“I won’t hurt you.” Ray kept his voice low. “I’m wolf,” he added, in case they had missed this, if he was lucky and his gaze had not turned animal. Pain could do that. It was surprisingly easier to deal with pain in a wolf body than a human-seeming one. “I won’t hurt you, but you have to stay back.”
Speaking made his head ache more. He put his hand to his temple as if that would help.
The other one, the human, made a small, shocked sound. The fairy went so still that even his wings didn’t move.
Ray sniffed the air carefully, finding more itchy human magic, already fading, and then a collection of mingled surface scents from the two of them that he momentarily discarded. They did not smell calm, but they weren’t full of panic, either.
He returned his focus to the one who had said his name, his nose and mouth filling with the sweetness from before. If he held it on his tongue, he could label it. The fairy would taste the same.
Ray tossed his head to banish the stray thought.
A mistake.
He stumbled back into the wall as the world spun and his mind went red and hot.
The fairy’s voice became louder. “Ray?Ray?”Now, the fairy was alarmed. Real alarm, since fairies didn’t lie.
Ray immediately straightened and forced his eyes open. “Stay back.” He growled again, accidentally, which was humiliating, but not nearly as much as the realization that he was half-collapsed against the wall.
He was… weak.
Weres didn’t get weak.
The other stranger, the non-fairy, moved, and Ray twitched to see a phone in the man’s hand where there hadn’t been one before. It could have been a weapon and Ray could have been dead by now for all that he’d noticed it. Not that Ray believed someone in pressed slacks and comfortable sweater would be out to kill him, and definitely not while standing next to a fairy.
Fairies didn’t like unpleasant things, or so the stories went. Anything from heartbreak to murder to a paper cut could send a fairy running. They were honest, but hardly committed or faithful. Ray would have said that was as much bullshit as all the tall tales about weres, but he wasn’t often in the village and didn’t interact with fairies much, so he wasn’t sure what was real and what was human-spun nonsense.
“Raymond,“ the fairy said Ray’s name, harder this time. Ray looked at him and bared his teeth. The fairy narrowed his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
Grunting, Ray pulled himself up to his full height. His eyes were likely glowing and he wasn’t entirely certain he could stop them. Usually, the sight made humans uneasy… or aroused. Ray was large and felt larger, standing near the two of them. He was broad and giant next to anything but a troll or a demon.
The muffled sounds in the distance grew sharper, the ringing in his ears falling to a whine. Car radios. Chatter.
“Where’s Penn?” Ray demanded hoarsely. “Detective Del Mar,” he corrected himself. “Where is she?”
The human and the fairy in front of him exchanged another look.
“She’s back there with everyone else,” the human answered, slowly. “She was fine the last we saw her. Which was, like, two minutes ago.”
“What’s wrong?” the fairy broke in, voice rising.
Ray took a deep, sugary breath that made him warm under his suit. “Why do you keep asking me that, fairy?”
The fairy scoffed without taking his eyes off Ray. “Aside from the fact that you called me ‘fairy’ and told us you’re a wolf like we don’t know? I can see your colors, obviously. They’re—Ray,” his wings began to flutter wildly, “tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m standing.” Ray swept a look over the bare chest with its lack of hair and listened to the heart inside it beat in time with those dainty wings. Then he looked up to meet the swirling eyes. “Fairy,” he added, pointedly.
“Cal,“ the human hissed,worry/concern/alarmin his scent now.
“Cal,” Ray echoed, rough. “That’s not a fairy’s name.” The name, like the scent, was heavy in Ray’s mouth and rich in his lungs. It was like everything sweet and comforting, and yet not specifically like anything. The sweetness was warm peach cobbler in the summer, but also terrible chalky candy hearts with words stamped into them. Ray had always hated the taste of those, but had enjoyed, in a squirmy, childlike way, the fall of a box of them into the bucket made of construction paper by his desk in elementary school, to go with the few, frail paper valentines a werewolf child in a human school would receive. He inhaled again and thought of fall, and apple cider donuts, and the ubiquitous pumpkin-flavored everything, which he didn’t even like, or didn’t think he did. The fairy smelled of more than just sugar now that Ray had focused on him. He was also sweat, clean and heady, and roses, somehow, though Ray didn’t pay much attention to flowers and too many roses had always felt overwhelming to his senses.
“A fairy’s name is whatever they say it is,” the fairy—Cal—corrected, with a sting in the words. But then he exhaled a shaking breath and said, “Callalily.” His friend reached out, as if to touch his arm, only to freeze when Ray briefly turned toward him. The fairy closed his eyes, then opened them. “Callalily,” he introduced himself again, voice like a bruise.
“Callalily? Ray repeated, tasting that as well. His heartbeat slowed, his headache easing. “Purity,” he remembered aloud. “Faithfulness.” Some flowers had meanings ascribed to them by fairies or by humans, once upon a time. Ray wasn’t sure where he had picked up the meaning of a gift of a calla lily, but the scrap of information had probably been for a case.
Callalily put a hand to his throat. “You... you know flower meanings?”
Ray didn’t. Except that apparently, he did. He clenched his jaw and said nothing.
