I gaped. “Wait a minute! You know my aunt?”
“Aggie Deveaux, lives in Fremont, owns a boutique,” Millicent promptly and correctly replied, making me gape more. “Long story. Short form, known her for twenty-seven years, and she’s had me keeping an eye on you all this time, Kendis Thompson. C’mon, now, call her. If you don’t I will, but you’ll feel better if you hear it from her yourself.”
She not only knew my aunt, she knew me. Who in the name of God was this woman? I stared at her long and hard, but she stared complacently back without offering any answers to the questions rampaging through my head. And as I thought about it, I realized she was right. If Aunt Aggie could provide an explanation to all the weird things that had been happening to me lately, I wanted to hear it from her a lot more than I wanted to hear it from two total strangers. I tapped her number onto the phone’s touchscreen, aware of Christopher and Jude both watching me, he with a concern his obvious pain couldn’t quite hide, she through first one teary eye and then the other as she dabbed at them with Millicent’s handkerchief. Both her eyes still looked normal. Whatever was in that bottle hadn’t changed them as far as I could see.
My aunt picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?” The phone’s tiny speaker was good; it clearly conveyed her lush, low voice, the voice I’d loved as a mother’s for as long as I could remember, into my ear. I teared up again at the sound of it.
“Aunt Aggie, it’s me. I didn’t wake you up or anything, did I?”
The phone must have relayed my voice just as strongly back to my aunt, for her tone of late-evening relaxed weariness vanished instantly. “No, baby, it’s all right. What’s wrong?”
I nearly choked at the question, and couldn’t begin to describe everything that had happened to me in the last two nights and some of the hours in between. So I settled for blurting the first thing that came to mind: “Does the name Millicent Merriweather mean anything to you?”
The line went significantly quieter for two seconds, and when she finally answered me, so had my aunt’s voice. “Is she there with you now, Kendis baby?”
That was a yes. “This is her phone I’m on,” I admitted, swallowing hard. “We’re in Capitol Hill and some stuff’s been happening, Aunt Aggie, really weird stuff. She said I should call you…?” My own voice crept up higher in pitch on those last few words, threatening to crack.
A soft, resigned sigh sounded through the phone. “If you’ve met Millicent, she was right to have you call me. Get over here, sweetie, and bring her with you. You’ll be safe if she’s with you.”
“I’ve got a couple of friends with me too. Jude from work, and a guy named Christopher. Uh, Millicent says he’s a Warder. Like her.” As I said this, I glanced at the old woman in the fedora for confirmation. Millie beamed. Christopher jerked his gaze down and off to the side, scowling in earnest now. Troubled by the scowl, I added into the phone, “He saved my life last night, Aunt Aggie.” That lessened the scowl, but only a little. Somewhere underneath it, pain that I suspected had nothing to do with his bruised head stirred in Christopher’s face.
Quietly my aunt said, “Then he’s welcome in my house. Bring both your friends with you. And remember, baby: I love you.”
“I love you too,” I answered, trying not to sniffle. “Be there in a bit.”
We hung up; I handed the phone back to Millicent. The Warder squirreled it away back under her vest, then retrieved her handkerchief and put that away too. “So,” she said briskly, “which of you youngsters has a car?”
“My truck’s parked six blocks away,” Jude spoke up, but with a tremulous sort of tone that matched the look she was giving me. The same sort of thunderstruck look that Christopher had given me the first time he’d laid eyes on me.
“Good!” Millicent tilted her shotgun along her shoulder, looking like an extremely old member of an extremely oddly uniformed militia. “You get to drive. Can your truck hold four?”
Christopher gave the rest of us an obstreperous glare and corrected, “Three. You don’t need me in this.”
“Son, even if you could walk two feet under your own power, you won’t get out of the city limits,” Millie chided. “Did you even try to learn the lore of the lineage? Your magic’s awake, and the city knows it. You’re in this up to your pretty neck, whether you like it or not.”
He might have argued further, but I grabbed Christopher’s shoulder, pulling his attention back to me. “Please come with us,” I pleaded, worried about his condition, and oddly fascinated by that current that kept tingling between us. Every other time I’d felt it so far, from the hedge-creatures and the Sidhe, scared the hell out of me. But from Christopher, it didn’t. And that was strangely consoling. “I know you don’t want to be involved,” I plaintively went on, “But you did save me, and you stuck up for me to the, um, Sidhe.” The word rolled uncomfortably off my tongue. “And I don’t want anything else to happen to you. So you should stay with us and rest somewhere where it’s safe. Safety in numbers, y’know?”
Christopher stared down at me again, his eyes dark amber now under the glare of the parking lot lights, conflicted and angry. I hoped I wasn’t imagining the panic underneath the anger. After the way the last two nights had gone, I still wasn’t about to make any assumptions.
Then his gaze lowered, and so did his voice. “I’ll come,” he whispered, much to my relief.
And, it seemed, Millicent’s satisfaction. “Then get a move on,” she ordered, poking him with her gun and then poking Jude for good measure. “And let’s get to this girlie’s truck. One of you children get my things, would you?”
We got a move on, Jude leading the way, and I fetched the old Warder’s belongings off the sidewalk as we went. But as we headed off to where she had parked, my friend pulled me to her and gave me another long, baffled stare.
“Ken… since when have your eyes been yellow?”
Chapter Eight
Fremont has a longstanding reputation as the artsy bohemian district of Seattle. This isn’t so much the case anymore, not since another big software company moved in and started yuppifying the place, but the reality behind that reputation still prevails in certain of its corners. Like the Aurora Bridge on 36th Street, under which lurks a huge stone sculpture of a troll with a Volkswagen pinned under its mighty paw. I was six years old when the Troll was erected, and as a teen, I’d played live-action sessions of Dungeons & Dragons on it with gamer friends. Every day through high school and college, I’d biked past it; now that I’m an adult, I still attend the yearly Halloween parties in its honor.
Tonight, as Jude drove past it en route to my aunt’s, I took one look at the Troll and screamed.
Jude ran off the road in her startled reaction, her truck’s wheels skidding on the wide expanse of gravel next to the road beneath the bridge. Christopher, exiled to the back seat with me in deference to Millicent’s age, threw a protective arm across me while he shot alarmed looks in all directions, trying to find what must have set me off. But the old Warder glanced back at me from her spot up front and then out her window at the looming stone sculpture, and chortled.
“It’s not real, dearie,” she assured me. “Never was. Trolls don’t get that big.”
“Y-you sure about that?”
Millicent chortled louder. “Sure as tornadoes in Oklahoma! Believe me, troll gets even close to that size, it’ll cause a city a lot more headache than that one’s ever done, and you’ll need a tank with armor-piercing shells to take him out. That one’s a fake. He’s for scaring off real trolls.”
Jude looked out to check the truck’s blind spot before pulling back onto the road, and peeked in my direction as she did. More or less. She didn’t manage to look straight at me. “Warn me next time you’re about to do that,” she said, sounding rattled. I guiltily wondered if my altered eyes had spooked her. They still spooked me, and I’d pointedly avoided the truck’s mirrors as we’d left Capitol Hill.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Jude
shot me a small fleeting smile over her shoulder, and I took that as a promising sign. Summoning a nervous smile of my own, I looked back to Millicent. “Trolls buy it?”
“Oh yeah. Doesn’t take much to fool a troll.”
I giggled a little, pulled in a long breath, and tried to calm down. “And here I thought it was just a quirky piece of art. Who knew?”
Then Christopher’s arm shifted against me. I started and found him studying first me, and then his own limb, as if only just realizing he’d flung it across my chest. He carefully withdrew it. But his hand stopped at my shoulder, long enough to give it a brief squeeze. “Trolls,” he said, one corner of his mouth curling up, “are wicked stupid.”
Certain I must have imagined that momentary glimmer of better humor, I peered at him, but he turned and slumped wearily against the window. Bracketed above by the gauze on his brow and below by the beard that lined his jaw, his profile showed me nothing else except stoic resignation and a barely suppressed, powerful need for sleep.
But all the rest of the way to Aunt Aggie’s, my own mood grew oddly lighter.
* * *
My aunt is the most unflappable person I’ve ever seen. Not a single thing throughout my childhood surprised her, from the challenges a single African-American woman of her generation with a child to feed had to face to the vagaries of politics and the eternal gray wetness of Seattle winters. She met trends in popular culture or advances in science and technology with a wry serenity. Not even the Inauguration Day windstorm back when I was seven threw her off her stride, even though she spent weeks afterwards promising me that our house wasn’t going to blow away.
When we arrived on her doorstep, two rattled young women, one injured young man, and an elderly lady who had more bubbling vigor than the rest of us combined, Aggie was more agitated than I’d ever seen her. Oh, she didn’t blink as she waved us into the house, saying dryly, “Twenty-eight years I’ve been waiting for a night like this. You’d have thought I’d have been better prepared.” But old grief and sober determination churned within her dark eyes behind her habitual calm, especially when she got a good look at me.
It made me wonder what she saw. And what she knew.
Awaiting us in the living room was a plate of homemade bread and Gouda cheese, a porcelain teapot with steaming tendrils that smelled of hot cocoa wafting up from its spout, and five cups. Next to the teapot stood a bottle of brandy, and at the sight of it Millicent whooped, “Looks like you’re prepared enough for me!” Snagging the bottle and one of the cups, she plopped down into the papasan chair in the corner and got comfortable. She kicked off her boots, propped feet in brightly colored, hand-knit socks onto a nearby footstool, tilted back her hat, and proceeded to pour herself a cup of brandy and sip it. “You kiddies can talk amongst yourselves. I’ll chime in when I need to,” she added magnanimously to the room at large.
I almost snickered. With her wildly mismatched attire, she looked like a refugee from the food bank where my aunt sometimes volunteered her time, and something in the proud hook of her nose and the faint reddish cast to her tan hinted at Native American blood somewhere in her background. But she cradled that cup in her fingers as though she were a fine British lady at tea.
“I’m glad to see you haven’t changed, Millicent.” With a low chuckle, Aggie waved the rest of us over to the couch. From me she took the old Warder’s rolled-up blanket, the gun nestled within it, and the whistle in its bag, and set them all on the dining room table. “And you young people make yourselves at home. Jude, it’s good to see you again.” Then her gaze fell upon the young man who crept into the house behind me, moving with the wary, deliberate care of a tightrope walker in a high wind. “You must be Christopher.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, barely loud enough to hear. “Christopher MacSimidh.”
I seized on the sound of his odd last name, hoping to learn how he pronounced it, but my aunt’s attention focused on Christopher’s bandaged forehead. “My niece told me you saved her life, but she didn’t tell me you were hurt.”
Christopher avoided her scrutiny, his gaze angling off to the knickknacks on Aggie’s nearest bookshelf. His blush cut high across his cheeks out to his ears, distinct against his pallor. “I’ll do well enough, ma’am,” he muttered in reply. “Thank you.”
“Carson, Jake, and I got him to the hospital last night,” I put in, though I wasn’t quite sure whether I was trying to soothe my aunt’s concern or Christopher’s chagrin.
Aggie nodded to let me know she’d heard me without looking away from Christopher. Gratitude shone in her face, but she let him off the hook and didn’t actually voice it. That was my aunt for you. Instead, she told him, “You’re welcome. And as I told Kendis, you’re welcome in my house. Now sit down, boy, before you fall down.”
He sat, slowly and stiffly, claiming one end of the L-shaped burgundy-colored couch that dominated the living room, fierce discomfort spilling off him in an almost palpable aura. Jude didn’t look much more at ease, but she tried on a smile and ventured, “So, um! Hot chocolate and brandy? This looks great, Ms. Deveaux. Who wants what? I’ll pour.”
That helped settle us in. The middle of August was hardly the season for hot chocolate, but no one complained. It was very good hot chocolate, made the way my aunt had always made it, from chocolate syrup and milk, real marshmallows, and a dash of raspberry for flavor. Jude gave Christopher a shot of the brandy in his cup after making sure he wasn’t on any painkillers for his head; for me, she did it without even asking, offering a tiny, sheepish smile along with the mug she held out. I took both with no small relief. The alcohol melded with the chocolate, giving it an extra bite of warmth. Along with Jude’s visible effort to deal and all of us being in Aunt Aggie’s house, I was encouraged to try to relax.
As we nibbled bread and cheese no one spoke, and it dawned on me that everyone was waiting for me. Joy. I swallowed down what I had in my mouth, sighed, and looked around the room. “So,” I said, “I guess I’d better start with what’s been going on with me since last night, just to make sure we’re all on the same page. Nobody interrupt me, all right? I’m not sure I can make it through this even once, so just let me try.” Aggie nodded her encouragement. Millicent watched me shrewdly, Jude with anxious concern. Christopher kept his gaze fixed into the depths of his cup. But I found myself watching him sidelong while I looked back and forth between everyone else and started making with the recap.
I went over everything, at least in the big picture sense: Christopher coming to my rescue on the Burke-Gilman Trail, and getting him to the hospital. Seeing yellow eyes instead of brown ones in the mirror, and no one seeming to notice the change. Strange things lurking in trees and hedges near my house and on Capitol Hill. My entire body prickling in that unsettling way, pretty much non-stop since the ambush on the trail. And last, but most certainly not least, the run-in with the four Sidhe at the bar.
Some things I left out, though. Like the terror of a troll turning to stone on top of you. Or the blissful, dangerous compulsion of both Elessir’s singing and the—what was it Millicent had called it?—thrall the red-haired Sidhe had thrown on me. I wasn’t sure I could put that into words. Or if I should. It seemed dangerous somehow, as if to talk about the thrall would somehow turn it loose within me again.
Neither did I mention the way Christopher kept pulling my attention to him. Part of it was that unseen current still flowing between us; even across the room, I could feel it. But part of it had a far simpler cause. He was handsome, I realized with a pleased little tremor. The effects of injury aside, the lines of his face were appealingly rugged, and I especially liked his wide, expressive, mercurial eyes. I kept glancing at them as I spoke, wondering if they would be green or brown or amber the next time I looked.
Jude’s eyes went through a progression of their own as I recounted my tale, getting rounder with every word, until at last they seemed ready to roll right out of her head. Aunt Aggie still showed no surprise, but her broa
d, brown face grew more strained of expression as she listened to me. It made her look tired and old, almost as old as Millicent, and when I finished I noted with a pang of worry that her eyes, too, had altered. They glistened with hints of tears.
As for Millicent, she let out a merry cackle. “Well then. That makes a lot of things clearer, dearie. For me, anyway, not so sure about you. You don’t look too keen on having joined the ‘Guess What! There Are Elves In Seattle!’ club.”
Understatement of a lifetime, that. “Um, no,” I admitted. My voice shook; so did my hands. I took a moment to pour myself a bit more cocoa. Holding the cup and breathing in the scent of brandy-laced chocolate steadied me some. “It’d help a lot if you and Aunt Aggie could fill me in on some stuff now though.”
I glanced from her to my aunt, my brow crinkling, and decided Millicent was a slightly safer subject to question. My head felt about to explode from trying to make sense of everything that had happened—and if I was going to erupt in a burst of frustration, I didn’t want to do it to Aggie. I didn’t want to do it to a stranger, either, but I was too tired and too freaked to keep a hint of challenge from escaping into my voice. “To start with, who are you, why haven’t I known about you if you’ve known Aunt Aggie for most of my life, and what’s a Warder?”
The old woman considered me cagily over her cup, black eyes glinting. “You’ve got my name and my station already, girlie, and you haven’t known about me yet because you weren’t supposed to. I do my Warding better the fewer who know what I’m up to. But I knew about you the moment your auntie brought you over the city Wards when you were a baby. And I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since! Promised Aggie here I would.”
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