The Fey Read online



  The Fey

  Claudia Hall Christian

  Cook Street Publishing

  Denver, CO

  By Claudia Hall Christian

  ALEX THE FEY SERIES

  (AlextheFey.com)

  The Fey

  Learning to Stand

  Who I Am

  Lean on Me

  In the Grey

  THE DENVER CEREAL

  (DenverCereal.com)

  The Denver Cereal

  Celia’s Puppies

  Cascade

  Cimarron

  Black Forest

  Fairplay

  Gold Hill

  The queen of cooL

  (theQueenofCool.com)

  The Queen of Cool

  Seth and Ava Mysteries

  (Seth and Ava Mysteries)

  The Tax Assassin

  Copyright © Claudia Hall Christian

  Licensed under the Creative Commons License:

  Attribution—NonCommercial—Share Alike 3.0

  You are free :

  to Share—to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work

  to Remix—to make derivative works

  For more information, go to: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

  ISBN (13 digits) : 978-0-9822746-6-8

  (10 digits) : 0-9822746-6-1

  Library of Congress : 2009909008 (print)

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Third edition © June 2013

  Cook Street Publishing

  PO Box 18217

  Denver, CO 80218

  CookStreetPublishing.com

  For the Silent Partner.

  If you were truly silent,

  the Fey would never exist.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THRITY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PROLOGUE

  October 8—12:42 P.M.

  Paris, France

  “This is it?”

  “We thought you’d like to see a familiar face,” her childhood friend said. His bright cricket smile flashed across his face.

  “Well, they got it wrong in Catholic School.”

  His top hat bounced on his head when he nodded. Adjusting his ascot, he held a white-gloved hand out to her.

  “Take my hand.”

  “What about the others?” She pulled her hand to her chest. “Don’t you have to take them first?”

  “Except for one, they have moved on,” he said. “It’s your time.”

  “I think I’ll stay here.”

  Jiminy Cricket’s head fell back in laughter. The buttons on his vest strained against the gale.

  “I am thirty years old,” she said through her teeth. “I am a Special Forces Intelligence Officer. I am a Sergeant in the United States Army. They call me the Fey. My name is . . .”

  The lights came on. The cricket faded.

  She was sitting cross-legged with her best friend’s head in her lap. Touching his face, she confirmed what she already knew. Sergeant Jesse Abreu was dead. She collapsed back against the door to the limestone vault. She would join him soon.

  Her heart jumped. There was movement inside the vault. Someone had survived! Shifting her torso toward the vault, Jesse’s head ground further into the gaping wounds on her left hip. She clamped her mouth shut against the scream forming in her throat.

  Overwhelmed with pain, her focus slipped. The cricket’s smiling face came into view again. She screwed up her face and squinted.

  She was not dying.

  Not yet.

  Her beloved childhood friend laughed and fanned her with his umbrella.

  She was sitting in the doorway again.

  “I wondered if you were alive,” a slight, dark-haired man said in Arabic. “Don’t move.”

  Pressing the muzzle of a handgun against her forehead, he kneeled in front of her. His hand reached under her jacket. Pulling her dog tags from under her T-shirt, he jerked the secondary tag from the longer chain.

  “From the look of things, you’ll be dead soon enough.”

  He rummaged through Jesse’s shirt until he found Jesse’s dog tags. He ripped his secondary dog tag from its chain. The man held eleven dog tags in front of her face.

  “You’re quite valuable.” Holstering the handgun, he stood and looked back into the vault. “Now, where can I find that security token? No token, no payment.”

  “Gosh, I wish I could help you.” She replied in Hebrew, knowing it would make him angry. She opened and closed her eyes in an attempt to bat her large brown eyes.

  “Yes, fuck me.” The man sneered then kicked Jesse’s dead body. Continuing in Arabic, he said, “I’m not the one who is fucked. You should be grateful. Death is preferable to what is planned for you. Just give me the token, and we’re even.”

  She glared at him. Under Jesse’s body, she slipped her hand into her pocket to find her Zippo lighter.

  “No matter. You’ll be dead in a few minutes.”

  Drawing on her deepest reserves, she jerked her torso left causing the man to look into the vault. With a quick flip of her right hand, the lighter bounced down the dark limestone hallway. When the man jumped after the lighter, she pulled a small journal from inside her jacket. Tucking the journal deep into the front pocket of Jesse’s shirt, she sagged forward.

  “Nice try, Fey. I have the token.” The man bent and kissed her cheek. “Thanks. With this, I can afford that house in the South of France.”

  The man’s expression turned to disgust when he noticed he was holding a St. Christopher medallion on a secondary dog tag. Spitting on the medallion, he threw it into the pool of blood forming around her. She grabbed for the St. Christopher, the only gift Jesse ever received from his mother. With his foot, the man moved the medallion just out of her reach and smirked.

  “I am sorry. I did like your team . . . and you.”

  “If you like me so much, why not just kill me now?” she asked in Hebrew.

  “I am not a killer. I am merely a businessman.”

  “You hire people to do your killing. You must have known that I would kill him.”

  “In fact, I predicted that, if we left you alive, you would kill our associate. But you were to be left alive.” He shrugged as if to say that the shooter’s death was a reasonable business expense. Looking into the vault, he said, “Did you have to shoot him in the head? So messy.”

  Pull
ing a neck gaiter up over his mouth and nose, the man retreated into the blood-drenched vault. He glanced around the vault and then began rummaging through a stack of clean clothing. Finding what he needed, he wrapped the shooter’s head with T-shirts.

  The man jerked to a stop.

  Footsteps in the hallway!

  Through drooping eyes, she watched him press into a dark corner of the vault.

  “Take my hand,” Jiminy Cricket said. “It is time.”

  She took the gloved hand and looked into the cricket’s beloved face.

  “Can we sing?” she asked.

  “Of course,” her cricket said, as he began singing her favorite song, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

  They sang as they rose through five floors of limestone tunnels and into the building above. They were floating through the bright fall Paris day when a male voice joined in their song.

  “Max,” she whispered her identical twin’s name.

  A strong, deep voice, with a distinctive London accent, joined the song.

  “John,” she whispered her husband’s name.

  Like a beacon, their voices called her home.

  Turning to Jiminy Cricket, she let go of his hand. With death on her tail, she dove back to the pain. She leapt toward the horror. She pushed her spirit back into her broken body.

  Feeling a brush across her lips, Alexandra “The Fey” Hargreaves opened her eyes.

  F