Stranger Magics

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  She nodded again, even more emphatically, and I pulled Mrs. Cooper into the kitchen. “Okay, then,” I told her, “it’s as I thought.”

  Her hands had clasped above her chest in her agitation. “What did you—”

  “She’s a cult member,” I lied. “Harmless, but somewhat brainwashed. I guess they just kicked her out,” I continued, cocking my head toward the sitting room. “It’s going to take some time—she may be a little traumatized.”

  “But what did you say to her?”

  “Standard greeting for that particular cult,” I said, willing the lie to hold, and pressing a touch of suggestion into play for good measure. “I used to do some mentoring—the priest I know, that’s how we met—and he saw these people every so often. Told me what to do to gain their trust.”

  She still seemed unconvinced. “What sort of cult?”

  “Something vaguely pagan. Lot of bonfires, some running naked in the woods, but they don’t kill anything. And since I’ve seen this sort of thing before, I’d like to take the girl back to my place and try to figure out where she belongs.”

  Mrs. Cooper still seemed doubtful. “Are you sure that’s safe? Do you want some help? I mean, if she starts to take her clothes—”

  “We’ll manage,” I interrupted, pushing the enchantment until I saw the concern fade from my neighbor’s eyes.

  “Well, all right then,” she said. “I’ll just get the door for you.”

  While she headed for the stairs, I returned to the sitting room and beckoned for the girl to follow. “We’re going across the street,” I muttered when Mrs. Cooper was out of earshot. “My place. No commentary until we’re inside.”

  It took only a matter of seconds to shepherd my charge into my store, but the seconds stretched into worry-inducing minutes every time she slowed or turned her head to gawk at the scenery. I could only imagine what might happen if someone chanced to drive by and saw me half-pulling an adolescent Goth into my home at an odd hour. We made it without incident, however, and I relaxed slightly once I stepped through the network of protective magic flowing around my building.

  The girl wrinkled her upturned nose at my shop, pivoting slowly to take in the tall shelves and dusty books, and folded her thin arms across her bodice. “What is this place?” she asked with a disdainful sniff.

  “My store,” I replied, turning the locks behind us. “Go on upstairs—there’s a door in the back, and my apartment is up a floor.”

  She regarded me with unease. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You don’t have much of a choice, kid,” I snapped, pulling down the shades against Mrs. Cooper’s binoculars. “If you’re not happy here, you’re free to go back across the way.”

  She shuddered. “No. But how did you come to learn the high tongue? We seldom have dealings with wizards.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Do you always insult your hosts?” I asked, taking her elbow and steering her toward the stairs.

  Her brow creased into deep furrows. “You . . . are not a wizard?”

  “Moon and stars,” I sighed, and pushed open the apartment door. “What on earth would give you that ridiculous idea?”

  “Well, um . . . the spells around this place—”

  “That’s not spellcraft,” I replied, unsure of whether to be proud of the technicality of my work or insulted by the insinuation. “Probably not the sort of enchantment you’re accustomed to seeing, but far from spellcraft. Do they teach nothing of magic in Faerie these days?”

  Her eyes flew open wide, scanning me up and down. “You’re fae?”

  I glanced at my terry robe and fraying sweatpants and shrugged. “Again, probably not what you’re accustomed to seeing.”

  The girl slipped from my grasp, then retreated to my kitchen, putting the short wall dividing the two rooms between us. “I am Lady Moyna, daughter of the queen,” she said, attempting to sound intimidating. “I order you to keep your distance and state your liege.”

  I leaned against the wall and folded my arms, watching as the girl’s jaw clenched. “Coileán,” I said quietly. “The old bitch’s eldest. And if you are who you claim to be, your half brother.”

  Her façade fell. “You . . . you . . .” She pointed at me over my dusty panini press, trying to formulate a response of more than one syllable.

  “Lord Coileán, if you prefer. But don’t tell Mrs. Cooper. She worries enough about me as it is without thinking I’ve lost my mind.”

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, suspecting that she was ready to bolt. “I’m just trying to help. Relax.”

  She floundered for a moment more, casting her eyes toward the door and windows for escape routes. “What are you doing here?” she finally asked, realizing there was no easy way out.

  “You may have noticed the store directly beneath your feet. I sell books. A little freelance pest removal on the side, but I assume you’ve heard about that.”

  “You rebelled for this?” she asked incredulously.

  “Believe me, dear lady, it was far rougher when I first came, though I believe Faerie is still the more barbarous place. Speaking of which, let’s talk about you.” I felt her shield begin to go up as I stepped closer—I smelled it long before I walked into it—and paused. “So, you did learn something about magic, then.”

  Her stare was defiant and cold, and I probed her defenses, gauging their strength and limit. “If you mean me ill,” she warned, “I will protect myself, hospitality or no.”

  “Really, I don’t,” I replied, and felt the shield fade. “Though I am surprised that you managed so complicated a shield.”

  “I told you, I am the daughter of—”

  “No, you’re not.”

  The words hung between us, sudden and silencing. “Yes, I am,” she whispered.

  “She tired of you, didn’t she?” I murmured. “When did she send you away? Last night?” The girl gave no reply, and I planted my hands on the counter, a few feet away from her trembling chin. “You’re a changeling. Let me help you.”

  That was, on reflection, the worst thing I could have said.

  Half an hour later, once Moyna stopped sobbing, I crouched beside her on the kitchen floor and offered her a box of Kleenex. She yanked a handful free and honked, then balled the tissues up in her fists and stared at the white refrigerator, which hummed on, oblivious to her sorrow. “She threw me out,” she mumbled, then hiccupped. “She threw me out.”

  Little pieces of blue tissue clung to her bodice, but she didn’t move to brush them off.

  “Want to tell me what happened?” I ventured.

  Moyna briefly turned her puffy eyes to me, then pulled her knees to her chin and resumed staring into space.

  “If you tell me,” I pressed, keeping my distance for fear of setting her off again, “maybe I can do something about it. You’re welcome to sit here and keep crying, but that’s not going to change anything.”

  I tensed, awaiting the next explosion as she took a hitching breath, but she managed to swallow the tears before they could erupt again and steadied herself enough to speak. “Yesterday was my birthday. Sixteenth.” Her voice had flattened to a low monotone. “Mother asked me to come to court at sunset. Wouldn’t tell me why. I thought she was going to have a party, you know, a . . . a surprise ball or . . . something. For me.”

  I waited silently as she swiped at her black-smeared eyes with the back of her hand.

  “So I dressed for it. Every trick I knew. Every bit of glamour. New dress, fixed my hair . . .” She waved her hand in the vicinity of her wrinkled skirt. “It was going to be a night affair, I thought, so I decided a black dress would be nice, and I made it twinkle like stars . . .”

  Nothing original there—every girl I had ever known in Faerie, and most of the boys, went through a twinkly star phase—but I refrained from saying so. “Sounds pretty.”

  Moyna sniffed. “I was beautiful. And I walked into the throne ro
om, played dumb.” She paused, swallowing hard. “There was no ball.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Just Mother and some of her ladies. She . . . she didn’t even say anything about my dress . . .”

  Again, I proffered the Kleenex once the newest flood slowed. “She told you the truth?”

  She nodded as she absently ripped a tissue into shreds. “Announced it in front of everyone. The ladies all . . . they laughed. They laughed.” The ripping increased in tempo. “And Mo . . . Mother, she said that because . . . because it was my buh . . . birthday, she was going to give me a present . . .”

  The tears were becoming tiresome, but I waited them out. “Here,” I said once she came up for air, “why don’t you just take the whole box?”

  She squeezed it into the space between her chin and knees. “She gave me some piece of trash. Said I’d been wearing it when she took me,” she mumbled. “And gave me the tongue of this hellish place. And . . .” Moyna finally turned to look at me again, her face splotchy and streaked, her eyes red and watery. “She said I could only come back if I brought something she really wanted. But she wouldn’t tell me what it was!”

  “That sounds like her. Listen, you’ve had a hard night,” I said, pushing myself from the floor. “I’m sure you didn’t get any rest across the street. Why don’t you wash your face and go to sleep?”

  She wiped her runny nose on her sleeve, leaving a glistening stain on the black silk. “Here?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go fix the bed. Rest, and we’ll deal with this later.”

  I pulled her off the floor and escorted her to the bathroom, then stood outside the closed door, mulling over what she had said as I listened to the water run. “Hey, Moyna?”

  “Yes?” she called from the other side.

  “That thing she gave you, can I see it?”

  The water stopped. “Why?”

  “Because it might help me figure out where you belong.”

  “I belong in Faerie,” she snapped.

  “Please don’t be difficult,” I sighed. “Just let me see it, all right?”

  The door opened a crack, and two thin fingers appeared in the space, pinching a tiny gold chain from which dangled a baby locket. “Whatever amuses you,” she muttered. “Where’s my bed?”

  It didn’t make sense. It just didn’t make sense.

  Within thirty seconds of Moyna stepping into my bedroom, the hunter green blanket had become pale pink and fluffy, the light-blocking curtains had been exchanged for creamy gauze that somehow still did the trick, and Moyna was hidden from view by coordinating bed drapes that hung from new canopy rails. I cut the lights when the drapes slid closed, then saw myself back into the kitchen, disturbed by more than the locket in my hand.

  I didn’t mind the changes she had made to my décor—it’s expected among the fae that one will always change one’s surroundings to best suit one’s tastes, and besides, I could put my room back to rights in under a minute. Hell, I mused, reheating my coffee, I might even keep the canopy, or at least the headboard. Her taste wasn’t entirely terrible. No, what perplexed me was how she had managed the transformation in the first place.

  It’s no secret that changelings who dwell long term in Faerie often develop rudimentary magical skills of their own. If you stand in the sea long enough, you’re going to get wet, and you may eventually learn to swim. But take changelings out of Faerie—assuming that they don’t instantly die of extreme old age—and ask them to manipulate magic, and they’re almost certain to fail. There simply isn’t as much magic on the other side of the border, after all, and it’s harder to control. A changeling brought back into the mortal realm usually can’t even work a personal glamour, which for a faerie is as easy as breathing.

  But the girl—as far as I could tell, a changeling for certain—had redecorated with hardly a thought. Her control of magic appeared effortless.

  It was impossible, unless . . .

  No. She didn’t feel like a wizard. I had been wrong before, granted, but what she had done wasn’t spellcraft.

  I fixed my coffee, holding the mug with one hand while the other flipped the locket in all directions. Gold. But then, surely Titania wouldn’t have taken silver into Faerie. My thumb found the clasp, and I popped the locket open with a little snick.

  Olive, the engraving read. March 7, 1997.

  The date was accurate, I thought, comparing it to what little information Moyna had given me. But I needed more.

  “Do you have an originating state?”

  “No,” I replied, sipping my drink and twirling the locket at the end of its chain. “The first name and the birth date. Is that enough?”

  “Maybe.”

  I could hear Paul’s laborious two-fingered typing on the other end of the line. Calling on him to do my research wasn’t fair, but I hadn’t owned a computer since a poorly aimed enchantment turned my IBM into an expensive hunk of melted plastic and twisted metal. “She’s blonde,” I told him. “Sandy blonde, really, sort of close to brown. Blue eyes, very light blue. No weird birthmarks that I can see. Five and a half feet, perhaps.”

  “That’s meaningless if she was abducted as an infant,” he muttered. “Hang on, it’s loading . . .”

  His voice faded, and I frowned at the locket. “Yes?”

  “I’ve got a hit.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I wasn’t expecting only one.” Paul cleared his throat and tapped a few more keys. “Okay, let’s see . . . Olive Marie Horn, born on the right date, taken from . . .” He paused, then muttered, “Coleridge.”

  Ice ran through my veins. “Does it list her next of kin?”

  Paul hesitated. “Just the mother.”

  I closed my eyes. “Is it . . . it’s Meggy?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

  There was silence on the other end for a long moment. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Can you send me her address?”

  “Sure,” he said slowly. “She moved, actually—looks like she’s in Virginia now.”

  I felt a dull pain in my hand and realized that I had been crushing the locket against my palm. “Really.”

  “Maybe an hour’s drive from you. But look, Colin, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Nothing good is going to come out of you revisiting everything that happened in Phoenix. You know that. If you want help, I’m willing. Say the word.”

  “I’ve got it,” I said shortly. “Just . . . the address. Please.”

  Paul hung up a moment later, but I barely registered his farewell or the subsequent text message on my phone with the address. The tightness in my chest was unbearable.

  My mother had done this to Meggy.

  And I hadn’t stopped her.

  Perhaps it was irresponsible of me to sneak out while Moyna slept, but my once-cozy apartment’s walls were pressing in on me. In times of stress, it’s only natural to seek out comforting surroundings, and for me, that meant a brisk walk through the sleeping town to Slim’s.

  Rigby offered two options for social imbibing. The kids who wanted to be seen and didn’t mind paying exorbitant sums for spiked fruit juice frequented the tiki-themed bar on the beach, which offered a deck with a view of the rolling Atlantic. My ilk, on the other hand, found refuge at Slim’s, a dingy hole with a decent selection and a grimy television tuned to ESPN. When I slunk in shortly after midnight, the place was deserted but for Slim himself, who leaned his bulk against the bar to watch a highlight reel.

  My bartender was not a conventionally handsome man. Though middle-aged, pasty, and bulbous, Slim had retained most of his dark hair, but there was little else to commend him from an aesthetic standpoint. That night, he sported his typical uniform: straining black T-shirt, matching sweatpants, and black Crocs. “You’re late,” he said by way of greeting as I threaded my way between the tables to my usual bar stool. “Everything all right?”

  “No,” I muttered, and made myself comfortable. “Cup of coffee? Maybe lace it?”

  As I’d been
a patron of Slim’s for some years, he didn’t bat an eye at the request. “Something to do with that priest guy?” he asked, heading for the kitchen at the back.

  “No.”

  A few minutes later, after he slid a full mug in front of me, I looked up to find Slim regarding me with his arms folded and his brown eyes narrowed in thought. “Really, the priest is fine,” I told him. “Needed me to give his trainee a ride, that’s all.”

  “What’s bothering you, then?”

  I sipped, stalling while I thought of what to tell him. Slim wasn’t stupid, and I’d been in his orbit long enough for him to know my moods. Still, I couldn’t simply tell him the truth. “I, uh . . . I’ve got to go see someone tomorrow,” I finally said. “Someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

  “A female someone?” he enquired.

  “Yes.”

  “Things ended badly, I take it?”

  I sighed and raised my mug. “You could say that.”

  “Mm.” He watched me drink for a moment, then said, “Well, last call’s at two. Holler if you need something,” he added, and returned to his program.

  I needed many things—a time machine, to start—but there was nothing Slim could do to improve the situation. And so, I drank in silence, letting the television wash over me like white noise, and wondered what the hell I was going to say to Meggy in the morning.

  Chapter 3

  In 1995, I’d been enjoying all Boston had to offer for a decade—making the most of a city that was the perfect compromise between the energy of New York and the relative safety and reasonable pricing of anywhere else—but in April, Paul gave me notice that he’d been transferred out west. “There’s an opening near Phoenix,” he’d explained over pizza at the rectory. “I volunteered.”

  “Why?” I’d whined around a mouthful of crust.

  “My asthma keeps flaring, and the doctor said the desert climate might help. And besides,” he’d added, helping himself to a soda from the old green refrigerator, “these winters are the pits. I’m not getting any younger, you know.”