“My hero,” she said softly. Then she looked down at her small hand held in his and quietly begged, “Don’t let go. Don’t ever let go.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“I know.”
TIFFANY ENTERED THE small clearing where the two stood, slowing her lurching beast. Her hounds hurdled over hedges, flanking her quarry, preventing their escape.
It had been nearly seven years but Knocks recognized the demon on horseback. The face of his first adopted mother was something he could never purge. She was dead, of that he was certain. He’d watched her tie the rope around her neck, cheered her on as she wobbled, toppling the chair beneath her. From the looks of it, she too had not forgotten their time together.
“Knocks,” whispered Laila into her son’s ear, “I’m going to put you down and I want you to run as fast as you can. Can you do that for Mommy?”
“No, Mama,” he whimpered back. “I can’t.”
“Yes. Yes you can. And you will,” she said sternly. “Mama has something she has to do.” Slowly, she put Knocks down on the ground, giving him a shove. But he was only able to take a few steps before the two hellhounds brayed a deep bellow that stopped him in his tracks. He wasn’t going anywhere. Laila took a few steps, putting herself squarely between Tiffany and Knocks.
Tiffany Thatcher sat atop her uneasy beast, her eyes steeled upon Laila. Laila, naked, dripping with mossy lake water, didn’t let her nakedness or stature disadvantage her. She held firm, unwilling to give up an inch of ground.
Tiffany’s goat paced back and forth, its powerful muscles impatient to charge—ready to surge forward and run this creature down. It bleated once more, sounding its restlessness. But Tiffany Thatcher stayed her mount. Cold and unrelenting she stared at Laila, then opened her mouth, letting out a shrill shriek in some pained language spoken only in the deepest, darkest parts of Hell. The trill formed words that came out in a deathly warble sounding eerily like a chorus played backward.
“He was not yours to take.”
Laila looked around, a little confused. “He was not yours to begin with,” she replied.
“No!” Tiffany shouted, her anger whipping up a hot wind that rustled the trees and kicked up a cloud of dry dust. “He. Was not. Yours. To take.” The goat was having a hard time keeping itself in check. With a jerk of the reins and a firm hand on its horns, Tiffany dug spiked barbs into the fiend, managing to stay it a bit longer. “He was mine,” she hissed.
“I didn’t take your son. I only took what was left for the lake. Your quarrel is not with me. And it is not with my boy.”
“No, you took him! You took him and you drowned him! And you kept his soul! He was mine!”
“Your son isn’t dead. He’s . . .” Laila fell silent, her heart breaking. Tiffany Thatcher had not pierced the veil of Hell and ridden across time itself to kill the doppelganger that had driven her to suicide. This wasn’t about that at all. This was about Laila and the man she had drowned beneath the waves of Ladybird Lake half a dozen or so years ago. Until then, Laila was ready to die—she had something to die for, something that actually meant something. But this wasn’t sacrifice; this was revenge. Laila wasn’t going to die for her son; she was going to die for her sins. For her nature. And that wasn’t a very good reason at all to die.
“I loved him. I love him still,” said Tiffany of her husband. With that, she let loose her hellbeast and rode it full bore into the waiting nixie, whose eyes stayed locked upon Tiffany’s.
This fate was unavoidable. The only thing Laila had left in this world was one last lesson to offer her son. She turned, looking at Knocks—who cowered crying behind her—and mouthed “I love you.” Then she turned back to see the smoldering blackness of her own death.
The huge infernal goat ran her down like a cardboard placard, its hooves tearing off limbs as it passed over her. Knocks leapt to his feet, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Mama!” He stopped in his place, his arm outstretched, as if he were capable of stopping time in its tracks. But the goat still lunged, dragging limp pieces of his mother along with it, meat smeared and tangled in its long black fur.
Tiffany reared the creature around, passing within inches of Knocks, and wheeled about again, trotting back toward him. She stopped, looking squarely at the boy while holding Laila’s agonized soul firmly by the scruff of her neck.
Tiffany’s lip snarled back across jagged teeth—sharpened and fractured from trying to gnaw her way out of Hell. Her eyes went black and what little color had remained in her skin vanished entirely. She raised her arm, pointing a crooked finger at the abomination below her. “That’s not my baby,” she howled on the wind. “That’s not my baby!” Kicking its sides, Tiffany urged her lurching steed forward once more, its hulking muscles surging toward the changeling. But as its shoe touched the dirt with its step, the hoof disintegrated into ash, like the end of a lit cigarette. The immolation swept up its leg to the torso, and in that fraction of a second, both goat and rider were consumed, exploding into a cloud of cinders. Her hour was up.
Ash and embers drifted slowly to the ground, the remnants of Tiffany Thatcher coating Knocks in a fine layer of gray and black. Not entirely sure what to make of what had just happened, he staggered in a daze over to where his mother last stood, but she was gone, every last bit of her dragged off by the Wild Hunt.
Mallaidh and Ewan emerged hand in hand from the wood, scraped and shaken, but no worse for the wear. Knocks looked up, seething. Mallaidh abruptly let go of Ewan and ran to Knocks. She put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, but he struck it off, shaking his head.
He looked over at Ewan. “You. You did this! This is your fault!”
Ewan had no idea what he was talking about. While Knocks possessed a memory seven years long and perfect in every detail, Ewan had no idea who that horsewoman was, what she meant, or why she had killed Knocks’s mom. But Knocks knew all too well, and he hated Ewan for it.
“Nuh-uh!” denied Ewan. “It’s not my fault.”
“I hate you!” screamed Knocks, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Mallaidh tried once more to comfort him. “Knocks, Ewan had nothing to do with this.”
“Yes, he did!” he shouted. “Yes he did! Yes he did! Yes he did!” He looked directly at Ewan. “I hate you!” he screamed again. Then his passion cooled and his eyes grew cold. “I will see you dead.” He straightened, stiff as a board, storming off into the forest. For a moment his choked sobs were the only reminder of his presence, but soon even they vanished.
DITHERS AWOKE TO a ghostly quiet, a searing pain in his chest. He shook the cobwebs from his head, wondering just how it was that he came to find himself draped over a creaking limb in the middle of the night. Then at once it all came screaming back to him. THE WILD HUNT!
He scanned the ground frantically for any signs of his young ward. If he returned to court without Ewan, they would have his hide. One job, he had but one job to do: protect that little boy from harm. But now he’d lost him, given him up to a pack of unruly hellspawn that had no doubt carried him back to the very pits of Hell.
He sniffed the air. The brimstone was gone. Gone too were the clouds that had obscured the moon, the entire valley awash in bright blue hues. While the scattered remnants of fallen trees and smoldering hoofprints remained, there were few other signs that the hunt had even taken place. The arrow that had pierced his chest had vanished, its flaming tip having cauterized the wound into a painful burn. The valley was empty, quiet, abandoned even by the dead.
Dithers dropped down from the tree. He looked up, held his breath, and waited. They’re gonna kill me.
The bushes burst apart, Ewan springing from them in a full run. Dithers threw his arms open wide, his crooked mouth splayed ear to ear with a glowing, thunderstruck grin. “Don’t you ever run off like that again,” he chided, swinging Ewan around.
“But I had to. You dropped me.”
Dithers paused for a moment, still holding the boy a foot off
the ground, trying to recall what had happened. “I did, didn’t I?” he asked, the memories fading back into place. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do that again. Where did you run off to?”
Mallaidh emerged from the woods behind them. “To get her.” Ewan pointed.
Dithers smiled coyly now. “I see. You had to save the pretty girl, didn’t you?”
Ewan looked away, embarrassed. “Nooooo.”
“Yes he did,” said Mallaidh. “He saved me quite well.” Ewan shrugged, words failing him.
Dithers’s grin slowly drooped. “And the others?” he asked. “Did anyone else make it?”
“Nixie Knocks did,” Ewan replied. “I didn’t see anyone else.”
Dithers set Ewan down and let out a shrill whistle. “ANYONE OUT THERE?” he called into the night. “ANYONE?”
For a moment there was no reply, until . . .
“Well, shit.” Emerging from the dark seeped the misty form of Bill the Shadow. “That was a nightmare.” He gazed over at Dithers, looking him up and down, then tipped his hat. “You look a little banged up, old buddy. How you holding up?”
“I’ll be fine,” muttered Dithers. “Hurts like a thousand needles stabbing me all at once, but I’ll live. You see what happened to anyone else?”
Bill nodded sadly, reaching up, removing his hat, holding it politely over his chest. “Dragana and Nils.”
Dithers swallowed hard, shaking his head, his eyes glazing over with the hint of tears. “They were good friends.”
“As good as one can find in the Limestone Kingdom,” agreed Bill.
“Well,” said Dithers, “I guess we should collect Nixie Knocks and head back to the court.”
“Bah!” cursed Bill. “Let that creepy little shit run back to his precious mama in the lake. Let her deal with him.”
Mallaidh spoke up sadly. “His mom got killed. The horse lady got her.”
“You saw it?!” asked Dithers. Both children nodded slowly. Then Dithers looked at Bill. “What did they want? Did you hear anything?”
Bill shook his head, but Mallaidh nodded eagerly. Ewan looked at her as if to tell her to stop, but it was too late. Mallaidh spoke up, sounding a little hurt, trying to make sense of the words coming out of her own mouth. “She said I was going to kill Ewan.” Bill and Dithers traded confused looks. “She said she saw me kill Ewan.”
Bill shook his head, spitting in the dirt. “Aw, hell. Now we’ve got to talk to Meinrad.”
“We were going to have to talk to him anyway,” said Dithers.
“Yeah, but now it’s messy.” Bill motioned to Ewan. “This could have been about him.”
“We don’t know what this was about.”
“No,” he said, peering out from beneath the shadowy brim of his hat. “But I could hazard a guess.”
Dithers looked cheerlessly at the children, then back up at Bill. “Let’s get them home.”
IT WAS ALMOST dawn before they arrived back at camp, the sun reaching up to pluck the stars one by one from the night sky, its glorious pink crown peeking over the horizon, the muggy morning dew drenching everything as if it had rained all night. Ewan wanted nothing more than to drink a saucer of milk and fall into bed. Dithers, on the other hand, had a long day ahead of him. He walked Ewan back to their cave, a small alcove set in a limestone rock face, sheltered by a large hackberry tree. On the stone floor, offset into a dug-out burrow, lay straw swept into the shape of a crude mattress. Next to it was a fresh saucer of milk, left by pixies sometime during the night.
Dithers pointed to the makeshift bed. “Go ahead and drink up your breakfast, then get some sleep.”
“Okay.” Ewan got on his knees by the bed, picking up the solid, stoneware saucer in both hands, and lapped up the milk, careful not to spill a single drop; he was told never to spill a drop. Then, after guzzling down the entire bowl, licking it clean, he set the saucer down, collapsed on his straw pile, pulling a brown rag of a blanket up to his neck. “Dithers?”
“Yes?”
“Did we do bad tonight?”
“No. Why would you say that?”
“Well, Hell came up to punish us for the bad things we were doing to those people.”
“No, no, no,” said Dithers, waving his arms frantically, dismissing the thought entirely. “Hell came up for a very different reason.”
“What reason?”
“I don’t know. That’s what we’re going to figure out.”
“They weren’t mad because I killed that guy?”
“Ahhhh. So that’s what this is about.” Dithers bent down on one knee, putting both hands on Ewan’s shoulders. “What you did was gentle, Ewan. That boy was suffering.”
“But I killed him like a rabbit.”
“Yes, but he was already dying. You just killed him before the pain got any worse.”
“But that means Dragana killed him.”
“Well, yes. She did. That is what she does . . .” Dithers looked away, mourning for a moment. “Did, I mean.”
“But why did she kill people? Isn’t that wrong?”
“No,” Dithers said, shaking his head. “People are food.”
Ewan’s eyes grew wide and he sat up, propping himself on his elbows. “People are food? But I’m a people!”
“No, Ewan. You’re a special peop . . . person. You’re not like them.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were chosen to be a fairy, like me. Do you drink fairy milk?”
Ewan looked over at the bowl as if it should be obvious. “Yeah.”
“And do you play with the other fairy children?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are mostly fairy. And one day, very soon, your journey will be complete and we will celebrate under a full moon and make you one of the court forever.”
“Will I have to kill people?”
Dithers laughed. “No. You’ll be a special sort of fairy.”
“What kind is that?”
“One with a very important destiny.” He smiled, pointing a knowing finger at the young boy. “Every fairy has a job, a reason for being. We all serve a purpose. Some fairies are rulers, like the Limestone King; other fairies are hunters, like redcaps or nixies; some fairies dance; some fairies, like me, make beautiful music for all of their friends. Each one of us has something to contribute, something we are called on to do. And sometimes that involves killing things.”
“But isn’t that wrong?”
“No. It’s wrong to kill each other. But every fairy has its own special way of feeding, and sometimes that involves the life force of people.” Ewan looked at Dithers skeptically. “Tell me this, Ewan. Would you have felt bad for that rabbit, had you gotten a chance to kill it for dinner?”
“No,” he said, looking guiltily down into his lap.
“Why not?”
“It was going to be dinner.”
“Well, that’s all people are to some fairies. Dinner.”
Ewan looked up, tears welling in his eyes. “But no fairies will eat me, will they?”
Dithers laughed again. “Nope. I won’t let them. That’s my job. Meinrad gave that job to me almost seven years ago and I haven’t let him down yet.”
“Is that your job? Taking care of me?”
“You bet. And I’m good at it, don’t you think?”
Ewan smiled, nodding, wiping his eyes dry with his sleeve. “Very.”
“Well then, give me a hug.” Ewan wrapped his arms around the Bendith’s neck, Dithers squeezing back. “Get some sleep.”
Dithers stood up and stepped outside. He gazed into the distance at the sun cresting over the hills.
“Meinrad wants a word,” said a familiar voice from over his shoulder. He looked back. Coyote. The old trickster stood there staring at him, sullen, with mournful eyes as Dithers’s heart sank into his stomach; the only thing worse than Coyote smiling at you was when Coyote wasn’t smiling at you.
“Shit.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” sai
d Coyote. “You’ll be fine. As long as you told someone about taking the Tithe Child on a hunt before you left.”
Though it seemed impossible, Dithers’s expression fell even further and he buried his face in his hands.
Coyote smiled. “Like I said, I wouldn’t worry. I knew.”
Dithers looked up at him. “How did . . . ?”
Coyote cocked his head back toward Dithers’s cave. “Ran into your boy yesterday. And no one can keep anything from me that I don’t want them to.” He patted Dithers on his meaty shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go get you out of trouble.”
The two walked off together out of the camp, into the woods.
“So what do you think they were trying to tell us?” asked Dithers. “Do you think it’s about the tithing?”
Coyote smiled. “For your sake, my friend, let’s hope not.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE DEVIL’S DUE
An excerpt by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D., from his book A Chronicle of the Dreamfolk
There are few things in this world more insidious than the notion of tithing the Devil. Certainly there are more violent acts and more stomach-turning deeds to be found among the habits of the fae, but none are so deliberately thought out or so cruelly and coldly enacted as that of the Tithe.
While many tales exist of its origin, most point to a deal struck by the fae sometime before the Common Era. Popular tales insist that fairies once had incredibly brief life spans, most never living long enough to see their teen years. They left behind no art, no literature, and no tangible mark on the world at all. Generation after generation of fairy were born of this world, lived, and then died in it, while the world went on mostly unaware that they were ever here. They tried desperately to find a way to live longer, with no success, until the Devil himself offered them a deal.
If they were willing to sacrifice one of their own once every seven years during the darkest part of the night on the darkest night of the year, he would grant them extraordinarily long lives that would dwarf even those experienced by human beings. They would be seemingly immortal, outlasting entire generations of men. That sacrifice was called the Tithe.
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