War for the Oaks (5 page)

The phouka's look of patient attention only intensified.

"And once I'm there, I can use the same techniques to get them to keep me there. Then if you want me, you can break me out of jail."

Why she hadn't already dialed 911, she didn't know. Perhaps it was the expression on the phouka's face, polite, intelligent, and doggy.

"Very good," he said at last. "And I, for my part, could break one of these glass walls and sever the cable on that telephone before you could say hello." Eddi began a surreptitious move toward the receiver. "But I'd much prefer not to. It would set a bad precedent."

"You mean like chasing me down the Nicollet Mall?" she snapped.

To her surprise, the phouka's ears drooped a little. "If you were to call that ill-considered, self-indulgent idiocy, I would probably allow it to be true."

Eddi would not have chosen any of those words, so she said nothing.

"But let us reason together, sweet. I have
not
tried the walls of your fortress." He indicated the phone booth with his nose. "I have not offered you violence." Eddi snorted, but let it pass. "Will you not deal fairly, and let me bear you company, at least until I
do
transgress?"

"Did it occur to you to try this approach down at the other goddamn end of the mall?"

He looked offended and embarrassed, and both expressions sat oddly on his dog face. "No," he said irritably.

Eddi decided it would be unwise to laugh. "What if I don't want to deal?"

He stood. "I do not predict the future."

Eddi stared at him. Her shoulders were getting sore, and one of her
feet was asleep. She was cold. For all she knew, he never got cold or tired. She would feel like a perfect idiot if she stepped out the door and he strangled her. But just now he didn't have hands. She unfolded the door.

"You gladden a poor dog's heart," he said. He trotted to the curb and looked back; after a moment, she followed him.

The phouka seemed oblivious to the effect a talking dog might produce; he chattered brightly to her all the way to her apartment building on Oak Grove. Fortunately, they passed no one else. She interrupted him only once, to ask, "Why me?"

"Why you, what?"

"Why are you picking on me? Why not grab some drunk off Hennepin Avenue and drop him on your stinking battlefield? They're all mortal, too."

"Lay the blame on good taste. We're a fastidious lot." But a block later, he said, "I can't explain now. Later, when you know our ways, perhaps I can answer you and you'll understand."

She felt strange holding the front door of the building for him. As she stood at the inner door, fishing in her pocket for her keys, he said, "There's a stink on this place."

"Drunks come in here to get warm."

"No, this is a reek of another sort. I smell rules and laws and Thou Shan'ts."

She pushed open the second door. "Mm. That's Roberta, the caretaker."

"Oho—a threat worthy of your guard dog! I shall go for her throat—GRRAAHRRR!" He bolted snarling down the hall and up the stairs, toenails clattering on the wood floors.

"Shut up!" she hissed, and ran after him. She caught up with him on the third floor, outside her apartment door. "God damn you! If she heard that, I am screwed to the wall!"

He cocked his head and looked doggily innocent. "Have I . . . done something?"

"This is a 'no pets' building, you . . ." Something about his voice lit her suspicions. "You knew that, didn't you?"

Eddi wondered if, had he been in human form, he would have pressed a hand to his breast. "You could believe that of me? Oh, I am wounded to the quick!"

She unlocked the door. "Get in there."

He loped into her tiny blind-alley kitchen, through the living room, into the bedroom. His voice drifted back, hollow from bouncing off the bathroom tiles. "Charming! A bit cramped for two, but I don't regard it in the least! What's for breakfast?"

"Chew off one of your hind legs." She sank down on the couch and rubbed her temples. Then she heard the sound she dreaded: the clackclack of a woman's shoes on the stairs.

Eddi opened the door to the firm knock. Roberta stood before her in a robe of salmon velour and white eyelet, and little heeled slippers. "Miss McCandry," she intoned, "I heard a dog."

"You did?" said Eddi stupidly.

"I did. And I heard you, as well."

"You did?"

"Miss McCandry, we do not allow pets here. I wish to inspect your apartment."

"You d—ah, right." But she didn't move.

Roberta frowned. "As stated in the lease, which you signed—"

"I know, I know. Come in."

As if she could smell the trail the phouka had left, Roberta stalked into the kitchen and out, into the living room, where she looked behind all the furniture, and across to the bedroom door. "May I?" she asked as if the answer didn't matter.

With a sigh, Eddi flung open the door.

Roberta gasped in horror, and Eddi followed her transfixed gaze. There on the bed was the phouka. He was lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, facing the door. His brown skin was a shocking contrast to the rumpled white sheets, which were drawn across him to barely cover his buttocks. He wore absolutely nothing.

"Good morning," he said with sleepy charm.

Roberta slammed the door.

"Uh, I'm sorry," Eddi began. "He's, uh . . . I mean . . ."

Roberta walked unsteadily to the apartment door, said, "Good day," without turning, and left.

Eddi locked the door behind her and ran to the bedroom. "You get out of my bed and get your clothes on," she hissed through the door.

"Aww . . ."

"I mean it! Right now!"

The door opened, and he stood before her, dressed as he had been on the mall.

"What are you trying to do?" she wailed. "This is a nice apartment! You think I want Roberta running to the owners with stories about my entertaining strange men?"

"I'm only one strange man."

"God give me strength. I should never have come out of that damn phone booth."

He sighed and said, "I am a phouka, my sweet, and by nature a tricksy wight. I cannot be otherwise."

She scrubbed at her tired eyes. "Oh, hell. Will you get out of there? I want to go to sleep." She squeezed past him and pushed him out into the living room.

"But where will
I
sleep?" he asked plaintively.

Eddi gave him a sweet smile. "Why don't you turn into a dog and curl up on the rug?"

And she slammed the door on him.

Eddi woke up staring at the bedroom ceiling, wondering why she knew that the sky had fallen. Then she heard someone in the living room, and remembered. There was no moment of selfdelusion, of believing that it was Stuart who'd come home with her. For one thing, Stuart didn't know how to whistle.

She slid into her robe and opened the door between the bedroom and the bathroom. The other bathroom door, the one that opened onto the living room, was closed. She dashed in and locked it, then locked the one to the bedroom as well. "Of course," she muttered to her reflection in the mirror, "for all I know, he can walk through walls."

Eddi turned on the shower. The rumble of the water covered the clamor that had started in the kitchen, a rattling of dishes and pans and the banging of cupboard doors. She pulled back the shower curtain—and hesitated. All that water reminded her of the Peavey Plaza fountain, and the glaistig with her cold voice and ominous little fangs. What if she could pop up wherever there was water?

It was an uneventful shower. She took the time to dry her hair, and the noise of the blow-dryer shielded her from any sounds from the front of the apartment. It didn't drown out the thunderous knocking on the bathroom door. Eddi jumped.

"Halloo, the pokey hostess! If you want me to eat your share, too, you've only to say so!"

"I'll . . . be right out," Eddi croaked. She made a great business out of putting away the hair dryer before she finally opened the door.

Yes, it was true. There was a dark-skinned man in her kitchen, who wasn't really a man at all, and he was proof that everything she remembered of last night had happened.

This morning he was wearing a bronze-colored jacket, broad-shouldered, that stopped at his waist, and a tight pair of pants to match. Eddi wondered what had happened to the clothes he'd worn the night before. He gave her a huge smile.

"That," said the phouka, in his reverberating low voice, "is a very fetching costume."

It was a secondhand silk kimono from Ragstock, embroidered with green willow leaves on a rust background. She had always thought it rather fetching herself, but she was irritated that
he
thought so. She said, "What're you doing?"

"Making breakfast. A job usually best left to the likes of hobs and brownies, but I fancy I do it well enough."

She peered past him to the stove top. There were what looked like pancakes in her largest frying pan. "What are they?" she asked.

"Flapjacks." He rolled the word off his tongue, clearly pleased with it.

She scowled suspiciously. "Anything in 'em?"

"Why no, they're made of air and dew. Of course there's something in them, or they wouldn't be there." He shot her a disgusted look and flipped pancakes onto one of her plates. It irked her to see him handling her things with such confidence.

The secondhand kitchen table that was her dining room was set neatly for two, with silverware, placemats, and two wine glasses (she only had two) filled with orange juice. It looked cozy and conjugal. Or was she being too sensitive? How was a . . . fairy . . . to know how she would view all this?
Then again, where did he learn to set the table in the first place, from reading Miss Manners?

There were butter and syrup on the table; she sat down and applied them to her pancakes. The phouka brought his plate out and sat down across from her.

"You're supposed to eat them hot, you know," he said.

Eddi took a bite.

"Well?" he studied her. "How are they?"

She made a noise, grudgingly.

"Now don't say thank you, my flowerlet; we are all made terribly uncomfortable by thanks." He took a bite himself. "Passable, certainly, but not brownie work. Now with a little forethought and a bowl of milk, a lass like you could have had a stack of brownie cakes thin as leaves and light as air waiting for you when you woke. Sink scrubbed and the floor swept as well, likely. But there, you couldn't know, could you?"

Eddi was doing her best to follow this monologue. She remembered
faintly, from her days as a Girl-Scouts sort of Brownie, that the fairytale brownie did chores for people. Eddi would have preferred to help fight forest fires. "If you wanted a brownie," she said at last, "why didn't
you
call one?"

He beamed at her. "Bless you, sweet, they won't come for a commoner like me."

She shook her head. "Last night you said you belonged to a Court. . . ."

He sighed and raked his hands through his hair. "You must learn to pay no mind to the glaistig. Or at least, you must learn
when
to pay her any mind. She has delusions of rank, but it's not true. Rowan and Thorn, my dear, she has goat feet!"

Eddi thought about that for a moment. "Goat feet. Is that some kind of fairy insult?"

The phouka blew through his lips like a horse. "You don't know
anything
, do you?"

"No. I know absolutely nothing." She rapped her knuckles on the side of her head. "Solid clear through, see? I don't know how to call brownies, ignore glaistigs, or accept insults from a dog!"

"I am not a—"

"And if you're so disgusted with me, you can damn well leave." She stuffed another bite into her mouth and chewed furiously. Then she remembered that he'd made breakfast. "Thank you," she said sweetly.

He did look uncomfortable. More, he looked angry. He wrapped her wrist with his first finger and thumb, and pulled her arm down to the table with no visible effort.

"There's no profit in trying my patience, Eddi," he said. His voice was soft, but his slanting dark eyes were narrowed.

"If somebody wants to blow me away," she said, trying to keep her voice even and failing, "he has to get you first. I'm sure to die happy."

An expression flicked across his face, and was gone before she could identify it. He released her. She started to say thank you, then remembered and bit it off.

"I . . . forgot myself." The phouka was looking out the window. Eddi doubted, since the view was of the backside of the building across the alley, that he was really looking at anything.

She finished her pancakes in silence, while the phouka continued to
stare at nothing and look thoughtful. They
were
very good pancakes, even at room temperature. Would it be safe, Eddi wondered, to say so? Wouldn't that be the same as thanking him?

"How long are you . . . staying here?" she asked.

He started a little and blinked at her. "Until you go out," he said, and smiled.

She took a deep breath and tried again. "How long are you going to guard me?"

"For as long as you need it, my primrose, nor shall I count the cost."

"I can stand the dodging around," Eddi muttered. "It's the smug tone of voice that gets me."

"Thank you," he said. But he relented at last. "We fight a war, Eddi, and wars go on for as long as they will. But among the Folk, warfare is something of a recreation, and has as a consequence more rules, more ritual. The campaign will begin on May Eve, and end no later than the eve of All Hallows. If by then neither side has the victory, both will withdraw and lick their wounds until next May Eve. I will be with you until the business is done, win or lose."

"I take it May Eve is the last day of April. All Hallows is . . . Halloween?" Eddi counted, horrified. "That's six months."

The phouka looked uncomfortable. "We, or they, might well prevail before All Hallows."

"Six months?"

He spread his fingers on the tabletop and looked at them. "And the time until May Eve."

"Oh, God."

"It's no trouble, really," he beamed.