Chapter 7

  School Lunches.

  I slipped on the last flight of stairs and went down hard, the world flipping end over end as I tumbled. I didn’t stop rolling until instinct kicked in and I turned the spill into a sprint, boots hammering the floor as I tore down the corridor.

  Behind me, the Alp Luachra hit the stairs and didn’t bother obeying physics. It skittered along the wall like gravity was just a suggestion, claws clicking, body scraping, wrong in every way a thing could be.

  I scanned the walls as I ran, hunting for a sign, anything that pointed to the cafeteria. If I was going to lose this thing, or kill it, that room was my best bet.

  The Alp Luachra gurgled, wet and eager. Closer than I liked. Too close by any measure.

  I hit a T-junction and there it was: double doors squatting in the centre, CAFETERIA stencilled above them like a promise I didn’t quite trust.

  I would’ve sighed in relief if I hadn’t had a malicious faeling biting at my heels.

  I burst through the doors and expected resistance. Didn’t get it. The hinges swung wide and I went down again, sliding across the cafeteria floor until I slammed into the first bench.

  I hauled myself up, lungs burning, grabbed the bench, and dragged it against the doors just as the faeling hit.

  The impact rattled the wood like a gunshot. Its lamprey mouth slapped onto the window, suctioning tight, teeth grinding as it heaved its weight forward. I didn’t wait to see if it would hold.

  I dashed for another table, muscles screaming, and shoved that into place too. Wood scraped, metal shrieked, and I backed away, breathing hard, praying the combined weight would be enough to keep the Alp Luachra out.

  Pans clattered somewhere in the kitchen and I spun, eyes cutting through the dark. I dropped low and moved toward the noise, quick but careful, every step measured. My heart was trying to punch its way out of my chest as the door ahead of me rattled and shook.

  “Sam?” I called out. “That better be you.”

  The kitchen looked like a riot had passed through and gotten hungry halfway. Pans and produce littered the floor. Bulk tins lay split open, metal peeled back and tossed aside by someone who didn’t care about cuts or waste.

  Something was feeding.

  I heard packaging tear, wet gulps, the desperate rhythm of swallowing followed by harsh, choking breaths.

  I crept forward, slow and steady.

  Two shapes moved in the half-light, tearing into the food with bare hands. Raw, frozen, cooked, it didn’t matter. They shovelled it down like the world was ending and they were trying to eat it first.

  One of them wore a security uniform. Or what was left of one. Bloated belly. Stretched fabric. One of the missing officers.

  I edged around the shelving, keeping grills and counters between us, scanning for salt—bags, if I could contaminate the food with salt, the host should vomit up the Alp Luachra.

  Failing that I could douse them in salt as they reacted to it like a slug

  Then they stopped.

  The officer let out a screech that curdled the air turning toward me.

  Where his mouth should have been was a lamprey maw, wide, gaping, permanently open. It looked fused to his face with mucus and slime, flesh and faeling welded together into something obscene.

  That wasn’t right.

  These things weren’t supposed to get this big.

  It shambled forward, dragging the night behind it, a low gurgle rattling up from somewhere deep and broken. Bloodshot eyes skated across the room, never settling, while mashed food and spit leaked from its open maw like something it couldn’t hold onto anymore.

  I didn’t move. Not a muscle. I let the darkness do the talking, prayed its gaze would slide right past me. Another gurgle crawled out of its throat, stretching into a long, pitiful whine before it turned away and shuffled toward the cafeteria.

  I tracked it with my eyes as it slipped through the door, crossing the serving line and drifting toward the far end of the room. One down.

  I glanced back at the other shadow still there, still feeding. It tore through food with a sick devotion, the kind you only see when hunger’s gone feral. I started easing toward the pantry, slow and quiet, like the floor might rat me out.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  I was almost there when it happened.

  Sam slammed his palms onto the metal worktable. The sound cracked through the kitchen like thunder over a dead city. A gurgling cry followed raw, angry. I froze and watched as he clawed through the empty tins, scraping for leftovers that didn’t exist. Every wet gurgle sounded like a sob, every breath a wail.

  That’s when I saw his face.

  Distorted. Familiar.

  It was Sam.

  His eyes were still there alert, aware, trapped behind the wheel while something else drove. His body was just a rented room now, playing host to the faeling. Whatever came next in my plan, it wasn’t going to be kind. Not to him. Not to me.

  I slipped into the pantry. It looked like a bomb had gone off, shelves gutted, supplies scattered. But in the wreckage, I spotted a few bags still untouched.

  Salt.

  Now I just needed to make Sam eat it.

  I grabbed one and headed back into the kitchen. Sam was still digging through scraps, fingers slick with grease and blood from broken glass and torn tins. He didn’t look up, focused on his desperate feeding.

  I scanned the floor, at the remaining food, my options, looked as slim as the pickings. I couldn’t see a way to trick him into eating nearly a pound of salt willingly. The bag was too unbalanced to throw with any accuracy.

  Second guessing wouldn’t help anyone.

  I bull rushed him.

  We hit the floor hard, skidding across tile as he clawed and punched, strength coming from someplace that wasn’t human. I jammed the bag into the gaping maw and poured, forcing salt past teeth and slime.

  He went into convulsions.

  The Alp Luachra screamed in a guttural gurgle. Its mucus membrane began to break down, flesh liquefying as it fought its way free of Sam’s body. The skin around Sam’s mouth turned redraw, blistered, burned. His jaw hung dislocated from the bulk of the thing as it regurgitated everything it had forced Sam to feed it.

  The faeling made it halfway to the kitchen door, dragging itself towards water, before its body lost cohesion. It collapsed its body now a putrid slurry of slime and mucus, stinking up the tiles like a bad memory.

  Sam lay there breathing hard, drifting in and out. I hauled him onto a worktop and checked him over before finding a first aid kit on the wall. For once, luck showed up sober.

  “Sorry, Sam,” I muttered. “This is going to hurt.”

  I braced his jaw, thumbs on his back teeth, fingers supporting the hinge, and pressed. He groaned, a small, broken sound, as I eased it back into place. I bandaged it tight, smeared burn cream over blistered skin, and wrapped it up to keep it protected.

  And to keep anything else from trying to crawl inside.

  Damn, I hated faelings.

  Most folks painted them as pranksters, mischievous spirits with impish natures. That was the fairy-tale version. The truth was uglier, sharper, it was lies, all of it. Faelings weren’t playful. They were hungry. They didn’t prank you; they tested you, the way a butcher presses a thumb into meat to see where it gives.

  Faelings didn’t laugh with you. They laughed while they peeled you apart, Fae needed people for their own goals, it was never benevolent.

  I braced myself against the stainless-steel worktop as the world tilted; the room doing a slow, ugly spin like it was deciding whether to drop me on my face. Darkness crowded the corners of my vision, thick and hungry, threatening to snuff the lights out. I clenched my jaw and waited it out. Passing out now would’ve been a kindness I couldn’t afford.

  When my senses finally staggered back into line, the slamming at the cafeteria doors had gone quiet. Too quiet. I lifted my head and stared out from the kitchen’s shadows into the moonlit hall beyond.

  Silver light spilled across overturned tables and smeared footprints, and dread settled into my gut like a bad debt I knew was coming due.

  Where the hell was Veronica?

  She should’ve been with Sam. She always was when things went sideways. I told myself she’d stayed with the car, smart, safe. Being incorporeal undead gave her a long list of advantages, most of them involving not having a body to ruin. But magic didn’t care about those loopholes.

  Fey magic didn’t care about bodies. It unravelled essence. It peeled ghosts apart thread by thread until there was nothing left but a memory that couldn’t remember itself

  I staggered to the sink as bile clawed its way up my throat. Twisting the tap, I leaned over then froze.

  Instead of water, a thick brown sludge coughed its way out, stinking of sulphur and rot. The pipes screamed as if whatever was inside them wanted out, a wounded animal’s whine echoing through the kitchen. I killed the tap with a grunt, wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve and trying not to think about what that meant. The place was rotting from the inside out.

  My eyes drifted back to Sam, laid out on the worktop like yesterday’s news. The sight of him hit harder than the nausea. My shoulders sagged under the weight of it all, the bodies, the silence, the certainty that none of this was random.

  Grim had fingerprints all over this mess, I was sure of it.

  Faelings didn’t just wander in off the street. They were drawn, called. And Grim’s obsession with carving out a brand new Fae Realm was like blood in the water. Where he went, they followed.

  I grabbed the remaining bulk bags of salt and went to work. my hands shook as the ward locked into place, a clean, unbroken ring around Sam and the table, old magic, simple and stubborn. Salt didn’t ask questions. It just did its job, anchoring things that wanted to slip sideways.

  I slung the heaviest sack over my shoulder and headed out of the kitchen, following the path the first victim had shuffled toward.

  Two sets of double doors waited at the end of the hall. One hung open, swinging gently in the night breeze, its hinge twisted and broken like a snapped bone. I poured a thick line of salt across the threshold while muttering my chant, sealing it off from anything thinking of coming, or going, through that way. The air hissed softly as the ward bit down.

  I crossed the courtyard at a jog, the moon hanging low and swollen overhead, moonlight glinting off cracked concrete, casting shadows that lagged behind their owners.

  The gymnasium loomed ahead, brick walls in the dark looking as if they were breathing slow and deep, like a thing pretending not to be awake, in hopes to lure in prey.

  Inside, the building was carved up into its usual pieces: swimming pool, basketball court, gymnastics area, each with its own changing rooms. Familiar spaces, now wrong, as if the space felt folded wrong. Distances stretched. Corners bent when I wasn’t looking. The smell of chlorine from the pool mixed with something older, wetter. Drowned things.

  I headed straight for the pool.

  As I reached the doors to the pool and changing rooms, I pressed my back to the wall and listened. Nothing but my own breathing and the distant hum of something alive where it shouldn’t be. Then I heard it, soft splashing, far too slow to be water, like something moving under the surface that didn’t need to breathe.

  I poured salt across both doorways, my voice dropping to a low mutter as I whispered the chant. The ward settled in with a quiet finality, sealing the exits tight.

  If there were faelings in there, they weren’t leaving this way.