Faerie Blood by Angela Korra'ti Read Free Book Online Page B

scratched at my cheeks and snagged my hat off my head; my left palm and elbow scraped against concrete as I landed hard. I lay stunned for a few seconds with my eyes squeezed tightly shut. Then I groaned a string of curses and tried to extricate myself from the hedge.
    But before I could get up, I blinked through frustrated tears and saw a dozen pairs of eyes glaring malevolently down at me. They belonged to a swarm of creatures with twig-thin bodies no bigger than my hand, and long brown noses and fingers of a bark-brown color that made them seem like mobile pieces of the hedge. Some of them hissed. The rest shrilled in anger, a noise that echoed somewhere to the immediate right of my head, and in alarm I realized two more of the twig-creatures were writhing through my hair.
    Worse yet, they were calling out comprehensible words.
    “Nasty Big One falling into nest!”
    “Scratch it! Sting it! Make it hurt for falling on us!”
    “Magic in eyes, magic in smell, sting it before it smashes us with magic!”
    My brain reeled at those high, piping voices, but I didn’t stop to make sense of any of it. I hurtled to my feet, snatched up my hat, and flailed out with it at the creatures. They swarmed after me with preternatural speed. Half of them leapt up to cling with sharp, miniscule fingers to my limbs and sides before I’d run ten feet, and I swatted at them as though they were a cloud of mosquitoes out for blood. The jabs of their fingers and the nips of their teeth stung and itched like any mosquito bite, only worse.
    One of the creatures fell off me as I ran. I knocked off two more with my hat. The other three tenaciously hung on, one in my hair and the other two on my left arm; one of the latter pair bit me hard enough to pierce my skin near where I’d taken a scrape in the fall. Infuriated now as well as frightened, I yelped and stumbled, swiping harder at the things on my arm. The bite throbbed fiercely, overriding the other small pains along my body and flaring through my entire system.
    For a few seconds my eyes welled with hot tears of reaction, blinding me. But even as I struggled to keep my feet, I heard the twig-creatures shrieking in alarm.
    “Magic in her blood!”
    “Great Fey! Smash us with magic!”
    “No smash! Flee! Flee back to nest!”
    Without warning, they let go of me, dropped down, and skittered along the sidewalk back to the laurel hedge. My vision refocused in time to show me the last three twig-creatures vanishing into the shelter I’d disturbed. They leapt into the laurel, melding with the leaves now uncannily weaving together until I could no longer spot the place where I’d fallen through.
    I blinked, stared, and then wheeled around and sprinted for the bus stop. My bus arrived just as I came pelting up, and I could barely keep from clawing through the doors before the driver could open them. Once on board I found nothing out of the ordinary: route leaflets behind the driver’s seat, ads and random poetry high on each side of the vehicle over the windows, and passengers of various ages, dress styles, and levels of alertness. Profoundly relieved, I showed the driver my pass and toppled into the first empty seat I reached.
    And I kept my eyes closed—refusing to look out any of the windows—all the way to work.
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    Microsoft is not the only software company around Seattle. It’s just the biggest, a lone giant sequoia in a forest of lesser pines and oaks and saplings that die off fast for want of the sunlight of profit. I worked for one of the lesser oaks: a company that boasted a modest office building overlooking Lake Union, several hundred employees, and products translated into three foreign languages. We specialized in Internet security and performance applications for Windows and Linux, a versatility that helped us stay afloat. My department developed a program that monitored network traffic levels, rerouting data across different servers to avoid overloading any single one. And