The Dock was packed.
Fairies thronged the long marble concourse, squashed together thick as Times Square at New Years. They overflowed the space behind the counters on each side, filled every perch and girder to the pale, starry spine of the ceiling. The map of the human world sparked and glittered across the long wall, the great pendulum that tracked the swing of universal belief swung in a wide circle at the very centre of the polished flower mosaics, but the assembled fairies had no attention to spare for anything except the enormous information boards that took up most of the far wall of the concourse. Every face was turned towards them, the massive and endless waterfall of names and places, children and teeth spinning in bright trickledown shimmers from top to bottom.
The space buzzed with bright chatter, a thousand voices raised in a festive, expectant cacophony. It was very difficult to be heard above the racket- but here, halfway up one of the few long ladders fixed to the counterside wall, where a pyramid of chairs and desks had been cleared away for the occasion, someone was trying.
"But why not?"
"Shh," said one of the fairies who happened to be nearest.
"But it doesn't make sense," persisted the small fairy. He was a snub-nosed twig of a thing, all big owly glasses and pointy ears, frowning fiercely over the top of a big, blocky black lump that looked like a Casio calculator with all the insides missing. "Two billion human children- how many noughts in a billion?"
"Six," said someone.
"Eight?" guessed someone else.
"SSHHHH," said the first fairy.
"That's more'n sixty thousand teeth!" said the small fairy, wobbling alarmingly as he tried to hang on to the ladder while shoving his gutted calculator display-first into his nearest companion's face. "Just in one night! And- and if they leave 'em tonight and we don't take them away, they're not gonna believe-"
"It's a holiday," said a fairy hovering nearby, as if this explained everything. "It's tradition. Don't worry about it, kid. Most of them get left out again tomorrow. Or the parents take care of it for us-"
"Yeah, but why-"
"Thinking of having a go yourself?" said another fairy, who obscured most of the top of the ladder (and half the small fairy's view) with the sleek blue-purple mass of her perfectly-groomed wings. She laughed, looking around for support from the appreciative peanut gallery around them. "Did'ja hear that? The wingless wonder over here thinks he's a Tooth Fairy!"
There was a flutter of laughter. The young fairy shut his mouth in a thin line and managed a very tight sort of half-smile, clinging to the ladder as the bigger fairy rattled it carelessly with her foot. The tips of his ears were a blazing, furious pink.
"Shut up!" hissed the first fairy, as the light started to dim.
A ripple of hush spread through the Dock, from the map to the floor-length glass at the far end. The perpetual dawnlight which surrounded the Hive was fading, a blazing sunset falling across the faces of the waiting fairies, catching the delicate membranes of a thousand pairs of wings and painting them liquid gold. The small fairy looked up, the light sparking red-gold off his glasses as the shadows slanted deeper across the crowd.
For the only time in the entire Fairy year, true night was falling.
"Ten! Nine! Eight!"
The chant began, rising, gaining momentum in the near-total night, a host of voices lifting to chase the last threads of sunlight from the Dock. The tumbling letters on the information boards started to slow, emptying from the bottom upwards, the blank spaces marching up the board. LUCY PENNINGTON – HERTS – INCISOR – COMPLETED. ARNO BRÜCKNER – MUNICH – CANINE – COMPLETED. Up and up, space by space, each tooth filled, each job finished, until at last the golden letters of CHRISTIAN DEWITT – AZ – MOLAR were the only bright things in the chanting, breathing, living void- snapped from IN PROGRESS to COMPLETED-
"Three! Two! One!"
-and vanished from the board.
"HAPPY HALLOWEEEN!"
The flare of a wand, uplifted, sparking blue- another- a sweeping blanket of starlight unfolding across the floor and walls of the Dock. Blue, pink, gold, white- the wandlights re-drew the space, sketched the counters and benches and the applauding, cheering crowd into eerie, ghostlit existence. Someone started to sing (someone could usually be relied upon to, when fairies were involved) and immediately about a hundred other voices pitched in, belting out a cheerfully up-tempo version of something so old it was untranslatable, as confetti as thick and black as ash began to fall from the ceiling, making the wandlights twinkle and flicker like fire.
Amidst the celebrations, nobody noticed a single empty space on one of the tall ladders, or one of the tall archway doors slipping quietly shut.
"Why?" Jerry shook the top part of his newspaper into a flopping fold and looked down from his dusty, clutter-strewn desk. "You're asking me why we don't collect teeth on Halloween?"
"Zactly," said Tracy, or at least what little of Tracy could be seen over the top of Jerry's desk. There was a mop of blond hair, a nose, and the top part of the gutted calculator. "Sixty thousand teeth, barely a forty percent likelihood of, of getting another chance to get 'em, that's thirty-six thousand teeth, at twenty thaums per tooth per day- that's a loss of over-"
"Whoah, whoah, okay, Mr. Memory, slow down before you sprain something." Jerry shook his head. "'Why don't we collect teeth on Halloween?' he says. Sheesh, what are they teaching you kids? Listen..."
The old fairy tossed his newspaper on the desk and leaned forwards, flipping a switch on the anglepoise that overhung the desk and plunging the stuffy, shelf-crammed space into a sickly green otherworld, full of stark, lunging black shadows. Tracy shrunk back, eyes huge behind his glasses, as the shadow of the old fairy's smallish, fluffy wings grew and spread like a tattered shroud across the shelves, filling the room with midnight.
"On Halloween, all the magic in the human world belongs to the dead. They say that if ever the accord is broken, if even one single fairy collects one single tooth before dawn breaks on the next day, the vengeful spirits of the dead will rise from the grave to reclaim what's rightfully theirs..."
"R-ruh-really?" squeaked Tracy. He'd flattened himself against the shelf, hugging his memo pad like a shield.
"Nah," said Jerry, in his own voice, and flicked the switch again. Green glare and writhing shadow vanished in a second, replaced by warm lamplight and stuffy, friendly clutter, and he sat back, picking up his newspaper and shuffling it idly open. "I'm just messing with you, kid, how the heck should I know? It's probably a union thing."
"You- you mean you just- made all that up?" said Tracy, indignantly, unpeeling his fingers from his calculator with some difficulty.
"Hey, you try sitting down here on your own for more than a century, see what you get bored enough to do. You know, yesterday I rewrote Wagner's entire Ring Cycle. Scored it entirely for kazoos. Want to hear?"
Tracy vanished.
"Your loss." Jerry shook his head, and started to flip through the back of the paper, looking for the cartoons. "Kids these days. No sense of culture."
"Listen, Trace, I really don't know-"
"It's stupid," said Tracy, adjusting the strap of the satchel around his neck. He'd found it in Lost Property, and it was far too big for him- even with the buckle adjusted as short as it would go, it still hung nearly to his ankles. He gave his baggy grey tunic a sharp tug- it was an ingrained habit of his, as if by yanking on the hem sharply and often enough, he would force the shapeless thing to acquire some sort of style or symmetry. It was a losing battle.
"You're telling me. We're missing the party-"
"All that magic, and we're chucking it away just 'cause everyone wants a holiday. It's only Halloween. We collect teeth at Christmas and Midsummer Night and Easter and that other weird one they made up, there's no reason why we shouldn't-"
"Yeah," said Duke, who was a good few inches shorter than Tracy- most of the young fairies in their teind were. Although fairies, like human children, normally hit a spurt at some point or the other as they grew, it couldn't be denied that Tracy's had started early, and seemed to be settling in comfortably for the long run. "But you're not a Tooth Fairy."
"Neither are you," Tracy pointed out. He took an experimental step, tripped over the strap, and sat down hard in the middle of the blank white space of the Flight Room. "Oof. So what? If no-one else can be bothered to do it-"
"You can't fly, Tracy," said Duke, tucking his own snowy wings back awkwardly as he spoke. In stark contrast, they were unusually well-developed for a fairy his age, and could generally be relied upon to get in the way of everything. "Clover said human children sleep way up on the tops of their houses. How're you even going to get to the teeth?"
"I'll think of something," said Tracy, from the floor, tying a complicated knot in the strap to bring it up to the level of his knees. "Human children don't have wings either, and theymanage, don't they? Maybe they use ropes- I c'n climb a rope. I can climb anything."
"This is a really bad idea," said Duke, leaning back against the invisible, stark-white wall. "I mean, have you ever even been to the human world? It's dangerous down there! Humans are crazy. All that disbelief rots their brains, everyone knows that."
"First time for everything," said Tracy, climbing to his feet again. Duke opened his mouth, caught the slightly manic look behind Tracy's glasses, and shut it again. He wasn't-entirely-not-quite-friends with Tracy, and this was a perfect illustration of why. Most of the time, the wingless kid was just fine to be around- smart, friendly, and certainly never short of great ideas. Most of the time, you could practically forget that there was anything wrong with him, that he wasn't normal, but-
-but every so often something like this would happen. He'd get some crazy scheme into his head, something none of the others would have even thought of, something that ran totally against the way every sane fairy knew things were supposed to be. He'd just take off- so to speak- and you'd suddenly be reminded that there was quite a large difference between you and this scrawny, mad-eyed accident waiting to happen, and furthermore he'd somehow got the impression that you were on his side. It wasn't really safe, to be friends with that- to plant yourself next to someone who was always itching for something to prove, or prove wrong, who had no notion of sensible restraint.
Sometimes, when Tracy got like this, Duke wondered if maybe not having wings removed the safety net in your brain.
Tracy straightened the satchel, tugged at the shapeless hem of his tunic, stood up straight, and beamed at him. "How do I look?"
"Like someone heading for a whole lot of trouble. Look, Trace, I'm just Clover's 'prentice- if he finds out I gave you his spare wand, he'll kill me."
"Not a problem, he's never gonna know."
"He'll kill you."
"Swear on my name, I'll have it back by dawn. You wouldn't want me going down there unarmed, would you? Defenceless? It being so dangerous and everything..."
"Ughh," groaned Duke, banging his head on the invisible wall. Tracy, magnanimous in victory, patted him on the shoulder.
"Spoken like a true friend."
It was early evening, and the streetlights were just flickering to life, dopplering on and off up and down the long suburban street like a parade of fireflies having a conversation in Morse Code. The sky was a dimming dove-grey, and the air had a winter bite to it, fresh and sharp with the mingling scents of woodsmoke and wet leaves.
The nuances of the beautiful autumn evening were mostly lost on Tracy, as he knelt in a huddle on the damp concrete and tried very hard not to kick off his very first visit to the Human Plane by losing his lunch. The ground was hard and gritty under his palms, and there was something terribly wrong with the air- it sat in his lungs like glue, thick and foul. His stomach was heaving and he thought he might be sick at any second, but every breath he took tasted like someone else had beaten him to it.
How can they stand it-
A loud and horrible noise blared in his ears. Swallowing bile, he looked up and into a pair of glowing, smoking yellow eyes the size of a small dragon's.
"Hey, kid, get out of the road!"
Tracy found his feet, and stumbled to the kerb. His legs gave out again as soon as he reached the verge, and he dropped to the patchy grass and watched the large red Chrysler roll over the place where he'd Crossed and accelerate slowly away up the street. He did know what a car was- he'd watched filmreels, seen pictures- but it was shocking to see one so close, and in person. He hadn't expected them to be so big- or trail such a godawful stink in their wake, for that matter. The road was ingrained with the noisome stench of burning rubber, a glossy poisonslick of chemicals and oil.
He stood up again, carefully, tugging at his tunic. Now that he felt slightly less disoriented he could recognise other manmade things. They had names- human names, English syllables that tasted alien in his mouth- mailbox, streetlamp, trashcan-
"What're you meant to be?"
Tracy turned, sharply, and found himself confronted by a small, faintly-patterned bedsheet with eye-holes cut in, looking up at him suspiciously from behind a half-filled plastic pumpkin with handles. Presumably, there was a human child under there somewhere, and he felt slightly cheated that the first one he ever met should look so- so unimpressive, was a polite way of putting it. Bloody silly, was a ruder and slightly more accurate way.
"I'm a fairy," he said.
This didn't appear to satisfy the bedsheet. "You don't look like a fairy."
"That's rich," said Tracy, who always tended to feel better once he had someone to debate with, "coming from a ghost with forget-me-knots on."
"Why don't you have wings?"
"Why aren't you glowing in the dark?" said Tracy, stroppily. "Or floating? 'Venged many wrongs done to you in your mortal life, have you, lately?"
"I'm a pumpkin ghost," said the bedsheet, as if this should have been self-evident. "You got pointy ears. And you got no shoes on."
"Yes," agreed Tracy, perplexed. He wondered if human children were always disposed to point out perfectly normal and obvious things as if they were somehow odd, or if this particular child was just a bit funny in the head. It was hard to tell, with the bedsheet in the way. Trying another tack, he straightened up self-importantly and pulled a neat handwritten list from his satchel. "D'you know where... Five, Maple Terrace is, by any chance?"
The bedsheet pointed.
"Thanks," said Tracy, taking a deep breath. "Happy Halloween."
He shut his mouth tight, and faded from view. The bedsheet stood there for about five seconds before it started screaming, and by the time it had fled out of sight around the corner like a small forget-me-knot cloud on speed, Tracy had padded invisibly up the sloping front lawn of Five, Maple Terrace and positioned himself in the cover of a large tree draped in rubber spiders and ragged black muslin. The air was becoming more bearable now, no longer lying in his chest like a dead thing with every breath, and he was able to settle down comfortably and watch as a small group of human children started up the front path.
They were a mixed bunch. Another ghost, a witch, a stumbling sort of robot made from cardboard boxes, and something green with two ping-pong balls stuck to the top. They reached the front door, a warm orange cobweb-strung cave guarded by leering columns of stacked pumpkins, and the witch (apparently elected for the purpose) sidled forwards and knocked. The door opened, and-
"Trick or treaaaat!"
"Trickertreat," mouthed Tracy carefully, under his breath.
He watched, fascinated, as the ritual unfolded before his eyes. The costumed children approached, said the magic phrase, were welcomed and cooed over and given plastic-wrapped food- which they poured into their waiting sacks and buckets- then hurried away to repeat the process next door. It took him a few minutes to make sure he'd seen everything, understood the procedure, and then it was only a question of taking a deep breath, screwing up his courage, and shadowing the next group up the path-
"Trick or treaaaat!"
Trickertreat, thought Tracy, as firmly as he could, then squeezed his eyes and mouth tight-shut and stepped past the humans, over the threshold.
The magic word seemed to work just as he'd hoped- he felt no worse, no broken boundary-taboo clawing into his stomach or his mind. Even better, the first thing he saw upon ducking into the brightness of the front hall took a massive weight of worry off his chest- this human house had stairs. Actual, built-in stairs, an architectural consideration as rare as hens' teeth in good old shortsighted flight-oriented Fairy, and if this house had them, presumably the other houses on his list would, too.
His lungs were growing tight with lack of breath, the urge to gasp swelling up in his throat like a balloon of stale air. He forced himself to move and shot up the staircase two steps at a time, flattening himself to the wall like a gangly grey squirrel as the human shut the front door and turned away to refill her bowl of candy from a crackling bag on the hall table. He made it with a moment to spare, and tucked himself into the shadowy turn of the upstairs landing to sit and wait for his glasses to de-fog themselves in the warmth.
Slowly, he breathed himself calm. He was a wobbly-kneed bag of nerves, a world away from home, inside a human house, no less, right at the heart of the enemy camp. He was terrified. He was also having the time of his life.
I'm the only Tooth Fairy in the world tonight, he thought, and the idea filled him like a rosy cloud, putting the strength back into his legs and boosting him to his feet. He drew Clover's wand from the satchel's holster, and gave it an experimental flick. A warm firefly light glittered from the tip, reflecting double in his big, wonky glasses and guiding him down the short length of dark, carpeted corridor to the door right at the end. At least there was no mistaking the child's bedroom from the outside- the door was covered with crayon marks and animal stickers, and a sign at eye-height that read JACKIE! in gaudy alphabet bricks.
They write their children's names on their doors for everyone to see. Tracy crept closer, pushed the door ajar with a cautious hand. Everyone and everything. It's true, then, what everyone says- humans are crazy.
The bedroom was cosy, colourful, and half-lit. A night-light glowed soft and soothing on the stencilled walls, soft toys, a rug scattered with plastic bricks-
-the bed. Edging closer, wand at the ready, Tracy's breath caught in his throat. This was the first human child he'd ever seen- properly and at close quarters, without the camouflage of a bedsheet or a thick coat of green greasepaint and a crooked rubber nose on elastic. 'Jackie' was maybe six, a tiny bump under the flowery sheets, her dark hair frizzing out gently over the pillow. In the electric half-light, in the stale grey air, Tracy could see a curious thing- the shape of the child was sharp and bright to his eyes, more real than anything around her, as if she belonged more to his world than this one, the one where she'd been born.
This was what belief looked like, he realised- he was seeing it for the first time because this was what it looked like in isolation, in contrast to the rest of this drained, faithless world. You couldn't see it in Fairy, this warm, fragile sharpness, because it was all around you, all the time. Like a lot of precious things, you only noticed it when it wasn't there.
Tracy stood quietly, looking. What he felt- although he didn't understand it, then- was older than caution, surer than fear. It was a resonance, an instinctive echo deep down in the back of his mind- the connection between his small, awed, bird-boned self and this sleeping mortal child, the last traces of the fragile symbiosis between their species.
A sharp creak of floorboards broke the spell. It jogged him out of his reverie, snapped him back to the room and the voice of the mother, which to his horror sounded as if she was already halfway up the stairs.
"Honey? Are you out of bed?"
Tracy flinched, shoved Clover's wand back into his holster and darted to the pillow in a panic, shoved both small spidery hands underneath to locate the little packet of folded tissue. He had to heave against the weight of the little girl's head, which startled him by turning out to be as heavy as a bowling-ball despite her tiny size. Tooth safely in one fist, he snatched one of the shiny new quarters he'd found in the satchel and dropped it on the pillow by Jackie's nose, then gulped down a lungful of air and faded from sight, just as the mother opened the bedroom door.
Too close, he thought, scurrying from the house like a jubilant thief, tucking the tooth into his satchel as he went. The coin must have weighed more than the tooth, which was only a translucent dove-white speck, but it seemed to him that the satchel weighed slightly more already. And messy, way too messy.
I can do better than that...
Satisfied that her daughter was still fast asleep, Jackie's mother closed the bedroom door softly behind her and headed back downstairs. Her head full of ordinary concerns, like how much trouble Jackie's twelve-year-old brother and his friends were getting up to on their own Trick-or-Treating mission, and how many more trick-or-treaters she could provide for with two more bags of Mounds bars, she had failed to spot the quarter lying on the pillow.
Jackie slept peacefully, the coin catching the moonlight at her cheek- which was really just as well. If she had caught so much as a glimpse of the inky curl of shadow that crept up to touch the coin like a gaunt, spidery hand, or, worse, seen the way it recoiled with a cheated, hissing whisper and slipped, slow as treacle, back into the crack between the bed and the wall, there was no way on earth she would have continued to sleep peacefully- or, indeed, at all.
The second tooth was easier, if no less nerve-wracking. By the third, Tracy was somewhat less jittery. By the fifth and sixth, it had become fun. Cheerily disregarding time and distance, fading from here to there as if the human world was nothing but a giant game of hopscotch, Tracy put a girdle around the Earth from Quebec to New Orleans, from the Rhineland to Tokyo, finding teeth under pillows, in pouches and boxes and glasses of water, poked into mouseholes and thrown into the darkness under the house, until his ears were pink from the October air of half a dozen different countries and the satchel was a pleasing deadweight around his neck. He stopped choking on the polluted air and little-by-little lost his fear of being seen. He learned to jab Clover's wand at the coins before shoving them under the pillows, turning quarters into marks and francs and twenty-pence-pieces as he went.
By the tenth tooth, he was getting cocky. In a nameless human city that seemed to be made from multicoloured lights, endless grey rainbow-strung skyscrapers glistening under a downpour so cold it was nearly snow, he rode something called an elevator- amazing, practically magical device!- up forty floors to a blank carpeted tunnel of doors, and rang the doorbell of the right apartment himself, vanishing an instant before it was opened and whisking- trickertreat- in around the doorjamb before the human, puzzled and annoyed by the sight of the empty corridor, could shut it in his face. In an attic bedroom in a tiny village where the streets were lined with stuffed men made from straw and throwaway clothes, he found not one but two teeth, bloody in a folded hanky- the result, explained the proud and atrociously-spelled accompanying note, of a battle with a treacherously crunchy toffee-apple. Again, the wand seemed to know what to do, changing a quarter into a shiny silver dollar.
It was intoxicating, and Tracy loved it. He felt made for this, the responsibility, the excitement, the glimpses into strange lives in stranger places, the sense that he was really doing something, something much more important than the boring everyday chores he was expected to do back home, where most of the Higher Ups were given to viewing a small wingless fairy as something between a liability and an embarrassment. Tonight, he was Tracy the Tooth Fairy, and his satchel was weighed down by its belief-stuffed burden, making a dry, deliciously satisfying sound whenever he set it down, like loose grain shifting in a sack.
And who could blame him, at the height of his glee and triumph, for not noticing his lengthening, twisting shadow, or the sharp whispers on the very edge of hearing, so easily lost under the sighing autumn wind? After all, those were only branches scratching at the windows as he passed, not snatching claws- and the boards creaking under his feet carried no resentful, reproachful echo. No dark listless things followed him from place to place, nothing kept pace with him, matching his speed and exuberance step by dragging step, nothing was seeking him, hunting him, gathering like a thunderhead at his back...
Another country, another tooth. Tracy practically skipped up the steps of the target house, a tall thin greybrick townhouse set back from the street in a quiet, leafy street. Halloween didn't seem to be that big a deal here, although there was a desultory pumpkin glowing on the top step, and a few costumed children were being herded home from parties, chivvied along by sheepish adults in witch hats or vampire cloaks. It was almost midnight.
Tracy gave the knocker an imperious thump, and was slightly taken aback when the door creaked an inch or two open in response. Stepping inside, he found a chair parked in the middle of the doormat, draped with a fistful of orange streamers. A plastic bowl parked on the seat of the chair encouraged anyone passing to Help Yourself, and since the bowl contained only a single lonely marshmallow in the shape of a ghost and a lot of candy dust, it was evident that a lot of people Already Had.
Tracy took the marshmallow- trickertreat- stuck it in his mouth for safekeeping, and lugged his heavy satchel down the hall, past a gaudy art print and a sombre darkwood grandfather clock, and up the stairs. The door that led to the front room was frosted glass, and through it he could see the cloudy shape of another eye-hurting print over the mantelpiece, and the back of a dark-haired woman watching television on a big couch. The satchel bumped loudly on every step, but the television was making such a racket that he probably could have danced a jig on the stripped-pine floorboards and not attracted the slightest attention.
The first floor revealed only a bathroom, the mother's bedroom, and a study, and so Tracy continued, chewing on the marshmallow as he went, winding around the landing and eventually finding himself in a high and pitch-dark bedroom under the eaves. He took out his wand and groped impatiently through the gloom towards the bed, which stood under a skylight, so far back against the wall so that he had to duck to avoid the sloping ceiling. Idly, poking blind beneath the pillow with his free hand, he wondered how you would manage to sleep in such a bed without cracking your head every time you woke up-
"Gotcha!"
Tracy jerked back, and smacked his head sharply on the ceiling. Clover's wand winked out as it fell out of his hand, and the room was plunged back into darkness- unless you counted the stars blooming behind Tracy's eyes. Another moment, and the light clicked on, flooding the room with a painful spotlight glare. He grabbed a breath and held it, but something was very wrong- it was as if there was a thick net between him and his magic, and no matter how hard he focused and tried to fade he stayed put, traitorously visible, inarguably solid. Trapped.
He looked down at his hands. There- just beyond them on the pattered rug- a thin line of white powder. He snatched his hands back and followed it all the way around him with frightened eyes. Part of it was half-hidden under the bed, the last few inches drawn in a ragged snarl, as if done in a great hurry. With a plodding backwards clarity, his mind reconstructed the last few seconds- eager eyes waiting in the darkness under the bed, loaded palm poised above the last few missing inches of the circle, watching as Tracy's bare feet padded closer over the rug-
Salt.
Slowly, keeping the heel of his hand pressed to his stinging skull, he made himself look up.
"Wow," said the boy, reverently.
He was small and a little chubby, with a missing front tooth and a lot of dark, curly hair. He was standing on tiptoe in his slippers and hugging a mouldering leatherbound book bigger than his head tightly to the front of his Zebedee pyjamas. He was panting with the exertion of his mad kamikaze dash from under the bed to slam the bedroom door, and now he stood with his back against it, staring at Tracy with big, round eyes.
Tracy scrambled for Clover's wand, only to find that it had landed just outside the circle. He could move within the salt line, but any attempt to reach across the perimeter met a weird, spongy, yielding resistance that grew hotter and more uncomfortable the longer he tested it. He pulled his hand back, struck by a sudden conviction that if he pushed it too far it would start to burn, as surely as if he'd pressed his palm against the salt line itself.
"Let me out," he said, getting slowly to his feet.
"You're a fairy," said the boy. He looked down at the book, then back up at Tracy, blinking hard as if he still couldn't believe the evidence of his own eyes. "I caught an actual fairy!"
"Yeah, you did, well done, and this actual fairy would like to go, now. Please." Tracy did his best to sound calm and firm. He felt sick, a solid chunk of panic lodged in his windpipe, cutting his breath short and robbing the strength from his legs. "In- in your own time-"
He stopped in his tracks, because the boy, having flipped a few pages to another ragged notepaper bookmark, had started to read out loud. It was slow, and faltering, and a bit dodgy on the pronunciation, but the sound of it was unmistakable, and on top of the panic of being caught the initial shock of hearing the familiar syllables mangled in the boy's clumsy human mouth nearly unscrewed Tracy's brain altogether.
He was reading in the Old Speech.
"Téigh an oigheann.
Cuir an plúr agus sóide isteach i mbabhla mór.
Déan go maith i lár, agus Doirt an bainne.
Measc go tapa chun foirm a taos bog.
Cas ar dhromchla plúr clúdaithe,
Agus an meascán ar feadh tamaill.
Bhácáil ar feadh leathuaire,
Agus fág le fuarú."
He stopped and looked up, his eyes bright and expectant. There was a longish pause. At their feet, the sound of the television downstairs boomed and muffled its way up through the floor, sending faint, itchy vibrations through Tracy's sensitive toes. He stood idly on one leg, itching the back of his ankle.
"And that's all of it, is it?" he said, at last.
"Er," said the boy, uncertainly. He looked down at the book again. "Yes?"
"Mm. Cause, thing is, what you just said there was a recipe."
The boy blinked, turning an outraged and rather panicky stare on the book, scrabbling helter-skelter though the pages. Tracy thought it pretty likely that he was trying to find the part of the book that told him what to do if, having caught a fairy, it informed you that the ancient and powerful binding spell you had just recited was in actual fact something that belonged on Ready Steady Cook.
"No- no it wasn't, it's supposed to be a binding spell-"
"Yeah... soda bread, actually," said Tracy, rubbing the sore place at the back of his head ruefully. "See, thing about Fairy Lore- the kind humans have written down, anyway- is, it sort of depends on the veri- verisilly- the reliability, right, of the fairy they got it from in the first place. I mean, say you're a fairy, and some twit of a human- no offence- manages to catch you, and they go, 'aha, fairy, I've got you now, I command you to tell me the secrets of your fairy powers...' are you actually gonna to do that, or, are you gonna give 'em a recipe for soda bread?'
The boy thought about this, shaking his flopping hair out of his eyes. "Oh."
"You said it really well, though," added Tracy, kindly. "For a human."
"Stupid thing," said the boy, in a sulking, doomy sort of voice, chucking the book on his bed. "I been waiting weeks for that tooth to come out. And then it says in Mysteries of the Unexplained that Halloween's the best time for supernatural stuff to be abroad, but we've only ever gone to Calais for the day anyway, so-"
"Look." Tracy drew himself up, brushing off his tunic and straightening his glasses. He fixed the boy with what he hoped was a hard, businesslike stare, and tried his utmost to look like a proper Tooth Fairy, brave and totally on top of the situation and ready for anything- basically, the opposite of how he felt, which was like a proper idiot, sick and scared and a very long way from home. "I'm warning you- final warning- you're heading the right way to get yourself blacklisted, and I don't wanna have to tell you what happens then."
"Why? What happens?"
"I dunno," confessed Tracy, edging from foot to foot, "why'd you think I didn't want to have to tell you? But I bet it's horrible. And, and, nobody'll come for the rest of your teeth, and at twenty pence a tooth, that's at least four quid you'll miss out on, isn't it?"
"Umm," said the boy, frowning. He shook back his sheepy mop of hair again, and started to count on his fingers.
"Just- just let me go, will you? If I don't get that wand back home by dawn I'm going to probably literally get killed, and that's just for starters. Let me go," he added, struck by sudden inspiration, "and I'll give you a wish."
The boy stopped trying to do sums in his head. "What- really?"
"Course, I'm a fairy, aren't I? One wish."
"In stories," said the boy, dubiously, "people usually get three."
"Don't push your luck," advised Tracy. "One wish, that's your lot. But you got to let me out first, I can't do anything in here."
"You promise you won't just... whizz off?"
"Promise," said Tracy, who wasn't even sure if he certainly didn't feel very whizzy. The salt, or maybe just the shock of getting caught, had knocked all the wind out of his sails. He was fairly hopeful that the boy would let him go- or rather, he didn't want to think about what would happen if the boy didn't let him go-but he decided that this would be the last tooth he'd take tonight, even so. Enough was enough. The human world was a strange place, endlessly fascinating, great to visit, but he'd had enough of it for one night. Right now, he just wanted to go home.
"Swear on my name."
"Okay," said the boy, after a moment's thoughtful pause. He kicked gingerly at the circle, scuffing the salt, creating a gap about an inch wide. It wouldn't have been enough room for so much as a snail to pass without risking serious injury, but fortunately for Tracy that wasn't the point- the moment the circle was broken, he hopped smartly out, avoiding the scattered crystals and breathing a huge, secret sigh of relief.
"Thank you," he said, snatching up the wand. He felt much better with it back in his hand- a long, polished lathe-turned thing a bit scuffed with wear, far too big for him but still reassuringly solid and hefty, warm in his palm. He gave it a quick warm-up flick, and the string holding the nose of the Airfix bomber to the ceiling snapped in a puff of bright dust, sending it into a twirling half-nosedive. He ignored it, leaning over the bed.
"Where'd you find this thing, anyway?" he said, leafing through the book's tattered pages, closely-typeset runes and chunks of Old Speech laid out between passages of English text. "Recipe… recipe… limerick- hoo, that's rude… crossword… I've never seen such a lot of old tripe in my life."
"My mum collects old books. What about my wish?"
"Alright, alright, keep your hair on, one wish coming up." Tracy shut the book with a snap. "What d'you want?"
"I want to be famous,"said the boy, breathlessly, shiny-eyed. "Like Superman. Or Doctor Who."
Tracy looked at him for a moment.
"Look, it's a wand," he said, patiently. "It doesn't do great big complicated ideas like that. There's limits, alright, I can't just go round making people famous. People would notice- your whatd'youcallems, parents, for a start."
The boy snorted. "My mum never notices anything. All she does is watch telly and argue with people from the British Museum."
"Also, bigger snag- you haven't done anything to be famous for."
"I caught a fairy," said the boy, darkly.
"Yeah, and you let him go- so don't start getting any smart ideas," snapped Tracy, as the boy's eyes flicked towards the book. "You'll prob'ly make your own nose fall off if you go on reading out of that thing, and I won't be able to stick it back on. Wands don't do noses, either."
"What do they do, then?" said the boy, sulkily.
"Look, sunshine," said Tracy, who was beginning to lose his temper, "you want to watch it, or you're gonna be wishing you were more polite. An' I tell you what," he added, with a touch of spite, "I'm not wishing you a thing before you hand over your tooth. I'm a pr'fessional, you know, I didn't come here to be messed about."
"Hey! You promised!"
"Yeah, well, that was before you started mouthing off. No tooth, no wish- take it or leave it."
"Alright, alright," grumbled the boy, scowling and fumbling in the front pocket of his pyjamas. "Here."
Tracy held out his hand, and the boy dropped the tooth into it.
Downstairs, the clock struck twelve.
The first indication Tracy had that something was badly wrong came within a second of the tooth hitting his palm. To his horror, it started to glow, pulsing with an ebbing, greenish marshlight. Within the space of half a minute it had become unpleasantly bright, like a flare- or a beacon.
"What's-"
He looked down, and was appalled to see that the satchel by his legs was glowing too, becoming a smouldering pouch of green fire. By his side, the boy let out a startled yelp as the overhead light flickered and blew out with a sharp, whining pop, plunging the room into a smoky, emerald-tinted otherworld, sending the shadows of the everyday human objects that filled it crawling towards the ceiling. More shadows crept from the corners of the room, from between the floorboards, from the edges of the skylight blind- merging and flowing together in a single inky stream. Tracy hugged the satchel to his chest and backed off, mouth hanging frog-wide, watching his own shadow grow and twist, pulling this way and that in clumsy, puppetlike lunges as if it would tear itself in two.
And then- it did.
Two became three became four, and the sickly green shadow-shapes split again and again and puffed and swelled and pulled themselves away from the wall in jerky tendrils of green smoke, until there were thirteen, a full baker's dozen of tall, misty shadows, silent and staring at Tracy and the human child with the eyes they did not have, the blank holes where their eyes should have been.
For a moment, everything was deathly quiet. Only a moment, and then the other string holding the Airfix bomber to the ceiling took the opportunity to snap, sending the toy crashing to the rug and breaking the spell.
Tracy would later maintain that the boy screamed first, and the boy would probably have sworn blind that Tracy did, but in reality they took the same enormous, whooping breath at exactly the same moment and screamed together, grabbing for each other in their blind panic. Tracy's fingers bit into the boy's shoulders, and the boy latched on to Tracy's side like a limpet, small fists knotting in his shapeless tunic. The misty figures didn't so much as move in response- worse than any reaction, that blank, blind, deaf indifference- but Tracy didn't wait for them to make the first move. Still screaming at the top of his lungs, scared far beyond the capacity to do anything but grab for that single thread of sheer instinct in his chest, the one that said Home, he bundled the glowing satchel up in a one-armed death-grip, and Crossed out of the human world.
He hit the polished marble of the Dock on his knees and rolled, the wind knocked clean out of him, the zaps and crackles of excess magic grounding all around him in the darkness. His glasses skittered off his nose and out of sight, and he lunged blindly after them with scrabbling, sweat-slick hands. The sun-that-wasn't-quite-a-sun hadn't yet risen outside the big windows, and the information board was still an empty blank, but the party was over. For perhaps the only few hours in the busy year, the Dock was completely deserted.
Tracy snatched up his glasses and staggered to his feet, clinging to his satchel and letting the sweet air of his own world wash over him- Titania, Lilith and Mab, I'll never leave again!- and looked around wildly for someone or something to help. His heart was hammering and his stomach yawned like a bottomless pit, and he knew damn well that it wasn't all Crossing nausea this time, either. It was the kind of sick that you felt when you suspected you might possibly have done something incredibly, astronomically, phenomenally stupid.
At his feet, the boy groaned and picked himself up off the book, which had cushioned his fall.
"Where are we?" he said, shakily, as Tracy turned in a tight, panicky circle, holding his wand aloft. The Dock was far too big to light with one small wand-tip, and Clover's wand was drained by the busy night's workout he'd put it through- it cast a dying circle of warmth barely six feet around them, glinting off vague suggestions of marble and glass in the black void beyond.
"Home," said Tracy, jumpily, shaking the wand in the faint hope that it would hustle some more magic out of it. Wands were, at their heart, little more than a conduit for the magic and belief of the fairy wielding them, and this was a fact he sincerely wished he wasn't a party to, or at least didn't have to face while feeling so tired and scared, and believing not much more than he was altogether a bit of an idiot. "Well, for me. Fairy. Don't go wandering off, there's a hole 'bout five fathoms deep somewhere over there. And no safety rail. We don't do safety rails."
"Whuh-whuh-whuh-what were those- those things?" whispered the boy, backing into Tracy's side. He had lost a slipper somewhere, and his eyes were bigger than the moon, hazel and terrified in the light of Tracy's wand. He suddenly looked very small, and very young. "G-guh-ghosts? They looked like-"
"I think they were the vengeful spirits of the dead," said Tracy, grimly. His voice echoed off the high walls, hollow and plunking. "I think I might have gone and broken the accord."
"M-my uncle got me one of those," said the boy, in a sort of autopilot-voice, staring up into the black vault of space above them as if trying to comprehend the sheer, boggling size of it. "But Mum w-won't let me play it in the house."
"I'm gonna get in so much trouble." Tracy turned to look at him, his own owly eyes getting even wider with slow-dawning horror. "You, you shouldn't be here, nobody's allowed to bring humans into Fairy without proper permission and forms and everything- it's strictly forbidden. It's- it's the Lore. I've broken the Lore."
"My mum's prob'ly going to notice the house being all full of ghosts, too" said the boy, gloomily. "And if she finds out I was messing around with her books-"
The circle of wandlight dwindled suddenly, shrank to a fading handful of stardust at the tip of Tracy's wand, pitching them both into sudden darkness. He shook it, face locked in a panicked little snarl, thumb press-press-pressing the generator like the button of a broken vending machine, and was rewarded at last with a flooding resurgence of light-
-green light.
Tracy jerked back, dropping his wand for the second time that night, and at his back the boy let out a short, woeful wail of terror. The Dock was no longer empty. All around the two children, rising through the inky polish of the floor and encircling them in a dense, unbroken ring, the thirteen phantom shadows loomed. Tall, hunched, dripping smoky threads of green fire from their trailing shrouds and their bony, reaching hands, they pressed slowly inwards, and their hollow eyesockets seemed to fix Tracy with a dreadful, hungry accusation.
"This isn't real," the boy croaked, behind him. "It- it can't be real."
Tracy shook his head- whether in agreement or denial was unclear- and hugged the satchel, tightly, his mouth opening and closing like a frog's. The simple, stark new fact that home was not safe had shaken him to the core. It felt like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach, and his brain didn't seem to be functioning in the same dimension as his mouth, or the rest of his body for that matter.
"Wh-what did you do? What do th-they want?"
"The- the teeth," managed Tracy, "they- they belong to them-"
The boy looked at Tracy as if he was mad. "Give 'em back then!"
With clammy, shaking fingers, Tracy dragged the satchel strap from around his neck. The thought of letting go of the teeth chewed painfully at his gut, but on another level he knew the boy was right- if that primal magic-hungry part of him wanted to get horribly 'venged upon by a pack of angry ghosts, it could take its chances. The rest of Tracy- the smarter, reasoning part- wanted to live to see the sunrise.
"Here!" he yelled. "Take 'em!"
The satchel hit the floor where he threw it with a heavy thud, trailing green fire as it blazed from its magic-packed heart, whipping the nearest ghost's misty shroud into a billowing eddy of dry-ice ripples. The thing inclined its blind, long-jawed head, studying it slowly. As Tracy watched, his stomach knotting with a mixture of jealous loss and relief, the mist that made up the shape of its robes thickened and crept up over the burning bundle of the satchel, the radiance fading and mingling together until it blurred completely out of sight.
The ghosts had remained motionless throughout, their sagging fog-etched faces turned towards the place where the satchel had landed and been consumed- restored, whispered that older, cleverer part of Tracy, in the back of his mind. They seemed to be waiting, letting the silence drag out through the seconds. The boy, who seemed to be trying to make himself physically smaller through a combination of hiding behind Tracy and his own shaggy-dog fringe, let out a quiet whimper.
"It's alright, it's over," Tracy was just starting to say, when the nearest ghost's black-eyed waxwork face lifted slowly towards him once again. Pinned to the spot on the cold marble, nailed through by that terrible, hungry nothing-stare- and then another- and another and another- he realised that it wasn't over at all, not by a long shot.
Fairies didn't really have gods, at least not in the sense that humans did. As a species, they were naturally so reliant on faith that the idea of worshipping something that was even more dependent on belief tended to strike them as nothing more than a gross waste of resources. Sometimes, though, the need to pray to something transcended even the most sensible philosophies, and the thought that went through Tracy's terrified mind as the ghosts lifted up their heavy, trailing heads and began to drift slowly closer was something as close to a prayer as made no difference, a fear-bright and fervent litany on the basic theme of Oh Godmothers I'm sorry I swear I'm sorry somebody please help us now-
The ghosts had drifted so tight around them that they were pressed back-to-back, shrinking from the ragged mist that eddied around their feet. The first ghost opened its mouth in a yawning, silent scream, and Tracy gathered the last few tired sparks of his own magic and shielded the younger boy with his own skinny trembling body, squeezing his eyes shut tight-
"What is going on here?"
Upon finding himself not immediately dead, Tracy steeled himself and looked up. The ghosts were falling back, parting to reveal-
Lily didn't really have an official title, as such. She didn't need one. A century ago, she might have been called a Queen, but these days fairies tended to view that sort of thing as embarrassingly quaint and old-fashioned, detrimental to Fairy's slick new corporate image, and Lily had never claimed to be a Queen. For as long as anyone could remember she had always maintained that she was not ruling Fairy, but simply taking care of it. Managing it, looking after it until such a time as it passed into someone else's care.
Nevertheless, a Queen was more or less what she was, and it she certainly looked like one to Tracy at that moment, as she landed gracefully with her large peach-tinted wings unfurled to their full span and strode across the deserted stretch of the main concourse, a stately and disapproving expression set on her regal face, her skirts streaming behind her like a waterfall of cold ivory. The ghosts fell back before her, and she stepped in front of Tracy and the boy- barely sparing them a glance- and folded her arms, looking up into the sepulchral mists. As soon as her back was turned Tracy- or rather, Tracy's sense of self-preservation, Tracy himself had little to do with it- stuck Clover's wand behind his back and kicked the boy's book into the shadows.
"What is the meaning of this?"
The ghosts blurred, blended. A gaunt and foggy hand reached accusingly for Tracy, who shrank back again, words that were not quite words arriving whole and horrible in his head.
Stole...
...hungry...
...ours...
"I see," said Lily, as if talking to nine-foot-tall ghouls made from green fog with melting holes for eyes was something she did every day of the week before breakfast. "However, he returned the teeth of his own free will. By the terms of the accord-"
...accord...
…broken...
"Excuse me, I hadn't finished. By the terms of the accord, you have no claim to him. And since they are within the boundaries of Fairy, both he and the human child, ah..."
"M-muh-Martin," managed the boy, from behind Tracy. He was clinging shyly to Tracy's back, looking up at Lily with huge eyes as if he couldn't bring himself to stop. Lily glanced down at him, and for a moment her ironclad expression softened slightly into something a little more kindly, even faintly amused.
"-Martin, are under my protection, and that is the final word. If you wish to discuss our agreement, I'd be more than happy to do so, but the children are free to go. Tracy," she continued, and Tracy snapped upright, as if galvanised by a wand to the back of the legs, "take Martin home."
Tracy was stunned, not sure whether to be proud or frightened. She knew his name. "But-"
Lily half-turned, and her eyes locked with his own. It was only for a single second, but it was more than long enough as far as Tracy was concerned. She seemed to see him, all of him, inside and out, every inch of his own small soul weighed and measured and totally understood in one scathing glance. He gulped, and bowed his head.
"Yes, my Lady."
Before she could say anything else, or worse, change her mind, he grabbed Martin's arm- the boy was an awestruck, immobile lump- gave Lily and the twisting, mournful shades ringed around her a final, fearful look, and flipped out of the world.
"Are you gonna be in trouble?" asked Martin. Tracy, exploring the base and the cord of the lamp on the kid's messy desk, finally found something that looked appropriately switchlike and snapped it on, filling the room with warm light and dinosaur-shaped shadows from the patterned-paper shade. He looked around, and gave a nonchalant shrug.
"Oh, probably. I've been in trouble before, loads of times." This was true, but the larger fact was that once one has been in fear of one's life at the mercy of a host of angry phantoms risen from the grave, the idea of mundane punishment loses a lot of its sting, at least in prospect.
"Was- was that- that lady your mum?"
Tracy started to laugh, saw the look on Martin's face, and stopped. The human didn't look in the mood to be cracking jokes, much less appreciating them. He looked fairly shellshocked, in fact, sitting on the end of his bed and working his pyjama sleeve into shaky knots in both hands, his small feet not-quite-touching the floor. He was still missing a slipper, and it took Tracy a moment to locate it, tangled up in the string of the crashed Airfix bomber.
"Not exactly," he said, gravely, putting the tangle of string and plane parts on the bedside table and poking the slipper back onto Martin's unresponsive foot. It was like dressing a scarecrow. "That was Lily. She's... she's sort of everyone's mum."
"I wish she was mine," said Martin. He huddled around his knees, the picture of despondency. "I lost the book. Mum's going to go mental."
Tracy thought for a moment, then poked him in the shoulder with the wand, which by this point in the proceedings had about as much magic left in it as a Twiglet.
"You probably saved my life, you know," he said.
Martin looked up, frowning.
"Telling me to- to get rid of the teeth, back there. I- I was that scared, I didn't think of it." Didn't want to think of it, was the full truth, but Tracy didn't think Martin would understand that, not really. Maybe there were things that humans needed like breathing, things that it nearly almost hurt to be parted from, even though they might not even be rightfully yours- but he didn't know what they were, so he couldn't draw a comparison. "Thanks."
"That's- that's okay." Martin sat up a bit.
"You got to promise, though, no more going round trying to catch fairies. Alright? I won't tell on you this time, 'cause fair's fair, you saved my life, but if you do it again-"
"I won't."
"Promise?"
"Swear on my name," said Martin, starting to grin.
Tracy grinned back at him. For the first time, it occurred to him that perhaps there was something even trickier and more satisfying than collecting teeth- and that just maybe, he might be quite good at it, someday.
"Don't forget, I still owe you a wish," he said. "If you ever think of anything, let me know."
By the time Tracy summoned up the courage to return to the Dock, it was almost dawn. The walls were bleached of their warm pastels by the not-quite-dawnlight, the floor a washed-out pool of reflections spiralled with daisies the colour of dishwater. Even without holding his breath he was nearly invisible against it, his tunic the perfect camouflage, little more than a mop of blond hair and scuffed pink feet pattering across the wide polished expanse, only himself and a pale fleeting mirror-Tracy hurrying to beat the dawn.
He was nervous again, edgy and utterly exhausted. It had been hard enough resisting the urge to creep off to his own small burrow of a room and sleep for long enough to climb back up to the Flight Department and return the wand to Duke, but a promise was a promise, as he forced himself to remember while struggling to muffle yet another gargantuan yawn in his sleeve. From his point of view, the night seemed to have lasted at least a hundred years.
He paused just long enough in the middle of the grey marble floor to check that the immediate area was empty of ghosts, fairies, and terrifying authority figures in general, and then made a run for it. The big door at the far end creaked a little as he dragged on the heavy handle and cracked it just wide enough to slip through-
"Tracy."
He stopped in his tracks and turned, slowly, cringing. Lily stood at the far end of the main concourse, looking out over the brightening clouds that surrounded the Hive in their protective cocoon. Her back was turned to him, very straight, her wings folded gracefully behind her. He stared, unable to help it- he'd never seen her with her wings closed before.
"Come here."
Heart in his mouth, he pattered over the marble towards the raised dais, and the ghostly mirror-Tracy ran at his feet, their shared shadow long and thin in the strengthening dawnlight. The sun would rise very soon, and it wouldn't set again for another year, not even at the winter solstice, when the clouds beyond the glass would be heavy with picture-perfect snow. The weather system that surrounded the Hive was mostly controlled by Fairy magic, the same magic that kept the whole structure afloat and timeless in its armoured bubble, but some things refused to be altered by glamour- even Lily's.
Terror fluttered in his chest like a caged bird. He didn't know what happened to fairies that broke ancient laws and accidentally unleashed the spirits of the vengeful dead upon the living, but he was very sure that he didn't want to find out. Punishment to Tracy had always meant boring lectures and extra work and mind-numbing chores while everyone else was flitting around having fun, and while that sort of thing had always seemed monstrously unfair at the time, he realised now that there were crimes so serious that cleaning and copying and Thinking Hard About What You Did paled into insignificance.
He climbed the steps slowly, dragging his feet, full of the wretched knowledge that there were things a lot worse than chores. Fairies could be exiled, he'd never seen it happen but he'd read about it, and the thought filled his throat with tight painful panic and made his eyes swell with frightened, unshed tears.
"You broke a lot of rules tonight, Tracy," said Lily.
"I'm sorry," he muttered, halting on the very last step. However tall he was compared to Duke and the others, Lily was taller. Her straight-backed silhouette was stern and remote, her face unreadable against the brightening glass. He hunted the surface for her reflection, trying to find her expression before she saw him looking, but couldn't see her face- the light was too bright.
"The Lore is there for a reason." She sounded tired. "It protects us. What you did jeopardised much more than your own safety. I managed to bring them round- this time- but the fact remains, your actions directly threatened us all."
"Nbdysplained," said Tracy, in a tiny voice.
She looked away from the glass. "I beg your pardon?"
"Nobody explained," said Tracy, a bit louder, but still in the direction of his feet. He made himself look up. "I mean, someone sort of did, but they told me it was a joke. If they'd said, don't collect teeth on Halloween 'cause they really do belong to the dead-"
"-you still would have had no business collecting those children's teeth in the first place," said Lily. "Tooth Fairies learn these things as part of their training. They don't just rush in willy-nilly one day and start collecting teeth because they feel like it. Being a Tooth Fairy is a great privilege, and you are expected to earn it through dedication and hard work. And just because it relies on rules," she added, looking directly at him for the first time, "that does not make it a game."
Tracy felt about an inch tall. He looked down at his feet again, and sniffed.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled, again.
"You tried to protect the human child." said Lily, thoughtfully, as if she hadn't heard. "That was brave. Incredibly foolish, but brave. However, it doesn't change the fact that he never would have been in danger if you hadn't been so reckless. Whatever possessed you to do something so stupid?"
"I- I just..."
He trailed off, swallowing hard.
"I cannot abide people who mutter," said Lily, apparently to the glass. "If someone has something to say, there's no reason in the world why they shouldn't just say it. It makes things so much simpler."
"I just wanted to know what it felt like," whispered Tracy. "And... and I wanted to see if- if I could. Everyone says you can't be a Tooth Fairy if you haven't got wings, but I wanted- I just wanted to prove them wrong."
There was a pause.
"Life isn't about what you may or may not have," said Lily, at last, and to Tracy's amazement she sounded almost gentle, almost kind. "It's about how much you want the things you don't have, and how much you are prepared to work for them- and wait for them, if that's what it takes. And do you know the most important thing of all? Look at me, Tracy."
He looked. He felt very shaky and his eyes were blinking furiously behind his big crooked glasses, but he stood up straight and looked her in the eye, and was startled to realise that she was smiling.
"Believing that you deserve them."
Like a searchlight across a still pool, the first ray of sunlight crept down the steps and fell across the long marbled floor. Lily looked away, out across the gold-pink expanse of cloud beyond the glass, and her wings opened, glowing, unfurling like a flower seeking the light. Behind her, the first few sparse, timid pops and ticks echoed across the Dock from the information boards, letter by letter tumbling over into place and beginning to fill the blank black rows with names- places- PENDING- IN PROGRESS- COMPLETED-
"Now, hurry along," she said, briskly. "Take that book down to Supplies- we don't want it falling into any more clever little hands, do we? And Tracy..."
Tracy, who was still feeling more than a bit gobsmacked- and who could blame him; he had, after all, been expecting practically anything but this gracious eleventh-hour reprieve- checked himself halfway across the floor and looked uncertainly back up at her, Martin's grandfather's book clutched safely to his chest.
"Do at least try to stay out of trouble. I'll be keeping a close eye on you."
"Yes, m'Lady," said Tracy, who could feel himself starting to grin from sheer relief. He dared to flip a quick salute- it had to be quick, the book was heavy, and in danger of slipping- and then turned and fled before the grin had the chance to grow to a size that might be taken as disrespectful.
He scuttled the rest of the way across the gold-soaked floor, nimbly dodging the few early-bird fairies beginning to flit and hurry into the main concourse. Some of them stopped and looked after him, some in mild surprise, a few with faint disapproval- maybe wondering what such a small, untidy twig of a wingless fairy was doing up so early with such a big and important-looking book, or why he was grinning so maniacally, or going at such an unseemly rate, flying with wings at his heels.
Another blink and he was gone, trailing a fading, elated yell in his wake.
"Happy Halloween!"