Except the Queen (27 page)

“Shhh.” Sparrow hushed the agitated dog. “It’s only the dorks downstairs. Let it go, Lily. They’ll pass out soon.”

Lily’s disapproving growls quieted to a soft rumble, but her head remained lifted, ears erect, snout turned toward the door.

Sparrow scratched her left forearm aimlessly. Lately, it seemed that Alex and Nick had become more outrageous than usual, and their choice in girlfriends had gone from bimbo to beastly. The last pair had been wrong on so many levels, their lips too red, their translucent skin greenish beneath the porch light, eyes too large and wet, peering out beneath a fringe of stringy hair. “Damn tweakers,” Sparrow snorted and wondered when the boys had become so desperate.

The itch on her left arm began to burn the longer she
scratched it. Curious, Sparrow raised her arm to the moonlight, wondering if she had unknowingly cut herself, or picked up some sort of allergic reaction to a bug bite. The silvery moonlight fell in a broken pattern on her arm, revealing a curved shadow on her skin that seemed to be the source of her pain. She switched from itching to rubbing, hoping to lessen the fiery irritation on her arm. But she was much too tired to turn on a light and investigate more thoroughly. She’d figure it out in the morning. Reaching down, she stroked Lily’s ears, the velvety touch of fur comforting.

Lily stopped growling and licked Sparrow’s fingers.
I am here
, the gesture said.

Sparrow smiled, closed her eyes, and curled into a ball, dropping effortlessly back into sleep. And dreams.

In the dream, she lay curled in a fern bed, her back against the warm, rough hide of the deer nestled beside her. She tasted again the wild berries that had stained her lips and felt her hands close around the gathered acorns in her pockets. Surrendering to the sensations, Sparrow instinctively understood this to be a healing dream, a dream of the forest that surfaced whenever she felt threatened. Her arm prickled and she frowned.
Why do I feel threatened?

Mist angled through the trees, chasing away nesting birds in the branches above. They rose in a clamor of cries and pounding wings. Then the mist reached below the boughs and brushed the shrubs and grasses with icy hands. Delicate ferns bowed, heavy with pearly drops that slowly hardened into frost. Whimpering, Sparrow clenched into a ball, knees to nose. The deer were gone and she shivered as a clammy breeze cupped her face. The scar on her thigh ached. Her lashes were crusted with rime and she could not open her eyes.

Groaning as a wave of tiny stings pierced the skin of her forearm, she was all ice and fire; her face cold as though washed in snow, but her arm throbbing with a scalding burn. Tears brimmed beneath her closed lids as she rubbed her arm, trying to soothe the flaming skin.

Distantly, Sparrow heard Lily’s barking and she struggled to rouse herself. Suddenly, she became aware of a second, more demanding voice.

“Wake up! Sparrow, wake up for godsakes! Lily’s going fucking crazy!” Marti shouted at her. “Sparrow, wake up!”

The dream dissolved like shredding storm clouds, but the pain continued to blaze on her arm. Sparrow blinked rapidly and opened her eyes wide to the muted gray of early dawn.

“Quiet, Lily,” she mumbled. “Quiet, girl. It’s all good.” She ran a hand down Lily’s neck and shoulders, smoothing down the stiffened hackles on the dog’s spine.

“No it’s not,” Marti said, standing at the open door of Sparrow’s room. “I thought you were dead and Lily was scaring the hell out of me. She’s been barking like that for about an hour and wouldn’t let me near you. What’s the matter with you? Couldn’t you hear it? Are you drunk
again
? Or stoned?”

Sparrow wrenched herself upright on her elbows. “Neither,” she answered thickly, her tongue tasting of bile. A wave of nausea rolled up from her stomach to her throat. “Getting sick, I think.” She glanced over at Marti hovering at the open door. Her robe was pulled tightly around her body like armor, her arms crossed over her breasts. She was trembling, and Sparrow realized how scared she was, and how angry.

“For fuck’s sake, Sparrow,” Marti said, and drew a shaky hand across her face. “I can’t take this anymore. I don’t want to move, but between you howling at the moon, or getting dead drunk, and now that dog turning Cujo on me, I’ve had it. Some of us get up early to go to work.” Turning brusquely from the door, she stormed off down the hallway. Then she slammed her bedroom door. Sparrow could hear the low, pissed-off rumble of a male voice. Mitch. He was here, too, to witness Sparrow’s complete humiliation.

“Shit!” Sparrow sat up, dazed and chilled from the fading remnants of her nightmare. Gazing down at her
arm, she gave a hoarse cry, for circling her arm—elbow to wrist—was an elaborate tattoo of a snake, its fangs buried in the swollen veins of her wrists. She brushed her fingertips over the black lines. The rows of snake scales shuddered and the muscular coils seemed to tighten their grip on her arm. From its diamond-shaped head, the crimson snake eyes glared up at her. Sparrow gasped as a charge of venom penetrated her veins with fire and then spread a cold numbness across her palm. The skin of her fingers suddenly bleached white.

Sparrow stared, transfixed by the slow undulations of the snake’s body, at the fangs digging deeper into her flesh. A splash of new sunlight spilled across the bed, the warming rays falling over her outstretched arm. As it illuminated the tattooed snake, the skin glowed and then faded. Pale scales covered, then concealed the baleful red eyes. Quiet in the dawn’s light, the snake settled against her skin and, mercifully, warmed her chilled hand. She wriggled her fingers and the flesh turned pink again.

In the healing sunlight, Sparrow swallowed her fear and studied the lines of the tattoo.
Hawk. It had to be Hawk
. What a fool she’d been to challenge him in his own shop. She had underestimated the extent of his power. And now he was letting her know that he was coming for her.

Exhausted, Sparrow lay back on the bed, drew her knees to her chest, and pulled the sheets tightly over her head, breathing heavily into the musty folds of the fabric, rank with the odor of her sweat. Fear-washed blood churned through her limbs, but when it throbbed against the puckered scar on her thigh, she whispered, “Enough!”

Fear and Hurt
. She’d hauled those twin bastards all her life until the one day she fought back. True, she had to flee to save her life. There was no other choice back then.
But the real question is how much longer am I going to keep running?
She uncurled her body and forced her legs over the side of the bed.

“So—what do you want to do about this?” she asked
aloud. She stood abruptly, as though to defy the sudden weakness in her limbs and the terror in her heart.
Fight back
, she wanted to proclaim, but before the words could reach her tongue, she doubled over and vomited into a wastepaper basket by her bed.

Lily scampered out of the room, her ears flat against her head at the sounds of Sparrow’s retching.

*   *   *

S
PARROW LAY BACK ONCE MORE
in bed, waiting. She could hear Marti and Mitch arguing as they got ready to leave for work, banging kitchen cupboards, stomping around the apartment as though to pay Sparrow back for Lily’s barking into the wee hours. Then with a jangle of keys, the slam of the front door, they were gone. Sparrow heaved a sigh of relief as the apartment settled into a calm quiet. She was halfway to the bathroom for an aspirin when she heard the keys in the lock and Marti burst into the living room.

“Those little punks have skipped out,” Marti announced. “Nick and Alex. They’re gone and the place is a disaster.”

“Shit!” Sparrow groaned. Rents were due soon, and Baba Yaga wasn’t going to like it that they would be short. “How bad?”

“Really bad. Looks they trashed it just to be assholes.”

“Crap.” Sparrow squeezed her eyes shut against the throbbing pain of a headache. Her throat was scratchy and dry from heaving.

“But I have an idea,” Marti said, speaking rapidly. “Mitch and I will clean it up and in return, maybe you could put in a good word to the rental agency so that Mitch and I could move down there.”

Sparrow opened her eyes.

“Look,” Marti was saying, “I know I was a bitch this morning—and I’m sorry for that—but really, I think it’s time Mitch and I found our own place. What do you think?”

“Sure,” Sparrow said. “I’ll talk to them.” It was an
easy lie. There was no rental agency. Just an office where students left phone messages, which Sparrow always answered. How exactly tenants came to the house Sparrow didn’t know, but she figured Baba Yaga had her own method for selecting them.

“Thanks a ton,” Marti answered, smiling. “We’ll take care of it tonight, after work. Look, I’m sorry I can’t stay to make you tea, especially if you’re getting sick.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Sparrow waved away Marti’s concern. She forced herself to smile, even though she felt miserable down to the soles of her feet. “I’m a big girl,” she joked. “I can take care of myself. But thanks for the offer. Go now, or you’ll be late for work.”

“See you later then. Feel better.” And then Marti was gone, leaving Sparrow alone, still weak and trembling.

“Okay,” Sparrow murmured. “Looks like I’m making a stand right here . . . even if it kills me. If not here in Baba Yaga’s house, then where else?” She glanced down at Lily who was wagging her tail frantically at the sound of Sparrow’s words. “But first an aspirin, then some food for the mighty beast, right, girl?”

Lily barked her approval and danced in a circle.

S
parrow sat in the far back corner of the Central Library, a stack of books at her elbow. The librarian thought she was doing research on fairy tales for a paper and had helped Sparrow use the library’s database to search articles and books on fairy lore, tales of fairy possession, and protection from fairies. She had a small spiral notebook and wrote down anything that might be useful to her now. She knew the usual things of course, a cross and holy water, though she shied away from them. She didn’t think it right or effective to use the sacred symbols of a religion one didn’t know anything about much less believed in.

No, she had been rescued all those years ago in the woods. She was pretty sure it was in nature that she would find her protection, even if she did live in the city.

The last two nights had been difficult, but she’d learned something since Hawk had marked her for a second time: the tattoos had the power to harm her only when she slept at night. With enough coffee, she could stay awake till morning. Then she could sleep, but only restless catnaps to avoid the dreams that still hovered even during waking hours.

In that time, Marti and Mitch had cleaned the downstairs apartment and quietly moved in. Sparrow told them the new lease was coming soon. That gave her a
chance to pick up a boilerplate lease at a stationery store and write in the house name and Marti and Mitch’s name as well. She decided against a new roommate. Instead, she planned to get a second job like waitressing or something to help pay Marti’s share of the rent. She didn’t want anyone else in her home while dealing with Hawk.

Leaning back in her chair, she yawned, stretching her arms overhead. The long sleeve of her turtleneck pulled back and revealed the snake’s head, its fangs still clamped around her wrist. Sparrow yanked down the sleeve to hide it and returned to the book in front of her. It was a textbook on psychological disorders and Sparrow had thought it an odd choice until the librarian pointed out a section of the book that dealt with patients whose psychoses were clustered around various claims of fairy possession.

“Maybe this could help you find what you need,” she’d said, sympathetically.

Their stories unnerved Sparrow, made her wonder and second-guess her own life, for these patients had also grown up in small communities, with histories of child abuse, domestic violence, and tragedy. She tapped her right forefinger against a passage about a girl whose history was a bit too much like hers.

But not one of the patients—not even the girl on the page under Sparrow’s finger—had lived what she had lived through, Sparrow reminded herself. Not one had been claimed by the woods, staying two years among the wild, sheltered at night by deer. In those days, when she needed it, she’d found clothing waiting for her beneath a bush or tree; not just stolen jeans and T-shirts, but also woven cloaks of rough wool, felted mittens lined with down feathers, and hats of rabbit skin. For most of the year there was always food growing wild: onions, sorrel, fairy spuds, berries, mushrooms, and nuts. And when there wasn’t enough to scrounge in the dead of winter, she would wake to find a small cake in her hand made of seed, dried berries, and coarse-ground flour.

“Match that!” she whispered to the people in the book.

She might never have been found had she not wandered too close to a campground one spring night, attracted by the sounds of human laughter. She’d been spotted by a young couple, who coaxed her closer to their fire. Though she’d tried to resist, it was no use. She’d missed the sound of human voices. They’d fed her cookies, and as she savored the sweet exotic taste, they had asked her a few questions. She tried to remember how to lie, or better, tell the truth without saying too much. But it hadn’t worked. While Sparrow waited for the woman to heat up some dried stew from a small clear pouch plunged into boiling water, the man had disappeared. Sparrow thought he had gone to relieve himself, but he returned shortly with a park ranger, who clapped his hand on her shoulder and asked her far more penetrating questions while she shoveled the food into her mouth. Three hours later, she was in custody, the forest far behind her.