April may be the cruelest month, but February's no picnic either. That was the thought written on people's faces as they gradually streamed out of the club - a small hole in the wall in London's Lower East Side, undistinguished even by the bands that habitually play there - and into the chilly three a.m. air. Drancy was one of the last to leave, as usual, hating crowds no matter how much her job might ultimately put her in the middle of them. She didn't own such a jejune thing as a car. Cars're expensive, eat petrol like nobody's business, and besides, she'd never bothered to learn to drive, having always lived in cosmopolitan centres of stink and belching pollution. En route to the nearest tube station, therefore, she was alone on the street. Well. Almost.
     According to various students of the topic, if one is to believe the legends and stories, there would be over six thousand varieties of faeries alone. As such, it should be no great surprise that one of the few trees, fenced in against the sidewalk as they are, left in London was both old enough and weakened enough to contain a lesser denizen of faerie. This denizen - a sort of myo-dryad, as some might say - was dying of more sins that the modern world has invented than even Drancy, with her political and social conscience honed to cynical and anarchic levels as it had been, could imagine. Steel borders : pollution : a sky blanked out from sun most of the time, and the rain which falls, carrying so little purity and nourishment as to provide the nutritional equivalent of well, cardboard. And cardboard is wood pulp, and hence, for a tree, cannibalism. And lo and behold, some love-besotten young buck had therein carved initials which, when the moon was right, began to bleed anew.
     "The fuck?", muttered Drancy, putting her hand against it to see what the hell was smeared there. "Looks like blood.... Ah, FUCK!" She jerked her hand back, falling to her knees as a reddish glow crawled up her fingers, causing a burning, tingling sensation to creep up her arm.