I was worried that we’d find something terrible on the other side of the ring, like a gryphon or hydra or other ancient monster. “I could bring Kleenex,” I said, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Plus, I’d enjoy your company.”
He gave me a little smile for effort. “I’m sure you would,” he said. “But you can enjoy me even more when you come home.”
“You really don’t like Jones, do you?”
Valentine stretched his legs and propped himself up on his elbow. “You don’t either or you’d have learned to call him Spenser by now.”
That was probably true. “Are you sure I can’t convince you?”
“I don’t like being trapped in a fairy ring. They’re small and stinky. Not unlike prison, honestly.”
Oh.
“You can stay.”
It was weird to see Jones out of uniform. When he answered the door, my first impression was that he didn’t quite know how to pull off “civilian.” He looked vaguely uncomfortable in slacks and a polo shirt.
“Come in,” he said. Looking over my shoulder into the night, he asked, “No dragon?”
“He seems to think I can handle this on my own,” I said.
“He’s probably right.” He stepped aside to let me in. “Besides, the fairy ring will protect us.”
The décor of Jones’s house could have been plucked straight from Field & Stream or Sports Illustrated. It was a man’s house, full of manly things. There was even a deer’s head on the wall.
If I didn’t know him better, I’d think he was trying too hard.
I didn’t get much chance to inspect the rest of the place, though, as I was only invited in long enough to walk straight through to the glass doors at the back. Outside, he had a wide wooden deck, complete with chunky woodsy patio furniture and an industrial-strength gas grill. A light on the garage illuminated a lone crab apple tree in an otherwise well-cared for lawn. A pile of snow melted in the drive in front of a beat-up truck.
He led me down the wooden stairs to where the deck shadowed the side of the house. There, just on this side of a gravel garden, delicately thin mushrooms grew in a perfect circle. I almost didn’t see them, their stalks were thread-thin and their brown caps so round and tiny. Though it was dark, I got the distinct impression of green in the center of the circle. I could smell summer: blooming clover and freshly cut grass.
Jones put out his hand to stop me from accidentally breaking the ring. I hadn’t even realized I was moving toward it.
“Careful,” he said, digging into the pocket of the Windbreaker he’d grabbed on the way out. Pulling out a familiar glass vial, he gave it to me.
I gripped it tightly.
“This is going to be trickier than the last time,” he warned. “Fairy magic is capricious and chaotic at best. We’re trying to go somewhere in place and time that’s very specific. We may have to spend time in-between until I can connect to the exact time that the fairy ring was created at Olson’s ranch. You can’t break the line until we’ve found the connecting ring.”
I nodded, even though I had no idea what “in-between” was. The concern in Jones’s face made me ask, “You’ve done this before, right?”
“When I was younger,” he said. “And more foolish.”
That must have been a long time ago, because I couldn’t even imagine the Jones that would even consider anything foolhardy. Still, I was comforted to know he’d had experience with this and was still alive to tell about it. “Okay,” I said, taking in a deep, steadying breath. “Let’s do this.”
He offered me a hand. When I didn’t immediately take it, he said, “It’s very disorienting.”
“Right,” I said.
My snake tattoo protested a little when we clasped hands, but it must be getting used to my friends because the ache was tolerable.
“On three,” he said. “One…two…”
“Three,” I said with him, as we stepped together over the slender, unimpressive-looking line of mushrooms.
But my foot never touched the ground on the other side. Instead, I fell into a dark, endless pit. I let Jones’s hand go in my panicked tumble. Darkness swallowed me whole.
TWENTY-THREE
The sound of pounding hooves hammered through the inky darkness. Slowly, as if from a great distance, I made out the sound of voices. A man with a voice like my old psychologist’s said something about catatonic delusion.
Was I dreaming?
The voices returned, talking over me, about me, about diagnoses and treatments.
My stepmother’s voice, shrill, but firm, explained to the doctor, “She’s intentionally driving a wedge between us with her fairy stories.”
When I tried to deny it, the doctor reminded me that my denial and sense of entitlement were all part of the symptoms of the grandiose and persecutory types of my disorder.
It was happening all over again.
Or…had it never stopped?
Was Pierre all part of some hallucination?
I tried to scream but couldn’t. Terror crushed my stomach.
No.
I was not insane. I’d left that place, hadn’t I?
A snake hissed angrily. A horse whinnied, like a cackling laugh.
I tumbled downward until something solid gripped my wrist. A yank, and then, suddenly, I could make out dim shapes. Dots of dark against dusty white, coming closer, and then my body slammed into hard-packed dirt.
My eyes began to clear. Soft flakes of snow drifted lazily from the sky, melting on contact with my hot and flushed face. The sound of my breathing was harsh in my ear. My entire front stung from the impact with the ground. I held on to these real sensations and clutched at stalks of brittle hay with my trembling fingers.
“Is this real?” I whispered, tears of fear in my eyes.
A hand rested, heavily, solidly, against my shoulder. I looked over to see Jones kneeling beside me. “Yes. Sadly,” he said, inspecting the remains of a spattered cow pie on the elbow of his Windbreaker.
“But…I heard…”
“Lies,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. He offered me a hand up. “Lies so awful they seem real, but you also heard the Night Mare’s hooves.” To my horrified expression, he added, “Tell me about it. I fucking hate fairy.”
With his help, I pulled myself into a sitting position. I revelled in each ache and pain and future bruise because they grounded me. The snow melted into wet on the butt of my jeans, a very annoying physical sensation.
I still felt unsettled, though.
It didn’t help that all around us lights danced, like fireflies, flickering on and off, but always staying within the confines of the circle. The ground began to warm as shoots of green hay unfurled and began to grow.
“Please tell me you didn’t drop the salt,” Jones said, once I’d made it all the way to my feet.
“Crap,” I muttered. It wasn’t in my hand or my pockets. I glanced around, beginning to get nervous, but, miraculously, found the vial on the ground inside the circle.
“Next time I hold on to it,” Jones said.
“No next time for me, thank you,” I said, handing it over. The dancing lights dimmed to pale streaks before disappearing entirely. I didn’t even want to go back if it meant returning to the dark place where my worst nightmares had come true.
I shivered. It was colder now than it had been at Jones’s house. I supposed that was because it was the day the cows got mutilated—two nights ago?—and not tonight at all. Snow drifted down in lazy, light flakes onto the field. Cows lowed in the pasture on the other side of the barn.
“We’re not going to be able to see much from here,” I noted. A light on the side of the building cast a bright yellow spotlight on the barn door. Snow glittered in the beam. It was difficult to see much in the night beyond, and the structure of the outbuilding blocked most of our view of the highway and the field where the cows roamed, anyway. With a heavy sigh, I muttered, “This is great.”
Jones didn�
�t take my disappointment personally. With a shrug, he said, “This is where it ended up. I’m just glad we seem to be here at the right time and the right place.”
“And I don’t suppose we can just walk over there?”
“Nope,” he said. “We have to stay inside the lines until it’s time to go back.”
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and shifted from foot to foot to try to stay warm. The hay had grown up to our toes already. I strained to see or hear anything beyond the barn. “How long until something happens?”
Jones didn’t check his watch, but instead looked at his feet. “Do you remember how tall the hay was?”
Almost knee-high. The stalks shimmied as they grew, like images of stop-motion. I estimated it wouldn’t be longer than ten minutes. “Will…whatever attacks the cattle be able to see us?”
Jones shook his head. “Not from here.”
“I guess that’s some comfort.”
“What are you expecting?” His breath wafted from his lips like smoke.
A dragon? Some other flying mythical beast? “I’m not sure,” I said. I held my hand up with my fingers pressed together firmly and mimed hitting something straight down. “What’s taller than a cow and has a long, flat paw that could go like this?”
A small bulldozer, like a Bobcat, chugged down the highway. I saw the bucket at the same time Jones remarked, “That.”
I was glad I couldn’t see the action when I heard the first sickening crunch. I distracted myself by asking Jones, “A bulldozer! Why didn’t we see the treads?”
“The ground is frozen solid, and it’s snowing. Besides, Olson had his tractor all over this place.”
“So, what do we do now?” I asked, wincing at the sounds coming from beyond the barn.
Jones pointed to the hay, which had nearly reached knee-high. “Go back,” he said.
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
Jones nodded. “There really is no other way. If it’s any consolation, you already did this.”
“What?”
“We’re the ones who made this fairy ring in the first place,” Jones said. With a little rueful laugh, “Just like my mother said. I was the only fairy here.”
“But, I just, the Night Mare or whatever, I don’t think I can take it.”
“That’s what I’m saying. We already made it home safely. Look at the hay. If we hadn’t left, it would have kept growing. We have to go back this way.” He withdrew the vial from where he’d stashed it. Uncorking the top, he put his thumb over the opening. He spun around. As he did, he lifted his finger. Salt sprayed out. When it hit the edges of the fairy ring, sparks flashed, as bright as lightning.
The salt burned through the magic in a second. Jones grabbed my hand and stepped over the edge.
And we fell into utter blackness, as dark as unconsciousness.
This time I clung on tightly to Jones. My fingernails dug into the flesh his palm.
Out of the darkness came a horse. It was huge. Its mane was silken black. As it galloped, stars twinkled along its haunches. Eyes like red-hot pokers bored into my soul, trying to tease out my greatest fear.
I crushed Jones’s fingers in a death grip, but no voices came. No one tried to convince me that my life here was a fraud and that, in reality, I was huddled in some corner in a padded room mumbling to myself.
The night horse thundered past. As the clatter of the hooves receded, I thought I heard: “Are you sure?”
My stomach clenched as laughter reverberated in the emptiness, but I held on. We seemed to flip head over heels in the zero gravity of fairy space. Passing through something gauzy, like a curtain of cobwebs, we stumbled into Jones’s lawn. More practiced at this, Jones turned his tumble into a graceful roll. Partly propelled by his momentum before he let my hand go, but mostly due to my own clumsiness, I tripped over my own feet and went facedown.
Again.
At least I didn’t drop into any cow manure. My coat and the knees of my jeans were grass stained. Wet seeped in everywhere, but I lay there, hugging the ground. I would have kissed it, but Jones was already giving me a funny look.
“You want some hot chocolate or something?” he asked. When I stayed on the lawn, unmoving, he offered: “Or a hot toddy?”
I’d never had a hot toddy before in my life, but I knew it had alcohol in it. “That sounds awesome.”
Jones invited me into his kitchen. He put a battered teakettle on the gas stove. I took a seat on the stool near the island counter. The walls were a cream color that the yellow overhead light made soft and inviting. Herbs grew in a box near the window, and a philodendron flowed over the top of the refrigerator. He didn’t have a lot of kitsch or other decorations, but the room felt homey.
“This is nice,” I said. It seemed much less like something from a magazine, and I wondered if this was Jones’s favorite space.
“Thanks.” He set two mugs on the counter. Brown with bright white streaks, they were handcrafted and sturdylooking. From a bottom drawer Jones pulled out a bottle of whiskey and splashed a bit into each cup. After digging around on the spice rack, he added a clove and a stick of cinnamon. “This will settle your nerves.”
I started to protest that my nerves were fine, but my teeth chattered. I was still trembling from our trip through the fairy ring. I wanted reassurances that I wasn’t dreaming all this from some psych ward. I knew Jones would give them to me, but I was afraid I’d start wondering if it was all just the rationalizations of my own insanity. So, I focused on something sure to distract. “I’m sorry about, well, the resignation and everything.”
The teakettle whistled, and he took it off the burner. He poured the boiling water into the mugs with the whiskey and spices. He shrugged. “I brought it on myself. I suppose if I wasn’t such an asshole, people wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get rid of me.”
“I think people like you more than you realize.” At least more than I realized. I didn’t know what else to say, so I added, “Two cases closed. That must feel good.”
He pushed the mug in my direction. “I guess. I still feel like we’re missing something critical in the necromancer case, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Do you think it’s something to do with Boyd?” I wrapped my hands around the pottery, letting it warm my fingers. The hot whiskey and cloves had an almost medicinal scent, but I took a cautious sip. It was powerful enough to clear my sinuses. It burned down my throat, and settled like an ember in my stomach.
Jones watched my reaction to the drink and then said, “Boyd? He was on the team?”
Now I was sure there was something strange going on with Boyd. “Yes,” I said, taking another swig of the toddy. It went down a little smoother, though I coughed a bit when the powerful liquid hit the back of my throat. “Everyone keeps forgetting he was, but I have an e-mail from him.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, as though uninterested. He seemed to search for something at the bottom of his mug for a few moments. Then, his eyes returned to me. “All right then, who do you think was driving that bulldozer that took out Olson’s cattle?”
I wondered at the sudden switch in topic, but I rolled with it for now. “I think it’s one of two possibilities. Either it’s a disgruntled neighbor, or it was the rancher himself.”
“For the insurance money?”
“Right.” I finished off my drink, careful to leave the clove bud at the bottom.
“I’m sure Peterson’s already on that,” he said, reaching for where his phone was plugged into the charger. “But I’ll text him a reminder.”
“It’s going to be hard to stay out of precinct business, isn’t it?”
His thumbs paused over the keyboard. He shut the phone and set it back down. “Hell yeah.”
Jones and I left his house at the same time. When I asked him where he was off to at this hour, he told me that he planned to deliver some coffee and donuts to whoever was on duty guarding Stone’s body.
There was an awkward moment of
silence that hung between us, as a thousand different responses spiraled through my mind. Eventually, I just said, “That’s nice.”
“Don’t get high and mighty on me,” he said warningly. We were standing on his stoop, while he finished locking up. “I’ve known Stone a lot longer than you.”
The alcohol fueled my audacity. “And yet you would let her die?”
“I would,” he said, his eyes flashing. “I don’t think there’s anything she’d want more than to go out a hero, honorably. If she comes back a soulless automaton, I will see it as my duty to take her out. Stone wouldn’t want to live that way.”
I flushed. I could understand his point, but I wasn’t finished arguing by far. “Why do you hate the unnatural so much? If you were more open to it, you would never have gotten into trouble with your girlfriend. She would have nothing to blackmail you with.”
He turned sharply and put a finger in my face. “It’s personal.”
His hand had dropped and balled into a tight fist. I didn’t think he’d really hit me, but I could tell that it was a struggle. I put my hands up, as if in surrender. As I walked to my car I could only think that some unnatural must have really fucked him over.
Maybe it was his mom.
I wondered what visions the Night Mare gave him.
I came home to discover my roommate flirting outrageously with my boyfriend. They were sitting at the kitchen table. The house smelled of baked apples and cinnamon. Robert had made his famous apple crumble without me!
“I was just telling Valentine he’d make an awesome dragon,” Robert said as I was hanging up my coat.
I nearly choked. “What?”
“In ElfWars,” Robert said. “I was just telling him how great the game is.”
“I’d rather be an orc,” Valentine said.
“You’re far too intelligent and elegant to be an orc,” Robert insisted. “If you really don’t want to be a dragon, I could see you as an elf.”
Valentine made a face. “Elves remind me too much of fairy. Speaking of, how was your date with the little prince, Alex?”
Robert looked shocked and offended so before I answered, I said, “He’s talking about the ones with pixie wings, Robert.” I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Things with Jones went okay, I guess. We’ve determined that the cows were killed by a bulldozer. Then we got into a fight about Stone.”
Precinct 13 Page 24
