The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (7 page)

Yet now, in the cool gray hour that summoned dawn, here after all was Other Tom, floating on the surface of the canal, right on the bend where it turned east toward the lock. She circled him, slowly, watched as the ripples she made played through the ends of his gray hair. He weighed heavy on her, body dense and greasy in her embrace, his taste sour and old. When she ran a hand over his cold face, she felt nothing. His eyes were closed, his husk empty: no last memories, no fear or surprise or regret. Like the last body, his life had been drained from him before he ever entered the water. He had wandered away from the canal shortly before the pubs emptied out, shambling off to one of his dens. Most of the other drinkers had already been gone by then, off somewhere into the concrete and tarmac floors of the city where Jenny could not find them. Other Tom had stayed to finish off his last bottle, and then …

She had not felt him come back. The cement sides of
the canal muted her senses. She had withdrawn to the heart of her territory, deep amidst the mud and the weeds, where the first body rested, weighted down by the end of one of the bedsteads. She did not readily give up what was hers, however empty or useless.

Other Tom was hers now, though the taste of his blood was foul in the water. She wrapped herself about him and began to draw him down.

A movement distracted her. In the shadows under the road bridge, something stirred. A waft of stale sweat and rotting fabric and musk, and Martin Jack squatted on the towpath, his ears flat to his skull and his tail pressed low against his side. He alone dared to sleep on her banks. He was of her kind, after all, his black dog shape as wound into human myth as her own haunting of the waters. He gave her a yellow grin and said, “Good eating, Jenny-love?”

“No eating at all, and you know it.” Jenny bared her teeth back at him.

“Ah.” Martin Jack scratched his belly with a back foot thoughtfully, then twisted to try and reach the small of his back. “Not like it used to be. Men don't know how to make the offerings, these days.”

“They don't make offerings at all.” She pulled herself up onto the bank beside him and sat, dangling her legs into the canal. “They don't remember.”

“They think they chained you, Jenny-love. They built their dykes and their drains and their sluices, and they wrapped you up tight.”

“Not so tight I can't catch you.” But she did not mean it. They were the last of their kind, her and Martin Jack, the last holdouts against the tide of human indifference. She'd never thought to make a friend out of such as he,
but in these hungry days, the fae made common cause where they could. “Not that you'd be more'n a mouthful of bone and hair.”

He nodded. “I'd choke you, Jenny-love, take you with me to wherever we go.” He sighed, looked at the body. “Somewhere other than him, I'll bet you. I hope he went to the good place. He'd earned it.”

Jenny shrugged. She wasn't sentimental about the drunks. They were her things, like the ducks and the waterweed. There were always more, if one or two of them wandered. She wasn't made to care for humans, not as anything more than prey. Whereas Martin Jack … It was the shape of him, she sometimes thought, that rangy hound form, which bound him to men. Oh, he'd lead them into trouble if he could, but over the centuries his canine heart had learnt to love them. The men and women washed up by life to drink on the canal banks were his flock, his charge, his chosen few. Now, he slumped, brows knitting.

Jenny didn't care for him either. It wasn't her way. Yet, somehow, she found herself asking anyway. “Did you see what happened?”

He shook his head. “Couldn't. There was a wrong smell.” His head drooped even lower. “I should've been watching.”

She sniffed, experimentally. Dank water and tar, a drift of yeast from the city brewery. The faintest trace of something else, something sharp and metallic, perhaps wafting from one of the old cars parked along the other side of the road. She wrinkled her nose. The new ways that had drained her fens and concreted them over worked to dim all her senses. Nothing smelled good to
her any more. She pointed at the body with her toe. “Something emptied him. Cheated me.”

“Men have always killed men.”

“Not like this. No memories left. Same as the last one.”

“He was a kind man. He shared his sausage rolls with me.”

That was of no use to Jenny. She stretched her skinny arms over her head. “Better sink him before some human sees him and starts prying.”

“Don't want to lose your treasures?” But Martin Jack's heart was not in it and the taunt fell flat.

She began to sink back down into the canal. As the waters reached her neck, he said, “Wait.”

“What?”

“I wanted …” He shifted, uncomfortable. “Let me smell him, Jenny-love. See if that wrong smell's there, too.”

Water was the enemy of scent. Martin Jack knew that as well as she did. And she owed him nothing. But she wound herself about the body, let her waves wash it to the edge just below him. He shook himself, craned out to sniff at the wet form. She caught the scent of him, warm and ashy. Where he touched the body, dry dark patches formed, sent hot shocks through her. She shuddered, setting the body jouncing and water splashing up onto the towpath. Martin Jack started backward, spitting and shaking droplets from his face and head. “Not fair, Jenny.”

“You burned me.”

“Not me.”

The two fae stared at one another. Jenny wrapped her long thin fingers into Other Tom's gray hair. She said, “Wasn't this one. He was just a man.”

“He smells wrong too. Hot wrong.”

She couldn't sense that. But the emptiness … She said, slowly, “Men always kill each other. Throw each other away. But they don't … they don't drain memories. They don't leave a trace, not like this.”

“There was a human …” Martin Jack frowned. “Sort of a human. Smelled … smelled different.”

Different was bad. Jenny closed her arms about Other Tom's body and pulled him down to her heart without another word.

The first men who strived to steal land from the marshes had labored with wooden shovels and buckets and small smelters to carve out ditches and to bend strips of iron to bind the edges of sluices. It had been easier by far in those days for Jenny to stretch herself out through the soft earth beneath their withy-built huts, to poke and push and insinuate a way for her waters into the shallow foundations, to overflow and undermine the manmade banks. Her reach extended for mile on mile, dictating the path of roads and the shape of settlements. Once, her hold had run underneath every square inch of Fenborough, from the stones of the old fort to the undercrofts of the oldest university buildings, from the muddy pastures where men kept their goats to the edge of the chalk ridge that sloped away to the south. But men always had new tricks, new skills with which to outmaneuver her. Inch by inch, they pushed at her, and, inch by inch she retreated. Yet the ground on which the city rested remained porous: every other year, the canal overflowed its banks somewhere and had to be resisted with sandbags. Out in the fields surrounding the canal, pumps and sluices still labored to keep the soil dry enough to farm.
In her bed of silt and mud, Jenny could hear them working. And in the streets of the city itself, waters lifted from her hoard and cleansed somewhere to the east flowed in earthenware pipes under the tarmac and cobbles to feed the faucets and valves of the buildings. Its flow was a distant tingle under her skin. If she listened really hard, she could hear its voice trickling through the layers of stone. Everywhere humans chattered and clattered, thumped and thrummed and thrashed through their short lives, scattering pieces of themselves as they went in snatches of conversations. She could not get a grasp on them; they slipped away from her too fast to hold.
There was a wrong smell
… . She reached out through her waters for a sense of that wrongness, of that hunger that had ripped all the memories from Other Tom and the first victim. Something in this town hunted where she should. Something in this town had cheated her of her rightful harvest of memories.

Two days and a night had passed since she had found Other Tom's body floating, emptied out. The drunks were anxious and skittish, pacing and cursing as they drank, and scurrying off to their various lairs long before sunset. Under the bridge, Martin Jack brooded. The traces of the smell choked him, left him shaking and nauseated when he had tried to pursue it over ground. So much for his flock. It was up to Jenny to find the hunter. Find it and stop it, whatever it was.

The university lay at the heart of the city, its buildings crowded close together in a knot of twisting streets. Once, it had stood on a small island in the midst of the marsh, rising a scant five or six feet above the rest. It had been a monastery in those days, a close-packed hive of men in rough robes who fished for eels in the waters,
muttering grim prayers to keep Jenny away. A demon, they had called her, a hell-spawn sent to lure them into sin and death. She had felt no remorse when the distant king of men sent his soldiers to drive them away, and had set up the university in their place. Students were easier prey by far, easy to lure with lights and smiles and hints of mystery. Jenny had fed well in those days, while the university outgrew its original boundaries and spread into her margins. Her fingers reached into its cellars and the lower corridors, and few were those who tried to bind her with holy signs or iron bars.

Now, she followed the faint trail, squeezing through pipes and conduits, eavesdropping at drains. It was hard to track, through the layers and layers of stone, but inch by narrow inch she pulled herself after it, around the park and past the fine houses, under the shopping center and, at last, into the basements of the university. Here, men fought off the dark and the dank with harsh neon and so-called water-resistant paints. But the buildings were old, built before the days of damp-proofing. As Jenny passed under the foundation, it called to her. Tendrils of damp wound their way up through the old walls, settled into the frames of windows, behind cupboards and wood panels, under the worn linoleum that covered the floors. She stretched out, relief shivering through her, and set herself to listen hard.

The humans were everywhere, huddled in groups about benches and tables, poring over screens and slabs, glass jars and books, gossiping and chattering and ranting at one another. Their feet drummed on floor after floor, rattled up stairwells. Their breath filled the building in hot clouds. Her fingers yearned toward them, hungry to taste their busy, petty lives. In a small side room, a
plump young man bent alone over a tank, adjusting fine paddles that made waves in the water it held. It would be so easy to creep up on him and pull his head down to her embrace. She could feel the beat of his heart, trembling in the fine veins just below his skin. Her right hand began to slide slowly through the pipe that linked the tank to the main.

With an effort, she pulled herself back to the task in hand. She could come back for the young man later, now she knew the way. But first … first she had to find the one who dared to hunt her territory.

Martin Jack's wrong smell was stronger here. She followed it up through a line of damp that climbed its way up the inside of a stairwell, traced it through the warm living roots of the ivy that blanketed the outside of the building, sealing her waters inside. She peered through the rotting wood of window-frames, slid about drainpipes, found herself at the last snug between the ill-fitting panes of a dormer window. The room beyond was tiny, little more than a cupboard, and made smaller by the mass of machinery that crowded it. It reeked of hot metal and wire, ozone and sweat, and old, dried blood. The smell and the burn that had lingered about Other Tom's body. Jenny shuddered. This was it, this was where her rival laired. This was his den, his sanctuary. She shook herself and oozed out through a crack in the frame. Droplets of water pocked the floor as she pulled herself together.

The place was a shambles. Objects covered every surface: papers, wires, empty mugs and cartons, small heavy boxes that hummed or flashed or beeped. A metal trolley under the window held a jumble of blades and bowls: underneath it a bin was filled with blood-stained
dressings. She sniffed, started back, choking. Blood, yes, blood that conjured for her the shapes of Other Tom and the first victim. The blood of another, also, young and strong and not quite right. A syringe lay beside a small vial. When she reached out for it, heat swirled from it. Not cold iron, nor yet a thing blessed by some human holy man, and yet it held something of the quality of both. Whatever that vial held, someone had imbued it with a vital faith. She pulled her hand back. The whole room was wrong, filled with a hunger that she did not understand.

Notes were everywhere, scribbled onto the piles of paper, scrawled across the walls in thick black lines. Jenny had absorbed human script long ago, from the early days of votive tablets to the sodden pages of old newspapers thrown into the canal. But these words made no sense.
… initial results suggests payments to test subjects would be better made after the conclusion of the experiment, to cut down on interference by alcohol… . Effects of drunkenness may be transferable: more data desirable… . Preliminary research indicates disturbed vision may be due to poor positioning of the chips as subject seems not to be suffering such effects despite alcohol intake… . Excessive bleeding on insertion still proving a problem in some cases. Subjects' memories cloudy. Cleaner and healthier subjects might be preferable to further research, but as yet can see no way to avoid inconvenient questions. Materials still unstable: unsafe to test on students… . Query: should seek further training on insertion work?
Jenny shook her head. None of it made any sense to her. What kind of creature hunted with words and needles and strange uncanny faith? It was nothing of her world, of that she was certain. And if it was human,
it was of a kind she had never known before. She had grown insular since the concrete walls had pinned her waters back into the bed of the canal. She needed to know more about how humans had changed.