The Trouble with Fate

by Leigh Evans

  “Stop it,” I pleaded.

  “Let me do it,” said Mannus, in irritation.

  Lou turned away from him, hunching her shoulders over her prize like a truculent child. Her blistered fingers found a weak strand. She pinched it. Tried to use a nail to pry it up. Then she took another dollop of water, and let it sit. “Patience,” she said to Mannus, watching the shuddering ball in her hand. Suddenly Merry exploded in a flurry of awful contortions, colors sparking from her center. Red. Purple. Blue. “Now, watch.” And then my aunt succeeded in accomplishing something I thought could not be done. With a smile to match her twisting fingers, she broke a strand of Fae gold in two. What followed was a quick ravishment, an unleashed spit of Fae cruelty.

  And finally, when tiny splinters of broken gold lay glinting at her feet, my aunt stopped. Lou extended her open hand to the Alpha, imperious and proud. “I told you I could do it,” she said.

  What had been one clump, was now two.

  Frowning, Lou lifted Merry by two fingers and then dropped her, as if she were a soup bone that had lost its flavor. She placed the Royal Amulet’s heavy chain around her scrawny neck. Her voice was reassuring. “I don’t think any harm has come to the Royal Amulet.”

  “It doesn’t look right.”

  “It is fine,” she said. With tender care she inspected her pet. “Yes, it is well.” Her shoulders were relaxed. She had what she wanted. And true to form, she cared little of the destruction she’d left in her wake.

  It was her way.

  I watched with lowered eyes, and hatred seething and churning, as Merry stabbed two torn ends into the soft ground, and painfully pulled herself toward the sanctuary of the tall weeds.

  “I will summon the portal now,” Lou said, and stepped to the edge of the pond. She shook the tension from her hands.

  How many times had I watched Lou perform her precall rituals? Each time, hoping as hard as she, that she’d find a way. That the gates would come. That I’d find my twin.

  One last open-squeeze session with her hands before she raised them chest high.

  Goddess, I loathed the sight of her now. Hated her for what she’d done, hated the pitiless hunger in her eyes. Take a good look, Hedi. That’s Lou’s true face.

  She stiffened as Mannus put his hands on her waist. Then she tossed her head and opened her mouth to begin. The rite always started with a seven-second hum, followed by the first real note, so low it sounded like a moan, and then on the same breath, the low flat would climb, and the true melody would begin. She’d sing in the language of her home, which sounded nothing like English, or any other language spoken on Earth. It was a difficult dialect to decode; capable of sounding harsh and heated when she said it under her breath and sometimes, when I’d done something stupid, relentlessly hectoring. But when she sang for the portal? I wish I could call it something else. Ugly. Horrible. Discordant. But it wasn’t. The melody was haunting—perhaps because as she sang, Lou’s voice softened from her usual grievous tone. The sound that spilled from her mouth was sweet, tender, and yearning. She’d lift her voice to the wind and patiently repeat the song from beginning to chorus, and all the time, her hands would be outstretched, as if she were hoping to absorb energy from the air. She could do it for hours. She had done it for hours. She’d warble until her hands trembled and her voice was gone.

  But this was ten years later, months after the start of her fade. Would her voice crack? Falter?

  At eight seconds, she abandoned the warm-up and went for the first low note. It was too much of a temptation for Scawens and Dawn. “Watch them,” Scawens said to the kid, as they turned in the direction of the pond, transfixed, like the other Weres who stood in a ragged line around the pond; their eyes were trained on the pond as if they expected the portal to suddenly appear with a flourish of horns.

  The kid cast an anguished glance toward us. As his eyes met mine, I lowered my own submissively. I kept my head down and watched his feet, and then when those size elevens finally turned in the direction of the pond, I held my breath and soundlessly backed away.

  Four steps, five steps. Each one taking me farther away from Bridge, but one step closer to Merry. The kid never turned around. I let out my breath, and kept going, my eyes darting between three compass points. Trowbridge in the east. The kid in the north.

  And in the south … Merry’s muddy trail.

  Her painful retreat had dredged a path between the weeds and left a wavering line into the shrubbery. It disappeared under the base of a dogwood. I knelt, and parted the low branches. In the gloom beneath the shrub, I searched for the gleam of her gold in the dark, and couldn’t find it. Where was she? I sat back and looked for another trail, some indication that she’d only stopped here for a moment, before she’d crawled painfully to another spot. But there was nothing. I roughly parted the branches and scanned the area again … and … Oh Goddess … found her. Oh Merry-mine. She was a ball of brown. Mud-streaked, dull. Covered in swamp slime that camouflaged her gold, and muted her amber warmth. Quivering against the trunk of the little shrub. Naked. One of her vines trailed behind her in the mud, like a small bent root.

  “It’s me,” I said. But she flinched under my gentle touch. Shivered and tried to pull that trailing vine up to hide her nakedness. “It’s me.” I touched her just with my knuckle. She shivered under it. “Let me dry you,” I said. “It will hurt less.” She allowed me to scoop her up from the dirt. Oh Goddess, she was trembling in my palm. I blotted up every drop of that water I could see. Blew tiny beads of it from her crevasses. Gently patted as worry swelled. She was too dull. Too unresponsive.

  Pain could do that. Grief and shame could too.

  I went to put her inside my bra and realized all over again that I was equally naked beneath my plaid shirt. She hung for a moment, limp and unresponsive between my breasts. Then she moved. Closer to my skin. Huddled against it, as if she could suckle from its warmth.

  I tied the shirttails into a knot, welcoming the pain in my hands as I did so.

  And as I did, Louise sang on.

  * * *

  The three of us had to get out, now, while the Weres were spellbound by Lou’s performance.

  I felt corrosive hurt just by thinking the word “Lou.”

  I looked for something that could be used to our advantage. There were a lot of rocks, but they had iron in them, and I doubted my Fae talent would agree to attach itself to any of those ferrous-contaminated stones. But there was a small chunk of granite near the big pirate rock that had been there for years. I could use that. Providing I was healing fast enough to have some magic. I rooted around my insides and checked. My magic was pebble-sized in my gut. I rubbed my thumb against my finger pads, using friction to roll off the dead skin. The layer beneath felt new-tender but not charred. I was healing. How many repetitions of the song before they got restless? I needed time. Just a little more time to think out a plan. A course of action that wouldn’t leave us all dead.

  Bridge took matters into his own head. Literally. He surged from his knees, and head-butted the kid, causing him to fall ass over kettle. “Go, Hedi,” he yelled as he turned, head lowered and shoulders bunched.

  I didn’t get farther than three feet toward that rock before Dawn tackled me. “Ooof.”

  “Run!” Trowbridge said. Running sounded good, since Dawn was smacking me around, left-right, left-right, not holding anything back. Lou didn’t lose a note, not even as Dawn punched me in my gut. I could hear her warbling in the background, as I fell to the ground.

  I let out a grunt on impact, and my mate called, “Hedi?”

  Stuart hit him. A one-two in the kidneys, and down my lover went. Scawens’s face twisted into a savage scowl as he reached for a rock.

  I screamed, “Trowbridge, look out.”

  Stupid right? He was blind.

  And then Dawn said, “Something’s happening!”

  The male duck suddenly broke into a skimming flight, his feet dragging on the surface of the pon
d as he herded his family to the shelter of an overhanging shrub. The rock fell from Stuart’s fingers. Goose bumps broke out on my hairless arms.

  Lou had called, and the portal had answered.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Cold horror, born of the gut and the mind, tightened everything into a moment of awareness—that little hiccup of breath that freezes in your windpipe when you realize you really haven’t lived your worst moment yet. It was coming, and when it hit, oh Goddess, when it hit.

  The air moved the way it does in a heat haze. The pond rippled and bubbled as if a bait ball of fish swarmed beneath. And there was a smell that all the Weres raised their snouts to. They might not know the name, but I did.

  Freesias.

  White vapor came next. Not like fog, more like someone had dropped a dollop of whitewash into the air, just so our eyes could track its sluggish rotation. The patch of swirling air grew. Pure white started to pinken, then became ruddy, until the mist was the color of a dark plum.

  I thought, That’s not right. But I watched with fascinated eyes as little specks of white-gold light, like fireflies on a hot summer night, started to glint in the deep purple air. The sparkling bursts of light increased, mixing in with the swirling air, until the whole whirling, magenta mass changed its aspect one final time. In one big gulp, the dark seething vapor swallowed all the fireflies, and presto.

  Deep plum had become violet-pink.

  Now it’s right.

  The energy ebbed. The top curling point of the spinning vortex slowly sank into the mass circulating below. The bottom flattened, and started looking solid, resembling a fog-coated floor; one that was five feet above the water, and had no discernible support, but still—a floor. As I watched, the air made one last sluggish rotation, and stopped altogether. The mist stayed, but now it rolled and twisted upward in two soft-formed columns, flanking a curtain of lilac mist.

  “Bring it closer,” said Mannus.

  The melody Lou crooned changed from haunting to lullaby soft. The floating portal moved a few feet toward us, and as it did, that sensation ran over my skin again. Alive. I felt as if I’d only been half alive before, and just hadn’t known it. The magic fragrant air made my skin hum and my body ache to open to it with crooning pleasure. I found my head nodding to the music, my own hands lifting toward the warmth of the portal, unconsciously mimicking Lou’s. The slow glide of the portal stopped a couple feet north of the log that bisected the pond. It stayed there, hovering perhaps a yard above the surface.

  “Why won’t it come closer?” Mannus said.

  It’s the iron, I thought. It’s the iron in the water.

  Lou’s thread-thin voice trembled on the last note then fell quiet. Her hands hung limp. She stood, staring up at it with a look of joy that stripped years from her face.

  “Is that as close as you can get it?” Mannus stalked over to the water’s edge, near the felled log, and frowned up at it, hands on his hips. “We’ll have to use this to get to it.” He tested the trunk’s stability with his foot, then walked a couple of feet along its floating back before turning to his mate. “Come, Louise.” He gripped her hand and helped her along the spine of the felled pine.

  “So, it won’t go any lower,” Mannus mused, gazing up at the portal. He rocked into his back leg and then sprang to catch the floor’s mist-shrouded edge with his hands. His back muscles flexed under his shirt as he power-armed up. From there it was short work to swing a foot up. He slithered up on to the portal’s misty floor, and then rose to his feet carefully, as if he expected the ground to splinter beneath his weight. A moment to collect himself, and then he spun back to us with gleaming eyes. “Help her up here,” he told Stuart.

  Dawn flicked a censuring glance at the kid guarding me. “If she moves another inch, I’ll take off your arm.” The teen took my arm and tried to look fierce, but the hand wrapped around my elbow trembled faintly.

  “It’s been so long,” Lou said, once she was standing beside him, staring up at the gateway to Merenwyn. “All this time spent in the mortal world, slowly dying.”

  “You’ll be young and beautiful again. We both will. All you have to do is open the door,” Mannus said. “Say the word to open the gates.”

  Her thin lips opened and she said three words—sharp, concise, full of authority. I heard a beautiful sound, like tiny brass bells dancing in the wind, as the opaque shroud between the two realms lightened. Mannus put a hand to touch it, and she said sharply, “No! The demons that dwell in the world-in-between wait for an opportunity to slip through the gates. Do not offer them your hand.” With a frown, he shifted back and watched. His head bent as he tried to peer through the dissipating veil. It thinned until it was gone, and all that kept one world safe from the other was a round gate, its surface smooth and clear as window glass. Fog curled in a clockwise circle around its edge.

  Such Fae deception. Here on earth’s realm, the door to the portal was appealing and inviting, as nonthreatening as possible—hobbit-round, and charmingly wreathed by violet-pink smoke. Who’d think twice before stepping into it? Only someone who’d seen the passage from Threall would know it wasn’t an easy step between this world and that, but a vertical plume of white smoke that pierced a never-ending sky. Only a person who’d witnessed its false trails and its appetite for innocent souls would hesitate before putting a foot through that doorway.

  Merenwyn’s daylight spilled through the gate, and the things it touched on our side—my aunt, my enemy, even the dark pond—were warmed pink-gold by its glow.

  Incredibly tempting to the unwary. So close. One step through the gate, one short passage through the world-in-between, and the traveler would land on a strip of land, no more than ten feet wide, thick with natural grasses. A clump of them swayed in Merenwyn’s breeze at the edge of a steep drop. Down in the green valley, the Pool of Life glittered; its water so very blue the cloudless sky appeared faded. But beyond that was the true prize: layer upon layer of virgin forests, green and untouched, rising with the swells of Merenwyn’s hills all the way to the horizon.

  Mannus cast a triumphant glance at his collection of openmouthed Weres. “Pass me something. That branch over there,” he said. “Now, watch.” He turned the length of sumac in his hands, smiled for his audience, and eased its pointed end into the gate’s mouth. The stick trembled in his fist. With a magician’s flourish, he let go. The gate slurped it inward. Then the bells—no, not bells, wind chimes—tinkled in an unseen wind. Beyond the gate’s barrier was a tunnel of wicked updrafts, fierce enough to make the sumac dance in midair for a couple of beats before it shot upward out of sight. Far less spacious than I’d thought when I viewed its spiraling shape from Threall. In reality it was a narrow space, perhaps wide enough for four people, if they stood close and held hands as they were propelled toward the heavens. We waited. Two seconds passed, perhaps three, before the branch fell onto the grass in Merenwyn.

  “Prepare yourself for that. You’re going to feel like you’ve been sent to the moon on a rocket,” said Mannus with a grin. His good humor faded as he held up his hand. “As much fun as it looks, there’s a few things you need to know. Though it looks like it takes seconds, it feels more like an hour to get to Merenwyn. It will be dark in the chute, but you’ll have some light from her amulet’s glow. You may sense things in the shadows around you. Louise calls them demons, but there are no such things as demons. But you’ll hear voices, calling to you in that fairy-shit language. Don’t let them worm their way inside your head. Be strong. Hold on to my mate’s arm. Focus on landing in Merenwyn. All you got to do is stay tight, and wait it out.”

  I shivered.

  Mannus lifted his arms wide and stepped back closer to the gate. He didn’t cross. Instead, he played with its pull again, tipping his head back so that his long graying hair flew up behind him, and his shirt fluttered, pulled taut across the soft bump of his belly. “It will be a new world. A new start.” Mannus closed his eyes, and rolled his head on his neck, lu
xuriating in the sensation. “My mate and I will cross first. She’ll return for each one of you, and guide you in turn, while I wait for you in Merenwyn. Make sure you have your vial of iron shavings in your pocket. And remember, getting to the Fae realm is only the beginning of the plan. Keep your mouth shut when you land. We don’t need to advertise our presence until we’ve got the job done.”

  She’ll never come for them, I thought. And Mannus will have never been seen or heard from again.

  The Alpha reached for his mate.

  Lou recoiled. “What do you think will happen to me over there?”

  “You’ll be my Queen.” But his smile was quick and much too light.

  “Can you protect me?”

  “You can count on it,” he said easily. He gave her a wink.

  Stupid. Never taunt a Fae.

  She offered him her most dreadful smile in return, and then with a furious cry, shoved him into the gate’s mouth. Mannus staggered back, arms windmilling, but all his aerobics couldn’t stop his back foot from sliding into the gate’s throat, and once that happened, he was the fish and the gate the reel. “You Fae bitch, I’ll get you for this!” He leaned on his good leg, gritted his teeth and fought to free the other, but the gate’s suction was indifferent to his efforts. It pulled him deeper into its maw and he promptly lost his ass. “When I get out of here, I’m going to—”

  “Sy’ehella,” said Lou.

  If wind chimes sang when the gate opened, hell screamed as it closed. The first voice was young, broken, and plaintive. Another followed, sharp and harsh. Their numbers swelled—hundreds of voices, crying, screaming, speaking in a language that sent another shiver up my spine—combined into a horrifying cacophony of pleas and moans that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. Lost souls, caught and forever tormented in the passage’s walls.

  The gate’s misty edges started to thicken and creep inward, as the aperture pursed its lips on the struggling Were caught in its mouth.

  The kid’s grip on my arm became painful as he watched in horror. For his Alpha, there was no hope, because there was no solid door to grapple open; there was only a clouded circle of mist, inexorably tightening around him. It swallowed Mannus’s wrists. Devoured his shoulders. As its toothless gums settled on his neck, Mannus thrust out his chin. “You bunch of sniveling ingrates! After all I’ve sacrificed for you? May the moon never call to you again! May you stay cursed in your mortal—” A look of surprise crossed his face. His mouth gaped, eyes bulged, and then his head dropped to the floor, neatly severed, as the door to Merenwyn sealed and smothered the clamor of those terrible cries.