Thistle Down

by Irene Radford

  Dick told them about following voices up a back staircase only to find the door they needed locked by Pixie magic.

  He didn’t say anything about how he’d kissed Thistle. She looked up at him at last and nodded a thank you, ever so slightly.

  She must have come to the same conclusion he had, that they had no future together. She’d go back to Pixie soon, and he’d go back . . . go back to unsatisfying onenight stands because no woman could live up to Thistle.

  “Thistle, you once told me that the Patriarch Oak is very special to all the tribes and that responsibility for caring for it makes your tribe more important than all the others combined. Why would any Pixie want to destroy The Ten Acre Wood?” Dusty put forth, returning both her hands to the music box. She pushed aside her half-eaten bowl of cereal in favor of caressing her treasure.

  Thistle bit her lip. Her silence stretched beyond hesitation into refusal.

  “Thistle, if you know something, now is not the time to keep secrets. We’re here to help you, and we will respect your confidence in us.” Dick found himself sitting beside her and holding her hand.

  I’m not coming on to her. I’m protecting her, taking care of her. But, damn, I wish it could be more.

  “The Patriarch Oak is where . . . is where,” she gulped. “Is where all Pixies go for a mating flight, the true expression of love and trust. Not all Pixies do it. But kings and queens of a tribe must when they take a mate, as a symbol of the peace treaty their marriage creates.”

  “Maybe it’s someone who’s been hurt by Pixies who wants to cut down the oak,” Dusty suggested.

  “Someone with the fire of Faery in his magic,” Thistle whispered. “The Faeries have always looked down upon Pixies. They call us traitors to our own kind because we make friends with humans, risking exposure and something called a witch hunt. We call them cowards because they won’t face up to the reality that humans are here to stay, thriving while they build atop our lands. We either have to adapt to them or die.”

  “Maybe it’s because the current king of your tribe won’t let anyone use the oak except for him,” Chase added, as if he hadn’t heard Thistle’s last remarks. He tried to pin her with his gaze, but she kept slipping away, hiding behind her black hair.

  “How did you know?” Thistle asked quietly. She hadn’t removed her hand from Dick’s.

  He squeezed her fingers in reassurance.

  “I half heard your conversation with Rosie. I’m guessing the rest,” Chase replied.

  “If that’s the case, then another tribe might be really pissed off that they can’t use the Oak and would rather see it destroyed than let Alder taunt them with his possession of it,” Dusty chimed in.

  “That’s it!” Thistle said with the first show of enthusiasm since the conversation started. Her eyes brightened and she rubbed the back of her head, looking puzzled.

  “So we’re looking for a Pixie who is influencing the people who bid on the timber in the park,” Dick mused. “So, Chase, anyone new in town we should be looking at more carefully?”

  “Haywood Wheatland.”

  Thistle half nodded, then opened her mouth and shook her head, still puzzled about something.

  “No!” Dusty gasped. “He wouldn’t. He’s too kind. He . . . he . . .”

  “He also talked to Rosie in Mabel’s garden. He called her ‘beloved’ and ‘sweetheart,’” Chase said quietly. He looked as if he wanted to caress Dusty’s hands upon the music box.

  “No, no, no.” Dusty gathered her music box tightly against her chest, eyes closed, and shaking her head in denial. Shutting them all out of her very private misery.

  Dick reluctantly let go of Thistle’s hand and shifted closer to his sister. He draped an arm around her shoulders and held her tight, weathering together the storm of tears he knew would follow.

  “Haywood Wheatland works for Phelma Jo. Her name is on the incorporation papers for Pixel Industries, Ltd,” Chase said more firmly. Facts. He laid out the facts as if they weighed more than Dusty’s fragile emotions.

  “I won’t believe that. He . . . he said he loves me. I can’t be so wrong about him. I can’t. I just can’t.” Dusty threw the music box back onto the table. It slid across the straight planks where Thistle caught it before it fell to the floor and broke again. Dusty didn’t seem to care as she dashed out the back door.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Chase said, rising slowly from his chair.

  “No, she needs another woman to talk to now. I know what she’s going through.” Thistle also headed toward the door.

  “No,” Dick said firmly. “Either or both of you will only make it worse. I’ll let her cry a bit, then I’ll talk to her and make her see logic. Just like I always have.” Seemed like he still had to protect his sister after all, even if only from herself.

  “Um . . . Dick . . . Chase, I think there’s something you should know,” Thistle said. She looked over her shoulder toward the door where Dusty had disappeared.

  “What?” Chase barked, all professional and stern. But he, too, looked toward the back door.

  “Last night, I overheard Haywood Wheatland . . .” Thistle spilled the entire story, all the while rubbing the back of her head, wincing occasionally. “I hurt so bad last night I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to tell anyone. Talking about Haywood Wheatland made me remember.”

  “Giving hallucinogenic mushrooms disguised in chocolate to underage kids. That’s enough for me to arrest him. I just hope he has a stash on his person, or the kids haven’t eaten any yet. I’ll need evidence, but an anonymous tip is enough to start a search and ask questions.” Chase stood up and straightened his uniform shirt and settled his utility belt around his hips.

  “First, you have to tell Dusty,” Dick insisted. “She has a right to hear it before you arrest him.”

  “But . . .”

  “Chase, are you in love with her or not?”

  Twenty-seven

  CHASE SLAMMED OUT THE BACK DOOR of Dick and Dusty’s house. He hurt all over. He’d been awake too long. The need to take down a dangerous corrupter of children burned inside him. He needed to hold Dusty in his arms and let her cry out her fears before he could reassure her.

  Damn, but he thought Dusty would return his affection for longer than ten minutes once he fixed the stupid music box for her. Didn’t she know how hard it was for him to accept help from Pixies? They fit into tiny places and bent broken parts back into shape when his fat fingers just made things worse.

  “Okay, Dusty. Time to stop being polite and hash this out,” he muttered.

  Where would she go? The museum basement, of course.

  A tiny blue Pixie sat on the yew hedge that lined the fence. He shook his head and pursed his lips.

  “This hurt is older and more primitive than her work at the museum. She’s gone to The Ten Acre Wood,” Chicory told him.

  “You sure about that, buddy?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I tagged her all the way over there. Do you know how far that is? I’m exhausted. No mere human is worth that much effort.”

  “Dusty is.”

  “Then go after her. If you truly love her. Stay here and dither if you don’t.”

  “You’re a pest.”

  “Yeah, but a wise one.” Chicory bounced up and dove deep into the yew where Chase couldn’t grab him. “Fix this before you take down that half blood, Haywood Wheatland. We’ll all be grateful to you when you do.” He flew back toward Mabel’s house and a well earned rest.

  Chase turned his steps toward The Ten Acre Wood. Not that far away, about three blocks, in human terms. Maybe that was a couple of miles to a Pixie. He didn’t know. Didn’t really care.

  He just had to set things straight with Dusty. See where they really stood; see if there was any chance at all.

  With each step he found himself stomping harder until he hit the gravel patch at the end of Center Street. Tiny rocks rolled out from under his feet and he just kept marching through the drainage ditc
h onto the game trail that looked too overgrown for the end of summer when kids had been in and out of here every day for three months.

  Two steps farther and he stopped in confusion. The place was dim, too quiet, almost sad. Birds and bugs and Pixies should be buzzing about gathering pollen, capturing the morning dew before it evaporated. Nothing moved. He couldn’t even hear the traffic down along the river road.

  Sword ferns that bent over the trail drooped. The Oregon grape leaves had lost luster, their clusters of green berries, tiny, hard, and bitter. And sparse. The foxgloves that should stand nearly six feet tall around the edges of the woods had gone to seed long before they reached any taller than his waist.

  Something was terribly wrong with The Ten Acre Wood. Like it had lost all of its magic. Its will to survive.

  He wanted to say it had been cursed by Faery fire. Preposterous. Or was it?

  He crept forward, careful to avoid making any noise. Some of the dullness lightened in the air as he approached the dried-up pond at the center. He expected a lot of mud with a trickle of a stream meandering toward the waterfall at the cliff edge and the path toward the river. He found hard-baked mud with dandelions and coarse grasses shouldering their way through cracks in the solid barrier. No water at all. No deer tracks. Not even raccoon paw prints.

  Aghast, he stopped and stared at the withered landscape. The Patriarch Oak seemed to have retreated behind more scrub hardwoods and weeds. Its leaves sagged beneath the weight of dirt. Very little green peaked through the muddy covering.

  A quiet snuffle alerted him to someone else standing nearby.

  Dusty stared at the same barren depression he did. She stood beneath a limp vine maple to his left.

  “Dusty?”

  “It’s ruined. Even before the first chain saw fires up, it’s ruined!”

  “I know. There’s a sadness here. A vulnerability.” He edged closer to her, needing reassurance that life continued despite the sere landscape.

  “The woods know what awaits them,” she whispered.

  “We can fix this. We have to.” He gestured to encompass the entire wood and themselves. “Can we fix what’s between us, Dusty?”

  “I don’t know.” She snuffled again.

  “Why did you run?”

  “It seemed the right thing to do.”

  “How?”

  “You accused Haywood of being behind the plot to destroy The Ten Acre Wood. I was starting to like him. He was the first man I chose to date. It was my decision, not my mother’s or Dick’s. Just me.”

  “He seems like a logical suspect. Thistle had some information she shared after you left.”

  “But . . . but he kissed me. It was magic. I can’t be that bad a judge of character. I know I can’t!”

  Anger sent heat to Chase’s head and heart. “When and where have you given yourself the opportunity to learn enough about people in general to judge a man’s character?”

  He wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. He got as far as reaching for her.

  “What about you, Chase Norton? I thought I knew you. I thought I could trust you.”

  “I fixed your damn music box!”

  “Then you go manufacturing evidence against a man who says he loves me. A man who makes my heart lighter and my toes tingle.”

  “I didn’t manufacture anything. I found evidence that links him to this operation. Thistle watched him give bad mushrooms disguised in chocolate to a bunch of kids, encouraging them to blow up the cell tower and start fires with illegal fireworks. They talked about tipping over the Ferris wheel at the carnival.”

  “You drew conclusions on bits and pieces of evidence because you can’t stand that I like him. Thistle doesn’t like him. She hasn’t . . . she . . .”

  Too angry to speak, he clenched her tight against him and ground his mouth into hers.

  She pounded his chest with her fists. Three blows came sharp and fierce and frightened.

  He loosened his grip and softened his kiss, tasting, savoring the tenderness of her inexperience. If this was the only time in his life he got to hold her this close, he needed to make the most of it.

  Then her fingers spread and clutched his shirt. She rose on tiptoe to come closer.

  His blood sang. The world fell away.

  And still they kissed, explored, cherished this moment out of time. Nothing existed but the two of them.

  They pressed closer. He needed to merge with her body, mind, and soul, become one being, one thought, one life.

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take advantage of her innocence and inexperience. With a monumental effort, he contented himself with exploring her mouth, her eyes, her neck, with his kisses.

  Slowly they relaxed and drew apart.

  Chase’s hands shook and his knees knocked together.

  “What just happened?” he whispered into her hair, too afraid of shattering into a million pieces if he let her go.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Dusty, I . . .”

  “This is too much! Too soon.” She wrenched away from him and ran, thrashing through the woods. “I don’t know who to trust. Who to love.”

  “Dusty!”

  The only reply was the sound of a sapling thwapping against a bigger tree as she thrust it aside in her headlong flight.

  Twenty-eight

  “DUSTY, PLEASE COME OUT of the basement and talk to me,” Thistle called down the deep black hole into Dusty’s lair.

  Why did her friend have to hide down there?

  Dusty mumbled something Thistle couldn’t understand.

  “I know you feel hurt and betrayed, Dusty. The same thing happened to me. It’s why—it’s why I’m exiled.” Thistle had to swallow hard to get the words around the lump in her throat. Then she swallowed again.

  “What?” Dusty appeared at the bottom of the crooked stairs, her face a pale blob in the darkness.

  “Please, Dusty, come up. You know I can’t go down there.”

  “Why not?” She came up a few steps, enough for her face to resolve into two huge eyes and a mouth surrounded by shadows.

  “Because underground is death to Pixies. Elves and Faeries live underhill, at least during the day, and banished us to the sun when they removed themselves from humanity.”

  “That’s folkloric nonsense.”

  “So are Pixies.” Thistle giggled for the first time in hours. “Want to know what happened between me and Alder? I can almost guarantee it’s more embarrassing than your date with Haywood. Some day I’ll be able to laugh about it. Not yet, though.”

  “Is that the beginning of some sage advice?” Dusty moved closer to the light.

  Thistle breathed easier and signaled with a hand wave for M’velle and Meggie to back off. She couldn’t do anything about Joe trying not to be obvious in his listening. But his office door was open and he read the same page on his computer three times without touching any key to make it move.

  “Advice in the form of a long story that I can’t tell you while you hide.”

  “Oh, well, it has to be more interesting than Dick promising to always take care of me. He had the audacity to tell me I didn’t need a man of my own, he’d always be there for me. But he can’t. He won’t. He’s my brother, not a potential lover.”

  “Another good reason for you to take charge of your life and stop hiding.”

  “Bad habits die hard,” Dusty sighed, emerging from the cool depths of the dreaded basement. “You can go back to work, girls,” she called, without having to see Meggie and M’Velle hovering around the corner. “But thank you for your concern.”

  “They’re your friends,” Thistle whispered. “You can’t have too many friends.”

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  A large tour group entered the front door of the museum. “Is this place air-conditioned?” a woman asked, presenting admission tickets to M’velle.

  “No, ma’am. It’s well designed with deep overhangs and shade trees. We try to keep
the place as authentic as possible.” She led them off into the parlor.

  Meggie greeted the next smaller group and led them upstairs so the tours wouldn’t overlap.

  “First time I’ve known those two to jump into tours without protests or at least rolled eyes and huge reluctance to heave themselves out of their chairs.” Dusty stared in the direction they’d departed with hands on hips and pursed lips.

  “They are learning. Today, they know you and I need to talk, so they’ve given us the back room.” Thistle looped her arm through Dusty’s and led her into the lounge with its refrigerator, worktable, and blessed air-conditioning.

  Thistle had never thought about the outside temperature in summer. Heat was heat, a fact of life that couldn’t be avoided. In winter, when cold nearly froze her wings, that was when she sought shelter.

  “So tell me why you feel betrayed and why it’s worse than Chase thinking Hay is the culprit behind the logging order,” Dusty ordered while fishing the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator. “And maybe the instigator in the recent rash of vandalism. I find it hard to believe. Very hard to believe. He’s sweet and kind.” She looked out the back window toward the cliff and the waterfall.

  “Talk, Thistle, or I go back downstairs and try to piece together that Russian pot found in a Chinook tribal midden.”

  “You know about the Patriarch Oak and mating flights,” Thistle said quietly, trying to find a way to say this so it wouldn’t hurt any more than she already did.

  “Enlighten me.”

  Drawing a deep breath, Thistle told her how important a mating flight was, told her about absolute trust. Told her about how the public display was an announcement of soul mates finding each other.

  “Is that why Meggie has convinced all her friends to call their latest crush Pixie love?”

  “She said something about that.” Thistle covered the ache deep in her chest by taking a long sip of tea.

  “Who took you to the top of the Patriarch Oak?” Dusty smoothed her skirts and took a seat across the long table from Thistle.