasonably confident we could make a difference. Get some of the corruption out of the system. My firm is the best in the nation. And you could get a good job.”

  “I have a good job,” Will said, already turning to walk away. “Not all of us love having our profession dictated to us by our magic. Maybe your law firm could take on the fairy court.”

  “Wait,” said Alex again, coming after him. He held out a business card. “If you change your mind, or if you run into any kind of trouble at all.”

  Will took the card. “Does it protect against kidnapping?” He flashed a grin, then turned and strode away. Finally, Alex let him go.

  Back in his car, Will sagged in his seat and puffed out a breath. That hadn’t gone as well as one could hope. Worth it? Of course. He’d just saved a dozen little kids’ lives. But would there be repercussions? Truth told, he always wondered that. But so far there never had been. Perhaps he only fooled himself that he was getting away with it. Perhaps the doctors and nurses saw him and knew him and let him go about his business unbothered because they saw the corruption in the system too. Maybe he was too hard on the Guild with their limits. It had taken him years to realize that other healers could not, in fact, perform more than nine or ten major healings back to back without collapsing.

  With a shrug he started the car and peeled out of the parking lot, laying down rubber through the crosswalk to vent some of his annoyance. The town passed in a blur, and soon he was cruising the coastal road toward home. To his left, a forbidding pine forest gathered gloom around itself like a cloak as twilight settled in. To his right, a guard rail and three feet of rocky ground separated the road from a couple hundred foot drop into the sea. In his rear view mirror he could just see the Cape Horn lighthouse shining out into the dusk before the road bent away.

  One minute his back seat was empty. The next minute, a figure solidified into view in the mirror, directly behind him.

  Will startled. His foot jerked on the gas, making the car rev and leap ahead, while the man in the back seat lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Will’s chest and throat from behind. A thick, glittering ring of diamonds and pale fairy gold flashed on one of the man’s bony fingers. Will saw that in a flash as he struggled. But the arms tightened around him, squeezing him back against the seat with terrible strength while a low, laughing voice said in his ear, “You were a very hard man to find, Will Lark.”

  With one hand Will tried to pry away the arm encircling his neck, but he might as well have tugged on a boa constrictor. The car veered wildly.

  So it had finally happened. He was to be the next victim of the Huntsman, found washed ashore dead. Crushing disappointment overwhelmed his fear, followed quickly by bitter rage. He might be the next dead healer, but he could take this freak with him.

  With that thought, he stomped the gas. The engine roared and the car took off like a rocket down the empty highway. He jerked the wheel suddenly to the right. They crashed through the guardrail. The car sailed out over the cliff’s edge, and everything became deathly quiet. Will’s stomach swooped up into his throat.

  Purple magic crackled around his captor’s arms suddenly, and then the world went out like a snuffed candle.