by Tom Deitz
God, but he wished he was riding with her now! “My fault,” Aikin whispered—yet he heard.
“No more than mine,” David called back. “If we’d been straight with you, like we should’ve—”
The horn cut him off again—close, so close, behind. The horse stumbled—misstepped, perhaps—or tripped. And David realized to his horror that the vanguard of the hounds were at the mare’s heels. He glimpsed one toothy maw, saw Aikin’s eyes go crazy-wide, then shut abruptly. Pain tore into his ankle. A downward glance showed a hound falling back with a scrap of what he prayed was only shoe leather in its teeth.
Hold for your life! From the horse-woman.
David did, hoping Aikin had also heard that command—likely he had, for his grip, if possible, grew tighter. Tight enough, maybe, to crack ribs.
And then the mare simply leapt, as though to clear a hurdle—and somehow, impossibly, in the middle of that leap, turned left in midair. David caught a flash of a solid wall of briars heading straight toward him, and flinched, as pain with a thousand edges thrust itself in his face. “Liz…!” he screamed.
And then the world turned over…his stomach and inner ears tied each other into complex knots…cold and hot strobed across his flesh—bitter cold.
He opened his eyes.
And didn’t close them again nearly fast enough to miss what no one should see: an endless nothingness in which nothing moved yet everything did. The only way he could describe it was as an infinitely large TV tuned to a nonexistent channel, save in three dimensions, and with himself a single pixel in the center. Scan lines zipped in every direction, yet nothing changed.
“Where…?” he tried to ask, but no sound answered.
No air…?
Or simply no time?
We are within the World Walls, the Faery replied. I sensed a weakening in them and chose to risk it, though it is a place of madness. Guard your thoughts and try to think of nothing, for only the insane can preserve their minds here intact.
“The Hunt…?”
If we are lucky, he has passed us. But he will return!
“So…”
This will buy us time. I hope it will give me a chance to look for… Yes! Beyond luck, I have found it!
“What?”
Silence—but the mare was moving. Even with his eyes closed, David felt reality blur. Yet even as he braced himself for…whatever she was about, he heard a horn. Pixels danced behind his lids, vibrating in harmony with that sound. Not-color became pervasive noise.
Now! the Faery cried.
—And leapt again.
Everything changed once more. For a timeless instant smells had colors, sounds had tastes, textures had scents, colors became breezes one could feel.
And then it ebbed away into a nothingness even more profound then heretofore—
—And reality came rushing back: grimy walls and exhaust fumes and, in the distance, music—electric music: rock and roll.
“Oh my God!” David heard Liz gasp, her voice a mix of awe and relief: the sweetest sound in the world.
Aikin’s iron grip relaxed the merest bit. David dragged in a long breath and opened his eyes. “Athens! Jesus Christ, we’re back in Athens!”
“No joke,” Aikin breathed and released his hold, the horse, for the nonce, having gone still.
“Did we escape him—it—whatever?” From Liz.
I hope so, but I fear not, the horse-woman replied. What I most fear is that we have made him angry. And if you anger one such as he, nothing will stop him, not the Tracks, not the World Walls, nothing! My hope is that he will not find the proper when to reach us here.
“When…is it, anyway?” David panted.
Aikin wiggled behind him, presumably to check the sky. “Shit!” he spat. “Can’t tell for the sky glow. Only…that music: it’s InYerFace—I think. Sounds like ’em, anyway. Or Donkey. Might be Gavin’s ’Fridge or the Lotus Eaters.”
David suppressed a nervous giggle that was dangerously close to hysteria.
“Those folks were all ’sposed to be playin’ on Halloween,” Aikin explained. “That means this probably is our Athens, our Halloween, and our year.”
David’s eyes had finally adjusted to a stationary reality, albeit a dimly lit one. The dirty bricks of an alley limited vision to either side, but ahead lay a strip of sidewalk, with, beyond it, a line of pavement down which a Toyota crept at speculative idle. With no urging from him, the mare paced toward the light. It clarified into a blank, gray-enameled wall, but a familiar sign showed to the right as they emerged: the one for Jackson Street Books. And if this was Jackson, then a block to the left was Clayton, and one block down it was College Avenue, the heart of downtown. More to the point, if this was Halloween, there’d be folks everywhere. Surely the Hunt wouldn’t follow them into a crowd.
Perhaps not, the Faery observed. But madness runs free in the Lands of Men tonight. That may attract him. For who would notice him here?
“I don’t care,” Liz inserted unexpectedly. “If we have to face him, I’d rather it was on our ground than his.”
“Right,” David agreed, and urged the mare forward. An instant later, they squinted into the glare of artificial light. Before he knew it, they had reached the corner of Jackson and Clayton. And blessedly, away to the right dark shapes capered around a Dumpster someone had torched, while a voice shrieked drunkenly, “How ’bout them dawgs?”—only to be drowned out when whatever band was playing closest found a few more clicks on the amp dial and blanked out the air with white noise.
Without the slightest prompting, the horse ambled toward those dancing figures and that thunderous roar. Madness, David thought grimly, loomed ahead. And a worse kind of madness quite possibly rode behind.
And then whoever was singing one block over gave up on lyrics and began to scream.
Or perhaps that was the baying of unseen hounds.
Chapter XIX: Awakening
(Aife’s tower—an uncertain place—no time)
Time stopped for Alec.
Surely it had—no way else his entire perception could have narrowed to the sentence he’d just heard pronounced, whose cadences still vibrated in the hot dusty air before that ancient oak door at the top of a shattered tower in…nowhere.
“Come in, oh Mortal who loves me…”
Eva’s voice.
Eva’s!
He could almost see her words: see the mirror-silver dust motes bunch and disperse in response to those tones. Certainly he felt them—as a soothing smoothness in his ears, but likewise as agencies that set his body to warring with itself. Part of him—that which had desired this reunion so long the impulse itself had become a force to be reckoned with—relaxed, knowing all he had to do was push through that door and he and Eva would be together again.
But another aspect went tense and nervous, as the abstract and hypothetical became imminent and real. Any instant mystery would resolve into truth, and he’d learn whether she still loved him, and maybe discover the same about himself. He felt like a soldier on the eve of his first battle. Would he fight or run away? Would he survive or become a statistic? The single certainty was that life would never be the same.
For a long breathless moment he stood frozen, one hand on the hilt of the sword with which he’d prodded the door, the other hovering upon the pouch that contained the ulunsuti. There was still time. It was perfectly possible to build a fire, imagine the house in Jackson County, and gate back home.
To square one.
—Where the beast of not knowing would haunt him for the rest of his life. He’d faced warriors scant minutes before. What could he fear from a woman?
That she’d lie to him?
That he’d misread her feelings or his own?
That what he’d taken for love was merely lust? That…
“Stop it, you fool!” he growled aloud, and thrust through the door.
And dream became reality.
If the room beyond was not precisely the one he’d se
en in his vision, it was only because he was viewing it from another angle. There were the same cracked and fissured walls circling a chamber maybe ten yards across, the same organic arches rising to a vaulted ceiling easily as tall, from which stones had fallen, revealing patches of darkness or the silvery no-color that was the sky. The floor was also the same: flagstones strewn with threadbare furs and worn hides of beasts that did not exist in the Lands of Men. Halfway around the right-hand wall, a low platform supported a bed strewn with more furs and a profusion of silk and velvet pillows in colors like faded jewels, while festoons of tattered crimson comprised a canopy from the center of the vault to the headboard.
Directly opposite, a window narrow as his shoulders and twice his height looked on nothingness. And before it, wedged into an inset seat like a luminescent shadow, sat Eva: dark-haired, pale, and beautiful; in a long white gown of simple cut that left her shoulders bare.
She rose as he entered, and strode forward: slowly, almost stately in her measured tread. And it came to him that he’d only seen her in mortal disguise—she’d favored gypsy-style togs—and once in the armor of Lugh’s guard, which reduced male and female to one likeness and showed how similar were the faces of both sexes among the Sidhe.
This was no gypsy, however, and no woman in warrior drag.
This was a queen. Deposed, yes, and in exile, shorn of the trappings of her royalty, but a queen nonetheless. Not Eva of the earth, but Aife of the Daoine Sidhe.
Alec felt the rags of his hero persona slip to the floor as the vision before him made him realize only too clearly how unlike he and Aife were: she of Faery nobility, an immortal, able to work magic, betray princes, and precipitate wars and trials and deadly vengeance; while he was simply Alec McLean: barely a junior in college, averagely tall, averagely handsome, above averagely bright, but so were all his friends, so it didn’t matter. And no great genius when it came to the social graces; no master at doing the right thing at the right time. Certainly no champion at wooing Faery ladies.
What could she possibly see in him?
What indeed?
Swallowing hard, he squared his shoulders and advanced to meet her. His steps rang loud on the floor, and he felt more awkward than ever; still didn’t know whether to rush to embrace her or hold back and let her come to him (which would reveal where her head was regarding this reunion); whether to fall on the floor at her feet, or run screaming out the door.
For her part, she continued as before, but with a sad smile that brightened shyly as she drew near, so that her stature seemed to shrink and the glamour of stateliness to dim as she halted the reach of their extended hands away.
And suddenly, she was no more than a woman. Not quite as tall as he, but slim; beautiful, but no more than he’d seen at UGA.
“Alec McLean,” she whispered. “My Alec.”
“Uh, yeah,” he managed, inanely. “And if I wanted to sound really dumb, I’d do like Luke Skywalker and say, ‘I’m here to rescue you.’”
“Aren’t you?”
He blushed. “I guess. Uh, I mean, yeah—yes—I am. I mean—well, it sounds kinda stupid to say it.”
“Have I changed that much?” she chuckled. “Or have you?”
Alec stared at the floor. It was impossible to think while looking at her, impossible to compose his thoughts while gazing at those dark blue eyes. Impossible not to recall what had passed between them, what lay hidden beneath her clothes and stirred to life under his.
“You haven’t,” he began shakily. “That is, you’re the same but…different…I mean…oh hell!” he blurted finally, and closed his eyes. Calm fingers found his trembling ones and drew him toward the low seat that followed the curve of the wall beside the window.
“Many are the things I have pondered,” Aife murmured, as she sank down beside him—not too close, he was both relieved and perplexed to note. “And foremost among them is that which has passed ’twixt you and me and brought me to this state.”
Alec started to speak, but she silenced him with a finger against his lips. “You wonder if I love you,” she said. “And you wonder if you love me or the memory you have kept so faithfully. You wonder how you can ever fit loving one such as I into the World you know, or whether you are brave enough to dwell in mine.”
“Yeah,” Alec sighed. “You got it.”
“You also wonder how it is that I am alive and in my own right body, when you saw me die.”
Another nod. “Right again.”
“That at least, is simple enough to explain, as the others are not,” she said. “I truly died when you saw me die—that is, my body became inviable as a housing for my soul, for the agony washing through my physical self was more than my other self could bear, and so my soul dissolved the Silver Cord and fled. That which remained became merely so much matter; yet that which was me persisted. I could then have willed my soul into a child new-quickened in some Faery woman’s womb, and grown up with full cognizance of who I had been. Or I could have exerted my will and gathered substance and become my former self in a matter of days. Neither would free me from Lugh’s justice, only the Death of Iron. My choice was thus to serve my sentence at once or wait. I chose the former, for by then I knew that I did love you, that I had been a traitor to my king, and that it was my duty to surrender myself to justice—which I did. The rest is as I related when you came to me in a dream a few days ago: that since I feigned love to betray a mortal man and a Faery king, only true love would be the key to my release.”
“That’s…what I thought,” Alec acknowledged weakly, with a sick feeling in his gut—for something had changed. When first they’d met they had shared a bond of loneliness—his of finding himself odd man out with David and Liz, hers of being a foreigner (how foreign he’d not suspected) in an alien land. She’d been exotic, but had seemed to enjoy his company, and had laughed and joked and shared naivetés with him.
But at least they’d been equals—so it seemed.
Now, however, a barrier had risen where he’d expected none, and he could no longer love her as Eva: another human, another same-aged friend. For Aife was his superior—in wisdom; knowledge, power, and actual (if not apparent) age. And it frightened him past knowing.
“You’re…not how I remember,” he mumbled bleakly, feeling the weight of every word as it left his tongue, as though each were a shovelful of earth cast into his grave, shutting his corpse off from light.
Eva smiled and patted his hand. “Yet you came.”
Alec tried to smile back. He wondered if he’d hurt her, or if she was secretly relieved. He wondered if he even believed what he’d just said.
“So what does this mean?” he asked finally. “I came to rescue you, and I thought I was the…mortal man who loved you, and I do love you—sort of…and I want to love you like I used to love you; only…now I’m not sure about things, ’cept that I just want the best for you ’cause—this is gonna sound stupid—you’re a good person, I think. But…well, hell. Can I still rescue you? Or does the…truth change everything?”
“Truth,” she echoed softly. “In truth, you loved me because I loved you—or seemed to. No one else did at that time, and the cold part of me saw that and knew you were ripe for manipulation, and so I did. But I likewise sensed the love you kept for your friend, and how he had hurt you, and how you hated yourself for hating him for loving another, and I could not help but love you for that. And to speak more truth: you loved me when you came here, and that is enough to win my release.”
“So, you’re free to go?”
Aife remained where she was. “Yes,” she smiled. “But there is no hurry. Fast or slow, it is the same to Lugh, now that you are here.”
“My friends—”
“Time passes differently here than there, you should know that.” She touched his hand.
A thrill pulsed through him that had nothing to do with intellect. Her fingers traced the length of his thigh. He closed his eyes and shuddered. His face felt hot.
; “So you do love me,” she whispered. “In a way.”
“Of…c-course I do,” he stammered, not looking at her. “I’m only human, and you’re a beautiful, beautiful lady…”
“But…?”
“But I don’t really love you. And to do…that, I have to really love you. I have to trust you. You have to be an equal—and you can’t be.”
“Did you love me before?”
“Something…else was thinking then.”
Aife laughed. The fingers stroked higher, farther in… Closer. Alec swallowed again. His groin tightened in spite of himself. God, it felt so good, and it had been so long, and he’d wanted it so badly, and it ought to be the same because the bodies would be the same…
But the minds wouldn’t.
There was more honesty between them, which should bring them closer—yet it didn’t.
“Love me,” Eva murmured.
“I shouldn’t. I—”
“You have nothing to fear,” she said before he could finish. “I am your perfect lover, the only woman with whom you can let go completely, without guilt or fear. I know your body, and so you have no need to be shy. You have known mine, and so no new mysteries await you there. You were clumsy before, but you have had years in which to recall and refine and perfect your desire.”
“I…” Alec tried again. But her hand slid inside his shirt.
“Oh hell,” he gasped. “Why not?”
*
Cold awakened him.
God, he was cold too!
—All over!
Wind blew chill across his shoulders—his thighs, the small of his back, his feet and buttocks. He rolled onto his side, drew himself in a tight ball, one arm clasped around his knees while the other fumbled for the furs to tug over him—and for Aife to draw her into one last guilty embrace.
