by C. E. Murphy
Her father's magic screamed. The strings that had settled beneath her skin shriveled and withered, racing away. Cat chased them with the knife, pushing them out of her body, prepared to cut if his power had the nerve to lodge anywhere. It didn't, and in moments she rose, panting with anger, to face the man who had spent her entire childhood trying to make her his puppet. "I'm not nearly as easy a mark as that, Dad." She advanced on him, the iron blade in her hand countering any magic he tried to throw at her. His hand dropped to his hip, looking for the sword he'd lent his simulacrum, and Cat's harsh laugh surprised them both. A couple more steps and then she lunged, not grabbing, but shoving him as she stepped.
They crossed into the Waste, and Cat, gleefully, dumped his elfin ass there on her way back into the World.
Grace, behind her, groaned. Cat spun toward her, heart in her throat, but Grace was sitting up groggily, looking tired and baffled. "They said pregnancy wrung you out, but wow, I didn't expect dropping uncons…" Her words fell into a confused frown as she saw Cat, and as some of what had happened earlier obviously came back to her. "Someone was…here?"
"My father."
"I didn't invite him in." Grace's eyebrows drew down far enough to look like she'd give herself a headache. "I don't think I invited him in? And…how did you get here…?" She glanced at the baby rattle she held, then back up at Cat, increasing uncertainty lining her face.
"You didn't use it. It would have dissolved, if you had. I was tracking him." Cat came back to Grace, crouching a few feet in front of her, the iron knife still dangling from her fingers. Grace stared at it in horror and Cat said, "Oh. Sorry," and put it away. "Are you okay?"
"I feel like that's a complicated question."
A brief smile ran across Cat's face. "Yeah, okay. Are you hurt?"
"No." Fear shot through Grace's whole body and she folded her hands over her belly. "Is the baby?"
"No. That's the last thing he wanted. Look, I'm really sorry, Grace, but whatever great guy you chose to be your baby daddy, he's not it. My dad paid somebody off to make sure you ended up carrying his child."
"Why?"
"Why you? Just bad luck for you, I think. Why a child, for him? Because he thought he could teach it to be what he wants it to be. Except I got in the way."
"You knew," Grace said after a long moment. "Back at the clinic, you knew it wasn't the man I'd chosen's baby."
"Yeah. And maybe I should have said something then. I don't know. But you sounded…" Cat closed her eyes, fighting an unexpected rise of emotion, then met Grace's eyes. "Honestly, you sounded like somebody prepared to be a great mom even if your kid wasn't what you expected, and…and I thought I could keep him away from you, so that you'd never even have to know. I'm sorry."
"Why did you think that?" Grace asked slowly. "He…I saw him appear in my driveway. Like magic. He said something, and I got so tired. Unnaturally tired." She frowned at Cat. "And you got from New York to Los Angeles in twenty minutes. What are you?"
"You'd probably call us elves. My mother was human, though."
Of all the questions Cat expected, the one Grace asked wasn't on the list. "What happened to her?"
Cat, very softly, said, "I don't know."
"Right." Grace wet her lips and stared at Cat in silence for a while. "This baby's your half-brother, then. Or half-sister."
Cat shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. "I just wanted you both to be safe."
"Why?"
"Because nobody was able to keep me safe." That, at least, was an easy one, albeit not an answer Cat had ever imagined giving anyone.
Grace fell quiet again, obviously trying to absorb all of what she was hearing. Eventually, carefully, she said, "So this baby is a…half-elf? Not…human?"
"We don't call it elfland, or fairyland, or anything like that, ourselves, but it's the best I've got in human words. We call it the Torn, and this place, the World. Those like me—like your child—are half of the World, rather than being half-human or half-elf or half-troll or half…whatever. I was raised there, so I'm called Torn-born. Your child will be World-born."
"But magical?"
"Probably."
"This is...a lot."
Cat ducked her head and chuckled. "Yeah. It is. You're taking it very well."
"I'm not sure I'm processing it at all. That rattle you gave me…?"
"Is magic. It would have pulled me straight to your side, if you'd had the chance to use it."
"Because you want to keep us safe. From your mutual father." At Cat's nod, Grace said, "Okay," and went quiet again for a long minute. "I have to think about all of this."
"I know. Can I give you my phone number? Just in case you need to talk about anything? Or want to?"
"That seems like a really good idea." Grace got her phone and Cat put her number into it, all without rising from her crouch. The backs of her leather-clad knees were sweaty, but nothing much was new about that. Grace sat again, looking at the surface of the phone, and, without looking up, said, "Is it going to work? You keeping us safe from him?"
"Welp." Cat exhaled heavily. "Trouble is, that motherfucker can't keep his word to save his life. He can't lie, but he can promise something and not follow through, and I guess that's where we are right now. I'm going to go back to him," she said more quietly. "Give him another shot at my services, at keeping away from you."
"Why?"
"Because you and that baby deserve better than being tangled up with him, and I guess it doesn't matter whether he's an evil son of a bitch who can't keep his word. I can keep mine, and it'll help to protect you. After a while he might realize I'm always going to give him another chance, just to keep you safe, but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it."
"Cross," Grace corrected faintly.
"Oh no." Cat stood, finally. "No, I'm pretty sure it's gonna burn."
* * *
It took her father six days to make his way back from the Waste. Cat was waiting for him when he returned, sprawled across the chair in his sanctum, practical boots on his desk, eating an apple, studying the stories hidden in the walls.
She had eaten literally hundreds of apples in the past week, just to rock the casual, devil-may-care attitude of doing so when he arrived.
It was worth the gut rot she'd been paying for it, too. He stopped cold just inside the twisted arch of the entryway, rage contorting features that had long since lost their human glamour. His eyes veritably glowed with anger, cords standing out in his throat, and the best part was, he clearly had no idea what to say in the face of her audacity.
Cat gave him an absolutely withering once-over and drawled, "You look like hell, old man."
He whitened with fury and she smiled lazily in response. "Trouble traversing the Waste, hm? Well, look at it this way. I've heard if you survive it, you're destined for great things."
"Get out. From behind. My. Desk." Her father stalked into the room, an entrance that would have been more impressive with recently-washed hair and clothes she couldn't smell from ten feet away. Still, she rose, not with the speed of a guilty child, but with the insouciant calm of a—
Well. Of a cat.
"Listen to me," she said softly. "I don't give one good goddamn shit about what you do in the Torn. Play your politics here all you like. Rise through the ranks, get stabbed in the back, fall to the muck, and do it all over again. I really don't care." Cat leaned across his desk at him, jabbing one finger toward his World-and-Waste-stained finery. "But if you ever cross to the World again, if you ever threaten that which I've vowed to protect, if you ever again besmirch the value of your own oath, you will discover I have allies, Father. You'll discover that I have power you can't even dream of. And you'll discover that I have little enough love for the Torn that I will raze it all in order to end you. Do not ever again imagine that I might be your puppet, you shit-heeled coward."
Her father, his voice low and trembling with rage, said, "You should not speak to me this way."
Cat took an Arti
fact from her pocket and held it up between her fingertips. A ring: hawk's eye, polished green with streaks of yellow, set in silver shaped from the Waste. Below the stone, a blood-filled hollow with a cunning pricking mechanism, to pierce skin and force a single drop into aelfen veins. "If you want to be able to tell lies, I'll speak to you any fucking way I want to."
Watching him decide was a delight that would warm her at night for years to come. Greed warred with pride and—as Cat had known it would—won. He reached to pluck the ring from her fingers, and she deliberately dropped it on his desk.
His reflexes were much worse than they should have been, and she heard the heavy Artifact bounce once, as she stepped away from the Torn.
* * *
Cat stood in the Waste a long time, listening to its oppressive silence, feeling its nothingness ghost across her skin. She knew where she was, within it; she always did. Her boots could take her anywhere with just a step or two; they always had.
But she had never had the opportunity to simply stand and feel and think, before. She had always been in too much of a hurry, trying not to get caught. Skirting around the edges of what was rightfully hers to traverse: she'd earned that, by surviving in the first place.
And now she'd earned the chance to actually enjoy what she'd proven herself worthy of. Not many others wanted to hang out in the Waste. None of them wanted to, if they'd been shoved into it the way she'd pushed her father in. She wouldn't have lost any sleep if he'd gotten lost here, but she'd been fairly certain he'd find his way out again, even without a map.
Savos had a map. A simple one, one that led back and forth to the Torn, although the Torn itself refused to remain in exactly the same place, always falling, slowly, farther away from the World. That had gotten Savos in trouble with the elemental; she would have to adapt, or the Torn would, without remorse or regret, wreck her.
Cat's map was so much more. Every step she'd taken, every path she'd traveled, lay burned into the back of her mind, but it meant nothing unless laid over the stuff of the Waste itself. It lay before her now, silver cords that traveled every which way across the emptiness. To her eyes, they were all but labeled: that cord led to Los Angeles, and the tiny thread off of it led directly to Grace's house. There lay New York, and all the networked shortcuts she'd taken back and forth across it. And this was the first step she'd taken with her boots, and its opposite end was the second. It gleamed a darker shade of silver at the far end, reaching out of time. The paths crossed themselves like snowy footprints on a field, but each of them told a story of its own to Cat.
Each of them, laid bare like this, finally truly showed her where she'd been.
The silhouette of a woman in her father's study told her where she needed to go.
Smiling, Cat stepped.
please turn the page for an excerpt from the pulp fiction novel STONE'S THROE!
Excerpt: Stone's Throe
I am, and have been for the best part of a century, a woman of some twenty-eight or thirty years. There is nothing terribly special about this, no mystery save that which has long since been explained: I, and others like me, born on the first day of the twentieth century, grew from ordinary children into what we came to call spirits—spirits of the century, each of us given to embody certain traits and aspects that we believe in, fight for, and hope to shape the world toward. It is as this spirit that I share my story.
I remember my childhood as most of us do, naturellement: hazy and indistinct, punctured by moments extraordinary to myself, if not to those around me. My parents were kind but, as I grew to understand, desperate, and it is in their desperation that my story truly begins.
* * *
My father spoke the same words he always did when a certain light footstep was heard on the stairs: "Quiet. Quiet, Estelle. Don't sing for him right away. Amelia, go to the kitchen. Go, work on the bread. Your mother and I have to speak to the Benefactor. Go on now, like a good girl."
It was the autumn of 1914, and war raged to the east of us. At times it even seemed to rage within the walls of our own small Montmartre apartment. It had not always been thus; indeed, it had not been thus until the war started and the Benefactor's visits became regular. Before then he was a specter, oft mentioned, barely seen, respected in the way that fear commands respect; even as a child I could see that in how my parents responded to him: warily, as though they were hungry dogs that did not trust the hand that fed them.
Consequently, I had no interest in being a good girl: I wanted to meet the Benefactor about whom my parents were so reticent. I wanted to understand what it was in him that caused them to become stiff and formal when he appeared. But I was not yet quite old, or bold, enough to directly disobey my father, and so to the kitchen I went. Sadly, neither was I in the least suited to baking. Week after week the Benefactor visited; week after week I performed alchemy, making lead out of dough. Week after week I burnt the brick-like bread, and week after week we ate it, because Maman and Papa could not afford to replace what I baked so poorly.
"I do not understand," I finally said to Maman one night, after some eight or ten months of the Benefactor's visits. That night we gnawed on bread softened by tart jam and sweet wine sauce, because it was not Sunday and there was no meat to be had. Potatoes made a pleasant contrast to the sauce soaking the bread. "How is he our benefactor if we cannot afford bread? What benefit is he to us?"
Papa chuckled, and if it was forced, at fourteen I lacked the insight to hear it. "A benefactor is a complicated relationship, Amelia. He owns this flat. He owns many of the buildings in Montmartre, and it's his...beneficence...that allows us to live here. Your mother sings, and we stay."
I held up my burnt bread. "We sing for our supper, is that it, Papa? Maman's voice is an angel's. Surely it's worth more than a roof over our heads and a crust of old bread. Why do you not sing for the opera, Maman? Why do you not sing at the fashionable clubs, as you did when you came to Paris?"
My parents exchanged a glance before Maman smiled at me, a smile that promised all was well in the world. "I'm not as young as I once was, Amelia. Fashions change. We are fortunate to have the Benefactor's good will. Without it our lives would be very different indeed. Now eat your dinner, ma chérie, and do not worry yourself about our needs. They are well enough met."
I set my jaw but lowered my eyes, unable to argue against the injustice I sensed. We ate our blackened bread, and I went to bed as I had been told, but in the morning I stole out to prowl the streets of Montmartre, seeking a way to redress my parents' poverty.
I was turned away from the clubs, sometimes with sympathetic smiles, but more often with sarcastic ones. No one would tell me why Maman was no longer fashionable. To me she was nearly magical, brave and strong and gentle, the very embodiment of all that was good in a soul. She had left Ethiopia as hardly more than a girl, traveling through North Africa and across the Mediterranean Sea by selling not her body, but her voice. I knew by heart the stories and songs that had bought her passage through Italy, through Switzerland, and finally to the place I was born: la Ville-Lumière, the city of lights.
There was no doubt that she was beautiful, with large black eyes and the long, slender bones of the Ethiope people. Her hair she wore in a shuruba, many braids along her finely shaped skull, loosening at her nape; it was a style of her country, and decades in Europe had not inspired her to adopt a more conventional style. Her skin was a shade of brown and red, as if gods had mixed together the colors of earth and sunrise to make her. Yes, she was beautiful, but—as if thinking the job only half done—those same gods had then mixed together la Nil's songbirds to give my Maman her voice. And yet not one club would have her sing for them, nor explain to me why.
Even when I dared travel farther afield, going so far as to implore the opera house for an audition, I was turned away. I might have thought it was my age making me a laughingstock, save that every person I spoke to caught their breath and murmured, "Ah, Madame Stone," or "the voice of an angel," before reme
mbering themselves. Even with these accolades escaping their lips, they would not hire her, nor offer me more than furtive excuses before their swift retreats.
I had no further recourse beyond the opera house; I had chosen it for last because it was both the greatest prize and the most unlikely seeming to my young self. Denied its glory, I stood on its broad shallow steps, hands fisted at my sides, and scowled at Paris to keep myself from crying.
That was how the Benefactor found me, a slight creature outgrowing a little girl's dress, but unable to afford something more suitable to my age. I did not remember being introduced to him, but he stopped his swift climb of the opera house steps and examined me. "Mademoiselle Stone, oui? Je suis Monsieur Laval, a friend of your parents."
I replied, "Oui," stiffly, and curtsied even more stiffly. I did not want to see the Benefactor then, when I was at a loss and close to tears, for reasons of youthful vanity if nothing else. He was very handsome, the Benefactor, very handsome indeed, even if shockingly old; at least as old as Maman and Papa. His eyes were like Papa's, bright and intensely green, and his hair as black as Maman's. He was taller than Papa, though, and narrow through and through, like a knife cut of black shadow, for he wore black all the time, even in the bright spring sunshine that day. Always the finest wool, the finest linen, always with a splash of color at his throat or pocket: a cravat or kerchief in blue or red or green. His shoes shone even when he came in out of the rain, and the hem of his coat was never dirtied.
"You look unwell, Miss Stone. May I be of assistance?"
"No one will answer me," I replied, and to my horror, the confession flowed from me then, as did tears. I told him everything, how Maman could find nowhere to sing; how we were still poor despite his support; how I had tried for days to find employment for her and had been turned away everywhere without explanation. The Benefactor listened with gratifying attention to my woes, and I hardly knew that we had left the opera house until we stopped beneath a shady parasol and he bought me a sweet ice to calm my histrionics.
