War for the Oaks

by Emma Bull

  “I’m not sleeping with him.” She had a wild urge to tell him, “He followed me home.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to get your sleep someplace else, won’t you? How goddamn stupid do you think I am?” His voice rose in volume and pitch, and he took a step toward her. “What, you want to pass this son of a bitch off as an old friend? Then why the fuck didn’t you introduce him last night?”

  “Last night?” the phouka’s voice broke in, all its laziness gone.

  “You shut up!” Stuart screamed at him, and turned on Eddi again. “You think I didn’t see him last night at the club? The two of you watching each other?”

  “That,” said the phouka softly, “is precisely what I’d thought.”

  “Well, think again. Are you from Jamaica, or what? You talk like a fucking faggot.”

  “For God’s sake, Stuart!” Eddi grabbed at his arm, frightened by the phouka’s stiffness, Stuart’s overflowing rage.

  “What do you say, Eddi?” Stuart asked sweetly, still watching the phouka. “Is he a faggot? Is that why you’re not fucking him? I mean, you would otherwise, wouldn’t you? As long as he could get it up.”

  She let go of his arm. “Anything would be better than the way we’ve been the last few months,” she said through clenched teeth.

  She watched the swing of Stuart’s arm, the fist sweeping toward her face, and thought, All those fights, and he never hit me. . . . She was too surprised to feel the blow at first, but it knocked her down. As she fell, she saw the phouka move from his chair to Stuart. Then Stuart was face down on the floor, one arm pinned behind him and the phouka’s knee in his back. Stuart’s face was white and pinched with pain.

  “Don’t. Do that. Again.” The phouka’s voice was soft, but with each word he tugged gently on Stuart’s pinned arm. Stuart’s breath hissed between his teeth.

  “Let him up,” Eddi croaked.

  The phouka looked at her with another of his unfathomable ex­pressions. He released Stuart and stood.

  Stuart rose slowly. He straightened his coat and dragged his fingers through his hair; then he took several shaky steps to the door. He paused in the doorway, as if he would turn and say one last thing. But he raised his head and disappeared down the hallway.

  Eddi struggled to her feet and lurched for the door. The phouka moved to follow her.

  She turned on him. “You! Stay!”

  As she ran down the hall, she wondered which of them was more surprised at his obedience.

  She caught up with Stuart on the second-floor landing. “Stu, wait!”

  He didn’t turn. When she came up beside him, she saw the stopping-up of his emotions in his face.

  “I’m sorry, Stu. That. . . that wasn’t what I wanted.”

  “You didn’t want to break it off?” There was no flicker of hope in his eyes or voice. She winced away from his stillness as she hadn’t from his upraised hand.

  “I didn’t want to do it like that.”

  He shrugged and looked away. “Too late now.”

  “Yeah.” She exhaled, gulped air. “I. . . the band . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. Carla, too, I suppose?”

  She was startled, and only nodded.

  He rubbed a hand over his face, and Eddi thought some of what he was holding in might escape. But the hand dropped, and his face was closed and hard. “Right. I gotta go.”

  “Good-bye, Stu.”

  He shrugged again, and went on down the stairs.

  When she got back to her apartment, she found the phouka in the doorway. He opened his mouth.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. She saw his eyes kindle with anger, before he turned sharply away. She stayed leaning against the doorjamb, too weary to move.

  “I was going to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” the phouka said at last.

  Eddi stared at him.

  “I hadn’t thought he would strike you.” Then he gave a bitter little bark of a laugh. “There are many things I hadn’t thought he’d do. Earth and sky guard me from the consequences of my error.”

  Eddi sank down on the couch. She was trembling. The phouka had gone to stand at the window. It seemed a long time before he spoke again.

  “I missed what I should have seen, and my only excuse is that he stood in your shadow.”

  “What?” said Eddi.

  The phouka turned, but backlighted as he was, Eddi saw only his silhouette. “When I heard you, I was drawn, forgive the coarse and common simile, like a moth to flame, and when I saw you, you glowed like the moon’s own face and blinded me. I should have seen that Stuart, too, had a certain . . . luminosity. But I did not, and that folly may prove costly. For what it’s worth, you have my apology.”

  “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

  The phouka turned back to the window.

  The phone rang then, and Eddi picked it up warily. “Hello?”

  “Hullo, kid. It’s Carla.”

  “Carla,” Eddi said; then her throat constricted and she couldn’t speak.

  “Eddi? You okay?”

  She took a deep breath. “Carla, can you come over?”

  “Shit, yes. I’m at the Seven-Eleven around the corner. Be there in three.” And Eddi heard her hang up.

  For three minutes there was silence in the apartment. When the door buzzer went off, the phouka stalked over and pressed the button.

  It wasn’t until Carla appeared in the doorway that Eddi realized she hadn’t shut the door after Stuart. Carla stopped and looked from Eddi, still sitting on the couch, to the phouka, who was standing by the bedroom door.

  “Well,” said Carla. “Hi.”

  “Come on in,” Eddi said.

  “I’m already in. You’ve seen Stuart, I take it.”

  Eddi nodded.

  “I also take it from your semicatatonic state that it was grisly.”

  Eddi wanted to burst into tears and fling herself upon Carla’s bosom. “Yes,” she said instead.

  “Uh-huh. So. Who’s this?” Carla pointed her chin at the phouka. “Friend of yours? Or are things even stranger here than they feel?”

  Eddi licked her lips. “You won’t like it.”

  “You’re getting a bruise on the side of your face. If he has anything to do with that”—Carla jerked her head toward the phouka—“you damn betcha I won’t like it.”

  “Not exactly. I mean, that wasn’t his fault. Carla . . .” There was no way to ease gently into the subject “Carla, he’s a phouka.”

  Carla stared at her, then looked at the phouka. “A—phouka?”

  “You know what it is?” Eddi asked.

  Carla looked at her dubiously. “The last time I heard that word, Jimmy Stewart was using it to describe a six-foot white rabbit.” And she looked back at the phouka.

  “Let me tell you what’s happened since I left you last night,” Eddi said. She saw the phouka scowl and open his mouth to interrupt, but she didn’t let him. She told Carla the whole story.

  When she’d finished, Carla shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it. “Dear,” she said, frowning, as the smoke rolled out of her mouth, “I love you like my own sister. Which is why I won’t hesitate to tell you that I don’t believe it.”

  “How much of it don’t you believe?” Eddi asked.

  “What do you mean, how much of it? The unbelievable parts. Start­ing with your gentleman caller here turning into a dog. On the other hand, I doubt that breaking up with Stuart has left you a few stairs short of the landing.”

  Eddi looked at the phouka. “I don’t suppose you’d prove it to her.”

  He scowled and stepped away from the wall. “It would serve you right if I shook my head sadly and said that you’d been like this since I found you in the street this morning. Watch closely, I won’t do it again.”

  And he changed. Eddi realized as he did it that she’d never seen the process, and she felt suddenly embarrassed, as if she’d asked to watch him undress. The transformation from man to dog wasn�
��t in­stantaneous, nor was it a slow metamorphosis of man’s arm into dog’s leg, man’s face lengthening into dog’s muzzle. There was a sparkling whirl of air around him that seemed to dissolve him, and with it a fleeting fragrance of warm earth and fresh water. The dog-form coa­lesced, and the confusion of air seemed to be absorbed back into it, until all that stood before them was an enormous black dog.

  “There,” said the phouka in his furry dog’s voice. “Look your fill and be done; I don’t feel especially doggish just now and would like to change back.”

  “Mary Mother of God,” Carla said in a flat voice. “Change the hell back. Please.”

  Eddi, for no reason she could explain, felt comforted by that. “Get used to him. He says he’s going to be my shadow until they finish their war.”

  The phouka returned to human form, and Carla took a long shaky drag on her cigarette.

  “Can I talk you out of taking her?” Carla said at last to the phouka.

  “No.” His gaze was fixed on the floor, and his voice was soft.

  “If. . . if anything happens, I’ll get you. I swear I will.”

  He met Carla’s hard look, and nodded. “All right.”

  Eddi looked at Carla’s profile and saw her filling slowly up with some dangerous resolve. The vision chilled her. She remembered the sight of Stuart in the doorway, his eyes asking for reassurance, and she remembered him leaving, the way he’d straightened his shoulders be­fore he stepped out into the hall.

  She had been drafted by the fairies. But wars have a way of coming home, she knew, and not all the shots are fired on the battlefield.

  chapter 4 – I’ve ]ust Seen a Face

  Eddi took a deep breath and said to the phouka, “I don’t suppose you’d go for a walk or something for half an hour.”

  He stretched in his chair. “No indeed. But it’s sweet of you to think of it.”

  “I want to talk to Carla in private.”

  The phouka looked elaborately hurt. “Oh, my heart, what can you say to her that you may not say to me?”

  “Do you expect to listen in on every conversation I have for the next six months? Because if that’s true, you can find yourself another sucker.”

  He shrugged. “There’s the bedroom.”

  “This is my living room. Why don’t you go sit in the goddamn bedroom?”

  The phouka cocked his head. “Are we going to have a fight?”

  Carla bounced out of her chair and grabbed Eddi’s arm. “Don’t beat him up, kid,” she said lightly. “It’d probably give him some kind of moral satisfaction.

  “And you” she added to the phouka, “can quit bugging her. What good does it do you to be such a jerk?”

  He shrugged and made a regretful face. “It’s the way I’m made, I suppose. For centuries, my kind have delighted in luring travelers off the path and into the marsh for the sheer pleasure of seeing them wet their feet.”

  “What,” said Eddi, spitting out each word, “does that have to do with my living room?”

  “Nothing, but it serves to explain why I’ve done a necessary thing in an unnecessarily annoying fashion.”

  “Can I have my living room to myself?”

  “No,” said the phouka.

  “Are you going to tell me why not?”

  He laughed, not at all unpleasantly. “I hadn’t intended to, but see how sweetly you beguile me?”

  Eddi made a disgusted noise.

  “If the two of you sit in the living room and I in the bedroom, my primrose, you might take a notion to try to slip out the door. I would find you and bring you back, of course, and you would be embarrassed. See the suffering I have spared you?”

  “My,” said Eddi, “I guess a pair of handcuffs would make me the happiest girl in the world.”

  “And,” said the phouka, “not incidentally, as long as I am between you and the door, I am also between you and anyone who might come in.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, my child, that the Unseelie Court will find out about you. Soon, unless I miss my reckoning. When they do, they will want—how shall I say this?—to do you a mischief. Should they choose a bold attack over a sly one, I would rather be the one to meet them at the door.”

  “In her own damn apartment?” Carla said, but the phouka paid no attention.

  Eddi pushed her hair back with both hands and stared at him. “I’m not safe here.”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh.” Eddi supposed she ought to be afraid, but in place of fear she found only a simmering anger. This bastard chases me all over down­town, moves into my apartment, mauls my boyfriend, refuses me my own living room—and tells me he’s just protecting me from somebody worse? If these are the good guys, who the hell are the villains?

  She looked down her nose at the phouka and said, “All right, play guard dog if it makes you feel good. I’ll go climb out the bedroom window.” She turned and started away.

  “It’s painted shut.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Gracious, pet, I’m a supernatural being.”

  “You’re a shithead,” Eddi said sweetly, and led Carla off to the bedroom.

  Eddi paced the tiny space at the end of the bed, and Carla drew her feet out of the way in mock alarm.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell him how to handle you.”

  Eddi glanced at her deadpan face. “I don’t think I want to know this.”

  Carla shrugged. “Anytime I want you to do something, I convince you it would be stupid and annoying.”

  Eddi laughed and sat on the bed beside her. “You don’t want me to start a band?”

  Carla shrugged. “Sometimes I forget.”

  Eddi pulled a strand of Carla’s shiny black hair. “Silly bitch.” Then she grew solemn. “Listen, kiddo, you don’t want to be in on this—this war, or whatever it is. Really. You’re afraid I’ll screw up without you. And you’re probably right.”

  “You betcha.”

  “But whatever else these guys want, they seem to want me in one piece. I’m taken care of.” I hope. “If you get mixed up in this, I don’t know if they’ll care so much what happens to you. So why don’t you pretend that I’ve gone to Europe for the summer?”

  “What, and not even any postcards?”

  “Carla—”

  “It’s an idea, though,” Carla said, rolling backward on the bed. “Why not go to Mexico or something, and give these guys the slip? We’d get the money from someplace.”

  “Money is not the problem. The problem is getting past the warden out there.”

  “You mean Rover?”

  Eddi fell back on the bed, giggling. “Jesus, Carla, don’t call him that to his face!”

  “Why not? What can he do to me?”

  Eddi had a vivid memory of the speed that had brought Stuart down, and the careless strength that had held him there. “I don’t want to know. And neither do you.”

  “Listen,” Carla said firmly, poking the air with her finger for em­phasis, “I will buy that he’s one bad dude. I will not buy that he’s invincible.”

  Eddi sighed. “There’s probably something short of a stick of dy­namite that’ll move him out of that living room. But whatever it is, I don’t think either of us have it.”

  Carla propped herself up on her elbows. “Why are you so sure?”

  “Carla, this is a guy who turns into a dog.”

  “So you might as well give up?”

  “You didn’t see him last night.”

  “No, I didn’t. All I have seen is a guy who turns into a dog, and I’m not even sure about that. I’ll bet Steven Spielberg could get the same effect.”

  Eddi blinked. “In my living room?”

  “All right, all right. But that still doesn’t make him unbeatable. And it doesn’t prove anything about this fairy war jazz.”

  “There was the glaistig. Who walked on water, by the way.”

  “In the dark.”

  Eddi threw up her h
ands. “Okay, it’s all wires, or mirrors, or hyp­notism. But if they’re not who they say they are, and they don’t want what they say they want, what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Carla, why would anybody go to this much trouble and expense to get me? Either they’re who—and what—they say they are, or I’m wacko and imagining the whole thing.”

  “You could ask me to go back to the damn Seven-Eleven and call the cops for you.”

  Eddie shook her head. “When the police got here, all they’d find is a chick keeping a dog in a no-pets apartment building. A weird un­employed rock ‘n’ roller chick.”

  Carla made a face. “Maybe they’d take him to the pound?”

  “No. I’d just get kicked out of the apartment.” She rumpled Carla’s hair. “Don’t worry, kiddo. We will think of something.”

  “Well, all right. As long as you promise to keep thinking.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good. What was Stuart like? Awful?”

  Eddi thought of all the things she could say. None were small enough to get past the lump in her throat. She pressed the bruised side of her face lightly. Maybe if she hated Stuart she could wring out of herself all the righteous anger that had to be in her somewhere. “Let’s not talk about it now. I think sometime soon I’ll have a nice burst of hysterics over Stuart. But not now.”

  “Do you suppose Bowser would let you go out to eat?”

  “God only knows. You’re hungry?”

  “Yeah, and you cook like a guitar player. I didn’t have breakfast. Come to think of it, what did you do for breakfast?”

  Eddi jerked her thumb at the living room. “He made it.”

  Carla raised her eyebrows. “He makes breakfast for his hostages? And you didn’t even have to sleep with him?” Then she frowned. “You didn’t have to sleep with him, did you?”

  “The subject didn’t come up.”

  “Huh. Well, if it does, and you don’t want to . . . just don’t be a wimp about it, okay?”

  “I am never a wimp,” Eddi said grandly.

  “Hah. C’mon.” Carla jumped off the bed and grabbed her hand. “Let’s go ask him.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “If he’ll let you go eat, you gas-head. Everything looks better after dinner.” She pushed the bedroom door open. “As my grandma used to say, ‘You feel better, you eat-a some a dis nice-a lasagne.’ ”