Trueheart (Portland After Dark Book 1) (2 page)

He passed Chinatown, careful to avoid its borders, marked by its red lampposts, and crossed Burnside to Old Town, where the goblin market clattered and gibbered beneath the bridge at all hours. Thomas had never understood how so large a presence of fae could go unremarked among humans, but the market was even home to a colony of human artisans on the weekends. They sold their bright trinkets and tasty food, unaware of the sulfurous shimmer of goblin taint everywhere.

This was one way the Queen found her human lovers. In the old days, she'd had to seek for them as she had sought out Thomas, whose voice caught her ear in a rowdy midnight tavern, and whose human beauty caught her eye by lantern light. She had beckoned him into the mound of Forest Park and plied him with sweetmeats and sex. Afterward, he had never been the same. Nowadays it was all too easy. The artisans came of their own accord, drawn by the lures of the human market, then slid all unknowing into the world of the fae. Like fish to a worm sheathing a barbed and bloody hook.

He lingered on the fringes of the market, where the Skidmore Fountain played. The human market had closed at sunset, but the goblin market was building to a frenzy. Amongst the fae vendors, a few humans lingered, wandering dazedly. The night was blurred by the rain, but lit by streetlights, headlights of cars, and the spill of fluorescent light from the surrounding buildings.

In the dark it was harder to suppress his trow nature. The bulky, bunchy form wanted to push itself forth, coarsen his fingers and lessen his dexterity. Where his human form was a hand, all deftness and skill, his trow form was a fist. The loose, flapping oilskin coat he wore fit both his bodies and shed much of the wet and dirt of the world. When he was human, as now, he wore it belted snug. But it required much effort to hold his humanity, despite two centuries of practice. Here in the market, though most of the vendors knew him on sight, he would be less remarked if he were fae.

Thomas tugged at the coat's belt and opened a few buttons. Beneath the oilskin, his thin shirt stretched tight as he closed his eyes and gave in to the ever-present itch, the need to relinquish his humanity. He was fortunate that his legs and hips stayed more or less the same length and girth whether man or trow, though his waist thickened. As long as there was a little room in the seat of his jeans and a hole or two left in his belt, he was comfortable enough.

The Queen had once told him if he would only give up his chance at returning to normal—to his former humanity—she would end his servitude then and there. The band around his arm would drop away.

But he would be a trow forever. Broad-shouldered, rough-fingered, with large ears and a nose to match. Hair like the spiky stripe down a hyena's spine and a mouth with almost as many teeth. A tail with a lion's tuft at the end.

It wasn't the looks that bothered Thomas and kept him clinging with bitter desperation to his former life. As the Queen pointed out one chilly midnight, her sharp teeth mouthing and scoring the sensitive places on his body with each word, everyone he'd ever loved was worm's meat by now. None were left to call him Thomas, lover, brother, son.

None but the Queen.

No.
He welcomed the power and strength of his trow form, used it as a tool. But he couldn't set aside the knowledge of what had been taken from him, taken without permission or explanation. He would, one day, be human again, cost what it might.

It was only time, the one thing he had in abundance. Trows lived exceedingly long lives, usually finding death only through murder, misadventure or a particularly noxious meal.

The Queen had reminded him, too, that regaining his human form meant regaining his human lifespan.

Thomas scowled and let his human self fritter away like the dust from a moth's wings. He took a deep breath and shook all over like a wet dog, feeling the trow muscles filling out the spare corners of his flesh and skin, and the cramped coiling of his tail in the back of his jeans. The trow eyes saw the market better, showing him the fae taint that smeared the bricks and concrete and seeped down the plywood of the closed stalls left from the humans' day.

Thomas dunked his hand in the fountain and splashed a palmful of water over his head to slick down the spiky stripe of head-fur, then he strolled into the market. Might as well get a little dinner while he watched for a nobody stealing nothings.

T
ESS
REVIEWED HER NOTES FROM
the last session with Aaron Eisley.
I don't know where I go. I just gotta go, so I do. There's power. Vision. A Green Man, a Wild Man, you know? A Man of the Forest.

It was practically all Aaron had said that session, and she'd only pried it out of him through careful slow questioning and friendly smiles and promises that no one else needed to know his secret. She could hear the capital letters in his voice, the words that were important to him, gravid with meaning. Aaron was all but catatonic these days, declined from the high point she'd seen him at four months ago when he was too blissed-out to resent his family's insistence that he start drug rehabilitation.

Just like Stephen.

Her brother had withered away to a mindless husk with an empty smile. Gone now, buried six months ago. Stephen had been convinced that he, too, was something other. Big brother Stephen, her dark elf. The senselessness of his death still gutted her. Stephen's problems had changed the direction of Tess's life.

Aaron was the fourth such client the rehab center had treated in the past ten months. Four young men, all handsome, all with the world at their feet, steadily decaying from bliss to utter absence of personality, recognition of responsibility or humanity. All of them convinced they were becoming something other than human.

Just like Stephen. While he hadn't been a client at her center, as his sister and only living relative, Tess had been deeply involved with his treatment and eventual hospitalization. Stephen's decline and death had transformed her from a mere counselor to a woman desperate to find a solution. She'd been unable to help any of the young men and unable to determine what drug they'd taken. Its effects were much like heroin, but not one of them had the telltale track marks.

Tess knew that meant it was something they'd swallowed or inhaled, though they all denied doing either.

Her contacts at the police department just shrugged when she asked about new drugs on the street. It wasn't something they'd seen on patrol or on calls. And it was only four young men, decent citizens, no real criminal records except for the occasional oddball behavior—jousting with a sedan on a city street or scaling the sides of buildings only to become stranded on a narrow window ledge four floors up. One of them had ridden an office chair like a skateboard down the steep slope of a neighborhood street, heedless of cross traffic or pedestrians. They weren't stealing or robbing or killing. They wouldn't have blipped cop radar if not for citizen complaints.

But for Tess, it was four people she knew, four souls she hadn't been able to reach, much less save. There was no methadone treatment for whatever addiction this was. No going cold turkey, no patch. Three of the four lived like vegetables, fed and watered like babies, their noses and asses wiped when necessary.

Which meant Aaron was living on borrowed time. She would do her damnedest to save him. If that meant she had to step outside professional boundaries, so be it. Aaron was someone's beloved brother, too.

Tess sat in her aging Jeep outside Aaron's family's house. The Craftsman bungalow looked warm and welcoming in the noncommittal rain of October, yellow lamplight showing through several windows. She reread Aaron's file by the tiny light on her keychain. All of his counselors and doctors had been baffled by the lack of information provided by testing and interviews. For some time now, it had been in her mind to knock at the door, go in and talk to Aaron's parents, his sister, anyone who could tell her where he'd first found the drug. It was crossing the professional line, and she knew it. So she was still sitting in the chilly car, watching the rain seep along the seams of the Jeep's old tonneau. In another climate, sun rot would have long ago destroyed the canvas, but here in Portland, the wet seemed to preserve it, stretched drum-tight but still snapping into place grommet by grommet each autumn.

She leaned her head back, crushing her brown ponytail against the headrest, staring at the Eisleys' front door, debating. Go in, violate her client's confidentiality, or stay here like a coward, keeping Aaron's secrets in the dark where they could continue to destroy him.

I'm a Green Man, a Wild Man
. She had looked it up, just like she'd looked up Stephen's dark elves, and the redcaps and sprites of other clients. Aaron believed he was a force of nature, a man more than human, a man whose hair was fresh green leaves, whose fertility was vast and relentlessly potent.

Her left hand crept to the door handle and had locked around it when a wedge of light from the front door spilled onto the sidewalk. Aaron himself came out, hunched in his dark hoodie, hands jammed into the kangaroo pouch. He moved down the street as if hypnotized.

He moved like Stephen had, in those last months before Tess was forced to institutionalize him. The same puppet-like pace, jerky and other-guided. He moved with purpose, but not his own. Something compelled him forward in the rainy October darkness.

Tess drew a long breath. She could go in and talk with his family now, and perhaps Aaron would never know...or she could follow him, and maybe figure out what mess he was in and who his pusher was. Somehow, find justice and closure for herself and Stephen.

She waited until he was a block ahead, nearly out of sight in the dimness between streetlights, before she turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of her parking spot. She didn't think he'd be alert enough to notice a Jeep creeping along behind him, but it was best to keep her distance all the same.

Three blocks away, he boarded a bus that took him out of the Alameda neighborhood and down the hill toward the Willamette. Now she didn't have to be as cautious and picked up speed to keep him in sight. The bus crawled through the rainy evening, stopping, starting, but Aaron didn't step off until it had crossed the Burnside Bridge and entered Old Town.

Tess passed him while the bus hid her, turned the Jeep to the right into Chinatown, and stopped just short of the crimson gate guarded by the gold-painted
fu
dog statues. She parked illegally in a loading zone. It was after business hours and hopefully no one would notice. She grabbed her purse and slung it across her body, locked the Jeep, and hurried to the corner. Aaron had already crossed Burnside Street, headed for the staircase that would take him down to the impromptu market and ersatz camp that formed Sunday nights after the legitimate artisans and vendors had packed up and gone home. This gray market would run in fits and starts between roustings by cops, until the next weekend, when the artisans returned.

She stared, open-mouthed, hardly believing this could be coincidence. Surely Aaron didn't come to the bridge just to visit with the hard-luck cases sheltering there. Boys from the Alameda neighborhood were expected to do better than that. Glancing left and right, she jaywalked, reaching the stairs just as Aaron disappeared under the bridge. Tess followed.

She'd been under the Burnside Bridge a hundred times before, visiting the weekend market with family and friends over the years, and using the market as a shortcut at other times. It had been one of Stephen's favorite places. He loved to prowl the booths and food trucks, always wanting her to share a cinnamon-sugar elephant ear with him. Even in his darker days, as the drugs clawed deeper into him, he'd wanted to go there. Tess still visited on special occasions, but she no longer ate the sweet treat that reminded her so painfully of her brother. She had been thinking of Stephen more and more lately, but sometimes she wished she could leave responsibility and memory behind, cut herself free of that weight, travel more lightly.

For the first time, she began to wonder if Stephen's attachment to the Saturday Market was less about fun and more about hooking up with his pusher. He'd haunted Old Town, too, and seeing Aaron following a path that Stephen had taken gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. In the months since Stephen had died, Tess had skulked cautiously through Old Town and other seedy parts of Portland at odd hours, trying to spot something, anything, among the hopeless and homeless, that could lead her to a solution for the other young men whose lives were effectively ended. Now she might have a chance at a breakthrough. She'd made the right choice to follow Aaron, rather than confronting his family.

Tonight, the area beneath the bridge sheltered a remarkable crowd of people from the drizzle, more than she would have expected on a gloomy evening. It took her a moment to locate Aaron. He was about fifty feet away, watching a young boy drumming on a collection of overturned cat litter buckets, trashcans and refrigerator drawers. The beat seduced Aaron's feet to a stuttering, hopping dance as he joined a ring of people bobbing and swaying around the drummer. But Aaron lacked grace; the drug, whatever it was, had stolen much of his coordination and sense of timing. Now he looked like any other hopped-up junkie twitching for his next fix, taken over by sensation and stimulation.

Tess tried to be inconspicuous, but her tall frame caught the eye of the vagrants and gray market merchants alike. At the foot of the stairs, she paused next to a man sitting on a blanket with a collection of scavenged books arrayed in front of him. As her gaze passed over the market, he lit a flashlight and shone it over the titles, swiftly flicking the pool of light, watching her face for reactions to the more lurid covers. "You look like an educated woman! I have books for you. Any book, just a dollar!"

Tess shook her head and moved away, keeping her eyes on Aaron, who continued to dance.

Another man spoke. "Hand-rolled smokes here. You know you want one."