Unseen

Time blurs with night like the streaking of black watercolors. I’m deeper in the forest than I have ever been before. Trees thin to a clearing of ragged grass and blackberry brambles. My toes dig into the dirt, rooting me there. Moonlight filters through thorns; at least, it would be moonlight if clouds didn’t carpet the sky.

Then they come, bringing a sunshine of their own with them as if eternally spotlighted.

They wear gilded, bejeweled carnival masks and a brocade of flowers and foliage that rustles with their stride. Unlike the tattered, dark faeries of the basement, they look eye-achingly vivid. Stained-glass-gold monarch wings studded with lapis lazuli. Aurora borealis iridescence shimmering over skin. Autumn leaves tangled in an auburn mane, living ivy twining over limbs. Beside them, I feel blank.

Vincent Black wants people to see him as an artist, not an albino, and he intends to remedy that once he starts college. As a freshman, he falls in love with Jenny, an otherworldly beauty with a gift for photography. Truly otherworldly-she is a faerie changeling. Vincent’s albinism may give him terrible vision, but Jenny gives him the Sight, the ability to see invisible faeries. Vincent discovers the wildest nights in the dorms have nothing on the unseen realm of Faerie. Cheap beer can’t compare to intoxication by faerie wine.

Vincent’s grades and art decline, but Jenny’s striking photographs of him bring her fame. His looks even catch the eye of the Faerie Queen, who notices his jealousy of Jenny and offers him a temptation: his soul in exchange for excellent vision and supernatural talent. Vincent can’t resist. When success rains down on him, he finds it even more intoxicating than faerie wine. Addicted to magic, he grows arrogant, and his true friends leave him. He claims he doesn’t need them, but he soon learns faeries can’t be trusted. Jenny cheats on him, and his faerie-gifted vision fails him-completely. He realizes he must save his soul from the faeries before it is too late. Perhaps Vincent has to be blind before he can truly see.