Roadside Magic (6 page)

J
eremiah was beginning to wish he hadn’t left his truck behind. The cold iron in it would have interfered with his tracking, but it would have thrown off Unwinter’s minions, too. It might have even confused Robin’s looping, wandering trail.

Instead, Gallow fought a running battle across the city, from rooftop to park, drow and barrow-wights swarming along the faint marks of her flight. Two of the hunting-bands had cullaugh-nets, meant to bring down fine, feathered prey without damage.

So they wanted Robin taken alive. Of course, since Puck had extracted a vow from Unwinter himself not to harm her, and since the lord of that gray and ash-choked land might think the Ragged still had the cure for the plague felling sidhe left and right, it made sense. He wondered if she sensed the pursuit, if she guessed he was at her heels as well.

A little past 5 a.m. found him at the edge of a trailer park in Northside, his entire body cold as he watched emergency personnel pour water on a fire that refused to be tamed. The smoke reeked of drow and the pine-resin of spilled woodwight
sapblood, but Robin’s trail led away—as well as a wide, stinking path of stonetroll, splattering black-smoking blood that petrified the edges of any living green it found. Traceries of stone, howling into the night.

She was a canny wench, indeed. Had he ever thought Robin helpless? Of course, there was her voice—and had there been a mortal in that trailer?

He didn’t want to think about that.

He
also
didn’t want to consider that he hadn’t thought about Daisy much, if at all, for the whole damn night.

She’s been dead five years, Jer. Focus on the present.

Just like a faithless fucking sidhe. Memory, like grief, was a mortal game. They died, it was what mortals did, brief blossomings and quick declines. Even a scatterbrained, evanescent pixie was likely to last longer than any of those mired in the gray, chill-mortal world.

The lance hummed, prickling in his arms, down his back. The marks, restless, writhed against his skin as he ran, basic lightfoot chantment barely disturbing the ground underneath. She’d come this way, skirting the ditch and probably using that shattered piece of plywood to cross, stepping sideways
there
; he could almost see the muscle in her dancer’s calves flickering as she climbed the slight hill and cut across the freeway. No traffic, it was the dead time.

He could, however, smell approaching dawn. Coffeemakers rousing, nurses and firemen finishing their night shifts, night-pixies yawning and winking out as the diurnal ones yawned and began to glimmer around eddies and swirls in the Veil, dryads and nymphs stirring in their homes of water and wood, construction workers tossing and turning as their bodies began to swim toward waking.

If he was still playing at being mortal, he’d be up already,
watching the coffeemaker as it burbled, ignoring the dirty dishes piled in the sink and the persistent mildewy smell his laundry had taken on, because he didn’t know how Daisy made the clothes smell sweet.

Robin had done his laundry, too, before she left. His bathroom and kitchen had both sparkled—before he’d set the chantments that would burn the whole place to the ground.

It had, in the end, been so easy.

When the sun’s first fiery limb lifted over the horizon, dew steaming on every edge and the rumble of traffic in the distance becoming the mutter of an awakened monster instead of the formless grumble of a dreaming one, he checked the sky and took a deep breath, rolling the air on his tongue and concentrating. For a moment, Robin’s trail blurred, so he stopped dead.

More rain on the way
. His nose untangled the various threads—no Unseelie had come this way. Clouds still massed in the north, but the thunder had retreated. No rain during the night, just breathless expectancy and combat teased by a chill wind. A note of juicy green—the Gates were open, the sap was rising, the weather warming rapidly.

When his chin tipped back down, streetlamps guttering on either side of the highway as the hazy gray light strengthened, he realized where he was and where she was likely to be heading.

The last time he’d been on Highway 4 was for repaving, long tar-melting afternoons, coming home to Daisy afterward reeking of asphalt, dirt, and a haze of mortal sweat. Not much could wring the salt from a sidhe, but that had come perilously close. The last summer before her death, a golden shimmering time. They’d talked about what they would do if she got pregnant, and she had quietly thrown away her birth control
pills. They’d slept with the window open all that summer, the nights cool enough to bring her snuggling into his side, and he hadn’t slipped out to the trashwood behind their trailer to practice with the lance’s cold, shining length.

The trouble with a half-sidhe memory was that it was vivid
and
unreliable, just like the sidhe themselves.

He halted at the edge of a sea of concrete, scanning the truck stop. The diner, shabby but still obviously doing good business, was one of those low 1970s brick numbers, the big red letters on its roof probably rusted and pitted but still solid enough except for the missing
E
. Before dawn it would have been a welcome beacon, and the cold iron clustered around it a good way to halt or delay pursuit.

Gallow kept to the edge of the lot, finally cutting in parallel to a chainlink fence separating the diner’s personal space from the diesel pumps and the long stretch of indifferently painted parking spots full of big rigs dozing in the freshness of morning. Behind the diner, two Dumpsters and a back door propped open to let out heat riding a clinking and steam-hiss cacophony of cooking. The morning rush would be well under way, a thread of burnt coffee and almost-burnt eggs, the good smell of bacon and the hot carbohydrate of pancakes on a grill.

His gaze snagged on a rusted ladder. A fading spice-tang was Robin’s trail, almost washed away by cold iron and the tide-shifting of dawn.

He coiled himself, ready to leap and catch the lower rungs even though the thing looked too rusted to bear any weight, but at that moment the diner’s back door banged open and a slim dark kid in a hairnet barged out, carrying two huge black trashbags. He stopped dead, and for a long, exotic moment Gallow found himself contemplating striking down a mortal, the marks painful-itching as they writhed.

The boy cocked his head. “Hey,” he said. “Look, don’t go looking in there, man. Hang on.”

He slung the bags down, and before Gallow could speak, the boy vanished back through the door.
What the hell?

Abruptly, Gallow realized he was unshaven, battle-filthy; his hair, though short, was wildly disarranged, and his coat much-mended along one side, as well as soaked with ditchwater and other, less salubrious fluids.

The idea that maybe the kid thought he was a homeless scrounger intent on the Dumpster’s treasures actually wrung a laugh out of him, and the urge to let the lance free and strike retreated. It reminded him of leaving Summer, having to learn the ways of the mortal world again, from the faster cars to the looser manners.

Jeremiah was just about to leap, vanishing onto the roof, when the kid appeared again, this time carrying a white Styrofoam rectangle. Balanced atop it was another white paper shape, this one steaming, and he blithely edged up the narrow space between the Dumpster and the chainlink to offer both to Gallow with a small, tired smile. “Here, man.” A light tenor voice, nothing in the words but gentle goodwill.

The steam was from coffee, and the smell from the rectangle was heavenly, if heaven ever passed out greasy-spoon breakfasts. Jeremiah stood, his jaw almost ajar, and the kid turned back to his garbage bags. He heaved them both into the Dumpster with practiced efficiency, tipped Gallow a wink, and stepped aside, digging in his pocket. “You better eat before it gets cold.”

Gallow found his voice. “You’re kind, young one.” Had he even forgotten how to speak like one of them, in just a few days?

It was so damnably
easy
to slip back into the sidhe manner of speaking. And fighting, and running.

And everything else.

“Yeah, well, gotta do what you can.” The kid brought out a battered pack of Marlboros, tapped one up, and lit it. His hands were chapped and water-wrinkled. A dishwasher, then, low man on the diner totem pole. “Go ahead, eat. You can sit on that box.”

The box was a wooden crate, and Jeremiah lowered himself gingerly. The coffee was strong at least, and the kid had tossed a plastic fork and pats of real butter in with a stack of pancakes. There were scrambled eggs, too, and bacon.

It reminded him of Robin in his kitchen, offering a plate with a shy smile the morning after he had fought a plagued Unseelie knight.

He’d also lost the habit of mortal hunger, but he ate. It wasn’t polite to refuse such a gift, offered so frankly. Had this kid been kind to a ragged little bird, too?

Companionable silence descended on the almost-alleyway. Jeremiah mopped up melted butter with the last of the pancakes, barely tasting it. The kid finished his cigarette and field-stripped it, flicking the filter through the chainlink fence. He held the Dumpster lid up so Gallow could toss the Styrofoam, and nodded, briskly. “Be careful, okay? Some of the guys around here, they like to beat up dudes for fun.”

“Have they ever beaten you up?”

A broad white smile. “Nah, man, I’m too quick. Plus Natty, she owns this place, she gives ’em hell if they mess with her help. She don’t like guys hanging out behind here, though. I’ll get in trouble.”

“I’ll be gone in a few moments.” Gallow hesitated. “How may I repay you, young one?”

“No worries, man, just take care.”

“Wait.” Gallow offered his hand. “Shake. You’re an honorable man.”

The smile widened, and his grip was firm. Chantment tingled under Jeremiah’s palm, and a brief sparkle of gold outlined the kid as he vanished back inside, the heavy door slamming. Kind, but taking no chances. Frail mortal flesh, for all its firmness.

Not so long ago, he’d seen Robin Ragged toss a coin into a violin player’s open case, and she’d thought he wanted to chide her for kindness—or that he’d assume she would do the young violinist some ill. What would she have said if she’d seen this?

He might have been kind to her
, Gallow told himself, rolling his shoulders under the weight of his tattered coat.
That’s a good enough reason
. He gathered himself and leapt, the ladder almost wrenching itself free of the bricks under his weight, but he was already on the roof by the time it finished groaning.

She had tarried here, among the struts and supports, but she was gone.

A few moments later, he was, too.

M
ike Ramirez left work with a spring in his step, even though the dawn shift was the worst. Bill, the walrus-sized white-clad bigot of a cook, was always in a nasty temper, Natty wasn’t in the office to keep an eye on things, and the waitresses were fractious as cats during a windstorm. Bussing and washing for all of them was pretty much one serving of thankless shit after another, but he was blessed with a naturally sunny disposition and did his best.

He didn’t notice the faint tracery of golden glitter on his hand, sinking into his dishwater-raw skin. He caught the 75 and made it to Saxon County Community College early, managing to stay awake through four classes, and aced two pop quizzes despite being exhausted. Coffee and sheer will kept him upright, and when he got home he handed over the day’s tip-in to his stout, fiercely devoted mother and fell into bed, listening to the song of her telenovelas through the thin wall.

He was up at 11 p.m. to catch the bus back out to Natty’s diner that day, and when he walked in, Natty, her graying hair scraped back in a bun, buttonholed him: He was promoted. The cantankerous Bill had suffered a meltdown and quit, as usual, but this time Natty wasn’t going to hire him back. “You’re easier to squeeze
a day’s work out of,” she told Ramirez, and handed him a stack of fresh white aprons. “Get in there and get cooking.”

Happily, he’d spent long enough watching to know what to do, and even though the food was a bit slow, he didn’t burn anything or turn over a wrong order all day. The good luck held through a solid week, and by the end of it he was comfortable around the grill, beginning to get faster, and whistling while he worked.

It meant better hours, better tip-in, much better pay, and benefits as well. A stroke of luck, and Mike’s classes got a lot easier since he was able to get some sleep. When he finally graduated a year later, he lucked into a med school scholarship, and his mother had lost the tightness around her mouth since they’d manage to save a little. Then, just when things seemed like they were going to be hard but okay, his absent, alcoholic father finally kicked the bucket, and much to Señora Ramirez’s surprise, there was a life insurance policy the
cabron
had somehow kept the premiums current on, one final gesture from the otherwise useless man. She thanked God with novenas burning night and day, and Mike crossed himself whenever he thought about it.

He barely remembered the green-eyed stranger that morning behind Natty’s diner. That was the greatest—and most silent—luck of all.