Widdershins (14 page)

“It’s not like you asked to be attacked by them in the first place.”

“I know. But still . . .”

“Still, nothing. It wasn’t your fault, and this is a free country where we can say what we want, so it isn’t my fault either.” Siobhan gave a meaningful look around the room. “There are other, more civilized ways of making your point in an argument.”

They fell silent, almost expecting a response, but none came.

“So what do we do now?” Lizzie asked.

“I don’t know.” Siobhan gave another look around the room. “Keep our mouths shut and try to get along, I suppose.”

Lizzie smiled. Like that would be easy for her cousin. She wasn’t normally bad-tempered, but she certainly wasn’t shy about speaking her mind.

“Do you remember any of the protections against fairies that Pappy told us?” she asked.

Siobhan reached into drawer of her night table with her right hand and took out the expected copy of the Bible.

“There’s this,” she said. “And I remember iron and rowan twigs and oatmeal.”

Lizzie nodded. “None of which we have.”

“We’ll figure it out. I think I saw a mountain ash out back of the hotel, and that’s the same diff’ as rowan. In the meantime, I’m dead on my feet—well, not literally, considering I’m lying down and still breathing.”

“I don’t know if I can sleep.”

“I suppose we could take turns standing guard,” Siobhan said, “but what’s the worst they’re going to do? Tie our hair into fairy knots? They better have a damn light touch, because if I wake up and catch them at it, I’ll have more than words for them, one-armed or not.”

Lizzie nodded. Unless they’d drunk a lot—as Siobhan had last night—they were both light sleepers. It often felt like a curse, because musicians on the road didn’t always get the best accommodations, but it would be useful now.

“But I’m not getting undressed,” she said.

Siobhan smiled. “You’ll have to at some point or you’re going to smell louder than you play.”

“Smells don’t have volume.”

“So sue me. But first help me get my top off.”

Lizzie felt terrible all over again when Siobhan’s injured arm was revealed in all its painful, bandaged glory.

“This sucks,” she said.

“No,” Siobhan said, “being dead would suck. This is just inconvenient.”

“You make a much better invalid than I ever would.”

“It’s one of my strong points, ranked just under my humility.”

Lizzie laughed. “Luckily, I got all the talent.”

“I’d hit you, but I’m too tired and I only have one working arm. But consider yourself on probation.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Siobhan shook her head. “Now you’re just being mean.”

Jilly

I was having lunch by myself
in the greenhouse studio when I heard a tap on the glass pane of the side door that leads into the garden. Looking up, I saw it was Geordie and waved him in.

“Hey, stranger,” I said. “You want some coffee? It’s in the thermos,” I added, pointing to the corner of the room by the little sink Sophie and I used to clean our brushes.

“Thanks,” he said. “Do you want some?”

“No, I’m good.”

There was a time when we were forever dropping in on each other, at all hours of the day and the night. That hadn’t happened for the longest time. For me to go anywhere was a major production, and these days Geordie always called ahead. I suppose that small change might have reflected a much larger one, and in some ways it had. We weren’t as much an everyday part of each others’ lives anymore. But the good thing was that when we
were
together, it was like nothing had changed at all.

Geordie poured himself a cup from the thermos and brought it over to the empty chair beside my wheelchair. He had a sip of his coffee and grinned at me.

“This is
good,”
he said.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “I haven’t gotten all culinary in my dotage. Goon made the coffee, just like he made this sandwich. Do you want some? Because I’m pretty much done.”

“No,
I
already ate.”

But after a moment he took one of the sandwich quarters still on my plate.

“How come you never got the nickname Stomach Riddell?” I asked him.

“Same reason no one calls you Smart Mouth Coppercom.”

“But those would be good gangster names.”

He pretended to think about it, then shook his head.

“No, they’re not tough enough,” he said.

“Well, there you go. And all along I’ve been thinking that they were supposed to be silly.”

“Silly would be if either of us actually were gangsters.”

“I’d make a great gangster,” I told him.

I gave him my tough girl look, but all he did was laugh.

“So what brings you by on a Sunday afternoon?” I asked.

“Are you up for a road trip?”

He had a twinkle in his eye that was so familiar, I actually got a little pang of nostalgia that rose up from deep in my chest. A melancholy for how things had once been when we were young and full of energy and . . . well, more mobile on my part.

“Unless you and Daniel already have plans,” he added.

“No, I’m on my own today,” I said. “Mona stayed overnight, but she left right after breakfast.”

I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell him that I’d broken up with Daniel last night. We usually shared all the details of our respective love lives. Maybe it was because I was the one who’d done the breaking up and I knew that, two years after the fact, he still carried a confused hurt over Tanya having dumped him the way she had, just like that, out of the blue. I guess I didn’t want him to side with Daniel, who’d undoubtedly been as confused when I did the same thing to him.

“So, where are you bound?” I asked.

“The Custom House Hotel in Sweetwater. The Knotted Cord’s playing there. One of their fiddlers sprained her arm last night, and they asked me to fill in for the matinee and evening shows.”

I couldn’t help the surprised look I gave him. Not that he was asked to fill in, because lord knows, he’s one of the best fiddlers this city’s ever produced. No, it was his asking me if I wanted to come along.

We used to do this all the time, go on little road trips to out-of-the-way towns and villages up the line where he’d have some gig. That stopped when he moved to L.A., and hadn’t come up again since his return a few years ago.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“I don’t know. This is just new . . . or rather, unexpected.”

“Yeah, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? But I haven’t been taking out-of-town gigs for some time now.”

It hadn’t really occurred to me before, but now that he mentioned it, I realized it was true.

“How come?” I asked.

“There was always the revel . . .”

“Ah, the revel . . .”

He’d asked me to go a few times, back when he was first going, but Ialways felt like it was too much of an imposition, asking him to take care of the invalid I was at the time. After that, it just didn’t come up again.

“You never did go,” he said.

“You make it sound like they’re not having them anymore.”

“I’m sure they are. It’s just that I found out yesterday that my going as often as I did was due to a . . . I don’t know . . . a compulsion that was put on me.”

“You mean like a spell?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Well, what did Mother Crone say when you asked her about it?”

“She’s the one who put it on me.”

“What? And you haven’t confronted her about it?”

“I haven’t. Not yet. Christiana told me. She said she went to the mall and asked Mother Crone to lift the compulsion.” He smiled suddenly. “Though knowing Christiana, I doubt it was necessarily a polite request.”

I smiled with him. “Yeah, she can be feisty, all right.”

“But the weird thing is the reason Mother Crone gave her for having put the compulsion on me in the first place. Apparently, she had some kind of premonition that if she didn’t keep me close to the court, something bad was going to happen to me.”

“What kind of something bad?” I asked, already worrying.

He shrugged. “She didn’t know.”

“And you’re not worried?”

“Of course I’m worried. Mother Crone’s a seer. But what can I do? If she doesn’t know, and there’s no one else I can ask . . .”

“Do we know that for sure? Maybe Bones or Cassie could help you.”

“I don’t know that Bones likes me all that much.”

“Oh, pooh. It’s your brother that drives him crazy. You he likes.”

Geordie smiled—I’ve pretty much always been able to jolly him out of a mood, though during the fallout from the Tanya breakup it was a tough sell. He had the rest of my sandwich and washed it down with some more coffee before turning to me.

“You know about fairies,” he said. “Have you ever heard of an enmity between the ones that are native to North America and the ones that immigrated here?”

“Not really. But Bramley would. He should be back some time this afternoon.”

“Can’t—I’ve got this gig, remember?”

“Right.”

“So, do you want to come? I know it’s short notice, but I thought it might be fun.”

I thought about sitting here in the greenhouse for the rest of the day, all on my own unless I sought out Goon or Bramley for company.

“I’d love to get out,” I said. “If it’s not too much of a bother.”

He just rolled his eyes at me.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get the message. Yes, I’d love to come. When do we need to leave?”

He glanced at his watch. “Now?”

“Do I need to bring anything?”

“Well, depending on how we feel, we might want to stay overnight in the hotel. They’ll comp us a room.”

“Let me grab a few things.”

I started to wheel away—I can get around now on my own two legs, but it’s way slower and my balance still isn’t great.

“It’ll go quicker if you do the packing,” I added.

He followed me into my room and got my bag from the closet while I wheeled over to the dresser and studied the clothes in the drawers.

“Have you talked to Christy about this fairy business?” I asked as I tossed a few things onto the bed.

He shook his head. “I meant to when I was over at his place last night, but then we got off on this whole other tangent of me making a CD to get the money to put down some roots. You know, actually get my own place, that kind of thing.”

I paused on my way to the bathroom to look back at him. I could have told him he was welcome to keep living in my old apartment for as long as he wanted, but the idea of him actually making a commitment to record a CD—and all that would entail—took me too much by surprise.

“So, how do you feel about that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m not saying no.” He laughed and added before I could comment, “And yeah, I know. That
is
new. But I have to do something with my life. I look at Christy and Saskia and . . . I’m not exactly jealous. But I know I’d like that kind of stability in my life. I think I need it.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Took awhile, but maybe I’m finally growing up.”

We’d both had troubled childhoods—it was part of what drew us together all those years ago when we first met, working part-time at the post office. We didn’t have real families of our own, so we had to make a new one for ourselves. He’d reconciled with Christy since then, and I was now working on doing the same with my sister Raylene.

“We had to grow up too quickly,” I told him, “so I think we were allowed to indulge ourselves with late childhoods. And really, whose business is it what we do with our lives?”

That sounded defensive, and I guess I was talking as much about myself as him, but he just nodded.

“I’d be doing it for myself,” he said. “Because I want to.”

“Then it’s a good thing. Let me know if I can help.”

He gave me a funny look, then walked over to the bed and started stowing the clothes I’d put there into my bag.

“Are you really going to need all of this?” he asked.

I was in the bathroom now, getting my toiletries together.

“Probably not,” I called back. “But it’s been forever since I’ve been on a road trip. Wait until I raid the kitchen.”

“They have food at the hotel,” Geordie said.

“Ah, but we need snacks for the drive.”

It was another fifteen minutes before we were finally pulling out of Bramley’s lane in Christy’s old station wagon, which Geordie used far more often than Christy ever seemed to. My wheelchair was in the back. My bag was on the rear seat along with Geordie’s fiddle and his small knapsack. The food I’d raided from the kitchen was in a plastic bag on the bench seat between us.

When I opened it, I found that Goon had slipped in sandwiches while he was helping me pack the food. Oh, and sensible man that he was, a couple bottles of water, too. I decided to save them for later and went straight to the road food.

“Tortilla chip?” I asked and offered Geordie the bag.

He laughed. “We’re not even into the burbs yet.”

“We have to do the best we can,” I informed him. “It’s not far to Sweetwater, so it’ll be a short road trip and we’ve got a lot of food here.”