Free The Child Thief by Brom

among the Sluagh now wasn’t he? Peter thought. “Well what of it?” he whispered bitterly. Whose fault is that? Am I to blame because he hadn’t listened? It’s better this way, he told himself, better to let the Mist sort them out…the weak from the strong. Peter kicked the high-top. Everything comes with a price. Everything. Some things just cost more than others.
    Chimes rang from somewhere far away, then muffled laughter and children singing; the Mist began to stir.
    This got Peter moving, almost running, keeping his eyes forward, keeping to the path.
    “It will all end soon,” he whispered.
     

    THE SPONGY GROUND gave way to asphalt and the Mist began to thin. The sun could be seen crawling up behind the buildings, and the sounds of the awakening city echoed down the long avenues of South Brooklyn. The Mist slid back into the sea, its swirling, sparkling mass dissipating, leaving Peter standing alone.
    The child thief pulled his hood up and headed toward a distant cluster of bleak tenant buildings. A sign, covered in graffiti, proclaimed the complex to be the pride of the Brooklyn City Housing Commission. Peter understood none of the political implications of that sign, but he knew about slums and ghettoes; such squalid, impoverished places had always been fertile hunting grounds. The buildings were larger now, the accents and dress different, but the faces were the same destitute faces of centuries ago: the despair of the forgotten old, and the grim hostility of the futureless young. A breeding ground for troubled youth, sometimes too troubled. But time was short and Avalon needed more children; he would take his chances.
    The child thief entered the housing complex through the back alleyways, sticking to the shadows, his keen senses alert for the dispirited and desperate, the abandoned and abused, for the lost child. Because lost children needed someone to trust, needed a friend, and Peter was good at making friends.
    He shimmied up a drainpipe and dropped onto a balcony cluttered with garbage bags. He situated himself beneath a rain-sodden sheet of plywood and waited for the boys and girls to come out and play. As he waited, an odor permeated his nostrils, every bit as offensive as the sour rot of the garbage. It was the musky smell of grown-ups: their sweat, their gastric utterances, their dandruff-ridden scalps, greasy pimple-pocked skin, wax-encrusted ears, hemorrhoid-infested rumps. He wrinkled his nose. It hadn’t changed since the day he was born—over fourteen hundred years ago.
    He could vividly recall that day: the crushing pressure as his watery sanctuary strove to eject him, fighting to remain, a feeling not unlike drowning, sliding from his mother’s womb, cold hard hands clamping about his legs and tugging him into the world, the blurry, dazzling brightness, the numbing cold, the shock as someone slapped him across his bottom, the fury and frustration as he wailed at the blurry blob holding him, and their booming laughter.
    Then he was wiped down and passed to other hands, gentle, caressing hands that crushed him against warm, milk-swollen bosoms. Someone covered him in a blanket heated by the fireside and he began to suckle. The milk had been sweet, and the woman had begun to hum a soft lullaby. Peter fell into the sweetest sleep he would ever know.
    The smells of grown-ups had not been offensive then, not when mixed with the spice of that large, communal roundhouse: the smoky aromas from the great fireplace, salted meats and honey mead, roasted potatoes and boiled cabbage, the musty scent of the two wolfhounds, stale bedding hay, the sharp tang of fresh-cut spruce hanging from the ceiling beams. But what made it all so harmonious to his nostrils was the ever-pervasive smell of his mother, that warm, sweet milk smell that to him would always be the smell of love.
    His eyes were amber then, with only the faintest specks of gold, and his ears—though oddly shaped—had yet to develop their