Bindings

by Carla Jablonski

  Tim climbed to his feet, pushed aside the curtain, and stepped into the main room of the flat. The “kitchen” ran along one wall of the living room—a stove, a fridge, a sink—and the whole place was quite messy. Plates were piled up in the sink, clothes were strewn everywhere. The girl strode to the stove and turned off the gas. The kettle silenced itself.

  “This may sound like a silly question, but ummm…” Tim’s voice trailed off. He knew what he wanted to find out, but he wasn’t quite sure how to ask. He was still getting his bearings. He felt all off balance.

  The girl rummaged through the cupboards and pulled out a tin of tea. She plopped tea bags into two mugs. Tim wondered if the mugs were clean.

  “The only silly questions are the ones you already know the answers to,” the girl said. “And it’s totally natural to ask those sometimes, too. Ask away.”

  There was something about this girl’s straightforward manner that put Tim at ease. Of all the people he had ever met, she seemed the most comfortable in her own skin. She exuded the same kind of warmth he had felt from Zatanna, the lady magician in California. And Molly, of course. When he let himself feel it.

  “Okay, so where—” Tim cut himself off. He didn’t really need to know where he was. There was a much more important answer he needed. “What I was really wondering is…who are you?”

  The girl picked up the kettle and poured boiling water into the two mugs. Steam rose from her mug as she lifted it and took a deep whiff. “Mmmm. Sometimes I brew this stuff just for the smell of it. Smells more like almonds than almonds do.” She handed Tim a mug. “See what I mean?”

  “Thank you,” he said, taking the mug from her. He took a whiff and pretended to notice the smell. She still hadn’t answered his question. Why is she stalling?

  “You’re welcome.” She took a sip of tea. “I have a lot of names, Tim. Even if I stuck to my favorites, it would take forever to run through them all. But who am I? That’s easier to say. I’m Death.”

  Tim burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Big hearty, full-out, full-body guffaws. He hoped she didn’t get insulted, but he didn’t even try to stop himself.

  Eventually, Tim’s laughter melted down into chuckles. The girl’s steady gaze never left him. Then his knees went all wobbly and he sat hard on her sofa.

  “Did you say Death? Like with skulls and skeletons and stuff?” He checked her out again. She was dressed all Goth—maybe she was using “Death” as her club name or something. She couldn’t really mean she was the Grim Reaper, could she?

  “Generally, I have about as much to do with skulls as your average chicken has to do with soufflés. Think about it.”

  Tim gave her a sideways glance, then blew on his tea to cool it. He took another sip, and images suddenly flooded through him. The manticore. A slashing across his wrist. Burning pain. Blood. Falling. Darkness. Her face.

  “Oh,” Tim whispered. “I remember now.” He carefully placed the mug on the low table in front of him, afraid he would drop it. “You are, aren’t you.” This time it was a statement, not a question. “That’s why you were there at the end of the universe, too.”

  Death nodded.

  Tim went cold. He bent forward and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Will I feel anything?” he asked in a small voice.

  “Tim, relax,” Death said.

  “Easy for you to say,” Tim snapped. “You’re not the one dying.”

  “Hey, you can lean on Cavendish, if you want,” the girl suggested, “or just hold him. He’s good for that.”

  “Cavendish?” He squinted at her. What was she on about?

  “He’s right behind you. Wait.” She reached behind Tim and handed him a stuffed bear. “He’s not the brightest bear in the world, but at least he knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

  Tim stared at the teddy bear. Was she nuts? What was he supposed to do with a stupid toy? He didn’t want to make her mad though. He figured, since she was Death, if she got angry there would be serious consequences. He sat the teddy bear on his lap.

  “Sorry, Tim,” she said. “I thought it would take you a while longer to figure it out. You caught on so quickly I didn’t have a chance to really prepare you.”

  She tousled his hair. “That is quite a hearty laugh you have, though. When I told you who I was and you bawled, I almost forgot for a moment that you’re a magician.”

  What did that mean? Tim wondered. Magicians have no sense of humor? Or did she mean that the life of a magician was so riddled with pain, confusion, and tragedy that there was nothing for a magician to laugh about? But Tim pushed that thought aside to deal with the present moment.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Tim said slowly. He found he was clutching the teddy bear a little tighter. “I’m dead. Funny. I always thought there’d be more to it.”

  “You’re not dead, trust me.” The girl patted Tim’s knee. “I’d know if you were. You’re pretty close to it though, or I couldn’t have brought you here. Not so easily, anyway.”

  “You brought me here?”

  The girl nodded. “Uh-huh. Manticore venom is nasty. Manticores like it that way. If you were in your body right now, you’d be in agony. And when I say agony, I don’t mean just pain.”

  “But—” Tim tried to understand. “You mean you brought me here so I wouldn’t suffer? That’s bizarre.”

  The girl looked puzzled. “Why?”

  It was so obvious to Tim—why wasn’t she getting it? “Well, because you’re Death, of course.”

  “There’s nothing bizarre about it,” the girl replied. “Death and suffering don’t necessarily go together. Hey, do us both a favor, would you?”

  “Uh, sure.” What favor could she possibly ask of him? He braced himself.

  “Don’t let that tea get cold.” She gave him a grin.

  Tim grinned back. She was funny. He liked her, even if she was Death.

  She seemed to be studying him. “So, you get around a lot,” she said, “even for a magician.”

  Tim put his mug down again. “I wish you’d stop calling me that.”

  “All right. You get around a lot, period. What are you up to in Faerie?”

  “Oh.” He fiddled with the teddy bear’s foot. “I was just…just trying to figure out who my father was. Is. It’s sort of…sort of…” His voice began to break. “Complicated,” he finished. No, he told himself, digging his fingernails into his palms. I’m not going to cry.

  He felt a huge lump in his throat, and no matter how much he swallowed he couldn’t loosen it. His vision grew watery as tears filled his eyes.

  He felt humiliated, crying in front of her. She’d think he was a total baby. He doubled over, the teddy bear crushed on his lap, as he tried to hide his face. His shoulders shook from struggling to keep the sobs jammed inside his chest. But he knew she could see he was crying. No way to pretend he wasn’t.

  “This…this is stupid,” he choked out. He took off his glasses and wiped his face. He stared at the wetness on his fingertips. “They’re not even real, are they? I’m just imagining I’m crying.”

  “Mmm. I don’t know,” Death said. “They look like real tears to me.” She settled back into the arm of the couch and tucked her feet up under her. “Why don’t you tell me about this father thing.”

  “Do I have time to?” He’d never faced imminent death before. He didn’t know how long it would take.

  “We have time.”

  Tim wiped his face on his sleeve, then replaced his glasses. He cleared his throat a few times. “You’re just trying to be nice. Thanks, but I don’t need to talk. I’ll be fine.” He put the teddy bear between him and Death on the couch. He didn’t want it to look like he was a little kid who needed a stuffed animal.

  “Well, I’m not trying not to be nice, I’ll grant you that. But I asked mainly because I’d like to know. What’s this all about?”

  Tim sighed. How could he possibly explain it all? He was still trying to understand it himsel
f.

  Tamlin sat beside Timothy Hunter’s stiffening body. The boy was going blue, and his limbs twisted as the venom made its accursed way through his body.

  The child has— Tamlin thought, then stopped himself. What am I saying? “The child”? My son, I mean. My son has brought the land back from the dead. My son has broken a binding that Titania herself could not undo. He has overthrown an adversary no paladin of Faerie has ever dared challenge. And he has paid a grievous price. The manticore’s venom seethes in his blood. And no healer born of woman ever worked a cure for that bane. He will die soon.

  Tamlin could not allow that to happen. He had to do something—anything. He stood over Tim and said words of transformation.

  “Flesh of my flesh, be what you must if I am to carry you,” Tamlin said, tapping into the magic surrounding him, the magic of Faerie. “By our blood, breath of my breath, shape yourself as I will.” With several passes of his hands, Tamlin felt the energies mingle and mix. The outline of the dying boy’s body shimmered as he lost his human boundaries. The molecules and atoms rearranged themselves into a new shape, a shape Tamlin could work with.

  Timothy Hunter transformed slowly into a hawk’s feather. Once this was done, Tamlin, his father, assumed the hawk’s shape. He picked up the quill of the feather in his beak, flapped his powerful wings, and took to the sky.

  As Tamlin flew, he thought over the remarkable change in himself. The boy was a stranger to me. For thirteen years of his life and three hundred of mine, I never gave him a thought. But now—

  Was it seeing him? Talking to him? Testing him? When did I begin to want to know him?

  Tamlin traveled quickly, covering a great distance, urgency carrying him forward.

  He saw into me. While I played at judging him, he needed no knife to cut to the heart of me. “Do you feel sorry for yourself all the time?” he asked me. And I struck him because he had seen and spoken a truth. I should have thanked him.

  The infant he was—who I had never thought of again after that first moment—became a child whose eyes pierce the darkness as mine never have and never will. I would like to know the man that child will become. Might have become.

  Upon reaching the palace gardens, Tamlin swooped down and landed at the feet of Titania. Laying the feather gently on the grass, he transformed himself back into human shape.

  “Tamlin!” Titania cried. “Oh, Tam, you’ve done it!” She flung her arms around his neck, her body pressing against his. He could feel the life flowing through her again, as it had when they first met. Before it had all soured. Before the bindings. Before the manticore sucked the spirit from the land. She was as restored as Faerie.

  “Everything is beautiful again,” she exclaimed. “The garden is so alive. All the roses are whispering secrets to one another.” She ran her hands along his arms and took both his hands in hers. “Walk in the arbor with me, Tamlin. I want you to hear them, too. You and no other.”

  Tamlin gently held her away from him. “I am not the one who has restored your twilight land to beauty. You owe me no thanks for your deliverance. Another paid that price.”

  “Who did this, then?” Titania asked. “And what is this price you speak of?”

  Tamlin released Titania and faced Tim, still a feather on the grass. Using his talents, Tamlin transformed Tim back into his twisted, pained, and suffering body. He stepped aside for Titania to see.

  “Merciful gods,” Titania gasped and dropped to her knees beside Tim’s tortured body. “The child. Oh, Tamlin. The prophecies were true.”

  Tamlin gazed at his former love and watched her weep. She looked up at him, her eyes flashing with anger. “Who did this to him?” she demanded.

  “The child was raving when I found him, lady. Delirious. But he gave me reason to believe he’d fought the manticore.”

  “The manticore,” Titania repeated. “Tell me more.”

  Tamlin kneeled down beside her. “I brought the boy here for healing. Let the story wait.”

  “I have asked you once,” Titania said, her voice stern. “Tell me what you know.”

  Why couldn’t she just help? Why must she have the explanation? Perhaps, though, the explanation would give her the information she needed to help. “As you will,” Tamlin acceded. “The withering of the land was the work of the manticore. The bindings you could not break were his. The child—”

  “The child?” Titania repeated angrily. “He is called Timothy.”

  Tamlin was surprised at her vehemence, but if she believed she had just cause, due to a misunderstood connection between herself and the boy, it would only work in his favor. His and the boy’s.

  “Timothy destroyed the manticore. How is anybody’s guess. I found him wounded beyond my power to heal. So I flew him here to you.”

  Titania gazed sadly at the boy. “For the serpent’s bite and the scorpion’s sting, there are tinctures of great virtue. Against the breath of demons and the spittle of the mandrake, there are spells. But for the venom of the manticore, there is no cure. None, Tam. I am so sorry.”

  She stood and took Tamlin’s hand. He did not shake her off. He knew she wanted to comfort him, and he wondered if comfort was possible. Beyond her, he could see that flowers were still blossoming, and creatures he had not seen in years fluttered or gamboled or frolicked in the lush grasses.

  “I share your grief, Tamlin,” Titania said. “But he was born to die, as they all are. The mortal blood in him—your blood—makes it so.” She shook her head sadly. “It seems as though your kind barely live. They skim the surface of time and vanish without a ripple, like mayflies.”

  She released Tamlin’s hand and stood over Tim again. “If only he had been raised in Faerie. The land and I would have worked our ways to blur those boundaries between your kind and mine.”

  This was not what Tamlin needed to hear—how things might have been different. Things are as they are.

  Titania turned to face Tamlin. “Where did you say he slew the manticore?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “You surprise me, Tamlin,” Titania scolded. “Faerie lives because of Timothy’s courage. We must honor his sacrifice. A monument will be built in the place of his victory. At the site of his triumph.”

  As Tamlin gazed down at his son’s tortured, blue body, at the child who would not see manhood, he saw only waste. This may have been a victory for magic, for Faerie, and Tim may have triumphed over a monster, but how could Tamlin rejoice? Honor was a bitter achievement when one did not live to see it.

  But he said none of this. He merely nodded, and lifted the boy into his arms. The boy who had done so much, when he, his father, had done so little.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DEATH WAS STILL WAITING. Tim hadn’t spoken a word in some time. He decided there was no point in telling her his story. Why should he?

  “Like you give a toss,” he muttered. “Well, I’m sorry. I don’t feel like relieving anyone’s eternal boredom at the moment,” he told her. He crossed his arms and stared straight ahead.

  “Excuse me?” Death seemed startled. She stood up. “You don’t want to talk to me? Fine. But I’ve got news for you, buster. I don’t particularly enjoy being insulted.” She picked up her mug and went over to the sink. She turned on the water and began washing dishes.

  Tim instantly regretted his words. He hovered behind her at the sink. “Miss?” He still couldn’t bring himself to call her “Death.” “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Is that a fact?” She scrubbed a pot vigorously with a scouring pad.

  “Well, yes…Yes, it is a fact.”

  Death turned off the faucet and dried her hands on a stained dishcloth. Ignoring Tim, she went over to a set of slatted double doors. Tim figured that it had originally been a pantry, but that she had converted it into a big walk-in closet. Tim was curious about what she might have stashed in there. He’d heard of a person having “skeletons in the closet.” That would be singularly appropriate here. He fought b
ack a giddy laugh.

  “Stand back,” Death instructed. She unlatched the double doors.

  Tim did as he was told. He had no idea what might leap out at him from Death’s closet.

  Death ducked as an old toaster and a boot fell from a top shelf and nearly beaned her.

  “Wow,” Tim exclaimed. “That’s the most packed, jammed closet I’ve ever seen.”

  “You should see the one in my bedroom,” Death told him. “Now about your quest—you don’t mind if I call it a quest, do you? I know you’re touchy about certain words relating to magic.”

  “I don’t mind,” Tim assured her. “Are you still angry at me?” He continued to stare at the closet. He couldn’t quite get over the amount of stuff in it. “Uh, are those all hats?”

  “In the hatboxes? Nope. What’s in them is mostly junk.” Death dropped down to a crouch and started shoving aside suitcases, file folders, and the hatboxes. She was obviously looking for something.

  “I can’t say that I’m angry at you, Mr. Sarcasm, but I haven’t forgiven you either.” She grunted as she pushed a box to the back of the closet. She glanced at Tim over her shoulder. “You might try apologizing. Works wonders.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He sat on the floor behind her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.” She gave him one of her killer grins. That’s good, Tim thought. Death having a “killer grin.” There were loads of opportunities for superbad puns in this situation. Just the kind of jokes Molly punched him on the arm for but Tim knew she secretly enjoyed.

  Death turned all the way around to face him directly. “Now as far as the quest thing goes—what are you really trying to find out?”

  “I told you. I want to know who my father is. My real father.”

  “Uh-huh. You did say that. But you never said why.”

  “Why do you people have to make everything so complicated?” Tim complained.

  “Hey, you were the one who said this was complicated, remember?” She turned back around and rummaged through the closet again. She seemed to have found what she’d been searching for; she tugged hard on a large trunk. “I’m just trying to figure out why someone as sensible as you would wander into a manticore’s lair. I mean you didn’t just wake up one morning suddenly dying to know whose gametes had the pleasure of becoming your blastocyst?”