Tension knotted between Megan’s shoulderblades.
On the other side of the door a hallway three times her height shone in glittering crystal lit from within.
They dared not let anyone see them, not here. Delorias’s bruises and scratches against his white skin, their nakedness . . . They could not be mistaken for anything but escapees.
He eased the door shut. “The heights.” It was the barest of whispers, but still the crystal-clad walls caught the sound, reflecting it endlessly.
Megan nodded, and they began to run once more.
* * *
The aeries were a charnel house. Megan stood, her hands on her thighs as she panted, trying to catch her breath and hold her stomach. She had expected the smell of horses, of hay and wheat. Not to see sharptoothed horse things tearing into meat.
Meat that looked like it had once belonged to a human—or an elf.
Sweat dripped from her hair, slicked her skin. She had no idea how far she and Delorias had run, only that below them Athaniel’s Hunters searched with a fury that made her chest tighten with fear. She had no notion why they had not been stopped, not been found, and could only hope that their good fortune would last long enough for them to escape.
At least the aeries had side passages. Megan presumed that the conspicuously absent attendants used the passages to bring food to the creatures, and to discard their waste.
She straightened, swallowing, and nodded to Delorias.
They walked toward the stars outlined by the passage.
Like the prison, it was rough-cut stone, unadorned.
Cold air brushed through the passages, making Megan shiver.
Only a few steps more, she promised herself. Then it’s downhill all the way.
“Leaving so soon?”
Megan whirled, fury rising within her. Athaniel’s lazy amusement, his arrogance, made her long to wipe the mockery from his face. He stood with his legs apart and his arms crossed, a vision of inhuman beauty in red silk and velvet.
Without thought, she surged towards him, left hand raised with her fingers curled to claws, splayed out to catch both eyes.
Surprise flickered across Athaniel’s face. Both his hands closed around her left wrist.
Her right knee drove up, hard, between his legs.
Athaniel’s breath caught. He released Megan’s arms, doubling over to protect his abused genitals.
She pulled away from him. This time, Megan had no need to conjure Frank’s image from her imagination.
She had more than enough reason to want Athaniel to suffer.
Her kick caught him behind the ear. Even though she was barefoot, the kick connected with enough force that he lurched to the side and toppled. His head hit the stone floor with a dull crack.
Megan hopped backwards. “Crap. That hurt.”
“He still lives.” Delorias sounded as though he had no idea what to think.
Megan hobbled back to him, her toes throbbing. “I don’t care. I just want out of here.” She could probably prize a rock from the mountain and make sure Athaniel would never wake, but . . . She had killed too many already. The thought of killing someone in cold blood, even a bastard like Athaniel, made her stomach twist.
The passage opened to a sheer cliff. Megan swayed back into the passage, gulping. She closed her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you can make us fall softly or something?”
“His spells block me from working magic.”
She opened her eyes and really looked at Delorias.
Even in the dim light leaking from the aeries, he looked bad. Pale, with dark circles under his eyes. “Ouch.”
Megan had no real idea what to say, or how to express sympathy. “I guess that means you can’t—” she swallowed.
“—do anything about him, either.”
Delorias shook his head. “It would be my death.”
Something was going to be their deaths soon. Either Athaniel would wake and be really pissed, or they’d die trying to climb an unclimbable cliff. Neither option appealed.
Megan shivered. “Let’s climb. Maybe something will . . .” She couldn’t make herself finish. There was nothing to save them, nothing to stop Athaniel simply plucking them from the cliff face even if they managed not to fall.
She clenched her teeth and sat at the passage entry, legs dangling over a height she didn’t want to consider.
Dark shapes flitted through the air, blotting out the stars in a flickering veil of shadows.
Delorias rested his hands on her shoulders. “I can . . . send you on quickly,” he said finally. “It is too little, but it is all I can offer.”
Megan watched the approaching shapes, hypnotized.
“No.” Her voice sounded distant, as though it belonged to someone else. “But thank you.” A merciful death was no small thing here, no artifact of medical science that could prolong life for years without adding any quality to it. Here, mercy meant a swift end, with no torture.
A flicker of scarlet light bloomed about the shadows, gone as quickly as it had come.
“Dragons?” Delorias’s hands tightened about her shoulders. “But they never—”
A voice with the rumbling power of an earthquake vibrated through Megan’s bones, a voice that didn’t touch her ears. “Have thee trust, and jump!”
The power in that voice, the command, took her body and demanded obedience. As though in a dream, Megan lifted her legs, set her feet against the cliff face.
She leaned forward, closed her eyes, and pushed with all her strength.
Air rushed past her, icy, tearing at her skin. If she screamed, she couldn’t hear it over the rush of air in her ears.
Something closed around her, slowing her fall, gradually reducing the rushing wind until she could hear the steady beat of wings. Immense wings . . . and claws that held her as gently as a mother cradling a baby.
This is too much. Megan had time for that one thought before the day’s exertions, the fear, everything caught up with her, and she knew nothing more.
* * *
The familiar sounds and smells of an oak forest seemed so out of place that Megan sat with a lurch that sent her head spinning. “What . . . ?” This was the state park. Her forest. She could see the bush she’d flattened rather than be pushed through it, see the marks in the dirt and leaf litter that told of horses and people.
A quick, frantic examination revealed her clothes, her shoes and socks, even her iPod, all where they belonged.
She shook her head. “Christ. I couldn’t have passed out and dreamed all that?”
Her fanny pack was missing.
Megan climbed to her feet, wincing as every muscle in her body complained. That on its own was reason to believe the whole thing had happened, even if bent and broken greenery was all she had to prove it.
“Crap. Trust me to get an elf who dumps me back here when the whole deal is over.” Though she knew Delorias deserved better, Megan needed to bitch about something, and she didn’t dare think too closely about Athaniel. The last thing she wanted to do was bring him and his Hunt back here.
She turned slowly, scanning the woods.
There. “Got you!” Megan reached under a tangle of broken shrub and caught the strap of her fanny pack. The familiar weight felt comforting as she fastened it around her waist. The knowledge that she wouldn’t have to pay a small fortune to replace her Beretta was even more comforting. It wasn’t a cheap piece of hardware.
She patted the outline of the pistol, and smiled.
Then frowned as something crackled.
Megan reached inside. The pistol was there, presumably undamaged—something she would need to check when she cleaned it—but there was also something that didn’t feel quite like paper.
She drew it out, unfolded the creamy rectangle.
The note was simple enough, once she puzzled out spelling that wasn’t so much appalling as several hundred years late. It seemed that dragons regularly flew around the castle seeking
anyone who might be trying to escape, rescuing who they could, and killing the Hunters’ mounts when the opportunity arose. Delorias seemed surprised, Megan had the impression from his words that he had thought dragons cared nothing for what happened among the other Fey creatures.
The dragons had built the portal to return her home and had restored her possessions. They wished her well, as did he.
Just as well, Megan thought. I had enough trouble with a human partner. Who knows what I’d get from an elf?
And that, it seemed, was that. All the evidence was gone. Not a trace of elf blood remained to darken the ground. She couldn’t even smell the cordite from all the rounds she’d fired. If she told anyone about this, they’d think she was insane.
All the same, Megan was going to decorate her house with iron grille work. She wasn’t taking any chances with that bastard Athaniel.
She started walking, putting her earphones in and switching on the iPod. A moment later, she skipped to the next tune. After today, she didn’t want to know what would happen if she played “It’s Raining Men” again.
STILL LIFE, WITH CATS
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
THE feral cats in the courtyard were having sex again. Joshua pulled his pillow over his head and tried to go back to sleep. No matter how many times he got animal control out here, he never seemed to win.
A thousand cats had to live in the trees behind the old stone mansion. A thousand cats, and a thousand more being made every single day.
No one had warned him about the cats when he moved in.
Or the raccoons. They made even worse sounds during sex than the cats. Cats were bad enough; they sounded like panicked children or terrified women, bringing back old memories from his years in Beirut, Bosnia, and Iraq.
But raccoons sounded like vicious lions ripping up a corpse. On his first night in the mansion, he grabbed his largest flashlight and ventured outside to see what was causing the noise—his curse, always to run toward danger instead of away from it—and expected to see a bear mauling some skanky kid who’d been smoking meth near the back of the property.
Instead, he startled two raccoons having a private (well, not really private, more like intimate) moment.
One screeched and scurried toward him, while the other fell over backward.
He ran all the way back to the mansion, laughing harder than he had in years. Fortunately, the raccoon didn’t give pursuit.
Outside his window, the sex continued. One particularly throaty yowl sounded like Stuben’s cameraman right after the roadside bomb sliced off his left leg.
The image—blood spurting, Stuben covered with shrapnel crawling toward his injured friend, the truck burning behind them—already flashed in front of Joshua’s eyes.
He wouldn’t get any more sleep, maybe not for a few days.
He rolled over and looked at the clock alarm he didn’t need. Six A.M. A long day of nothing ahead.
But if he stayed in bed, he would either haul out his gun and shoot the damn cats—which was illegal, since he was just inside the city limits—or he would try to sleep and would suffer the nightmares for the rest of the morning.
More yowling. His skin had become gooseflesh. He rubbed his right arm, the only unscarred patch of his upper torso, and watched the gooseflesh disappear.
Then he got up, and made the bed, just as if he were still in the field.
Actually, it felt as if he were in the field. This old mansion reminded him of some of the places in Bosnia—built long ago, abandoned by the people who had loved it, and left to decay. Yet vestiges of luxury remained.
This room was one of those vestiges. The gold marble floor caught the morning light, and the sandcolored walls reflected it. The bed stood on a large raised platform made of marble as well, and his friend Roxy had placed silk hangings around the king-sized mattress, so that it felt as if he slept under expensive mosquito netting—not that he needed any in this part of Oregon.
The bed itself, one of those pillow-top jobbies with a machine that adjusted the mattress hardness, bordered on ridiculous. So did the silk sheets, the thick down comforter he hadn’t needed since it was spring, and the extra soft pillows. The occasional tables matched the marble floor, and the vanity in the walkin closet seemed like just that, a vanity.
But he’d only given Roxy a week to prepare the place for his arrival. That included furnishing, cleaning, and repair. From what he had heard (and seen) the cleaning had taken most of the week. The furnishing was a one-day affair, and the repair, unless it was an emergency, hadn’t gotten done at all.
His own fault, really. From the time he left the hospital in Wiesbaden to the day he had arrived in the town his passport claimed as home, he’d had nearly six weeks. Of course some of that included evaluations at Bethesda, and a psych work-up in some private D.C. clinic that operated on government grants.
But he still could have guessed his arrival here with more than a week’s accuracy.
Here, not home. He couldn’t call this place home.
It wasn’t. It never had been. He’d come here as a child to visit his grandparents, and he’d spent summers in a now-unusable room down the hall. From those visits, he remembered his grandmother’s kitchen (warm and inviting, always smelling of coffee and cake), the books in the library (mostly untouchable in languages he couldn’t then read), and the hot sunlight (clear and crisp without the haze of humidity he had come to accept from his parents’ sojourn in the south).
He used to think he loved it here. But he had discovered he didn’t love it anywhere. Not that one place was better than the next. No. He couldn’t stay in any place long enough to get to know it.
That was one of the many reasons he’d become a war correspondent. One of the many reasons he’d traveled for ninety percent of his adult life.
One of the many reasons he felt like he was going slowly insane locked in this place, on the outskirts of a town he didn’t remember.
The cats screeched, and then something clattered.
He peered out the window in time to see a black-andwhite tabby fleeing across the yard. A clay pot, still filled with dirt, had fallen over. A gray cat with eyes that looked like abalone stared at him from below.
The evil eye, his great-grandmother would have said. She had lived in this room until he was eight.
That summer, she had died during her afternoon nap, and his grandmother made him say good-bye.
That was the first time he had seen death. The small, shrunken old woman with clawlike hands was completely motionless. She smelled faintly of pee and mothballs. Her skin was a color of gray that he knew was unnatural, even then.
His grandmother had cried that afternoon, but all he had felt was relief. Relief that the old woman wouldn’t caw questions at him, spraying him with her musty breath; relieved that those hands would no longer clutch at him; relieved that he no longer had to pretend to enjoy the sticky candies she had forced on him every morning when he went to see her before being allowed outside.
Outside, into the courtyard, where fountains had once sprayed and flowers had bloomed. The same courtyard where cats had sex and broke his grandmother’s pots and stared at him as if he was the one who was out of place.
* * *
He waited until ten to call animal control, and by then it felt like midafternoon. He was hot and cranky and filled with coffee. He’d already watched three iterations of Headline News, two silly Fox News roundups, and some MSNBC reports, all while tuning his radio back and forth between the BBC and NPR. He had read the Oregonian and wished for better west coast paper versions of the east coast dailies, because reading them on-line made him feel as if he were still in the field.
He saved the international papers for the real afternoon, when he was done with the American entertainment nonsense and ready for unabashed journalism.
But he had a gap to fill between ten and one, and on this day, he decided to fill it by solving the cat problem once and for all.
He got t
he same dispatch that he always got, a lackluster woman with a voice to match, who seemed to believe that people’s animal problems were none of her business. This time, he asked for her supervisor.
He knew it would take some argument, and it did, but he got transferred to a kind, caring woman who knew his property and empathized with his problem.
But, she told him, all animal control could do was put down the rabid cats and the terribly sick ones. The county would fix the animals at taxpayer expense, and then return them to the place they were found.
Which explained why his feline population hadn’t gone down no matter how many cats he live-trapped for Animal Control. He felt an uncharacteristic surge of anger and frustration. How was he supposed to live here if the place was overrun with felines?
And that was the problem: He was living here. He couldn’t just move to another dilapidated mansion or a quiet ranch house. The only way he’d gotten out of the hospitals was to promise he would stay in one place for a year. One place didn’t mean one town. It meant one building, one location, no moving—not even once.
Of course, he had to check in with the local psychiatrist, who sent reports back to Bethesda. Joshua wouldn’t be approved for military access—no embedding—without finishing his year in the States. He could, he supposed, report the old-fashioned way—sneaking around, doing the work on the side—but modern news organizations required their reporters—even the stringers—to have military access. He’d have to work for Pacifica, which paid next to nothing, or Al Jazeera, which would make him suspect in his home country, or any host of other not-quite-mainstream news organizations.
He thought of all this while the supervisor explained her problems—the lack of funding, the lack of state regulations, and the lack of interest by anyone who didn’t have an animal problem—and midway through her discourse, he realized she had recognized his name and was hoping for a local story of some kind, one that might help her fund her tiny government fiefdom.
“I empathize,” he said when she took a breath.
Something Magic This Way Comes Page 13
