A/N: This is a short story that I wrote for a scholarship competition at a school I applied to. It's going to be serialized as a novel series later, but until I'm finished with WITCH'S BLADE and BLOOD OF THE GODS, this one is going on the back burner. Let me know what you think of this one. If enough people like it, then I might post the first novel on here.

You hear a lot about missing people on the news these days. You witness grieving families, distraught lovers, terrified children begging to know where Mommy or Daddy went. And in the background you can see the angry faces of cops who no longer know what to do about any of this.

That last one would be me. Working quietly behind the scenes, unnoticed but for the rare glimpse of anger that burns bright as hatred in eyes gone cold and suspicious.

I'm a 27-year-old cop of Black Irish descent. Big blue eyes. Dark, dark chocolate brown hair. Skin whiter than snow. The coloring attracts certain...people. And sometimes that's even useful in my line of work. But mostly, it's just a fecking nuisance.

“Rosschilde! You finish that report yet?”

“I put it on your desk an hour ago!” You bloody eejit.

Captain Duffy is another reason for my anger. He ain't human. No. He's a fecking faery in high glamour.

I came to the States to get away from the God-damned fecking faeries. I wanted to leave them all behind in Ireland. Or better yet, in Underhill, where they belong. God knows I tried. But it's like the damn things followed me here just to piss me off.

But then everything changed. The world stopped for just a fraction of a second, a fraction that stretched into eternity as everyone around me froze and left me alone, filling the dead quiet with breathing suddenly gone ragged with fear and panic. The world turned upside-down. Bones cracked, popped and rearranged themselves according to new laws. The walls came down when the Ripping happened. People were displaced, gone missing in Underhill, with folks none the wiser, faeries in their place.

My whole world blew apart, ripped at the seams, shattered into a million tiny glass fragments, each reflecting a different life, a different world. Suddenly, I could see the holes, places where Underhill overlapped with Earth, where you could cross from highway straight into a sea filled with selkies. They'd strip the flesh from your bones before you even had time to start screaming.

“I can't find it! Dammit, Rosschilde! Where the hell is that report!” 'Duffy's' mouth moved up and down, the pointed gray teeth gnashing together menacingly. He is one ugly son of a bitch. Cadaverous cheeks, death pale skin, eyes the color of dull brown mud. He's stooped over, with gnarled hands and scythe-like claws on his three-knuckled fingers. It always amazes me that no one else can see him for what he really is.

Feck you, faery. “I'm going home. Find the damn thing yourself!”

“Dammit, Rosschilde! If you weren't such a good detective, you'd be out on your ear, my bootprints in your ass!”

Yeah, that would be me. Iahn Rosschilde: bad cop, good detective, Irishman with a vendetta.

The streets are crawlin' with faeries, even this far into the city. The iron doesn't seem to bother 'em anymore. But these are faeries walking around without glamour, so beautiful as to make your heart stop. Royal blood from the high courts no doubt. Shite. Can't go a foot without seein' another one.

I jerk the wheel to the right. Pressure builds behind the bones of my face. My ears pop as the pressure changes. Blood drips from my nose.

“Shite! The hell?”

I close my mouth, stop cursing. It becomes too much of a challenge to draw breath. Fire burns up my spine as gravity rearranges and rips me from my seat. I'm being ripped apart down the middle, my skin throbbing and burning hotter than the fires of Hell. The driver's side airbag doesn't trigger as the front of my car wraps around the nearest telephone pole. My head slams against the wheel. I'm in too much pain to try and stop the damage.

Holy shite!

Colored lights dance across my vision before everything funnels into black. My joints creak and protest the sudden change in pressure.

The car suddenly ceases to purr. All I can hear is my ragged breathing and the steady drip of blood as it falls from my chin.

Slowly, so slowly, the pressure begins to ease. The pain dies into embers, but something still troubles me. At the base of my skull, a visceral scent almost, I can taste them, sense them somehow.

Sweet Mary, Mother of God, help me.

I have to squint to see around the glamour. At least I think it's a glamour. No faery has ever looked like that. No faery I've seen has ever exuded such raw emptiness as this one.

I blink to keep my eyes from tearing up, and when I open them again, the faery is gone.

“Sidhe-keening,” a sibilant voice whispers.

“Shite!” I yelp and turn around in my seat, hand reaching for the gun at my hips. It isn't there.

The faery is standing by my window, seemingly unaffected by the steel framework of my car, or the cold iron in its hands. I lean away from the window, hit the release on the seatbelt buckle. I start to slide across the seats, towards the far door.

The faery leans forward, puts its head through the rolled down window. Its emptiness pounds restlessly against my psyche, a violent, mindless assault.

“What are you doing here, sidhe-keening?” The words sound forced, wrong somehow, as if the faery is having trouble speaking my language.

“Unseelie,” I hiss.

The supple lines of the faery's body ripple and bend outward. I feel the familiar pressure begin behind my cheekbones again. Agony grips my body as some kind of force crushes my lungs, my limbs, my bones. I can't get any air.

Black spots dance across my vision. My head feels light, empty. I'd fall if I were to stand.

There's a loud pop, and the faery is gone when I can see clearly again. The pressure fades. But I'm still stuck in Underhill, a lonely stretch of road with abandoned and corroded cars stretched before me.

“Fecking faeries! God-damned fecking shite-bag faeries!” My voice echoes strangely in the flat planes of Underhill. I shudder to think what happened to the other humans that got displaced, ripped from their own world and dumped here.

Angry, I step out of the car, look around for my gun. Not like it'll do any good here. The car doesn't even work in this place.

“Well, shite,” I say with feeling. Stuck in Underhill with no way to defend myself. Stuck in Faery and I don't know how to get home.

I slam the car door with more force than necessary. The sound is loud, somehow more real than even my own heartbeat. I scowl at the stretch of road before me, notice the dead and ugly land around me.

Iron-kissed, I think. The cars and their iron destroyed this part of Underhill. The thought brings me some small sense of vindictive pleasure. I can't help the smile that spreads across my face. It's an unfamiliar gesture. My face feels tight, almost uncomfortable. I shrug the feeling off and walk down the road, eyes restlessly darting from side to side, searching for the tell-tale sign of faery glamour, cautiously seeking for the agonizing pressure of displacement.

I can hear whispers in the wind, empty and sibilant voices hissing unfamiliar words. Pain bordering on pleasure wraps around my body, rubs the insides of my head like velvet-coated fingers. A shudder wracks my spine and a cold, dead feeling spreads outward from the pit of my stomach.

“Sidhe-keening.”

The wind sighs, wraps around my body. Close. Closer than a lover. It feels so good. So warm and peaceful. I'm content to let it lull me into unprotected sleep.

God-dammit! Fecking faeries are trying to glamour me with their voices. I clench my hands into fists and stop, raise my voice to the loving wind.

“Send me home, you fecking faeries! Send me home now!”

The hissing whispers grow louder, more frenzied. The caressing wind becomes violent, harsh against my skin. I forgot that glamour works both ways.

I scream, one long ragged rage-filled scream. It pours from my mouth, chases back the voices, the thorny power. The faeries lurk at the far off borders of the iron-kissed land, excited. Hungry.

“Come to us, sidhe-keening. Come and feed our hunger.”

“Go back to Hell where you belong!”

“Feed our hunger.”

A command this time. I take a recalcitrant step off the road, towards the voices and farther into the iron-kissed land.

“Come to us, sidhe-keening.”

It's no use trying to fight. There's too many of them. All of them directing their voices, their glamour, at me at once. My feet move forward of their own accord, unresponsive to my mental commands.

“Sidhe-keening,” the voices growl. The land beneath my feet is slowly petering out into lush grasses, and in the distance, a large hill ringed with tall trees, one at each of the compass points.

Panic is ugly. A fecking ugly thing that grows and eats away at your confidence, yer calm, yer patience. Ye cannae escape it. Ye cannae figh' it except to never let it grab a hol' of ye in the firs' place. But now, i's got a hol' of me and it ain't lettin' go. The insi'e of my head is uglier than the panic eatin' it.

“God save me,” I murmur.

As I go to cross into the lush lands behind the iron-kissed blight, my foot strikes something hard and cold. Metal, I think. The call of the glamoured voices is easier to resist. I can pull away from them, step back onto safe ground.

I crouch down, balanced on the balls of my feet, and I wish I had my gun and that it worked in this place. But for now, for now, sweet Jesus, it's an iron rod, high grade steel.

“Thank ye, God,” I say as I wrap my fingers around it and raise it above my head, a symbol of victory if I ever did one.

“What now, ye shite-bag faeries! Cannae touch me now!”

I whoop my victory, the wind carrying my voice out into the far reaches of Underhill. All of the voices disappear and the wind ceases to blow. The world is flat and terrifying, but now that I have a weapon, the panic and fear are fightable. I'm no longer defenseless.

Only luck saved me from the faeries. Luck and a stubborn streak. The steel rod in my hand feels solid and reassuring. It lacks that vague sense of unreality that permeates the air, the ground, even my thoughts, in this cursed place. I heft it higher in my hand and clutch it to my chest.

If I ever get out of this place, I'm having solid iron chains wrapped around my neck for the rest of my life.

“We know what you are, sidhe-keening,” the faeries whisper into the wind.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “A sidhe-keening, I get it. Don't care what it is. Don't care about you. I”m going home. Ye hear that? I'm going home, you feckers!”

“You cannot hide from us, sidhe-keening,” is the last thing I hear them say before pure agony rips up my spine and pounds through my temples. My vision is washed in a red haze, and then gravity decides to crush me into a ball of nothing. Everything swirls in black and then I feel no more.

When I wake, it is in an alley of a city that I would recognize anywhere, no matter the time or place.

I push myself to my feet. Everything hurts, like I've worked muscles I didn't even know I had. My nerves are raw, shot. My knees are weak, and my hands shake with a fine tremble. The smells around me are pungent, wet. I breathe deeply, take them into my lungs.

Blarney always did have a unique scent.