Lost Destinies

↳ 26: In Which Time Runs Out

Teenage career criminals weren't a laughing matter in Fairy Kingdom. There were lots of them, forged by desperation and poverty and years of growing up listening to stories of evil queens and dastardly sorcerers. Who wouldn't dream of slaying a giant if they knew it meant riches beyond measure? The giant's innocence would never matter.

Claude was twenty-one. Sicilienne had only left something like a week before. Everyone knew, at the time, that the Ugly Duckling was still in Fairy Kingdom, because she'd been spotted vanishing from the site of a robbery in one of those nice neighborhoods filled with stacked white houses—where the upper class lived. You see, the problem with Fairy was that there was really no middle class. There was the very rich and the very poor and that was all, and with large gaps in quality of living came spikes in crime. The poor would steal from the rich and sometimes the bodies of the poor would turn up in alleyways, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not in a place where virtually every type of magic was legal, where creatures of every species, big and small, gathered in communities that were supposed to be accepting but sometimes just ended up with the stronger ones at the top of an unspoken hierarchy.

Now, once the word got out that the Ugly Duckling had gone after one house, it was inevitable that she would go after a few more, because no one went overseas for one haul and then went right back to where they'd come from. Claude heard word of her arrival and figured he should watch his back—there were endless rumors about the Ugly Duckling back then: that she could control birds and make them peck your eyes out, that she would rob you blind and vanish before you ever saw her coming, that she could be anyone and everyone you knew and make you entirely lose your senses. Stuff like that.

The first thing he noticed about the Ugly Duckling when he encountered her was that she wasn't ugly at all. There was no questioning that she was a Villagetowner; the telltale sign was plainness. And she was plain indeed: thin lips, a slightly bumpy, hooked nose, muddy gray-brown eyes. But she wasn't ugly. Ramona told him later that when she was just a bit younger her wings had been brownish, crooked and disheveled, her frame frail and bony, which was likely where that nickname had originated. She'd grown into herself. But she never grew into her reputation. She didn't at all fit the tales of a girl with a hideous curse, or an invisible killer. The 'invisible' part, maybe, was true. Claude had joked once that her superpower was being utterly beige and boring, and she'd replied that for all intents and purposes, it was. Ramona Swan disappeared in a crowd and never came back. She could be everyone, no one. Somehow while being completely noticeable one could still overlook her, and no one who'd seen her could identify her. It could be some form of magic, but Claude suspected there was no magic in it at all, no secret to it. She was just that ordinary.

But while seemingly invisible at times, she was no killer. In fact, Claude had learned that she not only hated death, but cowered in the face of it. And on the day they met, he saved her life.

He'd fully intended, really, to throw his life of stealing away after Sicilienne left. Don't laugh—he had! No longer having someone else under his care meant maybe he could afford to sacrifice having food and shelter here and there again so that he could find himself a respectable job. But whether it was fate or luck or something else entirely, he went around the back of a drugstore to search the dumpsters and entered a scene he hadn't expected that day. The supposedly legendary and fearsome Ugly Duckling looked suspiciously like a teenage girl way out of her league, and she was being pinned to the wall at gunpoint by three men twice her size, the contents of her pockets emptied on the ground. Everyone knew the street rules in Mab. Pickpockets, if caught, would have a hand or several fingers cut off. Sticky fingers. Oftentimes the punishment for girls was much worse. And as one of the men whipped out a blade and advanced closer, the young thief trembling with fear and saying nothing, Claude felt something consume him. It was this little feeling that occasionally came around to say hello. He liked to call it his conscience. So he stepped into full view and flashed a smile, holding up his hands—which at the time, weren't gloved—and did what he did best.