stepped into the light to catch up to Bran, to confront the lad and notify him of the danger he was in from Merle and whatever watched from the shadows, when a sound came on the chilly air that stopped him short.
It was a chittering Richard knew well.
The knight sank deeper into the night, watching. He did not have to wait long. The hum came again, more urgent and excited this time, whirring overhead from several directions at once. Richard kept quiet. He watched to differentiate whom the buzzing creatures were after.
“Come get some,” Richard whispered.
The shadows dropped like stones but not toward the knight. Instead they went for Bran, too colorful to be bats. His worst assumptions about the boy made clear, Richard scowled.
The fairies had found their prey.
Bran Ardall strode through the vacant, dilapidated streets in the area he now knew as the Bricks, the city of Seattle hiding him beneath a mantle of darkness.
The damp avenues were like many others he had traveled.
Even though he had not lived in the city since before the death of his parents and had never been in the Bricks to his knowledge, Bran felt he knew Pioneer Square. Every city possessed a quarter where the less fortunate converged—an area a bit darker but available, more run down but with a soup kitchen, perceived less clean by the locals but with enough people to beg change from. The name of the city did not matter. Bran had been up and down the West Coast from place to place, but wherever he roamed he was prepared to survive because it never changed.
He hated living in such conditions.
To be homeless was hardship he wished on no other.
It was a difficult life. Food was hard to come by. The winter stole warmth and the summer scalded. Sleep was fitful and rarely replenishing. Danger strolled the streets in the form of aggressive drug dealers, meth heads, and thugs from every background, all of whom fought for imaginary turf. Thieves were rampant; liars were everywhere. Despair was a tangible entity, able to kill if one let it. Disgust from those who passed on their way to lives of importance permeated this world, gazes of contempt left unchecked.
Bran wondered when such looks would not wound.
Now nineteen years old, Bran hoped it would no longer matter. He had settled. Merle had given him an opportunity, looked past the grime of the streets, and Bran planned on taking advantage of his generosity.
Bran had been discovering what type of businesses existed in the Bricks, when he stopped in front of Old World Tales to scan the volumes in the windows. His father had loved books. As a nine-year-old, one of the last memories Bran had of him took place in his father’s library, watching him pore over various tomes. Bran could not touch them; many were quite old, bound in leather with foreign letters stamped into the spines. When his father was not traveling, Bran watched him closely, fascinated by what he deemed so important.
At times, the odor of parchment and ink from that library returned to Bran from buried memory, thick in his nose, reminding him of a past before the streets, a past when he was happy and loved.
No matter what city he found himself in, the memory accosted him anew when coming across a bookstore.
While staring at the books, lost in reverie, the door had opened. A white-bearded man wearing a white collared shirt and khaki pants stood at the entrance and breathed in the warm late summer air before his eyes settled on Bran.
“Love books?” the man inquired.
“I do,” Bran said, nodding. “Just something about them.”
“Magic.”
“Excuse me?”
“Magic,” the old man repeated. “Nothing like a book, really. Nothing like a book can help a person become who they have always wanted to be. Nothing like a book can return us to our childhood. A book can hold amazing magic.”
Bran looked at the man. Icy blue eyes penetrated deep, but his face held warmth and understanding.
“Looking for a way to get off the streets?”
Bran frowned. Trust was a luxury he had a hard time offering freely. Homeless rarely benefited from such unions with more respectable members of society. But there was something different about the man in the doorway, an innate goodness like his father had possessed.
“You own the store then?” Bran asked.
The other smiled. “Maybe.”
“Then maybe I am looking to get off the streets.”
“My name is Merle.”
“Bran Ardall.”
Merle nodded and, pulling a pipe from his pocket, welcomed Bran