Marus came running to see what was happening and when he saw the creature, his expression darkened.
“Allard, no,” he yelled, aiming a kick at the beast.
Allard cowered back, his hands (paws?) raised in a defensive gesture.
He was still making those strange gabbling noises and whatever he was trying to say just made Marus angrier. He rained blows down on him, driving him back and away from the spring.
I was horrified. It was like watching someone beat a clumsy puppy. “Stop,” I said finally. “You’re hurting him.”
Marus turned to me and his amber eyes were mean. “You were screaming,” he said. “I thought you were in distress.”
“I didn’t mean to scream,” I said. “I was just taken by surprise.”
I looked straight at the thing he called Allard. “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “You scared me.”
Allard looked at me with his sad eyes and made another one of those apologetic-sounding noises.
“What did he say?” I asked Marus.
“Who knows?” he said. “He is like a parrot. He can mimic speech but make no sense of it.”
I decided right then that host or not, I didn’t like Marus very much.
He looked at me, taking in my towel-clad form and I didn’t much like the way he was looking at me either. And I again got the feeling that he knew what I was thinking, but all he said was, “Just leave your things. They’re ruined and mother will have something for you to change into.”
Without waiting to see if I was following, he turned and headed for the cottage again. I looked at Allard who gave me a helpless shrug.
You’re a lot of help, I thought. Clutching the towel more closely around me, I stepped barefoot onto one of the paving stones. But when I got to the edge of the paving stones there was still a good five or six feet of mud I’d have to cross. I looked down at my bare, freshly washed feet, and sighed.
Suddenly Allard was there, scooping me up in his hands (paws?) and carrying me like a baby.
Or like King Kong carrying Fay Wray, I thought, although he smelled like a clean, wet dog. When he reached the door of the cottage, he set me down gently before backing away.
“Thank you,” I said to his retreating form, although I wasn’t sure if he heard me.
Syla was alone in the cottage, which was odd, but I was more than happy not to be around Marus. His ferocious treatment of Allard had unnerved me.
She was reading a leather-bound book that looked as ancient as she was. She looked up when she heard me and smiled.
She was missing a tooth.
“You look much better,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
“A little,” I said, which was true. I hadn’t eaten before the party and I’d left without eating so much as a pita chip. “But I’d really like to change—”
She interrupted, “Is the hunger a cramp in your gut that makes you want to hunch over?”
“I’m sorry—” I began, but she cut me off again.
“Or is it the pinching kind of hunger that makes you weak?”
“I’m fine,” I said, a little weirded out by the cheerful intensity of her odd questions.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The hunger eventually goes away.”
She looked at me as if she expected a response.
“That’s good to know,” I said slowly, thinking, I’ve got to get out of here.
“You can’t,” the old woman said, as if I’d spoken aloud.
I looked at her in surprise. “Why not?” I asked.
“You died when you crashed your car.”
No, that’s not possible, I thought.
“She’s going through the stages,” the old woman said to Marus, who had come back into the cottage through a door I hadn’t seen before. He was carrying a bundle of clothes, which he tossed to me.
I couldn’t catch them without letting go of the towel, so it dropped at my feet. He’d given me some sort of tunic thing and what looked like hospital scrub pants.
I bent carefully and picked them up.
I can’t be dead, I thought.
“She’s in denial right now,” Syla added.
“I always forget what comes next,” he said. “Anger or bargaining?”
“Anger,” she said and stared at me expectantly.
And then she started laughing maniacally and her son joined in. “We’re just fooling with you Hilde,” he said, “you’re not dead, you’re in the Verge.”
“It never gets old,” Syla chortled. “You’re dead,” she said, which sent her off into a fresh round of merriment.
You are insane, I thought, and I didn’t much care if she heard that thought or not.
I looked around for some place I could change in privacy. There didn’t seem to be any separate rooms in the cottage, just a big open space with two beds and a table with two chairs and a kitchen area.
Marus didn’t seem inclined to look away so I finally just pulled the tunic on over my head then pulled the towel off as I tugged the pants on.
I really wished I’d gone back into the car for the keys to the trunk. The idea of walking back to the crash scene in my bare feet was not appealing.
I wondered if I could summon the stag like an Uber.
I wondered when I was going to wake up from this nightmare.
“You’re not dreaming Hildegard,” Syla said.
“So you can read my mind,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s one of my many talents.”
I stared at her.
“Who are you?” I asked, but that wasn’t the question I wanted to ask her.
“Do you mean what am I?”
I nodded. She smiled that hag smile of hers and this time there was absolutely nothing kindly in it.
“I’m a witch Hildegard. And I’m your aunt.”
Chapter 4
I gaped at her as she gestured for Marus to leave the room.
As much as I wanted to simply run from the cottage, if she could tell me about my mother, I was willing to stay and listen.
“Sit,” she said, and I pulled out one of the chairs and sat at the table. She frowned. “That’s my chair,” she said and I almost laughed. She frowned again and sat in the chair opposite me. There was an earthenware teapot between us and two cups. She put her hands on the teapot and pressed and there was a glow.
Steam came pouring out of the spout.
She looked at me. “Another of my talents.”
She smirked as she poured us both cups of an herb tea that was nearly as dark as coffee and just as bitter. Chicory, I thought, maybe yerba mate. Taking her cup in both hands, she inhaled the steam, then took a big slurp. I took a tiny sip out of my own cup, thinking that I was probably tasting Syla cooties since I didn’t see any sign of a dishwasher. The liquid was blistering hot and burned my tongue.
“So, you want the tale that only I can tell.”
I realized belatedly that she was asking me a question and said, “Yes. Please.”
She looked at me over the rim of her cup, her eyes hooded and black.
“Your mother and I were twins.”
“What was her name?” I asked.
She grimaced, not happy with the interruption. “Alys.”
Alys? And Syla? “Your name is Alys spelled backwards?”
“Alys is Syla spelled backward,” she corrected me. “We were born with cauls over our faces. Do you know what that means?”
“That you were born still in the amniotic sack?” I said, vaguely recalling a lesson from freshman biology.
She looked annoyed. “It means we were marked as special,” she said. “Gifted as well as beautiful.”
Humble too, I thought.
“We were witches. Self-taught but very powerful. And we wanted to dance with the fairies on the summer solstice so that we could learn fae magic and grow even more powerful.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” I said.
Syla looked at me and snapped her fingers and I fel
t a pinch on my cheek. “Ow,” I said.
“I’m telling you a story,” she said. “Don’t be rude.”
“Sorry,” I said and had another sip of the vile tea.
“We knew there was a place in the forest where the fae were rumored to gather on the solstice and so when we were eighteen, we went there, and offered our spells and the Verge opened to us and we entered.”
“the Verge? Where we are now?”
“Yes,” she said impatiently, “will you listen?”
I nodded, biting back my many questions.
“The Verge is just an entryway, an airlock, if you will, a place between the world of the mortal and the world of the fae. To gain passage to the land of light, you must be invited. And we were. For we were beautiful and we caught the attention of Lyrus.
We?
She answered my unspoken thought. “Yes, both of us. For the fae are a greedy race and they take what they want and never mind the consequences.”
There was emotion behind those words, emotion and…pain.
“Lyrus seduced Alys while I found love with Marus’ father.”
Here she paused as if inviting me to ask a question. “So Marus is…part fairy?”
“A halfling,” she said, “like you and your brother.”
And there it was.
I sat back in the chair, trying to wrap my head around her revelation.
But crazy as it seems, this information came as something of a relief. It would explain why Hugh and I had always felt a little different, like we’d never quite belonged anywhere. It would explain why we had always been able to do odd little things that other children couldn’t, like understand what animals were saying and make our toys move by themselves.
Syla began talking again and I had to tell myself to focus on her words.
“Lyrus was thrilled when he found out Alys was pregnant for most fairy women are barren. He was even more delighted when he discovered she was carrying twins.”
Syla’s voice took on a dreamy cast, as if she was half-asleep. It was as if this was a story she had told many times, so often that the details had become a little soft around the edges, like the pages of a book that has been read too many times.
“When the twins were born, they were beautiful,” she said, “but they were not perfect. Each of them had one blue eye and one hazel eye.”
I winced. I’d hated having bi-colored eyes growing up, no matter how many times my adoptive mother had tried to convince me that they marked me as special. No one really wants to be “special” when they’re a teenager because “special” means “different” and teenagers don’t really do different. Syla seemed to smile at my internal monologue and continued, “Lyrus blamed that flaw on Alys, blamed her mortal blood.”
That rang true to me. The fairy tales I read as a child always suggested that the fae guarded their bloodlines more zealously than a white supremacist.
“As time went on, his distaste for his imperfect children grew until at last, in fear that Lyrus would do violence to them, Alys asked me to help her hide her children in the world of mortal men.”
“How?” I asked.
“Our mother had been a maternity nurse,” she said, “so we knew our way around the hospital. It was easy enough to find a woman who had miscarried a child and was willing to accept two babies no questions asked.”
Syla looked at me. “Her husband loved her very much and was willing to handle the…complications.”
She paused in her story. “I’m curious. What did they tell you about your origins?”
“Private adoption,” I said. “They told us they found us in a Ukrainian orphanage while my father was on a sabbatical doing research on medieval Russian folklore.”
Something about that story had never felt quite right to me, and when Hugh and I started looking for our birth mother and found a complete blank, it had seemed even more unlikely.
“What happened to Alys?” I said, because I couldn’t call a woman I’d never known my mother.
Syla gave an odd little grimace that almost looked like a smirk.
“Lyrus was enraged when he found that she had spirited you away and would not tell him where. Distraught, Alys took her own life, stabbing herself in the heart with an iron dagger.”
“No,” I said aloud, horrified.
“Yes,” she said. “I found her body and removed the dagger myself, for iron is death to fairy kind and no one else would touch it.
“I kept it, though, and one day will use it to kill Lyrus.”
She fell silent then and I thought her story was over. “Is that why you stayed in the Verge? Why you didn’t go home?”
“Home?” she laughed. “My home was in the land of light with the father of my child but Lyrus realized that someone had helped Alys kidnap his children and he assumed it was me. So he sent my love to die in the goblin wars and exiled me and Marus to the Verge.”
Syla was starting to breathe hard, freshly enraged by the wrong that had been done to her.
“And he cursed me to look like this,” she hissed, pointing to her face. “I was beautiful,” she said. :He would have restored my youth and beauty if I had just told him where you were. But I owed my sister my silence and so I kept her confidence.”
She looked at me with something close to hatred. “So thanks to you and your brother, my son and I have been prisoners here for twenty-three years.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was, but I still wondered why she simply hadn’t taken Marus and left the Verge.
“I cannot leave without his permission,” she said.
She waved her hand dismissively, as if cleaning an invisible slate. “But you’re here now,” she said, “and that is all that matters.”
I did not like the sound of that and I still didn’t know exactly how I’d come to be in this odd place.
“It was the solstice,” she said, “on the solstice anyone can enter the Verge. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And once again, she started to laugh maniacally.
“So I can’t leave?”
“Not unless Lyrus says you can.”
Okay then. Sounded like it was time to meet my dad.
“How do I contact him?”
“I’m sure he already knows you’re here. But this time of year, he holds the Seelie Court, and will be occupied for a while. You’ll simply have to wait here with us until he deigns to give you audience.”
I’m not good at waiting.
“You can’t always get what you want,” she said. “Do they still play that on the radio?”
“What?” I said, not following her.
“The Rolling Stones,” she said. “Are they still alive?”
“Yes,” I said and then realized there was still one player unaccounted for. I looked around for the beast/man. “Who’s Allard?”
“A mistake of nature,” she said. “A goblin I took in out of the kindness of my heart, only to be repaid in pain and sorrow.” She looked at me keenly. “Goblins are not to be trusted. You should keep your distance from him.”
No worries, I thought and then, I felt ashamed, thinking of the beating he had taken at Marus’ hands.
“It’s late,” she said, “and you are tired. You can sleep in Marus’ bed tonight.”
“Um,” I began, not liking that idea at all.
“He’ll sleep in the woods,” she said. “You won’t be bothered. And besides,” she added, “I’ll be right over there.”
Somehow that didn’t reassure me at all but I was tired. Exhausted, actually, so I reluctantly tucked myself into one of the beds pushed against the walls of the multi-purpose living space.
It was very comfortable and I fell asleep much sooner than I would have thought.
Only to find myself being shaken away by Allard. “Wake up girl,” he said.
I sat up. “You can talk?”
“Listen to me,” he said. “Syla can’t read your thoughts in dreams.”
I’m dreaming?
I must have made a noise then for the next thing I knew—
“Hildegard?” Syla’s voice cut through the dark and woke me up.
“What?” I said drowsily.
“Are you having a nightmare?”
My stomach clenched. “The crash,” I lied. “I must have been dreaming about the crash.”
“I can give you a sleeping potion if you like.”
“No,” I said, “I’m good.”
It took every ounce of self-control I had not to think about Allard. But, there was no getting back to sleep after that.
Chapter 5
The next morning Syla offered me bread and jam and more of the awful tea. I accepted the bread and jam—which was made from some delicious red berry I’d never tasted before—but passed on the tea.
Afterwards I didn’t know quite what to do with myself. I’d retrieved my heels and was tottering around the cottage, trying not to trip over the hem of the long tunic as I paced the space like a panther in a cage. The fourth or fifth time I stumbled, Syla finally looked up from her book.
“Give me your shoes,” she said.
“I don’t like going barefoot,” I said.
She snapped her fingers impatiently and the shoes began quivering on my feet, the ankle straps unbuckling of their own accord.
“Wait,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
The shoes went still.
I pulled them off and handed them over.
She fondled them like she had a fetish. “These are pretty,” she said, and as she handled them, they shrank a couple of sizes.
“You have big feet,” she observed and slipped the right shoe on her own foot. It fit perfectly. She admired her foot from every angle and then shook it off.
I noticed she had a perfect pedicure and wondered how she managed that.
“Magic,” she said, and as I watched, the polish on her toes shifted from a Christmassy red to a berry pink.
And suddenly, it was as if a mental block had been removed and I flashed on a childhood memory I’d buried deep. I was out shopping with a friend and her mom. My mother had given me money to buy something I wanted and when we went into a shoe store, I saw a pair of really cute pink sandals.
Curse of Christmas: A Collection of Paranormal Holiday Stories Page 33
