by Mel Sterling
After a minute, Tess broke the spell. "More toast?"
"Yes, please." Milk and bread. If the fae knew about the ridiculous amounts of milk and bread humans kept in their houses, there would be more raids for food than raids for changelings. Only the fact that Thomas rarely had human money stopped him from eating nothing else. It took a long time to find enough dropped coins to buy a carton of milk, not to mention bread to go with it. Add to that the summer in a jar that was strawberry jam, and Thomas could have eaten until he was well past stuffed and died happy. He sat at the table again and watched Tess moving from little machine to little machine, warming the bread and covering it with deliciousness.
When the toast was ready, she sat down. "We should talk about the thing that was chasing us last night."
"Which thing?" he asked, though he knew she meant Hunter. He wanted to know a little more about what she had seen. Hunter's glamour had been fraying considerably, up in the darkness beneath the Burnside Bridge, surrounded by so much iron. He didn't think she'd used the stone to see, but he couldn't be sure.
"The one hiding up in the bridge, the one we ran from. It had red eyes, and it looked like Batman. Er, something in a black cloak. You called it Hunter."
"He's the Queen's huntsman. He leads the sluagh—legends call it the wild hunt—and tracks down her enemies or brings her meat."
Tess swallowed hard and put her toast down. "Brings her...meat?"
"The fae don't really live on dewdrops and nectar. You need to stop thinking fairies are sweet and kind and scatter pixie dust to give humans pleasant dreams. They're harsh things who find humans convenient toys or tools."
"But this...Hunter...was looking for you. Us."
"Yes. And I'm not sure why."
Her brows furrowed. "Does the queen want to eat you?"
Thomas shrugged, shaking his head. "I doubt it. I'm not convinced she sent him last night. I think he was working alone, on his own agenda. He didn't have the rest of his host with him, the solitary fae who serve him in return for scraps or a chance to work their nasty magics."
"He had a few bogles with him, you said—the ones I..." She bit her lip.
"Lookouts. They were watching your car, waiting for you to turn up again. Someone at the market knows what you drive and told a tale."
Her expression grew darker still. "That boy. The horse one."
"That's my guess." He finished off the toast and gulped the last of his milk. "Come with me a moment. I need to show you something." He rose, letting the human glamour shred away like shadow. It would be easier to convince her what had to be done if he didn't look so ordinary and human to her eyes. He held out his big trow hand, pleased and a bit surprised when Tess took it and followed him into the living room.
"Where did you get all these things?" Thomas gestured to the curio cabinet in the corner.
"Oh, here and there. Walks on the beach, hiking in Forest Park—" Thomas knew she saw him cringe, but did not comment upon it. Time enough later to drop the bomb she was living virtually atop the largest fairy mound in the world, if he ever needed to do that. Tess was reckless enough that she might take it into her head to visit the Queen on her own, if she knew that Forest Park was the Queen's home. "Some of them I found at the Saturday Market. Those are the really interesting ones. Like this one—" she reached for the thistle made of wood and bronze, but Thomas caught her hand before she could touch it.
"Yes, those are the ones I mean. I've been looking for those things for weeks. The Queen tasked me with finding them, and here they are."
"What?" She shook her head in confusion. "No, I found them—"
"Yes, you did. Now I want you to look at them through your stone."
Tess leaned backward warily, and her fingers went to the gray rock still on its thong around her neck. He was foolishly relieved she hadn't yet taken it off, even though it would almost certainly mean more trouble. It might yet save her, and it meant she believed him and his preposterous stories.
She lifted it to her right eye. He knew from her indrawn breath that she could see the glimmers of magic chasing over the surfaces of the items. She lowered the stone again, clutching it tightly as if it were a talisman.
"You see they're not just things. They're of the fae."
"What were they doing at Saturday Market? If I'd known, I wouldn't have taken them, but they seemed so interesting, and they...Thomas, it's almost like they called to me; something about them seemed familiar, though I can't imagine why. I'd find one every few weeks or so, and there was never anyone around who knew anything about them. So I'd just bring them home, and put them on the shelf. And now they're...they're in my house." She turned to stare at him in dread and confusion.
"The Queen put them there, and she's angry, very angry, that they've gone missing."
"Then why put them where they could be found in the first place? It doesn't make sense."
Thomas shook his head. "None of us know why our Queen does the things she does, but she's been the Queen for centuries. She must be doing something right."
"She sounds like a bloodthirsty old bitch to me." Tess gestured to his trow-form. "Look what she did to you."
"With the fae, nothing is only as it seems. No bad is unmixed with good. I may be smelly and ugly, but I've been alive and young for almost two hundred years."
"You really don't smell that bad." Tess put a comforting hand on his arm. "Just...a lot like a steakhouse. Sirloin, with mushroom gravy."
At his toothy grin, she took a step back, and he laughed. "But not quite good enough to eat, eh? And still ugly." Then he grew serious. "Listen. Today, since I can't go home until dark, I'm going to see if I can find out what's really going on. Hunter has something in mind, but it's not clear. If I can't get the truth out of him, I'll go to the Queen. This has to stop before you get hurt."
"Thomas, no—" Out came her hand again, that soft, tender hand. Other human women, when confronted by his trow-form, had fainted, or looked away in disbelief, or fled in fear. Tess had managed to absorb his reality and still find him likable.
He would do almost anything to keep her kind regard. He craved her touch, her sweetness, her smile. He wanted more than that, but while she might find him a likable trow, she doubtless no longer thought of him as relationship material.
"I'll be all right."
"You don't know that."
"I have to be all right, because I'm coming back here so we can get these things out of your house, since you're too stubborn to leave town."
"Thomas—" This time she did put her hand on his arm, bare inches from the Queen's wretched slave band, then moved so the palm was cupped gently over his heart. "Please be careful. Or—I know, let me come with you! We'll take the Jeep, I want to get out and put fuel in it anyway, and—"
Thomas could not stop himself from pulling her into his arms. He tucked her head under his chin. "Listen to me. This is important." He turned them so they were facing the curio cabinet. "If I don't come back tonight, then tomorrow morning you must take everything in this cabinet and put it in a sack. It would be best if you didn't touch the things with your bare hands. The Queen would know if a fae touched these things. I don't think she can sense when a human does or she'd have come for them by now, but better to be safe."
Tess leaned back in the circle of his arms and stared up at him in horror. "You want me to give them back to her?"
Thomas shook his head. "I want you to take them somewhere near Underbridge and leave them. Do it in daylight, as sunny as possible. She wants them put back. Very well, we'll put them back. It's the only way I know to keep you safe, and maybe keep my head."
"We'll give them back now, then! It's simple. I'll get a bag and some gloves."
Thomas tightened his arms when she would have rushed away. "Not yet. There's still too much I don't know. I can't be certain that returning her things will solve our problems. There's still Hunter to consider. But I'll know, one way or the other, by dawn, and if I can, I'll come back here."
"What if you don't come back? Where can I...where will I find you? I suppose I could try to get to your place in the bridge..."
It was enough to melt his heart, that look of hers. If he hadn't been more than halfway in love with her already, her words would have done the trick. As it was, they were like a knife to his breast, plunging deep, gouging out a place in his soul where the image of her would lodge forever, brown-eyed and so sincere.
"You won't find me," he whispered, knowing that neither the Queen nor Hunter would allow him to walk away if he put a foot wrong. "Just remember to do what I said. Take these things out of here, and afterward, keep away from Underbridge."
Her lip quivered for a moment, then her chin firmed and lifted. "I'll remember, but you make sure you come back, Thomas!"
Thomas made certain Tess didn't see him climb the fairy mound. When he left her on the porch in the cloudy morning light, he walked down the street, hunched and hooded in his oilskin, until he heard her close the front door. Then, masked by an overgrown laurel hedge, he slipped between two houses, hopped a fence, and scrambled up the steep slope onto the mound. The ubiquitous ivy, the Queen's clever warning system, twined up his legs beneath his trousers, wrapping around his ankles and calves above his boots, catching him, tasting his skin with its hairy feet. After that taste, the ivy knew him for fae and did not obstruct him further as he slogged uphill and headed northwest parallel to the spine of the mound.
Entrances to the mound were few and far between, and well guarded, not only by the ivy, but by trolls. This time of day the trolls would be rigid and stony, immovable as glacial boulders, without the great strength his trow-form gave him. Even with that aid, he'd have to struggle. In the process, the Queen and the countless denizens of the mound would be alerted. Relatively few of the fae chose to live outside the mound the way he, and some of the market regulars, did. Most preferred the company of other fae, and the concentration of iron in the human areas was off-putting, when it didn't cause actual illness among the more sensitive.
He paused to think once he was within the shelter of the firs and big leaf maples. He chose a mossy, fallen log to sit on, apologizing when the roots stirred peevishly. He'd woken the thing, but he didn't move away. After a moment or two it settled again, leaving one wet, clay-streaked root where it could keep track of him. Around him he heard the hollow sounds of last night's rain and dew still dripping on the leaves and stones. Many of the deciduous trees in the park were bare, their bright autumn colors dimmed and muddy, the autumn rains and wind having torn loose their foliage. The few oaks he could see still held tight to their leaves, some brown, some red. The birches showed their gold, the female spirits inside the trees growing drowsier with each passing day. Soon, the lovely birch girls would dance their last dances, then root themselves deep and sleep until spring.
Thomas could feel the Eve approaching, only a day away. With Allantide, the barriers between the human world and the world of the fae would be at their weakest. This year, the moon would be a hunter's moon, full on that fateful night. It happened only a few times each century, and Thomas had learned to dread those nights for their extraordinary, bestial toll on the fae and humans alike.
Hunter would ride with his hounds, in full voice and full strength. Even the humans would be able to hear their strange, bloodthirsty cries. Some would go mad, some might throw off the shackles of convention and morality and join the Hunt, but most would lock their doors and toss in restless, blurred and dreadful dreams, waking sick and weary the next morning, with elf-locks knotting their hair.
Inside the mound, the fae who were not out with the Wild Hunt would hold an orgy of dancing and feasting and coupling. In decades past, when Thomas was still bedazzled by the Queen, joyously doing her twisted bidding, he had joined in the spectacle with relish, knowing the dawn would bring nothing but heartache and sickness, but unable to stop himself. Over the years as he realized what he was really doing for the Queen in between excesses of pleasure—killing and torturing so she wouldn't have to sully her bright, sharp claws—his soul seemed to shrivel. The more fae he became, the more he resented the decay of his human self.
A year came when he sat on the sidelines, glowering and sullen, while the dance went on around him. The Queen looked at him from the corners of her serpent eyes, and it was that night she brought a different young man to her couch of thistledown as dawn came, kissing his mouth and twining about him while Thomas looked on in astonishment, from a spot against the wall near the door. Thomas had killed the boy in a fit of jealous rage, afterward vomiting all the delicate fae viands across the Queen's perfect onyx floor while she smiled. The next year Thomas attended as usual, feigning abandon, but despising every whirling step, every sly and insinuating touch from fae hands. He fell on the Queen at dawn with fury and hatred, for the first time taking her in his trow body, and rejoicing when she struck him and cut his face with her claws. She spat and bit at him, but she climaxed all the same.
It was only later, when two strands of his slave band snapped and curled back on themselves, that he realized he'd done what she wanted, after all. Damn her. She knew him too well, for he was the creature she herself had made. She waited like a spider, patient and sticky-webbed, for the last of his human self to melt away, for him to become completely fae. Completely hers.
The year after that, he sealed the door of his trow-hold and spent the night thinking about how he would have liked to destroy the gear room while the bridge was up, to leave its spans forever apart. But the humans would only use other bridges and eventually repair the damage.
He'd never gone back to the mound at Allantide. The Queen didn't command him, and now Thomas knew she had taken other lovers, though she still occasionally bedded him. He had often wished she would kill him, but she only gave him new tasks, slowly whittling away at the bond of his servitude.
Ugly years.
Desperate years.
Now there was Tess.
The hope he felt was as bitter and sharp as the salt of her tears and the richness of her blood. As surely as she would be his ruin, she might be his salvation. There was always a choice, even if both alternatives were dire.
He rose from the log, belting his oilskin around him. He didn't let his thoughts linger on a third alternative that presented itself with monotonous frequency: handing over the thief to the Queen and washing his hands of the whole mess.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WITH THOMAS GONE, THE DUPLEX seemed too quiet and frighteningly empty. Tess jumped at the least sound—the refrigerator motor kicking on, the neighbor in the other half of the duplex starting his car in the driveway. She walked the rooms restlessly, worrying and fretting and pondering every strange explanation Thomas had given.
The treasures in the curio cabinet drew her back time and again. She examined them through the seeing stone, not touching them, watching the slow crawl of the purple magic—for what else could she call it, after last night?—over their surfaces. An hour before she was due at work, she called in sick. Likely they'd all roll their eyes and think she was taking Halloween off to party, but in truth she was exhausted from the disrupted night and the weary days preceding it, and she needed time to process. Sometimes it was hell being a psychologist, examining all her own motives in microscopic detail.
In the end, Tess huddled in a fat armchair in the living room with a mug of hot tea, staring at the cabinet, wondering what to do and just how much to believe. The trouble was, she'd been given the proof she demanded, and now it was hard to fit reality into the new paradigm. Everything made sense if she believed Thomas, the man who became something other from time to time, and who had wormed his strange way into her heart with nobility, earnestness and vulnerability.
Tess shook her head. She had to find some professional distance again. Get a grip on her feelings.
She woke two hours later from a dream of something dark and flapping, dimly seen, with red eyes, chasing her down the wet, leaf-strewn jogging trails of F
orest Park. The half-drunk tea, long cold, splashed down her leg onto the carpet, and made her curse. As she mopped up the mess, she sat back on her heels and stared at the curio cabinet, struck by a sudden thought.
Rory had taken one of the things—the little silver hazelnut. Had it been one of the fae objects?
What was more, after he'd taken the nut, he'd made a spectacular and unexpected recovery, and been released from Ridge Manor.
A wild series of questions raced through Tess's mind. What if the nut had been fae? What if its concealed power had healed Rory? What if another object could heal Aaron? What if she took the things to Aaron's house and one of them cured him?
The thought was too exciting to bear. She discounted the unreality of it; reality was fluid these days, and too many coincidences aligned for her not to try. Aaron's continual assertions he wasn't on drugs. The way the creatures in Underbridge indicated he belonged to their Queen. The strange, beautiful girl he had met in Waterfront Park. The way all his tests had turned up negative for drugs. His family unable to say what he might be on. Rory's sudden cure.
And, of course, Thomas.
Everything Thomas was changed her world.
Tess got to her feet, went upstairs to shower and change, and came back downstairs with a pair of winter gloves and an empty cloth grocery tote bag. She marched over to the curio cabinet, pulled on the gloves, yanked open the glass door, and froze, biting her lip. The what-if game began again.
What if Thomas was right, and the things did belong to his Queen? What if the Queen knew Tess had them? What if moving them caused real problems, or they made Aaron sick, or drew the attention of the creatures in Underbridge—or other creatures even worse, since Thomas insisted the fae were everywhere in Portland.
