Roadside Magic

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Well, he’s not here now, so I’ll have to do both jobs.

  Crenn skidded to a stop at the end of the fairway. His ears tingled, perking. They were loud, and the hounds were belling furiously now. The dog pressed close, whining, and he calculated its size, and hers.

  “Listen.” He dropped his bow, caught her face. Her summersky eyes flew open and she stared, witless with terror, perhaps, or just numb. “Listen to me, pretty girl. The dog will take you, I’ll hold them. You run, you stay alive, and I will find you. I promise.”

  Her mouth worked for a moment. Her skin was so soft. What was she doing tangled up in this?

  “I hate you,” she whispered under the ultrasonic thrills. Close now, the net tightening, but there was a hole in its knotting, and he was about to send her through it. The dog was fast, and one sidhe with a bow and a habit of hunting could make merry hob of a pursuit. With a little luck, that was.

  Or just a little cold calculation, and a willingness to fight dirty.

  “I hate you,” she repeated, and sense flooded her dark-blue eyes. “I remember what you did!” Her voice was a husk of itself, broken to pieces.

  I did that to her. I dragged her to Summer.

  He shook his hair back, stared down at her. “You can’t,” he told her, “hate me any more than I hate myself, Robin Ragged.” He beckoned the hound, who pressed close, shivering and sweating, and lifted her. She grabbed at fur, righted herself, and he’d be damned if the beast didn’t bulk up a little, its legs thickening to carry her weight. “Now run. I’ll find you later.”

  “I’ll kill you,” she informed him in a whisper, with the utter calm of despair. Bright blood tinged her lips. “I will rip your heart out with my bare hands, Alastair Crenn.”

  Looking forward to it, pretty girl. He stepped aside, and the dog jetted forward, a coppergold blur.

  Crenn scooped his bow up, closed his eyes, and listened.

  Hoofbeats. Whistling. The pads of Unwinter’s hounds, a frantic baying. The receding soft thump-thump of Pepperbuckle’s feet. And, to top it all off, the clamor of mortal voices. The carnival folk were beginning to wake to strangeness in their midst.

  “Time to hunt,” he murmured, and drew another arrow from the quiver by touch. He held it loosely nocked and ran toward the noise.

  A BODY TO EXPLAIN

  58

  In the morning, with the fires under control and everyone finally accounted for, Leo stood, his arms crossed, in front of the blackened skeleton of Marylou the cook’s trailer. Marylou, the shawl pulled tight over her shoulders, leaned on Acacia. “They didn’t find a body,” she said flatly, and shivered. The younger girl braced her, circles under her eyes and a bruise on her cheek. She could have sworn she saw men on horses riding through the chaos of two trailer fires last night, and somehow the funhouse had been broken into. Gus had dragged Marylou out of her trailer; he was at the hospital with smoke inhalation. The only other injury was Kastner the barker’s broken leg; he swore to God a man on a black motorcycle had run him down, and that the man had fallen off the chopper with a tomahawk embedded in his skull.

  Of course, Kastner had probably been higher than a kite, since his pot habit was rivaled only by Marlon’s drinking. Marlon’s trailer had burned down, too. He’d just managed to escape, and he was telling everyone who would listen that the bad fairies had been at him.

  Marlon was Irish, and was also full of shit.

  “Jesus Christ.” Leo ran his hand back over his balding head. “Trouble, Marylou. You and your strays, always trouble.”

  Acacia glared at him, but she was always glaring. If she didn’t have such a gift for blinking her big eyes and getting guys to spend a wad at the ring-toss, he’d tell her a thing or two.

  Marylou shook her head. “Next time I’ll leave someone to drown. Would you like that?”

  “Shitfire and save matches.” He grumbled a bit more, then lapsed into silence, staring at the smoking wreck. The townie fire department had been quick and thorough, and they hadn’t even cited him for code violations. They’d been in too much of a hurry, and Leo had greased palms on his way into town, as he did every time. None of the assholes he carted around understood what it took to keep them all moving along, year after year.

  Maybe he should retire.

  Finally, he clapped his sweat-stained fedora back on. “Well, at least we don’t have a body to explain. There’s a dealership over on Sunset. I’ll see if they’ve got something reasonable for you. Marlon can bunk with Timmo, it might even do him some good. Get some coffee going, will you?”

  “Yes sir.” Marylou didn’t even give him any shit. She just turned around and set off for the cooking tent with Acacia trailing in her wake. The cook limped through a bar of sunlight, her leg a little stiff—she’d have a bruise the size of a cat’s head on her thigh later, from banging into the open fridge door as Gus dragged her out—and Leo squinted. For a moment she seemed covered in gold.

  The disaster was their last bit of bad luck. The next six months were easy sailing. Nothing broke, Marlon quit drinking, and the take was good and steady. Marylou retired to Florida, Gus went with her, and Leo retired a month later, handing the carnival over to Acacia, who happened to have quite a head for business. When she wasn’t glaring or rolling her eyes.

  And for the rest of her long, semi-charmed life, Marylou wondered about the girl from the sea, and what had really happened that night. Guster never ventured an opinion, but he did often rib her gently about being lucky.

  Especially in love.

  A SERVICE TO PERFORM

  59

  A stone cube. His armor. The Horn at his chest. He wasn’t chained, but he lay on the pallet writhing with fever, his side a mass of spiked agony, and it was useless. Everything was useless.

  A thrumming ran through the Keep, and shortly afterward the dim torch outside the barred door sputtered. Jeremiah panted, readying himself for the next great gripping cramp.

  It didn’t come. He held his breath, waiting, until black flowers bloomed over his vision, but it still tarried. A gush of sweat broke out of him, sour and acrid, and he heaved over the side of the cot onto the stone floor strewn with sweetrushes.

  By the time the torch brightened, sensing some feral current in the air, he was dozing. He suspected he was very near the end.

  Robin. Where is she?

  When the door groaned open and the tall, broad-shouldered sidhe man glided through, Jeremiah could only blink hazily. This sidhe had a shock of matted white thistledown hair, pale ringed fingers, and a dusty black doublet; a plain silver fillet clasped his pale brow. He stepped into the room, avoiding a pool of bile and sick, and regarded Gallow.

  Jeremiah blinked, hazily.

  “Can you imagine,” his visitor said softly, “feeling this, for an eternity? The Horn you stole, Half, will not let you die.”

  Jeremiah choked on a fresh flood of puke. Tinged with blood, it burned his nose on the way out. The Horn quivered on his chest. Cold, so cold.

  The sidhe man’s eyes were crimson, from lid to lid. Fine black veins webbed their orbs, and they resembled nothing so much as Summer’s ageless black eyes. The same burning presence, the same terrible intensity—even though there was no pupil or iris, you could tell what they had fixed on by the sheer weight of the gaze alone.

  Gallow said nothing. There was nothing to say, so he didn’t even attempt it. One thought burned in the smoking fog his brain had become.

  He’s here. If he’s here . . . Robin got away.

  Two thoughts. Or she’s dead.

  The sidhe spoke again, the effluvia on the floor crackling into ice. “I shall remove the poison, Half.” A long, considering pause. “What do you think of that?”

  Jeremiah’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his body convulsed again. Even in extremis, he did not beg for mercy.

  Perhaps that was the final deciding factor. Or perhaps Unwinter had decided long ago, and only waited for the correct moment to do as he pleased
.

  Unwinter bent to the wrecked body on the bed. Here in the bowels of his Keep, the lord of the Hunt pressed one elegant, wasted hand to the former Armormaster’s side. Seizures passed through the body below him, hollow, choked screams were lost in the maze of stone corridors that were Unwinter’s dungeon.

  When it passed, Unwinter straightened, flicking his fingers. Colorless venom roiled and sent up crackling steam. A very faint smile tilted the sidhe lord’s bloodless lips.

  “Rest well, Gallow. You have a service to perform, and I wish you whole for it.”

  The door screamed on dust-caked hinges as it drifted closed, and as Unwinter strode up the hall, he began to laugh. The cold, bitter, sharply musical sound turned the stone passageway briefly into a blizzard, and the torch was snuffed.

  In the womblike dark, Jeremiah Gallow fell into a deathly sleep. Above him, Unwinter’s Keep loomed, and from its high spires crimson pennants shredded to nothing on a sharp, ice-laden wind. They were replaced by black flags, a sight few sidhe had ever witnessed. Summer could have told them what it meant, or Puck Goodfellow, had either of them been inclined.

  The crimson was Unwinter’s peace.

  The black, though . . .

  The black was war.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks must go to Mark Sanders, whose dream provided the impetus for Gallow’s world, and to Mel Sanders for telling me I could certainly write it. Additional thanks must go to Miriam Kriss for encouraging me, to Devi Pillai for putting up with me, and to Lindsey Hall for not strangling me when I change things at the very last moment.

  Lastly, as always, thank you, dear Reader. Come a little closer, just around this corner, and let me tell you a story . . .

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo credit: Daron Gildrow

  LILITH SAINTCROW was born in New Mexico, bounced around the world as an Air Force brat, and fell in love with writing when she was ten years old. She currently lives in Vancouver, Washington.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  ROADSIDE MAGIC

  look out for

  WASTELAND KING

  Gallow & Ragged: Book Three

  by Lilith Saintcrow

  Faint Comfort

  1

  Gray highway ribboned over tawny hills touched with sagebush clinging to any scrap of moisture it could find, heat-haze shimmering above sandy slope and concrete alike. The morning sun was a brazen coin hanging above a bleached horizon as if it intended to stay in that spot forever, a bright nail to hang an endless weary day upon. The night’s chill had whisked itself away, an escaping guest.

  Cars shimmered faraway, announced their presence with a faint drone, and passed with a glare and blare of engine and tire-friction. Most didn’t stop, even though two signs, each leaning somewhere between ten and twenty-three degrees away from true, proclaimed LAST GAS FOR 80 MI.

  An ancient pair of gas pumps squatted under a rusting roof; they and the convenience store keeping watch over them had been refurbished probably around twenty years prior. Tinny music blatted from old loudspeakers on listing poles, the tired breeze dragging shackles made of paper cups, glittering dust, and a dry, skunky whiff of weedsmoke through umber shade and gold-treacle sunshine.

  A burst of static cut through the music just as the slim shade on the north side of the building rippled. A single point of brilliance, lost in the glare of day, dilated, and there was a flutter of russet, of indigo, of cream.

  One moment empty, the next, full; a large dog winked into being a split second before a slim female shape appeared, clinging to the canine’s back as the Veil between real and more-than-real flexed. The dog staggered, its proud head hanging low, and slumped against the building. The girl slid from its broad back—the thing was huge—and her hair was a coppergold gleam, firing even in the shade. Tattered black velvet clung to her, swirling as it struggled to keep up with the transition, the hood not quite covering her bright hair. She heaved, dryly, a cricketwhisper cough under the tinpan music.

  Robin’s stomach cramped, unhappy with the seawater she’d swallowed and the butter she’d filched. The fuel from the milkfat had already worn off, and her throat was on fire again. Her hands spread against dusty grit; there was a simmering reek from around the corner of the building that shouted Dumpster, and the music was a tinkling rendition of a ballad about mothers not letting their children grow up to be cowboys.

  Good advice, maybe. But you had to grow up to be something, even if you were a Half, mortal and sidhe in equal measure. It was her mortal part that had trouble blinking through the Veil like this. It was much better to use a proper entrance, or someplace where the lands of the free sidhe overlapped, rubbing through what mortals called “real” like a needle dragged along paper. Creasing, not quite breaking, almost-visible.

  Pepperbuckle made a low, unhappy noise. The dog had carried her away from the nighttime carnival, hauling her through folds and pockets, light and shade pressing against Robin’s closed eyes in strobe flashes. He’d be weary. They’d run past dawn, the silver huntwhistles further and further behind them.

  Concentrate. Four in, four out. The discipline of breath returned. A lifetime’s worth of habit helped—if you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t sing, and the song was her only defense.

  She might have broken her voice, though, by singing with shusweed juice still coating her throat. The prospect was enough to bring a cold sweat out all over her, even though it was a scorching afternoon outside the thin slice of shade where she and Pepperbuckle cowered.

  Where are we?

  She sniffed, gulping down mortal air full of exhaust and the dry nasal rasp of baking metal and sand. A whiff of something green and living—sagebrush? No hint of anything sidhe except her and the dog, his sides heaving under glossy, red-tipped golden fur. His fine tail drooped a bit, and he eyed her sidelong, his irises bright blue and the pupils uneven orbs. It gave his gaze an uncanny quality.

  She’d wrought well. In for a penny, in for a pound, and all the old clichés. There was the large unsound of wind, and a drone that could have been traffic in the very far distance.

  The music wound down, and another song started. Someone was standing by her man. A wheezing noise was an ancient air-conditioning unit on the roof.

  Robin shuddered. She pushed herself upright, making her knees unbend because there was no other choice. Pepperbuckle was depending on her, and while the mortal sun was up, they were safe enough from Unwinter’s hunt.

  It was some faint comfort that Summer would think Robin either still trapped, or dead.

  Don’t think about that. Her lips cracked as she parted them. She wanted to say Pepperbuckle’s name, stopped herself. She had to shepherd her voice carefully. No more raving at that treacherous bastard Crenn when she had the breath to permit it.

  You can’t hate me any more than I hate myself, he’d informed her, calmly enough, before slapping Pepperbuckle’s haunch to send them away. Why had he bothered to save her, after delivering her to Summer’s not-so-tender mercies?

  Had he also betrayed Gallow? It was entirely likely. Not that it mattered—Unwinter’s poison had most likely finished off her dead sister’s husband.

  Don’t think about that, either. Her head throbbed.

  She uncurled, one arm a bar across her midriff to hold her aching belly in. The night was a whirl of impressions, everything inside her skull fracturing like broken—

  Mirrors?

  She shook her head violently. Glass, like broken glass. That word wasn’t as troubling as the other, the m-word, the terrifying idea of a reflection lurching and . . .

  Robin’s shoulder struck the wall, jolting her back into herself. She glanced around wildly, her shorn hair whipping—it stood out around her head now, the halo giving her a headful of cowlicks. The gold hoops in her ears swung, tapping her cheeks, and she forced herself to straighten again.

  A prefabricated concrete wall, either paint
ed a dingy yellow or simply sandblasted to that color, met her. The angle of the shade and the taste of the air said morning, and it was going to be a hot day. Pepperbuckle sat down, his sides heaving as he panted, and his teeth gleamed bright white. The scrubland here was full of small, empty hills, and if she peered around the corner she could see ancient cracked pavement and the two gas pumps.

  A little ding sounded, and her breath stopped as a lean, rangy mortal boy with a certain sullen handsomeness to his sharp face stepped out into the sun. He hunched his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and ambled for the pumps. A red polyester vest proclaimed him as an employee of HAPPY HARRY’S STOP N SIP. Harry was apparently a cartoon beaver, even though such an animal had very likely never been sighted in this part of the country.

  Robin exhaled softly. Pumps meant a convenience store. They would have a refrigerator. Very likely, there was milk. The burning in her throat increased a notch as she contemplated this.

  She glanced at Pepperbuckle, who hauled himself up wearily and followed as she edged for the back of the building.

  She didn’t think using the front door would be wise.

  Pixies

  2

  Matt Grogan liked leaning against the pumps and having a smoke, even if the bossman would give him hell about safety. It wasn’t like anyone ever used them, despite the fact that they were live. You had to walk inside to pay for what you pumped, and nobody wanted to do that. They wanted the ones with the credit card readers, and they drove straight on to Barton to the shiny stop-and-robs there.

  When he came back in, he thought he was dreaming.

  Nobody had driven up, but there was a redheaded woman in a black velvet coat in front of the ancient cooler-case, the glass door open and letting out a sourish frigid breeze as she drank from a quart of milk, probably right at its sell-by date. Christ knew no tourist ever bought anything but cigarettes and Doritos, pity buys really so they could use the small, filthy CUSTOMERS ONLY bathroom around the side.