Daye, S., Cassidy, M., et al.

Sonny

I pressed the button on the remote controller and flicked the projector onto my last slide. In enormous, neon-pink animated letters—because why the fuck not?—it spelled out:

HAPPY SPRING FEST FOLKS

“I just wanted to say to everyone, thank you for a super-fun semester. Next term we’ll start looking into your research proposals. Yay.” I gave the room at large a thumbs up. “But it’s fair to say you guys have earned the next two weeks’ break.”

A few whoops reverberated around the university auditorium.

“If anyone is interested, or bored, during the holidays, I’ve got a couple of workshops planned at the rooftop community allotments in Waterside. One on no-dig gardening, and another on the soil food web. There are flyers at the front with dates and times.

“And that just leaves me to say two final things. One, don’t go to any parties at Professor Cassidy’s house, and two, if you happen to find yourself at Cassidy’s place, don’t take any man-made party drugs. Seriously, kids, if you’ve gotta do drugs, always opt for the ones mother nature has gifted us.”

Titters filled the air, plus a couple of too-close-to-the-bone groans. Including one from the professor himself. My research fellow and... would I call him my best friend? Hmm... jury was out on that, but he was the closest thing I had.

Doctor Mash Cassidy. Werewolf. One half of the Cassidy-Daye research team, environmental super-warrior, and all-round wild party animal. I fired a finger gun at him, and he flipped me off.

“Aaaand semester!” I said, snapping my arms together in a director’s clapperboard manner, dismissing the class.

Like a swarm of hornets whose nest had been shot at, the students rose all at once with cacophonous buzzing. People packed up their uni shit and made their way out of the lecture hall for the last time that term.

Some of my class called out, “Happy Spring Fest, Sonny” as they walked by. Some stopped to thank me, or to receive a famous Professor Daye elbow pat. A relic from my bygone pickpocketing days, and though those days were behind me, the motion transferred effectively to congratulating or comforting students.

Well... Those days were sort of behind me.

These days, I didn’t deliberately steal, but old habits died hard. I plunged my hand into the back pocket of my jeans and thumbed the small gold cufflink I’d swiped from Claude Stinkhorn. The breath left my lungs in a rush of frustration and exasperation, and... something else. Something I couldn’t quite pinpoint.

“Hey, Sonny,” said Marnie, a petite gorgon who always sat in the front row and never took out a notepad or pen. I wasn’t even sure she carried a bag with her. “Are you going to Mash’s this Friday?”

I shot my partner a questioning raise of the brow. He shrugged.

“Unequivocally, unashamedly, one million percent, no,” I said to Marnie. “But you have fun. Let off some steam. Not too much, though, okay? And drink nothing that comes out of his big yellow plastic keg. That stuff’s lethal.”

She laughed, cast the werewolf a knowing look which I understood meant well, I tried, and walked away with her shoulders a little hunched. Even so, she grabbed a flyer for my spring break soil-themed workshops on her way out the door.

“She’s into you,” Mash said to me, after most of the students had left.

I gathered what remained of my flyers—printed on fully recycled and recyclable paper—and tapped the edges against the desktop to neaten them up again. Perhaps I would drop the rest off at my local cafe when I collected the used coffee grounds for my plant fertiliser.

“Do not fuck her,” I said. I hoisted my messenger bag over my shoulder. “You know how I feel about this whole professor-student kink of yours.” Mash was six foot nine, blonde, and borderline fatally attractive. Devastating really. And if you were the lucky—or unlucky depending on which way you looked at it—person he wanted to take home that night, you’d be utterly powerless to resist his charms.

“Come on, they’re PHD students, not undergrads. They’re the same age as us.”

“I’m three hundred and sixty-six,” I reminded him.

“And you don’t look a day older than three hundred and fifty-nine.” He pinched my cheek like a nana. Hard. My blood rushed to meet his touch. “I know, I know, mushroom-jizz face cream, blah blah blah.”

I shrugged a single shoulder. My face cream really was a wonder product. I hadn’t nicked it, like Claude accused me of. I’d made the lotion myself, in my kitchen-cosmetology lab. The jizz part referred to the oat milk, not the mushroom extract, and not actual jizz either, because ew. To collect it, you placed organic oats in a linen bag, soaked them in warm, filtered water and squeezed. What gushed out of the cloth was—yeah, okay, it was cum adjacent, but wow—a moisture miracle in the palm of my hands. Used to treat almost every skin condition you could think of. Eczema, dermatitis, acne, general blahness.

I should stop referring to it as jizz, even if it did look extraordinarily like the substance in question. I’d gotten into a habit, which only served to embarrass me in front of people I wanted to impress.

Mash threw an arm over my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. I want to get some of that twelve percent moonshine for Friday night. You really not coming?” He didn’t give me a chance to answer before he ploughed on. “What are you gonna do for two entire weeks except whine about some grimy, polluted city allotment? And don’t say work on your paper. You’ve been working on that thing for years and not a bloody word has changed. You can afford to take a breather. Release some of that pent-up... tension.”

“I spoke to him today,” I said, clutching at the mention of my paper. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. I sounded like a teenage girl with a crush.

“You did?” Mash said, sycophantically. He batted his big puppy-dog lashes at me. “Let me guess, he told you to fuck off?”

Heat crept under my collar, and I pushed away from the werewolf.

“Wait, no,” Mash continued, grinning from ear to ear, oblivious to my reaction. “That would be at least three too many words for a shroom fae.” He laughed at his own joke. “But seriously, what did he say? Did he spill all the secrets of his ancestral glamour? Tell you every piece of knowledge you’ve ever craved.”

For some reason, my neck suddenly became very itchy. “Uh, well, he...” I trailed off.

Mash laughed again and slapped my bicep with the back of his furry hand. “See! You won’t get a thing out of him. You get on this guy’s train every day—twice a day for like, three years. Get into the lab an hour early just so you can see him, speak to him, whatever. You’ve asked him out on a date, how many times now?”

“Not a date,” I corrected.

“My bad. You’re absolutely right. Not a date, an ‘academic’”—he air quoted—“hook-up.” He winked. “How many times has he rejected you?”

“But see, I think he must misunderstand the situation—”

“How many times, Daye?”

I sighed. “Upwards of thirty, I guess.”

“You’ll never get him to talk. Shroom fae don’t talk. About anything. They just sit in their little toadstool houses and crank—cry wank—themselves to sleep every night because they’re all such miserable fuckers. You can’t even ask them how they are without getting a stare-down or a ‘Go to hell.’ You’ll never get one to talk about ancient mushroom magic they’ve all but forgotten because none of them talk to each other. There’s a reason they’ve been left out of folktales. Nobody has bothered to carry on with the storytelling.”

I shook my head, but I couldn’t counter it out loud. Fae couldn’t lie, even sneaky magpie fae like me. And Mash was right, shroom fae were a notoriously tight-lipped and fiercely self-governing species.

Three years, and I’d only ever received the same monosyllabic answer to the question, “Claude, would you like to get coffee with me?”

“No.” Sometimes—I expected when he felt generous—he would bestow a “No, thank you” upon me.

But I am nothing if not super fucking persistent.

First-hand accounts and experiments from an actual shroom fae could make or break my research project. If I was right, and I was ninety-nine point nine recurring percent certain I was, Claude’s obsolete mushroom magic—not to be confused with magic mushrooms—held the answer to every modern ecological problem.

Not to exaggerate, but it could save the Eight and a Half Kingdoms. Reverse the damage caused by centuries of industrial pollution and intensive farming, and more recently, billionaires joyriding into space. Help people grow healthier, more nutrient-rich food in poorer conditions with fewer resources.

It could change everything. Potentially end famine. All thanks to one teeny mycelium spore and a weensy bit of bygone glamour.

Mycology for the win.

I had that on a T-shirt somewhere.

All I had to do was complete my three-step plan. Step one, locate a shroom fae. Yep. Done. Tick.

That part was straightforward, even considering how rare the species was. Seasonal fae and nymphs, now they were ten a penny, but shroom fae... You had to know where to look to find one.

What did mushrooms like? Dark, dank spaces, lots of moisture. The underground train network, of course. And that was precisely where I’d found Claude.

My heart almost spontaneously combusted the first day I caught the eight-thirty to Downtown and he was there. And not just any old shroom fae, okay... he was hot. Gorgeous even. With his brown skin and fiery copper hair and his furrowed brow. He’d been wearing his conductor’s uniform—a love letter in royal blue and gold to his incredible curves. A shiny ticket machine sat on his hip, and a cute little railroad cap embellished with pins celebrating the many years of his U-Rail service was nestled on his copper curls.

Over the years, I may have sequestered a couple of those pins. Just, like... three or four.

I usually gave everything back after I’d stolen it. But with Claude, for some reason my fingers wouldn’t relinquish his treasures.

I never set out to steal anything from anybody. Truly, I didn’t. It was simply... something I had very little control over. Millennia of ingrained magpie-fae instinct. It didn’t matter how often I told myself not to, or how much therapy I’d sought to override it, or even if I physically tied my hands together.

See something shiny, and I was a shark sniffing a droplet of blood in an ocean.

Anyway, back to the plan. Step one? Yes, done that. Shroom fae located.

Now, step two, convince said shroom fae to let me use him for experimentation, and step three, complete experimentation. Those were the tricky bits. Especially considering I only had vague ideas of what those experiments might be.

It had been three years. Three years of catching that bloody train. Three years of buying my ticket from Claude, instead of swiping my card at the barrier like a normal person, just to give me an extra two minutes of his attention. And three years of hoping and praying that was the morning or afternoon he’d finally agree to have coffee with me.

“Dude, come on,” Mash said, interrupting my thoughts. “You’ve gone all fuzzy eyed thinking about him. I say you should come Friday. Marnie’s friend, Josh—you know, the law professor guy—is coming. He’s cute.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, but I didn’t say how long I’d think about it for.

Aaand I was done. It was a no. But I’d keep that to myself until Saturday. Guaranteed Mash wouldn’t even notice my absence until he was on his comedown from whichever synthetic high he’d sought.

“Sure.” He rolled his eyes and slung his arm over my shoulder again. “Hey, Sonny?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have my watch back now?”

“Shit, yeah. Sorry, mate.”