Which circled me around in the loop to my original problem. Where was I going? What would I do when I got there? How would I survive and for how long? I might be an introvert, but I didn’t look forward to being a hermitess for the rest of my life, slowly and inexorably going bat-shit crazy on some deserted island at the edge of the barrier.
Realistically, though, a deserted island in the lagoon was my best hope. Northeast of Venice, the barene, a network of mudflats and sandbars that emerged from the water only at low tide, were also home to islands that did not flood daily, dozens more than had existed in the twenty-first century. If I found one, I could lay low. None of the islands was likely to have a water supply, but I could sleep and then figure out my next move, surviving on the water I’d brought with me for a day or two.
I looked over my shoulder. Venice and the amethyst bridge had shrunk to a colorful shimmer on the horizon. Every few seconds, the dinghy’s motor sputtered. Even at this distance, the fate cell would be visible to anyone who looked my way, but I was running out of fuel, and the increasingly rough waters ate up what was left at too fast a rate. Time to switch. I had no other option.
I shut down the engine and reached for the backpack at my feet, opened it, and pulled out the brocade bag. This alone marked the object inside as the work of the Brights. I’d never encountered fabric so exquisite to the touch and of such intricate weave as this. Like most things made by the fae, it had a type of inbuilt sentience. As I handled it, the design changed, responding to pressure from my fingers and palms, threads sliding by one another to create new patterns. What was inside the bag sang as it had in Sulla’s shop. I couldn’t say if there were voices or instruments, or if I listened to the heartbeat of the universe itself, but the music energized and calmed me, and for just a moment, I wanted nothing more than to forget.
A living, breathing thing, the power inside the bag told me I didn’t need anything else but it. I didn’t need food or water or air or love or revenge or safety or to live beyond the next five minutes because it was enough.
Wow.
I shook myself out of the trance.
No wonder the cells were so sought after and considered as hazardous as they were. I couldn’t let myself be sucked in by this one. I’d never make it to shore again.
I’d just had a glimpse, I think, of what the moment immediately following death could be like. Once you got past the terror and the sadness and the hard-wiring to survive at all costs, you’d be left with what was inside the small brocade bag in my hands.
Heaven?
Not by my definition, but the fae were the closest things in this world to immortal. It made sense they wouldn’t want to wait for paradise after death. They’d want it here with them as a part of their lives and would create it with their magic. No wonder they didn’t give a flying damn what we humans did with ourselves, so long as we didn’t impact their version of Nirvana.
Sulla had warned me to use gloves, but I didn’t have any. I’d use the bag to hold the cell while attaching it to the motor. I kissed the knot I’d tied earlier in the drawstring, recited a handful of memorized words in a low voice and a language I would never be able to translate no matter how many years I studied it, and the cord swiftly unknotted itself. Cautiously prying open the top of the bag, I slid the cell out onto the seat next to me.
It mesmerized. If I’d had to fight the pull of its magic while the cell was shielded in the bag, I now suffocated in beauty. Rose pink and sparkling in the moonlight, the cell was medallion-shaped, approximately ten centimeters in diameter and carved of a stone I’d never seen before. To call it quartz would be like calling a frozen puddle of dirt and oil freshly fallen snow. When you stared at it, any one spot you chose to focus on magnified in your vision and showed you the strands of crystals that formed its matrix on a molecular level. Even more astonishing, the cell wasn’t really carved at all. Rather, each and every strand had been woven by hand. I wasn’t good at math or judging amounts of things, but I estimated at least a million knots, a million spells, had gone into its manufacture.
Who could do that? And by hand? Logically, my mind couldn’t wrap itself around the feat. Once again, the Brights proved themselves architects of the impossible.
I blame total exhaustion for what happened next. Recalling what had happened in the boat shop when the bag had come untied and the magic was let loose, I should have been prepared for its effect on the dinghy’s motor. Moments after I released the fate cell, the boat’s tiny outboard exploded to life of its own accord. The dinghy’s bow reared out of the water at a sharp angle. I was tossed back against the motor and the fate cell shot into the air.
Instinct made me lunge for the rose medallion faster than self-preservation could pull me back. I caught the cell barehanded before it could drop overboard into the water. Fingers clutching it, I hugged the cell possessively to my chest. Blinding rays of light shot out from the spaces between my fingers.
I gasped when I finally realized my mistake. Pulling the stone away from my body I turned my hand palm up and relaxed my fingers. Pink light blossomed in petal-like waves from the center of the cell, opening up high over my head and then folding down around the dingy, enclosing it in radiance that brought day to night for five meters in every direction.
I had expected to be singed but wasn’t. Anticipated being spelled unconscious, but that didn’t happen either. Instead, energy sank right through my skin. It warmed me and sated the hunger that had started to gnaw at my stomach since leaving the city. Not so bad. I rotated my free hand, and magic trailed pink light from my fingertips. I had magic! I played with the light, drawing curls of fuchsia-colored smoke, entranced by the power flying off my hands. A few seconds later, however, fascination changed to worry when so much energy built inside me my bones vibrated in their sockets.
I groaned in pain. I was human. My body wasn’t meant to store energy like this.
If I held on much longer, I didn’t doubt my bones would disintegrate inside me.
Spinning around on the bench seat, I smacked the cell up against the motor, where it glued itself limpet-like to the engine’s housing, and then yanked my hand back, glad to be rid of it. The boat sped forward, battering haphazardly through the waves at angles that would have torn the aluminum skin apart if I hadn’t eventually wrested the motor’s throttle and tiller under my control. Even when it was under my direction, the boat skimmed across the surface of the lagoon several times faster than its relatively fragile hull was ever designed to go.
No question someone back in Venice would have spotted the blast of rose-colored light in the dark, kilometers from land, but would they make the connection to a fleeing criminal? I hoped not. Since there was nothing I could do about it, I concentrated on the way forward, searching for refuge.
Forty minutes beyond the island of Murano, where furnaces glowed in the night and humans used blowpipes to shape and twist molten glass into masterworks identical to those of the ancient Italians, my boat zoomed into a part of the barene I knew wasn’t on any historic map. This meant these particular salt marshes were a result of the merge and likely fae in origin. I saw nothing special about the shoals I passed—or veime as we called them—which were separated by narrow channels that wound and coiled like snakes. Each of the faux islands was underwater at high tide; tall rushes and sea lavender, dormant this time of year the only clue to their location. Finally, I spied the silhouette of trees blotting out the moon, which was minutes from setting. A real island with a strip of beach lay straight ahead. My fate cell-powered outboard ground and screeched as I throttled down to slowly cruise parallel to the shoreline. I couldn’t see the whole island in the dark but noticed nothing remarkable or forbidding about it. With no structures, no lights winking at me from the interior, it appeared uninhabited.
I reached for the brocade bag, turned it inside out, placed it over the fate cell, and then pried the medallion off the motor housing, afterward turning the bag right side out again with the cell inside.
Instantly, the engine quit. Leftover momentum ran the dinghy up on the beach. I sealed the bag with the same spell and knots I’d used the first time, got out and dragged the boat across the open space into the trees. My pen light found a few rocks for me to toss aside, but the area was free of animals and birds’ nests. I emptied the boat of my belongings, flipped over the hull, and propped it against a tree trunk to form shelter from the wet wind.
I had no appetite, and the fate cell’s unnerving energy had finally drained away. I was too tired to manage more than a few sips of water. Stretching out in my sleeping bag under the dinghy, my lack of sleep caught up with me in seconds.
But I was not too tired to dream.
6
I was six again in the dream.
The door to the orphanage where I’d spent almost all those years closed quietly behind me.
No slam of disgust proclaimed good riddance!
I received no goodbye, may God keep and protect you.
Not even may God have mercy on your soul.
The father and his nuns stripped me wordlessly of my shoes, which could serve another child more worthy of them after I was gone, and pushed me out the rear gate into the dead-end alley off the Fondamenta Ghetto. I wore nothing more than a hand-me-down polyester shift. They gave me no food, no water, no blanket. Told me nothing about the outside world. Provided no guidance on where to go to find help. Probably because there was no help for someone like me.
Father Bartolo had told me that much, shouting in my face minutes before.
“You are wicked. Very wicked,” he said. “This place is for good children in need of God’s blessing. I don’t know what evil made you, but you defile such a holy place. I don’t mind telling you either, because evil must hear what I say. It must not send any more like you to our door seeking our charity under false pretenses.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I only knew I was a bad girl and that they didn’t want me anymore.
I blamed the dreams. I had terrible nightmares that made horrible things happen.
Once I saw a painting in a book showing the Holy Virgin Mary and asked Sister Sabina a question.
“Why does she have a fat tummy, Sister?”
“Because she has been blessed by God.”
“Why is a fat tummy a blessing?”
“Because in this picture Mary is carrying the Son of God.”
“Under her dress?”
“Yes.”
“Why is Jesus hiding under her dress, Sister?”
“He’s not hiding. Christ does not hide anywhere.”
“Then why is he under her dress?”
“He is in her pancia. The baby Jesus is inside her belly in this picture.”
“He is? Why?”
“He is waiting to be born.”
“Is the Son of God waiting in your tummy, Sister Sabina?”
Sister Sabina, who was short, heavy, and round, opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Her cheeks grew very red, and she slammed the book, snatching it away from me.
“No! Certainly not,” she said.
“I think it would be fun to have baby Jesus to play with.”
“The Christ child is not a doll or a toy. Go!” Sister Sabina said. “Up to your dorm room. You are not to come down for dinner, either.”
That night, without food, I went to bed with a pain in my belly and because my stomach hurt, my last thoughts before going to bed were of the Virgin Mary hiding the baby Jesus in hers. In the morning, I woke to excited cries and giggles from the other orphan girls who shared my dormitory. They clustered around a small window overlooking the garden where an alabaster statue of the Virgin stood at its center. Pushing and shoving, each wanted to see. When, finally, I got my chance, I looked down and saw the statue, which used to wear saintly robes, was naked. Something like a huge sack made out of parts of a person was attached to her belly.
Father Bartolo and every nun in the orphanage gaped at the sight. Sister Sabina crossed herself and pointed back over her shoulder. All the nuns, also crossing themselves, turned and looked up at our dorm room window, but I knew it wasn’t the window the sister pointed at.
It was me.
A moment later, the fake belly hanging to the Virgin Mary slid off. It burst on the ground like a balloon made of skin and filled with puss-yellow goo that splashed on everyone’s clothing. I almost didn’t see it because it burst at the same time as the belly, but for a second I thought there was a baby inside the skin bag.
After that, no one except the father spoke to me, and only then when I’d been bad and dreamed again. No one would look at me. I wasn’t removed from the other girls, but they separated themselves from me. The two beds closest to mine were never slept in. Their owners curled up on the floor at the side of the room farthest from me.
Then, on the morning they threw me out, just before dawn, I had another of my nightmares. I don’t remember what I was dreaming when I woke up, only the confusion and screaming surrounding me. And the buzzing. With a single nightlight to illuminate a space holding twenty-four beds, it took me a while to understand and identify the streaks of black flying past my face.
My bed sat at the center of a tornado of wasps. Thousands of the insects circled my end of the room. So loud was the storm that the shrieks of girls being bitten by the creatures sounded faint by comparison. I felt, rather than heard, my dorm-mates running for the hall as they trampled each other to get out, and the rickety wooden floor trembled under their feet. Old Sister Ignacio was first of the adults to reach our doorway and find me at the center of the madness, hugging my knees to my chest and rocking, sobbing.
I saw the nun, and then reached out to her through the funnel-shaped cloud of wasps for help. Their little bodies battered my arm.
“Sister!” I cried in hysterics. “Sister!”
Sister Ignacio backed away from the door into the hall. It took Father Bartolo braving the dorm room minutes later to open the window and provide the swarm with escape.
His face, when he and the sisters kicked me out of the orphanage, was bloated by twenty wasp bites, if not more, his eyelids swelling shut. He no longer looked like a man.
He shut the gate, and I was left with nowhere to go.
I may have been evil, but I was an obedient little girl. At first, I believed that if I faced the gate, sat down, and waited patiently, those inside would change their mind. This was punishment. It was meant to scare me. It did scare me. I’d never been outside the orphanage walls.
After hours passed, after the July sun had burned my pale skin, and no one had come to let me back in, I stood and beat at the gate.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “I’m sorry! I promise not to do it again. I’ll never do it again. Please, let me in!”
Quiet.
I don’t think there was anyone on the other side of that door. I waited. Beat my hands harder on the wood. Cried and begged as loudly as I could.
“Let me in! Please, let me in!” Over and over.
No one came.
Exhausted and thirsty, I looked around, hoping I might find something out here to eat or drink, but the tiny alley was empty, just bricks and stones. I started walking, moving cautiously toward the fondamenta at the open end. I saw boats and mountains of broken bricks on the other side of the canal, though there were no people, no food. I was so thirsty by then that I climbed down a small staircase leading down into the water, and crouching down, scooped up some filthy green liquid to drink. I choked on the first swallow, hacked and coughed. I’d never tasted salt water. I didn’t know there were two types, salt and fresh. I struggled to get down two mouthfuls, couldn’t swallow any more, climbed up the steps, and then threw up.
“You shouldn’t be drinking that stuff,” a female voice said behind me.
I whirled around to see who spoke and stumbled to one knee.
“Hey, careful there, little girl.”
A long, slender arm covered in downy, black fur reached for my arm and helped me to s
tand. My eyes went wide when I saw her face. She was old, not old like Sister Ignacio old, or even Sister Sabina. All the girls in my dorm were less than ten, but there was another dorm where teen girls lived, preparing to sacrifice their lives to Christ. I thought she might be their age, maybe a little older. It wasn’t her age that surprised me, though.
She had green lips.
Dark emerald green, they turned dusky black at the corners. It wasn’t anything on them, either. That was their color. Her eyes were strange, too, pretty and scary at the same time. Shiny green scales grew on the lids. Real scales. Fine and smooth like a lizard. They shimmered with other colors whenever she blinked.
“You okay? Not bleeding or anything?” she asked.
Too awed to answer, I shook my head no.
“I’m guessing you’re thirsty.”
I nodded my head.
“What am I saying? Of course you are, or you wouldn’t try drinking the canal.”
I’d thought she wore gloves and wondered if she wasn’t hot dressed in such long ones since it was summer, but when I looked again, I noticed the fur grew up past her elbows and also sprouted thick and soft on the backs of her hands and around her fingers. Only her palms and the tips of her fingers were free of it. Her fingernails were black and came to sharp points at the ends.
“Tua papa e mamma around here?” the girl asked.
I shook my head again.
“Do you have a mother or father?”
I looked down at my bare feet.
“Anyone?”
I glanced down the alley toward the gate that wouldn’t let me in and then back at my feet.
“That’s okay,” the girl said. “I don’t either. But I know where we can get you something to drink. And eat. If you like?”
I gazed up at her. My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I tried again. My throat didn’t want to obey.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go. I’ll take you to my friends, and we can fix you up.”
My feet, not used to walking without shoes, burned on the scorching pavement. Wherever I could, I rushed to soothe them in the shadows next to walls and houses. We walked for a long time, and I was getting tired. The girl talked the whole way, asking me questions, telling me about the places we passed. I never spoke. For some reason, I couldn’t. This had never happened to me, but I wasn’t worried about my lack of words. All I cared about were promises of something good to drink and eat when we got where we were going.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 6
