Unbinding

by Eileen Wilks

  “You just zoomed way past me.”

  “Sorry. What I mean is that the unquantifiable nature of spatial references inherent in true chaos combined with the inversion of—”

  Kai laughed. That startled her eyes open. She squeezed them shut again. The colors were now so bright they hurt. It had never been this bad before, not even during a big thunderstorm. “You’re not helping, though you did provide me with a new fantasy. I’d love to see you go up against Eharin.”

  “I wish I could talk to her, even if she is a pain in the butt.” Arjenie sounded wistful. “I could learn so much. But maybe looping your Gift isn’t a great idea, given the potential risk.”

  “I’ve done it before, and left it looped for hours with no problem. We’ll have plenty of time for coffee.”

  “If we’re right about the problem. It seems like Eharin would have at least nodded when you suggested that, even if she didn’t want to take the time to explain.”

  Kai snorted. “What, and admit the pathetic little human is right about something? Aside from how much she’d dislike that, I don’t think she ignores my questions to save herself the bother of explaining. I think her plan is to honor our deal to the letter while leaving me so frustrated I’ll agree to renegotiate. Probably she wants something she didn’t get in our initial deal. Probably something from Nathan.” They all wanted something from Nathan, and were happy to use Kai to try and get it.

  All except one, that is. The Queen of Winter already had Nathan’s service. Now she wanted Kai’s.

  “Devious,” Arjenie commented. “But elves dote on devious, don’t they?”

  “Oh, yeah. Give them a choice between straight and twisty and they’ll take twisty every time.”

  “Are the other sidhe like that?”

  “Some. The elves are sort of the United States of the sidhe realms. They aren’t the only ones with power, but they’ve got more of it than anyone else, and their culture pervades the realms. Not everyone adopts it, but no one is untouched by it.” Kai frowned at the darkness behind her closed lids . . . which wasn’t entirely dark anymore. “Arjenie, my eyes are closed.”

  “Um, yes.”

  “I’m seeing colors anyway.” Colors that brightened even as she spoke. Sharpened. And pulled.

  “Did that ever happen before?”

  “No. It’s not supposed to. I’m going to loop my Gift.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “I’m sure that being pulled into fugue is a bad idea.” The fugue state was almost identical to the one she entered to heal—the same kind of “almost” that separated flying from falling.

  “Oh.” A beat of silence. “Do you need me to pull over?”

  “Nope. I just have to focus.” While she still could.

  Until Kai was catapulted into Faerie eighteen months ago, all her training had come from her grandfather. Joseph Tallman was a Navajo shaman, and his techniques were very different from those of the sidhe. Eharin considered Kai’s method of centering slow and inelegant, but she’d admitted that it worked. So first Kai prayed silently, asking the Powers for their aid and blessing. When she felt centered, she touched her lower belly, her chest, and her lips, whispering a word with each touch, feathering power into the touch through the word. She did that three times.

  Kai opened her eyes. And grinned at the crisp, clear world around her. “Better call Doug and tell him we changed our minds again.”

  TWO

  FAGIOLI—which meant “beans” in Italian, according to Arjenie—was noisy, crowded, and charming, with a large patio to catch the overflow. The stone walls enclosing the patio were mostly hidden by an enthusiastic vine smothered in bright pink flowers. Kai and Arjenie sat on that patio in air soft with spring and heady with the mixed scents of flowers and brewing coffee.

  Also chocolate. Kai inhaled deeply before sipping on the best knock-off mocha Frappuccino in the world, which made it the best in all the worlds. Coming home had been wonderful, but kind of weird, too. Not what she’d expected. She’d changed on her journey, of course, but she hadn’t expected those changes to make everything here look so . . . different.

  But her mocha coffee drink was everything it was supposed to be.

  Across from her, her new friend was sipping her own mocha. Aside from her hair, Arjenie Fox looked like the geek she was. Her eyes were an unusual aquamarine color, but hidden as they were behind her glasses, they didn’t draw attention. Her face was narrow, her skin pale with a scatter of freckles. She was short and thin and had a small limp when she walked, due to a long-ago injury.

  But that hair! It wasn’t just red. It was RED. That shout of color burst into curls the way birds burst into song or fireworks erupt in temporary stars. Today Arjenie had set a dam in place—a headband that held back that wild froth of curls.

  Kai sipped again. “And you claim this is only the third-best coffee shop in the city?”

  Arjenie grinned. “According to the coffee snobs I hang out with these days, anyway. You should hear a bunch of lupi arguing about coffee. Is the subtle balance of Ethiopian beans superior to the aromatic acidity of Kenyan, or is it a tad bland? Or maybe it’s Costa Rican beans with the subtle balance. Whatever. They can’t agree on who grows the best coffee, who roasts the best coffee, or who brews the best coffee, but they have reached consensus on the third-best place in San Diego to buy a cup, and this is it.”

  “But with the very best mochas.”

  “Amen. I guess they don’t have mochas in the sidhe realms?”

  “There is no coffee in the sidhe realms,” Kai said gloomily.

  Arjenie’s eyebrows shot up. “None?”

  “Not in any of the realms I was in. Mostly people hadn’t ever heard of it.”

  “That’s so sad. How many realms did you visit, anyway? Unless that’s one of the things you can’t talk about—”

  “Oh, that’s no secret. Four. Well, five if you count Edge. Some don’t consider it a true realm, since it’s so small—more of a between-place. Though I wonder if that’s the real reason it gets demoted. Edge is more about gnomes, not so much about elves.”

  “Count Edge,” Arjenie said firmly, then paused to lick whipped cream off her upper lip. “Just in case it bothers a snooty elf or two.”

  Kai grinned. “I like the way you think.”

  Arjenie cocked her head. “Which was your favorite realm? Not Iath, I’m guessing.”

  “Definitely not.” The Queens’ realm was all about elves.

  “But you didn’t dislike them all.”

  “No . . . I do have some good memories.” Absently Kai’s hand went to the silver cuff on her left wrist and the cabochon jewels set there. She thought of an old man and a most uncanny child and smiled. “I liked Deredon. It’s more rugged than most—more primitive, I guess, if you consider wilderness primitive. A lot of Wild Sidhe live there. A fair number of humans, too. It’s a chancy place, but all the realms are chancy.”

  “Isn’t that where you got your amulet, the one Cullen’s so eager to study?”

  Kai nodded. “He wanted me to leave it with him, but the amulet’s tuned to me. If I take it off, it starts losing that tuning right away. I’ve let him look at it while I’m wearing it a couple times. That gets pretty boring, just sitting there while he stares and scribbles notes in the air, but—”

  Frenzied yapping broke into their conversation. Kai twisted around to see.

  A few tables away, a small dog was trying desperately to attack Doug and his partner. The dog’s flustered owner tugged on the leash attached to his harness. She finally picked him up. “I am so sorry. He’s usually such a friendly thing.”

  “Smells my dogs on me, I bet,” Doug said easily. “I’ve got three.”

  “Terriers,” Arjenie whispered, “do not like the way lupi smell. Most dogs react to them, but terriers tend to consider their smell a challen
ge. My aunt has a Jack Russell named Havoc, which is the perfect name for him. When Havoc and Benedict first met—did I tell you about that already?”

  “No, and I want to hear.”

  “It was soon after Benedict and I became a couple. We drove back to Virginia to spend Christmas with my family. Now, this was the first time for him to meet them, and vice versa. Poor baby. He was so anxious, and things didn’t go at all the way he’d hoped.”

  Arjenie’s “poor baby” was over six feet of pure warrior. “And you can tell Benedict is anxious . . . how?”

  Arjenie grinned. “He looks even more grimly determined than usual. Anyway, we pulled up out front . . .”

  She went on to tell a story involving Havoc, a skinwalker, at least two native Powers and several members of her family. Kai wouldn’t have believed it coming from someone else—not with her Gift shut down, anyway—but Arjenie was painfully honest. It was one of the things Kai liked best about her.

  “You think it was really Coyote?” she said when Arjenie finished.

  “Oh, yes. Benedict was sure of it.”

  “And if he’s sure, you are.” And that, Kai thought, was the other thing the two of them had in common. They were both in love with someone they trusted all the way down—

  “Hey, it’s not like he’s never wrong. But he was wearing his knowing face, not the stubborn one. I saw the stubborn face this morning when he insisted that I bring guards with me today. He might be right, he might not, but he was surely stubborn.”

  Someone who could be unbelievably pigheaded—

  “His knowing face, though—that’s how he looks when he talks about running four-footed. He knows what that’s like. Stubborn doesn’t come into the picture.”

  —someone who wasn’t human. Nathan couldn’t turn furry the way Arjenie’s lover did. He had only one shape, and that was very much a man’s shape, but he’d been born a hellhound. “What do you do when he’s being stubborn?”

  “Depends on if it’s stubborn-reasonable or stubborn-idiotic. The guards, now, I have to admit that’s reasonable. Someone could try to grab me to use against Benedict. I’m not much of a threat to the Enemy, but he is.”

  Kai’s lupi hosts were at war. So were the humans around them, but mostly they didn’t know it. Their enemy was an Old One they usually referred to as the Great Bitch or the Great Enemy. Battling an Old One would have made for a short and lopsided war if she had been able to conduct her battles in person. But she had been locked out of the realms when the Great War ended over three thousand years ago, so she had to fight through proxies—like the one whose possession of a forbidden artifact had brought Kai and Nathan back to Earth a few weeks ago.

  Kai wondered if Arjenie felt as matter-of-fact about the possibility of being kidnapped as she sounded. She couldn’t, could she? Without her Gift, Kai couldn’t tell. It was disconcerting. “And if he’s being stubborn and unreasonable?”

  Arjenie’s eyebrows lifted. “You might as well tell me, you know.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Nathan seems like a reasonable guy, but no one is reasonable about everything all the time.”

  Reluctantly Kai smiled. “I’m being obvious, huh?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It’s this business about getting my eyes fixed. Nathan thinks surgery is barbaric. He . . . I told you why Dell can’t help me, didn’t I?”

  “She doesn’t know how to change just one part of a body.”

  “Pretty much, yeah. But there are people who could fix my eyes in a blink. No surgery, no pain, no problems. I’d go from 20/200 to 20/20. Maybe better than 20/20.” Kai paused. Nathan expected her to keep this secret. But the offer had been made to her, not him, right? So it was up to her to decide how much of a secret it should be. “People like the Winter Queen.”

  “I’m sure she could, but—wait. You mean she’d do that?”

  “For a price. She wants me to take service with her.”

  “Well, that bitch.”

  Kai laughed. Arjenie never cursed, not even the occasional “damn,” which made it even funnier. “It’s not like she’s being evil to make the offer, but I don’t like the idea of putting myself in her hands. I’d have to vow to her, you see. And she to me,” Kai added, wanting to be fair. “And there are some strong benefits to that. I’d get the very best training, for one. I’d also become a legal adult, which—”

  “Wait, you aren’t one now?”

  “Not in sidhe eyes. I’m human. The trace of sidhe blood in my makeup may be the reason for my Gift—they certainly think so—but it’s not enough to make me sidhe, so I’m not one of the grownups. Not in the realms.” Kai paused. And blinked. The flowers on the vine behind Arjenie were moving. Fluttering. But there wasn’t any wind. “That is so weird.”

  The flowers burst up into the air.

  Not flowers. Butterflies. Hundreds of bright pink butterflies exploded silently from the leaves of the vine where, a moment ago, they’d been growing. They blossomed up into the air in a cloud of frothing pink.

  People exclaimed. Four tables away, two chairs scraped. “Arjenie—wink out!” Doug called.

  Kai didn’t remember standing, but she was on her feet when Arjenie vanished. One second the redhead was sitting in her chair, looking up at butterflies that shouldn’t exist. The next, that chair was empty.

  A lone butterfly landed on Kai’s arm.

  “Ouch!” Without thinking, she slapped it—then stared at her arm. Pink dust from the slaughtered butterfly smeared her skin. A bright bead of blood glistened amid the pink. The pretty little butterfly had bit her.

  The pink cloud descended.

  * * *

  NATHAN moved to the free throw line, having been thoroughly fouled by a wiry fellow named Carl who could jump like a bullfrog.

  Nathan hadn’t played basketball until three weeks ago, but he’d watched the game often and thought he was catching on pretty well. For a very long time he’d avoided playing any sport because of the difficulty in holding himself to a human level of competence, but he no longer had to hide what he was. Since they arrived at Nokolai Clanhome he’d played pickup with his hosts several times. He liked it. Werewolves were as fast as he was and almost as strong.

  They were also highly competitive. Nathan grinned as the ball sailed smoothly through the hoop. So was he.

  Cheers and jeers rang out from both teams and from those who’d gathered to watch. There were several women among the watchers. None of them were werewolves, of course, that being a sex-linked inheritance.

  Lupi, not werewolves, he corrected himself, using his T-shirt to mop his face. They preferred to be called lupi, and any people should be allowed to name themselves. But the habits of years are hard to break, and he’d thought of them as werewolves for roughly four centuries now. Avoided them for that long, too, since they could sniff out what he was—or at least that he wasn’t human—and passing for human had been important during his long stranding here. Plus his scent was inherently challenging to a lupus, which could cause trouble.

  But now he was here openly, no longer pretending to a humanity he didn’t possess, and the Nokolai leader—their Rho—had named him ospi. That meant clan-guest. These particular lupi seemed to be dealing well with the provocation of his scent.

  Turned out he really liked playing with werewolves.

  Over on the sidelines, his phone trilled. “It’s Kai,” he explained, and headed that way.

  “Hey, what about our game?” someone on the other team called. Another one jeered, “She calls, you come running?”

  Since that was self-evidently true, Nathan didn’t bother to answer. If the man didn’t understand that Kai was more important, words wouldn’t convince him.

  “Shut up, Harris,” a big man said.

  The big man was watching the game, not playing in it, mainly because no one wa
nted to be on the team that played against him. So Nathan had been told, and he believed it. Benedict Jones—whose Native American features didn’t go with the surname—was in charge of security and training at Nokolai Clanhome, and he was more than simply good at his job.

  The first time Nathan sparred with Benedict, he’d lost.

  That had gotten his attention. This form wasn’t as deadly as his original body, but he hadn’t been defeated in unarmed combat in nearly three hundred years. Then it had been a pair of Chinese monks, and he’d promptly joined their order so he could learn from them. He hadn’t had the opportunity to train with anyone who posed a challenge in a very long time, but hadn’t thought it mattered. One of his Gifts was what might be called perfect muscle memory. Once he learned how to do something, his body knew that move.

  He saw now that he’d been wrong. His body remembered everything he’d taught it, but training was about the mind as well as the body. His speed had suffered, too, from the lack of a real challenge.

  When Nathan and Benedict fought their second match, they’d used knives. Nathan won that one. It would have been amazing if he hadn’t. The long knife was his weapon, and he was very good with smaller knives, too. He knew of one person, a crotchety old elf named Samision, who could defeat him with a sword and might be his equal with a knife, but there was only one being who could definitely best him, knife-to-knife. The Huntsman could not be defeated by any weapon.

  For their third bout, he and Benedict had returned to unarmed fighting. That match had lasted over two hours before they decided to call it a draw. Nathan was confident he could kill Benedict if he had to. That was his Gift, after all. He wasn’t sure he could defeat the man short of killing him. It was really very intriguing.

  As Nathan reached the place he’d left his phone, Benedict’s phone rang. The back of Nathan’s neck prickled with alarm. Benedict’s Arjenie was with Kai. If they were both calling at the same time . . . he answered his phone. “What’s wrong?”