F is for FALLEN_THE LAST FAE

Fallen, the last fae.

She is a recurring character in many of my novels:

RITES OF PASSAGE, ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM, the LOVE LIKE DEATH quartet of urban/epic fantasies, THE BEAR WITH 2 SHADOWS, and the heroine of her very own THE LAST FAE.

Here is a snippet from the chapter, LIES THAT LOCUST TELL, from THE LAST FAE:

The pebble shot from between my thumb and forefinger like a bullet straight into the barred window. An electric circuit died, wailing its death song in tones higher than humans could hear. I smiled like a wolf. We would have visitors soon.

More the pity for them.

I drew in a breath from the cold breeze bleeding from the wounded window. The sharp tang of Autumn. Oak. Ash. Thorn. Decay. Rotting leaves, mottled in bright hues of strangled life.

The dark and bloody soil beneath them breathed out its lineage. An aching sadness hollowed out my chest. The Misty Isles. Albion. England.

I whispered, the words feeling like dewdrops of blood on a wounded deer, "The lonely season in lonely lands."

Clover kept studying me. I wondered what she saw. One human in a generation saw me as I was. The rest of the herd saw only what they were looking for. And I? What was I looking for?

I turned to the face reflected in the barred window. Certainly not that. Not that.

High cheekbones, seemingly intent on bursting up and out of flesh that shimmered as if coated with stardust. A living waterfall of honey-wheat hair, looking more like a lion's mane than any other earthly phrase I could use.

My eyes. I shivered looking at them though they were my own. Large, slanted fae eyes chilling even me with their lack of warmth or mercy. Their color the burnt-out ends of ancient days.

From beyond the wounded window I heard a mournful singing. Nightingales. Far off and forlorn. To do a service for a Sidhe was a fearsome thing indeed, never to be done lightly nor without cost.

But before the field mouse found that out I would do her a kindness. I smiled bitter. A breaking of tradition, true, but I broke every rule I could not bend.

I brought the faint, bittersweet song to the ears of the field mouse and murmured lines from the poet she so liked,

"Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams;
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art."
***