Something Magic This Way Comes (36 page)

In the spilled dirt from the urn, I saw a vast paw print.

For a moment I couldn’t move. Ice crystallized around my heart, and my mind became a thing detached.

“Mr. Smith,” she croaked.

I sped forward and dropped to my knees beside her, pressing my handkerchief to her throat.

“Ah, Jane. What have I done?”

Her eyes showed more worry than fear. “Elise . . .”

“I won’t let anything happen to her. I swear it.”

The blood soaked through the cloth and poured onto my hands. It ran past and drenched my coat. It puddled in vast sheets on the floor around me, crawled in viscous streams toward the elevator.

Enchanted. They’d enchanted her blood to pour like a river through her wound. Even as I watched, she grew pale and luminous as a tropical orchid. The blood diminished to a drip, then stopped altogether.

She died in my arms.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

The elevator door opened and Elise stepped out.

“Mother!”

“Elise, turn around. Go down to your apartment and stay there. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

I’d placed my strongest charms around Elise’s door and windows. If she were to be safe anywhere, it would be in her own apartment.

“But—”

“Trust me, Elise. You’ll be safe there, but only there.”

“Mother!”

“It’s what your mother would want you to do.”

Trembling, Elise turned her back but made no move toward the elevator. Her thin shoulders shook with her sobs.

“Aren’t there good tribes?” she whispered. “There must be good tribes. I’ve dreamed about them. You’ve got to learn to play for the good faeries.”

“There aren’t any good faeries anymore. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can’t play music that way. I’ve tried.”

“It’s like the kittens. Remember? You have to think differently.”

* * *

The police took me down to the local station in handcuffs.

I couldn’t blame them. I’d been found holding Jane’s dead body, my clothes covered with her blood.

In my grief, I’d had no time to magick myself with a manifestation of innocence.

They put me in a small, green-painted room with a mirror which I guessed was actually two-way glass, and a metal table with two chairs. The room smelled of sweat and hormones. A detective came in and introduced himself, asked me a lot of questions. It was clearly his role to convince me I couldn’t escape my guilt.

He knew nothing of true guilt.

I waived my Miranda rights, and after a time he tired of my protests of innocence and stomped from the room.

Impatient, I paced. What was happening to Elise while I was caught here? If the Old Ones had breached my outer charms, how much longer would the inner spells hold?

If I could have saved Elise by confessing, I would gladly have gone to jail. But to send her into the darkness while I slowly died in the light? Impossible.

I could not condemn Elise even to save her life.

When the detective returned, he was much subdued.

He said my neighbors had corroborated my story and that I was free to go.

“Just don’t go far, Mr. Smith.”

“No.”

Only to the depths of hell.

* * *

The charms still held, but they had weakened in the time I’d been with the police. I knew it was only a matter of minutes—perhaps as much as an hour— before they failed.

I lit all the candles and turned off the lights. In the warm glow, I opened the windows and door and released the last of the charms protecting my apartment.

I sat at the piano and began to play. Opus No. 1, the composer’s first—and last—composition.

But it wasn’t the Old Ones who arrived. It was Elise.

“Keep playing,” she commanded from inside the door. “For me and my mother.”

My fingers kept moving. “Go back downstairs, Elise! They’re coming.”

“They’ll come for me no matter where I am.”

I touched on A-minor, the melancholy key. Always my favorite. I glided through a cadenza, the notes glimmering like pearls strung along the keys.

“That’s too sad,” she said.

In the corners, the shadows rustled.

“All the minor keys are sad.”

“Then play another kind.”

She sat next to me on the bench, her feet swinging free. She was too small to reach the pedals.

From A-minor, up four half-steps to its related Major, C.

“That’s better,” Elise said. “But it isn’t right.”

The dominant tone, then. Onto G-Major. I played a few notes from Bach’s fugue. Without knowing I’d done it, I went back to the minor key.

Forms loomed inside the door, tall and sinister.

Cold like a breath from the dead soul of winter.

“Stop it!” Elise cried to me. “I saw you at the concert. I looked up and saw you in your box. You were smiling. You were happy.”

“I was.”

“Then play what that man was playing.”

So I played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor.

A composition by a man who knew that the sorrow of night could be balanced by the sweet taste of moonlight.

I played the sad tones with a richness and warmth that surprised me.
Tenerezza
. Tenderness.

The creature by the door stepped forward and
blew
, hard and sharp and long like the wind off a glacier.

The candles sputtered and went out.

Elise’s hand pressed against my arm.

I kept playing. Into the brief
animato
, I captured a touch of abandon.

But the darkness crept closer.

“The clowns, Mr. Smith,” Elise whispered.

On to the
friska
. Light and gentle. Up, then down along the full range of the keyboard. Faster and faster.

Every bit of concentration to keep my fingers from tripping over each other.

Beside me, Elise clapped her hands and laughed.

“Those are the clowns. Can’t you see them?”

“Yes. Yes!”

I segued into my own composition. My Opus No. 1.

This time in E-Major.

Basso, then swelling upward, a sparkling sound that reached toward the stars. A noise like a chorus of birds, the wind in the trees, the rumble of waves, pale moonlight resting on the river bank.

A man in love.

The candelabra on the floor beside me burst into flame. In its gleam, I watched my hands in the reflection on the fall board, dancing, dancing.

I played for hours while outside, the world turned gray. I played through fear and past exhaustion, driving back the darkness, composing for my lost love.

And for our child.

The shadows shattered like ice. Gold and silver ribbons of light swirled across the floor and tossed the shards into the air. Slivers of darkness vaporized in the sudden breeze that made the draperies dance.

Elise jumped to her feet.

The room filled with a hundred winged figures, tall and slender. They smiled on us, and the air vibrated with their song.

“You’ve done it,” Elise whispered, as sunlight streamed through the windows.

The light surrounding her blossomed as I took her hand.

“P
SST!”

Either I was being attacked by a leaky gasbag, or someone was trying to attract my attention from the dark alley to my left. A sinister alley, you might say, in every sense of the word. Perhaps it was a snake with a speech impediment! At this time of night, it seemed likely, or at least to anyone who had had a passing-through acquaintance with as many pints of strong ale as I had had.

It could, of course, be someone who wished me to step into a place even darker than the vague lamplight of the mist-swirled street to relieve me of my moneybag.

Tch. There are people with hopeless delusions everywhere, even in sinister alleys that smell like urinals.

How could I so dishearten a fellow creature? If I’d had any more money I would never have left that purveyor of my refuge from the vile duplicity of all the female race. I would have stayed on until I passed into happy oblivion. I lurched peacefully on.

“Psst!” The leak in the gasmain was more voluble now, as if trying to convey a sense of urgency.

I ignored it.

And then, by low cunning, an uneven paving stone made a totally unprovoked attack on my toes (the cowardly things will do this, but only when you have drunk more than sixteen pints of strong ale and fair amount of blue ruin). I sprawled into the gutter, which was a good thing, as I felt at home there these days.

More at home than in my own home on Grosvenor Square, to be honest. That was merely a trap filled with lost dreams.

The gas leak seemed to believe that I had fallen simply so that it could have the opportunity to go “pssst” at me again.

And I had obviously misguessed its ambition to knock me down and then attempt to rob my now empty pouch, because I was down, an easy victim for the most puny dacoit, and it had made no such attempt.

Instead, it hissed at me yet again.

In exasperation I addressed the narrow slit of darkness.

“I have no interest in your sister, no matter how fair, young, or clean she is. Nor do I have money to buy anything illegal with. So you can stop making that noise at me. You are disturbing my rest. Go away.”

“You stupid human!” whispered someone from the alley, pure exasperation oozing out of the words like Trinity students out of the gin-sluiceries after Oxford boat night. “Do you think that if I could get away from here on my own I would be asking a drunken sot for help?”

There was something undeniably feminine about that whispered accusation. That in itself was enough to irritate me. And I was inured to the bleating of people about my state, anyway. “I have no interest in helping anyone leave this charming locale. I’m happy here, happy for now, anyway, and you are disturbing my feeling of well-being,” I said, composing myself for slumber upon the lovely soft curbstone.

She flung a fishhead at me. “You fool,” she whispered crossly, and accurately. “You’ll be run over by a hackney carriage. Or the mohocks will find you and rob you. They were prowling earlier. Keep quiet, crawl in here, and get this thing off me.”

“I have nothing left for them to steal. And a hackney carriage would be a welcome release. Especially from your hissing,” I said loftily.

“I’ll curse you with a lifetime’s misfortune,” she hissed.

“Too late,” I said, turning my head away.

“I’ll give you wealth beyond your dreams of avarice.”

“I have already had that. A lot of good it did me,” I said bitterly.

I would have been quite content if she had not begun to sob quietly. Even fishheads don’t worry me that much.

So I crawled into the darkness. The noisome darkness.

With a tumble of spilled garbage and more fishheads, by the bouquet. To think that I’d once been a rather fastidious soul.

Her arm was trapped under the edge of the overturned garbage-bin. At her size, not even all her strength and the beating of her ragged filmy little wings could shift it. The little fey face was screwed up in pain. “Get me out of here,” she said, “before the cat comes back again.”

I lifted the heavy steel rim off her easily enough.

But even in this poor light it was clear enough to see that her arm hung at a strange angle. It needed attention.

And her wings too were tattered, perhaps by her encounter with the cat.

It wasn’t every day that I encountered a denizen of Faerie here in the grimy streets of London, not even after five years of Prinny.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, between clenched little teeth, as I picked her up in both hands.

“Put me down. I’ve got to get after them.”

“I am taking you out of this alley, to find one of those hackney carriages. Then I’ll splint your arm. Then I shall probably lie down and sleep off this dream,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster.

“Ah!” she gasped as she tried to move, her little face ghostly pale. “No. I have to catch them.” She moved. And screamed, despite obviously trying not to.

“You asked me to help. Now I am going to help you. And you need that arm splinted.” I put my hand inside my coat. “Now shut up and keep still unless you want to end up in an iron cage at a freak show.”

I tried to walk as carefully as I could, wishing that my head was clearer and feet were steadier. A hack clattered towards us out of the mist tendrils as if it had been called, with the steady clip-clop of hooves.

“My good jarvey,” I called out, suddenly painfully aware of the empty state of my money pouch. “I need a cab to Grosvenor Square.”

The coachman lifted his whip. And then, perhaps because of the address, or my accents pulled his horse to a halt. “ ‘You got any money, Guv?” he asked suspiciously.

“Cos I’ll see the rhino up front, see.”

“Er. I was set upon by mohocks . . .”

He shrugged. Raised his whip to give the horse a tap.

“No fare, no ride. I been in taken by you toffs afore.”

“Pick up a fishhead and show it to him,” whispered a weak little voice from inside my coat.

I could at least throw it at him. And convince him that haddock’s eyes were mutton pies perhaps . . . I bent over and picked up the fishhead.

It glistened golden.

“I seem to have found one of my coins,” I said, holding it out. The jarvey’s whip hand was arrested in midstroke.

“That will do nicely, sir. And where would you be wishful of me to be taking you? It’ll be payment in advance, o’course.”

I gave him my address and the fishhead. “Keep the change,” I said, doing my best to alight one-handed.

As the cab rattled across the cobbles my fuddled mind wondered just what I should do now. My knowledge of medicine was slightly less than my knowledge of faerie-folk, which in turn was greater than my knowledge of females. The little fay was both of the latter. Still, something told me that this was not a case to summons Dr. Knighton to attend.

* * *

Through the pain Annwn also tried to think rationally.

It had been pure misfortune that the dogs had knocked over the canister of the accursed metal.

Still . . . they had saved her from the cat, when they’d returned. And having someone of the old blood come along to rescue her, even if the fool did not realize it, was a piece of rare luck. He was, she reluctantly acknowledged, quite right. An injury inflicted by cold iron was always serious. She could forget what she had planned. The problem was going to be getting back, injured as she was, let alone following Prince Gwyn. The doors between here and faerie were few nowadays, and well guarded. It wouldn’t matter how she’d got here, the way back would be perilous. In the meanwhile, every bump they went over hurt. She gritted her teeth and wished for an end to the journey, at least. The human was doing his best to help. It was right that she gave him some form of repayment, she thought, although in the fashion of humans he probably wouldn’t appreciate it. In the old days Faerie had tried to shape human society, interbreeding with the noble houses. When failure became too apparent, they’d settled for shutting themselves off as much as possible. Now, it seemed that some—like Gwyn—were trafficking here. Just thinking about him hurt her. Left her with a conflict of emotions.