“Estimated Value,” by DeAnna Knippling, appears in Stolen by the Fae, the 6th volume in the anthology series A Procession of Faeries.

Excerpt

“You said something last night after we went to sleep,” he said.

“I did not!”

“You talk in your sleep,” he pointed out.

“I do not!”

“You said, and you’re gonna want to take credit for this, that the fairies took the girl away. I gotta agree with you on this one. You said, ‘Fairies is old magic.’ I have never known you to lie while you’re talking in your sleep. So that’s what I think.”

“You don’t believe in fairies! You don’t even believe in ghosts!”

“I believe in ghosts,” he said, through a mouthful of eggs and sausage. He drank the coffee, then made a face. “Ghosts just don’t believe in me. Where’s the sugar?”

Marianne rolled her eyes as she got up and found, then refilled, the sugar bowl, a shimmering piece of carnival glass with grapes on it. “So now you believe in fairies. But they don’t believe in you.”

“That’s right,” Butler said. “Nothin’ weird ever happens to me personally. But it happens around the edges all the time. Peripheral-like. If you know what that word means,” he added, to stir her up.

She snorted. “I know what peripheral means.” She leaned back in her seat and rubbed the pad of her thumb over her fingernails.

“You going to the salon today?” he asked. “You stripped the varnish off your claws last night.”

She looked down at them. “Sure did, didn’t I? I don’t remember it. So let’s say the little girl went with the fairies, maybe she’s still with them, and she’s going to appear a hundred years later, no idea that any time passed at all. What good does that do anybody? Her mother will be dead. We’ll be dead. Nobody will find out what happened at all.”

—from “Estimated Value,” by DeAnna Knippling, in Stolen by the Fae

About DeAnna

DeAnna Knippling is always tempted to lie on her bios. Her favorite musician is Tom Waits, and her favorite author is Lewis Carroll. Her favorite monster is zombies. Her life goal is to remake her house in the image of the House on the Rock, or at least Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. You should buy her books. She promises that she’ll use the money wisely on bookshelves and secret doors. She lives in Florida and is the author of The House Without a Summer: A Gothic Novel, and other books like The Clockwork Alice, A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters & the Macabre, and more.