Faerie Blood

by Angela Korra'ti

  “I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t with him when it happened. But I can tell you this.” My aunt had been staring at the photo of Mom and Dad as she spoke; now, she swung her attention back to me and looked me full in the face. “He called me that night, sounding stranger than I’d ever heard him in all my days. Drunk to begin with, and Willie never touched a drop in his life. And he was out of his head with fear, too. He kept telling me he was sure something was wrong and he couldn’t figure out what.

  “I tried to tell him you and your mama were fine and safe, but that only set him off more. He told me….” She trailed off then, tears of her own beginning to stream unheeded down her face. But Aggie took only a moment to regain her fraying composure before she went on, “He told me, and he said it like he was trying to wake up from a dream, ‘That’s right, I do have a little girl. I’m a daddy.’ Then he cried, ‘Who’s her mama, Aggie? Why can’t I remember my baby girl’s mama?’“

  Her voice did not alter in rhythm, pitch, or pacing, the measured contralto I’d always known. But as she spoke, I heard those same syllables echoing up from somewhere within my mind and almost drowning out Aggie’s words, delivered in another voice entirely: the dazed, frantic babble of a terrified young man. The chill sank deeper into me, while the prickling flared up again.

  I went rigid where I sat, a single thought blanking out everything and everyone else in the room: Dad?

  “Kendie baby?” Aggie laid her fingertips against my shoulder; I started violently, but I also seized her hand. Mine trembled.

  Her brow furrowing anxiously, Jude said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Ken.”

  When I tried to answer her, I found my throat had gone dry. Cocoa, I ordered myself. But that was easier thought than done. I had to consciously force myself to let go of Aggie’s hand, lean forward, take up my cup from the coffee table, and pour myself a bit more of the hot chocolate. As I moved I flushed hotly, all too aware of everyone watching me—Jude and Aggie with equal concern, Millicent with an undisguised critical interest. Christopher looked as though he was spending every faculty he had on staying awake, but even he was staring my way, the weariness in his face not yet drowning out a reluctant fascination.

  I ignored them all until I could drink down enough of the cocoa to regain my voice, and only then did I answer Jude, “I think I heard one, maybe. A ghost.” Even then, the admission came out as a breathless croak. “I don’t know why.”

  “We’ll get to that,” Millie pronounced, waving impatiently at my aunt. “Better tell her the rest, Aggie. She’s going to need it all.”

  Soothing though it was, the cocoa didn’t quite banish the chill still lingering somewhere within me. Part of me balked at learning anything else that might set off any more weird reactions, and it wasn’t a small part. I’d already spent the last several hours wondering if I’d been seeing things without hearing things, too. But I made myself look back at Aggie, and I made myself nod. “Keep going,” I said. “What did Dad do then?”

  Old memories and tears still gleamed in Aggie’s eyes, but I had all her attention now. Thoughtfully, soberly, she considered me as she went on with her story. “Well, Willie told me he was getting home as fast as he could. I was closer, so I got there first. Your mama was already on her way out of the house—and she knew something had happened to your daddy without me having to say a word. I think you must have too, because you were squalling as though your little heart had broken right in two. Your mama gave you a kiss on your head and said something in those sweet Faerie words she spoke sometimes. Then she gave you to me, and she said to me, ‘Guard her, Agatha, sister of my mate. If I do not return, take her far away from this place, quickly, before my people find her.’“

  Another echo swept through me, stronger than the first, starting as a pang within my chest and swelling up through my throat and my skull. The voice this time was feminine, but I could not understand the words it whispered; there was only the voice, a brief liquid flicker of syllables across my mind, and an unnerving conviction that I’d heard it before. My hands clenched around the cup I held, and I mentally latched onto the warm, solid shape of the ceramic as a bulwark against my own chaotic thoughts. It let me focus enough to listen to the rest of what Aggie had to say, despite a surge of dread that I wasn’t going to like it.

  “I asked her what she was going to do,” my aunt murmured, “and she told me with a cold, stark fire in her eyes that it was better if I didn’t know. The next morning the police told me Will crashed his car. They called me in to identify his body, but they found no trace of your mama. That night I took the next bus to Charleston, and from there I came west with you. It took just over a day for Millicent to find me once I’d entered the city. And she’s been helping me look after you in her own way ever since.”

  She stopped there, turning to the table and reaching to pour herself a very small share of the brandy. She didn’t say whether Mom had ever come back. I didn’t need to ask.

  I closed the album and held it for a few moments, looking at the places on the cover where the original blue had turned muted, closer to gray. And I looked at the color of my hands against the cover, lighter than Dad’s, darker than Mom’s. I wondered in a daze whether, if my eyes had changed to be like hers, anything else about me would follow suit. Would my skin take on that same glow the Sidhe had about them, make me seem perpetually bathed in light?

  “But they found me.” I looked up, my gaze traveling from face to face around the room. “Why now? Why twenty-eight years later?”

  Jude considered, chewing on her lower lip, and then said, “They called you a changeling, Ken. Maybe that’s got something to do with it.”

  I thought of the Sidhe discussing me in their cool, detached voices, remote and lovely as snowcaps upon the Olympics during the winter, and shivered. “But I thought changelings were fake babies. The fairies would steal a human baby and put a goblin in its place, or a bunch of muddy sticks, something like that, right?” This last I directed over to the old Warder, as Millicent seemed the resident expert—and because Christopher’s eyes flickered shut as I glanced his way. They came open an instant later, but they’d gone completely unfocused; he was drowsing off, hard and fast.

  Millicent canted her head, birdlike, and hemmed and hawed for a second or two before affirming, “You do have the old stories right, but the Sidhe have their own take on it. To them a changeling is somebody with part fey blood.” Her weathered, seamed face gentled then, just a little, as she studied me. “And fey blood’s a tricky thing, being part magic and all. A body with fey blood can just sometimes up and change, no call for it, no rhyme or reason past the blood just deciding it’s time.”

  “You’re saying I’m some kind of were-elf?” I asked, making a face. Jude snickered, and I poked her and made another face at her.

  That won me a grin from Millie and a thoughtful spark in her dark eyes, as she looked me up and down. “Maybe. You got fey blood in you, so you got magic in you. And I just have to look at you to tell it’s waking up, girlie. I can feel it pouring off you from here. And you say you heard a voice just now, as your aunt was talking. Whose?”

  “Dad’s, I think,” I said uneasily. “And I think I heard Mom’s too, or more like… I remembered it. Like I’d heard it before.”

  Aggie murmured at my side, “You did. Long time ago, but you heard them both.”

  “But it’s a rare grownup who can remember something clear back to infancy without a bit of magical help,” Millicent mused, leaning forward now on the papasan. “You feel anything if I do this, honey?”

  She didn’t move in any obvious way. But all at once I felt a strong buzz rushing from my head down to my feet, as if a small bolt of lightning had struck the floor directly between the old woman and me. Jude and Aggie seemed to notice nothing, but I jolted between them on the couch and nearly dropped my cup. The surge hit Christopher too, with an abruptness that had to hurt; he snapped awake once more, blinking wildly at Millicent, but it was
a distant cousin of consciousness at best. His hand unthinkingly clapped against his head, and any coherent thought still active behind his eyes wasn’t making it out past a mask of nausea, exhaustion, and pain.

  Worriedly I rose and stepped closer to him even as I answered Millicent’s question. “Yeah, I felt that—kind of like electricity?”

  She bobbed her head vigorously, making her hat brim waggle. “That was me tapping into the earth under the house,” she proclaimed. “And that was your own blood telling you I did it. Magic calls to magic, girlie. Fey or Warder, it’s all the same.”

  Christopher looked up at me as Millicent spoke, and for a long moment, I just stared back at him. Questions crowded one another in my head, but I uttered none of them, not quite yet. When I finally managed to speak the words came out small and hoarse. “I think this is the part where I’m supposed to ask you if that’s a good thing,” I breathed, glancing at the older Warder before my attention swung back to the younger one. “But I think you need to sleep.”

  So did I, for that matter. My head felt filled to bursting, with no room left for any more bizarre revelations about either my past or my present. A little part of my consciousness, like my laptop’s battery indicator, fired off a warning: two percent power remaining, please save all work in progress.

  But I wasn’t budging until I was certain Christopher would get some rest.

  His head moved in the barest beginning of a nod, but he caught himself as if thinking better of even that tiny motion. Instead, he whispered in sheepish acknowledgement, “Yeah… sleep.”

  That was enough. Relieved, I turned towards my aunt. “Can he have the couch, Aunt Aggie? I don’t think he ought to be going anywhere.”

  “Neither should you,” Millicent told me. “This house is the safest place you can be tonight with that new magic spilling off of you like water off a duck. Until we know what the Sidhe want with you, best not to let ’em have any free cracks at you. First thing tomorrow, though, I want a few more words with you.”

  “I should get going—” Jude began.

  But the old Warder overrode her. “Don’t think so, girlie. The Seelie and that Unseelie saw you, they know you’re Kendis’ friend, and they already slapped a thrall on you once. They might try it again.”

  “Oh,” my friend mumbled, unnerved.

  Aggie got to her feet then, informing the room at large as she began to gather the dishes from the coffee table, “You’ll all stay the night, of course. I have room for all of you, and as Millie said, it’s safer.” That prompted Jude into motion to give her a hand, and my aunt gave her a grateful smile.

  “I know my business,” Millicent agreed staunchly. “And Kendis should keep out of sight of anything else fey in the city till we get her sorted out, and till I can patch the Wards to keep anything else from getting in. That shiny new magic probably called the troll down on her in the first place. Trolls eat Sidhe, you know. Love ’em.”

  That was not a comfort.

  Aunt Aggie’s quilts were, though. She’d given me the one I had at my house; she made them herself and sometimes sold them in her store. But the ones I liked best were the ones she kept, and I went to one of her hall closets to fetch one for Christopher while Aggie and Jude cleared the coffee table. I glanced back at him over my shoulder as I went, surreptitiously watching as his attempt to rise and help the women got him a unanimous order to stay put. Chastened, he slowly turned to stretch out on the couch. Only when his dark head had lowered down out of my line of sight did I force my attention back to the fetching of a quilt.

  Hadn’t he said something at the hospital about being from Newfoundland? I didn’t know much about the place, but some random fragment of memory connected it with the ocean in my mind and guided my hands to a quilt in oceanic blues and greens and whites. By the time I came back to offer it to Christopher, though, he was already out cold. The sight of his long rangy frame gone limp gave me momentary pause; I found myself tucking the quilt over him with a gentleness I didn’t consciously consider. And when he made a small wordless noise before settling once more, just enough to let me know he’d fallen asleep rather than fainting, I felt a second, stronger wave of relief.

  Aggie was looking at me when I straightened up from settling the quilt into place. Her eyes gleamed, still a little teary, but I thought I saw amusement in the smile that tugged at her lips.

  “What?” I challenged her.

  With a soft, heartfelt laugh my aunt gave me another hug, and I saw love and pride along with the humor in her expression. “Just taking a moment to thank the good Lord for the woman you are, baby,” she said. “And that I think you’ll stay, even if your ears get all pointy like your mama’s. You go on to bed now. Your old room is all ready, and you and Jude can sleep in there. Millie’ll sleep with me.”

  “Good night, Aunt Aggie.” I squeezed her close, with a little prayer of thanks of my own for the solid haven of her presence and her home. And for keeping any embarrassing suspicions she harbored about my behavior towards the wounded Newfoundlander sleeping on her couch to herself.

  Chapter Ten

  That I had nightmares after we all went to bed was no surprise; that I didn’t wake Jude up with them, however, was.

  They started with the voices I’d heard during Aggie’s story, murmuring and jumbling together in my mind in a soft ongoing susurration, like distant ocean waves. Neither voice was very clear, but my dreaming mind locked onto them with the strength of desperation. Dad and Mom needed me, and I had to find them. I had to help.

  One moment the dream was formless; in the next, it took shape as an endless labyrinth of mirrors. I plunged through the gleaming twists and turns, straining to catch the slightest glimpse of my parents’ figures. Every so often one or the other of them appeared in the shining surfaces I passed, reflected wraiths that spurred me on even as they filled me with a gnawing fright. My father’s face was a blank-eyed mask of grief, my mother’s ablaze with a wrathful sorrow that threatened to consume her from within.

  They never appeared together, and they both looked more than a little mad. I wept each time I saw their reflections, but no matter how loudly I called, no matter how quickly I whirled to see if Mom or Dad stood behind me to cast an image into the mirror I faced, their forms vanished out of the glass. My own supplanted them, and I changed in every mirror I saw. Sometimes I was as dark as Dad, hair, eyes, and skin all a rich deep brown. Sometimes I was pale as my mother, with tapered ears and gemstone eyes that shone almost too brightly for the mirrors to show anything else. Then the details mixed and matched shapes and colors of features in countless variations, morphing me from human to Sidhe and back again.

  Which was I? One or the other? Both? Something in between?

  Then something thundered through the labyrinth in my wake, rattling hundreds of the mirrors and toppling dozens more with the force of each heavy footfall. Jagged shards rained down upon me, slicing my flesh in a dozen places, but the maze offered no hiding place, no cover; I had to run for my life. All around me, mirrors both broken and whole began to report what was hot on my trail: the Fremont Troll, an immobile sculpture no longer. It hurled its captured Volkswagen after me, and the car exploded like cannon fire through the maze’s walls. I shrieked, flung myself to the ground and rolled hard to one side to elude the airborne missile, and looked back the way I’d come.

  I saw the troll reaching out for me with hungry, ferocious hands—except it was as mutable as everything else in the maze. The moment I clapped eyes on it the thing began to change, growing sleeker and darker, until it became a hulking black shadow with eyes of flame. A troll no longer, but rather something darker and far more terrible, it threw back its head and roared in an eruption of sound that shattered every remaining mirror between it and me.

  And then it lunged.

  Every thought except flight evaporated from my mind. I screamed and scrabbled backwards along the ground, splinters of glass stabbing into my palms, until I slammed into one of the in
tact mirrors behind me. Its surface broke into a million pieces as I struck it, but as I pitched through the frame the mirror’s fragments liquefied and splashed onto my skin. They united in a quicksilver flow, sinking into my flesh and heating it, warmer and warmer, until I felt my form grow fluid beneath its molten weight and I, too, began to change.

  I was—

  * * *

  —Tiny and frightened, but cradled in arms that held me protectively close. Something important was gone, but my mother’s scent enfolded me and gave me comfort. Her voice whispered words that made no sense to my dreaming adult mind; to my infant self, however, they rang like bells of purest silver.

  Aiye’la hwekannil nirienna vo, Kendeshel.

  Gentle lips kissed my brow, but she handed me to another, and I wailed in panic.

  I was—

  * * *

  —Young, tall, strong and male, and my head spun at the whisper in my ear. The most beautiful voice I’d ever heard…

  Except it wasn’t. I fought with all my might to hang onto that, and to stick a name and a face on that other voice, but the whisper wrapped itself around my brain and made it so I couldn’t think of anything else. And I didn’t want to. Beautiful voice. Beautiful whisper. I wanted it to whisper like honey in my ear forever.

  “Forget, William Douglas Thompson. Forget.”

  My knees turned into water and my heart went hammer, hammer, hammer inside of me, and I knew I would do anything for that sweet voice. Whatever it wanted me to forget was fine with me as long as it would go on whispering; if it asked me to, I’d forget my own name right then and there. I didn’t care. It slid deeper into my head, and the parts of me that didn’t go to water went straight to rock at how it felt.

  But then it got a hold of something I didn’t want to give up.

  “Lannie!”

  “There is no Elanna. There never was an Elanna. Forget, William. Forget.”