Greetings! Before we get going, a few notes on my part:

- First, though this may shock you, I am not Victor Hugo. This is a fanfiction website. Ergo, I own none of the characters, except possibly Amali. In any event, it hardly matters as I am not making money off this publication.

- Second, I do owe an additional acknowledgement to Ms. Judika Illes, as it was in reading her book The Encyclopedia of Spirits that I developed the idea for this story. Thanks to her for details on Romani-Gypsy mythology.

- Finally, this is a slash fanfic that is utterly unrelated to my previous work, and I doubt very much that it will be connected to anything I may write later. As this contains a lot of relationship development, please be advised that no physical intimacy occurs before chapter fifteen.

Thank you for bearing with me. Without further ado, I give you Chapter One...

...In Which Landing is Not the Result of Falling

In the beginning, or rather, the beginning of what he could remember, the world was formless and empty, and darkness lay over all. He knew not where he was, nor where he had come from, nor even in that instant whom he was. Then, a spark jumped from the flintstone of thought and a memory swam to the surface of the deep. The memory spoke of falling, limp and helpless for what seemed like an age. In casual review, one almost got bored of such continuous flux.

At last, the sensation of an endless plummet was replaced by something new, a sensation of numbing cold. This too seemed unending, a state of frigidity so permanent that one almost came to believe one was the cold, that cold was all there was, and that one had never been a broken figure falling through empty space...

Monsieur l'Inspector Javert woke with a start, though in point of fact, that expression is something of a misnomer. While it is true that Javert's return to a state of consciousness was so swift as to be almost instantaneous, he resisted the powerful urge to throw his eyes open. Years of police work had put the Inspector in many an unfamiliar situation, and his instincts had thus been honed to a state of expert precision. There was danger present, and until he could ascertain the nature thereof, it was unquestionably safer to remain relaxed in all semblance of continued sleep.

He was lying on damp grass, and though Javert was unbound, that was hardly a guarantee of safety or of freedom. He certainly did not have the faintest idea how he had come to be there, though again, in his line of work, waking up in strange places wasn't a particularly unusual occurrence. He was about to risk a peek at his surroundings when he heard a low chuckle to his left.

"It's lucky that we found him first," said a male voice from the same direction. Javert carefully kept his face free of any emotion or tension.

"Lucky?" scoffed a similar voice, this one to his right. "Too right we are. If his little friends had found him first, it could've taken us days to catch up with them."

Had Javert not been feigning sleep, he'd have rolled his eyes. Crooks so often played up the dramatic cliché, not understanding that fresh witticisms were often more effective. By "friends", the man had to mean the police. The Inspector was not known for his ability to form personal relationships. The idea of his even liking someone else was ludicrous, let alone befriending them.

"Quiet!" The third voice sounded female, though it was as raspy as the other two. "We mustn't attract attention! Let's just kill him now and get out of here."

The voice's owner stood right behind him. Javert was surrounded. The Inspector tensed his muscles with a painstaking slowness, careful to avoid rousing the slightest suspicion. He would be prepared to fly at the first opportunity. Though he was unarmed, his captors would come to regret leaving him untethered.

The three were not yet through talking.

"You can't kill him now!" hissed the first man. "We have our orders - he's got to be awake first!"

Javert was fervently glad that he'd maintained the façade of sleep.

"If he's not totally corporeal yet and we kill him, bits of consciousness will be hanging around forever and a day. We'll never find them all," the man continued. He'd lost the Inspector - this last statement made no sense in the slightest, unless it were some form of code.

Whatever the statement meant, it was not what the woman wanted to hear. Seething, she said "Fine. Let's wake him up, then."

Javert heard the sound of water being drawn and could guess what was going to happen. Sure enough, a bucket of icy water was poured over his head seconds later. This time, the Inspector made no pretence of continued unconsciousness. His abductors would never have believed it. Instead, he sat bolt upright, wiping water from his eyes in the same motion.

The scene that greeted his eyes was something out of a nightmare - literally. He was next to a river in the middle of a forest, without a trace of Paris in sight, but it was not the scenery causing his consternation. Rather, his discomfort was the result of the figures before him.

As a child, the tales surrounding these monsters had haunted his imagination for days after the telling. The creature holding the water bucket in her ghastly mouth was a pale worm nearly Javert's own size. The bristles covering her bloated body were all quivering in the Inspector's direction.

If Javert seemed to be staring singly at this apparition, it was only because the other two demons hardly bore looking at. Nevertheless, the Inspector was only too aware of their hovering in his peripheral vision. One was a sickly green bird with serrated talons. The other was a man, but with seven heads - three of them belonged on the body of a vicious cat, and the other four on an enormous canine. Both exceeded the worm in stature.

"Good morning," said the worm, dropping the bucket to the ground. "Sleep well?"

Javert's usual steady stream of sarcastic commentary had dried up about the same time he had opened his eyes. He was dreaming, or hallucinating. That realization brought him some degree of calm - in a dream, he couldn't actually be hurt. He could wait patiently until he woke up. It was a technique that had worked well before; the Inspector had a lot of nightmares. Generally, however, they centered around his work and not distant childhood memories.

There was a shout in the distance. Javert turned with only a passive interest, but the monsters panicked.

"Kill him! Kill him now!" croaked the giant bird.

What is his name? Javert wondered. I used to know.

The worm growled.

Could worms growl?

She struck out with her tail, knocking Javert over. He fell flat on his back, air driven harshly from his lungs. Before he could pull himself away, the worm bunched herself up and launched her body onto Javert's chest. The shaky breath he'd drawn was expelled as quickly as the first. At close quarters, the Inspector received an enlightening view of the creature's mandibles.

Tcaridyi, he thought. That's this one's name. Javert was duly impressed by the realistic nature of whatever hallucination he was being subjected to. Usually, he would have woken up by now. All preponderance was driven from his mind, however, when the gaping jaws of the maggot worm closed around his forearm.

Javert cried aloud, more from surprise than from pain. A bizarre numbness had in fact overtaken the spot where he'd been bitten - adrenaline was an astonishing painkiller. He was still asleep. Shouldn't such an attack have woken him?

The second surprise was an answering shout from somewhere behind the other two demons. Instantly, the Inspector linked the shout with the "friends" the animal-headed man had mentioned earlier. Given that this hallucination was rapidly becoming uncomfortable, Javert made the executive decision to participate for the time being.

"Over here!" he shouted. With a fierce twist of his arm, he pulled it free of the worm's pincer-like mouth. "By the river!" he called again. There was another exclamation from back in the forest. The Inspector could only hope that the voices belonged to someone inclined to be helpful to him.

Tcaridyi was not pleased with Javert's outburst. "Silence," she hissed, "or I will destroy you slowly."

Javert grabbed hold of what scraps of mythology he still remembered.

"You're bluffing," he said with more confidence than he felt. "It's not your nature to kill people. You are a spirit of pain, only."

The worm laughed, a sort of hideous clicking sound.

"What right have you to say what I can and cannot do? You, who never bothered to pay attention to the legends of your own people? It is you who bluff - I've been promoted. You see? Even my brothers give me first choice of sport."

She punctuated her final sentence with a dive for the Inspector's uninjured arm. He had managed to wrest this from under the worm's bulbous body while she talked, and now this fragile victory proved to be a life-saving diversion. As Tcaridyi thrust her jaws at Javert's arm, he grabbed hold of one giant pincer and shoved her to the side. He was in no condition to actually mount an offensive against the creature, or even to push her off his legs. It was all he could do to sit up and breathe deeply now that his lungs were no longer being crushed.

His brief respite, though fruitless had he been on his own, gave two people the opportunity to enter the clearing, a man and a woman. Both were human enough in form, though the woman had large white wings. The Inspector was passed the point of caring. Either they would rescue him or it would soon cease to matter.

Tcaridyi meanwhile had overcome her surprise at actually meeting with resistance. She rose up to as full a height as she could display and struck out, knocking Javert to the ground for the second time that day.

Javert had just resigned himself to either the grave or an asylum when something burst like fire in the back of the worm's head. The massive creature collapsed. The good news was that she was no longer attempting to chew off limbs. The bad news was that the worm landed more completely on the police Inspector's torso than ever, such that he well and truly was rendered unable to breathe. From the silence reigning in the clearing, it seemed the other demons had been similarly dispatched.

Gentle hands carefully pulled Javert out from under Tcaridyi's girth and helped him to his feet. Javert's head swam as he tried to focus on the faces of his saviors. It was no good. He was exhausted, nauseous, and in increasing amounts of pain as his body flushed adrenaline from his bloodstream. The Inspector collapsed, vision fading into blackness. He was senseless before he hit the ground.

The silent forest stood vigilant over the three figures, one incapable of moving, while the other two, shocked, stood frozen in place. It had been easier to find the Inspector than they had feared, but the circumstances under which they had found him were less than ideal. The winged woman pulled Javert's languorous body to a standing position, draping his arm around her shoulders. She looked up, eyes glazed with worry.

"What do you make of it, Amali?" the man asked her, his expression mirroring her concern. "He's not too badly hurt, surely?"

"It's worse than it looks. We've got to get him back to Paris immediately."

"My house, then. He will be alright, though, won't he?"

The woman lifted Javert into her arms, knowing perfectly well that had he been in any state of awareness he would have forbidden such presumptuous familiarity. When she finally faced her companion again, she'd smothered her fear in a mask of clinical objectivity.

"I don't know, Jean. I just don't know."