Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1)

by Mel Sterling

  Heaven, for a little while, with her in his arms. As long as he could manage it, to make them both safe. It was only a matter of time before the Queen called for him. But in the meantime, heaven, in a darkened room in a human house on the edge of the fairy mound.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE MORNING LIGHT SEEMED GLOOMIER than usual, even for the rainy days before Halloween. The front of Tess's body was chilled, but her back was furnace-warm, as was a stripe across her belly. She blinked and groped with her feet to find the blankets and pull them up, but the hard sole of her boot knocked against her shin. She must have fallen asleep with her clothes on. She smelled something meaty and warm, and very masculine, giving a vague impression of stew and childhood comfort foods.

  Tess opened her eyes slowly. The warmth across her belly came from a bulky arm and a rawboned hand with large, scraped knuckles. It held her prisoner on the bed.

  A trow hand. She remembered everything in a rush of renewed terror. She shuddered, turning to look over her shoulder, and found trow-Thomas huddled against her back, the long line of his big body warming hers from behind. His eyes were closed, and after the first few seconds her heart rate settled. Taken all together, his features formed an unappealing whole. A nose like a turnip. Eyebrows that would have shamed the woolliest of caterpillars. A forehead that was flat and broad, above high, blunt cheekbones. A mouth slack with sleep, fleshy and red, betokening a hunger for foods Tess would rather not think about. A chin like a bulldog's, but startlingly hairless, with roughened, pebbly skin. And that sparse stripe of hair down the middle of his head.

  In the midst of that, Thomas's all-too-human eyes, too small for the scale of his trow face, dark-lashed and closed in sleep. They gave him a piggish look, set as they were near the snout-like nose. He was the source of the comforting scent, too. What a collection of incongruities, as though he had been constructed of spare parts.

  She grabbed his hand to move his arm and escape him, and suddenly Thomas was fully awake and aware. There was the barest instant when Tess knew he would not let her go. She could sense a vast hunger and need within him—and then he was rolling away from her, the trow-form fading as he moved. Tess got to her feet, feeling safer with the bed between them.

  "I guess we fell asleep." His voice was somewhere between trow and human, rough and deep, and strangely attractive. He looked up at the window, where a wedge of gray light seeped past the edge of the blind. "Is that the sun?"

  "It's nearly seven thirty," Tess replied, pretending everything was normal; just a human girl accustomed to waking up with supernatural creatures in her bed.

  Thomas pulled his hand over his face. "Morning."

  "Ye-e-s..." She watched, fascinated, as the stripe of hair down his head and his neck—does it go all the way down his spine? I wonder how muscular his back is—seemed to vanish beneath the skin while Thomas's close-cropped haircut reappeared. In moments he was just a man in ill-fitting clothes sitting on the other side of the bed, flexing his hands and looking at their raw palms.

  He turned to look at her. The last of the turnip nose had vanished, and there was only Thomas's bruised face. Even the bruises were fading, but his skin still showed enough mottling to remind her of an exhausted prize-fighter. With his shift in form, the odor diminished as well. "Dawn means I can't go home. I'm trapped."

  Tess blinked. "What?"

  "Trow-holds seal shut when sunlight strikes them. I can't go home until dusk."

  "What are you now, a vampire or something?"

  "Vampires aren't real." He groped at his upper left arm, frowning.

  Tess snorted. "But trolls—excuse me, trows—and bogles and redcaps are?"

  "Mock away. Deny the evidence of your own eyes." He kept prodding at his arm, and finally Tess gestured at it.

  "Are you all right?"

  Thomas shrugged. "Just wondering why she hasn't summoned me, is all. I would have thought..."

  "She?"

  "The Queen of the Unseelie court."

  "Queen of the Unseelie—" Tess stopped herself, shaking her head. "I need coffee." She stumped away down the stairs, half surprised Thomas didn't follow, though he did call after her.

  "Leave the blinds closed."

  In the shuttered kitchen, she put bread in the toaster and ground beans for coffee. Upstairs she heard water running, and then the shower. In spite of herself, she smiled. She could use a shower herself. She was grungy after the frightening evening and sleeping in her clothes. The perverse and capricious imp that lived in her brain suggested Thomas might not be averse to her joining him in the shower, but the part of Tess that was still struggling with her new reality pointed out that what was in the shower was not exactly human.

  By the time the toast popped up, the shower had stopped. And only a few seconds after she had smeared the toast with butter and strawberry jam, Thomas appeared in the doorway, with his oilskin over his arm. The coffee maker gurgled its last, and she filled a mug, adding a little milk. She looked a question at Thomas, who was staring at the quart of milk.

  "Oh, yes, please," he said, reaching, but not for the coffee. He took the milk jug from her hand and tipped it up, drinking straight from the spout. Swallow after swallow went down, and in a few seconds the quart was empty. When he noticed her open-mouthed stare, he looked sheepish, and coughed a little. "The...uh, the fae like milk. A lot. Warmed, if possible."

  "No wonder you like your lattes with only one shot of espresso in twenty ounces of milk. I thought caffeine bothered you." She opened the fridge, brought out another carton of milk, and filled a large mug, which she put into the microwave to heat. She gestured him toward the table shared by both dining room and kitchen, and put the toast in front of him. He laid the oilskin over the back of a chair, sat down, and set to with gusto. Tess realized she'd better make more toast, as well. While the microwave and toaster worked, she leaned against the counter and said meditatively, "So I'm making breakfast for a trow."

  "Wasn't that on your list for someday?" Thomas asked, with a tentative smile. "Now you can mark it complete."

  Tess buttered the next round of toast and put in two more slices. She brought her breakfast to the table and sat down. "I think we have a lot to talk about, don't we, Thomas?" She fingered the stone, still on its thong around her neck.

  "You still need to be convinced the fae exist?"

  "Nnnnooo, but...why do you keep insisting they're after us? We've just...um, spent the whole night together, and nothing came to break down the door."

  "I don't think they were able to track us last night, and now that the sun's up, they'll be slowed even more. They can do a lot more in Portland after dark."

  "But you were expecting someone—the Queen? to call you. Or something. What was it you said?"

  "Summon." He wolfed down the last bite of toast and looked longingly toward her own plate.

  "I'm making more, if you can just be patient. Summon you how?"

  "She has a way of calling me. I don't know why she hasn't, that's what I don't understand."

  "You know her."

  "We all do."

  "You say 'we' like you're one of the fae, yet you told me you're not like them. Which is it?"

  Thomas pushed away from the table, scowling. He prowled to the window above the sink and lifted the corner of the blind to peer out. "It's hard to explain."

  "Try. If you want me to believe you, you have to try." The toast popped up, and as she was buttering it, the microwave beeped. She gestured for Thomas to get the milk. He opened the microwave tentatively, as if it might bite him, and reached inside. He sat down again and bent over the mug to luxuriate in the scent of the hot milk. Now that she was seeing his behavior through new eyes—the eyes that knew he was something other than human—she found it odd, instead of curious or charming. All the little mismatches of conversation and action were starting to fall into place. No phone, no car. He didn't want her seeing his home. His insistence on walking around Underbridge, rather than through it
. Wanting the windows in the Jeep rolled down. Sudden appearances and disappearances.

  She put the toast in front of him and passed him the jam. "Tell me about your Queen, then. Start there."

  His cheekbones flared bright red as he spooned large dollops of jam on the toast and spread it thickly. "She's...she's beautiful. Terrible. Fascinating. Horrible. Wonderful. Murderous. She was long ago one of the Tylwyth Teg, a bright spirit, but something changed and she became a solitary fae, and then Queen of the Unseelie court. She took it away from him who was king before her and moved her court from Britain to Portland."

  "They crossed the ocean? Those creatures?"

  "She enslaved the kelpies. They brought the court over the seas upon their backs with the mer-folk and selkies. She's unimaginably powerful."

  "Kelpies."

  "Like that young man—you remember, the one who said his claim upon you was prior to mine. Selkies are sea-creatures—gentler than kelpies."

  Tess froze in mid-sip, remembering the fearsome angular grace and foulness of the young man who had sought to take her seeing stone from her the night before. Her finger went to the spot on her throat, hardly more than a scratch this morning, where Thomas had drawn her blood.

  His eyes met hers and held them. "You believe me when I say you must never be alone with him or any of his kind again, don't you? They are seducers, but what they kiss, they devour. Some of the young women found drowned in the Willamette are their victims. Your police don't mention how the girls are missing their livers when the bodies come ashore, or how sometimes—"

  Tess let out a cry and shot up from the table. "But fairies are beautiful, tiny, magical things...imaginary things..."

  "Not these." When Thomas took a toothy bite of the toast, spread with the fleshy, blood-red bits of strawberries, Tess felt her gorge rising and hurried to lean over the sink, afraid her breakfast would make a reappearance.

  After a moment her stomach calmed and she turned, clutching the edge of the sink. "How will I know them? They look like people! I can't go around staring at everybody through a rock and screaming when one of them turns out to be a waterlogged pony! I'll be locked up as a danger to myself and others!"

  "They always give themselves away. For one thing, they're always male. Look for water—tears in the eyes, a damp spot on his shirt, sweat standing on his skin even on a cool day. The smell of waterweed. The way they won't let you look away from their eyes. The way they always want you to walk away with them to someplace less crowded."

  She couldn't control the quiver in her voice. "You do the same things. Sometimes when you talk, I can hardly look away. You're always wanting me to go with you, and I do..."

  Thomas raked his hands through his hair. "And I haven't even sniffed at your liver, have I? Come on. I'm a trow, not a kelpie."

  "What does that mean? What, really? You'll eat me next week instead of right now? God, listen to me. I hardly know what I'm saying."

  He sighed heavily and put his palms flat on the table, long fingers spread apart. "I won't eat you at all. Look. I'm half human. The Queen met me years ago, and I became her lover, and she...changed me. Began to make me one of the fae. I've fought it ever since, but it's hard and getting harder, and there may come a time when I can't be human any longer. I want out, but I don't know how to get out. All I know is when I'm with you, I'm more human than I've been for years, and I'm holding onto that as hard as I can."

  His hands turned palm-up of their own accord, and on the raw pink skin she saw the clear impressions of the rows of rusty bolts and rivets of the Burnside Bridge girders, scalded there like cattle brands. "Will you help me? I shouldn't ask you, but I—"

  "Oh, your poor hands." The words came out in a rush as she crossed the kitchen and reached for his right hand, then pulled back, afraid she would hurt him. Half-remembered stories from childhood began to surface. The fairies didn't like iron, or horseshoes, or inside-out clothing. Couldn't cross running water. Had to be gone by cockcrow. Kept pots of gold at the feet of rainbows. Made shoes at night for true and worthy shoemakers.

  Thomas let her touch the welts gently, his fingers twitching when she brushed over tender spots. "They'll heal, you know. They always do."

  "Why do you live in the bridge, if you have to hurt yourself to live there?"

  "Because it hurts the rest of the fae even more. When I'm my human self, the iron doesn't burn me as much. But last night I had to cross the girders as a trow, and so you see." He shrugged. "I like my privacy."

  "Let me get something for that." She went up the stairs to her bathroom, where she had some first-aid spray. She needed a moment to and reconcile her conflicting emotions. Thoughts roiled in her head. Thomas—who she was coming to care for more than she wanted to admit—brought far too strange a world with him. She wanted to go back to the time before the trip to the beach, when he was still an ordinary man who could kiss like the best prince in the best dream ever.

  And yet...she could not deny her own excitement at perhaps finding an explanation for her clients, no matter how bizarre...

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WHILE TESS WAS UPSTAIRS, THOMAS made a circuit of the downstairs rooms, checking door locks and window blinds, peering outside, and seeing nothing to alarm him beyond the wet green and autumn colors of Forest Park. Was it possible they'd really got away clean, at least until the Queen decided to call him? When he'd crawled under the Jeep looking for tendrils of Hunter's snares, he'd been hopeful, but uncertain, that he'd found it all. The smallest bit would eventually call the powerful Hunter to it. Had none of the market fae gone to the Queen? Was Hunter's binding and masking influence that great? For certainly it had been Hunter seeking Thomas—and perhaps Tess—last night. Hunter, back from the snapped ley line in the Coast Range and prowling Underbridge without most of his rabid entourage.

  So many questions. Not even Sharpwit, with her contacts in the market and elsewhere, could have answered them. In the gray morning light filtered by the living room blinds, his eye was drawn to a dim purple gleam in the corner closest to the outside wall. He approached, curious, detecting a glamour-like shimmer with a sinking of his stomach.

  That shade of purple, like the dark throats of irises and violets and shadows cast by moonlight, belonged to only one fae that he knew of: the Queen. He should have noticed it the night before as he secured Tess's home. There were a number of small items on the shelf in the corner, but most of them were ordinary. Bird feathers, curiously shaped stones, seashells, glass insulators from utility poles, skeleton keys. And mixed in with these were other, stranger objects more like the glass thimble Tess had discovered a few nights ago.

  I find the oddest, most interesting things down here.

  His heart jumped like a fish on a hook. Though he had suspected for days, now he'd confirmed the identity of the Queen's thief, unwitting though Tess was. He groaned, rubbing both raw hands over his face. "Oh, T—" He managed to stop himself before her truename tumbled out of his mouth, there where the Queen's things were waiting. She knew when he'd touched one near Underbridge. For all he knew, she could even hear what was said near them.

  All he had to do was sweep them into a sack and return them to the Queen without revealing where he'd found them. Not only would the Queen sever more of the strands on his armband, but Tess could be free.

  Except he didn't really believe that this time the Queen would let him get away with a vague explanation. She would want blood. She was never so angry as when she had been thwarted in little things. War, the Queen could handle. Simple frustration made her cruel and petty and committed to revenge.

  Tess? Or his armband and slavery? What to choose?

  While he debated, torn, he looked around for something to put the objects in and something to shield his skin so the Queen wouldn't be alerted the instant he touched them. Maybe he could simply scatter them at the market and let some other fae find them. Then he gritted his teeth. He'd only be consigning other fae to his own fate, or worse. It wouldn
't matter to him if some of the nastier fae found the things, for they deserved the fates they earned, but what if it were a harmless, heedless hob or two, or worse, someone he actually cared a bit for, like Sharpwit?

  But he still didn't understand why the items were so important to the Queen. That part of the equation had never made sense. He had too many unanswered questions, and his current situation made finding answers exceedingly difficult. Hunter was involved here, in some subversive, underhanded way Thomas didn't yet understand.

  He clenched his fists against the temptation to gather up all the things and run. The objects had been safe enough here for a long time, even so close to the fairy mound. Surely another few hours, while he organized his thoughts or even paid a visit to Forest Park, wouldn't matter.

  "Thomas?" Tess called, from the kitchen. "Come in here, where there's better light. This spray should take the sting out of your hands."

  Thomas did as she bade him, standing next to her at the sink while she first gently washed his hands under warm running water and dried them on a fresh kitchen towel, then spritzed medicine on his palms until the burning stopped.

  "There's still rust imbedded in the skin," she fretted. "I don't want to rub it too hard or the blisters might burst."

  "It's much better. Thank you." He looked down at her bent head and careful, tender fingers holding his hands. When she looked up, it was as if she had her own form of Hunter's magical snare. Her dark eyes, so wide-set and hopeful. Her peony mouth, inviting a kiss, whether she knew it or not. Their gazes held for a long moment, then she smiled. Thomas couldn't quite return a genuine smile through his worry, but he felt his mouth quirk a little, and that seemed to satisfy her.