• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Though I’ll tell you, while I grew up with his stories of faeries and such, accepting them the way you do things that are spoken of in your family, I’d never really believed in them. It was like any other superstition—spilling salt, walking under ladders, that kind of thing. Most people don’t believe, but they avoid such situations all the same, just in case.Which is why I’d paid my respects to invisible presences in the boardinghouse and my squat. Just in case.

“Listen,” I began, “I didn’t realize who—”

But he cut me off.

“Seven years,” he repeated.

“Seven years and what?”

“You’ll be my tithe to the Grey Man.”

My dad had stories about him as well. How the brolaghan known as Old Boneless was like a Mafia don to the smaller faeries, offering them his protection in return for a tithe—the main protection he offered being that he himself wouldn’t hurt them. The tithe could be anything from tasty morsels, beer or whiskey, to pilfered knickknacks and even changelings. It just had to be something stolen from the human world.

Dad’s stories didn’t say what the Grey Man did with any of those things. Being a creature of mist and fog, you wouldn’t think he’d have any use for material items. Maybe they helped make him more substantial.

I certainly didn’t want to find out firsthand.

“Wait a sec’,” I said. “All I did was—”

“Disrespect me. And just to remind you of my displeasure,” he added.

He pointed that gnarled finger at me again, and my pants came undone, falling down around my ankles. By the time I’d stooped to pull them up, he was gone. I zipped up my fly and redid my belt.

They came undone, and my pants fell down once more.

I suppose that’s what really convinced me that I’d just had an encounter with a genuine faerie man. No matter how often I tried, I couldn’t get my pants to stay up. Finally, I sat down there in the hall holding them in place with one hand while I tried to figure out what to do.

Nothing came to mind.

And the worst thing about it, there was this totally cute girl named Nita Singh that I’d been spending my breaks with. She worked the floor below mine, and while I hadn’t quite figured out yet if she was seeing anybody, she was friendly enough to give me hope that maybe she wasn’t. She certainly seemed to return my interest.

So of course she had to come up looking for me when I didn’t come down at break time.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she came down the hall from the stairwell.

Nita was almost as tall as me, with shoulder-length, straight dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Like all of us, she was wearing grubby jeans and a T-shirt, but they looked much better on her.

“Oh sure,” I said. “I’m just . . . you know, having a rest.”

She leaned her back against the wall, then slid down until she was sitting beside me. She glanced at how I was holding my jeans and grinned.

“Having some trouble with your pants?”

I shrugged. “I think my zipper’s broken.”

From the first night I’d met her, all I’d ever wanted was to be close to her. But right then I just wanted her to go away.

“Maybe I can fix it,” she said.

In any other circumstance, could this have played out any better?

“I don’t think so,” I told her.

I couldn’t believe I had to say that. She was going to think I was such a dork, but instead she gave me a knowing look.

“Had a run-in with the local butter spirit, did you?” she asked.

Butter spirits were supposed to be a kind of house faerie related to leprechauns, but much more thieving and malicious. Back home they especially enjoyed fresh butter and would draw the “good” of the milk before it was churned.

I blinked in surprise. “How do you know about that kind of thing?”

“Daddy-ji’s Indian,” she said, “but my mum’s Irish. There was a big to-do when they hooked up.You know, son disowned, the whole bit.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Not your fault. Anyway, Mum was forever telling stories about the little people.”

“My dad did, too.”

“I just never thought they were more than stories.”

“But you do now? Have you seen him?”

She nodded. “Not up close. But I’ve