Wondrous Strange Read Online Free

mortal world and the Faerie Otherworld.
    Only a century and a half earlier there had been four such Gates: Samhain, Beltane, Imbolc, and Lúnasa, scattered throughout the Old World—passageways by which the Fair Folk could come and go, interacting with the mortal realm.But once the Faerie had begun to drift to the New World in the wake of large-scale human immigration from across the sea, the Courts of Faerie had decided to relocate one of the four Great Gates to this new land, where so many mortals—the kind who still believed in the Faerie—had settled.
    As Central Park was being built at the end of the nineteenth century, the Samhain Gate had grown within its confines. Hidden from the populace of the city, it meshed seamlessly and unseen with the growing urban oasis, providing a perfect playground for those who crossed over, a place of nature and thus a natural habitat for the Fae, right in the middle of bustling human habitation.
    The Samhain Gate had provided endless diversion for the dwellers of the Faerie Otherworld, but it wouldn’t last long.
    A few decades after the park’s completion, around the turn of the twentieth century, Auberon had taken it upon himself to shut all four Gates. Angered by a mortal transgression, the king cast an enchantment that would seal them forever so that the Faerie realm and the world of mortals would remain separate.
    But Auberon’s enchantment had been flawed.
    A crack remained in one of the Gates.
    The Gate that stood in the center of the teeming New World metropolis would open for one night every year, from sundown on October 31 to sunrise on the first of November. What was more, every nine years the Gate would swing wide for nine full nights, of which Samhain was the last.
    And so Auberon had decided that if he could not keep the Gate shut, he would bring together the most promising of all the mortal changelings from across the Faerie realms. Gathering thirteen of them, Auberon trained them and gifted them with abilities that would enable them to guard the Gate on his behalf.
    The irony was not lost on the newly made Janus Guards. But they were a fairly pragmatic lot and understood the realities of the situation: They could serve the Faerie king or they could die. So they served.
    They served so well, in fact, that most of them could never return home—never go back to their lives in the Otherworld. Auberon’s Janus Guard had developed such a fearsome reputation that they found themselves unwelcome, reviled and shunned as murderers, called monsters by the same Faerie who’d treated them as pets and playthings in the times before. It was a lonely vocation.
    Sonny pushed the thought away and focused on the Gate. As a Janus, Sonny could sense not only the park; he could sense every living soul in the park. They flickered in his mind like candle flames: clear, pale yellow fire—if they were human. There were fewer of them than usual. Mortals, he’d been told, tended to instinctively avoid the park around the time when the Gate opened.
    Scattered here and there about the perimeter of the park, he could sense other flames: blue and green, a few red ones. These were the Lost Fae, the ones who’d successfully evadedthe Janus in years past and, once through the Gate, now lived in secret in the mortal realm. They did not concern him, and they would be gone soon enough—well before sundown, in order to avoid crossing paths with the Janus.
    But there was something else.
    Something—someone— different had entered the park.
    Concentrating, Sonny reached out with his mind to touch a presence…one distinctly unlike all the other candle flames in Sonny’s mind’s eye. This one did not burn with a steady glow.
    It sparked erratically, like the lit fuse of a firecracker.
    His Janus sensibilities alerted and his curiosity piqued, Sonny decided to investigate. The anomaly was moving, slowly. Drifting in a meandering fashion that Sonny recognized as following one of the paths of the