36. They Called it the Feyra!

Chapter 36: They called it the Feyra

They crouched in the weeds a long while after Kaplan had gone, neither of them speaking, both turning the same ugly shape over in their heads until Freya finally broke the silence.

"She's been playing everyone," Freya said, low. "The sweet old caretaker act, the concern for the children, sending Eto off to investigate her own home like she's got nothing to hide. It's perfect cover. Nobody looks twice at a crippled old woman."

"And Kaplan's her errand boy." Mikaela's hands had curled into fists in the dirt. "Pays her, works with her, feeds her information, maybe even helps cover for whatever she is. That's why he pushed us onto this job in the first place. Not because he cared about the kids. Because he needed someone strong enough to handle whatever she needed handled, and dumb enough not to ask too many questions."

"We have what we need." Freya rose slow, brushing weeds off her knees, eyes still on the house. "The coin exchange. The timing. Kael and Lyra both connected to her directly, both gone the same week we started poking around. That's enough to bring to Alaric, or enough to confront her ourselves and see what she says when she's cornered."

"So we have no choice, we confront her." Mikaela's jaw set. "Tonight."

They went back after dark, the yard empty and quiet under a moon half swallowed by cloud, and found Elara's window still lit, a low warm glow behind old glass. Freya knocked once, sharp, and didn't wait for an answer before pushing the door open.

Elara sat where she always sat, near the dying fire, shawl drawn close, and she looked up at the two of them with nothing but mild surprise on her face.

"Girls," she said. "It's rather late for visiting."

"We saw you," Mikaela said, no preamble, no circling. "This afternoon. You and Kaplan. We saw him hand you money."

Something flickered behind Elara's eyes, there and gone. "Did you now."

"Don't." Mikaela stepped further into the room. "Don't do the sweet old lady thing right now. We know he's working with you. We know you've been paying him, or he's been paying you, either way there's coin moving between the two of you and two people are dead and my, and Eto is sitting in a cell for it. So you're going to tell us the truth, right now, or so help me."

Elara didn't flinch. She set her folded hands into her lap, calm, patient, and looked between the two of them with something that might have been sadness. "I have no idea what you think you saw. But if it was coin passing hands, then yes. He pays me. He has for years."

"Convenient."

"He grew up in this home," Elara said, steady. "Same as Kael did. Different years, but the same walls, the same beds gone cold in winter, the same too little food stretched too thin. When he made his way out of the slums and started earning proper coin, he came back. Quietly. Started leaving money for the children. New blankets. Extra grain when the harvest ran short. He's done it every month for six years now, and he's never once wanted thanks for it, never wanted anyone to know, because he said knowing where he came from was shame enough without the whole city knowing it too." Her voice hadn't risen once. "That's what you saw. A man giving money to an old woman so children he used to be one of don't go hungry."

The room went quiet.

Mikaela's certainty, so solid a moment ago, had a crack running through it now, and she hated how fast it had come.

"You expect us to just believe that," she said, though the fire had gone out of it.

"I expect nothing from you but what you decide to give me." Elara's eyes moved between them, weighing something. "But you didn't come here in the middle of the night over a pouch of coin. Something else has you frightened. Tell me."

Freya answered before Mikaela could stop herself from softening further. "The attacks. The thing that threw Eto through two walls in two nights. Kael and Lyra, both gone, no bodies, nothing left behind. Someone on a rooftop this morning, standing beside Kaplan, watching Eto get dragged off in chains."

Elara went very still.

"A figure," she said. "Robed. Dark."

"You've seen it?"

"I have not seen it." Elara's hands had tightened in her lap. "But I have been looking for it. First I thought it was Kael, then I thought it was Lyra. That is why I sent your big guy after her. For weeks now. Ever since the first child went quiet, I could not accept it as illness, not the way it happened, not the way their eyes went empty all at once like something had reached in and simply taken what made them them. I've been watching. Listening. Tracking which children it happens to and when, trying to find the pattern in it, because an old woman with useless legs cannot chase shadows across rooftops, but she can sit very still and notice things." Her eyes lifted, fixed hard on both of them now. "I know who it is. I know where it hides."

Unofficial copy! This story was published elsewhere by its author and copied here without anyone asking them.

"Tell us."

"Finn," Elara said.

Mikaela laughed, short, disbelieving. "Finn? The super energy boy? The boy who couldn’t stay still to safe his life? The boy who climbed all over Eto like he was a tree. That Finn?"

"I would not believe it either, if I had not seen what I've seen." Elara pushed herself up from the chair with effort, reaching for her cane. "I heard about the arrest on the big Keth earlier today and the sudden disappearance of Kael last night and this morning when I woke up, there was no Lyra. After you two left last night after the incident with Bram, I was very suspicious and last night I saw Finn walking the halls alone. So when I heard of Kael and Lyra this morning, I decided to follow him and what I found was disturbing to say the least. You don't have to believe me. I'll show you instead."

She led them through the dark house, past sleeping rooms full of children curled small under thin blankets, down a back hallway Mikaela hadn't noticed on either visit, to a section of wall that looked, to every appearance, exactly like the rest of the stone around it. Elara pressed her palm flat against a particular block, low near the floor, and something gave way with a grinding shudder, a section of wall swinging inward on a hinge worn smooth by more years than either of them could guess at.

"This home is old," Elara said, voice dropped to a whisper now. "Older than anyone remembers. There's a cellar beneath it that predates the building itself, sealed off for longer than I've been alive. I found this passage years ago, it has been sealed for lack of staff."

The stairs beyond were narrow, cut crude into old stone, and the air that rose up to meet them was cold enough to raise gooseflesh, carrying with it a smell like wet earth and something else beneath it, faint, sweetish, wrong.

They descended in silence. Elara went slow on the uneven steps, cane tapping careful ahead of each footfall, and neither Mikaela nor Freya rushed her, both gripped now by a dread too heavy for hurry.

The passage at the bottom ran long and low, forcing even Freya to duck in places, and it opened at last into a chamber so much larger than anything above it seemed impossible, the ceiling lost somewhere up in shadow, torchlight from somewhere ahead throwing long shapes across walls carved with symbols none of them recognized.

Mikaela saw the bodies first and had to bite down hard on the sound that wanted to come out of her.

Kael and Lyra hung near the ceiling, suspended in the dark with no rope, no chain, nothing visible holding them at all, limbs loose, heads tipped back, floating there like puppets whose strings had gone slack. Alive. Chests moving, slow and shallow. Unconscious.

"Oh gods," Freya breathed. "Oh gods, they're alive."

A sound came from the far side of the chamber. Soft footsteps, small, unhurried. Finn walked out of the dark.

But it wasn't Finn, not really, not in the way his body moved, slow and vacant, none of the constant motion that usually filled him, eyes flat and empty as he crossed toward the center of the room and simply stopped.

Then he began to change.

His small frame stretched, bones lengthening with a sound like wet wood cracking, robes bleeding into existence around him out of nothing at all, black cloth pouring up from his shoulders like ink through water. Colour drained from him as he grew, skin going the grey white of old bone, until what stood in the chamber's center bore no resemblance to the boy who'd climbed Eto's shoulders and begged them to visit again.

It floated. Inches off the stone, robes hanging still despite no wind to move them.

Mikaela's stomach turned to ice. "That's it. That's the thing from the rooftop."

The creature didn't turn toward them. It drifted instead to where Kael and Lyra hung suspended and reached up, gentle, achingly gentle, and drew them both down into its arms, cradling one against each side of its narrow chest the way a mother might hold sleeping children.

It made a sound then, low, keening, not a scream, nothing like the wave of pressure that had torn through walls, just a soft moan of something that sounded, impossibly, like grief.

Elara caught both their arms and pulled them back into the passage, slow, careful not to let a single footstep scrape stone, and the creature never so much as glanced their way, lost entirely in whatever private sorrow it carried down there in the dark with its stolen children in its arms.

They didn't speak again until they were back in Elara's warm little room, door shut, and even then it was a long moment before anyone found their voice.

"I've seen one in person before," Elara said finally, and her hands were shaking now, the calm she'd worn like armor cracked clean through. "Fifty years ago. I traveled south with this Adventurer named Luciel. in my youth, down past the great desert to the southern kingdoms at the edge of the continent, and there were stories there, old stories, mothers frightening children with them the way we frighten ours with tales of banshees. They called it the Feyra."

"The Feyra," Freya repeated.

"A demon out of Tartaros. Far south, past even the kingdoms I visited, a continent most sailors won't chart near." Elara's eyes had gone distant, pulled back fifty years into memory. "It's a shapeshifter. It grows strong by feeding on children, on their youth, their energy, taking it through sound the way we take breath through air. It leaves them hollow. Quiet. And it doesn't stop with children, not once it's strong enough. It reaches for the adults who protect them next, and it doesn't kill them either. It makes them its own. Turns them slowly into smaller versions of itself. Minions."

"Kael and Lyra," Mikaela said, the words coming out numb.

"Being made into more of it," Elara said. "Yes. I believe that's what's happening to them right now, in that chamber."

Freya's hand had gone to the hilt of her sword without her seeming to notice, knuckles white around it. "Then we don't have time to wait for an army from the capital."

"No," Elara said, quiet, final. "We don't. We have to stop it ourselves. We have to save them, all of them, before there's nothing left of Kael or Lyra to save at all."