May 13th, 1929

The next several weeks held more, and more complex, training runs with Nicoletta. When they weren’t together, Fex was subjected to a number of meetings and tests. He impressed them during his language assessment with his fluency in nearly a dozen European languages, especially French, German, Spanish, and oddly, Polish; a few centuries of life and a lot of moving around would do that for a person. There were a handful of additional European languages he’d studied or lived with, but it hadn’t seemed prudent to let them know. Then came basic tests of his intelligence and general knowledge. And then there were the medical evaluations and inoculations, which proved to be a point of contention given Fex’s “unique physiology” as the Army doctor had put it.  

But for the most part, things fell into a routine. One of Dunfre’s people would come to collect Fex from his off-base apartment and escort him to a conference room. Nicoletta would arrive with her ever-present guard, and Mrs. Dunfre would commence their “mission briefing.” Nicoletta would change, and they’d run the course and secure their objective. Then they’d have a second meeting with Dunfre, and sometimes one or two additional evaluators, to go over what had gone right and what could have gone better.

It was getting easier to work with Nicoletta. Fex had a better handle on her personality: volatile, sharp as a thorn, and (because first impressions were sometimes right) fickle. And he was much more comfortable with her wolf form—maybe even more so than her human one, since outside of their exercises, he never saw her. He wasn’t sure she even lived near the base. 

And then came Wednesday.

The debriefing room was oppressively silent while Mrs. Dunfre and Fex waited for Nicoletta to change and dress. Fex hunched over sore ribs and a skinned-raw elbow, rubbing his bruised shin through muddy trousers. Every bit of him was sopping wet, and the itchy, wool Army blanket Corporal Moore had given him wasn’t nearly up to the task of rectifying that.

Mrs. Dunfre finally stopped writing aggressively on her clipboard when the door latch clicked, and Nicoletta stomped in. She was dressed in a navy shift that might even have flattered her, if she weren’t just as bruised, wet, and muddy as Fex. She’d made an effort to clean the worst of the grime off her face, but hadn’t made much more progress than Fex had with his blanket.

“Sit,” Mrs. Dunfre said. When Nicoletta started to take a seat at the far end, Dunfre smacked the edge of her clipboard on the wooden table and pointed to an empty chair next to Fex. “There.” 

Nicoletta speared Dunfre with a furious glower, but did as she’d been ordered. The legs of her chair scraped against the floor. Fex didn’t offer to help seat her.

“You are both dead. Do you understand that?” Dunfre barked. “She’s dead, you’re dead, and thanks to you both, the artifact is in enemy hands.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” grumbled Nicoletta. She glared pointedly at the table over crossed arms.

“Did I say you could speak?” Mrs. Dunfre demanded. “Whose fault should we say it is, then? Mr. Woodward’s alone?”

That was, Fex thought sourly, arguably true. But Nicoletta gave him a guilty glance and said, “That’s not what I meant.” 

Dunfre tapped the table sharply. “Nicoletta, you were the one who broke cover and ran ahead, making yourself a target for capture. You endangered yourself and the entire mission with your recklessness. Do you deny it?”

Fex frowned. “Mrs. Dunfre, ma’am, that’s not—”

Dunfre rounded on him like a hawk on a hare. “I will get to your part in this fiasco, Mr. Woodward.”

Fex grimaced and looked away. 

“Do you deny it?” Dunfre repeated.

Nicoletta tugged the wrinkles out of her skirt with both hands. Her olive cheeks flushed. She folded her hands in her lap and answered with a prim, “No.”

“No,” Dunfre echoed. “I would hope not. This isn’t the first time in training that you’ve—” She seemed to be looking for a word. “That you’ve moved outside the bounds of Mr. Woodward’s effect.”

“She thought I’d glamoured a larger area—” Fex protested.

“She should have verified the bounds before she moved,” Mrs. Dunfre snapped. “But yes, that is another failing, Mr. Woodward. You didn’t create enough of a buffer for your partner to operate in. Anyone would think you were trying to get her captured or killed.”

“Why would I do that?” Fex’s voice cracked on his outrage.

“Why indeed? If you’d carried on with the mission, I might have believed it was a deliberate ploy. Sacrifice your teammate to guarantee yourself a safe escape. But that isn’t what you did.” Mrs. Dunfre picked up her clipboard and clacked her pen against it with each accusation.

“You gave your partner inadequate cover and she was captured. Then you compounded your mistake a thousandfold with your ill-conceived attempt to rescue her. You misjudged your enemy and you yourself were captured. And the artifact, which you were responsible for, Mr. Woodward, fell into enemy hands.” 

Fex couldn’t contest it.

Nicoletta looked like she might try, but Dunfre blazed on before she could speak. 

“How many deaths in addition to your own, Mr. Woodward, Nicoletta, do you think a bungle like this would be responsible for? A unit? A battalion? Or maybe a whole city on American soil?”

Nicoletta glowered at the table, looking more defeated than sullen.

Fex glowered guiltily with her. A whole American city? Hyperbole, surely. But maybe not. They’d never explained anything about the ‘artifacts’ that were the focus of Fex and Nicoletta’s training exercises.

“If the foreign threat to the lives of our fighting boys isn’t enough for you, you would be wise to remember the safety of your own families is at stake.” Dunfre’s peculiar emphasis was barbed, and not just for Fex. 

Nicoletta flinched. Her shoulders hunched and her cheeks paled. “We’ll do better,” she said, still looking down.

“Repeat that,” Dunfre ordered. “And don’t mumble this time.” 

“We’ll do—”

“She said we’ll do better,” Fex snapped, abruptly done with being lectured like a child by a woman a tenth of his age.

“Yes you will,” Dunfre said silkily. “Because you do understand what’s at stake. Don’t you, Mr. Woodward? Freedom itself.”

She might as well have said it plainly: the trapped Fey kindred’s access to the dimension portal the government was constructing was dependent on Fex’s performance in this program.

“Yes, Mrs. Dunfre,” he said, schooling contrition into his voice by grinding blunt and filthy nails against his palms. “Of course I understand.” There was absolutely nothing to be gained from letting this woman get under his skin. For all he knew this change in tactics from her was still part of the exercise. 

“I expect to see significant improvement from you both when we reconvene,” Dunfre said. “So get your acts together.” She strode out of the room on clacking heels, pausing to give instructions to Nicoletta’s guard of the day.

He turned to relay, “You have two hours. Are you eating in the canteen or do you need your lunch brought here?” It was abundantly obvious that the answer he wanted was ‘canteen,’ which made Fex inclined to insist on lunch in the conference room.

Nicoletta looked up, mouth open in surprise. She blinked at the guard, then turned questioning eyes to Fex.

“What’s your preference, Miss Nicoletta?” he asked.

“Figure it out, I need to hit the can,” the soldier said before she could answer. “If you leave the room before I get back, it’s on your heads, not mine.”

The door clicked closed.

Fex met Nicoletta’s eyes. “I’m not sure what they’re up to,” he said quietly, “but we may as well take advantage of the opportunity. If you want to leave, I can make us less conspicuous.”

Nicoletta looked between Fex and the door a few times, like she was calculating her odds, but ultimately deflated. “No. They’ll know we’re gone. We’ve tested them enough for the day.”

Fex huffed. “You’d think we’d fouled the exercise on purpose. I recognize that I should have made a broader glamour field for you in the first place—”

“I shouldn’t have outrun it.” Nicoletta cut him off. She looked thoughtfully at Fex. “We need a better system of communication.”

“We do.” Fex made another desultory attempt at drying his hair with the blanket. “I wish I had my cousin’s ability to talk to animals. Not that I mean you’re an animal,” he corrected hastily, “but then I could understand you even when you’re in wolf form.”

“He can talk—” She cut herself off and pivoted to, “That would be nice. But surely we can figure something out. I can understand you just fine.”

“Shayleigh can. But she’s terrible at glamours, so it all evens out.” Fex gave up on getting himself any drier, and turned back to the problem at hand. “I can understand you for the big things. Like ‘I smell mines this way,’ or ‘Dear heavens, not another rope bridge.’ But you’re right, we need more. Maybe we need to invent a sign language for wolves.”

“Yes, a wolf sign language would be good,” Nicoletta said distantly. “Mr. Woodward, may I ask you a personal question?”

Fex blinked. “Yes?”

“What, precisely, are you and your people?”

“You don’t already know?” Now Fex was perplexed. “Granted, most people these days don’t know we’re still here, but there are plenty of stories, and I figured since you could see my true appearance…”

Nicoletta gave him a blank look.

“Fey. Elves and fairies? Oh, what is it they call us in your grandparents’ tongue…” Half-remembered lessons on what humans said of the Fey came back to him.  “Keshalyi. Those stories… They’re mostly exaggerated.”

Nicoletta’s expression turned dubious. She gave Fex a look up and down like she was searching for the trick. “Those are just tales told by grandmothers. There aren’t any Keshalyi.”

Fex chuckled. “You mean the way there aren’t any werefolk? Until I met you I was certain your people had ah… Well, died out long ago.”

Nicoletta gave an indignant huff. “We’ve always been here. Just because we keep our heads down—” She blushed and looked away. Because what was true of her people was undoubtedly true of his, Fex guessed.

After a moment she cleared her throat and turned back to give Fex a suspicious look. “You said ‘true appearance.’ What did you mean by that?”

“Well, what I look like. I figured my ears gave it away immediately and you were just being circumspect. Obviously I can’t let the humans see them. When you caught me out in the woods that first time, after I’d spun up a disappearing glamour, I realized you could see through…” Fex splayed his fingers across his mouth as a realization that should have been obvious hit him. “Wait. You can’t see them. You just don’t see them at all, do you? I mean… do you?”

**

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, trying to assess what he thought she knew. Clearly she was missing something—had been missing something—but she wasn’t sure what, and his question didn’t give her enough to work with. She tugged on a lock of hair and tried to judge the situation. “You’ll have to be more specific,” she said at last. “Do I what, exactly?”

“Do you see where my illusions begin and end?” He watched her with a single-minded focus, though she didn’t get the sense it was predatory in nature—and she knew predators. Her mind raced, but she couldn’t think of a way to hedge and still look like she knew what she was talking about. Vano was the one with the silver tongue. She’d never been any good at half truths. 

“Not exactly,” she said at last, still somewhat confused. 

“Ah,” he said, and she couldn’t fathom what that meant. “Well I guess… Let me try something.”

Between one blink and the next, his black hair turned white and coiled into a wet braid that vanished under his wool blanket. His skin shaded darker, more a rich umber than light caramel, and his ears—they grew, elongating and growing points that framed his face. 

She didn’t see any more than that; she was vaulting out of the chair, knocking it over in her rush to put space between her and the demon. He made changing into a wolf look like an achingly slow process. One minute he was definably human, the next he was—he was something else. 

“Holy Mary—” she said, before slapping her own hand over her mouth to stop more from coming out. With the wall now at her back and some room to settle her instincts, she stared at him. 

Except for his posture—hands patting the air as if he could calm it—he didn’t look anything like himself. His chin was hairless and narrow, his jawline a blade, his cheekbones just as sharp. His eyes were different too, but she couldn’t put her finger on how. 

One of his long, pointed ears twitched. She sniffed reflexively, but she wasn’t a wolf. Even so, she was still pretty sure his scent hadn’t changed.

“Oh, oh no, Miss Nicoletta,” he said, and it sounded just like him, too. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.” Then the image vanished, and he’d returned. 

Nicoletta’s eyes widened. “No, no, no, no. Go back.” She gestured as if she could flip a page and read what had been there a moment before. 

This time she didn’t blink, but it didn’t matter; everything changed again. Hair lightened, skin darkened, ears lengthened, his whole facial structure shifted subtly. And was there a difference in his body? She couldn’t be sure. 

“You really can’t see through?” he asked, voice layered with dismay. Not because she couldn’t see, she thought. He seemed contrite at her reaction. “I can put the glamour back on for you. Only I thought you already knew how I looked.”

She tried to say something only to find a squirrel had taken up residence in her throat. She cleared it several times before words would come. “No, don’t—don’t do that.” Nicoletta took a step closer, looking from one eye, then tilting her head to look from the other, as if the view might be different. 

He took a deep breath and visibly tried to relax, practically emanating harmlessness. His ears drooped. “Keshalyi are kind in your stories, aren’t they?”

She took another two steps closer to him. “Yes,” she said slowly. “But not in everyone’s stories.” Before there was more than a flash of—something—across his expression, she winced and quickly added, “Not that I have reason to think you’re anything but kind, Mr. Woodward.” 

“It’s Fex,” he said. “It just doesn’t feel right to be ‘Mr. Woodward’ looking like myself. And I assure you I’m not here to trick or torment you. I’m just trying to secure safe passage home for my kin.”

Right. The bribe they’d given him, instead of stealing a loved one like they’d done with her and Vano. For a moment anger burned under her breastbone, but she shoved it away to focus on him again. She was close enough now to see small differences. His eyes, formerly a velvety brown with just a hint of the unusual, there and gone again, were now a dark, rich violet. As she moved and the light shifted across his hair, lavender highlights pooled in the silver waves. 

“Nicoletta,” she offered in response. Absently, she gave him a polite smile. “As you know.” She filed away “Fex.” 

She inched closer while studying him, and was on the boundary of violating his personal space. Without conscious thought she reached out to touch a lock of hair that had escaped the braid. The few strands that had dried and were loose were—not floating, exactly, but something like it. 

She caught herself in time and stepped back, blushing. To cover it she said, “Is your hair… purple? A little?”

He stood carefully still, watching her in return with an odd vulnerability in his eyes. “It is. Bees like it,” he added, as if he needed to say something more. “It’s been a long time since I let anyone but my family and my cat see my true face. You may, uh, touch. So you can be sure what your eyes are seeing is real.”

Nicoletta tugged at a curl of her own hair, torn by indecision. The impropriety of touching a man she was neither related nor married to—touching his hair, for goodness’ sake—versus the desire to see if it was actually real battled with each other. 

Curiosity won out, and she reached out slowly to run a finger down the dry lock of hair. “It’s so soft,” she breathed, and touched a little more of it, making his ear twitch. Then she wrinkled her nose and wiped her finger off on her shift. “And wet.” 

Fex’s gentle chuckle rode on a sigh as he tucked the loose lock back with its damp fellows. Then he stood there awkwardly, for all the world looking like one of her younger brothers casting around for something to say to a near-stranger.

She focused on him, stepping out of his personal space with as much aplomb as she could muster, as if it were every day she laid fingers on a man’s hair.

Or, well, not that, but—something. 

“So,” Nicoletta asked as her mind started putting pieces together, “when Mr. Droste said he could help your kind…”

“There are many of us all around the globe. We’ve been here for thousands of years, but this isn’t our home—” he cast about for a word, “dimension? We were tricked. The first of us to come here, I mean. They were tricked and trapped and we’ve been in this world ever since, unable to return.”

She set the chair back up to give herself some time to absorb all this new information. Once the chair was righted she lowered herself into it, smoothing the skirt of her frankly ugly dress while she ordered her thoughts. 

When she glanced up, Fex had moved his own chair to face her a little better and sat down as well. 

“So they,” she gestured to the room, encompassing the entire military base around them, “said they had a way to get your people back to their home.” She swallowed the resentment that brought up every time she thought of it. 

Of course, there was nothing she wanted badly enough to willingly work for them, except her brother.

“They said they were close. They have a portal. It’s something to do with all the new physics scientists have been working out. Radiation and so forth.”

She tipped her head, looking at her knees and thinking it through. With all the new gadgets coming out of science-minded folk these days, with the new radio waves that could get anywhere, a portal seemed possible. 

But she didn’t trust the people they were working for at all, and something about the story they’d told Fex just didn’t seem on the up and up to her. She started to frame a question in her mind, trying to push it into some sort of shape. 

Before she quite had the feel of it, footsteps approached and Fex’s glamour snapped back into place. The door opened. Nicoletta glanced around to glare at Moore.

“All right, you two,” he said, apparently oblivious to her expression. “We’re headed to the canteen, and then I gotta get this one,” he jerked his chin at Nicoletta, “home.”

Softly, but not so softly that the corporal couldn’t hear it, Fex spoke. The words were just shy of sardonic. “How nice that they’ll give us lunch first.”

Nicoletta’s lips kicked upward, but it wasn’t a polite smile.