Roadside Magic (2 page)

R
obin Ragged’s throat burned. So did her eyes, every tear she had dammed behind a blank expression threatening to spill free in a bitter flood. There was a joy in solitude, certainly—no bright avid gazes, no crimson lips sneering or whispering hurtful gossip behind scented fans—but it meant she had no reason to keep her face a mask, or her heart a stone.

So she walked alongside the weed-flanked road, a slim, bare-shouldered woman in a blue dress, her black heels making crisp little sounds on cracked paving. Despite the tangled glory of her redgold curls, no gaze caught on her, no catcalls pierced her sphere of numbness. Of course, any mortal sensitive enough to see her would no doubt be wise enough to keep his foolish mouth shut, unless he was of the mad or feytouched.

If he was, she would have to find some means of making certain her presence wasn’t babbled about. The thought filled her with exhausted revulsion, even if she did have a knife now.

A leafbladed curve in a finely grained, age-blackened sheath hung from a stolen belt low on her hips, chantment-knotted leather attaching it securely, and every time her hand brushed
the bone hilt, a queasy thrill sank through her. She was no knight or assassin; death did not delight her as it did some.

Oh, come now, Robin. There is a certain death that would delight you.

That was a useless, dangerous thought, so long practice swept it neatly under a mental carpet. Such a habit, born of long years at Court, was convenient enough.

Especially if you sought to hide a truth from yourself.

It would have been best to leave the city. No realm, sideways or mortal, would hide you forever if both Summer and Unwinter wanted to find you badly enough. The easiest entrances to Summer moved slowly, sometimes on one continent, sometimes another—but Unwinter could find a way through anywhere, its borders only ever a step away, its blood-freshened thresholds losing their vigor only slowly over centuries. Still . . . the mortal world was weary and gray, but it was also wide, and she could lead a merry chase before she was inevitably brought down. Was it worth it?

Worry about that later
. There was one last debt to be paid before Robin could strike out into the mortal world and leave the sidhe to their plague. Now that Summer’s borders had been broken, the infection was very likely to spread.

It’s what
she
deserves.

Well, yes, but all the other sidhe, especially the lesser who sickened so quickly? Even the ones she’d never met, or the elfhorses, or . . .

Robin found herself, as the sun reached nooning and tried to pierce a veil of damp-misting cloud, in almost-familiar territory. Thin metal walls, squatting trailers and mobiles, weeds forcing up between cracks in the paving, broken-down fences and trashwood behind the huddled backs of every small
squatting domicile. She blinked, pushing her hair back from her forehead, brought back to full, uncomfortable alertness.

She was not grief-mazed enough to wander into the trailer park that had recently held the Queen’s prized human pet, the scientist who had mixed the black boils of plague in his little glass bottles and whirling machineries under the benign glow of his computer. She could not step there again for many long mortal lifetimes, not if she wished to remain breathing. The Unseelie had gone a-hunting through that particular mortal space, though now she knew Jacob Henzler’s death hadn’t been of their making.

No, they had only ridden in the Goodfellow’s wake, and though she had struck Puck down in vengeance, she had not added Henzler’s name to the list of those she was avenging. Perhaps she should have.

Too late. Look about you now, and plan.

This was another sad little collection of tin cans masquerading as homes clinging to a neglected slice of the city, but there was a certain comfort to be found in its familiarity. Faded paint and rusting walls, the cars up on concrete blocks threaded through with tall weeds, the ramshackle fences and sun-bleached children’s toys scattered and overgrown, the trampolines—three of them in this park alone—sitting proudly, like the status symbols they were.

There
were
nice parks, she supposed, with mortals who chose to live in such structures and cared for them. Once, her mother had even received a catalog—
BRAND-NEW HOMES! EASY LIVING!
Smiling faces, a family grouped around a grill on a patio, all airbrushed until they looked almost like sidhe. Bright smiles, clear skin, but without the sharp, glossy sheen of the sideways realms. Instead, theirs was a purely mortal beauty,
interchangeable and brief. Young Robin, not knowing anything about the sideways realms, had thought that the only kind of loveliness once, and a good one, too. Something to be yearned for.

She and her sister had played the game so often.
When I have my own trailer I’m gonna
 . . . Choosing features, deciding about drapes and carpets, the height of luxury a big television and a man whose job kept him gone most of the time.
And all the magazines
, Daisy would whisper.
I’ll cut out them pitchers and make them murals, Rob. You see if I don’t.

Stone and Throne, but Daisy had loved her magazines. She could escape into anything sent monthly—Robin would steal them from the drugstore or the supermarket, neighbors’ houses or doctors’ offices, her technique practiced and sure. It didn’t matter what they were about—racing, hunting and fishing, fashion, cooking, anything—Daisy perused them all with the same grave attention, a small line between her childish eyebrows and her redgold hair, paler than Robin’s own, falling forward in sleek curls.

Not knowing what had killed her baby sister was bad enough, but to find out she had been pixie-led into a car accident by Puck himself, and then the biggest lie of all . . . or was it truth?

Dearest Robin, who
did
you think you were named for?

Robin almost staggered. Noon, and she had not yet found a hole to hide in. She needed rest, and milk if she could find it. Half-n-half, sun-yellow butter, even the falsity of flavored, sugar-drenched creamer would do. Anything.

At the end of the street, a brown-and-white trailer slumped. Instinct drew Robin toward it, but before she went any further she turned thrice widdershins, against the direction of the sun. She also touched the matted lock of hair tied carefully
with blue silken ribbon on the left side of her head, under the longer sweep of her curls. Next to it, the bone comb nestled, and two long pins, well secured. She needed none of them at the moment, but the elflock was reassuring. You could always tell a Half—or really, any mortal with a tinge of sidhe blood—by the little things. A seam left unraveling, a habit of turning in a complete circle, a single item of clothing worn inside out. Such things had been known to fox pursuit ever since mortals appeared.

Nowadays, simple unbelief sometimes worked, but that was a luxury the Ragged did not have. Long ago, she might have been able to knock at a door and beg a cup of milk and leave a small chantment of spite were she refused, or gratitude if not. It might have even been the best kind, warm from an udder grass-fed and sun-sweetened, not pale and processed. It was more difficult to steal fresh cream these days, with cold iron fencing miserable cows in lots full of refuse and excrement.

Her chosen trailer was old but neat and trim, the postage stamp of a yard edged. Three newspapers sat soggy on the trailer’s porch, and the top one looked fresh. She could have checked the dates, but why bother? She had only the foggiest remembrance of how the mortals counted time anymore. There was Summer’s half of the year, and Unwinter’s. More did not concern a sidhe, especially at Court. The mortal world changed, fickle as the sidhe themselves, and the mortals dragged cold iron from the earth’s halls to poison every living bit of green. Sooner or later, though, their machines would fail, their cities would crumble, field and forest would return.

Or so some of the sidhe said, affecting at prophecy.

Robin climbed the rickety porch steps, ignoring the stuffed-full mailbox. No screen, the porch light still burning, and the trashcan, empty, sat at the end of the gently hillocked gravel
driveway. The door was locked, of course, but almost any mortal lock was glad to help a sidhe along. This one was a little happier than most, and she nipped quickly through.

It was close and fusty inside, and Robin halted as a cat hissed from atop a humpbacked couch in a darkened living room. It was a sleek beast, a black pelt with white collar and cuffs, its wide green eyes lambent in the shuttered gloom. The kitchen was poor but clean, she saw with a glance, and while the place smelled close, it did not reek of dank neglect. Any sidhe seeking shelter here would find it agreeable. In the old days, a slatternly kitchen would be left stuffed full of ill-luck and maddened pixies.

The cat, catching a breath of sidhe, hopped off her perch and trotted to make acquaintance, forgetting her initial shock. Half sideways themselves, felines were always a good omen, even if they did sometimes hunt scatterbrained pixies and small liggots. Robin bent to scratch behind the ears, smooth the fur along the spine, and whisper a thread of chantment. No mortal in the house that she could hear, and she could be gone in a moment should one arrive. The little catkin here would serve as a handsome sentinel.

Properly introduced, the cat stropped her ankles as she cautiously tried the kitchen. A plastic container of dry cat food, cunningly designed so that it would measure out more as the cat ate, and a burbling fountain full of clear water set on the floor for the cat’s delectation, its tank only half full. She could smell a litter box, but not very strongly. There was half a carton of milk in the fridge, and it had not spoiled. Robin drank it all, her throat moving with long, hasty swallows, strangely naked without her locket. Gallow had kept that . . .

She had not wanted to think of him.

Fortunately, she was tired enough there was little sting to
the memory, even fresh and new as it was. The former Armormaster had seemed almost willing to let her stay, draw trouble and yet more violence to him—
if
, that is, she could be as blithe and bonny as her dead sister.

Daisy.

Jeremiah Gallow’s wife.

The trailer’s narrow hall held no pictures. She pushed the bedroom door open slowly and found a monk’s narrow bed, a closet full of blue overalls with
EDDIE
neatly embroidered on the left pocket flap, three pairs of workboots ranged below. Cold iron and engine grease, and the smell of a dark-haired male; Robin sniffed a little more deeply. Nobody had slept here for a few days. Perhaps he would be gone tonight, too.

Eddie’s dressertop held a jewelry box that played a tinkling tune when opened and a white card stitched with silver tinsel. A wedding invitation. Perhaps he was a-visiting. When he returned, hopefully he would find good fortune awaiting him, and not a smoking ruin reeking of Unwinter.

Robin Ragged fell onto a stranger’s bed and did not dream.

T
he storm, stalking the city all through morning and half the afternoon, finally leapt on its quarry with a gush of warm spring rain and a rattle of heavenly artillery. Fat, heavy droplets drummed across the rooftops and washed away frost-rimes from the last hard chill as the wind veered and became sweeter. The Gates of Seelie were open, and lion-maned spring roared forth. Surprised mortals scurried through the downpour, newspapers and grocery bags became soaked, drips started through some ceilings, street drains still blocked from last year’s fallen leaves, pine needles, or mortal refuse gurgled and foamed.

Atop the Savoigh, water beaded on the thing’s hard, hornlike shell, each drop softening its semi-translucent barrier. The metal hood shielded it from stinging wind, and lightning flashed along whorls and rings decorating its hunched, unlovely carapace. Faint shadows played underneath, something inside twisting and turning, angles pulsing and shimmers of green-yellow.

Thinning, like a snail’s curled home soaked in honey or a tortoise’s in simmering oils, the hard surface slowly collapsing. It settled, a sheet of hardened leather now instead of a shell,
over a small, curled form. Knees drawn up, its vague approximation of a head far too large for the rest of it, spines along its back flexing but unable to pierce through.

Little spatters of foxfire began, flickering around the collapsed shell. It pulsed, a low punky glow, and the pixies solidified as they always did where the Veil was thinning, clotted, or disturbed. Each one a dot of chiming light, their excited wing-clatters lost in the thunder—blue, red, gold, green, each burst of color passing through a pixie’s neighbors and giving way to the next, a semaphore of feverish joy. The braver ones swooped down to almost touch the pulsating shape, and each time one did it flushed yellowgreen and darted away, buzzing a little high-pitched squeal. Excitement or trepidation, who could tell? They were probably indistinguishable to the little naked, glowing forms with their gossamer wings.

Lightning again, bleaching the rooftop. In the moment afterward, the tough, thick, elastic covering showed an odd protuberance, almost as if a small fist had struck it from inside.

The pixies flittered, fluttered, but now they observed from a safe distance. Scatterbrained and hummingbird as they were, they knew enough to stay out of reach. Some forgot but were pulled back by the agitated chiming of their brethren.

The spines along its unseen back flexed, not quite piercing the tough almost-leather, membranous as a turtle’s egg. The thing, bigger now, rolled across the top of the roof, fists and feet flailing. The rain thinned its covering even more. The pixies, dodging raindrops and turning white each time lightning flashed, followed. The Veil thinned afresh, reverberating with whatever event was rising to the surface of
now
.

A snap. A crunch. A shower of wet saltsmell, spines now piercing the thinned membrane. The thing, on all fours, shook and twisted, the toothy projections from its back scraping and
rending. Clear fluid bubbled free, the drumming rain mixing opalescent, steaming slugsheen onto the roof. The Savoigh Limited’s ragged, carved gargoyles couldn’t bear to watch; they gazed at the river-streets below instead.

Thunder boomed. The thing tore free of the membrane and tumbled free, wet and naked on a gush of smoking birthfluid that stain-scorched the roof’s grit-crunching top. Rain spattered, each drop striking twice from the violence of impact. Extra-jointed hands flailing, a scream tearing from a wet
O
of a mouth, yellowgreen irises flashing before the black of the pupils swallowed them whole, the creature steamed. It was clawed both hand and foot; the membrane that had held it dissolved under steady pounding water.

They called him
Eldest
, and
Fatherless
. It pleased him to allow it, sometimes, and surely no other sidhe could do
this
.

The pixies fluttered nearer, nearer, then scattered as its hands and feet shot out again, grasping as if to tear. The newborn thing howled, and the pixies burned yellowgreen to match its eyes before settling on a throbbing, stinging crimson cloud. More and more of them came, flocking to the disturbance in the Veil, climbing out of small holes between the real and the more-than-real.

It collapsed and lay under stinging water-needles. For now, it was content simply to cough the fluid out of its lungs, vomiting jets of rubbery acid foam that etched complex patterns into the mortal roof.

Its belly was hunger-distended, though. Soon, it would need to eat. The pixies were too quick for it to catch in its weakened state.

It didn’t matter. Once the rain stopped, prey would creep out to see what the rain had washed up or exposed. Mortals would be best, certainly, but they were large and it was small, no matter that its teeth were sharp.

But . . . rats. Pigeons. Even in this concrete hell, the mortals kept pets. Cats. Dogs.

A veritable buffet. Its teeth champed, thinking about it. It caught a mouthful of the exhaust-tinged rain, not satisfying in any way, but its warmth helped. An aperitif, you could say.

The reborn thing dozed, curled around its hunger, waiting for the rain to pass.