Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (26 page)

Sol blinked awake into the haze of morning. Outside his window, clouds covered the sky, eerily similar to his dream. He stared at his clock, trying to make sense of the numbers; it was five-thirty, forty-five minutes before he had to get up. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his head back into the pillow, but he could not get Niki’s anger out of his head. The friend turning his back, Henri’s stubborn refusal to understand, his blind adherence to this idealistic life of art…

At least he hadn’t woken up with a painting under his arm. He shifted under the covers, and felt a rough grit against the pads of his foot. He exhaled, and lifted the blanket.

Against his black fur, specks of white showed like snow. Crumbs.

He stared at his white-speckled foot. It had been days since the ribbon, and though he’d had the oily paint smell and the bitten lip, he’d forgotten the cold chill of seeing something tangible return from his dream with him. His heart pounded with the urge to collect the crumbs, to hold them and keep them as proof that his dreams were real.

Of course, they weren’t proof. He was being silly about this. He’d had bread last night, for sure, even if he couldn’t quite remember what kind. So that was all these were, just remnants of dinner rolls. Their scent, weakly yeasty, only registered when he leaned forward and sniffed at them, but it was the same familiar smell of modern-day bread, not the rich fresh baguette smell he remembered from his dreams. At least, as far as he could tell.

“Pretty weak,” he said. Saying the words out loud reassured him that the crumbs were perfectly normal. Must be because he’d had the absinthe so early, it had time to wear off and not give him weird hallucinations in the morning. Briefly, he wondered how the crumbs had gotten onto his foot, when he’d never woken up with crumbs in his fur from dinner before. Well, he told himself, you never ate dinner buzzed on absinthe before, either.

He yawned and got up to go to the bathroom, where the crumbs persisted. He brushed them off against the back of his leg, dismissing a small urge to taste them. Whether they were stale crumbs from last night or dream-crumbs from 1901 (he felt a little foolish for thinking that now, seeing them cold and real on the tile floor), he didn’t think they would be very appetizing.

It was probably just because he was thinking of the crumbs, but when he walked out of the bathroom and turned off the light, he saw a sprinkling of white, like hard snow, on the hallway carpet.

Sol stood and stared. The small patch of crumbs didn’t go away. He hadn’t walked by there on his way from the room to the bathroom, so they hadn’t come from his foot. As he watched, a small speck of white fell to land amidst the other crumbs.

His eyes tracked it backwards, up to the trap door that led to the attic. He walked over to the door and lifted his paw to the ring dangling from a string. It was only two years ago that he’d grown tall enough to reach it without jumping. The plastic felt cool to his pads as he slid his finger through it and tugged gently.

The door didn’t open. The silence of the house grew oppressive. Of course it wasn’t crumbs from his dream in the hallway. It was just dust from the attic that looked like crumbs.

Another crumb—piece of dust—floated down past his nose. Sol rubbed the back of his paw across his muzzle. Then he pulled, hard, and reached up to stop the clatter of the ladder falling as the door sprung open. With only a little noise, he eased it down, ears perked for any sound from his parents’ room.

The house remained silent. Sol lifted his muzzle, but the attic was darker even than the hallway, and he saw nothing. He put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, still staring up. He felt as though at any moment, something might tumble (or jump) out of the darkness at him. But when he shifted all his weight to the foot on the ladder and lifted the other one, the darkness remained still, silent, waiting until he arrived at the top.

With his head immersed in it, his eyes adjusted more quickly. He scanned the ground slowly, but there were no more crumbs anywhere to be seen, only the grey trails of cobwebs and an even layer of dust. No smell of bread reached his nose, only old scents from his family, from older relatives, from insects and mice and squirrels. Sol frowned, his breath shifting particles of dust, and looked around again.

There, in the corner, small white specks lay around the base of a long cylinder propped against a box. The cylinder, a roll of something, had one corner peeled back to show a dark color. Sol stepped up into the attic, took a deep breath, and immediately coughed out a mouthful of dust. The roll did not move. He crept forward through the warm, musty air, as though the roll were a coiled snake. Two more steps through the dust, and he had to stop to sneeze, but even that did not disturb the roll. It stayed where it was until he was close enough to reach out and touch it.

It was thick between his thumb and forefinger; canvas, not paper. A rolled-up painting, as he’d known it would be. He pulled; it unrolled slowly, reluctant and stiff with age. Leaves, bright gold and sultry red, glowed on the canvas against the soft brown ground. More leaves and the grey of stone, as he unrolled it, painted in thick brushstrokes, familiar brushstrokes, short and sure, and then...a splash of pure white.

Sol dropped the canvas, which snapped immediately back into its roll. He backed two steps away from it, ears flat, tail wrapped tightly around his thigh. It stayed on the floor, not moving, not mysteriously uncurling to reveal the female mouse. For all that he could see, the canvas looked entirely normal up here in the dusty, musty attic. He smelled cobwebs and small creatures and insulation, saw the lazy trails of dust in the air in the half-light that filtered down through the grimy window, and felt the cool floorboards under his feet. The painting was just there, it was real, and it was normal.

And when he went back downstairs, it would be gone, wouldn’t it? Like the ribbons, like the paint. He rubbed the back of his paw and kept his eyes on the roll. His ears flicked back to the open trap door; the rest of the house was still silent. Slowly, his tail uncurled and swung slowly behind him. Even if the painting weren’t gone, he could just ignore it, if it remained up here in the attic.

But Niki wanted so badly for something of Henri to survive. And if Sol ignored the painting, left it up here to molder—though who knew what it was doing up here in the first place—then what would that be doing for Henri?

Of course, the rational part of Sol reminded him, Henri was all part of his dream. He had a Wikipedia page, but that didn’t mean that what Sol was dreaming was true. But even if so, even if Henri was only part of a message from Sol’s own subconscious, well…it was still a message.

The black wolf strode forward. His paw closed around the roll and lifted it from the floor. He resisted the temptation to unroll it again, just keeping it in his paw as he hurried back down the ladder. It would have been difficult to close up the ladder quietly even with two paws free; with only one, it was impossible. It clattered up, and Sol lost his grip on the ring as the trap door flipped upward and slammed shut.

His ears rang with the noise. He stood staring at his parents’ door for a moment, then darted into his room. Carefully, he leaned the rolled-up canvas in the corner, then ran into the bathroom to shower. Rustles of movement came from his parents’ room, but they did not look out in the brief time he was in the hall.

When he came back, the canvas was still there. It looked so normal in the morning light that if he hadn’t known where it came from, if he couldn’t still feel the itch of crumbs on his foot or the smell of dust in his nose, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Twice while getting ready for school, he walked halfway across the room, his paw shivering, and stopped, staring at the rolled-up cylinder. He wanted to know, wanted his dream to be real, but to unroll the canvas fully and see Henri’s painting would also irrevocably place him in the middle of it. The questions about how it was all happening were bad enough without adding the question of why it was happening to him.

Those questions consumed him all through the morning. Meg didn’t talk to him on the bus, and Tanny smacked him once on the back of the head in homeroom, but the visions of crumbs and canvas persisted. Tsarev turned to talk to him, but only got as far as hello before they had to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In each class, Sol traced horrible sketches of his memory of Henri’s painting in his notebook, then ripped them out and threw them away.

At lunch, he sat by himself again. The cafeteria’s offering today was stuffed tomatoes, supposedly filled with some weird vegetarian tomato-saucy rice mix, but when Sol poked through the stuffing, he uncovered suspicious-looking brown-grey lumps in it that he thought might be sausage. That was where Tsarev found him, trying to pick the unidentifiable lumps out of the undercooked tomato.

The fox sat next to him, startling Sol, who’d been sniffing his tomato closely trying to figure out what the grey lumps were. Tsarev laid his ears back. “It’s okay that I sit here?”

“Sure, yes.” Sol smiled. “Sorry, just…not sure what this is.”

Tsarev leaned to sniff at his own tomato. “In Siberia, we call this
taina
.”

“Tie-nah?”

“Nobody knows what it is.”

Sol laughed. “I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

“I think it is not meat.” Tsarev lifted his muzzle. “It smells not like meat.”

“I’m just not sure I want to eat it, whatever it is.” Sol picked another lump out of the tomato.

Tsarev shrugged and scooped a lump of rice, sauce, and lumps onto his fork. “It is not so bad.” He chewed and swallowed. “You did not stay long at practice yesterday.”

“No.” Sol sighed, and told him about not being selected for the team, about the fight with his father, and almost about being grounded. You barely know this guy, he chided himself. He doesn’t want to know about your home life, especially not about being grounded like a little cub. But the lure of a sympathetic ear was stronger than his courtesy, and Tsarev listened attentively.

The fox nodded. “I am sorry to hear that,” he said. “You saw an otter after that?”

“Uh. Yes.” Sol tilted his muzzle. “You saw me?”

“I was not looking,” Tsarev said hastily. “Not, um…” He mimed using a telescope.

“Spying?”

“Not spying. I came back out, I see you go under seats with her.”

“Right.” Sol’s fur prickled with guilt. Was the fox going to turn him in for drinking?

“She is…girlfriend?”

“Oh!” The wolf realized what Tsarev probably thought they’d been doing. Making out was better than drinking. “Yes, yes. That’s right.”

The fox’s ears lowered and he took another bite of his tomato. Sol wondered if maybe Tsarev felt he’d intruded on Sol’s personal life. Maybe it was a Siberian thing.

“Don’t believe him,” jeered a voice behind them.

Sol turned, Tsarev turning a moment later. Taric and his two friends stood behind them staring down. Nearby, Xavy and one of the other wolves had stopped eating to watch. The coyote in back held a tray, but Taric and the football player didn’t. Taric spoke again. “See, meatless, you made the poor guy sad. He wanted to suck your cock. Tell him the truth.”

“Shut up,” Sol snarled, but the fox talked over him.

“You may leave us alone,” he said.

“Oh, may I?” Taric adopted a mocking tone before going back to his sneer. “See, I know he lied. Cause you don’t know about the time we caught him in the shower with a boner, staring at the
guys
.”

Sol’s ears flattened, uncomfortably warm. He looked at Tsarev, but the fox didn’t react with disgust—at him, anyway. Tsarev was definitely leaning away from Taric. So Sol said, “Nobody cares. Just go away.”

Taric laughed. “You want people to believe you like girls, you should pick a pretty one, not an ugly goth bitch.”

Sol kicked his chair back and stood, paws balled into fists. “Shut up!”

“Sit down, backup,” Taric said. He stepped forward and shoved Sol back down in his chair so hard that the wolf’s tail was caught between his butt and the seat.

The ache from his dream flared. Sol restrained a yelp, with difficulty, but before he could spring up again, Tsarev was on his feet. “I said, you may leave us alone. I am not interested in what you—”

“You sit too.” Taric pushed the fox, hard, with one arm.

Tsarev fell back onto the seat of the chair, overbalanced, and landed heavily on the floor, his tail puffed out and askew. The three coyotes nearly doubled over laughing. “See you, fags,” Taric said, and led the others away.

Sol looked around for a teacher, but none were in evidence. He kicked his chair back, eyes fixed on Taric, all the anger from his dream coming back to him. “Hey, asshole!” he yelled, and grabbed the tomato from his plate.

Taric turned, still laughing, and had only a moment to change his expression. Sol fired the tomato, a frozen rope of a throw. It sped straight and true, and caught the coyote square across his muzzle.

The missile exploded in a shower of tomato and rice and unidentifiable grey non-meat. Pieces rained down Taric’s shirt, sprayed his friends, splattered all around. His tan muzzle looked gruesomely bloody, smeared with red sauce and bright red fragments of tomato skin. Sauce dripped red from the end of his muzzle as he stared, disbelieving, at Sol.