Called into the headmistress's office on the first day.
Wonderful.
Freezing cold winters, constant hunger: This was the life of a homeless orphan. This was my life. Then I got the letter.
Published: October 22nd, 2019
Called into the headmistress's office on the first day.
Wonderful.
Freezing cold winters, constant hunger: This was the life of a homeless orphan. This was my life. Then I got the letter.
I've been on the streets since I was born. It got very rough after my aunt got sick and died. But I made do.
The streets of New York city can very unforgiving, especially when times get desperate. Like in winter.
At least I never had to worry about the cold.
But then I got hurt. Things were looking very bad.
Then Chance showed up with the letter.
The letter that said I was misborn of the fae. A bastard, but the magic still counted.
The letter that said I'd been accepted into Titania's Academy.
When the magic blood of the fae runs through your veins, they will find you, no matter what.
~ ~ ~
So I get to the school. The Faerie Academy Chance said was soooo great. And before I even step one toe on the ground, these girls are doing double takes and giggling behind their backs at me and I just want to plant my fist in their faces.
Then I get upstairs to my dorm room and find some Barbie doll is bullying a girl.
Then she mouths off at me, giving me attitude.
Well, that was it. I couldn't hold back.
I punched her. Yeah, I did it.
Called into the headmistress's office on the first day.
Wonderful.
EXCERPT
TOUR SCHEDULE
Chapter One
Thief
“HEY! COME BACK HERE!” The
shopkeeper shook his fist at me as I ran. “THIEF!”
I was thirteen years old, skinny
as a rail, and small for my size.
So I was fast. Really fast. I
could run like the wind, even while carrying the two loaves of bread.
I heard a police whistle behind
me, but I didn’t stop to look.
If you stop to look, they
catch you.
I raced down the alleyway,
stuffing the bread into the sack hanging from my shoulder as I ran.They were
hot on my heels; I could hear them breathing behind me.
More like puffing. Fat old
man, you can’t catch me.
I reached the end of the alley,
and leaped, catching the top of the dumpster with both hands and swinging my
feet up. Scrambling to the back edge, I jumped up and caught the side of the
second-floor fire escape, and swung myself over the eight-foot-high chain-link
fence to the next alley.
This alley led away from the
street where I’d just swiped the bread, the deli that had the table on the
sidewalk full of just-baked bread, to tantalize people with the smell and lure
them inside. The soup they were then sold was gross. I’d seen a rat fall into
the vat last month, and the gross thing was, so did the cook. He hadn’t fished
the thing out; he’d left it in. I guess he figured, “more meat for the soup.”
I didn’t eat rat. Aunt Clare
always told me they carried disease and to avoid them. We’d been lucky: We
hadn’t had to eat rat yet. Though things had gotten lean in the last year. Aunt
Clare had gotten older, and she didn’t really gather food anymore.
That was up to me. And I was good
at it. She’d taught me well, after all.
But it was still hard.
“Being skinny will help you,
Holly,” Aunt Clare had said. “You can run faster, you can squeeze through gaps
in fences better, and you can jump farther. Sometimes jumping rooftops is the
only thing that’ll get you away from the coppers, and it’ll save your hide. So
stay thin and lean and live to read another day.”
Aunt Clare love to read. She had
two books she kept guarded and read to me most nights.She’d taught me to read
from those books.
I ran down the alley, my feet
padding the ground noiselessly in my sneakers.
Aunt Clare had procured the
canvas sneakers one night six months ago, and they were already
getting tight.
“You’re growing like a weed,
Holly,” she’d said, smiling.
“I am a weed, Aunt Clare,” I said
ruefully, trying to brush out my wild hair with my fingers.
My hair was kind of white, at
least after I went swimming in the canal. Most days it was grey, and wild. An
untamed mess of tangles, Aunt Clare called it.
It flew behind me when I ran, a
white/grey silvery beacon, and helped the coppers spot me in a crowd. It was
not an asset, let me put it this way.
I wore a brown hoodie, the hood
covering my head of crazy platinum hair, the drawstrings tied snugly under my
chin. It helped to hide me in a crowd, and in dark alleyways.
I turned and ran down a sidewalk,
slowing as I approached a crowd.
Slipping in through the edges, I
lost myself in the throng of people walking, and I disappeared.
New York City was a great place
to live if you were homeless, Aunt Clare had always said. Whenever she would
say that, I wondered why she didn’t mention the winters, which were cold as
ice, the rats, which managed to get in everywhere, and the dangers.
Dangers of being grabbed by
coppers.
Dangers of being robbed by the
others who shared the streets with you.
Dangers of getting sick.
Dangers of getting stabbed.
Lots of dangers.
I was now walking rapidly through
the crowd, one hand firmly wrapped around my bag holding the precious bread
loaves. Aunt Clare and I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and I had a hollow
feeling in my stomach.
Ten minutes later, I turned down
between two buildings and into a side door that led down to the subway system.
Ten minutes after that, and I was
walking down a nearly dark subway tunnel beside tracks that had been abandoned
before I was born.
I trotted faster, then ducked
into an alcove, lifted a heavy metal grate, and slipped into our home.
The spot was barely seven feet
square. It was lined with discarded coats, blankets from the shelters and
giveaways, and a small, flea-infested old mattress Aunt Clare and I had dragged
in five years ago.
“I’m back,” I whispered, setting
the candles I had swiped on the crate that served as a table. A button lamp sat
there, flickering fitfully.
Aunt Clare had made it last
month.
“Let me show you how to make a
button lamp,” she’d said. “My parents had these when I was a child.”
She’d taken a small metal disk
that we’d used to burn candles in, it had wax at the bottom, and she’d put a
small tear of fabric from her shirt, threaded it through a large plastic button
from an old coat long since lost, and stuck it in the wax.
Then she’d lit it.
It didn’t give much light, but it
lasted forever and stubbornly refused to go out.
“It will stay. It will stay for a
long, long time,” she’d said.
Aunt Clare was asleep on the bed,
wrapped in an old tattered blanket.
I leaned over to her face and
kissed her cheek.
Her eyes opened, fluttering
softly in the dim light.
I pressed one of the loaves of
bread into her hands, and she sat up and began to eat.
I sat facing her in my own little
nest. My back against the wall, and my knees drawn up to my chest, I began to
nibble on my own loaf of bread.
She was all I had.
“Aunt Clare?” I whispered, rubbing
her arm. “How are you feeling today?”
“Ohh,” she yawned. “I think I’m
feeling better, child.” She took a bite out of the small loaf of bread. “Mmmm,
this is delicious!”
The bread loaves were about ten
inches long and crusty on the outside, baked to a golden brown. The inside was
soft and fluffy, just the way Aunt Clare liked it.
I smiled.
“Mmmm, it is good, isn’t it?” I
crunched the bread with relish.
We ate in silence for a few
minutes.
Our little corner of the world
was small and dirty, and the walls were stained with old water runoff, and no
matter how much I tried, I could never keep all the insects out, but one thing
that set it apart from the other cubbies underground in this old subway tunnel
was that it was warm.
A few years back, we’d had a woman
who befriended us, and shared her food with us. She’d been homeless a few years
and had learned the ropes from others in the city.
She’d been nice and asked to
sleep in our cubby in exchange for sharing the food she stole, and we let her.
That had been a mistake.
After two months of this
situation, she’d pulled a knife on us and forced us out of our cubby.
“Yours is the only one that’s not
freezing!” she’d screamed.
It was true that the underground
could be brutally cold during winter. But she was right: ours was the only
cubby not freezing.
In fact, it was warm enough so I
could take off my coat.
So, we’d grabbed our stuff and
fled, while she’d brandished the knife at us and glowered. We’d spent a day
looking for a new space to sleep in, and finally found one, about a half mile
down the tunnel.
It was another warm cubby.
I wasn’t sure I understood what
was going on, but Aunt Clare and I had spent the evening talking in whispers
about it.
“Holly, sweet baby girl, you’re
the reason why the cubby was warm,” Aunt Clare had hugged
me and whispered, then put a
finger to her lips. “No one can know.”
No one can know.
I never understood this thing I
did, but I did realize that it was because of me. When I left the cubby for a
long time, the temperature slowly dropped until it was freezing.
Once, I had been gone for two
days, because I got caught in a bad deal with several people chasing me and the
coppers were around, and I just ran. I ran and ran and ran, then found an old
coal chute I could hide in. I had some food in my bag since it’d been the end
of my hunting-forfood day, so I was fine. Even though there’d been snow on the
ground outside, I was able to huddle in the three-foot space and wait it out.
It had grown warm while I
crouched there, and I’d decided to stay.
But when I finally emerged and
was able to make my way back to Aunt Clare in the cubby, I’d found her
shivering and the cubby had been freezing.
When I entered it, she’d been so
happy to see me, and had hugged me for a long time.
“You’re so warm,” she’d said
through her chattering teeth.
I thought about all these things
as I ate the bread, chewing slowly, savoring every bite.
I glanced around our little
cubby. It was our world. It was home. I always felt better when I was back home
after a day of foraging for food in the city.
Food.
It was a constant worry. I
usually went to the park or the fountain and watched people eat their lunch,
waiting for one of them who glanced at their watch, realized they were late,
and tossed the last half of their sandwich or meatpie into the trash. I was
there like a flash, picking it back out and running off as I stuffed it into my
bag.
Sometimes no one threw out
half-eaten food, and I had to go hunting for something to eat. Then I’d walk
down the streets and look for stores that had food out front, displayed to
entice shoppers to enter and buy.
I could often get away with
grabbing an apple or orange, a banana or a pecan pie, or a small loaf of bread
without being seen.
But sometimes they saw me. That’s
when I ran.
They’d never caught me, not once.
It was a point of pride.
A far-off noise rattled outside
in the tunnel and brought me back to the present.
About the author:
Samaire Provost grew up in a lot of different places, and now happily resides on the
East Coast of America, laboring away at writing stories every day. She is an animal lover with far too many pets, yet she still muses how she’d like to add even more. A lover of all things night and gothic, she also loves to read and reread her favorite books. Owned by a cat named Tyrion, she can be found haunting the shadows and mists that hang low over the hills of southern Virginia.
Author's Giveaway
4 comments:
Nice cover.
Sounds great.
This cover is absolutely beautiful. I am obsessed with anything magical, so I know I would love this book.
The cover art seems appropriate for the book. Good job.
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