Roadside Magic (7 page)

C
runch. Snap.
To break the neck, to sink the teeth in—simple pleasures indeed. A puff of feathers, a frantic heart pounding inside a light-boned chest, and he bit the head from the pigeon with a satisfying snap of his white, white teeth.

The pixies fluttered around him, tiny dots of green-yellow, their wings buzzing and chiming. They made a game of it, flickering before night-running rats, leading them on with bursts of scent and little movements. The rats were canny, though, and grew more difficult after two or three had lost their little lives.

Once he could crawl the pixies guided him to nests where drowsy pigeons cooed softly at one another, unwaking even when his fingers deftly snatched them from warmth and safety.

Sometimes he grabbed for the pixies, but they scattered, too quick for his clutching fingers, even if they did have extra joints. Far finer than human paws, but still too slow.

It didn’t matter. The danger of true death was past. He was too old to be Twisted past recovery.

Fortunately, he liked hunting. Soon the pixies fluttered around him as he unfolded, steam rising in fine traceries from
pale, naked skin. He glowed in the predawn hush, nacreous as any newborn thing, and frowned slightly.

The little flittering things darted close as he whispered, coaxingly, telling them what he wanted. They spread through the Veil, winking out and winking back, their tiny brains losing the thread as soon as they left him.

He snarled, halfheartedly, picking dry feathers from between his teeth. They ached, poking through red gums, each bit of bone he ingested feeding his own skeleton. Needed more, and it was near dawn. Before the mortal sun rose, he had a certain leeway. Once its golden nail pierced the sky, his form would be set, and he was still weakened.

The iron burned his bare skin everywhere it touched as he half-fell down the fire escape, displeasure hissing between his lips. A filthy alley greeted his bruised and torn feet; he slip-stumbled along, away from the rooftops and their hidden nests.

More, he needed
more
.

At certain hours, a mortal city takes no notice of a naked man, even one pearly-glowing and sharptooth. He can weave along, flinching and hissing, through curiously deserted streets, keeping to shadows and stepping far more heavily than was his wont before freezing, his high-peaked ears twitching.

They have, those fine ears, caught a sound. A slight cough, air escaping diseased lungs.

A homeless mortal, curled in a ratty sleeping bag, dozing before cruel dawn arose. Perhaps he had congratulated himself, this man, on finding a lonely place to sleep, free of passing feet and the bright lights, or the revolving, garish blue and red of the police.
Move along, old man, can’t sleep here
. Perhaps he had nipped from a bottle before stretching out, a faint alcoholic rose blooming to take the edge from the cold, sharp night. The cardboard under his sleeping bag was dry enough; above,
Dalroyle Place soared, keeping its own secrets. Here at the back, the Dumpsters hid him from view, and perhaps he knew that in the morning the restaurant on the bottom floor would throw something edible into the bins.

Softly, stealthily, the naked figure crept toward the sleeping mortal. The pixies, their chiming growing agitated, hung back, some of them flushing red in anticipation.

Crunch.

Sleep-mazed and witless, the mortal still almost fought his attacker off, but the pixies descended, tiny sharp teeth nipping, their fingers yanking his hair, stabbing for his eyes with sewing-needle blades. A nuzzling at his throat, a hot gush, and the mortal man knew no more.

The naked boy settled to his feast, and the pixies crept over flesh-hill and vein-valley, biting what they could. There was an hour until dawn’s rising, but they needed hunt no further.

Grinning, humming to himself, the naked boy ate his fill.

S
he should not have waited. Or she should not be here now, in this new-built suburb. The houses were large clumps of still-pristine siding in bland creamy colors, the trees spindly in tiny circles of beauty bark, each driveway wide and welcoming and precisely the same as every other. The streets had long, pretty names—
wildwood
and
marchblossom
and
azalea
. The streets were wider than average, too, their pavement black as sin and uncracked.

The only house that was different . . . well.

Nothing
looked
wrong. Oh, the yard was a little shaggy, but someone could have forgotten to mow over a weekend. It was the tree in the front yard, a young birch in a carefully cut hole in the turf, standing straight and tall and in exuberant leaf where every other sapling was still barely budded, that brought Robin to a halt.

They’ve been here.

She peered around a holly-hedge caught in scrawny adolescence, her heart pounding and her mouth dry.
No. Oh, no.

Were they still inside? The sun had just cleared the horizon—had they come with the dawn?

Leave. Go away. If they’ve been here, nothing you want is inside that house.

She hesitated. It would be best to flee, lose herself in the mortal world for as long as she could.

But . . . she had to know.

She’d visited this place twice before, once to simply stare from the rooftop of the empty, for-sale structure across from it, and once in the middle of the night, using the lightfoot to climb like a thief and peer into windows. A mother and father, slumbering peacefully in a king-sized bed, the woman’s face whole and serene, the man’s arm over her and his nose buried in her hair. Robin had seen an echo of a boy’s face in the mother’s sleeping smile, and the father’s hair was a gold she knew from stroking a child’s head as he ate his bread and honey in a dusty nursery, in the very heart of Summer’s realm.

Robin-mama!
he would crow, and run through the orchard heedless of pitfalls, with Robin by his side. She fed him, rocked him, and the only time she herself slept dreamlessly was in her narrow bed, with Sean’s weight beside her reminding her of another child, blithe laughing Daisy.

During the long, fragrant Summer dusks, she would take him to the narrow casement and teach him the names of the constellations, so different from the pale mortal stars.
Time for bed, Sean.

Oh, please, one more, what’s that one? And that?

Dead now, caught in a game much too large for him, turned to amber and shattered on a marble floor. Puck’s hungry grin as the statue toppled, and underneath it all the small sound of a half-mortal heart cracking.

Her thieving night visit had also taken her to a different window. She’d peered in and seen a familiar tousled wheat-gold
head, and stared long enough for the glamour to thin, sensing her attention. The changeling sleeping in Sean’s bed looked well cared for, and child-plump. One of its little paws stretched out from under the covers, and she’d blinked, carefully, seeing the vestigial sixth finger under the mask of seeming.

A placeholder in the mortal realm, and how often had she thought of returning little Sean and bringing the changeling back into Summer? Or simply letting it roam free for the childcatchers to net? Sometimes a dreaming child, an especially blessed one, slipped back through the Veil. None might suspect Robin had taken a hand in affairs.

But she hadn’t. A greedy little sidhe, she had kept him.
Just one more day . . . what harm can one more day do?

None, until Summer had perhaps noticed how Robin cared for the little mortal.

Robin found herself clutching a holly branch, the plant reverberating as she trembled, the leaves prickling defensively as best they could. She let go, with a whispered apology, and brushed at the supple stem. A word of the Old Language, a chantment taking shape, and now any fool could see another of Summer’s ilk had stood here as well. The holly stretched, whispering back to her, and Robin tilted her russet head.

How long ago?

Trees didn’t count time the way mortals did, or even sidhe. Still, its memory was very fresh, of waking partly and hearing a distant song it yearned for with bole and branch. Then night, the time of darkness and soft stretching.

Yesterday. The childcatchers had been here only yesterday.

Robin brushed her hands together, though the holly had not loosed any sap. Of course they had come to take the changeling. Unwinter’s attack would have done much damage; they
would be retrieving every nameless placeholder they could, to bring to Summer’s white hand and the wicked-sharp flint knife.

Which was worse—Unwinter’s blood-freshened doorways and cold, inalterable will, or the green fields of Summer bought and anchored with nameless lives?

Idiot. This place is not safe. Leave, vanish, don’t let anyone catch you here!

Silly and stupid to come.

Robin stepped out onto the bone-white sidewalk. Her heels clicked softly as she strode for the house. If any mortal was peering through a window at this hour, they would see her, but what did that matter?

What did anything matter, now?

The house had a wraparound porch. Two newspapers lay on the
WELCOME
mat, its fraying a comfortable sign of habitation. The door, painted a merry green, had a lovely etched-glass inset, rosevines in a lover’s knot. She touched the doorknob with a single fingertip.

It was unlocked.

Why are you doing this? It could be a trap.

The front door ghosted wide. She hopped nervously over the threshold—no cold iron buried here to bar passage, of course. They lamented in Summer, sometimes, that they were forgotten. Mortals did not recognize or fear them as they once had.

The smell was awful. She peered into the living room—a television large enough to stable an elfhorse in, its face glaring blindly at a leather couch and two comfortable armchairs. The place was huge, the carpeting still fluffy, and Robin glanced into the kitchen—spick-and-span except for half a glass of water near the gleaming white sink. The countertops, some
manner of plastic made to look like polished stone, glowed in the early-morning light without stone’s solidity.

Dining room, empty, the table stacked with papers along one end. Downstairs bathroom, utility room leading to the garage—there was so much
space
, Stone and Throne, did they rattle in here like tiny peas in a too-big pod? Stairs, slightly creaking as she edged up them one at a time, not daring to touch the banister.

Daisy would have loved a big house like this.

The reek grew worse. Robin tried not to breathe too deeply, despite the fact that she would need her lungs full if this was a trap. Brass and a loathsome bathroom stench, reminding her of nauseating scrubbing after Daddy Snowe had “let a bomb off” in a tiny trailer toilet.
Wooo-eeee!
he’d yell.
Go fix that, Miss High-N-Mighty!

He never made Daisy clean up. When she was born, still redheaded but unquestionably Daddy Snowe’s child, he’d mellowed a little, thinking maybe Robin was his after all. Mama had sworn up and down she was, but what woman left alone with a baby and finding a protector wouldn’t swear such a thing?

Three bedrooms. Had they wanted another child? Was the changeling difficult? They were usually strange but passive, sometimes called
special needs
, but once or twice they could turn into troublesome sprites indeed. No matter how disobedient they proved to be, though, the Seelie expected mortals to care for them and could grow . . . irate . . . if their “gift” was abused. In the old days, sometimes the mortals had threatened the changelings or left them on the hills to force the sidhe to bring the precious mortal children back as the placeholder withered. Risky, of course—the sidhe could take offense to that, too.

If they chose to.

Master bedroom. The door, hacked wide open, shattered bits of it still quivering from the violence of the explosion. Robin took one look into the dark cave and turned away, retching so hard her eyes filled with hot salt water. The sound echoed horribly down the stairs.

Why did they not simply take the changeling? Mortal children vanished all the time, their glowing televisions were full of reports. Any of the childcatchers could have simply come to the changeling’s window and called to it, and it would have risen, with dreamy slowness, to undo any lock between it and the catchers’ painful-sweet urging. Why did they have to . . .

She found herself stumbling down the stairs, turning away from the front door, blindly staggering through the kitchen as if she were mortal-drunk or pixie-led.
Why? Why would they—

Oh, but she knew. Sean was dead, and the changeling taken—but Summer’s wrath would not cease there. Robin had robbed the Queen of a mortal plaything before she was done with it, and had not loosed her song on Unwinter when commanded to. Of course the kin of any mortal brat Robin Ragged cherished would be punished.

There was no vengeance more thorough than Summer’s when she felt herself cheated.

The back door was unlocked, too, but Robin simply blundered through it, so heedless she tumbled out onto a low, pleasant deck with an expensive gas grill crouching under a canvas sheath in one corner. Another canvas shape, dragonlike, had to be a patio table; she ran full-tilt into it with a noise like a wyrm’s snapcrunching bite. Glass shattered, tubing buckled, and she regained her senses lying in a heap, the cover’s tough material folded and crumpled, torn where the table had broken and sent metal jabbing through.

She’d narrowly missed spearing herself on one—now
that
would be a fine jest, to escape Unwinter and Summer both, and impale oneself on a table. The only thing better would be one of the huge umbrellas the mortals used to shield such things.

She lay there for a moment, very still, her eyes closed and throat working. Had she not, she never would have heard the slight scuffle as something darted across the patio.

Robin Ragged realized she was not alone.

Her throat relaxed, the music under her thoughts spiking into dissonance, and she turned her head, very slowly. Cradled in a twisted nest of what had no doubt been a very fine patio table, she couldn’t see a damn thing.

Except the top of a pale golden head, slowly rising over the curve of damp, stretched canvas speared by glass teeth. A small, furrowed brow, and her heart caught in her throat, silencing her just as effectively as a barrow-wight’s strangling fingers.

Its deepset eyes were a worn, faded blue, and its ears came to sharp points through a mat of curiously bleached hair. Under its sharp, misshapen nose a crust of snot had formed, and its wide, sloppy mouth housed picket-fence teeth. The glamour that kept it from mortal discovery was fading fast, and those teeth were sharp-white and strong.

Its lips trembled, its thin shoulders hunched, and the changeling that had held Sean’s place in the mortal world let out a small piping sound.