Roadside Magic

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The troll heaved yet again, dragging his leash-holder with him, breaking through the remainder of the wall and, instead of backing away from the inferno, plunged forward, crashing entirely through the other side of the trailer. The noise was incredible, mortals would soon take notice, her heels clattered on a narrow strip of damp pavement. The mortal whose home they had just destroyed had a charcoal grill set here, all rust carefully scrubbed from its legs and black bowl. It went flying as Robin’s hip bumped it, clattering and striking gonglike as it rolled.

  Did I strike him, please tell me I did—

  The net-bearing drow bulleted out of the burning trailer. The wight’s scream and flapping curse had vanished into a snap and crackle of flame, a burst of hot air lifting smoke and sparks heavenward as the fire could now suck on the night air outside the shattered home, window-glass shivered into breaking. Robin kept backing up over the small concrete patio, light, shuffling skips, and the urge to cough tickled mercilessly at the back of her palate. She denied it, saw she had, indeed, managed to hit the net-bearer. Thick yellowgreenish ichor threaded with crimson stained his side, his face was a ruin of scratches and soot, his hair full of burning sparks, and one of his feet was tangled with a mass of glittering spikes, fading quickly as they burrowed through his boots, seeking the flesh underneath.

  The song burst free of Robin’s throat, a low, throbbing orchestral noise. It smashed into the net-bearer head-on, and he flew backward into the fire, which took another deep breath, finding fresh fuel, and grunted a mass of sparks and blackening smoke skyward. A wet, heavy breeze full of spring-smell and the good greenness of more rain approaching whisked it into a curtain of burning.

  Robin halted, her sides heaving. The stonetroll, truly maddened now, dragged the other drow away into the damp night, its grinding shrieks interspersed with the dark sidhe’s screams. It would not be calmed until it had exhausted itself.

  She struggled to control her breathing, staring at the flames. The cat. Stone and Throne, the cat. Is she still inside?

  Sirens in the distance. Some mortal had noticed this, and Robin did not wish to be here when they swarmed. Still, she darted along the back of the house, searching for any unburnt portion. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I did not mean for this to happen.

  What else had she expected? She was a Half, mortal and sidhe in equal measure, a faithless sidhe bitch possibly sired by a monstrous ancient, the cause of more trouble and sorrow than any mortal could ever hope to be.

  There was no sign of the cat, and Robin, smoke-tarnished, fled before anyone else arrived.

  A GODDAMN GOOD BIT OF LUCK

  6

  Eddie Sharnahan returned that morning from his niece’s wedding to find his trailer gone, but that was all right because he had insurance and Juniper, her black-and-white fur reeking of smoke, was unharmed. He held her in the soft morning drizzle while he surveyed the smoking ruins, and none of the emergency personnel noticed that the cat’s frenzied rubbing against her master’s face lent a faint dusty glitter to him. They didn’t notice the malformed curse lingering in the wreckage, either, or when it blindly scented something familiar from the burning it had been trapped in and crawled toward Eddie, shivering and Twisted from the sap-fueled flames.

  Sharnahan’s work buddy Clyde, a wide-set foreman with a seamed brown bullet head and a fine wide white mustache, let Eddie stay at his house while the insurance paperwork was processed. A week afterward, Eddie bought a lotto ticket at the Kwik-Ease during their morning coffee run. It turned out to be worth a cool ten million, which was a goddamn good bit of luck, he remarked to his buddy.

  Clyde just grunted and asked if that meant he’d be quitting on the spot or would give him two weeks. Sharnahan did the latter, then retired after a beer-soaked party at Clyde’s.

  Unfortunately, Eddie was dead within six months of a bone cancer spurred by a black flapping curse’s last fading breath. He left half the money to the animal shelter he’d gotten Juniper from, and Juniper and the remaining half to his niece, who had married rich, divorced richer, and finally moved to San Francisco with Juniper, who lived longer than any feline had a right to. The niece became the Crazy Cat Lady of Holt Hill and often was heard to remark that cats were lucky. They brought the good fairies.

  Her beloved uncle had always told her so.

  BRAVADO

  7

  Hunting Unseelie again. Midnight found Jeremiah Gallow crouched easily on the edge of a rooftop, surveying the terrain. Feels fucking familiar, doesn’t it?

  The city wheeled below him, waves of traffic on concrete shores, tang of cold iron and the fog of exhaust, garbage in alleys and a faint note of burning on a chill spring wind. The breeze had lost winter’s bite—Summer’s Gates were open now, both her realm and the mortal world turned toward renewal—and its broad back carried other, darker scents. Rain blurred and softened the air, a tang of ozone from the afternoon’s lightning and a heavy, spicy expectancy.

  The sidhe are out tonight. Close your windows, hide your cows, and above all else, bar your doorways with iron.

  He closed his eyes, a lean man with a heavy dun coat, its side mended with needle-chantment and its leather patches scuffed and scarred, his dark hair cut military-short to hug his skull. Mortal gazes would slide right over him, maybe pausing briefly at the breadth of his shoulders or a flash of the light, the piercing green of his irises. On a jobsite he was close to invisible, just another construction worker, young enough not to have run to fat but old enough that a career other than backbreaking labor was a vanishing prospect. He showed up on time, traded dirty jokes, ate his lunch, had a beer or two or went home, everyone’s buddy and nobody’s friend.

  There. Silver threads pierced the sound of traffic, stitching through the dark fabric of mortal night. The huntwhistles were far away and to the south—they had noticed the burning of his mortal trailer and knew he would not be weary or stupid enough to burrow himself near it. They hoped to find his trail near the ashes, now.

  The Unseelie were no doubt hunting a woman tonight, too.

  Robin Ragged would be using every trick she could beg, win, or steal to confuse her trail, but Jeremiah had the locket that had rested next to her skin and now throbbed against his own as he thought about its owner. Simple chantment would lead him to her—it had, in fact, brought him to this wreck of a building downtown, an Art Deco leftover with gargoyles watching the street, sandwiched between two high-rises. There was a lot of cold iron in its construction, and a curious slick patch on the roof that reeked of sidhe. If it was spoor, it was nothing he’d encountered in the sideways realms or the mortal world, and its presence here was troubling, to say the least. Given the way Gallow’s skin crawled when he approached it, a death had been meted out.

  It hadn’t been hers, though. That was all he cared to ascertain, before his nape prickled uneasily. He had left that particular building hurriedly, following Robin’s trail, and it was good that he had.

  Otherwise they might have caught him before he was ready, on another much more modern rooftop in the financial district.

  Jeremiah unfolded, drawing himself up, and if he hadn’t been wearing the coat, any onlooker, mortal or otherwise, would have seen the marks on his arms begin to writhe. From the wrist up, running over muscle hardened from years of mortal labor and years before that as the Armormaster of Summer’s Court, ran ink-dark, thorny tendrils. Mortals would mistake them for tribal tattoos, cupping his shoulders with daggered fingers, sending branches down his chest and back. The knotwork, vaguely tribal or vaguely Celtic, shifted with his mood.

  Those who remembered his tenure at Court would have heard the whispers. A dwarven-inked lance—they crossed him, though, and did not expect him to survive.

  He lived, did the Armormaster, and Finnion’s clan is no more.

  Jeremiah turned, his workboot soles gripping just enough, and the shadows gathering at the far end of the rooftop showed gleams of pale gold worn at throat, wrist, fingers. Pallid, noseless fac
es floated on the darkness, sharp, pointed chins and wide, generous cheekbones.

  In certain lights, you might even call a barrow-wight attractive. Right before their sharp silver blades rent your flesh.

  Three he could see, and behind them more tiny glimmers. His nostrils flared slightly, and he caught the crusted salt and wetwood scent of drow. The tinge of heavy, low-burning incense meant not just any of the Lightless, but the Red Clan.

  The Unclean.

  His arms ran with familiar pins and needles. The lance resolved into being, dappled moonlight along its edges, its haft suddenly solid against his palms. Its blade lengthened, the leafshape becoming a wicked almost-curve, thickening near the end. The haft lengthened, too, its tasseled end dripping moonfire—the more distance he could gain, the better. One-against-many on open ground, with a sharp drop to his back, wasn’t the worst situation.

  Unless, of course, there were harpies to flank him. One problem at a time.

  “Gallow,” one of the barrow-wights breathed, a rasp of scales against the cold weeping walls of a burrow.

  Jeremiah inhaled, and the lance finished resolving, the blade shimmering with more moonfire before it flushed, its edge a wicked red gleam.

  Cold iron, that most mortal of metals.

  “As you see me, Unwinter filth.” A thin, unamused smile accompanied the words. He’d fallen back into the sidhe way of speaking, with its curious mix of insult and circumlocution. “Either give a name or withdraw.” Pure bravado—the cold weight at his chest, the medallion on its silver chain, was a reminder of just how badly they would want him dead.

  Unwinter’s Horn, wrenched from the extra-jointed, mailed grasp of the lord of the Hunt himself, would earn its bearer a rich reward, presented along with Gallow’s head. You did not send drow and wights to simply capture; you sent them when you wished your prey to suffer before he choked his last.

  Chasing Robin, or him? Both?

  Who cared? All that mattered now was the killing. The ice of the Horn and the warmth of Robin’s locket faded against the certainty of combat.

  It was a relief to finally have a clear-cut problem in front of him.

  The lance’s blade whistled, a low, ominous, sweet noise, as one of the drow darted forward. The rasp of blades leaving sheaths—daggers, of course, the drow fought with little else, but the wights had silver sickle-blades, alive with pallid glow and wicked sharp all along their crescent edges. The horn hilts were shaped especially for their strangler’s hands, and if they had survived long enough to earn such blades, they were quick and brutal.

  Perhaps even cunning.

  The lance vibrated in his hands, communicating in its silent, hungry way. The battle unreeled inside his head, present and immediate future interlocking. Fairly straightforward, a tangle of action and reaction flexing and splitting as he took a single step to the side, the weapon lifted slightly, playing through the first move in the sequence that would end with the first barrow-wight sheared in half, greenish ichor splatting dully—but they spread out, evidently cautious, so he halted, the tangles taking on a cast he didn’t quite like.

  Then attack.

  Faraway thunder rumbled; Gallow moved. The cursed sidhe speed was still with him, the mortal rooftop a drum his soles whisked over light as a kitten’s tail brushing against a wall. The lance’s blade made a low, sweet sound as it clove chill night air, the drawn-out note dropping at the end as sharp iron tore sidhe flesh. An arc of green ichor, droplets hanging in the air as the lancehaft socked itself against the fulcrum of his hip, the remaining wights scattering and two of the drow leaping, an HVAC unit’s casing creak-buckling as their glove-shod feet pushed against it. Angles shifted, the tangle becoming a braided snarl, and he had enough time if he could just gain enough height. Muscles screaming as he leapt as well, mortal world rippling as the Veil snapped like pennons in a high breeze above Summer’s castle upon the green hills.

  The haft scraped his palms; he’d largely lost the protective calluses. Construction wasn’t the same as combat; a cramp seized his left side with clawed fingers.

  Just where Unwinter’s poisoned blade had struck him.

  Gallow ignored it, the lance spinning as it shortened, the blade flushing red as he stabbed with a crunch through drow skull. The lance keened, a jolt of warmth up his arms as it sucked a death into its hungry core, and the splatter of sponge-rotted bone and blood and brain was still hanging in the air when he landed, spinning on the ball of his right foot.

  The lance flicked once, twice, lizard-tongue darts. Four drow left, three wights, the terrain was open enough that he could dance. They sought to ring him, the wights hissing and the drow thrumming in their peculiar subvocal almost-language. Their caverns, under forest or mountain, were always full of that grumble, as well as the soft, slippery phosphorescence of their excrescences, clinging in barb-arrowed trails very much like the markings on his own body.

  Every sidhe art had its pattern.

  A short rush forward, the lance singing to itself, warmed and loosened. A drow folding down as the blade punched through its middle, twisting with a savage jerk and bursting free with hungry serrated teeth. To rip and gouge, to whistle and slice, a sleepy warmth replacing its hunger as it gulped another death into its core. He was no more than a bow upon an instrument’s strings, drawing back and forth to sing a cacophony of shattered bone and split flesh, sidhe blood and ichor spattering in unholy flowers. One of the wights had the presence of mind to spit a blackwing curse or two, but Jeremiah skipped aside, past caring about cramps or muscle-tearing, adrenaline-sparks tearing through his bloodstream. Turning, the lance bending impossibly as he leaned back, avoiding the solid silver arc of a bone-hilted blade, too close too goddamn close, his knee flashing up to sink into the juncture of the wight’s legs.

  They didn’t breed like mortals, or even like other sidhe, but there was still a nerve-bundle there that could hurt them plenty, if you hit hard enough.

  A long, ear-tearing howl threatened to deafen him, but he was already past the wight as the lanceblade sank in and cut deep, Gallow’s body airborne and spinning, his axis almost parallel to the rooftop as the Veil bunched and shivered. Landing, still spinning, the lance a propeller now, the last wight baring its yellowed fangs and hissing. Another curse, this one hurried and malformed, hurtled flapping for Gallow’s eyes, but his own spat phrase of the Old Language batted it aside, a dart of moonglow shredding the black wings.

  Skidding, heels digging in and his breath coming harsh-tearing, he jolted to a stop with the lance’s haft behind his back, its blade pointing down from his right hand, left hand outflung for balance and his head down. Tiny black flowers bloomed in his vision, his lungs heaving.

  One of the drow was still alive, flopping weakly. The wights, rotting into brackish iron-poisoned slime, sent up thin curls of noisome steam. The one he’d kneed twitched slightly before its open mouth runneled with decay, its face collapsing.

  Jeremiah paced to the survivor, wincing as his body reminded him he was out of practice. He would harden soon enough—nothing like true combat to wring the softness out of a man, even a sidhe.

  The drow, its arm severed, clutched its remaining hand to the gushing wound. It hissed in the Old Language, syllables dropping like rain. Not a curse, but no gentle love-words, either.

  Gallow shrugged as its tortured gaze lit on him. “It will take more than the Red Clan to bring me to bay.”

  More of the sidhe tongue, the Veil resonating uneasily between mortal and sideways realms. Death and the tongue of chantment and curse both warped at that fabric, and Jeremiah, when younger, had wondered at the implied relationships.

  Not very often, or very deeply, though. His concerns, like his talents, were not . . . philosophical.

  The drow spat two more words and laughed, writhing on a mortal rooftop, and Jeremiah’s skin turned cold. The lance struck, ringing as its tip punched through spongy ribs and sank into the roof beneath, a hot knife into butter.

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nbsp; One final death, sucked into the weapon’s ever-aching, ever-hungry core. Gallow yanked it free, his arms tingling as he forced it into insubstantiality. The locket, nestling safely against the top of his breastbone, was warm against his fingertips, he drew it out and watched it spin lazily on its hair-fine chain as those final words still echoed.

  Robin Ragged.

  “I’ll find her first,” he muttered, and surveyed his work afresh. It was barely a skirmish, not really a victory. There would be more of Unwinter abroad tonight. His side ached, and the thought that perhaps the poison had not been drawn entirely from the knife-wound was not comforting in the least.

  He hopped easily onto the waist-high barrier at the roof’s edge. Not so long ago he had gazed down at mortals from the shell of a half-finished building and thought of letting himself fall. Odd that a few days, just a handful of mortal hours, could change a man’s outlook so completely.

  Moments later the rooftop was empty, and in another part of the city the silver huntwhistles rose afresh over a roil of distant thunder.

  The prey had been sighted.

  DIN R

  8

  The truck stop on Highway 4, at the very edge of the city, burned with electric light, soaked itself in diesel fumes, and was full of enough cold iron to deter any sidhe with less than at least a half share of mortal blood. Robin hopped nimbly onto a Dumpster’s slick lid, leapt to catch the rung of a rusting ladder, and hung for a moment before a whispered chantment boosted her up just enough to brace one of her feet on an odd, protruding brick. Why there was only half a ladder didn’t concern her as much as its sudden wobbling and rocking, but she reached the roof without further disaster.