Of course it couldn’t be that easy, who was I kidding?
“Sir, this thing is dying, I need something to put it back together or this mission will fail.” I looked up, pleading, hoping to spot some sort of camera or monitor that would give me a clue as to what was happening.
“Unless that is the purpose of the trial, to set me to fail? To have this faerie die here?”
Another minute of silence that almost gave me a heart attack.
“Cloutie root will be delivered in the next hour along with dosage instructions,” the voice, my mysterious superior, announced before shutting the connection.
I groggily gave up my cosy bed to turn off the tablet’s alarm and prepare the Cloutie tea, a ritual I had become able to perform in my sleep.
Cloutie root is going to take effect within twenty-four hours, to be boiled for ten minutes and given to the subject as and when needed.
That made me excited on the first day and I hurried to make the tea and follow the instructions, eager to get the faerie healed and talking.
I used another straw and placed it gently in the faerie’s mouth, urging it to start sucking the healing drink. It took it a while to react and even longer for its lips to start moving, but when it did, I swear I heard angels singing. The mug emptied in a few minutes, and I found myself spending the entire day checking on the subject. On the hour.
To see no improvement.
Of course, I made another tea, and when the second one did not work, I made another. And another. For three days.
With absolutely no effect.
I knew all about the Cloutie trees and how precious they were for the faeries. The purest plants to ever exist, highly protected. Given to them by their Earth goddess, Catalina after her passing as a way to keep them safe and protected. Legend says that the early faeries used to hang their clothes on the Cloutie trees and wait for the connecting energies to discover the injuries in their bodies and regenerate it.
It must have been amazing to have healing trees hanging around and use them whenever you had a scratch, broke a leg or even slept wrong. Not something we could find nowadays. Cloutie trees were protected and kept away, in special and top-secret locations and I wondered how much the bag of roots I had received must have cost.
Which again, raised the question of funding for this operation. Who in the hell had so much money to invest in a full bag of Cloutie and give this faerie as much as it needed to be healed?
I still had no answers about the faerie, but I reached the conclusion that Gale must be its name. The tablet did not help to identify another species and judging by the delayed effect the Cloutie tea had on it, I decided it must have been one of the subspecies of the main faeries. Its muscles started to regenerate, covering the old injuries in some sort of pink jelly, which made me think that it was preparing to grow scales, tree bark or some sort of hard cover.
I had tried to move it a few times, but every time I suggested it and approached the faerie to touch it, it groaned in pain. I also feared infection, dragging it and creating more injury, so I decided to leave it on the floor, just like the first day and offer it a pillow and a blanket. It did not touch them, preferring the hard surface.
The tablet alarm started buzzing again, this time with the notification that announced a new instruction, making me run to check the screen.
“Meet Gale.”
Only this time, something new appeared: a subtext with grey lettering, barely noticeable on the white background.
Instruction to be completed in two hours.
I had already met the faerie and cared for it for four days, so I wasn’t sure what this instruction referred to. Nonetheless, I decided to follow my routine and start preparing the morning dose of Cloutie tea, checking the faerie on my way to the kitchen.
Something shifted, the energy in the room buzzed with excitement, even the electricity felt more potent all of a sudden. I instantly hurried to the faerie, expecting to find the pile of growing meat I got used to checking on in the past few days.
Instead, a muscled backside, fully covered with skin appeared from under the blanket, dark hair branching out on the pillow.
A male, I barely breathed. Gale was a fae male.
My fingers tightened, causing the tablet to fall on the wooden floor with an echoing thump. Which in turn caused the faerie to draw a sharp breath. Waking him up.
My legs rooted themselves in that spot, making my muscles unable to move or react. My entire body strained, this new information changing everything, even the way I drew breath or apparently, reacted.
It couldn’t be, they could not give me a fae male.
I blinked a few times, eyes straining to spot anything out of place, anything that might make me wrong in my assumption, but every visible part of the new body marked what I already knew. What my eyes refused to acknowledge. Perfection.
“I am not going to fuck him for information,” I burst out, not caring who heard me, the message solely directed at PDD. If there was one thing that proved always valid for fae males, sex was like their oxygen. They were made for it, built for it, excellent at it.
