Black Swan Rising (18 page)

“
Despair and Discord?
Those were his exact words?”

“Yes.”

“I just want to look at something.” He took off down the street. This time I couldn’t begin to keep up with him. I found him standing in front of 121½ Cordelia Street, staring at the glass door with its faded gilt lettering.
Air & Mist,
it had read before, I was sure of it. But now other letters had appeared. A
d,
an
e,
and an
s
on the line above the word
air,
and a
d
above the word
mist
—only the
t
in
mist
had disappeared and part of the ampersand had rubbed off, leaving something that looked like a letter
d.
The letters
c o r
and
d
had appeared in the bottom line where you would expect the street address to be. I
knew
they hadn’t been there before because I hadn’t been able to see an address on the door. I looked at the whole door, sounding out the letters until they made sense.

“ ‘Despair,’ ” I read out loud. “ ‘Discord.’ ”

Oberon turned to me. “We’re too late. He’s summoned the demons already.”

“Will Hughes said that the box had to be opened for seven days to summon the demons,” I said as we walked back to Puck’s.

Oberon shook his head. “He’s managed to bring the demons into the world in an incorporeal form as a fog. They can still be banished if we close the box before seven days have passed, but in order for him to have done this much Dee must have grown even more powerful than any of us realized—or the box has grown more powerful during the years it remained closed. I told Marguerite at the time that you can’t seal up magic without some repercussions.”

“You knew the first Marguerite—?” I began to ask as Oberon opened the door to Puck’s, but he put a finger to his lips.

“Shh,” he said. “Puck is still a trifle jealous of Marguerite. Best not to bring her up.”

“It’s too late,” a voice came from the back of the shop. I looked for the baker, but the space behind the counter was empty. In fact, the whole tearoom was empty even though it was packed at exactly the same time yesterday. I wondered what thought had intruded itself into all those mothers’ heads to send them off somewhere other than their favorite hangout.

“Puck gave all the children a rash,” the baker said as she straightened up behind the counter holding a tray of pink petits fours in her hands. “Every pediatrician will be scratching his head. Literally. It doesn’t bother the children any, but it makes any adult within two feet itch.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

Fen shrugged. “It’s perfectly harmless and will go away by tomorrow. We’re lucky he didn’t give them nits. I haven’t seen him this upset for a while.”

“I hope it’s not because of me,” I said. “Oh, and by the way, thank—”

She held up both hands and Oberon whispered in my ear, “Brownies don’t like to be thanked. And whatever you do, never give one clothes.”

“So you’re a brownie?” I asked coming closer. Of all the revelations I’d heard in the last twelve hours, this one was the least surprising. I’d known there was something otherworldly about the baker the minute I’d seen her, and now I could clearly perceive that a warm butter-yellow glow—the color of buttercream frosting—filled the air around her. I could also see that beneath her corduroy tam her ears were pointed.

“A Manx brownie,” she said, “or rather, a fenodoree, as we’re called on the Isle of Man.”

“Garet has regards for you from a friend,” Oberon said, coming up beside me.

“I do?” I asked. “Oh . . . you mean Will Hughes. He did ask how you were doing.”

Fen turned as pink as the icing on the petits fours. “Oh, I can’t imagine why he’d ask after me,” she said, turning to punch down a lump of dough in a blue bowl. “Why it must be years since I saw him . . . decades . . .” She turned the dough out onto a floured board and began kneading it vigorously. “Centuries even.”

“When
exactly
did you see him last?” Oberon asked.

She looked up. Her round glasses flashed green from the reflection of the light blazing off Oberon. “Last week,” she answered meekly. “I happened to run into him at a lecture at the Ninety-second Street Y.”

“What was the lecture on?” Oberon asked.

“ ‘The Mysteries of Science,’ ” Fen recited, tilting her chin up defiantly as if remembering the exact name of the lecture proved the meeting with Will Hughes had been accidental. “ ‘Nanotechnology in the Twenty-first Century.’ ”

Oberon tilted his head and looked skeptically at her.

“The science lectures get the most men,” she added, now more defensive than defiant. “You try meeting a nice single man in New York! And I found it quite interesting. All those wee atoms remind me of the
ferrishyn
.”

“And Will Hughes frequents the Ninety-second Street Y?”

“He might have known I’d be there,” she said in a very low voice.

“How long have you been meeting him?”

A bell chimed in the back room before Fen had to answer. “That’s my sponge cake,” she said, scurrying through the doorway.

“Come on,” Oberon told me, lifting the counter up to pass behind it. “She’s gone to earth.”

“Gone to earth?” I repeated. “What—?” But he was already in the back room, a tiny space dominated by a huge cast-iron oven. A yellow sponge cake sat on a cooling rack, steam rising from it, but there was no sign of Fen. Oberon glanced around the diminutive kitchen—I half expected him to check the oven, but instead he moved a rush mat on the floor, uncovering a round wooden door with a bronze handle set into it. He lifted the door, revealing the top steps of a spiral staircase that twisted down into the gloom. “Come on,” he said.

“Down there?” I croaked, unable to disguise the fear in my voice as I looked down into the dark hole. In the last twenty-four hours I’d defended myself against a mythological beast and walked through a fairy-ridden park with a vampire, but there was no way I was going into a dark pit below the streets of New York City. Who knew what nightmares out of urban legend might be lurking down there—albino crocodiles, giant rat people, mutant cockroaches . . . the possibilities seemed endless. No, I’d had enough. It was time to put my foot down. “I’ll wait up here. It’s too dark down there for me.”

In answer he snapped his fingers and a small yellow-green flame appeared at the tip of his thumb. “Here,” he said, “you might as well begin your lessons. You work with fire every day, so it shouldn’t be so hard for you to conjure it. Hold your hand up . . . palm facing you.” He turned my hand around so that my palm was about five inches from my face. “Now, focus on your aura.”

I’d seen the silver glow around my hand earlier on the street, but that had been when I was thinking of Will Hughes. I found myself a little worried about what color my aura would be when I wasn’t thinking about him. I’d been through a lot lately. I’d blurted that concern about paying Maia to Roman in the hospital without any real concern for his condition, which was so unlike me—

“Focus!” Oberon’s booming voice crashed through what was sure to become yet another self-pity session. I stared at my hand, freeing my mind of everything but the task at hand: seeing my aura. After a few seconds I began to see a bluish white glow limning my hands. The glow came to a point at the end of each fingertip and trailed off into the air like streamers.

“I see it!”

“Good.” Oberon’s voice was warm with the lilt of the West Indian islands again, and I felt a warmth in the air that hadn’t been there a second ago. I wondered if he was deliberately using his voice to literally
heat things up
. “Now touch your thumb and middle finger together, concentrating on the heat your aura produces. When you can feel a spark, snap your fingers together.”

I snapped my fingers together. Nothing happened.

“Too soon,” he said. “You have to wait until you feel the spark.”

I tried again. This time I waited until I felt the spark—a tiny charge like static electricity—but when I snapped my fingers, the spark flew off into the air and sizzled to the ground.

“Hold your thumb straight up after you snap your fingers to keep the flame steady.”

I tried again. This time the spark traveled to my thumb and flared up into a tiny bluish white flame. The sight of my own
thumb on fire startled me so badly I shook my hand to make it go out.

Oberon groaned. “It’s your own life force burning,” he said as if lecturing a kindergartener. “It can’t hurt you. Now try it one more time.”

I stared at my hand, summoned my aura, placed thumb and middle finger together, waited for the spark, snapped my fingers, held my thumb upright . . . and the flame leapt out of my thumb and swayed there like a miniature hula-dancer. Oberon was right; it didn’t hurt.

“Good job,” he said.

I glanced away from the flame and grinned at him. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I almost wish I smoked so I could show it off.”

He shook his head and started down the steps with me following him, my fears abated by delight in my new powers . . . until Oberon gave me something else to worry about. “Just don’t try to do it if you’re menstruating. Women have a tendency to light themselves on fire at that time of the month.”

I started down the stairs after him, wondering how he had known it
wasn’t
that time of the month, but he was already issuing another warning. “Stay close to me and don’t go off into any of the side corridors.”

How many side corridors could there be in a Manhattan basement? I wondered as I followed him. But as we went farther and farther down the spiral stairs, I began to suspect that this wasn’t any ordinary Manhattan basement. For one thing, the walls were faced with a glittering pink quartz. When I held my thumb-flame up to the wall, I saw symbols and pictographs etched into the stone. There were carvings of figures—beautiful men and women riding on horseback through a landscape of
mountains and woods. There were scenes of people dancing around circles of standing stones and great bonfires. Winged creatures flew through the air—dragons and griffins and, I noticed with a shudder, manticores. Dragons also crouched inside caves deep inside mountains where small, wizened creatures mined gems and minerals. These pictures were adorned with actual gems: diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds that glittered in the light from my hand. I’d taken enough gemology in college to know they were real, but I couldn’t begin to estimate the monetary value of such a hoard.

The largest stones of all were four gemstones, a sapphire, an emerald, a ruby, and a topaz, each carved into the shape of an eye, each set on top of a tower.

“Come on,” Oberon called from a few steps below me. “We don’t want to leave Puck and Fen alone too long—” He stopped when he saw how closely I was looking at the wall and climbed back up to where I stood.

“Are these the watchtowers?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes on me, not the pictures. “They were built to defend humanity against the dark forces. Each one was given a guardian, one of the fey who dedicated her life to guarding the tower.”

“What happened to them?”

“There was a war. The towers were destroyed . . . one of the guardians was killed—”

“I thought you guys were immortal.”

Oberon shook his head. “We don’t age, but we can be killed in a few specific ways and sometimes we . . .
diminish
.” He uttered the last word with such a dire intonation that I didn’t dare ask him to elaborate. Instead I asked him what had happened to the other three guardians.

“One went into hiding, one chose to become human—that was your ancestor, Marguerite.”

“And the fourth?”

“We don’t speak of her,” he said, turning to go down the stairs. “She joined the other side. And for that she was consigned to the deepest pit of hell.”

Just when I was beginning to be afraid that
we
were descending into the deepest pit of hell, we came to a round room at the bottom of the staircase. Four narrow corridors branched off from the circle. I couldn’t see that they were marked in any way, but Oberon didn’t hesitate before setting off down one. As he went, he touched the flame on his hand to sconces along the wall that instantly flared up, lighting the arched corridor. I tried to guess what direction we were heading in, but going around and around in that spiral staircase had completely turned me around. At any rate, it was hard to imagine that we were still below the streets of Manhattan at all—that subway trains ran over our heads, that people were going to work, eating lunch, working out at gyms, walking their dogs, putting cranky toddlers down for their naps up there in the “real” world. That felt like an illusion. This felt real—the solid stone walls, the arched ceiling . . . I looked closer at the ceiling. It was paved in a herringbone pattern of ceramic tiles that looked familiar.

“Hey,” I called to Oberon’s retreating back, “this ceiling looks like the one in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, and like the dome at St. John the Divine.”

“That’s because they were made by the same person—Rafael Guastavino,” Oberon answered without turning around. “He was brought down here in the 1890s. We’d always had trouble with leaks before.”

“Really? You mean a mere mortal was able to do a better job than a bunch of immortal fairies?”