by Leigh Evans
“Ah.” I was handed down the line like an explosive package, until her case nurse escorted me to a curtained cubicle. A note had been taped to the curtain: Gloves only.
The curtains rattled as she pulled them open. They’d taken Lou’s clothes and put her into a blue hospital gown. The white sheet was pulled up to her waist. The hospital gown gaped at the neck. Her eyes were half open, half closed, exposing unfocused dead gray pupils. Up and down her left arm were burns, some livid red and some liquid filled. Someone had tied her wrists to the sides of the bed with white gauze. A needle had been inserted in one blue vein. A drip bag hung from a metal stand.
“What’s in the bag?”
“She’s dehydrated, so we’ve got her on fluids. She was given a sedative as well. It affected her more than we anticipated.” She checked the fluid level and reached for Lou’s chart. “Is there any immediate family we can call?”
“I am her family.”
“She’s your guardian?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “No, I’m hers.”
“How old are you?” she asked, frowning down at me.
What is it? Is it because I’m short? Or because my face is baby-shaped? I’m going to be carded until I’m forty. I added a year. “Twenty-three.”
She didn’t look like she believed me, but she didn’t ask for the fake driver’s license I’d been forced to spend two hundred bucks on—it’s impossible to get a job or even a bus pass in Deerfield without some sort of ID—which was too bad, because the new card was a beauty and I hadn’t had a chance to air it yet. There was another piece of gauze taped to the inside of Lou’s elbow. I tilted my head toward it inquiringly.
“We had to take some blood tests. We’re waiting on the results. The sedative really knocked her out. Is she on any medication?”
“No.” Except for the slow rise of her chest, Lou looked dead.
“We’re concerned about her burns. Do you know how she got them?”
“I was at work.”
“Hmm.” The nurse made a note on her chart. “There are some older burns too. Maybe she got them a couple of weeks ago? Do you know anything about them?”
They just looked older. She got all her wounds at the same time, a couple of hours ago when the cop tried to subdue her. The touch from a mortal male burns a female Fae—the result of some Mage spell that kicks in at birth—all because some ninny on the Royal Court started worrying that humans might foul their gene pool. The truth was, she didn’t heal very well anymore. The mechanism was still inside her, trying to heal her, but it was weak and fitful like her moods. It had healed some, already, but was slowing down on others, making it seem like she had a long history of being burned. Try explaining that to a human. Try explaining anything about my life to a human.
The Fae don’t fade out in a logical fashion, as if someone had a checklist and a panel of switches. Do they all fade like that? I don’t know. I’ve never seen one do it before Lou. And as far as I knew, Lou was the last Fae on this side of the portal to Merenwyn.
She hadn’t been able to Call to the Seven in months. That was her talent—calling metals. In Merenwyn she was known as the Collector. She was able to call to precious metal with her voice and hands, and it would melt and roll right to her, to collect in a puddle by her feet. She could do that with all the seven: gold, copper, silver, lead, tin, mercury, and—this is where her talent came in real value for Merenwyn’s royal family—iron. Gold was valuable, silver was pretty, but iron was deadly. Enough of it could render a strong ruler as weak as a drooling infant.
She told me she was one of only two living Fae who had the talent. I could never understand why they let her stay on this side of the portal, after my parents died, if her skills were so prized. Before they closed the portals that night, they must have sounded some sort of retreat before they slammed the doors. Humans blamed the horrific sound of the barricades coming down on a minor earthquake, but they were wrong. That loud earth-trembling boom was the sound of gates closing simultaneously, forever ensuring that this world and the other would never touch again.
Lou’s hands were curled like claws on the white sheet. The skin on them was thin, but her nails still grew long and diamond-hard. “Where is her ring?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
My voice was sharp. “She wears a small green ring on her baby finger. It’s missing.”
“Oh, that thing,” the nurse said. “She scratched one of our nurses during admissions with it. We locked it away for safekeeping.”
“I want it returned right now.”
“Fine. The receptionist has the key. When she comes back from break, I’ll get it from her.” Her tone was cool. “In the meantime, maybe we can get your information. And later, someone from social services will need to talk with you.” She pulled the curtains wide and bustled out.
There was one blue plastic chair, jammed under the shelf with the box of gloves. I pulled it out and sat down. And then I leaned back to pull the curtains closed again. My last remaining relative was tied to a bed in a human hospital. I didn’t have the right to feel sorry for myself. Not one bit.
As I worked at the knot on her restraint, I studied Lou. She was too thin, too yellow. I was losing her. I’d been losing her for the last half year. A year ago Lou could have passed for a thirty-five-year-old. Now, her scalp played peekaboo with what was left of her long hair. If you stared hard at her, hard enough to ignore the slack skin, you’d realize that her features were still handsome. But the fading was relentless. The fat had melted away from her face as fast as her muscles withered, leaving crepe skin and jowls. Without that padding to soften her edges, her nose appeared sharper and predatory, her mouth a thin, pale gash.
She wasn’t an old lady. She was just a Fae on the wrong side of the portal, without a key to get back. There wasn’t enough magic and maple syrup to keep her here.
Would I wither like her one day? I have my own measure of Fae blood, but it’s diluted—poisoned, Lou once said—by the Were blood running in my veins. Sometimes I find myself thinking too long about whether I’ll fade like Lou, or live long like a Were.
The nurse jerked the curtains wide. “Do you have her health card?”
I stepped outside the cubicle, pulled the curtains all the way until one edge met the other snugly, and then followed the nurse.
After some creative form-filling, I took a slow stroll through the hallways. The nurse still had me in her sights, so the best thing to do was to map out our escape. As far as I could tell, there were only two ways to get in; through the swinging doors at reception and through the back hall that lead to the imaging department. At first glance, the back hall seemed like the best way of moving her out of the hospital, but there was a long corridor leading to it, and leaning against the wall were the two cops, their belts bristling with things that could do serious harm. Talking to them was a couple of paramedics.
The cops’ eyes flicked to me as I passed. There was a door ahead for the women’s washroom, and I took it. I closed the door and locked it.
“Merry?” I pressed my hand to my chest. “I need to talk.” Fae Stars. The washroom smelled even worse than the hallways. I pulled my white blouse away from my chest, looked down and tried again. “Merry?” Nestled between my breasts, Merry remained stiff and unyielding.
“Stop sulking.”
Merry didn’t stir, unwind, or even change color. That was the measure of her hatred for Lou. She was in her usual place, the inside curve of my left breast, tucked warm between the lace of my bra and my skin, pretending to be asleep. Somewhere during that anxious jog to the hospital, she’d reverted back to her original design. Golden strands of elegantly entwined ivy formed a protective basketwork around the cloudy amber of her stone. “Gone baroque, huh?” I gave her a disgusted prod. “You know, sometimes I feel like taking you off my neck, and leaving you hanging in a rack of costume jewelery at Zellers. All I wanted you to do was listen while I worked out a plan.”
N
o response. No pulse of heat, no change in color. When she wanted, my Asrai could look as dumb as a rock.
I emerged from the washroom, pausing on the threshold to fastidiously dry my hands. The tally had swollen to two cops and three paramedics. All of them looked like they worked out.
The nurse stopped me on the way back to Lou’s bedside. “Here’s her ring.”
I tore open the envelope and shook into my palm the only piece of jewelry I’d ever seen Lou wear. As befitting a ring designed to go on a woman’s baby finger, the design was simple. A narrow strip of gold had been fashioned into a serpentine cradle for one dull, irregularly shaped green stone. Uncut and unpolished, the gem was unlovely, except for one little perk. With the emerald on her finger, Lou could lie—breathtakingly huge whoppers—and do so without a flicker of her eyelash to betray her deception. Which was a bonus as Lou was pure Fae, and was born handicapped by their natural inability to tell an untruth, something that could have posed a huge problem to us, considering that we lived a life on the margins of the criminal world.
Possibly we might have limped along without her needing it. Faes can’t lie, but they can do wonders with misdirection. Still, I was grateful for the fact that somehow, somewhere, Lou had charmed a mage out of his ring. It made life easier. When I wasn’t around to lie for her, she could do so on her own, providing she rubbed the gem before she spoke. Once, for payment to the ring’s dark magic. The second time, to seal the lie. Sort of like a compound fib tax.
I slipped the ring over her knuckle and sat down beside her with a sigh.
I hate thinking. I hate that whole, contemplate your life, find your inner self, hug your tree, kiss your neighbor mind trap that comes from watching too much daytime TV. I’d rather be entertained. Give me a book. Show me a movie. Be a human. That’s comedy enough. Don’t ask me to sit and think. Don’t ask me to come up with a plan.
Step one. Wake up Lou. From my backpack, I pulled out the maple syrup I’d bought on the way to work. I smeared some on my finger and put it to her lips. Her mouth softened, and the tip of her tongue reached out for it. Her thin lips opened wider. After the second mouthful, she shut her eyes against the artificial light. I was so damn grateful, I forgot myself and put my hand to her face.
There was no warning, no slow slip into her head: I was just suddenly in there, experiencing one of her memories. The colors hit me first. All of them were supersaturated, as if gray didn’t belong in the palette. I couldn’t have pulled my hand off her face for the life of me, for she was in Merenwyn, and she rarely allowed herself to think of home.
* * *
Lou is outdoors, looking at a man standing with his back turned to us. It’s a nice, well-developed back in a gray T-shirt that has gone through the spin cycle enough times to get thin and tight on the shoulders. There’s a painting of Champlain in the same pose, staring at the river that he probably thought was going to be called Champlain, but ended up being called the St. Lawrence. Change the boots for sneakers, and it’s essentially the same guy. This guy’s tawny hair is shorter, but he has one foot propped on a stony outcrop. Like the French explorer, his hand rests on his thigh, while the other sits on his hip. Even without seeing his face, you know this man understands his own attraction. It’s something in the pose, something in the arrogance of that straight back.
Predator.
Beyond him, impossibly green trees grow upside down into a fluffy bank of clouds above a layer of brilliant blue. A breeze picks up a lock of his hair. A fish jumps in the pool, its scales glittering in the sun. Suddenly, it all made sense: the upside-down trees, the reversal of clouds and sky. The smooth surface of the natural pond is catching the reflection of the surrounding trees and sky.
Don’t let him despoil that pool, I think. But in Lou’s thoughts, the breeze plays with his hair like a lover, while the clouds slide across the brilliant sky.
* * *
“Don’t touch me,” Lou said peevishly, as her dream abruptly disappeared from my vision. My chair screeched as I bolted backward. For a second I gaped at her, horrified at my thoughts. She could have dragged me to Threall and back again, and I wouldn’t have tried to fight her. Fae Stars, I’d been so Fae-struck by Merenwyn, my only worry had been whether the dream would end. I breathed carefully, willing my racing heart to settle. It had been running in my head, like the chorus to a ballad. Stay, stay in the dream. Damn, Mum was right: those dreams were dangerous.
“More,” she demanded, without opening her eyes. Carefully, I stood to dribble another mouthful of syrup into her. She swallowed and then rolled her head to look at me. “There are a lot of mortals here,” she said.
“I know.”
She focused on me, her fingers plucking at her bed coverlet, her forehead creased. “I want to go home.”
Chapter Three
Bob keeps the keys to his aqua ’93 Taurus wagon in the drawer under his counter. That was the first thing I went for when I arrived home and found his shop empty. I left him four books from the café, my tips for the day, and a stethoscope, which had turned out to be kind of a one-trick pony. I relocked the shop’s back door on the way out. My legs felt like lead as I climbed the stairs to our apartment.
Our home is nothing much. Four-room apartments that don’t cost an arm, a leg, and a kidney are hard to come by in our town, so you don’t bitch about niceties like new paint or better floors. You pay the rent, and keep your head down, and try to blend, blend, blend.
A good landlord doesn’t notice that you never go to school. A great one is mostly blind and completely unaware that his tenant’s kid uses his store like a lending library without due dates. Sometimes I wondered how oblivious one human could be. Sometimes, I wondered if Bob was just a nice man instead, which made me feel all kinds of squirrelly inside.
So, our home. Four rooms, all connected by one long hall. The kitchen used mostly by me, though Lou sometimes stepped inside, her lip curling fastidiously, to pick up a new can of maple syrup. Beyond that, two small bedrooms and a rectangular living room. I had furnished the living room slowly over time, exchanging lawn chairs for real ones as my muscles grew along with my ability to grab things before the garbage man got them. I had two mismatched armchairs book-ended by two beat-up matching side tables. In the corner was my entertainment center: an RCA and a $40 DVD player.
It had taken me a long time to find a working television that didn’t need a remote, as they were problematic for Fae-born. Not only remotes, but cell phones, a computer when connected to the Internet, and weirdly, intercoms were just some of the things that worked on the maybe-yes, maybe-no basis around our kind. On the free wall was a faux-wood shelving unit from Goodwill. It was cheap and I could lift it, and it did the job of displaying my paperbacks and my growing collection of pirated movies that I bartered for with a high school kid named Melanie.
That sounds sparse, but it wasn’t. I’m a thief with poor impulse control, a fact that would have surprised Mum and Dad if they were still around to register their disapproval, because of the two of us, it had been Lexi, not me, who’d shown a certain Fae-bent talent for acquisition. Relatively speaking, I had lived a virtuous life before the Fae stole my brother. Then, two months to the day after I lost Lexi, I stole a pair of salt and pepper shakers from a diner on Spadina. There wasn’t any premeditation to it. I was thinking of my twin, and felt myself sinking downward into that awful, aching hurt, and then the neatest thing happened: I became Lexi. Not for very long. Just long enough to slide the condiment containers across the laminate table into my lap, and then from there into my coat pockets.
It filled the Lexi-sized hole left in me. Well, maybe not filled; nothing seemed to do that. But stealing stuff shrank the gaping wound until it was nothing more than a wistful, whistling tear in my armor. And that was good enough. That afternoon, I tossed my inconvenient conscience over my shoulder and became a thief. Now, whenever my nerves start to jangle, and that hole starts to widen, I take something. Other than a fascination for any
thing in pairs, I’m fairly indiscriminate. Consequently, there were a lot of shiny things in that room to brighten it up.
We needed to make tracks, and we needed money. It took a lot of convincing, plus the threat of being left in the hands of the pestilent mortals—nicely inserted into the argument after another visit from the nurse—before Lou told me where to find my mum’s bride belt. When I think of all those hours I’d spent searching her room for it, I wanted to smack myself.
I’d pinned a poster of four dogs playing poker to the living room wall as a taunt to my aunt, who rarely let an opportunity go by without making reference to my mixed blood. The print had stayed there ever since, even though humidity had long ago curled its edges.
Lou had quietly delivered her own insult, and I hadn’t even known it.
I ripped the poster down and studied the wall. There was no dimple or crack to say “here be magic,” which meant that she’d spent good money purchasing the spell from the local coven. Which, if I cared to think about it, was a double slap, as my paycheck had probably paid for the magic. I repeated the word Lou had whispered into my ear at the hospital, and immediately, the illusion melted away, exposing a four-inch hole in the wallboard. Inside the dark cavity, Fae gold gleamed.
With a trembling hand, I pulled my mother’s bride belt into the light.
How many times had I seen this thin gold chain around her hip? Ran my finger over the gilt embellishment that decorated the small leather pouch that hung from the sleek supple links? The belt had been a gift from her mother, a token to remember her Fae heritage, and an open acknowledgment of Mum’s transition from child to woman, on the occasion of her marriage.
I drew open the delicate leather strings and peered inside the pouch. Lou hadn’t sold them, after all. Nestled at the bottom were five tear-shaped pink stones. I inhaled deeply, and caught my father’s scent for the first time in ten years.
Move, I told myself, as everything inside me stiffened into want. Move. I fastened the belt around my own waist and let it fall low. Mum was taller than me, but I’m sure I’m rounder; despite my curves, the chain hung low on my hips.
