Grey Folk

Chapter 1

It was Emory's day off, and he was bound and determined to ignore that knocking.

Any other day he wouldn't mind being pulled into whatever drama would inevitably need his input to solve, but today he was going to read The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe, and Poe days were sacred.

So, Emory turned his eyes back to the book of collected works in his hands and continued with that delicious first paragraph, murmuring to himself to find his place again. "'My good will'... hmm, no... ah. 'He did not perceive that my smile was now at the thought of his immolation.'"

Another knock on his office door, and Emory nearly flung his book at the bothersome aperture. He managed to keep his grip on it at the last moment, sucking in a deep breath through his nose.

"Go away," he called out, raising his nose over the top of the page just enough to ensure that the knocker had not physically managed to break through the polished old wood.

The surface remained smooth and unblemished, but it shook again beneath the weight of the eager fist. Damnation.

Emory couldn't take it anymore. Not even a full day of complete solitude was worth this. Pushing languidly to his feet, he paced to the rattling door. "Although I bid her 'go away,' her fist continues sounding, still incessant in its pounding; this tumult is resounding, and your pig-headed obstinance is frankly quite--"

Yanking open the door, Emory came face to face with the tubby faun he knew he would find there and finished his verse. "Astounding."

Rita puffed out her round, pink cheeks into an affronted glare, though her brown eyes were still smiling. One of the worst things about being confronted by a faun was the inability to take one seriously; even now Emory's frustration faded under the force of Rita's aura. The nest of golden ringlets perched on top of her head bobbed indignantly and the soft matching fur that covered her from the waist down rippled like a field of wheat as she stepped back from the door. The sound of her hooves clopping against the stone floor echoed down the hallway into darkness.

"What is astounding?" she chirped in her usual sweet soprano.

"How incredibly distracting you can be when you try, Rita," Emory said, propping one shoulder against the doorway and crossing his arms. "What brings you to my domain in the middle of the day?"

Rita curled up one finger in the universal gesture of the smaller races that meant 'lean down you enormous jerk so I can tell you a secret.' Emory chuckled, bending at the waist to bring his pointed ear closer to her mouth. Being a part of the small, slender Shadar-kel race, he would never grow past his current five-foot height, so being around Rita was the only time he ever felt like an 'enormous' anything at all.

"Don't laugh at me," was the first thing she snapped when he was closer to her level. "I hate it when you laugh at me."

"It's not at you. I laugh at the living world," Emory intoned in an effort to wipe the smirk off his face.

"Right." Rita squinted at him. "You know I'm part of the living world, you narrow-minded undead freak."

"And yet I've never treated you as anything but Shadar-kith," Emory said, channeling the most innocent expression he could conjure. "Is it really worth getting into an argument over nothing?"

Again Rita's curls trembled with indignation, but being called a Shadar-kith was too fine a compliment for a faun to ignore. Her faintly twinkling golden aura brightened and she wrinkled her snub nose. "Very well, I will forgive your tasteless amusement for the moment, but only in the name of the strange thing I found on my morning caper."