The Girl from the Caves

  It was a dark and stormy night. Probably-maybe. Hamish hadn’t left the barn in a couple of days, so he wasn’t entirely sure on the weather, but it may as well have been dark and stormy. Hamish felt dark and stormy, deep in his soul.

  An ominous scraping sound pulled his attention away from the baby rabbits he was nurturing. They scattered to the four corners of the pen and then immediately squished into the space between Hamish and the wall he leaned against.

   “I have to get up,” he apologized. He could hear more scraping — a wood crate sliding across a rough-hewn wood floor — and the mind of his dad, Nell, pushing the crate and thinking of Hamish.

  His skin crawled. Not that his dad was bad, but he didn’t like being thought of, in general. Thoughts led to actions, and Hamish was in permanent hiding from society. He’d already fallen apart once, fallen into a world of drink and drugs and sex.

  He’d pulled himself out of that, dated in a serious way that he’d thought was both intense and irrevocable, and he’d still messed it up.

  It took every ounce of his willpower to walk the line between holding himself together and shattering. People-avoidance facilitated his ability to stay on the non-drug side of that line, so he hid — in the fields, in the barn, in his barn-loft-apartment.

  Now his dad needed him, wanted to involve him in a project. Dread — the fear of the living — coalesced in his veins and in the panicked racing of his heart.

  He shouldn’t be afraid of people. They were just mammals. They had predictable behaviors and the same bodily needs as every other living organism. It might not have been the person. People weren’t any different from rabbits — rabbits with sharp-toothed souls and agendas that twisted ugliness around until it resembled beauty, prepackaged for one another to consume. This time it was the silence. His dad wasn’t sharing what was in the box, what demands he would put on Hamish. No, he was silent on that matter. Only the scraping, the heaviness implied by a thunk, gave any clue as to what was in store.

  Something twisted in Hamish’s gut. He stepped out of the barn stall.

  His dad stood in the wide main corridor of the barn, lead lines draped over his shoulder and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. In front of him, a crate large enough to hold a human loomed at the end of a line of drag marks.

  “New inventory?’ Hamish asked, eyes and mind on the crate. There were no coherent thoughts from the crate, just animal drive — a desire to protect young, an unholy and insidious terror, a pain because it had dug its claws into the wood.

  His dad patted the top of the crate with featherlight fingers so the creature inside wouldn’t be scared. “This is for you. Can you assist me?”

  For him?

  Unless it was a video game system or the deed to a faraway house where Hamish could avoid everyone for the rest of forever, he didn’t want it.

  “Sure,” he said.

  He didn’t want it, but he didn’t want his dad dealing with it on his own, either. 

  “It’s not my birthday,” he pointed out begrudgingly. 

  With a pry bar — and an unearthly shriek of metal against wood that sent the crated animal into a cringe of terror — his dad wrenched the lid off one corner of the crate. “It isn’t a present, per se. It’s more of a project. I know you’ve been having a difficult go of it, and your present also hasn’t had the easiest time.”

  Was it a present, or not? The contradiction made his skin crawl. He wanted simple, and this was the opposite of simple.

  His dad slid the heavy barn door closed across the barn’s maw, leaving them in near-darkness. “Can you see?” he asked.

  “Yes.” He peered into the open corner of the crate. “Is it a spider?”

  He was hopeful — too hopeful. Spiders were easy for him, and his dad intended this to be a project. It was probably whatever the animal opposite of a spider was.

  Rather than answer, his dad pried the nails out of the other three corners and the walls of the crate fell away, leaving a floomf of dust in their wake.

  Inside the crate, concealed in the natural shadows of the barn, crouched a humanoid. Not any humanoid — a very pregnant female fairy.

  She ducked her head, peering at Hamish out of the corner of her eyes, an almost feral expression on her face.

  Hamish stepped back. “Why is this for me?”

  He didn’t want it. Her. Whatever. He wasn’t made for dealing with humans or fairies or anyone else, as he’d proved time and again. He wasn’t made for projects, for molted beings whose thoughts were chaotic spurts of waves instead of coherent words.

  “She needs help,” his dad said, as if it could be that simple, “She needs to be kept quiet. No one can know she is here.”

  “Can I be part of no one?” Hamish begged.

 The woman cringed more. A shimmer of fire flickered across her skin as the air in the barn swirled 

  He sighed. “You want me to hide her? In my apartment?”

  “You do have a spare bedroom,” was his dad’s only answer.

  The woman stared at them both, her eyes white almonds in the shadows, splinters of fear and resignation lighting the otherwise peaceful night. 

  “Does it talk?” She, he corrected himself, but he let the sentence hang as it was.

  “Yes,” she said in a raspy, tentative voice. “I can talk.”

  Those eyes pierced him, knowing in a way only the more intelligent animals were. 

  “This is Hamish, my son,” his dad said in a soothing tone. “He will protect you and see you to your new room.”

  “I will?” Hamish protested. He hadn’t agreed to take her anywhere.

His dad hadn’t assured him he was safe from her.

  His dad pressed forward, determined. “She’ll need a slow acclimation to light.” He rested his hand on Hamish’s forearm and met his eyes. “I would not trust her with anyone else. I know this may be difficult for you.”

  What he meant was: Her safety matters more than your fear.

  It was true. The right to life trumped the right to emotional security. He groaned. “I’ll keep her safe.”

  It wasn’t her fault his life was a mess of things he didn’t want to bother with anymore. The real monster was himself. Everyone else only seemed like monsters to him because he projected his fears onto them.

  They hate me. They see how pathetic I am. They know I’ve failed at life.

  The scariest things in the world, for Hamish, were the inescapable thoughts that circled in his own mind. As long as he remembered that, the woman couldn’t hurt him. Hopefully, he wouldn’t hurt her, either.

He could try to face this shattered, monstrous, girl.

  “Go with Hamish to your new room,” his dad urged her in a gentle voice. “Do not leave it until you are otherwise instructed by myself or Hamish.”

  Or it was burning down, or she discovered Hamish was barely human and she fled, or she saw the spiders and realized she was better off wherever she came from.

  He walked down the length of the barn and listened for the woman to fall into step beside him. She didn’t: She followed behind. He could hear in her clouded mind the way she hunched her shoulders forward, rounding her back and making herself look small.

  Every so often a breeze blew through the air, wind swirling the bits of dust and sending shivers through Hamish’s body.

  He opened his apartment door. Early in his childhood, he’d lived with his dads. After he left home and came crawling back, he’d gotten his own apartment, in the barn where he could hide from his mom, who lived in the main house.

  “This is my place,” Hamish told the woman, with a sweeping wave of his arm. “You can have the bed.” He pointed toward the bedroom, the darkened doorway that gave over to a bed and private bathroom.

  He could sleep on the couch. Indefinitely. It would be fine.

  The woman looked around at the messy, web-covered mess that was Hamish’s lair. Every Pixie had an animal affinity, and Hamish’s happened to be spiders. It did great things for socializing.

  The woman nodded slowly…accepting something?

  “Do you have a cleaning schedule?” she asked. “A latrine bucket? Wash bucket?”

  He cringed. Wherever she’d come from, it had been bad. Worse, probably, than anything he’d been through (that wasn’t self-inflicted). Yet here she stood, ready to face whatever came next.

  “I don’t really clean,” he said. He hoped she got the message there: You shouldn’t clean, either. “Watch out for spiders? They won’t hurt you but—”

  “I’ll have them cleaned up right away,” she promised, a hand on her belly.

  “No!” He held up a hand to stop her. “They’re my friends.”

  And there went any chance of this woman ever thinking he was sane.

  She shriveled. “Okay. Am I allowed to dust any webs away, such as unoccupied ones?”

  “I think,” he articulated. He could still be with the rabbits, with the kind souls who never judged, and their fluffy boop noses. “My dad’s plan was for you to just live here. Not clean.”

  “But…what do I do?” She was lost. Cleaning gave her purpose, direction. He could see in her mind how cleaning was tied to living, because purpose gave her value to…to Titania, the cruel queen that ruled over the people in the caves.

Bit by bit, the layers that scared him became layers he wanted to explore.

  This girl did not belong among them, but somehow she’d ended up there, and his dad had rescued her. Had known she belonged with Hamish.

  Or she was a spy.

  Hamish felt his interest stir in a new way. He needed to figure out who she was and what she wanted, before she hurt someone or before someone hurt her. 

  Maybe purpose was tied to life.

  “Did anyone in the caves tell you that we don’t hurt people?” he asked.

  Her thoughts turned to fear of him and his dad, to confusion because she’d been told the people here would kill her, but the people in the caves had hurt her, so how could she know who to trust. “I…” She ducked her head. “I will do what you need me to do. I promise I won’t get in your way.” Then you won’t kill me.

“I would kill you?” Hamish echoed her thoughts. “You work for Titania!”

  “You’re a zhezhol,” she countered. It was the dirty word the Salamanders — Queen Titania’s people — used for outsiders. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know who is violent and who is kind. I don’t know what the sun looks like anymore, except I dream of it. But I won’t get in your way, beyond the fact that I—” She pointed to her enormous belly. “-am in all the ways.”

  “Well,” he promised her through gritted teeth. “I’m very violent if you try anything. And I’m very kind if you don’t.”

  She blinked. “What is anything? Because I’m trying to breathe, technically.”

  He blinked back. How had she survived Titania’s rule with an attitude like that? No wonder his dad had needed to rescue her. 

  “If you try to hurt anyone,” he enunciated.

  She threw her arms up. “Why would I hurt anyone? Oh, you mean the spiders? I won’t hurt the spiders.”

  The spiders could take care of themselves. He meant…the people he loved. “People are dangerous,” he hissed. “You’re a person.”

  “People are dangerous,” she agreed, staring at his person-ness pointedly.

  He rolled his eyes. “Just stay away from knives and poisons and gossip.”

  She laughed. “Says the person who has knives and poisons and gossip in his house!”

  “Yeah,” he growled. “So watch out.”

  She ducked her head and he immediately felt bad. She was no monster, but she’d been shaped by one.

Still, he liked her spirit, her openness when she’d talked back for those brief seconds. It filled him with warmth, with purpose, with life.

  It would have been easier if she was a monster, a beast he could put in another box.

  He wanted to hold her hand and promise she would be safe here.

  That was scariest of all.