Silver and Salt (5 page)

We were truly beyond pretentious.

From the moment I spotted Ialach he became Buttercup to the entire Dark Court. That was the cause of our first duel. It was a tie, but as I swore up and down it was only because I could not stop laughing every time I addressed him as Lord Buttercup.

When we had come here and discovered what the humans had wrought, I’d stumbled across a sweet in one of their shops. Butterscotch it had been called and it was similar to the color of
Ialach’s then much shorter hair. As a peace offering between new partners, I called him Butterscotch instead of Buttercup and tried to kill him for only the first week or two. Eventually we discovered something from the time we remembered humans last:
uisge beatha
. The ‘water of life’. Scotch whisky. Scotch had seized upon several bottles and drank nothing but that or water from then on. Taking the name for his own. After three years, I gave in and stopped telling anyone and everyone in the outposts we passed the truth of it. Once you decide not to kill your partner, you have his back. Not in the Courts, but here. Always here.

And then he goes and stabs you in the chest. Where had I gone wrong?

I woke up to a night sky. Hazily I counted ten lonely stars. Not long now. No, not long. I coughed against a dry throat and asked hoarsely, “Are my boots on?”

“No.” Scotch’s voice was beside me. I turned my head to see him squatting by a small fire to add another chunk of dried manure. “Just in case you were weak and useless enough to die, I wanted you to wander what lies beyond eternity in your socks cursing my name.
My
real
name.”

I was lying on a sleeping bag, covered with two blankets, but I could see my toes. I wiggled them. Nothing but socks was right, the bastard. Not that I didn’t like socks. That was one thing humans had done right. Thick, warm socks beat striding black marble floors in silk hose and knee-high boots…oh, damn, and a crimson lined cloak that was be-spelled to drop blood-tipped black thorns in my path. I really had been a fucking douche-bag. I didn’t know what a fucking douche-bag was, but a human had spat it at me before I gutted him. I took that to mean it was a fair enough insult.

“And why aren’t I dead? With the silver and then you helpfully stabbing me in the chest, I expected something less in the living realm.”

“I didn’t stab you in the chest. I cannot believe all the
Seelie that you bested in duels. Swatting pixies should’ve been beyond you. You whine like a satyr who’s lost his nymphs and his cock.” He sat beside me, stirring a can of beans. Another human invention, less appreciated than the socks. “I didn’t stab you. I cut only as deep as needed to remove the bullet.” He had his gloves off and I could see the silver-burns on his fingers where he had plucked it out of me. “Unfortunately it wasn’t deep enough to discover if you in fact have a heart. Now none will ever know.” He ate a bite of beans. “Then I stitched you up with a few of Pie’s tail hairs.”

I was alive. Shit. That was damn near unheard of. Human speech, bad habits—easy to slide back into when you can throw
all that grand ‘leave your partner with a good memory’ fairy princess crap out the window. “They’ve tried taking silver bullets out before. They go too deep. Nobody lives. The poison of the metal spreads too fast.”

“Guess I’m a helluva sight damn faster than any other
sumbitch ‘round these parts.” Scotch grinned.

I laughed, groaned and held my chest, and laughed again. Ten years to bring a
Seelie down to my level or at least half way between. It was worth the wait. “Hungry?” Scotch spooned up some more beans and hovered them in front of my mouth. I growled that I wasn’t an infant and reached for the spoon. I managed to get at least one third of the spoonful in my mouth, the rest on my chin and blanket.

“So,” Scotch said as I mopped my face with the blanket, “I’m still waiting on that story. Why are you called
Seven?”

I had threatened to kill and had killed one or two who had been foolish enough to say my birth name aloud in the Dark Court. I had been known as nothing but Seven since I could heft a sword, but if I owed anyone, it was my partner. Wasn’t this a bitch?

“It’s short for seventeen,” I gave in and grumbled. “When I was born my father was drunk. Well, he was always drunk, but he was drooling drunk this time. When he stood at my mother’s birthing bed to name me, he became, they told me,” I winced and it wasn’t because of a bullet wound, “caught up in the moment. He declared I’d be called Prince of Shadows, he who rides among the storm clouds and will forge the blackest and mightiest of swords to strike down the White Army, spilling their blood as a river…by then he sobered up some and remembered my mother had slept with his three brothers, his archenemy and I think Titania. Mom always liked to mix it up. That’s when he added Born of a whore who would rut with any barnyard boar that would have her. And then he passed out or I wouldn’t be Seven. I’d be Twenty or Thirty. Seven is short for seventeen which is short for seventeen syllables. He thought I was a cretin because I couldn’t memorize my name until I was fifty.” Which to give me credit was about a human child of four. “There. That’s your story. Happy now?”

He leaned back against the rock wall we were camped again, beans forgotten. His smile was as wicked as any
Unseelie could hope for. “Actually, I think I am the most happy that I have ever been in my life. Let me bask in it for a moment.” Tilting his head back, he looked up at the ten stars and for once wasn’t, as we always did, counting them—the sand trickling down the hourglass. This time he was seeing them simply as stars. I could see by the softening of the stubborn jaw. He might not be a portrait of joy and rainbow farting bunnies, but he wasn’t grim. For a moment I could see home in him, see the magic lost.

Looking back down, he leaned over to search in his saddle bags to hand me a bottle of his precious scotch and lift one of his own.

I was shaky, but not so much I couldn’t clink my bottle against his with the peal of a bell. It sounded the same as the ones they rang at most of the outposts—a habit the Fey who ran them had picked up from the humans.

Last call.

Not yet perhaps, but soon. Close enough to be draining your glass and ordering that last round. There was no one I’d rather drink that last round with than a Seelie Fey. Who could possibly have known? 

“You were the worst of the best,” I said and meant it for the compliment it was.

“And you were the best of the worst,” he offered solemnly in the same spirit.

Maybe Scotch was fast with a knife like he said or maybe there was a tiny speck of magic left in us after all. A magic that came from finding out what a millennia of balls, duels, conniving, spying, wars, taking the throne, losing the throne, all over and over again had failed to teach us: there was no Light Fey, no Dark Fey. There was only the inevitable end, the last dancing star to burn out and vanish. It would come, sooner or later.

But as Ialach had said, we wouldn’t be alone when it did.

Eleven Years Ago

The man from the park followed me home.

It should panic you, right? The man behind you, taking a step each time you did. It should terrify you. It’s how the night terrors began of every kid, and much as I hated to admit it, I
was
a kid—not always, but sometimes. This time, kid or not, I knew it was how all their worst dreams bloomed into genuine damn life. Those footfalls mirrored any of those in every horror movie made. The monster behind, the scrape of the shoe against the asphalt, homing in on you and only you. That was the nightmare made into real life. But it wasn’t how my dark nighttime visions began. Not me. Mine had happened before that. Mine was reversed. My reality came first before crawling into my nightmares. The truth was in both of them, awake or asleep, but I’d been awake in the beginning—conscious and aware of the man in the park.

The son of a bitch who had started it all in bloodstained grass, wouldn’t he be surprised when it turned out….

I’d be the one to
finish
it.

The Man from the Park

The first time I’d seen the invisible man…

Wait, that’s pretty hilarious, huh?

Never mind. The first time I’d seen him was in the park—the first time I saw him, watched him, he hadn’t cared anything about me. He was already playing his game. There were no new players wanted or needed.

I spotted him in the overgrown empty lot six blocks from the schools, the elementary and junior high next to each other. The empty lot was part of a “green space”, fucking hysterical, next to an abandoned dog food factory. Nothing else smells like that, coating the inside of your mouth. This one had shut down twenty years ago and it still stank. That didn’t stop most of the kids from pretending the weedy area was a park, that the yellow ragweed was flowers and that the broken and cracked concrete blocks were benches. They’d lived here long enough, they didn’t smell the factory anymore. Lucky them, because their park was on my way home, and I could smell it fine. I walked home instead of taking the bus.

I used to ride it when I was younger, but I hated it now. It was a cage full of screaming and shouting. It was too much and made me want to punch and kick until there was quiet. Niko had said it was “excessive stimulation and acted as a trigger”. I hadn’t been exactly sure of what he meant. I knew what a trigger was, but what all that noisy crap was triggering specifically other than violence or why it did, I hadn’t known. But I had known he was right, that it was too much.
Just too much. After I was kicked off the bus a few times for fighting, he’d agreed walking was an improvement over punching. It was a long walk, but I didn’t mind. Anything was more peaceful than a tin can full of screaming, thrown books, and the sound/sight/smell of anger.

I’d told Niko about the smell—sweat/adrenaline/rage, how it was even worse than the noise, how it made me feel the same, only maybe more so, considering I’d tried to shove one extremely loud kid out of a bus window. It sucked that he was chunky and didn’t fit.
Nik said it was hormones. The kids, they’d all grow out of it. I’d noticed he didn’t say the same about me. I hadn’t cared if the other kids grew out of it or not, as long as they weren’t around to piss me off. The walk was good, and rain or smothering heat, I didn’t mind. The bus was a frenzy on wheels, and I didn’t miss it. I called it Thunderdome from a really old movie we’d seen on TV once. Nik hadn’t known whether to laugh or admit I was right.

He did call me Mad Max for a week or so.

Normally, I didn’t stop at the park that wasn’t a park. I’d lived in big cites, tiny towns, and deep enough in the country that your only neighbors were cows, which
smell
more but
stink
less than the factory. Nope, a patch of weeds was a patch of weeds. I’d wait for the next time we were on the run from the cops and were back in the trees, the soft grass, and the stars that flowed in a river in the night sky. That was real peace…

If you didn’t notice how many more shadows there were, how many more hiding places you needed to watch.
Had to watch. Would sooner stop breathing than stop watching.

But the past didn’t matter. The grass and the wide wash of light that shone above were gone, same as the deeper, darker shadows. We were in the city now, and I knew a real park, and this wasn’t one. Why bother sitting in a patch of weeds and half-dead bushes? If it was all you’d known and all you’d had, that didn’t mean it was enough. The Dairy Queen parking lot put this to shame.

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan and I never stopped, but when I saw him, the man in the park, I did. That once. I stopped the second I recognized him or what he was. He wasn’t in the shadows, but that was because he carried the shadows with him. Under a bright sun, he’d still been hard to…not see, that wasn’t quite right…but to see as
more
than a smudge of dried blood on an even larger smudge of rust. They weren’t the same at all. One was carelessness and rain, and one was what kept you alive. He was that, a splatter of death against the enormous rusty machine of buzzing life that was the world around him. They were the opposite, but they blended into one anyway.

It made him almost invisible, halfway there and halfway not. That was his talent, a snake in the grass, one you didn’t see until its fangs were hooked into your flesh. Camouflaged, waiting for a bite of fresh meat, and that meat could be you. The city was his grass and he was the hide-and-seek serpent. He was the poison that hardly anyone would see coming. I saw him, though. He was special, in a venomous way, but I was special, too.

Special enough that “almost invisible” didn’t cut it with me.

Mr. Bailey, who worked mopping the floors at
school said “almost” only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. He’d been in the war, he’d said. I didn’t know which one; there were lots of wars. He said, too, he’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky for a while, dodging kicks while mucking out stalls. Mucking meant shoveling horseshit, he’d whispered to me gleefully. Mr. Bailey had killed people in a war, he was pretty gleeful about that as well, and he’d seen lots of horseshoes flying at him. Mr. Bailey was batshit crazy, but he knew when “almost” counted.

It didn’t count here.

I wasn’t a snake in the grass like this guy, but being different in my own way helped me see him. I watched, always, the kind of watching hardly anyone else did or could do. I’d been taught since I was five to see what waited in the alleys and the shadows and the dark. I knew about the things that hid there, and because I did watch for them, I saw him, too. Not like what I usually watched for, but bad all the same.

I kept watching as he talked to a little girl. Sitting on two of those concrete blocks stacked high and swinging her legs, she was seven or eight with dirty toes and pink nail polish, wearing yellow sandals and a shirt covered with daisies. She was talking fast and happy to the guy crouched in front of her. He smiled and laughed with her, before handing her a tiny stuffed purple pony. It wasn’t even new. It had thrift store matting in its fake fur, but her face lit up as if it were a real live Shetland pony, ribbons in its mane and solid gold saddle. As she grabbed it with both hands, he stood, tugging lightly at her orange ponytail. Girls would call it strawberry blond, but it was orange as the fake juice they served in the school cafeteria. Waving at her, the man gave her one
more happy smile and walked to the sidewalk and away. I watched him go with tight lips. I knew what he was and it wasn’t her father, uncle, nothing like that.

He was a monster.

I knew, because I knew monsters. My mother, my brother, and me—no one but us knew what crawled the surface of the world. Grendels, the real monsters that existed outside of a horror movie. The kind that hide in the dark, press their moon-pale bodies on your roof to scratch the cheap tiles with long curved black claws and let you hear their gargled glass laughter, knowing,
knowing
you’re hiding under your blankets, your pajama pants soaked with your piss. The kind of monsters with red eyes that flared through a slippery fall of white hair, and hungry grins filled with thousands of metal needles. I knew these monsters as they followed me my whole life. I knew them thanks to my mother having fucked one for money, as she didn’t mind telling me over and over and over…she didn’t shut up.
Never
shut up.

Anyway, I was the result—half monster, no matter how human I looked.

They were why I watched, the Grendels.

But I also knew there were different monsters, ones that are all human, that weren’t made by an albino
thing
with talons, demon eyes, and a blood-smeared mouth wide enough to swallow you whole. They were people, these lesser monsters, whose parents were both human and normal and might’ve been nice people who had no idea what they’d raised. Or they might not. They might be responsible for what he was. In that way, he—the man no one else but me bothered to see—could be like me. Monsters can be made, same as I had been. Or he might not be like me. Some monsters, the human ones, are born that way for no reason.

It had made me think. I was both: made
and
born.

Planned.

Observed like a rat in an experiment since birth.

Fourteen years and I still didn’t know why.

When I finally found out, I’d probably wish I’d never learned the reason, the why.

But while I didn’t know enough about my monsters to do anything but keep an eye on them, all of them, and there were plenty in the dark and murky places, I thought I could do something about this. This little girl, she had only one monster. I could help her with just one, and a human one on top of that, not half as hard. I wished mine were like hers. Mine made you believe in hell even if you didn’t believe in God.

I started towards her as she played with her pony. Who let little girls alone in this neighborhood of brassy sky, shitty stench, speeding cars, and bums begging for change behind the liquor store, anyway? Someone who didn’t care or someone who cared too much, had too much faith in the world. The shorter version? An asshole or someone stupid. Sighing, I lugged my backpack over to the girl.

If only I hadn’t seen the monster, I’d be halfway home by now and screw responsibility.

But I had.

“Hey.” I put my backpack down on the ground in front of her and sat on it. “My name’s Caliban. What’s your name?”

She giggled and petted the pony. “Melanie, but my mee-maw calls me Mels.” She tilted her head sideways as she looked at me. Lots of little girls did that—the head thing. I had no idea why and less curiosity. “Caliban is a weird name. Are you lying? Did you make it up?”

Shit. The kid would talk to anyone. Had no one taught her anything about survival?

Stupid question. Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be in this mess.

“Nope.”
I shook my head. “Some guy named Shakespeare made it up a long time ago. Then when I was born, that’s what Soph…that’s what my mother named me.”

Caliban, the monster, son of a witch, a lost and begotten creature.
I wouldn’t have known that, especially word for word, if she didn’t say it every other week or so when she was around, softly sang it sometimes—like a particularly vicious lullaby. And if she said my name, she said it with a twisted smile of barbed-wire delight. My brother had not once called me Caliban, only Cal. Sometimes, if I’d been listening to Sophia too long, I couldn’t be like my brother, like Niko. Sometimes, after seeing too many monsters with hands and claws pressed to the glass of our bedroom window at night or across the street on other roofs or under cars, pointing at me with fingers so white they were almost see-through and laughing like rabid hyenas in the dark, I called myself Caliban. I called myself Caliban and not Cal because I knew it was true.

Maybe not a monster, but not human, either.

“But my brother calls me Cal. That’s close to as cool as Mels, huh?” I went on. “Or at least half as cool as your pony.”

“She’s purple,”
came the instant reply.

“The most purple there is,” I agreed with a wide smile that was happy for her, happy for her pony, and happy purple existed as a color. My mother was a whore, a thief, and a con artist. I’d learned to take what I didn’t feel a long time ago and fake it with more talent than most adults, including the one who’d given Melanie the pony. “She’s the same color as a grape and Grape Crush is my favorite.”

Like I gave a shit about purple, but you can’t con someone if they don’t trust you. I wasn’t conning Melanie, but I was screwed-up enough that I knew I could fake her out and get her trust that way when I didn’t know if I could as my real self. Being honest would’ve felt faker than fooling her a little.

So screwed-up.

More screwed-up that I didn’t much care.

Hell, I didn’t care at all.

She considered what was practically my love letter to the color purple and a grape soft drink, stared into the pony’s tiny eyes as if it had an opinion, and nodded. “Mels and Cal. Both are awesome, and grape is the best.” She had said “awesome” as if was a magic word, like abracadabra. She’d probably heard her older sister or cousin say it with lots of hair-tossing as she tossed her ponytail with extra flounce the same time she said it.

“I think you’re right. Grape is best,” I replied before carefully letting the happy smile turn into a more solemn one, equally fake, but easier for me to pull off.
Took less practice. “Mels, I have something to tell you. Can you listen and remember? Because it’s really, really important.”

She clutched the pony closer to her thin chest covered in a daisy-patterned shirt, put out by the serious turn to our fun. “What?” I could see her unhappiness in the pout that pulled at her lips and paled skin under freckles half the size of pennies and the same copper color.

I shifted on my backpack uncomfortably; faking people skills wasn’t hard, but I was out of the habit as no one had been too curious about us since we’d moved here. Plus, now I was fourteen, a teenager with a license to be surly. It was expected.

Until now.

I kept my eyes on hers, as friendly and innocent as I could keep them. When I looked at people, genuinely
looked
and for long enough, they turned away. Not my brother, not him, but other people did. They saw something there they didn’t see in a casual glance. I didn’t know what, but they didn’t look too long, the way you didn’t try to stare down a big junkyard dog. Friendly, innocent, shy, they were only extra things I learned to fake along the way. An hour or two and a mirror and it was no problem, but I had to remember to do it. Honestly, I’d rarely bothered even before the sanctified sullen teen years, just for special occasions. For Melanie, I would try my best. I needed her to believe me, completely and absolutely.