Spin the Shadows (Dark and Wicked Fae #1) - Cate Corvin Page 0,39

club in his hairy, clawed hands, the tattered robes dragging on the cracked sidewalk behind him. I was only several steps behind, smiling nervously at some of the Fae we passed.

There were no Gentry here. This was the part of town ruled entirely by the Lessers, the castoffs of the Seelie Court and those Unseelie who were willing to brave the light of day.

I wish I could’ve said they were my kind of Lessers, but they were the kind my mother had told me to stay far away from. Barely clothed nymphs danced in windows, bathed in red light, and more than a few interested eyes watched me from alleyways. The street was covered in a coat of grime that years of washing wouldn’t be able to scrape away.

Luckily, Robin had chosen the best type of Lesser to pose as to ensure we wouldn’t be accosted. Fachans were notoriously ill-tempered, besides being hideously ugly; nobody wanted to meet the spiked club with their face.

He led me past several grimy bars to an arch set in a stone wall. A set of narrow steps descended into a wet sort of darkness.

“Go work,” he grated, settling on a broken box nearby and clutching his pail to his chest. “Make money.”

Fachans weren’t exactly known for their eloquence, either.

I steeled my nerves. Robin had prepped me for what waited in the Undercity, a complete dossier on the upper-level Skin Market, and which doors to stay away from to avoid going lower and dropping into the Unseelie Court, or the Unseelie city of Annwyn, the reverse side of Avilion.

Still, he hadn’t told me that walking it alone would be safe at all.

I tottered down the stairs, avoiding touching the slimy walls. At the bottom of the shallow well was a warped door that pushed open easily under my touch, leading to another dank tunnel lit with oil lamps and cobbled-together electric lights that ran off power stolen from the Avilion grid.

The smell of water and stone was overpowered by the smell of the Skin Market ahead: perfume, food, piss, sweat. I wanted to wrinkle my nose, but this needed to look like second nature to me.

The tunnel opened on a wide underground room. Roots grew down from the ceiling in pale tangles like entwined limbs, but under it, the Skin Market was in full hustle.

I plunged in, one of a thousand others. A sylph reclining on a divan under a tent exhaled smoke that danced in rings around her head. There was another dryad, her skin pale from living underground, and a crown of branches rising from her thick hair. She sat in a tree that had managed to grow out of a hostile environment, its spindly branches reaching for the ceiling.

Their eyes slid right over me; I was one of them in this disguise.

A hob that barely reached my knee touched my leg. “How much?” His paws were slimy, making me shudder.

“You can’t afford me,” I told him haughtily, and strolled off. Robin had made me practice the liquid accent of the Harbor all day until I sounded passably nereid, as long as I didn’t say too much.

I heard the hob swearing at me from behind, but he was soon swallowed up by the milling crowd.

I went from one entrance all the way to another with no sign of a satyr.

My heart fell. I’d known it was a long shot, that we might have to repeat this several times in different disguises before we came across Calder, but I’d been hoping my luck would hold out.

I looked down a dark tunnel: one of the ones Robin had warned me away from. There were a thousand of them, a network of underground passages spreading all across Avilion, but until I’d seen them for myself, I hadn’t understood just how many Solitary Fae lived beneath the streets. It was like a city under a city.

I turned back, ready to search the other side, when the soft clip-clop of hooves caught my ear. My heart began racing before I even saw him.

Calder stepped into the Skin Market, flanked by bodyguards: two Dullahans in dark leather armor, each carrying their heads under one arm, with the other hand resting on a sword at their waists.

He was talking at rapid speed into a phone, his piggish little eyes scanning the market. The leather jacket he’d worn the other day was stretched almost to the breaking point across his belly.

I almost tripped over the legs of an unconscious Fae in