The Paper Wings

Mr. Telle was a genius, an artist, a revolutionary of paranormal affairs. Mr. Telle was so revolutionary, in fact, that he was arrested for conspiring with the vampires he was theoretically out to stake. After five years buried alive in Hässlich’s highest security dungeon, Varian Telle escapes prison three days before the grizzly assassination of military official Scurlock Hooks. Varian, his treachery and arrest immediately make every headline, news station and billboard as murder suspect number one. After all, hadn’t Hooks been the one to accuse Varian of plotting in the first place?
There’s only one problem: he’s disappeared before the murder trial.
And the artful young pickpocket with serious debt, and her unicorn with a knack for tracking, are just the pair to find him in a coffee shop, morose and slightly hungover. She threatens to not only expose Varian if he does not accept her business proposal, but accuse him of abducting her as well. Should he accept, then once his work is complete she will reveal her identity, that he may demand a ransom from her fabulously wealthy parents. Either way, he's cornered.
She claims she is a changeling, a human child stolen away to by Others, the invisible, magical race only talented few like Varian can still See, and raised in the place of a faerie as a slave. She has, however, entered into a bargain with the Underworld as well. Within three months, she must find a fae to take her place in the Seelie Court. Obviously, professional help is in order, and who could be more fit for the job the Varian Telle, himself? The pair of them enter into a contract: he finds the Imperfect whom her parents have raised in her place, and she, in return, pays him enough money to smuggle himself out of the country.