Black Swan Rising (17 page)

I walked into the room and found Obie Smith sitting on a chair beside my father’s bed playing a hand of cards with my father and Zach Reese. Zach and my father were laughing at something the nurse had just said. They didn’t notice that I’d come in. But Obie Smith did. He raised his face to me and I saw sparks of green fire coming from his eyes and his fingertips
as he dealt another hand. Flashes of gold lit the air around him. I would once have identified those flashes as scintillations—another of the symptoms of ocular migraine—but I’d never seen those scintillations take the shape of fairy wings before.

“Garet,” my father crooned when he noticed me standing in the doorway, “why are you standing in the door with your mouth open? Come in! It turns out this young man . . . what did you say your name was again?”

“Oberon.” He had his eyes on me as he answered my father’s question. “Oberon Smith.”

Oberon. The king of the fairies,
I thought, amazed that anything still had the power to amaze me. But the sight of this creature out of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
did.

“Oberon here knew Santé Leone in Haiti,” my father said.

I looked at my father. Was it possible to be in the presence of this . . . creature, this
luminous
creature . . . and not know what he was? But then I had met him three times before and not suspected that he was anything other than an effective nurse and decent human being. But he wasn’t a human being at all. That was clear to me now as I entered the room and he stood up. The semitransparent green and gold wings spread out behind him like a peacock’s tail unfolding. I felt as if I were supposed to curtsy, but instead he bowed to me first, sweeping his arm toward the chair he had just vacated.

“Please, Miss James, take my seat. You look like you’ve had a long night.”

His eyes were on my throat. I’d wrapped my scarf around my neck, but I could feel the force of his gaze on the two puncture wounds there and I felt the blood rise to my face.

“You do look tired, Garet. You mustn’t let yourself get run-down while I’m not at home to look after you.”

I almost laughed out loud at the look of solicitation on my father’s face. When was the last time I had felt
looked after
? Not since my mother had died. I remembered that when we came home from her funeral my father had sat down in my mother’s rocking chair—a favorite chair that they had bought in an antiques shop on Fourth Avenue when she was pregnant with me—and the chair had collapsed beneath him. He’d wept then, as he hadn’t at the funeral, but I hadn’t. I’d known with a certainty that if we both cried, we’d never stop. I’d been looking after him ever since. Had he thought all this time that he’d been looking after me?

“Have you been fussing too much over the gallery with me not there?” he asked.

“Maia’s been filling in admirably for both of us,” I reassured him. “But we really do need to think about scraping together some money to pay her more now with all the extra hours she’s putting in.” I winced at having brought up money when Roman was recovering, but Maia had been going well beyond the call of duty.

My father nodded his agreement as I took the chair Oberon offered to me. Oberon moved a few inches away and leaned against the wall, his wings folded and pinned behind his back. How had I missed the signs? His almond-shaped eyes tilted up at the corners like a cat’s, the color wasn’t just green—they were emerald flecked with gold. The tips of his ears were slightly pointed and his skin had a golden sheen. Even in hospital scrubs he looked like a king. I recalled a line of poetry—not Shakespeare, but some other poet describing Oberon:
King of moonshine, prince of dreams
. The lines fit. This creature seemed to be made out of moonshine and dreams.

“So you’re from Haiti?” I asked, looking him straight in the eye. I remembered from the fairy tales that my mother read me that fairies couldn’t lie to a direct question.

“My people came to the islands from abroad,” he said, smiling slyly.

“But you really knew Santé Leone? You look young to have been much more than a kid in the seventies when Santé lived in Haiti.”

“I’m older than I look. I came to New York right around the time Santé did. In fact, I was just telling your father that Santé stayed at my place for a while. Just before he died he left a painting in my apartment. It’s of a beautiful dark-haired woman standing in front of a stone tower. It’s called
Marguerite
.”

“It must be of your mother,” Zach said. “Santé thought the world of her . . . of course we all did.”

I looked over at Zach. He had swept up the playing cards, his big rawboned hands deftly shuffling them. There was something different about him. I hadn’t noticed my father’s or Zach’s aura since I’d walked in because Oberon’s green glow overwhelmed every other color in the room, but now I noticed that there was a lighter green glow around Zach. It was the color of new leaves in the spring and was only about a quarter inch thick, but even though I’d never consciously seen Zach’s aura before, I was sure this hadn’t been its color . . . at least not for a long time.

The other thing I noticed was that Zach’s hands weren’t shaking. I don’t think I had ever seen them this steady. Certainly not when he talked about my mother.

“Of course it’s of Margot,” my father said. “He always called her Marguerite. ‘Marguerite, my tower of strength,’ he’d say,
‘watch over me.’ It does me good to think he painted her near the end, that he hadn’t forgotten her.” I looked at my father, surprised that he’d remembered that Santé was dead. He didn’t seem upset, though.

“I’d like to see that painting,” I said, looking up at Oberon Smith.

“I told your father that I would bring it to him, but perhaps you’ll come with me and bring it back yourself. I’m going off my shift now. If you’re not busy, you could come with me. I don’t live far.”

“I only just got here, I want to spend some time with my father . . .” But before I could finish my sentence I heard a low gurgling sound. I glanced at my father and saw that he had fallen asleep and was snoring peacefully.

“I’m afraid we’ve tired him out telling stories all night,” Oberon said in a low, musical voice. He laid a hand on Zach’s shoulder, and the big man slumped down in his chair and instantly fell asleep. The leaf-green glow around Zach’s skin pulsed and thickened another quarter inch. “Why don’t you come with me. We’ve got much to talk about.”

I got up and followed Oberon out of the room. There were a million things I wanted to ask. Were there more creatures like him? Was he really the same Oberon that Shakespeare wrote about in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
? Could he fly with those wings? Or were they an illusion, a trick? Was it all a trick? Was I going crazy? But instead I found myself asking a rather mundane question about his profession. “So,” I asked when we were in the hallway, “what’s the King of Moonshine, Prince of Dreams, doing working in a hospital?”

He tilted his head back and deep, rumbling laughter flowed out into the hospital corridor. A wave of green-gold light
cascaded in front of him washing over an orderly and a shrunken, desiccated man in a wheelchair, who looked up and lifted a trembling hand to his own face as if he’d just remembered who he was.

“That old scoundrel Horace Walpole! I told him his flowery praise would embarrass me someday. Well, to answer your question, darling, things are rough all over. And they’re about to get rougher.”

I followed Oberon to the nurses’ fifth-floor locker room so he could get his coat and watched as he swung it over his shoulders. It slid between his shoulder blades and wings without ruffling his wings at all.

“The first thing you have to learn,” he said, taking in where my gaze rested, “is that magic and reality—what you’re used to thinking of as reality—are layered. It’s not always so clear where the one leaves off and the other begins.”

“I thought my job as a Watchtower was to guard the door between the two,” I said as we took the elevator down to the lobby.

He gave me a long assessing look, but instead of saying anything he took out a Sharpie pen from one pocket and a pack of multicolored Post-it notes from the other. He scribbled something on the top green note—a sort of spiral doodle—then flipped to the next sheet and scribbled the same mark on that.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride down or as he strode through the lobby so fast that the tails of his long coat snapped at his heels. Outside, he crossed Twelfth Street in the middle of the block. I had to dodge a car to keep up with him. Had I
said something to make him angry? Maybe I wasn’t supposed to talk about being a watchtower.

Halfway down the block he abruptly stopped, his wings beating the air as he turned, grabbed me, and pulled me into a doorway framed by two columns. He pushed me behind him and spread out his arms, a Post-it note affixed to the palm of each hand. The symbols he had drawn began to glow green, then blue, then white—like heating metal—and then began to smoke. The inside of the spiral glowed like an eye. Then he wrapped his hands around the columns on either side of the doorway. I heard a sizzling sound and smelled singed flesh. When he moved his hands away, the spiral eyes were imprinted on the columns, glowing silver. A skein of light, like a spiderweb made up of silver threads, sprung up between the two columns.

I wanted to ask him if it had hurt his hands, but when he turned to me, his eyes were blazing gold and green with anger. He pulled my scarf down away from my throat, revealing the marks on my neck.

“Tell me everything that happened between you and the vampire,” he said, his voice stern, all trace of that lovely West Indies accent gone now. “And everything he told you about the Watchtower.”

I told him everything that happened from the time Will Hughes’s driver picked me up until the moment Will Hughes vanished from the park. While we talked, two people approached the doorway—one a woman with grocery bags in her arms who clearly lived there, the other a UPS deliveryman carrying a package and clipboard. Each time their eyes became
cloudy when they approached the doorway. They stopped, appeared to remember something they had forgotten, turned around, and left. The deliveryman had been so close to me that I had looked straight into his eyes, but I couldn’t see my own reflection in them, only an empty doorway.

When I was done, Oberon asked one question. “You say he told you Fenodoree’s name?”

I nodded.

“All right,” he said after a moment. “We’d better go talk to Puck.”

He peeled the two Post-it notes off the doorway. The two spiral eyes blinked and then vanished. The silver web sizzled and dissolved into a shower of sparks, which Oberon stirred with his hands and then walked through. At Seventh Avenue he crossed against the light. A yellow cab screeched to a halt inches from us. Oberon glared at the driver and the man stammered an apology. We continued west on Greenwich Avenue. Oberon’s green aura had dwindled to a hard malachite shell, but it glowed with a fiercer light, like a banked fire. People on the street got out of his way. Three car alarms went off as he passed. A Great Dane whimpered and pulled his owner into the gutter.

“I don’t understand what’s so bad,” I said. “Will Hughes saved me from the manticore. He told me to seek out a fey guide. He seemed . . .
nice
.”

“That’s what’s so bad,” Oberon roared, turning on me. “You thinking a four-hundred-year-old bloodsucking vampire—a creature of the darkness—seems
nice
. You . . . the descendant of the Watchtower.”

“According to the story he told me, the original Marguerite was in love with him. She’s the reason he became a vampire in the first place.”

“And did you believe everything he told you?”

I considered the question. I found that when I thought about Will Hughes, I felt a prickling sensation in my neck where he had bitten me. The sensation traveled down my throat, into my chest, made my heart beat faster, then spread lower. I remembered his body pressed against mine, his mouth on my throat, the tug of a silver thread that traveled from his lips to the core of my being. I could feel it now. I lifted my hand in front of my face and saw a silver glow surrounding my fingers.
We’re connected,
he’d said. Could he have lied to me after that?

“I believe that he believed everything he told me,” I said.

Oberon reached out and touched my hand. The silver light flared. Sparks flew into the air—silver and gold—then swirled up into the sky like a miniature tornado. “Okay,” Oberon said, nodding. “I think you’re right about that part—and you’re not so far gone that you can’t question what he says. I think he tied himself as much to you as he tied you to him . . . and that might come in handy. But don’t forget, he’s a thing of the dark. He may not be on Dee’s side, but he’s not on ours either.”

We’d come to the corner of Cordelia and Hudson, to the door of Puck’s tea shop. Oberon stopped and looked up Cordelia Street toward the river.

“What did Hughes say about the demons Dee would raise?” he asked me.

I closed my eyes to remember exactly what Will Hughes had said. I could hear his voice so clearly that when I opened my eyes, I half expected to find him standing in front of me. In broad daylight. The thought that he hadn’t stood outside in the sunlight for four hundred years brought tears to my eyes.

“He said that Dee would use the box to summon the ‘demons of Despair and Discord.’ ”