Only a Few More Nights

A Fairies of the Night Novella By the time Liora reached the apartment, the city had already begun pretending it was innocent. The rain had stopped just before dawn, leaving the streets slick and shining, the motel signs dimmed to tired red bones, the convenience stores humming with half-empty coffee pots, and the alleys rinsed clean enough that no one passing through them in daylight would believe what had been bought, whispered, refused, laughed off, endured, or survived there only a few hours before. She climbed the back stairs of the old brick building with her silver heels dangling from two fingers, her bare feet sore and blackened from the pavement, her translucent wings folded tightly beneath her torn velvet jacket, and when she opened the apartment door with the little brass key they all shared, she found Orla already sitting on the kitchen counter in nothing but a long robe, wet hair wrapped in a towel, smoking from a cracked teacup because they had no ashtray and because, as Orla had said the first week, “If we are going to fall from myth into poverty, we might as well do it with household charm.” “You’re late,” Orla said, though her voice was softer than the words. “You’re early,” Liora answered, closing the door behind her with her hip. “I had a man ask if my wings came off.” Liora stopped in the middle of the room, stared at her, and then, because she was too tired not to laugh, she laughed so hard she had to lean against the wall. Orla pointed her cigarette at her. “Do not laugh. He looked disappointed when I said no.” “He wanted a costume fairy?” “He wanted a discount fairy.” “That is worse.” “That is exactly what I told him.” The apartment was small enough that every room overheard every other room, a fifth-floor walk-up above a shuttered tailor shop, with one kitchen, one bathroom, two bedrooms, six mattresses, three cracked mirrors, a curtain instead of a closet door, and a shoebox under the loose floorboard where they kept their real future. Not wishes, not spells, not moon-water, not the names of lost trees, but money: folded bills, counted nightly, bound with hair ribbons, kept beneath a chipped blue saucer painted with tiny mushrooms. Liora crossed to the stove, where fairy food waited under a cloth: cold honeycakes made from cheap flour and stolen clover syrup, slices of candied apple, a jar of violet jam, and a bowl of pearl rice that Sable insisted tasted “almost like dew if you were drunk enough.” She picked up a honeycake and took half of it in one bite. Orla watched her. “Good night or bad night?” Liora chewed, swallowed, and shrugged. “Both.” “That is not an answer.” “It is the only honest answer.” Before Orla could reply, the door opened again and Sable came in wearing her long black leather coat like armor, moth wings glittering faintly through the back slit, her tiny crystal purse clutched in one hand and her face arranged in the sharp, polished mask she wore for men who leaned out of truck windows and mistook wonder for something they owned. She kicked the door shut behind her, looked at the two of them, and said, “I charged double.” Orla lifted her teacup in salute. “For what?” “For the wings.” Liora raised both brows. “Only double?” Sable’s mouth twitched. “Triple after he asked if the ears were real.” Orla made a grand little bow from the counter. “A businesswoman.” “A ruined princess with rent due,” Sable said, but she smiled as she said it, and the smile stayed for almost three seconds before fading into exhaustion. She crossed the room, opened the loose floorboard with the heel of one hand, and dropped a folded stack into the shoebox. The three of them leaned over it. “How much?” Liora asked. Sable said, “Two hundred and forty.” Orla whistled low. “For one night?” “For one man who thought saying ‘I’ve never had a fairy before’ was romantic.” Liora groaned and covered her face. “Why do they all say that?” “Because human men believe discovery is the same as charm,” Sable said, pulling off her gloves finger by finger. Orla nodded wisely. “And because they have never discovered a book.” That made them laugh again, not because it was the funniest thing ever said, but because dawn laughter was different; it rose out of the broken places, thin and wild, and if you let it rise long enough it could almost carry you. Then the bathroom door opened, steam rolled out, and Vessa emerged wrapped in a towel with her pale blue wings dripping like wet glass. “Who has the violet jam?” she demanded. Liora pointed with the remaining half of her honeycake. “There.” Vessa came into the kitchen, opened the jar, smelled it, and closed her eyes. “Almost home.” No one spoke for a moment. Home was a dangerous word in that apartment. Home had been moss and mushroom rings, lantern beetles, foxgloves tall as cathedral windows, old queens asleep in trees, dances that lasted three nights and left no one tired, and streams so clean that moonlight lay on them like silk. Home had also been bulldozers, smoke, survey flags, the crack of branches, the scream of owls, the long road out, and six fairies with nowhere to go except the city, where everything glowed but nothing grew. Vessa opened her eyes and, perhaps because she had felt the room darken, shoved the jam toward Liora and said, “He asked whether fairy kisses cure loneliness.” Orla leaned forward. “Do they?” “No,” Vessa said. “But I charged him as if they might.” Sable laughed into her hands. Liora shook her head. “That is immoral.” Vessa spread her arms. “We sell the illusion of enchantment to men who arrive already enchanted by themselves. I call that balance.” The door opened for the fourth time, and Nix slipped in, small, glittering, rain-damp, and shaking with silent laughter before anyone had even asked why. “What happened?” Orla asked. Nix pressed her back to the door and tried to breathe. “He brought flowers.” The room froze. “Flowers?” Sable asked. Nix nodded, still laughing. “Gas station roses. Wrapped in plastic. Half dead. He said he thought fairies liked flowers.” Vessa clutched her towel to her chest. “What did you do?” “I took them.” “Of course you did.” “And then I charged him extra for emotional accuracy.” The apartment exploded. Orla nearly dropped her teacup, Liora had to sit on the floor, Vessa bent over the sink, Sable put one hand on the counter and laughed with the low, helpless sound of someone too tired to defend herself, and Nix stood by the door holding up the miserable bouquet like a trophy from a very stupid war. When the laughter faded, Nix set the flowers in a chipped jar beside the window, where the dawn made them look almost noble. “They are ugly,” Sable said. “They are ours,” Nix replied. That silenced them too, but this time the silence was warmer. Nix took off her purse, opened it, and emptied money onto the table: crumpled bills, coins, one folded note with a phone number she immediately tore in half and dropped into the trash. “One hundred and twelve,” she said. “And a sad bouquet.” “We count the bouquet as spiritual profit,” Orla said. “We do not,” Sable said. “We should,” Liora said. “It may be the first thing a human man has given us that was not followed by a speech about himself.” Vessa, now spooning violet jam directly into her mouth, said, “Put that in the ledger.” They had a ledger, because Nix had stolen one from an office supply store during their second week in the city and written on the first page, in curling green ink: The Future Fund. Beneath that, in smaller letters, Orla had added: No Men, No Motels, No Discounts. Their plan had changed many times. At first they wanted to buy a van and flee to another forest, but there were no forests left that were not watched, fenced, poisoned, or named after the people who had destroyed them. Then Sable wanted a private fortune-telling parlor, Vessa wanted a bakery that sold night-blooming cakes, Nix wanted a shop that repaired broken things with glamour, Orla wanted a cabaret where fairies sang and humans paid to cry, and Liora, who had once known every herb that could heal a wing tear, wanted something quieter. In the end, they had combined all six wishes into one. A little night shop. Open sunset to sunrise. Tea, charms, mended jewelry, lucky matchbooks, honeycakes, glamour repairs, real music on Fridays, and a back room where lost creatures could sleep without being asked what they were worth. They had already chosen a name. The Second Moon. Tamsin came home just as Liora was writing Nix’s amount into the ledger. Tamsin entered without drama, which meant the night had been bad. She was still beautiful, painfully so, with rain caught in her lashes and gold pollen clinging to the dark curls around her pointed ears, but her mouth was held too tightly, and one wing twitched under her coat in the old signal for do not touch me yet. No one did. Orla slid from the counter and poured her a drink from the bottle of cheap plum liquor they saved for dawns that needed softening. Tamsin took it, swallowed half, and stared at the floor. Sable asked, “Do we hate him?” Tamsin breathed once, twice, then nodded. Vessa set the jam down. “Do we need to curse him?” “Not the big curse,” Tamsin said. “Maybe the small one.” Nix brightened. “The one where every vending machine steals his money?” Tamsin considered. “Smaller.” “The one where he always steps in puddles?” “Better.” Liora stood and came closer, stopping just far enough away to leave Tamsin her space. “Are you hurt?” Tamsin shook her head. “No. Just tired of being looked at like I am a thing with wings instead of a person with bills.” Orla lifted her cup. “To being a person with bills.” They all lifted whatever they had: liquor, jam spoon, honeycake, cigarette, empty hand. “To being a person with bills,” they repeated. Tamsin laughed once, and the laugh broke in the middle, and then she cried. It was not dramatic crying. It was dawn crying, quiet and angry and inconvenient. Vessa moved first, wrapping Tamsin in the towel she was still wearing, and then the others closed around them, six almost-strangers who had become a household because the city had taken everything else and because no one survived the neon alone. When the crying passed, Tamsin wiped her face and said, “I made ninety.” Sable said, “You do not have to count tonight.” Tamsin sniffed. “Yes, I do. I suffered for that ninety. It is going into the shop.” So it did. Orla, who had already been home when the others arrived and who had spent the first hour of dawn pretending she had nothing left to say, finally reached down beside the counter, lifted two paper bags with a grin, and announced, “Before anyone becomes tragic again, I have stolen breakfast.” “You bought breakfast,” Liora said. “I paid with money I earned from a man who wanted to know if fairy ears were sensitive, so morally, I stole it.” “What did you say?” Nix asked. “I said, ‘Yes, and so is my patience.’ Then I charged him for asking.” Sable placed both hands on the table. “You are an artist.” Orla dumped the bags onto the counter: peaches, bread, cigarettes, coffee packets, a box of powdered donuts, and one tiny jar of imported honey so expensive that everyone stared. Liora whispered, “Orla.” Orla shrugged, suddenly shy. “For the shop. We should know what rich honey tastes like before we sell poor honey.” Vessa opened the jar immediately. “Research.” They ate standing up, sitting on counters, leaning against cupboards, wrapped in towels or coats or nothing but exhaustion and old magic. They drank plum liquor from mismatched cups and coffee from chipped mugs, smoked by the open window, and watched the city brighten from black to gray to a color that could almost be mistaken for mercy. Then Liora counted the money. They gathered around the table as she smoothed every bill flat. Sable’s two hundred and forty. Nix’s one hundred and twelve. Tamsin’s ninety. Orla’s one hundred and seventy-five. Vessa’s one hundred and thirty. Liora’s one hundred and sixty. The shoebox became heavier. The ledger received its new total. For a moment, no one breathed. “How much more?” Orla asked. Liora checked the page twice, because hope was more frightening than despair and had to be handled with both hands. “Eight hundred and twenty,” she said. Nix blinked. “That is all?” “That is all.” “For the deposit?” “For the deposit, first month, license fee, and the little sign in the window.” Vessa covered her mouth. Tamsin sat down hard on the nearest chair. “How many nights?” Sable looked at the money, then at their faces, then toward the window where the gas station roses drooped in their jar like tragic little witnesses. “Four,” she said. Orla shook her head slowly. “Maybe five if the city is cheap.” “Three if the men are stupid,” Nix added. “They are often stupid,” Vessa said. “They are reliably stupid,” Orla said. Tamsin wiped the last of her tears with her sleeve and laughed, and this time it did not break. Liora closed the ledger carefully. “Then we do not belong to this forever,” she said. No one answered immediately, because that was another dangerous thing to say. Forever had seemed very powerful once. The forest had felt forever. Moonlit courts had felt forever. Their own wings, bright and unpriced and unhidden, had felt forever. But the city had taught them that forever could be evicted, bulldozed, arrested, underpaid, renamed, and replaced with parking. So instead of promising forever, Orla reached for the plum liquor and poured six tiny measures. “To The Second Moon,” she said. “To no discounts,” Sable added. “To expensive ears,” Orla said. “To wings at full price,” Nix said. “To honeycakes that do not taste like rent,” Vessa said. Tamsin lifted her cup last. “To never standing outside Room Seven again unless we own the building.” They drank. Then they celebrated in the small ways available to the almost-broken and almost-free. Nix put the gas station roses in the center of the table and enchanted them badly on purpose so that they opened and closed like tiny drunken mouths. Vessa made powdered donuts look, for one shining minute, like moon pastries from home. Orla danced barefoot on the kitchen tiles until her wings knocked a pan from the wall. Sable laughed for real. Liora sang one verse of an old forest song, then stopped before it hurt too much. Tamsin rested her head on Liora’s shoulder. Liora let her. By seven in the morning, the city outside had fully become itself again: buses sighing at corners, office workers stepping around puddles, delivery trucks blocking alleys, sunlight exposing every stain the neon had made glamorous. Inside the apartment, the fairies prepared for sleep. Orla took the first mattress by the window because she liked the weak stripe of sun across her ankles. Nix curled beside the wall with the bouquet near her head. Vessa went to sleep still smelling faintly of violet jam. Sable counted the locks twice before lying down. Tamsin showered last, stayed under the hot water until the bathroom mirror was blind with steam, and came out quieter, softer, almost herself. Liora slid the shoebox back beneath the floorboard, placed the blue mushroom saucer over the loose plank, and stood for a moment with her bare foot resting above their future. Only eight hundred and twenty more. Only a few more nights. Only a little more neon. Then she crossed the room, turned off the last lamp, and lay down among the others as the day pressed its pale face against the curtains. In the dimness, just before sleep took them one by one, Sable murmured, “Do you think the shop will smell like honey?” Vessa, already half gone, answered, “Honey, rain, and revenge.” Nix whispered, “And gas station roses.” Orla said, “Absolutely not.” Tamsin said, “Maybe one rose.” Orla yawned. “One ugly rose by the register.” Liora smiled into the pillow. Outside, the city kept grinding, buying, selling, forgetting. Inside, six pairs of wings glowed faintly beneath cheap blankets, and in the floorboards below them, their future waited in a shoebox, folded into hundreds, twenties, tens, and ones, smelling of rain, smoke, motel hallways, convenience-store coffee, and the impossible beginning of a better life.