Fly Away, Fairy

A vision of lacy, frilly, girly splendor in the darkness. A pale blur against the backdrop of small night-shadowed park spaces and commercial buildings. A lithe, springing, satin-winged form running and skipping in the moonlight.

The night was her time. The time of sleep and the time when the Tooth Fairy wandered. Even before she had existed, it had been a time for the mythical tooth fairies that left money in return for baby teeth.

Night. A time of monsters and financially generous fae folk, she thought with a giggle in her head.

Her movements were somehow joyous in a childlike fashion while also suggesting something predatory.

But tonight she wasn’t hunting for random trouble—or random teeth. She didn’t have a scheme or plan to carry out to satisfy her sadistic urges or her greedy ones.

Tonight she was trying to figure out who was following her and why.

Eluding a pursuer while secretly hunting that pursuer. Playing at being unwitting prey so that she could strike.

Tooth Fairy smiled as she jogged and skipped and moved in and out of the dark places. Smiled and let her mouth be home to a wide assortment of different types of fangs, changing over and over as they glistened and sparkled in the moonlight and glow of the streetlamps.

* * *

Another shape in the night, moving quickly but stealthily and avoiding the open spaces and the light as much as possible.

Another shape whose back also bore wings—though these were darker, smaller and shaped like a butterfly. Unlike Tooth Fairy’s more articulated wings, these ones didn’t flap realistically as the skulking form moved and pursued Tooth Fairy.

They were pretty, but static. Rigid. Fixed.

A perfect complement to someone who felt stuck. Who felt awkward. Who need direction.

Catching up with Tooth Fairy was the beginning of solving all of that.

* * *

From above—from a fire escape on the side of a shuttered department store—came a snarling voice.

“Who are you, what the hell do you want and which body part should I start chomping on first?” Tooth Fairy queried and challenged from her shadowy perch. “I’ve known you were behind me a long time; might as well come out and play.”

A woman stepped just barely into view. Pale skin and hair, but a short gauzy dress of deepest black, and her butterfly-shaped wings affixed to the back of it, colored mostly in purple, indigo and charcoal. Her mask was a simple black domino-style one, with a pair of butterfly antennae extending from the sides of it.

The Tooth Fairy being shadowed by a butterfly fairy, thought the woman poised above and licking her teeth which she morphed from sharp fangs back to her natural dentition. That’s a novel change of pace.

“I’m Night Fae,” the woman said from below.

“I don’t know if there’s room for more than one fairy in New Judah,” Tooth Fairy warned. “So, you got the short straw this month, eh?”

“What do you mean?” Night Fae asked, scrunching her blue eyes as she warily and curiously observed the woman watching her from above.

“Seems like every month, give or take, some half-assed hero finds me and tries to take me down. I had thought handing them their asses and keeping parts of some of their bodies as trophies might have sent a message by now,” Tooth Fairy said in a half-snarl, half-purr. “Do I have to start killing all of you to make it more clear?”

“I’m not here to take you in or take you down,” Night Fae said. “I’m no hero. I want to be something, but not that. I want to be like you. I really admire you, Tooth Fairy.”

Mouth wide and filled with jagged teeth like broken white chisel tips, Tooth Fairy dropped to the pavement and fixed her eyes on Night Fae’s.

“I don’t need your admiration,” Tooth Fairy snapped. “I don’t fucking want it.”

“And I like the idea of your apprenticeship even more repulsive,” she added as she pounced, the carefully designed white wings on her back flapping furiously as she launched herself forward.

* * *

The third time that Night Fae evaded one of Tooth Fairy’s attacks, the aggressor skipped backward and stopped, feet together in something almost like a ballerina’s stance, and swayed back and forth, almost seductively, for a few moments as she assessed her former pursuer.

“Better moves than the last guy who tussled with me,” Tooth Fairy noted. “Aggravating, really. I wasn’t looking for a workout tonight. I just cleaned this outfit and I don’t want pit stains or crotch sweat. I might force my estranged husband to have disturbing sex with me tonight and I had fragrant things in mind much more exotic and unsettling than sweat. That’s three times you’ve slipped away. That’s three teeth I’ll claim.”

Then Tooth Fairy struck again, and Night Fae dodged a flurry of attacks again, putting distance between her and the woman she emulated.

“I’m not your enemy,” she said. “Even so-called villains could use allies and friends.”

“I have more allies than I ever wanted, and Janus had to pay me a lot of money to accept them into my world at all,” Tooth Fairy said. “That’s four teeth I’ll have from your mouth now.”

“If you’re that dead-set against having anything to do with me, I’ll leave then,” Night Fae said, breathing heavily—clearly unused to prolonged combat maneuvers.

“Not until I have the teeth you owe for putting me out.”

“God you’re so fucking eerie and menacing and self-assured and independent,” Night Fae effused.

“Stop with the fucking reverence, bitch!” Tooth Fairy snapped. “I don’t want your adoration and I don’t want to be a mentor to anyone but my child.”

“You’re better than me; I know that. In so many ways,” Night Fae said. “That’s why I hoped I could learn from you. But one thing I can do really well is stay away from you. I’ve stolen so many security videos and even a couple news recordings of you in action. I know all your moves.”

That’s what’s so unnervingly familiar and that’s what’s annoying me more and more as this goes on, Tooth Fairy realized. She has my moves.

“You’re a Mimic,” Tooth Fairy growled. “Can you do voices, too?” she sneered. “Go ahead, imitate my voice. I want a new reason to dislike you and add a fifth tooth to your debt.”

“I don’t mimic voices,” Night Fae said. “I can do movements, though. I can copy moves and I learn enough from what I see to fill in a lot of the blanks. Plus add my own touches. I’ve got other powers, too, like the ones that helped me find and follow you. I could be a great help to you. I swear!”

“I don’t want an attention whore sidekick either, you needy bitch!” Tooth Fairy shrieked, and rushed forward again.

This time, though, she abandoned all those martial arts classes she had taken over the years, especially the ones she’d taken up as her powers began to emerge. Instead, she thought of her years with her husband—before she’d become a transhuman; before she’d made herself thus to hopefully ensure her unborn child could grow into powers as well one day. She thought about the college wrestling moves he’d playfully taught her and that she’d seen when he’d coach wrestling camps in the summers for the high school boys. She abandoned everything that had worked in battles since she’d taken up crime, mayhem and torture as her career and went after Night Fae like she’d in the past sometimes gone after Will playfully in the bedroom to pin him and fuck him.

Night Fae hadn’t been ready for any of that, and she grunted as Tooth Fairy slammed into her, hugged her tight, and wrestled her to the ground. Legs wrapped around her prey’s torso now, Tooth Fairy used her Morph powers to extend two long, razor-like prongs from her forearm instead of altering her teeth, and let the sharp, bony tips of those organic blades hover at the throat of Night Fae.

As the women recovered her senses, she tried to struggle out of Tooth Fairy’s grip and failed, then noticed the deadly predicament at her neck. She settled down, and smiled.

“You have enough real enemies out there without killing me. If you don’t want me, at least let me be bad like you’ve been able to be,” Night Fae said. “Reject me if you must; but this is still a man’s world. It needs more women like us. Let me live to be a bad girl like you did.”

“I dislike you on general principles,” Tooth Fairy said. “But you make a good case for a sorority of villainy. If you move or try to get away from me, I’ll kill you. If you cooperate, you live. I might even warm to mentoring one day—long in the future—if you can follow those simple instructions.”

Night Fae nodded and the deadly protrusions retreated back into Tooth Fairy’s skeletal system as she traded them in for the gold-plated pair of pliers she carried in a small, silky white fanny pack under her wing assembly.

“This will only hurt  a lot,” Tooth Fairy whispered eagerly.

* * *

Tooth Fairy walked slowly and contemplatively as she worked her way back to her lair.

In a Ziploc bag in her fanny pack were four teeth—payment in full. Out of kindness, she’d taken the woman’s four rearmost molars so as not to ruin her smile. She felt enough sympathy to hope Night Fae had dental insurance to get some dental implants as replacements.

Along with those teeth, a small slip of paper with Night Fae’s phone numbers and email address.

I don’t want an apprentice or a sidekick, but I might teach her a thing or two, Tooth Fairy thought. More importantly, I will be taking my child more and more often to have time with her away from Will, and a bad girl’s gotta work even on visitation weekends.

Good nannies were hard to find.

Especially ones who could appreciate the need for a mother to go out and sow pain that wasn’t deserved and reap treasures that weren’t hers.