He stopped kicking the counter and hid behind the register, hoping he hadn’t been seen. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of them, as that the Bogan Boys were always up to no good, and the trouble that followed them had a tendency to spill over onto anyone unfortunate enough to be in their vicinity.

Over the past few years, they had become more and more like those old Irish wolves, the hard men. The hard men had been a pack of shapechanging spirits who’d once held the city under their sway until, rumour had it, the green land itself arose and swallowed them whole. But where the hard men were tall, with old dark hurts burning in their eyes, the Bogan Boys were half the size of a fullgrown human and carried only spite in their small dark eyes. What they lacked in height, they made up for in muscle, stocky as dwarves, but quick and cunning. Their heads were large, their hair raggedy, their teeth sharp. And they were not at all pleasant company.

But Edgan wasn’t looking for their company. He hadn’t been looking for them at all and would be quite content to keep his own counsel, and let them keep theirs. Except, like any treekin, he had too much cat in his blood—a deep-rooted feline twitch that would travel the length of his nerves to tickle his mind at the faintest sign of a mystery, no matter how small. He could no more let a riddle go unsolved than he could pass by the perfect length of colourful wire without picking it up. So curiosity had him unplug himself from the outlet and then slip out of the store through a bodach door to trail along behind the little pack, his head brimming with questions.

What were bogans doing out tonight in their grey hunting leathers, knives strapped to their waists, bows and arrows in hand? Because hunts were forbidden in the city, and who was brave or foolish enough to go out into the green and wild to dare the wrath of the first people, from whom immigrant humans and fairies had already stolen so much? Not Big Dan Cockle and his little hard men for all their strutting bravado, yet here they were all the same, armed for a hunt at the north edge of the city, where protection for fairies ended unless you kept to the man-made highways and roads.

Edgan hesitated when the bogans stepped from the safety of the parking lot into the adjoining field, their footsteps crunching the dry, dead weeds underfoot. He looked across the field. In a half year, if not sooner, the bulldozers would come to clear this land, too, and some new enormous store would spring up in its place. Concrete and glass and steel. And with the man-made structure in place, it would be safe for fairies to venture out into it.