To a human, that might mean anything. To me, it suggested something entirely different.

I walked out into the street, blinking a little at the sunlight, since the baseball cap I’d jammed over my curls didn’t do quite enough to shield my eyes. My father’s species wasn’t much for sunlight, except maybe to nap in while recovering from their hangovers, and I’m willing to admit I’d inherited significant night-owl tendencies. That, and the pair of thumb-sized horns that my thick curls didn’t quite cover, were about all I’d gotten from him, thankfully.

All right, that and a way with the ladies. The fact that my father had been a charmer was supported by the fact that my human mother, on discovering that her weekend of passion with a faun during Fleet Week had resulted in a pregnancy, decided to keep the result of said pregnancy: me.

I wondered sometimes if she’d made the right decision.

“Hey.”

The piercing whisper was all too familiar. I looked up, squinting and cursing again at the sunlight, to see a small creature perched in the overhang of the building to my left, like some kind of furry gargoyle. A piskie. I stepped back, leaning against the wall as though contemplating the midday traffic passing by on Broadway.

“Hey Boo. You got something I should listen to?”

“Your skidoodle.”

“I’m listening.” Boo had brought me scoops before. If there was something useful, I’d reward the little pisher, and he knew it. If it was useless I’d kick his ass to Pretoria for wasting my time. He knew that, too.

“She got dusted” Boo told me.

I dragged the toe of my boot against the cement. “Aw, fuck.”

I’d been afraid of that. Dusted, from a fatae, doesn’t mean what it does in human slang. It’s worse. It’s what happens when a Null teenager — usually a girl, but not always — discovers that the fatae are real. They want nothing more than to traipse off with their newfound discovery, to go play with the fairies. Unfortunately, most of my fatae cousins are just as tricky and unreliable, if pretty, as human fairy takes suggest, and the playing … rarely ends well.